By any old-fashioned newspaper standard, the big news out of the Middle East this week would be the discovery of a cache of documents indicating that the Saudi Arabian government is directly involved in terrorism. The documents, seized and disclosed by Israel, show that funds for terrorism have been coming not from some Saudi-based charity but the kingdom itself, or, as the document detailing $545,000 in payments to the “Martyrs of the Al-Aqsa Intifada” puts it, “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Committee for Aid to the Al-Quds Intifada.” This committee was established by Saudi Arabia’s minister of the interior, Prince Naif bin ‘Abd al-Aziz. Its money is going to the families of suicide bombers and of known terrorists like the commander of Hamas’s military wing in the West Bank, Mahmud Abu Hanud.*

What did we read in The New York Times? A disquisition by Thomas Friedman on the spread of anti-Semitic ideas all the way to Indonesia. The three-times Pulitzer Prize winner blames the anti-Semitism of Muslim youth on “unquestioning Congressional support for Israel.” To ameliorate the anti-Semitism he suggests Israel “get out of the West Bank and Gaza any way it can — just get out.” He neglects to mention that Israel just got out of Lebanon, and anti-Semitism doesn’t seem to have abated. Perhaps if the withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza fails to placate the anti-Semites, Mr. Friedman will next suggest that American Jews do their part against anti-Semitism by just getting out of the American movie, media and banking industries any way they can — just getting out.

What needs to be said over and over again is that Jewish behavior is not the cause of anti-Semitism — nor its remedy. Elsewhere on yesterday’s Times op-ed page, an article “translated from the German” refers to Israeli home-building on the West Bank as “unlawful land seizure” and “the taking of land.” It’s unclear to what law the writer, one Peter Schneider, is referring and from whom the land in question is being seized. Israel certainly has as clear a claim to it as anyone else. All of which is worth remembering as President Bush prepares to meet tomorrow with Prime Minister Sharon. The way that Mr. Bush is said to have divided the labor with Prince Abdullah is that Mr. Bush is going to pressure Israel while Abdullah pressures Yasser Arafat. It all leaves open the question of who, then, is going to pressure the Saudis to cease their funding of suicide bombers targeting Jews.

*Abu Hanud’s victims, according to the Zionist organization of America, include David Boim, a 17-year-old American citizen murdered in a drive-by shooting in May 1996; Leah Stern, a grandmother from Passaic, N.J., who was murdered in the July 1997 Mahane Yehuda marketplace bombing in Jerusalem; and 14-year-old Yael Botwin of Los Angeles, who was murdered in the September 1997 Ben-Yehuda Street bombing in Jerusalem. An issue brief detailing what the captured documents show about the Saudi funding of terrorism is to be released today by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.