At some point in the 1920s, Jews were heavily overrepresented in the ranks of the both the fascist and the Communist parties. Yet—as Communists in the USSR and the eastern bloc would do later on—the fascists turned sharply against the Jews in the 1930s. The story would end when Benito Mussolini agreed to hand Italian Jews, stripped of their rights and driven back into ghettos, to his ally Adolf Hitler to be murdered in death camps. Alex Winston dives into this complicated story:

Mussolini himself acknowledged the contribution of Italian Jews in the early years of his regime. In 1929, . . . he publicly recognized the importance of Jewish participation in Italian society and framed Jewish culture as essentially Mediterranean, in line with his early view of Italy’s place in a broader Latin and cultural sphere. At the time, Mussolini considered the Jews native Italians, a people who had lived on the Italian peninsula for millennia and were woven into the national fabric.

In 1934, at the request of the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, Mussolini’s government helped establish a naval training school for Jewish cadets in Civitavecchia, a major seaport 60 kilometers (37 miles) west-northwest of Rome—a curious footnote in the history of the Israeli navy.

For much of the 1920s and into the early 1930s, Mussolini firmly denied that anti-Semitism had any place in Italian fascism. . . . The regime also took a unique stance toward Ethiopian Jews—the Beta Israel community—after Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in 1935. Italian authorities enacted laws to protect this Jewish minority from persecution by local Christians and Muslims. They even encouraged cultural links between Italian Jews and their Ethiopian counterparts.

The turn against the Jews is often attributed to Mussolini’s alliance with the Third Reich, but, as Watson notes, there were other contributing factors:

Within the fascist ranks, there were voices who had long pushed anti-Semitic rhetoric from the fringes; . . . as the 1930s progressed, their ideas gained traction, especially after Italy’s political alignment with Nazi Germany. As early as 1934, signs of exclusion began to surface. The regime began targeting anti-fascist Jews in the press, often lumping them together with Zionists.

Ron Ben-Yishai, reporting from a visit to IDF forces in the Gaza Strip, analyzes the state of the fighting, and “the persistent challenge of eradicating an entrenched enemy in a complex urban terrain.”

Hamas, sensing the war’s end, is mounting a final effort to inflict casualties. The IDF now controls 65 percent of Gaza’s territory operationally, with observation, fire dominance, and relative freedom of movement, alongside systematic tunnel destruction. . . . Major P, a reserve company commander, says, “It’s frustrating to hear at home that we’re stagnating. The public doesn’t get that if we stop, Hamas will recover.”

Senior IDF officers cite two reasons for the slow progress: meticulous care to protect hostages, requiring cautious movement and constant intelligence gathering, and avoiding heavy losses, with 22 soldiers killed since June.

Two-and-a-half of Hamas’s five brigades have been dismantled, yet a new hostage deal and IDF withdrawal could allow Hamas to regroup. . . . Hamas is at its lowest military and governing point since its founding, reduced to a fragmented guerrilla force. Yet, without complete disarmament and infrastructure destruction, it could resurge as a threat in years.

At the same time, Ben-Yishai observes, not everything hangs on the IDF:

According to the Southern Command chief Major General Yaron Finkelman, the IDF is close to completing its objectives. In classical military terms, “defeat” means the enemy surrenders—but with a jihadist organization, the benchmark is its ability to operate against Israel.

Despite [the IDF’s] battlefield successes, the broader strategic outcome—especially regarding the hostages—now hinges on decisions from the political leadership. “We’ve done our part,” said a senior officer. “We’ve reached a crossroads where the government must decide where it wants to go—both on the hostage issue and on Gaza’s future.”