On June 15, the U.S.-based far-left New Israel Fund (NIF) distributed a press release decrying a proposal before Israel’s legislature to outlaw the filming of Israeli soldiers. Left-wing activists and journalists quickly joined in denouncing an authoritarian assault on freedom of speech by preventing news coverage of allegedly misbehaving troops; a major television channel aired a heated debate over the bill between an activist and a right-wing politician. Two days later NIF claimed that the bill had made it through the committee—the first of four votes required for such a bill to become law—and was on its way to making it through the Knesset. But, writes Haviv Rettig Gur, the entire episode was a sham:

[The parliamentarian] Robert Ilatov did, in fact, pen [such] a bill. . . . But he didn’t do so because he thought it might pass, or even because he wanted it to pass. As anyone with more than a [little] familiarity with Israeli politics . . . can attest, right-wing lawmakers use such bills to get their names in the newspaper in a nation where news events come at a fevered pace and no mere press release from a junior politician has much hope of getting noticed. The most effective way to get noticed, right-wing lawmakers have discovered, is to trigger the left into a public-relations campaign against them. . . .

The fact that his bill forbidding all filming of IDF soldiers had no hope of becoming the law of the land was the only reason Ilatov allowed himself to propose it in the first place. . . .

As for the bill that made it through the June 17 committee meeting, it no longer forbids filming IDF soldiers. Any filming, for it to become illegal under the stipulations of the new bill, would have to be part of an activist’s already-illegal efforts to obstruct the soldiers’ work. . . . Even now, with the bill so thoroughly gutted as to be unrecognizable, it is not at all clear it can pass in the Knesset. Even the Jewish Home party, the farthest right one gets in the current Knesset, isn’t eager to support it. . . .

[Yet] just about everyone got what they wanted [from the exercise]: the bill’s supporters got to pretend they were defending Israel’s soldiers, and in the bargain that they’re just illiberal enough to satisfy a right-wing base that dislikes liberal pearl-clutching. The NIF and [the Israeli human-rights group] B’Tselem dutifully supplied the pearl-clutching about “tyrants” and got to pretend in their turn that they alone stood athwart history, holding aloft the torch of transparency and liberty in a slowly darkening world. For organizations that fundraise among low-information foreign donors, it’s hard to imagine a better narrative. . . .

But there were losers, too, in this exercise. Israel as a whole, of course, was depicted by its own lawmakers as a nation that could seek to prevent citizens from filming misbehaving troops. [And] IDF soldiers [were] besmirched by the claim that their “morale” is so fragile and their behavior so troubling that photographing them should carry a ten-year prison term.

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.