Israel

As the bodies of hundreds of Israelis lay freshly butchered by Hamas terrorists, the group’s supporters from around the world celebrated — including by mourning the dead terrorists and cohosting a rally with a designated terrorist group — and urged them to “globalize the intifada.” The rallies sprouted up almost immediately after Hamas stunned Israel by launching a surprise attack, likely with Iranian assistance, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. The images of Israeli grandparents and infants being held hostage, and of Israeli villages being wiped out shocked the world. It wasn’t just Israelis who were murdered, however; nine Americans have already been confirmed among the dead, along with German, French and Cambodian citizens.

Two days after Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu postponed his government’s planned judicial reforms, President Joe Biden felt it necessary to go after his own country's ally. In an off-the-cuff comment, he said, “Like many strong supporters of Israel, I'm very concerned. And I'm concerned that they get this straight. They cannot continue down this road. And I've sort of made that clear.” “Hopefully the prime minister will act in a way that he can try to work out some genuine compromise,” he continued, “but that remains to be seen.” Later on Tuesday, the president added that he hopes Netanyahu “walks away from it [the reform].” There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about Israel’s judicial reforms.

Despite recent hyperbole, Israel is not on the verge of authoritarianism. The proposed reforms to the country's judicial system, which have attracted so much controversy — usually under the assumption that they will turn Benjamin Netanyahu into an Israeli Viktor Orbán — are lacking in historical context. The Israeli Supreme Court is one of the most activist courts in the world. It has assigned itself more authority and subverted the balance of power between Israel's different branches of government. It has done all this while at the same time lacking any kind of serious accountability to the electorate.

Last month, then-Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz made headlines when he said that Israel may strike Iran’s nuclear infrastructure within two to three years. Gantz has made readying Jerusalem for this contingency a priority, and in November said that Israel had “achieved preparedness, we have [more] capabilities we are developing and we have long-term processes I don’t want to elaborate on.” But while Israel may have the capability to hit Iran, the US should not force it to risk such a strike.

With about 90 percent of the vote counted as of this morning, former Israeli prime minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu appears set to return to power in a stunning comeback. Having lost power in May 2021, and facing mounting legal challenges, his political career seemed over. Now, with his right-wing alliance set to secure a majority — likely between 61 and 65 seats in the 120-seat Knesset — his return to the premiership seems almost inevitable. The party he leads, Likud, is likely to receive around 32 seats. While Bibi may once again lead his country, his coalition will be different this time around. The far-right Religious Zionist Party (RZP), led by firebrands Betzalel Smoltrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, will have around 14 seats, up from seven before the election.

A mere four years after President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the international agreement that had constrained Iran’s nuclear program, Iran is closer to building a nuclear weapon than ever before. Both the Trump administration’s pressure and the Biden administration’s diplomatic campaigns have failed to yield Iran’s capitulation, yet still the United States has not changed tack. Instead, it has only raised fears of a cataclysmic clash in the Middle East. To be sure, while the Trump team’s maximum pressure strategy had great success in “crushing” Iran’s economy, it was far less effective in achieving any of its stated objectives.

It took Barack Obama less than three months to fly to the Middle East for a visit, landing in Iraq to visit the tens of thousands of US troops stationed there at the time. Donald Trump’s first overseas trip as president was to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (also three months into his tenure), where he basked in the limelight, watched in awe as his face was plastered on buildings in Riyadh, and hovered over a glowing orb with King Salman. Now, eighteen months into his presidency, Joe Biden will be spending a few days this week in the region, making stops in Israel, the West Bank, and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for a summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

When news broke that President Biden was planning a trip to Saudi Arabia to visit the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MbS), members of his party were horrified. Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was especially disturbed and recommended the White House cancel it outright. "I wouldn't go. I wouldn't shake his hand,” Schiff told CBS on June 5. "This is someone who butchered an American resident, cut him up into pieces in the most terrible and pre-meditated way.” That resident was Jamal Khashoggi, a former Saudi royal family insider who used his perch as a columnist at the Washington Post to raise awareness about the crown prince’s ruthless ways.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has revealed what members of his country’s national security elite have been chatting about behind closed doors for quite a while. “The United States has been, and will always be our best friend,” the Israeli PM said in a speech delivered before the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv University. Then came the big “but”: “Washington has its own set of interests, which we must honestly admit do not always overlap with ours.” “We are speaking honestly and understand one another,” Bennett elaborated. America’s “interest in the region is dwindling. The United States is currently focused on the Russian-Ukrainian border and it is in a strategic conflict with China.

With diplomats fearing that the Iranian nuclear talks will collapse, minds are inevitably turning to what happens the morning after. In the realm of politics, this has amounted to buck-passing. Last week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told journalists: “None of the things we’re looking at now…would be happening if the former president had not recklessly pulled out of the nuclear deal, with no thoughts about what might come next.” In the real world, meanwhile, with regional peace in the balance, the stakes are rather higher. As the Biden administration’s softly-softly approach plunges towards global humiliation, American negotiators have been waking up to what should have been obvious from the start: you can’t build an effective Iran strategy with carrots.

We were promised a war of nerves in Vienna between Washington and Tehran, a game of chicken. Instead, President Biden has chickened out. He's also blaming Israel. Call it fowl play. Here's how it should be going. The United States wants Iran to re-commit to refreezing its nuclear program. Iran demands in exchange the revoking of the economic sanctions against it. Each side insists that it won't give up on its demands — even if that could lead to the collapse of the negotiations, the demise of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and eventually to a military confrontation. The diplomatic and military tensions between the United States and Russia over Ukraine involve just such an exercise in brinkmanship.

Was it inevitable that Iran would one day gain nuclear weapons? Identifying causality in human actions is a tricky exercise, especially when it comes to historical events, like the outbreak of World War Two. Was appeasement the cause? Or perhaps a war with Germany was unavoidable as long as Adolf Hitler was in power? It may also be fated that a nation of ninety million people, proud about its history and place in the world — Persia was already an advanced civilization when barbarian tribes roamed the British Isles — would become a nuclear military power. That nuclearization process actually commenced under Mohammad Reza Shah and continued because of concern that, thanks to French assistance, Iran’s adversary Iraq was on its way to developing a nuclear weapon.

Israel has carried out three major operations over the last eighteen months against Iran's nuclear sites. These attacks involved as many as a thousand Mossad personnel and were executed with ruthless precision using high-tech weaponry including drones and a quadcopter — and spies within Tehran's holy of holies, its nuclear program. While Joe Biden’s nuclear negotiators try to snatch catastrophe from the jaws of defeat in Vienna, Israel is taking things more seriously. Last week, Naftali Bennett, the Israeli prime minister, pivoted to a new policy on Tehran: retaliating against aggression from militias backed by Tehran with covert strikes on Iranian soil. This builds on the extensive capabilities that the Mossad has built up in the Islamic Republic in recent years.