Last Friday was Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day), the holiday that celebrates Israel’s capture, during the Six-Day War, of those parts of Jerusalem that had been seized by Jordan in 1948. Gerald Steinberg uses the occasion to reflect on the two intervening decades in the city’s history:

Jews have lived in Jerusalem continuously, and were the majority population in the decades before the 1948 war. [But] on May 28, 1948 the Jordanian army (also known as the Arab Legion) completed the capture of the Jewish Quarter. . . . All of the Jewish inhabitants were exiled—the ethnic cleansing was complete. Jews were prohibited from accessing the Temple Mount . . . or the Western Wall.

Even after the fall of the Jewish Quarter, the conquerors systematically desecrated all remnants of 3,000 years of Jewish Jerusalem. Fifty-seven ancient synagogues, libraries and centers of religious study were ransacked and twelve were totally and deliberately destroyed. Those that remained standing were defaced and turned into barns for goats, sheep, and donkeys. Appeals were made to the United Nations and in the international community to declare the Old City to be an “open city” and stop this destruction, but there was no response.

In addition, thousands of tombstones from the ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives were used as paving stones for roads and as construction material in Jordanian army camps.

The armistice agreement that ended Israel’s War of Independence included a Jordanian guarantee that Jews would still be allowed access to their holy places, but it was at first ignored and then forgotten.

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.