Several years ago, Genie Milgrom—raised a Catholic by Cuban-born parents—discovered that her mother kept a collection of handwritten recipes apparently passed down in the family for many generations. These included instructions for making such dishes as fried bread dressed up to resemble pork chops. Sometime later, Milgrom realized that these were recipes used by Spanish Jewish converts to Christianity, and their descendants, during the Inquisition to convince neighbors and churchmen that they had shed their Jewish ways. Milgrom then began to recognize the Jewish origins of culinary traditions taught to her by her maternal grandmother—such as checking eggs for bloodspots—and would go on to discover more. (Interview by Greg Allen. Audio, 5 minutes. A text version can be found at the link below.)

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.