Circassians—a people from the northwestern Caucasus who speak a language related to Chechen and Georgian—first came to the Middle East as mamluk soldiers in the Middle Ages. But during the bloody conquest of their homeland by Russia in the 19th century, Circassians fled en masse to the Ottoman empire, and some settled in the Land of Israel, where their descendants remain to this day. Shir Aharon Bram describes the history of their two main communities in the Jewish state, Kfar Kama and Rehaniya.

Throughout the 19th century, the eastern Lower Galilee, where Kfar Kama was founded, was under the de-facto control of Bedouin tribes. The Ottoman government tried to impose its rule over the region in various ways, settling Maghrebi migrants from Algiers there and sending Kurdish battalions to confront the Bedouin, but with little success. The arrival of the Circassians changed things and effectively paved the way for Jewish settlement in the area about twenty years later.

Wherever they went, the Circassians often brought modernization along with them. Besides the Galilee, they established thirteen settlements in the central Golan Heights, while also settling across the Jordan River, where they established the modern city of Amman. They introduced advanced construction methods, metal- and woodworking techniques, and a mixed economy, and also incorporated European architectural styles, such as the famous “Marseille tiles” still visible in their villages.

In the 1948 war, the Circassians chose to fight alongside the Jews, and ever since then they have fulfilled their compulsory service in the IDF. . . Every Circassian child learns Hebrew, English, Adyghe [their native tongue], and Arabic, and some also study Russian and Turkish. The schools in Kfar Kama and Rehaniya are the only ones in the world where the students are Muslim and the language of instruction is Hebrew.

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].