In three of his presidency’s most ignoble words, just below “I am fit,” US president Joe Biden advised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in April, 2024: “Take the win.” That meant, “Don’t counterattack” despite Iran launching 300 rockets at Israel, because Israel didn’t sustain major damage. Such cowardly advice probably encouraged Iran’s second missile barrage in October.
Now, however, if Israel accepts US President Donald Trump’s announced ceasefire, Israel will show it knows how to “take a real win” – having secured a historic victory without overpromising, overstepping, or getting bogged down in another Gaza-like grind.
Bravo to Netanyahu for courageously unleashing the Israel Air Force and to Trump for joining. Their leadership is even more impressive considering the world’s knickers-in-a-twist reaction, and how many opinion-makers were stuck in their conceptions, believing Iran’s bluster. Attacking Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure was a necessary, justified, proportional response to decades of threats, hundreds of rockets launched, and the mullahs’ mad rush to go nuclear – and ballistic.
Most Israelis and Americans support war against Iran
Eighty percent of Israelis supported the war. And despite preferring to avoid fighting, most Americans overwhelmingly supported Israel in its existential battle against Iran’s genocidal, Holocaust-denying, civilian-targeting, war-crime-committing, Jew-hating, America-bashing dictatorship.
God bless America! Polls estimated that 57% of Americans in their deeply divided country supported Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, with 80% wanting Iran stopped from having nuclear weapons – because it threatens America, too. Defying the mostly antisemitic, MAGA loudmouths, 83% of Trump voters supported Israel’s airstrikes.
General Michael Kurilla, CENTCOM’s commander, declared: “There has rarely been a time with greater opportunity to protect [our] national interests” in the Middle East. That’s what America’s bombing did.
Americans should wonder how so many of them became happy to lean on little Israel to do the Free World’s “dirty work,” as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz acknowledged.
Pro-Israel Democrats should recognize how many in their party betrayed Israel – and core American values of self-defense. Preferring to blast Trump rather than support Israel – and America – Sen. Chuck Schumer allied with AOC-Ilhan Omar Democrats, saying “No president should be allowed to unilaterally march this nation into something as consequential as war with erratic threats and no strategy.” Never again should Chuck dare strut as “Shomer Yisrael” – Israel’s guardian.
Phil Gordon, Kamala Harris’s foreign policy “brain,” admitted: “I would have found it too risky to initiate military force with all that that could unleash.” He would have tried “to get an enduring, diplomatically negotiated nuclear arrangement that prevented Iran from being able to get a nuclear weapon.”
This is cowardly Tooth Fairy diplomacy. Most Israelis also wish they could have believed in Ayatollah Khamenei’s good faith – he seems just so lovely. Shouldn’t morally serious people admit this Iran con went on too long and became hazardous to everyone’s health?
Netanyahu must discipline his coalition
As we try turning from war-war to jaw-jaw, it’s essential that Netanyahu discipline his coalition gasbags.
Most rational moral people hope the Iranian regime collapses. But it doesn’t help to have a defense minister ranting that Khamenei “can no longer be allowed to exist.” It makes us sound like them. It puts Israel’s brand on a regime change that must come from the Iranian people. Most dangerous, it overpromises, risking that foreign policy fiasco-creator: “nation building.”
Netanyahu initiated this essential mission more deliberately, calling Rising Lion “a targeted military operation to roll back the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival. This operation will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.” The threat is ballistic and nuclear.
Too many Israeli leaders’ post-October 7 trash talk raised unrealistic expectations of “eliminating” Hamas and sullied the purity of Israel’s equally justified war of self-defense in Gaza. That’s why the Talmud teaches: “Silence is beautiful for wise people; it’s all the more beautiful for fools.”
Defense Minister Israel Katz’s vows to “destabilize the regime” sound like his campaign launch to woo the Likud’s goonatic wing and succeed Bibi – when Netanyahu finally retires in 2125.
Israel did the world a great service by pounding Iran’s regime. It followed Theodore Roosevelt’s guiding principle “to speak softly but carry a big stick.”
Democracies win when our reluctant warriors, fighting justified wars in self-defense, achieve achievable achievements. The first night of the war, within hours, Israeli firepower, brainpower, and discipline exposed the Islamic Republic of Iran’s 40-year scam.
Some of us had long suggested that this regime punched way above its weight, manipulating proxies, sacrificing other nations’ soldiers, and bamboozling the West with empty threats. Israel has made us and the world safer, degrading Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, crushing its ballistic missile death machine from factory to launch pad, and killing leaders and scientists responsible for these threats.
But, boy, we were lucky, or divinely blessed. With so much firepower exploding around so many civilians, we were millimeters away from a mass casualty event in Israel or in Iran. One catastrophe could have demoralized Israelis or undermined our moral stance. On October 17, 2023, with our kibbutzim still smoldering, a big Hamas lie that Israel killed 500 at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City suddenly cast bleeding Israel as the aggressor.
So let’s thank our amazing pilots, spies, grounds crews, soldiers – and their families. Let’s take this real win. Now America should lead the West in hollowing out the regime through sanctions, sabotage, and support for Iran’s dissidents. Still, ultimately, Iranian heroes themselves must overcome the barrier of fear their corrupt, incompetent, self-destructive, regime built – and take their win, too.
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest books are To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath.