As Israel’s major political parties have grown closer on the key issues of security and the economy, other divides are surfacing. These divides, according to Haviv Rettig Gur, hark back to the decades when the left dominated Israel’s government, culture, and society, while the right spoke for the poor, the religious, Mizraḥim, and other non-elite groups. The current electoral campaign suggests that these old cleavages have not disappeared:

[S]upport for the political center-left is concentrated in “large cities,” . . . precisely where Israeli conventional wisdom suggests, while the right is stronger in the geographic and social peripheries, just as it was in [Menachem] Begin’s day. Much has changed over the past five decades, but some of the most basic patterns of Israeli political identity have remained intact.

So when the Likud campaign declares the race to be between “us” and “them,” between patriots and “anti-Zionists,” the explicit personal attack against Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni is only half the story. There is a larger “them” in the right’s political imagination, nebulous, shifting, but undeniably there. Despite ruling Israel for thirteen of the past nineteen years, with Netanyahu himself serving as premier for nine of those, Likud leaders still appeal to the not-yet-forgotten memory of exclusion by that adversary.

Similarly, when the [religious-Zionist] Jewish Home party bases its entire election campaign on the slogan “We don’t apologize anymore,” it too is speaking to this older culture war, the sense that the religious right’s narrative has been shunted aside for too long by the disenfranchising elitism of the left.

These identity politics are less helpful to the left. The party perhaps most clearly identified with socialist politics and a robust welfare state is Meretz, yet Meretz is also the party with arguably the least appeal to the very poor and disenfranchised who loom so large in its ideological narrative. . . . Rightly or wrongly, the party is widely perceived as too secular, too centered on Tel Aviv’s northern suburbs, [and] too Ashkenazi.

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.