Russian Bombs Hit Babi Yar

On Tuesday, a Russian strike on a TV tower in Kyiv also damaged the Babi Yar (in Ukrainian, Babyn Yar) memorial site, which marks the mass grave of tens of thousands of Jews, murdered there in 1941. JNS reports:

Natan Sharansky, chair of the advisory board of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, confirmed the damage. “[That] Putin seeks to distort and manipulate the Holocaust to justify an illegal invasion of a sovereign democratic country is utterly abhorrent. It is symbolic that he starts attacking Kyiv by bombing the site of Babyn Yar, the biggest of Nazi massacre[s],” Sharansky wrote.

On Twitter, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky lamented the irony of the memorial being hit. “What is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?” he wrote. . . .

Yad Vashem also “vehemently condemned” the strike by Russian forces and urged the international community to take action, stating, “We call on the international community to take concerted measures to safeguard civilian lives as well as these historical sites because of their irreplaceable value for research, education, and commemoration of the Holocaust. . . . Sacred sites like Babi Yar must be protected.”

Read more at JNS

More about: Holocaust, Holocaust memorial, War in Ukraine

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF