Identity/Crisis
Are Trump, Netanyahu, and Iran acting like rational players—or are we misreading the logic of this war entirely?
In this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer sits down with Chief Policy Officer at the Israel Policy Forum, Michael Koplow to assess a volatile and uncertain moment in U.S.–Iran–Israel relations. Amid a fragile ceasefire, they explore conflicting logics and interests driving American, Israeli, and Iranian decision-making, from domestic political pressure to competing visions of regional power. Their conversation considers whether military success can translate into lasting strategic gains, how the war is reshaping Israel’s relationship with the United States, and what it means for American Jews caught between support for Israel’s legitimacy and concern about its policies.
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Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Friday, May 8th, 2026.
So I’m sure you remember the venerable rational actor theory when it comes to international relations. Rational actor theory, when applied to states, argues that states make calculated decisions based on their interests, based on cost-benefit analysis on their predetermined goals, their long-term strategies, among other considerations.
The classic example of the application of rational actor theory, some of you remember this from real life, some of you from AP US History, was that stretch of time during the Cold War when both the USSR and the US had achieved sufficient nuclear capabilities to ensure mutually assured destruction. If you believe that both states were acting rationally, you would believe that that state of detente in which they found themselves at the point of brinksmanship but never actually launching the nukes, well, that state of affairs would remain. But if you feared that one of those states would act irrationally, then all bets were off.
In 2026, are Iran and the United States rational actors? So let’s assume that they are, for the sake of this thought experiment, and then we’ll consider the critiques. Iran has nuclear aspirations which are rational in a nuclear-rich region. Its strongest political and military adversaries locally, which are Israel and the Gulf States, are key allies of Iran’s worst enemy, the United States.
The contest for power in the region is not merely ideological. It also pertains to things like natural resources. There are larger global realignment issues at stake in this era following the Pax Americana, and Iran is part of a different power axis with Russia and China. Even though we still think of Iran in post-revolutionary terms, their regime has been stable and has managed to stay in power with continuous rule by essentially a single entity for nearly fifty years.
So the critique that Iran is not a rational actor would hinge on rhetoric, religion, and the nature of Iran’s ideological worldview. Those that fear Iran the most, especially the leadership of the State of Israel, they code Iran’s nuclear aspirations not as rational and calculated power moves, but as a mechanism for it to achieve its apocalyptic and genocidal wishes to eradicate Israel from the map.
To do so, of course, is an irrational act. Israel and the United States would retaliate and destroy Iran in return. But if you believe that Iran’s irrational dreams override its calculated concerns, then your own fears become pretty rational. In general, when anyone describes a different regime using the language of evil, they are effectively characterizing that regime as an irrational actor.
What about the United States? So as an American, I’m inclined by my biases to believe that America usually acts rationally. Now, sometimes that can be foolish, right? You can have a rational actor who does foolish things, but bad decisions can still emanate from rational considerations.
There are rational arguments for the US to have gone to war against Iran. These include preventing Iran’s nuclear growth, supporting key allies in the region, the same regional and global realignments, the oil industry, and so forth. But the fear when it comes to the United States lies in one of the foundational critiques of rational actor theory, namely, it can’t fully account for cognitive biases and irrational decision-makers.
So, you know, one of the more common rhetorical conceits that tends to be offered about President Trump, usually in response to this or that erratic, unpredictable policy decisions and shifts, which are rarely explained or justified, they’re just kind of undertaken as a form of presidential privilege, is the claim that, quote, “Others are playing checkers, but he’s actually playing chess.” And maybe that’s true. There is much in the world and behind the scenes I don’t understand. Trump is actually quite honest about the way he operates and his understanding of American self-interests. I leave open the possibility that there are rational moves taking place here that are hard to see and hard to understand.
And at the same time, maybe that assessment is just not true. Maybe others are playing checkers, and Trump is also playing checkers. Maybe worse, others are playing checkers, and Trump is playing Jenga. When so much is at stake about the future of the West and the future of Israel, how confident are we? Actually, I would say, how confident are we allowed to be that the key decision-maker in this conflict is making rational decisions?
And let me just be clear. There are plenty of people who support the war with Iran for their own rational reasons. They hope for outcomes that will alleviate their fears and ensure a Middle East that is safer and more stable. Israelis are overwhelmingly disappointed that the war with Iran came to a pause without a definitive victory, whatever that looks like. Maybe we’ll talk about it. And their anger comes from very rational reasons.
Meanwhile, there are those who oppose the war for equally rational reasons. Those include the ramifications for American domestic politics in a country where there’s widespread suspicion of expensive foreign entanglements.
I’m not suggesting that either side here is irrational. I’m wondering aloud, rather, whether the people holding the keys are rational actors, and I’m sorry to say that I’m just not sure. We’re in a pretty delicate moment right now, and I’m scared of doing this episode about the current state of play with Iran because I don’t want to jinx the ceasefire.
On February 26th, I had coffee with my friend Eric, longtime listener, who asked whether I thought we were gonna be going to war with Iran. I sat there very confidently. I was like, “Nah, no way. I don’t see it. What’s the value, the political ramifications? Blah, blah.” Less than 48 hours later, I was proven quite wrong. This is why I am more of a historian than a prophet.
But I did wanna spend some time at least assessing the present, if not the future, of this tenuous moment with the ever-wise Michael Koplow. Michael’s a senior fellow at Hartman. His full-time job is the chief policy officer at Israel Policy Forum. He’s one of the most trusted voices in the Jewish community and the policy community about Israel and the region. Very regular guest here on the podcast. Michael, thanks for coming back and being in this muckety-muck together with me for a little bit.
Michael: Of course. This is my second home when it comes to podcasting.
Yehuda: Yeah. So let’s talk about the state of play with this ceasefire. And it’s a crazy question. Based on what you see and based on what you understand, how stable do you think the ceasefire is? Or put it differently, what are the forces at work that are gonna maintain the momentum of a ceasefire towards some form of resolution, and where do you see the forces at work that have the potential to really destabilize where we are?
Michael: So first, let’s acknowledge that we’re officially in a ceasefire, but in reality,
Yehuda: Is not.
Michael: We’re not in a ceasefire. Yeah. We’re recording this on Friday morning, and already today there have been shots fired back and forth between the United States and Iran. So, okay. We’ll, we’ll call it what it is.
I think that in many ways President Trump is the force that seems to want a ceasefire the most. He, by many measures, is looking for a way out of this because I don’t think that he has a great idea about what to do next. And so we see him, and he’s done this in, in Gaza, he’s done this in Lebanon, he’s done this in other places, unilaterally declaring a ceasefire and saying that negotiations are happening or well on their way, and sometimes that’s true and sometimes it’s not. But this is definitely his preferred method.
The Iranians I, I’m not entirely clear about. They, obviously to me, think that they can wait out the United States. I think they are reading Trump correctly in understanding that he keeps on flitting back and forth between different tactics and doesn’t know where he wants to land. And so they’re happy to test the boundaries of what they can and cannot get away with, and they seem to be reading it very well.
So, when earlier this week they fired drones and missiles at the UAE, they got a response from the US where both the president and the secretary of defense literally said, well, this wasn’t enough to actually end the ceasefire. This didn’t rise to the level of the thing that we have to be too concerned about. And so you see them testing those boundaries in a way that, I don’t think they want the ceasefire to collapse, but they’re very clearly trying to figure out what they can do within the confines of the ceasefire.
And then finally, you have the Israelis. They are, I don’t think, happy with the ceasefire at all. They’re less happy with the ceasefire in Lebanon, which is even less of a real ceasefire, but they’re not happy with it in Iran either. And there’s a dispute right now going on in the Israeli security establishment, where you have the IDF on one side that wants to deal with Iran’s nuclear program and then call it a day, and you have the Mossad that reportedly wants to keep on going until regime change.
But either way, that dictates some sort of military activity, whether it’s resume strikes, whether it’s a blockade until something definitive happens. So the Israelis are abiding by the ceasefire because they’re not gonna go against anything that President Trump tells them they have to do, but they’re not happy with it.
So we have different forces here operating on different levels. I, I suppose we should quickly mention the Gulf as well, where there is definitely a split. The Emiratis, and I think the Bahrainis, are closer to the Israeli position. The Saudis and others are definitely not. So within the Gulf too, we have different actors working to get to different outcomes.
Yehuda: Yeah. So let’s unpack just the American piece first. By the way, you referred to him, to the Secretary of Defense. I don’t think it’s his actual title anymore. I think he’s now the Secretary of War.
Michael: Well, I like to use the old terminology. I’m also a Gulf of Mexico guy, not a Gulf of America guy, so.
Yehuda: Yeah, okay, fair enough.
Do you think that the president’s desire for a ceasefire, it seems to me that the two strongest plausible arguments for this are, they kinda think this might have been a bad idea to begin with, and made a decision in the moment for any of a number of variety of reasons which we can talk about, and now they’re just like, okay, let’s get out of this. Do you think that it’s about the dramatic political ramifications domestically?
I mean, this war is unbelievably unpopular. It’s extremely costly. It is savaging both parties, actually, in a whole bunch of ways, but the most immediate political ramifications will be for the Republican Party facing the midterms. What do you think is driving the president’s ambivalence about a war that he entered in unilaterally and seemingly excitedly only a couple of months ago?
Michael: I think there are a number of things that are probably driving it. You mentioned two, and I’ll go through those, and I’ll add another onto the pile.
So it’s pretty clear by every account that the president miscalculated in launching the war about how successful it would be and how long it would take. There are many ways in which this war has been successful. We, we almost lose sight of the fact that the United States literally killed the leader of Iran. It gets, it gets lost in the shuffle. But the US and Israel jointly have taken out Iranian political leadership, Iranian military leadership, destroyed—there’s a dispute as to how many of the ballistic missiles and what percentage of launchers, but by any measure, destroyed many of them, set the nuclear program back even further, decimated the Iranian navy, all sorts of ways in which there have been great successes.
But the president obviously thought that this was going to be a rerun of Venezuela, where the US would, to borrow a 2003 term, demonstrate shock and awe, and the Iranians would fold after three days, five days, a week, and that did not happen. And so now, I think, given that assumption, which proved to be incorrect, he isn’t entirely sure how to proceed.
Then there is the political angle, which as you point out, is not going well for Republicans, where this war is very unpopular, and he sees oil prices high, and he sees people worried about the economy and inflation, and he has the MAGA America-first base, many of whom are still in his corner, but we’re seeing very obvious voices of dissent, including the podcasters with whom he’s now constantly bickering.
So I think that’s concerning him as well. And then there’s another issue, which is that here too, by all accounts, including what he says and what people report he has said in private, the president is genuinely concerned about Iran’s nuclear program. He keeps on justifying the war by saying, “How could you not pay any price to get rid of this enormous threat to the world?”
And it’s probably becoming clear to him, as it is to many people, that if you actually want to get rid of the four hundred and forty kilograms of highly enriched uranium, if you want to stop Iran from enriching further, if you wanna take out the far greater numbers or far greater amount of low-enriched uranium that can very quickly be enriched even higher, there’s no military solution to this. It has to be a deal, which is why we now see the US and Iran reportedly negotiating over a one-page framework, which will presumably lead to something that looks a lot like the twenty fifteen Iran deal, the JCPOA, that President Trump exited from.
If his premise, and I think the premise is correct, that the only way to deal with the nuclear issue is through negotiations, even if that was not what he thought originally, and even if that wasn’t his preferred option, if that premise is correct, then he needs a ceasefire to do it. You can keep the blockade in place and hope to get better terms, and maybe you can launch another series of relatively heavy but short time-bound strikes to get better terms, but ultimately, you have to get to a deal.
And so if there is more military action, and I don’t rule it out, I think it will be in the service of trying to get the Iranians to fold on negotiations and on their negotiating positions rather than under the premise that more strikes is going to lead to the downfall of the regime or lead them to unilaterally give up their nuclear program.
Yehuda: It sounds like you are at a place where I feel similarly that any of the talk of either regime change or the complete eradication of the Iranian nuclear program or any of those things are simply unrealistic political goals, and that we’re really back in kind of George Kennan territory of, like, containment, a strategy of containment.
And that requires, I guess, a primary focus on negotiation and the threat of military repercussions, but that there’s just no long-term way in which this is going to be resolved with a kind of great apocalyptic war to end all wars. It makes sense to me on the American side. What are the Israelis gonna ultimately do about that? ‘Cause that’s just not the Netanyahu doctrine.
Michael: It’s not the Netanyahu doctrine, and frankly, it’s not the Israeli political or security doctrine writ large across the spectrum. The Israelis are gonna have to live with whatever the US ends up doing here, and I think the Israelis are trying very hard to convince the United States that if you maintain the blockade for another two months, six months, whatever it is, the Iranian regime will fall, and this problem will go away. I have no idea if President Trump is going to accept that argument, but that is the argument right now coming from the Israeli security establishment.
But let’s assume that they don’t get their way. Let’s assume that there is some sort of deal. The Israelis are, I suspect, going to end up treating Iran the way they treated Hamas and Gaza and the way that they have treated Hezbollah and Lebanon, which is the idea of mowing the grass.
The notion that anytime the Iranians are getting too close to something, you’ll see Israeli airstrikes that are intended to set back whatever the target is, whether it’s the nuclear program or whether it’s ballistic missiles. I think they’re gonna have a more difficult time acting against Iran’s nuclear program going forward in the event of some sort of deal with the United States because they can’t risk literally blowing up that sort of agreement.
But mowing the grass against Iranian proxies, against Iranian ballistic missiles, that, I think, they’re going to be prepared to do. The problem of the Iranian regime is a bigger problem for Israel and frankly, for Gulf States than it is for us. Iranian proxies, for the most part, even though they’ve killed plenty of US military members in the Middle East, they’re not acting against us here at home, and Iranian ballistic missiles are not reaching us.
So if you’re the Israelis or if you’re the Emiratis, your calculus is very different and you’re probably now getting ready for basically a long war of attrition that will hopefully never rise to a huge all-out war.
But this is something that the Israelis are very used to, and I think some of the Gulf States, particularly the Emiratis, are acclimating themselves to the idea that they’re gonna have to be Israelis going forward.
Yehuda: The fascinating thing is that that’s essentially the same state of play that we were in in twenty twenty-two, right? So the, the interesting thing about this, and maybe this is just about like what history sounds like when you’re living it, which is there was a window of time, I would say twenty twenty-four, when it looked like Israel, by virtue of its overwhelming success against Hezbollah and against other Iranian proxies and its decimation of Gaza and Hamas, and you heard this language out there, it was completely resetting the agenda in the Middle East.
How has it happened so quickly that we’re effectively coming to a place where, oh, I guess we’re just going back to the same state of affairs that we were? Obviously, the effects on Hamas are very significant, although Hamas is effectively ruling Gaza again in a whole bunch of ways. The intelligence turned out to be very wrong about Hezbollah.
You know, they claimed that they had destroyed Hezbollah, and it turns out they had not, not surprisingly, and now we’re back with Iran. Was that story just wrong in twenty twenty-four? Was there a window of time in twenty twenty-four where that actually could have succeeded at changing something? What happened in that two-year period that makes us now say, well, that was a lot of noise and a lot of violence, but nothing dramatically actually changed in the Middle East?
Michael: My colleagues and I joke sometimes that no matter what the Israeli operation, you always hear from the Israelis they’ve destroyed seventy percent of whatever it is, right? So literally yesterday, there’s a disputed reporting between US intelligence sources that say we’ve destroyed something like forty percent of Iran’s missiles launchers, and the Israelis say no, seventy percent.
So I think part of it was either Israeli intelligence miscalculation or perhaps Israeli bluster. I do think, though, there are some important ways in which everything that Israel has done over the last two and a half years did change things.
So when we talk about proxies, for instance, Hezbollah is obviously still very much alive and kicking, but Iran spent billions of dollars over decades building a much larger proxy network, and that proxy network has largely been dismantled, and I don’t think that the Iranians are gonna be in position after this is all done to spend as much time and money and effort setting it back up. So to me, that actually is a genuine success.
On other fronts, you are correct. This did not actually reset the region, and it’s partially because the Israeli view was that their issues around the region all stemmed from Iran and from Iran only, and also that every country in the region viewed things as a zero-sum game the same way the Israelis do. And that wasn’t correct at the time, and it’s not correct now.
When you speak to officials from states in the region that are not the UAE and not Bahrain, and it’s been like this now for a while, their view was that Iran was a big problem and a massive destabilizing factor in the region. Their view was also that Israel was a massive destabilizing factor in the region.
So when the Israelis looked and said, hey, we’re taking the fight to Iran, and we’re disrupting their proxy network, and the next step is gonna be normalization and wonderful relations with everybody, and the Iranians will be deterred, they were wrong about the way the Iranians were gonna react, but they were also wrong about the way the region was going to react.
And this brings up what should be the fundamental thing the Israelis need to think about and should be working on, which is that for all of Israel’s genuinely incredible military tactical victories over the last two and a half years, and the enormous accomplishments they have racked up, it’s hard to point to even one place where they have gained a strategic victory, because you can’t get that through military means.
And so this is the mistake they make. They look around and they say, we have eliminated threats and remade the region. But if you want to remake the region, you’ve got to turn those military victories into political strategic victories, and certainly the Netanyahu government is not willing to do that.
Yehuda: So the place where it, it has become very clear that Israel has lost the war over the last several years is definitely here in the United States. In some ways, if you zoomed out and said Israel would achieve these tactical victories against its Iranian proxies but lose overwhelming support among Americans, you never would have made those choices. I mean, it just seems crazy. It’s the worst possible place to lose.
You know, early in the war, in this particular iteration of this actual four-year war, whatever it is, the narrative came out of, and, you know, Marco Rubio even said it at one point, before he retracted it, that essentially Israel had coerced America into going into this war. The response overwhelmingly, especially from the Jewish community, was not just, that’s not true, but, to say so is antisemitic, which I find to be kind of a weird argument. Like, allies can coerce their partners, or they can insist that people come to their defense. That doesn’t feel antisemitic. I guess it gets loaded with this notion that, like, Jews are pulling the strings, but that’s, like, a totally silly way to understand international relations. But it does seem like that was obviously one of the reasons why America went to war.
So I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit, and to unpack it both as a kind of accusation and now to notice what it means that it is such an unpopular thing politically to imagine that America would actually do something on behalf of Israel. I mean, that just seems like where the biggest sea change in the story is taking place, and it took place in, like, a six-week period of time.
Michael: I don’t think there’s any question, and there’s of course tons of reporting on this, that Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israeli officials played a very large role in persuading President Trump about the threat from Iran and about what a war could accomplish, and what the timing should be. That does not mean that Israel coerced the United States into war. As you point out, this is what allies and partners do. No two countries’ interests are identical. As much as people want to think that the US and Israel have had identical interests for decades, that has never been the case, and it’s not the case.
So it’s completely kosher from my perspective for the Israelis to come here and say, “This is what we think and this is what we’d like you to do, and we’re gonna try our hardest to persuade you.” Doesn’t mean the president was tricked.
Now, was that a mistake? I think that for all of the achievements of this war, Israel really only has one existential issue, and it’s not Iran. It’s the strategic relationship with the United States. It’s impossible, impossible to look at what has gone on over the last couple of months, but really what has gone on over the last few years, and argue that strategic relationship is better now than it was before.
I think there are a lot of people who look at the close, unprecedented relationship, military relationship between the US and Israel under President Trump, and particularly during this second term, and they say, “How can you possibly argue that US-Israel relations is in trouble or that the strategic relationship has been damaged?” But all you have to do is look at what’s being said in both parties, including the Republican Party, other than by President Trump, and you see it right away.
For anybody who has not yet, I can’t believe I’m gonna actually give this person a boost, but for anybody who has not yet listened to the Tucker Carlson interview with The New York Times from last weekend, it’s very long. It’s almost two hours. The first hour of it is basically about the Iran war and the role of Israel, and Tucker Carlson distills the argument to its purest sense, that the Israelis have tricked Trump, that there’s no way this is in the US interest, that even President Trump doesn’t think it’s in the US interest, and he’s acting against his own will. The subtext, of course, being that Israel or Jews are holding something over his head, and so he has no choice.
I don’t know how many people believe that most extreme view of this, but it’s certainly not nobody aside from Tucker Carlson. And so that is, of course, going to damage the US-Israel relationship and damage Israel on one side of the aisle.
And on the other side of the aisle, this Iran war is opposed by, I think, every single Democratic senator and member of Congress other than John Fetterman. And that means that Israel is seen as being wrapped up and in some ways even responsible for the biggest foreign policy fiasco in Democratic eyes, certainly since Iraq, and maybe it even eclipses Iraq.
And so if we look at, for instance, the vote in the Senate a couple of weeks ago where you had forty out of forty-seven Democratic senators vote to not sell D9 bulldozers to Israel, and you had thirty-six out of forty-seven Democratic senators vote to not sell one thousand-pound bombs to Israel. There are all sorts of complex reasons for why that happened. Some of it is certainly anti-Israel sentiment. Some of it is anger at Prime Minister Netanyahu. Some of it is anger at Israeli policy. A lot of it is the Iran war, because you had senators who said, “We don’t support funding this war from our side, from the US side. Why in the world would we vote to send one thousand-pound bombs to Israel, which will be used in a war against Iran?”
So you see this war operating on both sides of the aisle in a really damaging way to US-Israel relations in the long term. And maybe the Israelis understand that, and they say the trade-off is worth it because we’ve now gotten the US twice to act against Iranian nuclear facilities and wider Iranian political and military infrastructure. And maybe they don’t actually grasp the enormity of it because they’re mostly dealing with President Trump and the Trump administration, and so the view they’re getting is, “This is great. This is wonderful. Thank you for being such good partners.”
But President Trump, in a lot of ways, and this entire administration, is operating as this huge blinding light that’s shining directly into Israel’s eyes. And when President Trump is no longer president, the Israelis are gonna see a landscape here that looks very different from what they’re used to and maybe from what they think is actually going on.
Yehuda: Yeah, there are potential presidential candidates, both in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, who would want to maintain the historic relationship with Israel the way that it has operated, but those voices are becoming minority voices within their own parties, and they’re gonna face an uphill battle on both ends.
Like, you know, Ted Cruz becomes president, which is very unlikely to me, then you’re fine, right? You know?
Michael: Sure.
Yehuda: Definitely John Fetterman’s not gonna become president, but like, you know, even the way that Pritzker is talking, you’re basically within some measure of continuity where at least, like, the drumbeat within Democratic Party, which what you have to say is “I oppose Prime Minister Netanyahu,” but you still kind of are operating from that baseline of assuming that Israel remains an ally. But it does feel like an increasingly countercultural position.
I wanna unpack what’s happened in the Democratic Party, and I appreciated your distinction between this turn and the vote, I was gonna ask you about the vote in the Senate, that vote as being an indicator more about the war than it is, like, a massive ideological turn against Israel, which, by the way, Republicans want to make it look like. The Democratic Party is turning against Israel ’cause they wanna leverage that for as long as they can. Do you see a path back?
Michael: I do see a path back. First, I, I think it’s important to acknowledge that views of Israel have shifted massively in the Democratic Party. That, that’s a very real thing. But the Iran war is a part of it. It’s not as if Israel had no problems with Democrats before February 28th, but this is accelerating things in a very quick way.
There is a path back. There are plenty of elected Democrats who will tell you that if you have a different Israeli government that is not run by Prime Minister Netanyahu, that will help things, and I think that it will help things to an extent, but that’s not gonna be the end of the story by any means.
Democrats for a while now have been dismayed not only with Prime Minister Netanyahu, and it really dates back to the 2015 speech to Congress against the JCPOA and the way in which they felt it was disrespectful to President Obama. They’re upset with tangible Israeli policies. You hear this argument sometimes from Israelis that it doesn’t matter what they’re going to do.
Reportedly, even Itamar Ben-Gvir said this just yesterday about the Europeans. “Why should Israel change any policies? The Europeans hate us no matter what.” And you hear this increasingly from Israelis, that Democrats hate Israel, and it doesn’t matter what Israel does. There certainly may be some Democrats who fall into that camp, but writ large, I don’t buy that argument for a second. Democrats are upset with actual things that the Israelis are doing, so if you have a shift in Israeli policy, it will help things.
Now, we can talk about what that shift has to look like and how large it will be and how long a honeymoon period will be with the new Israeli government that I think will almost certainly improve the situation in the West Bank with regard to settler violence, which in a lot of ways is actually the biggest stressor right now between Israel and elected Democrats. And I think a new Israeli government will not pursue the same revolutionary expansionist settlement policy that Israel is pursuing in the West Bank and has been under this government. And that will help some, but ultimately, the Democrats are very much pushing the idea of a values-based foreign policy.
That was actually the secret superpower of the U.S.-Israel relationship for decades. It wasn’t shared interests. It was the idea of shared values. And increasingly, and really overwhelmingly, Democrats in particular, happening with Republicans too, but it’s much more acute on the Democratic side, they don’t believe that a values-based foreign policy has space in it for Israel, given what they see Israel doing. So there’s gonna have to be a sea change in Israeli policy if we’re gonna see a sea change in Democratic attitudes.
So all of that is to say that some of this is easily reversible. A lot of it is much harder to reverse, and it’s going to depend a lot on what happens across the ocean versus what happens here.
Yehuda: The only time I remember an Israeli elected trying to leverage the extent of their influence with America for electoral purposes was really Bibi with Trump. I don’t know what to make of it. It’s interesting, it seems to me, how little Netanyahu’s political opponents are using the risks of what’s taking place here in America for the long-term vitality of the U.S.-Israel relationship for their own political benefit.
And I wonder whether part of that is that they, by and large, agree with Netanyahu’s foreign policy positions. So it puts them in kind of an uncomfortable position. They support Netanyahu around going to war with Iran, even though the war with Iran is actually damaging the relationship with the U.S., and therefore, it doesn’t give them any space to then say, we’re gonna rehabilitate that relationship with America.
Does that capture the paradox a little bit? Because otherwise, if I’m Lapid, if I’m Bennett, if I’m Gantz, anybody, Eisenkot, take advantage of the fact that you could be the person who could remediate the long-term U.S.-Israel relationship. You could point to the fact that Bibi put all of his eggs in the basket of President Trump. That worked for as long as it worked, but it actually is not a long-term victory.
Michael: Lapid in particular is really concerned about what’s going on in the United States. I, I think of maybe all of the leaders in the opposition, he’s the one who historically is the most attuned to this and the most sensitive to it.
But Bennett, Lapid, Eisenkot, Yair Golan, Avigdor Lieberman, all of them, they have some real political problems. One is that if you’re going to criticize Bibi over what he’s done, then that is going to mean you have to implicitly and maybe explicitly criticize actions that President Trump has taken, and President Trump is just overwhelmingly popular with Israelis.
Second, you see this coming from many of these opposition leaders. They are hitting Netanyahu on foreign policy from the right. They’re saying he hasn’t been hawkish enough on Gaza. They’re saying he hasn’t been hawkish enough on Iran, that Israel should be hitting Iranian energy facilities. Yeah. So it’s hard to criticize him from the right and say, you’re not being hawkish enough, and also you have been too hawkish for the US-Israel relationship.
And then there’s the fact that when you poll Israelis, I mean, there, there’s polling of this, but it’s certainly true anecdotally too, and you say, hey, how’s the US-Israel relationship going?
Yehuda: It’s fine.
Michael: Israelis think that it’s not just fine. It, it’s, it’s at an apex. It’s, it’s all-time high. So it’s not really a potent political issue for the opposition figures, even if they understand what is going on in the long term.
But they need to win an election, and they need to get rid of Netanyahu in October, and they are only going to bring up arguments that help them do that. Anything that muddies the waters at all, even if it happens to be true, they have very little incentive to bring up and to try to hit Netanyahu over the head with.
Yehuda: I’m gonna try to say this gently, given my role. I think Israelis operate from a place of such a deep self-evidency of the morality of their cause that they then tend to translate that into the self-evidency of the tactics and policies of the country that is pursuing that cause.
And certainly when it comes to, like, classifying many different things as existential threats, it’s very easy to then say, well, then it’s self-evident that anything we do to fight against those existential threats is morally legitimate, and therefore anybody who’s on our side, you know, sees the light, and anyone who opposes the, even just the tactics, not the cause, but the tactics, you know, is on the wrong side of history and is against us.
And I’ve struggled, even internally, to try to divide between those two things. It feels so vital for the long-term Israel-US relationship to be able to simultaneously make the case that Israelis have to make, which is, yes, the cause of the continued existence of Israel is a self-evidently moral concern. But the various strategies, policies, and tactics that Israel undertakes in pursuit of its destiny are not self-evidently moral and can’t rely on that long term. It has to make space for others.
And where this hits, I think, and I wanna ask you about American Jews in this, where it hits American Jews, this was my piece that I wrote a few weeks after the war started. American Jews who believe in the cause of Israel as self-evidently legitimate and moral are gonna have very strong arguments, both as Americans and as Jews and as people, about the problematics of this war. And if that is viewed as the kind of disloyalty against the self-evident legitimacy of Israel, I feel like we’re in a lot of trouble for the long run.
Michael: I agree with you. I think we are in a lot of trouble for the long run, and it makes me incredibly sad. The best shorthand for this, the easiest way to see it, and I rail against this all the time, is the slogan, “The IDF is the most moral army in the world.” And when IDF bad behavior is raised, you often see Israelis saying, “Well, that can’t be because the IDF is the most moral army in the world.”
And it stems from this paradox that you raise. The idea is that a Jewish state absolutely is legitimate and is a just and moral cause, and so the army of the Jewish state is too a moral cause, and therefore, the army of the Jewish state can’t possibly act immorally because it’s a fundamentally moral institution with a moral mission beyond just defending a random state in the world.
American Jews, I think, grasp and certainly struggle with this far more than Israelis do, and it’s not an easy place in which to live. And you’re right. If Israelis don’t start to get a better grasp of how the rest of the world sees what Israel is doing, divorced from whether you think Israel is just and legitimate because of course Israel is just and legitimate.
I’m so sick and tired of having to make perfunctory arguments about Israel’s right to exist. Doesn’t matter whether it has a right to exist or not. It exists. It’s there. And it’s not going anywhere. So let’s move the conversation away from that and think about how different things that Israel might be doing are harming it in the long run.
And I wish that more Israelis would be able to understand this point. I get why it’s very difficult for them, difficult for them historically, even more difficult for them now after October 7th and while they’re still living in bomb shelters. But Israel is losing people that you never would have imagined in the past they would have lost, and that includes American Jews. And so I would love to see Israelis just try and step outside of themselves for a moment and take the thirty-thousand-foot view and try to grasp how things that they are doing, which they believe are just and moral, land the opposite way outside of their own borders.
Yehuda: Yeah. I think a good example of it is the settler violence piece, which is so profound, so devastating, and hard to watch, and I’ve even lost my own patience.
Look, I mean, part of the reason it’s happening right now is because the opportunists who are doing this are using the cover of the Iran war, right? And the assumption everyone else is distracted to be able to perpetuate these, effectively, pogroms against Palestinians trying to create new facts on the ground, et cetera.
And the defense that I oftentimes hear from Israelis, which is, this is a marginal piece of the population, a kind of no true Scotsman argument about Zionism. They’re not really Zionists. They can’t be, right? As opposed to actually noticing that the conflation of these two things, a foreign policy that is less and less popular, even among its allies, and this kind of domestic deterioration of the value system of what the country is supposed to be about. They travel together, and they shape the story that maybe many Israelis don’t want the world to see, but they are shaping the actual story that not only Israel’s opponents are taking advantage of, but even many of Israel’s friends are looking at this and saying, you can’t continue to rely on the self-evidency of the claims that you’re making for me until you kind of get your house in order.
Michael: Right. So you get the claim almost always that it’s a small group of people. It’s not representative. It’s more of a mental health and education and social work issue than it is a security or law enforcement or policing issue.
Yehuda: Or ideological, core ideological issue of the society issue. Yeah.
Michael: Right. So that’s one argument you get, but you also get other arguments that I think go to this issue you’ve raised about morality and whether Israelis can really see the larger picture because you often get the claim that all of this is done in response to Palestinian violence, which is absolutely—
Yehuda: False.
Michael: Not true and easily disprovable. And you also get the claim that even if it’s not in response to Palestinian violence, it’s preempting it, that if you didn’t have these Israelis on hilltops, and if you didn’t have them out patrolling their area and making sure that Palestinians don’t encroach on them, then you would have an October seventh massacre in the West Bank because all the Palestinians living in these villages, they’re just waiting to carry that out. And so this is actually a preventive and necessary security measure.
And almost nobody, I wish it was nobody, but almost nobody outside of Israel views it this way. And many Israelis make these arguments, and they make them in some cases because they truly believe them, and in some cases, they’re making the arguments because they think they’re persuasive. And I don’t think that they often see just how large this gap is in terms of morality, which is why they miss the notion that they’re making what they view as persuasive arguments that not only don’t persuade anybody, in many instances, they actually accomplish the opposite.
Yehuda: Mm-hmm. Yeah. My last question for you, Michael, there’s many other pieces of this, but I’m gonna put you in the uncomfortable position of where I was on February 26th. I wanna know what you think is gonna happen over the next couple of months.
I have a very self-interested hope of how you might answer this question. You know, we announced this week that Hartman programs are gonna take place in Israel this summer. We’re doing so. We said the caveat that we put in our email was so long as Israeli airspace is open and El Al flights are taking place. Right now, they are open and available. There’s still space at Hartman programs for those who wanna come.
I don’t know if it’s, what’s gonna happen over the next six, seven weeks, but what do you think are the indicators that we should watch for that would suggest that something about the status quo could change? And what are the indicators we should look for that might suggest that we’re on a pathway towards at least some stable resolution of this current crisis?
Michael: It won’t surprise you to know that many people come up to me in shul, email me, stop me on the street and—
Yehuda: Should I buy a ticket? Yeah.
Michael: Ask me—exactly.
Yehuda: Should I buy a ticket?
Yehuda: And buy travel insurance. That’s very important.
Michael: That’s right. Well, I’ve been telling people recently that my oldest child is going off to Israel for her mandatory six-week, Israel travel after tenth grade, and I’m still sending her, and the program sent an email two days ago asking about buying trip insurance, and my wife and I are still debating whether we think the risk is high enough that we should spend even more money to buy the trip insurance. So, you know, that maybe gives an indication of where I think things are headed.
In terms of what to actually watch for, the president’s tactics and, and really his entire mindset in many ways, it’s sort of like a bankruptcy attorney, which, you know, he’s got lots of experience in this realm, so it shouldn’t be that surprising. But, and I think he brings it to foreign policy, where he says, okay, you know, I’m offering you a deal. It’s fifty cents on the dollar. It’s open until X amount of time, and if you don’t take it, the deal’s gonna get worse. And often the way he makes the deal worse, and we’ve seen it particularly in the Iran context, is more military action, and the next time he thinks it’ll be forty cents on the dollar.
Right now, he’s got his offer open, and that’s what we’re waiting for. If he loses patience, then I do think he’s going to authorize more military strikes to try and get a better deal. We will know that in the next few weeks. I don’t think that he’s gonna hold the current negotiating window open indefinitely.
And so if we see renewed US strikes and the Israelis join in as well, that can very quickly spiral out of control and, and that may lead to another round of renewed fighting that goes on for longer than people may anticipate.
The two other things I would watch, one is on Lebanon, where the Israelis desperately want to delink the Iranian theater from the Lebanese theater. They had successfully done that. President Trump then imposed the Lebanon ceasefire on them, connecting it to the Iran ceasefire. If they’re able to successfully convince the president that these things should once again be delinked, and that may happen in the face of more perceived Iranian intransigence in the White House, then you’re gonna see a much larger Israeli operation in Southern Lebanon, where the IDF is raring to go, and that will have certainly consequences not just for Israel’s north, but for the whole country.
The third, and this is the one that I think is on the fewest radars, but in my mind is probably the highest percentage, is a resumption of fighting in Gaza. And not just the random airstrikes or artillery strikes that we’ve seen, but an actual return to serious fighting. The groundwork for that was laid this week in many ways by the Board of Peace and the Trump administration, who announced that if Hamas doesn’t agree to the disarmament plan the Board of Peace passed them about a month ago, then from their perspective, Israel is no longer under any obligations under phase one of the Trump twenty-point plan. And phase one was ceasefire and pulling back the yellow line and humanitarian assistance and opening the Rafah crossing.
So if the US and the Board of Peace say to the Israelis, okay, Hamas has not accepted the disarmament proposal, so from our perspective, you have no obligations left. Do what you like. Especially with the election coming in November and Netanyahu having a serious problem of people saying, what was all of this for? Hamas is still in control of Gaza and getting stronger by the day. I think that’s actually the arena that has the greatest chance of renewed military activity.
Now, that’s the sort of thing that won’t shut down Hartman programming because thankfully, Hamas doesn’t really seem to have rockets left to shoot, but it will mean a return to fighting and everything that that entails. And of course, as we’ve seen, that can very quickly spiral into bringing other actors, whether it be the Houthis or the Iranians, even greater strength into the fold.
Yehuda: Well, listen, Michael, I can’t say that this was uplifting, but it was, it is always great to get your wisdom on these issues. Let’s hope that sanity prevails. Let’s hope that your kid and I get to Israel this summer for a long period of time. Thanks, as always, for being on the show.
Michael: My pleasure.
