At this year’s Olympic games, Lebanese athletes prevented their Israeli counterparts from boarding a bus, an Egyptian judoka refused to shake hands with his Israeli opponent after a match, and a Saudi judoka canceled a fight with an Israeli. Such behavior, dictated by Arab and Muslim states, is hardly unprecedented. Employing “petty apartheid,” a phrase used in South Africa to refer to the more minor, everyday forms of racial persecution, Gerald Steinberg describes this scandalous and systematic shunning of the Jewish state, and the world’s indifference to it:

The so-called international community, including the Olympic Committee, has, at most, reprimanded the boycotting teams and athletes, [thus] becoming a willing accomplice to anti-Israel apartheid. In previous displays of [such] racism, no action was taken against the Syrian, Iranian, and Lebanese teams and no penalties exacted to create a deterrent or express opposition.

In these frameworks, as in the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, the 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, including the wealthy oil producers, control the agendas and have veto power over the officials. Similarly, the self-appointed guardians of human rights, including . . . Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, are silent when Israelis are the victims. . . .

In Lebanon, whose government and society is subject to intimidation by Hizballah, . . . the minister of youth and sport . . . praised [the team’s] actions in Rio as “principled and patriotic.” . . . As in the case of South Africa under the apartheid regime, contact with Israelis is treated as a form of impurity, and petty apartheid remains the norm.

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.