The Global Left's War on Israel and the United States

Many on the global Left are more determined to undermine Israel and America than to confront the authoritarian regimes threatening global stability.

The Left applies more criticism to democratic leaders like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu than it does to authoritarian regimes. (photo: The White House from Washington, DC)

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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.

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In theory, the primary responsibility of political leaders is simple: Safeguard the security and long-term interests of their nations and allies. In practice, that responsibility is increasingly being subordinated to ideological reflexes, especially across large segments of the global Left.

The result is an extraordinary paradox. At a moment when authoritarian regimes are expanding their influence and destabilizing the international system, many Western political movements appear more determined to oppose Israel and the United States than to confront the regimes that openly threaten them.

Much of this dynamic revolves around Iran.

For decades, the Islamic Republic has defined itself through hostility to the United States and Israel. The regime’s founding thesis — chanted in the streets and institutionalized in its education system, media, mosques, and overall ideology — remains “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” Its proxies have killed hundreds of Americans, its militias destabilize multiple Middle Eastern states, and its leadership openly calls for Israel’s destruction.

And yet, in Western political discourse, the primary skepticism is often directed not at Tehran, but at Washington and Jerusalem.

Consider the recent comments of U.S. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said that “there was no imminent threat to the United States of America by the Iranians.” This statement ignores nearly half a century of reality.

Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Islamic Republic has been engaged in a sustained campaign of hostility toward the United States, Israel, and their allies. American embassies have been attacked. American soldiers have been killed. Israel has faced thousands of rockets and missile attacks from groups trained and financed by Iran. Terrorist networks funded by Tehran operate across the Middle East and beyond. If that does not constitute an ongoing threat, it becomes difficult to imagine what would.

Does Mark Warner not remember the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, when 66 Americans, including diplomats and other civilian personnel, were taken hostage at the Embassy of the United States in Tehran, with 52 of them being held until January 1981?

Similarly, U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer recently said he found the Trump Administration’s justification for military action against Iran “completely and totally insufficient.” But what answers are still required when the regime’s central theme remains “Death to America,” no less that it has been lying for decades about its nefarious nuclear weapons program?

Unsurprisingly, the same pattern appears across Europe.

Spain reportedly refused permission for the United States to use certain bases for strikes on Iranian targets. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer initially blocked American use of British bases. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that “the outbreak of war between the United States, Israel, and Iran carries grave consequences for international peace and security,” adding that “the ongoing escalation is dangerous for all. It must stop.” But the Islamic Republic’s routine actions and rhetoric have already had grave consequences for international peace and security since 1979, serving as the core driver of this “escalation.”

Its Revolutionary Guard has built a network of terror proxies stretching from Lebanon to Yemen. It has destabilized Iraq, fueled the Syrian civil war, armed Hezbollah and Hamas, and threatened the shipping lanes through which much of the world’s energy supply travels.

The real question is not whether confronting the regime carries risks. The question is how much longer the free world is expected to endure a death-cult government whose ideology is built around exporting Islamism, violence, and destabilization.

U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently drew a sharp contrast between Israel and what he described as hesitant allies, saying: “Israel has clear missions as well, for which we are grateful. Capable partners, as we’ve said since the beginning. Capable partners are good partners, unlike so many of our traditional allies, who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.”

Europe’s hesitation is particularly puzzling because a reformed Iran — one no longer ruled by an Islamist regime — would likely be far more aligned with Western interests. It would also weaken Russia, one of the Islamic Republic’s key strategic partners. For Europe especially, that should matter. Russia remains the continent’s principal geopolitical threat. An Iran no longer functioning as Moscow’s ally would reshape the strategic landscape in a multitude of ways that benefit the West. And yet many Western leaders appear more comfortable issuing warnings about escalation than confronting the regime that created the crisis in the first place.

The contrast with Israel could not be sharper. As internationally known Arab-Israeli influencer Nuseir Yassin, known as Nas Daily, wrote on Saturday, following the coordinated U.S.-Israeli attacks against the Islamic Republic:

“Today, I am proud to be Israeli. Despite all the shaming. Despite all the UN ‘resolutions’. Despite all the academics. Despite all the online pressure. Israel is cleaning the Middle East from radical religious terrorists. One by one. They will not thank us for it. But someone had to do the job.”

The divide is not only geopolitical; it is cultural. One widely circulated online video recently suggested that Europe appears more focused on data privacy regulations and energy efficiency targets than on military threats to its own security.

Meanwhile, Israelis operate with a level of strategic clarity. Nearly every Israeli across the sociopolitical spectrum supports the effort to degrade Iran’s military and nuclear capabilities. That includes politicians who fiercely oppose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party on nearly every domestic issue. Even Yair Golan, a prominent figure on Israel’s political Left, recently wrote: “Eliminating Khamenei is a dramatic and significant step. Israel’s security forces, together with the American forces, have once again demonstrated intelligence superiority and impressive operational capability. I salute you.”

That kind of national unity is striking.

Contrast it with organizations like J Street, which describes itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy.” The group recently declared that it was “appalled by President Trump’s reckless decision to launch a war of choice against Iran.” But if the Iranian government has long been anti-Israel, anti-peace, and anti-democracy, then how can J Street bill itself as against this war and, at the same time, “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy”? The hypocrisy is astounding.

If anything, the global Left should be the first ones cheering for the downfall of the Islamic Republic. It is a government that represses women, executes dissidents, imprisons journalists, persecutes religious minorities, and brutally suppresses its own people whenever they dare to demand freedom. It criminalizes homosexuality, enforces theocratic rule through violence, and exports extremism across an entire region. By every metric the global Left claims to care about—human rights, democracy, gender equality, and freedom of expression — the Islamic Republic stands as arguably the most oppressive regimes on earth.

And yet, when the possibility emerges that this regime might finally be weakened or even fall, many of the same voices that claim to champion those values suddenly find reasons to hesitate, object, or condemn the very forces confronting it. As the kids say these days: Make it make sense.

The ideological divide extends into media coverage as well. The Left-leaning press frequently applies more skepticism to democratic leaders like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu than it does to authoritarian regimes. Following Israel’s assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the New York Times ran the headline: “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Hard-Line Cleric Who Made Iran a Regional Power, Is Dead at 86.” One social media account imagined what the newspaper might have written when Hitler died: “Führer Adolf Hitler, Dog Loving Artist Who Made Germany a World Power, Is Dead at 56.”

The comparison may be exaggerated, but it highlights a deeper problem: When the leaders of democracies are treated as uniquely suspect while authoritarian figures are framed with clinical neutrality, or even reluctant admiration, the moral landscape becomes distorted.

The same distortion appears in the constant comparison between today’s conflict and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That comparison is intellectually lazy and historically inaccurate. Iraq involved a ground invasion and long-term occupation aimed at reconstructing an entire state. Afghanistan became a 20-year counterinsurgency campaign involving hundreds of thousands of troops and enormous nation-building ambitions.

The current effort to degrade Iran’s nuclear program and military infrastructure bears little resemblance to those wars. It is far closer to a targeted strategic campaign aimed at preventing a hostile regime from acquiring nuclear weapons and expanding its vile regional influence. Equating the two does not illuminate the debate; it shuts debate down altogether. There’s a term for that: manipulation.

The deeper irony is that many of the same political movements invoking Iraq as a cautionary tale once supported the Iran nuclear deal negotiated in 2015. In July of that year, then-U.S. President Barack Obama even called Vladimir Putin to thank him for helping secure the agreement, an extraordinary gesture given Russia’s own adversarial relationship with the West. The deal was widely promoted as a diplomatic triumph. In reality, it postponed rather than eliminated Iran’s nuclear ambitions and relied heavily on Iranian compliance.

When internal communications later revealed that the Obama Administration had purposefully misled the public about key aspects of the negotiations, parts of the media treated the deception not as a scandal but as strategic cleverness. CBS News famously ran the headline: “The Obama administration’s useful lie about Iran talks.” Today’s crisis is, in many ways, the delayed consequence of that agreement, so if we’re going to have an honest conversation about the current war against Iran, we must talk about the failed diplomacy of the Left.

Meanwhile, deterrence from the Western Left has often amounted to little more than rhetoric. During their time in the White House, former U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were asked about the Islamic Republic’s behavior. Their response was famously simple: “Don’t.”

That warning did nothing to stop Iran’s aggression or its rogue nuclear program. Dubai hotels, Saudi water infrastructure, Bahraini apartment buildings, and Israeli hospitals have all experienced the consequences of Iranian anarchy since the “don’t” charade, not to mention the 30,000-to-40,000 Iranian civilians whom the Islamic Republic reportedly murdered in recent protests.

The problem is not merely strategic hesitation. It is ideological inversion. As one commentator, Ellen Ginsberg Simon, recently observed: “Last week, you attended a ‘No Kings’ protest, and this week you are attending a ‘Mourn the Ayatollah’ protest.” The line is humorous, but it captures a genuine contradiction: Movements that claim to oppose authoritarianism at home often find themselves expressing sympathy, or at least restraint, when confronting authoritarian regimes abroad.

Thankfully, not everyone in the democratic world sees the situation this way. Last summer, after the Israel-Iran 12-Day War, Ukrainian Member of Parliament Oleksiy Goncharenko delivered a striking message in the European Parliament:

“Israel defends democracy, human rights, and the values we all share. Instead of attacking Israel, we need to support Israel. And if we can’t do nothing, please let us not attack Israel. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, a country that truly protects women’s rights, freedom, and the rule of law. While we’re arguing, Israel is acting. It is defending not only itself, but all of us.”

The clarity of that statement stands in stark contrast to the confusion that dominates much of the West, which ought to be learning from Israel — of all countries — because Israel understands something that far too much of the West has forgotten: Peace sometimes requires military action. “If you want peace, prepare for war,” as the famous 4th-century Roman aphorism goes.

The Israeli public reflects that understanding. Across political parties and points of view, nearly every Israeli — Left, Right, Center, secular, religious, Muslim, Christian, Jewish — understands that confronting Iran’s regime is not about Benjamin Netanyahu, or any single coalition, or any one political faction. It is about preventing a regime that openly calls for Israel’s destruction from acquiring the means to carry it out. When the survival of the country is at stake, the political debates end, the finger-pointing stops, and real unity takes shape.

That unity is not blind nationalism; it is moral clarity. It is the recognition that some threats transcend partisan politics and require collective resolve. The tragedy of the current moment is that much of the global Left has lost that clarity. Rather than confronting regimes that openly threaten the democratic world, many prefer to obsessively focus their criticism on the democratically elected parties and politicians they dislike in their own countries. That’s not reasonable political critique; it’s tribal allegiance of the most unintelligent kind.

And when that tribalism runs out of sensible arguments, it quickly reaches for procedural ones, like much of the Left lecturing us about the “illegality” of the U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran. We’re told they “violate the UN Charter” and “undermine the rules-based order.”

In practice, the United Nations today functions less as a guardian of peace and more as a stage where human-rights-abusing dictatorships lecture democracies about restraint. This is why invoking the UN Charter as an absolute prohibition on force is not only legally incorrect; it is politically naive.

The deeper question, then, is not whether Israel and the United States have violated the sensibilities of the United Nations. The question is whether the free world should allow its security to be dictated by an institution increasingly influenced by the very regimes that threaten it.

Israel and the United States have answered that question with characteristic courage and clarity. The global Left, and much of its international establishment, still seems confused — and that in and of itself is a security threat.

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