Sponsored by a bipartisan quartet of senators, the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act, now before the Senate Judiciary Committee, seeks to make it easier for those seeking restitution of stolen artwork to press their claims. Alice B. Lloyd explains the bill’s significance:

The HEAR Act [is] an effective reset on statutes of limitation restricting restitution for heirs. . . .

A grandmother in Ohio may remember a Flemish landscape hanging in her parents’ dining room in the interwar old country, and her grandchildren, heirs to that obliterated culture, can now take the search [for the stolen art] online. But even if a tech-savvy grandson can find a possible match on one of the public online archives—he’d judge by its dimensions, description, and, if luck would have it, by its photograph—the work of verifying her claim to even a minor Old Master would take expensive expert advising and legal counsel. Meanwhile, statutes of limitation and laches, legal restraints on the time a claimant waits to seek justice for a crime, differ from state to state; but nowhere in the U.S. do these restraints favor the victims of international crimes carried out a lifetime ago. . . . .

In a legal system unaccustomed to timeless ownership, granting families’ claims on their stolen treasures full credit under the law establishes claim to the world as it was before the Holocaust—a world in which a woman, looking upon a painting, would feel the same soul-stirring we do. And if the Holocaust was a failure of all humanity, the task of picking up what pieces remain is, as supporters of the HEAR Act see it, also the responsibility of us all.

When he called upon Hamas to end the war and release the hostages last week, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was also getting ready for a reshuffle within his regime. On Saturday, he appointed Hussein al-Sheikh deputy president of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which is intimately tied to the PA itself. Al-Sheikh would therefore succeed Abbas—who is eighty-nine and reportedly in ill health—as head of the PLO if he should die or become incapacitated, and be positioned to succeed him as head of the PA as well.

Al-Sheikh spent eleven years in an Israeli prison and, writes Maurice Hirsch, was involved in planning a 2002 Jerusalem suicide bombing that killed three. Moreover, Hirsch writes, he “does not enjoy broad Palestinian popularity or support.”

Still, by appointing Al-Sheikh, Abbas has taken a step in the internal reforms he inaugurated last year in the hope that he could prove to the Biden administration and other relevant players that the PA was up to the task of governing the Gaza Strip. Neomi Neumann writes:

Abbas’s motivation for reform also appears rooted in the need to meet the expectations of Arab and European donors without compromising his authority. On April 14, the EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas approved a three-year aid package worth 1.6 billion euros, including 620 million euros in direct budget support tied to reforms. Meanwhile, the French president Emmanuel Macron held a call with Abbas [earlier this month] and noted afterward that reforms are essential for the PA to be seen as a viable governing authority for Gaza—a telling remark given reports that Paris may soon recognize “the state of Palestine.”

In some cases, reforms appear targeted at specific regional partners. The idea of appointing a vice-president originated with Saudi Arabia.

In the near term, Abbas’s main goal appears to be preserving Arab and European support ahead of a major international conference in New York this June.