A different kind of literary courage—one that involves confronting the past—might be found in Cécile Desprairies’s novel The Propagandist, recently published in English translation. Ari Hoffman writes in his review:

The narrator of The Propagandist is Coline, an avatar for the author. They both come of age at Paris in the 1960s, a world where the war is everywhere and nowhere, spoken of in sideways code—“apparently this was the way things were for Jews. And Jews were, well, Jews. . . . That was the role of Jews in general: to give away, to part with their possessions.” The book’s center is a charismatic black hole—Coline’s mother Lucie, an unrepentant Nazi.

This novel tracks Lucie’s fall for a German race scientist, Friedrich, and the ideology to which he is committed. . . . Lucie’s passion for Nazism owes just as much to petty resentments as high-falutin’ swooning. “Her schoolmates, from well-to-do families, were almost all Jewish. . . . Lucie would have the last laugh.” She gloats of the disappearances—murder—of “all the Biancas, Simones, Dinahs, and the rest.” She reasons that “it was only the stupid ones who were deported.” From there it is a small step to “Jews were to be treated like tubercular bacilli.” . . .

Liberation brings a “great whitewashing.”

Ron Ben-Yishai, reporting from a visit to IDF forces in the Gaza Strip, analyzes the state of the fighting, and “the persistent challenge of eradicating an entrenched enemy in a complex urban terrain.”

Hamas, sensing the war’s end, is mounting a final effort to inflict casualties. The IDF now controls 65 percent of Gaza’s territory operationally, with observation, fire dominance, and relative freedom of movement, alongside systematic tunnel destruction. . . . Major P, a reserve company commander, says, “It’s frustrating to hear at home that we’re stagnating. The public doesn’t get that if we stop, Hamas will recover.”

Senior IDF officers cite two reasons for the slow progress: meticulous care to protect hostages, requiring cautious movement and constant intelligence gathering, and avoiding heavy losses, with 22 soldiers killed since June.

Two-and-a-half of Hamas’s five brigades have been dismantled, yet a new hostage deal and IDF withdrawal could allow Hamas to regroup. . . . Hamas is at its lowest military and governing point since its founding, reduced to a fragmented guerrilla force. Yet, without complete disarmament and infrastructure destruction, it could resurge as a threat in years.

At the same time, Ben-Yishai observes, not everything hangs on the IDF:

According to the Southern Command chief Major General Yaron Finkelman, the IDF is close to completing its objectives. In classical military terms, “defeat” means the enemy surrenders—but with a jihadist organization, the benchmark is its ability to operate against Israel.

Despite [the IDF’s] battlefield successes, the broader strategic outcome—especially regarding the hostages—now hinges on decisions from the political leadership. “We’ve done our part,” said a senior officer. “We’ve reached a crossroads where the government must decide where it wants to go—both on the hostage issue and on Gaza’s future.”