Last week, Berlin preliminarily approved the purchase of the Arrow-3 missile-defense system from Jerusalem, for a price of $4.3 billion dollars. Such a news story would have been entirely inconceivable 80 years ago. Herb Keinon comments:

[O]nce so desperate for arms that it agreed to take them from West Germany in 1958 despite fierce internal opposition to the idea on moral grounds, [Israel] is now able to sell state-of-the-art weaponry to Germany. And it is doing so without any significant internal debate about whether it is seemly for the Jewish state to provide weapons to Germany, a nation that only three generations ago was responsible for the murder of more than one-third of the Jewish people.

This reversal of fortune also reflects the distance that Israel has traveled as a country. Not that long ago, the main thing it had to offer the world was Jaffa oranges, a revolutionary depilating device called Epilady, and the Uzi submachine gun. Today, it provides missiles that shoot down other missiles in the stratosphere [and] software that drives industries, and is on the cusp of exporting natural gas to European countries seeking to reduce their dependence on Russian oil.

These sales are important to Israel for two main reasons. First, they strengthen bilateral ties. If Israel is providing a country with weapons that keep it safe, that country—for instance, Azerbaijan or India, which have emerged as key markets for Israeli arms—will relate to Israel in a fundamentally different way than if there were no arms sales in the relationship.

The second reason these sales are so critical for Israel is that they make it possible for the country to conduct the research and development to produce the weapons it needs for its own survival.

On the same day the cease-fire went into effect along the Israel-Lebanon border, rebel forces launched an unexpected offensive, and within a few days captured much of Aleppo. This lightening advance originated in the northwestern part of the country, which has been relatively quiet over the past four years, since Bashar al-Assad effectively gave up on restoring control over the remaining rebel enclaves in the area. The fighting comes at an inopportune moment for the powers that Damascus has called on for help in the past: Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and Hizballah has been shattered.

But the situation is extremely complex. David Wurmser points to the dangers that lie ahead:

The desolation wrought on Hizballah by Israel, and the humiliation inflicted on Iran, has not only left the Iranian axis exposed to Israeli power and further withering. It has altered the strategic tectonics of the Middle East. The story is not just Iran anymore. The region is showing the first signs of tremendous geopolitical change. And the plates are beginning to move.

The removal of the religious-totalitarian tyranny of the Iranian regime remains the greatest strategic imperative in the region for the United States and its allies, foremost among whom stands Israel. . . . However, as Iran’s regime descends into the graveyard of history, it is important not to neglect the emergence of other, new threats. navigating the new reality taking shape.

The retreat of the Syrian Assad regime from Aleppo in the face of Turkish-backed, partly Islamist rebels made from remnants of Islamic State is an early skirmish in this new strategic reality. Aleppo is falling to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS—a descendant of Nusra Front led by Abu Mohammed al-Julani, himself a graduate of al-Qaeda’s system and cobbled together of IS elements. Behind this force is the power of nearby Turkey.