On Thursday, November 15, El Al Flight 002 from New York to Tel Aviv was scheduled to depart at 6:30 pm but was delayed by over five hours due to the snow. Over the next two days, Israeli media inundated their audiences with stories about the ultra-Orthodox passengers who demanded to be let off the plane when it became clear that it would not be able to arrive in Israel before Shabbat and who, when their request was denied, proceeded to riot. The airline then capitulated to their demands by having the plane make an unscheduled stop in Athens to let off observant passengers. This version of the events, however, turned out to bear only a vague resemblance to the truth, and not only because it omitted the airline’s own unprofessional conduct. Liel Leibovitz writes:

When Yehuda Schlesinger, a passenger aboard Flight 002, . . . saw the viral video that allegedly documented those rascally ḥaredi men flexing their muscles and threatening violence, he recognized the clip because he had shot it with his [own] smartphone. There was only one small problem: the video Schlesinger took was of ḥaredi men singing and dancing to cheer each other up under difficult circumstances; the video shown on Israeli television was edited and given a radically different soundtrack, one featuring men shouting in a menacing fashion. . . .

While Israel’s national airline proved to be incompetent, its media mendacious, and its mandarins seething with contempt for their observant brothers and sisters, there’s another side to the story of Flight 002 that deserves to be heard. Far from being uniformly ḥaredi, as early press reports insisted, the passengers who rushed against the clock in Greece were a wildly diverse bunch: black hatters and wearers of knitted kippot, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, men and women from all across Israel with nothing much in common save for the tradition that has bound us all for millennia. Welcomed by Mendel and Nechama Hendel, the local Chabad emissaries [in Athens], these stranded passengers, according to their own accounts, passed a joyous Shabbat, enjoying each other’s company and the spirit of the holy day despite being separated from their luggage and their loved ones waiting at home.

If Israelis are indeed slouching toward elections, . . . you need only look to Flight 002 to discover the nation’s real divides. . . . Israelis, like Americans, fall squarely into the two camps visible on board the Boeing that snowy night last week. In one corner are those who keep their faith, who come together in times of crisis, and who expect the conversation to remain respectful and those in power to remain accountable. If you’re wondering about their values, just watch Schlesinger’s undoctored video and ask yourself when was the last time you reacted to a major inconvenience by finding some stream of inner happiness and bursting into song in public.

The group in the other corner, sadly, isn’t quite so cheerful.

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.