Israel Will "Fight Tooth and Nail, if Necessary"
Also, the "fly a leftist home on election day" myth.
Interception of an Iranian missile attack on Israel as it seen from the Jerusalem Mountains, June 14, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
It’s Sunday, August 9, and “I will fight tooth and nail, if necessary,” Netanyahu declared when President Biden imposed a weapons embargo on him. But what, exactly, will the United States fight with? Even without an embargo, its own arsenals are approaching the red line fast. The commander of United States European Command warned the Pentagon that there aren’t enough resources to defend against the coming confrontation with Iran while protecting both Israel and American forces—they will have to choose. Reuters reported that the U.S. Army has nearly exhausted its entire stock of precision missiles. In Israel, it was reported that the bunker-buster bombs of the kind dropped on Fordow last year are also nearly gone after a single night of strikes, making an attack on Pickaxe Mountain difficult.
And all this after just a few weeks of fighting a failing Middle Eastern dictatorship—torn from within and teetering on economic collapse. What happens if Russia stages a provocation somewhere else in Europe? Or if China decides to push forces toward Taiwan? The state of the U.S. military brings to mind the IDF on the eve of October 7: an imposing image that, in practice, delivered failure after failure, draw after draw. Its only clear victory since the end of the Cold War was over Saddam Hussein, a quarter of a century ago.
The whole world is now watching Trump. Will he end the war with Iran still controlling the Strait of Hormuz, the regime still standing, and its army merely licking its wounds?
Two absurdities. The first: the American—and especially Republican—trauma of a ground operation and a bloody quagmire is the very thing that has kept the Iranians alive. Almost any ground operation—to seize uranium, take Kharg Island, or capture senior officials—would likely have triggered a dramatic upheaval of the regime. The second: it is precisely the fear of a dramatic collapse in American standing that stops Trump from ending this conflict the way Washington ended Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. Walter Russell Mead, a prominent American conservative commentator, proposed years ago that the United States finish off Iran—the small, weak, estranged son of the Sino-Russian-Korean axis, and the only one that doesn’t yet have nuclear weapons. The message, he wrote shortly after October 7, would land well in every capital that loves evil—even if the message is that the United States can no longer win.
This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.
El Al plane takes off at the Ben Gurion International Airport, outside of Tel Aviv, August 4, 2026. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
It’s called Fly&Vote, an initiative of the AID Coalition—a group that grew out of the 2023 anti-judicial-reform protests. With Israel’s Knesset election set for October the coalition is helping expatriate Israelis get home for one thing: to vote. In recent days, social media has filled with screenshots of the tickets. Israeli law offers no shortcut—absentee voting is reserved for diplomats, soldiers posted overseas, and representatives of national institutions. Everyone else has to show up in person.
A little perspective, for anyone swept up in the euphoria or the hysteria over the “fly a leftist home on election day” initiative: one seat equals roughly 41,000 votes. An El Al Dreamliner seats about 330. An airlift of 125 planes equals a single seat.
The more fundamental question is whether the center-left has anywhere left to grow in turnout. The rule that holds worldwide is that as income and education rise, so does voter participation. The one exception is Israel’s Haredi community—poor, with very low rates of high-school and university completion, yet with extraordinary turnout.
So the volatile variable in Israeli elections is turnout in two camps: the Likud periphery and the Arabs. In the 2022 election, Likud turnout rose 5 percent over the previous round, and that alone drove almost all of the change. That’s why Netanyahu tends to build his campaign around getting people to the polls, and his rivals around persuasion. He has plenty of voters—just dormant ones—while theirs are switched on, but too few. Even in 2022, when they were complacent, demoralized, and low on energy, they still turned out in droves.
If the change bloc has a million shekels, it’s better off spending it on persuading the bloc-switchers, or on suppressing Haredi turnout. But it has far, far more than that—as the mysterious anti-government ads in the weekend papers of the religious-Zionist press suggest, along with the Haredi consultants quietly working to soften the ground. So there’s still budget left over to encourage people to vote from home.
Isn’t the opposition’s push to bring out voters just an attempt to wring one more drop from an empty oil bottle? Well—yes. But that drop matters. In Tel Aviv, turnout fell 3.4 percent in the last election compared with 2019. In Givatayim it dropped 2.6 percent, in Herzliya 2.3 percent. In other words, turnout is sliding in the central cities—which are also center-left cities. That’s worth roughly one net seat. In ordinary times, not worth the effort. In an election already crowned “fateful in the history of the state,” it’s a seat that could decide everything.
English Editor: Ari Tatarka
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I’m confused about the Hermon reference in the first paragraph. Does be mean Pickaxe?