On Thursday night, a stampede left 45 people dead and many more injured at Mount Meron in the Galilee. They were among some 90,000 mostly ḥaredi pilgrims who gathered at the burial place of the 2nd-century sage Shimon bar Yoḥai for a traditional celebration of Lag ba-Omer. For several years, public-safety experts, government officials, and others have warned that the pilgrimages are dangerously overcrowded, and called for better regulation. Herb Keinon notes that there is much blame to go around, but finds in Israel’s response an inspiring patriotism:

After the initial shock of the scope of the tragedy seeped in, the concern of some when they heard the news was that in today’s Israel—a country where the divisions between the ḥaredi and non-ḥaredi communities have rarely been greater—this would be viewed as a sectoral tragedy, a ḥaredi tragedy, not a national one.

But that didn’t happen. The country, as it knows how to do in times of tragedy, rallied together. Flags were flown at half-mast for the victims, one or two of whom may not even have recognized the authority of the nation standing behind that flag. A day of national mourning was declared. Somber music was played on the radio. The voice of a seasoned radio presenter, . . . Esti Perez, cracked when she read the names, ages, and places of residence of the victims.

These deaths were not mourned only by the ḥaredi “tribe,” but by the whole nation. People from each of Israel’s “tribes” went out and donated blood, and people from each of Israel’s “tribes” shed tears when they heard the heartbreaking stories and saw the gut-wrenching images. Despite the super-charged and even hateful rhetoric of recent months, despite the deep divisions highlighted by the coronavirus, mystic bonds of brotherhood still bind people here—something that provides badly needed solace at trying times such as these.

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].