Widely the recognized as one of Israel’s great poets at the time of its founding, Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896-1981) produced verse in both Hebrew and Yiddish. Greenberg gradually moved during the 1920s and 30s from a commitment to Labor Zionism to the Revisionist Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky, even serving in the first Knesset as a representative of the party that would later become Likud. In the wake of the Arab riots of 1929, which left 133 dead, Greenberg wrote the short poem “Sicarii II,” which took its name from a group of radical anti-Roman zealots from the Jewish Revolt of the 1st century CE. Yisrael Medad comments on its meaning:

Greenberg’s poetry became more responsive to Arab hostility—and British obsequiousness to that hostility—to Zionism’s goals of reconstituting the Jewish national home, a goal that had been guaranteed by the League of Nations in 1922. . . . In this poem Greenberg places an immediate emergency—the pogroms of August 1929—in a familiar religious and historical frame of reference. Layers of history are invoked to mobilize and encourage, and to suggest the value of reviving old patterns of response to contemporary threats. He is enlisting recruits for a new Hebrew renaissance, which will correct the past mistakes of the Jewish people.

Greenberg employs phrases or terms straight out of talmudic and rabbinic sources or prayers such as . . . Psalm 44:23: “for Thy sake are we killed all the day; we are compared to sheep for the slaughter.” [Likewise his invocation of a] pillar of fire recalls the trek of the Children of Israel leaving Egypt. The Sicarii were the extremist faction during the siege of the Second Temple who used short swords, hence their name, [which is Latin for “dagger-men”]. The events of 2,000 years are made available as resources for Jews in Palestine.

Greenberg’s choice of “heroic fighting Jews” is eclectic yet subversively inclusive. . . . He adds those who died in pogroms, Inquisition torture chambers, and autos-de-fé. Yet Greenberg’s twist is to turn this lachrymose history around by returning to the Sicarii to create a new myth.

Greenberg is using his poetic genius to sharpen awareness of the need for a recalibration of the policies required to assure the success of the Zionist enterprise in the Land of Israel. This territory is not a “land of the Exile,” a corner of the Dispersion. It is the territory of recall of the heroic deeds of the Hebrew nation, of David the guerrilla warrior, his “mighty men,” of the Zealots, Bar Kokhba, and the Sicarii.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.