Doing it for Hersh

 

Desert gazelle (tzvi in Hebrew, hersh in Yiddish), via.

The killing of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi in a tunnel underneath Rafah last Thursday, or possibly Friday morning, a day or two before the Israeli Defense Forces found their bodies Saturday afternoon, according to the autopsy reports from Israel's ministry of health, isn't the only terrible thing—it's all terrible—but maybe made especially poignant for many of us by the presence of the Israeli-American, the youngest of these particular victims, Goldberg-Polin, 23, who we've come to know a bit, or at least his parents, Rachel and Jon, who addressed the DNC in Chicago last month with a plea for a Gaza ceasefire:

the one thing that can most immediately release pressure and bring calm to the entire region: a deal that brings this diverse group of 109 hostages home and ends the suffering of the innocent civilians in Gaza. The time is now.

Hersh was my father's Yiddish name, and by extension that of my son, who was born just a month after my dad died, and named after him, in accordance with Jewish custom, so that I find myself involuntarily projecting the special qualities of my young Hersh, generous, attentive, deeply mentshlekh, on their young Hersh. It's too sad. May all their memories be a blessing.

We don't always mention the other thing, which is that so many of the victims of the October 7 massacre belong to the Israeli left, a political movement that has been mostly defunct for three or four decades, with a commitment to equity between Jews and Palestinians that the Israeli government was not often willing to match and the Palestinian resistance movements rarely took seriously (with some reason; even the nicest Jews weren't usually offering to give the stolen land back).  

What's Going On

 

Tips of 15mm artillery shells and howitzer on the Israel-Lebanon border. Photo by Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images from Axios.

Activity on the Gaza front continues to intensify, not in Gaza itself, of course, where it's the same rhythm of lower-level Israeli attacks killing families in Rafah, though not the threatened major attack, and the death toll continuing to inch toward 35,000, and reports of "full-blown" famine from the director of the UN's World Food Program, Cindy McCain, yes, that Cindy McCain, but on the diplomatic side, where Haaretz (that's a gift link) reported yesterday that Hamas had agreed to Egypt's proposed ceasefire, while Israel issued a denial that this had happened. 

This round of talks in Cairo seems to be definitely over, with Haniyeh and Netanyahu blaming each other, of course, though CIA director William Burns is still shuttling around Tel Aviv, Doha, and Cairo as if it weren't, but the shape of the deal as reported makes it look to me like it's Israel that turned it down: a 118-day deal in three phases, during the second of which (34 days in)

the parties will start enacting the principles that will lead to a prolonged cease-fire, including the withdrawal of the IDF to the borderline. Not all of these principles are reported.

and in the final 42 days,

I'll just leave this here

Neville Chamberlain pic.twitter.com/xnYDcXQicB

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 2, 2019

Mike Pence pic.twitter.com/OhZDhZdmUU

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 2, 2019