Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro meets with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, Oct. 24, 2024. Photo: Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS

Bad actors stick together. Few relationships prove that more clearly than Iran and Venezuela’s. The regimes’ close ties are on full display with Iran’s foreign ministry on November 15, threatening the United States with “dangerous consequences” over the US military buildup near Venezuela’s shores.

It’s not just talk: the Iran-Venezuela strategic partnership has matured into a robust, multi-dimensional alliance, impacting both regional security and US foreign policy calculations. Iran and Venezuela’s cooperation spans the social, political, diplomatic, economic, and military domains — and is directly influencing the US posture toward Venezuela, including the recent military buildup near its shores and targeted strikes on drug trafficking operations.

The Iran-Venezuela partnership began in the 1950s and has deepened substantially, especially after former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez declared the countries “brothers” in 2005.

Chávez signed a formal partnership in 2007 with then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The presidents developed a notably close personal and political relationship, highlighted by frequent state visits, public demonstrations of solidarity, and formal agreements spanning the economic, energy, and industrial sectors. Today, both countries maintain comprehensive diplomatic ties via their official embassies and frequent high-level exchanges. The partnership intensified under current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and includes regular presidential meetings, official delegation visits, and joint commission sessions. 

Iran has used this leverage to establish a robust foothold in Latin America, constructing a dense network involving both direct state-to-state links and the integration of proxy actors like Hezbollah. The bilateral relationship has been solidified by defense pacts, including a 20-year agreement signed in 2022, and joint manufacturing of Iranian drones and weapons on Venezuelan soil, including potential deployments of loitering munitions and jamming devices.

Economically, the alliance is built on mutual circumvention of Western sanctions. Iran and Venezuela have exchanged oil, gold, and infrastructure assistance, often using Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah-linked front companies for money laundering and sanctions evasion. This economic cooperation enables the Maduro regime to survive by generating hard currency and illicit financial streams, while also facilitating transnational criminal activity including drug trafficking, with groups such as Cartel de los Soles and Tren de Aragua working with Hezbollah proxies to move drugs into US territory. The proceeds fuel both regimes and deepen their partnership and resilience to international pressure.

Simultaneously, Iran and Venezuela collaborate on energy trade that is inimical to US interests and enriches Russia. Iran not only exports refined crude oil to Venezuela to enrich itself, but also helps Venezuela build and fix energy infrastructure, increasing Venezuelan storage and refining capacity. In turn, that boosts Caracas’s appetite for Russian naphtha, a petroleum product that further enables Venezuela to dilute and export its oil, giving Russia a new and growing energy market for its exports to replace Europe and undermining Western sanctions.

As the US presence in the region grows, Venezuela and Iran have enhanced their military coordination. Recently, Venezuela requested additional Iranian drones, military electronics, and asymmetric warfare technologies. Iran provides technical personnel and expertise, optimizing Venezuela’s capacity for electronic warfare and irregular tactics, thereby enhancing deterrence and complicating US intervention plans.

Against this backdrop, the United States has deployed significant naval assets and possibly special operations elements off the coast of Venezuela, amounting to the largest regional buildup since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Officially, the United States has justified this surge to counter escalating drug trafficking, with at least 20 recent kinetic strikes on alleged narco-trafficking vessels departing Venezuelan ports. Many of these drug networks are tied to Venezuelan state actors and Iran-linked proxies. It would not be a stretch to assume that the Maduro regime is leveraging its Iranian connection as strategic insurance.

Venezuela provides Iran and Hezbollah with greater access to the Western Hemisphere. This expanding axis has regional security consequences beyond criminality and drug flows. Venezuelan threats toward neighbors like Guyana, coupled with the risk to Western energy interests and the broader use of Iranian technology, could draw the United States and its partners into more direct conflict. Furthermore, Iran’s strategy of exporting proxy warfare to the Western Hemisphere — mirroring tactics used in the Middle East — creates parallel dilemmas for US policy in both regions. 

To counter these threats, enhanced sanctions enforcement against the Iranian–Venezuelan illicit oil trade, improved intelligence and interdiction of military shipments, and regional efforts to dismantle Hezbollah networks are essential. Disrupting the financial pipeline sustaining both the regime and its Iranian backers is critical for neutralizing their broader destabilizing potential.

Iran — along with its proxy Hezbollah — and Venezuela are force multipliers. All three work in concert to enrich the Iranian regime, strengthen Venezuela’s military and imperil regional stability, and facilitate transnational crime that threatens the US homeland. Washington should not allow this Venn diagram of threats to continue converging.

LTG Ray Palumbo, USA (ret.) is the former Deputy Commander of US Army Special Operations Command and a 2021 Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) Generals and Admirals Program participant. Yoni Tobin is a senior policy analyst at JINSA.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu participates in the state memorial ceremony for the fallen of the Iron Swords War on Mount Herzl, Jerusalem, Oct. 16, 2025. Photo: Alex Kolomoisky/POOL/Pool via REUTERS

The Israeli government on Sunday approved a plan to revive long-stalled efforts to bring the entire Bnei Menashe Jewish community from northeast India to Israel amid rising ethnic tensions, seeking to reunite families and advance their integration into the country.

According to a statement from the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, the plan envisions the relocation of 1,200 members of the Bnei Menashe community by the end of 2026, with another 4,600 expected to follow by 2030.

Amid rising instability and ethnic violence in their home region in India, members of the ethnic community from the northeastern states of Mizoram and Manipur are seeking to rebuild their lives through reintegration into Israeli society.

As part of government efforts to repopulate the northern part of the country, which was heavily affected by last year’s war with the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, the new immigrants are expected to settle in Nof HaGalil and other northern cities after thousands of residents were forced to flee.

“I welcome the important and Zionist decision adopted today by the government, which will bring about an additional wave of immigration of the Bnei Menashe community to the Land of Israel,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. 

“The new immigrants will settle in the north of the country, as part of the government’s policy to strengthen and develop the North and the Galilee,” the Israeli leader continued. 

In coordination with the Indian government, the plan was initiated by Netanyahu and Aliyah and Integration Minister Ofir Sofer, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister Zeev Elkin, who oversees the Northern Rehabilitation Directorate, also involved in the decision.

“This wave of immigration joins the blessed immigration we have seen over the past two years from many Jewish communities around the world — an immigration that strengthens the resilience, solidarity, and renewal of the State of Israel,” Sofer said in a statement.

In the past two decades, approximately 4,000 members of the community have made aliyah to Israel under previous government efforts, with authorities now moving to complete the community’s settlement in the Jewish state.

Under this initiative, the government will provide initial financial support, Hebrew language instruction, job guidance, temporary housing, and social programs to help newcomers settle, allocating approximately $27.4 million for the first phase.

Next week, an Israeli delegation will travel to India, joined by officials from the Chief Rabbinate, Conversion Authority, Aliyah and Integration Ministry, Population and Immigration Authority, Foreign Ministry, and the Jewish Agency, to evaluate the community members’ eligibility under a 2007 decision allowing groups to enter Israel for conversion and naturalization purposes.

After receiving approval from Israel’s Chief Rabbi and the president of the Great Rabbinical Court, the government confirmed that the new immigrants will enter on A/5 visas, allowing them to undergo conversion and ultimately gain Israeli citizenship.

Identified as descendants of the biblical tribe of Manasseh, one of Israel’s “lost tribes,” the Bnei Menashe largely practiced Christianity before converting to Judaism and gaining recognition from Israel’s Chief Rabbinate.

Until 2005, Israel did not formally endorse Bnei Menashe immigration, when the then-Sephardi Chief Rabbi officially recognized the community as descendants of one of Israel’s lost tribes.

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s ambivalent response to last week’s protests against an Israeli immigration event at an Upper East Side synagogue pleased no one. But his words were meaningful precisely because they were so frustrating. They revealed something essential about not just Mamdani’s politics, but about the fabric of New York Jewish life today.

When Park East Synagogue hosted an event with Nefesh B’Nefesh, a nonprofit that facilitates immigration to Israel, last Wednesday, protesters outside chanted slogans like “death to the IDF” and “globalize the intifada.” The event’s attendees said the protest made them feel unsafe. But Mamdani did not respond with either full-throated endorsement or condemnation, as many on both sides of the issue wanted him to. Instead, his spokesperson issued a statement condemning “the language used at last night’s protest,”” and specifically reiterating his belief that “every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation.”

Yet in the same statement, Mamdani also argued that “sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.” Specifically, his team said he was referring to the fact that Nefesh B’Nefesh has ties to Israel settlement activity in the West Bank.

Mamdani’s ambivalent response to the protests represent an attempt to knit together two competing imperatives, which are not easily reconciled.

As the mayor of a city with political activists on multiple sides of contentious issues, he wants to protect the right to protest. And he surely shares some of the protesters’ criticisms of Israeli settlement activity. American immigrants to Israel are more likely than other Jewish immigrants to move to West Bank settlements; Mamdani is making the point, in this context, that an event like the one at Park East can carry clear geopolitical implications.

Yet at the same time, Mamdani, who has committed to increasing funding for hate crime prevention by 800% and pledged “to root the scourge of antisemitism out of our city,” knows how problematic it is that protesters used threatening language in front of a house of worship. (On Friday, Mamdani told Rabbi Marc Schneier, son of Park East’s rabbi and a vocal critic of Mamdani’s, that he’d consider a pitch for legislation prohibiting protests outside houses of worship.) His insistence that no one should feel intimidated entering a synagogue is not merely rhetorical, but represents a genuine commitment to religious freedom, to public safety, and to basic respect.

These two impulses — protecting the right to protest, and safeguarding houses of worship — pull in different directions. They do not lend themselves to a tidy, one-line slogan. Yet Mamdani’s ambivalence is not just a political calculation; it is an expression of something deeply Jewish about New York City.

The city’s Jewish community — the largest of any city on earth — is not monolithic. Some New York Jews view Zionism as foundational to their identities, as a spiritual and cultural demand that goes beyond mere politics. Others see Zionism as a fundamentally political ideology, one to be critiqued or resisted, especially when tied to the realities of the occupation of the West Bank.

These are not just academic debates. They mark how Jewish people across the city — and the country — build meaning, pray, mourn and hope.

New York City embodies Jewish pluralism. It is where so many different strains of Jewish identity cross paths: Orthodox, Reform, secular; Zionist and anti-Zionist; immigrant Jews, native-born Jews. And it is also a city where immigrants from all around the world live together in relative peace, where countless religions worship together, where just about any kind of food on earth can be sampled.

With his nuanced response, Mamdani is showing that he is trying to represent that city. He is not offering reassurance to one side by abandoning the other; instead, he is straining to hold multiple truths at once.

Navigating a city of such profound pluralism is necessarily messy. And for many people, that very messiness will be unsatisfying. To critics, Mamdani’s statements may feel evasive, insufficient or morally suspect. Some argue he should never have questioned the legitimacy of a Jewish gathering about making aliyah. Others contend he should never have condemned the slogan “globalize the intifada” in the first place.

But sometimes, leadership over this diverse metropolis means recognizing that people will feel uncomforable, and still forging a space where dissent and belonging have to coexist, even if uneasily.

Mamdani must be pressed to clarify what concrete steps he will take to ensure that places of worship are protected from intimidation. His words to Schneier, and the apology that police commissioner Jessica Tisch — who will retain her role under Mamdani — offered to the synagogue are steps in the right direction.

And Mamdani must engage more deeply with Jewish communities who feel their identity and safety were undermined by this incident. Theirs are legitimate and necessary demands.

But if we reduce this episode to a clear binary, in which Mamdani is seen as either supporting the protesters or the Jewish community , we erase a crucial reality. Part of what makes political life in New York City, and Jewish life in New York City, so vibrant is that both are too complex to allow for neat explanations.

And at a time when the reigning political culture wants to force people into simple black-and-white boxes, we need to make more space for that ambivalence.

Because in the end, Mamdani’s response is not a statement of political convenience. It is a mirror of the divisions and tensions that exist within ourselves and our communities. It reflects back to us a city where protest and prayer, dissent and belonging, identity and ideology coexist.

That tension may be painful. But while the struggle to speak honestly across differences may be messy, it is also indispensable.

If we want leaders who represent all of us, we might have to live with their ambivalence, and, in so doing, accept that our community is stronger when its contradictions are acknowledged and not erased.

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