Since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel’s Arab enemies have given up on achieving a conventional military victory and switched entirely to a strategy of demoralizing the Jewish state through terror and limited warfare. This shift, Uzi Rubin explains, creates a dilemma for Israel:

The limited campaigns of the past decade, all of which featured standoff attacks against Israeli population centers, have generally met a fairly high level of civilian resilience, expressed in the readiness to suffer casualties, damage, and the disruption of Israelis’ daily lives, and in rapid recovery at the end of each campaign.

[But] these campaigns did not significantly impair the national economy beyond local damages, the cost of which was quickly paid by the state. There is no certainty that this will be the case in the future: the lethality and accuracy of current Hizballah (and perhaps also Hamas) rockets and missiles could wreak havoc on national infrastructures such as the electricity grid, the water system, and land, sea, and air transportation systems, which could cause significant and long-term damage to the national economy.

Experience has shown that the main motive for emigration from Israel is not the security situation but the economic situation. Israel’s burgeoning economy, which greatly enhances its wealth and stature, is also a source of vulnerability to any disruption of its infrastructure. This is well known to Israel’s foes. Thus, their expectation that economic decline due to the continued rounds of limited campaigns would lead to the collapse of national resilience and significant emigration from Israel is not unreasonable, at least from their point of view. . . .

What is needed [therefore] is not a classic military “decision” of a state army, but rather [the ability to conduct] limited campaigns while minimizing damage and losses among the home population. This outcome requires a change in force build-up and allocation of resources, including significant investment in the survivability of the national infrastructure against missile attacks. . . .

The problem, as Rubin puts it, is that to focus on preparations of this kind Israel would have to draw on limited resources that would otherwise be used to build up conventional military strength. Thus Jerusalem must choose either to prepare simultaneously for both conventional and low-intensity war—and thereby to risk being prepared for neither—or to focus on one at the expense of the other.

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.