Lisa Schwartzbaum describes a recent Jewish “heritage tour” in Central Europe that visited various cities along the Danube River and explored their Jewish past and present. On her stay in the cities of Bratislava and Vienna, she writes:

[Bratislava’s] mournful Jewish centerpiece is the underground mausoleum of the rabbi and sage Moshe Schreiber (1762-1839), known as Hatam Sofer. The cemetery in which he was buried—itself built atop a 17th-century Jewish graveyard—was upended during and after World War II. But the rabbi’s tomb survived, along with the graves of some twenty other rabbis, albeit shut away under a concrete tunnel.

The site was reconstructed and rededicated in 2002, in all its gloomy, claustrophobic, end-of-the-line pathos. The old Jewish neighborhood, meanwhile, was smashed decades ago by Communist construction—ugly in intention and result. There are very few Jews and an army of shadows in this exhausted Slovakian city. . . .

[The next day], we were in Vienna, as rigorously stately and aloof in its elegance as Bratislava is exasperated and down at the heel. Ah, Vienna, where vanished Jewish life leaves a uniquely conflicted legacy, a mixture of pride and humiliation, sophistication and hurt.

At the bright, modern Jewish Museum Vienna, visitors’ bags and passports were examined with grim concentration. But then, at Vienna’s main synagogue, . . . our crowd had the great luck to arrive in time for a Thursday bar mitzvah. The young man was from a Bukharan family—immigrants from Eastern Europe, Russia, and former Soviet republics are the last best hope for restocking Jewish places of worship in the region—and we were thrilled to join in the traditional pelting of the bar-mitzvah boy with a volley of little candies. Later, the clan’s granny broke away from a family celebration in the synagogue vestibule to offer us slices of sweet melon.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.