As a young schoolteacher in the 1940s, Andrée Geulen noticed that several of her students were missing from class one day. She soon learned that they and their families had been rounded up by the Gestapo. Shortly thereafter, Joseph Berger recounts, Geulen joined the clandestine Committee for the Defense of Jews, determined to help other children escape.

The work was not just treacherous but also emotionally wrenching. Parents had to agree to turn over their children to the committee’s escorts without being told where the young were being taken or whether the parents might ever see them again. Some parents were arrested mere hours after Ms. Geulen had picked up their children.

She estimated that from the fall of 1942 to September 1944, when Belgium was liberated by Allied forces, she found havens or hiding places for 300 to 400 Jewish children, ranging from newborns to teenagers. For that, she was honored in 1989 by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance and research center in Jerusalem, as one of the Righteous among the Nations, a recognition given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazi genocide. She was made an honorary citizen of Israel.

When she died at one hundred on May 31 in a Brussels nursing home, Ms. Geulen had been the last survivor of a cadre of twelve women who, working for the committee, together rescued some 3,000 Jewish children.

Between Sunday and Tuesday, the Israeli air force and navy carried out operation “Bashan Arrow”—after the biblical name for the Golan Heights—which involved 350 strikes on Syrian military assets, disabling, according to the the IDF, between 70 and 80 percent of Syria’s “strategic” weaponry. The operation destroyed Scud missiles, weapons factories, anti-aircraft batteries, chemical weapons, and most of the Syrian navy.

Important as these steps are, Jerusalem will also have to devise a longer-term approach to dealing with Syria. Ehud Yaari has some suggestions, and also notes one of the most important consequences for Israel of Bashar al-Assad’s demise:

One of the most important commentators in Tehran, Suheil Karimi, has warned on Iranian television that “without Assad, ultimately there will be no Hizballah.” Weakened, confused, and decapitated, Hizballah is bound to lose much of its political clout inside Lebanon.

Yaari believes that the next steps in Syria should revolve around making and maintaining alliances, while staying on guard:

Military deployments along the Golan Heights border with Syria have taken place, but should not reach a point where they are seen on the other side of the border as a menace. There is no reason to fear the rebel factions in the adjacent Dara’a and Quneitra provinces [along the Israeli border]. Many of their commanders were assisted by Israel for years before they had to accept a deal with Assad in 2018. Some of those commanders regularly met Israeli officers in Tiberias and in other places. Many villages in this region have benefited in the past decade from Israel’s Good Neighborhood operation, which provided humanitarian aid on a large scale. . . .

Turkey has managed to have the upper hand in its competition with Iran over influence in Syria. Rapprochement with [the Turkish president Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan would be complicated yet not impossible.