Palestine

West Bank It’s hard to take someone seriously when they tell you: be extremely careful, that part of the West Bank is just like Gaza now. Hyperbole, surely, but duly noted. It was late August and I was heading to the Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps, two adjacent Palestinian communities in the northern occupied West Bank which are now the site of almost daily fighting between the Israeli military and Palestinian armed groups. The nearby city of Jenin has seen even worse violence. On the approach to Nur Shams, the landscape suddenly turned from an impoverished yet benign Arab countryside into a full-blown urban war zone. Dust filled the air, Hamas propaganda was plastered all around, an Israeli drone circled above us.

It was a short, stern, matter-of-fact message from the Israeli Defense Forces — "Eliminated: Yahya Sinwar." The man the Israeli military establishment was searching for throughout Gaza's alleyways, underground tunnels and blasted-out buildings for more than a year, responsible for the worst terrorist attack on Israel since the founding of the state, is now dead and gone. Sinwar becomes the latest in a long line of Hamas leaders and commanders — Ahmed Yassin, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, to name a few — who have eventually met their fate at Israel’s hand.  Sinwar, however, often made the others look like conciliatory men. The sixty-something-year-old Palestinian, born in a Gaza refugee camp, lived and breathed Hamas for his entire adult life.

During Rosh Hashanah dinner this past week, my mother — an occasional yet focused steamer — recommended I check out the Israeli show A Body That Works on Netflix. And so I did. The series focuses on the marital joy and strife that emerges during a surrogate pregnancy situation between an affluent Tel Aviv couple and a single mother from far more modest circumstances.  Clearly shot before last October 7, I couldn’t help thinking that A Body That Works reflects all that is great about Israel — a place I’ve visited and lived in for decades. There’s Tel Aviv’s balmy seafront location. The series’ hip and hunky cast.

The killing of Hassan Nazrallah is the latest — and most impressive — stage in Israel’s campaign to wipe out Iran’s terrorist proxies on its doorstep. From the Egyptian border to Beirut, the campaign is the most dazzling demonstration of real-time intelligence, high technology and precise military action in the modern era. It will be recounted on screen and studied by military experts for decades to come. James Bond’s gadgets had nothing on the booby-trapped pagers. As the meme put it, “From the liver to the knee.”  The battle started a year ago, when Hamas terrorists in Gaza broke the ceasefire, raped and killed innocent Israelis and took hundreds of hostages for negotiating leverage. It was obvious from the outset that Israel would respond with full force.

The months-long ceasefire and hostage release negotiations between Israel and Hamas have been the diplomatic equivalent of Groundhog Day. And the US officials tasked with bringing those talks across the finish-line have contributed mightily to the very bad, never-ending movie we (not to mention the hostages’ families and the more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza) have watched since President Biden rolled out his ceasefire plan in late May. In the months since, Washington has committed verbal blunder after verbal blunder by getting over its skis and proclaiming progress where no progress exists.

Everywhere you turn in conversations about Israel, Gaza, Jews and antisemitism right now, the long-promised specter of expansion and escalation is... well... escalating. More than nine months into Israel’s war with Hamas, the rhetoric of conflict and activism has escalated into violent confrontations on the battlefields of war, politics and protest.   Across Israel’s northern flank, for instance, its months-long flare-up with Hezbollah is quickly escalating into an all-out war as the Iranian-backed militia killed a pair of Israeli civilians last week via rockets launched from Lebanon.