Pro-Israel and Against This War

Why American Jews Should Be Both

One of the questions I’ve been asked in recent days is this: How can you be pro-Israel and oppose the war with Iran when Israelis overwhelmingly support it? I’m going to answer this question as a foreign policy wonk by evaluating U.S. and Israeli interests. This weekend, you should expect Jeremy to also take on this question from the perspective of how American Jews and community leaders can navigate this dichotomy at the moment.

The answer for me is twofold. First, just because the Israeli public supports the war doesn’t mean it’s a good idea or in Israel’s interest. 72 percent of Americans supported invading Iraq in 2003. That didn’t make it a wise decision.

Second, answering this question requires understanding that Americans and Israelis see this conflict through very different strategic lenses. After all, while 93 percent of Jews in Israel and 26 percent of Arabs in Israel support the war, most polls show that around 60 percent of Americans disapprove of the war, while only about 40 percent support it. And that is because American and Israeli interests and perspectives are not perfectly aligned.

Where You Sit is Where You Stand

There’s an old saying in Washington: Where you sit is where you stand. In other words, perspectives really matter.

Israel is a small country in a very tough neighborhood. For decades, it has contended with adversaries who threaten its security, and today many Israelis see Iran as the single most serious threat they face. So when the United States, the world’s most powerful country, begins bombing Iran alongside Israel, many Israelis see that as America going after their most dangerous enemy.

As one very senior former Israeli official who broadly aligns with J Street on Israeli-Palestinian issues told me last week, “If the American President wants to go to war with my biggest enemy, who am I to say no?”

From an Israeli perspective, that reaction makes complete sense, even if, as I will get into later, it is not clear that this war will make Israel safer in the long-run.

But Americans occupy a very different strategic position in the world. The United States is a global superpower protected by two oceans, and we evaluate national security challenges on a global scale. From that vantage point, Iran simply is not America’s primary strategic challenge.

China is the central geopolitical competitor. Russia remains a major security challenge. One could even argue that North Korea poses a more direct military threat to the United States than Iran does, given that North Korea already possesses nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States.

Iran is a serious regional problem, but it is not an existential threat to the United States in the way it is perceived in Israel. That difference matters enormously when it comes to evaluating the costs of war.

From an American perspective, this raises difficult questions. Does it make sense to expend significant portions of our missile defense inventory and precision munitions in the Middle East when we may need those same capabilities to deter China in the Pacific – especially in a potential war over Taiwan? Does it make sense to move missile defense systems out of places like South Korea – where they defend against North Korea – and redeploy them to the Middle East? Does it make sense to risk global economic disruption, $100 or $120 oil, and rising inflation because of a conflict that does not directly threaten the American homeland?

For Israel, these sacrifices may feel worth making because the Iran threat feels existential. For the United States, it does not. That gap in perception is at the heart of the difference, which is why Americans overwhelmingly oppose this war while Israelis support it.

There is another factor shaping Israeli public opinion as well: trauma. Israeli society experienced a horrific shock on October 7, and less than three years later, that trauma is still very raw. In the aftermath of such events, societies often seek something that is ultimately unattainable: absolute security. That can lead to aggressive policies – preventive strikes against Iran, a war that went on far too long against Hamas – in an attempt to eliminate threats before they emerge.

The United States went through something very similar after September 11. Two and a half years after 9/11, the United States was deep into the Iraq War, and the American public overwhelmingly supported the mission. At that time, the United States had adopted policies – such as torture, regime change and preventive war – that violated American values and were at odds with a strategy it had long pursued. The country was acting out of a mixture of anger, fear and trauma.

Looking back today, many Americans see that period as a time of profound strategic overreach. Israel is likely going through something similar now. And just as the United States eventually reassessed its choices after Iraq, Israel will likely go through its own reassessment in the future.

These differences in threat perception also shape how Americans and Israelis think about the possible outcomes of this war. Broadly speaking, there are three potential endgames. The first is that the Iranian regime survives but is weakened, leaving the United States deeply entangled in the region, trying to contain it. This is an outcome that is bad for both the United States and Israel, but it is also by far the most likely.

The second is that a more moderate leadership emerges in Iran that changes the country’s regional behavior and opens the door to de-escalation. The third scenario is a collapse of the Iranian state itself, producing chaos and instability across a country of nearly ninety million people.

From an American perspective, only the second scenario clearly represents a positive outcome. The first risks pulling the United States deeper into Middle Eastern conflicts at exactly the moment when our strategic focus should be shifting toward the Indo-Pacific. The third – a collapse of the Iranian state – could create profound instability stretching from the Gulf to Afghanistan and Pakistan, triggering refugee flows, proxy conflicts and regional chaos, which would not only draw the U.S. in but result in so many of our allies and partners blaming us for this mess.

For Israel, however, the calculation looks somewhat different. Even if the Iranian regime survives but emerges significantly weakened, Israel may view that as an improvement over the status quo – especially if it draws the US into a long-term commitment to the region. Though it should also be noted that this scenario potentially puts Israel into an endless cycle of escalation where it finds itself at war with Iran or Hezbollah every six months or year – a terrible outcome for Israelis.

A complete collapse of the Iranian state, meanwhile, would be terrible for Iranians and for America’s Gulf allies, but it could also eliminate Iran’s ability to project power against Israel for years. What looks like a strategic disaster from Washington is an acceptable outcome from Jerusalem.

You can see this disconnect in how the war is being conducted. When Israel chose to strike major Iranian oil depots and energy infrastructure, causing massive fires, senior American officials reportedly reacted with alarm. U.S. officials described themselves as “dismayed” and indicated that the president was unhappy with the strikes. From Israel’s perspective, targeting energy infrastructure may be part of a broader strategy of weakening Iran and sowing internal instability. From the American perspective, however, those kinds of strikes increase the risk of the very outcome Washington most wants to avoid: the collapse of the Iranian state.

This divergence I am describing is not new. Over the past two decades, Israeli leaders have repeatedly argued to American presidents that the United States should take military action against Iran. Presidents from both parties – George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden – ultimately chose to restrain those impulses. They did so not because they dismissed Israel’s concerns, but because they concluded that a large-scale war with Iran was not in America’s national interest or in Israel’s.

Instead, they pursued imperfect alternatives that attempted to address both American and Israeli concerns. Those approaches ranged from the diplomatic deal that produced the JCPOA under President Obama to strategies focused on containing and deterring Iran while allowing internal pressures to weaken the regime over time.

The Consequences of this War

Today, we are seeing the consequences of abandoning those approaches and joining Israel in attacking Iran. And over the long run, those consequences may be negative not only for the United States but for Israel as well.

The first consequence is that if we have learned anything from the past three years it is that these repeated cycles of violence just suck Israel further in and do not necessarily address its security. In early 2024 Benjamin Netanyahu argued that Israel had to conduct the Rafah operation because it was the only way to defeat Hamas. Two years later, Hamas still holds half of Gaza because Netanyahu refused to actually do real planning for the day after and create conditions for alternative Palestinian leadership. In June of 2025, Israel launched the 12-Day War. Afterwards, the argument was that Iran was set back for years and its nuclear program “obliterated.” Eight months later, Israel and the United States are at war again, partially because of how quickly Iran was able to rebuild. The most likely outcome of this war is the same. Playing whack-a-mole again and again and again and rallying around the flag might feel good in the moment, just as the American public mobilized for years around the War on Terror after 9/11. But it will not offer Israel any long-term solutions to its security while also plunging it into a costly cycle of one war after another.

Beyond this fundamental strategic problem, there are also other dangers to Israel that stem from the U.S.-Israel disconnect. Over time, many Americans will come to believe that the United States fought this war because of Israel. Already, we see early signs of that narrative emerging, with some officials suggesting that Washington was effectively dragged into the conflict. Whether that is accurate or not almost doesn’t matter politically. The perception itself could weaken American support for Israel for a generation.

Israeli leaders have long emphasized that Israel must be able to defend itself by itself. One reason for that principle, especially amongst national security professionals, was precisely to avoid the perception that Americans were dying in Israel’s wars. Israelis wanted American support in the form of arms and intelligence sharing, but they usually insisted on fighting their own wars. This conflict blurs that line in ways that could have lasting consequences.

There is also a domestic concern: the risk of rising antisemitism in the United States. We are already seeing rhetoric that frames this conflict as “Netanyahu’s war.” It is a short step from there to older antisemitic tropes – that Jews control American foreign policy, that American troops are dying for Israel or that wars are being fought for Jewish interests.

That is why it is so important to be clear about responsibility. When American troops are placed in harm’s way, that decision belongs to the President of the United States. It is the single most consequential decision that a president makes. Even if Israeli leaders support the decision or encourage it, the buck must stop with Donald Trump.

This war also risks weakening the United States strategically in ways that ultimately harm Israel as well. Some Israeli commentators have argued that confronting Iran somehow strengthens America in its competition with China. That argument collapses under serious scrutiny. The future of global power will largely be determined in the Indo-Pacific, not the Middle East. Every missile interceptor used in this war is one that cannot be used to deter China in a potential conflict over Taiwan, which still produces 90 percent of the advanced chips used in technologies around the world, and is equally, if not more critical for the global economy than Middle Eastern oil.

Moreover, if the United States becomes weaker globally vis-a-vis China, one of the countries that will feel that most acutely is Israel. Israel’s strategic position in the world is closely tied to its relationship with the United States. American diplomatic protection, military support and global influence are central pillars of Israel’s security.

And this war also pushes another long-term goal further out of reach: The vision of a more stable Middle East in which Israel is integrated into the region and living at peace with its neighbors – what we at J Street call the 23-state solution. In the aftermath of the agreement on the 20-point plan for Gaza, there is a pathway that can ultimately move Israel towards greater and eventually total regional integration.

Because of the decision of the US and Israel to go to war with Iran, that vision is now farther away. Gulf states are furious – certainly with Iran for attacking them, but also with the United States and Israel for launching a war that has placed them directly in the line of fire without ever seriously consulting them. Instead of seeing Israel as a partner in economic development, technology sharing and regional integration, many now see a country exporting instability across the region in pursuit of a level of security that will ultimately be unattainable and come at a great cost to its neighbors.

That is not a strong foundation for long-term peace.

Most of my Israeli friends support this war. I understand why they do. But I do not. I believe it is bad for American interests and bad for Israel’s interests.

And that is why it is entirely possible – indeed necessary – to be pro-Israel, pro-American and firmly opposed to this war.