In Joshua Cohen’s novel The Netanyahus, set in 1960, an Israeli historian of the Spanish Inquisition named Benzion Netanyahu arrives for a visit at the American Corbin College, with his wife and three sons in tow, and is hosted by an American Jewish professor named Ruben Blum. Benzion is not a fictional character but a very real historian and the personal secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky; no less real are his wife and three sons, one of whom was until recently the prime minister of Israel. The visit too is real, although Cohen fictionalizes the rest of the work. At its heart is what Allan Arkush calls “a spurious history” of Zionism, apparently designed to flatter the assumptions of American Jews who are uncomfortable with Israel. And that’s not the only flaw Arkush finds:

I find it hard even to list all of the things in the novel that ring false. . . . And just about every character in the book from the precocious teenage daughter to the WASPy chairman of the History Department lacks verisimilitude. They seem to have been put together out of raw materials mined from some other American Jewish novel—or in the case of the narrator’s assimilated nouveau riche in-laws, maybe The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—to play a specific role in the book’s formulaic plot.

Shortly after making the Blums’ acquaintance on a wintry day, these “Yahus” barge into their host’s den without removing their shoes, “tracking snow across the wood, the parquet puddling with the melting runoff.” Then Benzion’s obnoxious wife, Tzila, changes the seven-year-old (!) Iddo’s soiled diaper in the living room. Later, when the adults are out of the house, Iddo smashes the new color television set, and thirteen-year-old Yonatan, still a long way from being the hero of Entebbe, beds the Blums’ teenaged daughter while the ten-year-old Bibi serves as a lookout. This is all clearly supposed to be funny.

Shorn of its pseudoscholarly trimmings, . . . The Netanyahus consists of little besides distasteful mockery of the Zionist idea.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.