While local collaboration with the Nazis in the execution of the Holocaust happened throughout Europe, the case of Romania is unique. Poles, Ukrainians, and other East Europeans served as guards in death camps and even participated in the mass-slaughter of Jews. Dutch bureaucrats and French and Hungarian policemen helped round up Jews for slave labor and to be shipped to Auschwitz. But Romania, ruled at the time by a fascist dictator named Ion Antonescu, was the only country whose armed forces, as such, pursued a policy of extermination—more or less independent of the Nazis—with some 380,000 victims. Yet, for complex reasons, many more Romanian Jews survived, giving the country an excuse to downplay its ugly history.

A new law has changed that, placing Holocaust education on the national curriculum. Amanda Coakley writes:

The new course, called “The Holocaust and Jewish History,” was passed into law in November 2021 after the Romanian lawmaker Silviu Vexler, who is Jewish, introduced it. All parties supported it except the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), which argued that the Holocaust in Romania was a “minor topic” and that focusing on it would undermine the quality of students’ education. The party also claimed that there were no longer any serious cases of anti-Semitism in Romania, a statement rebuffed by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania, which has issued annual reports concerning the anti-Jewish rhetoric that continues to surface around the country.

In recent years, vandals have upturned Jewish gravestones and defaced the childhood home of Romanian-born Wiesel, a Nobel laureate and survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Romania’s role in the Holocaust was mostly ignored under the Communist regime of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, which began in 1947. Under the 1965–89 leadership of Nicolae Ceausescu, another Communist, Romanians were told that the wartime dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu saved the country’s Jewish population by stopping death-camp deportations toward the end of World War II. This was selective picking of history.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.