On Sunday, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky urged Israel to send more aid to his country, particularly the Iron Dome missile-defense system. As Jim Geraghty points out, this request may not be reasonable or even feasible, given Israel’s precarious relations with Russia and the logistical hazards of shipping the system’s components through a war zone.

At least based upon publicly available information, Israel still doesn’t have as many [Iron Dome] batteries as it would like to have, and the country doesn’t have any spares lying around. If Israel did choose to ship an Iron Dome battery to Ukraine, it would have to choose an area to leave unguarded. And as we’ve noted, those systems are very expensive to replace.

Then there’s the question of transferring the weapons system to the Ukrainians. The good news is that Iron Dome systems are meant to be mobile, and the components can be relatively easily transported by truck. In 2020, the U.S. began putting its two Iron Dome systems on Oshkosh trucks—and it brought those U.S. trucks to Israel on an Antonov 225 cargo plane, the largest plane in the world.

Alas, only one Antonov 225 cargo plane was ever produced—and it was destroyed in the Battle of Antonov Airport outside Kyiv on February 24.

Even if the Israelis broke down an Iron Dome system into smaller and more easily transported parts, flying it into Ukraine through contested airspace is likely to be deemed too risky. With these systems so valuable and expensive, neither Israel nor Ukraine would want to risk some Russian pilot getting lucky. . . . Then there’s the question of how quickly the Ukrainians can get trained to use the new system. As of September, the U.S. was having a difficult time getting its two delivered systems up and running.

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].