The ups and downs that really matter: Why Israel, the US are not fighting the same war - opinion

This striking, grimly satirical political cartoon expresses what is being said in diplomatic circles this week, capturing the strategic vertigo gripping both Jerusalem and Washington. It depicts an elevator labeled “Lobby of Hell.”

But look closer at the cartoon, and the unsettling truth reveals itself: we are all staring intently at the elevator buttons, but we have completely lost track of the shaft itself. We are trapped in a dangerous collective delusion, focusing on political theater while completely missing the structural architecture of the war we are supposedly fighting.

The shaft symbolizes that the Iranians are happy to pull us all down to hell with them in a jihad-like suicidal moment. Worse still, it is no longer clear whether Uncle Sam or Theodor Herzl possess the same binding relevance or moral authority in modern America or contemporary Israel that they once did.

We are executing policies based on outdated paradigms, and in doing so, we run the risk of fulfilling the grim punchline of the old medical joke: the operation was a spectacular success, but the patient died on the table.

Uncle Sam was created for the American public and reinforced by political cartoonists who wanted a symbol that represented the strength, authority, and government of the nation itself, rather than just its abstract ideals. The lack of American support for the war with Iran is evident in that the American people are not looking at Uncle Sam in the same way as they did before.

Our leaders tell us that we are winning. We are treated to triumphant press conferences celebrating the degradation of Iran’s conventional capabilities.

The United States and Israel have claimed sweeping, early victories after a series of highly sophisticated operations that decimated the Iranian conventional navy, shattered their sophisticated air defense networks, and severely compromised their targeted nuclear facilities.

Militarily, these were masterpieces of intelligence and kinetic execution. Strategically, however, they have exposed a profound, almost catastrophic misunderstanding of our adversary.

Jerusalem and Washington measured victory by Western metrics – ships sunk, centrifuges smashed, radar screens gone dark. But we quickly discovered that this conventional infrastructure was never what the Islamic Republic considered its true center of gravity.

Despite the devastation of their formal navy, the Iranians simply pivoted to their real naval doctrine: utilizing swarms of small, lethal “mosquito” crafts capable of harassing, damaging, and paralyzing massive oil tankers, maintaining a permanent chokehold over the Straits of Hormuz and destabilizing the global economy at will.

Their conventional air defenses are gone, yet their massive, deeply buried ballistic missile stockpiles remain entirely capable of penetrating regional defenses and shifting global markets in a single afternoon.

Furthermore, our fixation on “cutting off the head of the snake” has ignored the deeply institutionalized, hydra-like nature of the regime’s ideological apparatus. Time and again, as senior commanders and clerical figures are neutralized, a fresh cohort of fanatical, highly trained leaders stands ready to immediately step into the vacuum and continue the Jihad.

This war with Iran did not begin with the dramatic escalations of January 2026. It began decades ago as a meticulously planned, multi-layered, low-intensity conflict. For years, while the West hoped for diplomatic integration, Iran quietly constructed a matrix of power: a domestic paramilitary state, an impressive ballistic and naval asymmetric capability, and a sprawling proxy military, intelligence, and influence network.

Yet this reality has been completely obscured. The conflict has never been properly explained or sold to either the American or the Israeli public. Instead, leaders and the media have collapsed a complex, civilizational struggle into a single, monochromatic talking point: the nuclear issue.

By framing the entire Iranian threat around the singular question of whether Tehran possesses a nuclear weapon, the public has been fundamentally misled.

The hard truth is that even without a single nuclear warhead, the Iranian regime, as one of the world’s most prolific and sophisticated exporters of global terrorism and asymmetric Jihad, remains an existential threat.

By over-indexing on the nuclear threshold, our leadership has allowed the public to believe that if the centrifuges are stopped, the threat is neutralized. This has created a dangerous cycle of false victories and subsequent disillusionment when the asymmetric onslaught continues unabated.

Months ago, I was frequently quoted on Channel 14 asserting that Israel and America were “fighting the same enemy but not the same war.” Today, as I watch the political ground shift beneath our feet, it is clear to me that even that statement was overly optimistic. We are no longer even fighting with a shared understanding of the enemy.

In the initial stages of his return, Trump’s rhetoric suggested a firm grip on the nature of the Iranian regime and its malevolent intentions. He spoke clearly of Iran as an unmitigated adversary of the United States.

However, when the Iranians refused to fold under maximum pressure and instead outplayed the administration through calculated asymmetric escalations, Washington’s appetite for confrontation vanished.

Trump quickly began looking for an exit strategy, seeking a grand bargain and shifting his rhetoric to suggest that there are “reasonable” factions within Iran with whom a deal can be struck.

The American electorate, exhausted by decades of Middle Eastern entanglements, originally acquiesced to the concept of confronting an evil Iran.

But as the current conflict begins to mirror the ghosts of the Iraq War – long, drawn-out, costly conflicts with no definitive end in sight, accompanied by rising gas prices, deepening global isolation, and widening strategic vulnerabilities opposite a rising China and an aggressive Russia – the public’s patience has shattered.

Today, the broader American public no longer views Iran as an arch-enemy demanding a national mobilization. Instead, they view Iran much like North Korea: a distant, unsavory, nuclear-adjacent nuisance, but not a day-to-day American problem.

Trump has reached the end of the elasticity of public support for this war; his “America First” base is signaling a profound weariness with foreign campaigns that offer no domestic return.

Contrast this with the reality in Jerusalem. For Israel, this is not a discretionary foreign policy choice or a distant geopolitical chess match. It is a stark, absolute, existential war against a suicidal, fundamentalist Islamist enemy dedicated to the total eradication of the Jewish state – an enemy operating a ring of fire via Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen.

Netanyahu now finds himself in a position where he has lost the public’s confidence that he possesses (in him possessing) a meaningful, reasonable, or executable plan for actually bringing long-term safety to the country. There is a pervasive, terrifying fear among the Israeli public that Israel is becoming globally isolated, locked in a forever war with no end in sight for the threats raining down on its borders.

Trump and his base risk losing the American midterm elections as an explicit sign that middle America has lost confidence in his approach to global stability. Simultaneously, Netanyahu faces electoral defeat driven by an Israeli public terrified of permanent international isolation and perpetual vulnerability.

If Israel loses the broad middle of American society, it loses the logistical, diplomatic, and moral lifeline that allows it to survive in a hostile region.

We cannot afford to continue operating in isolation, blinded by our own leaders’ domestic political agendas for survival. Both democratic electorates have endured enough confusion, strategic incoherence, and suffering for this decade.

It is time to step away from the elevator buttons. We must immediately level-set, rigorously coordinate our strategic narratives and messaging with our most vital ally, and responsibly manage expectations on both sides of the Atlantic.

If we do not realign our visions of the future, the elevator will continue its descent, and we will find that we might have won the battle but lost the war, only to find ourselves in the lobby of hell that we were hoping to send our enemies.

If Iran is an enemy, it is not just their nuclear ambitions, their ballistic missiles, their proxies, or support of global terror that needs to be confronted alone; it is either regime change or the illusion of victory.

America must decide, in an America-first approach, to choose its own direction and whether to be in or out of the real solution.

Israel independently must make the same decision as an independent entity.

Weakening the Iranian threat is also a strategy, but it is not a victory. It is a temporary, perhaps acceptable short-term solution - but it is not a victory. Fooling ourselves is clearly not a good long-term strategy and should end now.