Born in 1889 into a religious Jewish family in rural Ukraine, David Hofshteyn became one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated poets. His Yiddish poem “Ukraine,” penned during the Nazi invasion of his country, has particular resonance for Ukrainians today. Ben Cohen discussed Hofshteyn’s legacy with the poet’s eighty-five-year-old niece, Svetlana Hofshteyn, who now resides in Germany:

“Ukraine has this very strange history,” Svetlana said. “Jews were killed in pogroms, then the revolution was pushed on them, but David Hofshteyn became an enthusiastic patriot. He loved Ukraine, and the other Ukrainian writers felt the same way towards him.”

A collection of Hofshteyn’s poems published in 1922, which mourned the anti-Semitic pogroms waged by the anti-Soviet “White” armies during the Russian civil war, was illustrated by the renowned painter Marc Chagall. The two artists had met while working as a teachers at a refuge for Jewish children who fled the pogroms. “David greeted the arrival of the Soviet regime, and so did Chagall,” Svetlana noted. “They welcomed it because it gave them the right to move out of the shtetl to the cities, where they could obtain an education. So he was in favor of the revolution, but he was also a huge believer in Jewish identity. Writing in Yiddish got him into many unfortunate situations, because he didn’t want to assimilate.”

In 1948, Hofshteyn was thrown into prison; many other prominent Soviet Yiddish writers soon joined him. Like many of them, he was murdered in 1952.

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.