How a Group of Holocaust Survivors Defied the British Navy to Sail from Italy to the Land of Israel

As World War II came to an end, Jews who had lived through the camps and ghettos returned to their former homes in Eastern Europe to discover intense, and sometimes violent, hostility from their erstwhile neighbors, not to mention the encroachment of Stalinist tyranny. They thus left in droves for areas under control of the Western Allies, whence many hoped to immigrate to Palestine. But they soon discovered that the United Kingdom had slammed the doors to their homeland shut. Some 70,000 Jews thus made their way over the Alps to Italy, where a Zionist underground was working to secure their passage to the Land of Israel. In her recent book, The People on the Beach, Rosie Whitehouse tells this story, focusing on 1,300 young Jews who crammed onto the Josiah Wedgewood, a Canadian corvette, in 1946. She discusses her book in an interview with Rob Attar. (Audio, 44 minutes.)

Read more at History Extra

More about: Aliyah, Anti-Semitism, Holocaust, United Kingdom, Zionism

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