When Michael Oren came from the U.S. to Israel in the 1970s, it was a very different country than it is now. Likewise, American Jewry was quite different, and those American Jews who chose to leave their native country for their ancestral homeland often did so for very different reasons than they do now. Israeli society too has changed its attitudes toward aliyah: there is much less commitment now to the Zionist ideal that Diaspora communities would come wholesale to the Jewish state, and much more concern that new immigrants will compete for jobs and resources. Discussing his own experiences with Daniel Gordis—an American of about the same age who made aliyah decades later—Oren analyzes these changes, and urges Jerusalem once again to embrace the mission of encouraging the ingathering of exiles. (Audio, 34 minutes. A transcript is available at the link below.)

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].