Israel had grown used to targeting Iranian officials without head-on retaliation from Iran, an assumption overturned by Iran’s attacks on Saturday.

Israel had grown used to targeting Iranian officials without head-on retaliation from Iran, an assumption overturned by Iran’s attacks on Saturday. “I think we miscalculated,” said Sima Shine, a former head of research for the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency. “The accumulated experience of Israel is that Iran doesn’t have good means to retaliate,” Ms. Shine added. “There was a strong feeling that they don’t want to be involved in the war.”

Instead, Iran has created “a completely new paradigm,” Ms. Shine said.

Iran’s response ultimately caused little damage in Israel, in large part because Iran had telegraphed its intentions well in advance, giving Israel and its allies several days to prepare a strong defense. Iran also released a statement, even before the attack was over, that it had no further plans to strike Israel.

Iran has demonstrated that it has considerable firepower that can only be rebuffed with intensive support from Israel’s allies, like the United States, underscoring how much damage it could potentially inflict without such protection.

Iran also needed to show proxies like Hezbollah that it could stand up for itself, Mr. Vaez added. “To demonstrate that Iran is too afraid to retaliate against such a brazen attack on its own diplomatic facility in Damascus would have been very damaging for Iran’s relations and the credibility of the Iranians in the eyes of their regional partners,” he said.

 Aaron David Miller, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based research group, said that Israel had now made two major strategic errors in less than a year: Before Oct. 7, Israeli officials had publicly — and wrongly — concluded that Hamas had been deterred from attacking Israel.

Then Hamas launched the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.

“When it comes to conceptions, Israel is batting 0 for 2,” said Mr. Miller. “They failed to read Hamas’s capacity and motivation correctly on Oct. 7 and they clearly misjudged how Iran would respond to the April 1 hit.”

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NYT; China v India; India sees an opportunity as the United States and Europe look for alternatives to China as a place to make their products. One early success has been sharply increased production of iPhones in India.

But even with these openings, China continues to expose Indian insecurities. The Chinese economy is about five times the size of India’s, and China remains India’s second-biggest trade partner (after the United States), exporting about six times as much to India as it imports. China spends more than three times what India does on its military, giving its forces a significant advantage across land, sea and air.

The Indian military, which has long struggled to modernize, is now forced to be conflict-ready on two fronts, with China to India’s east and archrival Pakistan to its west.

Tens of thousands of troops from both India and China remain on a war footing high in the Himalayas four years after the deadly skirmishes broke out in the disputed Eastern Ladakh region, where both countries have been building up their military presence. Nearly two dozen rounds of negotiations have failed to bring disengagement.

In a book published in 2020, just as he had taken over as Mr. Modi’s trusted foreign policy architect, Mr. Jaishankar wrote that the tensions between the United States and China set “the global backdrop” for India’s choices in a “world of all against all.” India’s ambitions as a major power, he wrote, would require a juggling act: “engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia.”

While India remains wary of becoming a pawn in the West’s fight with Beijing, and has not forgotten its frosty history with the United States, China has become an unavoidable focus after being a secondary threat for much of modern Indian history.

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“Moreover, this war has never been one just between Zionism and Israel on one side and the Palestinians on the other, occasionally supported by Arab and other actors. It has always involved the massive intervention of the greatest powers of the age on the side of the Zionist movement and Israel: Britain until the second world war, and the US and others since then. These great powers were never neutral or honest brokers, but have always been active participants in this war in support of Israel. In this war between coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed, there has been nothing remotely approaching equivalence between the two sides, but instead a vast imbalance in favour of Zionism and Israel.

This thesis has been starkly confirmed by the events that followed 7 October, with the imbalance of power evident in the disproportionate levels of death, destruction and displacement: the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed so far is about 25-1. It is further reinforced by the overwhelming level of US political, diplomatic and military support for Israel, combined with that of the UK and other western countries, in contrast with the relatively limited military and financial backing for the Palestinians by Iran and several non-state actors.”

“In the past, where Gaza was concerned, this doctrine – described by Israeli analysts as “mowing the lawn” – involved periodically pounding the population and killing large numbers of them to force them to accept a status quo of siege and blockade that has lasted for 17 years.

I call this a temporary collapse of the doctrine, because while the events of 7 October exposed the bankruptcy of a force-based approach to an essentially political problem, the Israeli leadership has clearly learned nothing. Instead, it has doubled down on previous practices, in keeping with the Israeli adage: “If force does not work, use more force.” Israeli leaders seem to have forgotten Clausewitz’s dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means.”

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Zero-knowledge proofs allow researchers to prove their knowledge without divulging the knowledge itself.

Imagine you had some useful knowledge — maybe a secret recipe, or the key to a cipher. Could you prove to a friend that you had that knowledge, without revealing anything about it? Computer scientists proved over 30 years ago that you could, if you used what’s called a zero-knowledge proof.

For a simple way to understand this idea, let’s suppose you want to show your friend that you know how to get through a maze, without divulging any details about the path. You could simply traverse the maze within a time limit, while your friend was forbidden from watching. (The time limit is necessary because given enough time, anyone can eventually find their way out through trial and error.) Your friend would know you could do it, but they wouldn’t know how.

Zero-knowledge proofs are helpful to cryptographers, who work with secret information, but also to researchers of computational complexity, which deals with classifying the difficulty of different problems. “A lot of modern cryptography relies on complexity assumptions — on the assumption that certain problems are hard to solve, so there has always been some connections between the two worlds,” said Claude Crépeau, a computer scientist at McGill University. “But [these] proofs have created a whole world of connection.”

Zero-knowledge proofs belong to a category known as interactive proofs, so to learn how the former work, it helps to understand the latter. First described in a 1985 paper by the computer scientists Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff, interactive proofs work like an interrogation: Over a series of messages, one party (the prover) tries to convince the other (the verifier) that a given statement is true. An interactive proof must satisfy two properties. First, a true statement will always eventually convince an honest verifier. Second, if the given statement is false, no prover — even one pretending to possess certain knowledge — can convince the verifier, except with negligibly small probability.

Interactive proofs are probabilistic in nature. The prover could answer one or two questions correctly simply by luck, so it takes a large enough number of challenges, all of which the prover must get right, for the verifier to become confident that the prover does in fact know the statement is true.

This idea of interactions came when Micali and Goldwasser — then graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley — puzzled through the logistics of playing poker over a network. How can all players verify that when one of them gets a card from the virtual deck, the result is random? Interactive proofs could lead the way. But then, how can players verify that the entire protocol — the full set of rules — was followed correctly, without revealing every player’s hand along the way?

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