Diet Eman died last week in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the age of ninety-nine. Born in The Hague, Eman left Europe after World War II and lived in the U.S. for many years before becoming a citizen in 2007. It was only in 1990 that she began to speak publicly about her wartime experiences, which Sam Roberts describes in an obituary:

[W]hen, in May 1940, the Germans, hours after Hitler had vowed to respect Dutch neutrality, invaded the Netherlands, . . . some of [Eman’s] neighbors, fellow churchgoers, argued that for whatever reason, God in his wisdom must have willed the German invasion. But Eman—herself so deeply religious that she would leave assassinations, sabotage, and, for the most part, even lying to others—could find no justification for such evil.

She and her then-boyfriend, Hein Seitsma, joined a Resistance group. They began by spreading news received on clandestine radios from the British Broadcasting Corporation, then smuggling downed Allied pilots to England, either by boat across the North Sea or more circuitously through Portugal. [In 1942], a plea for help by Herman van Zuidan, a Jewish co-worker of Eman’s, prompted her Resistance group to focus on stealing food- and gas-ration cards, forging identity papers, and sheltering hundreds of fugitive Jews. . . .

Eman delivered supplies and moral support to one apartment in The Hague that in late 1942 housed 27 Jews in hiding. The walls were paper thin. Crying babies and even flushing a toilet risked raising the suspicions of neighbors. [Yet] each time some of the Jews there were smuggled out to isolated farms outside the city, Eman returned to find that the woman had taken in more refugees. . . .

Eman was [eventually caught and] interned in the Vught concentration camp in the southern Netherlands, but after stubbornly insisting that she was simply a callow housemaid, she was released three months later, in August 1944. She immediately rejoined the Resistance and remained with it until May 1945, when she mounted a tank and directed Canadian liberators to die-hard German snipers only days before Germany surrendered.

Seitsma was not so lucky: he was caught and taken by the Gestapo to the Dachau concentration camp, where he was tortured and killed.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”