Joe Epstein wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week that Jewish Americans find themselves politically homeless, repelled by a Republican Party that historically excluded them and attacked within a Democratic Party whose leftward trajectory has made it openly hostile to Israel.
Peter Berkowitz, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, former director of policy planning at the State Department, and author of Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to push back on that framing and assess the competing diplomatic tracks the Trump administration is pursuing simultaneously with Iran and in Lebanon.
On the political situation of American Jews, Berkowitz said he would draw a different frame than Epstein. He said since at least Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party and the conservative movement have been genuine friends to Israel and to Jewish Americans. For the past thirty years, the primary home of anti-Semitism in the United States has been the left, fomented primarily in the university system. He acknowledged a genuine and worrying upsurge of anti-Semitism on the right over the past eighteen months, associated with figures like Tucker Carlson, but said it must be kept in proportion. The key driver of anti-Semitism on the left is the academic world’s broader anti-Americanism, its framework of oppressor and oppressed classes, and its characterization of America as a principal source of evil in the world. He said that anti-American ideology translates directly into anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment because Israel is cast as an extension of the same oppressive Western power structure. For most American Jews under seventy, he said, anti-Semitism has seldom been experienced outside the university context and has not come from the Republican Party.
On the geopolitical situation, Berkowitz identified what he called an unprecedented tension within American diplomacy. Vice President Vance is spearheading negotiations with Iran through his fourteen-point memorandum of understanding, while Secretary of State Rubio is managing a separate Israel-Lebanon framework. The two tracks are in direct conflict because Iran’s interests and the interests of a stable Lebanon are fundamentally opposed. He noted several irregularities in the Vance memorandum: Israel is never mentioned in it, yet it calls for an end to military activities in Lebanon even though neither the United States nor Iran is officially fighting there. It calls for both parties to respect the internal affairs of the other, despite the fact that the entire American military deployment to the region began in January specifically because Trump was outraged by Iran’s slaughter of tens of thousands of its own protesters, which is by definition a reaction to Iran’s internal affairs.
The critical substantive difference between the two frameworks, Berkowitz said, is what happens to Hezbollah. The Vance memorandum with Iran calls for a termination of hostilities with Hezbollah left intact as a functioning organization. The Rubio framework calls for Israel and the government of Lebanon to collaborate in dismantling Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. These are irreconcilable objectives as long as Iran views Hezbollah as an essential component of its regional security architecture, which it does.
On the Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Hennessey comparison of Iran to a street hoodlum operating under a nuisance license, understanding exactly how much provocation law enforcement will tolerate before intervening, Berkowitz said the analogy had some explanatory power but that Iran had been proceeding well beyond the nuisance threshold before the war began. By January of this year, Iran had come so close to weapons-grade fissile material that its own negotiators told the Americans they could produce eleven nuclear weapons if they chose to. They had manufactured thousands of ballistic missiles and excavated underground fortresses so deep that even B-2 bombers could not reach them. They had constructed what he called a ring of fire around the Middle East with proxy forces stretching from Iraq to Lebanon in the north and from Yemen to Gaza in the south. He said Iran was reaching proportions of malignancy that raised the question of whether military action could still reverse their growth, and that the Trump administration’s decision on February 28th to strike was a reasonable judgment that the window for effective action was closing.
The question now is whether the post-kinetic negotiating phase is allowing Iran to regress toward that pre-war trajectory. Berkowitz noted that the memorandum of understanding says nothing about ballistic missiles and nothing about proxy forces, leaving the most dangerous elements of Iranian power completely unaddressed during whatever remains of the sixty-day negotiating window. He said it is difficult to imagine a stable agreement emerging as long as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps dominates the Iranian power structure, because the IRGC’s reason for being is to wage Islamic war in the Middle East, destroy Western-friendly powers, and make Tehran the center of Islamic order in the region. Until they renounce those intentions, which are not secret but openly stated, no agreement will achieve the American interest of regional stability.
On internal Iranian factionalization, Berkowitz said the reporting, particularly from the indispensable Iran International, confirms that cracks have emerged within the religious leadership. But he cautioned against concluding that the hardliners have been sidelined. To the contrary, one consequence of Operation Epic Fury and the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei and approximately forty of his top security officials on the first day of the war has been a tighter grip by the IRGC on the remaining power structure. The IRGC controls the military and the weapons, and its leadership consists of hardliners. Whatever multiplicity of voices appears in negotiations, all the evidence suggests the hardliners retain at least as much power as they have always had, and possibly more.