An Israeli television program reported earlier this week that two prominent Jewish Israeli left-wing activists had been involved in entrapping Palestinians trying to sell land to Israelis and then handing them over to the Palestinian Authority—which generally punishes this “crime” with death. Contrasting the defensive reaction to these revelations from leaders of the Israeli left to the widespread and firm condemnations from the Israeli right following an attack on a Palestinian family last summer, Liel Leibovitz writes:

Rather than decrying the act of delivering innocents to their tormentors and collaborating with a regime routinely counted among the world’s most repressive, Gideon Levy—the Grand Old Man of the Israeli left—blamed the messenger, insisting that [the television show that broke the story] was airing right-wing propaganda in an effort to curry favor with the brownshirts in the government and save itself from imminent censorship. “This,” Levy wrote in his typically overheated style, “is what it feels like when the ground is burning underneath your feet.” . . . And the author A. B. Yehoshua, no stranger to idiotic pronouncements, said that if the Palestinian Authority chose to execute its own citizens for selling land to Jews, it was fully within its rights to do so. . . .

[T]his collective refusal to move away from the party line and condemn what so obviously needs condemning is evidence of a real and deep crisis in the Israeli left. . . . [After its post-Oslo] prayers for peaceful coexistence were met with Palestinian violence, and most of its voters . . . decamped for other, more sober camps, the Israeli left, shell-shocked, had two choices: readjust their analysis of reality or devolve into dogma. Catastrophically, it chose the latter. . . . If the left truly wants to save Israeli democracy from descending into darkness, it should begin by saving itself.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.