Michael Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate, is incensed by what he has read in Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land about a 1948 massacre, allegedly committed by the Palmah, in the Palestinian town of Lydda. As Martin Kramer has demonstrated, there is no evidence that such a massacre occurred—and yet Kinsley not only repeats Shavit’s claim but goes beyond it, accusing Jews of rewriting Israel’s past and adding ludicrous comparisons to the Rwandan genocide. Kramer writes:

[T]ake this point of supposed similarity between Lydda and Rwanda: “Crowding ‎people into a church (or, in this case, a mosque) and then blowing it up or setting it on fire.” ‎This originates in Shavit’s claim that Israeli troops detained Palestinian Arabs in a small ‎mosque, and then fired an anti-armor rocket into it as an act of revenge, killing 70 ‎persons.

Trouble is, to borrow Kinsley’s phrase, “all this is not even close to being true.” ‎Kinsley, far from showing himself a careful sifter of history, clearly has been seduced by ‎Shavit’s dramatic opera, mistaking it for history. And Kinsley then amplifies Shavit’s biases ‎still further, for reasons known only to him, producing a grotesque defamation of Israel that ‎goes even beyond Shavit’s account.‎ . . . To insinuate a parallel between the battle in Lydda and the most ‎heinous crimes against humanity, committed as part of a genocide, is simply obscene.‎

And it suggests that Kinsley didn’t even read Shavit carefully, for Shavit concludes his ‎account with this admission: “The small-mosque massacre could have been a ‎misunderstanding brought about by a tragic chain of accidental events.” But for Kinsley, ‎there are no accidents. He attributes a murderous intent to Israeli troops not because he can ‎be sure of it, but because it suits his forced narrative of Israeli sin.‎

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.