I have to confess that I’m not someone who pays a lot of attention to the Olympics, but, while catching up on other Middle East news, I happened upon a story about Yuval Freilich, the first male Israeli fencer to qualify for the games in the épée. A winner of the European championship, Freilich ended up losing to a lower-ranked opponent. (Those seeking to take pride in Jewish athletic prowess can look instead to the two Jewish fencers on the four-member, gold-medal-winning U.S. women’s fencing team.) But this put me in mind of the 1999 movie Sunshine, about a fictional Hungarian Jewish family named Sors. Its central character, played by Ralph Fiennes, is a fencing champion. The eminent historian Istvan Deak wrote in a fascinating review:

In the film, the new anti-Semitic currents do not prevent Ignatz Sors’s son, Adam, from earning high honors for Hungary. He takes up saber fencing, converts to Roman Catholicism so he can join the team of the elite officers’ club, and goes on to become an Olympic and world champion. All this rings true. Toward the end of the 19th century both aristocratic and well-to-do Jews became obsessed with sports and were keen sponsors of athletic competitions. The first Hungarian Olympic champions—and there were quite a few of them—were mostly Jews who particularly excelled in saber fencing, that most Hungarian of martial arts. Hungarians had always taken pride in being descended from saber-wielding mounted warriors, and for a Jew to become a saber champion was to fulfill a fantasy of acceptance.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.