Last week, Harold Kasimow, a retired professor of religious studies, came to Benedictine University in Illinois to speak about his experiences surviving the Holocaust as a child. At his talk he was confronted by a member of the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) who wanted to know if he supported or condemned “the establishment of the Zionist Israeli state”; the student eventually walked out after he refused to give the answers she hoped for. Video of the incident has been making the rounds on social media. Jonathan Tobin comments:

Kasimow wasn’t there to talk about Israel or [even to argue that] the history of oppression in the Diaspora that culminated in the Holocaust justified the quest to create a Jewish state. But in spite of his narrow, apolitical agenda, . . . SJP was still in effect ready to “cancel” him unless he didn’t merely condemn Israeli policy but agree that Israel needs to be erased.

Now it is not enough to demand that Jews acknowledge the tragedy of the Nakba for Palestinians. A Jewish refusal to treat the Arab disaster as morally equivalent to the Nazi “final solution” apparently justifies a walkout from a talk by an apolitical Holocaust survivor. The support [the student] gained on the Internet for her crude [attack on] Kasimow provides a troubling context for the incident.

Israel’s enemies have thus gone beyond Holocaust inversion—the claim that Jewish “oppression” of the Palestinians is equivalent to the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews—to what Tobin terms “Nakba supersessionism”: the idea that the “catastrophe” entailed in the creation of a Jewish state should overshadow or replace any discussion of the Holocaust.

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.