Born in the cosmopolitan city of Odessa, then in the Russian empire, in 1880, Vladimir Jabotinsky as a young adult had a promising career as an essayist, playwright, and literary critic—without any particular interest in Jewish affairs. That slowly changed as Jabotinsky was drawn to Zionism, and eventually founded and led the Revisionist movement, the ancestor of today’s Likud. As his biographer Hillel Halkin puts it, he was “a politician who did not want to be a politician.” Halkin discusses Jabotinsky’s life, his talents as an orator and translator, his critique of the Zionist left, and his fateful meetings in 1934 with David Ben-Gurion, who would soon thereafter become his greatest rival. (Interview by David Makovsky. Audio, 49 minutes.)

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].