By October 24, 1973, Israel had turned the tide of the war it was fighting against both Egypt and Syria, and both countries’ forces were on the run. Leonid Brezhnev, then the ruler of the Soviet Union, panicked at the prospect of the defeat of his two most important Middle Eastern allies—to an extent made clear by documents made public only recently. Eric Cortellessa writes:

According to letters and notes collected and translated by the Woodrow Wilson Center, Brezhnev sent a letter to then-President Richard Nixon warning him that he would send troops to the Middle East if both countries did not act together to curb the Israelis. . . .

[In particular], the Soviets had a vested interest in Egypt, one of its major client states. The new documents show that Brezhnev sought to take advantage of Nixon’s political strife back in America —this was during the apex of the Watergate scandal—to secure an Arab victory. . . .

[T]hen-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger . . . first received Brezhnev’s threatening letter to Nixon. Given the U.S. president’s precarious position—and the fact that he was indisposed when the letter came in—Kissinger consulted with then-White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig and other national-security officials, who jointly decided to move America’s nuclear alert level to Defcon 3.

The new documents show that this was not just a reaction to the Soviets’ sending a naval brigade into the Mediterranean, which was believed to be the reason at the time. It was, in fact, because intelligence reports found that a Soviet ship believed to be carrying nuclear weapons was en route for the Egyptian port of Alexandria.

The Soviets backed down, and the next day Israel and its enemies agreed to a cease-fire.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.