This week, unnoticed by the Western media, Palestinian demonstrations in Lebanon turned into violent confrontations with police. Precipitating the riots was Beirut’s crackdown on companies employing foreign laborers—mostly Syrian refugees and Palestinians—without work permits, which businesses must pay a fee to obtain. Now the protesters are demanding that Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of whom were born in the country, and are banned outright from dozens of professions, have the same rights to employment as “native” Lebanese.

Pinḥas Inbari explains:

The Syrian crisis caused a deep demographic change in Lebanon after one-million, mostly Sunni, Syrians flooded the country, including many Palestinians from the Syrian refugee camps. The change has introduced many radical elements and reinforced various al-Qaeda groups in the camps in Lebanon. Lebanon doesn’t want them to set down roots in the country, and in any case the Lebanese hate the Syrians and want to throw them out and to use the opportunity to get rid of the Palestinians. . . .

Generally, the crisis in Syria cut Syrian Palestinians off from the PLO, which has been unconcerned about them. (Almost 4,000 Palestinian men, women, and children were killed in the civil war.) The Palestinians formed ad-hoc groups to represent and care for themselves. No refugee from Syria wants to go to Palestine; they all want to go to Turkey and beyond to Europe.

Palestinian leaders, of course, have consistently demanded the “right of return,” which would mean that descendants of those who fled Israel during the 1948 war would be able to return to the Jewish state, even if there were a Palestinian state alongside it. The Trump administration’s peace plan would seem to involve the opposite: settling the descendants of those refugees in the countries where they live. This, argues Inbari, is exactly what Beirut and Ramallah fear, and exactly what Lebanese Palestinians want.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.