Yesterday a nineteen-year-old Israeli yeshiva student named Dvir Sorek was murdered in what authorities are treating as an attack by Palestinian terrorists. He was on his way back to his yeshiva from a trip to Jerusalem where he had bought a book as a gift for one of his teachers when he was apparently taken and stabbed to death, his body left on a road leading to his home.

His father, Yoav Sorek, the editor of Hashiloach, an Israeli journal of ideas, and a friend and contributor to Mosaic, remembered his son as a boy with “light in his eyes,” reports the Times of Israel.

“Whoever didn’t know him missed out; he used to help the weak around him who were in need of a friend,” a tearful Yoav Sorek told reporters outside his home.

“Our Dvir was sweet,” Sorek . . . said of his nineteen-year-old son. “Two months ago he had a karate exam and he didn’t get a high grade because his teacher said he performs the movements well, but lacks ‘murder’ in his eyes. That’s right. He had light in his eyes. Now someone with murder in his eyes has taken him.

“We received a gift for almost nineteen years—for that gift we are grateful, we will carry the pain from now on,” he said.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”