On Sunday, a synagogue in Los Angeles’s heavily Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood held an event for those interested in purchasing real estate in Israel. Noah Pollak, who was present, describes what ensued:

Over the course of several hours, with dozens of LAPD officers decked out in riot gear largely staying out of the fray, around 100 pro-Hamas activists attacked, bear-sprayed, harassed, and brawled with Jews up and down Pico Boulevard.

The police occasionally stepped in, but their main activity Sunday afternoon seemed to be to ensure that the activists were able successfully to shut down the front entrance to the synagogue, ruin the event, and harass Jews more or less with impunity. Dozens of video clips from Sunday afternoon have been posted online. . . . The striking thing about the footage is that despite the significant police presence, there is scant footage of the police forcefully intervening in the numerous fistfights, brawls, and beatings.

When Pollak tried to enter the synagogue, the police advised him to leave. He later found out from a friend that it was possible to enter through a rear exit. “How hard would it have been,” he asks, to instruct the protesters to move to “a safe distance away from the entrance to the synagogue and ensure freedom of entry and exit?”

And that brings us to the similarity to the pogroms of 19th-century Russia, a comparison I mentioned in Tuesday’s newsletter. The violence of these outbursts was greater, but—contrary to popular perception—they were not organized or encouraged by the authorities, who didn’t like any kind of disorder and were constantly afraid riots would evolve into revolt. But police were generally reluctant to stop pogroms; the idea that it could be their job to protect Jews seemed to them counterintuitive. Similarly, Pollak writes that today,

as they have realized on elite college campuses and in . . . cities across the country, anti-Israel activists understand that they enjoy something like immunity. They can’t murder or severely beat people, but pretty much all other criminality—vandalism, graffiti, trespassing, harassment—will go unpunished. . . . If you think that’s unfair, just look at the statement released yesterday by the Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass. She pledged to take three actions in response to the Pico pogrom.

None of them involve arresting and punishing the perpetrators.

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.