In 1983, thanks to an interview in the New Statesman, it was revealed to the world that the beloved children’s author Roald Dahl was a vicious anti-Semite; it was in the same year that he published his novel The Witches, recently adapted as a film with an all-star cast. The book’s premise is that a secret cabal of people—facially indistinguishable from everyone else except for their funny accents and large noses—exercises malign control in every country on earth, while enriching themselves and inflicting suffering on unsuspecting children. While Dara Horn absolves the film of the book’s thinly veiled anti-Semitism, she nonetheless concludes that it cannot escape the original’s perversity:

The key to Dahl’s success as a children’s author lay in how he pitted children against adults, making children into a beloved underdog class whose moral victory lay in vanquishing their powerful exploiters. His heroes are blameless boys and girls tortured by diabolically abusive adults, whom they destroy in outrageous revenge sequences of the sort even the most fortunate child occasionally fantasizes about.

In short, Dahl is like a modern Charles Dickens, except instead of social justice and spiritual redemption, Dahl’s books offer only revenge. Kids, like all emotionally and morally stunted people, eat this stuff up. Dahl tapped into something primal and hideous in the human psyche: the desire of disenfranchised people to feel righteous precisely by demonizing others. As a kid, I bought this too. The sheer sadism of it went right over my head until I shared these books with my children and saw how I’d been punked. And The Witches was the worst.

[M]ost tellingly, what really distinguishes witches in this film is that they are rich. . . . This class warfare idea is utterly absent from Dahl’s book, but it perhaps unintentionally provides a trendy update to his rather old-school racial anti-Semitism: the idea that a secret society of fantastically wealthy “global elites”—often, but not inevitably, Jews—prey on the poor. This means that bigotry against them, rather than being retrograde, is, in fact, a fresh and righteous way of “punching up.”

As Hollywood knows well, everyone loves a good conspiracy theory—and that’s the problem. . . . It is so easy, after all, to believe in a conspiracy, so self-indulgent, so appealing—and, as I now finally understood, so much fun.

Considering the current state of Israel-Arab relations, Ghaith al-Omari writes

First and foremost, no ceasefire will be possible without the release of Israeli hostages and commitments to disarm Hamas and remove it from power. The final say on these matters rests with Hamas commanders on the ground in Gaza, who have been largely impervious to foreign pressure so far. At minimum, however, the United States should insist that Qatari and Egyptian mediators push Hamas’s external leadership to accept these conditions publicly, which could increase pressure on the group’s Gaza leadership.

Washington should also demand a clear, public position from key Arab states regarding disarmament. The Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas endorsed this position in a June letter to Saudi Arabia and France, giving Arab states Palestinian cover for endorsing it themselves.

Some Arab states have already indicated a willingness to play a significant role, but they will have little incentive to commit resources and personnel to Gaza unless Israel (1) provides guarantees that it will not occupy the Strip indefinitely, and (2) removes its veto on a PA role in Gaza’s future, even if only symbolic at first. Arab officials are also seeking assurances that any role they play in Gaza will be in the context of a wider effort to reach a two-state solution.

On the other hand, Washington must remain mindful that current conditions between Israel and the Palestinians are not remotely conducive to . . . implementing a two-state solution.