According to the conventional wisdom on the American Jewish left, Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank, together with the policies of the Likud, have alienated U.S. Jewry from the Jewish state. The Israeli right, too, has its own variation on this narrative—namely, that American Jews can’t possibly understand the security challenges Israelis face. In Divided We Stand, Daniel Gordis argues that the profound differences between the two Jewries go back a century and revolve around issues far more fundamental than conventional wisdom assumes. Haviv Rettig Gur suggests an additional explanation for Jewry’s great divide:

Perhaps the most fundamental gap . . . is rooted in the all-encompassing influence of American Protestantism on every aspect and wrinkle of American life. . . . This notion of the centrality of selfhood in producing our most authentic identities and religious truths would grow from a narrowly Puritan religious concept into a habit of mind applied throughout American social and political thought and life, and would become one of the most distinctive aspects of American culture. . . . American democracy as conceived by its founders was a struggle equally against both the privileged and the masses in the service of the only freedom that really mattered, that of the individual.

That’s why American Jewish Zionists seems so maddeningly strange to the Israeli observer. European Zionists sought to forge a new collectivist consciousness to rescue the Jews from never-ending persecution. Louis Brandeis constructed American Jewish Zionism as an expression of individual commitment, one of many overlapping, voluntarily undertaken obligations that make up the web of belonging of the individualistic American.

This is why, [for instance], American Jews view the ḥaredi monopolization of the Western Wall in such visceral terms, leaving Israelis startled and sometimes offended by their vehemence. To an American, Israel’s acquiescence in ultra-Orthodox control over official religious expression—indeed, the very idea that there can be an official religious expression—is an abomination, a violation of the most basic purpose of religious life, which is granted its validity through individual choice.

In Israel, of course, ḥaredi control over Israeli religion is only natural, many Israelis believe, because that is what religion is. It obtains its authenticity and power from outside the self, from experts and spiritual leaders and the institutions that appoint and empower them.

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].