Future of Jewish

This is a guest essay by Tali Aynalem, an Ethiopian, Israeli, and American Jew who writes about Jewish identity and belonging.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

I want to start with a question I genuinely cannot answer: What is it about us?

Seriously.

Of all the peoples, all the nations, all the histories on this earth, what is it about less than 20 million Jews that takes up so much real estate in everyone else’s head?

We are 0.2 percent of the world’s population. You could fit every Jewish person alive today into the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area and still have room for the bagels.

And yet.

The United Nations passes more resolutions about Israel than about every other country on earth combined. Combined.

College campuses that couldn’t find Tel Aviv on a map have entire organizations dedicated to its dismantling.

Dinner parties derail. Group chats explode. People who have never met a Jewish person in their lives have extremely strong opinions about what Jewish people should do, feel, believe, and apologize for.

I’m not even angry about it anymore. I’m just genuinely curious.

What. Is. It. About. Us.

Let me offer a theory: We are interesting.

I don’t mean that as vanity. I mean it as an observable fact. We have been, for thousands of years, the most argued-about, written-about, painted-about, philosophized-about people in recorded history.

Three of the world’s major religions trace their roots to us. The book we wrote is the most printed, most translated, most distributed document in human history. The arguments we started in the Talmud are arguments people are still having. The land we come from is the most contested piece of real estate on earth, not because it has oil, not because it has strategic military value, but because people have feelings about it that go so deep they can’t even explain them.

That’s not nothing. That’s actually extraordinary. We didn’t ask for this level of attention, but here we are.

Here’s the other thing about the obsession: It’s not new. Not even a little bit.

This is the part that should make you exhale, or laugh, depending on your temperament. Because if you zoom out far enough, the pattern becomes almost comedic in its predictability.

Egypt tried to destroy us. We became a people. Babylon tried to erase us. We wrote some of our greatest poetry in exile. Persia tried to eliminate us. We got a whole holiday out of it — with costumes. Rome tried to erase our memory from the land. We prayed toward Jerusalem for 2,000 years and then went back. Spain expelled us in 1492. Sephardic Jews carried their house keys with them into exile, and their descendants kept those keys for 500 years. Five-hundred years, as a statement.

The Cossacks. The pogroms. The Inquisition. The Holocaust was the most systematic attempt to destroy a people in human history, with the full machinery of a modern state behind it. Six million of us gone.

And then, 30 years later, David Ben-Gurion and other modern Zionists declared a Jewish state on May 14, 1948. The next morning, five Arab armies invaded. We won. We built a country in large part in the desert that now feeds other countries. We built a startup nation out of trauma and chutzpah and the stubborn refusal to disappear.

If you were watching from the outside, wouldn’t you be obsessed with us too?

The Renaissance is already happening. Many people might have missed it.

So here’s what I want us to notice: Something is shifting. I can feel it and I think you can too.

October 7th broke something open. Not just in the obvious, devastating way, the grief, the hostages, the war. But in a quieter, stranger way. It woke something up in Jews who had spent years performing their Jewishness at a comfortable distance.

People who hadn’t thought about Israel in years suddenly found themselves awake at 3 a.m. reading about their fellow Jews. People who had never worn a Star of David put one on and didn’t take it off. Synagogues that were half-empty filled up. Substack essays about Jewish identity, I’m just saying, started doing numbers.

There is a generation of young Jews right now who are prouder, louder, and more rooted than the generation before them. Who are done apologizing for Israel’s existence. Who are done shrinking. Who are learning Hebrew, visiting the Jewish country, and asking their grandparents questions they should have asked years ago before it was too late.

That’s a renaissance.

It doesn’t look like the Harlem Renaissance or the Italian Renaissance with the paintings and the marble.

It looks like a 24-year-old putting on a kippah for the first time at a rally. It looks like a woman in Portland writing an essay about Ethiopian Israeli identity at midnight on a Thursday. It looks like Breaking Bread dinners bringing Jews of all kinds to the same table to remember that we are one people.

It’s happening. Right now. In real time.

So why are they obsessed with us?

Because we refuse to go away.

Because every single time history has demanded our disappearance, we have responded with creation. With scholarship. With art. With children. With tables full of food and songs that outlast the empires which tried to silence them.

Because there is something in the Jewish story that is genuinely threatening to people who believe that power is the only thing that matters, and that something is this: We are living proof that it isn’t. That a people without an army held itself together for two thousand years through the power of a shared text, a shared calendar, a shared table. That identity can be stronger than geography. That memory can outlast violence.

That’s not a small thing. That’s actually a revolutionary idea. And revolutionary ideas make people uncomfortable.

Here’s what I want you to take from this: The obsession is not a sign that something is wrong with us. It is a sign that something is right.

We are a people who have been counted out more times than anyone can count, and we are still here. Still arguing. Still building. Still feeding people. Still dancing. Still writing. Still showing up for each other in ways that make no rational sense unless you understand that we genuinely believe we are responsible for one another.

Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. All of Israel is responsible for one another. It’s not a slogan. It’s an operating system.

So the next time someone asks you why everyone is so obsessed with Jews and Israel, you can give them the long answer, the historical answer, the political answer.

Or you can give them the short one: We’ve been here before, and we always come out swinging.

Thank you for reading Future of Jewish. Help us make more people smarter about Israel and the Jewish world.

Inside America's Most Successful Antisemitic Political Machine

Bob Goldberg — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:02:42 GMT

photo: Patrick Perkins/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Bob Goldberg, who writes the newsletter, “The New Zionist Times.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

On June 2, 2026, Dr. Adam Hamawy won the Democratic Party’s primary in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, defeating 12 other candidates with about 27 percent of the vote.

In a district where Democrats hold a voter-registration advantage of more than two to one, he is now the prohibitive favorite in November’s election.

It was not an isolated event. It was the opening chord of a coordinated campaign — one with a digital nervous system, a venture-capital funding model, and a candidate pipeline engineered not merely to shift U.S. policy on Israel, but to make antisemitism an organizing principle of the modern-day Democratic Party.

Three weeks later, New York’s primaries earlier this week confirmed the sweep. Brad Lander toppled incumbent Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th congressional district. Darializa Avila Chevalier — co-founder of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition — ousted five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th congressional district. Claire Valdez won New York’s 7th congressional district with more than 56 percent.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had endorsed all three. All three won. In New Jersey’s 11th congressional district, Analilia Mejia — who declared Israel’s actions “genocide” within 30 days of October 7th — defeated Tom Malinowski despite heavy pro-Israel spending. These candidates did not simply share a policy position. They shared a machine — one that converts antisemitism from a social pathology into an electoral asset.

Much of the attention has focused on American Priorities, an American “pro-Palestine” super political action committees (PAC) — the independent expenditure group that spent $2 million backing Lander, Chevalier, and Valdez in New York alone. But the PAC is only the most visible component of a far larger apparatus. At the center of that apparatus are the same individuals who built and fund “Tech for Palestine.”

American Priorities was seeded with money from T4P board member Amir Nathoo and former AppLovin executives, whose capital traces back to a Chinese state-connected private equity firm that the U.S. government blocked on national security grounds. The same core donors (Hasan and Ahmed) first funded New Yorkers for Lower Costs, the super PAC that made Mamdani’s mayoral campaign viable, establishing the investment sequence clearly: Fund Mamdani, prove the model, scale nationally.

Meanwhile, Sam Mahrouq — a Texas businessman giving $100,000 to American Priorities — simultaneously donated to Anti-Zionist America PAC and Citizens Against AIPAC1 Corruption, revealing that American Priorities is not a standalone operation but the anchor of an interlocking anti-Israel donor network.

A New Policy PAC, founded by two former Joe Biden administration officials who resigned over U.S. support for Israel, runs parallel operations — microtargeting Dearborn, Michigan to build a lobbying force against AIPAC, while American Priorities operates in formal partnership with Justice Democrats and Vice Chairman of the Democratic National Committee David Hogg’s Leaders We Deserve, with eight-figure spending planned across at least twelve House of Representatives races.

The organizational web is equally dense. The Democratic Socialists of America formally endorsed Chevalier and Valdez. Chevalier co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the Columbia University encampment coalition that exemplified precisely the kind of campus digital occupation T4P’s tools were engineered to enable. Lander personally campaigned for Mejia. Both received J Street2 political cover while benefiting from the same dark-money pipeline.

The candidates are different. The machine behind them is the same.

This is the first fully operational antisemitic political machine in American history — not smoke-filled rooms and ward bosses, but servers, algorithms, encrypted apps, and venture capital, all coordinated through a network of individuals who share a board seat, a donor list, a vocabulary engine, and a single goal: to make opposition to Jewish statehood the defining litmus test of the Democratic Party.

The old Tammany Hall3 ran on patronage and fear. This machine runs on code. The loyalty oath has been replaced by a vocabulary test enforced by artificial intelligence — vocabulary that denies Jewish peoplehood, delegitimizes the Jewish state, and weaponizes the language of civil rights to make Jew-hatred respectable.

Mamdani being ceremonially sworn in as mayor by Bernie Sanders with Mamdani’s wife Rama Duwaji in the background (photo: NYC Mayor’s Office/Wikipedia)

In 2016, Chinese private equity firm Orient Hontai Capital (a subsidiary of state-connected Orient Securities) agreed to acquire a majority stake in Palo Alto-based AppLovin for $1.4 billion.

The deal never closed. The U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States killed it on national security grounds, citing concerns about Chinese state-linked ownership of AppLovin’s vast trove of American user data and Hontai’s ties to a state-connected financial institution.

The acquisition was restructured: Orient Hontai retained a 9.98 percent equity stake and converted the remainder into $841 million in debt financing, capital that remained inside the AppLovin ecosystem as the company’s valuation exploded. The parent company, Orient Group, is now under active investigation by China’s securities regulator for four consecutive years of serious financial fraud and faces mandatory delisting.

That is the financial origin of American Priorities. Capital that the U.S. government deemed a national security threat when it tried to buy a controlling stake in an American tech company has since been recycled — through AppLovin executives, a T4P board member, and a syndicate-model super PAC — into congressional seats in New York and New Jersey.

The currency being spent was flagged by the U.S. government. It was spent anyway.

If American Priorities is the machine’s treasury, T4P is its engine room — and the engine runs on antisemitism. T4P’s “Resistance Tech Stack” (over 90 technical projects) bypasses American technological controls, isolates Israel economically and politically, and builds a sovereign information ecosystem in which the delegitimization of Jewish civilization is the default, unquestioned premise.

The old machines sought power. This one seeks the destruction of Jewish statehood.

UpScrolled is T4P’s media arm, built specifically to host what mainstream platforms prohibit. It carries Hamas and Hezbollah content without moderation, erased Israel from its location menu, and labels content moderation “Zionist censorship.” Drop Site News and Mondoweiss migrated here to reach millions of young Americans unfiltered. Adam Hamawy’s campaign narrative entered this pipeline and reached a radicalized base no legacy outlet could deliver. The machine creates an information environment in which Jews have no legitimate national home and no legitimate right to self-defense, before a voter ever sees a ballot.

Thaura AI (thaura means revolution in Arabic) manufactures message discipline at scale. Built by Syrian engineers within the T4P network, it distills legal briefs and academic texts into standardized rhetoric: “settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing.” This is not a policy vocabulary. It systematically denies Jewish historical connection to the Land of Israel and equates the Jewish state with history’s worst crimes.

Mejia adopted the “genocide” framing within thirty days of October 7th — while Israelis were still identifying their dead. Hamawy built his campaign around it. Darializa Avila Chevalier’s deleted posts denied Israel’s right to exist. Claire Valdez named “genocide” before naming a single policy alternative.

The machine does not wait for politicians to find the right words. It gives them the words, tests the words, and elects the politicians who use them. When AI automates antisemitic consensus, it stops being a fringe position and starts becoming the price of admission to a major American political party.

The software Boycat embeds economic warfare into the grocery run: Scan a barcode, instantly know whether a product is tied to a BDS target. The BDS movement’s stated goal is not a two-state solution. It is the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. With 500,000 active users, Boycat has turned that goal into a consumer routine.

The website “Find a Protest” mobilizes bodies on demand — processing activist schedules into a single interactive map drawing 500,000 weekly visits, enabling flash mobs at supply hubs, ports of entry, or synagogues within hours. The inclusion of synagogues is not an accident. It is a feature.

Chevalier attended the October 8th Times Square rally (organized by Al-Awda New York, a “Find a Protest” partner) one day after Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. She defended her attendance. The machine brought her to that rally. The machine later brought her to U.S. Congress.

The website Newscord manages the press algorithmically — monitoring journalism for “pro-Israel framing,” then automatically firing targeted messages surpassing 40,000 communications per campaign at editors and newsrooms. This is not media criticism. It is the systematic intimidation of any voice that refuses to adopt the machine’s premise: that Israel has no right to exist, its defense is a crime, and people who support the Jewish state are complicit in “genocide.”

“Entrepreneurs for Palestine” is the machine’s suit-and-tie division — and its most dangerous innovation is making antisemitism respectable in the corporate world.

With over 270 founders, venture capitalists, and CEOs across 44 countries, Entrepreneurs for Palestine’s “Strategic Decoupling” pledge asks tech leaders to purge Israeli-linked cybersecurity, cloud, and analytics vendors. It routes capital toward investors feeding the same financial networks as American Priorities. It works with hiring engines like the organization Apricot (which claims it “connects startups with top talent from the Middle East and North Africa region including Palestine”) redirect global tech salaries away from Israeli professionals at scale.

When a company audits its supply chain for “Israeli-linked” vendors, it is not engaging in policy debate. It is practicing economic discrimination against Jews on the basis of national origin. Entrepreneurs for Palestine has given that discrimination a PowerPoint, a pledge form, and a LinkedIn post. It has laundered Jew-hatred through the language of the corporate framework ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance).

This machine does not merely elect antisemitic politicians. It restructures the economy around antisemitism, controls information to normalize it, redirects capital to fund it, and shapes the next generation’s vocabulary so that antisemitism arrives pre-installed before they ever vote.

Adam Hamawy, Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, and Analilia Mejia are the machine’s output — identified, funded, messaged, mobilized, and elected through a system no single political action committee or protest organization could have produced alone.

Lander completed the machine’s most important task: It turned a Jewish politician into a vector for the delegitimization of the Jewish state. His transformation from opposing BDS in 2016 to pledging to vote against arms to Israel in 2026 is not political evolution. It is a case study in what this machine does to those who need its support to survive. He won.

Zohran Mamdani now governs New York City on the machine’s terms. In his first week in office this past January, he revoked the world-renowned International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s antisemitism definition and restored the right of city agencies to participate in BDS. The largest Jewish city outside Israel is now led by a man who refuses to recognize the standard definition of Jew-hatred.

The T4P network has backed over 20 candidates this cycle. Between 125 and 135 anti-Israel elected officials are now documented across federal, state, and local levels. NGOs like “Teach for Palestine” distribute curricula replacing standard history with “apartheid” and “nakba” frameworks — pre-installing the machine’s conclusions in young voters before they ever enter a polling booth.

The Democratic Party was once the political home of many American Jews. That party is being systematically captured. The machine is not merely changing the Democratic Party’s policy on Israel. It is remaking the party’s moral architecture — replacing the prohibition on ethnic hatred with the requirement of it, so long as the target is Jews and the Jewish state.

Thank you for reading Future of Jewish. Help us make more people smarter about Israel and the Jewish world.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is a major, bipartisan American lobbying group that advocates for policies strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship.

J Street is a Far-Left advocacy and lobby group based in the United States whose aims include strengthening Jewish democracy in Israel and promoting a two-state solution for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Tammany Hall was a powerful New York City political machine that dominated Democratic Party politics and municipal affairs from the 1790s through the mid-20th century. Operating as both a social club and a political organization, it became legendary for utilizing a system of patronage, corruption, and immigrant aid to secure votes.

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Future of Jewish — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 22:01:14 GMT

My name is Joshua Hoffman, and I’m reaching out on behalf of Future of Jewish — a publication dedicated to helping people better understand, think critically about, and feel more connected to Judaism, Israel, and the Jewish world.

Since October 7th, we’ve made Future of Jewish completely free — no paywalls, no ads — so that everyone, no matter their background or circumstance, can access meaningful insight, education, and inspiration.

Our work goes far beyond headlines and soundbites. We bring context, depth, and nuance to the stories and conversations that shape Jewish life today — the kind of perspective mainstream media too often overlooks.

In just the past week, here are the top essays and podcasts:

The guarantee that failed Israel is back.
America owes Israel a thank-you, not a lecture.
I am leaving Britain and moving to Israel.
The Jewish state is too powerful for the world’s liking.
I escaped Hezbollah — and found the truth about Israel.
Everything they say about U.S. aid to Israel is wrong.
Israel keeps winning wars. So why are we losing?

Your support makes our mission possible. If you have the means, please consider contributing to help us continue sharing the very best of Judaism, Israel, and the Jewish world with people everywhere.

A team based in Israel, we are proud to serve nearly 2 million people from 50-plus countries. Here is what some of our supporters say:

“Can’t live without Future of Jewish anymore at this point. I mean, I could of course, but I need it. Thanks for creating this space for Jewish and non-Jewish voices.” — Jenny S.
“Unique, informed, and a much-needed antidote to the tsunami of ignorance, anti-Israel sentiment and, sometimes, outright antisemitism now saturating our media.” — Ron C.
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“You present a reasonable, logical, creditable, and fair analysis of events, not just in Israel or the Middle East, but the entire world. I am not Jewish, but your work is very important.” — Séan G.
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Thank you for considering this opportunity to help us continue creating and amplifying our meaningful impact!

If you have any questions or would like to learn more, I’d be happy to connect directly: josh@jewishfuture.global

With sincere gratitude,
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P.S. Here are the top essays and podcasts from the past week:

The guarantee that failed Israel is back.

Adam Hummel — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 10:01:30 GMT

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

This is a guest essay by Adam Hummel, a writer in Toronto.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

In recent days, an American president stood in a French palace, signed a memorandum ending a war that America undertook with Israeli support — a war Israel was then forbidden to finish — and called the Israeli prime minister his “very small partner.”

He said it almost fondly.

Benjamin Netanyahu “gets a little excited sometimes,” Trump explained. We are the big partner. He is the small one.

When trying to make sense of the present, I often go looking for it in the past. Not for comfort necessarily, but because the present is bad at telling you what it actually is, and the past is much better at it.

So when I read that phrase — “very small partner” — I went looking and found that I had read this script before. The setting changes, the waterway changes, the enemy changes. The structure, not so much. A great power decides that Israel’s war has gone far enough, ends it on terms Israel didn’t write, reopens a waterway, and offers, in place of victory, a dangerous guarantee.

Let me tell you about the last time.

In the summer of 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Britain and France, who still imagined themselves empires, wanted him gone. They conspired in secret with Israel at a villa outside Paris, in the suburb of Sèvres, over three days in late October.

The plan was a piece of theatre: Israel would invade the Sinai. Britain and France would then sweep in to separate the Israeli and Egyptian combatants and seize the canal, as though they were peacemakers and not the actual authors of the war.

Israel had its own reason to play the part. For years, Egypt had blockaded the Straits of Tiran, narrow sea passages between the Sinai and Arabian peninsulas that connect the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea — choking off Israeli shipping to the south and strangling the Port of Eilat (Israel’s sole Red Sea port).

Freedom of navigation was a real Israeli interest, not a pretext. So Israel invaded on October 29, 1956, and went deep into Sinai.

Then Washington, D.C. ended it.

U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had not been told. He learned of the invasion the way you learn of a betrayal — after the fact — from people other than the ones who owed you the truth. He was furious. He didn’t issue a stern statement. He waged financial war on his own allies.

The United States blocked Britain’s credit at the International Monetary Fund. It blocked a loan from the Export-Import Bank. It threatened to dump its holdings of British sterling, which would have collapsed the pound while Britain’s reserves were already bleeding out. Oil was withheld. Within days the British government folded, and with it the last pretension of European power in the Middle East.

UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned three months later.

Israel held on longer. It took until March of 1957, and relentless American pressure, before Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion agreed to give the Sinai back to Egypt.

He didn’t return it for nothing. He extracted assurances. The Straits of Tiran would stay open. Israeli ships would reach Eilat. A United Nations Emergency Force (the brainchild of Canada’s Lester B. Pearson) would stand in the Sinai as a buffer, and, he was told, it could not simply be waved away on Egypt’s say-so.

This was the consolation prize. Israel surrendered the territory it had conquered and received, in exchange, a guarantee; an international promise; a piece of paper about an open waterway. Hold onto that piece of paper.

It was worth nothing in just 10 years.

In May of 1967, Nasser unilaterally ordered the UN force out of the Sinai. The UN, to its lasting shame, complied at once. Then Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, the exact act that Israel had warned, in 1957, it would treat as a cause of war. Ninety percent of Israel’s oil came through that strait.

So the Israelis went to the guarantors. They sent Minister of Foreign Affairs Abba Eban to Paris, London, and Washington to call in the promise of 1957. And the guarantors discovered they had urgent business elsewhere.

France, under Charles de Gaulle, had made its peace with the Arab world after losing Algeria, and was no longer interested. Washington was drowning in the Vietnam War and in no mood to force open anyone’s strait. De Gaulle admitted, to Eban’s face, that yes, the commitment had been made. It simply would not be kept.

U.S. President Lyndon Johnson later called Egypt’s closing of the Straits of Tiran the single act of folly most responsible for the war that followed. He was right about the folly. He was quiet about the other half of it, which is that the United States had promised, a decade earlier, that this exact folly would never be allowed to stand — and then allowed it to stand.

Israel opened the strait itself, in June, by force, alone — miraculously, in just six days. It has not leaned on a guarantee about Tiran since, because there was nothing left to lean on. The guarantee had been written in water.

Smoke rises from oil tanks beside the Suez Canal hit during the initial Anglo-French assault on Port Said in November 1956. (photo: Wikipedia)

Now look at last week. The United States went to war with Iran in February, with Israel alongside it. Never had two more formidable air forces fought together for a more just cause. Whatever you think of how it started, the ending is the part that should hold your attention. Because the ending is 1956 again, with the furniture rearranged.

The war is being closed on American terms. Israel was not in the room. It was not shown the text of the Memorandum of Understanding until after the fact. The centrepiece of the deal is a waterway: the Strait of Hormuz, reopened, the American blockade lifted, the oil flowing.

There is a guarantee architecture, of course. There always is. Toll-free passage, but only for 60 days. A future administration of the Strait, to be worked out later by Iran and the Gulf states. A $300 billion dollar fund to rebuild Iran, to be paid for by the same Gulf neighbours that Iran spent this spring bombing.

It’s the same sand: a temporary arrangement dressed as a permanent one, a promise about an open strait that depends entirely on the interests of powers who will have moved on by the time it is tested.

But here’s the cruelty in the 2026 version, the detail that makes it way worse than 1956: Back then, the open strait was at least Israel’s prize. Tiran was reopened for Israeli ships. This time the strait is opened for Iran. Israel does not even get the consolation. It gets the bill — the surviving enemy, and a patron who stood at a microphone and called it the “very small partner.”

And the patron is already turning away. Trump’s whole posture toward the region is transactional, Gulf-facing, allergic to long wars. He is scared of lengthy engagements, even the ones he undertook.

Trump has said, more or less, that he keeps no permanent enemies. He thinks that Hamas recently hasn’t been that bad, and he has essentially faulted Israel for the conflict with Hezbollah. The future he is building runs through Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and the reconstruction of Tehran, and Israel is a line item in it, not the point of it.

So here is what I take from the two straits, 70 years apart: A guarantee from a great power is not a gift. It’s a loan, and the great power decides when to call it in and when to let it lapse. The open waterway that someone else’s navy opens for you is a waterway that someone else’s navy can close against you, or simply decline to keep open, the moment its attention drifts. Tiran in 1957 was a solemn international commitment, and it dissolved the first time it was tested.

The deeper danger is not that the guarantee fails. It is what the guarantee does to you while you still believe in it. It teaches you to stop guaranteeing yourself. It persuades you that your security has been subcontracted to someone larger and kinder, so that you can lay down the heavy work of holding the strait open with your own hand.

And then the day comes, and the larger kinder power is in Vietnam, or in Versailles, or simply in love with a deal, and you discover that the only freedom of navigation you ever truly held was the kind you took and kept yourself.

The trajectory of the “very small partner” runs in one direction. In 1956, Israel was the junior member who at least got the strait. In 2026, it is the “very small partner” who gets nothing. If you let someone else define how small you are, they will keep refining the number downward, because it costs them nothing and it flatters them to do it.

We cannot take anything for granted.

The most expensive illusion in our history is the one that keeps coming back, the one that whispers someone bigger will keep the water open for us, so that we need not keep it open ourselves.

Thank you for reading Future of Jewish. Help us make more people smarter about Israel and the Jewish world.

JD Vance is repeating Obama's Middle East mistakes.

Joshua Hoffman — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 23:13:38 GMT

U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance (center) sitting next to Secretary of State Marco Rubio (photo: The White House/Wikipedia)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance and former President Barack Obama could hardly appear more different politically. One emerged from the populist Right, the other from the “progressive” Left. One speaks the language of nationalism and restraint, the other of liberal internationalism and multilateralism.

Yet a provocative question is increasingly being asked in pro-Israel circles: Is JD Vance poised to become for the Trump era what Barack Obama became for his own — the American leader who fundamentally reorients Washington’s Middle East strategy, even at the expense of America and its traditional allies?

The comparison is imperfect, but it is no longer unreasonable.

From the earliest days of the recent U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, it became increasingly apparent that Vance was deeply skeptical of military escalation. Trump told reporters that he and Vance were “philosophically, a little bit different” in their initial viewpoints on the Iran war.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In any democracy, disagreements over war and peace are both inevitable and healthy. Reasonable people can disagree over whether military action against Iran advances American interests.

But there is a profound difference between opposing a specific military operation and making the Islamic Republic of Iran — one of the worst regimes in modern history — a central stakeholder in the future architecture of the Middle East.

Washington has already made significant concessions to Tehran before resolving the core issues surrounding Iran’s nuclear program and regional aggression. Reports indicate that the United States has provided temporary sanctions relief, permitted continued Iranian oil exports during negotiations, and is considering granting Iran access to portions of its frozen assets.

At the same time, the most difficult questions — including the future of Iran’s enrichment program and long-term sanctions policy — have reportedly been deferred to later negotiations, allowing Tehran to retain much of its nuclear infrastructure in the interim.

Iran is not merely another state pursuing nuclear capabilities. It is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, a revolutionary regime that has spent nearly half a century building a network of proxies stretching from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza.

New reporting has shed light on just how deeply Iran has embedded itself inside Lebanon. According to Iran International, Lebanon’s parliamentary speaker allegedly receives more than $500,000 per month from Tehran to support Iranian interests and those of Hezbollah.

The issue has never been solely about centrifuges and uranium enrichment. It has always been about the nature of the regime itself.

The Islamic Republic has repeatedly demonstrated both the intent and the capability to destabilize the region, threaten global energy markets, disrupt international commerce, and ignite wider conflict at moments of its choosing. Any American strategy that treats Iran merely as a nuclear file rather than as a revolutionary actor risks fundamentally misunderstanding the challenge.

This concern is not new.

Barack Obama’s Middle East doctrine was built upon the belief that America’s traditional regional strategy had failed and that Washington needed to fundamentally rethink its relationships and assumptions.

The clearest expression of this vision came in Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech, which sought to reset relations with what he called the “Muslim world.” Critics viewed the speech as more than symbolic. They saw it as the beginning of a broader strategic shift: away from a regional order centered on America’s traditional allies and toward one increasingly reliant on Islamist movements, regional intermediaries, and long-standing adversaries.

Obama reportedly insisted that members of the Muslim Brotherhood attend the Cairo address despite the organization’s outlawed status in Egypt at the time, a decision that reportedly contributed to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak declining to attend. More broadly, critics argued that the administration consistently underestimated the ideological ambitions of Islamist movements while overestimating the moderating effects of engagement.

At the same time, the Obama administration increasingly elevated Qatar into a central position within America’s Middle East strategy. Doha became indispensable to Washington’s regional diplomacy — serving as mediator with Hamas, host of negotiations with the Taliban, interlocutor with Iran, and a principal diplomatic bridge to a range of Islamist actors.

For many of America’s traditional regional allies, this represented a profound strategic shift. Qatar was not viewed simply as a neutral mediator. Rather, many in Jerusalem, Cairo, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi saw Doha as the principal state sponsor and patron of Muslim Brotherhood movements across the region.

The Obama administration’s approach effectively transformed Qatar and other Islamist-aligned actors from regional disruptors into indispensable diplomatic stakeholders — and that same administration’s handling of Iran reinforced those concerns.

During the 2009 Green Movement protests, the Obama White House failed to adequately support Iranians risking their lives to challenge the regime. Those concerns deepened during negotiations over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (colloquially known as the “Iranian nuclear deal”), which Obama viewed as a historic diplomatic achievement.

Israel and many Sunni Arab states viewed the agreement very differently.

From their perspective, the Iranian nuclear deal did not fundamentally alter the character of the Islamic Republic. Rather, it legitimized and empowered a revolutionary regime while only temporarily constraining its nuclear ambitions. The deal’s sunset clauses meant that many restrictions would eventually expire, while sanctions relief provided Tehran with significant new financial resources.

Rather than moderating Iranian behavior, critics argue, those resources helped strengthen Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Shiite militias in Iraq, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen.

More broadly, Obama’s administration increasingly viewed America’s traditional allies as obstacles to diplomacy while treating revisionist actors as indispensable partners.

This history matters because many Israelis and regional observers fear they are witnessing the early stages of a similar strategic realignment under JD Vance.

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, was highly critical of the diplomatic track pursued under current circumstances, warning in Hebrew as negotiations began that “we are in a train wreck.”

Those concerns intensified as the United States sought to end the recent conflict with Iran amid mounting fears over global energy markets and supply chains. Reports indicated that Tehran demanded any ceasefire arrangement extend not merely to the direct U.S.-Iran theater but also to Lebanon — terms that Israel has insisted are not binding upon it.

Even more troubling were reports that a new deconfliction mechanism for Lebanon, established as part of weekend negotiations between the United States and Iran in Switzerland, would exclude Israel altogether. According to Israel’s Channel 12, the arrangement would limit Israeli military action to responses against “imminent threats” rather than the broader category of “emerging threats” that has traditionally formed the basis of Israel’s preventive security doctrine.

If accurate, such an arrangement would represent a dramatic departure from longstanding Israeli security principles. It would effectively place decisions about Israel’s freedom of action in the hands of outside countries and international actors whose primary interest is regional stability, not Israel’s security.

For many Israelis, this raises an obvious question: Can countries that do not bear the consequences of Hezbollah rockets, Iranian proxies, or cross-border terrorism be trusted to determine when Israel may act in self-defense?

More striking still is the perception that Israel’s exclusion from portions of these diplomatic arrangements was not an oversight but a feature. As one observer noted regarding the U.S.-Iran memorandum negotiated in Pakistan, Israel’s exclusion was not a flaw. It was the point.

That is why comparisons between Vance and Obama are beginning to emerge.

Obama sought to reshape the Middle East by reducing America’s direct military footprint, empowering regional intermediaries, and seeking accommodations with adversaries where possible. Supporters viewed this as “realism,” but it was really retrenchment that empowered revisionist actors at the expense of America’s allies.

Whether Vance ultimately follows a similar path remains uncertain. Skepticism toward military intervention does not automatically translate into accommodation of hostile regimes.

Yet the central question remains: Is America’s objective merely to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon? Or is it to constrain a revolutionary regime that has spent nearly five decades undermining regional stability, bullying America’s allies, and threatening the global economy?

How JD Vance answers that question may determine the future shape of the Middle East.

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If Israel was a mistake, then what about Lebanon?

Ben Koan — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 10:02:37 GMT

The Lebanese flag (photo: Ahmad Bader/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Ben Koan, who writes the newsletter, “The Thousand-Year View.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

The post-October 7th wars have brought renewed fervor to “anti-Zionism,” a counterfactual movement to undo the creation of the Jewish state.

But if we’re questioning the legitimacy of Middle Eastern states, why stop at Israel?

Every country in the Levant was carved out of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Each has borders that were drawn by European powers. The latest Middle Eastern hostilities pit Israel (an economic, technological, and military powerhouse) against Hezbollah (a theocratic, Iranian-sponsored militia in a tribally fractured failed state).

By the metric of national success, then, the opportune question is not whether Israel should exist. It’s whether Lebanon was a mistake.

After all, Lebanon is perhaps the only post-colonial state whose people have petitioned for a return to foreign rule. Its politics are corrupt, sectarian, and foreign-dominated. Its economy is marked by GDP contraction, hyperinflation, and soaring unemployment.

Lebanon has not just been stricken by crisis and war; it is fundamentally prone to crisis and war by its very nature. Though it may be too late to undo the errors of its foundation, other countries can still learn from Lebanon’s historic, ongoing state failure.

Today’s map of the Middle East was largely drawn by Britain and France after their victory in World War I. The Ottoman Empire, which formerly controlled most of the region, had sided with Germany and Austria-Hungary and was dismembered as a result. As historian David Fromkin noted:

“What was real in the Ottoman Empire tended to be local: a tribe, a clan, a sect, or a town was the true political unit to which loyalties adhered.”1

Modern states like Iraq and Syria were not incipient nations yearning to be free. Instead, they were created as European (technically League of Nations) mandates to reflect European interests. Jordan, for example, largely originated as a consolation prize for the Hashemite dynasty, which had sided with the British but was driven out of the Arabian Peninsula by the House of Saud.

The British formed “Palestine” out of several different Ottoman districts to help safeguard the Suez Canal and serve as a “national home for the Jewish People” (per the Balfour Declaration, which was partly motivated by a desire to win Jewish support during the war). Insofar as Palestine’s Arab population was politically organized, it called for incorporation into a broader Syrian Arab state.

Lebanon had a more substantial raison d’être than many of its neighbors. The French were the traditional champions of the Maronites, a Christian ethnoreligious group located around Mount Lebanon. Following sectarian conflict, Western pressure led to the creation of an autonomous Maronite district within the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century.

During World War I, the Ottomans massacred their empire’s Armenian population, which gave renewed impetus to the need for Western powers to protect local Christians. In 1920, Lebanon was subsequently founded as a Maronite-dominant enclave under French control.

Yet for historical and economic reasons, the Maronites urged, and the French granted, the creation of a “Greater Lebanon” that extended beyond their Christian (and Druze) mountain redoubt. Thus the Mandate of Lebanon included substantial Sunni and Shi’ite Muslim populations.

According to a 1932 census, its population was 51.2 percent Christian, 22.4 percent Sunni, 19.6 percent Shi’ite, and 6.8 percent Druze. The Lebanese political system was explicitly designed to reflect the country’s sectarian divisions.

Per the 1943 National Pact, the Maronites were granted the presidency, command of the armed forces, and a parliamentary majority; the Sunnis had the role of prime minister; the Shi’ites were given speaker of parliament; and the Druze and Greek Orthodox Christians were promised lesser positions.

The Lebanese Civil War from 1975 to 1990 brought the country’s internal tensions to a boil. The poorer, faster-growing Muslims resented the Maronites’ political dominance, which was guaranteed by the National Pact but reflected an outdated census. The National Pact had promised that the Maronites wouldn’t seek Western intervention and that the Muslims wouldn’t aspire to unite with other Arab countries.

Yet geopolitically, Maronites sided with the Western world, Sunnis (and pan-Arabist Greek Orthodox Christians) turned to their Arab neighbors, Shi’ites were loyal to their co-religionists in Iran, and the Druze looked out for themselves. An influx of Palestinians ensnared Lebanon in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further complicated the country’s demographics and foreign loyalties.

A coalition of Muslims and leftists demanded a new census and constitutional changes, the national army fell apart, and Beirut, once called the “Paris of the Middle East,” turned into a battlefield. The civil war’s inter- and intra-sectional warfare ultimately drew in Syria, Israel, Iran, and Iraq. It ended with the renegotiation of the National Pact (reducing Christian power) and the disarmament of armed factions — with the notable exception of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shi’ite militia that continues to provoke Israel.

Today, Lebanon is estimated to be 32.4 percent Christian, 31.9 percent Sunni, 31.2 percent Shi’ite, and 4.5 percent Druze. Many Christians — generally wealthier and more educated than their neighbors — have immigrated to Western countries. Thus Lebanon’s original case for existence, as a safe haven for the Maronites, has been rendered obsolete.

Though the civil war is over, Lebanon remains a failed state, subject to political paralysis, sectarian division, foreign intervention, and economic decline. It’s not a showcase for religious pluralism and multicultural harmony. Instead, it’s a cautionary example of the need for functioning states to have a majority nationality. That nationality does not necessarily need to belong to a single religion or ethnicity. But it needs to primarily identify itself with the nation.

The Green Line that separated West and East Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, 1982 (photo: James Case/Wikipedia)

Lebanon was doomed to fail because only the Christians typically saw themselves as Lebanese first, and there weren’t enough of them to keep the country stable. Even the Christians were divided, with the majority Maronites loyal to Lebanese nationhood and many minority Greek Orthodox drawn to pan-Arabism. Lack of Christian numerical strength and cohesion also made other groups, like the Druze, less compelled to close ranks with them out of their own sectarian self-interest.

At its inception, Lebanon could have been established as a smaller, more religiously homogeneous state. This compact Lebanon could have extended into the Christian-majority Wadi al-Nasara (“Valley of the Christians”) in present-day Syria, instead of its current Muslim-majority territory. The Lebanese Christians are largely Maronite, whereas Syrian Christians are largely Greek Orthodox, so this alternative Lebanon would have needed to forge a pan-Christian, neo-Aramean identity (and reject pan-Arabism in turn).

That identity could have been strengthened by a policy to encourage the immigration of other Middle Eastern Christians, such as the persecuted Aramaic speakers of Iraq. A Christian “right of return” would simply have reversed the original process by which Muslims achieved numerical dominance. As historian Philip Jenkins wrote:

“From the earliest days of the Muslim expansion, new regimes sponsored the migration of Arab and Muslim peoples into what had been Coptic or Syriac territories, reducing the relative power of older-stock populations and their cultures — and faiths.”2

A homegrown Christian Zionism might have mitigated the dramatic decline of Christianity in the Middle East, from around 14 percent of the region’s population in 1914 to under 5 percent today.

The original impetus for Greater Lebanon was largely economic: The Maronites sought ports and more arable land. But there are no financial upsides to a collapsed country. A cohesive Christian nation-state would have been rich in human capital and pro-Western in orientation — a recipe for foreign investment and economic success.

Lebanon’s failure has immediate lessons for its more successful neighbor, Israel. Jews are a clear national majority outside of the West Bank and Gaza. But in the Holy Land as a whole, they are under 50 percent of the population — closer to Lebanon’s Christians before that country’s civil war.

Also, like Lebanon’s pan-Arabist Christians, the Jews include a minority (non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox) who question the legitimacy of their own state. Jewish ambitions of a Greater Israel, like Maronite visions of a Greater Lebanon, are thus doomed by demographics.

On the other political extreme, dreams of a binational state must contend with the sobering reality of sectarian Lebanon. At least Muslim irredentists like Hamas, whose goal is an ethnically cleansed “Palestine,” recognize the untenability of a state with no clear majority.

Lebanon is also a warning to the West more broadly. According to progressive mantra, “Diversity is our strength.”

But diversity absent a unifying force — such as national identity — leads to internal conflict and consequent weakness. Because of its split demographics, Lebanon was a weak state before it was a failed state. Its weakness made it vulnerable to foreign interference, which imperils the country to this day. Hezbollah fires rockets at Israel on behalf of its sectarian benefactor, Iran, not out of any Lebanese national interest.

True Lebanese nationalists, now a minority in their own country, are powerless to stop them.

When the bulwark that identifies with its own country’s interests loses majority status, that country is effectively over. This bulwark can be strengthened by immigration, if it involves incorporating newcomers into the national project. But the nationalist majority can also be weakened by immigration, if sectionalism is imported into once-cohesive countries.

Of course, sectionalism can also develop organically through extreme political polarization. A country can start off as flawed as Lebanon, but it can also turn into Lebanon over time, if demographics are allowed to become destiny and the center cannot hold.

As for the question of whether Lebanon should exist, the answer is that it doesn’t. Outsiders are apt to confuse the map for the territory, the semblance of a nation (demarcated territory and a flag) for the reality. But Lebanon has become a mere assemblage of tribes — most of which see the country, to quote the Maronite patriarch, as “real estate, not a homeland.”

Lebanon only survives as a nominally independent nation because the American-led world order upholds the principle of established borders. Thus a U.S.-led coalition fought to keep Iraq from absorbing Kuwait. But as Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine demonstrates, the international “rules-based” order is fragile and prone to challenge.

Notably, an equally expansionist Iran backs Russia in its bid for neo-Tsarist empire. In the words of neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan, the jungle (i.e., an explicitly strength-based international order) is growing back. Israel may be the Middle Eastern nation that is continually threatened with annihilation, but unlike Lebanon, it has a unifying national identity, a sense of collective purpose, and a demonstrated will to survive.

In a century’s time, the Middle Eastern country most likely to disappear from the map isn’t Israel. It’s Lebanon.

Thank you for reading Future of Jewish. Help us make more people smarter about Israel and the Jewish world.

David Fromkin, “A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914–1922” (1989), p. 36.

Philip Jenkins, “The Lost History of Christianity” (2008), p. 212.

Everything they say about U.S. aid to Israel is wrong.

General Yoav Gallant — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 22:01:12 GMT

U.S. CENTCOM Commander General Michael Kurilla (left) meets me in Israel in a photo released March 4, 2024. (photo: Defense Ministry/Shachar Yurman)

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This is a guest essay by General Yoav Gallant, former Israeli Minister of Defense.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

Heading into the U.S. midterm elections this November, almost every American politician asked about Israel is being asked the same question, on every stage: Should the United States continue aid to Israel? Should it be cut, conditioned, or used as leverage?

The question carries a premise. The premise is that American support for Israel is a transfer of value from a benefactor to a recipient, and that the only remaining question is how generous the benefactor should be.

That premise is wrong. It has been wrong for a long time. And because it is wrong, the debate built on top of it produces answers that misrepresent to the American people what their money has actually been doing for the past half-century.

I served as Israel’s Minister of Defense during the most difficult period in our modern history, more than a year of the seven-front war that began on October 7, 2023. I have sat across the table from American counterparts in shaping this relationship. I have watched, on the battlefield, what American and Israeli capabilities look like when they are combined against a common enemy.

I want to set out what this relationship actually is, and what it is not.

Under the current Memorandum of Understanding, the United States provides Israel $3.8 billion annually, of which $3.3 billion is Foreign Military Financing and $500 million is cooperative missile defense. American political discourse treats this as foreign aid, grouping it with disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, calling it a subsidy or a gift.

The description misidentifies the transaction.

Foreign Military Financing is not a transfer of value to Israel. It is a defense procurement arrangement under which Israel receives the dollars on paper and then spends them on American-made defense equipment, produced on American soil, by American workers, in American congressional districts.

By 2028, nearly every Foreign Military Financing dollar will be required to be spent in the United States. The checks are written in Jerusalem. The jobs are in Arkansas, Alabama, Texas, Arizona, and Connecticut.

This is a co-investment in American industrial capability, denominated in American manufacturing output. Investments are measured by their return, and the return on this one is documented.

When American Foreign Military Financing dollars pay for the F-15s, F-35s, and other U.S.-made systems Israel buys, Israel’s own defense budget is freed for what no foreign assistance program covers, namely the indigenous research and development of Israeli systems.

The aid does not simply move money. It allows Israel to invest its own resources in domestic research and development at a scale no other ally can match, with the urgency of a country that has stood under arms continuously for nearly 80 years, defending borders against constant attack from neighbors who do not accept its existence. No other Western country has built up that kind of accumulated combat experience over that span of time.

The systems that come out of that research and development get tested under combat conditions. By the time they mature, they have been validated against the most demanding threat environments in the world. American forces then receive the finished products, ready for fielding, without having paid for the development cycle and without having borne the operational risk of testing them in war.

Trophy, the active protection system now fielded on American Abrams tanks across multiple armored brigades, was developed in Israel using Israeli resources, combat-proven on Israeli Merkavas, and only then procured by the U.S. Army after American commanders concluded no equivalent American system existed. The helmet-mounted display that defines the F-35’s pilot interface, supplied through a joint venture between Israel’s Elbit Systems and the American firm Collins Aerospace, equips every F-35 produced anywhere in the world.

In the June 2025 campaign against Iran and the February 2026 joint operation, Israeli air defenses helped protect American bases across the Gulf, and Israeli intelligence and electronic warfare contributed to combined operations that would otherwise have required additional American deployments.

The American taxpayer rarely hears about these returns, because the political debate is conducted at the level of the headline number rather than at the level of the mechanism. The mechanism is not charity. American dollars flow into American factories, American assistance frees Israeli capital for innovation, and American forces eventually receive Israeli-developed capabilities refined in real combat.

If you are still not convinced this is a good investment, set the United States government aside for a moment and ask the question any private investor would ask: Would a private investor put capital into Israel right now?

The answer is in public data anyone can pull up.

In 2025, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange’s flagship index rose roughly 50 percent, after rising 30 percent in 2024. It was the best-performing major stock market in the world for two consecutive years.

Foreign institutional holdings in Tel Aviv equities reached a record $19 billion, more than double the pre-war level, with 80 percent of inflows from North America. Google paid $32 billion for a single Israeli cybersecurity company (Wiz), the largest acquisition in Google’s history.

In 2020, Nvidia, a single American company, paid $6.9 billion for one Israeli technology firm called Mellanox, a specialist in high-speed networking. That single acquisition cost roughly 1.8 times what the United States transfers to Israel in an entire year. Mellanox’s technology became the networking core of the entire AI data center revolution.

Nvidia’s networking division, built on the acquisition, generated nearly $11 billion in revenue in a single recent quarter, exceeding the entire purchase price. Over the same period, Nvidia’s market capitalization rose from $93 billion to more than $5 trillion.

This is one American company making one investment in one Israeli company. The bet was less than two years of American aid to Israel. The return reshaped an industry.

All of this happened while Israel has faced multi-front wars, alongside European arms embargoes, credit-rating downgrades, and the most sustained international campaign to isolate Israel diplomatically in a generation. Capital does not vote with slogans. It votes with facts. Every major institutional investor in the world, looking at the same evidence available to Washington, is increasing their allocation to Israel.

Washington is the only one debating an exit.

$3.8 billion is a significant amount of money, and the security assistance Israel receives from the United States matters to Israel. But the budgetary share has changed. In the past, the aid was a significant share of Israeli GDP.

Today, measured against an Israeli economy approaching $720 billion, it represents about half a percent. The shekel appreciated 14 percent against the dollar in 2025 alone, reaching its strongest level in three decades, further reducing the aid’s practical value to Israel.

The aid still matters in budgetary terms. The relative share is much smaller than it once was. And alongside that change, the shared benefit, what each country gains from the partnership, has only grown more important.

There is no doubt the time has come to update the system. The original relationship was built between a global superpower and a small, determined country at the start of its journey.

Today Israel is still small, but it is also a defense partner that fights alongside American forces, an arms exporter to dozens of allied nations, and a creator of technologies that the whole world buys and that the United States benefits from. Israeli defense exports reached $14.8 billion in 2024 in their fourth consecutive record year, placing Israel among the top 10 arms exporters in the world.

This is no longer the relationship the original aid framework was designed to manage.

The shift is already happening, project by project, contract by contract — American capital and scale meeting Israeli research and combat validation, manufacturing running through both economies, export revenue shared, strategic capability compounding on both sides. The pattern is consistent.

What is missing is the framework that institutionalizes it as the basis of the relationship rather than the exception to it.

American security assistance to Israel is, in effect, already an American investment in joint developments. I proposed this evolution when I was Israel’s Minister of Defense, and I am proposing it again now. The transition should happen gradually, with both governments designing the instruments, the rules, and the milestones together. The proper horizon is 2048, Israel’s centennial, 22 years away — the length of a mortgage.

A long-term industrial program, not a political instrument used against either ally for electoral advantage.

The American public deserves a true picture of this relationship, not an agenda dressed up as policy analysis to serve someone’s political interests. Americans understand the difference between a cost and a return, between a handout and a stake. What they rightly object to is being told that a strategic asset is a cost, or that a co-investment which has built American factories, fielded American capabilities, and protected American troops is a favor done to someone else.

The data points the same way from every direction. The battlefield says the partnership works. American industry says the partnership works. Capital markets say the partnership works. Every investor with access to the facts is committing more to Israel, not less.

The question is not whether to continue. The question is how to update the structure to reflect what the evidence has been showing for years.

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Meet Netanyahu's most dangerous rival.

Nadav Eyal — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 10:01:31 GMT

Gadi Eisenkot was the 21st Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces from 2015 to 2019. (photo: IDF/X)

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This is a guest essay by Nadav Eyal, a columnist for Yediot Aharonot (one of Israel’s largest newspapers).

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Israel’s elections are due this fall.

The exact date isn’t yet settled. It could come in September, but most likely toward the end of October.

Under Israeli law, the latest possible date is October 27th. Prime Minister Benjamin 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 he leads is on track to lose.

Netanyahu has been trailing in these polls since March 2023 — more than three years now — even before October 7, 2023. There are surveys, run by the government-aligned TV station Channel 14 and his loyalists, that show him close to winning, but these remain outliers.

This isn’t close to be over. Netanyahu, a leader who has won more democratic elections than anyone alive today, has managed to narrow the gap between himself and his rivals, and he should certainly not be counted out. Yet the bloc of parties committed to replacing Netanyahu has consistently held well over 61 seats in the Knesset (Israeli parliament).

Until recently, the most likely and formidable challenger to rise against him was Naftali Bennett. Bennett served as prime minister during the short-lived “Change Government” in 2021 and 2022.

A Right-winger and a relatively young politician (he is 54), Bennett was seen as a dynamic alternative to Netanyahu. His Right-wing credentials run deeper than those of Netanyahu: He once headed the settlers’ lobby, he is himself an observant Jew and, like Netanyahu, he served in Sayeret Matkal (the most elite special reconnaissance and counter-terrorism unit in the Israel Defense Forces).

Bennett was often marketed as a better, more high-tech, next-generation version of Netanyahu. He founded and ran an Israeli tech company that had a successful exit years ago — the new Israeli dream.

This is the backdrop against which something substantial has happened over the past few weeks — and it has everything to do with Gadi Eisenkot, the 21st Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces from 2015 to 2019. Eisenkot and his new party are rising rapidly in the polls, closing in on Bennett and his newly formed list, and Eisenkot himself is now seen as a more suitable choice for prime minister than Bennett, and even than Netanyahu, if only by very narrow margins.

It is still early, but even now, Eisenkot is the most well-liked politician in Israel according to the polls.

It isn’t hard to understand why. He isn’t seen as aggressive toward anyone but Netanyahu. The fact that he lost his 25-year-old son — Master Sergeant (reserve) Gal Meir Eisenkot, killed in action in Gaza in December 2023, and also two of his nephews — makes it unmistakably clear that this is a man, and a family, committed to Israel’s security in the deepest sense.

Even before that, the former chief of staff was seen as someone attached to Israel’s mainstream national ethos. It was Netanyahu himself who appointed him to the post of chief of staff, and who was, by every account, enthusiastic about him at the time, arguably more so than about any chief of staff he has named.

So, why is Eisenkot rising now?

For now, it’s mostly at Bennett’s expense. He has yet to show he can actually take substantial number of votes away from the Bibi bloc. Yet the trend is clear: Even if he climbs at a slower pace than he has over the past two months, he can absolutely overtake Bennett as the bloc’s front-running candidate for prime minister.

Bennett decided to join forces with the current leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid — a longtime friend of his, but a figure positioned well to the Center. The two assumed that by uniting their ticket they would seal the deal for Bennett as the bloc’s candidate for prime minister.

The opposite happened.

Their “Change Government” formed in June 2021, famously ousting Netanyahu. That alliance featured a historic rotation agreement where Bennett served as Prime Minister first, later handing the role to Lapid in July 2022 — but the coalition collapsed due to inner ideological friction and legislative defections, so the Knesset dissolved itself. Lapid served primarily as a caretaker Prime Minister for exactly 181 days, making him the shortest-serving non-interim prime minister in Israel’s history.

That move is now widely seen as a political mistake for Bennett. By aligning with Lapid, he is now perceived as more centrist himself, and his appeal as a Right-winger running for the country’s top job has been undermined — by his own hand. Bennett is already viewed by much of the Israeli Right as a traitor to the cause, simply for having formed a coalition — on the strength of a single-digit number of seats — with the camp that opposes Netanyahu.

He still holds significant appeal for Right-wing voters, and he still leads Eisenkot, if only by a very small margin. But joining forces with Lapid has eroded that lead considerably.

Voters in the anti-Netanyahu bloc ask only one question: Who can unseat the prime minister? That is the only thing uniting Avigdor Lieberman’s voters on the Right and Yair Golan’s voters on the Left — removing Netanyahu. When Bennett tied himself to Lapid, he drifted toward the Center and weakened his central claim: that he was the Right-winger, the only Right-winger, who could bring Netanyahu down.

Eisenkot is seen as the real deal. In a political universe full of Netanyahu wannabes — politicians who built their entire careers in the Netanyahu era — Eisenkot reads as a man of a different generation, far more connected to the traditional security narratives of Zionism.

Eisenkot is everything Netanyahu is not. Netanyahu grew up in an elite academic family in an upscale Jerusalem neighborhood, where his household rubbed shoulders with that of the famed Israeli writer Amos Oz. His father Benzion was a renowned scholar and one of the chief editors of the Hebrew Encyclopedia.

Eisenkot is the son of Moroccan immigrants who later divorced. The second of five children, he grew up on the “periphery” (the country’s geographically outlying and socioeconomically disadvantaged regions) in Eilat. He did not serve in Sayeret Matkal, the elite commando unit, but in Golani — a renowned infantry brigade long seen as the brigade of the people.

Netanyahu is extraordinarily eloquent, radiating an American political style that has impressed Israeli politicians for almost a generation, from Benny Gantz to Yair Lapid. Eisenkot doesn’t play that game at all. He’s a slightly heavyset, teddy-bear-like former chief of staff who has devoted his entire life to the IDF.

And while he worked closely and well with Netanyahu, he never looked to him as a model for his own public life. He doesn’t come across as someone putting on an act or straining for effect. And that is exactly what captivates the Center and Center-Left voters who were never enthusiastic about Bennett in the first place.

Much of it comes down to the electorate itself. The truth is that Israel’s Center-Left bloc is extraordinarily fickle in its devotion to its leaders. It offers no real loyalty — unlike Right-wing voters, who have stayed fiercely loyal to Netanyahu for decades.

Center-Left voters are forever shifting their allegiance from one figure to the next, and much of that churn stems from a single, anxious, perpetual question: Who can actually beat Netanyahu?

Lately, Bennett’s campaign has not managed to shine brightly enough, while Eisenkot has come across as far more aggressive toward Netanyahu. And Eisenkot can afford to be because, unlike Bennett, his claim to fame doesn’t rest on winning over Right-wing voters.

This has put Bennett in a difficult position. If he pivots to court the Center-Left voters with whom he has less natural affinity, he loses the Right-wingers he needs to win against the Prime Minister. If he pivots back to the Right, he may draw those voters in, but at the cost of the centrist majority that makes up most of the bloc.

Eisenkot is the one who benefits from precisely this bind.

Gadi Eisenkot (left), then IDF Chief of Staff, meeting with the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, in 2016 (photo: Wikipedia)

What do Bennett’s people say?

They see Eisenkot as a fata morgana — yet another mirage of the Center-Left, and proof that the camp still refuses to absorb the lesson that only someone with genuine Right-wing credentials can become prime minister after the war and October 7th.

They see the former chief of staff as a tool Netanyahu will use to his own advantage, and argue that he is precisely the candidate Bibi wants to run against — one who can be cast as too Left-wing. (Eisenkot once admitted to voting for Shimon Peres in the 1981 election — a notable choice for a young man from the periphery, then the bedrock of Menachem Begin’s Likud party, the same party that Netanyahu heads today.)

I have known Eisenkot for years, since he served as military secretary to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Eisenkot is sophisticated, and enjoys a rare quality for a politician: He is constantly underestimated. He is a deep thinker on military strategy; at times it is hard to follow his train of thought once he gets going on military history.

What Netanyahu will undoubtedly do is two things: Present him as a leftist hiding behind a banner of securitism, and try to make a joke of him.

But for any of that to matter, first things first: Eisenkot must establish himself as the leader of the bloc — and that is far from certain. His rise has been rapid, and his people report real public enthusiasm; yet Bennett is a sophisticated, fast-learning politician, and he did not become prime minister without the ability to overcome obstacles.

The worst-case scenario for the bloc would be that the two of them carry on an endless rivalry, cannibalizing their own camp, while Netanyahu secures another victory, or even a non-victory: a stalemate in which the other side fails to form a coalition, and so does he, leaving Netanyahu in power until yet another election.

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How Dictators Are Defeating Democracies

Vanessa Berg — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 22:00:58 GMT

photo: Wikipedia

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

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A few months ago, I met a friend in Lisbon, Portugal. Over coffee, we spoke about the state of the world.

Wars. America. China. Israel. Iran.

At one point, he made an observation that has stayed with me ever since: Fortune favors the dictator.

The more I think about it, the more I believe he was right.

Democracies possess enormous strengths. They are freer, more innovative, more prosperous, and ultimately more legitimate than autocracies. But they also suffer from a profound strategic weakness: They are governed by politicians whose time horizons are often measured in election cycles.

Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, play the long game.

Western governments, from city councils to national capitals, are increasingly dominated by short-term thinking because political careers themselves are short-term. In the next days, for example, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is reportedly on the brink of issuing his resignation less than two years in office.

Leaders spend as much time campaigning as governing. Every major decision is filtered through opinion polls, approval ratings, media cycles, and the next election. Democratic politicians govern under the constant shadow of political expiration. In many parliamentary democracies, governments can collapse overnight. In presidential systems, leaders face hard constitutional limits on their tenure.

Vladimir Putin does not. Neither do Iran’s ayatollahs. Nor Erdogan. Nor the Chinese Communist Party. There is no shot clock on any of their tenures.

As a result, they can pursue strategic objectives over decades rather than years. They can absorb temporary setbacks because they are not fighting for political survival every election season. They need only outlast their democratic adversaries.

The Iranian regime has understood this perfectly. For years, its nuclear strategy has rested on patience. The regime knows that American administrations come and go. Presidents serve four years, eight at most. Prior to being assassinated on February 28th, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had ruled Iran since 1989.

From Tehran’s perspective, time itself is a weapon. A five-year restriction on Iran’s nuclear program, for example, would not necessarily represent defeat. It could simply mean waiting out U.S. President Donald Trump, watching his administration leave office, and betting that his successor would be distracted by other crises.

Even now, the Iranian regime has all the reason to delay, stall, and prolong negotiations with the United States. Trump reminded us all a few days ago about the crucial 60-day negotiation period to reach a final deal, before adding more empty threats: “… if I don’t like [the deal], we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their heads. … We’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head.”

That’s because, in 60 days, U.S. midterm elections will start heating up, and the Republican Party needs a successful deal to sell to voters. The Iranian regime has seen this movie before. They know that in democracies, domestic political calendars are often more powerful than geopolitical ones. Democracies rotate priorities. Dictatorships do not.

The same principle applies to Russia. After years of war in Ukraine, Russia has suffered enormous military and economic losses. Yet the Kremlin continues to fight because Putin understands something fundamental: Democratic coalitions are inherently fragile, Western publics tire, governments change, priorities shift, elections intervene. The Kremlin does not need to win quickly. It merely needs to endure.

This creates a profound asymmetry: Authoritarian regimes govern in decades, while democratic governments increasingly govern in news cycles.

Elections are among democracy’s greatest strengths. They allow for peaceful transfers of power, accountability, and self-correction. But they are also one of democracy’s greatest vulnerabilities. Every election risks resetting national priorities. America’s adversaries understand this. Often, they simply wait for the next administration.

The challenge for democracies is not military weakness. The United States remains the most powerful nation in human history. Rather, the challenge is strategic inconsistency.

America can mobilize overwhelming force, but it often struggles to sustain strategic focus once immediate political costs emerge. This problem is especially acute in the Middle East.

Iran’s revolutionary regime is not merely another regional actor. It is the central engine behind Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, and numerous Shiite militias throughout the region. Its ambitions extend far beyond Israel. Tehran seeks regional hegemony and the gradual expulsion of American influence from the Middle East.

Confronting such a regime requires patience, persistence, and strategic clarity measured not in months, but in decades.

Instead, democratic politics frequently rewards the opposite. Leaders seek quick victories, dramatic announcements, and short-term economic gains. A temporary increase in fuel prices may prove politically more costly than pursuing a difficult long-term strategy against hostile regimes. The incentives of democratic politics often favor immediate comfort over future security.

This was Winston Churchill’s great insight.

Churchill understood that statesmen are sometimes required to ask their citizens for sacrifice rather than comfort. “Blood, toil, tears and sweat” was not merely rhetoric. It was an acknowledgment that preserving civilization often demands enduring temporary hardship. Modern democracies increasingly produce politicians who promise precisely the opposite: immediate comfort, lower prices, and the avoidance of difficult choices.

Yet democracies have overcome this challenge before.

The Cold War was not won in a single election cycle. It was won because successive American administrations — Republican and Democrat alike — sustained a grand strategy of containment against the Soviet Union for more than four decades. The Marshall Plan, NATO, America’s alliance systems in Europe and Asia, and the broader architecture of the post-war international order were all products of long-term strategic thinking.

The lesson is not that democracies cannot think long-term. It is that they must consciously choose to do so.

Israel offers an interesting case study. Many critics complain, not without reason, that the Israeli prime ministership has no term limits. Benjamin Netanyahu has now served, cumulatively, for more than 19 years across three separate periods in office.

There are obvious disadvantages to such longevity. Extended tenures can breed complacency, polarization, and excessive concentrations of power. No democratic society should ignore those dangers.

But there is also an underappreciated advantage: Political continuity allows states to pursue long-term national strategies.

Israel’s strategic culture predates Netanyahu by decades. David Ben-Gurion spent years laying the foundations of Israel’s security doctrine. Menachem Begin ordered the destruction of Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 despite fierce international opposition. Successive governments invested in intelligence capabilities, missile-defense systems, and regional alliances long before they became politically fashionable.

The development of groundbreaking defense technologies such as Iron Dome, David’s Sling, the Arrow, and Iron Beam required years of investment across multiple governments. So too did Israel’s long campaign against Iran’s nuclear program, the cultivation of relationships with Gulf states, and the patient construction of intelligence networks throughout the Middle East.

These achievements were not products of a single election cycle. They were products of continuity.

Indeed, one of Israel’s greatest geopolitical strengths has been its ability to identify existential threats early and maintain strategic focus despite constant political turbulence. Governments have changed. Coalitions have collapsed. Prime ministers have come and gone. Yet on core national-security questions, a remarkable degree of institutional memory has persisted.

None of this is an argument for dictatorship. Far from it.

Dictators possess continuity, but continuity alone is not wisdom. The absence of elections can just as easily produce catastrophe. The same system that allows a regime to pursue a 20-year strategy also allows a single leader’s delusions to go unchallenged for decades.

History is filled with examples. Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” led to one of the deadliest famines in human history. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait destroyed his regime. Adolf Hitler launched a war on multiple fronts and brought ruin upon Germany. Democracies make many mistakes. Dictators often make fewer mistakes — but when they do, those mistakes can be civilizational in scale.

The challenge facing the free world, therefore, is not to become less democratic. It is to become more strategically disciplined.

Free societies must rediscover how to preserve long-term national interests despite short-term political turnover. They must rebuild bipartisan foreign-policy consensus where possible, cultivate leaders willing to ask citizens for sacrifice rather than merely promise comfort, and strengthen institutions capable of sustaining long-term strategy.

In fact, institutions are probably more important than politicians themselves. But today, across the West, we see institutions that are increasingly politicized. Civil services, intelligence agencies, universities, regulatory bodies, and even militaries are often drawn into ideological battles that undermine public trust and distract them from their core missions.

A democracy can survive frequent changes in leadership. What it cannot easily survive is the erosion of professional institutions.

Again, Israel provides an instructive example. Israeli governments rise and fall with astonishing frequency. Yet despite this political instability, Israel has managed to maintain remarkable strategic consistency on matters of national security.

The reason is not merely Benjamin Netanyahu, or any other prime minister. The reason is institutions.

The Israel Defense Forces, Mossad, and Shin Bet have, for decades, cultivated professional cultures centered primarily on national security rather than partisan politics. These institutions preserve institutional memory, develop long-term operational plans, identify emerging threats years in advance, and ensure that Israel’s enemies cannot simply wait out a single government.

The campaign against Iran’s nuclear program and its proxies is perhaps the clearest example. It has spanned multiple governments from across Israel’s political spectrum. Labor, Kadima, Likud, and various coalition partners have all come and gone. Intelligence chiefs have retired and been replaced. Yet the underlying strategic objective has remained remarkably constant for decades.

Democracies do not defeat long-term authoritarian adversaries through charismatic politicians alone. They do so through resilient institutions staffed by professionals whose loyalty is to the state rather than to a particular party or ideology.

Indeed, one could argue that the greatest challenge facing Western democracies today is not simply political polarization. It is the weakening of the very institutions that make long-term democratic strategy possible.

Authoritarian regimes enjoy continuity because leaders remain in power indefinitely. Democracies must create continuity through institutions. If those institutions become merely another arena for partisan warfare, democracies risk losing one of their few structural advantages in the contest against regimes that think in decades.

Fortune favors the dictator — unless the democracies learn to make fortune favor them instead.

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Future of Jewish — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 10:02:12 GMT

In just the past week, here are the top essays and podcasts:

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The Jewish state is too powerful for the world’s liking.

Joshua Hoffman — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 22:01:42 GMT

photo: Cole Keister/Unsplash

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The headlines following this week’s U.S.-Iran agreement have been remarkably predictable.

Some accuse Israel of “dragging America into another Middle Eastern war.” Others insist that U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned Israel at the moment of victory. Still others portray the agreement as proof that Washington ultimately restrains Jerusalem whenever Israeli military success becomes inconvenient.

All three interpretations miss the larger story.

The agreement signed by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, which seeks to end the conflict that began with the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28th and opens a 60-day negotiation period on broader issues, reveals something far more significant: Israel may simply have become too powerful for the world’s liking.

For years, governments throughout the Middle East have viewed the Islamic Republic of Iran as the region’s principal destabilizing force. Iran finances, arms, and directs a network of proxy militias and terrorist organizations stretching from Lebanon to Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Gaza. From the Gulf monarchies to the eastern Mediterranean, few governments mourn the weakening of Iranian power.

But there is a profound difference between wanting Iran weakened and wanting the Iranian regime to collapse. A weakened Iran creates opportunities. A collapsing Iran creates uncertainty.

Who takes power? Does the country fragment along ethnic and sectarian lines? Does a new regime emerge that is more moderate, or more radical? Would regime change produce stability, or merely unleash another regional vacuum similar to those seen in Iraq, Libya, or Syria?

These questions matter enormously to countries such as Saudi Arabia.

For decades, Saudi Arabia regarded revolutionary Iran as one of its principal strategic rivals. Yet today’s Saudi leadership is simultaneously pursuing perhaps the most ambitious economic transformation in the kingdom’s history. Massive infrastructure projects, foreign investment, tourism initiatives, and long-term development plans all depend upon one indispensable condition: regional stability.

A weakened Iran may serve Saudi interests. An imploding Iran may not.

The same logic applies elsewhere.

Qatar, despite its tiny population and geographic size, has accumulated extraordinary influence by making itself strategically indispensable. It hosts major American military assets. It maintains relationships across ideological divides. It has spent years cultivating influence throughout Western institutions, universities, media organizations, and diplomatic circles.

Qatar’s power rests not upon military supremacy, but upon relevance. In a Middle East defined by competing centers of power, Qatar often serves as a bridge among them. But bridges become less valuable when one actor towers over everyone else.

And this leads to a reality that many policymakers prefer not to discuss openly: Many countries in the region do not want Israel to become significantly stronger than it already is.

This concern is not unique to the Arab world. Turkey also had reasons to oppose a decisive transformation of the regional balance.

Reports surrounding the war suggested that Israeli planners envisioned exploiting internal Iranian vulnerabilities by encouraging pressure from Kurdish, Baluchi, and Ahwazi groups, thereby stretching the regime on multiple fronts. Some reports further suggested that Kurdish elements operating from Iraqi Kurdistan could play a significant role in such a strategy.

From Ankara’s perspective, this possibility was deeply alarming.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spent years suppressing Kurdish separatism and preventing the emergence of political developments that might energize Kurdish nationalism across Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. A successful Kurdish campaign against Tehran, particularly one associated with an Israeli victory, could have reverberated far beyond Iran’s borders.

It would not merely have weakened Tehran. It might also have reshaped regional politics in ways fundamentally contrary to Turkish interests.

Turkey, like many regional powers, may welcome limits on Iranian influence, but it has little interest in seeing Israel emerge as the uncontested victor in the Middle East.

Russia and China also have reasons to view an increasingly dominant Israel with caution. Russia has spent decades positioning itself as a power broker in the Middle East. From Syria to Libya to Iran, Moscow has sought influence by balancing among competing regional actors and presenting itself as an indispensable diplomatic and military partner. A Middle East in which Israel emerges as the overwhelmingly dominant military power — particularly one closely aligned with Washington — would inevitably reduce Russia’s leverage and diminish its role as a regional arbiter.

China’s concerns are different but no less significant. Beijing’s primary interest in the Middle East is stability. China depends heavily on energy imports from the region and has invested enormous resources into expanding its economic and political footprint throughout the Gulf. Beijing prefers a regional balance in which no single power can dictate terms and in which China can maintain productive relationships with all sides simultaneously.

An Israel capable of unilaterally reshaping the regional order complicates that strategy — and that is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the current moment. Many countries wanted Iran weakened. Far fewer wanted the region transformed.

For decades, Israel’s critics portrayed the Jewish state as uniquely weak, uniquely vulnerable, and utterly dependent upon American protection.

Reality tells a different story. It is historically remarkable that a state established in the wake of the Holocaust has, within less than eight decades, become one of the world’s most formidable military, technological, intelligence, and economic powers.

There is scarcely a historical precedent for such a transformation.

As historian Walter Russell Mead once observed: “Israel did not grow strong because it had an American alliance. It acquired an American alliance because it had grown strong.”1

That observation is increasingly relevant.

The United States did not create Israeli power. Rather, successive American administrations aligned themselves with a country that had already demonstrated extraordinary military capability, social resilience, and strategic effectiveness. Ironically, some now argue that Israel has become so successful that it must be restrained.

This pattern is hardly new. Again and again, Israel is permitted to fight — but rarely permitted to decisively win. International calls for ceasefires almost invariably intensify at precisely the moment Israeli battlefield success appears within reach. Israel may be allowed to restore deterrence temporarily. It may be allowed to fight to a stalemate, but outright victory often provokes international discomfort.

No other country is so routinely urged to stop short of victory, and the reason is obvious: A decisive Israeli victory does more than defeat an adversary, it alters regional hierarchies, it redistributes influence, and it creates new realities that neighboring states, global powers, and international institutions may not welcome.

The issue, therefore, is not that America abandoned Israel, nor is it that Israel dragged America into war. Rather, Israel encountered the same phenomenon that many rising powers eventually encounter: Success itself generates resistance.

When Israel’s adversaries like Hamas and Hezbollah and their useful-idiot supporters around the world talk about “resistance,” this is precisely what they are talking about: resistance to Israel’s success. The stronger Israel becomes, the more others seek to limit the extent of its victories.

If Israel were weak, poor, isolated, militarily incompetent, or perpetually dependent on others for survival, there would be far less need for “resistance.” A failed Zionist project would garner little attention. What many of Israel’s enemies find intolerable is not simply that Israel exists, but that it exists successfully.

Israel was supposed to be a temporary experiment. Instead, it became a thriving democracy, a technological powerhouse, a military force, and an increasingly influential regional actor. It absorbed millions of Jewish immigrants from around the world, revived an ancient language, built world-class universities, developed a globally significant innovation economy, and repeatedly defeated larger adversaries on the battlefield.

For movements whose identity has been built around opposing Zionism, every Israeli success represents a political and ideological failure. Every normalization agreement, every economic achievement, every successful military operation, and every diplomatic breakthrough undermines the narrative that Israel is unnatural, illegitimate, and destined to disappear.

This helps explain why “resistance” often continues irrespective of Israeli concessions, territorial withdrawals, or peace initiatives. Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. It withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Yet the conflict persisted. The issue, for many rejectionist movements, was never solely where Israel’s borders lay. The issue was that a sovereign, powerful, and successful Jewish state existed at all.

The same dynamic increasingly extends to segments of the Western activist world. For some activists, Israel represents a deeply uncomfortable anomaly: a people once viewed primarily through the lens of persecution and powerlessness has become powerful, sovereign, and capable of defending itself. In contemporary ideological frameworks that divide the world into oppressors and oppressed, Israel’s success complicates easy moral categories.

Resistance, then, is not merely resistance to Israeli actions. In many cases, it is resistance to the fact that the Jewish People succeeded in reclaiming sovereignty, exercising power, and rebuilding in our ancestral homeland.

Which brings us back to the present moment.

The agreement between Washington and Tehran should not be understood primarily as a story of American betrayal or Israeli defeat. It is, in many ways, a recognition of a new regional reality. Many countries wanted Iran weakened. Very few wanted to see Israel emerge from the conflict even more dominant than it already was.

For decades, Israel’s enemies insisted that the Jewish state was fragile, artificial, and unsustainable. Yet today, it is precisely Israel’s growing strength that is causing anxiety throughout the region and beyond. Regional powers, global powers, and transnational institutions are all adjusting to a Middle East in which Israel is no longer merely surviving, but shaping consequential events.

The stronger Israel becomes, the more resistance it encounters — not simply from its enemies, but from allies, competitors, and observers who fear what an overwhelmingly powerful Israel might mean for the future of the Middle East.

This is the paradox of modern Israel. For centuries, Jews were persecuted because they were powerless. Today, the Jewish state is increasingly constrained because it is powerful.

The world is content with a constrained Israel, but a Jewish state approaching the mountaintop is a whole other story.

Thank you for reading Future of Jewish. Help us make more people smarter about Israel and the Jewish world.

Mead, Walter Russell. “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.” Knopf. July 5, 2022.

America owes Israel a thank-you, not a lecture.

Bob Goldberg — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 10:01:39 GMT

U.S. Vice President JD Vance (left) with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2025 (photo: Office of the Vice President of the United States/Wikipedia

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This is a guest essay by Bob Goldberg, who writes the newsletter, “The New Zionist Times.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance is worried that Israel is isolated.

He should ask why.

If President Donald Trump is now the only head of state in the world openly sympathetic to Israel, the explanation is not mysterious: Israel is isolated because it did what the rest of the world would not. It entered the war against Iran. It took the risk. It supplied the intelligence. It absorbed the retaliation. It made America’s victory possible.

This is not a sentimental point. It is a strategic one.

Operation Epic Fury destroyed Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, gutted its missile inventory, wrecked key manufacturing capacity, crippled its defense-industrial base, neutralized air-defense networks built over two decades, and eliminated senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership, including the Supreme Leader himself.

This was not a raid. It was the systematic dismantling of a regime’s war-making architecture. And it was, in crucial respects, an Israeli achievement.

Israel made Operation Epic Fury devastating because it supplied the things American power often lacks on its own: intimate access, human intelligence, target geometry, and real-time knowledge of the regime’s military architecture.

The core contribution was intelligence penetration. Israeli networks had reportedly mapped Iranian procurement channels, nuclear-support facilities, command nodes, missile infrastructure, and hardened sites that satellite collection alone could not reliably characterize.

That mattered because destroying a nuclear or missile program is not just a matter of dropping heavy ordnance. You have to know which tunnel mouth matters, which power node feeds which cascade hall, which workshop produces guidance systems, which warehouse holds solid-fuel components, and which “civilian” facility is actually part of the defense-industrial chain.

Israel also supplied targeting architecture.

Israeli intelligence gave Washington the “eyes and maps” needed to distinguish symbolic targets from system-critical ones: uranium enrichment facility layouts, missile-launch infrastructure, air-defense nodes, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command centers, manufacturing sites, and logistics chokepoints.

That allowed Operation Epic Fury to move beyond punishment strikes into something much more consequential — the dismantling of Iran’s war-making system. Your draft states the result directly: The operation damaged Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, missile inventory, air-defense network, military leadership, and manufacturing base.

Israel’s air campaign also appears to have opened the battlefield. Public reporting on the 2026 Iran war describes Israel’s “Operation Roaring Lion” campaign as involving roughly 200 Israeli aircraft striking hundreds of targets in western and central Iran, including air defenses and missile launchers, in what Israel described as its largest combat sortie. That would have degraded Iran’s ability to detect, track, and contest follow-on American strikes.

Cyber and electronic warfare were another multiplier. Reporting summarized in open-source accounts says U.S.-Israeli cyber operations disrupted Iranian command-and-control, communications, sensor networks, media, and domestic internet connectivity during the opening phase. That would have compounded the air-defense collapse. Iran was not merely hit; it was blinded, confused, and partially cut off from its own response mechanisms.

Finally, Israel — check that, Israeli civilians — absorbed the retaliation. Iran’s missile salvos against Israel were not random; they were punishment for the Israeli role in making the American strike effective. That matters politically because Israel did not merely benefit from an American operation; it helped enable one, then took the blowback.

Israel supplied the intelligence, opened the skies, identified the organs of the regime’s war machine, and then stood under the missiles when Iran tried to exact the price. American logistics, refueling, and suppression assets amplified the campaign. But the eyes were Israeli. The maps were Israeli. The operational knowledge was Israeli.

That is why the operation did not merely punish Iran; it crippled the machinery by which Iran builds, hides, launches, and commands its wars.

Iran knew this. Iran attacked Israel not because Israel was a helpless client sheltering under American protection, not because Israel had dragged America into someone else’s war. Iran struck Israel because Israel had helped America strike Iran.

That is the fact that the Trump Administration seemingly finds inconvenient.

Israel was the indispensable partner in an American campaign. It was then hit for being that partner. America used American-funded defenses, including THAAD, to help keep Israel alive under Iranian retaliation, as it did in defending other Gulf states. The difference is that the other countries (the United Arab Emirates being the exception) neither joined the fight officially nor offered America their blood and treasure as did the Jewish state.

Then Washington signed a Memorandum of Understanding that constrains Israel against Hezbollah in Lebanon while handing Iran new leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. There is a word for this, and it is not gratitude.

Trump and Vance owe Israel a thank-you, not a lecture. Without Israel, there is likely no Operation Epic Fury. Without Operation Epic Fury, there is no Iranian military collapse to convert into diplomacy. Without Israeli intelligence and Israeli willingness to absorb retaliation, there is no Memorandum of Understanding for Washington to announce.

That is the irony. The agreement exists because Israel helped weaken Iran enough to sign it. And now Israel must live with the consequences of the agreement America signed.

photo: Cherie A. Thurlby/Wikipedia

For 30 years, Pentagon wargames reached the same conclusion: Fight Iran, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps closes the Strait of Hormuz with mines, fast boats, and anti-ship missiles. This was not obscure. It was the central Iranian play.

Yet six months before Operation Epic Fury, the Navy retired its MH-53E Sea Dragon mine-countermeasure helicopters. A month later, it decommissioned Bahrain’s four Avenger-class minesweepers. Their replacements — three LCS vessels with bolt-on mine-countermeasure packages — were magnetically vulnerable and rated below 30-percent effective against modern moored mines.

Then Iran mined Hormuz within hours of the first strike. Washington had no viable unilateral way to clear it. U.S. Admiral Daryl Caudle, Chief of Naval Operations, later admitted escort operations would exceed the Navy’s effective capacity. Translation: The Navy had spent thirty years gaming the exact crisis it entered the war unable to solve.

Worse, the war plan appears to have rested on a wager: that Hormuz would reopen before emergency oil reserves reached politically critical levels. It did not. The oil reserve was not a strategy. It was a timer. Once the timer started running, Iran did not need to defeat the United States Navy. It needed only to wait until the economics of the crisis weakened Washington’s negotiating position.

That is how the Memorandum of Understanding became possible — because America had made itself dependent on Iranian cooperation to solve a crisis America had long known Iran would create.

The June 14th Memorandum of Understanding addresses mine clearance in the most revealing way: not by placing Hormuz under American, coalition, or neutral control, but by allowing full reopening within 30 days after “de-mining by the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Translation: Iran mined the strait, and Iran now certifies it safe.

After three months of war, blockade, casualties, and $130 oil barrels, Washington left Hormuz clearance and certification to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy — the force that mined it, re-mined it, kept no reliable map of its own ordnance, and had declared the strait “closed to all vessels” days earlier.

This is not peace. It is leverage.

After 60 days, Iran and Oman are to define the strait’s future “management and maritime services” with Gulf-state consultation. Temporary reopening becomes institutionalized Iranian control. Once shippers, insurers, and operators adapt to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-supervised transit, Tehran’s threat to close the strait becomes stronger, not weaker.

A rebuilt chokepoint is a better hostage.

The Memorandum of Understanding’s economic terms do not merely reward Iran. They help fund Hezbollah’s recovery. The Institute for the Study of War, published on June 17th, report captures the Iranian end-state framing with precision: Top Iranian officials were publicly claiming they had satisfied their core war aims by “controlling the Strait of Hormuz and preserving Hezbollah.” Now the Memorandum of Understanding allows Iran to use the strait to finance it’s proxy.

Iran’s renewed access to money, shipping, banking, insurance, and transport gives Hezbollah what it needs most: time, cash, and commercial cover. The pipeline was already operating before the Memorandum of Understanding. Hezbollah was paying fighters, procuring weapons, and developing drones and missiles. When air and land routes became harder, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps expanded maritime smuggling.

The Memorandum of Understanding’s normalization of Hormuz traffic gives that network cover. At commercial scale, dual-use cargo becomes just another container in the flow. This is the part Vance should study carefully.

Eight Israeli Air Force fighter jets on their way to attack Iran in June 2025 (photo: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit/Wikipedia)

Israel helped America break Iran’s war machine. The Memorandum of Understanding gives Iran a protected interval to rebuild Hezbollah, the forward trigger aimed at Israel. The mechanism is simple: Israel strikes Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran calls it an “all-fronts” ceasefire violation,and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps slows transit, suspends permits, threatens re-mining, or closes Hormuz again.

The strait is the financial gun. Hezbollah is the trigger. Lebanon is the wedge.

This is not theory. Iran has already used Hormuz as a response mechanism to Israeli operations in Lebanon. It has already tried to transform negotiations over Iran into negotiations over Israel’s freedom of action against Hezbollah. The Memorandum of Understanding gives that strategy a framework — which is why the agreement should be understood for what it is. It is not merely a framework for ending a war, but a mechanism for isolating Israel from the ally whose campaign it helped win.

Israel made Operation Epic Fury possible. Israel absorbed Iran’s revenge. Israel now faces Hezbollah’s reconstitution under cover of the agreement made possible by Iran’s defeat. And Washington calls this diplomacy.

There is a familiar pattern here: Israel acts, the world condemns, America benefits, then Washington discovers complications and asks Israel for restraint. Restraint, in this case, means allowing Iran to use Hormuz as a weapon while Hezbollah rebuilds under the cover of a ceasefire. It means turning Israel’s battlefield contribution into Israel’s strategic liability. It means thanking the fireman by handing the hydrant over to the arsonist.

If Israel is isolated, it is isolated because it stood where others would not. Europe postured. The Gulf states hedged. The international community issued statements. Israel acted.

Because Israel acted, America could strike Iran’s nuclear infrastructure with historic success. Because Israel acted, Iran was weakened enough to negotiate. Because Israel acted, Trump had a Memorandum of Understanding to announce. The thanks Israel received was an agreement that gives Iran leverage over Hormuz and time to rebuild Hezbollah.

The test now is simple: Will Washington let this architecture harden, or stop it?

Stopping it means rejecting Iran’s “all-fronts” reading of the Memorandum of Understanding. It means tranching assets against verified compliance. It means interdicting Hezbollah resupply before normal commerce hides it. It means independent mine-clearance verification, not faith in “Iranian arrangements.”

None of this is elegant. All of it is necessary.

JD Vance is right to care about American interests, but American interests are not served by treating Israel as a liability after relying on it as an asset.

Israel helped America win. Trump should say so. Vance should remember it. And Washington should not repay the only ally that entered the fight by leaving it alone with the consequences of the deal its courage made possible.

Thank you for reading Future of Jewish. Help us make more people smarter about Israel and the Jewish world.

I am leaving Britain and moving to Israel.

Ben M. Freeman — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:01:34 GMT

photo: Ian Taylor/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Ben M. Freeman, the founder of the modern Jewish Pride movement and author of the books “Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People,” “Reclaiming our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride” and “The Jews: An Indigenous People.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

In 1945, English novelist and poet George Orwell wrote his famous essay, “Antisemitism in Britain.”

It was a searing examination of Jew-hate in the UK just as the Second World War was drawing to a close and the full horrors of the Holocaust were becoming widely known.

Orwell wrote, in part:

“If, as I suggest, prejudice against Jews has always been pretty widespread in England, there is no reason to think that Hitler has genuinely diminished it.”
“He has merely caused a sharp division between the politically conscious person who realizes that this is not a time to throw stones at the Jews, and the unconscious person whose native antisemitism is increased by the nervous strain of the war.”
“One can assume, therefore, that many people who would perish rather than admit to antisemitic feelings are secretly prone to them.”
“The point is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil.”

For a period, as in much of the Western world, overt Jew-hate was driven underground in Britain.

I was born at the tail end of this post-Holocaust era. Although my late father tried to warn me that the non-Jewish world still hated Jews, I pushed back. I did not believe him. Although I knew Jew-hate had not disappeared, I would tell him: “Things have changed, Dad.”

The events of the last decade, from the Jeremy Corbyn crisis to the aftermath of October 7th, have proven that my father was right and that much of what Orwell described still rings true today. At a certain point, the cumulative effect becomes impossible to ignore. For this reason, I have decided to leave the UK and make Aliyah (immigrate to Israel).

This is not a conclusion I reached lightly. As a former Holocaust educator and the author of three books on Jewish pride and Jewish indigeneity, I have spent years thinking and writing about Jew-hate, Jewish identity, and the Jewish People’s relationship to the Land of Israel. Precisely because I have spent so much time engaged with these questions, I do not make this decision casually.

Yet none of this is merely academic. I was born in Britain. I hold a British passport. Britishness is woven into who I am. I learned about its kings and queens as my own history. I was raised on its culture, humor, and traditions. Although my Jewishness and connection to Israel were always central to my identity, I still felt deeply British.

Despite this, there is a particular exhaustion that many diaspora Jews understand: the exhaustion of constantly feeling the need to justify ourselves, defend our legitimacy, moderate our visibility, and accept scraps of acceptance as though they are acts of generosity. Many Jews in the diaspora know this feeling, even if we rarely articulate it.

October 7th and its aftermath shattered something for many of us. We watched crowds celebrate the massacre of Jews. We watched support for Hamas and other extremist groups become normalized in activist spaces and on the streets of our cities. We watched Jewish fear become something to debate, minimize, mock, or explain away.

What troubles me most is not simply the existence of anti-Jewish hatred. Jew-hate has existed in every society where Jews have lived. What troubles me is how normalized certain forms of it have become in contemporary Britain.

Part of the answer lies in a longstanding failure to understand Jew-hate itself. Too many politicians and public figures still view it exclusively through the lens of 20th-century fascism. They recognize the Nazi with a swastika. They are less willing to recognize anti-Jewish prejudice when it emerges from ideological movements they otherwise sympathize with, or when it is wrapped in the language of anti-racism, anti-colonialism, or activism.

When anti-Jewish prejudice appears on the political Left, it is frequently dismissed as confusion over Israel rather than confronted on its own terms.

Britain has also struggled to confront forms of anti-Jewish extremism that exist within parts of its Muslim population. Yet for years, many politicians, commentators, and public institutions have treated these realities as effectively undiscussable. The result has been a culture of evasion in which difficult conversations are postponed, extremism is reframed as grievance, and those who raise legitimate concerns are often treated as the problem rather than the problem’s messenger.

Many British Jews increasingly feel that the institutions responsible for protecting them neither understand the threats they face nor possess the confidence to confront them. There comes a point where you realize that you have spent years trying to persuade yourself that tolerance is the same thing as genuine belonging. I no longer want to live that way.

The issue is not whether British Jews have integrated. We have. British Jews have contributed to every aspect of national life. We have served in Parliament, in the armed forces, in medicine, business, culture, and public service. Every Shabbat, many synagogues still recite a prayer for the King and the Royal Family.

But ultimately, none of this should matter. A Jew born in Britain should not have to justify his or her place in British society any more than anyone else born here. We should not have to point to our contributions, our patriotism, or our loyalty in order to establish that we belong. We are British. That should be enough.

The question is not whether Jews have demonstrated loyalty. The question is why we are so often expected to keep proving it. A society that continually demands demonstrations of loyalty from a minority can never fully become that minority’s home.

Yet focusing solely on what I am leaving behind would miss an equally important part of the story. If rising Jew-hate in Britain explains why this decision feels urgent, it does not fully explain why I am making it.

In many ways, my decision is also the logical conclusion of my own journey. Through my work on Jewish Pride, I came to believe that Jews should define themselves through their own history, identity, and peoplehood rather than through the prejudice directed against them. That belief has not changed. If anything, it has deepened.

I believe that Jews must see themselves not merely as victims of Jew-hate, but as a people with a civilization, a culture, and an indigenous homeland. Indeed, it is precisely because I believe this that I refuse to ignore the realities facing Jews in Britain today. Jewish pride requires confidence, but it also requires honesty. It asks us to see both ourselves and the world clearly. My decision to make Aliyah is rooted in both realities.

For 2,000 years, Jews maintained an unbroken connection to the Land of Israel through prayer, ritual, memory, language, and national consciousness. Even in exile, we never regarded ourselves as adherents of a religion detached from land and peoplehood. We remained a nation dispersed from its homeland. Jerusalem was never just a metaphor. Zion was never just an abstraction.

Much of my recent work has focused on Jewish indigeneity, and that work has only reinforced what Jews themselves have always known: Our connection to the Land of Israel is not merely theological or symbolic. It is the connection of an indigenous people to its ancestral land.

For centuries, Jews maintained that connection despite exile, persecution, and repeated efforts to sever us from our history. The modern State of Israel is not the beginning of that story. It is the latest chapter in it.

Today, for the first time in two millennia, Jews once again have sovereignty in that land. The modern State of Israel represents the re-establishment of Jewish self-determination in the land where Jewish civilization emerged. For the first time in centuries, Jews are not only a minority in someone else’s society; we are participating in the development of our own.

Some will ask why I am making this move in the middle of a war. The answer is simple: If Israel is home, then it is home in times of war as well as peace. Waiting for perfect certainty would mean waiting forever.

I am not making Aliyah because I believe life in Israel will be free from challenges. Rather, I am making Aliyah because, as a Jew in the 21st century, I possess a privilege that most previous generations of Jews could scarcely imagine.

For most of our history, Jews fleeing persecution could only move from one diaspora community to another, exchanging one uncertainty for a different one. I have a different option. I can leave a country where Jew-hate is becoming increasingly normalized and return to the indigenous homeland of the Jewish People.

I can live in the place where Jewish civilization emerged, where Hebrew is spoken in the streets, and where Jewish life is lived openly rather than constantly negotiated with others. I can help build the future of the Jewish people in the place where our story began.

For most of Jewish history, returning home was a dream. For my generation, it is a choice.

Today, I made mine.

A version of this essay also appeared in the Jerusalem Journal.

Thank you for reading Future of Jewish. Help us make more people smarter about Israel and the Jewish world.

The most important Jewish victory happened after we lost.

Adam Hummel — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 10:02:59 GMT

A modern replica of the First Jewish–Roman War (photo: Wikipedia)

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This is a guest essay by Adam Hummel, a lawyer in Toronto.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

I recently finished reading the book, “Jews vs. Rome.”

The author, Barry Strauss, walks the reader through roughly two centuries of Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire, from the first uprising that erupted in 63 BCE to Bar Kokhba’s last stand around 135.

It is full of names most of us have only half heard: Simon son of Giora and John of Giscala, the rival rebel commanders who held Jerusalem against the legions, and Bar Kokhba himself, the messianic and barbaric warlord of the final revolt. Cities lost, walls breached, the Second Temple burned to ash in the year 70 CE and its treasures hauled off to Rome as someone else’s trophy.

And then, in the epilogue, Strauss tells you what the whole bloody story was for.

The Jews of ancient Israel lost battle after battle, and yet Strauss calls them one of history’s great examples of a people who can lose on the field and still prevail. Lose and prevail — not lose and endure, which would be sad, and not lose and recover, which would be lucky.

Prevail.

We were the people who learned how to be defeated and go on being ourselves anyway, and that, it turns out, is a rarer skill than winning.

The strategy behind it was almost reckless. Once the Temple was gone and the revolts crushed, the surviving rabbis made a bet that Strauss clearly admires: that a people could outlast its conquerors on spiritual armour rather than the metal kind. They traded the Temple for the study house or synagogue, the sword for the book. No army, no fortress, no king. Just text, memory, and the stubborn refusal to dissolve into whoever happened to be ruling.

It was a wild thing to wager a nation and a future on, but it worked. Two thousand years later, the culture is — in Strauss’s words — remarkably similar to what it was under Rome, which is to say we are still arguing about the same passages and lighting the same lights.

I read this passage several times because so much of what I write circles that watchtower: the fatigue, the vigilance, the sense of standing guard over something fragile.

But consider that a thing which has outlasted Rome isn’t necessarily fragile. We the Jewish People have buried more empires than most peoples have ever met. Rome is a ruin you pay to walk through, snapping pictures of Roman soldiers carrying the Menorah on the Arch of Titus on the way out of the Forum. Yet we are the ones still walking.

Strauss is too honest to leave it there, and I love him for it. Spiritual armour kept the soul intact, he says, but it left a great many bodies unprotected, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise: a straight line from antiquity to the Crusades to the pogroms to the Holocaust. The spirit is the most important thing, he writes, but it is not the only thing.

A people needs a sword too — and a strategy for how to hold it.

Then there’s this: The Jewish rebels who fought Rome were a remarkable generation, capable of the best and the worst in the national character. Brave, swift, deadly. Also factionalized, also poisoned by what the Talmud calls sinat chinam, causeless hatred of one another. They had troops to train and walls to build and Romans to ambush, and instead they spent their last good years fighting each other inside a city that was about to fall.

Strauss calls it military and political malpractice. The Jews of Jerusalem had everything they needed to make Rome bleed. The one thing they could not manage was each other.

I read that passage and winced, because it’s not only ancient history. Need proof? Just look around at our own community.

But the uplifting reading is right there if you reach for it. The thing the ancients could not do is the thing now in front of us. They had the sword and lacked the unity. We have, mostly, the unity that survival forces on a people, and now, for the first time in 2,000 years, we have the sword back too.

That’s the miracle Strauss, a historian, saves for the end. He tells the story of a gold medallion dug up near the southern wall of the Temple Mount in 2013, a menorah at its centre, buried with a small hoard of coins around 614 CE by someone who meant to come back for it. It took almost 1,400 years for anyone to lift it out of the ground.

Fourteen hundred years is a long time to keep a promise to the soil. But that’s the whole of us in one object. We are the people who bury the Menorah and trust that someone, someday, will be standing in Jerusalem to find it. And now someone is.

Strauss closes on the oldest vow we have, the psalmist swearing that if he forgets Jerusalem, let his right hand forget its skill. For most of Jewish history that was a love letter to a place we couldn’t reach. Today it’s an address. One that requires a bus pass, a rental car, or an airline ticket to reach in minutes or days.

This month the point makes itself. Recently, we marked 59 years since Israeli paratroopers fought their way through the stone alleys of the Old City and reached the Western Wall, and a brigade commander named Motta Gur radioed back the three Hebrew words that still give me goosebumps: “Har HaBayit BeYadenu!” (“The Temple Mount is in our hands!”)

It was one more battle for the walls of Jerusalem, in a line that stretches back 2,000 years — except this time, when the smoke cleared, the Jews were the ones left holding the city. Strauss calls the ancient revolts glorious failures.

The fight for Jerusalem in 1967 was that same heroism with the ending rewritten. And the gold medallion was pulled from the earth beside the southern wall of that very mount, buried by someone who could never have let themselves dream that the soldiers who would one day take the city back would be speaking Hebrew.

The return that Simon son of Giora and Bar Kokhba died reaching for, that the rebels squandered on faction, that the rabbis preserved without ever expecting to see, has actually happened, and we are the generation alive inside the answer.

So here is what being Jewish today is: being a living link in the most durable thing human beings have ever built, a chain that ran through fire it had no business surviving and kept its shape. It is holding both hands open at last: the scroll that carried us when we had nothing else, and the sword we were not allowed to carry for far too long.

The trick now, the only trick that was ever the point, is to wield the one with the wisdom of the other.

Strauss said it best by pointing at Homer. For weapons you go to Odysseus, the warrior who is cunning enough to find his way home. For wisdom you go to the rabbis. The question was never whether to hold the sword. It was always how to hold it without becoming the thing we fought.

We are, finally, the people who get to answer that. What a privilege, to be born into the chapter that gets to try.

A people can lose every war and still win the long argument, and we are the proof of it.

Strauss’s history lands on three things worth carrying around: that we survived on spirit when we had nothing else, that our worst defeats came not from Rome but from turning on each other, and that the return our ancestors swore to and never saw is the ordinary fact of our lives now.

The ancients had the sword without the unity. We have a second chance at both.

Being Jewish today is not only standing guard over something fragile. It is getting to be the living link in something that has outlasted every empire which tried to end it, holding the scroll in one hand and the sword in the other, and being asked to be wise enough to carry them together.

Thank you for reading Future of Jewish. Help us make more people smarter about Israel and the Jewish world.

I escaped Hezbollah — and found the truth about Israel.

Rawan Osman — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:01:28 GMT

Author Rawan Osman speaks at an event in Germany. (photo: author provided)

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This is a guest essay by Guy Goldstein, a third-generation Holocaust survivor.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

I grew up in a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a fertile valley in eastern Lebanon and its most important farming region, located about 30 kilometers east of Beirut.

Israel was not a country in my education. It was a crime — a wound kept open on purpose. Every funeral, every slogan, every sermon pointed in the same direction: There, across the border, is the source of your suffering.

Believe it. Repeat it. Pass it on.

I believed it. I repeated it. For years.

Then I moved to France, and I met Jews — not the abstraction, not the enemy, but real people, neighbors, and colleagues. And the collision between what I had been taught and what I was seeing in front of me was so violent — so intellectually embarrassing — that I had no honest choice but to start over by reading, asking, and dismantling, brick by brick, everything I had been given as truth.

What I found on the other side of that dismantling was not just the absence of hatred. It was something I had not expected: admiration.

Let me be precise about what I am defending and what I am not.

I am not defending every Israeli policy. I am not defending any government unconditionally. I am not asking anyone to check their critical faculties at the door.

Instead, I am defending what Israel is, what it represents, and what it has built, against every conceivable pressure, in a region that has largely failed its own people.

Israel is a democracy in a neighborhood of autocracies. It is a state governed by law in a region where law is routinely weaponized against citizens. It is a country where Arabs sit in parliament, where women lead, where dissent is not a death sentence. It is imperfect — as every democracy is — but it is genuinely, structurally different from everything surrounding it.

That difference is not incidental. It is the point.

The so-called “Palestinian cause,” as it is prosecuted today, is not a national liberation movement. I say this not to dismiss Palestinian suffering; suffering is real, and real people pay its price. I say it because the infrastructure of the “cause” — its funders, its ideologues, its loudest champions — has never been interested in Palestinian statehood. It has been interested in Jewish elimination.

Look at who built the movement’s international architecture. Look at the 1997 Organization of the Islamic Conference summit held in Tehran, where the language of “apartheid” was first systematically attached to Israel, not by Palestinians, but by the Iranian regime, for export.

Look at Durban, the infamous 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa — the moment when the geopolitical strategy conceived by Iran was successfully mainstreamed on the world stage, to shift the international framework of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a territorial dispute to a human rights struggle against a racist regime.

Look at who profits when the conflict continues and who loses when it tries to resolve. The answer is never the Palestinian family in Gaza. The answer is always the regime, the militia, the ideological infrastructure that needs the wound open.

The Palestinian cause, as it functions globally today, is a tool of an anti-Western civilizational project. Its goal is not a state alongside Israel. Its goal is a world without Israel, and, by extension, a world where the values Israel represents are defeated. Liberal democracy. Jewish self-determination. The idea that a small people can survive, build, and insist on their own dignity against the will of those who would erase them.

When Western “progressives” march under that banner, they are not marching for freedom. They are marching for the annihilation of the only thing in the Middle East that resembles what they claim to value.

I came to Judaism slowly, the way you come to something true, not in a rush, but in accumulation.

It was not the politics that moved me first. It was the texts — the insistence, running through thousands of years of Jewish thought, that the human being is created in the image of G-d, and that this is not a metaphor but an obligation. An obligation to see the other, to argue, to question, to hold power accountable, including your own.

I had grown up in a culture where the highest virtue was submission to the leader, the militia, the narrative. Judaism confronted me with the opposite proposition: that G-d does not want your silence.

That wrestling with truth is itself a form of worship.

And then there is the resilience — not the resilience of stubbornness, but the resilience of a people who have survived every civilization that tried to destroy them and responded not with conquest but with contribution, law, literature, medicine, and the insistence, generation after generation, that life is worth protecting and that the world can be made more just.

Israel is the political expression of that tradition: an improbable state, a people who returned to their ancestral land after two thousand years of exile and built, in decades, what their neighbors have not managed in centuries. Not because they are superior, but because they were shaped by a tradition that takes civilization seriously.

That is what is under attack. Not a government. Not a policy. A civilization.

I am Syrian-Lebanese. I was born in Damascus. I was raised on Hezbollah’s version of history. My family has paid a price for my choices. I live under threat.

I am telling you this not for sympathy, but because who is speaking matters.

I am not a Westerner who discovered Israel on a Birthright trip. I am not someone who stumbled into this position from comfort. I came from inside the machine that produces hatred of Israel, and I am telling you: The machine is a lie. I have seen both sides from the inside, and there is no honest comparison.

Israel is not our enemy. It never was. Our enemy is the ideology that needed us to believe otherwise because as long as we were pointed at Israel, we were not looking at what was being done to us.

I support Israel because I believe in civilization. Because I believe in the dignity of every human being, including my own. Because I found, in Judaism and in the state it produced, something worth defending — not despite my background, but because of everything my background taught me to recognize.

The truth, when you finally reach it, does not feel like a revelation. It feels like something you should have known all along.

Thank you for reading Future of Jewish. Help us make more people smarter about Israel and the Jewish world.

The Real Reason Israel Doesn’t Go to the World Cup

Vanessa Berg — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:03:39 GMT

Ronny Rosenthal (center) playing for Israel at the 1990 FIFA World Cup qualification against New Zealand (photo: Israeli Zvika/Wikipedia)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

There is a lazy explanation that people repeat: Israel just “can’t qualify” for the World Cup.

That’s technically true in the same way saying a fighter “lost because he got knocked out” is true. It describes the outcome, not the system that produced it.

The real story is more uncomfortable — and far more revealing about how international sport actually works when politics enters the pitch. Fittingly, our story starts with Iran.

Iranian football’s rise in the 1950s and 1960s tracked closely with Iran’s broader modernization under the Shah. In the 1950s, the national team was still inconsistent and regionally minor, but its participation in early Asian competitions marked a shift: Sport was becoming part of how Iran presented itself internationally, even before it had the infrastructure or consistency of a footballing power.

By the early 1960s, results improved enough to make football politically visible. Wins and losses against regional rivals like Iraq, India, and Pakistan began attracting attention from top political leadership, including direct criticism when results disappointed. By the mid-1960s, football had overtaken wrestling as Iran’s most popular sport.

Iran–Israel relations at this stage were structurally contradictory. Officially, there were no formal diplomatic ties, and Tehran carefully avoided open recognition. But practically, relations were extensive: intelligence cooperation, oil exports, trade, airline routes, and technical exchanges all continued. Israel maintained a presence in Tehran, while Iran simultaneously aligned itself (at least rhetorically) with Arab positions in international forums, especially at the United Nations.

This dual-track relationship created a political tension that would eventually spill into sport. After the 1967 Six-Day War, public sentiment inside Iran shifted more strongly in favor of Arab and Palestinian positions. Anti-Israel rhetoric increased in the press and public discourse, while the state attempted to balance domestic opinion with its quiet strategic ties to Israel. Football, now a mass national obsession, became one of the few arenas where this contradiction could surface indirectly.

That contradiction became visible in the 1968 Asian Cup in Tehran, where Iran and Israel met in a final that carried meaning far beyond sport. The match unfolded in a climate shaped by post-1967 regional anger, Iranian public sympathy for Arabs, and growing discomfort with the Shah’s perceived closeness to Israel.

Although Iran and Israel still cooperated behind the scenes, the public atmosphere had shifted. The match was accompanied by nationalist and anti-Israel expressions in the stands, and afterward violence targeted parts of Iran’s Jewish community. The key shift wasn’t just the game itself, but the realization that football had become a container for political identity conflict inside Iran—not just a sporting rivalry.

That event also triggered a longer-term effect: growing insecurity among Iranian Jews and the beginning of more visible emigration pressures, even as official Iran–Israel cooperation continued.

In the years that followed, Iranian football entered its “golden age,” winning multiple Asian Cups and failing to qualify for early World Cups. This culminated in Iran’s decision to host the 1974 Asian Games in Tehran, an elaborate showcase designed to project an image of a modern, outward-looking, and increasingly influential state under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

As one of the Shah’s key regional partners at the time, Israel was invited to take part in the competition. Four years earlier, the then-22-year-old Jewish state qualified for the World Cup held in Mexico (as part of the Asian Football Confederation), Israel’s first and only participation in the global football event.

But the 1974 Games also exposed how far sport had become politicized in Asia. The Arab–Israeli conflict increasingly shaped sporting participation, and Israel’s presence in Asian sport was already under pressure from boycotts and diplomatic opposition. During the Games, multiple delegations refused to compete against Israeli athletes across different sports, turning the event into a stage for coordinated political protest rather than unified competition.

In football, Israel entered the tournament regarded as one of the stronger teams in contention for the gold medal, a view also held by Iran’s manager Frank O’Farrell. Yet its path to the final was unusual: It advanced in part because both North Korea and Kuwait declined to face it for political reasons. As one Egyptian journalist based in Kuwait put it to his Israeli counterpart:

“I can only drink coffee with you, but playing football — we can’t. We have instructions, there is a government, we took a decision not to appear against Israel. It’s forbidden, it’s forbidden.”1

For Israel, this was a turning point: Even when it was physically present in Asian sport, it was being systematically excluded from competition itself. For Iran, it revealed a contradiction the regime could no longer fully control — hosting Israel in Tehran while simultaneously operating in an Asian sporting environment where boycott politics were becoming the norm.

By the time the football tournament reached its final stage, Iran and Israel again found themselves positioned toward a confrontation that was no longer accidental. Reports and decisions around scheduling, refereeing assignments, and group placements created a perception that Iran’s sporting establishment was not neutral. The symbolism of Iran as host, Israel as participant, and the wider Arab political context made the final feel predetermined in its meaning even before kickoff.

“Iranian Jews extended their hospitality to us, presented us with gifts, and even encouraged us throughout the tournament,” said Shiyeh Feigenboym, who played for the Israeli football national team. “However, prior to the final, they notified us they couldn’t attend. They marked Jewish houses, and consequently, they were absent from the final.”2

The 1974 final thus became the climax of a long escalation: from Iran’s modernization and football’s rise, to Iran–Israel covert cooperation, to post-1967 political polarization, to the 1968 rupture, and finally to the Asian Games where sport itself had become a proxy arena for regional alignment.

Players and journalists described the Iran–Israel final not as a game, but as an environment saturated with political meaning.

“Five minutes into the game, Shalom Schwarz made a break on the left side and passed me the ball about 20 meters from the goal. I took a powerful shot, and the ball hit the crossbar,” Feigenboym recounted. “Ultimately, we lost 1 to 0 due to an own goal by Yitzhak Shum. After the game, the players told me: ‘Listen, if your shot had gone in at the start, they would have lynched us.’ That was the prevailing sentiment.”

Two weeks later, on September 14, 1974, just as the Asian Games were drawing to a close, the Asian Football Confederation expelled Israeli football. The move barred Israel from participating in official Asian Football Confederation competitions and prevented it from hosting matches under the organization’s framework, including the cancellation of the Asian Nations Cup qualifiers scheduled to be held in Israel in 1975.

Israel winning the 1964 Asian Football Confederation’s Asian Cup (photo: Wikipedia)

This followed a familiar trend for much of the post-1948 period, after Israel humiliated the five attacking Arab armies in its War of Independence that year. Many Arab and Muslim states refused to recognize Israel diplomatically, which set the baseline for its regional isolation. This translated into a broader Arab League boycott that restricted trade and investment ties, including secondary and tertiary pressure on companies doing business with Israel.

In parallel, Israel was largely shut out of regional frameworks — economic, transport, cultural, and academic — because participation in such systems depended on political recognition that most states withheld.

Israel was eventually placed into the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) in the 1990s. This is often misunderstood as geography. It isn’t. It’s governance. FIFA’s confederations are not continents. They are administrative ecosystems designed to ensure predictable fixtures, functioning qualification cycles, and politically survivable competition structures.

Israel moved not because Europe was “closer,” but because Europe was stable enough to host its participation without constant breakdowns. That solution came with a hidden cost that is almost never stated clearly.

Once Israel entered UEFA, it didn’t just change opponents. It changed probability. In UEFA World Cup qualifying, Israel now competes in the densest concentration of elite national teams on earth: France, Spain, Germany, England, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, Croatia, and Belgium. And underneath them, there is a second tier of nations that would be dominant across any other confederation.

In most regions, a team can build a qualification path through lower-ranked opponents, regional balance, and occasional upsets. In Europe, there is no stable “lower tier” to rely on. Every group is a knife fight. A single bad window can end everything.

So when people ask why Israel isn’t in the World Cup, they are often asking the wrong question. The real question is: Why did Israel’s route get placed in the most competitive system in the sport?

International football is built on a contradiction: It treats national identity as fixed (you represent your country), but treats it competition structure as adjustable (you play where governance allows). So outcomes are not just about talent; they are about placement. And placement is history.

Hence why Israeli football is good all things considered (it is the most popular sport in Israel), yet countries like Iraq, Qatar, Jordan, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, and Haiti qualify for the World Cup while the Jewish state does not.

Israel moving from the Asian Football Confederation to the Union of European Football Associations solved one problem, but it created another: Israel’s seemingly forever absence in the World Cup.

One could make the argument that this is effectively a boycott without the formal declaration.

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Interview with Machnes; Maariv, September 8, 1974.

“When Israel last faced Iran on Soccer field.” Ynet News.

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Future of Jewish — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 23:00:22 GMT

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Israel keeps winning wars. So why are we losing?

Joshua Hoffman — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:01:10 GMT

photo: IDF/X

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You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

Israel has spent decades becoming extraordinarily good at winning military battles, conflicts, and confrontations.

Its intelligence services penetrate enemy networks. Its military can strike targets thousands of miles away. Its technology sector produces tools that most countries cannot replicate. Its enemies routinely underestimate it and pay the price.

Yet something strange keeps happening: Israel wins on the battlefield and loses seemingly everywhere else.

This is not a new phenomenon. In many ways, it began the moment Israel achieved its most decisive military victory.

In 1967, Israel defeated multiple Arab armies in six days. Militarily, it was one of the most extraordinary victories in modern history. But the Arab world learned a valuable lesson from that war: If you cannot defeat Israel militarily, stop fighting where Israel is strongest — and fight the Jewish state elsewhere.

Fight in traditional and modern media. Fight in education and academia. Fight in local and international organizations. Fight in culture. Fight in diplomacy. Fight through activists, celebrities, academics, journalists, influencers, and social media.

Over time, much of the Arab world’s strategy evolved accordingly. The objective became not necessarily to defeat Israel on the battlefield, but to shape how the battlefield itself was understood.

Israel, meanwhile, continued investing primarily in the tools that had delivered victory before: military superiority, intelligence superiority, technological superiority. Those investments were and still are necessary, but they are no longer sufficient in and of themselves.

It appears that wars are not won solely on battlefields anymore. They are won in the stories people tell about those battlefields. The recent Iran war demonstrated this reality more clearly than perhaps any conflict in recent memory.

From a military perspective, the campaign was remarkably straightforward. Iran had spent decades funding proxy armies across the Middle East that deliberately destabilize the region. It had threatened regional allies, global shipping routes, energy markets, and Western interests. It was pursuing capabilities that many policymakers believed would fundamentally alter the strategic balance of the region and beyond.

Whether one supported the military campaign or opposed it, the strategic rationale was easy to explain. Yet much of the public messaging surrounding the conflict felt disconnected from ordinary people.

The argument centered overwhelmingly on nuclear weapons. The problem is that nuclear weapons are an abstraction for most citizens. Most people do not wake up wondering about uranium enrichment levels. They wake up wondering why groceries cost more than they did last year. They wonder why gas prices rise. They wonder why supply chains break. They wonder why global instability makes everyday life more expensive and less predictable.

The real argument was never simply about nuclear weapons. It was about leverage.

A nuclear-armed Iran would possess greater ability to intimidate neighbors, threaten shipping lanes, influence energy markets, and extract concessions from governments and companies around the world. The consequences would not be limited to diplomats and generals. They would eventually reach consumers.

That is the language people understand — not centrifuges, not enrichment percentages, not technical briefings, but interests, costs, prices, security, and stability.

This is why many Americans looked at the operation against then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and saw an action tied, however imperfectly, to concrete American interests. Yet when it came to Iran, policymakers often spoke as if the public spent its evenings reading nuclear inspection reports rather than worrying about gas prices, inflation, and economic uncertainty.

The inability to consistently translate strategic realities into everyday language has become one of Israel’s greatest weaknesses. For years, Israel has often approached communications as an extension of diplomacy. Statements are crafted for policymakers, journalists, and experts. But the battlefield has changed. Today’s information environment rewards simplicity, emotion, repetition, and accessibility.

A 20-page policy paper loses to a 30-second video. A carefully worded government statement loses to a viral influencer. A factual explanation loses to a compelling story. Israel’s adversaries understand this. Increasingly, Israel’s allies understand it too. Israel often does not, or at least it does not execute according to this understanding.

This challenge cannot be solved by Israeli government ministries alone, nor by one or even a handful of NGOs or independent nonprofits. The scale of the problem is too large, and the speed of execution is too fast. Winning the next information war requires building a decentralized ecosystem long before the next military war begins. In other words: today, now, immediately, without delay.

That ecosystem should include Jewish organizations, Zionist organizations, academics, business leaders, creators, influencers, celebrities, policymakers, educators, and independent voices who can communicate to different audiences in different languages and through different platforms — not because they are taking orders from a government, but because narratives do not spread through governments anymore. They spread through decentralized networks.

The next conflict will not begin when the first attack is launched. It will begin years earlier: in classrooms, podcasts, documentaries, social media feeds, think tanks, entertainment, and public discourse. By the time a war starts, most people will already have decided how they interpret it. That is the uncomfortable reality that Israel and the Jewish People face.

The country’s military capabilities continue to improve. Its intelligence capabilities continue to improve. Its technological capabilities continue to improve. But power itself has changed. Military power remains essential. Intelligence power remains essential. And soft power increasingly determines whether military victories translate into strategic victories.

The Arab world recognized this decades ago and adjusted accordingly. Israel now faces a choice: It can continue fighting twentieth-century wars with 21st-century weapons and 21st-century communications challenges, or it can recognize that the battlefield has tremendously evolved.

photo: Yoav Aziz/Unsplash

Whenever this conversation comes up, there is always a predictable objection from within the Jewish community. It goes something like this: “What’s the point? The people who hate us will always hate us.”

There is truth in that statement. Some people will never change their minds. Some people hated Jews before Israel existed, hate Jews now, and will continue hating Jews regardless of what Israel says or does. No communications strategy can persuade someone who has made hatred part of their identity.

But that is the wrong standard.

The purpose of communication is not to convince everyone. No movement, country, religion, company, or political cause in history has ever persuaded everyone. The question is whether you can persuade enough people. I believe the answer is yes. In fact, I know it is yes.

The mistake many Jews make is assuming that because the loudest anti-Israel and anti-Jewish voices are unreachable, everyone is unreachable. They are not. Most people are not activists or ideologues. Most people are busy. They have jobs, goals, living expenses, and routines. They are not spending hours every day or even every week thinking about the Middle East. They are looking for quick, simple, and easy explanations from people they trust.

That audience matters far more than the extremists on either side.

The goal is not to win an argument with the most committed Jew-hater on social media. The goal is to reach the billions of people watching quietly from the sidelines who have not yet made up their minds, or whose minds are at least malleable. That audience is persuadable. It always has been.

And every successful movement in history understood something: You do not build influence by obsessing over the people you cannot reach. You build influence by investing in the people you can. The Arab world understood this decades ago. It invested heavily in shaping how outsiders understood its story. Israel and the Jewish world must learn to do the same — not because everyone can be convinced, but because enough people can.

Since October 7th, I have published many guest essays on Future of Jewish from people whose views changed. Some arrived skeptical of Israel. Others were indifferent to Jewish issues altogether. Many had absorbed simplistic narratives about Jews, Israel, and Zionism because those were the only narratives they had ever encountered.

Then something happened. They met Jews. They read more about Israel. They encountered realities they had never heard before. They experienced October 7th and the months that followed. They listened. They learned. They reconsidered.

Not all of them became Zionists overnight. Not all of them agree with every Israeli policy. Not all of them think Jews are God’s gift to our planet Earth. That was never the point. The point is that their minds changed. Their hearts changed. And once enough individual hearts and minds change, public opinion changes.

This is the lesson that much of Israel and the Jewish world still struggle to absorb. We continue to think in top-down terms. We have over-invested in government ministries, organizations, and institutional campaigns. Those things matter, but they are increasingly downstream of something more powerful: Culture is downstream of people, public opinion is downstream of relationships, and narratives are downstream of trust.

The modern information environment is not controlled from the top. It is built from the bottom, one conversation, one podcast, one article, one social media post, one friendship, one creator, one influencer, one converted skeptic at a time. It sounds cliché, and it is, but clichés tend to be true, and this case is no different.

photo: Anton Mislawsky/Unsplash

For decades, Israel and the Jewish world have communicated as if the only people who mattered sat in conference rooms. But influence no longer flows from the top down. It flows through networks. The audience is no longer just presidents, diplomats, and newspaper editors. The audience is everyone else: the student scrolling TikTok, the entrepreneur listening to a podcast, the celebrity with millions of followers, the journalist looking for a source, the professor teaching a class, and the voter who knows almost nothing about the Middle East but will form an opinion about it sooner or later.

Win enough of those people and the politicians follow. Lose them and the politicians eventually follow that too.

The future of Israel’s soft power (and, by extension, the Jewish world’s soft power) will not be decided primarily in ministries, embassies, conference rooms, or fundraising events. It will be decided by thousands of independent voices making a compelling case to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of ordinary people long before the next crisis arrives.

That is how opinions change. That is how culture changes. And ultimately, that is how history changes.

In a world where attention is scarce, narratives travel faster than facts, and self-interest shapes opinion, winning the war is no longer enough. We also have to win the story.

The good news is, we have plenty of stories to choose from — both past and present. Those stories remain extraordinary, and they remain essential, but they must be adapted to the modern age, at scale.

The challenge of our time is different from the challenge of previous generations. We cannot assume that military victories alone will secure Israel’s future. Nor can we assume that economic influence alone will do the job.

The reality is that there are countries with larger populations than ours, countries with larger armies than ours, countries with more territory than ours, countries with vastly more natural resources than ours, countries with sovereign wealth funds that dwarf the budgets of most Jewish organizations combined.

Trying to outspend them is a losing game. Trying to outnumber them is an impossible game. Fortunately, neither of those has ever been the Jewish strategy.

The Jewish People never became influential because we were the largest group in the room. We became influential because we learned how to build. We built institutions. We built communities. We built companies. We built schools. We built ideas. We built networks. We built a country from almost nothing and transformed it into one of the most innovative societies on earth.

That is our comparative advantage — and it happens to be exactly the advantage that matters most in the world we are entering.

For centuries, we have told stories powerful enough to survive empires. Now we must learn how to tell them again.

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Israel exposed the war inside Trump's White House.

Guy Goldstein — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:01:43 GMT

photo: Natilyn Hicks Photography/Unsplash

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