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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
For decades, Israel has lived with the comforting strategic assumption that when the worst comes, America will be beside Israel — perhaps late and grumbling, and maybe after issuing several idiotic statements about restraint, proportionality, and the sacred dignity of men currently building ballistic missiles under hospitals.
However, eventually, America would come around.
That assumption is dying.
It may not die tomorrow, or even completely. America is not about to become the Islamic Republic of Iran, Qatar, or Belgium with aircraft carriers. It remains Israel’s most powerful ally, the world’s indispensable military power, and the only country with the capacity to shape the international system at scale.
Israel should not indulge in childish anti-Americanism. America has armed Israel, protected it diplomatically, and stood beside it at critical moments when Europe was busy polishing its conscience and misplacing its spine.
Yet the U.S. President Donald Trump drama over Iran has revealed something more important than one man’s vanity: It has exposed the central weakness of Israel’s national security doctrine. Too much of it still depends on the mood, ego, ideology, electoral needs, and attention span of America’s presidents.
That is intolerable.
Trump is not the whole problem. He is the loudest symptom. Barack Obama believed Iran could be managed through diplomatic theatre. Joe Biden tried to restrain Israel while support it at the same time.
Trump, who once presented himself as Israel’s great friend, now appears perfectly willing to treat Iran as a negotiating partner, Israel as an inconvenience, and regional stability as a branding exercise. His supporters will explain this, as they explain everything, by insisting that the master strategist is playing seven-dimensional chess.
Israel cannot base its survival on such fanaticism.
America has its own interests, political cycles, exhaustion, demagogues, isolationists, “progressive” moral exhibitionists, realist mandarins, and voters who understandably do not wake up every morning asking how to secure the Galilee. That is normal. Nations have interests, not permanent emotional commitments.
Israel must now do what serious countries do when the world changes: It must stop sentimentalizing old arrangements, and build a post-American strategy while preserving the American alliance for as long as it remains viable and useful.
The first step is intellectual sobriety.
Israel must stop confusing access with control. Having friends in Congress is not control. Having donors, evangelical supporters, sympathetic senators, and former officials on cable television is not control. Nor is a warm speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) or a presidential candidate saying nice things about Jerusalem while campaigning in Florida.
Control is the ability to defend yourself when others hesitate.
Israel’s founders understood this. They did not build a state because they trusted humanity’s conscience, but because they had studied humanity with appropriate suspicion. Founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion did not assume that liberal democracies would save the Jews. He assumed they might write moving editorials after the Jews were dead.
That was the entire point of Zionism. Jews did not regain sovereignty to become a dependency with a flag. Israel was not created so that its prime minister could spend every war waiting for permission from Washington. The Zionist idea was not that Jews would finally have the right to lobby foreign governments for ammunition. It was that Jews would regain the power to act in history rather than plead with it.
That spirit must now return.
Israel’s second task is military independence. Not complete independence. That is impossible for a small state facing multiple fronts and a regional nuclear threat. Even great powers depend on supply chains, alliances, technology transfers, and industrial cooperation. Autarky is for North Korea and other countries that have traded poverty for purity.
Yet Israel needs far greater self-sufficiency in munitions, air defence interceptors, precision weapons, drones, spare parts, cyber systems, armour, fuel reserves, and critical battlefield technologies. Its stockpiles must be measured not in weeks of intense fighting but in years of strategic pressure. Its industrial base must be expanded with the understanding that supply chains are not friendships.
The lesson of Ukraine is obvious: The country that controls production controls the tempo of war against imperialist Russia.
The lesson of Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, and the wider Iranian proxy system is even more obvious: Israel may have to fight prolonged, simultaneous, politically inconvenient wars while its allies urge restraint from rooms very far away from the rockets. No country can afford to discover during a war that its ammunition is hostage to another country’s election season.
This will be expensive. Good. Survival usually is. Israel has spent decades building one of the world’s most impressive technology sectors. It can build platforms that change the way humanity communicates, trades, navigates, farms, secures data, and fights disease. It can also build more shells, missiles, engines, interceptors, drones, and explosives. A nation that can produce genius on demand should not have to behave like a supplicant every time a warehouse in America becomes politically sensitive.
The third task is to assume that Iran is Israel’s problem.
This is the hardest psychological adjustment because Israeli leaders have spent years hoping, sometimes rationally and sometimes pathetically, that America would solve the Iran problem. That America would sanction, deter, bomb, negotiate from strength, and prevent enrichment. It would impose consequences and understand that a millenarian revolutionary regime with regional proxies and nuclear ambitions is not a misunderstood Rotary Club chapter.
Instead, America negotiated, withdrew, sanctioned, negotiated again, threatened, delayed, leaked, restrained Israel, and then rediscovered diplomacy with the enthusiasm of a man who keeps returning to the same casino because this time the roulette wheel is definitely his friend.
The Iranian regime has watched all of it. It understands Western psychology with exquisite contempt. It knows how to pocket concessions, stretch talks, divide allies, activate proxies, perform tactical moderation, and present temporary pauses as historic breakthroughs. It knows that Western diplomats are addicted to process because it allows them to mistake movement for progress.
The demented Iranian regime has turned negotiation into a form of strategic anaesthesia. By the time the patient wakes up, the centrifuges are spinning.
Israel must draw the only serious conclusion: If Iran is stopped, Israel may have to do most of the stopping. That does not mean reckless unilateralism or Broadway strikes for domestic applause. It means that Israel must no longer treat American action as the decisive variable. American participation should be welcomed when available, but it should not be assumed. Israel’s red lines must be its own. Its capabilities must match its doctrine, and its doctrine must match its threats and their scale.
A nuclear-armed Iran would be a civilisational disaster. It would place a fanatical anti-Zionist regime under a nuclear shield, embolden Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, and every other franchise in Tehran’s empire of grievance, and trigger proliferation across the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia would not sit quietly. Turkey would not abstain. Egypt would not meditate peacefully on the Sinai sunset. The whole region would become a nuclear bazaar run by men with historical grudges, apocalyptic vocabularies, and questionable beards.
Israel cannot outsource this to Washington’s latest mood.
The fourth task is diplomatic diversification. Israel should preserve its American alliance. Only a fool would discard it just as only a fool would rely on it exclusively.
The future belongs to networked states: small, agile, heavily armed, technologically advanced countries that cultivate many relationships without surrendering their freedom of action to any single patron.
Israel’s diplomatic map should be redrawn around strategic usefulness, not emotional validation.
India matters greatly. It is a rising power, a civilisational state, a technology partner, a defence partner, and a country with its own long education in Islamist violence.
Greece and Cyprus matter because the Eastern Mediterranean matters to Israel. Azerbaijan matters because geography matters.
The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and possibly even Saudi Arabia matter because the Sunni Arab world fears Iran more than it enjoys performing concern for Palestinians at conferences.
Eastern Europe and central Asia matter because some countries remember tyranny are less intoxicated by fashionable “anti-Zionism” than Western Europe’s postmodern nurseries.
Israel should build overlapping partnerships in defence production, intelligence sharing, energy, cyber, water technology, food security, and missile defence. It should become harder to isolate because too many countries benefit from its success.
The fifth task is to stop chasing European approval. Europe is boring.
More seriously, Europe is not entirely irrelevant. It is still wealthy and matters economically. Some European countries remain serious even though much of Western Europe has perfected combining strategic impotence with moral verbosity.
But a growing majority of Europeans cannot defend their borders, integrate their migrants, control their streets, confront Islamism without apologising to it, and cannot maintain military readiness without American help — and yet still speaks to Israel as though the IDF should take field instruction from societies that treat policing a protest as a near-insurmountable metaphysical puzzle.
Israel should block its ears until the sermonising stops, trade where useful, and cooperate where possible.
There is no prize for being loved by countries that have outsourced their own defence while lecturing others on proportionality. European bureaucrats’ approval is not a strategic asset. Usually it is evidence that one has made a terrible mistake.
The sixth task is narrative warfare.
For too long, Israel behaved as though facts would defeat lies because facts are facts. This was adorable. Facts do not defeat lies by existing. They defeat lies when they are organised, repeated, dramatised, institutionalised, and carried into every arena where meaning is formed.
The Palestinians understood this. Their leaders failed at state-building, economic development, democratic governance, and basic moral responsibility, but they succeeded spectacularly at narrative construction. They turned rejectionism into victimhood, terrorism into resistance, maximalism into grievance, and permanent failure into a global moral identity.
Israelis built fighter jets, cyber companies, trauma hospitals, desalination systems, intelligence networks, missile defences, start-ups, universities, and one of world’s elite militaries. They forgot that civilisation also needs a story.
This must change. Israel needs a permanent strategic communications architecture, not another panicked press conference after civilians have already been slaughtered and Hamas has already uploaded the first lie. It needs historians, linguists, filmmakers, psychologists, intelligence professionals, diplomats, soldiers, religious scholars, Arabic speakers, Farsi speakers, campus organisers, social media operators, and diaspora partners working in concert.
Israel must explain not only what it does, but what it is.
The Jewish state is a revived indigenous civilisation. A refuge after catastrophe, a democracy under siege, a technological power built by a people who refused disappearance. A small country facing an imperial Islamist system. A society arguing fiercely with itself while its enemies murder dissidents, veil women by force, hang homosexuals, persecute minorities, and then receive applause from Western activists whose moral imagination has less range than a teaspoon.
The seventh task is internal resilience.
A post-American future will demand more from Israeli society: more unity, seriousness, service, strength, confidence and, crucially, political discipline than Israel has recently displayed.
This is not a call for bland consensus. Israel is a Jewish democracy, not a Scandinavian customer service desk. Argument is part of its soul. The Talmud is not exactly a pamphlet on emotional containment. Jews argue because words matter, law matters, memory matters, truth matters, and someone at the table is always wrong in a way that requires immediate correction.
Yet there is an argument and there is fracture. Israel cannot afford political discourse that turns every dispute into civilisational civil war; or elites who despise half the country, religious factions that treat the state as an ATM with a flag, secular factions that treat tradition as an embarrassment, military reservists used as political weapons, or leaders who confuse personal political survival with national destiny.
A more isolated Israel will need a broader social contract. The ultra-Orthodox must carry more of the national burden. Secular Israelis must recover respect for the Jewish state’s Jewish content, even parts that make them feel uncomfortable.
The Right must govern with competence, not just resentment. The Left must stop confusing international applause with wisdom. Everyone must understand that the enemies surrounding Israel are not waiting for a more elegant coalition agreement before trying again.
The eighth task is aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) and diaspora strategy.
If the West continues its strange little experiment in moral disintegration, more Jews will understand what previous generations learned too late: Tolerance is not permanence. The diaspora is not ending, nor should it. Jewish life outside Israel has dignity, depth, history, and purpose and cultures of its own. It remains as essential part of Jewish civilization.
Yet the direction of travel is no longer difficult to see. Universities are corrupted. “Progressive” politics has absorbed “anti-Zionism” as a status marker. Islamist intimidation is rising. Conservative isolationism is mutating. Police forces hesitate. Governments equivocate. Jewish institutions invest in security guards while their neighbours invest in excuses.
Israel should prepare for a serious wave of aliyah from countries whose Jewish communities once assumed they were safe. This requires housing, employment, credential recognition, Hebrew education, school capacity, tax incentives, and a cultural shift away from treating immigrants as an administrative inconvenience.
Every Jew who comes home strengthens Israel. Every scientist, doctor, engineer, teacher, entrepreneur, soldier, artist, farmer, builder, and child matters. Demography and hope are strategy. A nation that grows can endure; one that absorbs its exiles is not just surviving. It is fulfilling its purpose.
Finally, Israel must recover the founding generation’s tragic clarity.
The country’s founders were not naïve. They did not believe the world would be fair and expect gratitude nor imagine that Jewish suffering would permanently educate mankind. They had seen too much for such sentimental rubbish. They knew that sympathy has a short shelf life and that dead Jews are often more popular than armed ones.
So they built farms, factories, militias, institutions, universities, ports, intelligence services, political parties, courts, and an army. They built while surrounded, boycotted, invaded, condemned, and outnumbered. They built with one eye on the horizon and one hand on the rifle.
Israel needs this mindset again.
It does not need panic, despair, anti-American tantrums, or fantasies of splendid isolation. A mature post-American strategy would preserve the alliance with Washington while preparing for its erosion. It would thank America without depending on it. It would cooperate with presidents without trusting them and accept support without mistaking it for sovereignty.
The coming era will be harsher. Alliances will be more conditional, power more fragmented, U.S. politics more volatile. Europe will be more useless (if that is even possible), Iran will be more cunning, China will be plotting and expanding, and Russia will be meddling.
Islamist movements will continue learning Western weaknesses with parasitic brilliance. International institutions will continue mistaking their own corruption for law. Israel cannot control most of this, only whether it remains capable of defending itself when others hesitate.
That has always been the central Zionist proposition — not that the world would love the Jews, or that morality would prevail automatically, or that liberal civilisation would always recognise its friends, but that Jews would never again be forced to wait helplessly while others debated their fate.
Israel’s post-American future does not require abandoning America, but it does require abandoning illusion. The U.S. may remain Israel’s ally for many years. Outstanding. Long may the alliance endure for both countries’ benefit. Yet Israel must now prepare for a world in which American friendship is useful rather than decisive, welcome rather than necessary, and valued rather than worshipped.
The Jewish state was reborn to ensure that when history again came looking for the Jews, the Jews would be ready. History is knocking again. Israel must be ready.
Brilliant. The most well described article about Israel's future I've read - now I know it's none of my business at this point, but I know the West will eat itself, and Israel will be the indespensible ally the governments around the world will wish for. You've got this! 👏👏👏👏💪🇮🇱💙🙏
Superb. A "must-read" for every Jew.