Yesterday, Israeli police working in cooperation with U.S. law enforcement arrested a nineteen-year-old dual Israeli-American citizen for making dozens of bomb threats against Jewish institutions in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand. The young man has reportedly suffered from a brain tumor for several years, which may have affected his behavior. David Bernstein makes sense of this unexpected discovery in light of some of the more overwrought reactions to the recent wave of threats:

Even if the threats had been the work of an anti-Semitic alt-righter, one [lunatic] with a phone shouldn’t cause panic, nor should one [lunatic’s] actions be used to extrapolate wild exaggerations about the declining safety of American Jews. But . . . various groups and individuals had an incentive to hype the “threat” and, not incidentally, blame it on President Trump.

Note also what this does not mean. It does not mean that all reported hate crimes, or all reported anti-Semitic hate crimes, are a hoax. Most of them are not, and the anti-truck-bomb barriers in front of my local JCCs and Jewish day schools bear witness to actual threats. It also does not mean, as I’ve seen far too many commenters on the Internet assert, that all anti-Semitism in the United States and/or around the world comes either from the left or from Muslims. That is not just false, but egregiously false. . . .

Unfortunately, the points above will be lost on many, and the fight against actual anti-Semitism and other forms of racism will likely have been dealt a blow because self-serving groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) chose to hype and politicize the threats without any idea of their actual origin. The ADL’s board of directors needs to clean house to regain credibility, starting with anyone who publicly attributed the bomb threats to emboldened white supremacists.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.