This week: The United States and Iran have agreed to end their war, on terms that have dismayed Israel. President Trump announced a US-Iran deal to end the fighting that began on 28 February and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with a memorandum to be signed in Geneva on 19 June. Israel was not at the table. Hours earlier it had struck Hezbollah in Beirut, and Trump rebuked it publicly, calling the threat ‘very small and meaningless.’ The regime in Tehran survives, Hezbollah is undisarmed, and Israeli ministers say the deal ‘does not safeguard our security.’ Thousands are dead in Iran and Lebanon, and more than ninety million Iranians are left under the same rulers. On Israel’s own front, the fighting goes on.
In Canada, two synagogues were attacked within 24 hours: an attempted arson in Montreal and smashed windows in Toronto, with a Chabad centre in Guelph defaced days later. Two plots against Jews were foiled, one aimed at a New Jersey synagogue, another at an Israeli cruise ship. At Cornell, a student refused a job because its founders are Jewish; the brothers who exposed his reply were then flooded with threats and Hitler praise. In Berlin, a celebrated Jewish bakery beside the Wannsee villa closed after years of abuse since 7 October.
And the Maccabiah opens in Jerusalem on 1 July, the largest Jewish gathering in Israel since 7 October.