Five years before Eva Frank was born in 1756 in what is now Ukraine, her father Jacob had declared himself the successor of the 17th-century false messiah Shabbetai Tzvi. As Shira Telushkin writes, the elder Frank amassed thousands of followers before being excommunicated by Jewish authorities in 1756. He responded by converting to Catholicism, along with 3,000 of his disciples. Eva, raised in this strange religious atmosphere, followed in her father’s footsteps to become a radical spiritual leader.

Eva, who had been named Rachel at birth in honor of Jacob’s mother, was baptized with her new name. At this point, Jacob began to integrate Jewish and Christian beliefs more boldly into his theology. Soon after, however, local Catholic authorities imprisoned Jacob on charges of false conversion, noting that his followers continued to worship him as a divine presence and refused to marry outside their own community. Jacob was kept in a monastery in Częstochowa, where he continued to receive visits from admirers and develop his own ideas about mysticism, redemption, and feminine sexual power. Eva stayed with her father throughout the thirteen years of his imprisonment, along with her mother Hannah, and grew close to him. Their bond was reinforced when, later, Eva refused to leave during a Russian siege of the city, which kept even his staunchest followers outside the gates.

Jacob established Eva as a central figure of worship among his followers and encouraged her to hear confessions and administer punishments for sins. When Jacob died in 1791, Eva moved to Offenbach, Germany, with two of her brothers, where they strived to continue their father’s work and continue her role as the messianic divine figurehead of the movement. There, she continued to receive visitors, offer confession, and maintain support.

What do we make of Eva Frank? Her strange legacy is often caught between those eager to embrace her as a trailblazing icon of female religious authority, and those convinced she was a tragic victim in her father’s abusive schemes.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.