I spent Shabbat dinner in San Francisco last week with wonderful fellow Jews. Not one wore a Star of David necklace. I behaved—until I didn’t. “The war with Iran was a useless provocation by you-know-who,” a dinner mate offered.
“Sorry?” I said. “Iran has been the biggest sponsor of terror since 9/11. What precisely would you have done?”
So I dropped the name: “Trump.”
“The U.S. president is the only one to say Dayenu: Enough is enough!”
My new friends shifted in their seats.
The dealmaker made a deal, Iran predictably torched it within three weeks, and everyone is in an uproar.
Has Trump betrayed Israel? Hit pause before you hit panic. Nothing is ever as it seems in Trump’s political theatre. And it ain’t over. Far from it.
“Operation Epic Fury” raged for three months until a bipartisan War Powers Resolution pulled the rug out. Typical Trump. He pivots in a blink. No regime change, but oil flows. A non-deal signed: Enter the Memorandum of Understanding.
An MoU is an agreement to agree, which, any lawyer will tell you, is not an agreement, but rather, a handshake on paper. And Trump’s team knew exactly what they were doing with it.
Why fold a winning hand 108 days in?
Five reasons. One: Congress. A bipartisan rebuke of a commander-in-chief mid-conflict signaled that the runway for war had limits. Two: the midterms. Lose the House in November, and the last two years of this presidency will become obstruction management. Three: economics. A closed Strait of Hormuz was choking 20% of global oil supply, threatening a correction that would land on middle-class Americans like a freight train. Four: “America First” means “America First,” not Israel first. That is not betrayal; it is constitutional reality. Five: Israel itself. Its signature is not on the MOU. Its exclusion is not abandonment; it is cover. Whatever Israel must do, Washington keeps plausible deniability.
Meanwhile, the mullahs do not sign deals to keep them; they sign them to survive them. There is only taqiyya—doctrinally sanctioned deception. Right on cue, they proved the point.
Barely a week after the ink dried, an Iranian drone slammed into a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz. This week, during slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s funeral processions (“We gave them a week off for a funeral because we’re nice,” Trump quipped), Iran struck three more tankers.
The response? Some 80-plus targets hit in a single night. On Wednesday, Trump declared the MoU “over.” He called the regime liars, cheats and “scum”—sick, vicious people who, if they had a nuclear weapon, would use it.
I have argued from the start: The MoU was a placeholder handed to a regime that was always going to break it. I expected Trump to coast past the midterms before the reckoning. The mullahs could not even give him that. Now, Trump holds the “I told you so” heard around the world, delivered not by an American politician but by Iranian drones.
And Israel, unburdened by any signature on the agreement, retains every option it has always had.
Iran just handed Trump a mandate of war that Congress cannot deny. American interests are now under attack. What’s a guy who gets things done to do? Iran had everything in its favor; it just needed to play ball. Perhaps it’s three strikes—and you’re out. We can only hope.
We are living in godly and ungodly times. There is an unlikelihood to this chain of events that defies reason; I can only call it Divine intervention.
Did the deal fail? The deal was never the point.
There is no final curtain call here. Nothing in this fast-moving world is as it seems. We would all do well to remember that.
