In the third game of the World Baseball Classic last month, a nineteen-year-old unknown struck out a thirty-year-old veteran. Such an upset would be noteworthy in itself, but what makes the event truly surprising is that the pitcher was an Orthodox Jew named Jacob Steinmetz, playing for team Israel, and the batter Manny Machado, considered one of the best of the Major League, playing for the powerhouse team of the Dominican Republic. (During the regular season, Machado is the third baseman for the San Diego Padres.) Elli Wohlgelernter writes:

It was July 13, 2021 [when] the Arizona Diamondbacks selected seventeen-year-old Jacob with the 77th pick of the amateur draft, a month after he graduated from high school. It was a watershed pick: Jacob became the first practicing Orthodox Jew drafted to play organized baseball, dating back to the first draft in 1965.

Arizona wasn’t worried about caring for Steinmetz’s religious needs when they drafted him. According to the scout [Alex] Jacobs, the senior vice-president and assistant general manager of the Diamondbacks, Amiel Sawdaye, is a practicing Jew . . . who explained the inside baseball of kosher to the front office . . . and assured them that it would not be a problem.

“In fact,” Jacobs said, “they called his agent right before they were going to draft him and said, ‘Listen, we’re going to accommodate everything you could possibly need to make this as comfortable as possible for you so that you can be set up for success.” And so they have. Whereas once upon a time, Jacob had to pack his mom’s sandwiches in a cooler bag when traveling to tournaments, frozen packages will now be shipped to the team from a catering company once a week to wherever Jacob is playing.

As for Machado, he proved himself a model of sportsmanship, autographing a ball for Steinmetz after the game with the words, “Great pitch. Keep working. The sky’s the limit.”

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.