Hebrew, like many languages, has a strict system of grammatical gender. Most verb forms indicate whether the subject is male or female; nouns are always either masculine or feminine. A group of females is addressed with a feminine form; a group of males, with a masculine form. For mixed groups, one uses the masculine form—but a few intrepid pioneers of political correctness have attempted to repudiate this last rule. Their reasoning is based on the long-debunked claim that language conditions thought, write Philologos:

The time-honored Hebrew convention . . . was that in addressing a sexually mixed group of people, one employs the masculine form, so that a resort to the feminine sounded bizarre. This had nothing to do, I maintained, with sexism. One should not confuse grammatical form with semantic content. The speakers of any language are quite capable of making the distinction between the two, and Hebrew speakers have no trouble understanding that addressing a classroom of 16 women and 11 men in masculine language is a grammatical technicality that does not exclude the women or privilege the men. In Hebrew, to take another example, the word for “father” is av and the word for “woman” is isha, but in the plural av takes the grammatically feminine form of avot while isha takes the masculine form of nashim. Does this mean that Hebrew speakers think of two or more fathers as females and two or more women as males? That would obviously be an absurd conclusion.

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.