In a scene in the movie Patton, the titular general, coming across the site of an ancient battle between Romans and Carthaginians, tells a fellow officer, “The Carthaginians were proud and brave, but they couldn’t hold. Two thousand years ago. I was here.” While the dialogue is the work of the screenwriters, the real Patton, a sincere believer in reincarnation, made many similar statements. Meir Soloveichik comments on the scene:

The point is to stress the strangeness of a man who personally identifies with a battle that took place nearly two dozen centuries earlier. Patton had himself written some terrible things about the Jewish people; but for Jews, this scene in particular should not be that odd. We remember, commemorate, and mourn moments that took place in the ancient past, some of them intimately involving defeats at the hands of the very same Romans themselves.

This was brought home to me over the past few months, as I have been teaching a seminar on Josephus’ The Jewish War at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. . . . If one were to teach a seminar to American students on the Punic or Peloponnesian Wars, one would have to describe a geography utterly unfamiliar to the students. But these young women are entirely aware of the sites being discussed. If I describe where a specific battle around Jerusalem took place, I merely refer to a current location in the Old City, where these students have been many times. Similarly, when the rest of the Holy Land is described, they have a sense of the layout of the land.

Not through personal reincarnation, but as a people, the Jews did endure “the travail of ages.”

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.