With the Paris Olympics in full swing, it seems an appropriate time to read the story of Alfred “Artem” Nakache, an Algerian-born Jew who came to Paris in the 1930s to pursue his promising career as a swimmer. Sarah Abrevaya Stein writes:

Between 1935 and 1938, [Nakache] earned seven French national titles, and between 1941 and 1942, six more. During this period, Nakache represented France and Morocco at the Second Maccabiah Games in Tel Aviv in 1935 in the 100-meter freestyle and water polo, respectively. At the notorious 1936 Summer Olympics, in swastika-draped Berlin, Nakache helped France take fourth in the 4×200-meter relay. . . . A show of force in 1936 Berlin felt like a political triumph to athletes deemed “subhuman” by the Nazis, and Nakache’s later remarks suggest that he was among them.

In the years that followed, he won the freestyle on the French national stage a staggering six times and the breaststroke four times. In July 1941, he set a world record (the first by a French swimmer) in a long seawater course in Marseilles. The record stood for five years.

Nakache enlisted in the French army in 1939, and after France fell to the Nazis his star status protected him and his family for a time; he was still competing publicly (while secretly aiding the resistance) while thousands of French Jews were being sent to Auschwitz. But near the end of 1942 he met the same fate. He survived, although his wife and young daughter did not:

In 1948 Nakache swam for the French team, the first Holocaust survivor to earn a place on an Olympic team and one of only two to ever do so. In the London Summer Games, Nakache reached the semifinals in the 200-meter breaststroke and played on France’s water-polo team, which placed sixth. (In 1956, Ben Helfgott, a Jewish weightlifter from Poland and a survivor of Buchenwald and Theresienstadt, competed for Great Britain.)

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.