Speaking at a recent event honoring the late Shimon Peres, the Israeli prime minister declared that “the weak crumble, are slaughtered, and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive.” These comments quickly met with scorn, derision, and even outrage on social media—some of which came from respected journalists, professors, and retired statesmen. Seth Frantzman notes that the events of the past 100 years strongly support Netanyahu’s claim:

For all of those who are outraged about the prime minister’s statement, I have a question. Where were they in August 2014 when Islamic State (IS) launched its attack on the weak, peaceful, defenseless, and vulnerable Yazidis in northern Iraq? When IS overran their villages and separated men and women, and then systematically machine-gunned the men into mass graves as the Einsatzgruppen did in 1941, where were they? . . .

[The Yazidis] are the weak. Who helped them? Well, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) helped them in 2014. Who was it that formed a human wall against IS in 2014 at the gates of Erbil and Baghdad? It was Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite militias aided by U.S. air power. . . .

So let’s read again what Netanyahu said. “The weak crumble, are slaughtered, and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.” People [have commented] that this [sentiment] reminds them of fascism and Hitler. But let me tell you a story about the people who stopped Hitler. Was it the weak? Did protesters in New York stop Hitler? Whose troops liberated Auschwitz? The Soviet Red Army. It was the strong who stopped Hitler. It was [military might paired with] the strength of conviction of such leaders as Winston Churchill.

If you care about the weak, you need to be strong to defend them. A bully isn’t defeated by virtue signaling. A bully is defeated by someone who is willing to stand up and be strong.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.