Léon Blum: The Jewish Prime Minister of France Who Wanted to Fight Hitler

The socialist (and anti-Soviet) politician Léon Blum was France’s first Jewish prime minister from 1936 to 1938. After Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, Blum was one of a small group of parliamentarians who wanted France to keep fighting. He was promptly imprisoned by the Vichy regime. In April 1943, he was deported to Buchenwald and from there to Dachau, but survived the war and briefly returned to French politics. Herewith, an excerpt from a new biography by Pierre Birnbaum:

In a way, Vichy represented the nationalist right’s revenge for the Dreyfus affair. Only 34 years separated the end of the affair from the birth of Vichy, and any number of frustrated anti-Semites from the Dreyfus years . . . were still active. They had not changed one bit. They still called for Jews to be expelled from government and the public arena, as well as excluded from most professions and stripped of civil rights. All Jews [employed by the government]—be they deputies or senators, state councilors, judges, prefects, military officers, or teachers—were dismissed from public service. Vichy answered the prayers of the most zealous anti-Dreyfusards: the Jewish statute of October 4, 1940, one of the very first measures taken by Vichy, made the government of France judenrein.

Blum and many of his closest friends from the [French parliament], such as Paul Grunebaum-Ballin, were affected. A small number protested vehemently, insisting that their families had been French for generations, that their parents had made sacrifices in France’s wars, that they themselves had been decorated in World War I and had always served France loyally. They wrote to Marshal Pétain, [the ruler of Vichy], whom many had met in the course of their careers, asking that he intervene to prevent the Jewish statute from being applied to them and later asking him to block their deportation—all in vain. Blum, certain of his rights and his legitimacy and unafraid of reprisals, refrained from protesting his arrest or requesting special treatment. He courageously defended his actions as prime minister as well as his Jewish identity, which he never tried to hide.

Read more at Tablet

More about: French Jewry, History & Ideas, Leon Blum, Socialism, Vichy France, World War II

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF