We tend to think of colors as fixed properties, and anyone who has studied French, Spanish, German, or Modern Hebrew knows that the basic crayon-box colors have exact equivalents in these languages. But this is not true of all languages. Russian, for instance, has no precise equivalent for “blue,” and other tongues have only two or three words for colors altogether. There was once a Yiddish humor magazine called Royte Pomerantsen—“Red Oranges”—because Yiddish had a word for the fruit but not for the hue. Biblical Hebrew has words meaning white (lavan), black (shahor), and red (adom), as well as names for specific dyes like the turquoise t’khelet. Other color words are a bit of mystery, which leads to problems in interpreting this week’s Torah reading, with its detailed discussions of a dermatological ailment usually rendered as “leprosy.” Phil Lieberman explains:

The basic rules for identifying ritually impure skin disease (tsara’at) are based on color changes: the afflicted individual is impure if the color of the affected skin turns “white” or “reddish white” and if the affected hair turns white. One sub-case, however, mentions the color tsahov. This is a rare Hebrew word, found only three times, all in this section (Leviticus 13:30–36). . . . In Modern Hebrew, it means “yellow,” but is this what it means in the Bible?

Lieberman takes us on a tour of the various translations offered throughout the ages (themselves often ambiguous), which range from yellow to red to simply pale or shiny.

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.