The U.S. Consulate in East Jerusalem, which serves as a de-facto embassy to the Palestinian Authority, recently violated a 2011 agreement by firing some of the IDF veterans who guarded the consulate and replacing them with members of the Palestinian police. The incident follows American efforts to beef up Mahmoud Abbas’s security forces, ostensibly to protect his government in the event of a violent confrontation with Hamas. Arming the PA has worked out poorly in the past, and there is little reason, writes Shoshana Bryen, to believe it will work better this time:

Throwing American support to one Palestinian faction over another was a political decision to side with what [the U.S.] government assumed was “better” or more “moderate” Palestinians, hoping they would use [American] help to put down Hamas rather than using it to kill ever more Israelis.

What it did was legitimize the creeping movement of the Palestinians toward [possessing] a full-fledged army.

The question always was twofold: What constitutes “appropriate” weapons for the Palestinian security forces, and how does the U.S. justify training security forces the ultimate loyalty of whom will be to a government that we cannot foresee and may become something—or already is something—[the U.S.] doesn’t like? . . .

To raise the questions is to understand that there are no sound answers from either the consulate or the State Department.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.