In American history, the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” refers to a gang killing on February 14, 1929. But the term could just as easily be applied to an event in Jewish history, as Yvette Alt Miller notes in her reflection on what the day signifies for Jews:

The Bubonic Plague was sweeping Europe and, in many locales, Jews were accused of spreading the disease. On St. Valentine’s Day, 1349, a Shabbat, the entire Jewish community of Strasbourg, in France, was massacred, burned alive in the town square while townspeople watched. Afterwards, townspeople searched the corpses, looking for valuables, and the property of Strasbourg’s Jews was distributed to local Gentiles.

Miller also discusses the recent trend to turn the fifteenth day of the month of Av into a Jewish Valentine’s Day, an effort Julian Sinclair wrote about in Mosaic back in 2016.

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.