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The deal as confession

Yesterday, Trump announced the deal he had spent weeks insisting he did not need.

The White House has called it a peace deal. At this stage, it is a memorandum of understanding, scheduled for formal signature in Switzerland on Friday. The text remains opaque: we do not yet know the final terms. However, the outline is clear enough to grasp the political meaning. Washington appears to have bought time. Hormuz is to reopen. The naval blockade is to be lifted. Iran receives some combination of oil waivers, asset releases, sanctions relief, or economic breathing space. The nuclear file moves into a 60-day negotiating window. Trump gets a ceasefire and lower oil prices. Tehran gets survival, liquidity, and time.

That is the endpoint of the debacle, at least for now. A war launched with maximalist assumptions has reached an interim understanding that leaves the regime in place, Hezbollah in the field, Iran’s missile architecture as the central fact of regional security, and the nuclear question in the long grass. What forced Washington’s hand was the oil clock. Emergency reserves, rerouting schemes, naval workarounds, tanker insurance, Asian demand destruction, and political patience were all running down at once. Trump rushed to a deal because the alternative was a global oil shock that would hit American gas stations just in time for the domestic political season.

The war was supposed to show that American and Israeli power could reorder the region. Instead, it showed how quickly tactical dominance can become strategic dependence. Washington could destroy targets inside Iran, but it could not force Tehran to surrender its political position. It could not open the Strait of Hormuz by military means at an acceptable cost. It could not push Saudi Arabia into war. It could not impose normalisation with Israel on the Gulf states. It could not get Europe to join the campaign. It could not convince China to pull away from Iran. It could not stop Gulf states from privately seeking understandings with Tehran to keep themselves off Iran’s target list. It could not protect allies from cheaper Iranian missiles without burning through expensive Western interceptors at a rate that made every other theatre nervous.

The global image of American power has been significantly diminished. The United States remains capable of extraordinary destruction. The war has made something else equally clear: destruction is not the same thing as control. The limits of American hard power have been brutally exposed.

The fantasy in the Situation Room

Every military debacle reaches a point when fantasy hardens into strategy in the planning process. The Iran operation appears to have had several such points, though the decisive moment came when Benjamin Netanyahu secured Donald Trump’s initial buy-in for a war plan centred on regime collapse. According to leaks to the NY Times and Ynet, the presentation was cinematic by design (although credible given subsequent events, we must be wary of leaks clearly from the JD Vance camp, which allowed him to wash his hands of the decision to go to war). Allegedly, Netanyahu arrived at the White House with Mossad director David Barnea on screen, Israeli military officials arrayed behind him, and a theory of victory tailored to a president who favours audacity, speed, and historical drama.

The premise was simple enough: kill the leadership, smash the missile infrastructure, paralyse the coercive organs, stir the streets, open a Kurdish front from Iraq, present an alternative leadership, and let the Islamic Republic collapse under the weight of its own unpopularity. For Netanyahu, this was the culmination of a career-long project. For the Mossad, it was a rare operation in which tactical penetration, psychological warfare, targeted killing, and political engineering could be fused into a single decisive blow. For Trump, it offered something even more dangerous: a fast war with the feel of history.

American officials claim they saw the weak point almost immediately. The CIA assessment reportedly broke the Israeli presentation into four components: decapitation, military degradation, popular uprising, and regime change. The first two were achievable with American and Israeli capabilities. The last two were judged fantasy. John Ratcliffe reportedly called the regime-change scenario farcical. General Dan Caine warned that the Israelis were overselling. Even Rubio, hardly a dove on Iran, understood that destroying missiles and birthing a new regime were different projects. Whilst one or some of these officials may have leaked this to exonerate themselves from the subsequent mess, it has the opposite effect: it speaks to the spinelessness and yes-man culture Trump has created in his administration.

Either way, it appears the United States and Israel embarked on a campaign whose political success hinged on assumptions that their own intelligence process had already downgraded. Within days of the first strikes, regime change was treated as a welcome possibility rather than a genuine operational requirement, even as the campaign’s initial logic still depended on it. The air war could damage the Iranian state, kill men, destroy buildings, erase depots, blind radars, and sever command networks. None of that created a governing coalition. None of it made frightened Iranians take to bombed streets. None of it converted Kurdish militias, Israeli influence operations, royalist nostalgia, and American airpower into a credible national transition.

This is a familiar pattern. Foreign powers are often adept at identifying the weaknesses of an enemy regime. They are much worse at understanding the sources of its survival. The Islamic Republic is corrupt, brutal, loathed by millions, and economically incompetent. It is also deeply practised in repression. It has survived war, sanctions, assassination, protest waves, elite factionalism, and decades of external pressure. Its security organs exist and were designed for moments like this. The Basij and Revolutionary Guards merely need to be feared, armed, and organisationally intact enough to make rebellion costly.

The regime was never going to fall on schedule

Externally imposed regime change has a poor record of producing stable, friendly, durable political orders. Intervening powers can remove rulers and deform institutions. Legitimacy cannot be air-dropped. The coercive apparatus does not dissolve because a foreign intelligence service has identified a replacement. Citizens do not become the infantry of someone else’s war because a foreign president tells them help is coming.

The Iranian people made the only rational choice available to many of them. They stayed alive. From Washington or Tel Aviv, it is easy to imagine a population rising once the tyrant is wounded. It is harder to persuade a parent in Tehran to step into the street unarmed, while bombs fall from above and regime gunmen wait below. Hatred of the regime is real. Fear of being shot as a collaborator is also real. Fear usually wins in the opening phase of a war whose outcome remains uncertain.

The Kurdish component revealed the second major failure. There was sufficient circumstantial reporting at the time to support recent media accounts that the plan required a ground invasion from Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurdish, Baluchi, and Ahwazi elements were to stretch the regime and create the appearance of internal disintegration. Israeli aircraft had begun clearing a corridor. The force was reportedly hours from crossing. Then Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Trump.

Trump folded.

From Ankara’s perspective, the intervention made perfect sense. Erdogan had no interest in seeing Kurdish forces become the heroic vanguard of a victorious regional war. A successful Kurdish march into Iran would have echoed across Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. It would have revived separatist anxieties and threatened Erdogan’s claim to regional primacy. It would also have given Israel a spectacular political win in an arena where Turkey seeks influence. Erdogan saw the plan’s vulnerability and pressed it.

The scandal is that the vulnerability existed at all. A regime-change plan dependent on a Kurdish ground front required a serious answer to the Turkish veto. Evidently, there was none. Trump approved the war, adopted the Israeli theory of victory, then removed one of its central pillars under pressure from Ankara within days of the first bombs falling. From that point, Israeli influence over events declined, and a clear divergence of interests emerged between the two allies. The United States became both indispensable and unreliable. The campaign kept moving, while its internal logic broke down.

This is how debacles take shape. The original fantasy meets the first serious political constraint, and the plan is adjusted to preserve motion while destroying coherence.

Hormuz decided the war

The Strait of Hormuz was the third and most significant failure. Any campaign against Iran should have begun there. It is the lever Tehran has always held. Iran did not need to defeat the United States Navy; it simply needed to threaten shipping, mine waters, harass tankers, raise insurance costs, create uncertainty, and force markets to price in the possibility of prolonged disruption. Iran could impose serious costs in the Strait even while losing a conventional fight. The channel is narrow. Traffic is dense. The global economy is exquisitely sensitive to disruption there.

Trump appears to have assumed the regime would collapse before it could use that lever. That assumption deserves a long life in war colleges. It reveals a whole strategic culture: impatient, theatrical, contemptuous of logistics, indifferent to escalation, and convinced that adversaries will conform to an American timetable.

Failing to secure Hormuz before launching this war was a first-order planning failure. Treating it as a manageable contingency only made the failure worse. The regime did not fall. The Strait was closed. Oil markets began to price in political reality rather than White House confidence.

Exxon Mobil executive Neil Chapman’s warning that oil could reach $150 to $160 a barrel gives the domestic consequences a concrete figure if Trump had not managed to reopen Hormuz in the next week or so. A barrel contains 42 gallons. At $150 a barrel, crude alone is roughly $3.57 per gallon. At $160, it is roughly $3.81 per gallon. That is before refining, transport, federal taxes, state taxes, retail margins, and regional constraints. In practical American terms, this points to gasoline well above $5 nationally, with $6 or $7 plausible in expensive states and stressed local markets. Diesel would transmit the shock through trucking, agriculture, food, construction, and retail. Heating, petrochemicals, aviation, fertiliser, and freight would all absorb the blow.

A war sold as a strategic masterstroke would arrive in American life as a pump price.

The oil shock mechanism is well known. Energy shocks squeeze household incomes, push up inflation, distort consumption, and can tip weak economies into recession. Gasoline has an additional political dimension: voters see the price every day. They do not need to see the news headlines. They need only the number on the sign outside the gas station.

That is why Trump became desperate for a deal. He could continue the war and own the oil shock, the munitions burn, the risk of wider escalation, and the possibility that Iran survived anyway. Or, he could seek an MOU and concede that the regime he tried to break remained the negotiating counterparty. If he escalated, the costs would fall to America. If he retreated into diplomacy, the result would look like a rescue operation for his own misjudgement. He chose the latter.

Yesterday’s announcement is best understood in that light. We do not yet know the final terms. Current reporting points to a preliminary understanding, a formal signature in Switzerland on Friday, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the lifting of the US blockade on Iranian ports, some form of oil or sanctions relief, and a 60-day period during which the nuclear question is deferred to further negotiations. That is a ceasefire with economic relief attached, but it is also a confession that the war could not be sustained on its original strategic theory.

Iran’s missile lesson

There is another reason Washington needed an exit. Iran’s missile performance shifted the debate. The verified picture remains severe and explains why Washington could not afford to return to all-out war. Iran repeatedly targeted the infrastructure on which American airpower depends: radars, communications nodes, tankers, and battle-management aircraft. Iranian strikes damaged multiple KC-135 aerial refuelling tankers and an E-3 Sentry, with the E-3 likely beyond economical repair. Radar sites across the Gulf and wider region were struck or degraded. Kuwait reported damage to airport radar following an Iranian strike. Earlier evidence indicates damage to radar and radome infrastructure in Bahrain.

The volume is a strategic fact. By mid-April, more than two thousand Iranian ballistic missiles had been launched since the start of the war. That is roughly comparable to the combined short- and medium-range ballistic missile inventory the Pentagon attributed to China in its 2024 report. However one slices the comparison, Iran forced the United States to experience, in real time, the operational logic usually discussed in Taiwan scenarios: missiles can close airbases, suppress radars, threaten tankers, complicate sortie generation, and compel the defender to expend expensive interceptors against cheaper offensive systems.

Iran’s best systems performed far beyond legacy assumptions about Iranian missiles. Some effects appear consistent with single-digit-metre accuracy. The political conclusion is already safe: Iran is a serious missile power, and it showed.

That fact imposes an unfavourable exchange ratio on the United States and its partners. Iranian missiles are cheaper to produce than the interceptors needed to stop them. Even while heavily degraded, Iran could fire enough to force ammunition consumption, expose vulnerabilities, and impose operational paralysis, even when most incoming missiles are intercepted. The United States and Israel can win many individual engagements and still lose the campaign’s economics. Each Patriot, THAAD, Arrow, David’s Sling, SM-3, or SM-6 fired in the Middle East is one less available for Europe, Taiwan, Japan, or the next Gulf contingency until the industrial base catches up. The industrial base is nowhere near catching up.

The arsenal problem now reaches Europe and Taiwan

Depleted missile interceptors are the root of the problem. A war with Iran consumes the same scarce high-end munitions, interceptors, air-defence systems, and precision weapons that Europe and Taiwan also need. When supplies to Europe and Taiwan are halted or delayed because Washington has burned through its reserves in the Middle East, the message is brutal: American weapons are excellent until everyone needs them at once.

Taiwan will notice. Europe will notice. Future buyers of American arms will notice. A weapons supplier whose production base cannot keep pace with simultaneous crises is selling uncertainty with every platform. States that planned around American arsenals will now begin hedging, diversifying suppliers, expanding domestic production, and asking whether American kit carries an invisible caveat: available only if Washington is not already overextended.

The rare-earth problem makes this worse. Reconstituting advanced weapons production goes beyond congressional appropriations alone. It depends on industrial capacity, supply chains, critical minerals, skilled labour, and processing networks. Rare-earth permanent magnets and related materials are integral to the industrial base of modern power, including defence-relevant technologies. China’s position in these supply chains gives Beijing leverage at exactly the moment Washington needs to rebuild.

This is the strategic irony. A war launched to display American and Israeli dominance may end up advertising Chinese leverage over the material foundations of American power. Beijing only needs to appear patient, solvent, predictable, and useful, while Washington appears impulsive, depleted, and trapped. As Iran rebuilds, China will be there, with energy demand, infrastructure finance, diplomatic bandwidth, and the quiet confidence of a power that did not spend its missile stocks proving a theory of collapse that failed.

The Gulf drew the correct lesson

As money flows from Dubai to Tehran, the emerging rapprochement between the United Arab Emirates and Iran exposes another flaw in the assumptions underpinning the campaign. For much of the past year, Israeli policymakers appeared to believe that the war would accelerate regional alignment against Tehran, deepen the Abraham Accords, and encourage Gulf states to move closer to Israel. The opposite is now evident. Across much of the Gulf, there is growing frustration that they were drawn into a confrontation that imposed economic and security costs while offering few tangible benefits. The strikes on Qatar, threats to energy infrastructure, and the vulnerability of US bases across the region reinforced a lesson Gulf capitals will not forget: escalation can be initiated elsewhere, while the bill is delivered to them.

Gulf states are not naïve about Iran. They remain acutely aware of Tehran’s capacity for subversion, coercion, missile attacks, and regional interference. Their calculation is simply more pragmatic. Their political economies depend on capital inflows, aviation hubs, energy exports, sovereign wealth deployment, tourism, logistics, and the perception that their territory is insulated from the region’s worst convulsions. If the choice is between symbolic alignment with Israel and a working channel to Tehran that reduces the risk of missiles over Doha, Abu Dhabi, Manama, or Riyadh, the Gulf will choose the backchannel. Jerusalem may call that appeasement, but Gulf rulers will call it preservation and prosperity.

Consequently, the prospect of major new normalisation agreements has receded. Without meaningful progress on the Palestinian issue, Gulf leaders have little political incentive to deepen ties with Israel. More importantly, they have reached a sober assessment of Iran itself. Whatever damage has been inflicted on the regime, it remains the dominant power on the northern shore of the Gulf and will continue to be a permanent feature of the regional landscape. Attempts to isolate Tehran completely or force its collapse no longer seem realistic.

The Abraham Accords 2.0 fantasy is therefore buried for the foreseeable future. Trump tried to link an Iran deal to mass normalisation with Israel. Gulf leaders looked at the battlefield, the oil shock, the American rush to secure an MOU, and Israel’s inability to sustain the campaign without US support. They drew the obvious conclusion. Why should Arab states absorb the political costs of openly aligning with Israel on Iran if Washington itself is negotiating with Tehran and constraining Israel’s freedom of action? Why break with the wider Arab consensus if the patron is already hedging?

The logic can run in reverse. Existing Abraham Accords states will reassess what they are receiving in return for strategic separation from their Arab partners. If the benefits of remaining within the framework shrink while the costs rise, second thoughts become rational. Arms, investment, technology, and access are valuable. Security against Iran is even more valuable. If the United States cannot deliver that security without negotiating with Tehran, the structure of incentives changes.

Saudi Arabia looks vindicated. Riyadh refused to be drawn into the conflict. It resisted pressure to normalise relations with Israel in exchange for security. It resisted efforts by more hawkish regional actors to form an Arab-Israeli front for the war. It deepened coordination with Pakistan and Turkey on supply chains, routes, and regional de-escalation. It preserved enough space to negotiate quiet arrangements with Iran. Saudi policy was derided by some as passive, but it now reads as disciplined self-preservation.

Israel overreached

Israel overreached and failed. It succeeded in convincing the United States to go to war with Iran, a notable achievement. It failed to achieve the strategic aims that were supposed to justify that risk. No regime change. No Arab-Israeli coalition. No decisive solution to the missile problem. No durable removal of Hezbollah from the northern border. No regional normalisation dividend. Instead, Netanyahu has been publicly rebuked by Trump after last week’s attack on Beirut, forced into a deal he adamantly opposed, and Israel is left facing an American public debate in which Tel Aviv will increasingly be blamed for pulling Washington into an unnecessary war.

The consequences for the US-Israeli relationship could be generational. Israel can initiate certain operations alone, but it cannot sustain a major regional war for long without American munitions, air defence replenishment, spare parts, financing, intelligence support, forward-deployed systems, and diplomatic cover. The war has exposed that dependency at the worst possible moment. It has also revealed the political cost to Washington of underwriting Israeli maximalism, when the result is higher fuel prices, depleted missile stocks, angry allies, and a deal with Iran that arrives anyway.

Israel is now in an impossible position. It can accept Hezbollah’s continued presence on its northern border, with all the strategic humiliation that follows months of war, or it can break with Washington by continuing a campaign the White House wants closed. This is why the Lebanon clause in the emerging deal is so dangerous for Netanyahu. Hezbollah survives as an armed actor. Iran has tied the Lebanese front to the broader ceasefire architecture. Washington now has an interest in restraining Israel to preserve the Iran MOU. Israel can denounce that outcome, but denunciation does not solve the total reliance on and subordination to Washington that Netanyahu has embedded into Israeli strategy since Trump’s election. It does not remove Hezbollah from the hills, villages, and networks that define the northern front. Israel cannot accept this latter point, so a breach with Washington looms.

Turkey and Pakistan step into the gap

Erdogan’s position has improved. Israel tried to use the war with Iran to drive a wedge between Ankara and Washington, but the opposite happened. Erdogan blocked the Kurdish ground component, preserved Turkey’s red lines, and emerged as one of the indispensable actors in the diplomatic aftermath. Trump has asserted his personal friendship with Erdogan, thanked him publicly for helping move the deal, and signalled his belief in Turkey as a stabilising force by elevating figures around him who are far more sympathetic to Ankara than Israelis would like.

Tom Barrack’s expanded regional role fits within that shift. Israelis resent his partiality and positive view of Ankara for good reason. Personnel choices reveal hierarchy. If Washington is leaning on Turkey to manage Syria, Lebanon, and the wider de-escalation architecture around Iran, Israel’s room for unilateral action narrows. Ankara’s post-war message is simple: every superpower seeking regional stability must pass through Turkey. Erdogan has been saying this for years. The Iran debacle made the case for him.

Pakistan also emerges stronger. The Islamabad channel, Shehbaz Sharif’s role, and the prominence of Pakistani military leadership in the background all point to a regional order in which Washington cannot simply dictate terms through traditional Gulf partners and Israel. Pakistan has energy exposure, links to China, ties to the Gulf, its own nuclear status, and a security relationship with Saudi Arabia that cannot be ignored. In a war whose end required mediation, those attributes presented Pakistan with a golden opportunity that it seized with both hands.

The nuclear problem got harder

The nuclear file has also become more intractable. US intelligence sources believe Iran has sharply escalated efforts to seal off its stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium, deliberately collapsing tunnels and placing explosive mines at the entrances. The objective is clear. Tehran wants to make any future attempt to seize, inspect, remove, dilute or destroy the material vastly more difficult and dangerous.

That detail captures the entire war. Rather than negotiating from a position of helplessness, Tehran appears to be hardening its most valuable strategic asset ahead of any peace settlement. A campaign launched in part to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat may have left the international community facing a stockpile that is harder to locate, monitor, and access. Even if a diplomatic agreement is reached, inspectors, engineers, or military personnel may first have to navigate collapsed tunnels, mined entrances, and fortified underground complexes before determining the true status of Iran’s uranium reserves.

The MOU appears to kick the central problem into a 60-day window. That is strategically revealing. After months of war, the United States has returned to negotiations on enrichment, stockpiles, verification, sanctions relief, and sequencing that it was conducting with Tehran before the war. This is the same class of problem Trump claimed force would solve. Now he is negotiating it under worse conditions, with a regime that has survived, a nuclear cache reportedly harder to reach, a missile force that has proved its worth, and a global economy desperate for Hormuz to remain open.

The deal will strengthen the regime before it weakens it

There is a final irony. Much of the discussion in Washington assumes that sanctions relief is the prize Tehran seeks above all else. The regime certainly wants access to frozen assets, oil revenue, and relief from economic pressure. It is negotiating for those things, but economic recovery is not the regime’s ultimate objective. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has repeatedly accepted severe economic pain in pursuit of ideological and geopolitical goals. Its leadership views the struggle against American influence and Israel as a religious mission and defining features of the revolutionary state, not as temporary bargaining positions.

If a deal is reached, resources will flow into Iran. The key question is where they will go. A state primarily concerned with national prosperity would prioritise reconstruction, consumer welfare, infrastructure, currency stability, and reintegration with the global economy. The Islamic Republic will prioritise power. No matter the clauses not to do so in any deal, it is beyond doubt that a significant share of any relief will be directed towards openly or covertly rebuilding missile production, command networks, air defences, hardened facilities, internal security, and the regional networks that project Iranian influence through Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, the Houthis, and other partners.

That will not necessarily make the regime safer. Rebuilding the economy would strengthen its long-term resilience. Rebuilding the military-industrial base will strengthen its ability to threaten Israel, intimidate neighbours, and contest American influence, while recreating the very target set that brought American and Israeli airpower down on it in the first place. The more resources Iran devotes to restoring its war machine, the more it creates the conditions for another confrontation. In seeking security, the regime will deepen its vulnerability.

This is why the deal, if signed on Friday, should not be mistaken for a resolution. It is a pause bought under pressure. It may reopen Hormuz, reduce oil prices, and give Trump a line to sell at home. It may give Tehran the cash and time it needs, give Gulf states space to breathe, or force Israel to swallow a Lebanon outcome it hates. None of that resolves the structural conflict. It only changes the tempo.

The balance sheet

The balance sheet is stark. Netanyahu sold Trump a war. Trump altered the plan under Turkish pressure. The Kurdish front died before it began. The Iranian street did not rise. The regime survived. Hormuz became the coercive centre of the conflict. Oil markets created urgency. The missile war exposed the cost curve. American stocks were depleted. Europe and Taiwan were reminded that US arsenals are finite and that American support is conditional. Gulf states began hedging. Saudi Arabia looked prudent. Turkey gained leverage. Pakistan gained relevance. China gained opportunity. Israel gained dependence and humiliation. Trump gained a ceasefire that, in strategic terms, looks like an emergency exit.

The war required too many favourable contingencies. Khamenei and the senior leadership had to be killed or rendered irrelevant. Command and control had to collapse. The Iranian public had to move in vast numbers despite fear and bombardment. Kurdish forces had to cross without triggering a Turkish veto. A credible alternative authority had to emerge. Hormuz had to remain manageable. Oil markets had to stay calm. American interceptor stocks had to absorb the burn rate. Allies had to accept delays and depletion. China had to remain a spectator. Trump had to remain steady.

A plan dependent on that many favourable contingencies is unserious.

Trump’s announcement yesterday laid bare the debacle. Washington entered the war to coerce Iran and ended up negotiating with an Iranian regime that held a position of strength, threatening to collapse the global economy. Israel entered the war to shift the regional balance and is now being told by Washington to stand down in Lebanon. Gulf states were expected to rally behind Israel and are now reopening channels to Tehran. Europe was expected to support American leadership and instead watched from the sidelines, increasingly convinced that an alliance with Washington has become a source of risk. Taiwan was supposed to trust American abundance, and now sees scarcity and unreliability in motion.

Trump wanted the glory of a decisive war without the burdens that usually follow, the drama of regime change without occupation, the optics of strength without the patience of strategy, and the Israeli promise of regime collapse without the American responsibility for what came after. Now he has a damaged Iran that has not fallen, a Strait of Hormuz crisis that forced a ceasefire, Gulf partners reconsidering American protection, Europeans questioning American reliability, Taiwan watching munitions flows, depleted missile reserves, Chinese leverage over rearmament, and a White House searching for a final nuclear agreement with the regime it expected to outlast.

That is the anatomy of the debacle: an Israeli theory of victory sold to an American president who mistook confidence for strategy, revised under Turkish pressure, exposed by Hormuz, and now suspended within a ceasefire MOU designed to buy 60 days before the bill comes due again.

Let me answer plainly. Am I paid by Israel? No. Never. Not a penny in state money. I have flown to Israel for conferences rather than accept funding from the Israeli government or from people organising events on its behalf. I once declined dinner at President Herzog’s house and instead had dinner with my father and my friend Caroline in Jerusalem, because, nothing against President Herzog, but I preferred their company and because I am not interested in proximity to power. I am interested in truth, decency and the moderation of extremes.

Am I pro-Israel? Yes, in the sense that I support its existence unconditionally. For clarity, when I use the term in the rest of this article, that is what I mean. I love Israel as a country. I have been there fourteen times, always for work, and I am always happy to arrive and sad to leave. What refugees and survivors built after the Second World War is extraordinary. The country is beautiful. Israelis have tended and improved the land with genuine devotion. You see it in the agriculture, the water systems, the drip irrigation, the technological ingenuity, and the determination to make things grow in places where others might have seen only difficulty.

My Israeli friends are among the loveliest people I know. In my experience, the Jewish faith is one of the most welcoming on earth. Whenever I am there, I am inundated with Shabbat dinner invitations. There is a warmth, intimacy and generosity to Jewish communal life that is difficult to convey unless you have experienced it. It is one of the reasons I find the caricature of Israelis and Jews in much contemporary debate not merely wrong but grotesque.

However, loving a place and a people does not require abandoning one’s critical faculties.

The same is true of Israel, politically and militarily. The IDF is not perfect. It goes hard when on the offensive. Israel’s current politics contain ghastly far-right elements, which are ugly, damaging and dangerous. I think Netanyahu has been a disaster. Israeli policy in the West Bank is a car crash. The West Bank chapter of my forthcoming book was by far the hardest to write because the place is such a complex mess: legally, morally, historically, strategically and humanly. It is possible to understand the Jewish attachment to Judea and Samaria, recognise the security imperatives that shape Israeli conduct there, and still think that much of the present policy is disastrous.

Yes, I am a Zionist. I do not accept the term as an insult. I use it in its basic sense: I believe the Jewish people deserve a state and a refuge, especially after the Holocaust. They deserve what they have built, and they deserve security, continuity and self-determination. That does not mean I think every Israeli policy is wise, every Israeli politician is decent, or every IDF action is beyond criticism. No serious person should think that about any state, army or war.

What I want in this debate, more than anything, is fairness. That is what is so absent. I believe the war after 7 October was just. I believe Israel’s actions in Gaza have often been harsh, yet fundamentally just and lawful. I personally know IDF lawyers who go days without sleep when targeting is at a high tempo. They are not cartoon villains gleefully pressing buttons. They are people making appalling decisions under appalling conditions, in a war forced on Israel by a genocidal terrorist organisation that murdered, raped, kidnapped and livestreamed its crimes, backed by a genocidal terrorist state in Tehran.

I have also been critical. I condemned the IDF’s conduct at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites because machine-gun fire for crowd control is unforgivable. When I went on Triggernometry and said the IDF could be prone to being trigger-happy, drawing on what I had seen at GHF sites in Gaza and later confirmed through interviews with IDF soldiers for my Lessons from Gaza paper, I was attacked by some pro-Israel advocates for “giving the opposition ammunition” and “not being on the same team”. I received phone calls from friends, telling me off. I was harangued by colleagues at conferences. The assumption was that any criticism of Israel, however fair, however evidence-based, however carefully framed, was a betrayal.

That assumption is strategically catastrophic. For nearly two years, I have argued that Israel faces an existential threat, one that many of its supporters have badly underestimated. I do not mean Hamas, Hezbollah or even Iran, serious as those threats are. I mean the progressive collapse of Israel’s international legitimacy. When I first began highlighting how dangerous this incipient pariah status was, I was aggressively shouted down, including by people such as John Spencer. I was told that the information war did not matter, that battlefield reality would prevail, that Israeli strategy was flawless, the IDF were perfect, that international opinion was mostly noise, and that Israel could afford to ignore the fury building against it. I thought that was wrong then. It is indefensible now.

The latest Pew poll should terrify anyone who cares about Israel’s future. Pew surveyed 44,657 adults across 36 countries between February and May 2026. Across those countries, a median of 67 per cent of adults held an unfavourable view of Israel, while only 25 per cent held a favourable view. In the United Kingdom, 69 per cent held an unfavourable view. In Germany, 73 per cent did. In Italy, 75 per cent did. In Australia, 79 per cent did. Pew also found that majorities in most countries surveyed had little or no confidence in Benjamin Netanyahu to do the right thing in world affairs.

Those figures are a strategic warning. States do not survive on military power alone. They require alliances, diplomatic cover, arms supply chains, trade relationships, intelligence partnerships, legal legitimacy, and a basic presumption among other nations that they belong to the community of acceptable states. Israel is militarily formidable, but it is also small, exposed, and structurally dependent on external relationships. A country in Israel’s position cannot afford to become permanently toxic to the publics, parliaments, and political parties of the democratic world.

The pathway from reputational collapse to strategic isolation is not hard to imagine. First comes the erosion of sympathy. Then activist opinion bleeds into elite opinion. Then parliamentary pressure, legal campaigns, arms embargoes, cultural boycotts, university divestment campaigns, corporate withdrawals and selective sanctions. Eventually, the comparison with apartheid-era South Africa, however historically crude and morally distorted, becomes politically useful enough to shape policy. The danger is not that enough people come to believe it, and that their governments begin to act accordingly.

That is what makes this potentially existential for Israel. A future in which Israel is isolated South Africa-style, steadily sanctioned and abandoned by its traditional friends, is now a visible possibility. Nor is it impossible to imagine Israel losing even the diplomatic protection it has long relied on at the United Nations Security Council, having already lost the goodwill of the majority of the population of every single permanent member. People who dismiss this as hysteria have not understood how quickly legitimacy can disappear once a state is successfully cast as uniquely immoral, uniquely criminal and uniquely beyond defence.

The information war against Israel has been extraordinarily effective. Part of that is due to Israel’s enemies lying fluently, constantly and without shame. They understand the emotional grammar of the age. They know how to turn images into politics, civilian suffering into strategic leverage, and the language of human rights into a weapon against the only Jewish state on earth. Hamas has fought not only from tunnels and behind civilians, but also through the screens and consciences of Western societies. It has understood, often better than Israel itself, that a war can be lost internationally even while it is being won tactically.

Yet Israel’s own failures cannot be ignored. Hasbara and Jewish advocacy organisations have failed, disastrously, for two and a half years. The standard modes of Israeli advocacy have not persuaded those who needed persuasion. Almost exclusively, pro-Israel messaging has spoken only to those already convinced. Too often, it has treated every criticism as hostile, every critic as suspect, and every uncomfortable fact as enemy ammunition. That approach may sustain morale within a closed circle, but it does not persuade outsiders. In fact, it confirms their suspicion that Israel’s defenders are not serious interlocutors.

Friendly critics of Israel are therefore not a liability. They are now indispensable. The only voices that will count in the next phase of this argument are fair and balanced: people who can defend Israel’s right to exist and to fight while acknowledging Israeli mistakes; people who can explain why Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organisation while admitting that some IDF conduct deserves scrutiny; people who can reject blood libels, antisemitism and propaganda while refusing to pretend that every Israeli minister is wise or that every Israeli tactical choice is defensible.

This is why the accusation that criticism “gives the opposition ammunition” is so foolish. The opposition already has ammunition. Some of it is fabricated, some is distorted, and some is real. The question is whether Israel’s friends can distinguish among these categories. If they cannot, they will lose all credibility with precisely the audiences they need to reach. A person who defends Israel when it is right and criticises it when it is wrong is much harder to dismiss than someone who simply defends Israel regardless of the facts.

That distinction now matters enormously. If you defend every Israeli action, you become a propagandist. If you condemn every Israeli action, you become a propagandist in the opposite direction. Neither posture is morally serious, nor is either strategically useful. The space that remains is narrow, uncomfortable and increasingly lonely, but it is the only space from which persuasion is still possible.

I am pro-Israel, and because I am pro-Israel, I want Israel to survive. That means I care about more than battlefield success. I care about legitimacy. I care about the quality of Israeli decision-making. I care about the damage caused by far-right ministers who seem unable to distinguish between extreme ideological gratification and the national interest. I care about the West Bank because it is a moral, legal and strategic disaster that risks deepening. I care about the conduct of soldiers in Gaza because armies that lose discipline harm not only civilians but also the state they serve.

None of this requires any dilution of moral clarity about Hamas. Hamas started this war with an act of barbarism. It brought Israel’s response into a military system within civilian life in Gaza. It turned hospitals, schools, mosques, apartment blocks and humanitarian space into instruments of war. It has encouraged Palestinian deaths as a political asset. It murdered Israelis, destroyed Palestinian futures, and then invited the world to blame Israel for the consequences. Any serious account of this war must begin with that reality.

A serious account cannot end there. Israel’s friends need to recognise that the world has changed around them. Young people in Western countries do not instinctively see Israel as David. They increasingly see it as Goliath. Many have no living memory of the Holocaust as part of family history, no memory of the Arab-Israeli wars, no understanding of the Second Intifada, and little knowledge of the long history of rejectionism, terrorism and regional hostility that shaped Israeli security culture. Into that vacuum has poured a relentless stream of anti-Israel propaganda, much of it simplistic, much of it malicious, and much of it highly effective.

The consequences are already evident. Jews worldwide are paying the price. Synagogues need guards. Jewish schools require security. Jewish students are harassed. Jewish people in London, Paris, New York and Sydney are expected to answer personally for a war they did not start and a government they did not elect. Anti-Israel hatred easily slips into antisemitism, and then everyone pretends not to have noticed. The oldest hatred has learned the language of the new politics and media.

Social media has corroded this debate almost beyond recognition. It rewards hysteria, cruelty, ignorance and certainty. It turns war into content, suffering into ammunition and half-truths into moral performance. In that environment, pro-Israel voices have a particular responsibility to remain truthful. We cannot answer lies with lies. We cannot defend Israel by pretending every Israeli decision is perfect. We defend Israel best by telling the truth: about 7 October, about Hamas, about the hostages, about urban warfare, about human shields, about international law, and about the mistakes Israel must be honest enough to confront.

The life of the Jewish state may, in part, depend on whether those who understand its case can present it honestly, clearly, with emotional resonance and without apology. Israel does not need flatterers. It does not need Western supporters who treat criticism as treachery. It does not need advocates who imagine that shouting “antisemitism” at every objection will rescue its reputation. It needs serious people to make serious arguments in a world increasingly inclined not to listen.

Yes, I am pro-Israel. I am a Zionist. I believe the Jewish people have the right to defend the only Jewish state on earth. I believe Israel has made mistakes, and I will continue to say so when it does. I will not pretend that Israel is the monster in this story. I will not pretend that Hamas is a resistance movement. I will not pretend that the campaign now directed at Israel is ordinary criticism when so much of it is propaganda, hatred and antisemitism dressed up as justice.

No one pays me to say this. No embassy writes my lines. No government funds my conscience. I say it because fairness requires it. I say it because truth requires it. I say it because Israel is being lied about on a scale that should shame the world, and because some of Israel’s friends still refuse to confront the strategic consequences of those lies.

Criticise Israel when criticism is due. I do. Defend Israel when defence is required. I do that too. The two are not opposites. In the world Israel now faces, they may be inseparable.

There’s a running joke among Gaza War veterans that people who’ve never been to Gaza read Haaretz to learn what’s going on there; those who’ve been there read Haaretz when they’re in the mood for some escapist fiction. For those of us who’ve fought in Gaza, the pattern of Haaretz war stories has become familiar: the author typically takes a kernel of truth, removes essential details and highlights unimportant ones, painting a fuzzy, incoherent picture whose only coherent thread is that the IDF is barbaric. Haaretz’s latest hit about IDF veterans’ ‘Moral Injuries’ is a case in point.

The very term is controversial. In fact, the article itself admits that the term doesn’t exist in the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness, nor is it recognized by the Israeli Defense Ministry. But the author made sure to bury that inconvenient fact deep in the article and, just to play it safe, he turns that weakness into a strength by quoting an unnamed source who insinuates that the IDF does not recognize the term because that would effectively involve a public admission that the IDF is not nearly as moral as advertised. That’s right. Haaretz published a piece on a mental illness that may or may not exist and used the very dubiousness of that illness’ existence as proof that the IDF is wicked.

The reason the author insists on using that dubious term is that it sounds so bad. The term ‘moral injury’ conjures an image of a guilt-ridden soldier who is crippled by the knowledge of the atrocities he has committed. The article’s opening story reinforces that image by describing a man who is so horrified by his own wickedness he can’t even bear to look himself in the mirror and then goes on to describe an ex-sniper who wet his bed because of nightmares. It carefully avoids delving into the psychology behind that sense of guilt, leaving the reader to assume that those veterans feel evil because they are evil.

However, the reality about guilt is much more complicated, especially in the context of trauma. The broader context is that a sense of guilt is a natural reaction to trauma. It is perfectly natural to rehash terrible events that have happened to us and to think how we could have handled them differently, both to learn and to regain a sense of control – a feeling that “I’ll be ready for it next time.” And once people start focusing on what they could have or should have done, it is easy to feel guilty for not having chosen that supposedly correct course of action in real time. That is one reason sexual abuse survivors often feel guilty about being abused. I felt guilty when a platoon mate of mine got injured in Gaza, even though I knew I had done everything I could for him. A Nova survivor told me he felt a similar sense of guilt about his surviving while so many of his friends did not. In other words, a sense of guilt does not necessarily imply moral guilt. But casual readers don’t make that distinction. And the author weaponizes that.

And for a good reason. Because once you read the story carefully, the narrative begins to unravel. For starters, the therapists and experts who are quoted all seem to view the sufferers of ‘moral injuries’ as people who need to be treated rather than necessarily condemned. And once you start reading between the lines, it is easy to see why.

For instance, remember that opening story about a guilt-ridden veteran who can’t even look at himself in the mirror? The experience that caused that reaction is indeed tragic, but underwhelming from a guilt perspective: his unit spotted an apparent enemy infiltration, he charged along with his mates to eliminate the threat and discovered that it was a case of mistaken identity. They had killed civilians. That’s a terrible outcome, but one that is, unfortunately, all too common in war. Did those soldiers make the right call based on available information, or were they careless or possibly even murderous?

The answer to that question is critical to the reader’s assessment of the incident – and is the one critical factor that determines whether that soldier’s sense of guilt is morally justified. So, of course, the author ignores it. Instead, he implies guilt by focusing on a gruesome – yet comparatively trivial – event that followed, describing how a junior officer yelled some obscenities and spat at the bodies. The rendition of that callous, revolting act is meant to reinforce the reader’s unfavorable perception of those soldiers, and by extension, imply that the guilt-ridden one must indeed be morally guilty.

That pattern gets even more ridiculous as the piece goes on. The article mentions an Israeli Air Force guy who grew frustrated with the civilian toll of aerial bombardment. It’s clearly a case of collateral damage rather than intentional targeting, although Haaretz tries to bury that fact. Nor is there any proof – or even allegation – that those strikes violated the rules of proportionality (i.e., the civilian toll being proportional to the military value of the target that’s struck). The author overcomes those seemingly-insurmountable obstacles brilliantly. First comes the framing: “Israel violated a ceasefire with Hamas”, letting the reader know which side is the bloodthirsty, evil one. The fact that those attacks followed the expiration of a ceasefire is conveniently omitted. Then, to create the impression that the attacks were unusually nasty, the author quotes the IAF person as saying that “everything I knew about collateral damage was thrown away.” In reality, all that means is that the IAF relaxed its pre-war policy regarding collateral damage. The big question, whether the new guidelines are justified, is sidestepped.

The piece ends with a story about a commando who recalled how the smell of dead bodies at Shifa reminded him of Be’eri in the aftermath of the October 7^th massacre. The article uses that common smell to suggest that there’s a moral parallel too – without providing any evidence, of course.

The sad thing is that the type of deep-dive Haaretz pretends to do with this article would have been critically important if done correctly and accurately. Helping civilians understand the mental strain of combat could make it easier for veterans to reintegrate into civil society. It could also prevent war crimes by helping more people identify warning signs of soldiers who are more likely to crack or lose control. But instead of explaining, Haaretz takes advantage of the average civilian’s ignorance to push its narrative.

Take the story of the bed-wetting former sniper. As an ex-serviceman, I know that being a sniper is an emotional nightmare. It effectively involves hunting humans in cold blood and watching a close-up of them dying. That is true whether the sniper ends up killing an enemy or an innocent. But the average reader assumes that the sniper in the article is haunted by the knowledge of the innocent civilians he has murdered – an assumption that the author implicitly encourages by withholding that critical context.

Similarly, veterans who have transitioned between military and civilian life would understand the critical role that transition plays in the ‘moral injury’ phenomena the article describes. Adjusting to the different moral codes and behavior patterns of military and civilian life takes time and, in my own experience, it can be very painful. At least one of the stories related in the Haaretz article is essentially about a sensitive young man who was yanked into a warzone and then plunked back into his old life and is now struggling because he’s looking at his wartime actions through a peacetime lens. That transition is particularly tough because the society that raised him taught him to be decent and peaceable, and so he’s ashamed of the harsher animal reactions that he felt and witnessed under intense circumstances. Once again, the Haaretz piece implicitly condemns that young man (or his comrades) by side-stepping the all-important question of whether those wartime reactions were appropriate under wartime conditions.

Perhaps the author of that article refused to delve deeper because that would have forced him to consider the inconvenient possibility that those ‘moral injuries’ might be common not because Israeli society is uniquely evil, but because it’s mostly decent – which is why the gap between the cruel realities of war and the values most people are raised on is so hard for many of those veterans to stomach.

Of course, I am not claiming that all those guilt-ridden veterans are good people or that none of them should feel terrible about their wartime actions. Every army has its power-hungry sadists, cowards, and unhinged. Every army does, after all, reflect the diversity of the society it is drawn from. Reality is complex, especially when it comes to war. And a good journalist should strive to explain that complexity to readers. Sadly, but not surprisingly, Haaretz opted to abandon journalism in favor of information warfare.

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In an era increasingly shaped by digital media and online influence, this report examines how disinformation exploits human psychology to shape public perception and behaviour. Drawing on cognitive research and contemporary case studies, it demonstra…

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I was invited to speak at a conference organised by Thinc, a Dutch think tank, on the weaponisation of international law against Israel. My first talk to the main audience was about the psychological function of that weaponisation. The …

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I was on a plane recently watching Band of Brothers, and what struck me was the way the series captured the confusion of war. The noise, exhaustion, rumour, sudden violence, men trying to look calm when they plainly were not. The way orders arrive late, wrong, or not at all. The way courage and fear sit in the same body. The way men joke, because the alternative is admitting what is happening to them.

It reminded me of Afghanistan, not in scale or brutality or historical significance, obviously. The Second World War was an industrial catastrophe beyond anything I saw, but the emotional register was familiar. The chaos, absurdity, tenderness, anger, deadening fatigue and brief moments of competence surrounded by vast uncertainty. That, I recognised.

It also struck me how few people in the modern West have any reference point for what they are seeing when they see images of war. That sounds arrogant, and I do not mean it that way; veterans do not possess some sacred wisdom. Combat experience gives you proximity, not omniscience, and veterans are just as capable of stupidity, ideology, sentimentality and selective memory as anybody else, and sometimes more so. However, proximity does change something. It gives you a feel for how little is visible from the image. That is the problem with the way the war in Gaza has been consumed by Western audiences. We were all watching fragments: drone clips, helmet cameras, apartment blocks collapsing, tanks firing down streets, men running across open ground, civilians pulled from rubble, a body in a stairwell, a child covered in dust, a plume of smoke. The image, the suffering and the dead are real, but the image is not the war.

The image is a shard of the war, stripped of sequence, context, intent, alternatives and uncertainty. It can reveal a crime, incompetence, necessity, or nothing more than the fact that modern war is hideous. From the image alone, you cannot know which. That does not mean people should look away; democracies should be forced to look at what is done in their name, by their allies, by their enemies and by themselves, but there is a difference between horror and understanding. One is a moral reaction and the other is a discipline. Most people have the horror, but far fewer have the discipline.

In Afghanistan, what I learned very quickly was that war is both more primitive and more bureaucratic than civilians imagine. There are radios, maps, drones, legal advisers, intelligence packets, rules of engagement, PowerPoint briefings and carefully worded orders. There is also dust, panic, bad visibility, faulty assumptions, tired men, frightened men, angry men, civilians where you were told there would be none, enemies where you were told there would be civilians, and commanders making decisions with less information than the public later assumes they had. The Western imagination still thinks of war as a controlled instrument: a commander sees the battlefield, identifies the threat, chooses the cleanest possible option and executes it with precision. Sometimes that happens, but far more often it does not.

Very often the reality is a section commander trying to work out whether movement in a compound is a fighter, a farmer, a child, a decoy, a spotter or nothing at all. It is a platoon pinned down by fire from a location nobody marked on the map. It is a vehicle commander trying to reverse down an alley while people scream on the radio net. It is an aircraft overhead with a partial picture. It is a lawyer asking the right questions at a speed war does not permit. It is a commander deciding whether to risk his own men, risk civilians, lose the initiative, call for fire, wait, push, withdraw or do nothing. Every option has a cost; the cost is just paid by different people. Civilians often imagine the choice is between violence and no violence. In reality, the choice is frequently between different distributions of violence, risk and failure.

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