On March 15, 1979, Habib Elghanian, an Iranian-Jewish philanthropist and entrepreneur, was arrested by the Islamist government that had just installed itself in Tehran. He had previously turned down many opportunities to leave: even after the government had forbidden him from exiting the country, the Israeli ambassador offered him a seat on one of the last El Al flights out, no ticket or passport necessary. He offered the seat to a family member. Two months after his arrest, the government announced that he had been shot, on charges including “friendship with the enemies of God” and “spying for the Zionistic state of Israel.”

Tara Bahrampour reviews a new biography of Elghanian, written by his granddaughter Shahrzad:

Elghanayan travels the world to talk with her grandfather’s friends, relatives, and business associates, and pores over books, news articles, letters, photos, videos, and journals. She learns that his birth and death were bookends to an extraordinary sweet spot of openness and opportunity for Jews in Iran. Jews had lived there since before the arrival of Islam and had survived centuries of discrimination. When Elghanian was born in 1912, about 50,000 lived in ghettos in Iranian cities. Just six years earlier, equal rights for minority groups were enshrined in a new Western-style constitution, paving the way for Jews to integrate into the broader social, economic, and political landscape.

The son of a poor tailor, Elghanian grew up in a neighborhood of narrow alleys beside an open garbage dump. But his family valued education, and he and his brothers attended a school that provided a modern trilingual education, and were taken under the wings of uncles building up small import-export businesses between Iran and Europe.

Before the revolution there would have been little reason for Elghanian to leave Iran: he was a highly respected community leader who had established charitable foundations, served on the Chamber of Commerce and as the head of the Central Jewish Board of Tehran, built some of the capital’s first high-rises, and helped forge connections between Iran and Israel.

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].