Until last year, the American poet James Reiss was unable to read the mature work of his brother, the late Israeli poet Reuven Ben-Yosef (né Robert Eliot Reiss), who made the Jewish state his home in 1959. Thanks to a recently published volume of English translations by Michael Weingrad, he has familiarized himself with both the poetry and the poet:

Now that I can finally read his poems, I see how, even though we weren’t personally close, our work developed in parallel—or what Saul Bellow called axial—lines over the decades. [Ben-Yosef’s] long poem about New York, “The City,” complements my own Big Apple poems; his portrait of the poet as an “aging lion” echoes my portrait of the king of beasts in “Three Leos”; his description of our father’s funeral service aboard a rented boat pairs well with my elegy for our dad in my first book; his frequent preference for stanzas with the same number of lines equals my own; his experiments with visual poems match “concrete” verse I continue to tweak; his love of imagery and sound shows (at least in translation) in seven stark words I wish I had written: “A shack in a stand of pines.”

Unlike such colloquial late-20th-century Israeli poetry as Yehuda Amichai’s, and unlike much of my own work, which has been called “plainspoken,” Ben-Yosef’s verse apparently deploys biblical and demotic Hebrew in dense, allusive ways. . . .

Fifteen years after he died, a major reassessment of Ben-Yosef’s work may win him readers—an audience—on this shore. As far as I’m concerned, the book is a triumph for our family.

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.