The miniseries Our Boys—created, directed, and acted by Israelis and released simultaneously in the U.S. and Israel—takes place in the summer or 2014, on the eve of the Gaza war. At its heart is the abduction and brutal murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, an Arab Jerusalemite, by three religious Jews, and the police who identify and capture the perpetrators. While calling the series “a drama of uncommon power,” Stephen Daisley finds it deeply flawed:

What Our Boys does not tell is the story of Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel. They were the Israeli teenagers whose deaths inspired [Abu Khdeir’s murderers]. The yeshiva students were abducted while hitchhiking home from Alon Shvut in Gush Etzion, a hill-scattered region south of Jerusalem and frequent target of Palestinian terrorism. Despite police efforts, their mothers’ appeals, and prayer vigils in Rabin Square, their bodies were found dumped in a field eighteen days later. They had been shot at close range.

The yeshiva boys of Gush Etzion, like thousands of other Israeli victims of homicidal Palestinian anti-Semitism, do not long detain the plot of Our Boys. [We] learn nothing about them. On the other hand, we learn that Mohammed, the Arab victim, went to the mosque faithfully, that he was planning to meet up with a girl from Turkey, and that he preferred flirting with her on WhatsApp to working for his father.

This is a series that communicates a particular perspective on Israel to a particular audience, namely Americans. Brian Lowry has given the game away on CNN.com, writing that the series “puts faces on a conflict often seen—especially in the U.S.—from a distant aerial view.” . . . [W]e can infer that what he means by “distant aerial view” is a view insufficiently sympathetic to the Palestinians. Our Boys does put faces on the conflict—but its Arab faces are almost entirely sympathetic while its Israeli faces are crazed settlers, racist cops, and a smattering of well-meaning liberals trying their best in a suffocatingly hateful society.

Critics have accused the drama of moral equivalence, but in truth there is no equivalence: the introspection is entirely one-sided. All the harsh truths are broken to Israelis, all the urgent conversations about race and hatred are to be held in Hebrew. With the macho-liberal bravado of the Israeli center, Our Boys tells Israelis to shape up but has nothing to say to Palestinians.

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.