Yossi Klein Halevi discusses the impact of the 1967 war on Israeli society, recent shifts in Israeli politics, and his own memories from a half-century ago. (Interview by Calev Ben-Dor.)

My most primal memory was in the latter part of May 1967, watching the news with my father, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary who constantly carried that experience with him. We saw crowds of demonstrators chanting “death to Israel” and waving banners imprinted with skulls and cross-bones, which, as a fourteen-year-old boy, made a very deep impression on me. Both my father and I had this same dread that some version of the Holocaust was about to re-occur. And that feeling was repeated across the Jewish world, from Moscow to Tel Aviv. . . .

[The dread] of May 1967 was followed by the victory in June 1967. So there was an emotional trajectory from relief when we realized that Israel was not going to be destroyed, to joy and pride at the defeat of our enemies, and finally ecstasy—even a kind of religious ecstasy for many Jews—at the reversal: from destruction to redemption. It was a re-enactment, [in a sense, of the story] of Purim—the reversal of a genocidal threat, [with] the evil Haman hanging on the gallows that were intended for [the heroic] Mordechai. The euphoria was a combination of realizing we had just witnessed the greatest military victory in Jewish history as well as the restoration of those parts of the land of our past that had been denied to us.

Before the Six-Day War, Israel didn’t possess a single significant Jewish holy site. Thus, in some way, the state had been emptied of its religious content, of its soul. After the war we experienced the return to the Western Wall, to the tombs of the Matriarchs and Patriarchs in Hebron, and to Rachel’s tomb near Bethlehem as a restoration of everything that had been taken from us. My parents’ generation had no access to their own ancestral graves—either because they were forced to leave them behind (as was the case for Jews from the Arab world) or because they didn’t even exist (in the case of many Holocaust survivors). So to return to the graves of the first Jews was some kind of compensation for everything that had been denied for generations.

I remember powerful but conflicting emotions converging. Not only sitting with my father in anguish about the possibility of another Holocaust, but also standing with my father at the Western Wall and seeing him become a religious Jew again. After World War II he had stopped praying, yet after the Six-Day War he felt he could forgive God, which reflects a very Jewish way of navigating one’s relationship with God. My father never stopped believing in God but didn’t think He deserved the prayers of the Jewish people. Yet at the Western Wall my father made his peace with God, and became a devout Jew. What happened to my father also played out in the Jewish people.

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.