FUTURE OF JEWISH
America owes Israel a thank-you, not a lecture
Bob Goldberg
June 20, 2026

U.S. Vice President JD Vance is worried that Israel is isolated. He should ask why. If President Donald Trump is now the only head of state in the world openly sympathetic to Israel, the explanation is not mysterious: Israel is isolated because it did what the rest of the world would not. It entered the war against Iran. It took the risk. It supplied the intelligence. It absorbed the retaliation. It made America’s victory possible. This is not a sentimental point. It is a strategic one. Operation Epic Fury destroyed Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, gutted its missile inventory, wrecked key manufacturing capacity, crippled its defense-industrial base, neutralized air-defense networks built over two decades, and eliminated senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership, including the Supreme Leader himself. This was not a raid. It was the systematic dismantling of a regime’s war-making architecture. And it was, in crucial respects, an Israeli achievement. READ MORE

FUTURE OF JEWISH The guarantee that failed Israel is back In recent days, an American president stood in a French palace, signed a memorandum ending a war that America undertook with Israeli support — a war Israel was then forbidden to finish — and called the Israeli prime minister his “very small partner.” He said it almost fondly. Benjamin Netanyahu “gets a little excited sometimes,” Trump explained. We are the big partner. He is the small one. When trying to make sense of the present, I often go looking for it in the past. Not for comfort necessarily, but because the present is bad at telling you what it actually is, and the past is much better at it. So when I read that phrase — “very small partner” — I went looking and found that I had read this script before. The setting changes, the waterway changes, the enemy changes. The structure, not so much.