The Heart That Endures

Charles Dennis Buchinsky—better known to the world as Charles Bronson—wore a face that rarely cracked under pressure. That composed toughness was no Hollywood invention. Born the eleventh of fifteen children in the hard coal country of Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, he lost his father to black lung when he was only ten. The boy went into the mines himself, earning a dollar a ton. At about twenty-one he left the darkness of the pits for the skies of the Pacific, serving as an aerial gunner on B-29 Superfortresses. He was wounded in combat and earned the Purple Heart—the oldest military decoration still in continuous use by the United States.

Bronson stands in a long line of recipients that includes James Garner, Kurt Vonnegut, Colin Powell, John F. Kennedy, and Audie Murphy. Each received the medal for wounds sustained in service to the nation. Yet the story of the Purple Heart begins long before any of them were born.

On 7 August 1782, near the end of the War of Independence, General George Washington issued General Orders from his headquarters at Newburgh, New York. He created the Badge of Military Merit: a heart of purple cloth or silk, edged with narrow lace or binding, to be worn over the left breast. It was to be awarded for “any singularly meritorious action”—not only unusual gallantry in battle, but also extraordinary fidelity and essential service of any kind. The wearer’s name and regiment were to be entered in a Book of Merit, and the recipient could pass guards and sentinels unchallenged.

Washington’s purpose was clear and radical for its time. European armies reserved honors almost exclusively for officers and aristocrats. Congress, short of funds, had forbidden him from granting commissions as rewards. Washington insisted that in a patriot army and a free country “the road to glory… is thus open to all.” The Badge was deliberately aimed at enlisted men and non-commissioned officers—the common soldiers who had carried the Revolution on their backs for more than seven hard years. Only three known awards were made before the decoration slipped into obscurity for a century and a half.

In 1932, on the bicentennial of Washington’s birth, Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur revived and redesigned it as the Purple Heart. Over time the criteria narrowed to those wounded or killed by enemy action. What began as a broad recognition of merit became the nation’s enduring symbol of personal sacrifice in combat. More than 1.8 million have been awarded.

Did Washington foresee what the Purple Heart would become? Almost certainly not in its modern form. He could not have imagined air power, global wars, or the sheer scale of the awards that would follow. Yet he understood something essential: that a republic must honor the ordinary man who bleeds for it, and that such honor must not be the exclusive property of rank or birth. The purple heart he designed was a quiet democratic statement. That principle has survived every change of criteria, every redesign of the medal, and every generation of conflict.

On the anniversary of its institution, the medal still speaks the language Washington intended. It does not measure victory or rank. It records the cost paid by those who stood in the line of fire—miners-turned-gunners like Charles Bronson, and countless others whose faces, like his, learned composure the hard way. The road to glory remains open to all.

Selecting Hiroshima, 81 Years On

Hiroshima was not the last city subjected to nuclear attack. Nagasaki followed three days later. Neither bomb, by itself, ended the Pacific War or demonstrably “saved lives” in the neat arithmetic long claimed. The Soviet Union’s declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria on 9 August did more to collapse Japanese options in hours than the destruction of one or even two cities.

Japan had been warned. The Potsdam Declaration of 26 July offered terms and threatened “prompt and utter destruction.” Tokyo’s response was interpreted as rejection. After Hiroshima on 6 August, Japanese leaders continued to pursue mediation through Moscow. They fought on. Only when the Soviets entered—invalidating the last diplomatic card and opening a second front that Japanese forces could not hope to contain—did the Supreme War Council confront the impossibility of continued resistance. The Emperor’s intervention followed the twin shocks of 9 August. Historians such as Tsuyoshi Hasegawa have documented this chronology carefully: Hiroshima raised urgency but did not force the decisive political shift; Soviet entry did.

Truman never lost sleep over the decision, at least not publicly. He later said so repeatedly. The choice was effectively pre-shaped by the Interim Committee and Target Committee, which included scientists of the calibre of Oppenheimer and Fermi. Their criteria—large urban areas of sufficient diameter, relatively untouched by prior bombing so the weapon’s effects could be measured, and high psychological impact—systematically ruled out purely military or unpopulated alternatives. Demonstration shots were rejected. Kyoto was removed for cultural reasons at Stimson’s insistence; Hiroshima met the remaining tests as an army headquarters city and embarkation port that was still largely intact.

Japan had placed Allied prisoners of war in industrial and military zones, a practice that complicated any clean distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Truman was aware of the political and moral risks. British firebombing of German cities had already drawn criticism. His private diary entry of 25 July recorded an instruction to target “military objectives and soldiers and sailors… not women and children,” and to spare the old and new capitals. That caveat was empty in practice. The aiming point in Hiroshima was the city centre. Tens of thousands of civilians died immediately; the total, including radiation effects, ran into six figures. A smaller number of Allied POWs also perished in the blast.

Then and now, much of the press and official narrative has treated the decision as self-evidently justified because it was taken by a Democratic administration under wartime pressure. Alternatives—modifying the unconditional-surrender demand to clarify the Emperor’s status earlier, waiting for the already-scheduled Soviet entry, or intensifying the blockade and conventional campaign—are waved away with the assertion that the bombs alone ended the war early and spared American lives. The evidence does not support that clean claim. Japan’s military hardliners remained prepared to fight after Hiroshima. The combination of nuclear demonstration and Soviet assault produced the surrender. Casualties from a full invasion of the home islands would have been horrific; that does not prove the specific targeting of two cities was the only or least costly path available in early August 1945.

The scale of the nuclear attack exceeded anything previously imaginable, even after the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities. Hiroshima finished nothing by itself. What followed was more consequential for the post-war order: a rapid American pivot that left Eastern Europe under Soviet domination, Stalin’s position strengthened, and China descending into civil war that produced a communist victory. Atrocities on the Burma-Thailand railway and elsewhere received incomplete justice. American resolve to confront Soviet expansion was real, yet the pattern of selective memory about the closing days of the Pacific War has persisted.

Eighty-one years later the official story remains largely intact in popular retelling. The historical record is more complicated. The bombs were weapons of unprecedented power used against cities containing military facilities and large civilian populations. The Soviet entry was strategically decisive. Japan had been offered terms and chose to continue. Truman accepted the committee’s framework and never publicly second-guessed it. Those facts do not require romanticising Japanese militarism or denying the savagery of the Pacific War. They do require abandoning the comforting simplification that two nuclear strikes alone ended the fighting and thereby redeemed the civilian deaths.

Palestinians, in history, are Jewish

Around this time of year we mark the anniversary of the fall of Betar in 135 AD. Betar was the last major fortress of the Bar Kokhba revolt, the final large-scale Jewish uprising against Rome. The revolt erupted after Emperor Hadrian’s plans to rebuild Jerusalem as the pagan city Aelia Capitolina, complete with a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount. The day of Betar’s fall coincided with Tisha B’Av, the same fast day that already commemorated the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians and the Second Temple by the Romans sixty-five years earlier. After crushing the revolt, the Romans renamed the province of Judea “Syria Palaestina.” The name was not inventing an ancient nation; it was a deliberate administrative and symbolic act that sought to erase the Jewish character of the land.

Most people today treat “Palestine” as if it were the continuous name of an ancient sovereign people. It was not. The term itself has older roots in Greek sources for the coastal region associated with the Philistines, but the formal Roman redesignation of the Jewish province came after a Jewish rebellion was suppressed. The land remained the historic homeland of the Jews. Jews had lived there for more than a thousand years before the revolt, returned after the Babylonian exile, rebuilt their Temple, and maintained continuous presence even under successive empires. Dispersal followed Roman victory, yet the connection to the land never disappeared. The Jewish diaspora is wide precisely because Jewish history is long—three to four thousand years of recorded continuity, not a recent invention.

The modern claim that “Palestine” is the exclusive homeland of a distinct Arab people called Palestinians is recent. It does not rest on continuous ancient nationhood. It rests on a selective reading of the Balfour Declaration, the subsequent British Mandate, the 1947 UN partition proposal, and especially the aftermath of 1948 and 1967. The Balfour Declaration supported a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine while protecting the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities. The Mandate territory originally included land east of the Jordan; Transjordan was later administered separately and became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In 1948 Israel declared independence on the basis of the UN partition and surviving Jewish settlement. Neighbouring Arab states, including the newly independent Jordan, invaded. Jordan occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) until 1967; Egypt held Gaza. No independent Palestinian Arab state was established by those occupying powers.

Jordan itself was no stranger to internal political tension over the Palestinian question. In 1951 King Abdullah I was assassinated at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by a Palestinian gunman (a Jordanian subject after the annexation of the West Bank). The killing reflected deep resentment among some Palestinian nationalists toward the Hashemite monarchy’s policies, including its pragmatic dealings and the formal incorporation of the West Bank into the kingdom. The 1950s saw repeated civil unrest, demonstrations, and attempted coups, particularly on the West Bank, as Palestinian nationalists and pan-Arab radicals challenged the monarchy’s authority and its Western alignments. These tensions never fully disappeared.

After 1967 the presence of armed Palestinian fedayeen groups inside Jordan escalated into open confrontation. In 1970 King Hussein’s forces moved decisively against the PLO and other guerrilla organisations that had established a state-within-a-state and challenged royal control. The fighting, remembered as Black September, drove the bulk of the fedayeen leadership and fighters out of Jordan and into Lebanon, where their presence contributed heavily to that country’s later instability. One of the central figures who emerged from this period, Yasser Arafat, advanced the ambit claim that “his” people were Palestinians entitled to a state in the territory of Israel, including parts of Jerusalem.

For many reasons not rooted in historical continuity, the UN and much of the international system found it convenient to maintain a particular status quo after 1967. Neighbouring Islamic states largely refused permanent absorption of the original 1948 refugees and their descendants. Worse, the UN adopted a unique refugee definition and hereditary status solely for Palestinians under UNRWA—status that passes down the male line and can persist even after citizenship is acquired elsewhere—turning a mid-century displacement into a multigenerational political instrument.

Critics of Israel point to the West Bank and Gaza and insist Israel should not hold them. Israel captured those territories in a defensive war in 1967. It has repeatedly offered withdrawals and territorial compromise in exchange for recognition and an end to violence. What followed decades of concessions, including the complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, was not durable peace but sustained terrorism, culminating in the massacre of 7 October 2023, the worst single day of anti-Jewish slaughter since the Holocaust. In the intervening years, international funding and UN-endorsed education systems in the territories have coexisted with curricula, media, and official rhetoric that celebrate the killing of Jews, often packaged as “anti-Zionism” and the demand “from the river to the sea.” Senior figures in the Palestinian leadership have histories of terrorism and crimes against civilians; accountability has been selective at best.

None of this requires denying that Arabs have lived in the land for centuries or that individual Palestinians have genuine grievances and attachments. It does require rejecting the erasure of Jewish history. The Romans renamed Judea after crushing a Jewish revolt. The modern political identity of “Palestine” as an exclusive Arab national claim is a 20th-century development, sharpened after 1967 and sustained by institutions that treat Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate. The land’s deepest continuous historical identity is Jewish. Pretending otherwise does not produce peace; it produces permanent grievance.