Earlier this month, Charles III received leading British imams and rabbis, among them Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who presented him with the Drumlanrig Accord, a document meant to promote “reconciliation, understanding, and solidarity,” between Jews and Muslims. Melanie Phillips sounds a note of skepticism:

The interfaith document says that “both communities must strive to offer reassurance, promoting dialogue and reaffirming our shared commitment to peace and mutual understanding.”

“Shared commitment”? Really? How many Muslim members of this group publicly denounced Hamas after the October 7 atrocities and said, “Not in our name”? How many have publicly rejected the Muslim Brotherhood, the jihadist parent body of Hamas that’s entrenched in Britain’s Muslim community? . . .  Worse, this document draws an equivalence between Jews and Muslims, Judaism and Islam, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. It implies that both Jews and Muslims equally promote tensions against each other. Not so. Jews have no issue with Muslims other than when Muslims threaten them, the state of Israel, or Western civilization.

All bigotry is wrong, and the increase in unprovoked attacks on Muslims is reprehensible. But there’s no comparison between that and the state of siege under which British Jews—who have never threatened anyone—have been forced to conduct their activities for years.

Most important, the claim of Islamophobia is a weapon of censorship to silence all criticism of the Islamic world, including the extent of Muslim anti-Semitism. . . . Forming an alliance with a community that refuses to acknowledge the threat posed by a large number of its members against Jews and others isn’t reconciliation but bending the knee to intimidation.

Ron Ben-Yishai, reporting from a visit to IDF forces in the Gaza Strip, analyzes the state of the fighting, and “the persistent challenge of eradicating an entrenched enemy in a complex urban terrain.”

Hamas, sensing the war’s end, is mounting a final effort to inflict casualties. The IDF now controls 65 percent of Gaza’s territory operationally, with observation, fire dominance, and relative freedom of movement, alongside systematic tunnel destruction. . . . Major P, a reserve company commander, says, “It’s frustrating to hear at home that we’re stagnating. The public doesn’t get that if we stop, Hamas will recover.”

Senior IDF officers cite two reasons for the slow progress: meticulous care to protect hostages, requiring cautious movement and constant intelligence gathering, and avoiding heavy losses, with 22 soldiers killed since June.

Two-and-a-half of Hamas’s five brigades have been dismantled, yet a new hostage deal and IDF withdrawal could allow Hamas to regroup. . . . Hamas is at its lowest military and governing point since its founding, reduced to a fragmented guerrilla force. Yet, without complete disarmament and infrastructure destruction, it could resurge as a threat in years.

At the same time, Ben-Yishai observes, not everything hangs on the IDF:

According to the Southern Command chief Major General Yaron Finkelman, the IDF is close to completing its objectives. In classical military terms, “defeat” means the enemy surrenders—but with a jihadist organization, the benchmark is its ability to operate against Israel.

Despite [the IDF’s] battlefield successes, the broader strategic outcome—especially regarding the hostages—now hinges on decisions from the political leadership. “We’ve done our part,” said a senior officer. “We’ve reached a crossroads where the government must decide where it wants to go—both on the hostage issue and on Gaza’s future.”