Born in Hamburg in 1843, Ahron Marcus received substantive Jewish and secular educations, then—following an apparent adolescent religious crisis—left Germany for Galicia, studied in a ḥasidic yeshiva, married a ḥasidic woman, and found himself a ḥasidic rebbe. He went on to author works of biblical and talmudic scholarship, in addition to books and articles (some in Hebrew, some in German) on Josephus, the relevance of recent archaeological discoveries in Egypt and Mesopotamia to the Bible and Talmud, and the application of contemporary psychological theories to Ḥasidism, as well as the first-ever scholarly history of the movement. In the 1880s, he became a leading figure in the pre-Herzlian Zionist movement Ḥibbat Tsiyon, as Shlomo Zuckier writes:

Marcus’s Zionism reached its peak . . . upon his reading Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat in 1896, on which he lectured in the following year. Breaking with Maḥzikey ha-Dat, [Galicia’s dominant] Orthodox communal organization, Marcus spent the next four years in lengthy correspondence and personal friendship with Herzl, discussing theoretical matters but, most importantly, the possibility of bringing East European traditionalists into alliance with the Zionist movement. . . . Marcus spent significant energies endeavoring to forge an alliance between . . . David Moshe Friedmann, the Czortkower rebbe, and Herzl’s Zionist movement, toiling in vain to set up a personal meeting between the two.

Ideologically, he combined a certain messianic view idealizing the potential restoration of the Jewish homeland with a down-to-earth position focused on uniting European Jewry around pragmatic alliances. Zionist nationalism should be uncontroversial, Marcus argued, because nationalistic loyalty is simply based on the extension of familial ties, and the ties of the Jewish family are strong. . . .

Unfortunately, the ḥasidic-Zionist alliance was not meant to be. The meeting between Herzl and Rabbi Friedmann never took place. By 1900, several ḥasidic leaders explicitly opposed Herzl and his project, Marcus despaired of his great plan, and in 1912 was among the founders of [the ultra-Orthodox party] Agudat Yisrael.

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 Luttwack 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.