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ost of our readers view Canada as a friendly nation with a well-established Jewish community, Panama as an exotic destination with a vibrant Jewish presence, and Greenland as an unapproachable island visible only from a distance on the Tel Aviv–New York flight route. I’ll never forget one flight when an El Al pilot opened the public address system to suggest looking out the window because “Greenland looks especially beautiful today.”

For President-elect Trump, these three countries signify something different. Greenland is a big, beautiful island he wants to pry from Denmark. Panama is home to the Panama Canal, which America built from 1903 to 1914 for $300 million and relinquished to Panama by treaty in 1977. Trump says he wants it back. Canada, which sells 75% of its exports to the US, is a primary target for the hefty tariffs Trump plans to impose on America’s largest trading partners.

With all the major foreign policy dilemmas facing the incoming administration, including America’s porous southern border, the chaotic and treacherous Middle East, the interminable war between Russia and Ukraine, and China’s saber-rattling with Taiwan, why is Trump trifling with small fry?

Or is it part of his grand strategy to make America great again?

James Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) who is following the Trump transition, contends that Trump is operating true to the form we saw in his first term. “[He] seems more interested in picking fights with friends than enlisting them in a common cause. And that will make it harder for the United States to succeed in a world of great power competition.”

Other analysts suggest that Trump is reinstating the Monroe doctrine as a foundation of US foreign policy. First promulgated in 1823 by America’s fifth president, James Monroe, the doctrine declared that America’s sphere of influence extended throughout the Western Hemisphere and that the US would no longer tolerate European efforts to colonize Latin and South America.

In 2013, President Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, disavowed the two-century-old doctrine, telling a meeting of the Organization of American States, which mainly consists of Latin American nations, that the “era of the Monroe doctrine was over.”

Trump overruled Kerry during his first term. In 2018, when addressing the UN General Assembly, Trump indirectly invoked the Monroe doctrine, stating, “Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.”

Canada, Panama, and Greenland are all part of the Western Hemisphere. Trump, on the cusp of his second term, has now fired warning shots at America’s 21st-century rivals, including China and Russia, to watch their step in America’s backyard.

Competition over Latin America

The dynamic with Canada is slightly different from the other two. When Trump advocated that Canada become America’s 51st state, it was his way of mocking Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose political ideology is polar opposite to Trump’s. Trudeau is extremely unpopular and at press time is under intense pressure to quit. He and his party will likely be trounced in this year’s elections, whenever they’re held, by the Conservatives and their new leader, Pierre Poilievre, a conservative far more in tune with Trump.

On the surface, the Panama Canal’s importance seems overinflated. The US is the canal’s largest customer, and Trump rails against the high fees that US ships pay to pass through the 51-mile artificial waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, everyone pays the same rate. Panama earns $5 billion annually in transit fees, which accounts for about 6% of its economy. For America, $5 billion is less than a drop in the bucket in a $30 trillion economy.

However, William Freeman, another CFR senior fellow, recently declared that the Panama Canal has much more to offer than its shipping revenues. “In the event of any military conflict with China, it would be needed to move US ships and other assets,” Freeman said.

China, the canal’s second-largest customer, has the same ideas. As South America’s largest trade partner, China is using its economic clout to build political alliances with countries, some of which are hostile to American interests.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced legislation almost three years ago to increase security cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean to stop transnational criminal organizations from smuggling illegal drugs into America, counter the destabilizing impact of authoritarian regimes, and rein in the malign activities of state actors like China and Russia.

He can be expected to follow up in his new role as secretary of state.

Race for Frigid Battlegrounds

Greenland, too, has strategic military value, then and now. Much of Europe’s stormy weather originates in Greenland and drifts to continental Europe a few days later. According to the Arctic Institute, Nazi Germany stationed four weather stations in Greenland during World War II to gather accurate meteorological data to predict weather patterns and determine the most favorable conditions for launching attacks.

Both Russia and China are eyeing Greenland. In last week’s edition of the US Naval Institute News, John Grady quoted the head of the Russian Navy, Admiral Aleksandr Moiseyev, as saying that the Arctic is “where the confrontation of the world’s leading states is unfolding.”

It’s hard to believe that Russia, stymied in Ukraine and having packed up and abandoned Syria, would be up for any more military adventurism, but don’t underestimate Vladimir Putin. Grady noted that Russia had concentrated its northern fleet of second-strike ballistic missile submarines and strategic bomber forces in the European Arctic. China also manages a fleet of satellites and plans to deploy a large-scale network of listening devices in the Arctic Ocean.

Scott Stephenson, a physical scientist at Rand Corporation, notes that Greenland may have the largest deposits of rare earth minerals outside China.According to the US Geological Survey, rare earth elements are necessary for defense purposes such as lasers and guidance, radar, and sonar systems. Greenland is strategically and centrally located between the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, along several shipping routes that are becoming increasingly accessible as sea ice melts. It also has numerous transcontinental flight paths that rely on Greenlandic airspace, as El Al pilots know.

Many countries consider Greenland especially beautiful. Stephenson agrees that US control of the island could also make strategic sense, given Russia’s Arctic military buildup and China’s recent attempts to purchase a naval base and build airports there.

But Greenland holds all the cards, and Denmark has some say.

Denmark, a NATO member, provides Greenland with an annual $670 million subsidy to control its security and foreign policy. With Greenlanders eager for full independence, Denmark recognized Greenland’s right to self-determination, should the matter arise. This means that its 56,000 residents would have to vote in a referendum on any potential territorial transfer.

So Trump isn’t coming out of left field. Neither tweets on X or his lengthy speeches are the place to debate sophisticated aspects of foreign policy. Still, these ideas and others will be discussed in the right circles in cabinet meetings once Trump takes over.

Merely suggesting that Trump is being whimsical in his foreign policy formulation, as the Washington Post indicated over the weekend, or that the MAGA doctrine is an updated version of the Monroe doctrine, is off the mark. Such takes contain some kernels of truth but are far too simplistic in a world that Trump claims is on the brink of World War III, and where, at the very least, American security and economic interests are at risk.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1043)

The post What Trump Might Really Be Thinking   first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photo: AP Images

You can buy a lot of weapons and pay a lot of soldiers with $895 billion.

The outgoing Congress ratified that princely sum last week when it passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2025. It is a preliminary step in setting next year’s national security priorities, and facilitates legislative oversight of the Department of Defense, which is part of the executive branch.

The $895 billion will not be spent until the incoming Congress passes a separate appropriations bill, so the amount is not yet etched in stone. Aside from reiterating America’s longstanding commitment to maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge over its adversaries, and increased vigilance and spending to deter Iran and China, the NDAA, as currently worded, provides several goodies for Israel and food for thought for its enemies.

Two key security priorities include an additional $30 million in aid to Israel to improve the IDF’s technical wherewithal to detect and destroy enemy tunnels and to fund yearly joint subterranean military drills between Israeli and US forces, to stop terrorists from using tunnels for military purposes and smuggling. A third new proposal calls on President Trump’s new “envoy for hostage affairs” to devise a proactive strategy to protect Americans from being taken hostage or otherwise unlawfully detained when overseas.

Matthew Kenney, vice president for government affairs at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), noted that this policy change is long overdue, following a 175 percent increase in the number of US citizens taken captive abroad in the last decade. Previous administrations’ policy “has often exacerbated this trend, rewarding hostage-takers with political and monetary concessions instead of deterring and penalizing them. There is an urgent need to change course to avoid more Americans being taken hostage.”

The NDAA also pulls the plug on the fanciful Biden administration program that provided $320 million to facilitate humanitarian aid to Gaza, via a floating dock that broke apart in typical summer Mediterranean winds; and asks the new secretary of defense to review the operational value of America’s air base in Qatar in light of that country providing safe harbor to Hamas leadership, and to evaluate the effect on the US Air Force if it redeployed its base elsewhere.

Watch to see if Pete Hegseth wins confirmation as defense secretary. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth criticized Qatar for funding left-wing institutions in the US.

Hegseth and some of the other Trump nominees will promote policy changes. Congress will give them more money to achieve their goals than it has ever allocated to national defense, yet all the money won’t buy victories until the US can erase its biggest weaknesses.

Defining Victory and Defeat

America is grappling with two gaping financial deficits. Its cumulative national debt for decades of spending way above what it receives in revenues is $36 trillion and counting. The nation’s annual budget runs a $2 trillion deficit. But its worst deficit is a “deficit of passion” that puts Western countries at a decided disadvantage when battling fiercely passionate enemies motivated by nationalist or religious zeal.

Professor David Betz, who holds the attention-grabbing title of “professor of war in the modern world” at King’s College in London, coined the term “deficit of passion.” For his 2015 book, Carnage and Connectivity, he borrowed that expression from the early 19th-century Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote that “passion,” “chance,” and “political purpose” drive the vicissitudes (fluctuations) of war.

James Farwell, a national security expert and strategic communication specialist, reviewed Betz’s Carnage and Connectivity for the US Army War College Quarterly in July 2016 and reached some alarming conclusions. At the time, President Obama was nearing the end of his second term, and his policy was to wage war with a minimum of bloodshed through drone and air strikes and few or no boots on the ground, which produced only illusory victories.

“Defeating the enemy kinetically in a battlespace does not necessarily equal winning. Winning requires the enemy to recognize it has been defeated and to subject itself to the victor’s will,” Farwell wrote. “The West may have bigger, more high-tech weapons, but as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated, these cannot compensate for the passion that motivates enemies comprised of moderately organized and loosely affiliated non-state groups… Intensely motivated, purposeful enemies using low-tech methods can still defeat high-tech opponents.”

Make America Solvent First

So while it’s encouraging to see America’s defense blueprint with a significant pro-Israel component — and support from the incoming Trump administration and Congress under Republican control should augment the plan — you can’t throw money at problems, as Ronald Reagan used to say; and you can’t defeat jihadists without matching their passion, ounce for ounce, as Clausewitz might have said.

Israel declared that it was fighting a war for its survival following Hamas’s October 7 invasion and massacre. So there should be no lack of passion — but how else can you explain the erratic execution of the war and all of its stops and starts? Indeed, the constraints placed on the Netanyahu government by both the Biden administration and domestic pressures from Israel’s sizable, vocal, and still powerful political left have played a role, not to mention the agonizing moral bind gripping Israel in how to deal with its hostage dilemma.

Despite the challenges, Israel’s military achievements have been impressive, especially in taking the military initiative to secure its interests in Syria after the Assad regime collapsed.

Israel can’t afford any slack in dealing with terrorist groups with a surplus of passion who glorify death and destruction and for whom no sacrifice is too great to make for their cause.

On the surface, the incoming Trump administration’s policy of picking its fights and keeping the US out of foreign conflicts that don’t serve its interests seems prudent. But how do America’s enemies and rivals view this policy? Do they detect a deficit of passion that they can exploit?

This remains to be seen. However, the US must tackle its financial deficits if it hopes to remain strong. In another report, “Wars and Stupid Wars,” which Professor Betz authored in February 2024 for the Danube Institute, he noted that American debt had grown to unsustainable levels, placing it in serious financial peril.

As of two years ago, America’s debt-to-GDP ratio was 129 percent and was on a ballistic trajectory to reach 225 percent by 2050, although he said that the numbers will never rise to that height because the system will collapse first: “As it was put to me by a former senior banker and diplomat, ‘It can’t happen, as investors won’t accept it. This sort of thing normally ends in hyperinflation, conflict, and loss of empire!’ ”

Republicans are enthusiastic about retaking power in Washington. Still, squabbles over spending — not just military spending — have consumed much of the oxygen on Capitol Hill as the 118th Congress took its last breaths before adjourning for the year-end holidays.

If Trump hopes to make America great again, he’s got to make it financially solvent first.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1042)

The post Passion Matters More than Cash      first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photo: AP Images

IT

sometimes seems like yesterday that Shimon Peres was selling Israelis his fantasy of a “new Middle East,” in which Israel and a Palestinian state would dwell in harmony, peace, and prosperity, with Israel becoming the Luxembourg of the Levant.

The Israeli media projected the process one giant step further, daydreaming of an era when Israelis could drive to Europe via Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey, making a pit stop in the Damascus souk to eat hummus and baklava.

Even after the sudden death of the Assad regime, kashrus agencies are not scampering to arrange supervision in Damascus.

According to Al-Jazeera, Syria’s new ruler — previously known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, before reverting to his birth name of Ahmad al-Shaara — has declared that under his rule, Syria will be “a beacon for the Islamic nation.”

How that plays out for the beleaguered Syrian people remains to be seen. Regime change is a laborious and tortuous process with no guarantee of success. A country destroyed by 13 years of civil war and more than 50 years of despotic rule won’t be rebuilt in a day. And despite al-Shaara’s second declaration that he’s not seeking conflict with Israel, don’t expect him to appear on the White House lawn any time soon to join the Abraham Accords.

Fantasy peddlers are not the only ones who believe regime change in Syria will produce results.

Stone-cold realists have set their sights on a second target for regime change — Iran.

A bipartisan group of senators, led by Texas Republican Ted Cruz, New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker, and New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen — whose husband Bill is a Lebanese-American — all called for regime change when addressing an event last week hosted by the Organization for Iranian American Communities.

Some Trump supporters contend that the overriding goal of Trump’s maximum pressure policy on Iran will be to coerce regime change. However, before the election, Trump dashed that idea, telling an Iranian-American interviewer: “We can’t get totally involved in all that.”

Trump is right to be wary. Regime change doesn’t come easy, especially when forced by outsiders. America’s track record in fomenting regime change is abysmal.

The Cato Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., that advocates globally for individual liberty and limited government, notes that the US government has toppled more than 30 foreign leaders since the start of the 20th century. Benjamin Denison, a foreign policy expert and former researcher at the University of Notre Dame International Security Center, published a policy analysis for Cato in January 2020, citing academic research by political scientists Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten, who reviewed 28 of those 30 cases. Just three proved successful in building a lasting democracy.

Lasting Misconceptions

Denison’s essay noted one stark example of how it can backfire, even when aimed elsewhere. He said that North Korea closely followed developments in Libya, where Obama administration–led military intervention ousted the tyrant Muammar Gaddafi.

“The North Koreans concluded that only nuclear weapons can prevent regime change, which made a choice to continue their nuclear program easier,” Denison wrote.

In deciding how to deal with Iran, decision-makers must rid themselves of two misconceptions.

First, no matter who rules Iran, they will seek to become a nuclear power. Iran first obtained an atomic reactor fueled by highly enriched uranium in 1953 under the Eisenhower administration’s “Atoms for Peace” program, some 26 years before Iran’s current Islamic Revolutionary Government led by ayatollahs deposed the Shah. Eisenhower thought a stronger Iran would protect US interests against Soviet influence in the region.

The more significant misconception is that the ayatollahs imposed Islam on the Iranians, and a new regime would restore old Persian customs and religion to Iran.

The ayatollahs indeed enforced a more extreme brand of Islam. Still, Iran embraced Islam shortly after Muhammad established the religion in the 7th century, when Muslim tribes began conquering Persia. Islam consolidated its grip in Iran between 800 and 1100 of the common era. The Safavid dynasty made Shiite Islam the empire’s official religion in the 1500s, and today, up to 95% of Iranians belong to a sect known as Twelver Islam, which means that the 12th Imam, who they believe has been in hiding since the 9th century, will reappear and exact revenge against the nonbelievers of the world, mainly the Little Satan (Israel) and the Great Satan (the US).

Even if the younger generation chafes under the most severe restrictions and succeeds in changing or reforming the regime from within, their religious beliefs will remain intact, and so will any new government’s drive to actualize their nuclear ambitions.

Recycling Bad Ideas

Both Israel and the incoming Trump administration can draw lessons from this when coordinating strategy to deal with Iran.

Iran is far weaker than it was a year ago. The IDF battles in Gaza and south Lebanon have destroyed much of the military capabilities of Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. The loss of Syria as a land bridge between Iran and Lebanon (via Iraq) is a significant defeat for Iran.

The fact that two Iranian missile attacks on Israel failed to do strategic damage while Israel’s limited retaliations inflicted enormous military losses on Iran further humiliated a regime that still harbors fantasies of subduing Israel first and America last.

As long as Iran pursues nuclear weapons, the threat remains tangible. The proverbial wounded bear can still be destructive. Two weeks ago, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran was dramatically accelerating its enrichment of nuclear fuel to 60%, not far from the 90% required to produce a nuclear weapon.

Some foreign press reports claim Israel is scheming covertly with the incoming administration to leverage the last month of the lame-duck Biden administration to launch a preemptive attack against Iranian nuclear sites. None of this can be confirmed, although Prime Minister Netanyahu hinted that something was in the works when he explained, without elaborating, that one reason he accepted the US-French-sponsored ceasefire in Lebanon was so that Israel could focus on Iran.

Banking on regime change in a country that embraced Islam hook, line, and sinker 1,400 years ago is a very low-percentage move and quite dangerous. Israel must also resist calls for regime change in Gaza and Palestinian-controlled areas of Judea and Samaria. The idea that regime change in the form of a reconstituted Palestinian Authority or defanged Hamas would bring peace or even stability to a new Middle East is an old notion that has been debunked.

If it hasn’t worked historically for the US, it won’t work for Israel either.

Not that America is looking to build democracy in Iran. The main goal must be to prevent a radical Islamic regime from producing or obtaining nuclear weapons, and that will require destroying Iran’s military assets and capabilities so that they are no longer a threat, no matter who rules their land.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1041)

The post Change Misconceptions, Not Regimes first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photo: Flash90

T

he IDF has deployed troops in the buffer zone along the Israeli-Syrian border in the Golan Heights, and has attacked military targets belonging to the former Assad regime that could still pose a threat to Israel, while keeping a close eye on Syrian rebel forces to ensure they don’t advance toward the Golan Heights. Army brass is watching Iran from afar to bar them from leveraging the chaos to deploy militias who could rearm and reinvigorate Hezbollah.

Israel is taking no chances following the startling collapse of the brutal Assad regime that has ruled Syria since 1971. The United States has skin in the game, too, with some 900 combat troops stationed in Syria backing the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to combat what remains of ISIS. Still, it has done little, with President Biden having all but checked out of the White House.

President-elect Donald Trump is sticking to his campaign promises to keep the US out of foreign entanglements. “Syria is a mess, but it’s not our friend,” he tweeted. Reverting to all caps, he added: “the united states should have nothing to do with it. this is not our fight. let it play out. do not get involved!”

Sitting on the sidelines, watching fanatical radicals dictate the pace and the outcome, may prove deadly and detrimental to both America’s and Israel’s long-term interests.

“The US needs to get ahead of this,” contends Damascus-born Hazem Alghabra, founder and president of Frontiers Consultants, a Washington–based public relations and crisis management firm, and a ten-year State Department veteran who worked as a public affairs coordinator and advisor to the Bush and Obama administrations.

Alghabra expressed his opinions during a webinar sponsored by EMET — the Endowment for Middle East Truth, based in DC. Adding that “the Biden administration seems confused, at best,” he called for “a very high level of coordination between the US, Israel, and our ace in the hole — the Kurdish forces.”

Alghabra’s concerns were backed up by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a Milstein writing fellow at the Middle East Forum, who said US troops in Syria had prevented ISIS soldiers from filling vacuums left by Assad forces who either fled or defected. Still, Al-Tamimi doesn’t have high hopes for the HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) rebels who routed Assad’s army and who are trying to consolidate their rule in territories they control.

“That’s still something of concern for the international community, as the rebels remain a designated terrorist organization in the United States,” Al-Tamimi added.

Not Mild or Mannered

Only some people are as clear-eyed as Alghabra and Al-Tamimi.

Many Western media pundits glamorize Abu Mohammed al-Golani, the leader of the HTS rebels, as a modern-day swashbuckler. Al-Golani, sometimes spelled al-Julani, was born Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a. Agence France-Presse, rated “left” by AllSides, quoted Thomas Pierret, a specialist in political Islam, as describing al-Golani as a “pragmatic radical,” however he might define that. Even the British Telegraph newspaper, which AllSides rates as “leans right,” labels him a moderate.

Al-Golani sometimes wears a turban in public. When interviewed by the foreign press, he dresses like Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. When he rouses his troops in the field, he wears a green army cap and, with his long brown beard, bears an uncanny resemblance to Fidel Castro.

Hazem Alghabra knows a lot about al-Golani’s background, which he shared with Jewish media during the EMET webinar. The HTS leader is called al-Golani because his family lived in the Golan Heights before Israel captured it from Syria in the June 1967 Six-Day War. Al-Golani was born 15 years later, in 1982, in Saudi Arabia, where his father found work as an oil engineer and published several books on how Arab nations could utilize their oil revenues for economic development. His father had a deeply ideological bent and supported the Palestinian Fedayeen, the terrorist branch of the PLO based in Jordan that committed cross-border terrorist attacks against Jews in Israel. In 1989, the family moved to an elegant neighborhood in Damascus, so it’s not as if al-Golani was drawn to the military to escape poverty.

After the US invaded Iraq in 2003 in the ill-fated search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, al-Golani joined al-Qaeda in Iraq. He was arrested and held in an Iraqi prison for five years, then returned to Syria as an envoy of Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the ISIS chief who coronated himself as the first caliph of the Islamic State back in the terror group’s heyday.

That’s quite a résumé and family background.

Let’s remember, too, how the hopelessly naive Western media had high hopes for democratic reforms in Syria when Bashar Assad assumed control in July 2000, describing him as a “mild-mannered, Western-trained ophthalmologist.” Since the 2011 outbreak of civil war in Syria, Assad’s legacy includes the murders of some 600,000 Syrians, internal displacement of seven million others, and five million refugees who fled to Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, and elsewhere. That’s a staggering 57% of Syria’s estimated prewar population of 22 million whose lives were ruined.

It’s frightful to think what Assad could have accomplished if he weren’t so mild-mannered.

It’s Not Progressive

This is Syria’s problem, not Israel’s or America’s, but we have to understand the ideology of the HTS rebels to know what to expect and how to deal with them.

Al-Golani’s group belongs to the Salafi branch of Sunni Islam.

“Salafi Islam is socially conservative,” explains Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi of the Middle East Forum. “Women wear the hijab in areas the rebels control in northwestern Syria. They also imposed forced conversion on the Druze minority in Idlib and made them destroy their shrines. They’re not progressive or anything like that.”

Some analysts take solace in the fact that the HTS rebels are Sunni Muslims and generally fierce opponents of the Shiite brand of Islam that Iran espouses and hope that if the HTS rebels take control of Syria, they will eject Iran. Salafi Islam bears some similarities to the Hanafi Sunni Islam practiced in Afghanistan under the Taliban, who profess to favor peaceful relations with other countries as opposed to preaching global jihad.

The common denominator is that all of them are religious zealots who grew up in lands torn by war and tribal intrigue, and they are hostile to Western-style democracies.

Hazem Alghabra explained that under the Assad regime, young people were subjected to emergency laws that prohibited the formation of any youth groups unless government entities or mosques controlled them. He says that anyone who belonged to such groups was fed a high-calorie diet of anti-Semitism. “You’re dealing with two factions that have been raised on the concept that Israel is bad and the Jewish People are bad. And this is why we don’t see any friends among these groups.”

So, in that respect, Donald Trump is correct. Syria is not our friend. But the 1974 separation of forces agreement that Bashar Assad’s father Hafez signed with Israel to formally end the Yom Kippur War and delineate the Israel-Syrian border is now a dead letter, according to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Will Syria’s new leaders honor that deal?

In the meantime, the Netanyahu government has ordered IDF reinforcements to secure the border until new arrangements can be made.

Still, the longer Syria remains in a state of anarchy, the more Israel — and the US — will have to monitor the border 24/7 to ensure Israel’s security. And this is nothing that Trump or Netanyahu can let slide.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1040)

The post Syria Is a Mess. Should We Mess with It?     first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

There are grounds for optimism, rationales for realism, a solid basis for healthy skepticism, and some mandatory pessimism when evaluating Israel’s logic in signing a 60-day ceasefire agreement in Lebanon.

Let’s start with the realism.

The IDF is strained to capacity. In addition to maintaining a standing army with an estimated 180,000 soldiers on full alert, Israel has called up some 300,000 reservists during the past year. Some have served seven consecutive months away from their homes, families, and jobs.

The war has exacted a steep economic toll. The Bank of Israel estimates that by the end of 2025, Israel will have spent more than $60 billion (NIS 220 billion) on war expenses, not to mention lost revenues. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that more than one million hours of work are lost each month because soldiers are on the battlefield instead of at the office.

It’s no secret that in its waning days, the Biden administration, starving for foreign policy achievements, pressured Israel into signing the ceasefire agreement by withholding arms and by threatening to take revenge for Israeli disobedience by supporting a UN resolution calling for a mandatory and enforceable ceasefire on terms even more onerous than the deal Israel agreed to, and perhaps another resolution under which the US would have recognized a Palestinian state.

These were two nooses dangling in the air over Prime Minister Netanyahu’s neck. The 60-day break in the fighting ends after the Trump-Vance administration’s first week in office. Israel hopes it can be renewed on more favorable terms or get more leeway to fight if it crumbles beforehand.

After the security cabinet voted 10-1 to approve the ceasefire (Itamar Ben-Gvir was the lone dissenter), Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed the nation, outlining three reasons for agreeing to the deal. First, he said it would enable Israel to pivot to the Iranian threat, on which he did not elaborate. Second, it would allow the IDF to update its military forces and equipment. Third, the neutralization of Hezbollah would isolate Hamas. Bibi also noted that the IDF had already achieved virtually all of its military goals in Lebanon.

Former national security advisor Major-General (retired) Yaakov Amidror agreed with most of Bibi’s assessment when he addressed the Jerusalem Press Club late last week and said that while Israel can’t declare victory in its seven-front war, the biggest loser to date is Iran.

“They built a ring of fire around Israel and thought Israel would crumble,” Amidror said. “It’s clear that did not work. Now they have to think about a direct war with Israel. That was their nightmare. They didn’t want to be exposed.”

Taming the Beast

With Hamas and Islamic Jihad on their last legs in Gaza, Iran has lost one powerful proxy on Israel’s southwest border. While Hezbollah is still a powerful organization, Amidror contends it’s no longer a proxy that can deter Israel.

“We know its weak points, and we know how to continue to destroy them if there is a need,” Amidror said. He said Israel can use the timeout in the north to restructure its air force and all intelligence services to take on enemy number one: “We know we have a job to finish concerning the Iranian nuclear effort.”

The healthy skepticism comes from Dr. Jonathan Spyer, who fought in the Second Lebanon War in the IDF reserves. That war ended with an August 2006 ceasefire, with Hezbollah agreeing under UN Resolution 1701 to withdraw its forces north of the Litani River. Had they kept their end of the bargain, this would have given Israel an 18-mile buffer zone along its northern border.

Spyer returned to Lebanon in late 2007 to observe the process by which Hezbollah was reestablishing itself south of the Litani, despite the beefed-up presence of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the UN peacekeeping force, UNIFIL.

Spyer is currently the editor of the Middle East Quarterly. He wrote a piece last week for the Spectator, a British weekly, recounting Hezbollah’s numerous violations. “One glimpsed it in the signs familiar to anyone who knows the area: in the lone men on motorcycles deployed and observing in the villages, in the cars without license plates and with blacked-out windows on the roads, speeding along the highways, signifying the group’s half-seen presence.”

Even after the immense damage the IDF has inflicted on Hezbollah, Spyer contended that Lebanon is still host to an Iran-implanted deep state that is much stronger than the official bodies of the state.

“The LAF, heavily infiltrated by officers and soldiers with links to Hezbollah, is not going to prevent [Hezbollah] from reemerging and rearming,” he wrote.

Act Now, Explain Later

There are two reasons to believe this time might be different.

The first is the enforcement mechanism. Instead of leaving it to the UN to enforce, a US-led committee will oversee the current arrangement. The second is the existence of a side letter from the US to Israel endorsing Israel’s right to take action against rocket and missile launches and hinder military resupply efforts coming from Syria, which has all it can handle in fending off rebels who despise Hezbollah almost as much as they hate Syria’s Iranian-Russian backed Assad regime.

However, even side letters are often not worth more than the paper they’re written on.

Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a piece for the Middle East Forum last week expressing some necessary pessimism, saying no one should celebrate.

He cited comments from Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who accused the Biden administration of coercing Netanyahu’s acceptance by withholding vital munitions, and that should have raised a red flag before Israel raised a white flag.

“Hezbollah is a terror group, and Lebanon is a failed Mafia state,” Rubin wrote. “US support for Israel’s defense against its adversaries should be absolute. At worst, Biden reminds enemies that they can try their best to attack Israel and other US allies and that if they can extend the fighting from days to weeks or months, Washington will pressure their allies to concede. In the fight against terror, America has become a liability to its more clear-eyed allies.”

Donald Trump will upend any Biden doctrines shortly after taking office, but it’s too early to tell how that will plug into Israel’s battles. Trump wants to avoid foreign entanglements that distract him from the domestic shakeup he’s planning.

Trump may well lend military and vocal support to the IDF to do as it sees fit, provided it does so quickly and efficiently and leaves the US out of the fighting. If so, Israel will have to act forcefully and independently. Amidror said the IDF must be vigilant on multiple fronts, from Iraq to the Mediterranean and all lands in between, including Syria and Lebanon, to stop Hezbollah from “regrowing the beast on our border,” as he phrased it.

We can’t be content with just saying something when we see something. We have to do something. “It must be understood by the US, Lebanon, and the French we will act immediately, without notification, and only after will we explain to whoever will ask questions,” Amidror added.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1039)

The post Achievements? Yes. Victory? Not Yet   first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Add the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to the growing list of global institutions that feign righteous indignation when it comes to Israel’s acts of self-defense and look the other way when Israel’s enemies commit terrorist atrocities, including against their own people.

What are the likely repercussions of the ICC’s decision to request arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu? What measures must Israel take to counter the growing number of countries looking to make it and their prime ministers into pariahs? Will Donald Trump arrest that trend when he takes office? And how did the ICC outfox the Biden administration and a bipartisan group of senators who tried to spare Israel from the brunt of their trumped-up charges?

Lieutenant Colonel Ori Egoz of the IDF reserves had eyewitness experience as head of the legal team in the Southern Command when officers would choose enemy targets to attack in Gaza.

During Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Egoz was on duty when terrorists fired at IDF tanks from positions inside a UNRWA school. An IDF commander noticed something that caused him to hold his return fire.

“You know what the terrorists did?” Egoz said. “They took two kids, about six, and tied them with rope onto two missile batteries that were shooting against the tanks. I saw it with my own eyes. They kept shooting at us this way for three hours until another [IDF] unit came from the back to surprise the terrorists. We did everything we could not to harm those kids, even though we could have been harming the lives of our soldiers.”

Egoz was emotional as she recounted this story to the foreign press last Thursday night, hours after the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague announced it had issued arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity — not against Hamas, who brazenly use children as human shields, but against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, who have led Israel in war since last October 7, constrained by 24/7 scrutiny and hypocrisy that no other country has ever faced in defense of its citizens. The ICC also issued a token and most likely posthumous indictment on Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, which the IDF eliminated two months ago, although Hamas never confirmed his death.

Lt. Col. Egoz, a former assistant to the Chief Military Prosecutor and a judge in cases against terrorists in the Judea and Samaria Military Court, describes herself as a liberal, Western, democratic woman. She is a member of Forum Dvorah, an NGO promoting the equal representation of women in key decision-making positions in national security and foreign policy. She’s not your dyed-in-the-wool Netanyahu supporter, but she empathizes with his isolation in the face of global condemnation.

“Never mind whether you voted for him or not, he’s still our prime minister,” Egoz said. “I know people here who don’t necessarily like Netanyahu or his perspectives, but this is not against Netanyahu. This is against a democratic state. We’re all in this together.”

As soon as a three-judge ICC panel announced its charges, Israelis of all stripes joined in condemning the move. That includes Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, who has taken a contrarian stance to Bibi in virtually every legal matter before the state’s High Court or under deliberation in the Knesset. She criticized the ICC decision as “baseless, regrettable, and fundamentally legally flawed,” and said that the ICC lacks any jurisdiction in this matter.

The ICC is an international court created under the Rome Statute in 2001 to prosecute war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity, mainly in countries run by dictators without an independent and transparent judicial system. That doesn’t apply to Israel, which has a powerful (some say too powerful) judicial system and possesses all the legal tools to investigate and prosecute criminal misconduct.

Since its inception, the ICC has a spotty track record, issuing just 56 arrest warrants and holding 32 trials. It has convicted just six of the 11 men it has charged with war crimes. All were African militia leaders from the Congo, Mali, and Uganda, hardly bastions of democracy.

Some 124 countries have signed onto the Rome Statute, which obligates them to comply with ICC rulings, to arrest and extradite people the court serves with warrants, and to provide access to evidence and witnesses. The court only has jurisdiction over member nations. The US and Israel have not joined (nor have China, Russia, or most Middle East nations); therefore, Israel is not legally obliged to cooperate.

The Biden administration has backed Israel’s position, issuing a strong condemnation of its own, but it is tainted by its cooperation with the ICC on other matters. Donald Trump was more forceful against the ICC during his term in office, and now that it has acted against Israel, he will add the ICC to his growing menu of international junk food institutions that he may defund or defang when he takes office.

Bibi’s Bigger Problems

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrel, said the ICC decision was binding on all EU members, but he’s not long for his job. Borrel’s term in office ends on Sunday, December 1. Estonia’s former prime minister Kaja Kallas, a noted Israel supporter, will replace him.

Aside from that, much of Western Europe is in line with the ICC.

Dutch foreign minister Caspar Veldkamp announced the Netherlands would abide by the Rome Statute: “That means we comply with arrest warrants if someone is on Dutch territory.” Israel’s minister of foreign affairs Gideon Saar immediately retaliated by canceling Veldkamp’s scheduled Monday visit to Israel.

Ireland, whose recent governments have shown increased hostility toward Israel, called the indictments an “extremely significant step.” Still, some Western European countries, including the UK, France, Germany, and Italy, adopted nuanced views, professing support for the ICC without committing to handcuffing Netanyahu if he steps on their turf.

If Netanyahu must visit Europe, he will be welcome in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban invited him a day after the ICC ruling.

Eugene Kontorovich, head of the international law department at the Kohelet Policy Forum, a Jerusalem-based think tank, says the fallout from the ICC indictment is likely negligible.

“Bibi doesn’t travel so much anyway, and he doesn’t need to go to countries that are already not safe for Jews,” Kontorovich said. Besides, he added, Netanyahu has plenty to keep him occupied on the home front. “Hezbollah is shooting at us. They’re firing rockets at his house [in Caesarea]. Iran is trying to kill him, and now some fake court in the Hague is seeking to arrest him. Bibi isn’t going to stand trial at the ICC.”

Enforcing an ICC arrest warrant could also backfire on EU countries that have trade relationships and import arms from Israeli defense manufacturers and who rely on Mossad to warn them of any planned terror attacks in Europe.

Professor Kontorovich — who also teaches at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, where he established the Center for the Middle East and International Law to train young scholars to take a deeper dive into the intricacies of the Middle East — recommends Israel use that leverage to apply maximum diplomatic counterpressure and negotiate agreements with individual countries not to enforce arrest warrants.

“America also has numerous agreements like that with many countries,” he said.

Kontorovich contends that Israel must be proactive and continue to demonstrate the illegitimacy of the court. It must also cooperate with the incoming Trump administration to seek maximum sanctions against the ICC and those who comply with their rulings. He recommended the Knesset act quickly to pass a law already pending for years that would mirror America’s Armed Services Member Protection Act, nicknamed the Hague Act.

The Hague Act is a counterweight to the ICC’s powers. President George W. Bush signed it into law in 2002 to protect US armed forces stationed overseas to fight the war on terror after 9/11. The Hague Act empowers the president to employ “all necessary means,” including military force, to release US citizens, military personnel, or politicians detained by the ICC. This can be extended to include officials of US allies, such as Israel, that serve American national security interests.

Target Crime, Not People

Even if the personal consequences for Netanyahu remain limited to crimping his travel itinerary, the ICC decision is another phase in the trend of using lawfare to turn Israel into a global punching bag and scapegoating Netanyahu.

Lawfare describes the use or abuse of existing legal systems and institutions to damage or delegitimize an opponent. In the way the game is played against Israel, the goal is to apply enough political pressure to tie Israel’s hands militarily in its battle against Iran and its proxies.

Lt. Col. (retired) Geoffrey Corn addressed the abuse of lawfare at a Friday morning webinar sponsored by JINSA, the Jewish Institute for the National Security of America. Corn is a distinguished fellow at JINSA’s Gemunder Center, a pro-Israel think tank dedicated to advancing US national security interests in the Middle East.

Corn, who is also chair of criminal law and director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech School of Law, cited a speech by Robert Jackson, who served on the US Supreme Court from 1941 to 1954, following a brief stint as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attorney general.

“He [Jackson] said one of the greatest dangers of a prosecutor is that you target people and not crime,” Corn said. “In other words, you look for someone you want to get, and then you find a crime to charge them with — as opposed to looking for a crime, and then you go after whoever commits it. This [ICC case] has had this flavor since its inception.”

Corn said that the way the ICC operates, they can’t rescind the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant in the current pre-trial phase. The Court could throw the charges out, but only during the trial. That enabled Kenya’s former president, Uhuru Kenyatta, to get off the hook.

The ICC charged Kenyatta in 2012 with crimes against humanity for post-election violence in 2007 that led to the deaths of 1,200 Kenyans. The ICC dropped the charges in 2014, but only after he appeared before the ICC to fight. For him, it was a risk worth taking, because the Kenyan government took steps to obstruct the trial, refusing to hand over documents vital to the case and bribing and intimidating witnesses not to testify — conduct we would not expect from Israel.

The only way to clear their names is to fight the charges, and since neither Bibi nor Gallant can afford to take that risk, the cases will cause complications for the foreseeable future.

“This will have a profound shock effect,” Corn said. “The ICC ruling reinforces every Israel critic. It will be used as confirmation of the worst narratives of what Israel has done in this conflict, including the IDF, with no real opportunity for rebuttal.”

Trump’s Fight to Win

Israel and the incoming Trump administration are reportedly discussing countermeasures to employ against the ICC once Trump takes office.

Incoming national security advisor Mike Waltz tweeted that the US government has already refuted the ICC allegations against Israel and that “Israel has lawfully defended its people and borders from genocidal terrorists. You can expect a strong response to the antisemitic bias of the ICC and UN come January.”

The current Senate, under Democratic control, can beat Republicans to the punch. However, action in the Senate last week indicates that Democrats have yet to internalize that ganging up on Israel was one factor that enabled Republicans to wrest control of the Senate from them.

Last week, the Senate voted on three measures that would have prevented the US from supplying certain heavy armaments to Israel. While all failed by wide margins, between 17 and 19 progressive Democrats (and independents who caucus with Democrats) voted for one or more of those measures. This means that as many as 40% of the Democrats who will serve in the incoming Senate voted for some form of an arms embargo on Israel, which also shows how the sun is setting on the concept of bipartisan support for Israel.

Senate Democratic leadership has obstructed moves that might have stopped the ICC.

In June, the House passed HR 8282 by a 247-155 vote, calling for mandatory sanctions against ICC judges and senior leadership if they voted to levy arrest warrants against Israeli politicians or IDF brass. The sanctions include the right to block all financial and property transactions on assets ICC people may hold in the US, stop them from entering America, or to reject or revoke visa applications.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee reviewed the House bill, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has yet to release it for a vote on the Senate floor.

During the JINSA webinar, moderator Blaise Misztal asked JINSA fellow Gabriel Noronha for insight into why Schumer is delaying a vote.

Noronha, who formerly coordinated policy and directed communication between the State Department and Congress on Iran, said: “My understanding is this was based on a request from the Biden administration, who objects to these [arrest] warrants, but who also has a long history of cooperation with the ICC.”

Noronha said to the best of his knowledge, Biden administration legal minds, as well as Republican senators, including South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, played politics with the ICC when they issued an arrest warrant for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in March 2023, accusing him of illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine. Putin has since dismissed the charge as “meaningless.” The logic behind this was Putin could be charged, weakening his position, while the charges against Israel could be modified through ongoing discussions.

Noronha reported that Senate leaders from both sides of the aisle, including Israeli envoys, spoke with ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan and his team after Khan announced the court’s intention to file charges against Israel in May.

“The ICC had a lot of fair warning, and Karim Khan would have been warned specifically that this would lead to political warfare if they went down that path,” Noronha said.

But the ICC decided to plow ahead in a biased manner. Instead of accepting Israel’s offer to visit Gaza and see for themselves the ravages Hamas wreaked on Israeli communities, it declined the offer and instead released a flashy video of Khan, flanked by two of his prosecutors, announcing all of the charges.

Noronha added that the ICC decision breached the good faith effort to work toward a thoughtful compromise, and senators are fuming.

“They believe they’ve been burned, and they believe they’ve been lied to, and that includes, I believe, Majority Leader Schumer and a number of Democrat and Republican Senate leaders who were on these conference calls,” Noronha said. “I’ve been told by their staffers that they were explicitly lied to by Karim Khan and his associates.”

(Khan himself is now facing charges of personal misconduct, and some pundits believe the charges filed against Israel are meant to distract from his legal woes.)

Noronha noted that in Trump’s first administration, when Mike Pompeo was secretary of state, Trump leveled sanctions against ICC officials for prosecuting US soldiers for alleged crimes they committed in Afghanistan.

Assuming Marco Rubio is confirmed as secretary of state, Noronha said he will also show a “similar desire to go aggressively after ICC leadership.”

Until then, Schumer has until the end of December to decide whether to bring the House bill to sanction the ICC to the Senate floor for a vote and get the credit himself for pressuring the ICC.

“I think there is a lot of concern from majority leadership [Schumer] that a future Republican administration would be a lot more aggressive in executing sanctions,” Noronha said. “I’ll be interested to see if Biden proposes narrow countermeasures in the next month without disrupting the entire system, but I suspect the political trajectory is that this will roll over to the next administration.”

On Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham issued a challenge, warning US allies on Fox News, and naming Canada, Britain, Germany, France: “ If you are going to help the ICC as a nation enforce the arrest warrant against Bibi and Gallant… I will put sanctions on you.”

Noronha suggests that strong sanctions could induce the ICC to moderate its actions and try to return to what he called “a place of cooperation.” Still, he’s not optimistic: “I suspect the next year is going to be a very cold and ugly year in the relations.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1038)

The post Courting Disaster           first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

In the past decade, I’ve interviewed four men President-elect Trump just nominated for top cabinet positions. Here’s what they said then on issues relevant to the US-Israel relationship, how they fit in with Trump, and what we can expect from them if they win Senate confirmation.

O

nce the 119th Congress is gaveled into session on January 3, the Senate will begin confirmation hearings for President-elect Trump’s 15 top cabinet choices.

Republicans will hold a 53-47 majority in the incoming Senate, including majority control of the committees that will probe Trump’s nominees, but that doesn’t mean his picks are shoo-ins.

The Constitution grants the Senate “advice and consent” powers over cabinet appointments. Each nominee will undergo a rigorous vetting process by a relevant Senate committee. For example, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee holds hearings for the nominee for secretary of state while the Armed Services Committee takes testimony from Trump’s pick for defense secretary.

Senators traditionally take this constitutional duty to heart and act like lions, not lambs. Staffers and other federal agencies conduct background checks on nominees’ financial affairs and prior job and life experience. Nominees testify under oath, so the hearings are much more than a glorified job interview. Many of Trump’s picks lack federal experience and will face pressure to convince senators they are up to the task of managing a federal bureaucracy with budgets of hundreds of billions of dollars and employing tens of thousands of people.

Some nominees will face embarrassing or challenging questions about past foibles and lack of moral and ethical fiber.

Trump has history on his side when it comes to getting nominations approved. Many recent presidents have been compelled to withdraw nominees due to fierce Senate opposition, but the full Senate has only rejected a nominee nine times. The last time was in 1989, when it rejected George H.W. Bush’s selection of former Texas senator John Tower as secretary of defense when an FBI clearance check discovered evidence of personal misconduct.

Once the hearings conclude, the Senate committees deliberate in private and vote on whether to recommend the nominee for a vote on the Senate floor. A nominee needs only a one-vote majority from the panel they appeared before and on the Senate floor to win confirmation.

That’s where the GOP majority favors their chances, but some six of the returning 53 Republican senators are not loyal to Trump and have expressed dismay over controversial picks, including firebrand Matt Gaetz for attorney general and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services.

I’m zooming in on four picks I have personally interviewed, three of whom, if confirmed, will serve in positions critical to constructive US-Israeli relations.

1

Marco Rubio, Secretary of State–Designate

Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio has made a remarkable metamorphosis from the week in 2016 when he dropped out of the presidential race and told a Mishpacha reporter that Trump was “the most vulgar person that’s ever run for president” and “a terrible example for young people.”

We discussed Rubio’s change of heart when I interviewed him for our cover feature in June 2022 (“Life of the Party: Senator Marco Rubio Warns of American Weakness in a Hostile World,” Issue 917).

Rubio credited Trump for transforming the Republican Party, attracting new working-class voters who felt alienated and underrepresented, which we now know powered Trump’s victory.

As vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Rubio is qualified to serve as secretary of state, but the fact that his nomination was first leaked to the New York Times, instead of Trump directly announcing, was a sign that this might have been a trial balloon to see how hard MAGA forces might push back against Rubio, who is also part of the old Republican guard.

Rubio was already ahead of the curve on that, addressing his agreements and disagreements with Trump in our interview.

“Where our views align, I’m obviously going to be supportive of President Trump’s position,” Rubio said. “In those instances in which our views may not be entirely aligned, I’ll explain those differences and do what I think is right.”

As secretary of state, Rubio will be subservient to Trump, but if Rubio can be honest with Trump, and Trump is willing to listen, Rubio’s steadiness will pair well with Trump’s unpredictability.

For Israel, the secretary of state can either be an “ezer” or “k’negdo.” In most administrations, the scales have tilted to the k’negdo side, with a passionate pursuit of a two-state solution, putting the onus on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority that would jeopardize its security.

Rubio has never totally disavowed a two-state solution, and neither has Trump, but Rubio has long maintained that the conditions don’t exist for that to happen. Two months ago, Rubio wrote a letter criticizing the Biden administration’s pressure on Israel, noting: “Israelis rightfully living in their historic homeland are not the impediment to peace; the Palestinians are.”

One of Trump’s goals is to drain the swamp in Washington. The State Department sits on former swampland aptly nicknamed Foggy Bottom. Rubio admitted to me, “There’s no doubt that there are people with deep-seated antagonism toward the state of Israel within the embedded American bureaucracy, including our diplomatic corps.”

The State Department would be a good place for Trump and Rubio to get to work.

2

Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense–Designate

The nomination of this man, who spent the last seven years as a political commentator and weekend co-host of the highly rated Fox and Friends, was a head-scratcher to DC insiders. But Hegseth shares Trump’s goal of remaking — some call it purging — the Pentagon of woke generals and bureaucrats.

Hegseth has enraged the woke crowd for his fierce opposition to women in combat roles and his contention that the Pentagon’s emphasis on DEI hires has weakened the military, prioritizing race and color over merit, reducing young people’s motivation to enlist.

Hegseth is a former infantry captain in the Army National Guard in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he earned two Bronze Stars in combat. He also holds a bachelor’s in politics from Princeton and a master’s in public policy from Harvard, so intellectually, he’s no slouch.

We sat across from each other at a breakfast table in August 2016 at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, a few months before he joined Fox and Friends. He had come to Israel for a story comparing and contrasting IDF service to US Army service.

He noticed one fundamental difference that’s even more applicable today. “America usually deploys elsewhere in defense of itself, whereas in Israel, there’s an existential nature of what Israeli forces face in defending their homeland,” Hegseth said.

Since then, Hegseth has been a passionate defender of Israel using maximum force on Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists. Israel will benefit from a no-nonsense advocate in the Defense Department.

The woke left despises Hegseth, an evangelical Christian, and they are pouring their scrutiny on Hegseth’s tattoos, which they contend consist of slogans from alt-right groups. We know that Trump has a cadre of far-right supporters, some of whom have expressed anti-Semitic sentiments. It will be interesting to hear how Hegseth responds to these charges at his confirmation hearings.

3

Mike Huckabee, Ambassador–Designate to Israel

This was also a bit of a shocker. Many pundits expected Trump to renominate David Friedman, but Trump is looking for a new direction, and Huckabee will provide that.

A former governor of Arkansas, whose daughter now holds that position, Huckabee has made dozens of visits to Israel, leading evangelical groups on tours of Israel’s biblical past.

I first met him in February 2011 (“A Few Minutes with Mike Huckabee,” Issue 346), when he too was a Fox News host. He visited Israel to help lay the cornerstone for the expansion of a Jewish neighborhood on the campus of Beit Orot, a Hesder yeshivah located between Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives, land the international community would label “occupied Arab East Jerusalem.”

When I asked Huckabee if he was afraid of painting himself into a corner, he replied: “People have to take a stand. You can’t please everyone. One of the things that I learned in politics was that it’s best to be true to your own convictions and heart and have people unhappy with it rather than try to please everyone and ultimately make everyone unhappy.”

Since his nomination, Huckabee has suggested that Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria could be in the cards for 2025 while adding that Trump will make policy, and his role will be to help implement it.

Huckabee and Israel will be on the same page on Iran. When I interviewed Huckabee again in February 2015, as controversy was swirling over whether Prime Minister Netanyahu should address a joint session of Congress to lobby them to vote against the Obama administration’s pending nuclear deal with Iran, Huckabee said Bibi should go ahead despite the opposition.

He had Iran pegged and argued strongly against a deal that would loosen sanctions and enable them to develop nuclear weapons.

“My analogy is a simple one. Growing up in South Arkansas, we had snakes. When you’re dealing with a snake, you’re dealing with an entity with which you cannot reason. You never try to say, ‘I wonder why the snake wants to bite me.’ It doesn’t really matter why the snake wants to bite you… You don’t try to make friends with it. You kill the snake, because the snake will bite you if it has the chance…. What we’re dealing with [in Iran] is the equivalent of a global snake that truly has as its nature to kill us.”

Speaking of ambassadors, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Trump’s pick for UN ambassador, is cut from the same mold as Huckabee. Stefanik’s majestic takedown of several Ivy League presidents at House hearings on anti-Semitism on college campuses earned her a cabinet post. Her willingness to battle forces of darkness will serve her well at the UN, a cesspool of corruption that’s more polluted than the East River it abuts.

4

Doug Collins, Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs–Designate

This appointment is not directly relevant to the US-Israel relationship, but we’ve published many articles over the years about Orthodox military chaplains, so Trump’s appointment of former Georgia representative Doug Collins as secretary of Veterans Affairs should bring more moral clarity to a department employing more than 400,000 people, running an annual budget of well over $300 billion. The Department provides lifelong health care to eligible military veterans at some 170 VA medical centers and outpatient clinics nationwide and also provides non-health-care benefits, including vocational rehabilitation, education assistance, and home loans.

I interviewed Collins in his congressional office in April 2016, after he had sponsored a House bill requiring the president to assess whether the US was maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge in the Middle East every two years instead of every four.

Collins, a former Air Force chaplain for US troops in Iraq, also strongly supported an amendment that would prevent the Defense Department from appointing atheist chaplains, which he called an oxymoron, and he looked at the big picture.

“It’s an attack on chaplaincy as a whole, bottom line,” he told me. “This is an attack on the founders of our country who valued religious freedom and expression, no matter where you are… because they don’t want any morality or religious base to be a part of it. When you take out the moral underpinnings of family and faith or the belief that there is no moral right and wrong, you’re attacking the institution.”

It’s a battle that’s still going on in various sectors of American society, but Collins will face much bigger battles trying to reform or privatize services at a beleaguered government agency whose healthcare system is broken, leaving people who defended the country to fend for themselves.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1037)

The post Forceful and Resourceful first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

T

he even split in voter registration between Democrats and Republicans — which manifests itself at the voting booth and ultimately in the halls of power — looks on the surface like the picture of balance. But sometimes pictures are deceiving. In America today, extremes hold the mics and the reins. Polarization prevails.

Political polarization is not a new phenomenon. It’s been building in intensity for 50 years, since the early 1970s, due to widening gaps between Republican and Democratic officeholders and those who vote them into office. However, the polarization trend came to a head during the 2024 election campaign. What’s behind the troubling phenomenon?

Since his meteoric emergence on the political scene in 2015, Donald Trump has borne the brunt of the blame for inflaming political dialogue. But a persona like Trump doesn’t suddenly land on American soil from outer space. The climate had to be ripe for someone like him.

Is America’s current extreme polarization issues-based, a personality clash, or part of a global trend? Experts attribute it to all of the above, and it’s easier to define than to solve. It’s also causing rifts in society that are difficult to mend.

Polarization, in its most damaging form that everyday Americans have come to experience, is known as “affective polarization.” It trickles down and sometimes gushes into our social circles. Arguments break out at the dinner and kiddush tables or the workplace. Friends, family, and colleagues become estranged and find themselves having to set ground rules, such as no political talk at social gatherings.

Professionals have taken note. In 2012, the American Association of Public Opinion Research published a study from three researchers at Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Amsterdam demonstrating that both Republicans and Democrats increasingly dislike — even loathe — each other and ascribe negative traits to both politicians and rank-and-file members of the other party.

This study claimed political campaigns and the media are the worst offenders for reinforcing the partisan and biased views of their opponents. Actual policy disagreements take a backseat to these main offenders guilty of promoting frontal assaults.

A Half-Century of Ideological Drift

Having said that, there is no denying that sharp disagreements over weighty issues contribute strongly to polarization.

Republicans and Democrats hold antagonistic beliefs and opinions on economic issues, foreign policy — especially in the Middle East — immigration, crimefighting, the weaponization of the justice system, climate change, abortion, and the role of the federal government in people’s lives.

Pew Opinion Research backed this up with a comprehensive survey six months ago: “Changing Partisan Coalitions in a Politically Divided Nation.” They reviewed shifts over 30 years of their polling, which showed that these fault lines are deeply rooted and based mainly on levels of education and racial, ethnic, and geographic disparities.

Pew contends that both parties began drifting from their ideological centers in the early 1970s, with Democrats lurching left and Republicans veering right.

They cited data from DW-NOMINATE, a methodology that examines lawmakers’ roll-call votes over time to grade and compare them ideologically. Among their findings:

Moderates are an endangered species: Just about two dozen moderate Democrats and Republicans remain on Capitol Hill, compared to more than 160 moderates in 1971-72.

Democrats are far more liberal: In 1971-72, some 31.4% of all House Democrats hailed from the 11 former Confederate states and were notably less liberal than their Democratic colleagues from the other 39 states. Many of these were nicknamed the “Boll Weevil Democrats”; they crossed party lines to support Reaganomics. Today, nearly half of House Democrats are black, Hispanic, or Asian-Pacific, while the 22% remaining Southern Democrats are far less conservative than they used to be.

Republicans have shifted well to the right. Southerners, who made up less than 15% of the House GOP caucus 50 years ago, account for 42% of it today. Some 49 House Republicans, or 22%, are either members or allies of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus.

These shifts in political representation are manifestations of how voters have changed their views and alliances over the years. Whichever party controls the White House and Congress becomes less relevant when both politicians and the voters are galloping in different directions, and neither side seems inclined to tug on the reins and say “Whoa!”

A World in Poly-Crisis

American politics doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Part of US political polarization can be attributed to global factors. And the erosion of the center is a phenomenon that’s taking place in many other countries around the globe.

A 1999 book, Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millenium, coined the term “poly-crisis,” subsequently defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “a time of great disagreement, confusion, or suffering caused by many different problems happening at the same time so that they together have a very big effect.”

IPSOS, a multinational market research and consulting firm with headquarters in Paris, noted in an April 2023 report that citizens of the world are dissatisfied with their current political systems, democratic or autocratic, and share a bucketful of common concerns.

These include immigration, wars and geopolitical conflicts, extreme weather (climate change), Big Tech’s invasion of personal privacy — including growing threats of cyberattacks on infrastructure and ransomware — and increased resentment of entrenched economic inequalities.

These factors provide voters with the validation to fear a future run by a political party they distrust and even detest. This also helps explain why so many voters in European countries have rejected establishment politics and turned to far-right parties, whose disruptive style and even some of their prejudices appeal to those who fear a future based on universal ideals formulated by the elite class.

It doesn’t have to turn into a zero-sum game.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a global network of policy research centers, produced a report last year that contends that polarization is more a matter of misperception. They argue that average American voters are less ideologically polarized on the issues than they think. Raw partisanship — formed from the need to identify with one political stream or another — clouds their vision to the point where they view the opposing side as the enemy, and this phenomenon could be alleviated by bridging techniques such as correcting misperceptions based on policies and encouraging the formation of a common identity.

However, getting the extremes from both sides together could prove to be overambitious. The Carnegie report admitted that progressive activists suffer the cloudiest vision, followed closely by what they labeled as “extreme conservatives.”

In their words: “The people who are most involved in civic and political life hold the least accurate views of the other side’s beliefs.”

Will the common concerns and fears that citizens share ultimately bring them closer to each other? Does America and other nations around the world have leaders who can unify them and work to solve the problems? Or will misperceptions and cloudy vision continue to build and wreak havoc with political systems that seem to be beyond repair?

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1035)

The post Pulled to the Poles first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photo: AP Images

IT’S

getting too late for the Biden-Harris administration to pull off a November surprise to influence the presidential election.

By this time next week, we should know who won, but whether Kamala Harris becomes the 47th president or waddles into lame-duck status, the Biden administration will remain in power for another 76 days, giving them enough time to complicate life for Israel if they so desire.

For weeks, Israeli media and political circles have been abuzz with growing speculation that if Harris loses, the Biden administration will take out their frustrations on the Netanyahu government and punish it for its “disobedience” — or, if she wins, her incoming administration will initiate draconian anti-Israel policies and hide behind the claim that she merely inherited these policies from the previous administration.

These could include an arms embargo of some kind that would hamper Israel from prosecuting its wars against Hamas and Hezbollah, or a linkage of future arms shipments to a unilateral cease-fire on terms disadvantageous to Israel. Other options include leveling financial sanctions, such as freezing bank accounts or denying access to the SWIFT international money transfer system. Targets could include right-wing Israeli cabinet members such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, or organizations such as Amana and the Nachala Foundation, which raise money and help finance infrastructure in Judea and Samaria.

Most of these actions would be reversible if Trump takes office, but even two and a half months of sanctions could stall Israel’s military momentum, right when the IDF has Hamas and Hezbollah on the run. It would also encourage European nations clamoring for similar actions and embolden the forces working overtime to delegitimize Israel’s claims to Judea and Samaria, which is now home to more than 850,000 Jews, counting the 350,000 who live in Jerusalem neighborhoods built after the 1967 Six Day War.

Pressure Doesn’t Pay

There is precedent for a departing US administration shoving Israel under the bus in its waning days.

Just three weeks before Barack Obama ceded the Oval Office to Donald Trump, the Obama administration stabbed Israel in the back by abstaining from, rather than vetoing, UN Resolution 2334, which labeled Israel’s settlement activity in Judea and Samaria a “flagrant violation” of international law and declared that the settlements had no “legal validity.”

While Obama’s vindictive, last-minute move surprised no one, none other than Ronald Reagan pulled off a shocker in mid-December 1988, five weeks before his second term ended, when he broke a longstanding American boycott of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and entered into a “substantive dialogue” with the terrorist organization sworn to the destruction of Israel.

Except for the shock value, the UN resolution that the Obama administration let by was toothless. The UN did not invoke any sanctions or implement any coercive measures against Israel. Ultimately, the Trump administration showed its contempt for it with its November 2019 declaration that the settlements were not illegal.

However, Reagan’s decision to recognize the PLO caused Israel far more damage in the long term. It was a blunder of monumental proportions, as it granted American legitimacy to a terrorist organization and its chairman, Yasser Arafat. It provided the impetus for back-channel negotiations initiated by gullible Israelis and led to the Oslo Accords four years later. Arafat rewarded Israel’s blind leap of faith by building a terror infrastructure in Judea and Samaria that threatens the lives of Israelis to this day.

Reagan’s act came out of left field, as he was considered a strong supporter of Israel. Reagan had strengthened US strategic and military cooperation with Israel, despite his initial opposition to Israel’s 1981 air strike that destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor, and concerns over Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon in alliance with Lebanese Christian militias to oust PLO forces. Despite Israeli dependence on the US and whatever personal animosity he felt toward Israel’s unbending prime minister, Menachem Begin, Reagan made peace with the idea that the US could not force Israel to concur with positions that Israel believed ran contrary to its vital interests.

Friends in High Places

Which brings us back to the here and now.

What can Israel do to forestall any vindictive or punitive actions the outgoing Biden administration might take in its last days?

To the greatest extent possible, Israel should operate well under the radar. Israel has many friends in Washington who are keeping an eye out for any last-minute desperation Hail Marys the Biden administration might be tempted to employ as the clock runs out on their term in office.

Last week, Iowa’s Senator James Risch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that when Congress returns to session after the election, he and 26 Senate colleagues will introduce a “Stand with Israel” bill that would cut off US funding to United Nations agencies that expel, downgrade, suspend, or otherwise restrict the participation of the State of Israel. Representative Mike Lawler (R-NY), who is locked in a tight re-election race with Democrat Mondaire Jones, has introduced a similar bill in the House of Representatives.

In any event, it’s getting harder to justify US funding to a UN led by Antonio Guterres, who is hopelessly biased and hostile toward Israel and who supports UNRWA, an organization with proven ties to Hamas that stood idly by as Hamas exploited its infrastructure to use as bases from which to attack Israel.

In addition, Israel and Jewish supporters of Donald Trump should try to persuade him to declare that if he wins, he will consider any last-minute executive orders from the Biden administration against Israel, including arms embargos and financial sanctions, to be null and void and will reverse them shortly after he takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025.

Finally, someone ought to make the case to Biden that the split personality he has displayed to Israel will not help him build his legacy.

There is the Joe Biden who flew to Israel following the October 7 massacre, which at least initially was a genuine show of compassion and empathy, and the Joe Biden who has dispatched US naval warships to the Middle East and sophisticated anti-missile batteries to defend Israel and deter Iran.

Then there is the Joe Biden who has played petty politics, interfering in Israel’s internal affairs, trying to undermine its prime minister and government elected by a large majority of Israelis, and handcuffing Israel militarily as it fights for its survival against enemies trying to annihilate it.

Which legacy would Biden like to preserve?

The decisions he makes in his final two months, no matter whether his hand-picked successor or his despised political rival wins, will play an important role in how history views him.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1034)

The post Biden’s November Surprise for Israel? first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photo: SHUTTERSTOCK/PRASHANTRAJSINGH

For the past year, Israel has bravely battled Iranian proxies on multiple fronts while millions of Jewish citizens hunker down in sealed rooms and run-down shelters.

Will year two of the war mark the moment when Israel takes off the gloves and takes the battle directly to Iran? Does Israel have any other choice at this point?

At press time, we were on the verge of a major conflagration following Iran’s second missile attack on Israel in the past six months.

When Israel strikes back, as Prime Minister Netanyahu has vowed to do, can it inflict a decisive blow to make the price of further retaliation prohibitive? Or will an Israeli punch and Iranian counterpunch escalate into the all-out regional war that the Biden administration is pressuring Israel to avert?

Unless Netanyahu is willing to go it alone, Israel must walk a fine line. It will need ongoing American defense backing to subdue Iran, and US veto power on the UN Security Council to deter one-sided resolutions that could isolate Israel and force a premature cease-fire.

Israel can walk that line without stumbling if it continues its uncompromising approach to defending its vital security interests, and if it applies shrewd judgment as to when, where, and how to defy US advice, well-meaning or not.

“To me, the total war scenario is a no-go, because Israel’s many enemies in the US in politics and academia will accuse us of dragging the US into a war that’s against America’s interests and that the American people don’t want,” said Dr. Dan Schueftan, director of the University of Haifa’s National Security Studies Center, who advocated a more cautious approach during a moderated interview with Dr. Roi Yozevitch, a podcaster, lecturer, and researcher at Ariel University.

Having said that, Dr. Schueftan contends that Israel often achieves its best results by defying US wishes on a smaller scale. The Biden administration publicly opposed both the IDF invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza in May and last week’s incursion into southern Lebanon. By defying the US on both, Israel has Hamas on the ropes and has wiped out a massive percentage of Hezbollah’s military capabilities in just two weeks with minimal casualties and property damage inside Israel.

At the start of the new week, the IDF issued evacuation orders in northern Gaza before embarking on a new offensive to dismantle terrorist infrastructure. The latest IDF offensives are designed to contribute to Israel’s long-term security and pave safe passage for more than 100,000 Jewish evacuees to return to and rebuild their homes and their lives in border communities.

Dr. Schueftan is a seasoned analyst of the US-Israel relationship and all of its nuances.

Since 1977, he has briefed and consulted with senators and members of the House of Representatives and has served as a consultant to Israeli decision-makers, including the top echelon of the Prime Minister’s Office, foreign and defense ministries, and the National Security Council.

He says Israel has often ignored US requests when they ran counter to its best interests. It’s nothing to be afraid of. This advice applies more than ever right now, as the IDF continues to pound Hamas and Hezbollah into the sand to prevent them from regrouping militarily

A Series of Blunders

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rejected President Truman’s pressure to repatriate Arab refugees who fled after the 1948 War of Independence.

Two years after Israel’s miraculous victory in the 1967 Six Day War, the Israeli cabinet rejected a proposal by US Secretary of State William Rogers to trade the land they captured in that war for “peace.”

“If we had taken the Arab refugees back, we would have had a civil war by now, and we wouldn’t exist,” Dr. Schueftan said. “And if we had listened to America [in 1969] and accepted the Rogers Plan, we would have received a worthless treaty in return.”

Dr. Schueftan also cited a laundry list of American failures that haunt Israel to this day. They include President Bush urging Israel to show restraint during the 2006 Second Lebanon War, which allowed Hezbollah the next 18 years to augment its rocket arsenal. Bush’s second-term Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pressured Israel in 2005 to allow Hamas to participate in Palestinian Authority elections — a major blunder that brought Hamas to power in short order.

Schueftan leveled major criticism against the Biden administration for empowering the Houthis. Just three weeks after Biden took office, Secretary of State Antony Blinken officially removed the Houthis’ designation as a foreign terrorist organization on humanitarian grounds, despite their support from Iran and their links to Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Blinken had to reverse course earlier this year and relabel the Houthis a “specially designated global terrorist group” following their attacks on ships that closed shipping lanes in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

Facilitating an Exit

DR. Schueftan says it’s part of a pattern: “America has hallucinated many times in other places, trying to bring democracy to Iraq, women’s rights to Afghanistan. And now they want peace for the Palestinians.”

To achieve that peace, the Biden administration has consistently pressured Netanyahu to announce a “day after” plan for Gaza — and this is where Dr. Schueftan contends Israel could shrewdly align its interests with America’s. The US wants to exit the Middle East to focus more on China. If the US leaves, someone needs to fill that vacuum. He contends the only way to do that is to assemble a triumvirate of nations: Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and each is indispensable.

“Egypt has the legitimacy [in the Arab world], Saudi Arabia has the resources, and Israel has the military strength,” says Dr. Schueftan. “It’s not as if the US would become dependent on Israel. But by taking the lead on this, Israel could defend itself and serve US purposes [by creating a climate of stability that allows them to leave].”

And the more Israel asserts itself now in the current conflicts, the more it can gain the upper hand in devising future solutions.

“Israel’s biggest challenge since its founding is to continually strengthen relations with the US, mainly in defense and security, while at the same time not listening to what they tell us,” Dr. Schueftan adds. “We have to force America to make peace with the idea that we’re going to oppose them until it begins to dawn upon them that we’re fighting seriously to win this war.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1032)

The post When and How to Defy America first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.