In The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the German-Jewish writer Franz Werfel told the story of Armenians on “Mount Moses” who resisted the Ottoman army’s 1915 onslaught. Werfel intended the book, first published in 1933, as a warning to Germany about the dangers posed by Adolf Hitler, but would find its most faithful audience among Jews, especially those latter trapped in Nazi ghettos or fighting for survival in the land of Israel. Stefan Ihrig writes:

Werfel said about the book that the Armenians were his “stand-in Jews.” He assumed that his readers would understand the parallels . . . and so would see the slaughter of the Armenians as something that could be in store for German Jews. While it is a common assumption that Germans did not and could not know in 1932-1933 that Hitler’s rise to power could mean genocide, Werfel (and other of his German contemporaries) felt quite differently. . . .

Werfel’s book was translated into Hebrew as early as 1934. In an early review from the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine), Dov Kimḥi wrote extensively of the forthcoming book, based on excerpts published abroad. He wrote, among other things, that “we Hebrew readers . . . read into this book on the Armenians our very own tragedy.” . . .

Jews in the Nazi-imposed ghettos in Eastern Europe devoured Werfel’s story of resistance, hope, and salvation. Before the war began, the book had already been translated into Polish and Yiddish—and we have a whole series of testimonies from ghettos all over Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe showing how its distribution and influence only grew after the war began. One such testimony comes from Marcel Reich-Ranicki, by far the most famous German literary critic of recent decades. Writing of his time as an inmate of the Warsaw Ghetto, he stated that the book “enjoyed unexpected success in the ghetto, being passed from hand to hand.” . . .

[The historian] Yair Auron relates an anecdote about Yitzḥak Zuckerman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw uprising, as told afterward by one of his colleagues: “When he wanted to enlighten us he said that it was impossible to understand the Warsaw ghetto uprising without reading Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.”

How did Qatar, an American ally, become the nerve center of the leading Palestinian jihadist organization? Natalie Ecanow explains.

When Jordan expelled Hamas in 1999, Qatar offered sanctuary to the group, which had already become notorious for using suicide-bombing attacks over the previous decade. . . . Hamas chose to relocate to Syria. However, that arrangement lasted for only a decade. With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the terror group found its way back to Qatar.

In 2003, Hamas leaders reportedly convened in Qatar after the IDF attempted to eliminate Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, following a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed seven people, including two American citizens. This episode led to one of the first efforts by Qatar to advocate for its terror proxy.

Thirteen years and five wars between Hamas and Israel later, Qatar’s support for Hamas has not waned. . . . To this day, Qatari officials maintain that the office came at the “request from Washington to establish indirect lines of communication with Hamas.” However, an Obama White House official asserted that there was never any request from Washington. . . . Inexplicably, the United States government continues to rely on Qatar to negotiate for the release of the hostages held by Hamas, even as the regime hosts the terror group’s political elite.

A reckoning is needed between our two countries. Congressional hearings, legislation, executive orders, and other measures to regulate relations between our countries are long overdue.