Up until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the New Left in Western Europe and America maintained an ambivalent attitude toward Zionism; thereafter, it embraced the anti-Zionism of the Soviet Union and other Communist governments. Jeffrey Herf explains East Germany’s continuous record of hostility to Israel, the adoption of the same attitude by the radical Left in West Germany following the Six-Day War, and the anti-Semitism that persisted just below the surface in both countries:

One striking feature of both the East German Communist regime and the West German radical Left was a kind of obliviousness to the similarities between older anti-Semitic stereotypes of evil and powerful Jews and the attacks on Zionism and Israel as inherently aggressive, racist, and even exterminatory. . . .

[Another] distinctive feature of the secular leftist antagonism to Israel, first in the Soviet bloc and then in the global New Left, was the indignant assertion that it had absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Yet the eagerness with which Israel’s enemies spread lies about Zionism’s racist nature and their willingness to compare the Jewish state to Nazi Germany suggested that an element of anti-Semitism was indeed at work in the international Left as it responded to Israel’s victory in June 1967. . . .

[L]eftist Holocaust inversion [link to Kramer] rested on very old and false [claims] of enormous power and great evil that religious and secular anti-Semites had attributed to the Jews. Rather than acknowledge that the Jews, like any other nation with a state of its own, had defended themselves against a real threat and won a war, the Communists and the radical Left applied to the state of Israel the negative [stereotypes] once applied to the Jews of Europe. While anti-Semites before 1945 had described the Jews as the center of a powerful international conspiracy, the anti-Zionists of the cold-war era described Israel as the spearhead in the Middle East of a conspiracy led by the U.S. and supported by West Germany. . . . In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the idea of the powerful and evil Jew, so familiar in the history of European anti-Semitism, assumed a new form of a powerful and evil Israel.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.