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Israel and US go for regime change in Iran, with leaders few trust
TEL AVIV, Israel — We were woken just after 8 a.m. by a siren, followed within minutes by the notification that there were in fact no incoming missiles. It appeared the government had decided to use the alert system as a kind of national alarm clock, to let the country know that the war had begun. For the second time in nine months, Israel had attacked Iran. This time it was in coordination with the United States.
Within the hour we had already been sent to the shelter by an actual missile alert. By midday, we would make that trip five times. The country, as far as one can tell from the stairwells and the WhatsApp groups, is stoic. Irritated, tired, but stoic. This is absurd, people say, but they lace up their shoes and head downstairs anyway. Or to the reinforced safe rooms that the lucky few have.
The arguments for this round of conflict are not, on the surface, overwhelming. After the 12-day war in June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs had been set back for many years, that the major threat to Israel’s existence had been removed. President Donald Trump, after American B-2 bombers joined on the final day, spoke repeatedly of the nuclear threat being “obliterated” at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan. He bristled at intelligence assessments suggesting otherwise.
There has been little public evidence that Iran rebuilt that threat in the interim. Netanyahu said around midday Saturday in a recorded radio address that Iran’s new capabilities were being placed underground. Trump, meanwhile, demanded that Iran forswear nuclear weapons; but Tehran has long said it does not seek them, even as it enriched uranium to levels with no civilian justification. No one believes them. But they have been saying it.
In the shelter, I had time to contemplate all this with the same cast of neighbors I got to know rather well in June.
The divorced lawyer and her boyfriend. The mathematics divorcee with her enormous dog, which takes up the space of two folding chairs. The sweet elderly couple who sit holding hands, as if the room were a train platform and they might be separated. The religious French family from upstairs preparing to celebrate a son’s 18th birthday; the mother, improbably, in her finest dress at 9 in the morning. Everyone bleary-eyed. Everyone attempting humor. Some trepidation, but not much.
At one point a commotion erupted. Someone had noticed that a shop in the building had installed an air-conditioning unit in such a way that it partially blocked the emergency exit from the underground shelter. The prospect of being herded underground because of missiles while potentially trapped was not exactly welcome. My wife calmly announced she would deal with the management company first thing Sunday morning. I know her. She will.
It is in rooms like that that the big questions feel both distant and unavoidable. Why now? If the programs were truly crippled in June, what has changed? One possible answer lies not in centrifuges but in politics.
Trump had boxed himself in last month when he told Iranian protesters that “help is on its way.” Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, took him at his word and were killed by the regime’s goons. Trump took heat for having encouraged them and then done nothing. He looked ridiculous, and — to paraphrase The Godfather — a man in his position cannot afford to look ridiculous.
In the interim, the U.S. steadily built up an armada in the region. Ships and planes accumulated in a way that was slow, but deliberate and ultimately overwhelming. It began to look like the kind of force that was not likely to go unused.
The more reasonable argument for assuming the risks of war — casualties, disruption in the oil markets, escalation and so on — is regime change. That idea has a grim history. It rarely works as intended. It is unpredictable, destabilizing, morally fraught. The record in the Middle East is not encouraging. The legal right to do it is debatable at best.
But there are exceptions, and the Islamic Republic, in its 47 years, has made a compelling case for being one.
Its internal repression is ferocious. Protesters are shot or imprisoned in numbers that make gradual reform a fantasy. Short of a palace coup, the Iranian people have little chance of dislodging their rulers on their own.
Moreover, Iran has destabilized the region for decades through proxy militias trying to spread jihadism: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shiite militias in Iraq, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Hezbollah helped prop up Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack ignited a war that left tens of thousands dead in Gaza and over a thousand murdered in Israel. Not every evil in the region can be laid at Iran’s door, but a significant share can, and much of it has victimized fellow Muslims.
There is a wide consensus in Israel that the Iranian regime is a menace. Many Israelis believe that if it fell, it would be good for Israel and good for the Iranian people. They harbor a romantic notion that a democratic Iran would become a partner, even an ally, and that ordinary Iranians would thank Israel for helping to bring about that outcome. Whether that is naive is another matter, but the distinction between regime and people is real in the Israeli mind.
And in what was perhaps the only surprise of the day — for the attack itself was widely telegraphed — Trump set regime change as the true aim of the operation in his comments announcing the strikes. In his characteristic rambling, self-congratulatory style, he urged Iranians to take over their government — and catalogued the crimes of the regime, going all the way back to the 1979-80 hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
This from a man whose National Security Strategy, released in December, downplayed democracy promotion, and who has shown little affection for liberal norms at home or abroad. Many assumed he wanted only some agreement he could spin as a win — yet he instead seems intent on transforming Iran.
Might regime change actually work? Without a ground invasion — which is neither contemplated nor remotely plausible — the odds seem low. Authoritarian systems are designed precisely to absorb shocks. Enough of the regime would have to be symbolically and practically shattered — key figures eliminated, command centers wrecked, the aura of invulnerability broken — that mass protests resume at a scale the authorities cannot contain.
The calculation appears to be that sustained external pressure, combined with visible regime weakness, could tip internal dynamics. A military already stretched by external attack might find itself unable, or unwilling, to suppress millions in the streets. What follows would not be a popular revolution in the romantic sense but something closer to a palace coup: factions within the system deciding survival requires abandoning the clerical leadership.
Trump’s rhetoric suggested precisely this. His call for the Revolutionary Guard to stand down, coupled with promises of amnesty, is an attempt to split the regime from within, to persuade those with guns that their future lies in defecting rather than fighting. It could work — because that is how hated the regime actually is.
It would have been better for any such action to have gotten the green light from the United Nations Security Council. But — even beyond Trump’s disrespect for the organization — that body is paralyzed by the veto power of Russia, Iran’s sometimes ally.
Moreover, all of this would be easier to deal with if the leaderships in Israel and the U.S. were trusted at anywhere near a normal level. But we are dealing with Trump and Netanyahu.
Trump, it need hardly even be said, has made dishonesty a kind of performance art. He is the most determined dissembler to ever hold the American presidency, as far as I can tell. It has become something of a joke, in America and across the world. In a moment like this, it is not a joke. So in a crisis that could reshape the region, there is no reliable way to know if his claims are true.
Something even worse can be said of Netanyahu, who is on trial for bribery and trailing badly in the polls ahead of elections that must be held by October and could come sooner. It is axiomatic for many Israelis that he would do anything to cling to power, including starting another war.
So these two men, each viewed by large portions of their publics as self-interested and manipulative, now preside over a conflict that could be ruinous.
And yet there is another astonishing layer. Trump, who has damaged the standing of the U.S., abandoned Ukraine, expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and rattled NATO with talk of seizing Greenland from Denmark, may be on the verge of a historic achievement. If the Iranian regime were to fall with American assistance, it would rank among the most consequential geopolitical events of the past half-century, perhaps second only to the collapse of Soviet communism. Oddly, I am old enough to have witnessed that as well, as a correspondent for the Associated Press.
Back in the shelter, there is a massive improvement relative to June: Wi-Fi has been installed, thanks to my tireless wife. The dog is still panting, the elderly couple still holds hands, the air-conditioning unit still blocks the exit, the French mother is now checking her phone between sirens.
It is possible to feel two contradictory things at once. This might be a reckless, perhaps even insane action launched by unworthy leaders. And it might, just possibly, change everything for the better.
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Synagogue attacks were part of massive ISIS-inspired plot last week, FBI says
(JTA) — A 21-year-old man from Valencia, Pennsylvania, suggested poisoning food in synagogues as part of a mass attack in support of the Islamic State group last week, according to the FBI.
The suspect, Jonathan Kramer, said in an online forum using the pseudonym “Hamza Al Rashid” that “i wish to inject ricin or cyanide into places such as grocery stores inside water/food with a syringe, or going to food events, preferably synagogues and putting the chemicals in their food and drink…,” according to a sworn FBI affidavit.
The prospective poisoning was part of a broader plot of mass violence that included “repeated attempts to encourage and coordinate violence through encrypted platforms, such as advising others on attack methods, discussing chemical poisons, arson, vehicle attacks, drone delivery explosives and firearm based assaults,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard Evanchec said at a press conference last week.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh said in a security update on Friday that no synagogue had been specified by the FBI. , “We are in close contact with our law enforcement partners and federal prosecutors, and if we learn of anything concerning, we will share that immediately,” the organization noted.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg announced last Tuesday that Kramer was “preparing for a mass shooting that could have taken many lives, having already secured a rifle and approximately 190 rounds of ammunition for what he called his ‘mission.”
Efforts to reach Kramer’s public defender Jake Morrison were unsuccessful.
FBI agents arrested Kramer in a hotel parking lot in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, the Justice Department said. They seized a semiautomatic rifle, five rifle magazines, a rifle bipod and scope, a total of 190 rounds of rifle ammunition and about 30 knives following a search of him, his house and his hotel room.
Kramer was charged with receiving a firearm and ammunition believing they would be used to commit terrorism. He appeared in court last Wednesday to waive a preliminary hearing, according to CBS News. A court date has not been set for Kramer’s next proceedings, the network reported.
Kramer had been on the FBI’s radar since 2023, when he was charged by Pennsylvania state authorities “for his role in a plot to commit a mass casualty incident” and sent to a juvenile detention facility, FBI special agent Gregory Battaglia said in a sworn affidavit.
Nearly eight years ago, 11 worshippers were killed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Proposed U.S. $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia advances
(JTA) — The State Department has approved a possible $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia — a move that would make the kingdom the second Middle Eastern country after Israel to have the world’s most powerful combat aircraft.
“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a major non-NATO ally,” the department said in a statement.
Israel wants the sale attached to a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. However, there is a small chance that Congress could keep the sale from happening.
When President Donald Trump first confirmed that he was considering the sale last November, Israeli officials told Axios that while they don’t oppose the sale itself, they wanted it “to be subject to Saudi normalization with Israel.”
Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly brushed off the deal’s significance last fall, a security source at the time warned on CNN that the possibility of Saudi Arabia acquiring “the same capabilities” as Israel was “very concerning.”
The prime minister was more vocal in his opposition to a July announcement from Trump that he was weighing selling the advanced jets to Turkey as well, telling CNN that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is “not exactly a model ally of the United States.”
Israel has already purchased 50 F-35 jets, in two procurement rounds that occurred in 2016 and in 2017, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry. However, local media reports indicate that two of the 50 have yet to arrive, meaning that just 48 are on the ground – the same number of planes that the State Department has approved for Saudi Arabia’s potential purchase.
Israel would have many more F-35s than Saudi Arabia for the time being, because its Defense Ministry announced in 2024 that it would be procuring 25 more of the planes, slated to begin arriving in 2028. Earlier this year, the Defense Ministry revealed that it would be procuring yet another squadron of the jets, although the quantity remained unclear.
Congressional approval is not assured; wariness of the Saudi regime, stemming in part from the state-sanctioned 2018 murder of a U.S.-based journalist in Turkey, crosses party lines.
The U.S. Arms Export Control Act requires the executive branch of the government to notify Congress regarding major defense equipment sales to most countries. Congress can then deem a country ineligible to participate in a sale through a joint resolution. The president can then veto the resolution, which Congress would need a two-thirds supermajority to override.
Additionally, U.S. law requires the president to ensure that Israel maintains “a qualitative military edge over military threats” when considering arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries. Israel, per the law, must be able “to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat” from both other nations and “non-state actors.”
“The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the military balance in the region,” the State Department said on Thursday. It called Saudi Arabia “a force for political stability and economic progress in the Gulf region,” adding that the sale would help “deter current and future threats by strengthening its homeland defense.”
The department maintained that not only would the sale improve Saudi Arabia’s defense capabilities, but it would also boost “interoperability” with both U.S. forces and other players from NATO and the region.
As for the potential deal’s logistics, Saudi Arabia has requested 48 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter Jets, as well as 49 Pratt & Whitney engines, according to the State Department.
The kingdom is also seeking to acquire other non-major defense equipment, such as cryptographic devices, precision navigation, secure communications, simple key loaders and support for electronic warfare databases, maintenance and personnel training.
Producing and delivering these planes can take many years.
Meanwhile, just a day before Trump’s announcement, The New York Times surfaced intelligence concerns that China could acquire F-35 technology by spying on Saudi Arabia or through its partnerships with the kingdom.
U.S. House Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, warned in a statement on X that “Beijing has spent decades stealing American intellectual property” and that this deal could “help them do it.”
“Our own intelligence community is warning that it could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party,” Krishnamoorthi added.
The Biden administration reportedly ended a past F-35 deal with the United Arab Emirates — secured by the first Trump administration — due to similar concerns about the country’s connections to China, as well as to Russia.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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After outcry, Texas lieutenant governor says schools should teach Holocaust books ‘Night,’ ‘Anne Frank’
(JTA) — The lieutenant governor of Texas says his recent call for the state’s public schools to remove “over 2,000 titles” of “dirty, filthy and vulgar books” was not meant to include books about the Holocaust.
Dan Patrick’s statement, provided exclusively to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, comes after a month of confusion following a press conference in which he and a conservative Christian activist threatened schools with potential loss of state funding if they did not comply with his directive to purge their libraries.
“I believe Texas students must learn about the Holocaust, and that includes reading books such as ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ and other books about the Holocaust,” Patrick told JTA, singling out two books on the removal list he had promoted – one of which, “Night,” that he previously explicitly called for removal from middle schools.
Patrick added that his initiative was “focused on age-inappropriate, sexually explicit books in public school libraries across Texas.” At his earlier press conference, he had directed viewers to an online list compiled by an activist group that features several books about the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
Patrick’s threats have teeth. In Texas, lieutenant governors are more powerful than in many other states, playing central roles in shaping the budget and determining the legislative agenda.
Patrick also appeared to walk back some of the harsher proclamations from his Aug. 19 press conference, at which the Republican had stated, “We’re coming for the books.”
“As the law states, local communities have the right to make their own decisions about their public school libraries,” he told JTA Friday.
The lieutenant governor, who is up for reelection this fall, appeared at the conference with Bonnie Wallace, the head of the activist group Recover America, and told viewers to “go to RecoverAmerica.com.” That group has circulated a list of more than 2,100 “Harmful Books in Libraries.” Its list, which it describes as “books with harmful, sexually explicit, and vulgar content,” includes more than a dozen titles of particular import to Jewish readers.
Recover America’s flagged books include both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a comic-book adaptation of Frank’s diary and Bernard Malamud’s novel of a blood libel “The Fixer” — all books that have been removed from school districts in Texas and other states in the past amid broader conservative-led library culture wars. In some cases those books were restored to the districts following public outcry, but spurred deeper dialogue about the state of Holocaust education and antisemitism awareness in public schools.
Patrick’s latest push would go much further than a handful of districts, affecting the more than 5.5 million students in public schools across the state.
One book of particular contention on Recover America’s list was “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s bestselling memoir of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, which has been taught in schools for decades. After a Houston Chronicle story noted the book’s inclusion on the Recover America “harmful” list, Patrick initially doubled down on “Night,” saying that it was not appropriate for middle schools owing to its “violence.”
“If ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, were made into a movie, it would likely be rated R,” Patrick wrote on the social network X on Aug. 26. “‘Night,’ which includes depictions of graphic violence and the machine-gunning of babies, should not be available to sixth graders in middle-school libraries. High school is more age-appropriate.”
His tweet appeared to contradict the state’s own K-12 required reading list, passed this summer, which mandates that “Night” be taught in the eighth grade beginning in 2030.
Now, in response to questions from JTA, the lieutenant governor said he would defer to the Texas State Board of Education on the appropriate grade to teach “Night.”
“The State Board of Education decides the appropriate grade level for books and will determine whether ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, is at the appropriate grade level,” Patrick told JTA in his statement.
He continued to insist that books in schools should be held to “FCC standards,” referring to the Federal Communications Commission, an agency that governs broadcasting content and does not regulate publishing.
The head of the Texas Holocaust, Genocide and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a governor-appointed panel which advised the state on the inclusion of “Night” and other Holocaust texts on its required reading list, did not return a JTA request for comment.
In a statement, the Texas Educational Authority, which drafted the required-reading list, told JTA, “When Texas students learn about the Holocaust, they will be exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust. That is why the SBOE placed the book in 8th Grade to ensure age appropriateness for students.”
At the Emmys this week, when “The Librarians,” a documentary about librarians facing book removal threats, won an award, retired Texas librarian Carolyn Foote joined the producers on the stage and held up a copy of “Night” in protest.
“I felt like it was very symbolic to bring ‘Night,’” Foote, a subject of the film and a co-founder of the librarian activist group FReadom Fighters, told JTA. “Having read it, I just know the importance of not forgetting our past. And that’s part of Elie Wiesel’s whole legacy, is remembrance, and so it just felt very important for me to carry that book, coming from Texas.” Another librarian onstage for the win held up “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation.”
Elisha Wiesel, Elie’s son and chair of the Elie Wiesel Foundation, told JTA that “Texas deserves credit for recognizing that Holocaust education belongs in the eighth-grade curriculum.” Yet, the younger Wiesel suggested, Patrick’s concerns about the book’s violence were misplaced.
“‘Night’ contains violence because the Holocaust was violent; its purpose is not to shock young people, but to help them understand where hatred and indifference can lead,” he wrote in an email. “With context and guidance, students should not be shielded from this history. They should be equipped to confront it.”
Despite having directed viewers to Recover America’s book list during his press conference, Patrick’s new statement to JTA said, “I do not have a book list.” He pointed instead to a law passed in the state legislature in 2025 regulating school books that he said districts were required to follow.
Yet some districts in the state have removed every book on Recover America’s list from their own libraries out of fear of losing funding, Foote told JTA. While the list nominally contains a ratings system, many of the books do not have a rating.
Besides “Night,” “Maus,” “Anne Frank’s Diary” and “The Fixer,” other books about Judaism and the Holocaust on Recover America’s list of “Harmful Books” include:
- “Annexed,” a young-adult novel about Peter van Pels, who hid in the Amsterdam annex with Anne Frank
- “The Berlin Boxing Club,” a young-adult historical novel based on German boxer Max Schmeling, who helped young Jews during Hitler’s rise to power
- “Black, White and Jewish,” a memoir by Rebecca Walker, the mixed-race Jewish daughter of author Alice Walker
- “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” a nonfiction book analyzing the “caste systems” of Nazi Germany. “Caste” had been included on an earlier, Wallace-spearheaded list of books for removal from a Texas public library in a case that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear in 2025, allowing the removals to proceed.
- “Kasher in the Rye,” a memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher
- “Pride: the story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag,” a children’s picture-book biography of the pioneering Jewish LGBTQ legislator
- “Sophie’s Choice,” the bestselling Holocaust novel for adults
- “The Violin Maker’s Daughter,” a historical novel about a Jewish family of musicians during the Holocaust
- “White Bird,” a young-reader graphic novel about a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied France
In response to JTA sharing a list of the above books, Patrick’s statement mentioned only “Night” and Anne Frank by name. The Recover America list is largely made up of romance and fantasy novels, many with an LGBTQ element, while also including classics such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “Cat’s Cradle” and some picture books for children.
Recover America did not immediately return a JTA request for comment Friday on Patrick’s new statement. Wallace, the group’s leader who has also appeared on Patrick’s podcast, previously told the Houston Chronicle that she had “thought long and hard” about including “Night” on her list.
She ultimately did so, she said, because “an eighth-grade student is 13 years old. Do they need to read about soldiers massacring, throwing up babies, and killing them with machine guns?”
She added, “It’s not to say this doesn’t happen in life. And the Holocaust was maybe the worst tragedy in the history of the world.”
For Cameron Samuels, a Jewish alum of Texas public schools and founder of the activist group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, such efforts do not help Jewish students.
“Non-Jewish people are deciding for us what’s best, and making this public policy,” Samuels said. “We can’t readily access these books and stories. And that makes students feel alone. It also means that our classroom peers are not learning authentic Jewish narratives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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