On Sunday, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) will hold its annual conference in Washington, DC. Since its creation in 1951, the organization has accomplished much by rallying support for the Jewish state in the U.S., lobbying Congress, and working to keep a generally pro-Israel stance on the platforms of both major political parties. Yet, writes Neil Rogachevsky, its failure to prevent the Obama administration’s turn away from Israel and toward Iran, and the left’s increasingly anti-Israel stance, suggest that AIPAC’s usual tactics may be less effective than ever before. He proposes an alternative approach:

[P]erhaps the central focus of pro-Israel activity in the United States should shift toward “community reconstruction”—to the rebuilding of core institutions from which future pro-Israel leaders are likely to emerge in the first place. It is no accident that declining support for Israel among young Jews corresponds to the weakening of the Jewish day-school network around the country—a weakening both in terms of quality of instruction as well as an affordability crisis that has pushed many potentially interested Jewish families away from Jewish education.

It would be a refreshing change, and potentially highly salutary, if big-ticket AIPAC donors were to turn their attention to this crisis rather than to increasingly ineffectual efforts to influence national policy. Effective advocates for Israel are at the end of the day well-educated ones—and well-educated ones emerge out of the contexts where meaningful skill development in Hebrew language, Jewish history, theology, and Zionism can take place.

What if Jewish community leaders invested their efforts in ensuring that Hebrew-language instruction was more widely available to anyone who wanted it, knowledge of Hebrew being necessary (though certainly not sufficient) for understanding Israel? What if instead of focusing on winning an amorphous “battle of ideas,” community leaders sought to expand and improve failing Jewish high schools, both through the hiring and development of better teachers and through providing scholarships for the most talented and promising?

The “return on investment” of a back-to-basics approach such as this would be hard to be measure. . . . But the case that the money is better spent on political lobbying in Washington is getting harder and harder to make.

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.