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.)

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.