In 1960, Yossele Schumacher, an eight-year-old boy living in Israel, was kidnapped by his ultra-Orthodox grandparents who feared his parents were giving him an insufficiently religious upbringing. The Israeli government, in its quest to return the boy to his parents, eventually enlisted the same team of Mossad operatives who had tracked down Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. Two years later they found Yossele living in Brooklyn, but only after locating and interrogating the woman who had smuggled him out of the country. Shalom Goldman tells her story:

In what must have seemed to some Ḥaredim an act of divine intervention, a woman appeared on the ultra-Orthodox scene who would be willing and able to spirit Yossele to safety. This was Ruth Ben David, whose given name was Madeleine Feraille. She was a forty-year-old French woman, . . . [who] had served in the French Resistance. She later raised her son Claude on her own, had managed an import-export firm, and had attended graduate schools in both France and Switzerland. And in the early 1950s, after a long and arduous spiritual journey, she converted to Judaism.

Yet within a few years, Ben David became convinced that the political and cultural ideas dominant among Israeli Jews were a betrayal of the Jewish tradition. She described Zionism as “the thesis that nationalism should replace the Torah as the basis of the Jewish people” and condemned the Zionist movement as “a calamitous mistake.” Israel, in her eyes, was “a mundane, materialistic, secular culture.” . . .

But joining the [anti-Zionist] Ḥaredim as a single woman was not a very practical move. With no employment prospects before her, and with her son Uriel to support, Ben David was dependent on her new religious community. In France she had been an independent woman. Now she was joining a community in which women had little agency, power, or influence. . . .

Ben David’s mentor in Neturei Karta [an extreme anti-Zionist ḥaredi sect], Rabbi Abraham Elie Maizes, was keenly aware of Ben David’s dilemma—and of the ultra-Orthodox community’s dilemma in its face-off with the Israeli authorities [over the Schumacher affair]. He summoned her to his study in Jerusalem. Ben David was immediately brought into the community’s highest level of power and authority. Asked to participate in a conspiracy, one that seemed tailor-made for her, she was, in a sense, treated like a man, and a worldly, capable, man at that.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.