Last month, an off-duty police officer in a suburb of Haifa shot an unarmed teenager of Ethiopian-Jewish parentage. While the preliminary reports from the police investigation support the officer’s claim that he fired at the ground while trying to break up a fight in which the teenager, Solomon Tekah, was involved, the shooting has already provoked mass demonstrations, some of them violent, that have in turn prompted comparisons between this shooting and those in the U.S. that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. Shmuel Rosner argues that the parallels, noted by both the American press and some of the Israeli protesters themselves, are fewer than one might think:

[First, take the] two very different histories of two black communities. Africans were shipped to America as slaves. Ethiopian Israelis were brought by their own country to play their part in the great Zionist saga of gathering Israel’s tribes. Moreover, African Americans had to fight for equality. Ethiopian equality, at least the principle of it, was a given. And yes, mistakes were made. And yes, there are clearly some issues that are not yet resolved. And yet, Israel invested more resources in helping the newcomers than it did for any other community.

Alas, what [the protestors] see is not yesterday’s achievements. What they see is today’s failures. The community, on average, is still poor. It still has a high rate of crime, suicide, and domestic violence. . . . The majority of Israeli Jews want Ethiopian Jews to integrate and succeed. The majority of Israeli Jews say that Ethiopian Jews contribute to the prosperity and well-being of the country. But it’s hard to deny that there is a problem connected to the fact that Ethiopians are easily identified because of their skin color.

The media were sympathetic to the unrest. The government will be quick to respond, by throwing more money at the situation and looking more seriously into making improvements that have the potential to tame the anger. . . . The most worrying aspect of the violent protests that we’ve seen in recent days is the prospect of the Ethiopian integration issue being Americanized. That is, of its becoming not a short-term difficulty in need of a quick and efficient response, but rather a long-term problem, maybe permanent, with all the associated baggage of cultural fissures, intrinsic anger and fear, and a great sense of alienation.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.