Forty years ago this month, the Knesset decided to extend Israeli law to the Golan Heights, which it captured from Syria in the Six-Day War. In 2019, the White House gave official recognition to Israeli sovereignty there—responding in part to Syria’s collapse and the impossibility of returning the territory in exchange for peace with the discredited Bashar al-Assad. Now Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has unveiled a plan to invest 1 billion shekels in the territory, with the aim of expanding its population by 23,000 over the next five years, building two new towns, and expanding existing municipalities. Eyal Zisser comments:

Despite good intentions, very little has changed in the Golan Heights in 40 years. . . . Barely any new communities have been established in the area, and the number of Israeli residents has grown ever so slightly. In the Golan, some 50,000 people, 60 percent of them Druze, reside. In the 1990s and 2000s, a majority of governments in Israel even expressed a willingness to cede the Golan in return for a peace deal with Damascus.

In Syria, the civil war has come to a close. The Arab world is already rushing to welcome Bashar al-Assad back, as are some European leaders. Even Washington has signaled a willingness to do business with Damascus. . . . Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s spokesman said [that] Washington believes Israel’s presence [in the Golan] is vital so long as the country is at war and the Syrian regime lacks international legitimacy. In the future though, when the Syrian state is back on its feet, there will be a need to renew talks with Damascus, which ceased when the Syrian war broke out, on the future of the Golan and the possibility of returning it to Syria in return for the signing of a peace deal with Israel.

In the meantime, Israeli governments continue to declare their commitment to the Golan and determination to keep the territory. . . . All that remains is to see whether the plan moves forward or, as so many of its predecessors, remains just that. Given the new reality taking shape in Syria, . . . what we need now is action, not words.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.