In his short story “Sisters’ Boy,” Joseph Epstein tells of three siblings, getting on in years, divided by a squabble. It begins thus:

In late November, two weeks or so before my annual trip to Florida, I texted my sister Bobbie in Boca Raton to give her the date of my arrival and asked her to pass it along to our sister Freddy, who lives in nearby Delray Beach. Freddy, born Fradyl, now in her middle seventies, long ago decided to take a pass on the digital age, and has no computer, smart-phone, iPads, Kindles, or any of that other, as she calls it, dreck. The text that came back read, “I no longer speak to your sister. Tell her yourself.”

When I called Freddy to ask her what was going on, she said, controlled but with genuine anger in her voice: “Your sister’s son Jeremy, the fabulous stockbroker, caused my son-in-law Barry to lose some 60,000 dollars, and at a time when the kids badly need the money. Leslie is pregnant with their third child, and Barry’s job is very shaky.”

“What did Jeremy do, exactly?” I asked.

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].