Now an octogenarian, A.B. Yehoshua can firmly lay claim to the status of Israel’s foremost serious novelist. His latest literary contribution, The Tunnel, appeared in English translation last summer. By following an aging engineer named Zvi Luria as he faces the rapid erosion of his cognitive faculties, the work demonstrates that Yehoshua hasn’t lost his own, as Robert Alter writes in his review:

The Tunnel . . . is something of a hodgepodge. Its different pieces may not fit together as tightly as one would like, but each piece has its own fascination. In any case, the main achievement of the book is to draw us into the process of mental deterioration through aging and the gnawing anxieties about decline triggered by that process, a subject rarely tackled by novelists. This may sound dire, but Yehoshua’s distinctive gift as a novelist is demonstrated yet again in his ability to turn it into an occasion for absurd comedy as well as for fear.

Amid this “hodgepodge” are what Alter identifies as familiar themes from the author’s oeuvre:

Sexual desire, which ranges from happy marital consummation to free-floating lust, plays an important role in Luria’s story. It is an impulse we conventionally associate with youth, but this septuagenarian has it in abundance, if ambivalently. [The] alluring naked woman transmogrified [through simile] into a mummy angrily confronts him years after the encounter and tells him, “you lusted after me.” When he responds that if it was lust, he “blocked” it, she asks, “Who asked you to block it?” The phenomenon of blocked lust is a familiar theme in Yehoshua, and it is especially important here in Luria’s relation to the beautiful daughter of the Palestinian family on the Negev hilltop.

The Tunnel of the title is meant to go through the hilltop, and thereby save this family from displacement. Yet even as Yehoshua takes up the worn-out theme of the Zionist guilty conscience he seems to toy with the possibility of an almost organic Jewish-Arab reconciliation. A light, perhaps, at the end of the tunnel.

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.