The United States is wielding enormous power against Iran through cumulative warfare: another strike, another degradation, another punitive blow—each intended gradually to change Tehran’s will. This is the logic that prolonged Vietnam. Washington can control each strike’s intensity, but not how many will be required, how long the war will last, or its terms of termination. Unless the war is moved onto a track of decision, four months may prove only the beginning of a conflict whose outcome America cannot control.

When President Donald Trump was asked whether the continuing strikes on Iran had become the American public’s “new normal,” he replied: “We were in Vietnam for 19 years. We’re here for four months.” He then expressed the campaign’s achievements in percentages, saying that the United States had destroyed 92 percent of Iran’s drone-production capacity and 89 percent of its missile-production capacity.

Chronologically, Trump is right. Strategically, his answer misses the point. The Vietnam War did not last many years because it was already a long war at the outset. It became one because the United States employed immense force without constructing a mechanism capable of producing decision. Long wars always begin as short ones.

Trump’s answer illustrates the problem. Asked about duration, he responded with degradation statistics. But what end state are those percentages supposed to create? Has Iran’s war-making system been disabled? Has it lost the ability to operate effectively? Counting damaged targets is no substitute for answers.

A Washington Post report reinforces the warning. According to a U.S. intelligence assessment led by the CIA, the latest strikes are having no significant effect on the regime’s leadership and are not softening its position. Despite severe damage to military capabilities and the loss of senior officials, the regime continues to display structural stability. The United States and Iran have reached a stalemate—an undefined condition somewhere between peace and war.

This is a red card for the doctrine, not a request for more of the same. Damage is being inflicted, but the intended result is not materializing: the regime’s will remains unchanged and its war-making system continues to function.

Graduated Pressure in Vietnam

In Vietnam, the United States followed “graduated pressure.” Instead of depriving North Vietnam of the ability to continue the war, Washington increased pressure step by step. Each escalation was meant to raise the cost and persuade Hanoi to negotiate—without triggering a general war with China or the Soviet Union.

The same logic shaped the ground campaign through “search and destroy.” American forces sought to locate enemy units and eliminate more fighters and equipment than the enemy could replace. Success was measured by sorties, bombs dropped, targets struck, and enemy casualties.

Yet the United States controlled only the intensity of each blow, not how many would be required before Hanoi changed its will. As long as North Vietnam absorbed the damage and continued fighting, the war had no American-controlled termination mechanism. Graduated pressure also gave the enemy time to disperse, rebuild, and adapt. Short operations thus became a long, costly war.

The Same Logic in Iran

The doctrine being applied in Iran bears a different name, but its logic is almost identical. It relies on denying gains and gradually degrading capabilities: missile and drone systems, military infrastructure, command centers, and freedom of action in particular theaters. Yet these attacks do not disable Iran’s war-making system as a whole. Their effects are expected to accumulate until the regime decides that the price is too high and changes its will.

Elbridge Colby’s strategy of denial was designed to prevent an adversary—above all China—from rapidly achieving a defined objective and presenting a fait accompli. But denying a specific objective is not the same as deciding the entire war-making system. In Iran, denial has become partial degradation that leaves the enemy able to adapt. Without a mechanism of decision, it becomes cumulative war of uncontrolled duration.

Here, too, each blow is considered separately, its intensity calibrated, and the door to negotiations kept open. Iran receives time to adapt, alter its methods, and initiate the next round. The United States controls the rungs on the escalation ladder; Iran controls how many rungs must be climbed. Washington determines how much each round will hurt. Tehran determines how many rounds there will be.

Punitive strikes show the same pattern: Iran acts, America punishes, Iran adapts, and Washington launches another wave. Each round inflicts damage but leaves Iran able to initiate the next. Tactically successful, the strikes leave Tehran with the strategic initiative.

Concentrating effort around Hormuz does not necessarily mean concentrating it at the decisive point. Attacks in southern Iran may impair operations in the strait, but massing power in a secondary theater does not disable the nationwide war-making system. Strikes delivered in waves may permit adaptation rather than cause systemic shock.

As Yehoshafat Harkabi explained, a war may begin with limited aims and means yet escape control. Cumulative war looks controlled because every blow is calibrated. But if no one knows which blow will change the enemy’s will, there is no control over their number, the war’s duration, or its total cost. Tactical control can conceal strategic loss of control.

Captive to Technology

In both wars, technology created an illusion of control. In Vietnam, computing, data processing, and operations research encouraged Robert McNamara’s team to manage war through sorties, bombs, targets, and casualties. What could be counted replaced evaluation of strategic results.

The “McNamara fallacy” assumed that favorable metrics proved progress toward victory.

In Iran, precision intelligence, AI, surveillance, and long-range precision fire enable rapid strikes. Yet technology cannot answer the questions of generalship: What will decide the enemy, and how can it be done with available resources?

Launchers, command centers, and factories destroyed have replaced Vietnam’s sorties and casualty counts. But technology cannot turn a target list into a strategy. Control over execution is not control over outcome.

Cumulative Warfare Versus Decision

The doctrine of decision follows the opposite logic. It does not wait for the enemy to be persuaded, discouraged, or drawn toward compromise. His will is not its concern. It deprives him of the ability to operate effectively. Once that ability is lost, he must yield; if he refuses, the systematic dismantling of his capabilities continues until he can no longer function as a war-making system.

The Inchon landing in Korea demonstrated the difference. North Korea concentrated its strength against the Pusan Perimeter, leaving its vital rear less protected. Rather than reinforce the point of enemy strength, Douglas MacArthur landed at Inchon and turned the rear into the main battle space—an operational inversion. Local superiority severed supply and withdrawal routes and collapsed the northern campaign in the South.

Three principles converged: a decision-producing stratagem, concentration at the decisive point, and optimal use of resources to create superiority there. MacArthur did not change the enemy’s mind. He made it irrelevant to the outcome.

What Is the Iranian Inchon?

Iran’s war-making system comprises two integrated super-systems. The political-economic system includes the regime, economy, financing, legitimacy, and social control. The military-strategic system includes conventional forces, the Revolutionary Guards, missiles and drones, the nuclear program, infrastructure, and proxies.

Generalship must determine which system—or vital interface—is the supreme center of gravity, whose disablement would weaken the other. This is the “Iranian Inchon”: not a place for imitating an amphibious landing, but a systemic point where concentrated action would disable the regime’s ability to continue the war.

The United States has assembled enormous air, naval, and intelligence power. Israeli participation is not indispensable, but could multiply that power and shorten the war. Sensitivity to casualties need not preclude decision: long-range precision fire can carry the main effort, with limited ground maneuver only where fire is insufficient.

No Escape from Iran

The United States could ultimately withdraw from Vietnam. The Paris Accords removed its forces, and when South Vietnam collapsed two years later, Washington paid a heavy reputational and strategic price—but left the theater behind.

It cannot leave Iran in the same way. A unilateral withdrawal would leave intact a system capable of striking regional states, American forces, shipping lanes, energy infrastructure, and the global economy. It would allow the regime to recover, rebuild, and choose when to begin the next campaign. Agreements and sanctions cannot substitute for decision while the regime can violate them and restore its power.

An indecisive outcome would also expand China’s influence, deepen Tehran’s dependence on Beijing, and tie down American forces and resources needed in the Indo-Pacific. An undefeated Iran is not merely a regional threat; it benefits Washington’s principal pacing challenge.

The objective must shift from changing the regime’s will to denying its ability. This need not mean dismantling Iran or depriving citizens of essential services. It means disabling the mechanisms allowing the regime to control the country, finance its forces, and operate its war-making system. Their collapse may cause the regime to disintegrate. If it survives, it must lack the capacity to impose its will by force.

The CIA assessment is a red card. It warns that the war is heading down the track that led America into Vietnam: another strike, another round of degradation, another punishment—without a mechanism of decision and without control over the war’s duration. Four months are not nineteen years. But every nineteen-year war was once four months old.

The track can still be changed. The decisive question is not how many targets have already been destroyed, but what will deprive the Iranian regime of the ability to continue the war—and how the power already assembled in the theater can be concentrated to achieve it.

Published in Jerusalem Strategic Tribune September 02, 2026.

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

The Knesset will be asked over the coming month, meeting in special recess session, to vote on expansion of the defense budget for urgent IDF weapons procurement from NIS 70 billion to NIS 90b. (a rise from $20b. to $25b.).

This will push the annual defense budget to NIS 184b. (approximately $61b.). Israel’s long-term military buildup plan has grown by about NIS 50b. ($17b.) in just one year. And over the next decade, the military budget is expected to double yet still.

There is currently no identified full funding source for these enormous defense expenses. Ultimately, Israel will have to cut the budget of other ministries and impose new taxes.

There is no choice. The war with Iran and its proxies is far from over. In fact, 2027 is shaping up as a year of continued military conflict on all fronts – against Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Only God knows what kind of instability Israel may yet have to overcome on its eastern border, and the West Bank is unsettled too. Turkey is threatening Israel as well.

This is the overall security scenario Israel needs to be prepared for, under whatever government is elected in Jerusalem this fall.

Therefore, Israelis will need to dig their hands deeper than ever into their own pockets, especially since Israel must transition toward a more independent military industrial posture.

How Israel’s defense policies left the Jewish state unaware

Remember: Israel was caught flat-footed in 2023 by Hamas because of two decades of military downsizing and mistaken defense policies.

In 2013, then IDF chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz promulgated a misguided multiyear plan that accepted a significant decrease in funding to the IDF and shifted priorities away from the ground forces in favor of air force and cyber capabilities, intelligence, special operations forces, and standoff precision fire.

Gantz and then-defense minister Ehud Barak accepted the relative weakness of the maneuvering capabilities of the ground forces as a given. They did not think that the IDF would need to fight any army in the foreseeable future, nor have to conduct large-scale ground operations in enemy territory.

Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, the next IDF chief of staff, along with then-defense minister Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon, and later defense minister Avigdor Liberman, oversaw a continuation of the same hapless, dangerous policies.

The result: An IDF woefully unprepared – ideologically, doctrinally, and in terms of combat readiness and weapons supply – for years of hard war against deeply entrenched jihadist enemies.

The cost of this failure to prepare sufficiently: three years of warfare since late 2023 at a cost of approximately NIS 400b. ($134b.) in direct military expenses (ammunition, fuel, equipment, and personnel). It is likely that Israel spent more than $1b. alone on Arrow missile interceptions.

These figures do not include the cost of treatment and rehabilitation for 15,000 soldiers with varying degrees of injury, including many with long-term medical rehabilitation challenges plus trauma and other mental burdens. The numbers above also do not consider the tribulations and needs of 2,000 Israeli families with widows and orphans from this war.

Nor do the numbers above include necessary support for Israelis displaced from the Negev and Galilee, and the costs of rebuilding their cities and towns. In short, the defense and rehabilitation burden carried by Israelis is mammoth.

Israel already has decided that it needs a far larger military along with a more independent defense-industrial base. The latter is a hedge against embargoes – like the one imposed by the Biden administration when it decided in 2024 to delay delivery to Israel of 2,000-pound bombs.

In December 2025, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a plan to invest NIS 350b. (about $110b.) over the coming decade in the development of an independent Israeli arms industry. That has since grown to NIS 400b. ($133b.).

This year, two deals with Elbit totaling approximately NIS 1b. were signed – one for heavy aerial munitions and the other for the establishment of a national raw materials plant – a step described by the then-director-general of the Defense Ministry and current IDF chief of staff, Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir, as a central lesson of the war.

Contracts have been signed with Rafael to expand Iron Dome production, and with IAI to increase the production rate of Arrow interceptors.

Israel also is pouring resources into indigenous production of the Roem artillery gun, Barak tank, Namer tracked APC, and the Eitan wheeled combat vehicle.

The navy is advancing a blue-and-white shipbuilding program aimed at reducing dependence on foreign shipyards too, including production of five Reshef missile ships at Israel Shipyards at a cost of NIS 2.8b. ($780 million).

In terms of diversifying procurement sources, Israel is advancing joint production in India and importing components from the Far East, thus reducing dependence on the US. For example, Elbit is now co-producing the Hermes UAV and IAI is co-producing the Heron UAV in India with Indian defense contractors.

Development of new military technologies that allow Israel to stay a step ahead of its enemies are necessary too. An example of this is the Iron Beam air defense laser for which Israel has signed an initial $500m. contract with defense contractors Elbit and Rafael. If the system is proven successful, the outlay will rapidly increase to over $2b.

Overall, Israel’s defense spending as a percentage of GDP, which stood at 4.5% in 2023, has risen to a whopping 8.8% – the second highest in the world.

Alongside these heavy expenditures, Israel faces the immediate challenge of reshaping its security relationship with the US around the principle of reciprocity in production.

Israel’s 10-year security memorandum of understanding with the US (in which Congress allocated budget for Israeli military purchases in the US) expires in 2028, and will not be renewed as is.

A new accord should transition from a pattern of one-way dependence on American aid to a reciprocal production partnership.

The new logic is reflected in the American National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2027, which includes an initiative called the “US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” aimed at cooperation in the fields of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, directed energy, and autonomous systems.

Dr. Raphael BenLevi, a senior fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy, has penned a complete framework for post-aid strategic-industrial cooperation between the US and Israel. After speaking to just about everybody in the US and Israeli defense establishments and to senior leaders in the defense industries, he has written concrete language for a new MOU and an accompanying Letter of Intent.

BenLevi’s new framework relates to a phase-out of FMF (foreign military financing) from the US to Israel (a slow phase-out to allow for completion of existing contracts and a smooth transition), joint production of weapon systems, co-development of future-defense technologies, possibilities for integrated war fighting, enhanced intelligence sharing, the possibility of a limited US military footprint in Israel, regional cooperation opportunities, and ways for Israel to assist with broader US global interests.

In this way, Israel will strengthen its strategic value to the US, while reducing its vulnerability to boycotts and intense pressure in times of critical decisions.

The Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) also believes that such a shift will benefit both countries. “Closer alignment and cooperation with Israel across military, technological and economic lines of effort will help make America safer abroad, more prosperous at home and one step ahead of its adversaries,” it argues in a new report entitled “Shifting the Center of Gravity: Transforming the US-Israel Security Partnership.”

JINSA would have the two countries sign one more aid MOU to maintain $3.8b. in annual US assistance through fiscal year 2038, while pairing that funding with a series of initiatives designed to deepen operational and strategic integration between the two militaries over the long term.

It suggests a “Model Ally” status for Israel that would provide a framework for deeper joint research and development, co-production, and reciprocal offsets. The report argues that greater integration of the two countries’ defense industries would strengthen their respective industrial bases and supply chains.

JINSA also supports a larger US military footprint in Israel, including a permanent air force presence at Israel’s Uvda Air Force Base, a forward CENTCOM headquarters in Israel for regional planning, expansion and modernization of the prepositioned US arsenal hub and war reserve stockpile in Israel, and even a limited US-Israel mutual defense treaty (with a deliberately narrow threshold for activation).

Thankfully, the miracle of Israel’s wartime economy and its hi-tech prowess make such aid transitions feasible for Israel and worthwhile for the US – something that was considered unfathomable just a few years ago.

Published in the Jerusalem Post, at August 29, 2026.

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

Response to U.S. Central Command’s Request for Ideas on Punishing Iran

The unusual request by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) for new ideas on action against Iran offers a rare glimpse into the dead end into which the American campaign has drifted.

According to a CNN report, an officer in CENTCOM’s intelligence branch circulated a request to a wide group of military analysts asking for “creative and unconventional” ways to pressure and punish Iran. Military sources described the solicitation—akin to a form of professional crowdsourcing—as an unusual step. In its response, CENTCOM did not deny the report; instead, it explained that its commander, Admiral Brad Cooper, routinely turns to members of his staff regardless of rank in order to improve operational performance.

Broad consultation is, of course, a worthy practice. Yet it is difficult to ignore the timing and the wording of the request. The appeal was sent after weeks of strikes that failed to alter Iran’s negotiating position, and at a moment when the U.S. administration is weighing how to continue the war. At the same time, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, acknowledged that “air power has its limits.”

The request supplies four important pieces of evidence about the war the United States is waging against Iran.

First Evidence: This Is a War of Attrition

The use of the words “pressure” and “punishment” is not accidental. It reveals the American concept of the war: to inflict on Iran a sequence of heavy blows, gradually erode its capabilities, and persuade its leadership that the price has become too high to continue bearing. At that point Iran is expected to relent, come to the negotiating table, and accept terms it has so far rejected.

This is the practical definition of a war of attrition. The United States is not denying Iran the ability to continue fighting; it is trying gradually to influence Iran’s will to do so. It is not defeating the enemy in order to impose its own terms of surrender; it is punishing the enemy in the hope that it will agree to negotiate the terms of an ending.

Attrition is not necessarily a failure. It can serve as a temporary, deliberate phase within a broader decisive concept: controlled waiting until capabilities and political conditions ripen for a move that removes the threat. The failure lies not in the use of attrition itself, but in the absence of a plan for transitioning from it to decision.

In the war the United States is currently conducting against Iran, there is no sign of such a plan. Attrition is not a bridge to a decisive phase—it is the strategy. That is the difference between attrition as a means and attrition as a substitute for decision.

Second Evidence: The Punishment Is Not Achieving Its Purpose

Had the sequence of blows brought Iran to the negotiating table on American terms, CENTCOM would not have needed an extraordinary call for additional ideas on how to punish it.

This does not mean Iran is not being hurt. It is absorbing heavy damage. But inflicting pain on the enemy is not the same as achieving the war’s objective. If the blows do not change the adversary’s decisions, adding more targets and punishments may simply enlarge the stockpile of damage without bringing the war any closer to an end.

The United States can determine the intensity of every blow it delivers against Iran. It cannot determine how many blows will be required before the Iranian leadership decides to relent.

This is Iran’s great advantage in a war of attrition: the United States controls the intensity of the blows, but Iran controls the number of blows it is prepared to absorb—and thereby the duration of the war, the timing of its end, and indirectly the size of the U.S. military’s munitions inventory. If Washington’s patience runs out before Tehran’s capacity for endurance is broken, Iran can achieve its aim simply by surviving until the adversary tires.

The pressures exerted by regional states on Washington to avoid escalation reinforce this advantage. The longer the war continues, the more opportunities arise for political, coalition, and economic considerations to halt the next strike before its purpose has been achieved.

Third Evidence: The Denial Doctrine Is Being Tested

Conducting the war as an accumulation of erosions, blows, and punishments is consistent with the denial concept associated with Elbridge Colby and influential in U.S. defense policy: the application of limited, graduated force to deny the adversary gains, alter its calculations, and bring it to negotiation without being drawn into a war of decision.

Yet when gradual erosion becomes a substitute for decision, the war becomes uncontrollable. A great power retains control over the intensity of each action, but not over the number of actions that will be required until the enemy changes its will. Choosing a path supposedly designed to reduce risks transfers control of the war’s clock to the enemy.

CENTCOM’s request suggests that the United States is losing patience before Iran loses the will to continue. If that is the case, it constitutes an important Iranian achievement.

The alternative is not stronger punishment, but a different logic of war. A war of decision does not try to persuade the enemy to yield through the accumulation of pain; it denies the enemy the ability to continue fighting effectively, whatever its will may be.

It requires identifying the centers of gravity of the adversary’s war system, the assets essential to its functioning, and the vulnerabilities in their defense; concentrating effort against them; and neutralizing them in a way that triggers a cascade and dismantles the system. Once the enemy has been decided, one can dictate the terms for ending the war. There is no longer any need to wait until it agrees to come to the negotiating table.

Fourth Evidence: The Commander Has Disappeared from the War

The fact that the request originated in the intelligence branch and was directed at military analysts reveals a deeper failure.

Intelligence is essential for knowing the enemy, exposing its capabilities, identifying vulnerabilities, and locating targets. Fire-support elements are essential for destroying them. But they are not a substitute for generalship, whose role is to conceive the operational idea that will decide the enemy and, in its light, to extract the full potential of the army’s resources—even when most of them are standoff fires—so as to produce that decision.

The problem is not that CENTCOM is consulting. Every professional staff must gather information, examine alternatives, and conduct war games. The problem is the blurring of the boundary between the collection of raw material and the synthesizing work of generalship.

A systemic operational idea is not a pile of suggestions, nor a list of targets that can be crowdsourced. It is an intellectual creation of a commander, born of the linkage between the political purpose, an understanding of the enemy system, the principles of war and their reflection in historical precedents, available capabilities, and changing reality.

The precise war of attrition, managed as the destruction of targets by standoff fires, has created a tight, direct link between intelligence (which collects the targets) and the fire elements (which destroy them). The faster and more efficient this cycle becomes, the more the commander is pushed out of his unique role: to identify, in light of the war’s purpose, the system that must be collapsed and dismantled, to select the asset critical to its continued functioning, and to conceive a stratagem that will bring about its collapse.

Thus a self-reinforcing cycle is created. The attrition doctrine seemingly reduces the need for operational-command thinking; as that thinking diminishes it atrophies, and the military becomes still more dependent on erosion, punishment, and target destruction. Intelligence offers still more targets, fires destroy them—and the war continues.

This is not only an American problem. In the IDF as well, the tight link between intelligence and fires has pushed the commander aside and replaced systemic stratagem with target-production metrics. The technical success of the strike chain has obscured the fact that destroying many targets does not necessarily dismantle the enemy’s war system so as to decide and subdue it quickly on our terms.

The question CENTCOM should be asking is not “What else can we hit?” but “What holds the Iranian war system together as a system, and how can it be dismantled?”

Intelligence looks for targets. Generalship looks for systems and the most effective way to decide them.

A Possible Response to CENTCOM’s Request

It is neither wise nor responsible to offer CENTCOM additional targets for intensifying the punishment of Iran. It is far better to use the invitation to propose an American-Israeli commanders’ seminar to examine the principal reason the war is dragging on: the choice to wage it according to the attrition doctrine, without a plan for transitioning to decision.

Both armies have a distinguished history of successful wars of decision, and both share a need to strengthen once again the generalship that the attrition doctrine has atrophied.

In such a seminar one could briefly refresh the principles of a war of decision and analyze systems that were decided by brilliant operational stratagems: Washington’s stratagem at Trenton, Winfield Scott’s campaign that captured Mexico City, Patton’s rapid turnaround in the Battle of the Bulge, MacArthur’s landing at Inchon, and Schwarzkopf’s stratagem in the first Gulf War. The campaigns the IDF conducted in the previous century are likewise a rich source of stratagems and decisions, some of them brilliant.

Thereafter, if the Americans agree, commanders from both countries could jointly examine, on the basis of current intelligence, an operational idea for the rapid decision of the Iranian war system—using the means available to the United States and Israel, primarily standoff fires, and without departing from the war aims that have been set.

An emergency seminar held in the midst of a war cannot last more than a few hours. It may jump-start decisive thinking and produce a systemic idea, but it cannot close the gaps in knowledge and skill that have accumulated over more than two decades in which both armies drifted away from the doctrine of decision.

Such a seminar can therefore serve only as an immediate response, not as a fundamental remedy. A follow-on article will present a broader proposal for rebuilding the generalship that the attrition doctrine has eroded, drawing on the historical experience of the American and Israeli armies in restoring the professional competence of their commanders.

There is no need for yet another list of targets for stronger punishment of Iran. What is needed is a redefinition of the problem and commanders who know how to solve it.

CENTCOM asked for ideas to expand and deepen the punishment of Iran. Israel can place at its disposal a different proposal: not more targets, but a key— the transition from deterrent punishment, erosion, and attrition to rapid decision.

Published in The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune on August 21, 2026.

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

Unless Israel draws concrete red lines in Syria and the eastern Mediterranean, the Turkish army and navy will further encroach upon Israel’s northern and maritime borders. Israel could find itself facing Turkish tanks on the Golan Heights and Turkish frigates off the coast of Caesarea.

This is the warning I heard this week from a very senior Israeli intelligence official. The warning echoes the alarm expressed in the 2025 Nagel Commission report (which evaluated Israel’s security budget and force buildup) about the Turkish drive toward an Islamist-jihadist regional order with Ottoman-era hegemonic ambitions.

Israel must be prepared, the commission’s report cautioned, for direct confrontation with Ankara and with Syrian proxies and armies aligned with Turkey. “The threat from Syria could evolve into something even more dangerous than the Iranian threat,” the report stated.

This threatening reality explains the Israeli air strike several days ago on an airbase near Idlib in northern Syria, where the Turks apparently were setting up a radar and air defense system that was meant to interfere with the IAF’s operations in the north.

The Israeli strike sent a stark signal to Turkey’s radical Islamist dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Syrian satrap, the former ISIS terrorist named Ahmed al-Sharaa (a.k.a. Mohammed al-Julani), to back off.

Understand: Erdogan is a true-blue believing anti-Semite of the old school, who considers classic antisemitic myths like the Protocols of the Elder of Zion (where Jews control the global banking and media conglomerates) as truth. He honestly hates Jews and Israelis, and he openly seeks to lead a pan-Islamic coalition to crush Israel – while remaining a member of NATO.

Erdogan is anchoring a Sunni alliance of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Qatar (with some Egyptian role too) that has a malodourous anti-American and anti-Israeli scent. Erdogan has even drafted a model constitution for an Islamic confederation meant to replace NATO. According to US President Trump, Erdogan’s military was prepared to join Iran’s war against Israel this year until Trump “asked” Erdogan not to do so.

But that has not stopped Erdogan from siding with Russia against the West in defense of Iran and in support of the Iranian economy and Iranian war effort, and from hosting Hamas military headquarters. All the while, he petitions gullible Europeans for goodies, and lobbies his friend US President Donald Trump for engines for Turkey’s homegrown fighter jet and for advanced American F-35 fighter jets.

Trump and his special envoy to Turkey and Syria Tom Barrack (who is wildly solicitous towards Erdogan and Jolani) have stuffed their mouths with cotton balls and have nothing to say about Erdogan’s much-too-close alignment with Russia, China, and Iran; Erdogan’s long-term military occupation of northern Cyprus and northern Syria; and the diplomatic and military war he is waging (for the moment, mainly behind the scenes) against Israel.

Israel has not declared and does not want to consider Turkey an enemy country, but it cannot ignore Turkey’s military buildup and its encroachment – nay, its essential takeover of Syria and attempt to extend its military reach to Israel’s borders.

This week’s Israeli strike was designed to push back against Turkish air intrusion, and Israel will certainly strike again if Erdogan insists on expanding his military presence in Syria or attempts to rebuild the Syrian air force.

But the more immediate Turkish threat comes from its large navy, since Erdogan repeatedly threatens to wage war with Israel over gas fields in the Mediterranean.

The Turkish navy has tens of frigates, destroyers, and amphibious landing craft, as well as 12 submarines. It is now building six more submarines along with 24 new frigates and destroyers.

By comparison, the too-small Israeli navy has 15 missile ships, six submarines, and a dozen cruisers. Israel will soon add naval helicopters to its defensive arsenal. It is no surprise that the Nagel Commission recommended a massive build-up of the Israeli navy as a priority expenditure.

At the moment, NATO cannot afford a complete rupture with a country that controls the Turkish Straits and hosts US nuclear weapons. But at the very least, a “reciprocity standard” should be applied to Turkey. Contracts with that country must be tied to its foreign policy and military conduct.

Human rights standards should pertain to Turkey too. Erdogan has jailed more journalists, judges, generals, and academics than any other country in the world, including China. He is building 40,000 new jail cells to handle the overload. He is creating an authoritarian system to suit his imperial purposes.

So, Erdogan needs to be cut down to size, and his madly ferocious foreign and military policies put in a box. American and European leaders who prioritize stability in the region ought to weigh-in against Erdogan’s overly ambitious and aggressive schemes.

They should not be censuring Israel when it necessarily acts to drive Erdogan back from the brink.

Remember: The past three years of devastating enemy attacks on Israel taught Israelis an important lesson – which is the need to maintain a proactive defense posture including strategic ascendancy against enemies near and far.

Consequently, Israel will not return to the containment policies of recent decades that prioritized restraint and diplomacy over enemy degradation and military triumph. This approach allowed enemies to develop attack capabilities under the cover of diplomatic breathing time; what some Western officials mistakenly called periods of “stability.”

That approach blew-up in Israel’s face, with terror and invasion from the West Bank and Gaza and from Syria and Lebanon, and with the march of Iran’s nuclear bomb program to near completion and Iran’s ballistic missile array to near-annihilation-of-Israel potential.

The lessons Israel has learned apply to Turkey too. From Idlib to Erbil, Israel will attack, if necessary, not defend. It will insist on jihadist-free buffer zones along its borders with Lebanon and Syria. It will not tolerate the placement on its doorstep of equilibrium-breaking strategic weapon systems nor abide the advance of threatening foreign armies and navies.

Published in the Jerusalem Post, on August 21, 2026.

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

Israelis have every reason in the world to seriously doubt the American-hatched plans to bring peace to Israel’s southern and northern borders.

In both Gaza and Lebanon there are deeply entrenched, well-equipped, Iranian-backed terrorist armies arrayed against Israel. Nobody has yet met an Islamist truly willing to give up his weapons.

Now, you’ve got to give the Jared Kushner-driven American diplomacy some credit for trying to defang Hamas and Hezbollah and transform the regional security situation. Remember that nobody in Israel believed that Kushner and his team would be able to wedge Hamas into releasing all remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza. There was a one-in-one-thousand chance of that happening, and yet it did.

The new American plans are dreamy-delicious too, at least on paper – perhaps hallucinatory, perhaps possible.

Hamas is supposed to be stripped of its weapons (guns, rockets, missiles, underground bunkers and weapons storehouses, and terror attack tunnels) and Gaza is supposed to be demilitarized by an “International Stabilization Force” (ISF) of Moroccan, Albanian and other troops. Hamas rule is supposed to be replaced by a neutral (non-Hamas) “technocratic government.” Members of this government and its “new” police force are supposed to be “vetted” for their peaceful intentions.

Hezbollah in Lebanon is similarly, hypothetically, going to be “decommissioned” or driven out of southern Lebanon by the ghostly, Hezbollah-penetrated weakling army known as the “Lebanese Armed Forces.” This near-fictious force, overseen by international observers from the US and reportedly by Italy, Switzerland and Indonesia too, are to “verify” Hezbollah’s disarmament and disappearance.

This is notionally wonderful! But both Hamas and Hezbollah vociferously deny that they will disarm (except perhaps performatively, imaginarily, a bit for the cameras), and they certainly have not abandoned their declared ideological commitments to the destruction of Israel.

And none of the presumed peacekeepers, observers, verifiers, vetters, stabilizers, and guarantors are going to actually, militarily, kinetically confront Hamas and Hezbollah gunmen. Never ever, none of them, not with a single bullet, never mind with a company of commandos.

Worse still, even before implementation of the plan for Gaza gets going, the so-called US-led “Board of Peace” already is backsliding from the commitments it made to Israel in the 20-point plan signed last fall.

In the original plan (point 13) Hamas’ infrastructure was to be “destroyed and not rebuilt” and its weapons confiscated and put “permanently beyond use.”

However, article 8 of recently enunciated “road map” for implementation of the grand peace plan downgrades to a situation where weapons are to be “decommissioned and stored,” and only after establishment of a new “National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (a “technocratic” government staffed by people undoubtedly loyal to Hamas, after “vetting” by the plan’s guarantors like Hamas backers Qatar and Turkey).

“Destroyed” and removed from Gaza has become weapons “stored” in Gaza (meaning that the weapons will be accessible in future to Hamas, “subject to Palestinian law”), and the new governing body now precedes Hamas’ disarmament rather than following it.

Plus, there is a new invented category of weapons, “personal weapons” – whatever that means – which will be allowed to Gazans (Hamas chieftains, gorillas, goons, and the like), not confiscated.

Furthermore, the “stabilization force” is no longer defined as a “long term internal security solution working alongside Israel” but as a buffer force between Gaza and Israel (see article 12), meaning that it has no policing role versus Hamas but will be there to prevent the IDF from operating against terrorist threats as they develop; in other words, it will protect Hamas.

AGAIN, Hamas (like Hezbollah) has no intentions of voluntarily disarming itself, and no one other than Israel will truly do the necessary job. Nobody but the IDF is going to do battle with Hamas, and this must be a constant battle.

Alas, Israel already is being forced into a situation where the IDF’s hands are tied. Targeted strikes against Hamas commanders and even against heavily armed Hamas shock troops probing Israeli defenses along the Gaza borders have dropped over the past two weeks to almost zero. This, reportedly at the insistence of the US.

This is a major mistake. What disrupts the ability of terrorist organizations like Hamas to rebuild and conduct attacks on Israel is the constant pressure of targeted counterterrorist operations. As long as they live under a constant Israeli threat, the leaders and operatives of these genocidal gangs are forced to live as hunted men – in hiding, in restrictive operational settings.

Furthermore, to prevent a surprise attack against Israel, it is essential to deny the enemy the ability to organize and prepare. Halting or significantly reducing Israel’s counterterrorism operations gives the enemy the confidence and sense of immunity that it currently lacks.

According to reports, the 600 trucks a day of “reconstruction” and food supplies now going into Gaza are largely being “requestioned, “repurposed,” and otherwise “taxed” by Hamas for its military rebuilding. Hamas’ fighting force is apparently back at 40,000 strong.

Consequently, Israel needs to keep things simple. Kindly Kushner plans aside, and with best wishes for their success, Israel nevertheless must maintain freedom of action to conduct counterterrorism operations.

As a matter of principle and practical defense policy, Israel must forcefully respond to every attack or attempt to attack Israel, and it must interdict emerging security threats in real time – not “restrain” itself to “keep the peace process alive.”

Additionally, it cannot and must not withdraw from the security zones currently held before the terrorists have been totally disarmed and their organizations genuinely dismantled.

The containment policies of recent decades that prioritized restraint and diplomacy over enemy degradation and military triumph – failed. This approach allowed enemies to develop attack capabilities under the cover of diplomatic breathing time; what some Western officials mistakenly called periods of “stability.”

That approach blew-up in Israel’s face, with terror and invasion from the West Bank and Gaza and from Syria and Lebanon, and with the march of Iran’s nuclear bomb program to near completion and Iran’s ballistic missile array to near-annihilation-of-Israel potential.

Israel today understands that it must continue to make fierce and overwhelming moves against enemy strongholds from Gaza City to Beirut and Isfahan. Israel must attack, not defend. It must initiate, not respond. It must hunt down its enemies, not be hounded by them or be reined in by whimsical international agreements.

Israel must maintain a proactive defense posture including tactical and strategic ascendancy against enemies near and far.

On this, there is a broad consensus in Israel that crosses party lines. Gadi Eisencott and Naftali Bennett have been just as critical as Binyamin Netanyahu of the latest peace plan implementation proposals outlined by Nickolay Mladedov. With Hamas in the neighborhood, they know that the IDF must constantly be on the offensive. They know that Israeli public opinion won’t brook any compromise in this regard. 

No Israeli leader can be anything but dubious, too, of the tactical LAF test-takeover of two tiny villages in southern Lebanon where Hezbollah used to be based until Israeli troops rooted them out the hard way.

The likelihood that this can be expanded to all southern Lebanon and hold for the long-term without challenge by Hezbollah and its Iranian patron is slim to nil, even with Italian, Swiss, and Indonesian observers. The pilot project is likely no more than a Lebanese public relations endeavor.

Remember UNIFIL, which still impotently and even harmfully hangs around the zone? Is the American team going to propose the evil supervision services of Turkey and Qatar (and perhaps al-Jolani’s Syria) in south Lebanon too?

Color me amicably appreciative but stubbornly skeptical of the latest attempts to fashion fanciful diplomatic harmonies on Israel’s borders – an attitude born of hard-bitten experience.

Published in The Jerusalem Post 14.08.2026.

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

Those who interpret Israeli rejection of the “15-Point Implementation Outline” for Gaza as capitulation to political constraints or as an electoral ploy are ignoring the profound shift that has taken place in Israeli public opinion. Israelis today doubt the ability of international actors or diplomatic agreements to prevent Hamas from rearming and rebuilding its military strength. The true test of policy is what happens on the ground.

Growing Israeli public pressure regarding security policy in Gaza and Lebanon is one expression of the profound change that has taken place in Israeli public opinion. Since the events of October 7 and the “Swords of Iron” war, the government and the military leadership have been under intense public scrutiny. Any arrangement or move that does not guarantee a fundamental change in the security reality is perceived as a threat to the achievements of the war.

The sentiment among broad segments of the public is that diplomatic deals are nothing more than a lifeline for the enemy’s survival, temporary arrangements that allow Hamas and Hezbollah to rebuild their fighting forces in preparation for the next inevitable confrontation with Israel.

When this is the prevailing sentiment on the Israeli street, one cannot expect Israel’s political leadership to pursue a course that runs counter to it. Even more so when Israel’s military brass also is warning that the proposed framework for Gaza is a Hamas “strategic ambush.”

It cannot be denied that the alternative – continuation of the war effort against Hamas and Hezbollah – entails significant costs. However, this must be considered in context of the high costs Israel may have to pay if the enemy is left standing strong.

There is no need to delve far into memories of the past to understand the consequences of “closing a deal” with a determined enemy that has not yet been defeated. Hezbollah’s rapid return to active fighting against Israel in March of last year, alongside the pattern of deception and defiance that Iran is currently conducting vis-à-vis the Trump administration, provide a fresh illustration of this.

Shortly after Netanyahu’s statement rejecting the “15-Point Outline,” Hamas issued a public statement revealing the great hopes it places in that plan. Hamas reaffirmed its commitment to the understandings and called for a clear timetable to be established for their implementation. It emphasized that the movement’s absolute priority at the “current stage” is a permanent ceasefire, a full withdrawal, the opening of the crossings, and the reconstruction of the Strip.

For anyone unfamiliar with Hamas terminology, the words “at the current stage” make clear that Hamas has in no way abandoned its long-term objectives. This is merely a temporary adjustment of its priorities in light of Israel’s military pressure.

The Israeli media quoted anonymous senior officials from the “Council of Peace” who played down the significance of Netanyahu’s declaration. They suggested that Israeli policy should be judged by actions on the ground rather than by words and declarations, and claimed that in practice Israel is implementing the plan; that it has ceased targeted strikes on Hamas terrorist figures and is maintaining the ceasefire.

From Hamas’s perspective, the restraint of Israel’s military activity, together with the “creative ideas” contained in the plan, gives Hamas what it needs more than anything else: hope and breathing room.

Indeed, there is no better way to clarify Israeli policy than through actions on the ground. Israel must resume targeted strikes on terrorist leaders and proactive operations against terrorist groups, rather than contenting itself with defensive measures or the removal of immediate threats.

Every moment in which the terrorist elements are not being pursued is exploited by them for reconstruction, reorganization, and planning of the next attack. It is preferable to risk diplomatic criticism from Washington for deviating from the line it is attempting to lead than to pay the price of restraint.

Another Challenge—The “Sunni Alliance”

The signing of the “Mecca Joint Defense Agreement” (MJDA) between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan is another source of concern for Israel. On paper, it is a force multiplier that combines the strengths of three key states: Riyadh’s stable financial resources, geopolitical position, and religious influence; Islamabad’s operational experience and nuclear umbrella; and Ankara’s military power, defense industry, and NATO membership.

However, embedded within this synergy are inherent tensions and divided interests. Each side of the triangle is immersed in its own campaign. Pakistan is bound by its historic rivalry with India, Turkey is embroiled in the Syrian quagmire and in eastern Mediterranean disputes, and Saudi Arabia is focused on its existential struggle against Iran, the Houthis, and the proxies of the Shiite axis.

This development primarily signals an acceleration of regional preparations for an era of uncertainty. The three countries are coalescing into a powerful Sunni axis seeking to constitute a counterweight to other regional actors. It reflects a shared understanding that the Iranian threat is here to stay and that this requires preparedness for extreme scenarios.

Beyond that, the alliance expresses an overt desire for a partnership that bypasses Israel and does not rely exclusively on Washington. The paradox is striking. Turkey is a NATO member, Pakistan maintains longstanding military ties with the Pentagon, and Saudi Arabia hosts US forces and relies on American weapons. Thus, this is not a complete abandonment of the United States, but rather a diversification of sources, an expansion of room for maneuver, and greater strategic flexibility. This framework could serve as a lever not only for security coordination, but also for advancing diplomatic aspirations and cross-continental economic initiatives—alongside an expansion of Turkey’s regional influence under Erdoğan’s vision.

In this context, it is interesting to examine not only who joined the alliance, but also who chose to remain outside it—and foremost among them, the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi’s close relations with the United States, India, and Israel, alongside its disagreements with Riyadh, apparently tipped the balance in favor of remaining outside this framework.

For Israel, the bottom line is clear. Alongside the supreme and uncompromising effort necessary against Iran and its proxies, Israel must remain alert to the conduct of the new Sunni axis. Jerusalem must work to reduce this axis’s involvement in core issues that concern it, while simultaneously accelerating and strengthening strategic cooperation with India, the United Arab Emirates, and countries of the eastern Mediterranean.

“Wise is the Man Who is always Fearful”

The excitement that was recorded this week, following a media report about the “diplomatic deception exercise” planned against Israel, is a healthy public reaction, against the backdrop of the war in Gaza and considering the upheavals affecting the countries of the region.

According to the report, which is still subject to censorship restrictions, an actor in one key neighboring country advised an actor from another country that does not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel to sign a peace agreement with Israel; and after a period of “numbing” Israel (lulling it to sleep) and secret preparations, to launch a surprise war against Israel.

One may assume that such a scenario is not outside the spectrum of possibilities considered by anyone involved in diplomatic contacts of this kind or in the intelligence framework surrounding them.

Under the influence of the trauma of the Yom Kippur War, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Israel in November 1977 was suspected by senior figures in the Israeli system of being a deception operation, and caution was certainly not excessive.

It will be difficult to resolve the doubts regarding the true intentions of the adversarial interlocutor. The way to deal with them is to maintain wide margins of safety, not to exchange tangible assets for any document or diplomatic deal, and to keep in mind that an agreement—any agreement—could be violated. Even an accord signed with an actor who genuinely and sincerely wants peace with Israel may not last forever. Positions change over time, and leaders may be replaced by other leaders whose positions are different.

Therefore, Israel must not relinquish its aspirations for peace, but those aspirations must not cause Israel to abandon its better judgment.

Published in  Israel Hayom, August 17, 2026.  

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) are rich with Jewish national heritage sites. It is the Biblical heartland. The physical record of the Biblical narrative lies in the ground with thousands of known archaeological sites (and perhaps thousands yet more undocumented sites), providing incontrovertible evidence that connects the Jewish People to the Land of Israel. 

This is precisely why ever since the start of the Oslo process the Palestinian Authority (PA) has acted to destroy archaeological sites in Judea and Samaria – purposefully plundering Jewish antiquities, razing historical Jewish sites, and working in international institutions to erase the Jewish/Israeli identity of such places. 

This year the PA submitted a long list of obviously and undeniably Jewish historical sites to the World Heritage List at UNESCO, rebranding the sites as “Palestinian” or “Islamic” heritage locations while expunging any Jewish association to them. UNESCO appears to be slap happily going along with this political looting of Jewish/Israeli history. 

Indeed, the bludgeon that the PA and its backers at UNESCO have taken to Jewish heritage sites in Israel is like the sledgehammer that ISIS took to world heritage sites such as Mosul and Nimrud in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. 

UNESCO essentially has become an agency of annihilation, a willing partner in a campaign of systematic Jewish identity erasure. This amounts to cultural genocide. 

REMEMBER THAT, according to UNESCO, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is not really the Temple Mount. Back in 2018 that morally bankrupt international organization passed a series of nonsensical resolutions (proposed by PA dictator Mahmoud Abbas) declaring Jerusalem an exclusively Moslem heritage city and criminalizing Israel’s custodianship of the holy city. 

The major vote was taken davka, specifically, on Chanukah, a Jewish holiday that marks the liberation and rededication of the Temple by the Maccabees in the second century BCE. Most European nations, those great paragons of “peace” and “love” for Jews, went along with that affront, either voting for or abstaining on the denialist resolutions. 

They then doubled down on the perfidy by adopting in 2021 a similar resolution in the UN General Assembly which disavowed Jewish ties to the Temple Mount and called it solely by its Moslem name, al-Haram al-Sharif. 

At Palestinian urging, UNESCO also has disgracefully declared Hebron and its Cave of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, and Tel Jericho, as “State of Palestine” heritage sites. 

Last month, at the cultural-genocide bloody behest of that same so-called “state,” UNESCO declared Sebastia/Samaria – the capital of the biblical Kingdom of Israel – as a Palestinian-associated World Heritage site. This, despite ongoing PA looting of the site (which falls partially in Area A of Judea and Samaria) and its building of homes over the ancient Israelite, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine relics. 

Fortunately, Israel very recently begun to assert its rights at Sebastia by driving off the Palestinian marauders, resuming professional archaeological digs there, and beginning to invest in touristic development of the site. 

Now, UNESCO is considering declaration of a series of 22 additional properties in Judea and Samaria as Palestinian cultural assets under the World Heritage Convention. 

This outrageously includes sites of core Jewish patrimony like Qumran and its Dead Sea Scrolls, Herodian, Solomon’s Pools and the aqueducts leading to King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, Mount Gerizim, the Cave of Chariton, Tel Rumeida in Hebron, and the Hasmonean aqueducts in Wadi Qelt (Nahal Prat) with the Hasmonean palaces at the lower end of the wadi. 

All these sites are in Israeli-controlled territory, and none bear a historical or cultural connection under any plausible claim to “Palestinian heritage.” The PA list includes ancient Christian sites as well such as the Saint Hilarion Monastery in Gaza, now politically, ridiculously repackaged as a “Palestinian heritage” site. 

And of course, note this too: According to the PA and its UNESCO submissions, none of these sites are in the “Judean” desert or mountains – because using the true historical name of Judea would be an implicit acknowledgment of the Jewish People’s connection to the land. 

To wipe away Jewish history, the PA has instead invented new terminology for the territory. Thus, Judea disappears from the narrative, replaced by fabricated labels such as “Al Bariyah – Desert and Monasteries.” 

THIS JEWISH identity erasure campaign extends from historical denial to physical destruction. The PA owns a clear patten of archaeological persecution and demolition. 

According to the valiant Israeli NGO “Preserving the Eternal,” 80% of the 400 or so most significant heritage sites in Judea and Samaria have been damaged by “industrial-scale” Palestinian looting and the use of heavy machinery to bulldoze archeological sites for roads, factories and “agricultural projects” – read: purposeful bowdlerization of anything Jewish. (The numbers are from a five-year-old report and probably much worse today.) 

Three shocking examples pertain to the Temple Mount, Joshua’s Altar on Mount Ebal, and Solomon’s Pools. 

In 1999, the PA-led Wakf conducted vast, illegal construction projects on the Temple Mount and beneath it, willfully destroying centuries of Jewish archaeological treasures. Four hundred trucks full of archaeologically rich soil were unceremoniously dumped by the Wakf into the Kidron Valley. Thousands of artifacts from the Temple periods have since been found through careful sifting of the debris by Israeli archaeologists. 

On Mount Ebal near Nablus a large archaeological site identified by the late Prof. Adam Zartal as the altar of Joshua has been imperiled. (See the Book of Joshua chapter 8, where a dramatic ceremony reaffirming G-d’s covenant with the Jewish People was held in the area after the early stages of conquest of the Land of Israel). 

The PA drew up plans to pave over the site with roads and 24 high-rise housing units, and in 2001 Palestinian contractors ground part of the ancient stone fencing at the site to make gravel for roads. 

Recently, Israel halted renewed Palestinian attempts to vandalize the spot, and has approved establishment of a yeshiva and a settlement nearby that also will protect the archaeological site. 

Another infuriating episode relates to the incredible aqueduct identified as King Solomon’s water system for Jerusalem. This runs from Hebron through Bethlehem to Jerusalem, including what is today termed “Solomon’s Pools” southwest of Bethlehem. 

This marvel of ancient engineering, 40 km. long, is described in detail in the Bible, and the description matches the archaeological findings precisely. The pools and aqueducts survived 2,000 years of summer and winter and many invaders and predators – until the arrival of the Palestinian Authority. 

In 2022, the PA dug an enormous 1,500 dunam quarry pit at Beit Fajar right through a section of the aqueduct. The quarrying caused irreversible damage to the aqueducts, with some 100 meters of tunnel and approximately 2,000 meters of the aqueduct on either side of the tunnel reduced to rubble. 

Only recently has the government of Israel (finally!) stepped-in to prevent further damage to the relics and to develop the site for organized biblical tourism. 

THE ISRAELI cabinet has just approved NIS 113 million in government funding for protection and development of 70 Judea and Samaria heritage sites. This budget allocation was advanced by Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu. 

While insufficient given the scale of the challenge, this funding signals a shift in policy. Enforcement has increased, site development and public access have begun, and after decades of neglect and looting, long-buried historical treasures are being uncovered. The discoveries are significant, with the potential to reshape global scholarship on entire historical periods of importance to world heritage. 

Some examples: At Hyrcania, near the Jerusalem-Dead Sea highway, a fortress marking the fall of the Hasmonean Kingdom is being revealed as a “mini-Masada,” complete with siege systems, underground chambers, inscriptions, and ritual baths.

At the Alexandrion fortress on Mount Sartaba, mentioned in the Mishna in connection with signal fires that inspired today’s Yom Haatzmaut torch-lighting ceremony, excavations are producing dramatic new findings too.

 Every such archaeological excavation is a victory over Palestinian denialism and UNESCO’s ISIS-like efforts at Jewish erasure.

 Published in The Jerusalem Post 07.08.2026 and Israel Hayom 08.08.2026

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

On the eve of Tisha BeAv (which is the day of Jewish national mourning for the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temples and 2,000 subsequent years of exile from Israel), I ascended the Temple Mount, Har HaBayit.

It was an opportunity to pray at the sacred-most site in the world for Jews, to mourn the many misfortunes of Jewish history, and to rejoice in the slow but inevitable Jewish return to makom haShechinah, the apex of God’s presence in the Land of Israel. A whirlwind mix of emotions.

I discovered a massive improvement in opportunities for Jewish/Israeli visitation of the site as compared to my previous journeys in 2022, and opportunities for yet more Jewish/Israeli rootedness on the holy mount. More on this below.

But first I had to answer for myself these questions: Is permissible under halacha (Jewish law) to ascend the Temple Mount, given the religious holiness of the site and the ritual impurity imputed by Orthodox Jewish tradition to all people in our day? Even if this is possible, am I worthy of making this pilgrimage? Is the ascent to the Temple Mount worthwhile and necessary? And might it be recklessly provocative from a diplomatic perspective?

My answers to these four questions: Yes, perhaps, definitely, and defiantly no.

Permissible: After four years of study with scholars, I am convinced that it is possible today to walk around the outskirts of the expansive Temple Mount plaza without transgressing Torah law – after appropriate ritual and devotional preparation and under the strict guidance of Torah sages.

(You avoid the raised platform on which the Dome of the Rock rests and adjacent sections, because according to halachic literature and modern research this is where the First and Second Temples and their courtyards were located.)

My guide this week was Rabbi Elisha Wolfson, who has published a comprehensive volume on the matter, and who leads a Torah study session on the mount every day. He calls himself Head of the Har HaBayit Kollel.

Leading figures that not only permit but mandate such visits include rabbis Avi Gisser, Dov Lior, Eliezer Melamed, Elyakim Levanon, Reem HaCohen, Shabtai Rappaport, Tamir Granot, Tzfania Drori, Yaakov Medan, Yehuda Shlush, Yitzhak Shilat, Yuval Sirlow, and Zeev Weitman.

Meritorious: I am less sure of my personal worthiness in approaching the Divine Presence on the Mount. But in daring to do so I am relying on the merits of my illustrious ancestors and saintly sons (all long-serving Israeli soldiers and yeshiva-trained scholars of upstanding character). Their virtues, and the sacrifices of so many Israelis in recent wars, give me confidence that the Heavens are smiling on reclamation of the Temple Mount; approving of every demonstration of increased Jewish devotion.

Worthwhile: Properly conducted, a visit to the Temple Mount can be an awe-inspiring experience. Theological anxiety and religious exhilaration pulse through the territory and concentrate the mind. The visit is an opportunity to focus one’s thoughts on the truly important things in life and to swiftly convey them to the Almighty.

(Of course, one can and should attempt to pierce the Heavens when supplicating in any synagogue and communing in any prayer quorum, anywhere. But believe me, the prayer experience on Har HaBayit is powerfully different. In Jewish thought, the gates of Heaven, the most direct pathway to the Divine Throne, are directly above the Temple Mount.)

The wonderful news here is that in recent years it has become possible for Jews to actually pray on Har HaBayit, and to quietly sing, dance, and study Torah a bit. There are even several abbreviated prayer services held twice a day on the mount with a pickup halachic quorum (a minyan).

Israeli police on the Temple Mount now allow Jews to bow in prayer too, even to prostrate themselves face down on the ground with full extension of the arms and legs – which was the prayer practice in ancient Temple times.

Over the centuries, genuflecting in this way (known as kri-ah and hishtachava-ya) has fallen out of use at Jewish places of worship worldwide. It is a ritual unique to the Temple Mount, reintroduced in our times.

This was new, strange, even scary for me. Full-scale prostration in prayer is a position of vulnerability and self-abnegation. And yet it was so uplifting.

Necessary: None of this was possible four years ago when I first visited the Mount as part of tour guide study group. (I highly recommend the intensive course of study about Har HaBayit open to any adult run by an organization called Capot HaManool, The Open Gate.)

Then, Jews had only limited visitation rights and were ushered in tiny groups by very nervous police in and out of the Mount as swiftly as possible. Prayer was forbidden, and religious garb like kippot and tzizit were inadvisable.

Back then, the Wakf and radical Islamic movements had rigged the Mount as a base of terror, with periodic “outbursts” of harassment and rock-throwing against visiting Jews, violence against Jews approaching prayer at the Western Wall below the Mount, and several terrorist murders using live ammunition launched from within the Moslem shrines on the Mount.

The flags of ISIS, Hamas, and Turkey flew brazenly on the Mount. Wildcat Wakf construction projects on the Mount and beneath it willfully destroyed centuries of Jewish archaeological treasures too.

Today, thanks to determined police and intelligence operations, the Temple Mount is calm. The radical Islamic gangs have been run off the reserve. And by showing up to visit in ever-growing numbers, the Jewish/Israeli public has pushed the Israeli government to assert its sovereign control, and to facilitate partial, restrained expressions of Jewish prayer.

Indeed, I found the atmosphere on the Temple Mount to be relaxed, even festive. The scent in the air was spiritual, not political. The police presence was significant but laid back and supportive.

I visited for almost two hours alongside several large groups of Israeli men, women, and children (even babies in strollers) – and there was not a whiff of protest in any direction. No Jews violated the rules (which, alas, still ban Jewish prayer books and the Bible from the Mount), and no Moslems said boo.

We brushed by a large group of Moslem school girls (and their female teachers) in full hijabs in the plaza adjacent to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, peacefully. No feathers were ruffled; no hard feelings were vented. The Arab/Islamic and Israeli/Jewish populations tolerated – or at least ignored – one other.

So no, I don’t think that Jewish visitation and prayer rights on Har HaBayit are recklessly provocative. They need not be a political flashpoint. In fact, I think that it is time to lay out a new diplomatic initiative for establishment of a synagogue to solidify Jewish/Israeli rights on Har HaBayit, hopefully through dialogue and even a regional consensus.

You see, one of the things you learn when visiting the Temple Mount, something unknown to most people, is that there is plenty of room up there, loads of undeveloped and even desolate sections of land on the vast Temple Mount Plaza.

A Jewish house of prayer could easily be built in the southeast or northeast precincts of the Mount without interfering in any way with Moslem shrines and prayer practices.

Several leading religious figures such as Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu of Safed are now backing this suggestion (which I first made in this newspaper 12 years ago). Space-sharing and time-sharing arrangements can calmly be crafted, such as those in place at Maarat HaMachpela, the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron.

Again, nobody needs to feel threatened by the presence of Jewish petitioners tucked-away in a corner of the holy mount – unless your opposition to Jewish visitation and prayer stems from wholesale denial of indigenous Jewish rights in Jerusalem and the Land of Israel.

On the way out of the Temple Mount plaza, I tore my shirt in sorrow for the destroyed First and Second Temples that once stood on the site – just as a Jewish mourner does upon the death of a close relative.

This tearing in grief, and my earlier prostration in prayer – both of which are called kri-ah in Hebrew (although spelled differently) – were formidable bookends of a compelling visit to the Temple Mount.

Published in The Jerusalem Post 24.07.2026 and Israel Hayom 25.07.2026.

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

Israel is investing tens of millions of dollars to stem the loss of support in the United States. According to a report in Haaretz, the government is significantly expanding its influence efforts, with a budget exceeding $40 million directed primarily at Republican and Christian audiences. The main contract with a public relations firm has reportedly been expanded from $1.5 million per month to $4.5 million. The state has also contracted with American companies specializing in digital storytelling, content production, and advertising.

Credit must be given to the government: it is not resting on its laurels. It has correctly identified the disturbing decline in support for Israel — even among audiences once considered reliable bases of support — and it is willing to invest substantial resources to address the challenge.

The problem, however, is not a lack of activity, but the strategic concept guiding it.

From the report, it appears that the Israeli influence effort is designed mainly to halt the decline in support, win back distancing audiences, refute claims against Israel, and justify its actions — including the war against Iran. These are important efforts, but they remain essentially defensive and preventive in nature. They seek to prevent further losses rather than create new strategic gains.

Rahm Emanuel’s recent interview with Yonit Levi on Israel’s Channel 12 provided a clear illustration of the problem. While Israel is accustomed to standing in the position of the accused and explaining its actions, Emanuel — a senior figure in an administration whose Middle East policy left behind a record open to serious criticism — positioned himself as the prosecutor. Israel was required to explain itself; he was not required to explain the worldview, assumptions, or consequences behind his own arguments.

This is precisely the structure of the arena that Israel must change.

As long as Israel accepts a division of roles in which its critics set the indictment and it supplies the defense, even excellent hasbara leaves it on the defensive. An influence offensive begins by changing the agenda: not merely responding to Emanuel’s claims, but examining the worldview from which they stem, its record, and the price paid for it by the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and Israel itself.

The lesson of October 7 must apply to the cognitive battlefield as well.

The Military Lesson That Must Not Be Forgotten

Israel’s original national security doctrine was offensive and decisive. It sought to prevent the development of threats, remove them while they were still in their infancy, and act with initiative at a time of its choosing. Over the years, this concept was gradually replaced by a defensive-deterrent approach — containment instead of removal, postponement instead of initiative.

The “mabam” — the campaign between the wars — is the most prominent example. Israel carried out many sophisticated and daring operations that thwarted arms shipments, damaged infrastructure, and delayed the next war. Yet, measured by outcomes, these operational successes did not prevent the enemy’s strategic buildup.

Hezbollah nevertheless succeeded in building a deep, broad, and complex military threat. This exposed the gap between operational success and strategic achievement: one can win hundreds of small operations and still discover that the overall strategic balance has shifted against you.

October 7 was the terrible price of allowing continuous prevention to become a substitute for a strategy designed to remove the threat.

We must not repeat the same mistake in the battle of ideas.

From Military Mabam to Cognitive Mabam

There is no need to elaborate at length on the evidence of Israel’s failure in the influence arena. A broad consensus exists regarding the erosion of its standing, the decline in support, and the growing difficulty of defending the legitimacy of its actions.

The more interesting question is the mechanism of failure.

Here lies the parallel to the military mabam. The problem is not necessarily the absence of activity, or even the absence of pinpoint successes. One can accumulate millions of impressions, produce successful videos, refute lies, influence search results, and win media confrontations — and still lose the overall campaign over legitimacy, support, and the idea itself.

When success is measured by views, shares, and refutations while the strategic balance continues to shift against Israel, the same gap familiar from the military mabam appears: operational achievements that do not produce strategic achievement.

This is the danger inherent in a “cognitive campaign between the wars”: extensive and professional activity, pinpoint achievements, and impressive performance metrics — without any real change in the direction of the campaign.

One can win a thousand battles over facts and still lose the war over the idea.

The problem begins with the very term “hasbara.” Hasbara is intended primarily for friends — to explain, clarify, and keep them informed so they can continue their support. Against an active ideological adversary, offensive influence operations are required — operations whose goal is not only to defend existing positions, but to change the very structure of the contest.

In the Israeli case, one of the central objectives must be to transform the adversary operating against Israel — and especially the forces operating from within the Western space against its own foundations — from what is perceived as an “Israeli problem” into what is understood as a threat to the West itself.

No longer: “Why should you help Israel?”

But rather: “Why is the campaign Israel is waging also your campaign?”

From the End of History to the Clash Within the West

As the West sobers from Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” vision — according to which the victory of liberal democracy in the Cold War heralded humanity’s gradual convergence toward a shared political order — it finds itself approaching another reality foreseen by Samuel Huntington: the clash of civilizations.

Yet this is not, at least not yet, a grand clash between civilizations. At this stage, much of the clash is occurring within the West itself: between the existing Western order and radical forces operating inside it to undermine its foundations.

On one side are radical woke currents seeking to dismantle the Western order in the name of liberation; on the other are Islamist and jihadist currents seeking to dismantle it in order to replace it with an order of their own.

These are not two identical camps, nor do they share a common vision for the world after the existing order is dismantled. On the contrary, their values and ultimate goals contradict each other. Yet at the present stage, and for different reasons, they are riding the same train toward a shared interim station: the weakening of the Western order and the dismantling of its legitimacy.

The campus protests in the West after October 7 provided a tangible illustration of the phenomenon. Under the same slogans and in the same political spaces, radical activists from the Western left appeared alongside movements, organizations, and voices associated with Islamist worldviews.
Not all participants shared the same ideology, intentions, or vision for the future. Nevertheless, they often acted in the same direction: denying Israel’s legitimacy, portraying it as a colonial and oppressive force, and, in many cases, undermining the legitimacy of the Western order with which Israel is identified.

The irony is that the woke passenger seeks to reach a world in which the jihadist passenger would not be willing to live — and vice versa. Yet jihadism seeks to fill the vacuum created with a content that woke ideology itself would reject.

This is precisely the clash now taking place within the West: not yet a total war between civilizations, but a struggle over the West’s identity from within, and over whether it will continue to exist as a civilization of liberty.

The Enemy and the Threat: The Woke-Jihadist Alliance

Israel is not facing merely an anti-Israel campaign, but a political-ideological linkage between woke forces in the West and jihadist and Islamist forces.

This linkage does not require ideological identity, a formal alliance, or direct coordination. It arises when different forces, for entirely different reasons, act in the same historical moment to weaken the same order.

One seeks to dismantle the moral and cultural foundations of the West’s legitimacy; the other seeks to exploit the vacuum thereby created and impose an order of its own.

One of the central vulnerabilities of the progressive camp is its attitude toward identity itself. Those who view nation, religion, tradition, and historical memory primarily as power structures to be dismantled may have difficulty understanding their enduring power in other societies.

Here the dismantler and the filler meet.

One weakens the identities upon which Western society was built; the other arrives with a strong, comprehensive, and demanding identity of its own.

Precisely for this reason, the synergy between them is doubly dangerous. An offensive influence effort must expose this connection, emphasize its internal contradictions, work to dismantle it, and prevent it from recruiting additional audiences.

Its goal is not to convince the woke activist that he is a jihadist — a claim that would be untrue — but to show him where the path he is advancing may lead, who is traveling with him for part of the way, and who seeks to seize control of the station they reach together.

There is no need to tell every progressive that he is a jihadist. It is necessary to confront him with the paradox: whoever dismantles the house in the name of liberation may discover that someone else is already waiting to fill the vacuum.

The deep threat is not only to Israel, but to the entire civilization of liberty.

It is therefore incumbent upon Israel — the state of the people that first brought the idea of liberty into the world — to bear the manufacturer’s responsibility for it: to defend this idea against all those who seek to empty it of content, whether they come from woke or jihadist quarters.

Liberty. Our legacy. Our duty.

Published in Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, July 21, 2026.

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

Entering a 100-day election campaign this weekend, it is instructive to note what the coming Israeli vote is about and what it is not.

The election is mainly about government responsibility for the October 7, 2023 disastrous attack by Hamas and the government’s outrageous indulgences during wartime to the Ultra-Orthodox Israeli public.

The election is not about classic foreign and defense policy issues, because on these matters there is today a broad Israeli consensus. It is important to recognize this and understand the reasons why this is so.

The past three years of devastating enemy attacks on Israel taught Israelis an important lesson – which is the need to maintain a proactive defense posture including strategic ascendancy against enemies near and far.

Consequently, Israel will not return to the containment policies of recent decades that prioritized restraint and diplomacy over enemy degradation and military triumph. This approach allowed enemies to develop attack capabilities under the cover of diplomatic breathing time; what some Western officials mistakenly called periods of “stability.”

That approach blew-up in Israel’s face, with terror and invasion from the West Bank and Gaza and from Syria and Lebanon, and with the march of Iran’s nuclear bomb program to near completion and Iran’s ballistic missile array to near-annihilation-of-Israel potential.

Instead, Israel understands today that it must continue to make fierce and overwhelming moves against enemy strongholds from Sidon to Khan Yunis, and from Nablus to Isfahan. Israel will attack, not defend. It will initiate, not respond. It will hunt down its enemies, not be hounded by them.

Israel also has adopted a buffer-zone military strategy, with areas of long-term IDF control over borders where territory is dominated by Islamist-jihadist organizations. Behind the buffer zones now established in Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria is a set of ideas that identify a grim reality and provide a concrete and practical response.

Israelis also realize that this country’s neighbours will seek true reconciliation only when Jerusalem is strong. Additional Abraham Accord-style peace treaties are possible and desirable, but these will be based on muscular defense partnerships, not mushy notions of goodwill.

NOTICE THAT opposition figures now challenging Prime Minister Netanyahu for leadership of the country are not talking much about any of this, because they have nothing to say differently than him in this regard.

Neither Gadi Eisencott, Naftali Bennett, Benny Gantz, nor Yair Lapid would or could act otherwise if they sat in the prime minister’s chair. They would have to clobber Iran and Iran’s proxies (which includes most actors in the irredentist Palestinian national movement) no less than Netanyahu has. And they will have to resist international pressures on these matters no less than Netanyahu has.

They also know that Israeli public opinion won’t brook any weakness in these matters. Consider several recent Knesset decisions and declarations that were passed by overwhelming majorities; approved by crushing majorities that are so rare in the raucous and often-poisonous Israeli political playground.

In February 2024, 99 out of 120 members of Knesset – essentially representing the entire country aside from Israeli Arabs – voted to reject unilateral recognition by European and other countries of Palestinian statehood.

In July 2024, the Knesset issued a declaration by a 68-9 vote opposing Palestinian statehood all-together. The nine votes opposing the resolution came from the Knesset’s two Arab parties.

“The Israeli Knesset firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan [River]. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and destabilize the region. It will only be a short matter of time before Hamas takes over the Palestinian state and turns it into a radical Islamic terrorist base, working in coordination with the Iranian-led axis, to eliminate the State of Israel,” the declaration stated.

Indeed, recent polls indicate that 80% of Israelis, again basically the entire Jewish public, oppose the establishment of another Palestinian state beyond the ruinous one already extant in Gaza.

As a result, settlements in Judea and Samaria have manifestly become a consensus issue too. Israelis now understand that broad and deep settlement in Judea and Samaria is needed to torpedo the nightmare scenario of runaway Palestinian statehood.

This issue, which tore the Israeli public apart for four generations, has been resolved. Settlements are a security and Zionist asset, not a burden or a bar to peace.

Sure enough, and understandably so, settlements are not an issue in the coming election campaign. No mainstream Israeli politician is stupid enough to dredge-up stale paradigms about territorial withdrawals; to talk about tearing down the pioneering and more-important-than-ever settlement enterprise. (The muckraking “Democratic Party” leader Yair Golan, heir to the tiny extreme left Meretz Party voting public, is the exception to this rule.)

In fact, in July 2025 a majority of 71 out of 120 Knesset members from the coalition and opposition passed a non-binding resolution in favor of applying Israeli sovereignty to Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley. And I expect a next Israeli government – any government – to advance a declaration of Israeli sovereignty in at least Area C of these territories.

Congruous with this updated, necessarily tough, Israeli mindset on defense and national matters, the Knesset approved a law in March this year by a walloping vote of 93-0 (no objections or abstentions!) enabling the prosecution of Hamas’ Nukhba terrorists.

Indictments are expected in special military courts against more than 400 Hamas barbarians for crimes against the Jewish People, crimes against humanity, war crimes, murder, rape, abduction, and looting. The death penalty for convicted terrorists is explicitly an option, and this applies also to terrorists who killed Israeli hostages in captivity long after October 7.

The Israeli public demands no less. Protestations from the world against these trials and possible executions will fall on defiant and appropriately deaf Israeli ears.

ALAS, I sense that much of the international community and even the world Jewish community still does not comprehend the deep changes in national security thinking and practice that are now the rock-solid Israeli mainstream path, and which will not change much under the next Israeli government – whoever heads it.

Some highhanded politicians around the world refuse to consider the views of Israelis. They know better than Israelis how to secure this country. They flock to Israel to posture like peacocks and take this country’s leadership to task.

A classic example: The arrogant Rahm Emanuel, a US Democratic Party presidential candidate wannabe, who alighted in Tel Aviv last week to deride Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as a “drunk driver” and to dispense warmed-over, hackneyed advice from the dreadful playbook of his former boss. Like President Barack Obama, Emanuel only pretended to be upset about drawing away from Israel.

Emanuel is stuck in a world of double illusions – the illusion that his election will advance by bashing Israel, and the fantasy that Israel’s election can be swayed by pressure from abroad in favor of infirm foreign and defense policies. It would be smarter for world leaders to get used to a revamped Mideast strategic situation anchored by a hard-hitting, confident, and undivided Israel.

Published in The Jerusalem Post, 17.07.2026.

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.