Put aside the cursing, and focus on defeating Iran

This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

On multiple occasions when denigrating his political rivals and asserting his own credentials, Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly asserted that the single most important quality an Israeli prime minister must possess is the strength of purpose needed to say “no” to the president of the United States.

He has made the point in public speeches, in smaller meetings, and from the Knesset podium. In February 2022, to give just one example, during the period when, to his horror, he had been briefly ousted from the premiership by the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid coalition, he told parliament, “The prime minister of Israel must have one ability, one ability — and without it, he cannot be here [in that job]: He must be capable of saying one word to the president of the United States. And the word is: No.”

And the fact is that Netanyahu has said “no” to American presidents — most relevantly when opposing Barack Obama’s drive to the lousy 2015 deal intended to thwart Iran’s efforts to attain nuclear weapons. He told Obama that the agreement would, as proved to be the case, in fact enable the regime to advance toward the bomb, and he attempted to marshal the US Congress to his and Israel’s cause. In vain.

Evidently, despite the particularly high risk of attempting to oppose the current irascible, unpredictable and flailing US president, Netanyahu has again been attempting to say “no” to a leader of the free world — over Donald Trump’s handling of the battle to bring down the would-be genocidal regime in Iran, and specifically, this week, over how to counter the intensifying and widening attacks on Israel by the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror army in Lebanon.

It is unlikely that Trump planned to denounce Netanyahu in expletive-filled terms in their conversations on Monday, when the US president is reported to have furiously demanded to know “What the fuck are you doing?” ahead of intended Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah’s Dahiya stronghold in the Beirut suburbs, and to have shouted down the line to the prime minister something like: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

But the resort to the f-word is familiar: Trump publicly castigated Netanyahu at the end of last year’s 12-day war with Iran, and ordered him to recall pilots about to carry out airstrikes after Tehran had breached the president’s fresh ceasefire: “You know what?” he told reporters on the White House lawn on June 24, 2025, charmingly equating Israel with the ayatollahs. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Do you understand that?”

And the details of the conversation would only have been disseminated by Trump’s inner circle — Netanyahu was hardly going to leak it — and have not been denied by DC. Indeed, Trump confirmed some of them on Wednesday.

They showcase a president, and his team, determinedly seeking to counter the humiliating and inaccurate narrative that says Israel’s prime minister somehow tricked and manipulated the president into the joint war against Iran that began on February 28, and underline how desperate Trump now is to extricate the United States from the poorly planned and consequently unsuccessful resort to force.

Netanyahu has played up the achievement, as with the 12-day war last year, of Israel partnering with the world’s most powerful military force in attempting to bring down a regime in Iran that is determined to destroy the Jewish state. But with the regime proving far more tenacious than our two allied countries’ strategists had calculated, the ostensible shared interests have widely diverged.

A resurgent, emboldened, militarily strengthening Iran, capable moreover of bolstering its support for Hezbollah and Hamas, presents an existential danger to Israel. Trump well knows that the Islamic Republic has destructive ambitions that extend beyond Israel, across the region and beyond, deeply threatening American interests. But Americans do not regard that danger as immediate, and the president is clearly unwilling to put more American soldiers’ lives on the line and place America’s economy at further risk by doubling down on the failed effort to bring down the regime.

The result is a president all but imploring Tehran’s ruthless leadership to agree to accept incredibly advantageous terms for what he absurdly calls “peace,” beginning with a memorandum of understanding that, as far as we know, channels billions into Iran’s coffers and does not secure any of the war’s original goals — merely setting a framework for talks on Iran’s nuclear program, the fate of its enriched uranium, its ballistic missile development, support for terror proxies, and use of terrorism worldwide.

These are terms that the regime would have jumped at before the war, that will enable it to stave off any genuine concessions for the foreseeable future, that make the Obama nuclear deal Trump abrogated look hermetic by comparison, and that hang Israel out to dry.

If ever there was a time and a reason for a prime minister of Israel to say “no” to a US president, it is right now, with Trump going cap in hand to the mass murderers in Tehran. What’s needed is a civil version of “What the fuck are you doing?” — not from Trump to Netanyahu but from Netanyahu to Trump. To be followed by a joint, intimate, constructive effort by two vital allies to assess where and why this war has so signally failed, to avoid exacerbating the failure with a dreadful, self-defeating deal with the devil, and to pool their considerable wisdom, experience and power to resolutely turn the tide.

Shekel shock

The shekel has strengthened by about 20 percent against the dollar in the past year.

All manner of factors are being cited for this extraordinary show of faith in the currency of a tiny little country with a shaky democracy in the midst of a broadly unsuccessful multifront war.

These include the sale of vast amounts of US equity investments by Israeli pension and insurance funds, overseas investments in Israel’s still-thriving tech sector, and, risibly, global markets’ perceived sense of regional stability. Some analysts also assert that the shekel is appreciating amid a wider fall in the value of the dollar, but the fact is that the euro and pound sterling, to take two important examples, have barely shifted against the dollar this past year.

It has also been suggested to me that the Bank of Israel is wary of intervening for fear of irritating Trump, who is seeking to narrow the US trade deficit and make US manufacturing more competitive. And it’s been claimed that years of Bank of Israel intervention had long rendered the shekel unnaturally weak, and that what is now unfolding is a case of our local currency finding a more authentic level.

It’s plain to see that the many Israeli businesses whose revenues are in dollars but whose costs are in shekels are being devastated by the shift, with the crucial tech sector at front and center. Their investors’ dollars are worth far less, and they are therefore being financially pressured to move at least some of their operations overseas, where staffing has become far cheaper. Hence, a rising tide of firings. The massively strengthened shekel is not the only factor in the surge of dismissals — the impact of AI is widely cited, too — but it is central to the crisis.

In its annual report published last week, the government’s own Israel Innovation Authority found local startups were increasingly moving operations overseas, draining the nation of engineers, tech personnel, and managers, with the overall number of tech employees based in Israel declining. “Israeli high tech became so successful that now it’s coming back to bite it, because it created such an influx of investments coming into Israel, which changed the shekel-dollar exchange rate, and Israeli high tech has to adapt,” said the IIA’s outgoing CEO Dror Bin. “Our main challenge now is not only to continue to generate innovation, but also to ensure that this innovation continues to create value, jobs, and growth here in Israel.”

Again, it needs to be stressed: Israel is not the hapless victim of a mass global weakening of the dollar. It is an outlier, whose currency is now stronger against the dollar than at any time in the past three decades, prompting what threatens to become a domestic meltdown, especially in the high-tech industry that is peerlessly important to national growth. And yet the government is doing absolutely nothing about it.