Salvador Dalí’s Zionist Paintings

On display at a private exhibition in New York are a rare series of prints of paintings by the non-Jewish Spanish artist, entitled “Aliyah, the Rebirth of Israel.” Lea Speyer writes:

The paintings were commissioned by Shorewood Publishers in 1967 for the 20th anniversary of the state of Israel. The set comprises 25 mixed-media paintings highlighting important religious, historical, and political moments in Jewish history. The series received a special endorsement from David Ben-Gurion.

“The distinguished artist Salvador Dalí has succeeded through the power of his great artistry in embodying in a number of prints the marvel of aliyah, which in a short time fashioned a renewed people, a renewed country, and a renewed—as well as renewing—state,” Ben-Gurion wrote in a letter on display with the collection. Shorewood exhibited the original series in a New York museum, but each piece was eventually sold to private collectors. Their locations remain unknown to this day. . . .

Each painting is accompanied by a biblical verse originally assigned to each work by the artist.

Read more at Algemeiner

More about: Art, Arts & Culture, David Ben-Gurion, Hebrew Bible, Zionism

 

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