An eruv (literally, “merger”) is an elaborate fiction in Jewish law that allows the observant to skirt the prohibition on carrying objects out of doors on the Sabbath. Usually involving the symbolic enclosure of an area of a city with telephone poles and strings, an eruv tends to require the cooperation of municipal authorities. Simon Rocker explains how English Jewry’s attitude toward this institution has changed in recent years:

Unsurprisingly, British Jewry, not given to drawing too much attention to itself, did not go in for eruv building until recently. When the first metropolitan eruv was launched 21 years ago, covering a significant area in north-west London, it was transformative, liberating in particular young buggy-pushing parents. Its creation signaled a new self-confidence and its success inspired others; there are now more than a dozen eruvim operating across the country.

So normal a part of the Anglo-Jewish landscape have eruvim becme that it’s easy to forget how controversial the first initially proved. It took more than a decade from initial planning to the erection of the first poles. Objections poured into the local council. Some liberal Jews feared that the device would encourage a “ghetto” mentality. Secularists decried the intrusion of religious apparatus into the public square.

It is a sign of change that whereas the inaugural eruv faced a planning battle, the new Golders Green eruv went through almost on the nod.

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.