During his visit to Ukraine last week, Benjamin Netanyahu, along with the country’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenksy, visited Babi Yar—the ravine outside of Kyiv where the Nazis slaughtered over 30,000 Jews in a two-day massacre. There Netanyahu thanked Zelensky and the Ukrainian government for their “efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust [and] in the war against anti-Semitism.” Sam Sokol, by contrast, argues that since the 2014 popular uprising and the Russian invasion, Kyiv’s record in this regard has been more mixed:

[In 2015], the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, passed a series of bills known collectively as the Decommunization Laws, meant to sever the country’s ties to its Russian and Soviet past. One of the bills prohibited what it called the “public denial of the legitimacy of the struggle for independence of Ukraine in the 20th century.”

In practical terms, these bills paved the way for the rehabilitation of Ukrainian ultra-nationalist figures like Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its offshoot the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), respectively. Both men, and their organizations, collaborated with the Nazis and their followers and were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles. Over the last several years, streets all over the country have been named after these far-right figures and steps have been taken to rehabilitate their images, casting them as fighters for democracy whose followers saved Jews from the Germans.

During this period, several efforts were also made to revise the history of Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust that directly involved Babi Yar. . . . In early 2016, Jewish groups harshly criticized Ukraine over an architectural competition aimed at revamping the site that sought to fix the “discrepancy between the world’s view and Jewry’s exclusive view of Babi Yar as a symbol of the Holocaust.” . . . In 2018, then-President Petro Poroshenko appointed the leader of the OUN’s current incarnation to a committee tasked with planning for the future of the site.

In many ways, [however], Ukraine has made strides in raising awareness of the Holocaust, especially compared to the Soviet period when mention of the genocide was prohibited. One of the ways it has improved can be seen in its support for a project promoted by the former Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky to build a Holocaust memorial center at Babi Yar.

Earlier this month, an operative working for, or in conjunction with, Hizballah snuck across the Israel-Lebanese border and planted a sophisticated explosive near the town of Megiddo, which killed a civilian when detonated. On Thursday, another Iranian proxy group launched a drone at a U.S. military base in Syria, killing a contractor and wounding five American soldiers. The former attack appears to be an attempt to change what Israeli officials and analysts call the “rules of the game”: the mutually understood redlines that keep the Jewish state and Hizballah from going to war. Nadav Pollak explains how he believes Jerusalem should respond:

Israel cannot stop at pointing fingers and issuing harsh statements. The Megiddo attack might have caused much more damage given the additional explosives and other weapons the terrorist was carrying; even the lone device detonated at Megiddo could have easily been used to destroy a larger target such as a bus. Moreover, Hizballah’s apparent effort to test (or shift) Jerusalem’s redlines on a dangerous frontier needs to be answered. If [the terrorist group’s leader Hassan] Nasrallah has misjudged Israel, then it is incumbent on Jerusalem to make this clear.

Unfortunately, the days of keeping the north quiet at any cost have passed, especially if Hizballah no longer believes Israel is willing to respond forcefully. The last time the organization perceived Israel to be weak was in 2006, and its resultant cross-border operations (e.g., kidnapping Israeli soldiers) led to a war that proved to be devastating, mostly to Lebanon. If Hizballah tries to challenge Israel again, Israel should be ready to take strong action such as targeting the group’s commanders and headquarters in Lebanon—even if this runs the risk of intense fire exchanges or war.

Relevant preparations for this option should include increased monitoring of Hizballah officials—overtly and covertly—and perhaps even the transfer of some military units to the north. Hizballah needs to know that Israel is no longer shying away from conflict, since this may be the only way of forcing the group to return to the old, accepted rules of the game and step down from the precipice of a war that it does not appear to want.