In a recent speech, Simcha Rothman—a Religious Zionist-party parliamentarian and one of the major proponents of reforming the Jewish state’s judiciary—posed the question on which the country’s political future now turns. Now that the Knesset has passed a law curbing one of the Supreme Court’s powers, how can the court pass impartial judgment on that law’s constitutionality, a task it has recently taken up? Haviv Rettig Gur analyzes the speech, and observes a new approach emerging in Israel’s public conversation:

The political right no longer thinks it can ram any constitutional change it wants through the Knesset along narrow partisan lines. Or at least a great deal of it has become convinced of that. . . . A negotiated compromise on the overhaul is unlikely. Far-right factions that hold the deciding vote in the coalition can’t concede the minimum that opposition factions would need to sell any agreement to their voters. Nor does Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu command enough basic trust among opposition parties, including rightist ones that hunger for a compromise, to allow the latter to enter into politically risky negotiations.

Rothman’s speech was emphatically the bellicose cry of defiance that everyone heard. But contained within it was also, in the quiet fashion of a political pivot trying to avoid calling attention to itself, an acquiescence to political realities and a tentative signal of a new way forward. The court could not be expected to “join the effort” of the radical overhaul proposed back in January. . . . But it could be called upon to join in a new kind of effort, the kind Rothman and Speaker of the Knesset Amir Ohana, and conservative commentators, seem to be hesitantly circling.

Rothman leveled a good and vital question at Israel’s justices last week. “Can you be the ones who judge on this question, without fear or favor, without being biased by the fact that you’re dealing with your own dignity, your own standing, your own authority? It’s clear to me that you believe you’re acting appropriately, but if you become the final arbiter of this question too, where are the checks? Where are the balances?”

Critics of the overhaul have been leveling that very question at Rothman himself, at the slim Knesset majority that claimed it was restoring checks and balances while concentrating nearly all power in a narrow parliamentary coalition dependent on the most radical fringes of Israeli politics.

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].