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His family was forced to sell their precious Pissarro painting before fleeing Nazi Germany; will he finally see justice?
It has been more than four years since I first reported on the looted art case regarding the Camille Pissarro painting, “Rue Saint-Honoré, Apres Midi, Effet de Pluie,” in The Forward. The painting is part of a series the Jewish artist painted from the safety of his hotel room in Paris at the height of the Dreyfus Affair in France.
The scandal, sparked by the false conviction of a Jewish army office tore French society apart and brought to light the country’s deep antisemitism. “Rue Saint-Honoré” is both an important work of Impressionism and a testament to historical events. If recovered, it may even break records at auction, how rare a Pissarro cityscape comes on the market, and how robust the fine art auction industry is at present. “The painting could “easily break the hundred-million-dollar mark at auction, following its recovery,” says historian and looted art expert, Jonathan Petropoulos.
The case of this rediscovered Pissarro painting captured my imagination from an aesthetic, legal, and storytelling perspective. It is a saga that has it all — art, war, robber barons, and more — and forces everyone who encounters it to reckon with fundamental questions on morality and humanity — from both a personal and historical perspective.
The case has been in the public consciousness for far longer than my own connection to it, however. In 1939, just prior to the onset of World War II, Lilly Cassirer — who inherited Rue St. Honoré through her husband, a member of a renowned family of cultural patrons in Germany — was forced to sell the painting under duress in order to flee Nazi Germany.
Sixty years later, in December of 1999, Lilly’s heirs discovered that the Pissarro had not been lost or destroyed in the war. In fact, it had resurfaced at the new Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid, a collection belonging to the Kingdom of Spain acquired directly from the Thyssen Steel family, which had financed Hitler’s early rise to power.
The rediscovery kicked off an Odyssean legal journey up and down the federal courts in California, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington twice, and back. Now, another ruling is expected from the Federal District Court in Los Angeles this spring, on remand from the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has asked the district court to issue a new ruling in light of a new California law regarding stolen and Holocaust-looted art. For its part, the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum maintains that it is the legitimate owner of the painting and that “there were no indications of bad faith in the acquisition of the painting.”
A separate, concurrent effort is underway in Congress to update the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 (HEAR Act), a Federal law that enabled Nazi-looted art claims to be submitted within six years of discovery of a work of art, thereby supplanting any state statute of limitations. The law was intended to expire after ten years, but given the enormous amount of looted art still to be found, the proposed update would remove the sunset clause, as well as dismiss defenses not directly related to the merits of the cases. The new act specifically cites this Pissarro painting and the legal case to recover it, seeking to prevent other looted art claims from facing a similar, protracted legal battle. The bill already passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in a unanimous vote and is on the docket for a vote in the House of Representatives.
On the eve of two significant moments in the adjudication of Nazi-looted art, I sat down with David Cassirer, Lilly’s last living heir, and Sam Dubbin, one of his lawyers working on the case.
David, not long from now, there will be a new court decision on the long running case to restitute your family’s Pissarro painting “Rue Saint-Honoré, Apres Midi, Effet de Pluie,” which was a prized possession of your great-grandmother Lilly. What are you feeling at the moment?
David Cassirer: I’m pretty excited. It’s been such a long time since we started. This case gets exciting, and then it slows down. This is one of those exciting moments. There’s a lot going on, and we’re feeling pretty confident that we’re close to a recovery, after finding the painting more than twenty-six years ago
And what about you, Sam, how are you feeling?
Sam Dubbin: That’s a great question, because in my profession, you get optimistic, and then you get deflated, and sometimes the deflation takes a long time to get over. But deep down, I’m feeling optimistic, like this could really happen. And the moments when I feel lucky that it’s happening, I say to myself, “That’s ridiculous. It’s so long overdue.” What should have been done, should have been done so long ago. If the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum had given it back when Claude asked for it in 2000, he would have had ten years to enjoy it, to show it to people, to donate it. And it would have been a magnificent event.
This painting is important within the oeuvre of Pissarro’s work, but also historically in connection with the Dreyfus affair. Can you elaborate on its cultural and historical importance?
Dubbin: Pissarro painted this painting from the second floor of the Grand Hôtel du Louvre during the height of the Dreyfus Affair, when he literally feared for his life. He could not be seen on the streets of Paris because the antisemitism was so intense, and it’s considered one of the great works of the Impressionist movement. And so when you think about its origin during the Dreyfus Affair, then being looted by the Nazis during the preeminent human rights war crime in history, and now not being returned by the Kingdom of Spain, it’s just such an egregious, arrogant violation of decency and humanity.
And for you David, from a personal standpoint, what does the painting mean to you?
Cassirer: One of the things I like about the case is that there has been so much extraordinary publicity and interest by the public and by the press that it kind of reconnected the dots between the Impressionists and my family. My father would be very proud to read about the fact that his cousins Paul and Bruno, had championed the Impressionists and responsible for some of their success. There’s a new exhibition that’s starting soon in Berlin all about Paul Cassirer. It’s exciting to see this. It’s exciting in light of all the antisemitism that we’ve seen and the resurgence of it lately, to have some good news about Jewish contributions to culture, not to mention that Pissarro himself was Jewish. I’m delighted when I read stuff that starts to put in perspective this whole concept of our role in culture. It’s not the only thing Jewish people do, but it’s a big part of our culture.
I’d be very happy on behalf of the family and our friends to win the case, but it’s equally important that the case stands for something. And my father would feel that in his bones, especially since he really was there in the Holocaust and watched his family wiped out, watched their fortunes wiped out, watched most of his relatives sent off to the camps and so on. So, he felt it on a level I can only empathize with. It’s different if you’re there at a detention camp in the desert outside of Casablanca, and you’re dying of typhoid fever because there’s no running water and there’s no toilets. So luckily, he was young and strong and came back and survived and got here during the war. And of course, he went in to try to enlist. [The Americans] threw him out. “We’re not taking any Germans. Are you crazy?” He was very disappointed that he couldn’t join up and fight the Nazis.
The U.S. Supreme Court held in 2022 that California law should apply in this case, which was a big victory. But then the appellate court ruled against you, once again. What’s at stake with the next court decision?
Cassirer: I badly need this case to come out right, not just for the family. It’s a very important precedent. My father would have wanted people to be able to cite, to point to Cassirer v. Spain, Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza. That’s a big deal. We want people to be able to rely on that precedent all over the country and maybe in other countries as well, so I’m watching for that. It isn’t just California law versus Spain, it’s American law versus Spain. Generally speaking, throughout the country, the rule would be that you never acquire good title to stolen stuff. That’s the bigger picture here. The Supreme Court ruling meant that we are going to use good old American law to decide this thing ultimately.
Dubbin: By the way, Spanish law is an outlier. Even in other European countries, you cannot acquire good title even after the passage of time, if you take it in bad faith. Even countries like Germany, France, Netherlands, and Switzerland. Only Spain allows you to get good title after six years of adverse possession if you acquired something in bad faith.
It feels like a case in which, hopefully, common sense and morality can align. I think oftentimes, when the public thinks about the law, there’s sometimes a frustration that can arise, because cases are not always litigated based on what the public thinks is the logical, morally correct outcome. But hopefully, from what you’re saying, this could be one of those cases. David, what have been some of the positive things that have come out of this battle?
Cassirer: Lots of great stuff although it’s been difficult to wait so long and to watch my immediate family pass away in the interim. And as you can see, I’m not getting any younger here. (David is 71). It’s been a long, hard slog. The support from non-Jews has been extraordinary. We would expect, and we did receive, endless support from Jewish organizations and Jewish individuals. It’s been amazing, however, how much support we’ve had from day one in the press and in the public and in government, et cetera. I’ve been very heartened by the fact that we’ve had so much support from people “without a dog in the race,” so to speak, beyond the Jewish community.
I’ve also been very heartened in recent years with Sam’s extraordinary success working with legislatures, both in California and in Washington, and that the support isn’t just from one side or the other. It’s amazingly bipartisan. People who don’t even talk to each other gladly work together on these bills, sponsor these bills, and fend off anyone trying to undo it. Even though we haven’t won yet, we have won many battles along the way.
David, what advice would you give to other families who may be pursuing cases? What do you hope people take away from your experience?
Cassirer: That’s a good question. Assuming that we’re ultimately successful, which I’m still pretty confident with Sam’s help and this extraordinary team that we’ve managed to assemble, that we are going to win this thing. People should be encouraged, in a meta sense, that it’s worth fighting for stuff that’s important, even if the odds are long, even if other people might not be successful at it. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try and you shouldn’t stick with it. I’ve been in the case twenty-six years and counting. If you’re tough enough and dedicated enough and you figure out a way to surround yourself with talented, committed people, there’s very little that can’t be accomplished in this country and in other countries as well. I think for me, that’s a pretty big takeaway.
You’ve just struck me that you’re talking about the American dream.
Cassirer: Yes! My father told me that the greatest day he ever had was becoming an American citizen. After what he had been through and being stateless, having had his government turn against him, it’s interesting that, given his extraordinary life, the greatest day of his life to him was when he became a naturalized citizen; because, to him, that was the American dream.
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In David Baerwald’s epic tale of espionage and wartime horrors, family history is stranger than fiction
“When I started out writing this book, my model wasn’t James Clavell,” David Baerwald said with a laugh, as he paused for a smoke break at a waterfront picnic table in his current hometown of Kingston, New York. “It was more like Bernard Malamud, or something; it was this kind of interior, depressing thing about a family coming to grips with its crimes — the hazards of epigenetic traumatic memory in a family, and what it does to people. It was a much more personal tale, you know? I wasn’t really thinking of this huge, swashbuckling thing.”
The Fire Agent, Baerwald’s debut novel, is indeed a huge, swashbuckling affair, an epic, massively entertaining and often gut-punchingly horrifying tale of international espionage spanning four continents, two world wars and countless collisions between heartfelt idealism and the harsh realities of human behavior over its 600 pages. Though some of its characters and most of its conversations are fictional, The Fire Agent is firmly grounded in actual historical events and figures both well-known and obscure — some of which are truly stranger than fiction.
“I would not have dared to make up most of this,” Baerwald said with a shrug. “Some of the characters are so over-the-top, they’re like super-villains from a Bruce Lee movie or Get Smart. The Black Dragon Society? Treasure hoards of Chinese gold? That all sounds ridiculous, like something out of Terry and the Pirates, or fucking Indiana Jones. But it all happened! I really wanted to provide people with clues, so that they could look into the actual history, because I found it so interesting.”
Much of The Fire Agent’s plot is based around the life and career of Ernst Baerwald, the author’s actual grandfather, a German Jew who spent several decades in Japan — ostensibly working as a liaison for the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben, though the position served as cover for his extensive and deeply impactful espionage activities on behalf of the German (and later the United States) government. Long dead by the time his grandson was born in 1960, Ernst rarely came up in family conversation. “He went largely unrecognized in his lifetime,” said Baerwald. “Nobody ever really talked about him, and from what people would tell me about my grandfather, I had the impression that he was this kind of bum that sold ink on the streets in Tokyo. I had no idea that he’d led this crazy life!”
It wasn’t until about eight years ago, when Baerwald was cleaning out his parents’ wildfire-threatened West Los Angeles home, that he got an initial glimpse at Ernst’s actual occupation. “There were two boxes with a bunch of his papers that were in his office when he died,” Baerwald said. “They’d just been packed up and put away and buried under, like, 1960s-era skis and gardening equipment. In fact, I was gonna throw them away without looking at them; I was like, ‘Well, I’ve lived long enough without them.’ But this woman that was working with me, archiving the things in the house, she was like, ‘Well, let’s have a look.’”
Along with Ernst’s diaries and letters, Baerwald found maps and photographs of Japan, a Samurai sword and a miniature spy camera from the 1930s, and a speech that his grandfather had given to a U.S. government-run spy school in San Francisco in 1943. “I realized that there was, in fact, a huge story here that I needed to uncover,” Baerwald recalled. “That speech to the spy school was really the map to a huge portion of what I was soon to be researching. I didn’t know where it would take me, I didn’t know what it was for; I just knew that that was what I had to do, and suddenly that became my only thing in life.”
Baerwald is singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and film and TV composer best-known for Boomtown, his platinum-selling 1986 album by David & David, his duo with musician and producer David Ricketts, as well as his Golden Globe-nominated song “Come What May” from the Moulin Rouge! Soundtrack. His songs have been recorded by such disparate luminaries as Waylon Jennings, Sheryl Crow, Susanna Hoffs, Fishbone and Olivia Newton-John, but Baerwald said that writing a novel felt surprisingly natural for him.
“My first role was research, not writing,” he said. “But I did write some scenes just to see if I could do it, to see if I could actually write longform without meter or rhyme schemes, and it was like stepping into a warm, welcoming seat. You can get to feeling pretty claustrophobic as a songwriter; I’d accumulated a lot of rules for myself over God knows how many decades of doing that, just to survive — practices that I had acquired, mindsets — and I was happy to let them go, frankly. And I realized that there were a lot of things that I learned from not just lyric writing, but composition, that applied to writing a novel. When you’re composing for monophonic instruments like flutes or strings, they play the chords together as a group, but they’re each playing individual lines; and when you’re structuring complicated human interactions, that kind of muscle memory is really handy.
“To me, plots are like chord changes,” he continued. “They’re signifiers for change, but the real change is happening within the chord. It’s actually like a thousand minnows swimming in vaguely the same direction, rather than these monolithic events that proceed one after the other; there’s always a certain individuality in their movement. So if you think about characters like, ‘Here’s the cello section, and here’s the percussion,’ or whatever, it enables you to structure these sort of complicated scenes where everybody’s got some agenda, and everybody’s got their own melody that they’re singing.”
And as Ernst’s improbably cinematic life gradually unfolded for Baerwald through the diaries and correspondence of his grandfather and other family members (including Baerwald’s father Hans, who taught political science and Japanese studies at UCLA for 30 years), the plot of The Fire Agent fell into place. “I didn’t really need to outline the plot, because I already had the outline. It was his life — and it was like, ‘Wherever he goes, I go,’” he said with a laugh. “I just did research along the way to find out what he was doing and what was happening around him. Whether there’s a huge earthquake or whether there’s a plague or whether there’s a war, it kind of gives you the plot point, right there.”
Far more challenging for Baerwald was dealing with the “emotional rollercoaster” of researching the many soul-crushing horrors that his grandfather witnessed (and, in some cases, was directly involved in) as a soldier, citizen and spy. “I would find myself just weeping more than once,” he said. “You just find yourself coming across these artifacts that really take you into the historical moment, and it’s really powerful. I remember I was in the rare books library at Columbia, looking at my uncle’s papers, and there was a letter from one of the soon-to-be-dead fighters during the Lublin Massacre, and it’s 28 pages of just savagery. So I’m sitting there, reading the details of this doomed-yet-heroic effort, and I feel this little tap on my shoulder, and this girl says, “Excuse me, Sir, I’m sorry — there’s no crying on the manuscripts.’”
Indeed, one of the major themes running through The Fire Agent is mankind’s innate ability to solve a major problem while creating even worse ones with the solution. Early on in the story, Ernst is present at the unveiling of the Haber-Bosch process, the revolutionary industrial development which enabled man to produce synthetic ammonia on a grand scale — a discovery which then allowed the industrial synthesis of nitrogen fertilizers, which were desperately needed by farmers across the globe at the beginning of the 20th century. Unfortunately, while this discovery saved humanity from worldwide famine, the industrial-scale production of ammonia and ammonium nitrate also resulted in tremendous carnage on the battlefield and elsewhere.
“I knew that there was going to have to be some reference in the book to the transformation from life-giving fertilizers to life-taking gunpowder and phosgene gas,” said Baerwald. “The Haber-Bosch process has made the lives of the probably 7 billion people alive today possible, but it’s bleached the coral in the ocean, and the high-pressure tests that emerged from it ultimately fueled the Nazi air force and tanks and trucks…
“There are a lot of scientists in my family,” he said, “and one of them said something to me once that I put in Albert Einstein’s mouth in the book: ‘Look at us — we’re in the dreamiest of sciences, astrophysics, and what are we doing? We’re making missile trajectories and warheads.’ And that’s been a kind of a refrain in my family for my whole life, this awful feeling of being trapped in a sociopathic system that takes everything beautiful and turns it into a weapon somehow, that takes brotherhood and camaraderie and turns it into teams and armies, and takes love and turns it into prostitution.
“One of the reasons I chose the music business was that I didn’t want to be part of all that. I thought, ‘Even at its very worst, at least I’m not making weapons!’” Baerwald said. “But apparently, I am! Ultimately, the record companies started merging with multinational corporations who made fucking nuclear weapons, and now Spotify has gobbled up all my friends’ livelihoods and is investing in AI weapons. You can’t get away from this shit!”
Though he’s currently busy promoting The Fire Agent, Baerwald says that a sequel is already in the works, one which will include material cut from the first novel. “I’ve been like a guy chasing a piece of paper across a windy field for like seven years,” he said. “The full story was always just slightly out of reach — for the 600 pages that I ended up with, I wrote probably 1400. I wanted to take The Fire Agent up to 1980, but I realized that there was no way I’d physically able to do it; I honestly thought I was going blind by the end of it. But now I’m really looking forward to working on the next one.”
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Bamba blankets NYC after Park Slope Food Coop vote to boycott Israeli products. What’s next?
(JTA) — Jewish institutions are responding to a boycott of Israeli products at a Brooklyn grocery store by buying up Bamba.
Four thousand free bags of the Israeli peanut butter-flavored snack made their way Sunday along the Celebrate Israel Day Parade route up Fifth Avenue, passed around by volunteers with UJA-Federation of New York.
It was the organization’s first response to a contentious election result at the Park Slope Food Coop, the members-only Brooklyn grocery store that last week voted to boycott Israeli products. Bamba is one of the products no longer sold at the coop as a result of the boycott and a symbol of the Israeli snack food industry.
The Bamba distribution was coordinated by UJA, which was a sponsor of the parade, and the nonprofit group Met Council, which will also be distributing bags across their network of food pantries. (An initial purchase of 20,000 bags was made by UJA in the wake of the coop vote last week.) The snacks were brought to UJA’s office by truck on Friday.
The Met Council will distribute the remaining Bamba to the hundreds of food pantries who receive its food deliveries, including the 14 it owns and operates, by next week, CEO David Greenfield told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“They smartly decided to make lemonade out of lemons,” Greenfield said of the UJA initiative. (Some of the pantries, he noted, may decline the Bamba anticipating clients with peanut allergies.)
The Bamba will be added as an additional free snack item to pantry clients’ usual takeaways. Some of it will also be delivered directly to Holocaust survivors within the Met Council’s network.
Sunday’s parade was a respite for members of the Jewish community who say they felt alienated in the wake of the coop vote Tuesday night. But it was also controversial due to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s decision not to attend — a mayoral first — and the surprise appearance of far-right Israeli Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich.
But why purchase the popular Israeli snack in bulk, as opposed to encouraging local grocery stores to stock up on it and other Israeli items?
“There are a bunch of ideas on the table,” Hindy Poupko, senior vice president of the UJA-Federation told JTA. “We wanted to do something in the immediate aftermath of the boycott to demonstrate solidarity with the anti-boycott members of the coop, and all the work that they put into it. We wanted to immediately demonstrate to our community that we are able to respond quickly when these things happen, and also demonstrate that we will always be on the side of coops working together — not engaging in boycotts.”
One option UJA is floating, Poupko said, is an Israeli fair at a number of Jewish community centers where visitors can purchase Israeli goods.
Some advocates have even begun taking legal action against the coop, hoping to see the items restored to the shelves.
A group of pro-Israel activists filed a cease and desist motion in response to the boycott, alleging that the boycott itself is illegal and discriminatory.
CUNY law professor Jeffrey Lax announced in a post on X Wednesday that he had filed a New York State Division of Human Rights complaint on behalf of his Jewish advocacy group alleging that the boycott violates a state law that prevents the boycott or blacklist of products based on protected classes, including national origin.
“Instead of bringing neighbors together, this community institution chose to alienate many of its longtime Jewish members and their allies by banning a handful of Israeli products,” the ADL of New York/New Jersey said in a Thursday statement on X. “This move does nothing to advance peace in the Middle East; instead, the heinous rhetoric about Israel and Jews invoked in the process to ban these products contributes to the intense climate of antisemitism in NYC.”
The coop itself has not responded to JTA’s requests for comment. Activists aligned with the boycott, which passed with a 67% majority, referred JTA back to a press release distributed immediately following the vote last week.
“Tonight’s win is proof that cooperative movements are powerful models for exercising solidarity and participatory democracy,” coop board candidate Taylor Pate said in the May 26 statement.
In addition to Bamba, a variety of bell pepper sold only in the winter, persimmons, olive oil, sesame products, and Dorot frozen herb cubes are affected by the Park Slope Food Coop boycott. Two of the brands, Al Arz Tahini and Equal Exchange olive oil, are made at least in part by Arab-Israelis.
Asked for comment in regards to the coop vote results, Jewish Community Relations Council CEO Mark Treyger, through a spokesperson, referred JTA to a May 9 sermon by Congregation Beth Elohim senior Rabbi Rachel Timoner, in which she called it “the hyper local example of a proxy war.”
“If the boycott was designed to change Israel’s policies or to create a Palestinian state, or if it had the goal of safety, freedom, and equality for both Israelis and Palestinians, many of us would support it,” Timoner added. “But the BDS movement is not that.”
Timoner clarified her stance on the boycott at the coop in a sermon days after the vote.
“I do think that there is a lot of antisemitism threaded through the entire conversation about Israel,” Timoner said in the May 29 sermon. “But the vast majority of people who voted for that boycott were simply trying to say that what is happening to the Palestinians is wrong.”
A representative for Nestlé, the parent company of Osem, which manufactures Bamba, did not respond to a request for comment about the boycott.
The boycott means Brooklynites will have one fewer place to buy Bamba, the now ubiquitous snack that has been sold at Trader Joe’s for the last decade and is credited with reducing the prevalence of peanut allergies in Israel.
There’s at least one other place in New York City where Bamba was once available and no longer is. In March 2021, at the opening of baseball season, Bamba and the New York Mets announced a partnership in which the snack would be sold at the stadium in the main snack kiosks. The following year, the baseball team and the snack launched a sweepstakes for children to win free tickets to a game.
Since a March 2023 announcement that the brands would partner again for the season, Bamba has not publicly commented on their partnership. The Mets did not respond to a request for comment.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Bamba blankets NYC after Park Slope Food Coop vote to boycott Israeli products. What’s next? appeared first on The Forward.
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Hezbollah rejects US-brokered ceasefire deal struck by Lebanon and Israel
(JTA) — Hezbollah appears to have rejected a ceasefire that the United States brokered between Israel and Lebanon, where the Iranian proxy is based.
The deal reportedly would have allowed Israel to remain in southern Lebanon, where it has established a buffer zone, but not permit any attacks in Beirut unless Hezbollah attacked Israel within its own borders. It would also have required Hezbollah fighters to leave the buffer zone.
A top Hezbollah leader said accepting a demand to leave southern Lebanon would amount to “surrender” for the group.
“What we are concerned about is an end to the aggression, ceasefire and Israel’s withdrawal,” Secretary-General Naim Qassem said in a televised statement on Thursday, the Associated Press reported. “We did not make any commitment to any party to stop resisting as long as there is occupation.”
Dozens of Israeli soldiers have died in the fighting, which Hezbollah is increasingly prosecuting with the use of drones.
The rejection comes as the U.S. House of Representatives voted to rebuke President Donald Trump and his war on Iran on Wednesday, narrowly passing a resolution that limits Trump’s power to continue the war without congressional approval.
Four Republicans voted with Democrats on the bill, in a sign of how opposition to the war, which Trump launched jointly with Israel in February, is crossing party lines ahead of high-stakes midterm elections in the United States.
The bill would not require presidential signoff but is seen as unlikely to substantively change Trump’s handling of the war, which he has insisted does not require congressional approval.
Trump called the vote “meaningless” in a post on Truth Social on Thursday morning.
“Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote. “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing.”
The bill now goes to the Senate, where a similar measure has advanced in recent weeks, also with support from a handful of Republicans. It comes at a delicate time, as an uncertain ceasefire struck in early April has now stretched on without a resolution for longer than active hostilities unfolded. Trump has failed to achieve the terms for a deal to permanently end the war that he said he wanted, and this week said he thought the constant negotiations had grown “very boring.” Hezbollah’s apparent rejection of a ceasefire deal is another setback.
Iran has continued to battle during its ceasefire with the United States, though not against Israel: On Wednesday, it struck Kuwait’s main airport, killing one and injuring 60.
Also on Wednesday, Trump confirmed reports that he had called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “f—ing crazy” during a call on Monday in which Trump pressed Netanyahu to strike a ceasefire with Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. Trump told a New York Post podcast that he was “a little perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon” but that he liked Netanyahu and worked well with him.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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