America and the UK have been the closest of allies for many decades. Yet on today’s most pressing foreign-policy issues—the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war with Hamas and the Iranian axis—they take opposing points of view. Melanie Phillips notes a curious symmetry in the approaches of the countries’ leaders:

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has put Britain at the head of a coalition to defend Ukraine by declaring the UK will lead a peacekeeping force to protect it against Russia and keep military aid to Volodymyr Zelensky’s army flowing.

What a difference from Starmer’s attitude towards Israel. While he’s telling Ukraine to keep fighting against a tyrannical enemy out to destroy it, he has constantly told Israel to cease fighting against a tyrannical enemy out to destroy it.

While he thinks any compromise with the Russian president Vladimir Putin would amount to surrender and an invitation to further aggression, he has constantly urged upon Israel a cease-fire and a resumption of “two-state solution” negotiations with the Palestinians—which would incentivize them to redouble their attempt to destroy the Jewish state.

Yet while President Trump gets the difference between aggressor and victim over Israel, he appears to deny it with Ukraine. He’s clear that Hamas are an unconscionable enemy that must be eradicated. This moral clarity is absent in his attitude to Ukraine. By blaming Ukraine for starting the war and then claiming to be holding the ring between the two sides, Trump is doing to Ukraine what the Palestinian narrative does to Israel: blaming the victim while sanitizing and incentivizing the aggressor—all under the bankrupt rubric of moral equivalence.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.