In an interview last week, the eighty-one-year-old speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Nabih Berri, joked that one can tell whether a pregnant woman is carrying a Jewish child by throwing a piece of gold at her feet. “If the fetus jumps out of his mother’s womb and grabs the gold, you know that he is a Jew.” Berri told this joke when asked about his meeting a few days earlier with the Jewish, and reliably pro-Israel, New York congressman Eliot Engel. While his vulgar sentiments received no attention outside of the Jewish media, Berri, who has held his position since 1992, has been the subject of fawning pieces in the French press, and frequently serves as a go-between for the U.S. and Hizballah. Ben Cohen elaborates:

Berri [is] also a warlord—specifically one of the founders, and the current head, of the Lebanese Shiite Amal militia. While at the helm of [Amal], Berri amassed a fortune of $78 million. . . . Many of the more gruesome episodes of his career have long been forgotten: for example, Berri’s mid-1980s alliance with the Syrian dictator Hafez Assad against Yasir Arafat’s PLO. For three years, Amal militiamen imposed a punishing siege upon three of the main Palestinian refugee camps, during which thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed, wounded, starved, arrested, and tortured. . . .

Once an enemy of Hizballah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Berri is now the terror group’s political guardian, stating only last year that Hizballah’s “resistance” was one of the three pillars, along with the “people” and the Lebanese regular army, of Lebanon’s national security. . . .

For all the transformations of our [Western] culture’s sensitivity to race and gender in the last 50 years, we still don’t bat an eyelid when Arab or Muslim leaders come out with same anti-Semitic garbage that has dominated casual discourse about Israel and Jews in the region for at least a century. . . . In telling [this anti-Semitic joke], Berri sent a message to the next generation of Lebanese politicians that anti-Semitism is a legitimate instrument of politics, and that violently mocking Jews is a normal component of rhetoric. Meanwhile, the silence of the outside world tells them that because of Lebanon’s conflict with Israel, attacks on Jews, however vile, will pass without comment or censure.

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.