Benjamin Netanyahu’s reference in a speech to the meeting between Adolf Hitler and Amin Haj al-Husseini, then the grand mufti of Jerusalem, has occasioned a great deal of outrage, mostly from the political left. Elliot Jager defends the prime minister’s remarks, and wonders why they ruffled so many feathers:

Netanyahu did not say, [as some have claimed], that the mufti convinced Hitler to annihilate the Jews. . . .

Obviously, there is much more to be said about the mufti and the Nazis. But what matters in 2015 is this: first, the claim that the Jews want to change the status quo on the Temple Mount dates back at least to the mufti’s days. Second, fierce criticism by dovish Jewish journalists, pundits, and politicians (and of course the foreign media and the Arabs) of Netanyahu is intended to undermine his not-so-subtle implication that Arab intentions then and now are much the same.

That is the crux of the issue.

If you believe the conflict is about boundaries and settlements, then you want to play down the extraordinary consistency of Arab intentions. Why? Because it is almost too painful to imagine that the Palestinian Arabs today really want what the Palestinian Arabs of 1933 or 1929 wanted. So if you think that Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah are not disciples of the mufti’s values, then you need to be offended by Netanyahu’s efforts to link the Nazis to the Palestinian cause. Of course, you also need to keep your eyes tightly closed.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].