Nobody has had a greater influence on contemporary Israeli popular music, argues Matti Friedman, than Kobi Oz, who led the way in bringing North African and Middle Eastern sounds into the mainstream. Born to Tunisian parents in the working-class southern city of Sderot, then populated mostly by Moroccan Jews, Oz—together with his band, Teapacks—popularized a genre that Friedman terms the “spiritual equivalent of American country and Western music”:

[Teapacks’] first hit, [in 1992], was about a miracle-working charlatan, Rabbi Joe Kapara, a common type around the Israeli south. The idea was to sing specific songs about a specific place, like country music: you don’t drive a truck—you drive a flatbed Ford. You don’t sing about a woman, but about Jolene. And you’re not from just anywhere, you’re from Luckenbach, Texas, or Muskogee, or Sderot. (“When I hear country, I’m in my own country,” Oz said.)

Friedman describes one of Teapacks’ most memorable performances:

It was a night in June 2001, and the band was performing with the Mizraḥi pop queen Sarit Hadad, who’d become famous for singing with Teapacks a few years before. News began to arrive of a Palestinian suicide bombing at a nightclub in Tel Aviv; 21 people were dead, mostly teenagers. It’s the kind of situation Israeli artists have to deal with.

Oz wasn’t going to call off the concert, but the situation needed to be addressed, so he decided to open with the national anthem, “Hatikvah.” Why, I asked. “I always want to sing ‘Hatikva,’” he said. He and Hadad rehearsed a version that incorporated the style that Oz heard when his Tunisian grandfather sang the anthem. . . . Without adding a word, Oz’s version made a political point: the anthem might have been written by an East European but the song, and the country, belonged to people from Tunis as much as to anyone else.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.