Probably, writes Joshua Ezra Burns, but the rabbis sought to obscure the connection:

Since the Middle Ages, Jews and Christians generally have assumed that the first rabbis were Pharisees. . . . Like the Pharisees, the rabbis claimed to maintain a sacred tradition of scriptural exegesis. The Mishnah, the earliest record of the rabbinic legal tradition, . . . approvingly cites select opinions ascribed to the Pharisees. Later rabbinic sages espoused teachings on fate, free will, and the afterlife ascribed to the Pharisees in the New Testament and by the contemporary Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. . . .

While modern readers may easily draw these connections, neither the authors of the Mishnah nor their successors acknowledged that their intellectual forerunners were Pharisees. . . . Why might the earliest proponents of the rabbinic movement have wished to obscure their connection to Pharisees if that connection indeed existed?

Many contemporary scholars . . . suggest that the earliest rabbinic sages, though once Pharisees themselves, did not wish to implicate themselves in the volatile politics of their sectarian forerunners. The Pharisees had been among those Jewish parties whose agitation against Judea’s Roman [rulers] contributed to the outbreak of the disastrous revolt of 66-73 CE, [leading to] the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Those who survived the war reinvented themselves as rabbis to efface their new movement’s sectarian pedigree without purging their minds of what they deemed its more valuable cultural effects. They thus chose neither to draw attention to their Pharisaic pedigree nor to deny it.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.