Hannah Szenes’s Lost Work Comes to Israel’s National Library

At the age of twenty-three, Hannah Szenes, along with 36 other Jews of Mandate Palestine, parachuted into Nazi-controlled Yugoslavia from British planes in a last-ditch effort to save their fellow Jews from the death camps. The Germans captured Szenes, tortured her, and then executed her. Thereafter, one of her comrades in arms discovered some of her unpublished poetry in her home at Kibbutz Sdot Yam, cementing her reputation as both poet and heroine. Now her other papers, long preserved by her family members, have made their way to the National Library of Israel. JNS reports:

The Hannah Szenes Archival Collection includes handwritten poems; diaries; a newspaper she edited when she was just six years old; extensive correspondence; photos and personal documents from throughout her life; study materials; the minutes of her trial; letters and documents related to the Kasztner affair, [a highly controversial Fustian bargain made with the Nazis to save a small portion of Hungarian Jewry]; family documents going back to the 19th century, including materials from her father, the writer Bela Szenes; as well as personal items such as the suitcase she took when she moved to the Land of Israel, her personal typewriter, camera, and more.

Perhaps the two most moving items in the collection are a pair of notes found in her dress following her execution: the last poem she ever wrote and a personal letter to her mother.

Read more at JNS

More about: Hannah Szenes, Hebrew poetry, Holocaust, Mandate Palestine, Resistance

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