In the 1920s and 30s, Sam Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, the Warner brothers, and other Jews who had settled in Los Angeles played a major role in creating Hollywood and the movie business as we know it today. Some 100 years later, it is the Jewish state that is doing much to redefine entertainment. It began when Israeli shows were adapted for American audiences, producing such series as Homeland. Now Israeli shows like Fauda are simply being streamed on thousands of small screens around the world with subtitles. The Israeli-American writer and producer Alon Aranya, who has been involved in many of these programs, discusses the appeal of Israeli television, as well as one of his latest projects, a spy thriller titled Tehran. (Interview by Shmuel Rosner. Audio, 40 minutes.)

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].