In her recent book, What’s Divine about Divine Law, Christine Hayes examines how Jews in antiquity thought about the laws of the Torah. Many, especially those influenced by Greco-Roman thinking, considered halakhah divine because of its nature or characteristics; others saw it as divine simply because it was commanded by God. (This division, she remarks, corresponds neatly to the one in modern legal theory between those who believe in positive law and those who believe in natural law.) According to Hayes, many Greek-speaking Jews—including the Alexandrian philosopher Philo and the apostle Paul—found the two competing notions to be disturbingly dissonant, but the talmudic rabbis, for their part, tended toward a conception of law that transcended the distinction between them. (Interview by Joseph Ryan Kelly. Audio, 52 minutes.)

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.