Last spring, the Ukrainian government asked the Biden administration to transfer Iron Dome and Patriot defense missiles to Ukraine. The transaction would have required approval by both the U.S. and Israel, as the Iron Dome is a joint Israeli-American project. At the time, Israel reportedly declined to sign off on the deal. The Times of Israel reports:

Israeli officials reportedly made it clear to the U.S. administration in informal talks that it wouldn’t agree to the transfer of Iron Dome batteries to Kyiv, fearing it would hurt its relations with Russia, especially in light of Moscow’s influence over Syria.

The Ukrainians, in turn, have in recent months made direct requests to the Israeli government and asked for officials to approve the sale.

Convinced by Israel’s arguments, the U.S. dropped the transfer of both Iron Dome and Patriot missiles. The Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said last Wednesday that his country was seeking greater cooperation with Israel on air-defense technology amid fears of a Russian invasion. An Israel TV report specified that Ukraine has been in contact with Israel regarding the Iron Dome missile-defense system, other missile-warning technologies, and cyber-defense technology.

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].