In the past weeks, Palestinian leaders from both Fatah and Hamas have been inciting their people to violence with claims that Israel is planning to change the “status quo” on the Temple Mount. By this they mean the longstanding policy that gives administrative control of the area to Muslim religious authorities, allows unrestricted access to Muslims, and restricts Jewish access. But, argues Nadav Shragai, the “status quo” is no status quo at all. The areas designated for Muslim prayer have expanded, and Jews, long forbidden from praying there, are now sharply curtailed even from visiting. At the heart of the problem is Israel’s reluctance to enforce its laws:

Amid ongoing [Muslim] damage to antiquities, blatant violations of the laws on planning, construction, and antiquities on the Mount, and repeated appeals to Israel’s supreme court by different [Jewish] groups, as well as political activity by members of Knesset and other public figures, constant tension has arisen between the Muslim religious authorities and the state of Israel concerning the enforcement of Israeli law on the Temple Mount.

In response, the state has entrusted the attorney general and a special ministerial committee to decide on issues related to law enforcement in the compound. The ministerial committee has not convened for many years, and was reactivated only a few years ago. The attorney general is very cautious about applying Israeli law to the Temple Mount and sometimes has even refrained from doing so, preferring to deal with this issue through unofficial dialogue with the Muslims via the Israel police. The police, for their part, have often preferred to keep things quiet on the Temple Mount even if the “price” entails compromising the rule of law, damage to antiquities, or violating planning and construction laws.

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].