“So there came in the West a booted ruler with a little mustache, and in the East a booted ruler with a big mustache, and both of them together kicked the wise man to the ground and he sank into the mud.” Thus the novelist Chaim Grade has one of his characters describe the fate of Central European Jewry in the 1930s and 40s. These words aptly describe the story told in Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, the British journalist and Conservative peer Daniel Finkelstein’s telling of his family’s experiences in the 20th century. Robert Philpot recounts what befell some of its key characters:

Finkelstein’s grandfathers were impressive men. A fiercely patriotic German Jew, Alfred Wiener can lay claim to having been one of the first intellectuals to sound the alarm about the rise of anti-Semitism after World War I. “A mighty anti-Semitic storm has broken over us,” he wrote in his 1919 tract, Prelude to Pogroms? Working for the main German Jewish communal body throughout the 1920s, he accurately predicted the danger posed by the Nazi party, then still very much a fringe movement.

After Alfred left Germany in 1933—traveling first to the Netherlands, then to Britain in 1939 and the US in 1940—his now-renamed Jewish Central Information Office continued meticulously to track the Nazis’ activities. During World War II, Alfred’s files became, one of the heads of British wartime intelligence said, “by far the most useful of the outside sources of information available to us.”

No less impressive was Finkelstein’s paternal grandmother, Lusia, who lived in the Polish city of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) with her husband Dolu Finkelstein when World War II began:

The [1939] Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, under which Hitler and Stalin had secretly agreed to carve up Poland, saw Lwów occupied by the Soviets. As a member of the Polish elite, which Stalin was determined to destroy, Dolu was detained in April 1940, interrogated for months, and found guilty in absentia of being a “socially dangerous element.” In freezing temperatures, he was then transported 2,175 miles to a gulag on the edge of the Arctic Circle, where he was to serve his eight-year sentence. It was a brutal existence, with Dolu initially reduced to serving as a packhorse, hauling felled trees through a nearby forest.

Lusia and [and her son] Ludwik, meanwhile, fared little better. As part of the Soviets’ plan to smash Poland and suppress its people, they were exiled to a state farm in Siberia. It was, Lusia, later recalled, “an island of hunger and death.” Existing on small rations of unsifted flour, she made bricks from cow dung by day and slept in a cowshed by night. The winter—when she and Ludwik shared a small room in a freezing shack with four others—was worse still.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.