And Trump himself would be cheerleading the criticism, adapting his old Ukraine shtick by insisting that a war between Iran and Israel never would have happened if he were president.
As for President Kamala Harris, one never knows for sure but she almost certainly wouldn’t have joined an Israeli military campaign. There’s too much hostility to the Jewish state within her base, particularly after the war in Gaza and the Biden administration’s support of it, to believe she’d turn around five months into her term and tag-team with Benjamin Netanyahu to bomb Iran. Republican hawks would have been incensed at her show of weakness, accusing her of midwifing an eventual nuclear holocaust by passing on the last best chance to prevent it.
Only Donald Trump has enough political juice to attack Iran’s underground enrichment site at Fordow and to unite nearly the entirety of the American right behind doing so. In fact, according to one poll, self-described “MAGA Republicans” are more likely to support bombing Iran than traditional Republicans are. Steve Bannon, a pied piper of “America First”-ism, is under no illusions: “The vast majority of the MAGA movement will say, ‘Look, we trust your judgment, you walked us through this. … Maybe we hate it but you know, we’ll get on board,’” he said Wednesday, anticipating how populists would react to the president’s orders to strike.
So it was lucky for Iran hawks that Trump won last year, and lucky for Israel too. Wasn’t it?
On Tuesday we considered the political risks for the right in a U.S. attack on Iran. On Wednesday we considered the political risks for Trump. Today let’s consider the political risks for Israel itself.
Dying for Israel.
It’s usually worth ignoring Matt Gaetz now that he’s no longer voting on the laws that govern the United States, thank God. But he’s a MAGA darling and a reliable mouthpiece for the postliberal id, so it’s worth checking in when populists are divided.
“If the world is interested in secret nuclear programs in the Middle East, there is a country that doesn’t allow ANY IAEA inspectors: It’s Israel,” the former nominee to be U.S. attorney general reminded his millions of social media followers on Wednesday.
Touché, I suppose, but unlike in Iran there wouldn’t be much of a mystery for those inspectors to unravel. It’s an open secret that Israel does have nuclear weapons and has probably had them for more than 50 years, although its formal position on the subject has always been “no comment.” It’s never used them despite decades of intermittent warfare and even now, with Iran’s Fordow site unreachable by conventional Israeli munitions, there’s no talk of a nuclear strike to destroy it.
Gaetz isn’t worried about Israel’s nuke capabilities, though, any more than he is Britain’s or France’s. The point of his Tucker-esque bon mot is to challenge his audience’s assumption that Israel can be trusted but Iran cannot. A Western democracy that’s been allied with the United States since it was founded versus an Islamist fascist regime that’s preached “death to America” from the jump: Are you sure one is less dangerous than the other?
That’s postliberalism in a nutshell. The authoritarian project can’t succeed without convincing the American right to stop identifying reflexively with liberals, and Israel, as a bulwark of Judeo-Christian liberalism in a region of Muslim strongmen, is a special problem in that regard. Republicans feel cultural kinship with Israelis and admire their resilience in repeatedly defeating the eliminationist designs of their more populous enemies, many of whom also despise the United States. So long as the right views the alliance between our two countries as having more upside than downside, postliberals have a problem.
But if the United States ends up being drawn into a war that Israel started, that upside/downside calculus will change. Jason Willick explained in a column for the Washington Post:
Israel’s long-term strategic position depends to a significant degree on the strength of its relationship with the United States, meaning its political popularity among Americans. Direct American participation in the war on Iran would change the U.S.-Israel relationship in a meaningful way at a time when Israel’s political position in both parties is increasingly precarious.
It is a point of pride for Israel, and a great political asset to Israel’s American supporters, that the United States has never sent its own forces to directly participate in Israeli military campaigns. The Jewish state’s great existential wars—1948, 1967, 1973, and 2023 to now—have all been fought exclusively by Israeli forces, albeit with American equipment and diplomatic backing (and, recently, help with missile defense). Unleashing the U.S. Air Force over the skies of Iran to aid Israel’s bombardment would end that impressive Israeli record spanning three-quarters of a century.
Poke around on Twitter this week and you’ll find some of the worst people in America declaring that they “won’t die for Israel,” as if Donald Trump is about to hand them a rifle and order them to take Tehran. But that hysteria won’t seem quite as hysterical if U.S. planes strike Fordow. With the Carlsons and Gaetzes egging them on, some Americans will conclude that U.S. service members were in fact sent into combat to “fight for Israel,” never mind that the United States has its own national interest in destroying Iran’s nuclear program.
Willick is so worried about how the public might react that he thinks Netanyahu should decline Trump’s help and do his best to disable the Fordow site on his own, either by putting boots on the ground or sabotaging the facility by destroying its support systems. I lean that way myself. Even if the U.S. suffered no casualties after joining the conflict, which seems unlikely, antisemites would have a field day with a storyline about the cunning Jews, the source of all wars, tricking Uncle Sam into fighting their battles for them. It would be vintage “America First”-ism—literally.
The postliberal right would find that storyline attractive, as it would serve the purpose of exculpating Trump for his hawkish tilt. (“Jewish deceit!”) The postliberal left would probably prefer in the near term to accuse the president and his party of being hopeless warmongers who needed no encouragement from Israel to bomb a longtime neocon target, but in time they’d warm up to an antisemitic narrative too. It was inevitable, they’ll say, that a genocidal settler-colonialist movement like Zionism would expand beyond its borders and seek to hypnotize the world’s greatest military power into terrorizing its foreign adversaries.
The grudge that populists in both parties already bear Israel would grow if America gets involved and might begin to spread to more mainstream voters depending on how the conflict shakes out. Trump himself isn’t above feeding it if events in Iran go south and the war becomes hopelessly unpopular, forcing him to look for a scapegoat. That’s risky business for the Jewish state long-term.
The die is cast?
There are two strong counterarguments to Willick. One is that if destroying Fordow is in America’s national interest (it is) and truly can’t be accomplished by the Israelis acting alone (debatable), then Trump should do it regardless of what sort of hay antisemites might make of it. The president mustn’t be deterred from eliminating a major security risk to the United States by the fact that the Groypers and the “globalize the intifada” chuds will mutter afterward about the many tentacles of the Jewish octopus.
One way or another, whether or not it gives Nick Fuentes the sads, Iran’s nuclear program cannot survive this campaign.
The other, bleaker response to Willick is that Americans are going to turn against Israel over time no matter what, in which case Trump might as well seize an opportunity to damage Iran’s capabilities while he can.
Consider the fact that attitudes toward Israel and Jews generally are highly age-dependent, with numerous surveys in the last two years having found older Americans more likely to express sympathy for Israelis and/or Jewish people than the younger cohort. There are various reasons for that. An obvious one is the retreat of the Holocaust and Israel’s major wars of survival from collective memory. To an older person, the Jewish state is an underdog that’s prevailed over numerous organized attempts to exterminate its population. To a younger one, it’s a U.S.-backed military behemoth that routinely has its way with the deracinated Palestinians and now the beleaguered Iranians.
Another is media, as younger people were weaned on the Internet and are more likely to get their “news” online than older ones are. They hear directly from Palestinians in viral clips on social media, they get to watch smartphone footage of Israeli bombs falling in Iran, and they have access to reporting that’s considerably more skeptical of Israel than even the New York Times. Oh—and they’re also chest-deep in Jew-baiting crankery, even in quasi-mainstream forums with audiences of millions. The Trump era in American politics might be summarized as “garbage in, garbage out” based on how Republican voters’ lousy taste in media has shaped the right’s political leadership. (See again Gertz’s point about the “Fox News war.”) Younger Americans on both sides are consuming a lot of garbage about Israel; that garbage will show up in the leadership they choose and the policy they set eventually.
The third reason, related to the first two, is that postliberalism of very different stripes is in vogue among each party’s younger voters. Twitter’s odyssey in negative polarization is instructive, first becoming a notorious engine of “woke” cancel culture for the young postliberal left and later, after Elon Musk bought it, a notorious engine of nationalist propaganda for the young postliberal right. Here too a collective memory has been lost among younger generations as a decade of Trump has helped erase twentysomethings’ expectations for liberalism as the norm in American politics. On the contrary, it’s brought new possibilities: If you’re desperate for a populist alternative to politics as usual—and young people, with less to lose, are surely more prone than older ones—there’s nothing stopping you anymore from breaking radically with tired traditional liberalism. You might win! Trump did.
Add all of that up and you see the long-term problem for Israel in the United States. Its supporters are aging out of the electorate and being replaced by critics. It’s fighting an information war online that may be unwinnable. And it’s up against a rising populist tide on both sides that’s demanding dramatic changes to policy on many fronts, very much including foreign policy.
So maybe the U.S. hitting Fordow now is worth it. There’s no sense worrying that it will cause an anti-Israel backlash in America, one might say to Willick, since an anti-Israel backlash is coming to America no matter what. All Trump would be guilty of, perhaps, is speeding it up.
But if all of that’s too pessimistic, I can imagine a few reasons that support for the Jewish state might rebound.
One is that the era of Israel having to battle its neighbors every few years may at long, long, long last be coming to an end. For the moment, there are simply no more enemies left to fight. Hamas and Hezbollah have been whipped; Iran is embarrassed and may end up denuclearized; none of the Sunni powers in the region want a go at the Israeli military. Only a fool would bet on peace in the Middle East, but hard lessons have been learned over the last 20 months about the futility of trying to menace Israel. Fewer wars would make it easier for Tel Aviv to rebuild American support.
There’s also a chance that Trump will leverage his chummy relationship with Mohammed bin Salman to broker a new Abraham Accord between Israel and Saudi Arabia. That would be the most significant peace deal since the Camp David Accords and might reconcile the rest of the region’s Sunni bloc to Israel’s legitimacy as a nation. Meanwhile, Trump will doubtless continue to work on some big, beautiful deal with Iran, possibly even with an eye to restoring diplomatic relations. After the past week, Tehran might view that as the least bad option available to them, even a necessary sacrifice to preserve the regime. A newly quiescent Middle East would also brighten American attitudes toward Israel.
And at some point Benjamin Netanyahu will be gone, probably replaced by a (moderately) more dovish prime minister. His retirement would drain some of the venom from the American left’s antipathy to the Jewish state and possibly encourage moderates who have soured on it to look at it with fresh eyes.
All that’ll be left to do at that point is, uh, broker a peace between Israel and the Palestinians before whatever depraved successor to the PLO and Hamas gets up and running. Piece of cake.
But in the meantime, Willick is right: The Israelis should handle Fordow themselves if at all possible. Their enemies in the United States are looking for excuses to hold a grudge. They shouldn’t give them one.
