While most American Jews tend to see their country’s relationship with the Jewish state as motivated by attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, Michael Doran argues that underlying this and other foreign-policy debates is a division between Protestant “modernists”—who wish to perfect the world through charitable works, social reforms, and international institutions in an ecumenical spirit—and Protestant “fundamentalists”—who favor American exceptionalism and doctrinal orthodoxy while believing mankind’s fallen state makes social perfection unachievable. The modernists, as Doran wrote in a recent essay, tend to be hostile toward Israel and Zionism, while the fundamentalists tend to be sympathetic. Even in our secular age, this intra-Christian divide often lurks behind debates over Middle East policy. (Interview by Jonathan Silver. Audio, 36 minutes. Options for download and streaming are available at the link below.)

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].