Randy Yisroel Settenbrino is a writer and artist. He is a passionate advocate for Israel and Jewish-Christian solidarity, founder of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel, and founder of Ohr Chodosh L’Zion, a cultural and spiritual initiative dedicated to restoring Jewish identity, courage and creativity through art, history and living faith. His newest book, Between the Altar and the Sanctuary: The Life, Faith, and Fire of Rabbi Meir Kahane, is available on Amazon.
Israel stands at the crossroads where the world’s major powers compete for control over essential energy routes, trade corridors and regional security. To borrow the first rule of New York City real estate: location, location, location.
The US has repeatedly paid for retreat with American lives, abandoned allies, lost intelligence networks, diminished credibility and the expansion of terrorist organizations and hostile regional powers. From Lebanon and Somalia to Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, every vacuum invited America’s adversaries to advance. China and Russia stand ready to fill any void left by an administration retreating from America’s hard-earned positions of strength. Those who point to Turkey or Saudi Arabia overlook their use of stealth jihad in Europe and their tampering with the region’s demographics to entrench Islamist dominance.
No other trusted ally in the region possesses both the interest and experience necessary to prevent Chinese and Russian encroachment upon the strategic corridors through which the world’s energy and commerce flow.
Israel sounded the shofar over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Netanyahu took the case to the United Nations and Congress, where he was received with the indifference and contempt shown to Churchill in Chamberlain’s time. Israel became the only spark of hope for Kurds and Iranian dissidents, who prayed silently as it waged a shadow war of espionage, striking nuclear scientists and military commanders.
When the moment of truth arrived, Israel was the pit bull that forged ahead and then stood alongside America. Israel was on the field while a feckless Europe, once America’s most trusted ally, proved disingenuous. The team contributed no assists: no bases, warships or airspace. Instead, European governments circumvented their own sanctions and placed money into the coffers of rogue nations.
Technology wins wars, and Israel’s prime location is matched by its technological prowess. Israel’s brilliance shines on multiple fronts beyond military research and development. High technology, medicine, cyber defense, missile defense, agriculture, water management, intelligence and military innovation advance at a miraculous pace. From a sliver of land comes an extraordinary concentration of human ingenuity whose benefits travel far beyond Israel’s borders and directly into American medicine, industry, defense and security.
These are extraordinary benefits to receive from a proven friend.
Aristotle distinguished among friendships of pleasure, utility and virtue, with virtuous friendship being the highest. It alone possesses the foundation for an enduring relationship because it rests upon shared values and mutual respect. The bond between America and Israel is rooted in Judeo-Christian values under which the individual counts: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and respect for the dignity and liberty of the individual.
This is a recipe whose ingredients were never stirred into the ironclad cauldrons of Islamist and autocratic regimes. It reveals the disparity between civilization grounded in individual liberty and theocracies, as well as the self-serving powers of China and Russia that insinuate themselves into the region with malign intent. It is precisely this shared devotion to liberty that thwarts the aspirations of both Islamists and autocrats.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, frustrated by the American-Israeli alliance, convulses with repeated calls for the destruction of the “Big Satan" and the “Little Satan." Its devilish designs are focused on obliterating both America and Israel.
Under the Trump administration, Israel has been granted greater respect and latitude and has stood at the forefront of dismantling the unstable republic’s nuclear threat.
America has given Israel considerable moral support at the United Nations and remains, indisputably, its most abiding bulwark. That will never be forgotten.
Yet in recent years, Americans across the country, many of whom know nothing about the founding of their republic, Constitution, or the words to their own national anthem, and who, despite being college-educated, can’t name the first three presidents, have nonetheless memorized the $3.8B figure Israel "receives" in foreign aid, lifted straight off Instagram and TikTok, ready to recite on command. Not because they understand it, but because it’s ammunition, a talking point deployed to paint Israel as a drain on America, or worse, a pariah. There is no interest in any other recipients of America’s largesse, nations that offer nothing in return. They remain willfully ignorant of just how advantageous it is for the U.S. to support a strategic partner, and of when and how those funds are actually spent - in and for America.
Horrific as it sounds, weaponry is a business, and like all businesses, the rule is: old inventory out makes room for new designs. This is where Israel starts, by cleaning house on aging stockpiles, taking older inventory off the shelf: World War II-era weapons designs, Korean- and Vietnam-era systems, Vietnam-era M113 armored personnel carriers, older artillery, rifles, vehicles, and ammunition drawn from U.S. surplus programs and American stockpiles maintained in Israel. Meanwhile, some of the finest Israeli and American minds work in unison to transform $500 million in joint missile-defense funding into Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, technologies that protect lives while advancing American defense capabilities.
Israel also runs one of the largest outdoor urban warfare training courses in the world, and American soldiers regularly go there to train alongside their Israeli counterparts. It is estimated that between cybersecurity, intelligence sharing, and serving as what General Haig once called America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier, Israel’s value to the U.S. runs into the billions.
What deserves equal consideration is how often Israel has been forced to fight for its survival, and how, at nearly every juncture, America has restrained the very ally whose decisive victory would ultimately have best served American interests.
In 1948, as the newborn Jewish state faced invading Arab armies, the United States maintained an arms embargo. Israel survived anyway.
Until 1967, Israel was little more than a fleck on America’s radar. As the Six-Day War approached, Israel’s prospects looked grim; the country prepared for mass casualties, with threats mounting and enemy armies gathering around it. Survival appeared an insurmountable challenge. For Israel, those six days were as miraculous as the six days of Creation, the country rose from the chaos of a war for survival to soar as a regional power, accomplishing a feat that still bewilders military strategists. Israel captured the Sinai, Gaza, Judea and Samaria, eastern Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.
Yet almost immediately, the question ceased to be the existential threat posed by Israel’s enemies, and became instead how much of Israel’s battlefield victory would have to be surrendered.
Then came 1973.
Israel had been pressured not to strike first. Golda Meir’s government accepted American assurances and refrained from a preemptive attack even as Egypt and Syria prepared for war. The consequences were written in Israeli blood. More than 2,500 Israeli soldiers died in the Yom Kippur War. America eventually mounted an enormous resupply operation and Israel reversed the battlefield catastrophe, but once again Israeli military success was followed by American pressure for restraint.
Under the 1979 peace treaty, Israel ultimately returned the Sinai, a territory nearly three times its own size, to Egypt in exchange for a cold peace.
The pattern repeats:
Peace functions as an appetizer for renewed terrorism. Israel is attacked. Israel mobilizes. Young Israelis die. Israel gains the advantage. Then the world becomes frightened by the prospect of Israel actually finishing the job. Israel is asked to restrain itself, while its soldiers suffer and its children die.
Its enemies are permitted defeat without total destruction, retreat without transformation and ceasefires without surrender. They regroup, rearm and return with a satanic determination to maim, murder and destroy every living thing in their path.
Barack Obama cultivated the Middle East into a garden of Islamists. He directly pressured Hosni Mubarak to step down, a man who had kept smoldering Islamists from using the Copts as tinder. The Muslim Brotherhood found a stage under Morsi, and the prospect of an Islamist government in Egypt sharing a border and acting in concert with Hamas became a real possibility.
Meanwhile, Israelis living within range of Gaza endured rockets and terrorism while being lectured endlessly about the land recaptured from Egypt and Jordan in 67. The message was extraordinary: your soldiers fought for it, bled for it and died defending it, but you will not necessarily be permitted to enjoy the strategic benefits of victory. During the Obama administration, even Hellfire missile transfers became subject to heightened American scrutiny.
Obama called for Israel to return to an eight-mile-wide Auschwitz border, gave Iran $150 billion and a path to the A-bomb and failed to veto anti-Israel UN Resolution 2334. He effectively called for death at the hands of a neighbor, death at the hands of an adversary and death at the hands of the world.
Obama's influence remained evident in the Biden administration's restraint of Israel, precisely when military pressure was necessary in tthe war following the horendous October 7, 2023 massacre. That restraint had consequences. In 2024, the administration paused a shipment of heavy bombs amid disagreement over Israel's planned operation in Rafah.
Once again, the pressure was directed toward the democracy fighting the terrorists rather than toward the terrorists hiding among civilians. Israeli soldiers entered Gaza facing an enemy that had spent trillions over decades transforming civilians into an army of mujahideen and the terrain into an Islamist battlefield. Elaborate tunnels ran beneath neighborhoods, while fighters and weapons were embedded within mosques, schools and hospitals. Israel nevertheless undertook extraordinary measures to reduce civilian casualties at the expense of its own soldiers. Every pause offered the enemy valuable time to reposition, booby-trap, plant IEDs, rebuild command structures and prepare the next ambush.
And it is Israeli sons who are sent back inside the labyrinthine hellhole. As well-rehearsed packs of protesters across America squealed, ‘All Eyes on Gaza,’ the resulting pause left numerous Israeli soldiers dead or dismembered.
This is not only an Israeli tragedy. It represents a profound misunderstanding of American interests.
There are no empty spaces in geopolitics. Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and Middle Eastern Islamists understand this. Their goals differ, but their immediate interests converge.
Israel understands it because Israel lives there.
Israel is perhaps the only regional power possessing the intelligence, technological sophistication, military capability and determination to fill portions of the security void left when American forces diminish without requiring thousands of American mothers and fathers to send their children to fight there.
That makes Israel an extraordinary American strategic asset.
Yet Israel is treated as an entity to be managed.
Who does this agenda serve? Danger increases when incompatible forces discover that they can cooperate against a common adversary. Communists and Islamists do not share a vision of the world. Radical secular and Islamist movements have nevertheless found the great equalizer in strategic convergence: they share an immediate means, not an ultimate end. Movements that would eventually turn upon one another can still cooperate when their immediate interest lies in undermining an existing political order.
We watch versions of that strange dance across Europe. Radical-left and Islamist movements march beside one another in New York and elsewhere in America, despite ultimate visions of society that are often irreconcilable but immediate enemies that overlap. The same principle operates internationally. American withdrawal more often produces a vacuum than peace. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, competing powers move into these vacuums, cooperating tactically for a moment in history.
Turkey and Qatar view America through the cold lens of self-interest, using whatever wiggle room Washington gives them to play a better endgame.
Turkey, a country that still has not acknowledged the genocide of its infidel Christians, is a NATO member with regional ambitions. Turkey has displaced two hundred thousand Kurds and resettled Arabs in their villages, intending to strengthen the infrastructure needed to fill the void left by Iran in Syria. Qatar hosts important American facilities while simultaneously maintaining relationships throughout the Islamist world and using its wealth to undermine Western values.
Countries have interests. They are not interchangeable simply because Washington calls them allies. Neither are all allies equally valuable.
Israel is different. It does not ask America to station American soldiers on Israeli soil to defend it. Israel sends its own children.
It confronts forces hostile to America without asking American boys and girls to do its fighting. It develops weapons, intelligence and technologies that strengthen the United States. It occupies one of the most strategically consequential pieces of real estate on earth, at the crossroads of the West, in the heart and often the heat of the battle for civilization.
For generations, the American-Israeli relationship has too often been described by asking what America gives Israel. Perhaps America has been asking the question backward.
What would the Middle East look like without Israel?
Who would restrain Iran?
Who would contest Islamist military power?
Who would possess the intelligence capability to penetrate terrorist networks?
Who would stand against expanding Russian and Chinese strategic influence?
Who would develop the battlefield technologies, missile defenses, cyber systems and intelligence that ultimately protect Americans as well?
And who would fill the vacuum when America no longer wishes to send its own children?
The answer should force Washington to reconsider a State Department policy instinct that reaches back to George Marshall’s opposition to Truman’s recognition of Israel and has survived administration after administration.
America should be more concerned about Israel’s vulnerability than its military success.
A strong Israel means fewer American troops required in the Middle East, stronger intelligence for the United States, greater resistance to hostile regional powers, greater protection of strategic corridors and a formidable democracy capable of defending itself.
In Israel, America has an ally that functions as an unsinkable aircraft carrier, a laboratory that never sleeps and an intelligence partner living inside the world’s most dangerous neighborhood.
So Americans must finally ask themselves a question:
Why has America spent generations restraining and endangering a sliver of land blessed by G-d that has become one of the great technological, military and civilizational bulwarks of the Western world?
The time has come to let Israel not only defend itself but win.
(Op-ed Editor: For more on the subject, see here.)