2 November—Joe Biden is such a nice guy. Even though he has steadfastly and quite rightly refused to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, he has recently opined that there should be a “humanitarian pause” in the Israel-Hamas war. The stuff of Nobel Peace Prizes. (Yeah, right. Look at all the other undeserving Democrats who got them.) But Joe and his care-givers are crazy. Among other things.

Because, while the Israelis would doubtless do their best to pause humanitarianly, Hamas would doubtless take full advantage of Israel’s unilateral humanitarian pause to regroup its irredeemably evil hordes, capture more hostages, set up more human shields, and do everything else in its power to commit Jewicide, ethnic cleansing, and overall mayhem. So do Joe Biden’s ingenuous advisors really expect Israel to fall for a humanitarian pause?

That brings to mind a Cecil B. DeMille Technicolor flick the family saw in 1950. In it, Hedy Lamarr seduced Victor Mature and, evidently as part of a sex ritual of some sort, subjected him to a buzz-cut and then handed him over to Henry Wilcoxon, who took a red-hot chef’s knife or gladius and gouged out Victor’s eyes.

Truth be told, I was rather squeamish back then (as I am today) and averted my gaze when Henry’s knife approached Victor’s sweaty head, so I can only assume a bloody enucleation ensued, with Victor’s eye-holes probably being cauterized in the process. (My big brother ate it up and went on to med school.) Then Victor was chained up and put to work in a flour mill. Or something like that. And ultimately he was able to demolish a building all by himself, killing himself and Hedy in the bargain.

The flick, of course, was “Samson and Delilah.” So what? you ask. So, as the delightful King James Version puts it in Judges 16, “Then went Samson to Gaza, and saw there an harlot, and went unto her.” Yes, Samson, besides being an oversexed superhero who eschewed barbers and had a thing for Philistine girls, was a judge. And Delilah was a Philistine. And the Samson and Delilah story took place in Gaza.

To be sure, the Philistines, who controlled Gaza back around a millennium BC weren’t Semitic, unlike the Hamas Philistines who have (or had) controlled it since 2008. Back then, too, Palestinians were called Philistines and Palestine was their home. Plus ça change.

And just as Samson was caught with his pants down three millennia ago, so Israel was caught last month . . .