Grim news - The Jewish Standard

This is an unsettling time.

This isn’t news to anyone. No matter how sanguine anyone’s worldview might be, it’s not easy to squint hard enough to make things look good.

About two weeks ago, Robert Kagan, the well-respected neoconservative thinker who writes for the Atlantic, published a column that was so terrifying that when I brought it up at Shabbat lunch, everyone at the table shuddered.

He said that not only has the United States lost the war in Iran — at this point hardly a controversial position; official statements often tell us that we’re winning handily, but they’re rarely clear or consistent enough to be convincing — but that it will be a disaster for Israel.

It seems that President Trump is trying to extricate himself from the war, which has proven to be extremely unpopular at home; that situation hasn’t been helped by his neglecting to explain it before he began it or as he continued to wage it. There doesn’t seem to have been a threat to the United States severe enough to justify it, most Americans think.

It’s not the same for Israelis, who live constantly under the threat of attack — of annihilation — from the mullahs, who have made it clear that their prime goal is to erase the Jewish state. They know that Iran funds Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — the Islamic Republic did not create those groups’ brutal hatred, but it did give them the means to murder. Israelis live with the constant threat of running to shelters, of not making it in time. Of — please, God, no — another October 7.

But that doesn’t change the reality that the war in Iran is not going well.

According to Kagan — and to most other commentators, most of whom would prefer that this not be the case — our war against Iran is doomed. It was well carried out in the beginning but ill-conceived; the Iranians control the Strait of Hormuz, and that trumps everything.

That’s a humiliation for us, but a disaster for Israel.

This is what Robert Kagan wrote:

“The Iran war may end up as the single most devastating blow to Israel’s security in its brief history. On the present trajectory, Iran will emerge from the conflict many times stronger and more influential than it was before the war. It will exercise leverage with dozens of the richest nations in the world, all of which will have an acute interest in keeping Iran happy. They will be unlikely to take Israel’s side in any conflict that it has with Tehran or with its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, because Iran will have the means to punish them if they do. Israel will emerge more isolated than it has been at any time in its history — and not least from its only reliable protector, the United States. When Trump turns his back on Israel, as he must do to implement this policy, MAGA will gladly follow. The bipartisan anti-Israel consensus in the United States will grow and harden.”

It is hard to see how he’s wrong.

This is hard to write. It’s hard to think.

We can do whatever we can do here. Not be pushed around by antisemites. Not be bullied. Not lose our hope and our joy — and remember that now it is spring, the season for joy.

We as a people have been through far worse than this, and we’re still here. We will continue still to be here. Things will get better. But until then — whenever then might be — we have to hold on to hope.

–JP

Opinion

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