I want to be upfront about something before I get into this, which is that I did not expect to be writing a post defending Israel from the United States, of all configurations, and I am writing it anyway, because what I am seeing happen right now bothers me enough that I am willing to say something I know will get me called a name I don’t think applies to me. So let me just say the thing plainly first and explain it after. Hands off Israel. I mean that specifically as a statement about American military force, not as a statement about American policy, American funding, American diplomacy, or American criticism, all of which I think should continue and in some cases intensify. But actual violence, actual strikes, actual bombs, from the United States, aimed at Israel, is a line I am not willing to cross or to excuse anyone else for crossing, and I think more people who care about Palestine should be saying this loudly rather than staying quiet because the optics feel uncomfortable.
Here is what is actually happening, as best I can tell, separate from the version of it that gets flattened into a headline. The ceasefire architecture that ended the worst of the open war between Israel and Iran has been falling apart specifically over Lebanon, because Israel has kept hitting Hezbollah targets in and around Beirut and southern Lebanon even as Washington was trying to close out a deal with Tehran, and each time Israel does this, it nearly blows up talks that took months to assemble. Trump has responded to this, repeatedly, not with airstrikes on Israel, but with something that is still notable, sustained public pressure, sharp private language, and a level of open frustration with Netanyahu that is unusual for an American president to display about Israel specifically. He has told Netanyahu directly to stop hitting Lebanon while a deal was close, reportedly using language pointed enough that it made the news cycle on its own. He has said publicly that there should be no more attacks by Israel anywhere in Lebanon. His vice president, JD Vance, said something to Israeli officials that landed about as bluntly as it is possible to land something without actually issuing a threat, telling them essentially that Trump is the only head of state in the world still sympathetic to Israel right now, and that if Vance were sitting in the Israeli cabinet, he would think twice about attacking the one powerful ally his country has left. That is not a bombing threat. That is something else, a warning, a pressure tactic, an implicit reminder of dependency, and I think it is worth being precise about that distinction rather than rounding it up to something it is not.
But I understand why it feels like the temperature is rising toward something more dangerous, because the dynamic underneath it is genuinely volatile in a way it has not been before. Israel has been functionally sidelined from a major regional agreement that directly concerns its own security environment, brokered instead by Pakistan with Gulf states and Turkey at the table, and Israel has responded to that exclusion not by falling in line but by continuing exactly the operations the deal was supposed to stop, in defiance of direct requests from the president whose support it depends on for nearly everything, weapons, money, diplomatic cover at the UN, all of it. You have an Israeli government that has decided, apparently, that it would rather keep hitting Hezbollah than preserve a fragile peace process that the United States itself negotiated, and you have an American president who is visibly losing patience with that decision in public, which is rare, and which creates a kind of tension that did not used to exist between these two countries at anywhere near this level. So even if nobody has explicitly threatened to drop a bomb on Tel Aviv, the relationship itself is under more visible strain right now than it has been in a long time, and I don’t think it is unreasonable for people to be nervous about where that strain goes next.
And this is exactly where I want to plant my flag, because the nervousness is legitimate, but the conclusion some people seem to be drawing from it, that American force against Israel would somehow be a justified or even desirable escalation, is where I get off the train completely. I get the entire case for frustration with the Israeli government. I am not interested in relitigating that case here because I assume most people reading this already know where I stand on it, and I am not walking that back. The Israeli government’s conduct, both in Gaza and now in this expanding Lebanon front, has been horrific by any reasonable accounting, and I am not here to soften that or qualify it into nothing. But none of that, not one bit of it, translates into the United States having some kind of standing right to bomb a country that, whatever else it is, has been treated as a formal American ally for decades, under administrations of both parties, under treaties and arrangements that exist whether or not any of us personally like them. You don’t get to skip the part where you change that relationship through policy, through funding decisions, through diplomatic pressure, and jump straight to military force, just because the government in question is acting badly. That is not how alliances work, and more importantly, it is not how I think violence should be justified by anyone, ever, including by my own country.
I also want to name directly why this matters specifically to people who care about Palestine, because I think there’s a version of this argument that gets missed entirely if you’re only thinking about Israel as an abstraction. If the United States ever did escalate to actual strikes against Israel, and I want to be clear I am arguing against a hypothetical here, not describing something that has happened, that escalation would not stay neatly contained to Israeli military targets in some surgical, bloodless way. The United States has, by an enormous margin, more destructive capability than Israel does. If that kind of force ever got turned in Israel’s direction, the people most likely to get caught in whatever chaos followed are not just Israelis. They are Palestinians, in Gaza, in the West Bank, living inside and immediately next to whatever became the front line of that conflict. A wider war started by the US against Israel does not protect Palestinians. It very plausibly kills more of them, displaces more of them, destroys what little infrastructure they have left even faster than the current war already has. So if your actual priority is Palestinian lives, and I believe that is genuinely the priority for a lot of people saying things I disagree with right now, then cheering for or rationalizing American military escalation against Israel is, I think, working directly against that priority, not toward it.
I want to address the exact justification I keep seeing, because I think it deserves to be named instead of just gestured at. The argument goes something like, the Israeli government is bad, therefore strikes against it are justified, the same way strikes against Iran’s government were justified. And I think this argument should set off alarm bells immediately, because it is the precise logic that was used to justify attacking Iran in the first place, a sovereign country, a government plenty of people inside and outside that country oppose, where ordinary civilians who never asked for any of this ended up paying the price for decisions made by leadership they don’t control and in many cases despise. If you found that justification hollow when it was used to bomb Iran, and I did, then intellectual consistency requires you to find it equally hollow when someone tries to apply the identical logic to Israel. A bad government does not make a country’s civilian population a legitimate target, not in Tehran, not in Tel Aviv, not anywhere. I don’t think you can hold the position that civilian suffering in Iran was an outrage while also hoping for something that would inflict the same outcome on Israelis, including the ones actively organizing against their own government, the ones who have spent years protesting Netanyahu, the ones who want this war over as badly as anyone.
There is also a more practical, less moralized version of this argument that I think matters just as much. Whatever you believe about the legitimacy of Israel as a state, however you come down on the deeper historical questions about how it came to exist, the fact in front of us right now is that there are millions of people physically living there, going to work, raising kids, who did not individually choose this government’s military strategy and who would not be the ones making the decisions in some hypothetical war between Israel and the United States. Bombing a country does not bomb its cabinet. It bombs whoever happens to be nearby. I think it is possible, and I think it is actually necessary, to hold two things at once, a clear-eyed view that the current Israeli government’s actions have been indefensible, and a firm rejection of American violence as any kind of answer to that. Those two positions are not in tension. Believing the second doesn’t soften the first.
So here is where I actually land, and I’ll say it as plainly as I can. I would support an American president who cut off funding to Israel, who used real economic and diplomatic leverage to force a change in conduct, who said out loud that unconditional support ends here, because I think that kind of pressure is legitimate, it is available, and it might actually work. What I will not support, under any circumstance, is the United States using military force against Israel, and I think anyone who finds themselves rooting for that outcome, even quietly, even as a kind of grim satisfaction at watching an ally get what they think it deserves, should sit with what that outcome would actually do to the people they claim to be standing up for in the first place. That’s my line. I’d like it to be other people’s line too.