For friends and supporters of Israel, and those who care about human rights and truth more broadly, much news from the United Nations is bad news. But Anne Bayefsky finds some steps in the right direction from the most recent session of the General Assembly:

“The United Nations is a place where lies are told.” So said Daniel Patrick Moynihan on November 10, 1975. As America’s ambassador to the UN, Moynihan was addressing the General Assembly after it had adopted a resolution declaring the self-determination of the Jewish people—Zionism—to be a form of racism. Forty-six years later, on September 22, 2021, the General Assembly restated that lie. This time, though, 38 countries voted with their feet and boycotted the place where lies are told. That’s more than the 35 nations that in 1975 had voted against the resolution rightly characterized by Moynihan as an “abomination of anti-Semitism.” It was the first major global loss for the Palestinian legal and political war on the Jewish state in a long time.

The blow was delivered at the fourth iteration of the UN’s “anti-racist” world conference, which was first convened in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. Durban IV had been carefully planned for over a year as a 20th-anniversary commemoration of what became a global anti-Semitic hate-fest—one that ended three days before 9/11. NGO representatives and members of so-called civil society roamed the conference grounds and the streets of Durban with signs that read: “For the liberation of Quds, machine-guns based upon FAITH and ISLAM must be used,” “the martyrs’ blood irrigates the tree of revolution in Palestine,” and “down with Nazi-Israeli apartheid.”

For the enemies of Israel who had high hopes that the 20th-anniversary celebration would fast-track Israel to political isolation and oblivion, the global gathering was instead a major setback. Not only did 38 states boycott the event, but they boycotted it specifically because they recognized the demonization of Israel as a form of anti-Semitism.

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.