Seventy-eight years after it first began, it’s the high noon of the America-Israel alliance

IN

the skies of the Middle East, something extraordinary — miraculous, even — has been taking place for the last ten days.

I don’t just mean the air campaign, beginning with a surgical opening strike that killed the Iranian leadership. I mean the very fact that the American and Israeli air forces are operating, to all purposes, as one.

Decades of American politicians proclaiming the unbreakable bond between the two countries has never produced anything remotely like this.

And yet ironically, just as popular American support for Israel plunges, comes a partnership the likes of which will probably never be seen again.

To understand just how unique this moment is, here’s a brief view of what came before, and what’s up next.

Start with 1948, when the idea of such cooperation would have been a fantasy. In that year, despite Truman’s support for Israel’s independence, it was the Soviets who supplied the battle-winning weapons that enabled Israel to triumph.

The partnership wasn’t in evidence in the 1956 Sinai War, where Eisenhower armed the Arab states and embargoed the IDF.

Nor in 1967, when the closest that Lyndon Johnson came to outright support was a failed attempt to build a coalition to break the Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran. Ultimately when Israel fought, it did so with French-supplied arms.

Even in 1973, when Nixon famously came to Israel’s rescue with an airlift of weapons, it was to stave off the Soviet triumph that an Arab victory would have brought.

The partnership was still a thing of the future in 1982’s First Lebanon War. It was Israeli breakthroughs in electronic warfare that enabled American-made jets to trounce Syria’s Soviet-supplied air defenses in a move that hastened the end of the Cold War.

Partnership seemed further away in 1991, when Bush Sr. forced Israel to remain quiet even under Iraqi Scud attack, as the price for keeping the American-led coalition together.

Exhausted by his own ventures in the Middle East, joint warmaking was a nonstarter for Bush Jr. in 2006’s Second Lebanon War.

Ditto for the rounds of confrontation with Hamas in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, and 2023. Anxious to avoid regional war, Democratic administrations did everything in their power to bring Israel to the negotiating table early.

Without detracting an iota from America’s decades of economic, political, and strategic support for Israel, that list is essential to understanding just how unique is what we’re now witnessing.

Seventy-eight years after it first began, it’s the high noon of the America-Israel alliance.

Just how Heaven-sent this moment is becomes clear when you look at the constellation of events that have brought it about — an alignment that’s vanishingly unlikely to be repeated.

On the Israeli side, you have a post-October 7 country that will back any action that breaks the Iranian chokehold. As the region’s sole operator of game-changing F-35 stealth planes, Israel currently has the ability to range almost unchallenged across the Middle East.

Were China to supply its own advanced stealth jets to a regional ally, that air superiority would be a thing of the past.

Add to that what’s happening across the Atlantic. In the Oval Office sits a leader who’s almost unparalleled in American history. Fearless and anti-conventional, Trump is determined to find a new way to project US power without the vast cost in blood and treasure that came before.

Emboldened by his success in reorienting Venezuela, Donald Trump is now testing this new playbook to its limit: attempting to generate regime change by destroying the current Iranian leadership.

Everything about Trump’s second term tells us that this time around, he’s playing for keeps. Nothing would secure his legacy more than setting the Middle East free of Tehran’s terror. And with China indicating that it could enter the region’s arms market with its own advanced hardware, it’s not a moment too soon.

“Why now?” has been the jeering chorus from the American left and a vocal coalition of isolationists and antisemites on the far right who detest America’s alliance with Israel.

That growing chorus is itself the answer to the question. Because as Trump knows better than anyone, whoever wins the 2028 election is likely to be far less supportive of Israel.

If the swing of the political pendulum puts a Democrat in office, it will be back to Obama — or something worse.

It took 40 years for Democrats to sour on Israel — but the MAGA world is well on its way to accomplishing that in four.

There’s a generational struggle underway within the GOP, pitting over-40’s against the rest. Young evangelical support for Israel has dropped off a cliff.

At the head of this faction stands Tucker Carlson and a handful of influencers who spout increasingly deranged anti-Israel nonsense. With this new wave seemingly redefining the party, Trump is holding the fort against an Israel-skeptic insurgency within the party.

By 2028, a Republican win may well herald a tough new era for Israel.

All of which means that as we look up at the skies and see the Israeli jets on their twice — sometimes thrice — daily commute to Tehran, we’re witnessing something Heaven-sent.

To paraphrase words that we’ll say in a few weeks’ time, in every generation since the Holocaust, they’ve come to destroy us — but Hashem has saved this tiny, rickety country that’s home to the majority of the Jewish people.

In a strange handover of interchanging alliances, first it was the USSR who stepped in as unlikely saviors, then the French under De Gaulle played that role for their own reasons. Now, in a critical showdown with the malign Iranian regime, the America-Israel alliance has reached its zenith.

What lies over a darkened political horizon, we don’t know. Long before that, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that Iran can be knocked out. The skeptics and ill-wishers circle, desperate for this campaign to fail.

But that’s none of our business. Regardless of what comes next, those vapor trails are the looping script that spells out the message of recent history — that the Jewish people are never alone.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1103)