View from Jerusalem: The Real Mideast War

“After a night of tension” in Jerusalem, including “family time spent in the safe room,” the direct consequences of Iran’s attack on Israel aren’t yet clear, but the strike finally gave the world “a glimpse of the real war in the Middle East,” reports Matti Friedman at The Free Press. The Jewish state’s enemies have portrayed its war against Hamas as one pitting Israeli soldiers against Palestinian civilians. But it’s really just part of a century-old “Arab-Muslim war” against Jews, in which “most of the combatants on the Arab side haven’t been Palestinian” and some of the Jewish victims (like those killed in Iran’s 1994 attack on a Jewish center in Argentina) haven’t been Israeli. “For the first time,” Iran’s barrage demonstrated the real “scope” of the war.