Born into a wealthy Viennese Jewish family in 1891, Rudolphina Menzel became an ardent Zionist in her youth and obtained a PhD in the sciences before she bought her first dog, which she taught to answer to commands in Hebrew. She then set about learning everything she could about dogs, bred them professionally, and advised police and military units about how best to train her soon-famous “Linzer boxers.” At the invitation of the future Israeli president Yitzḥak Ben-Zvi, she visited Palestine to provide similar consultations for the Haganah. Allan Arkush, reviewing a collection of essays about Menzel’s remarkable life, writes:

Proud of the small cadre of dog trainers that she had left behind to continue her work, she returned to Europe, deeply impressed by what she had seen in Palestine. “I found a free people,” she wrote, “free despite limits on immigration and the like. . . . I had regained my faith in humanity.”

What she witnessed back in Europe in the mid-1930s couldn’t leave that faith intact. But even though Nazism was making inroads everywhere, the Austrian Cynology Association insisted, as late as 1935, that she and her husband represent Austria at a big international cynological congress in Germany. Even more surprisingly, Der Hund, the official German publication for dog sports, published a picture of the Menzels bearing the caption “The German researcher couple from Austria” next to a picture of Hitler and Göring.

After Austria merged with Germany in 1938, Menzel and her husband left for the Land of Israel permanently, where she threw herself into her cynological work—which included helping both the Haganah and the British train dogs for military purposes:

In the final months of 1947, when full-scale war was on the horizon, Menzel was driven around Palestine to find pets and stray dogs that could be usefully pressed into service. . . . While the magnitude of the role played by the hundreds of “four-legged soldiers” serving in the IDF in the War of Independence has never been properly assessed, there was at the time “widespread understanding that dogs had contributed to the Jewish victory.” The Arabs, hampered by traditional Muslim beliefs about the uncleanliness of dogs and lacking a Rudolphina Menzel of their own, had no dogs of their own in the fight.

The army absorbed the Menzels’ research institute [after Israel’s independence], but at fifty-seven, Rudolphina wasn’t ready to retire, so she founded the Israel Institute for Orientation and Mobility of the Blind. The institute concentrated on training guide dogs for the many people—both Arabs and Jews—who needed them but were deeply wary of them. She also resumed her purely scientific work and, among many other things, developed Israel’s national breed, the Canaan dog.

On the same day the cease-fire went into effect along the Israel-Lebanon border, rebel forces launched an unexpected offensive, and within a few days captured much of Aleppo. This lightening advance originated in the northwestern part of the country, which has been relatively quiet over the past four years, since Bashar al-Assad effectively gave up on restoring control over the remaining rebel enclaves in the area. The fighting comes at an inopportune for the powers that Damascus has called on for help in the past: Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and Hizballah has been shattered.

But the situation is extremely complex. David Wurmser points to the dangers that lie ahead:

The desolation wrought on Hizballah by Israel, and the humiliation inflicted on Iran, has not only left the Iranian axis exposed to Israeli power and further withering. It has altered the strategic tectonics of the Middle East. The story is not just Iran anymore. The region is showing the first signs of tremendous geopolitical change. And the plates are beginning to move.

The removal of the religious-totalitarian tyranny of the Iranian regime remains the greatest strategic imperative in the region for the United States and its allies, foremost among whom stands Israel. . . . However, as Iran’s regime descends into the graveyard of history, it is important not to neglect the emergence of other, new threats. navigating the new reality taking shape.

The retreat of the Syrian Assad regime from Aleppo in the face of Turkish-backed, partly Islamist rebels made from remnants of Islamic State is an early skirmish in this new strategic reality. Aleppo is falling to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS—a descendant of Nusra Front led by Abu Mohammed al-Julani, himself a graduate of al-Qaeda’s system and cobbled together of IS elements. Behind this force is the power of nearby Turkey.