During the most recent Republican presidential debate, Ann Coulter sent an obscene tweet about Jews. P. J. O’Rourke takes her comment personally:

[F]irst, my contempt is moral. Anti-Semitism is evil. . . . For the sake of argument, let us stipulate that you are not . . . an anti-Semite. . . . Being so stipulated, you are damn rude. One does not say, “f—ing Jews.” One does not say “f—ing blacks” or “f—ing Latinos” or even “f—ing relentlessly self-promoting Presbyterian white women from New Canaan.” . . .

[But also], Ann, it really is personal. . . . When I was growing up, Toledo was a factory town, a magnet for the immigrants you deplore (both foreign and from Kentucky). . . . The Jewish kids were the only kids who considered it cool to be smart. And so did their parents.

I was raised in a house without smart. My mother may once have had a life of the mind. . . . But being widowed, raising kids, marrying a drunk second husband, and having cancer distracted her.

One night at the dinner table, when I was about thirteen, my stepfather called me a skinny little smart-ass show-off for asking what Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was about. Of course I was showing off. What it’s about is self-evident. I was smugly savoring the fact that I was the only person in the family who knew the title and author (if nothing else) of such a tome.

But I bet the conversation wouldn’t have gone that way at my friend Barry Cantor’s house. There would have been a discussion. Perhaps with a tactful elision of how it was all the Christians’ fault. Or at least somebody would have looked up Gibbon in the World Book Encyclopedia. The Cantors owned the complete set.

Between Sunday and Tuesday, the Israeli air force and navy carried out operation “Bashan Arrow”—after the biblical name for the Golan Heights—which involved 350 strikes on Syrian military assets, disabling, according to the the IDF, between 70 and 80 percent of Syria’s “strategic” weaponry. The operation destroyed Scud missiles, weapons factories, anti-aircraft batteries, chemical weapons, and most of the Syrian navy.

Important as these steps are, Jerusalem will also have to devise a longer-term approach to dealing with Syria. Ehud Yaari has some suggestions, and also notes one of the most important consequences for Israel of Bashar al-Assad’s demise:

One of the most important commentators in Tehran, Suheil Karimi, has warned on Iranian television that “without Assad, ultimately there will be no Hizballah.” Weakened, confused, and decapitated, Hizballah is bound to lose much of its political clout inside Lebanon.

Yaari believes that the next steps in Syria should revolve around making and maintaining alliances, while staying on guard:

Military deployments along the Golan Heights border with Syria have taken place, but should not reach a point where they are seen on the other side of the border as a menace. There is no reason to fear the rebel factions in the adjacent Dara’a and Quneitra provinces [along the Israeli border]. Many of their commanders were assisted by Israel for years before they had to accept a deal with Assad in 2018. Some of those commanders regularly met Israeli officers in Tiberias and in other places. Many villages in this region have benefited in the past decade from Israel’s Good Neighborhood operation, which provided humanitarian aid on a large scale. . . .

Turkey has managed to have the upper hand in its competition with Iran over influence in Syria. Rapprochement with [the Turkish president Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan would be complicated yet not impossible.