Last week, agitators disrupted an outdoor Yom Kippur service taking place in Tel Aviv’s central Dizengoff Square. The attack followed a court ruling against the organizers of the service, which had determined that sex-segregated prayer cannot take place in Tel Aviv’s public spaces. (The court has not tried to apply this ruling to Muslim worship, which, like most Jewish worship in Israel, usually involves separate seating for men and women.) The editors of the Jerusalem Post comment:

Why, one must ask, did a prayer service that has taken place annually, without incident, since the onset of the coronavirus, turn so ugly this year? Why was there no uproar last year, or the year before, when a partition was rolled out for the prayers?

The reason lies not in the [seating arrangements], but goes much deeper and is related to fears and beliefs. It is the fear among the ardently secular that their way of life is endangered. It is the belief among the ardently religious that vaunted liberal values—“live and let live”—apply to everyone but them.

There was a time when this type of prayer service, just like refraining from eating [leaven] on Passover in a hospital, did not necessitate state intervention; when it did not require legislation; when it could all be managed with common sense, mutual respect, and basic decency. There was a time when issues such as these were governed by the simple understanding that if I know something bothers you, I won’t intentionally provoke you by doing it in your face. I’ll respect you, as I expect you to respect me.

A collapse of mutual respect emerged on Yom Kippur in Dizengoff Square. In Israel, circa 2023, everything is considered a “slippery slope,” everything is a matter of principle over which it is impossible to compromise.

Between Sunday and Tuesday, the Israeli air force and navy carried out operation “Bashan Arrow”—after the biblical name for the Golan Heights—which involved 350 strikes on Syrian military assets, disabling, according to the the IDF, between 70 and 80 percent of Syria’s “strategic” weaponry. The operation destroyed Scud missiles, weapons factories, anti-aircraft batteries, chemical weapons, and most of the Syrian navy.

Important as these steps are, Jerusalem will also have to devise a longer-term approach to dealing with Syria. Ehud Yaari has some suggestions, and also notes one of the most important consequences for Israel of Bashar al-Assad’s demise:

One of the most important commentators in Tehran, Suheil Karimi, has warned on Iranian television that “without Assad, ultimately there will be no Hizballah.” Weakened, confused, and decapitated, Hizballah is bound to lose much of its political clout inside Lebanon.

Yaari believes that the next steps in Syria should revolve around making and maintaining alliances, while staying on guard:

Military deployments along the Golan Heights border with Syria have taken place, but should not reach a point where they are seen on the other side of the border as a menace. There is no reason to fear the rebel factions in the adjacent Dara’a and Quneitra provinces [along the Israeli border]. Many of their commanders were assisted by Israel for years before they had to accept a deal with Assad in 2018. Some of those commanders regularly met Israeli officers in Tiberias and in other places. Many villages in this region have benefited in the past decade from Israel’s Good Neighborhood operation, which provided humanitarian aid on a large scale. . . .

Turkey has managed to have the upper hand in its competition with Iran over influence in Syria. Rapprochement with [the Turkish president Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan would be complicated yet not impossible.