America owes Israel a thank-you, not a lecture.
After helping the U.S. cripple Iran, Israel is being asked to accept an agreement that could leave it more vulnerable than before.
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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.
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.
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.
Bob, excellent article.
What has disturbed me almost as much as the agreement itself is the treatment of Israel throughout this process. It's not simply a matter of failing to thank Israel for its role. The way Israel has reportedly been treated has been disgraceful.
Israel supplied intelligence, took risks, absorbed retaliation, and helped make the military success possible. Yet when it came to shaping the agreement, Israel appears to have been pushed to the sidelines. Reports that Israel asked to see or participate in discussions regarding the document and was essentially told no are deeply troubling.
It leaves many of us wondering: who exactly is being listened to? Qatar? Turkey? Pakistan? How is it possible that countries with their own agendas seem to have more influence over the process than the nation that carried so much of the burden?
I continue to support Trump, and I'm not prepared to pass final judgment until the 60 days are up and we see the final outcome. If this process ultimately produces a verifiable end to Iran's nuclear ambitions, then much of today's criticism may prove premature.
But regardless of how the negotiations end, the treatment of Israel has been difficult to understand and impossible to justify.
And as for JD Vance, I have to admit that I was never entirely comfortable with his views on foreign policy. After watching how this has unfolded, I'm considerably less comfortable today than I was before.
America owes a lot to Israel .. those who cosy up to Qatar are fools .. Qatar is state sponsor of worldwide terrorist group, Muslim Brotherhood .. banned in Egypt, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and others .. for the USA to count Qatar as an ally, ie being bought off is a disgrace .. Trump, Vance and others are morally and financially corrupt .. accepting the Boeing 747 from Qatar is but one example.