Recently arrived on Broadway, Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic focuses on a French Jewish family between 1940 and the present. Ari Hoffman writes in his review:

The play’s central question is whether this confused bunch should move to Israel. It is no idle parlor game, as the Jewish agency reports a 430-percent increase in the number of aliyah files opened in France since October 7.

The ability of Prayer to answer that conundrum, though, is hobbled by the blind spots that mar its vision. It only sees threats from the Jews as emanating from the right. Set just before France’s last presidential election, in 2022, its villains are President Trump and the leader of the National Rally party, Marine Le Pen, who was beaten by President Macron in that contest but has since grown in political strength, possibly heralding a populist moment.

While there is no gainsaying the legacy of Vichy or the long arm of Pétainism, it is exceedingly strange that a play about anti-Semitism in France ignores the motherlode of anti-Semitism—a tidal wave of immigrants implacably hostile to Israel and Jews and a leftist class that has made common cause with them. From the banlieues to the heart of Paris, rage at Israel finds Jewish victims close at hand. By and large, the terror is not coming from the right. . . . The tribune of the country’s left, Jean-Luc Melenchon, meanwhile, is emerging as one of Hamas’s apologists. He once accused a Jewish minister of thinking not “in French” but in “international finance.”

Below, today’s newsletter will return to some other reflections on the one-year anniversary of the outbreak of the current war, but first something must be said of its recent progress. Israel has kept up its aerial and ground assault on Hizballah, and may have already killed the successor to Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader it eliminated less than two weeks ago. Matthew Levitt assesses the current state of the Lebanon-based terrorist group, which, in his view, is now “a shadow of its former self.” Indeed, he adds,

it is no exaggeration to say that the Hizballah of two weeks ago no longer exists. And since Hizballah was the backbone of Iran’s network of militant proxies, its so-called axis of resistance, Iran’s strategy of arming and deploying proxy groups throughout the region is suddenly at risk as well.

Hizballah’s attacks put increasing pressure on Israel, as intended, only that pressure did not lead Israelis to stop targeting Hamas so much as it chipped away at Israel’s fears about the cost of military action to address the military threats posed by Hizballah.

At the same time, Levitt explains, Hizballah still poses a serious threat, as it demonstrated last night when its missiles struck Haifa and Tiberias, injuring at least two people:

Hizballah still maintains an arsenal of rockets and a cadre of several thousand fighters. It will continue to pose potent military threats for Israel, Lebanon, and the wider region.

How will the group seek to avenge Nasrallah’s death amid these military setbacks? Hizballah is likely to resort to acts of international terrorism, which are overseen by one of the few elements of the group that has not yet lost key leaders.

But the true measure of whether the group will be able to reconstitute itself, even over many years, is whether Iran can restock Hizballah’s sophisticated arsenal. Tehran’s network of proxy groups—from Hizballah to Hamas to the Houthis—is only as dangerous as it is today because of Iran’s provision of weapons and money. Whatever Hizballah does next, Western governments must prioritize cutting off Tehran’s ability to arm and fund its proxies.