In the December 1915 issue of National Geographic, John Whiting detailed a severe, seemingly supernatural attack of locusts in the Land of Israel. Over the course of 30 pages, Armin Rosen writes, “Whiting often writes as if he’s seeing the Bible come to life in front of him,” citing heavily from the book of Joel.

Subsequent events now make the once-a-generation locust plague that occurred in 1915 seem like a minor horror in the 20th-century history of the land that became the state of Israel. The next several decades of world wars, regular wars, riots, invasions, massacres, and terror attacks might even make the insect swarm of that distant year seem comfortingly separate from the grim agency of human beings, an event belonging only to nature, with nothing much to say about us.

Jews should know better. In the Passover story, locusts are the eighth plague visited upon Pharoah, the antepenultimate rung on the God of Israel’s escalation ladder. The Muslims of Ottoman Palestine in 1915 certainly knew better. “All this is no use; go home and rest, you can do nothing,” an elderly peasant told Whiting, as his team from the American Colony in Jerusalem hunted for locust eggs on Mount Scopus. “They are Allah’s army, and once they fly they will destroy everything.” Whiting admits that events vindicated this stranger’s outlook.

I’ve never encountered any physical evidence or historical memory of this event over decades of visiting and reading and thinking about the Holy Land. But the horrors that a Wilson administration-era National Geographic reader encountered across 30-odd pages, right after eye-catching ads for Beech-Nut Tomato Catsup (“only two hours to make, bottle, and sterilize”) and the Alvin Silver Company’s brand-new Lafayette and George Washington spoon models, are not the kind that would just seem to drop easily out of the collective unconscious.

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].