On Tuesday, the Canadian House of Commons passed a resolution condemning the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS). Terry Glavin, while praising the decision, notes that the surrounding debate ignored what he considers the most important question:

As always, . . . the one question about the international BDS campaign never got a proper look-in: does the BDS strategy truly hold out the promise of improving the lives of the long-suffering Palestinian people, or advance the prospects for peace, or serve the cause of a democratic Palestinian state emerging from decades of antagonism to coexist alongside Israel?

You might not be surprised at who . . . came up with the most convincing answers to that question when I was asking around this week. But if you’ve absorbed the usual popular assumptions that underlie the debates about the Israeli-Palestinian agony, you will be surprised by what he has to say.

Bassem Eid is a prominent Palestinian human-rights activist who lives with his wife and four children in the ancient West Bank city of Hebron. . . . According to Eid, the “BDS campaign is completely contradictory to the Palestinian cause. We will never build peace this way. . . . The agenda of the BDS campaign is to try to destroy Israel.” . . .

To recap the history of BDS, without getting into any of the unambiguously anti-Semitic boycott-Jews associations from Europe’s recent past: the movement kicked off before Israel was born, with a pre-emptive campaign waged by the Arab League against the Jewish population of Palestine in 1945. The campaign was formalized after Israel’s birth in 1948; . . . it was [later] revived at the notorious Durban conference in 2001, which cast boycotts, divestments, and sanctions within a suite of strategies—including the “apartheid” smear—explicitly designed to isolate and marginalize Israel.

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.