RUTHFULLY YOURS

TEL AVIV—Israel launched airstrikes early Saturday at Hamas positions in response to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, as tensions simmer between Palestinians and Israeli forces over a White House policy change on Jerusalem.

​The strikes overnight targeted two weapons-manufacturing sites, an arms warehouse and a military compound, the Israeli military said. Three people were killed in the strikes and more than 20 were injured, Gazan health authorities said, according to the Palestinian Authority’s state news agency. Hamas said two of the dead were members of its armed wing.

Israel was responding to rockets fired on Israeli communities on the border of the strip. One of the rockets fired from Gaza exploded in the Israeli town of Sderot on Friday night, causing damage to several parked cars, Israeli media reported.

Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip, didn’t claim responsibility for the rocket fire directed at Israel. A number of small jihadist groups in Gaza instead said they were responsible for the rockets.

However, Hamas this week called for a Palestinian uprising against Israel after President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and said he would plan to move the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv.

While exchanges of rockets and strikes aren’t uncommon between Israel and the Gaza Strip, the timing is sensitive because it comes during heightened tensions between the two sides. Israel and Hamas have fought three wars over the past 10 years, in part because both sides escalated fire from smaller exchanges. CONTINUE AT SITE

Last month alone in Brussels, there were three separate outbreaks of rioting and looting on a major scale.

If you penetrate the thick cloud of professional indignation to scrutinize the reality of the “capital of Europe”, what you see in many respects is actually a hell hole, one where socialism, Islamism, riots and looting are the new normal.

When then-candidate Donald Trump noted in January 2016 that, thanks to mass immigration, Brussels was turning into a hell hole, Belgian and European politicians presented a united front at the (media) barricades: How dare he say such a thing? Brussels, capital of the European Union, the very quintessence of the post-modern world, the avant-garde of the coming new “global civilization,” a hell hole? Of course assimilating newcomers is not always easy, and there may be friction from time to time. But never mind, they said: Trump is a buffoon, and anyway, he has zero chance of getting elected. Such were the thoughts of those avid readers of The New York Times International Edition and regular watchers of CNN International.

However, Donald Trump, in his unmistakable, brash style, was quite simply right: Brussels is rapidly descending into chaos and anarchy. Exactly two months after that dramatic Trumpism, Brussels was eviscerated by a horrific Islamic terror attack that left 32 people dead. And that was only the tip of the monstrous iceberg that has built up over three decades of mass immigration and socialist madness.

Last month alone in Brussels, there were three separate outbreaks of rioting and looting on a major scale.

First, there was the qualification of the Moroccan team to the soccer World Cup: between 300 and 500 “youths” of foreign origin took to the streets of Brussels to “celebrate” the event in their own way, looting dozens of shops in the historical center of Brussels, wreaking havoc in the deserted avenues of the “capital of civilization” and, during their riot, injuring 22 police officers.

Three days later, a social media rap music star nicknamed “Vargasss 92,” who is a French citizen of foreign origin, decided to organize another unauthorized “celebration” in the center of Brussels, which quickly turned into another riot. Again, shops were destroyed and people assaulted for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Short clips of the event streamed onto the social networks, showing the world (and Belgians) the true face of Brussels without the politicians’ makeover. No wonder the European political elite hate social media from the depths of their hearts; they prefer the sanitized (and, in both France and francophone Belgium, heavily subsidized) traditional press.

Angela Merkel’s leftward drift cost her center-right party seats in September’s German election, and her center-left coalition partners fared even worse for having governed with her. Yet now she proposes to move even further left at the behest of that losing partner so she can form another unpopular coalition with them? Go figure.

Mrs. Merkel has failed to form a government since September’s murky result in which her center-right Christian Democrats (the CDU and Bavarian CSU) lost 65 seats. Her first try at a coalition, with the free-market Free Democrats (FDP) and the urban leftist Greens, fell apart when the FDP refused to bend on energy policy and migration.

Yet Mrs. Merkel is resisting a new election or a minority government, on the theory that either would be a post-War novelty in Germany and would echo a less stable and more frightening time in the country’s history. Instead she’s trying to browbeat the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) into negotiating another grand coalition after months of SPD resistance.

The SPD has participated in such coalitions for eight of the 12 years that Mrs. Merkel has been in office and seemed to have concluded after winning their lowest post-1949 vote share in September that voters want an opposition party that opposes.

On the policy merits a grand coalition is likely to be a bad deal. Some SPD leaders think the party can mitigate the political fallout from cooperation with Mrs. Merkel by striking a harder bargain than it has in the past, and Mrs. Merkel might go along to keep power.

That would mean less tax relief than the €15 billion ($18 billion) cuts to personal income taxes Mrs. Merkel promised before the election, or a further retreat from modest pension reforms that raised the retirement age. The SPD also could pull Mrs. Merkel away from a more realistic approach to Middle Eastern migration.

The bigger consequences of another grand coalition would be political. Mrs. Merkel, having been punished by voters for her milquetoast centrism, would be bowing to the policy wishes of a center-left party that now has even less of a mandate than it did before the election. This will be worse than the instability of a minority government or another election because it signals that voter dissatisfaction doesn’t matter in Berlin. That, and not a second election, is what creates opportunity for political extremists on the left and right.