Jews settled in the Alsace region of southeastern France in the 9th century CE, and the region became part of the cradle of Ashkenazi Jewry. Today, Jews in Alsatian cities live under constant threat of violence and harassment from Muslim neighbors, while both the political right and left flirt with anti-Semitism. Even though Alsace lost most of its Jewish population during the Holocaust, anti-Semites have been defacing Jewish graves. Adam Nossiter writes:

The defacing in December of gravestones in the [Jewish] cemetery in Westhoffen, a sleepy village in Alsace, was not isolated. . . . Last year there were 50 similar incidents targeting Jews in Alsace. . . . Cemeteries, schools, and village walls were daubed with swastikas or obscure references to the Third Reich. In Westhoffen’s cemetery, 107 tombstones were defaced; in the one in Quatzenheim, a village to the east, 96 were.

During World War II, the mass-defacement of Jewish graves by both Nazis and local collaborators and sympathizers was commonplace throughout Europe, and Alsace was no exception:

A large bald patch amid the headstones in the Wintzenheim graveyard is testimony to the day in 1945 when the retreating Germans forced inhabitants of the village to dig up the headstones to be used as an anti-tank barrier against the advancing Americans. The barrier was never used. But the residents of Wintzenheim, where Jews had lived since the 15th century, never put the headstones back. They used them instead in their postwar garden walls, or as paving stones.

[In some towns and villages], surviving Jews who returned after 1945 found that former neighbors didn’t want to give up the apartments and furniture they had seized with the help of the Germans.

But today’s local authorities found intolerable the image of old Jewish graves in contemporary France being defaced with the Nazi symbol. So they took an unusual step [of] organizing volunteers to patrol Alsace’s 67 threatened rural Jewish cemeteries, protecting some of these neglected vestiges of a time when Jews, excluded from the city, were forced to flourish in the Alsatian countryside.

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.”