The newly released film about the atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer makes several references to its subject’s Jewishness, as to that of many of his Manhattan Project colleagues. But viewers in the Arab world won’t be aware of this fact, writes Jordan Hoffman:

[T]he Lebanon-based company that translated the film for the region has dodged the specific word for Jews and, instead, has opted to use word ghurabaa that translates as “stranger” or “foreigner.”

The Egyptian film director Yousry Nasrallah criticized the decision, saying, “The Arabic translation of the dialogue was strikingly poor. There is nothing to justify or explain the translation of Jew to ghareeb or ghurabaa. It is a shame.”

An unnamed representative for the film told [reporters] that this is not atypical for Middle Eastern censor boards. “There are topics we usually don’t tackle, and that is one of them. We cannot use the word Jew, the direct translation in Arabic, otherwise it may be edited, or they ask us to remove it. . . . This has been an ongoing [situation] for the past fifteen or twenty years.” (In 2013, though a large section of the Brad Pitt action film World War Z was set in Israel, Turkish translations changed all references to simply “the Middle East.”)

Thus, in one scene, the physicist I.I. Rabi refers to himself and Oppenheimer as “a couple of New York Jews”—and the Arabic subtitles read, “inhabitants of New York.”

Robert Clark explains why the resumption of hostilities is both just and necessary:

These latest Israeli strikes come after weeks of consistent Palestinian provocation; they have repeatedly broken the terms of the cease-fire which they claimed they were so desperate for. There have been numerous [unsuccessful] bus bombings near Tel Aviv and Palestinian-instigated clashes in the West Bank. Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in captivity.

In fact, Hamas and their Palestinian supporters . . . have always known that they can sit back, parade dead Israeli hostages live on social media, and receive hundreds of their own convicted terrorists and murderers back in return. They believed they could get away with the October 7 pogrom.

One hopes Hamas’s leaders will get the message. Meanwhile, many inside and outside Israel seem to believe that, by resuming the fighting, Jerusalem has given up on rescuing the remaining hostages. But, writes Ron Ben-Yishai, this assertion misunderstands the goals of the present campaign. “Experience within the IDF and Israeli intelligence,” Ben-Yishai writes, “has shown that such pressure is the most effective way to push Hamas toward flexibility.” He outlines two other aims:

The second objective was to signal to Hamas that Israel is not only targeting its military wing—the terror army that was the focus of previous phases of the war up until the last cease-fire—but also its governance structure. This was demonstrated by the targeted elimination of five senior officials from Hamas’s political and civilian administration. . . . The strikes also served as a message to mediators, particularly Egypt, that Israel opposes Hamas remaining in any governing or military capacity in post-war Gaza.

The third objective was to create intense military pressure, coordinated with the U.S., on all remaining elements of the Shiite “axis of resistance,” including Yemen’s Houthis, Hamas, and Iran.