In an in-depth conversation, the former IDF chief of staff and Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon and the American political philosopher Michael Walzer discuss the moral challenges posed by 21st-century warfare. Among other topics, Yaalon emphasizes the importance of Jewish values in maintaining the IDF’s moral integrity, arguing that the “starting point to winning legitimacy . . . is the basic belief in the sanctity of human life. Every soldier must at his core recognize that every human being is created equal, even the enemy.” But this principle must be coupled with an understanding that, in the Talmud’s phrase, “by being merciful to the cruel we might in the end be cruel to the merciful.” (Moderated by Fred Schwab. Audio, 101 minutes. Transcript 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].