Last Friday marked the 37th anniversary of a Palestinian terrorist group’s attack on a Jewish restaurant in Paris, which left six dead and injured twenty more. Yves Bonnet, the French intelligence chief at the time, recently admitted that he made a deal with the perpetrators—an offshoot of Fatah known as the Abu Nidal group—guaranteeing that they could come and go as they please in France, so long as they did not carry out any further attacks within the country’s borders. In Bonnet’s words:

[I]t worked. There were no further attacks between the end of 1983 and the end of 1985. . . . Afterward, they carried out attacks in Italy, for example, but that did not concern me so long as there was nothing on French soil.

Jay Nordlinger comments:

In 1985, Palestinian terrorists hijacked the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship. They singled out one passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, for murder. He was an American. But more important to the terrorists: he was a Jew.

He was traveling with his wife, Marilyn, in celebration of their 36th wedding anniversary. They had several friends with them. Klinghoffer was sixty-nine-years-old and confined to a wheelchair. The terrorists shot him and dumped him overboard.

We captured them, we Americans did. We captured the terrorists—some of them—who then spent time in Italian jail cells. After a while . . . poof. They walked. The Italians had their own [version of Bonnet’s realism].

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.