Outrage spread rapidly via Twitter earlier this week based on the spurious claim that President Trump intended to label Jews “a separate nationality”—a move denounced as encouraging anti-Semitism or as itself anti-Semitic. Although correct information about the executive order that sparked the controversy is now widely available, one need not look far to find essays and editorials condemning it in heated terms. Liel Leibovitz notes that just as “our bien pensants were whipping everyone into a wild frenzy” over this imagined act of anti-Semitism, an armed couple attacked a kosher grocery store in a ḥasidic enclave in Jersey City, killing two Jews, one Gentile, and a police officer. The couple had brought with them multiple pipe bombs, and could easily have achieved far bloodier results. Leibovitz writes:

The shooting, we now know, was a premeditated attack, and one of the suspects was a black nationalist [a member of an anti-Semitic group styling themselves “Black Hebrew Israelites”] who had a long and proven track record of posting anti-Semitic screeds online.

Jews make up about 2 percent of the American population, yet were the victims of a whopping 57.8 percent of all religious-bias crimes last year, according to the FBI. Rather than vocally and unequivocally demanding that their Jewish constituents be protected, the politicians representing those targeted—from New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio to Senator Chuck Schumer—have been largely silent on this issue, while at the same time loudly and vigorously accusing the right of racism. Videos like [the] one shot at the scene shortly after the Jersey City attack and featuring local neighbors blaming the Jews for Jews being murdered are not likely to make any politician on the left take action, especially not someone like de Blasio, who has for years been kissing the ring of Al Sharpton, an anti-Semite best remembered for inciting an actual pogrom against the Jews of Brooklyn.

When the IDF finally caught up with the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, he wasn’t deep inside a subterranean lair, as many had expected, but moving around the streets the Rafah. Israeli forces had driven him out of whatever tunnel he had been hiding in and he could only get to another tunnel via the surface. Likewise, Israel hasn’t returned to fight in northern Gaza because its previous operations failed, but because of its success in forcing Hamas out of the tunnels and onto the surface, where the IDF can attack it more easily. Thus maps of the progress of the fighting show only half the story, not accounting for the simultaneous battle belowground.

At the beginning of the war, various options were floated in the press and by military and political leaders about how to deal with the problem posed by the tunnels: destroying them from the air, cutting off electricity and supplies so that they became uninhabitable, flooding them, and even creating offensive tunnels from which to burrow into them. These tactics proved impracticable or insufficient, but the IDF eventually developed methods that worked.

John Spencer, America’s leading expert on urban warfare, explains how. First, he notes the unprecedented size and complexity of the underground network, which served both a strategic and tactical purpose:

The Hamas underground network, often called the “Gaza metro,” includes between 350 and 450 miles of tunnels and bunkers at depths ranging from just beneath apartment complexes, mosques, schools, hospitals, and other civilian structures to over 200 feet underground. . . . The tunnels gave Hamas the ability to control the initiative of most battles in Gaza.

One elite unit, commanded by Brigadier-General Dan Goldfus, led the way in devising countermeasures:

General Goldfus developed a plan to enter Hamas’s tunnels without Hamas knowing his soldiers were there. . . . General Goldfus’s division headquarters refined the ability to control forces moving underground with the tempo of the surface forces. Incrementally, the division refined its tactics to the point its soldiers were conducting raids with separate brigades attacking on the surface while more than one subterranean force maneuvered on the same enemy underground. . . . They had turned tunnels from obstacles controlled by the defending enemy into maneuver corridors for the attacker.

This operational approach, Spencer explains, is “unlike that of any other military in modern history.” Later, Goldfus’s division was moved north to take on the hundreds of miles of tunnels built by Hizballah. The U.S. will have much to learn from these exploits, as China, Iran, and North Korea have all developed underground defenses of their own.