Reviewing an ongoing exhibit of the paintings of Max Oppenheimer at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Liam Hoare writes:

The nature of [Oppenheimer’s] life, which took him to Berlin, Prague, Geneva, and Zurich in search of work and forced him into exile in New York after the Nazi annexation of Austria in March 1938, led to his collection being scattered across continents. Because he was a Jewish artist and a modernist, his work was also branded “degenerate” by Nazi authorities, confiscated, and destroyed.

Born July 1, 1885 into an assimilated, middle-class Jewish family, the son of a journalist and music critic, Oppenheimer enrolled at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1900 before continuing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he came under the influence of the liberal experimentalist Franz Thiele.

Oppenheimer’s early work from around 1910 was dedicated to portraiture. His representations of his subjects, most prominently the German writer Heinrich Mann, are like apparitions. They are lit with a kind of ethereal glow that seems to emanate from the subjects themselves. The lines of their suit jackets wiggle and wave, while their facial expressions and posture radiate ennui, a mood accentuated by the portraits’ dark backdrops. There is a deep seriousness, in particular artistic seriousness, to Oppenheimer’s portrait work.

Why, ask many Israelis, can’t we just end the war, let our children, siblings, and spouses finally come home, and get out the hostages? Azar Gat seeks to answer this question by looking at the possible costs of concluding hostilities precipitously, and breaking down some of the more specific arguments put forward by those who have despaired of continuing military operations in Gaza. He points to the case of the second intifada, in which the IDF not only ended the epidemic of suicide bombing, but effectively convinced—through application of military force—Fatah and other Palestinian factions to cease their terror war.

“What we haven’t achieved militarily in Gaza after a year-and-a-half probably can’t be achieved.” Two years passed from the outbreak of the second intifada until the launch of Operation Defensive Shield, [whose aim was] to reoccupy the West Bank, and another two years until the intifada was fully suppressed. And all of that, then as now, was conducted against the background of a mostly hostile international community and with significant American constraints (together with critical assistance) on Israeli action. The Israeli chief of staff recently estimated that the intensified Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip would take about two months. Let’s hope that is the case.

The results of the [current] operation in [Gaza] and the breaking of Hamas’s grip on the supply routes may indeed pave the way for the entry of a non-Hamas Palestinian administration into the Strip—an arrangement that would necessarily need to be backed by Israeli bayonets, as in the West Bank. Any other end to the war will lead to Hamas’s recovery and its return to control of Gaza.

It is unclear how much Hamas was or would be willing to compromise on these figures in negotiations. But since the hostages are its primary bargaining chip, it has no incentive to compromise. On the contrary—it is interested in dragging out negotiations indefinitely, insisting on the full evacuation of the Gaza Strip and an internationally guaranteed cease-fire, to ensure its survival as Gaza’s de-facto ruler—a position that would also guarantee access to the flood of international aid destined for the Gaza Strip.

Once the hostages become the exclusive focus of discussion, Hamas dictates the rules. And since not only 251 or twenty hostages, but any number is considered worth “any price,” there is a real concern that Hamas will retain a certain number of captives as a long-term reserve.