“The negotiations are going along well; actually, very well… I have a good relationship with Iran".
President Donald Trump, June 3, 2026, regarding talks with Iran, and hours after he admitted reprimanding Benjamin Netanyahu quite harshly for Israel’s refusal to accept an end to the war.
Someone is being fooled here. It must be the president of the United States. Because it certainly is not the Islamic Republic of Iran. And Israel will end up paying the price.
It was almost forty years ago - during a discussion about the American role in the Middle East - that an important question was posed. It was not rhetorical.
The question was rather simple - as was the answer that followed. But - because it was a confession that few wished to be associated with, it has remained unspoken for those same forty years.
The question. Why - in the conflict in the Middle East, between Israel and its neighbors - has American foreign policy, certainly as espoused by its US State Department, almost invariably adopted a position that is more critical of Israel than its Arab and Muslim neighbors, most who are outwardly belligerent towards the Jewish State?
Forty years ago, the answer was given by a rather insignificant State Department Arabist who, axiomatically and by definition, would be sitting on the Arab/Muslim side of the fence. The answer was short, and honest. But it upset his superiors in the State Department as well as some of the elite decision-makers who orchestrated American foreign policy. Enough - that a directive was issued that the answer which he proffered be “retired" as illegitimate and not to be mentioned again.
A quasi-official denial - behind diplomatic circles - seemed to offer the proof that it was indeed both honest and true. The answer then - and yet still true today - even among those who do not share the Arabist “zeitgeist" - was profound in its simplicity. In a nutshell - this was the honest confession of the State Department apparatchik who did not realize the controversy that would follow.
The US State Department, he explained, fully understood that the Middle East conflict (as they called it then, to avoid any subjective analysis of who was right and who was wrong) was a conflict between the civilized and the savage. The actual language that the State Department official used - then - was “between the civilized and the less civilized".
Given this reality - the American position was predicated on the belief that one could reason with the former, but not the latter - based on the simple human dynamics. That the former would be reasonable - and amenable to compromise - while the latter was not, with a temperament that was neither reasonable nor open to accommodation. The obvious conclusions became the foundation of US State Department protocol for over two generations. Israel could be expected to be agreeable to concessions while its neighbors, falling somewhere between obstinate and barbaric, could not.
Therefore - pressure would be exerted against the Jews, not the Jew-haters. In its most simplistic implementation, that indeed was the philosophical foundation of American policy.
Yes, now it makes sense. We can get Israel to do what most ought to agree is the wrong thing, because after all, its leadership is reasonable. A simple formula. Israel gives, the Arabs get.
And the history of the conflict proves exactly that.
This reality is in evidence with any brief examination of everything that has happened diplomatically since Israel made its first significant concessions by forfeiting the captured Sinai Peninsula in 1956/57 (most amateur analysts, bereft of historical context, seem not to recall that Israel’s forfeiture of the Sinai to Egypt between 1979 and 1982 was the second time that Israel that was instructed to ‘give’, while the Arabs ‘got’). Jews can be expected (read: compelled) to be flexible and conciliatory, while their enemies could not even be bothered to comply with any similar expectation. Because they were not going to play along.
That - is the very straightforward and elementary explanation of American foreign policy as it is executed vis-à-vis Israel. In addition, of course, to a less-than-subtle anti-Semitism that has been endemic to State Department policy-makers for as long as Israel has been a modern Jewish State - with Mike Pompeo and Marco Rubio the lone exceptions - a fitting topic for a separate op ed.
Quite remarkably, in the Middle Erast, pressures were brought to bear against friend rather than foe.
Supporters of Israel would argue that Charles de Gaulle’s infamous and mostly accurate comment that “nations don’t have friends; they only have interests" seemed not to apply to Israel - at least not always.
There is of course the story that is told - with some credible contemporaneous support - that on rare occasions nations adopt policies because they were the proper thing to do. Just. Even moral.
In June 1967, during a meeting at the Glassboro Conference at the Hollybush Summit in New Jersey, two weeks after Six Day War, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, asked President Lyndon B. Johnson why the U.S. supported Israel when there were 80 million Arabs and less than 3 million Israelis. We are told that Johnson replied, “Because it is the right thing to do."
That was a rare exception indeed. Until President Donald Trump. We hoped.
We had come to expect no less from President Donald Trump - both Trump 45 and Trump 47. The president who moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the president who suspended the 2015 JCPOA Iran Nuke Deal in 2018, the president who severed relations and financial commitments to the Palestinian Authority, and the president who lobbied the Arab world to consider more harmonious relations with the Jewish State.
Until - we look under the hood and count too many exceptions to that expectation.
-The quid pro quo that was offered the UAE and Bahrain in exchange for their participation in the Abraham Accords - that no Israeli sovereignty would be applied to Gush Etzion and surrounding areas.
-And then, as Trump 47, the demands that Israel agree to a cease-fire it did not want with Hamas during a war that was not yet won;
-That Israel agree to a cease-fire with Hezbollah that it did not want;
-That Israel agree to end its 12-Day War with Iran, about 12 days too early, in June 2025.
-Consider, as well, Trump’s “Gaza 20-Point Peace Plan" - officially extant since October 10, 2025, and imploding completely and quietly because no one wanted to say it out loud. We might as well concede that Trump’s “Board of Peace" stands unemployed. But not out loud.
Meanwhile, today, Israel is told to stand back as bystanders while Qatar, Turkey and Pakistan guide the American president through negotiations with Iran in 2026. Yes, the indignity that the Jewish State is being asked to suffer as yet another link of a chain of imbecilic geo-strategic mistakes. Imposed on friends, who have their own, other, interests.
Why? Not - as LBJ had argued - because it’s the right thing to do. It is anything but…! But because we have an American president who - despite having already proven himself to be the best US president that Israel had ever known - had adopted the classical unspoken and insulting US State Department protocol that it was easier to demand concessions from the civilized without having to expect as much - from the savage. The kind that slaughtered 32,000 of its own citizens in January in two days - or was it 42,000? But what difference are 10,000 deaths in a Muslim totalitarian nation?!
You see, if you cannot tame the enemy - tame your friend instead. Even if it means insulting Israel by boasting that “I had a really good talk with Hezbollah this week," spoken only hours before Hezbollah missiles were launched again.
With the Midterm elections fast approaching in the US, with gas prices floating much above what the 2024 campaign promised, and with the realization now that Iran was not Venezuela, the American president displayed a symbiotic connection of two elements: Interests do take precedence over friendship, and it is easier to pressure the good guys than the bad.
The bad guys have noticed - which is a sure guarantee that the pressures for Israel to stand down have not ended.
And that history will continue to judge the admission of an insignificant foreign policy player forty years ago about the manner with which American policy is formulated as imprudent and irresponsible as it is reckless.
Meir Jolovitz is a past national executive director of the Zionist Organization of America, and formerly associated with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.