After some time living in Britain, Josh Kaplan recently visited Israel, where he is a dual citizen and where his family lives. He reflects on the real country that he had started to forget about amid the noise of war:

The second you step off the plane, the thought that American ideas of race could be even vaguely applicable, that Israel is a “white supremacist” settler-colonist outpost, is instantly dispelled. Tel Aviv feels more diverse than any American city, its beaches and bars packed with an insanely attractive array of people from all over the world. Despite the war, there are expats, there are foreign workers, there are millions of people—fewer than half of whom are “white”—going about their lives like everyone else.

In Jerusalem, a city of mixed faith for thousands of years, I saw families wearing hijabs picnicking in parks next to secular Jews. At the city’s marathon, I saw prayer mats facing east near the entrance, and runners with their Jewish prayer shawls flapping as they jogged. I mention these little moments not because I found them remarkable—they’re routine in Israel and have been for the last few decades I’ve been visiting. I raise them because seeing them for myself during this conflict, I realized how I’d taken them for granted. I had feared that perhaps the war would have rewritten the DNA of Israeli society.

But it hasn’t. Far away from the culture wars, on the frontlines of the actual war, life goes on. Israeli society has not been infected with the poisonous black-and-white discourse of the West.

At the moment, Hizballah’s superiors in Tehran probably aren’t giving much thought to the militia’s next move. More likely, they are focused on the fact that their country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, along with the foreign minister, may have been killed in a helicopter crash near the Iran-Azerbaijan border. Iranians set off fireworks to celebrate the possible death of this man known as “butcher of Tehran” for his role in executing dissidents. Shay Khatiri explains what will happen next:

If the president is dead or unable to perform his duties for longer than two months, the first vice-president, the speaker of the parliament, and the chief justice, with the consent of the supreme leader, form a council to choose the succession mechanism. In effect, this means that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will decide [how to proceed]. Either a new election is called, or Khamenei will dictate that the council chooses a single person to avoid an election in time of crisis.

Whatever happens next, however, Raisi’s “hard landing” will mark the first chapter in a game of musical chairs that will consume the Islamic Republic for months and will set the stage not only for the post-Raisi era, but the post-Khamenei one as well.

As for the inevitable speculation that Raisi’s death wasn’t an accident: everything I have read so far suggests that it was. Still, that its foremost enemy will be distracted by a succession struggle is good news for Israel. And it wouldn’t be terrible if Iran’s leaders suspect that the Mossad just might have taken out Raisi. For all their rhetoric about martyrdom, I doubt they relish the prospect of becoming martyrs themselves.