In an interview with NBC last month, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif boasted that Iran has “a history of tolerance and cooperation and living together in coexistence with our own Jewish people, and with Jews everywhere in the world.” Shahrzad Elghanayan, whose grandfather, a prominent Iranian-Jewish businessman, was executed by the nascent Islamic Republic in 1979, begs to differ:

In the 16th century, conservative Shiite scholars and clergy under the Safavid dynasty placed restrictions on all minorities, including Jews, to bar them from economic activity and to prevent them from passing their “ritual impurity” to Muslims: don’t open shops in the bazaar; don’t build attractive residences; don’t buy homes from Muslims; don’t give your children Muslim names; don’t use Muslim public baths; don’t leave your house when it rains or snows; don’t touch anything when entering Muslim shops. Jews weren’t protected by the legal criminal system, but they could convert on the spot to save their lives if attacked by Muslims. There were short periods of reprieve here and there but as a whole, life was pretty grim for the next several centuries. . . .

After Reza Shah founded the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925, he started a modernizing spree in which Jews participated and prospered [until the 1979 revolution]. . . . [After seizing power, Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini’s government instituted measures ensuring that from the earliest days in school, children were programmed into the party line. Salman Sima, a self-described moderate Muslim [who spent his childhood in Iran], says that every morning, beginning in grade school, he had to chant “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” He says his religion teachers would say things like, “if you do something wrong, you will die a Jew.” . . .

[Foreign Minister] Zarif points to what he says are Iran’s 20,000 Jews, who he says constitute the largest population of Jews in the Middle East outside Israel. (Iran’s latest census counted only 8,756 of them, and Turkey claims to have 20,000, as well.) What he omits is that . . . the Jewish population has plummeted from its estimated 80,000-100,000 in 1979.

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.