By any measure, Israel’s election campaign is now moving into high gear. The deadline for parties to submit their candidate lists for the Knesset, Israel’s 120-seat parliament, does not arrive until early September, and the first week of next month is likely to be critical. But at this relatively early stage - Israeli elections can change dramatically even in their final 24 hours - Netanyahu and Likud look, there is no delicate way to put it, terrible. Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief and one of Netanyahu’s main rivals, has so far proved remarkably Teflon-coated.

The Israeli media is wary of declaring the race over, and rightly so. Netanyahu is the most formidable campaigner in Israeli politics, and he has won more elections in a democracy than any other living leader. Still, caution can be justified and excessive at the same time.

My newspaper’s weekend magazine conducted a quick comparison of past polling with actual election results. The record is fairly clear. Across Israel’s four most recent elections, the average of final TV polls — those published on the Friday before voting— was reasonably accurate. Netanyahu’s bloc has tended to outperform the polling average by roughly one Knesset seat (out of 120).

Subscribe now

There is one important complication peculiar to Israel’s proportional system: When a party fails to clear the electoral threshold, its votes are effectively lost, sometimes shifting the balance between the blocs. This happened to the far-right Otzma Yehudit in one of the 2019 elections and to the left-wing Meretz in 2022. But broadly speaking, recent Israeli elections have not produced enormous polling surprises. So far, Netanyahu’s bloc has trailed in almost every reputable poll since March 2023 - seven months before the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The exception is Channel 14, a coalition-infused television network, whose polls generally show Netanyahu ahead. Netanyahu himself does not seem to put much faith in those numbers; if he did, he might have called an early election

Some observers abroad tend to ask whether the opposition bloc can reach 61 seats, an outright majority in the 120-seat Knesset. That is basically the right question, but it misses an important feature of Israeli politics: A government can also be formed as a minority government.

This matters. The parties representing much of Israel’s Arab public are formally non-Zionist. Many members of the anti-Netanyahu bloc are themselves on the right and do not regard these parties as legitimate coalition partners. But that does not necessarily prevent a change of government. Arab citizens are roughly a fifth of the population. The parties representing them could support — or simply decline to vote against — a government not led by Netanyahu, without formally joining it. Most political insiders, on both the left and the right, believe this is exactly what they will do.

Counted this way, the picture is much clearer. For years, the parties opposed to another Netanyahu government have consistently held roughly 66 to 71 seats in the polls.

Netanyahu’s present situation is bad enough that slogans and dreary campaign videos are unlikely, by themselves, to transform it. But he does have one source of hope: a serious outbreak of violence involving Arabs. There is, politically speaking, a hierarchy here. The closer the confrontation is to home — first with Arab citizens of Israel, then with Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza, and then with Israel’s more distant enemies — the greater Netanyahu’s potential political benefit.

Subscribe now

Since the Likud first came to power in 1977, almost every major deterioration in Israel’s security environment — a wave of terrorism, a war, an Israeli military operation, or an attack on Israel — has benefited the right at the ballot box. Menachem Begin’s decision to bomb Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981; the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987; the collapse of the Camp David peace talks in 2000; the devastating suicide-bombing campaign before the 1996 election: Again and again, Likud and the Israeli right collected a political dividend.

It does not necessarily matter who was prime minister when the crisis began, or who bears responsibility for it. When Israelis feel threatened, public opinion becomes more hawkish. A small portion of the electorate — small, but in Israel’s closely divided politics often decisive — moves to the right.

October 7 was a watershed for many reasons. One of the smaller ones was political. For most of the previous two decades, Netanyahu had shaped Israel’s policy toward Gaza. He and his allies developed what Israelis call a conceptzia — an entrenched strategic assumption — that Hamas’s continued rule in Gaza could serve Israeli interests and that destroying the organization was neither necessary nor desirable. That conception ended catastrophically on October 7. And for once, a segment of the Israeli right turned against Netanyahu because of a security failure.

It is a rare thing in Israeli politics for Likud and the right to pay an electoral price for deteriorating security. The previous notable case came in 1992, amid a wave of Palestinian knife attacks, when Yitzhak Rabin successfully campaigned on a promise to restore Israelis’ personal security.

A new wave of violence — regional, tribal, religious — could save Bibi.

Netanyahu’s opponents might reject this argument. Another eruption of violence, they will say, would merely demonstrate once again that Netanyahu has failed to provide security. It would be another echo of October 7: another breakdown on his watch, another indictment of his leadership.

That is a rational argument. It may even be correct. But contemporary politics is driven less by rational accounting than by sentiment — by the instincts of a tribe that feels it is losing control. In the event of another serious security escalation, the dominant Israeli sentiment is likely to be simple: hit back, and hit back hard.

Share

There is a reason Netanyahu has been investing so much political energy in warnings about “the Arabs” deciding the next elections, or being part of the other block’s government. He is planting a seed. If an eruption comes — and some figures on the Israeli far right, most notably National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, seem to be working hard to make confrontation more rather than less likely — Netanyahu hopes to harvest the political fruit.

Violence is not the only card. A Likud campaign billboard unveiled this week reads: “They want Netanyahu to lose. Don’t let them win.” It features, from left, Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Iran’s supreme leader; New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; and Naim Qassem, the leader of Hezbollah.

Mamdani and his ilk are a gift to Netanyahu: He can turn their rhetoric into campaign material. Putting the mayor of New York alongside the leader of Hezbollah is almost tailor-made for Israeli right-wing voters. And the message of they want Netanyahu to lose may sound a little desperate — but in Israeli politics, desperate can work.

Share

It is impossible to think about Israel’s plan to bring down the Islamic Republic without first thinking about its sheer presumption. Grinding a regime down over years — sanctions, influence operations, the slow seeding of fear and confusion — is one thing. Recruiting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president and Holocaust denier, as an asset and installing him in power is another. So is launching a full-scale Kurdish invasion. This is the kind of project superpowers fail at. Israel tried it, and poured an enormous effort into the attempt.

Over the past weeks, The New York Times and Haaretz have published a great deal about that effort. What follows adds to the record on the most ambitious regional objective Israel has ever pursued: regime change in a country of roughly 100 million people, a regional power — attempted in wartime, and in coordination with the only superpower, the United States.

In the presentation the Mossad gave the Israeli cabinet on the eve of the operation, regime change was projected to take “one to three years.” That was a reasonable hedge; the Islamic Revolution did not happen in a day either. The ministers heard a different tune. “We understood,” one of them told me, “that we were going for regime change in a fast, sweeping move — killing the current leader, a Kurdish invasion, Ahmadinejad as our agent, protesters in the streets.”

Begin with a distinction

Again and again this has been described as “a Mossad operation.” The Mossad — Israel’s foreign intelligence service — was without question the animating force, the planner, the one pushing. But this was an operation of the State of Israel, ordered by its cabinet. It grew out of a conviction that had taken root at the political level and was then imposed on the security establishment: there would be no solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis, and no end to the friction with Iran, without a change of regime in Tehran. The 12-day war of June 2025 had created an opening, and Donald Trump was in the White House. Israel had to try, because the window might close. The cost of inaction, even weighed against the risk of failure, was higher than the cost of action.

Those words were said explicitly by Benjamin Netanyahu to the American president. The doctrine is his.

None of this is interpretation. The war aims of Operation Roaring Lion were never officially published. After conversations with a double-digit number of sources, military and political, the central objective can be reconstructed:

To deeply degrade or remove the threats Iran poses to Israel by creating the military conditions for a change of regime in Iran. Those may not be the exact words. But “creating the conditions for regime change” was the bottom line.

The phrasing was a compromise, negotiated in part with the IDF. From the first moment, the army said it did not know how to produce regime change on its own. For the General Staff, the main effort was strategic damage to Iran — the erosion of capability over time. Support for the Mossad was, as the army understood it, a secondary effort.

Why “creating the conditions” rather than “toppling the regime”? One defense official offered me a guess: the IDF knew this was a complicated objective, possibly an impossible one. It did not want to be dragged into a war with an aim so absolute that it could run forever — far past the number of interceptors in Israel’s magazines.

And yet the cabinet voted for an objective that was, in practice, an attempt at regime change. An objective that large — Megalomanic, some would say — dictates the allocation of resources and carries severe regional consequences. Put another way: the nuclear program and the ballistic missiles mattered, but they were not the holy grail, and they were not the message of the new war that followed. Where Rising Lion, the June 2025 campaign, prioritized the nuclear project — and did in fact halt enrichment — Roaring Lion was meant to be the war that ended all wars. With Iran, at least.

The result, as of this hour: Iran’s defense industry, and its ballistic missile production line in particular, has been badly damaged, and the harm to the nuclear program has been deepened. The IDF inflicted losses that can be measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Israeli intelligence demonstrated extraordinary penetration of the Iranian establishment. But if the purpose of operation Roaring Lion was to create conditions for a change of regime, the regime is alive, intact, and ruling with an iron fist. Foreign parties made sure the details of the Israeli plan leaked, including the Mossad asset Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Once the Israeli operation failed to reach the objective it had set, the regime could claim victory. We won, because we survived.

This is not semantics. In the summer of 2025, the “axis of resistance” had been beaten across the region and Israelis, by every poll, felt they had won. In the summer of 2026, an overwhelming majority of Israelis do not believe they defeated Iran — only 11 percent say Israel won, according to a Channel 12 survey — and the axis looks steadier than it did. Last summer, the Iranians did not control Hormuz. A year later they hold a strait that is critical to the world economy. The regime will not last forever. It is doubtful the war “created the conditions” for its fall.

---

This is not a story about an adventure that didn’t pan out. Many of those involved argue the operation could have worked had Washington not changed its mind about its central components, and there is not enough on the record to judge, because parts of the plan remain in the dark. The story is one of systemic failure: how an enormous strategic objective — regime change — became an executable mission without the political level, the IDF, and the Mossad ever genuinely agreeing on what it was, how central it was, whether it was feasible, and whether the tools matched the goal. In hindsight, most of those parties cannot even agree on the facts.

“Appetite Comes with Eating” — the road to February 2026

The October 7 massacre, and Khamenei’s decision to enter the war directly against Israel, again and again, led Netanyahu to present the fall of the regime as the supreme objective of Israeli policy.

In parallel, the Mossad was running a deep and impressive effort to penetrate the Iranian government. As the various investigations have reported, Mossad director David Barnea met former president Ahmadinejad in Budapest, the product of contacts that had gone on for a long time. Ahmadinejad emerged as a leading candidate for an alternative inside Iran; having grown up within the system made him, ostensibly, a more credible figure. The political level was shown “analytic evidence” for Ahmadinejad’s strength and standing in the Iranian public — evidence the Mossad maintained had been validated repeatedly.

Netanyahu ran into reasoned opposition from the IDF of the day. Then-Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and then-Military Intelligence chief Aharon Haliva said in closed discussions that the ability to engineer regime change in a country like Iran was extremely limited. They warned that the approaches on offer, the Mossad’s among them, were pretentious and hollow against the regime’s grip on Iranian society. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was not persuaded either. The military’s reservations carried through the turnover in personnel, into the tenures of Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir and Military Intelligence chief Shlomi Binder.

From outside, the army’s resistance can look strange. What’s wrong with toppling the regime? Why not try?

Defense policy is a hierarchy of priorities, and there is no appetite for pouring vast resources into a plan expected to fail. A more strategic answer has to do with the nature of the objective itself: if you try to bring down the regime and fail, the ayatollahs have won.

After the 12-day war, something began to shift. The Iranians had been beaten so visibly that, in the words of one defense official, “our eyes opened to the possibility of a changed Middle East.” Appetite comes with eating.

Subscribe now

By the summer of 2025 it was clear Iran was rebuilding its ballistic array faster than expected. It was equally clear Israel could not afford to manage Iran through periodic rounds of strikes — the doctrine known here as the campaign between the wars (in hebrew: MABAM), the low-intensity attrition Israel has run for years against Iranian entrenchment in Syria and Lebanon.

“We thought there was only one strategic solution to this: regime change,” a senior figure involved in cabinet and security cabinet deliberations told me. “Otherwise we’re condemned to keep emptying this bucket, sometimes with a teaspoon, sometimes with a ladle. It isn’t sustainable.”

By that point the prime minister and the Mossad chief already held a common line — that regime change could and should be attempted — and the Mossad was deep in the field work of preparing a coup. The IDF, for its part, identified a renewed buildup of the Revolutionary Guards. The army kept its skepticism about toppling the regime, but felt urgency about the Iranian ballistic project and the surviving pieces of the nuclear program.

Israel began investing heavily in preparing a second, larger war. The distinction matters: for the political level, from the first moment, the plan was an attempt to bring down the Islamic Republic. Inside the IDF, the thinking was mainly about finishing the purely military business of the last round — ballistics, defense industry, nuclear. The Mossad assessed the operation could and should be executed in May or June of 2026. The IDF spoke of autumn 2026. The prime minister pressed relentlessly to move it up.

In December 2025 the mass demonstrations and the uprising erupted across Iran. It is safe to assume the Mossad’s influence directorate did everything it could to help them; that is what it was built for. The regime responded with mass killing of Iranian civilians. If Rising Lion (2025) had ended in deep satisfaction inside the security establishment, Iran’s destabilization in December and January produced something closer to euphoria — close to messianic. President Trump promised to come to the demonstrators’ aid. The Mossad and the IDF received an instruction from the prime minister to prepare for the big war, and to accelerate the plans toward execution.

Through January and February 2026, the entire Israeli system was focused on war preparations. The plans were nowhere near ready, least of all where the fall of the regime was concerned. The operative phrase was: don’t miss the opportunity.

The Kurdish plan

The Kurds became the cornerstone of the coup plan: they would invade from the west, move city to city, absorb more Kurds and Iranians as they went, and drive toward Tehran. In parallel, after the opening phase of bombardment, the masses would come out into the streets as they had in December 2025. A perfect storm.

Logistically, according to what has been published, Israel supplied weapons. It tried to assemble a Kurdish coalition.

It is worth pausing here: Israeli intelligence officers who have worked on Iran for many years consider any reliance on the Kurds to be, on its face, a wild delusion. The Mossad’s answer was that Iran is its field, its expertise. The Kurds would not take over Iran — they would mainly tie the regime down while the public brought it down.

Many of the problems with the Kurds were political: how to get several rival factions to act together, and to do so in a way that could actually produce political change in Iran. Among other things, Israel required the Kurds to fight under the monarchist Iranian flag — the pre-1979 tricolor bearing the Lion and Sun of the Pahlavi dynasty — rather than the Kurdish flag, so the offensive would read as an Iranian national uprising rather than a Kurdish separatist one. Israel arranged for the flags to be supplied.

The planning went down to a fine grain. The Mossad wanted to guard against the risk that the Kurds would carry out pogroms across Iran as they advanced. The condition set for them was known internally as the Ten Commandments: no killing, looting, theft, rape, or war crimes. “If you deviate from this,” the Israelis warned them, “the Israeli Air Force will not back you. The Iranians will slaughter you.”

The air force is the essential point. Israel did not tell the White House, President Trump, or the CIA that the plan was a Kurdish invasion. It described a joint operation of the Kurds and the Israeli Air Force. That was the explicit framing. The air force was to open ground corridors for the Kurds and handle emerging threats. The Kurdish force, roughly 15,000 fighters at the outset, was to liberate cities and gather more Iranians as it moved, until it numbered “150,000 to 200,000” advancing on Tehran under Israeli air cover.

Much else was supposed to happen first — uprisings among other minorities, and mass demonstrations by citizens across Iran some time after the opening of the offensive.

The Military Intelligence’ Warning, and The Blame Game

The IDF is fond of the word ‘tichlul’ — the integration and orchestration of a campaign across all its parts. In Israel, the army is the integrator of wars.

The Military Intelligence (AMAN) had deep reservations about the operation to bring down the regime, and its Research Division wrote an assessment putting the chances of success as low. As reported by Michael Hauser Tov in Haaretz, Military Intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder determined that the probability of the regime falling was low. The reasoning was specific: that the Kurds could not be relied upon, and that the degree of American support was “unclear.” Military Intelligence also warned that the regime would take down the internet immediately, sharply reducing the odds of coordinating a revolution at all.

There was a further warning, and a more dramatic one. The Research Division held that if the effort to change the regime failed, the risk of an Iranian breakout to a nuclear weapon would rise — a risk, in its language, that needed to be hedged. This was delivered in a written report. It warned, in effect, that the price of failing at regime change could be very high. Many Iran specialists now assess that Mojtaba Khamenei — the son who succeeded his assassinated father as supreme leader — is indeed weighing a dash for the bomb.

“The correct conclusion from the December–January protests should have been that the regime won its battle for survival,” a defense figure with long experience told me. “The demonstrators were killed. Their friends retreated. The regime used lethal force. That is an argument against trying to bring it down two months later.”

Subscribe now

These are serious points. Iran experts around the world respond to the details of the Israeli plan with something close to contempt. In their view, the vast apparatus of the Islamic Republic cannot be brought down by an external threat of this kind, certainly not in wartime. On the face of it, Military Intelligence’s skepticism was vindicated.

At the Mossad they tell the opposite story: there was no reservation from Military Intelligence at all, but rather remarkable cooperation.

When I spoke with political decision-makers — including some who were fiercely critical of the Mossad’s regime-change plan — they said they had heard no sharp warnings from the IDF about the plan to topple the regime.

In fact, they say they heard no reservations whatsoever. Not in the restricted consultations of the security cabinet, not in the cabinet session that authorized the prime minister and the defense minister.

“Does it seem plausible to you,” one of them said to me, “that we would hear all these grim assessments — that there’s no chance, that the Kurds aren’t serious, that the Americans aren’t with us, that they might dash for a nuclear weapon, that it won’t work — and that this wouldn’t set off a major debate?” Another minister told me: “The IDF pretty much agreed. And if it had reservations, it voiced them weakly. This wasn’t only the Mossad’s plan, it was the objective of the war. The IDF took part and believed in it, and if it didn’t believe in it that much, that never reached us.” I spoke with several people who sat in those rooms, and all of them offered a version of the same line: the army went along with it completely.

The IDF rejects this completely, and says every doubt and danger was presented in the relevant sessions to the decision-makers, in writing as well, and that the record documents it.

How does that square with what the ministers say? Former senior figures in the defense establishment answer that sometimes ministers hear what they want to hear. When something fails, they didn’t hear the warnings beforehand.

Which raises the obligatory question: in which discussions, and in which forums? The full cabinet barely discussed the complete plan, for fear of leaks. What is left? security cabinet sessions, and some meetings with the prime minister and the defense minister. There is no doubt that Netanyahu received a Research Division report expressing severe doubt about the prospects for regime change. Did he prevent that criticism from being presented in full to the cabinet, including the one that approved the war? And more broadly, what explains a factual gap this extreme between the ministers and the Mossad on one side and the IDF on the other?

Between “Bullshit” and “Ridiculous” — the American track

On February 11, the briefing for the American president takes place. Mossad chief David Barnea and Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir present the Israeli operational vision. The Israelis do not know what the journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan will later publish: that senior American officials, having heard the Israeli presentations on the war and above all on regime change, were unconvinced. They thought it was “bullshit,” to quote Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Or ridiculous, in the judgment of Barnea’s counterpart, the director of the CIA.

A few days later, Israelis say, the green light comes from the White House to proceed.

The war begins seventeen days after that briefing. A cabinet session is convened at the last possible moment, purely to obtain a rubber stamp from the ministers — standard procedure in the Netanyahu years. Then comes the assassination of Khamenei and members of his household. The IDF begins preparing air support for the Kurds, but prioritizes critical targets first. The Kurdish forces are ready to begin the invasion on 48 hours’ notice. The order never comes. The details begin to leak.

Share

About a week into the campaign, the American president halts the Kurdish plan. It is reported that Turkish President Erdoğan intervened and called Trump. Erdoğan later said that a Kurdish invasion of Iran could have provoked a Turkish response severe enough to slide into a conflict between Turkey and Israel. Three days later, Israel understands that America has closed the door.

The Mossad could have come forward and said something simple: there was a plan. It was stopped. You cannot judge the “failure” or the “non-success” of toppling the regime, because the execution order was never given. There were other assets, other instruments, other allies — none of them activated. There are no guarantees it would have worked, but we were never allowed to try.

“The Mossad didn’t deliver much of what it promised, even before the Kurds,” one minister told me in response. “People started asking whether we were dealing with fantasists.”

By most accounts of those involved in the decisions, up until the collapse of the Kurdish move there is an atmosphere of consensus and relatively harmonious work at the top of the Israeli security establishment. There is an objective, and it has to do with creating “conditions” for an overthrow in Iran. The IDF calls this “severe damage to the regime.” The Mossad is far more ambitious. The coalition manages to function.

With the “no” from the White House, everything changes. Netanyahu and Barnea insist there is more to be done, or at least attempted. Within 48 hours the Mossad brings forward an improvised, hurried plan — patched together, in the words of one participant. The Mossad makes clear this is no longer the plan but a last-minute effort, and lowers expectations.

If until that moment there was harmony in the Israeli system, or the appearance of it, in the second phase the agreements disintegrate. The IDF, the chief of staff, and ministers believe the stammering attempt at regime change is a waste of precious resources. Flight hours, munitions. And above all, the draining hourglass before the war has to end.

The arguments are bitter. “In the first phase, when the Kurds were in the game, everyone was in agreement — or transmitted that way. Once the Kurds were out, everything blew up,” a senior figure told me. Another added: “The astonishing thing is that after Trump rules out Kurdish involvement, Netanyahu imposes the Mossad’s new improvised plan. Another fantasy that obviously wasn’t going to work.”

Under the improvised plan, the air force tries to hunt checkpoints of the Basij — the regime’s volunteer paramilitary militia, the instrument of internal repression — and the prime minister issues his public call for Iranians to take to the streets on Nowruz, the Persian New Year. Other assets are employed. Israel invests hopes in this. The Iranians stay home.

“We paid a heavy price for the alternative plan,” one decision-maker says. “Resources are limited. The air force didn’t execute everything it could have on the nuclear program. We were chasing other things.”

A Failure of Decision Making

The full account is broader than what is described here. The Mossad’s plan contained additional components, some of them weighty and relatively persuasive, that have not been published. Their absence can create the impression of a plan far thinner than what the organization was actually trying to realize. But even from the limited details set out above, sharp questions emerge.

The ministers, the IDF, and the Mossad hold different versions of what the war was for.

The IDF treated the Mossad’s regime-change operation as something it was assisting with, not as a substantive objective.

The ministers saw it as a substantive objective, even if not immediately achievable.

The Mossad understood it as the central objective of the war. The formulation of the war aim — “creating the conditions” for a change of regime — was an attempt to paper over severe disagreement.

The result was a political formula. A welding-together of words designed to leave everyone satisfied. That is not a clear objective for a war.

The Mossad maintains there was no IDF opposition to its original plan at all, not even behind closed doors.

The IDF says it laid out the doubts and risks in detail.

Ministers say no clear IDF criticism of the regime-change attempt was ever presented to them, and that the Mossad was failing to deliver even before the Kurdish move was blocked. This is an intolerable factual gap.

Judging by their reactions, the overwhelming majority of Iran experts in Israel and abroad regard the Mossad’s plan — a Kurdish invasion, an uprising of minorities, a set of further steps, the recruitment of Ahmadinejad — as a fiasco. The Mossad insisted it was a realistic, persuasive, credible framework, backed by empirical proof. That is a professional gap that beggars belief.

Turkey’s opposition to a Kurdish force attempting to take over a sovereign state — particularly on behalf of Israel — was foreseeable. Anyone who knows the American administration knows about President Trump’s close relationship with President Erdoğan. How did Israel launch an operation of this kind without preparing for possible Turkish resistance? Who was holding the Erdoğan file?

In Defense of the Gamble?

The campaign against Iran is not over. The deep damage to Iran’s defense industry and its nuclear industry is not in doubt. The regime’s distress is a basic fact, and inflation and economic hardship attest to it. Sometimes very small acts and very small forces bring down empires — larger and stronger ones than Iran. Who knows: had Trump approved the Kurdish invasion, perhaps the regime would have been shaken, or at least slid into civil war. And then everyone would be praising the Mossad’s gamble. In something like this, you only have to succeed once.

It’s not a convincing case. In December 2025 an uprising began in Iran, and together with the state’s weakness after Rising Lion, Trump’s promise to shield the protesters, the American success in Venezuela, and the extraordinary capabilities Israeli Military Intelligence and the air force had displayed, an atmosphere took hold in which everything seemed possible. Including toppling a regime. Netanyahu, with an election coming, pushed — and pushed hard. This is precisely the point at which cabinet ministers and defense officials should have smelled the obvious danger: a bridge too far.

Worse: no staff work was done that took in the campaign as a whole. Whoever wants to crown kings needs to understand kingdoms.

What would happen to Israel’s standing in the United States if it publicly pushed for a full-scale war with Iran? (The answer: a hard, perhaps crucial collapse.) How could Turkey disrupt the Kurdish move? (With one phone call.) If the leader were eliminated, would that not open the door to dangerous radicalization? (It did.)

And above all: Israel did not understand, and to this moment does not understand, American conduct around the Strait of Hormuz. “It’s a mystery,” one well-informed source told me. Israel believed the U.S. would never allow the strait to be closed. Hormuz was and remains Iran’s single most important strategic achievement of the war.

In the late Netanyahu era, the phrase “the limits of force” has gone extinct. The defense establishment is locked in a war of attrition against a political level that is inflamed and unbounded. The National Security Council does not function as an effective staff body, least of all in wartime. The Defense Ministry’s political-military bureau is paralyzed. The professional ranks of the Foreign Ministry have no say in decision making. Around the prime minister there is no independent, functioning staff.

That was the situation on February 28, when Israel went to war. It is also the situation today, perhaps on the eve of another confrontation.

Leave a comment

Ever since the Israeli minister responsible for the police - a Jewish supremacist, a disciple of Meir Kahane, a convicted felon who, among other activities, incited against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin before his assassination — heard about Donald Trump's idea of a alligator-surrounded prison, he has devoted himself to a similar project. In his case, the proposition that prisoners held for security offenses — meaning, in practice, Palestinians — should somehow be guarded by crocodiles.

While in the United States this was an idea floated by the president, soon to be abandoned, in Israel the bureaucracy quietly went to work. Ten days ago, the minister responsible for environmental protection, Idit Silman, issued new regulations recognizing Nile crocodiles as "managed wildlife," thereby allowing them to be kept by security agencies for this purpose.

Subscribe now

The Israel Prison Service, under orders from Ben Gvir, has already announced that it is treating the project as “an experiment”.

This week, Ben-Gvir's Ministry of National Security issued the following statement regarding work that has begun at Ketziot Prison, which houses Hamas prisoners:

“The Israel Prison Service is fully prepared. The plan exists down to the smallest detail — from the maintenance and care of the crocodiles to the crocodiles' resting enclosures. Prison officers have been trained to operate the facility. The Ministry of National Security has allocated 21 million shekels for the project, enabling the construction of the canals. The Israel Prison Service welcomes the initiative, which it says will make it easier for prison guards overseeing the Nukhba terrorists. Whoever murdered, massacred, raped, and behaved like an animal deserves to be guarded by an animal, just like them."

One phone call from Netanyahu would end Ben-Gvir's pet project. He won't make it. Netanyahu won't rein Ben-Gvir in over the Temple Mount. Why would he do it over crocodiles?

Off the record, every professional involved in the prison system considers the idea lunacy. There is no meaningful prison escape problem to solve in the first place, and surrounding prisons with crocodiles would not save taxpayers' money.

Share

The reason most Israelis weren't surprised by this story is not only that Ben-Gvir's crocodile fixation is well known. It's also, to put it bluntly, the sheer madness — the unhinged nature — of the current far-right coalition government.

(If this piece seems focused on wasted tax money and practical lunacy, that's only because the moral failure of the project is so obvious it barely needs stating. Prisoners guarded by wild animals belongs to the Colosseum. Not to a Jewish and democratic state).

The crocodiles are just one example, perhaps the most surreal, of something that has become part of daily Israeli life.

Another, far more consequential and persistent example is the way the current coalition has funneled enormous sums of taxpayers' money to the ultra-Orthodox community, one of Benjamin Netanyahu's core political constituencies, throughout the war — even as Israel's national debt and budget deficit continue to grow.

Many commentators, myself included, have used the word "plunder" to describe the way taxpayers' money has been channeled into extraordinary allocations for ultra-Orthodox institutions — institutions that openly reject Zionism and educate their students not to serve in the Israel Defense Forces or any national service.

How much money are we talking about?

In the latest state budget, the government allocated roughly 6 billion shekels (about 2 billion USD) in coalition funds for narrow sectoral purposes. Ultra-Orthodox youth movements received roughly six times as much government funding as Zionist youth movements. The Likud-led government — supposedly committed to free-market economics — expanded a food voucher program, but the eligibility criteria were designed by Aryeh Deri’s people, leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, in a way that overwhelmingly benefited his own constituency. That program alone is worth 257 million shekels.

Ultra-Orthodox yeshivas received 2 billion shekels out of the six billion. Additionally, funding for religious buildings rose from 52 million shekels in 2023 to 131 million in 2024, before settling at 123 million in 2025. This was all done while Israel was fighting its longest, hardest war since 1948.

At the same time, the government refused to fund dedicated transportation for reserve soldiers who need to report for duty or return home during Shabbat and Jewish holidays. Also, deep cuts were made to social services because of the costs of the war.

These issues may seem far more technical and budgetary than the story about the crocodiles. But this is the daily fabric of Israeli public life.

These are just a few examples, a taste of Israeli discourse. Israelis are not worried only — or even primarily — about the war. Increasingly, they are worried about the future of their society, considering a a failed political system.

This has been one of Israel's longest-serving governments. Yet when it comes to meaningful reforms, it has accomplished remarkably little. But at channeling taxpayers' money into sectors economists warn are unproductive, it has worked on an industrial scale. The Crocodiles Are the Least of It.

Share

Israel’s Supreme Court issued an injunction this morning freezing a new law that would have barred the arrest of ultra-Orthodox men who refuse to report for military duty, less than a day after Netanyahu’s government pushed it through the Knesset. The measure passed alongside a new quasi-constitutional Basic Law enshrining Torah study as a foundational value of the state — the coalition’s final legislative acts before the Knesset dissolves ahead of the October 27 election.

Most sources in Jerusalem now assume the arrest-freeze law is dead. But the story of how it passed — and why — says a great deal about where Israeli politics stands after more than two years of war.

The background

Israel has mandatory military conscription, but for decades its ultra-Orthodox — Haredi — minority has been granted sweeping exemptions to study full-time in yeshivas instead of serving. This is one of the rawest fault lines in Israeli society; Israelis call it “sharing the burden.” It has grown rawer still during the war that began in Gaza, which has left the General Staff warning openly of a manpower crisis.

The Supreme Court has already ruled the blanket exemptions illegal. But Netanyahu’s coalition depends on the Haredi parties to survive. Hence this week’s legislation: a bill freezing the arrest of Haredi men who ignore draft orders, bundled with a Basic Law elevating Torah study to constitutional status.

Subscribe now

Why do it, knowing the court would intervene?

Netanyahu could hardly have failed to foresee the injunction. The answer, according to people familiar with the coalition’s thinking, is that the legislation was never primarily about taking effect. It was about demonstration.

Netanyahu is fighting for his political survival, and the Haredi parties are essential to it. He has funneled many billions to the Haredi sector in the middle of a war, with the help of far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — the man who has done more than anyone to keep Haredi men out of uniform and the money flowing. The goal of every arrangement, every combina (the Israeli word for a fix), is not effectiveness but signaling: showing his Haredi partners that he is the only politician who will deliver for them. He is willing to absorb the public-relations blow for the bigger prize — the coalition negotiations that will follow the election, which matter no less than the election itself.

All this while Haredi demonstrators block highways in protest of draft warrants, and while the army pleads for manpower.

The political calculation regarding right-wing voters appears to be simple: they will forget. Old and young alike will drop machal (מחל) — the Likud’s ballot slip — into the box on October 27.

Share

The army’s red line

For the IDF, the arrest-freeze measure was the last straw. The army is facing a severe and deepening shortage of fighters; for months the government ignored the General Staff’s pleas to resolve the crisis of extended reserve service. The new law went further than inaction: it spared deserters arrest while men their age are asked to risk their lives — and it imposed on the IDF itself the duty of granting the exemptions.

That last detail is worth some specific focus. Under the emergency provision, it is the army that must sign the exemptions for yeshiva students, through a military committee staffed by senior officers — placing the stain on the officers rather than the politicians.

Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir sent an urgent letter on Monday, and the restraint in it was visible in every sentence — as was the anger underneath. Its most important line: the bill grants an incentive not to report for service, because it comes bundled with immunity from prosecution, and is therefore, in his words, “clearly and unequivocally” inconsistent with the army’s needs.

Zamir raised three objections. The gravest was moral: it cannot be, he wrote, that the military establishment under his command — the one demanding unprecedented sacrifice from those who serve — should simultaneously put its signature to the mass granting of exemptions.

Senior officers were less restrained. “Enough!” one told me. “With one hand they’ll draft reservists like madmen, with a second hand they’ll grind the conscripts to dust, and with a third hand they’ll exempt the shirkers. It will break and tear the IDF apart.”

Subscribe now

The committee chairman’s defense

The response of Boaz Bismuth — the Likud lawmaker who chairs the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee — was that the army’s opposition arrived only after the committee had finished its deliberations.

The record says otherwise. The army objected sharply, repeatedly, throughout the committee’s hearings. The Chief of Staff’s letter came after the IDF had already registered its objections at every stage of the legislative process.

And it is difficult to believe an earlier letter would have changed anything. Had one arrived two weeks ago, would Bismuth have halted the hearings, told the Haredim there would be no immunity for deserters, and demanded an equal share of the burden from the prime minister? Nothing in his conduct suggests it.

Bismuth holds his post for one reason. His predecessor, Yuli Edelstein, believed that Israel’s security and its conscription actually mattered — and held up this very legislation over that principle. He was ousted in Bismuth’s favor.

What comes next

The politicians collaborating with the mass draft-dodging and the diversion of state resources appear to assume this is merely another chapter of politics. There was always talk of the draft; there was always coalition money; this is simply another day at the office.

The evidence from within the army — and from the polls — suggests otherwise, though in Israel such things can change quickly. Whether that memory survives until October 27 is now one of the central questions of the campaign. That is as true of draft-dodging bills as it is of the failure of October 7, 2023.

Subscribe now

Share

It began with Iranian attacks on oil tankers that, as far as the Islamic Republic was concerned, had strayed from the corridor it had allocated to them in the Strait of Hormuz.

It continued with the U.S. military striking dozens of targets inside Iran in response, and with the Iranians signaling that they no longer intend to permit the free movement through Hormuz that existed before this war.

Then, last night, the United States struck Iran again — President Trump describing the Iranians as, in his words, a "sick people," saying he no longer wants to deal with them, while at the same time making clear he is not eager to return to war.

What is really happening?

Share

1. Iran, and much of the region, sees the Islamic Republic emerging from this war stronger, not weaker.

As far as Tehran is concerned, it never signed anything guaranteeing free movement through Hormuz or a return to the prewar status quo. Indeed, the MoU contains no sentence restoring business as usual in the strait, no guarantee of complete freedom of maritime passage. What it does say is that Iran and Oman will establish some set of arrangements for passage — though it stipulates that no fees will be levied. For the first time in its modern history, this hands Iran genuine leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. And as far as the Iranians are concerned, they are not about to let it go.

They are further emboldened by what they read as American weakness — specifically, by the political moment in which this administration finds itself heading into the midterms. They listened carefully to President Trump's own explanations for why he chose the agreement: the quotes that surfaced from Paris, in which he raised the specter of another global depression, a 1929 scenario.

Tehran drew its conclusion — that now is the moment to ensure none of the agreement's achievements are eroded. And so it keeps attacking ships and vessels across Hormuz, pressing, testing, reinstating its position.

The funeral of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was itself a testament to Iran's standing — delegations arriving from across the Gulf and the wider world, including countries like Saudi Arabia that the Islamic Republic had attacked during the war. So it is not only rational calculation at work here, but the ideological sentiment of a fundementalist-revolutionary regime burying its supreme leader and determined to prove the war was not fought in vain.

Subscribe now

2. Among Israeli officials, the sentiment — one senior source told me as much last night — comes down to four words: we told you so.

The Israelis regarded the MoU from the outset as a flawed document, one that left deep ambiguity on a range of issues — the nuclear question among them, but also the Strait of Hormuz. They understood the advantage it conferred on the Iranians.

They also insisted that the two sides walked away with entirely different expectations of what the MoU actually was. The Iranians genuinely saw the agreement as Washington waving a white flag — an American acknowledgment that the war had been a disaster. Anyone listening to the President, or to his MAGA base, understands that this is not the case.

The Israeli position on negotiating with Iran was, and remains, unchanged: no plausible agreement is reachable unless the Iranians face simultaneous political, economic, and military pressure.

It was the recommendation of Israel's defense establishment not to halt the war during the ceasefire and MOU negotiations — to keep hitting the Iranians, and to hit them hard, so they would grasp that this was not a retreat, and certainly not a surrender. The Iranians, for their part, read the end of the war through the lens of a North-South Vietnam scenario, or an Afghanistan-style withdrawal. They still fail to grasp what Hormuz and the nuclear file materially mean to the West.

What surprises Israeli sources most is the audacity of the Iranians — continuing to attack ships and court escalation given the dire state of their economy. Western intelligence assessments describe conditions in Iran as worsening, and to date the sanctions relief has not meaningfully kicked in. Thirty-six hours ago the U.S. administration announced it was restoring the sanctions banning sale of Iranian oil.

Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, Israel does not want the agreement to collapse outright — not now. Both the government and IDF do not want a return to a full-blown war, including ballistic missiles falling on Israeli cities.

Much of this has to do with the coming elections, and with the perception that a renewed war would be read as a failure of the Netanyahu government — not because Netanyahu was responsible for the MoU, but because he led Israel into this conflict in the first place. A war that, according to most regional analysts, has thus far failed to sufficiently damage the Islamic Republic's standing — and in some respects has even strengthened it, as the behavior of its proxies in Gaza and Lebanon makes plain.

Hezbollah and Hamas are emboldened now, pressing new demands in the war's aftermath, pointing out that their patron was not broken — not by the region's most powerful military, Israel, nor by the world's foremost superpower, the United States.

3. This could become an ongoing conflict-

what the Israelis sometimes call the war between the wars. If this scenario develops, the United States and Iran will deal each other blows, try to maintain some understanding, and then do it all over again - for months or more. The general result, in terms of global energy and the safety of passage in the Gulf, would be negative, detrimental.

One instrument the Iranians hold and have not yet used is their ability to press the Houthis to close another strait — the passage into the Red Sea at the Bab el-Mandab. That option remains available to them as a means of escalation, alongside a range of others, including further activation of their proxies in Lebanon.

The Iranians view the Lebanon agreement — brokered between Israel and the Lebanese government under American auspices and mediation — as a betrayal of the MoU. What they see is the Americans working, once again, to alienate and marginalize Hezbollah.

For now, Hezbollah is abiding by the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, trying to demonstrate that Israel is not retreating from Lebanese land even when the organization refrains from killing or attacking Israelis. But the relative calm can change with a single order from Tehran.

Share

Part of the crisis flows from Iran’s own internal struggles. Tehran is not only playing a strategic regional game; it is also caught in a contest between factions across the regime — within the IRGC, within the circle around the new and younger Khamenei, and within the more civil-society-oriented wing of the Islamic Republic that has developed over the years.

Layered onto that is a conviction, held by some of these factions, that no agreement with the United States should be accepted at all — that now is precisely the moment for Iran to demonstrate its power in the region. It is a recipe for more miscalculation and more instability, in the near future.

Subscribe now

…

Read more

Asked whether he supported Israel as a Jewish state, Mamdani replied:

“I support the state of Israel as a state with equal rights.”

“But as a Jewish state is the question,” the interviewer pressed.

“I think any state…

Read more

This post will touch only briefly on the agreement itself; obviously, it is an achievement for Iran. The more i…

Read more

Under Israeli law, the latest possible date is October 27. Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to push the vote off as long as he can, because right now, according to every reliable poll in the country, the bloc h…

Read more

His birthday …

Read more

Read more

Within Israel’s defense establishment, officials are deeply concerned about a narrative that is gaining traction in the United States. The narrative is simple: that Israel — and more specifically Benjamin Netanyahu and the Mossad — sold the White House on a regime change plan in Iran, and then they didn’t deliver. Much of the U.S. discourse now blames Israel for dragging America into the war, and it remains unclear how Israel will contend with that accusation over the long term. From the first day of the conflict, it was evident that Israel was taking a gamble with its standing among the American public — a risk I have written and spoken about during those early days.

The assessments and plans of the Israelis, in this telling, were nothing more than wishful thinking, or even deliberate deception. Much of this perception is closely tied to the exclusive, detail-laden story published by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan about Netanyahu’s pitch to Trump at the White House.

Over recent weeks I spoke with senior figures in the defense establishment to discuss the events leading to the war. Beyond the concern expressed, what I heard was an overarching perception among Israeli security leadership about what happened — and what didn’t — in Iran.

Several points were raised. They constitute an effort by these sources to present a defense of the Mossad.

1. The Mossad’s plan included several phases, the vast majority of which were never authorized by Jerusalem and Washington. The elements the Mossad did implement — for instance, the targeting of Basij roadblocks across the country, and specifically in Tehran — were in fact successful. (According to reports, Israel deployed hundreds of assets to identify Basij positions before striking them. The Basij is the Islamic Republic’s main militia force used to suppress dissent).

2. The plan included, as was widely reported in the New York Times, a massive deployment of Kurdish forces in a broad invasion of Iran. This was thwarted by Turkey, which successfully used its influence to prevent the plan from being activated. Had such an invasion taken place, the Islamic Republic would have faced a severe crisis — forced to divert resources to suppress both an internal uprising and an armed incursion.

3. Even the opening of the war did not unfold as Israel’s defense establishment had proposed. While the assassination of the Supreme Leader and other officials was indeed authorized, other elements were not. They wanted more “shock and awe.” For example, Israel believed that in the opening salvo of the operation, all electricity in Tehran should have been knocked out — except for hospitals — leaving the city in darkness immediately at the start of the war. That proposal was not accepted.

4. A series of other operations were supposed to take place only after the bombing phase, and to date have not been given the green light (see also here). To declare the effort a failure before it was implemented — or when only parts of it were — is an unfair verdict against a Mossad that demonstrated impressive successes during the war.

Share

All of this should be taken with a grain of salt — and maybe two. The initial reporting did indicate that, immediately after the Israelis presented their regime-change blueprint, American officials — first and foremost Secretary of State Marco Rubio — dismissed it as “bullshit.” A senior Israeli official who was deeply involved in the discussions before and during the war told me he himself does not accept the defense establishment’s and Mossad’s framing.

In his words:

“The problem is not that the orders to execute the plans were withheld. The problem is that the Mossad said things were going to happen that did not happen. They promised and didn’t deliver.”

These are sharp words — and they come from an Israeli source. Adding to this is the fact that AMAN, Israel’s military intelligence, was far more doubtful about regime change than Mossad to begin with.

The enormous investment of resources aimed at creating the conditions for an Iranian revolution is a relatively new phenomenon in Mossad history — and largely the product of a strategic choice made by the current Mossad chief, David Barnea, who is nearing the end of his tenure.

Barnea has long been considered close to Netanyahu, but by most assessments, there has been a noticeable distancing of late.

Subscribe now

Deal or No Deal

The government’s outlook on an upcoming Iran deal falls into two opposing camps.

One group says there must be no deal with Iran. After all, an agreement will lead to the unfreezing of vast Iranian funds, the lifting of sanctions, and the release of pressure on the Islamic Republic. If that happens, then the war, which was meant to neutralize the Iranian threat, will only strengthen it — and especially the Revolutionary Guards.

The regime, this group holds, must be strangled until it capitulates or changes. Parts of the defense establishment, and especially the Mossad, support this position; they view the deal currently taking shape as a dangerous development.

The second group is calmer and concerned with the politics of the situation. They argue that this war is, first and foremost, about the issue of Iran’s nuclear program. If the enriched uranium leaves Iran and enrichment is halted for an extended period — the U.S. demands 20 years, Iran has agreed to 5; call it somewhere in between — that is a victory.

And what about the missile program, support for Hezbollah and the other proxies? Well, say those who support this pragmatic approach, you take what you can get while you have the chance.

Of course, it may be that none of this matters. Both camps, with all due respect to them, are waiting for President Trump’s decision. He will determine, navigate, and ultimately decide.

This basic truth seems lost on some in the defense apparatus. Israel recommended continuing the war during the US’s negotiations with Iran; that recommendation was rejected. The IDF wanted to begin taking down energy infrastructure, one facility at a time; and received a flat no.

I had several conversations in recent weeks with senior defense establishment figures; they spoke aggressively, without hedging and restraint. One explained that Iran’s entire energy sector should be destroyed immediately — come what may in the Iranian response on Gulf oil and gas facilities.

“They’re in love with kinetics, with strikes,” one government official in Israel told me. “They’re on a high. It’s the first time they’ve gone to war alongside America, and they’re trying to outflank this Israeli government from the right — just imagine, to outflank this government!”.

This is a notably different — and more nuanced — tone from Israeli officials. Beyond the obvious blame game, the deeper question is whether it signals the emergence of a new way of thinking. That remains to be seen.

Subscribe now

This action was not carried out under orders and was widely condemned in Israel. It will be seized upon by anti-Israeli and antisemitic voices, who show little concern for Christian communities across the region but are quick to indict Israel for every wrongful act committed by any Israeli, anywhere.

Yet saying that lets it off too easily. Israel has a real problem, and those who care about it should acknowledge it.

The previous flashpoint came when Israeli police prevented the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem — a senior figure in Catholicism — from holding even a symbolic Palm Sunday ceremony, for the first time in centuries. The police cited safety concerns tied to Iranian missile attacks, yet the church had intended a minimal, ceremonial event with only a few participants. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, confronted with sharp criticism from across the Catholic world — including unusually forceful condemnations from France and Italy, the latter a country generally considered more friendly to Israel — was compelled to issue a special statement promising that prayer would be made possible.

A week earlier, Netanyahu had quoted the historian Will Durant at a press conference, invoking a comparison between Genghis Khan and Jesus Christ; that, too, required a subsequent clarification. Now, as to the event in Lebanon, Netanyahu has declared:

“Yesterday, like the overwhelming majority of Israelis, I was stunned and saddened to learn that an IDF soldier damaged a Catholic religious icon in southern Lebanon. I condemn the act in the strongest terms.”

Here is the reality: Netanyahu was not stunned.

There is little left to be stunned by. Within the Israeli military, a deep process has been unfolding for years — the growing influence of religious and messianic currents, including extreme ones, reflected, for example, in the appearance of “Messiah” patches worn by some soldiers - against orders and army code. This has reached the point where the former IDF Chief of Staff had to personally order a soldier to remove the patch. This example is far less extreme and violent than the way reserve soldiers in local defence units in settlement areas are treating Palestinians, enabling violence towards them and/ or the media. It is, again, a problem the IDF senior ranks are well aware of.

In recent years, there has also been a troubling and increasingly visible rise in acts of hostility toward the Christian community, including violence, spitting incidents and verbal abuse directed at clergy. My colleague, journalist Yossi Eli of Channel 13, has documented many of these disturbing episodes.

Israel does maintain a comparatively thriving Christian community relative to neighboring countries. Freedom of worship is protected by law and, for many years, was one of the state’s great prides.

Yet religious intolerance is on the rise across society — and the military is no exception. The destruction of the statue in Debel comes in the same week that saw multiple reports of religious coercion within the IDF: female soldiers reportedly forced to run in long pants while their male counterparts ran in shorts during a Jerusalem marathon; another group of mandatory service police soldiers jailed for holding a barbecue on the Sabbath — officially due to a ban on lighting fires in military bases, but in practice tied to Sabbath observance; and conscripted female soldiers disciplined on the day of their discharge for wearing attire deemed immodest, with penalties including the withholding of their already modest pay. (It bears emphasizing: these are women fulfilling mandatory service — an obligation imposed only on secular Jewish women in Israel).

The broader truth is that Israeli society, after three years of war that began with the October 7 Hamas attack, is experiencing a sharper rise in hostility and hate, including on religious grounds.

The problem is compounded by a government — or significant parts of it — that is sympathetic and supports this posture. Its caution is more pronounced when it comes to Christians; far less so toward Muslims or other groups. The minister in charge of the police, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is a convicted felon who was raised in the ideological orbit of Meir Kahane, the architect of a doctrine of Jewish supremacy. Kahane was long treated as a pariah by the old guard of Israeli politics; Netanyahu has elevated one of his more provocative heirs to oversee law and order.

Ben-Gvir famously once displayed in his home a photograph of Baruch Goldstein, who carried out a massacre of Muslim worshippers in Hebron in 1994. He has made it a central mission to challenge the religious status quo on the Temple Mount, including promoting Jewish prayer at the site — despite explicit religious prohibitions by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate against both prayer and even ascent to the Mount. This is the messge of the minister in charge of the police as to religious tolerance.

The point is clear: PM Netanyahu is not “stunned” by the incident in Lebanon. His government does not center pluralism or the acceptance of the other, to say the least; it does not consistently repudiate hatred, except in urgent statements issued when Israel’s public image suffers severe damage.

Israel’s problem is not one of public relations. It is a matter of policy — and, in this case, of education. It reflects a worldview that has taken hold among its ruling elites, drifting away from foundational principles of tolerance.

I have much to say about the piece as a whole - first published under the headline “Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy,” later changed to “This Is Why There’s No Liberal Joe Rogan”.

As to Israel, I find the argument, at its core, hollow. Is there really a shortage of rabid anti-Zionist views in progressive circles - from Zohran Mamdani to many others? Or on the Right, for that matter? If Klein wanted to make the case for a more pluralistic discourse in progressive circles, he might just as well have argued for those who defend Israel—they are the real minority. Instead, he chose Israel because it’s easy, I suppose.

Now Klein urges acceptance of Hasan Piker’s “arguments” - those heavy-duty contributions like admiring Hezbollah’s flag or claiming Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel.

Some of the criticism of the Israeli government, in the same paragraph, I share and write about in my own columns. That is not the issue. The problem is the fusion of fact and distortion.

And it matters, because it reflects something deeper: a conversation increasingly detached from basic chronology and attached only to sentiment. Piker’s sentiment, it seems.

As to Lebanon falsehood: With global attention fixed on Gaza, many simply do not know what has unfolded in the north of Israel since October 7. Klein either doesn’t know, or doesn’t care.

Share

So — here are some facts.

1. Hezbollah opened hostilities against Israel on October 8, 2023 — less than 24 hours after Hamas carried out one of the deadliest massacres in the history of terrorist attacks. For more than a decade, Hezbollah had openly threatened to invade northern Israel and seize towns and villages, much as Hamas eventually did. It was a declared intent.

2. Hezbollah chose to sustain a continuous war of attrition against Israel’s north — before any Israeli ground operation in Gaza. The result: dozens of thousands of Israelis displaced, entire communities evacuated, a region effectively emptied - with Kibbutizm and other villages destroyed by bombing. This campaign was backed, financed, and directed by Iran.

3. Only after taking significant blows on the battlefield did Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire.

4. Inside Lebanon, something important happened during the war. Large parts of the political system — and the public — placed responsibility on Hezbollah. Calls to disarm the group (a commitment made by Lebanon back in 2000, entrenched in a U.N. security council decision) grew louder, including from the country’s leadership. Israel, for its part, maintained a limited incursion — measured in a few miles — pending a final arrangement that would push Hezbollah forces away from its border and and be disarmed.

5. When the current conflict with Iran began, Hezbollah attacked Israel again and broke the ceasefire — much to the dismay of Lebanese leaders and its people. Israel responded with a counter-attack, also issuing evacuation warnings in southern Lebanon as the area became an active war zone, and expanding operations against Hezbollah positions. Israeli leaders are floating a buffer zone — perhaps up to 12 miles, likely less — to push the threat away from border communities. One can debate the wisdom of that policy. Many in Israel do - I wrote its a march of folly. But it is a response to sustained attacks, not their origin.

6. Yet all of this is flattened into a single accusation, a falsehood: Israel as aggressor. In this framing, chronology disappears, agency is nothing, and responsibility flows in only one direction. What is left is not analysis, but narrative— one that requires forgetting how this began, and who chose to continue it.

   Once that inversion takes hold, the conclusions follow almost automatically.

7. Most Lebanese would have never written such a statement on the war, specifically not the liberals and progressives who despise Hezbollah. Yet Klein adopts the narrative of their fundamentalist rival, in Lebanon, only to indict Israel.

   Hasan Piker is really not the enemy to this text, it seems; he is a friend.

   

   Between Us is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

Like you, I have spent the week reading many summaries of a war that is not over. Yet sources across the region warned that the two-week ceasefire was not what it seemed; in their view, the United States has no intention of scaling back its core demands - particularly on the nuclear issue and, above all, the reopening of Hormuz.

As of 10:00 a.m. Eastern time, the United States is imposing a naval blockade on the Islamic Republic of Iran, following the widely anticipated collapse of the Pakistan-mediated talks.

The blockade marks the opening of a new phase in the war. It is no longer defined primarily by airstrikes inside Iran or by Tehran’s projection of force across the region— ballistic missiles striking Israel and Gulf countries — but by a theater that has, in many ways, been central all along: Hormuz, and with it, the global energy market.

It is tempting to make a final call on this war, as we are in what looks like the end of the kinetic phase. But it is impossible to measure the results of the war now, before it is clear what agreement — if any — will actually be reached with Iran. The scope of the damage inflicted on Iran has yet to be fully revealed, though it is clearly substantial, and its consequences will unfold over time, rather than all at once.

Share Between Us

2. The Meaning of the Blockade

Since President Trump has repeatedly argued that Iran has been virtually beaten on the battlefield in his view, its control over the Strait of Hormuz has become a central obstacle to America’s ability to end the war on its own terms. The strait is not closed, of course; the Iranians control it, monitoring the flow of tankers at their discretion — which is much worse than closure.

That has now changed with the imposition of the blockade. Paradoxically, Iran’s oil revenues have risen during the conflict, largely because the scarcity it created in the Strait drove prices higher. If the blockade holds, that’s over for now.

Two main options were debated for how to force Iran to reopen the Strait:

*Striking energy facilities and oil fields

*Seizing territorial control of strategic installations, such as Kharg Island

The administration ultimately chose a third path - a naval blockade.

This approach avoids the direct use of kinetic force. As a result, it may limit Iran’s ability to finance its war and army, but it does not inflict lasting structural damage on Iran’s oil economy.

The possible downside lies in market reaction — particularly oil prices, which have risen in the past 24 hours. Tehran may once again play for time, calculating that rising global pressure on the Trump administration will eventually force it to back down. Yet some of the pressure now also shifts to Asia — above all to China, a main buyer of Iranian oil.

Return to war remains a highly probable option. A blockade is, by definition, an act of war—and it can escalate rapidly if Iran fires on U.S. naval forces, for instance.

3. How to Measure Success or Failure

The desired end result for the United States, according to the president’s own statements, is an agreement — and some outcomes are more plausible than others. Iran may agree to halt uranium enrichment — with enforceable commitments — and remove its highly enriched stockpiles; both would constitute real achievements.

By contrast, few expect meaningful limits on its ballistic missile program — ones that could be monitored and enforced efficiently.

If none of these issues are truly addressed — and if Iran gains any recognition of the legitimacy of its illegal control over Hormuz — then this war can hardly be considered a success.

Share

4. Israelis are Disappointed

A new survey, conducted in the narrow window between the ceasefire with Iran and the announcement of a blockade, captures a striking shift in Israeli public sentiment: a growing sense that the war has fallen short of its aims.

The most remarkable aspect of this poll is the contrast between how the Israeli public feels now and how it felt after the 12-day war. That war, according to the same think tank and pollster, using the same methods, was seen by Israelis as extremely successful.

The poll was conducted by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).

Sixty-one percent of Israelis oppose the ceasefire, while only 29 percent support it. Confidence in the war’s achievements is limited: satisfaction with military gains stands at 37 percent, and with diplomatic outcomes at just 23 percent.

The public appears deeply skeptical of the current trajectory. Seventy-three percent believe Israel will need to resume fighting Iran within a year.

One constant remains: trust in the Israel Defense Forces is high, at 78 percent. Trust in the government, by contrast, stands at just 30 percent.

PM Netanyahu is said to be concerned by what he is seeing in internal polls, according to a Likud insider. He chose this week to release a second video address to the public—not a press conference, a rarity in his current term. In it, he again emphasized the war’s “historical achievements,” a move widely seen as another attempt to persuade a skeptical Israeli public.

As to the war Hezbollah: Sixty-five percent of Israeli residents in northern Israel believe the state has abandoned them- according to a special survey for Channel 12 News focused on the Haifa and Northern districts. Only a quarter of respondents say they trust the government to decisively confront Hezbollah. Politically, the balance tilts toward the opposition: 38% say they would vote against the government, compared to 26% who would support the coalition.

Despite this figures, residents of the north are showing remarkable resilience. Eighty percent of respondents say they are not considering leaving the region, compared to just 10% who are.

Findings like these could prove significant for Netanyahu’s re-election campaign, as a broad sense of disappointment takes hold.

And yet, as noted at the outset, this conflict is not over; Netanyahu’s political fortunes are now tied to its outcome.

(*The survey, conducted by iPanel, included 953 respondents (801 Hebrew-speaking and 152 Arabic-speaking), constituting a representative sample of Israel’s adult population, with a margin of error of ±3.17 percent).

Last week I spoke with a Jewish American woman in the United States. We began talking about the war in Israel, and how the Iranians were expected to try to disrupt the Passover Seder (their major barrage was about an hour before the seder, rather than during).

It was just a few seconds of a longer conversation, but tears appeared in her eyes immediately. This is not an unusual reaction from American Jews when the topic arises.

Since October 7, 2023, something has shifted among Jews everywhere — a heightened, almost primal sense of shared fate. The level of identification with Israel has been unprecedented, even among those long accustomed to supporting the Jewish state.

Those who stood by Israel in its most difficult moments were, first and foremost, Jews. Synagogues were turned into command centers for hostage campaigns and fundraising efforts; communities mobilized tirelessly for public advocacy. They donated vast sums. Many traveled repeatedly to Israel during the war, joined solidarity missions to the south, brought friends, while others continued to send their children to serve in the IDF.

At the same time, Jews sensed hostility toward Israel within their own societies — and soon faced a wave of antisemitism unlike anything seen in recent decades. Unlike the period before October 7, antisemitism and the plight of Jewish communities have become central to Israeli discourse. The solidarity has flowed both ways.

As noted here before, the Jewish people have arrived at a historic crossroads: a significant threat in the diaspora — from the far right, the far left, and radical Islam. And with it, a severe security anf political threat to Jewish flourishing in Israel.

Now more than ever, Israelis are bound by a shared fate to Jews in the diaspora. This moment demands a reassessment: a renewed relationship with the notion of the Galut, and a recognition of the diaspora’s intrinsic worth. Jewish communities abroad are not waystations en route to Israel, nor auxiliaries of the state, but integral to the fullness of Jewish life. To many reading this in English, it may seem self-evident.

In the Israeli narrative, it is not.

I am not writing this to diminish the remarkable story of Jewish national revival, nor out of skepticism about the future of Israel - my country. This essay is not a call to glorify the current phenomenon of emigration from Israel. On the contrary, it is an attempt to focus on what we Israelis could — and should — have learned from life in the diaspora.

Anyone who fails to grasp that the spiritual, political, and historical character of the Jewish people was also shaped — in modern times primarily — in the diaspora, will not understand its significance to the Jewish experience at all.

Moreover, they will fail to understand its critical importance to the survival of the State of Israel — physically and morally.

Share

Israel’s Declaration of Independence

Israel’s Declaration of Independence opens as follows:

“Eretz Yisrael was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.”

Most of the text is correct. And yet, it contains a claim that is historically problematic: that in the Land of Israel the spiritual, religious and political identity of the Jews was shaped.

The signatories opened their declaration with this sentence because they were trying to establish the Jewish people’s right to the land. For their own reasons, they were not satisfied with accurate claims about the Jewish people’s origins: that Jewish sovereignty was realized only in the Land of Israel, or that it is the land of the Bible. They insisted on claiming that the most essential parts of Jewish history happened in the land, and essentially only in the Land.

This is simply not true.

In classical Zionist thought, the story is simple: the Jewish people, all or nearly all, lived in Eretz Yisrael. They created their entire worldview and heritage there. Then the Romans destroyed the Temple and exiled them. The Jews preserved their longing to return to their only homeland, wandering in the meantime as a people alien and persecuted. Zionism came and redeemed them.

The real story is more nuanced. Even before the destruction of the Temple, and certainly before the final destruction following the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 132 AD, most Jews already lived outside the Land of Israel. Some did so as a result of an earlier exile — the Babylonian Exile — but most chose to live throughout the Roman Empire, and before that, the Hellenistic world.

The Land of Israel was, of course, a spiritual and political capital, and Jews came there from all over the world — for example, on the three pilgrimage festivals. But the choice to live outside the Land of Israel was not rare, did not stem only from hardship or historical circumstances.

Philo of Alexandria, who died well before the Temple’s destruction (probably by 45 AD), mentions a range of reasons for the existence of diaspora Jewry: the land was too small to contain its inhabitants, the convenience of those already born elsewhere, and personal identification with one’s “homeland” — and by “homeland,” he did not mean Judea. The historian Aryeh Kasher explains that “Jews called the cities of their residence [in exile] by the term ‘homeland.’” Again, this dual Jewish identity preceded the destruction of the Second Temple and the Roman exile. As Philo wrote (In Flaccus 46) about 2,000 years ago:

“They look indeed upon the holy city (of Jerusalem, n.e) as their metropolis in which is erected the sacred temple of the most high God, but accounting those regions which have been occupied by their fathers, and grandfathers, and great grandfathers, and still more remote ancestors, in which they have been born and brought up, as their country”

This sounds remarkably similar to the self-description of Jewish communities around the world today — without, of course, the Temple that no longer exists.

Even before the destruction, then, the Jewish people — while maintaining Jerusalem as its spiritual center — had already developed a parallel life in the wider world. This became fully entrenched after the Roman occupation.

The Talmud that dictated Jewish existence is, of course, the Babylonian Talmud, not the Jerusalem Talmud; Maimonides lived and worked mainly outside the Land of Israel and under the influence of Aristotelian philosophy; the exile and the loss of the Temple transformed the worship of God, from animal sacrifices to a three-times-daily prayers.

This, contrary to Israel’s Declaration of Independence, was a central element in shaping the Jewish people’s “religious character,” in which every synagogue became a “small Temple.” Daily religious life was transformed with the end of the sacrificial service.

Later, a series of ideas was derived from this, designed to preserve religious identity in exile, distinct from life in the Land of Israel. Among these, for example, is the second day of Yom Tov, the reason there are two Passover Seders outside of Israel.

The Declaration of Independence separates the “religious” from the “spiritual,” reflecting the secular outlook of most of its signatories and the largely secular — often anti-religious — character of mainstream Zionist movements. By “spiritual character,” the intention was to refer to the national-cultural dimension, not only the religious one.

But here, too, the Jewish people’s spiritual world was shaped over millennia of exile — in the works of writers like Shalom Aleichem, in the writings of thinkers such as Rabbi Yehudah Halevi, and even in the Zionist movement itself, which drew on European ideas of nationalism and self-determination.

None of this diminishes in the slightest the aspiration of the generations — which never wavered — to return to Eretz Yisrael. But even when most of Judea and the Galilee were under Jewish sovereignty, and the Levites sang in the Temple, many Jews lived in the diaspora. They too believed, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand fall lame.”

But it was a long-distance love. Jewish identity was not preserved despite the exile. It was, in large measure, created within it. All while preserving the yearning for Zion.

Leave a comment

The Two Kinds of Exile

A central principle of classical Zionism is the total rejection of exile — the Galut. The life out of Eretz Yisrael — again, a normal state for most Jews before the Second Temple’s destruction, and a matter of choice — became the source of all evil. In Zionist thought, the diaspora existence is considered a flawed, abnormal, degraded and degrading condition.

“Purging the shame of exile” became a central Zionist goal. David Ben-Gurion, the founding father, devoted much energy to this line of thinking: “The bearers of the Jewish (Zionist, n.e.) revolution in our time said: refusing to submit to fate is not enough; we must take control of our fate… not merely refusing the galut, but abolishing it—uprooting it altogether.”

The reasons were entirely understandable. Theodor Herzl discovered that dreams of emancipation and Jewish integration in Europe were destined to shatter against the rocks of antisemitism. In the end, he came to see that even a patriotic, secular French Jew like Alfred Dreyfus could meet the same fate as an orthodox Jew in the shtetl abused by Cossacks — or a Jew expelled from Rome.

Exile meant humiliation. It was the special tax imposed on Jews in the Roman Empire (used to fund the Temple of Jupiter), or the jizya in the Muslim world; endless persecutions, expulsions and blood libels; restrictions on professions and estrangement from agricultural labor; poverty that born out of oppression.

And even when a new era arrived, and an apparent age of enlightenment, it ended in the Holocaust that nearly annihilated the entire European Jewry. Even before, Zionism felt that the Jewish people were trapped between the control of rabbis and functionaries in the wretched, poor East European towns — rabbis who largely opposed Aliyah to Eretz Yisrael — and antisemites who would not let them flourish unless they abandoned their identity.

The result, many Jewish revolutionaries believed — Zionists, but also socialists and communists — was a people that had adapted itself to life inside a cage built by others, adjusting to it, even internalizing it.

Yitzhak Gruenbaum, one of the founders of the State of Israel and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, went further. In early 1943, he blamed the “diaspora character” for the catastrophe of European Jewry, saying that Jews had preferred “the life of a beaten dog to an honorable death,” and that he felt a “burning sense of shame” that they waited “in a kind of calm, in a terrible indifference, and no leader arose to rouse them to die in resistance.”

It was a cruel — and totally wrong — judgment. But it reflects the complex, often fraught attitude of Zionist leaders toward the world they themselves came from. Gruenbaum was born in Warsaw, Poland.

Most — but not all — Zionist leaders did not distinguish between two kinds of life outside Eretz Israel: one in which Jews still had political independence and could return at any time to their ancient homeland, to live under a sovereign Jewish political order; and actual exile, after the destruction of the Second Temple, when all Jewish sovereignty vanished.

These were, in fact, two entirely different conditions of diaspora.

The first was a matter of choice. The Jews were already a global people, many of whom lived outside the Land of Israel by decision, not compulsion, while maintaining a deep attachment to Zion — a historical and religious homeland.

The second was exile in the full sense of the word. It shaped much of the Jewish people’s spiritual and historical character, and it was not chosen. It unfolded under constraint, marked by extraordinary religious, economic, and cultural achievements, but also by degradation, persecution, pogroms, and, ultimately, the near-total catastrophe of the Holocaust.

In this second condition, Jews had no option but to exist as a minority. In the first, they elected to do so as free people. This distinction is crucial.

After the reestablishment of a Jewish state in 1948, the Jews effectively returned to the days before the destruction of the Second Temple. To the extent that there is exile, a Galut, it is by choice.

But Zionism continued to treat the diaspora, and life abroad, as if it were still that other exile — by compulsion. Most of Israel’s founders failed to see that the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty also brought about a reimagining of the Jewish global diaspora.

Accordingly, the attitude of Zionism and the State of Israel toward the diaspora has been mostly instrumental. For Israeli public figures, diaspora Jewry continued to be a “challenge.” Israelis have had, and continue to have, two or three set messages when they come to the diaspora.

The first message is to encourage aliyah — immigration to Israel. This is the Ben-Gurion vision. It is often accompanied by a measure of alarmism, which can seem justified these days. Antisemitism, after all, is a chronic disease that has crushed and murdered countless Jews. Those who choose to remain abroad are, in effect, gambling that it will not erupt in their own lifetimes.

The second message is the need to support Israel as the fulfillment of generations of longing — the fullest realization of Jewish life.

The third message follows from the first two: Israel is a success story like no other, and every Jew has a stake in its future.

In Israeli discourse, there is virtually no recognition that Jewish life and culture in the diaspora possess value in their own right — intrinsic, not instrumental.

No Israeli official comes to Jewish communities abroad to truly learn from them. Not really. They come to “explain,” “recruit,” “educate,” or, at best, to “conduct dialogue.” In the Israeli narrative, the diaspora is merely a phase on the way to the redemption of aliyah.

Rather than a conversation between equals, Israeli leaders often behave like the older brother — one who left home long ago and, supposedly, made it — lecturing the younger brother who cannot leave his room and step into the real world. Where there is a state, they insist, one must immigrate to it, fight its enemies, build a high-tech economy, celebrate Purim in bomb shelters as missiles fall, and send one’s children to the army.

This is, of course, a narrow—almost childish—view.

I am a descendant of Zionist pioneers. Most of their families went to America; they chose instead a harder path- building a nation, laying roads with their bare hands, fighting and sacrificing for an extraordinary mission.

Yet it is not difficult to acknowledge both the achievement and the success of my great-grandmother’s siblings who went to the United States and became part of one of the most remarkable success stories of any minority in history.

An Israeli Jew Vs. A Diaspora Jew

An Israeli Jew comes from the majority group in his society, and moves through his country as such. He must fight external threats, but he dictates the story of his country.

A diaspora Jew lives as a minority. And when you live as a minority, if you want to maintain your identity, you need Jewish institutions (not only religious ones), dedicated education, and yes, sometimes you need to act with caution toward the majority group, lest harm befall you.

This is an enormous gap.

It was diaspora Jews — Ashkenazi and Mizrahi — who founded Israel. They brought with them the accumulated experience of an ancient minority: their wisdom, their skill in behind-the-scenes diplomacy, and a deeply global perspective. All of this they carried into the young State of Israel. Israel was founded by Galut Jews, even as they sought to create a “new Jew”— the Sabra.

But then they died. And their children — and then their grandchildren and great-grandchildren — began to forget. Within the Zionist narrative, there is no structual recognition of the intrinsic value of the diaspora experience in shaping the Jewish people; nothing to preserve this collective memory or its lessons.

“What we can learn from Jewish life in exile” usually begins and ends, for many Israelis, with the Holocaust and the need to make aliyah. This is a grave mistake.

Subscribe now

Education, Alliances, and Persuasion

Life as a minority across the world required Jews to preserve their identity. But it also demanded adaptability, the ability to navigate between cultures, and the building of global networks of trade, knowledge, and relationships. Those became a source of strength in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the modern era.

Jews developed a sensitivity to political danger; they understood that they would be the first to pay the price for sweeping social upheavals — coups, revolutions, and extremism. Prime Minister Netanyahu has claimed more than once that Jews were not endowed with a strong instinct for recognizing danger, citing the Holocaust as evidence. I would argue the opposite: the most persecuted minority in the West could not have survived without an acute sensitivity to peril.

As a minority — never able to wield power, anywhere — they developed a worldview that rejected force and outward displays of power, a tendency already rooted in early Judaism’s rejection of idols. The veneration of power was replaced by a commitment to learning and education, seen as the true beginning of redemption — first in a religious sense, and later in secular and class terms.

Jews gravitated toward classical liberal values not by accident, but because they experienced the other side of the equation: entrenched traditionalism that masked prejudice, discrimination, and hatred. They built alliances with other minorities and with centers of power, and learned to speak effectively to public opinion — because it was the right thing to do, but also because doing so carried real survival value.

Cold realism, the ability to mobilize public opinion, political advocacy, and a focus on the next generation— all were essential to the flourishing of diaspora Jewry.

Most importantly, life as a minority cultivated a moral sensitivity — to the vulnerable, to injustice, and to the layered, complex nature of identity.

Much of this has lost its hold on Israeli governance. Consider what was outlined in the preceding paragraphs: political realism, a reverence for education, sensitivity to the possibility of a pogrom, the need to build alliances and engage public opinion, and a moral awareness of one’s place in the wider world. These are precisely the qualities diaspora Jews have had to cultivate — and which are absent in much of today’s Israeli establishment.

Many Jews in the diaspora see a Palestinian family whose flock is being looted, whose door is being battered, whose sons are beaten by far-right settlers, and they see more than a moral injustice. Even unconsciously, as a minority, they sense an echo of a nightmare that could happen to them — “Hilltop Youth” cast, in their memory, in the role once played by Cossacks.

The generation of my parents, and their parents, did not see much to learn from diaspora Jews even if they acknowledged the diaspora experience — partly because for some of them, these values were self-evident. Yet for many others, their parents and grandparents — with their “galuti” (exilic) ways — were a source of embarrassment, so far removed from the myth of the new Sabra.

Today, the discourse in Israel has changed completely. People celebrate their heritage, travel with their grandparents to Poland or Morocco, and reclaim the memory and identity of their families in the diaspora. It is a welcome — and much needed — shift.

Yet it has not been accompanied by a systematic rethinking at the core of the Israeli narrative — an effort to say: this is what we learned and crystallized over two thousand years of exile, and this is what we must carry forward. The nostalgia is mostly for folklore — customs, food, liturgical poetry (Piyutim), stories. That is not enough.

The Merits of the Diaspora

While Jews in America think of Israel as an insurance policy, more and more Israelis think the same of their foreign passports. Like that famous sketch from the Israeli TV show “Eretz Nehederet” about the meeting at Ben-Gurion Airport — between those returning to Israel because of antisemitism and those leaving it because of the war and an extreme government — these phenomena are happening in parallel.

Even beyond the language of insurance and future catastrophe, life in the diaspora is not a disgrace. It requires no atonement. It carries deep value for Jewish identity as a whole. The growth of Israeli communities abroad is an undeniable reality, and the hope should be that these communities draw on the Jewish experience of millennia —one that endured and flourished, despite everything.

And as long as life as a minority abroad remains a choice — rather than the result of tragedy in Eretz Israel — this is not the same Galut of two thousand years.

Israeli Jews who come to the diaspora will need to adopt the quality we Israelis often tend to forget: humility. Yes, the Israel we hail from represents a rebirth, one successful beyond compare to any national project in recent history. It is not only about past success, but about resilience — and the creation of a democratic culture that blends tradition with a relentless drive for the cutting edge, a dynamism like no other.

But diaspora Jews represent the ability to survive and flourish over thousands of years, sometimes in difficult conditions, and above all with a remarkable preservation of their identity. They have successfully created communities with thriving institutions based on self-generated investment.

The call to recognize the deep and independent value of Jewish life in the diaspora is not a rejection or dilution of the Jewish right to Eretz Yisrael. It is simply a correction of an error — one that Israelis cannot afford to make.

A central question, of course, is who exactly the U.S. is talking to, and who is supposed to sign off on the negotiations. There have been no public sightings of Iran’s new Supreme Leader since his leadership was announced by the Assembly of Experts on March 8, 2026.

Apparently, he has the final say. According to intelligence reports, Mojtaba Khamenei is alive and, if not in good condition, then at least functioning. To be sure, he is not at a particularly high level of functioning, “but this is a man who has never actually held managerial responsibility for anything serious in his life,” one source told me, so “he would already be quite shaken” in his new role as Supreme Leader. Trump’s remarks yesterday suggesting the new leader is gay likely didn’t help.

The young Khamenei has lost his father, his wife, and his son in Israeli airstrikes. He was wounded. Any communication with him could lead to another swift assassination, and he knows he is being hunted. So the discourse with him is limited, and the decisions he makes are restricted to only the most important ones.

How does it actually work?

For their part, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Iranian military are doing what they already were told to do, in line with the battle plans prepared before the war. Ultimately, the leader makes the key decisions, including signing off on negotiations with the United States.

In Israel, it is very well understood that this war could end at any minute with a decision by President Trump. Israel’s targets have even shifted away from centers of regime authority, towards hard military and industrial sites. Two main scenarios have emerged before decisionmakers.

Share

Scenario 1: Unilateral Declaration of Victory

The first is a unilateral ending: Washington announces that all its military objectives have been achieved with great success. As for enriched uranium and the ballistic missile program — America can say these do not currently pose a real threat. If the Iranians revert to their old habits, President Trump still has about three years left in the White House. He has shown America is willing to act.

Advocates of this approach are reading the political map. The Administration has thus far managed to impressively moderate the rise in energy and commodity prices. The shape of the graph has flattened after the initial spike:

Indeed, current prices aren’t comparable to the peak of the Ukraine war in 2022, when energy spikes were far more severe. In fact, the actual oil flow situation today is more constrained — yet the administration has managed to keep it in check, for now. The president’s near-daily signals about a quick end to the war have helped. But it’s unclear how long that can hold; how long the dam can be kept together with a finger in the breach.

There is another variation of this scenario: reaching a general “declaration of principles” with Iran, something reminiscent of the declaration of principles with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un at the Singapore summit during Trump’s first term. Will it lead to a detailed agreement? Maybe not. But it could create a sense of a breakthrough — enough basis to declare a sort of victory.

In Israel, it is assumed that the president could reach such a decision. However, the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia are extremely worried by the entertaining of any scenario in which Iran is not defeated. From their perspective, ending the war at this stage would abandon them to their fate — forcing them to reach protection agreements with a wounded, cruel enemy that believes it has won.

The long-term implications for Gulf oil prices would be significant. There would also be a sense this is only the first round. In the next, Iran could press for regional expansion — nightmare scenarios abound, from occupying Bahrain to the extraction of protection payments from Oman.

Subscribe now

Scenario 2: A Detailed Agreement

The second scenario is, of course, reaching a detailed agreement addressing the 15 points presented by the United States. When looking at the gaps between the sides, it is hard to believe that such an agreement could be reached — at least for now.

Security officials in Israel say the main problem lies in Iran’s sense of victory. Iran is issuing international statements dripping with arrogance — demanding the removal of all American bases from the region, and the collection of tolls by Iran in the Strait of Hormuz from every oil tanker (this would be an extraordinary strategic shift, one that would make Iran an official regional power).

This is not posturing, I am told — the Iranians truly believe they are winning. “With this mindset,” a senior source told me,

“It will be impossible to hold real negotiations. Because at the first crisis, they will get up and leave the room. Right now, it’s hard to see how negotiations will succeed — with an emphasis on ‘right now.’ It may be necessary to go through another military escalation.”

One security source put it this way: part of the problem with Iran’s leadership right now is that it is so detached from reality — hiding and fearing for its survival — that it does not fully grasp the extent of the damage inside Iran. As a result, it is neither sufficiently incentivized to move toward a meaningful agreement.

What fuels Iran’s sense of victory is the energy market and the blockage of Hormuz. In the global shipping world, it is reported that the Revolutionary Guards are collecting about $2 million in protection money for every tanker crossing the strait (that is not from Europe, the U.S., or linked to Israel). I was told by energy experts that the money is transferred in cryptocurrency.

Even Iran’s “gesture” to the U.S. — apparently allowing some tankers to pass — is seen by the Iranians as recognition of their new status running the strait. It is not a kind gesture in their eyes, but a dominant one — proof of superiority.

“Their feeling is that the strategy of setting the Middle East on fire has worked well. One must recognize that this is their perception, and do something more significant in the war — even at a heavy cost. There is no choice. Otherwise Iran will retain nuclear capabilities, and the war will have been pointless,” an Israeli official told me.

Needless to say, these are striking quotes, and they come from highly placed officials. They convey a sense of frustration - but not by the actual results of the military campaign.

Doing “something more significant,” is meant to “call Iran’s bluff,” as one senior official put it, “and have a go at energy. Either way — if [the Americans] try to seize Kharg or the strait — the Iranians will attack energy facilities in the region.”

The Iranians “100% need to understand that everything is on the table, including the destruction of their energy sector. Right now they think they’ve cracked the system, but they must understand they have more to lose. Otherwise they will not come to negotiations ready for compromise.”

Looking Ahead

It is no sure thing that this Israeli official’s stance will be accepted elsewhere. The implications for the global economy and energy markets could be dire. In Washington there are many — on the Republican side — who will say that it is time to stop. On the other hand, they will follow the president’s direction. Trump has so far demonstrated total control over the party.

But it is impossible to ignore the trap. Iran has taken the global economy hostage; to free it requires a strike on Iran, one that would deeply harm the global economy. The meaning of the trap: the war began over the nuclear issue but is now being fought over Hormuz.

There is another issue worth considering: the condition of the State of Israel. Israelis, according to polls, are still willing to sacrifice; but they want to know it was worth it.

It is one thing to bear sustained missile and rocket attacks across the country for a limited time — in order to win a war with Iran and attempt to change the regional balance of power. But continuing for more and more weeks on end — with the north of the country abandoned and bombed by Hezbollah, schools closed (or, at most, in very limited hours), the country sleep-deprived after running to shelters with sirens blaring 7 to 15 times a day (and night), and the economy not functioning — that is something entirely different.

I could not help but notice that this week, Fox News aired footage of young Americans on spring break on a Florida beach.

They were all in swimsuits, talking mostly about plans to do the things college kids do— well, some more enthusiastically than others — and to celebrate life. The interviewees didn’t know the United States is at war with Iran, barely knew what had happened in Venezuela, and didn’t recognize the word “Ayatollah.”

This is not the sort of link I typically post here, but the normalcy in the video is so jarring, so far removed from the reality in Israel at this war. It reveals something not noted often enough: the United States is so powerful that it can conduct a high-risk war on one side of the world while its young people continue partying on the beach; they don’t know because they don’t need to know.

Suffice to say, in Israel, that is not the situation. For young people, old people, or anyone in between.

**

I know everyone is looking for victory in Iran. But allow me to suggest a different kind of victory — one rooted in the best traditions of the Zionist project over the past century. It is not measured by enemy installations struck or senior officials assassinated. It is measured in life — in what a country builds.

In recent days, I have spoken with municipalities in southern Israel, along the Gaza border. The government has cut their budgets in the latest cycle, and they are understandably angry. Yet part of that frustration stems from something else: the rebuilding of the South has been far more successful than is widely acknowledged.

Less than three years after October 7, this is the reality: across the towns and villages near Gaza — the very places that were raided, where Hamas carried out its brutal massacres — the population is now 10 percent higher than it was on October 6, 2023, the eve of the attack. More Israelis live along the Gaza border today than before October 7.

There are waiting lists to join the kibbutzim on the Gaza border. After a difficult 2024, many of these communities are now experiencing a baby boom, tell me my friends and sources.

None of this diminishes the challenges, or the government’s (terrible) decision to cut 100 million shekels from what may be the most important project in Israel’s history: restoring the security and prosperity of this region. But these are remarkable facts. They capture, more clearly than anything else, what this is really about - and what is a lasting victory.

The major development of the day is his dramatic announcement of what he described as “productive conversations” with Iran, aimed at a “complete and total resolution” of hostilities in the Middle East.

Markets reacted immediately, rebounding on the news. It also aligns with sources reporting that Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt and other regional actors are engaged in intensive behind-the-scenes efforts to halt the war before it escalates into robust attacks on energy infrastructure across the region.

There are no public indications that Iran is prepared to make these concessions: relinquishing its nuclear program or transferring enriched material, accepting meaningful limits on its ballistic missile capabilities, or ending its support for proxy militias and armed groups across the region. The president has already signaled that, in his view, this war will not be decided by formal Iranian concessions, but by the degradation of its military capabilities — and that threshold, he believes, has largely been reached.

What remains is narrower and critical for global economy: the current focus of the war, the Strait of Hormuz. A central question now is whether Iran will agree— quickly — to reopen the Strait. If it begins attaching significant conditions, it will signal that Tehran believes Washington blinked first.

Subscribe now

By sharply escalating the threat of force, the administration sought to create enough pressure to open a diplomatic channel. Whether that calculation succeeds —or simply postpones a more dangerous confrontation — remains uncertain. The markets are pricing a breakthrough.

No matter how the war ends, the Islamic Republic will claim victory — as regimes of this kind tend to do. Its argument would be straightforward: the regime has survived. It has continued to strike its adversaries. And it has demonstrated the ability not only to threaten the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but to close it selectively, only to its enemies. If no commitment is made to end its nuclear enrichment program — or to transfer its stockpile of highly enriched material — this too will be framed in Tehran as a success.

On the other hand, if Iran were to relinquish even part of its stockpile, or accept meaningful limits on its ballistic missile program, this would be seen in Israel and Washington as a clear victory.

In Israel, even a minimalist outcome could be presented as success: Iran has been significantly degraded as a military. But many Iran experts would argue the opposite — that the regime has been further radicalized, not weakened.

Much of this remains speculation. The critical question is what, if anything, has been agreed behind closed doors.

Notably, Iran’s foreign ministry has initially pushed back, with officials in local media denying the president’s announcement — another reminder of how fluid, and uncertain, the situation remains.

The War’s Gordian Knot

The United States can achieve any military objective it sets — but it will take time, and the political and economic costs could be significant. Israeli officials tell me they have been signaled by the United States to prepare for at least another two weeks of the campaign. Is the United States prepared to continue for long? Perhaps. But the message perceived in the Middle East — and in global markets — is that it is not. That perception gives Iran hope; today’s postponement of the ultimatum, in favor of “productive” talks, will be read in Tehran as total confirmation. The constraints facing the United States and Israel are increasingly complex, amid a worsening global economic outlook.

Share

A forced opening of the Strait of Hormuz could trigger Iranian attacks on regional energy infrastructure — creating a situation in which the Strait is technically open, but oil is not flowing. In that case, the entire purpose of opening the strait is defeated.

Talk of seizing Kharg Island — Iran’s main oil export terminal, responsible for roughly 90% of exports — is at times superficial. Iran has alternative terminals and alternative routes. During periods of maximum pressure, it reduced its oil exports by 90% without fundamentally changing its policy (Kharg controls about 90% of its oil exports). Capturing Kharg is not equivalent to opening Hormuz, and the problem there would be also maintaining control of it.

Iran continues to produce about 1.5 million barrels of oil per day. The regime benefits from rising oil revenues even as it strains the global economy. Yet a massive military effort to halt this abnormal situation could itself choke the global economy — through damage to energy infrastructure and further escalation. Concerns over inflation and supply chains help explain the easing of sanctions on Iranian oil already at sea.

This is a paradox that reveals the core constraint of the war: oil must flow to sustain the global economy and the war’s legitimacy — but as long as oil flows, Iran profits and can more easily continue the war, while its neighbors suffer.

This is the Gordian knot President Trump is trying to cut with a single stroke: an ultimatum. “Never give yourself ultimatums,” warned the late Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol. Soon, we will know who benefited from this one.

Israel Does Not Expect to Neutralize Iran’s Missile Capabilities Before the War Ends

“If anyone imagines that on the last day of this war Iran will no longer be able to launch missiles at Israel — that’s an illusion,” a senior Israeli security official told me last night. We spoke on a secure line; in the background, loudspeakers in the command center announced an alert.

Yes, the Iranian capabilities are being degraded. But not erased.

“Think of it like a pot of boiling water,” he said. “We’re treating the water — and covering the pot, to reduce the effect.” He wouldn’t elaborate.

Despite the damage from recent Iranian strikes in the southern towns of Arad and Dimona, Iranian capabilities are not expanding. The shape of the graph remains relatively consistent, almost asymptotic:

Iran’s occasional successes in penetrating the missile defense system are inherent to the statistics of this kind of warfare, say Israeli sources, rather than reflecting a deeper failure or dwindling interceptor stockpile. Still, there is no doubt that interceptor limitations matter daily. There are interceptors, and there are interceptors. Arrow-3 operates in space, striking missiles earlier and farther out; Arrow-2 engages them later, inside the atmosphere, with less room for error.

“We are hitting them hard, and daily. It’s not fun to be in the missile units of the Revolutionary Guards right now,” the official said dryly. “Their situation is difficult for them —and getting worse.” And yet, when the war ends — whether in a week or two — Iran will still be able to launch missiles at Israel, he predicted.

Jewish Violence in the West Bank

While attention is fixed on Iran, the IDF is increasingly alarmed by developments in the West Bank and by organized acts of Jewish terrorism. Violent attacks by far-right, armed settlers against Palestinian communities have risen significantly. Between Saturday and Sunday, at least 20 separate attacks by Jewish extremists across the West Bank were reported, according to Israeli security sources. These included attempted arson of homes and vehicles, stone-throwing, road blockages, and fireworks fired into the air. At least 11 Palestinians were injured. One Israeli security official told me the attacks this week are unprecedented in scale and in the number of perpetrators involved.

On their Telegram channels, far-right activists openly take pride in what they describe as a sacred goal: expelling Palestinians, community by community — beginning with Area C of the West Bank, then Area B, and ultimately Area A, which is under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

The situation is deteriorating so rapidly that Prime Minister Netanyahu — who has largely kept his distance from the issue, wary of provoking his political base — held a meeting with the heads of the security services and “demanded” an end to the “nationalist violence” in the West Bank.

Last week, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir warned of “rioters who do not represent the settlement movement,” stressing that they endanger not only security, but “our values as a people and a state.” His most important line was a call for all state bodies to act “before it is too late,” since these actions “are causing extraordinary strategic damage to the IDF’s efforts.”

In effect, this was the IDF pointing a finger at the Israeli police, the Shin Bet, and the ruling coalition. The police is controlled by Itamar Ben Gvir, a convicted felon and a follower of the Kahanist ideology, who is seen as a key political enabler of Jewish extremism.

A serious question is what the Chief of Staff meant by “before it is too late.”

There are two trajectories.

The first is a widespread, violent Palestinian uprising. Elements of the far right — now inside the mainstream — view this not as a danger but as an opportunity: the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, and the possibility of large-scale expulsions under military cover. For the IDF, this is a nightmare. For ideological extremists, it is a vision of redemption.

The second is quieter, but no less dangerous: the transformation of Jewish extremist violence into an organized terrorist movement with strategic intent. In the 1980s, the far-right Jewish Underground plotted to blow up Al-Aqsa; the plot was foiled by the Shin Bet. It is difficult to argue that the underlying sentiment has disappeared, given the growing legitimacy of Jewish fundamentalism.

The IDF Central Command chief sent a letter last week to settlement community leaders, acknowledging the phenomenon as “dangerous, severe, and unacceptable.” Yet assurances that “this cannot continue” ring hollow.

Similar warnings were issued before. The phenomenon did not stop; it expanded. In some cases, IDF reservists in uniform were documented assisting or enabling it.

The Threat

This is the writing on the wall, as acknowledged by multiple security sources: Jewish terrorism in the West Bank — beyond its profound moral failure — is becoming a strategic threat. Its consequences may unfold in ways no one can fully anticipate. The political leadership is operating within an increasingly radicalized framework. And the IDF, as the sovereign authority in the territories under Israel’s control, carries a legal obligation to act — even when other institutions fail.

Why Larijani; Why Now

As far as Israel is concerned, the elimination of Ali Larijani on March 16th is more significant than the killing of the Supreme Leader at the outset of the current war. Ali Khamenei was Iran’s undisputed leader, but he was also 86; there were limitations stemming from his age. The chief executive, particularly since last year’s 12 Day War, was Larijani himself.

Formally the head of the National Security Council, this bureaucrat, who wrote his thesis on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, was much more than that. Ali Larijani’s life followed the arc of revolutionary Iran itself — born into one of its most powerful families, rising through its institutions as a Revolutionary Guard, negotiator, and parliament speaker, and ultimately becoming the regime’s ultimate insider.

He personally handled preparations for the current war and the oppression of the opposition uprising beginning in December 2025. In terms of perceived sophistication, capability, and international standing, Larijani was a towering figure in Iran.

“Beyond being the central decision-maker since Khamenei’s elimination, this is the man responsible for crushing the last uprising, for the deaths of many thousands. That says everything about him. This is the man,” officials in the security establishment told me.

There is another reason this strike is so important: the assassinations at the start of the war demonstrated deep Israeli intelligence penetration of the Iranian establishment. But they also relied on deception and surprise at Iran’s expense. The events of two nights ago demonstrate that Iran’s systems remain exposed, even after the Islamic Republic activated its emergency plans to protect senior officials.

In other words, Larijani’s killing showed that Israeli military intelligence (AMAN) can obtain rare, real-time intelligence during the war, not only collect targets in advance.

“Reaching these people was especially challenging; they feel hunted — this is the behavior of terrorists on the run,” said one senior security source.

The same night Larijani was killed, Israel eliminated Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of the Basij force — Iran’s ideological volunteer militia — used by the regime to crush dissent and project a sense of control. Soleimani was killed in a makeshift tent in Teheran — attempting to evade an Israeli strike. “They lost their assets — bases, apartments, headquarters — and are finding alternative solutions,” the Israeli security source told me. “We managed to expose their new locations. This is also true for surface-to-surface missile units and other ground forces.”

Leave a comment

State of Play: A Regime Under Pressure, Not Collapse

The tactical attacks on Basij checkpoints and the killing of senior leadership are intended to deter the Basij from continuing to suppress the Iranian opposition.

Because the Basij is a volunteer organization, its rank-and-file join freely, and therefore “we’re already seeing here and there desertions, failure to report, simply not showing up for shifts. A sense of being hunted. They were attacked last night in tents — because they had nowhere else to go after other locations were exposed and struck.”

In Israel, increasing disruption in Iran’s decision-making processes is being identified. After Khamenei’s killing, it was Larijani who made the decisions —and now no one, in the West or in Iran, knows who will make them going forward.

It is not entirely clear whether the new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, can issue orders — both due to his medical condition and, above all, because any communication with him or his entourage could expose his location.

Still, the IRGC has remaining capabilities. “There is determination within the Revolutionary Guards,” another source tells me. “They understand this is the battle of their lives, and there is still operational capability on the ground. People are willing to emerge from tunnels, risk their lives, and fire. But there are significant difficulties in command and control, and orders that come out distorted, far from what was intended,” says another source.

“On the other hand, one must look at the full picture. There is no truly senior Iranian commander who has defected or moved to another country — for now.”

This is the situation reflected in IDF assessments to the political leadership: there is no regime collapse; there are many cracks; no mass defections; command and control exist, but are highly limited and severely disrupted.

Share

The Strategic Aim — and the Hormuz Constraint

The IDF continues to emphasize that its own mission is not regime change. This line has been stated since the beginning of the war and has been reiterated in recent days by senior military command on the record — even after Larijani’s elimination.

A senior security official laid out the vision to me:

“The objective is to push back the strategic threats to the State of Israel, and this is being done methodically. We have work to do. Even if the regime survives, on the day after the kinetic phase [i.e. the bombing], it should wake up and discover that its capabilities have been so degraded that it will be occupied mainly with reconstruction. Not with destroying Israel, not with supporting proxies in the region — for example, the $1.5 billion they transferred to Hezbollah in the last two years. Every passing day means billions in damage to Iran and the Revolutionary Guards. The scale at which we are destroying Iran’s military industry is enormous.

“Imagine Israel waking up after several weeks of war and looking around to find no IMI, no Rafael, no Israel Aerospace Industries, no R&D, no Directorate of Defense R&D, no military industry. That is the level of infrastructural damage we are dealing them. And there is no high-tech sector building the technological backbone that will survive this. That is the depth of our campaign — and the insurance policy for the state of Israel, the day after.”

In Israel, it is understood that the central point of vulnerability in the war lies in Iran’s control and use of the Strait of Hormuz and its impact on energy prices. The consequences are not sufficiently reported: developing countries are beginning to cut energy consumption due to natural gas prices; a crisis is emerging in the fertilizer market; every day of high oil prices will affect the American economy months ahead — and that is assuming prices do not rise further.

As reported here in recent days, there is close coordination between Washington and Jerusalem regarding reopening the maritime passage. The understanding in Israel is that the United States is trying to apply massive pressure on Tehran — even amid the war — to climb down from closing the strait (it is not fully closed; Tehran allows countries it favors to pass freely).

In Israel, senior security officials say that, from their experience, the Americans knew, prepared, and planned for the scenario of Hormuz being closed. That was the assessment in Israeli intelligence — and in the United States as well. “These people,” says one Israeli security official of the Americans, “are professionals — serious military and political officials. They assessed this might happen and planned for it — and any other argument is factually not true.”

As for Iran’s military ability to hold the Strait of Hormuz, Israel’s current assessment is that most of the Revolutionary Guards’ relevant capabilities — the navy, small speed boats, anti-ship missiles, UAVs — meant to disrupt control of Hormuz are no longer operational. The cost of taking control would not be high, if there is early and thorough preparation, Israeli officials say.

The political leadership continues to assess that the United States has the ability to attempt to enforce the reopening of traffic in the Persian Gulf even without using force. One official told me, “the Iranians still have a great deal to lose, and pressure points on them that have not yet been activated, even before a massive military operation in the Strait.”

The reference, one may assume, is to Iran’s oil and energy facilities, which have enjoyed relative immunity since the beginning of the campaign — even as Tehran continues to attack those of its neighbors.

The war continues. The Americans have bombed military targets on Kharg. In Israel, sirens wail — again and again. In Iran, continuous airstrikes. including this morning.

Yet on Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export terminal, giant tankers are still being loaded.

I write “as usual,” but that is not quite right. A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal estimated that Iran is now selling more oil than it did before the war — and, of course, at a higher price.

If the U.S. prevents all Iranian oil exports, prices will rise even further, and the disruption to global markets will grow. Its clear from remarks made by U.S. officials after the targeted strikes against Kharg Island, that Washington is trying to draw a distinction between the oil industry and the war — again attempting to calm markets and ease panic among Gulf countries. They are worried that the Iranians might bomb the entire regional oil infrastructure.

The problem is that Iran seems to be pursuing the opposite strategy: turning oil into a lever of the war while stopping short of a full-scale shutdown — a position that is, strategically, extremely comfortable for the regime.

Subscribe now

Iran has not actually closed the Strait of Hormuz, as is sometimes reported. Instead, it has closed the strait to its enemies. Meanwhile, it continues to use its “ghost fleet” to ship oil to China — and not only to China. Anyone who wants permission to release their stranded tankers calls Tehran. That is what the Indian government has done, for example.

What was an open passage has turned into a managed corridor. By effectively controlling the strait, Iran is attempting to coerce the United States.

“This is an intolerable situation,” an Israeli official told me. “Our understanding is that the United States will not allow it… Hormuz will be opened at any cost, by force if necessary.”

“America is telling us to prepare for weeks more of fighting because of Hormuz. Hormuz is the story. They [The U.S.] have not abandoned the other objectives in Iran, but a problem has emerged here that cannot be ignored.”

Let’s note the obvious: in Israel there is sometimes a tendency to exaggerate the other side’s belligerent intentions. By “at any cost”, my guess is that the United States is not considering only force, but will use it if necessary.

Share

A Strategic Principle Put into Practice

Iran is now implementing, in practice, one of its core national-security doctrines: using the Strait of Hormuz to pressure the global economy and position itself as the region’s hegemon. With almost one-fifth of the world’s oil effectively blocked, that’s a great deal of leverage to play with.

Iran’s foreign minister said yesterday that a number of countries have approached Tehran seeking safe passage for their vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. This is his way of gloating.

The United States has now opened its Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and Saudi Arabia is moving vast quantities of oil through the east-to-west pipeline it built across the Saudi desert. There is a growing backlog of tankers trying to enter the Red Sea, hoping to load oil at the Saudi terminal instead of in the Persian Gulf.

But even taken together (there is also a UAE export terminal that bypasses the Strait) energy experts say these alternatives can account for only 40–50 percent of what normally exits the Gulf. The rest is effectively blocked.

Another Israeli official told me that Iran has closed the strait by deploying 12 large naval mines, creating a shipping lane that it controls.

No Simple Solutions

Obviously, the best option for the United States would be for Iran to cave- in to U.S. pressure and allow free or freer passage through the strait, climbing down the tree out of fear of what Washington might do. For now that does not appear to be the case, and most Iran analysts believe it is unlikely to happen soon.

In Israel, some propose simple solutions.

One is to bomb Iran’s oil facilities — especially Kharg — and cut off the lifeline of the regime. The problem with this approach is that the Iranians would almost certainly respond by blowing up oil infrastructure across the entire Gulf — or trying to. Thus, an attempt to reopen 20 percent of the world’s fossil-fuel supply could end up damaging that supply for years.

The market is extremely sensitive to a catastrophe of this kind. When Israel bombed military oil depots — not refineries — in Iran, even Senator Lindsey Graham, probably Israel’s best friend in Washington besides the President himself, tweeted a warning to Israel: “Please be cautious about what targets you select. Our goal is to liberate the Iranian people in a fashion that does not cripple their chance to start a new and better life when this regime collapses. The oil economy of Iran will be essential to that endeavor. ”

The main proposal is to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz and escort the tankers through it. This would probably involve naval, air and ground operations.

From a military standpoint, this is a feasible option- but far from a simple one. The United States could do it — and has already deployed 2,500 Marines to the region. Indeed, the U.S. is working to enlist other countries in reopening the Strait, with President Trump mentioning the NATO alliance. Countries do not appear to be lining up to join this mission, at least for now.

The risk is that Iran would respond by targeting oil infrastructure across the region. The Islamic Republic has spent decades preparing for precisely this moment. It has built a layered system of disruption — from explosive speedboats to drones and mines —designed for a confrontation in Hormuz.

The Tanker War of the 1980s, led by the United States, took a long time to resolve. It ended with the destruction of the Iranian navy on orders from President Ronald Reagan. Tehran learned from that defeat. It no longer relies only on a conventional navy.

Leave a comment

Two Possible Scenarios

Two scenarios emerge.

The first, as many in Washington are now advocating, is a “declare victory and go home” approach. This approach carries a price. If the war ends quickly — and it becomes clear that Tehran can open and close the Strait of Hormuz at will, even during a conflict with the United States — Iran will have effectively established itself as the region’s hegemon.

This form of economic coercion could then be applied, in more limited ways, for years to come.

The Gulf states, and especially Saudi Arabia, would be forced to acknowledge a bitter new reality: an Iran increasingly controlled by the Revolutionary Guard, less by the clerical establishment, holding the valve that regulates their economies. They are deeply afraid of this possibility. The fear is well founded.

In the second scenario, the United States attempts to force the Strait of Hormuz open. This risks both lengthening and widening the conflict, with a longer time commitment to the operation, and Iranian attacks on oil infrastructure across the Gulf.

One idea mentioned in this context in the U.S. media is the possibility of the United States taking physical control of Kharg Island itself. But even here the questions are obvious: what would be the cost, and how effective would it really be? Iran could try to bombard the island, including with cheap drones, or retaliate by striking oil installations in other Gulf countries.

Neither scenario is optimal. Both carry risks.

Indeed, a central challenge is now to avoid both of these scenarios — and to find a third way to resolve the Hormuz crisis.

What Comes Next

None of this should obscure two facts. First, that the damage inflicted on the Islamic Republic is already severe and American determination remains impressive. Iran’s ability to escalate and drag the region into wider destruction is rapidly eroding according to most analysts. Its remaining leverage lies in Hormuz. On the battlefield, however, it is still losing.

Beyond the current kinetic phase, plans aimed at weakening the regime still exist — and have not yet been fully implemented. For now, the Islamic Republic’s command and control still appears to be functioning, and the regime, Israeli officials say, is holding.

But the United States and Israel still have a few interesting initiatives for the war in reserve.

Before any of that unfolds, though, Washington will have to confront and resolve the question of the Strait of Hormuz. Deciding that a closed Strait is simply the price of war might hand the Iranians a historic precedent in the Gulf.