It’s Noon in Israel: U.S. Ambassador to Staff: “Leave Israel Today”
Also, Tehran's "Doomsday Order", and for the first time, Americans sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis.
U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner sit down for talks in Geneva yesterday.
It’s Friday, February 27, and today the U.S. made some indication that the negotiations were not as “positive” as they described. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee warned his staff, “Anyone who wants to leave should do so today,” and the families of personnel, along with non-essential U.S. employees, have already been ordered to evacuate.
Last night’s round of talks in Geneva ended just like the first: inconclusively. As with two weeks ago, the Omani mediator hailed “significant progress,” the Iranians said the elements of an agreement were becoming “very serious,” and the Americans were slightly more restrained, settling for the adjective “positive.”
Technical talks will begin next week in Vienna under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, but prospects look mixed at best. A senior Iranian official told Reuters, “There are still gaps,” adding, “Reaching a deal is possible if the United States seriously separates the nuclear issue from other matters.”
That seems unlikely, especially given today’s developments. According to Axios, U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner were reportedly “disappointed” at the outset of the talks, while The Wall Street Journal described the sides as “still far apart on key issues.”
With all this Talmudic parsing of adjectives, I can’t help but feel that I—and many others—am playing Donald Trump’s game. It has been nearly a month since a negotiated solution was floated, and almost two months since his initial threat against the Iranian regime. Since then, the world has clung to every phrase uttered by Trump and his administration, dissecting it for hidden intent.
Meanwhile, virtually nothing material has changed. This latest round of negotiations was nearly identical to the first and did not alter the fundamental dynamic: no deal, no mercy. If the Iranian regime cannot bend on more than one of its core principles—its nuclear program, support for proxies, ballistic missiles and repression at home—Trump will strike. That has been true for a month.
Trump set a deadline that should expire, at the latest, next Saturday. He may or may not allow further diplomatic attempts. The strike, if it comes, could be limited—designed to expedite negotiations—or more severe, signaling the end of diplomacy altogether.
I suspect we might find out his preference this weekend.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei speaking to a crowd on February 1. (leader.ir)
Hitler called it the “Nero Decree.” In March 1945, when the Allies were already on German soil advancing toward Berlin, he signed an order to burn all bridges, destroy all local industry and leave behind nothing but scorched earth.
A fierce debate is taking place in the upper floors of the IDF headquarters and the lower levels of the bunker beneath. It concerns the possible existence of a parallel Iranian directive, three words long: “The Doomsday Order.” If such an order exists, it would not deal with destroying Iranian infrastructure but rather with issuing a “go” command to the entire Axis of Resistance—Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas and the militias—to fire everything they have.
If such an order exists, its meaning is no longer existential from Israel’s perspective: Hamas has been dismantled as an army, Hezbollah has been cut down by 90 percent, and Syria no longer takes instructions from Tehran. But it would still be a major headache for the military, a serious challenge for Israel’s defense systems and a prelude to a broad military operation in Lebanon.
Supporters of this view argue this is the way of fundamentalists—they do not know how to compromise and, from their perspective, will allow the entire region to go up in flames. Opponents believe there is no evidence for this and, in any case, question what exactly a button pressed in Tehran would even activate.
But Israel’s actions over the past week seem to be driven—perhaps as a result of the lessons of October 7—by the assumption that it will happen. That is the reason for the escalating attacks on Hezbollah strongholds, with emphasis on its rocket array. It is also the reason for the growing concern and attention devoted to the Houthi threat.
How quickly we have forgotten the nightly rush of millions to shelters because of a single missile. The concern about the fanatics from Yemen goes far beyond that nuisance, whose main damage so far has been the prolonged destruction of the tourism industry. The Houthi army includes nearly 1 million fighters, and its plans reportedly include raids into Israeli territory. It is not an immediate threat, of course, and the distance is great, but we have already learned that seemingly far-fetched plans—in this case, an invasion via Jordan—cannot simply be dismissed.
This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.
To read on my website click here
An anti-Israel demonstration in Chicago, Illinois, Oct. 8, 2023. (Combat Antisemitism Movement)
For the first time, Americans sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis. According to a recent Gallup poll, 41 percent of Americans say they sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Middle East conflict, while 36 percent sympathize more with the Israelis. The five-point gap is not enormous—but just a year ago, Israel stood at 46 percent compared to 33 percent for the Palestinians, which was itself a 24-year low.
But here’s the question dividing the Foreign Ministry, the IDF, many experts—and one man, Benjamin Netanyahu: Is it temporary?
In August, Netanyahu was asked whether Israel had ever been this isolated. “Plenty of times,” he replied. “For example? “A year ago, under the Biden administration.” To understand his answer, one must consider that for Netanyahu, “the world” is, in fact, a very small area, a diameter of just over one mile: between Capitol Hill and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
If one had to draw a world map based on where Israel focuses its attention, Washington would be the size of Europe, and Europe would be a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. And in Washington terms, Netanyahu says, last year we were under a practical embargo: President Biden opposed IDF action in Rafah, Vice President Harris boycotted the prime minister’s speech in Congress, and Washington was not briefed about Israel’s beeper operation and assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, so that it could not sabotage them by leaking the plans. By that measure, in Washington, everything today seems like a dream. The problem is, of course, that every dream ends when you wake up.
Netanyahu believes that Israel’s standing with the rest of the world has, in fact, been worse in years gone by, namely during the 1970s oil embargo after the Yom Kippur War.
He said outright in 2025 that it is all reversible. He believed that when Israel wins the war, Jerusalem will leave all this hostility behind. After all, the source of nearly all of Israel’s international troubles is Gaza, which Israel left 20 years ago—not Judea and Samaria, where the so-called “occupation” continues.
His math—that it was better to solve the problem of Gaza once and for all than to stop and pay the price for temporary legitimacy—doesn’t seem to have worked out so far.
Here we are in the “peaceful” future, and Gallup indicates that the American people’s feelings align more with the Foreign Ministry’s prediction than with Netanyahu’s.
Then again, it’s only been four months, and the Gaza issue is far from settled. Whether the long-term trend will pull in Israel’s favor remains to be seen.
To read the article I wrote on this in August click here.
Shabbat Shalom
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Any clarity as to why Marco Rubio isn't doing Secretary of State duties?
Would anyone cry if their plane crashed tomorrow? Hurdle burden and curse seeking to fatten the purse
Francisco Gil white points out that Arabs receive nearly 10 times more aid and armaments than Israel and the Jews 🪤
https://substack.com/@thatdude1/note/c-220436693?r=36c3b5
I beg to differ on the issue of Israel’s standing in the world. The destruction and disabling of a large portion of Iran’s “Ring of Fire” is decisive to the country’s future prospects. I see it as ripping off the bandages, it hurts in the present but the pain dissolves quickly. It’s far better than, to mix metaphors, the drip-drip tactic of small, “proportionate” retaliations that maintained an unmaintainable status quo and allowed for the phony narrative of Palestinian “victimhood” to fester and be exploited.
With Iran, it seems clear (to me, anyway) that the regime cannot agree to any of President Trump’s conditions on nuclear, ballistic missiles and support of proxies. It is an Islamic revolutionary movement that controls a country and such an agreement wipes out its revolutionary identity - putting aside the humiliation from which whatever shred of legitimacy the regime may still have, would never recover. The U.S. deadlines are to allow for the deployment of military assets to take Iran down … with the only other option a surrender at the negotiating table which won’t happen.
On the PR front, Israel can do two things right away. First, it can use Hamas’ admission of losing 25,000 members to put the “genocide” claim to rest while shaming the media for its credulous reporting via Hamas’ supervised stringers - and contrast it with its slow and tentative reporting out of Iran where it now appears that as many (if not more) civilians were shot down in the streets protesting in two days than were killed in Gaza in two years of war. As an aside, one need only consider the quality (as in lack of objectivity) of the BBC journalist reporting from Teheran to understand what such “independent” journalists would have reported had they been let loose unprotected by the IDF in Gaza.
The second point would be to have the Western audience consider various aspects of the newly minted Palestinian “constitution” and ask if they support it. At least the fundamentally anti-Western aspect of what is at its base not a national but Islamic struggle against not Israel but the West might finally come through.
Beyond that, there’s my expectation that sometime soon after President Herzog returns, Ethiopia will in fact become the second country to recognize Somaliland and Egypt will have to rethink its increasing anti-Israel rhetoric because of the consequences on the Nile’s flow relating to a certain dam in Ethiopia.
I also see progress on the India-Israel-Europe corridor and the undersea pipeline, along with other possibilities.
Israel needs to focus its PR strategy by highlighting the good it does throughout Africa and Asia to counter the racism and antisemitism in certain dark corners. It needs to celebrate its successes unapologetically in making the world a better place and challenge the world to follow suit.
In other words, stop focusing on antisemitism but not quite in the way Brett Stephens suggested. Let Israel show itself as a model to emulate.