Last Thursday was the final day of the Arab League’s annual conference, which, according to Lawrence Franklin, might have been most interesting because of what it didn’t do:

[T]he most significant aspect of this year’s conference was the downgrading in significance of Palestinian issues on the agenda. . . . [W]hen the representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hectored delegates [by asserting] that they no longer seem to treat the depressed state of the Palestinian people as the overriding issue that should unite all Arabs, his pleas seemed to fall on deaf ears. . . .

Ironically, the only commentator who assessed that the Palestinian issue remains paramount in Arab minds was the French consul general in Jerusalem, Herv Magro, who commented that “the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the central issue in the Middle East.”

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].