Trump at Obama
“You don’t understand the Americans at all,” says a senior Middle Eastern official. “You look at Saudi planes as a potential future threat. The United States, by contrast, counts all the American planes it has sold to countries in the region as a shared air force of a foreign power: the Middle Eastern defense alliance.”
It’s a long historical process, but the United States is leaving the Middle East. America now produces more oil than any other country in the world and is no longer beholden to local embargoes. The two great American traumas of this century are tied to the Middle East: 9/11 dragged the US into the region, and the Iraq War dragged it out.
The Middle East is a region to avoid, President Obama said when justifying breaking his promise to protect the Syrian people from Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons. In that sense, Donald Trump is a surprising successor. He simply proposes a withdrawal that is more elegant, smarter, and less naïve. Instead of appeasing Iran, he places an iron wall against it. Indeed, that regional alliance protected Israel from two wild Iranian missile onslaughts in 2024.
“Don’t think about Jerusalem,” the official suggested. “Think about Tehran. When they see a war machine like the F-35 in the Middle East, will they interpret it as a local Saudi air force or as a de-facto American base?”
All this makes good sense regarding Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and it explains Israel’s silence compared to past uproars when a friendly Republican administration tried to sell weapons to Riyadh. Then it was Ronald Reagan with the F-15s, and the one who helped him was Democratic Senator Joe Biden.
But this is certainly not the case with Turkey. Ankara is doing everything it can to help the Iranians get around the sanctions, and there is no reason to believe that one day it will help Israel with air defense — perhaps the opposite.
Israel believes it succeeded in blocking the sale of the jets to Erdogan, and in linking the supply of F-35s to Saudi Arabia to a normalization deal. If an air force is being built in the region against Iran, perhaps the bases should also set up communication systems with one another.
Wait for the next government
The main quality that separates leaders from ordinary citizens is the ability to distinguish between the essential and the trivial. A journalist can tweet in the morning in favor of drafting the ultra-Orthodox into the IDF, at noon in favor of eliminating Hamas, and in the evening propose a broadly agreed-upon constitution. But prime ministers must set priorities. And when you’re high up at the top, the less important thing is sometimes of supreme importance itself.
Such was the story of drafting the Haredim during the war. It was infuriating to hear that senior members of United Torah Judaism called the Finance Ministry in the first week of the war to make sure the transfers to the yeshivas continued uninterrupted. It was galling to listen, over the past two years, to the collection of nonsense spouted by Haredi MK Yitzhak Goldknopf, the spokesman for the shtetl mentality. It was awful to see the signs declaring, “We will die before we enlist.”
At the same time, it was clear that running head-first into the ultra-Orthodox wouldn’t lead to mass Haredi enlistment, but more likely to the collapse of the government and, as a result, a halt to the war. In other words, national defeat, leaving Hamas and Hezbollah standing on their feet. This is hard to swallow when you’re a reservist tearing yourself apart in Gaza, or a reservist’s wife buckling under the enormous burden, but had this struggle succeeded in the past year, it would have turned into a Pyrrhic victory — useful idiocy in the service of those seeking Israel’s defeat.
Goldknopf. Photo: Oren Ben Hakoon
In the same breath, perpetuating the current situation now, after the war has ended, is useful idiocy in the service of those who support draft dodging. The army will not survive, and neither will the economy, unless major changes are made to Israel’s incentive structure. Today, it’s designed entirely to create conditions that allow Haredim not to show up for military service — and, as a result, not to participate in the labor market.
The law proposed by the coalition, nicknamed the “Bismuth Law,” will not cure the problem. The prime minister promises it will bring 10,000 ultra-Orthodox soldiers within two years. May it be so. In practice, the law imposes sanctions only if fewer than 7,500 Haredi soldiers are drafted in those two years. Subtract another thousand national service volunteers counted as soldiers, and you reach 3,000 soldiers per year — the exact number drafted this year, without the law.
And in exchange, the sharpest sword ever placed against the neck of the ultra-Orthodox leadership will be lowered: personal and institutional financial sanctions — and under a fully right-wing government. For the first time, the Haredim are truly backed against the wall. If the goal of the legislation is political survival and extending the government’s lifespan, the law is excellent. If the goal is to save the economy and national security, it is far from sufficient.
There is no reason to believe the situation will somehow resolve itself, because the Haredi worldview does not seek to shape the direction of the state, but rather to use it. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has a plan for what to do with the country on the day religious Zionists become the majority. Yair Golan has a vision for a secular-liberal state if the left returns to power. The ultra-Orthodox do not — because their way of life is unsustainable. It relies on subsidies and budgets from “the state,” but what will happen when they are the state? In all the demagogic arguments about Torah study, Tel Aviv draft-dodgers, who contributes more — Army Radio or Ponevezh Yeshiva — there is no answer to the question: Dear ultra-Orthodox, what is your business model?
In an attempt to reduce the burden on those who do serve, many initiatives are now emerging to improve the conditions of compulsory service, career military service, and reserve duty. The finance minister is pouring in billions. This is important and morally right, but irrelevant to the acute problem at hand. Why, for example, does a family in which one spouse does not work receive a significant discount on municipal taxes? I am not referring to the involuntarily unemployed, but to those unemployed by choice. If you want to study Torah, good for you — but why should other residents of your city fund it?
The answer is because the ultra-Orthodox parties hold 18 seats in the current Knesset and keep the coalition majority afloat. Without them — and because of the “anyone-but-Bibi” obsession — Netanyahu would not have a government, and Israel is unlikely to have achieved its astounding military successes from Beirut to Tehran. But with them, a law that would bring real enlistment of the Haredim cannot be implemented.
The Bismuth law proves it: all immediate economic sanctions were removed. What remains? A ban on flying abroad and a ban on a driver’s license — in short, codifying into law exactly what every yeshiva head wants from his students. The definition of “who is ultra-Orthodox” has been significantly watered down, the requirement for combat soldiers has disappeared, and oversight was given to a joint IDF-Haredi committee, both of whose members have extensive experience bending the truth. In the previous round of negotiations, even Druze soldiers were counted as ultra-Orthodox in order to meet the quotas.
This government cannot pass a real draft law. Even the outline discussed on the eve of the Iran war in June was an agreed-upon fraud: the ultra-Orthodox did not intend to abide by it, and Yuli Edelstein, then-chair of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, did not intend to settle for it.
There will be no compromise, and in a few years, thanks to demographics, it will already be too late to steer the Israeli ship away from the iceberg. The next government will have to look the mission straight in the eye, not look away. Until then, supporting the current law is buying time for a coalition in its twilight days, at an unbearably high price for Israeli society.
At the head
Suppose an alien force lands in Israel and encounters Israelis opposed to Benjamin Netanyahu. “Take me to your leader,” it commands them. With whom would they schedule a meeting? Who is leading, coordinating, and heading the anti-Netanyahu camp on the eve of an election year?
If it’s the parliamentary opposition, its undisputed leader is Yair Lapid. But in the polls, his Yesh Atid party is stuck on a single-digit number of seats. As for the political opposition, the leader is actually Naftali Bennett, head of the largest party in the bloc for over a year. But is he accepted by everyone — from Yair Golan on the left to Avigdor Liberman on the right? Gadi Eisenkot, for example, is not sure Bennett is the leader, otherwise he would already have joined him.
There is, of course, the far more effective opposition of 2023 — the street opposition. Its leadership is on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv, but its support in 2025 is shrinking.
So maybe the real opposition leader is Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara? If you check who has succeeded in blocking or delaying the greatest number of government actions, whose photo is carried at anti-government protests, who is the subject of strange articles of admiration in Netanyahu-critical media — then the attorney general certainly passes the test, alongside Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit and several other senior jurists. This is why the right gained ground after the military advocate general scandal. When the opposition stumbles, the coalition grows stronger.
Golan, Liberman, Lapid and Gantz
Such a concentration of forces would usually provide a critical mass to topple a government. The problem is that the forces are not concentrated at all.
In November 2023, the first Mano Geva poll after the outbreak of the war was conducted. Netanyahu’s bloc received only 41 seats — a low not seen since the 1960s. In November 2025, the bloc received 52 seats, regaining half its strength, and its trajectory is apparently upward. In the November 2023 poll, Netanyahu was tied with Lapid in suitability for prime minister. Now he receives twice the support. Two years ago, he trailed Benny Gantz by 16 percent; now they don’t even bother checking Gantz due to his irrelevance.
The right strategy against Netanyahu is not always a head-to-head confrontation. In fact, the only time he lost power — in 2021 — was when it wasn’t at all clear who was running against him for prime minister. But there is a difference between decentralization and total fragmentation.
If the anti-Netanyahu bloc wants to miss an open goal, it should continue behaving exactly as it has until now. If it wants to stop its deterioration and produce an alternative government, it will soon have to settle on a front-runner and an agenda. Lapid wants to do this by pushing Bennett rightward and Golan leftward, so that he can be exactly in the center of the bloc. Bennett himself wants to unite quickly with Eisenkot to stand head-to-head against Netanyahu.
Either way, if they don’t come to a decision, the elections may be over for the opposition before they have even begun.
