Currently, the Jewish state has vaccinated over a million of its citizens against the coronavirus, and leads the world in the number of vaccinations per capita. Daniel Gordis reflects on this feat, his own experience receiving an inoculation, and what both say about Israel’s vitality:

As the vaccinations were being given in one of Jerusalem’s large sports arenas, I anticipated utter bedlam, the sort of Israeli chaos that I usually can’t stand, and drove to the arena with a bit of dread. But I was entirely mistaken. Inside, there was a hushed calm, even a sense of sanctity. We waited only a very few minutes, and as I looked at the eyes of other people waiting, their faces hidden behind their masks, I could tell that I was not the only one overwhelmed by a profound sense of gratitude for being part of this country.

At moments, in these recent weeks, the warmth of the past and the promise of the future seemed to meld. A prominent Arab physician from the Galilee told [a] friend of mine what these past months of being on the front lines have felt like to him. “Usually, when Israel goes to war,” he said to her, “we’re not in the army, we can’t help. But this time, Israel went to war again, and we Arabs got to be soldiers, too!” When she wiped a tear from her eye, she told me, his eyes also watered.

Israel, like most countries, still has enormous obstacles to address, many of them important, a few of them existential. But there are still moments here when we recognize that this is not a country like any other. It is a country that was founded to give sanctuary to a particular people that desperately needed it, one that has weathered more in seven decades than most countries do in centuries, and that has produced a sort of familial resilience that can’t be replicated anywhere else.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.