Rare Color Footage Shows Jerusalem in the 1930s

In the 1930s, a Jewish family visited Jerusalem and filmed what they saw, in color, with a 16mm camera. Isaac Tessler reports that, as part of a larger project, the amateur movie has been restored and made publicly available. (A 5-minute video and pictures can be found at the link below.)

The rare documentation includes footage of Old City alleys, the Mount Scopus Hebrew University, and above all, the Western Wall, long before the modern-day plaza existed, when only a narrow path separated it from the Moroccan Quarter. . . . The highly prized material was transferred to the Jerusalem Cinematheque Archive, which digitized it and made it accessible to the public.

Photos [from the archive] show ḥaredi Jews from the Old Yishuv, Muslims wearing traditional garb, women in elaborate hats, camels, donkeys, and beggars on street corners. The few cars in the streets belong to people who served in administrative positions.

Read more at Ynet

More about: Film, Jerusalem, Mandate Palestine, Western Wall

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF