One High Holy Day prayer, playing on the homophony of the Hebrew words for “end” and “begin,” reads, “The year has ended [tikhlah] along with its curses; let a year begin [teḥel] along with its blessings.” Without a doubt, the pandemic has been among the year’s curses, and most Israelis feel the same about the recent announcement that there will be yet another election in March. But Ruthie Blum notes that this year has had many blessings for the Jewish state as well:

Working our way backwards can provide a bit of perspective. Let’s start with December. On December 9, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was at Ben-Gurion Airport welcoming the arrival of a plane bearing the first shipment of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. This was the culmination of a $237.5 million deal that he had inked in November with the pharmaceutical giant, for the purchase of eight million doses, sufficient to inoculate nearly half the country’s population. This batch is only the beginning. The prime minister also signed a deal with Moderna for six million doses, enough to vaccinate another three million Israelis. Meanwhile, Israel’s own Institute for Biological Research vaccine, BriLife, is in the midst of advanced clinical trials.

Earlier in the month, on December 3, Netanyahu greeted 316 Ethiopian immigrants who arrived as part of “Operation Tzur Israel” (“Rock of Israel”), to bring the approximately 2,000 others slated to make aliyah by the end of January. On December 10, Morocco agreed to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. Two days later, Bhutan jumped on the bandwagon.

On June 10, a “Group Aliyah Flight” landed in Israel, bringing 51 new immigrants from North America, many of whom said that the pandemic had sparked their final decision to make the move—one they’d been contemplating for a while. And that followed a 100-percent increase in May, compared to the same month in 2019, in the interest expressed by other U.S. Jews to make Israel their home. But May saw new immigrants arrive from Ethiopia (119), Ukraine (111), and Russia (41).

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.