September 29 and 30 marked the 75th anniversary of the massacres of Babi Yar, during which the Nazis, with help from local auxiliaries, slaughtered the entire Jewish population of Kiev, numbering some 33,000 souls. Subsequently, German forces used the site to murder Jews from elsewhere, Ukrainian nationalist and Communist leaders, Soviet prisoners of war, and Roma. At a ceremony commemorating the massacres, the Ukrainian bishop Borys Gudziak addressed the Ukrainian parliament on the need to prevent hatred from ever again becoming “a guiding spirit for politics”:

Babi Yar is a tragedy for all humanity, because in it human dignity was trampled and the ultimate value of human life was negated. . . . For decades, the history of Babi Yar, like the history of the Holodomor [the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, during which millions died as a result of Stalinist policies], was hushed up and ignored, erased from the chronicles.

A terrifying symbol of this perfidious camouflage was the Kuren tragedy of 1961. To erase the memory of Babi Yar, literally cover it geographically, Soviet authorities perpetrated a landslide that buried more than a thousand innocent lives. This pattern was repeated.

The Nazis destroyed Jews physically, and the Communists obliterated their memory. The latter were so successful that today many think that Jews with their rich millennia-old spirituality, culture, and social life were never in Ukraine, that they were not our fellow countrymen, that our grandmothers and grandfathers did not recognize in the Jews who marched to their executions their own neighbors and acquaintances.

In fact, Babi Yar is our common history. It is the history of all Ukraine, not only of the Jewish people. They were, after all, Kievans, Lvivites, Odessans, Vinnytsians. In almost every city and town in Ukraine, there is a yar—a ravine or ditch in front of which people were executed only because they were Jews. . . . We must recover the names of the victims and return their memory to their descendants, to us all.

We must recognize when [Gentile] Ukrainians were offenders. Such cases were, unfortunately, not few in number. At the same time, we cannot forget about the role of the many Ukrainian righteous ones, who, risking everything, saved the life and dignity of Jews. Eminent among these righteous ones is Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Lviv. There were also righteous ones on a simple, everyday level, such as both of my grandmothers who delivered food to Jews hiding from the Nazis. He and they serve for us as an example and a source of hope. The fact that we are proud of our righteous ones argues that their behavior, stance, and courage should become ours.

The events of the 20th century are a trauma for our people that we must and can overcome. We are called to live, to leave behind the syndrome of trauma and victimization, to which we are once again driven by Vladimir Putin, the war in the East, and the perverse populism today spreading through countries and continents. It is necessary to include Babi Yar in our history and our consciousness, in the history of Eastern Europe, in the history of the world, so that such a tragedy may never be repeated. So that hatred may never become a guiding spirit for politics, deadly ideologies, and homicidal passion.

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.