by A Tired Israeli

I am an ethnic Jew, born and raised in Tel Aviv in the 1950s. My family came from Poland and Manchester. Why they came is not presently relevant. It is enough that they came, and that I was born here. I am not religious at all — I haven’t set foot in a synagogue since my bar mitzvah, which I endured mostly for my parents. I eat what I want, marry who I want, and view our ancient texts as literature, not divine instruction. My Zionism is minimal and pragmatic: I believe that Jews, like every other self-aware nationality, should have a country where we form the majority and govern ourselves. As it happens, we have one in the Middle East. That is the extent of it. I do not believe we are a chosen people destined for messianic glory or eternal conflict. I simply want a secure, normal country that can trade with its neighbours and allow my grandchildren to live without perpetual war.

From this perspective, I watch the events of 2026 with a heavy, bitter clarity. The joint Israeli-American campaign against Iran — Operation whatever grandiose name they gave it — has ended not in victory but in strategic catastrophe. The emerging US-Iran deal, which President Trump sees as the least bad option, confirms that Netanyahu’s “Mr. Iran” doctrine lies in ruins. Iran is bloodied but more radical and more confident. The regime did not collapse, as all the talking heads assured us. It consolidated under hardliners. And Israel stands more isolated and more vulnerable than ever before. And this is not an isolated failure. It is the logical endpoint of a disastrous national strategy pursued by our establishment since 1948.

I will repeat the admission of my earlier article: Israel was founded in wholesale theft and murder. It was never a “Land without people for a people without land.” Before my people turned up en masse, Palestine was already filled with people, and these people had a truer bond with their land than some largely fictional bloodline going back beyond 70 AD. My people took the land from these people and drove out most of those they chose not to murder.

But, if I repeat my admission, I will not build on it. Libertarian Alliance writers, though not deaf to moral appeals, seem to have a greater taste for political realism. So let me deal with the really disastrous nature of the national strategy we chose after 1948.

Except to admit that it was a time of wholesale theft and murder, I will not criticise what happened in 1948. You show me a nation that did not begin with conquest. The United States expanded across a continent, often brutally displacing Native peoples. Anglo-Saxon England was born in genocide and ethnic cleansing. Even peaceful European states have bloody medieval foundations. Conquest is the brutal starting point of every history. The only difference between the birth of your nation and ours is that your killing was a long time ago, and ours within living memory. The important difference, and the disaster, is our varied handing of what came after the conquest. This is what separates viable nations from doomed nations.

A viable nation may establish itself in a bloodbath. But it then seeks some degree of accommodation with reality and with it neighbours. Borders stabilise, trade begins, mutual interests emerge, and pragmatic coexistence — however imperfect — takes root. The dispossessed never stop hating. But those who feel sorry for them can usually be persuaded to look the other way, especially when there are positive benefits that are honestly offered.

Israel never managed this transition. Instead of prioritising accommodation with the Arab world after our early victories, our leaders bet everything on co-opting American power. They cultivated a narrative of eternal victimhood and divine exceptionalism that resonated with certain quarters in the West while alienating everyone in our actual neighbourhood. This strategy required building and maintaining an unnatural coalition in the United States, one that relied heavily on the diaspora lobbying apparatus and, crucially, on recruiting armies of dispensationalist evangelical Christians who see us not as a normal country but as pawns in their apocalyptic End Times fantasy.

These Christian Zionists — many of whom believe the return of Jews to Israel will hasten the Rapture and the conversion or destruction of Jews who refuse Jesus — became political muscle for our right-wing governments. Netanyahu and his predecessors courted them openly, visiting their churches, praising their leaders, and aligning with Republican politics in ways that shattered the old bipartisan consensus in America. Meanwhile, at home, this external alliance encouraged the worst elements in Israeli society: an army of religious nationalists and settlers whose contempt for Arabs makes historical bigotries look tame by comparison. Their rhetoric — viewing Palestinians as Amalek, as existential vermin to be displaced or subjugated — went far beyond security concerns into something grotesque and dehumanising.

I cringe when I hear it. As a secular Israeli who served in the army, I understand the need for strength and deterrence. But turning an entire people into cartoonish monsters, while waving away any possibility of political compromise, was never sustainable. It poisoned our internal discourse and made genuine diplomacy radioactive. The establishment chose this path because American backing — weapons, vetoes at the UN, financial support — seemed like a superior substitute for the hard work of regional integration. For a while, it appeared to work. We got the Abraham Accords. We struck Iranian targets with impunity. We built a formidable military with US technology. But the problem with rotten foundations is that they eventually collapse.

The war with Iran in 2026 has brought on this collapse. Netanyahu received what he always demanded: full American partnership, B-2 strikes, sustained joint operations. The goals were clear — cripple the nuclear program and ideally topple the regime. We achieved some tactical hits. Enrichment facilities were damaged. Key figures were murdered—if you want to call this a success in even the tactical sense. Iran’s military industry took blows. Yet strategically, we failed completely.

The regime has survived and it has hardened. The multilayered Iranian system — religious, military, bureaucratic — absorbed the shocks far better than our analysts predicted. We overestimated the fragility, drawing silly analogies to Venezuela after Maduro’s fall. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz when cornered, disrupting global energy and forcing Washington to recalibrate. The war interrupted what looked like genuine internal softening in Iran: relaxed hijab enforcement, low election turnout signalling discontent, the rise of a relatively moderate president. Instead of letting rot do its work, we unified them. Mojtaba Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards emerged stronger. Iran will now rebuild with unfrozen funds and without crippling sanctions. Its missile program will be unconstrained by the eventual deal with Washington. It will emerge as a united and confident regional power, and will have the respect of China and Russia for having faced down the hegemon.

For the United States, this is also a defeat. Trump will choose the surrender deal the Iranians offer as damage limitation. No good options remain. America has learned the limits of its power in the region and the costs of endless entanglement. The patron-client dynamic in US-Israel relations has become too painfully obvious. Netanyahu’s long-term erosion of the “special relationship” — alienating liberal American Jews, Democrats, and the broader public through settlement policies and his own posturing — has left us exposed. The old bipartisan affection is gone. We are now a Republican project, dependent on evangelical votes and Trump’s personal whims. This is supplemented by the deliberate corruption of American public life. The Trump Administration is called “The Epstein Syndicate” for good reason. When America tires of us, as it inevitably will amid competition with China, we will be alone.

This Iran failure compounds our other disasters. In Lebanon, our “security zones” have again become deadly traps. We are playing the old game of terror and ethnic cleansing, but under the spotlight of news services that can no longer be censored. Hezbollah’s drones and guerrilla tactics bleed us daily. We repeat the mistakes of the 1990s, turning northern settlements into shields rather than protected civilians. The broader regional vision — that crushing Iran would bring Arab normalisation and solve the Palestinian question — lies shattered. The Palestinian issue remains, festering, because we refused accommodation.

I look at my country and feel sadness mixed with anger. We are a remarkable people: innovative, culturally vibrant. Our economy hums with tech and startups despite the wars. Yet our political culture has been captured by crazies who prioritise messianic dreams over pragmatic statecraft. The grotesque dehumanisation of Arabs — settlers chanting for expulsion and murder, politicians invoking biblical genocide in support and hope of votes from the crazies — has not made us safer. It has justified endless settlement expansion and refusal to envision any endgame short of total dominance. This mirrors how we handled Iran: maximum pressure, magical thinking about collapse.

The strategy worked only as long as America was both able and willing to serve as our shield. That era is ending. U.S. domestic politics are shifting. Younger Americans, including many Jews, view Israel through the lens of endless occupation rather than pioneering democracy. Evangelical support is powerful but fickle — tied to their theology, not our wellbeing. When Trump or his successors cut deals with Tehran, we discover the limits. We cannot act decisively alone. Our deterrence, once feared, is now tested daily by proxies.

The future of Israel is genuinely in doubt. This is not in the immediate sense of military annihilation — we remain strong enough to defend ourselves — but in the deeper sense of viability as a secure, prosperous, Jewish-majority democracy. Prolonged conflict drains our society. Reservists are exhausted. The economy suffers from uncertainty. International isolation grows. Birth rates among secular Israelis lag while ultra-Orthodox communities, often least integrated into the economy and military, expand. If we cannot normalise relations with our region, we risk becoming a garrison state, forever on edge, forever reliant on dwindling external patronage.

I still believe in a Jewish country here. But it must change course radically. We need genuine accommodation: serious engagement on Palestinian statehood (with ironclad security guarantees for both sides), regional economic integration, and a foreign policy based on interests rather than ideology or American domestic politics. We must sideline the messianic grotesques and the apocalyptic Christians who see us as expendable props. Diplomacy and targeted strength should replace blanket confrontation.

Netanyahu’s doctrine did not fail because we were too weak. It failed because it was built on denial of regional realities and the fantasy that we could outsource our security forever to Washington while rejecting compromise at home. Where hubris finds its home nemesis is never far behind. The 2026 Iran war was the final proof. We and the Americans suffered a major strategic defeat. Iran did not fall. It adapted. We are left weaker and more radicalised internally. In short, we face an uncertain future.

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A Reply to “An Israeli Who Wants Peace Without Erasure” A Liberal Israeli Considers an Impossible Peace Saifedean Ammous on Property Rights and the Palestinian–Israeli Conflict – PFS Bodrum 2025 Tom DiLorenzo on “Virtuous” War Crimes – The American and Israeli Traditions (PFS Bodrum 2025) The BBC and the Gaza Massacres: Silence as State Policy The Genocide Has Been Named: Britain Bears the Mark of Cain. Against Realism Without Restraint: A Response to “Gaza: Please Cut the Crocodile Tears” The Israel Trap Melanie Phillips and the War of Words: Gaza and the Truth She Won’t Face Israel v Palestine: Peace Through Compromise? A Response to “The Gaza Massacres: A Compromise Solution” Boris Johnson: The Butcher as Charlatan

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