Buck Up

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 08, 2026

 

This post is in response to Western Discourse Suggests October 7 Achieved Its Political Purpose

By Daniel Foster

 

Far be it from me to interrupt a bout of cathartic fatalism. Lord knows I’m good for those when the occasion permits. But Dan Foster’s latest is a bit too morose even for a “morosity” veteran like me.

 

A cursory survey of the noxious rhetoric coming from the American left and the nationalist right (in Israel, where they gathered for a conference, of all places) calling for America to, if not outright sever, at least strain its relationship with Israel to the breaking point led Dan toward a dour realization: “There’s really nothing else to conclude here but that October 7, at least as an act of political terrorism, if not as an attempt to destabilize the Israeli state, worked.”

 

To view Israel’s relative value to the world through the prism of anti-Israel activism in the West is to despair. But that’s not the only perspective we might bring to bear.

 

We could evaluate how Israel has fared, for example, since the single most violent attack on the Jewish people since 1945. If we did, we’d see that almost all of Qasem Soleimani’s “seven armies,” the “ring of fire” surrounding the Jewish state, are, for now, hobbled to the point of being negligible. Even the Syrian Assad regime — an Iranian satrap since at least the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime — is gone.

 

The ringmaster, Iran, is similarly crippled. Its military is in tatters. Its nuclear program is entombed in rubble. The American blockade is throttling its political class. Its people are destitute and angry, and we should expect that — just as the Iranians rose up in 2009, 2011, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2025 — they will come for the Islamic Republic’s leaders again.

 

As for Israel itself, the Jewish state is hardly isolated in its region. The war has repelled the Gulf Arab states further from Iran’s orbit and closer to the U.S.-led effort to create a reliable security architecture in the region, with Israel at its center. The Israeli state, already one of the more socially cohesive enterprises in the Western world, is even more integrated (if not exactly harmonious). Despite the deteriorating security situation in the region, foreign direct investment is pouring in from all over the world.

 

I don’t mean to suggest that the animosity toward Israel reliably displayed by Eurocrats, socialist revolutionaries, and right-wing post-liberals presents no threat to either Israel or Washington’s relationship with Jerusalem. It does. Moreover, it would be disastrous if the American right adopted the anti-Israel fashion that has overtaken the American left. But just survey some of the rhetoric coming out of the “NatCons in Jerusalem” that so unnerved Dan:

 

 

What American conservative believes that the U.S. should support Israel as some sort of cosmic recompense for the Holocaust? Do the NatCons even talk to conventional conservatives? If they did, they’d probably have been informed that Israel is by far the most capable American ally in the region, as well as a liberal democracy that promotes Western values and culture. Theirs is a materialistic and ideational argument that has precisely nothing to do with Hitler’s works. If the NatCons cannot even pass a Turing test in their attempts to nudge the American right in its ideological direction, their project isn’t going to get too far.

 

There are challenges ahead for the U.S.-Israel relationship, although the Israeli government’s eagerness to be done with American aid should compel Americans to wonder if the loss of a client for U.S. arms would leave us worse off than the Israelis. Still, those challenges do not remotely resemble the sort that Yahya Sinwar envisioned when he unleashed Hamas on Israeli civilians. The Jewish state was not supposed to emerge from this war stronger, richer, more regionally integrated, and more confident in its civilizational mission. But it has.

 

There’s plenty to be dismayed about these days. Israel’s future probably isn’t one of them.