It was an awful week for agitators who can’t resist setting everything aflame—you know, people who find themselves unable to speak unless it involves scorching the Earth.

Sometimes a coincidence becomes kismet—like my recently published book, Beyond Proportionality: Israel's Just War in Gaza, and Roman Polanski’s film “An Officer and a Spy,” released six years ago in France as “J’Accuse,” but which has finally made it to America, completing a two-week run at the Film Forum in Manhattan.

The hatred of Jews, from time immemorial to the outlandish way it has resurfaced globally today, is truly breathtaking. What on earth could this infinitesimal population of Jews, and their tiny ancestral homeland, Israel, have possibly done to inspire such universally unflinching contempt?

Who knew barbarism as a career path pays so well? With the ostensible objective of bringing the war in Gaza to an end—and the moral perversity of punishing Israel for the continued endangerment of Gazans at the hands of Hamas—the leaders of France, the U.K. and Canada have announced their nominal recognition of a Palestinian state. (Germany, for now, is merely halting the shipment of weapons to Israel.)

HBO premiered its two-part documentary “Billy Joel: And So It Goes,” a feel-good, fan-favorite time capsule for anyone who came of musical age during the prime of Joel’s recording career, which spanned from 1973’s “Piano Man” to 1993’s “River of Dreams”—consisting of eleven LP vinyl albums. (Two other records bookended his body of work.)