With Hanukkah having just ended, it seems appropriate to take a closer look at the years in Jewish history that followed Judah the Maccabee’s miraculous victory over the Greek-speaking Seleucid empire in 164 BCE. Lawrence Schiffman examines the wars fought by Judah and his successors—the Hasmonean dynasty—in the coastal territory known in the Bible as the land of the Philistines, and now known as the Gaza Strip:

From the breakup of Alexander the Great’s empire in 311 BCE, Gaza and the other areas of [Israel’s] southern coastal plain had been dominated in turn by the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria, two of the empires that emerged in the years after his death. Some soldiers from the area still called Philistia had joined the Seleucids in their war against the Jews. By then, the city of Gaza and the other cities in this area had been Hellenized, and the population was now a mix of the earlier Philistines and Hellenized Egyptians and Syrians.

Yet, apparently, the old antagonism between Philistia and the Jews, [described in the book of Judges and Samuel], still smoldered. So it is easy to understand why, as part of his efforts to obliterate idolatry, [Judah’s brother and successor] Jonathan made forays into this territory, destroying the pagan altars in Ashdod, burning their idolatrous images, and plundering the city.

Robert Clark explains why the resumption of hostilities is both just and necessary:

These latest Israeli strikes come after weeks of consistent Palestinian provocation; they have repeatedly broken the terms of the cease-fire which they claimed they were so desperate for. There have been numerous [unsuccessful] bus bombings near Tel Aviv and Palestinian-instigated clashes in the West Bank. Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in captivity.

In fact, Hamas and their Palestinian supporters . . . have always known that they can sit back, parade dead Israeli hostages live on social media, and receive hundreds of their own convicted terrorists and murderers back in return. They believed they could get away with the October 7 pogrom.

One hopes Hamas’s leaders will get the message. Meanwhile, many inside and outside Israel seem to believe that, by resuming the fighting, Jerusalem has given up on rescuing the remaining hostages. But, writes Ron Ben-Yishai, this assertion misunderstands the goals of the present campaign. “Experience within the IDF and Israeli intelligence,” Ben-Yishai writes, “has shown that such pressure is the most effective way to push Hamas toward flexibility.” He outlines two other aims:

The second objective was to signal to Hamas that Israel is not only targeting its military wing—the terror army that was the focus of previous phases of the war up until the last cease-fire—but also its governance structure. This was demonstrated by the targeted elimination of five senior officials from Hamas’s political and civilian administration. . . . The strikes also served as a message to mediators, particularly Egypt, that Israel opposes Hamas remaining in any governing or military capacity in post-war Gaza.

The third objective was to create intense military pressure, coordinated with the U.S., on all remaining elements of the Shiite “axis of resistance,” including Yemen’s Houthis, Hamas, and Iran.