Last week, the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharanksy gave a speech at Babi Yar in Ukraine to commemorate the Nazis’ massacre of over 33,000 Jews there 80 years ago. Babi Yar, he noted, was not just a symbol of the crimes of the Third Reich, but also of the USSR’s own crime of trying to erase the memory of the Holocaust. Reflecting on the deeds of the perpetrators, their local collaborators, and the Ukrainian Gentiles who rescued some of their Jewish compatriots, he concluded that “even when you walk through the valley of death, you are still making moral choices.” (Video, 13 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].