Was There Really a Medieval Jewish Empire on the Border of Europe and Asia?

According to ancient letters supposedly received by the 10th-century Spanish Jewish scholar and statesman Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut, the Khazar empire—located in Transcaucasia and what is now southern Ukraine and Russia—had been led by their king to convert to Judaism. While the theory, championed by Arthur Koestler and currently beloved by anti-Semites, that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are descended primarily from the Khazars has been debunked many times over, some scholars have recently gone even further to argue that the entire story of the Khazar conversion was a myth. Henry Abramson reviews the evidence and the current debate. (Video, 15 minutes.)

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More about: Arthur Koestler, Jewish history, Khazars, Medieval Spain

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.

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More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF