In its most recent anti-Israel op-ed, the New York Times hosts the philosophy professor Omri Boehm branding Zionism as inherently illiberal and racist, while dragging up distortions of history that have been subjected to numerous debunkings. The blogger known by the pen-name Elder of Ziyon writes:

Of course there is a tension between Zionism and liberalism, but that doesn’t mean that a Zionist state must be by definition illiberal, as Boehm claims. Zionism is not by any means “rooted in the denial of liberal politics.” This is an obvious lie.

Boehm then adduces a 1941 letter in which Avraham Stern, leader of a Revisionist Zionist splinter group, proposed cooperating with the Nazis to rescue Jews from Europe and bring them to Palestine. This Boehm declares a “sanctification of Zionism to the point of tolerating anti-Semitism.”

When this letter was written, Stern’s assumption was that Hitler did not want to exterminate the Jews systematically, but [instead] to encourage them to leave Europe. It is truly obscene to describe Stern’s desperate effort to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the clutches of the Nazis as an inherent Zionist affinity with Nazism. In fact, Stern was known to . . . compare Hitler to [the genocidal biblical villain] Haman.

But Boehm is doing much worse than misrepresenting Stern. Stern’s offer to collaborate with Germany to save thousands of Jews was anomalous. From the right to the left, the Zionist movement opposed Nazi Germany from the beginning. . . . It is instructive that Boehm digs up this little-known episode as the paradigm of Zionism’s supposed affinity with anti-Semitism.

What do you call a man who generalizes about an entire group of people based on a troubling anecdote about a single member of that group? You would call him a bigot.
You would certainly not call him liberal.

There is little doubt that if Hizballah had participated more intensively in Saturday’s attack, Israeli air defenses would have been pushed past their limits, and far more damage would have been done. Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack, trying to look at things from Tehran’s perspective, see this as an important sign of caution—but caution that shouldn’t be exaggerated:

Iran is well aware of the extent and capability of Israel’s air defenses. The scale of the strike was almost certainly designed to enable at least some of the attacking munitions to penetrate those defenses and cause some degree of damage. Their inability to do so was doubtless a disappointment to Tehran, but the Iranians can probably still console themselves that the attack was frightening for the Israeli people and alarming to their government. Iran probably hopes that it was unpleasant enough to give Israeli leaders pause the next time they consider an operation like the embassy strike.

Hizballah is Iran’s ace in the hole. With more than 150,000 rockets and missiles, the Lebanese militant group could overwhelm Israeli air defenses. . . . All of this reinforces the strategic assessment that Iran is not looking to escalate with Israel and is, in fact, working very hard to avoid escalation. . . . Still, Iran has crossed a Rubicon, although it may not recognize it. Iran had never struck Israel directly from its own territory before Saturday.

Byman and Pollack see here an important lesson for America:

What Saturday’s fireworks hopefully also illustrated is the danger of U.S. disengagement from the Middle East. . . . The latest round of violence shows why it is important for the United States to take the lead on pushing back on Iran and its proxies and bolstering U.S. allies.