Israelis have once again been asked to live under the shadow of war. Sirens and missiles punctuate sleepless nights. Families sleep beside safe rooms. Children measure their days between alarms.

People will endure that, when they believe there is a purpose behind the sacrifice.

Yet three weeks into the current confrontation with Iran, Israel’s government hasn’t offered anything resembling such clarity. Nor has that of the United States. And as the costs of war accrue in both countries — with Americans worrying about forces deployed across the region, and paying the price of the conflict at the gas pump — citizens of both countries deserve something basic from their leaders: a direct, compelling explanation of what this war is supposed to achieve.

In a democracy, citizens who are sending their children to shelters and their soldiers to the front absolutely have the right to know the objectives of a war. Yes, you cannot reveal operational details that could endanger pilots, intelligence sources, or soldiers in the field.

But explaining the purpose of a war is not the same thing as revealing tactics. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump aren’t exhibiting prudence by keeping things, as the Forward‘s Arno Rosenfeld wrote, “incoherent.” Instead, they’re showing contempt for those they govern.

The hubris would be troubling even if either government in question enjoyed broad public trust. But neither Netanyahu nor Trump are leaders who command such confidence. And the arrogance that has infected even officials under them reflects a deeper pattern that has long defined both men’s leadership: an extraordinary sense of entitlement to power.

An Israel defined by hubris

Many Israelis believe that Netanyahu bends the truth routinely and will do almost anything to remain in power. Under those circumstances, demanding blind faith in this war is insulting.

Consider the extraordinary elasticity of the government’s claims. In June, after the earlier 12-day confrontation with Iran, Netanyahu declared that Israel had pushed back Iran’s missile and nuclear threats “for generations.”

If anyone made the mistake of believing him at the time, it is now obvious that he was lying. Iran still possesses missiles, which we know, because they have rained down on Israel throughout this war. If this conflict is now necessary to confront the very same dangers, the public deserves an explanation of what exactly happened to the supposed “generations” of security their leader had promised.

Yet instead of engaging with tough questions from the press about why Israel engaged in this war, what its goals are, and when it will end, Netanyahu has opted to exclusively discuss the war on friendly platforms. There are social media videos produced by his team, which are pure propaganda; the rare stage-managed “news conference,” usually with the few questioners selected in advance; and a studious avoidance of interviews with the Israeli media — with the sole exception of the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14.

Incredibly, when asked by a reporter from Haaretz a few days ago what the goals of the war were — and why no explanation has been offered to the citizens of the country — Government Secretary Yossi Fuchs actually had the temerity to respond that, in his eyes, citizens don’t need to know about those goals. Some have been set, he said, but they are confidential.

This posture invites, of course, even more suspicion.

Muddled American messaging

If Netanyahu says too little, Trump, on the American side, possibly says too much.

He speaks constantly about the war, yet always seems to struggle with precision or coherence.

One day he suggests the conflict could last a long time. The next he says he thinks it may end soon. When asked about terrorism that could follow escalation, he shrugs that “some people will die.”

This is not surprising; Trump’s rhetoric on these things has always been belated, confused and focused on spectacle. Within hours of the bizarre American seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — a reprehensible figure but still the head of a sovereign state — Trump appeared on television explaining that the U.S. needed access to Venezuelan oil.

With short-term operations like that in Venezuela, Trump’s inability to explain why the U.S. needed to engage, and outline what Americans can expect going forward, was less glaring. Now, as he waffles between demanding NATO allies come to aid the war and insisting their help isn’t needed; bizarrely declares the war will end “when I feel it in my bones”; and makes clear that the war was initiated with no strategic foresight, it’s impossible to ignore

So Americans, like Israelis, are left struggling to understand what exactly their government is trying to accomplish. And while in Israel the war is still broadly supported — so great is the anger at the Iranian regime, and so effective has been Israel’s missile defense — that is hardly the case in the U.S.

The blame game

The risks of a war defined by ever-moving goalposts and a deliberately obscure timeframe are obvious and terrifying. Just look at the war in Gaza.

That conflict dragged on for nearly two years, accompanied by repeated declarations that Hamas would soon be eliminated. Today, Hamas still exists. Yet the government has offered no serious accounting of that reality. On the way to this endgame, in which the status quo has ended up preserved but with Gaza in ruins, Netanyahu repeatedly blocked off-ramps. He was clearly indifferent to the widespread perception that he was using the continuation of the war to avoid accountability: he explicitly and shamelessly argued that spectacular breakdown on Oct. 7 could not be investigated while the war continued.

In fact, he is using the exact same playbook in this new war, arguing last week — with Trump’s support — that Israeli President Isaac Herzog should issue him a pardon in his ongoing corruption trial so that he can focus on the war.

Some Israelis now genuinely fear that prolonged emergency conditions could become politically convenient. Netanyahu’s critics openly speculate that a monumental national crisis might provide justification to delay or manipulate elections — as Netanyahu is obsessed with remaining in power and is badly behind in the polls.

In the U.S., this fumbling has opened the door to an alarming new reality: one in which Israel and its international supporters are blamed for dragging the U.S. into war. On Tuesday, Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned over the war with a public letter making unproven allegations that Trump fell prey to an Israeli “misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform.” There is a clear risk that such rhetoric, fueled by the sense of directionlessness in this war, will increase already surging antisemitism.

The paradox of justification

Netanyahu and Trump’s failure to clearly justify the war does not mean that the Iranian regime deserves indulgence.

Tehran has brutalized its own citizens for decades and exported violence throughout the Middle East. Through Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq, it has helped fuel conflicts that have cost countless lives. The regime has given the world many reasons to wish for its disappearance.

For the past month I have been arguing relentlessly that the Iranian regime has forfeited any claim to sympathy and that its actions have justified the Israeli and U.S. attack.

A long war determined to bring the regime to its knees may not be fundamentally unjustified. But requiring blind faith in the leaders prosecuting that war is.

The post Israelis and Americans deserve to know why they are still at war appeared first on The Forward.

A senior U.S. counterterrorism official resigned Tuesday in protest of President Donald Trump’s military campaign against Iran, accusing Israel of playing an outsized role in pushing the United States into conflict.

Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said he could not support the war, arguing Tehran posed “no imminent threat” to the United States. But it was Kent’s broader assertion, that pressure from Israel and pro-Israel voices influenced the decision to go to war, that drew swift pushback from the White House and national security experts.

In his resignation, Kent also drew parallels to the Iraq War, suggesting that similar dynamics shaped both conflicts, arguing that Israel pushed the US into the conflict. His comments revived long-running debates about how U.S. intelligence and foreign alliances factor into decisions to use military force, though many officials and analysts have rejected such comparisons as misleading.

“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent wrote in his resignation letter. 

Kent further claimed that he lost his wife in a “war manufactured by Israel.” Kent’s wife, Shannon Kent, died in 2019 when an ISIS suicide bomber detonated an explosive device during a U.S. military operation during the Syrian Civil War. Kent’s assertion suggests that Israel started the Syrian Civil War is completely unfounded. However, the notion that Israel controls the ISIS terror group is a popular conspiracy online.

The Trump administration forcefully disputed Kent’s claims, maintaining that the decision to strike Iran was based on credible intelligence about threats to U.S. forces and interests in the region. Trump dismissed Kent as “weak on security,” defending the operation as necessary to deter Iranian aggression and protect American personnel and allies.

Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary, lambasted Kent’s letter as inaccurate . 

“The absurd allegation that President Trump made this decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries, is both insulting and laughable. President Trump has been remarkably consistent and has said for DECADES that Iran can NEVER possess a nuclear weapon,” she wrote. 

National security experts and former officials also criticized Kent’s framing, arguing that it oversimplifies the policymaking process and risks promoting narratives that inaccurately portray Israel as driving U.S. military decisions. They emphasize that while Israel is a close ally that shares intelligence and strategic concerns, particularly regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions and support for proxy groups, decisions to go to war are made by U.S. leadership based on American intelligence assessments.

Israel has long warned about the threat posed by Iran’s regional activities, including its backing of armed groups hostile to both Israeli and U.S. interests. Those concerns are broadly shared across multiple U.S. administrations and within the intelligence community, regardless of political party.

Kent’s resignation marks the most significant internal break so far over the Iran conflict and highlights growing divisions within the administration and across Washington. While some critics of the war have echoed his concerns about the lack of an imminent threat, others have expressed alarm at his decision to center Israel in his critique, warning that such claims can distort public understanding of how U.S. foreign policy decisions are made.

Kent came under fire during his confirmation process over his reported connections to white supremacists Nick Fuentes and Greyson Arnold. Kent admitted that he had conversations with Fuentes over social media strategy. However, Kent later distanced himself from Fuentes and repudiated his views. 

Kent also holds other unorthodox foreign policy viewpoints, such as a relatively forgiving posture towards Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In April 2022, following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Kent argued that Putin was “very reasonable” and accused the US foreign policy establishment of aggravating Russia into war. 

Kent’s comments on Tuesday drew widespread backlash from many who accused him of peddling antisemitic tropes. Ilan Goldberg, Senior Vice President and Chief Policy Officer  of liberal pro-Israel organization J-Street, praised Kent for leaving the administration, but added “the antisemitic stuff in here blaming Israel for the Iraq war and a secret conspiracy of the media and Israelis to deceive Trump into going to war with Iran is ugly stuff that plays on the worst antisemitic tropes.”

“Donald Trump is the President of the United States and he is the one ultimately responsible for sending American troops into harms way,” Goldberg added. 

As New York City moves to assume control of a financially distressed hospital that serves Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community, some local players are pushing back, filing lawsuits in hopes of stopping the imminent merger with the city’s public hospital system.

Many Hasidic patients rely on Maimonides Medical Center, an independent nonprofit in Borough Park, as their local hospital. Even in a city where hospitals typically offer kosher food and are sensitive to Jewish patients’ needs, Maimonides stands out, with Shabbat elevators that stop on every floor, Yiddish-speaking staff and an onsite synagogue in the main lobby that hosts daily afternoon prayer.

New York City Health and Hospitals CEO Dr. Mitchell Katz has promised to retain those religious accommodations at Maimonides under the merger, noting in court documents that the merger agreement between Maimonides and the city requires preservation of existing religious and cultural practices at the hospital for at least 30 years.

“We certainly have heard concerns at community settings from the Orthodox Jewish community who are concerned about whether or not the hospital will still respect their cultural traditions,” Katz said at a New York City Council hearing earlier this month about the proposed merger. “And we’ve explained, ‘Absolutely.’” But, he acknowledged, “Change makes people worried.”

Such reassurances, however, have done little to assuage the plaintiffs in the pair of lawsuits seeking to block the merger, who include hospital’s trustees who disagreed with the decision to go public, Orthodox Jewish patient advocacy groups, and local Bobov, Satmar and Belz Hasidic congregations.

Their cases, filed against Maimonides Medical Center, the New York State Department of Health, and New York City Health and Hospitals, argue that relinquishing local control to the city hospital system jeopardizes the hospital’s Jewish character, conflicts with the nonprofit’s local mission, and threatens to deteriorate its quality of care.

The lawsuits have set up a clash between two groups who each argue they have the hospital’s best interest at heart: a city that says it wants to rescue a hospital on the brink of financial collapse, and Jewish leaders wary of public institutions, who prefer to keep the hospital’s management within the community it serves.

“Maybe at first you won’t see such a change in the culture, but over time, it’s inevitable that it’s just going to become a city-run hospital, like all the other city-run hospitals,” Martin Bienstock, a lawyer for the plaintiffs suing to block the merger, told the Forward. “If people lose trust in the hospital, because they lose that sense of affiliation, you’re going to get poorer health quality outcomes.”

The merger is set to be finalized on April 1, but could be disrupted by a judge’s pending decision on a request for a preliminary injunction blocking the transaction. The next hearing is scheduled for March 27.

A financial lifeline

Maimonides Medical Center, named for the 12th century Jewish scholar, was founded over a century ago by a group of Jewish women as a philanthropic effort to serve the poor. It has long served a diverse, largely low-income population that includes many immigrant communities, in addition to the Brooklyn neighborhood’s longstanding Jewish population.

Even as other independent hospitals shut down or merged with big medical systems, Maimonides held out. But recent years have brought mounting financial strain, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last December, those financial troubles led the city to step in. Former Mayor Eric Adams, with just three days left in office, announced a plan to merge Maimonides Medical Center with the city’s public hospital system. Gov. Kathy Hochul endorsed the deal, backing it with a $2.2 billion grant as part of her broader push to stabilize New York’s struggling safety-net hospitals, which serve patients who can’t afford to pay for their care.

New York City’s public hospital system receives a higher Medicaid reimbursement rate than independent hospitals do — a potential lifeline for Maimonides, which receives 70% of its patient revenue from Medicare and Medicaid, according to the Healthcare Association of New York State.

The deal is poised to infuse Maimonides with more than $2 billion over five years, according to city hospital spokesperson Christopher Miller. The money will be used “for many important upgrades,” Miller said, including adopting electronic health records and renovating the hospital’s maternity ward, where more than 6,000 women give birth each per year — more babies than any other hospital in Brooklyn.

Advocates of the merger say that cash is urgently needed. Maimonides lost more than $165 million at its peak deficit in 2021 and has continued to operate tens of millions of dollars in the red in the years since, according to tax filings. A 2024 audit expressed “substantial doubt” about the organization’s ability to continue operating.

Those suing to block the transaction do not dispute that Maimonides’ finances are dire. But they argue that the hospital’s board did not adequately consider alternative options that could have allowed Maimonides to maintain its status as a private nonprofit, according to court documents that claim the hospital had snubbed potential partnerships with Touro University or Westchester Medical Center, according to court documents.

(The hospital’s CEO said in a court filing that he was not aware of any viable partners for Maimonides other than the city.)

Bienstock contends the merger will place Maimonides in the hands of an unwieldy government-sponsored bureaucracy — and under the political whims of New York City’s mayor, currently Zohran Mamdani, who oversees the city hospital system and proposes its budget.

“Any promises that they make, they’re always subject to later decisions by the Health and Hospitals board and mayor,” Bienstock said. “Ultimately, they’re going to be running the show.”

‘Grave concern’

It’s not the first time the hospital has had strained relations with the Orthodox community. During the pandemic, patients alleged that the hospital had removed patients from ventilators in ways that conflicted with Jewish values protecting the sanctity of life. Meanwhile, a campaign called “Save Maimonides,” led by local Orthodox Jewish leaders at odds with the leadership of CEO Ken Gibbs, alleged substandard patient care at the hospital and financial mismanagement.

Among the concerns was Maimonides Medical Center’s purchase of the naming rights to a minor league baseball stadium in Coney Island in 2021, and ballooning executive compensation even as the hospital lost millions. Gibbs’ salary was $3.2 million in 2020, up from $1.3 million the year prior, a payout hospital officials told THE CITY was deferred compensation Gibbs had been slated to receive after five years of work. Gibbs has earned roughly $1.8 million each year since.

In a statement to the Forward, Maimonides spokesperson Sam Miller said the hospital has won national recognition for “outstanding care across several clinical areas,” including top rank for its children’s hospital.

Asked about executive compensation and spending on the minor league baseball stadium, Miller said, “Our financial management is sound.”

Mendy Reiner, co-chair of “Save Maimonides” and founder of a nonprofit that connects patients with kidney donors, told the Forward he sees the proposed merger as yet another sign of the hospital’s decline. In his experience, locals who can afford to pay often travel across the river to Manhattan for what he described as superior care. U.S. News and World report currently ranks Maimonides 19th in the New York metro area, a market that includes some of the top-ranked academic hospitals in the nation.

“City hospitals are a failure across the board,” Reiner said. “And if we thought that Maimonides could go bad from bad to worse, here it is.”

In a statement, Miller said both Maimonides and NYC Health and Hospitals “run facilities that deliver high-quality care for their patients,” citing awards that include US News & World Report putting all 11 of the system’s hospitals on its “Best Hospitals 2025-2026” list.

H+H CEO Katz defended the public hospital system in court filings, arguing that the plaintiffs had made “inaccurate and baseless claims” about the quality of care and had “offensively” justified those allegations by pointing to the system’s large number of Medicaid patients.

Still, the proposed merger came as a shock to local state Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein, who said he had been working with hospital leadership for years to come up with an alternative solution. In an October 2025 video address, he said the city’s proposal for Maimonides was “being shoved down our throats.”

“Let me be clear. This is a shortsighted, quick fix made without the slightest understanding of our local diverse neighborhoods,” Eichenstein said. “This is not collaboration. This is coercion.”

Hatzalah, the Jewish volunteer emergency medical service organization that partners with Maimonides, issued a letter last October “strongly” opposing the potential takeover as “not in the best interest of our community.” Hatzalah coordinators serving four heavily Orthodox Brooklyn neighborhoods — Borough Park, Crown Heights, Flatbush and Mill Basin  — signed onto the letter “with grave concern.”

Since then, more Jewish institutions have joined the fight against the merger. Four Hasidic congregations — Congregation Khal Shaarei Zion Bobov, Congregation Kehilas Belz, Congregation Yetev Lev D’Satmar, and Khal Bobov 45 Inc. — signed onto the lawsuit filed against the hospital and state earlier this month, saying their congregants regularly rely on Maimonides for medical care. Other plaintiffs include Borough Park residents Chaim Beigel and Israel Minkoff, as well as the Orthodox Jewish patient advocacy groups Refuah Helpline and Chaim Medical Resource.

Miriam Knoll, CEO of the Jewish Orthodox Women’s Medical Association, said public hospitals can and do offer religious accommodations for Jewish patients. Still, she said, any new leadership must prioritize outreach to the local Jewish community to build trust.

For Knoll, the issue is close to home: She and all of her siblings were born at Maimonides, and her parents, both physicians, completed their medical residencies there.

“Maimonides is a deeply personal and important institution to the Jewish community in Brooklyn,” Knoll told the Forward. “And I think it’s very important that it continues to be a place that provides culturally sensitive care.”

The post A government takeover could save a struggling Brooklyn hospital — while unsettling the Orthodox Jewish community it serves appeared first on The Forward.