In 1998, Lithuania established a commission to investigate local collaboration with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, who successively occupied the country during World War II. But rather than searching out the numerous Lithuanians who aided the SS in murdering Jews, the commission turned against one of its own participants—the eminent Israeli Holocaust historian Yitzhak Arad, who fought the Germans as part of a pro-Soviet partisan unit. Daniel Brook writes:

On April 22, 2006, Respublika, an openly anti-Semitic newspaper that is one of Lithuania’s highest-circulation dailies, published a story headlined, “The Expert with Blood on His Hands.” The article used passages of Arad’s memoir, The Partisan, published in English in 1979, to smear him. In the Respublika article, what Arad’s memoir terms a 1944 “mopping-up operation” against “armed Lithuanians” after the Nazi withdrawal becomes an “ethnic cleansing of Lithuanians” that was part of a larger “Soviet genocide.” Arad, who was a teenager during the Holocaust, is referred to as an “NKVD storm trooper.”

The anti-Communist convictions that are evident throughout Arad’s book—his recounting of how Stalin crushed the organized Jewish community of Lithuania during the annexation of 1940 [and] his description of his hometown’s market turned scraggly and abandoned in the fallout from disastrous Communist economic policies—go unmentioned. As for the defection of this supposedly rabid Communist from Soviet Lithuania, the article seems genuinely puzzled: “It is not evident why, but right after the war Y. Arad decided to run to the West.”

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.