Both this year and last, Howard Jacobson accepted invitations to be involved in productions on the subject of anti-Semitism: the Anglo-Jewish journalist Jonathan Freedland’s play Jews. In Their Own Words and the comedian David Baddiel’s documentary Jews Don’t Count. Looking at both works, Jacobson observes that they go wrong in similar ways:

Intellectually, one cannot claim to grasp the nettle of Jew-hating—especially among the progressive left, which is Baddiel’s target—if the psychology of its most potent contemporary expression, even more potent than [soccer] fans calling Spurs supporters “Yids,” doesn’t interest you. In the stage play and the television documentary, Freedland and Baddiel allowed themselves to be distracted by the question of whether or not an English Jew bears responsibility for Israel’s heinous misdeeds.

There’s a right and a wrong way of answering that. “We are not our brother’s keeper” is the wrong way. “He is not even our brother” is worse still. Insist your innocence of someone else’s heinous misdeeds and all you do is concede the heinousness. To deny affinity with Israel is to deny affinity with Jewish history. The marauding, child-murdering colonialists of anti-Zionist propaganda . . . are the same hated Jews of 2,000 years ago: separatists, thieves, and bloodsuckers, long before there was an Israeli soldier patrolling the West Bank.

One cannot accuse Jonathan Freedland of indifference to Israel. For years now, his Guardian column has extolled the country’s achievements while scrupulously criticizing “the occupation.” But is his scrupulousness—as, for example, in the matter of just what words Jews. In Their Own Words speak—too one-sided?

For all their differences—Freedland the formidably acute and considered thinker, Baddiel the no less formidable polemicist—their views on Israel converge in the old discomfort. Israel just won’t give them the Jew they want.

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.