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A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs.
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Tucked in the far corner of a large, brightly-lit exhibition hall on the ground floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, there is a delicate-looking piece of art with a strong political message.
At first glance, it appears to be three circular vases with flowers in them. The ceramic vases sit on shelves attached to the wall, and colorful collages hang above them. On closer inspection, visitors will notice that the flowers are made out of paper and that affixed to each vase is an image of the Palestinian flag printed on foam board.
A nearby label written by the curators of the exhibit, titled “Tikkun: For the Cosmos, the Community, and Ourselves,” explains that the piece was inspired by a conversation the artist, Tosha Stimage of Berkeley, had with a Palestinian man. He told Stimage about the plants that are native to Palestine — “a place which he can no longer access due to the ongoing conflict in the region,” the curators write.
The label also includes a note about the flag: “Some may find its presence at The CJM troubling or confusing, while others may find it appropriate and forthright. Stimage recognizes the potential for these divergent responses and hopes to use them as a means of generating dialogue.”
On a Sunday afternoon in October, Maury Ostroff read the label and walked away without inspecting the artwork.
Visitors to the “Tikkun” exhibit are encouraged to share their responses to the artwork via comment cards. (Andrew Esensten)
Asked how the presence of the flag made him feel, Ostroff, who is Jewish and lives in Muir Beach, in Marin County, replied, “Unhappy.”
Why?
“It’s not offensive to me in the same way that a swastika is. My skin is a little bit thicker than that. But I wish it weren’t here.”
He added, “What’s so Jewish about this? What’s so ‘tikkun olam’ about all of this?”
For the “Tikkun” exhibit, which opened Feb. 17 and runs through Jan. 8, the CJM invited both Jewish and non-Jewish Bay Area artists to contribute new works on the theme of repair, however they chose to interpret it. “No one is listening to us,” the piece by Stimage, who is not Jewish, is the first work of art featuring the Palestinian flag to be shown at CJM in recent memory; the museum could not say when or if the flag has been displayed on its walls before.
The piece prompted several internal conversations among CJM staff when it was first submitted and, since it has been on display, has generated a variety of responses from museumgoers who have left comments in a box at the entrance to the exhibit. Intentionally or not, Stimage has raised numerous questions with the artwork, including: Does a work of art that is sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle for statehood belong in a Jewish museum? And what is the role of a contemporary Jewish museum, anyway?
“To truly be a contemporary art museum, meaning embedded in the contemporary issues of our day, our job is to provide a platform for dialogue and to share a diversity of perspectives on our walls,” said Chad Coerver, CJM’s executive director since September 2021. “If any institution [like ours] took the path of withholding artwork that troubled our staff, our board or our community, it would be very difficult to mount exhibitions.”
CJM is a member of the Council of American Jewish Museums, a network of 76 museums across the country. CAJM does not have guidelines about the kind of art its member museums can and cannot display, according to Executive Director Melissa Yaverbaum.
J. reached out to several CAJM member museums in New York, Los Angeles and other places by email to ask if they had ever shown artwork with Palestinian iconography or works by Palestinian artists. The museums declined to answer or did not respond.
In recent years, two Jewish museums have been embroiled in controversy over issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago staged an exhibit in 2008 on Israeli and Palestinian concepts of homeland that included maps and portraits of Palestinians. Following outcry from members of the local Jewish community who felt the exhibit presented Israel in a negative light, the museum decided to close the exhibit after only a few weeks. And in 2019, the director of the Jewish Museum Berlin resigned after the museum tweeted a link to a pro-BDS article in a German newspaper. (The museum previously came under fire for welcoming anti-Zionist scholar Judith Butler and representatives of Iran.)
In a joint interview with J., two CJM staffers who worked on “Tikkun” — co-curator Qianjin Montoya, who is not Jewish, and a Jewish senior curator who served in an advisory role, Heidi Rabben — shared the story of how Stimage’s piece came to be in the exhibit. (Montoya’s co-curator for the exhibit, Arianne Gelardin, no longer works at the museum.)
Since 2009, CJM has invited local artists from different backgrounds to create new work as part of the museum’s annual Dorothy Saxe Invitational. The idea for “Tikkun” was hatched before the pandemic put the planning process on hold. Once the CJM and Saxe — a local philanthropist and art collector — agreed on the theme, the co-curators invited artists “already engaged in healing through their relationship to community or in their practice of daily life,” Gelardin told J. last February.
The 30 artists who accepted the museum’s invitation were given only four months to conceive of and submit new works. That was likely the shortest timeline in the history of the invitational, which has been held 11 previous times, according to the museum. Each artist received a packet of materials compiled by CJM staff, with input from the Shalom Hartman Institute, a non-degree granting Jewish education center, to guide their thinking on “tikkun.”
Stimage was invited to participate because she is “very active” in the Bay Area and because “her work reflects ideas of community and connection,” Montoya said.
The curators said Stimage’s inclusion of the Palestinian flag in her submitted piece came as a surprise and prompted challenging conversations. However, they noted that they found the content of some of the other artists’ work surprising, too, and that it’s not unusual for contemporary artists to push the envelope in their work.
“I wouldn’t say we expected to receive a piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we weren’t steering anyone away from that, either,” Rabben told J., adding that the submission guidelines did not place any topic off limits. “That’s a commitment from the museum to authentically represent the creative spirit of the artists that we’re working with,” she said.
Still, the curators said they engaged in a dialogue with Stimage in order to better understand each aspect of her piece and her overall intentions. Through those conversations, the curators learned that Stimage wanted to explore a moment of “rupture,” and that through her piece she hoped to communicate “that before healing or repair might happen, you have to first acknowledge that rupture,” Rabben said.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco is showing “Tikkun,” an exhibit of works by Jewish and non-Jewish artists on the theme of repair. (Andrew Esensten)
Coerver, who was involved in some of the conversations, stressed that “careful consideration” was given to including the piece in the exhibit. “We felt an artwork addressing the plight of the Palestinians was appropriate in an exhibition on healing and repair,” he said. (No work submitted as part of the Dorothy Saxe Invitational has ever been outright rejected, the museum said.)
Stimage did not respond to interview requests from J. According to a CV on her website, she was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2016. She is a past fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and was an artist-in-residence at Facebook in 2018. She also owns a floral gift shop in Oakland called Saint Flora.
Her work often touches on Black identity; she created a piece honoring Sandra Bland, an African-American woman whose 2015 arrest and death in a Texas jail cell sparked protests, and contributed to a 2019 San Francisco Art Institute exhibit on the Black Panther Party.
“I have a responsibility to create things that will, to the best of my present knowledge, do more good than harm, heal, inspire and uplift other humans,” she told the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper in 2015.
Stimage’s precise views on Israel are unknown. CJM referred J. to her artist statement for “No one is listening to us,” which reads: “Olive, sage, and sumac are flowering plants native to the Mediterranean (including regions of Gaza and the West Bank) that have a direct relationship to contested ancestral land and affect the livelihood of so many Palestinian farmers and families caught in the conflict. They are positioned in the space of The Contemporary Jewish Museum as a metaphor for the ongoing conflict over land rights and the desperate need for restoration and healing of an age-old wound.”
The curators told J. that during their conversations with Stimage about her piece, they asked her why including images of the Palestinian flag was important to her but did not request that she remove them.
“We determined that none of [the piece’s] components in and of themselves signified something problematic or concerning,” Rabben said. “Of course, we had the awareness that the symbol [of the flag] will be read in a variety of ways by a variety of people.”
(Rabben pointed out that the exhibit includes other works with national symbols rendered in provocative ways, such as a black-and-white photograph of an American flag that was torn apart and partially reassembled by Mexican-American artist Jose Arias.)
The Palestinian flag — which contains the Pan-Arab colors of black, white, green and red — was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964. Since then, it has been the primary symbol of Palestinian nationalism.
For decades, the PLO was considered an enemy organization by Israel, and anything associated with it “had no place in Israeli public life,” said Eran Kaplan, an Israeli-born professor of Israel studies at San Francisco State University. Israel never went so far as to ban the flag. However, during the First Intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993, Israeli soldiers sometimes followed orders to confiscate the flag from protesters in the West Bank and Gaza.
With the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993, Israel and the PLO recognized each other as negotiating partners. Yet the Palestinian flag remains a contentious symbol in Israel today. Kaplan noted that it recently served as a flashpoint during the funeral procession of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian American broadcaster who was killed in the West Bank in May. (The IDF conducted a review and admitted that the Israeli soldier who shot her had most likely misidentified her as an armed militant.) After warning Abu Akleh’s family not to display the flag, Israeli police attacked mourners in East Jerusalem, ripping flags out of their hands and off of the vehicle carrying her casket.
Today, the flag holds different meanings for Israelis and American Jews from different generations and political persuasions.
“There are large segments in Israeli society who view any form of Palestinian national identity as a threat to the existence of Israel,” Kaplan said. “There are others who view the PLO as legitimate partners in any form of negotiations [over the creation of a Palestinian state], but there’s an absolute split over those questions.”
Given the sensitive nature of Stimage’s work and others in the exhibit, the curators decided to solicit feedback from visitors via comment cards available at the entrance to the hall. Rabben said the museum has received a number of comments specifically about “No one is listening to us,” most of which were positive. “The majority of those comments were ‘Thank you for offering space for this topic at the museum,’” she said.
Last month, a security guard sitting in the “Tikkun” exhibition hall told a reporter that he had not witnessed any expressions of outrage or protest through the first nine months of the exhibit. “When we opened we were afraid of negative reactions, but they’re not stressed about it,” he said of visitors. “We have shown worse things here.” The guard, who has worked at the museum since it opened in 2008, mentioned a 2010 exhibit, “Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf,” which included a copy of Hitler’s autobiography. “Some people were cussing us out” for displaying the book, he recalled.
Meanwhile, on the same floor as “Tikkun,” there is another, smaller exhibit containing potentially offensive art. A sign outside of the room warns visitors that inside is a Hitler marionette created by the parents of puppeteer Frank Oz. “Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today,” the sign says.
Coerver, CJM’s executive director, said he was proud that the museum’s three current exhibits — “Tikkun,” “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History” and “Gillian Laub: Family Matters,” which includes photographs that Laub took of her Trump-supporting relatives — are raising “challenging questions” and providing opportunities for both visitors and museum staff to “expand our horizons.”
“We’ve been wading into some issues that I think are a little thicker than maybe we’ve been confronting in the past,” he said, “and I hope that continues.”
A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
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First-Ever Study on Antisemitism in Ireland Reveals Most Incidents Go Unreported
Anti-Israel demonstrators stand outside the Israeli embassy after Ireland has announced it will recognize a Palestinian state, in Dublin, Ireland, May 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Molly Darlington
The main body representing the Irish Jewish community on Sunday released what it described as the “first-ever” report on antisemitic acts in Ireland, revealing 143 incidents tracked between July 2025 and January 2026, with analysts warning these findings represented only the iceberg’s tip of a much larger unreported total
“The incidents span public spaces, workplaces, educational institutions, health-care environments, retail and hospitality settings, and digital communications,” Maurice Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland (JRCI), said in a statement. “A recurring feature is hostility triggered solely by Jewish identity or perceived Jewish identity, including visible symbols, the Hebrew language, or accent.”
Thirty percent of the reported incidents began as normal interactions but became hostile when some “cue” revealed the soon-to-be victim’s Jewish or Israeli identity, triggering antisemitic abuse, the data shows.
The report emphasizes that the incident count should be understood in the context of the low population — only 2,200 Jews in Ireland.
According to the JRCI, the research fills the void caused by “the absence of a national system for recording antisemitic hate incidents.”
The data shows that 75 percent of the recorded incidents occurred in “everyday environments,” with 50 in public spaces, 21 in educational settings, and 13 in stores. The types of incidents in this category include verbal abuse (52), vandalism or graffiti (47), threats (35), exclusion or discrimination (29), and Holocaust denial (10). Researchers also received three reports of antisemitic assaults.
The other 25 percent of incidents researchers analyzed qualify as what the report describes as “direct digital targeting,” 47 percent of which included violent language and death threats. These digital messages refer to threatening emails or direct messages which are specifically sent to individuals or organizations. This category does not include social media antisemitism, which the JCRI notes will come in “a separate comprehensive report dedicated to that issue.”
Cohen noted that researchers observed “conspiracy narratives, Holocaust distortion, collective blame, and identity-based hostility,” which “reflect forms of antisemitism observed across Europe.” He said that “these dynamics cannot be adequately addressed through generalized anti-racism frameworks alone. Antisemitism presents distinct characteristics requiring targeted policy responses.”
The report emphasizes that the incidents themselves are only the beginning of harm for victims, explaining that institutional responses can exacerbate the experience. Common institutional failures cited include refusals to recognize antisemitism, premature closures without investigations, the reframing of incidents of hate as “neutral conflicts,” and offering “generic, unhelpful responses without resolution.”
These experiences of inadequate law enforcement response correspond with a reluctance among Irish Jews to report incidents. The report cites a 2026 analysis which found only 10 percent of victims of racist incidents in Ireland report the crime to police, a figure aligning with the 11 percent report rate for Jewish victims across Europe found by a 2024 EU Fundamental Rights Agency survey.
The JCRI data follows a report released in January by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), a nonprofit organization that negotiates and secures compensation for survivors of the Nazis’ atrocities worldwide. The report analyzed Holocaust denial in Ireland and found higher levels among the young. For the total adult population, 8 percent of respondents agreed that “the Holocaust is a myth and did not happen.” The number rose to 9 percent among those 18-29.
Similarly, 17 percent of total Irish adults agreed that the Holocaust happened but thought that the number of Jews murdered had been “greatly exaggerated,” while 19 percent of those 18-29 embraced this conspiracy theory.
Researchers also found that 20 percent of total Irish adults and 23 percent of adults 18-29 disagreed with the statement “the Holocaust happened, and the number of Jews killed has been accurately and fairly described.”
The JRCI emphasizes in its new report that unlike 17 other EU member states, Ireland lacks a national antisemitism strategy.
“The EU Strategy establishes a dual responsibility: combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life. These objectives are interdependent. Communities cannot flourish where hostility is insufficiently recognized or addressed,” Cohen said. “A dedicated national strategy, aligned with European standards, is the necessary and logical next step to ensure both the protection of Jewish citizens and the fostering of Jewish life and to remove contemporary, ambient antisemitism from our society.”
Gideon Taylor is a prominent Jewish American born in Ireland who discussed the report’s findings with The Algemeiner, describing the research as “the lived experience of Irish Jews,” who inhabit an environment today he described as infused with an “ambient antisemitism.”
“This is very different from an Ireland I grew up in,” Taylor told The Algemeiner. “The Irish youth community was a very robust, very active community, very involved in the public life of the country and the social life of the country and the cultural life of the country.”
Taylor recalled that Ireland “was a very warm place to grow up. I think what this report brings out is a very different Ireland and a very different part of living in Ireland today with its rise in antisemitism.”
Taylor added that he thought “there are people who are very concerned about this in government and others about this rise in antisemitism, and you see it from the statement of the prime minister down.”
Ireland has been one of Europe’s fiercest critics of Israel since the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023, a posture that, according to critics, has helped foster a more hostile environment for Jews.
In 2024, for example, an Irish official, Dublin City Councilor Punam Rane, claimed during a council meeting that Jews and Israel control the US economy, arguing that is why Washington, DC did not oppose Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
Antisemitism in Ireland has become “blatant and obvious” in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, according to Alan Shatter, a former member of parliament who served in the Irish cabinet between 2011 and 2014 as Minister for Justice, Equality and Defense.
Shatter told The Algemeiner in an interview in 2024 that Ireland has “evolved into the most hostile state towards Israel in the entire EU.”
In recent weeks, however, Irish officials have expressed support for the Jewish community amid mounting concern over antisemitism.
The “report from the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland is a sobering reminder of the increase we are experiencing in the scourge of antisemitism, both here in Ireland and internationally,” Irish Foreign Minister Helen McEntee said in a statement. “The report provides a clear and undeniable picture of the difficult situation currently experienced by Ireland’s Jewish communities.”
“This is completely unacceptable in the modern, inclusive republic we aspire to, and I condemn these incidents unreservedly,” she continued. “This government is committed to countering all forms of antisemitism and all forms of racism. The Program for Government sets out a clear commitment to implement the EU declaration on ‘Fostering Jewish Life in Europe’ and to give effect to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism.”
Weeks earlier, Prime Minister Micheál Martin expressed similar sentiments ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“I am acutely conscious that our Jewish community here in Ireland is experiencing a growing level of antisemitism,” he said. “I know that elements of our public discourse have coarsened.”
Taylor told The Algemeiner that, in response to the JRCI report’s findings, a goal should be to look at “how to move forward, how to have a national plan that will be clear, laid out with guidelines to try to combat this pernicious hatred.”
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Suspect in Brooklyn Chabad car-ramming incident faces federal charge
The man who repeatedly rammed his car into the Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters in Brooklyn in January has been federally charged with intentionally damaging religious property, the Department of Justice said Monday.
Dan Sohail, a 36-year-old resident of Carteret, New Jersey, allegedly rammed his car into the Chabad building at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights five times after gesturing at bystanders to move out of the way, knocking the door off of its hinges and destroying his car’s bumper. Earlier in the night, Sohail allegedly removed stanchions that block cars from going down the driveway toward the building.
The incident took place as thousands were gathered at Chabad’s headquarters in Crown Heights to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the date that Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson became the leader of the Lubavitch movement. No one was injured.
Sohail is also facing state charges of reckless endangerment and attempted assault as hate crimes. The newly unsealed federal charge was not labelled as a hate crime.
The day of the incident, Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone, Chabad’s social media director, said in a post on X that the attack did not appear to be antisemitic, while the NYPD investigated the incident as a hate crime.
The federal case does not include hate crime charges, which would have required proof of a bias motivation.
During a post-arrest interview, Sohail told authorities he had recently discovered he had Jewish heritage and was learning more about the Jewish tradition. Sohail had previously visited several other Chabad locations and Yeshiva Gedola of Carteret, where Rabbi Eliyahu Teitz said Sohail ranted about his experience with Chabad the day before the car ramming attack.
Sohail also told police he had lost control of the car because of icy conditions and because he was wearing heavy boots, which caused him to press the gas pedal.
If convicted of the federal charge, Sohail faces up to three years in prison.
The post Suspect in Brooklyn Chabad car-ramming incident faces federal charge appeared first on The Forward.
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In three days, Israel and the US reshaped the Middle East
The first three days of the new war in Iran will be studied in military academies for decades. They may also be remembered as the moment the Islamic Republic’s long arc of regional intimidation finally broke.
Israel and the United States swiftly eliminated much of Iran’s command structure. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Senior Revolutionary Guard commanders. The military high command. Key ministers. Even former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had dedicated years of rhetoric and policy to Israel’s destruction. Roughly forty senior officials were killed in a synchronized operation that combined intelligence penetration, precision strike capability and political nerve.
It is difficult to identify a modern precedent for such a comprehensive and instantaneous decapitation of an adversary. States have targeted leaders before. They have crippled command structures before. But to reach so deeply, so quickly, and with such apparent accuracy into the inner sanctum of a regime long defined by paranoia and internal security is extraordinary.
Whatever follows, that message will linger. Israel can reach you. It can map your hierarchy, and then collapse it in a night.
For once the cliché is true: This is truly a pivotal moment. Here’s a look at the interlocking elements, and the possible directions in which this unpredictable situation could next unfold.
Air supremacy without precedent
Perhaps most striking has been the dominance in the skies.
Israel fields more than 300 combat aircraft of the highest caliber. The U.S. has surged at least a comparable number into the region. Together, they have established near-total air superiority over Iranian territory.
Iranian air defenses — already degraded in strikes in late 2024 and mid-2025 — have proven unable to contest sustained sorties. Launchers that reveal themselves are rapidly destroyed. Radar systems are neutralized in cycles.
Wars between states are rarely so asymmetrical in the air. Iran has invested heavily in layered defenses and missile deterrence. But technology, training and integration have won the day. For the Israeli Air Force, this is an operational achievement of historic scale.
The alliance factor
Just as consequential is the political dimension: Israel and the U.S. fighting shoulder to shoulder in a major offensive campaign.
For much of Israel’s early history, U.S. military cooperation was uncertain. Even after the strategic partnership deepened in the 1970s, it was never a given that Washington would participate directly in high-risk regional operations. That barrier has now been crossed.
President Donald Trump’s decision to align so closely with Israel in a war of this magnitude will be remembered in Israel for a generation. Many Israelis have long believed him to be uniquely aligned with their security worldview. After three days of joint operations, the strategic intimacy is undeniable.
This does not resolve every question about long-term regional strategy, or about how steady of a partner the U.S. will prove to be. But in the immediate sense, Israel’s foundational anxiety — that in an existential confrontation it might stand alone — has been decisively eased.
Iran’s gamble in the Gulf — and Lebanon’s unfinished business
Tehran’s response to Israeli and U.S. strikes has been to widen the field.
By striking at Gulf states and issuing threats beyond Israel, Iran appears to be attempting escalation in order to generate pressure on Washington. The logic is clear: If oil markets tremble and regional capitals feel directly endangered, the U.S. might be compelled to restrain Israel to prevent broader instability. .
The gamble is that, with the exception of Qatar, few Gulf governments harbored much sympathy for the Islamic Republic to begin with. Iran’s support for militias across the Arab world has long been viewed as an assault on Arab sovereignty. So, instead of fracturing the U.S.-Israel coalition, Iran risks pushing Gulf states to join it.
Faced with direct attacks and threats, a group of Arab foreign ministers convened and issued a notably unified statement warning Iran of consequences. Even Doha has publicly criticized Tehran’s moves.
Threats toward Cyprus have also stirred a European reaction. What had been a near-global consensus around three core American demands — no military-level nuclear enrichment, no offensive long-range missile program, and an end to proxy warfare — is hardening rather than eroding. Only China and Russia stand conspicuously apart.
And then there is Lebanon. After Hezbollah joined the conflict, Brigadier General Effi Defrin declared that the conflict would end “with Hezbollah severely damaged, not just Iran.” That was not rhetorical flourish. It was a warning that the scope of the war could shift.
After striking significant blows against Hezbollah in the war that unfolded after Oct. 7, Israel gave Lebanon space to implement what had been promised: the disarmament or at least meaningful curtailment of the militia’s independent military capacity. That has not happened. Hezbollah, though badly thrashed in that earlier round, has preserved significant capabilities, and appears to believe it can fight another day.
Israel sees Hezbollah’s engagement as an invitation for a renewed campaign designed to decisively degrade the group. Should Washington prefer to limit escalation inside Iran itself, the center of gravity could shift northward, toward a resumption of intensive Israeli operations in Lebanon.
The war, in other words, has multiple possible theaters.
Missiles versus interceptors
Informing Israel’s choices is a grim arithmetic.
Iran retains a substantial stockpile of ballistic missiles. Israel’s layered defense is formidable but not inexhaustible. The strategic question is simple: Will Iranian missiles run out before Israeli interceptors do?
Iran’s firing patterns suggest awareness of this calculus. Rather than saturating Israeli defenses with hundreds of missiles at once, it has launched in more measured waves. Preserving inventory matters.
For Israel, two parallel imperatives follow: destroy as many launchers and depots as possible, and accelerate interceptor production and deployment. Both are underway. Strikes on missile infrastructure are a central component of the air campaign. Reports also indicate targeted killings of Iranian personnel involved in advanced missile research and development.
This is a race of attrition beneath the spectacle of air supremacy.
Jerusalem’s dilemma
If the war were to end now, Israel would not have achieved everything it wants. Iran’s nuclear infrastructure may not be fully dismantled. The missile threat would not be entirely erased. Hezbollah would remain armed, though weakened. The broader militia network would not yet have withered away. (Trump has suggested the conflict will continue for some weeks, but he is also notoriously changeable.)
Yet there is a serious argument in Jerusalem for exploring whether surrender terms can now be imposed while the balance of power is overwhelmingly favorable. The gains already secured are historic. The Iranian regime’s top tier is gone. Its air defenses are crippled. Its deterrent mystique has collapsed.
The alternative to a truce — escalation toward maximalist objectives, including outright regime change — entails unpredictability.
So Israel must now decide how hard to press Washington. Should it urge the U.S. to seize the moment and push for more profound structural transformation in Tehran? Or should it consolidate the gains already achieved and lock them into enforceable constraints? Should it pivot north and finish what it regards as unfinished business in Lebanon?
These are strategic questions. They are also political ones.
The domestic shadow
A large majority of Israelis believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is politically cynical enough to initiate or expand military confrontations to serve his own political survival. The trauma of Oct. 7, and the government’s earlier attempt to overhaul the judiciary in ways widely seen as authoritarian, left him deeply unpopular and mistrusted across much of the electorate.
A successful war against Iran could restore Netanyahu’s standing to a degree few would have imagined only months ago, and plausibly position him to win upcoming elections.
For Israel, that prospect is enormously consequential. A renewed Netanyahu mandate, built on the back of a historic military triumph, would likely entrench a version of Israel that is more nationalist, more religious, and more dismissive of liberal constraints. The tensions between secular and religious communities, between the judiciary and the executive, between integration and isolation, would only grow.
Israel’s most globally connected and economically productive sectors have already shown signs of anxiety about the country’s democratic trajectory. A perception that authoritarian tendencies have been vindicated by war could accelerate emigration among parts of the professional class. Over time, that would reshape not only Israel’s politics but its economy and society.
In that sense, the most consequential outcome of this war for Israel may not lie in Tehran or Beirut, but in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
The post In three days, Israel and the US reshaped the Middle East appeared first on The Forward.