During World War II, the Nazis and their collaborators routinely destroyed Jewish cemeteries, and in many instances used the headstones as pavement. Ongoing renovations in the Czech capital’s tourist district provides evidence that the Communist government of Czechoslovakia did something similar. Moreover, this didn’t happen during the Czechoslovakian Communist party’s orgy of anti-Semitism in 1952, but far more recently. Robert Tait writes:

Jewish leaders hailed the unearthing as proof of long-held suspicions that the Communist authorities . . . had taken stonework from Jewish burial sites for a much-vaunted pedestrianization of Wenceslas Square during the 1980s. The flagship project was showcased during a walkabout tour by the then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.

The names of the dead are unidentifiable because the headstones have been broken to form cobblestones. One person appears to have died in 1877, when Prague was part of the Habsburg empire, while the most recent death is shown to have happened in the 1970s, during the height of Communism. The stones appear to have been taken from different cemeteries.

Synagogues and cemeteries were allowed to fall into disrepair under an officially sanctioned hostile policy towards religious institutions in general and Judaism in particular, making them vulnerable to looting. František Bányai, the chairman of Prague’s Jewish community, [said that] “more Jewish synagogues were destroyed in the area of the current Czech Republic during Communist times than under the Nazis.”

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”