On July 24—the sixth day of Av, on the Jewish calendar—the Knesset passed a law limiting the ability of the Supreme Court to interfere with ministerial appointments and decisions. Opponents of the reform immediately drew parallels to the upcoming fast day of Tisha b’Av, the ninth of Av, which commemorates the destruction of the two Temples and various other national catastrophes. Meir Soloveichik comments:

[T]he rabbis of the Talmud connected the Ninth of Av to one other day in Jewish history—one that was not a moment for weeping, but in which Jews wept all the same. It was around the Ninth of Av, they tell us, that scouts sent by Moses returned from the Holy Land to Israel’s desert encampment and described the challenges facing the people in conquering and settling the site promised to Abraham.

The Israelites wept as they heard the testimony of the spies, unable to see the incredible opportunity awaiting them. According to the Talmud, God told Moses that though Israel now was engaged in an unreasonable act of mourning in failing to see the gift that the Holy Land embodied, in the future the Ninth of Av would be a day on which true tragedies would be remembered.

If those who suffered in the events marked on the Ninth of Av would have been shown images of our own age—a united Jerusalem featuring a Jewish government, a Judean desert in bloom, and Jewish homes rebuilt throughout the Holy Land—they would have rejoiced at this vindication of Jewish yearnings. And if they would have been told that during all this, the parliament of the Jewish state would then vote to limit the ability of a Supreme Court to pronounce administrative decisions as “unreasonable,” their awe would not be diminished by an iota, no matter the flaws or virtues of this vote.

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].