Israel's Bad Gamble on the Iran War | Will DEI Make a Comeback in the Department of Ed?
Friday Flashpoint: June 26, AD 2026
Welcome to Friday Flashpoint where I analyze and expose important historical and social developments impacting America’s place in the world.
Israel needs better advocates, and its advocates need a better behaving client.
Flashpoints this week:
1) Israel’s Diaspora Minister is attacking America engagement with Iran in a way reflects badly on Israel
2) The US Senate is considering Senator Jackie Rosen’s (D-NV) Jewish Security Act, backed by Senator James Lankford (R-OK) that looks like the policies MAGA accused DEI of being
Back in 2011, the intelligence forecaster George Friedman wrote The Next Decade: Where We’ve Been . . . and Where We’re Going in which he identified how Israel was changing into an unconstrained state that would create problems for the United States by attempting to create new facts on the ground that were different from what it had agreed to do. He argued that while a balance of power would lead to stability, the Israelis did not want a balance and so the interest of the US and Israel were going to misalign, and the best bet was for the United States to quietly distance from Israel in order to create the least disruption. He also predicted that the US would have to make a distasteful deal with Iran. He did not have a crystal ball. Rather he abided by something I teach my foreign policy students: A great power gains nothing by fantasy and self-deception; you have to accept the facts as you know them not as you wish them to be. What he predicted ultimately was that if Israel did not moderate it would alienate America and Europe and simply weaken itself.
Salvaging the US-Israel relationship means Israel will have to ask for less, give America space, and draw less attention to itself by reining in the settlers, implementing transparent policies supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state, and taking earned criticism on the chin. A failure to do so is simply going to provoke a rupture with a fed-up American electorate.
It does not have to go that way.
In a recent Washington Post1 op-ed, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli, accused Turkey of destabilizing the region through occupation, military overreach, and ideological expansionism. While the charges may be legitimate, they also describe, with uncomfortable precision, Israeli conduct in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Lebanon. Chikli further warns against empowering a volatile post-Khamenei Iran — while omitting that it was Israel’s own military campaign that reshaped killed the Iranian leadership in the first place. You cannot light a fire and then complain about the smoke.
It would have been wiser for Chikli to write nothing at this moment. American passions are running dangerously high — not just on the left, but among the traditional conservatives who form the bedrock of the 45/47 President’s coalition. A person to note is Rod Dreher. He should be read carefully by anyone trying to understand where that coalition is headed. He introduced J.D. Vance to a national audience. His Benedict Option challenged a generation of rightwing political-religious thought. He has an uncanny ability to put his finger on the pulse of the anxieties of traditional, right-leaning White Americans who fear national decline and distrust foreign entanglements — and he has called the Iran war America’s Suez moment.2
The analogy is to Britain’s 1956 humiliation over the Suez Canal: a once-dominant Western superpower allies with the Israelis against one of their Muslim country rivals, overreaches, fails, and the world sees the much weaker regional adversary emerge stronger from the confrontation.
Dreher asks plainly how America is better off for having fought this war and concludes that it is not and states that by 45/47’s own war aims, the United States failed, and that this constitutes a betrayal of the President’s core promise to keep America out of foreign wars. “This is a humiliation of immense strategic and historical consequence,” he writes — and he says so as someone who wanted Trump to win.
That many find Dreher controversial is beside the point: he provides a window into the worldview of normie-conservative Americans who backed Trump but now feel genuinely let down. The center-left was already opposed to this foreign policy misadventure. If the trad-right is now peeling away, what remains is a MAGA core that may constitute no more than a quarter of the electorate.
Dreher and those like him will hold the American president accountable.
However, many others, unlike them will simply blame Israel.
All of which makes Chikli’s op-ed not merely ill-timed, but actively counterproductive, because an Israeli minister using the US capital’s paper of record to attack the US administrations plan to end a war that the American people do not want is unnecessarily provocative.
On the domestic front, the Jewish American Security Act — S. 4576, co-led by Republican James Lankford threatens to reopen the DEI culture war. It mandates, for example, an antisemitism coordinator inside the Department of Education, and authorizes the Secretary of Education to contract out work for antisemitism sensitivity and awareness campaign. Which seems like the vision of “DEI bureaucracy” the MAGA/GOP have spent a decade alleging had infiltrated the federal government and was favoring Black Americans and other racialized minorities over and against White people. The bill is a gift to the opponents of anti-DEI efforts who argued that the opposition to DEI was never principled.
None of this is good politics when the American people are become increasingly skeptical of Israel and of the claims that opposition to Israel automatically equals antisemitism. These developments are flashpoints because they will harden the divide between Israel-critical Americans and the shrinking number of Israel-affirming Americans while also creating additional turmoil in the Democratic Party between Israel-aligned Jewish activists and the increasingly assertive social justice activists who argue that American and Democrats have their priorities backwards. For the GOP this may divide MAGA from the Christian-Zionists supporters of Israel, but the divide within the Republican Coalition will also be generational.
Younger Gen-Z Christians generally do not see Israel as a priority for their faith or politics despite being in most other ways conservative American voters.
The bill’s supporters might answer that the documented severity of antisemitic violence justifies the specific response. They are not wrong about the documentation. And I have argued that antisemitism is suicidal ideology that destroys the practitioner.3 The FBI recorded the highest number of anti-Jewish hate crime incidents in its institutional history in 2024. The Anti-Defamation League documented 9,534 antisemitic incidents that year — a 344 percent increase over the prior five-year average. The bill would make it the policy of the United States government “raise awareness of and educate the United States public about the history of Jewish Americans, the Holocaust, and antisemitism in all of its forms and manifestations;” however, the conservative movement made arguments that is was very much not the business of the federal government to ensure that everyone knew the history of white supremacy and racism in the USA when opposing DEI remedies for non-Jewish communities that were said to be experiencing documented, historic, and ongoing discrimination.
I am concerned that this is only going to create resentment on the right and the left due to allegations of favoritism and hypocrisy. Racism and religious bigotry are blights on society, but Americans need one policy for everyone, not selective identity priorities.
Two decades ago, I was an undergrad, a leader with the America Israel Public Affairs Committee told me, “they mess up in Jerusalem just as bad and as often as they do in Washington.” He was right.
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Available here https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/06/24/sanctions-relief-iran-makes-dangerous-middle-east/
The Suicidality of Antisemitism
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.