The synagogue in India’s capital city remains active, although the Jewish community there has dwindled to about 40 members. Although New Delhi, unlike Mumbai or Cochin, does not have a long history as a Jewish center, it experienced a brief golden age at midcentury, as Manoj Sharma reports:

Jews became a part of the New Delhi’s social fabric when it became India’s capital. They came to the new capital from different parts of the country to work with the central government—especially in the railways and defense. A few German and Polish Jews, who escaped the Holocaust, also settled in the city. A Jewish Welfare Association was formed in 1949; it built the synagogue in 1956.

Ever since, the Judah Hyam Synagogue has been at the center of Jewish life in the capital. The city’s Jewish families come together here during the Friday Shabbat service. During High Holidays, the synagogue is a bustling place, thanks to Israeli diplomats and other Jewish expatriates in the city. Besides, about 10,000 international travelers visit it every year.

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.