By: Barton Swaim – wsj.com – December 13, 2024

Six months ago, the Jewish state was weakened and demoralized. No longer. Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer discusses what America can learn.

No one knows whether the new Syrian government will generate fresh trouble or find its way to peace and stability. That the fall of the house of Assad is an inherently good thing, however, is certain—for more than 50 years, first under Hafez al-Assad and since 2000 under his son Bashar, the Syrian government has brutalized the country’s citizens and allied itself with malign regimes around the globe.

Two nations deserve most of the credit for Assad’s fall, and alas they don’t include the United States. They are Ukraine and Israel—Ukraine for preoccupying Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Israel for preventing Iran’s intervention by degrading Tehran’s military and humiliating its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

Just as Ukraine wouldn’t have troubled Russia if Russia hadn’t invaded it, Israel wouldn’t have decapitated Hezbollah, ravaged Iran’s air defenses, and destroyed Tehran’s client in Gaza, Hamas, absent the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Unlike Ukraine, however, Israel has been at war with America’s foes since its founding in 1948.

Critics used to complain about the “Israel lobby” and its supposed ability to bend U.S. policy to its will. A saner case could be made that Israel is constantly doing America’s dirty work at immense cost to itself. Its war against Hamas and Hezbollah isn’t some regional conflict over disputed territory but a battle in a worldwide cold war between an alliance of capitalist democracies—badly led at the moment by the U.S.—and a confederation of socialist anti-American dictatorships.

In a noisy corner of the Willard Hotel’s lobby, a block from the White House, Ron Dermer and I exchange pleasantries about the American Southeast—he grew up in Miami Beach, I in South Carolina’s upstate. Mr. Dermer is Israel’s minister for strategic affairs and among his country’s more articulate Anglophone exponents.

I begin by mentioning my view that Israel is fighting America’s war in the Middle East. He doesn’t surprise me by agreeing. “We’re the little Satan,” Mr. Dermer says. “America is the big Satan. And, as the prime minister often says”—he’s referring to his boss, Benjamin Netanyahu—“Europe’s annoyed because it’s only the middle-sized Satan.”

Mr. Dermer, 53, was Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2013-21 and tried to kill the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran. That effort failed, but his skepticism of the Iran deal has been vindicated a thousand times over. Mr. Netanyahu’s “middle-sized Satan” wisecrack is a good one, but Mr. Dermer notes a serious point. “A lot of people don’t understand,” he says. “They think America is hated because of Israel. I think Israel is hated because of America. We’re seen as an extension of your values. And guess what? They’re right.”

Mr. Dermer is in Washington to meet with members of the outgoing and incoming administrations on Middle East policy. Three weeks earlier, he met the president-elect in Mar-a-Lago. One subject of these meetings is the effort to fashion a deal to release the hostages held by Hamas. Mr. Dermer says he is confident the parties will reach a final agreement to return all the captives, alive and otherwise, and end the war. What’s taking so long? “Hamas wants to end the war and remain in power,” he says, “and we’re not prepared to end it that way.”

Hamas has hoped for the past year to avoid negotiating a deal to give up the hostages by provoking a conflagration across the Middle East. Thanks to the recent cease-fire with Hezbollah, he says, Hamas “understands that this broad regional escalation isn’t going to happen, and that gives us a chance to make a deal over the hostages. . . . I think there’s a greater prospect of that happening than I’ve seen in a long time.”

Israel certainly has more bargaining chips than it did a short while ago. What it has accomplished since the spring must astound even its enemies. Six months ago, global opinion makers and power brokers had all but forgotten the stomach-turning atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, and spoke mainly about the “genocide” perpetrated by Israel in Gaza. The White House, manifestly trying to shore up political support among key domestic constituencies, was slow-walking arms shipments to the Israelis and lecturing them about the impossibility of evacuating noncombatants from Rafah (which the Israelis later did). Protests against Israel on elite campuses cowed many Democratic politicians into sharpening their criticisms of the Jewish state; a few indulged in the “genocide” calumny. Israel itself appeared to have literally shrunk, its north vacated because of Hezbollah shelling from Lebanon. Israeli society seemed half-paralyzed by angst as families of hostages demanded that their government do the impossible—negotiate the release of captives from an organization that at the time had every reason to keep them.

Then came the turnaround. It started with a string of strikes that humiliated Iran and its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza. On July 30, Israel killed Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr in an airstrike, and early the following morning it killed Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh by detonating a bomb somehow hidden in his hotel room in Tehran. A few weeks later, in an exploit you might dismiss as impossible if you read it in a Robert Ludlum novel, the Israelis detonated the pagers and walkie-talkies carried by thousands of Hezbollah operatives—devices that had been sold to Hezbollah by a fake company set up years earlier by Israel for such a time as this. In late September an Israeli airstrike killed Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, and two weeks later an Israeli patrol in Gaza killed the legendarily elusive Yahya Sinwar, architect of the Oct. 7 attack.

It occurs to me that no other first-world nation, with the exception of the U.S. in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, possesses the shrewdness and sheer audacity to pull off so many exploits against its enemies. Israel, unlike the 21st-century West, takes its own side in a fight. Why?

“We have no choice,” Mr. Dermer says. He makes the point with a joke: “So I hear you have issues with Canada and Mexico. I’ll tell you what, we’ll take Canada, and you can have Syria. We’ll take Mexico, and you can have any other country in the Middle East.”

The necessity of remaining vigilant, of cultivating a sense of national self-confidence, has kept Israel from developing some of the pathologies of other prosperous liberal nations. “You’re always trying to find the right balance between security and civil liberties,” Mr. Dermer says. “Then, as danger from abroad recedes for a time, you naturally concentrate more on civil liberties and all of these issues.”

The remarkable fact about Israel, he says, is that “we’ve been living Sept. 12 for 76 years. And as somebody born and raised in the United States”—he took Israeli citizenship in 1997 and held U.S. citizenship till 2005—“what amazes me about Israel is that with all of its imperfections, and every society’s imperfect, it still remains a vibrant, thriving democracy that affords its citizens enormous freedoms.”

Plainly, though, the current situation in the Middle East, in which an imminently nuclear-armed Iran devotes itself to Israel’s destruction, can’t continue. For Israel to keep thriving, doesn’t the Iranian regime have to fall?

Mr. Dermer is a diplomat and politician and tends to avoid blunt answers, but he agrees with the premise of my question. “Israel doesn’t have a problem with the people of Iran,” he says. “There’s no question that if and when the regime falls—and it will; estimates say close to 80% of the Iranian population despises the regime—when it falls, I believe Israel will have a partner in Iran.”

The prospect of some level of stability in a future Middle East seems conceivable in a way it didn’t a year ago. Not because of any “peace process,” a phrase deserving of more ridicule than it can ever receive, but because the Iraq war had at least one unintended and underappreciated benefit. The dueling powers Iran and Iraq had dominated the Middle East for decades when the U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003. For all the bloody miscalculations of that war, a relatively peaceful post-Saddam regime in Baghdad has left Iran as the region’s one belligerent hegemon. The Gulf states have in turn been forced to look for an ally against Iran, particularly after Barack Obama gave Tehran more resources with which to fund terrorist proxies and more time to pursue a nuclear weapon.

The ally those Gulf states found: Israel. Hence the Abraham Accords, of which the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain are signatories, and hence the prospect of normal relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. If the Iranian regime falls and the country turns in a nonradical direction, who knows? Anything could happen.

As Mr. Dermer points out, however, the case for optimism has to reckon with Sunni radicalism: “You had al Qaeda, that was 1.0, and ISIS was 2.0. And you’ll have a 3.0. And you might see the beginnings of a 3.0 in whatever comes out of Syria.” But, he says, switching the metaphor, “let’s say you’re one of the Gulf states, and you’re worried about Sunni radical jihadis. You look around and you see the 800-pound gorilla has left the building. So you look around and you see, well, there’s a 250-pound gorilla with a kippah on. Maybe you’ll work with him.”

For the next 10 minutes Mr. Dermer makes the case that Israel is America’s most important ally. He notes the aforementioned claim that the “Israel lobby” persuades the U.S. to act against its own interests. “You don’t hear anyone making that argument anymore,” he says. “Now they attack our values—with all the lies about genocide and apartheid and ethnic cleansing, all of that.” Mr. Dermer constantly interrupts himself with stories and wisecracks, and here’s one: “By the way, the Jews must be the dumbest genocidal force in history. We win Nobel Prizes, but we’re idiots when it comes to genocide—the Palestinian population is about 10 times what it was in 1948.”

Back to his point: He asks me to imagine I’m president of the United States and I have to pick one ally for the next half-century. “Just one, strictly in terms of American interest. You want an ally that can defend itself by itself and you don’t have to send in troops to protect it. You want an ally with formidable intelligence capability and cyber capability and all the new forms of warfare. And you want an ally that can develop new weapons.”

He pauses—a rarity for Mr. Dermer. “If you’re honest, you’re down to Britain and Israel. And I think we have a bigger standing army than the Brits.” This argument isn’t about values, he says again, but about raw interest.

Mr. Dermer avoids direct criticism of the Biden administration, though he praises Mr. Netanyahu for not bowing to “international pressure,” meaning from Washington. “One of the most important things for an Israeli prime minister is to say one word: No.”

He thinks Israel has regained the capacity for deterrence it lost on Oct. 7, and it’s hard to disagree. But can the U.S. get back its power to deter? America’s deficit is greater than Israel’s; ours doesn’t involve one failure but a rolling series—the Afghanistan withdrawal, the reluctance to anger Mr. Putin by letting Ukraine go on the offensive, vacillating on Israel’s fight against Hamas for rank political reasons, a seeming inability even to guard the country’s own border.

How to regain deterrence at the end of all that? Mr. Dermer has an answer. “When the U.S. is part of a victory that projects strength”—he interrupts himself. “I’ll be diplomatic and I won’t get into what happens when you are perceived as weak, or how that might affect other theaters. I’ll just say, Israel’s war is a theater in which we are going to win, and America can win with it. So be part of that victory.”

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Source: wsj.com