In recent decades, collaboration between Washington and Jerusalem in the realm of military technology and cybersecurity has led to major breakthroughs that have benefited both, such as the David’s Sling and Iron Dome anti-missile systems. Jacob Nagel and John Hannah encourage the U.S. to look to Israeli medical and public-health ingenuity in addressing the current pandemic:

It should not have been a surprise when, near the start of the crisis, on March 8, Vice-President Mike Pence, head of the U.S. coronavirus task force, and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed in a phone call “to advance technological and scientific cooperation” to combat the deadly virus.

In a country of only 9 million people, more than 1,400 companies operate in the medical-innovation sector, developing transformative technologies to detect and to treat an array of serious illnesses, including cancer, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s. These private-sector actors are part of an extraordinarily rich biotech ecosystem that is supported by the government and also encompasses world-class academic institutions and medical centers with a proven track record of rapidly bringing life-saving breakthroughs to market.

Like the United States and other countries around the world, Israel has mobilized its entire society to combat COVID-19 and mitigate its impact. While biotech companies, academic institutions, and medical researchers are naturally on the front lines of the effort to forge technological solutions, they have also been joined by the Israel Defense Forces, the Ministry of Defense’s Directorate of Defense Research and Development, and Israel’s legacy defense firms. . . . [T]hese organizations have now taken on a major role in fighting the virus, drawing on their enormous pool of skilled manpower and creatively repurposing existing military technologies to support out-of-the-box solutions.

Leveraging Israeli innovation to bolster America’s own efforts to combat COVID-19 should be a priority for the Trump administration.

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.”