Last Tuesday, the Portuguese parliament decided to memorialize Aristides de Sousa Mendes (1885-1954), who served as consul to Bordeaux when World War II began, alongside the country’s other heroes in Lisbon’s National Pantheon. James Badcock tells his story:

It was mid-June 1940 and Hitler’s forces were days from vanquishing France. Paris fell on June 14 and an armistice was signed just over a week later. Portugal’s diplomatic corps was under strict instruction from the right-wing dictatorship of Antonio Salazar that visas should be issued to refugee Jews and stateless people only with express permission from Lisbon. For those thronging Bordeaux’s streets hoping to cross into Spain and escape Nazi persecution, there was no time to wait.

In Bordeaux, the consul had struck up a friendship with Rabbi Chaim Kruger, [who] had fled the Nazi advance from his home in Belgium. Sousa Mendes offered the rabbi and his immediate family safe passage across the Spanish border. . . . Kruger refused the offer, as he could not abandon the thousands of other Jewish refugees in Bordeaux.

At this point, Sousa Mendes suffered from what he termed a “nervous breakdown,” and was bedridden for a few days, during which, according to one witness, his hair turned gray. His internal crisis ended by June 17, when he announced that he would be giving visas to all who requested, regardless of their “nationalities, races, or religions.”

No one knows for sure how many transit visas [Sousa Mendes] issued, allowing refugees to pass from France into Spain and to travel onward to Portugal. But estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000; most [of the visa holders] sought to cross the Atlantic to a variety of American destinations. The U.S.-based Sousa Mendes Foundation has identified some 3,800 recipients of these visas.

As if possessed with a sense of mission, the consul even signed visas on the road as crowds in Bordeaux began to form a human column southward towards the border town of Hendaye. He stopped at the consulate in Bayonne to issue more papers. The foreign ministry in Lisbon began sending cablegrams to Bordeaux, ordering him to desist, amid reports from colleagues that he had “lost his senses.” Spanish authorities declared his visas invalid, but thousands had already made it across the Bidasoa river into Spain’s Basque region.

The Salazar regime relieved Mendes of his post a few weeks later, and he spent the rest of his life in poverty, supported by a Jewish soup kitchen.

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.”