President Trump took a rhetorical victory lap in front of the Israeli parliament Monday. Ignoring his patented departures from the teleprompter, which violated all sorts of valuable norms, it was a speech Trump deserved to give. The ending of the war — even if it’s just a ceasefire — and the release of Israel’s last living hostages is, by itself, a monumental diplomatic accomplishment, and Trump deserves to take a bow.
Much of Trump’s prepared text was forward-looking, calling for a new “golden age” for the Middle East to mirror the one allegedly unfolding here in America. I’m generally skeptical about “golden ages,” here or abroad, and especially leery about any talk about “everlasting peace” in a region that has known “peace” for only a handful of years since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
So, by all means, let’s be forward-looking about building peace.
But that project requires some honesty about how we got here.
Where to begin that story chronologically is the subject of Ph.D. dissertations. But conceptually it begins with a very basic observation. From its founding, Israel and its enemies have had irreconcilable positions. Israel insists that it has a right to exist. Its enemies take the opposite position.
For clarity’s sake at least, I think it is fair to distinguish between critics or opponents of Israel and its enemies. Many critics merely want a two-state solution or more autonomy and security for Palestinians. Israel’s enemies, meanwhile, want the “Zionist entity” to be erased. “From the river to the sea,” as the saying goes, they want the Israeli “colonizers” to die or be expelled from the region. That is the stated position of Iran and its various proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. It is also by extension the position of their supporters, whether they fully realize it or not.
In such a zero-sum conflict, these positions are axiomatically non-negotiable. One side has to lose for the other to win. But here’s where things get messy conceptually: Many of Israel’s enemies are treated as mere opponents and critics, and vice versa. The distinction gets blurred by friends and foes alike.
The linguistic legerdemain of “anti-Zionism” is treated as a legitimate, respectable perspective, as if anti-Zionism somehow means something other than a desire to end Israel’s existence as a sovereign Jewish nation-state. But that’s literally what anti-Zionism means. Zionism is simply the idea that Jews should have their own country in their historic homeland.
Under the umbrella of the United Nations, there is an alphabet soup of organizations, programs and committees that are dedicated to a one-sided effort to combat the Zionist project and rectify the problem of Israel’s existence. The U.N. Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) bequeaths to Palestinians a unique “hereditary” refugee status, not accorded to any of the hundreds of millions of refugee populations since the end of WWII.
UNRWA school teachers — some of whom are, or were, members of Hamas — indoctrinate children into hatred of, and “resistance” to, Israelis. The Human Rights Council has a long history of having an obsessive, institutionalized, structurally antisemitic double standard for Israel alone.
Western media outlets rely on these agencies to frame the discussion of Israel, keeping the idea alive that the only real solution is to do something about Zionism, as if Israel’s survival remains provisional, even though modern Israel is older than dozens of other nations.
Throughout the Gaza war, claims from the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry were greeted with reflexive credulity, as were charges of “genocide” — against Israel. Claims that Gaza was enduring mass starvation were not subjected to the journalistic skepticism reserved for Israel or the Trump White House, but rather treated with enthusiastic credulity. Watching the celebrations in Gaza this week, did you see a lot of emaciated Palestinians? Will the press search for them now?
Over the last two years, campus protesters and social media influencers lionized Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters. The protesters were often treated in the press and by school administrators as noble and heroic champions of free speech or human rights, despite the fact they were providing cover for an Islamist organization that murders Palestinian political dissenters and homosexuals, persecutes Christians, and repeatedly affirms its commitment to the genocidal destruction of Israel. Would pro-KKK groups get the same treatment?
I think many of the accusations that Israel is committed to genocide can best be understood as a mix of projection of — and distraction from — its enemies’ open support for genocide.
If a lasting, never mind everlasting, peace is possible, it will only be when Israel’s existence is accepted as an everlasting non-negotiable fact. Once that happens, disputes about borders, Palestinian rights, and autonomy can be negotiated on a non-zero-sum basis.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.