Ruthie Blum, senior contributing editor at JNS, describes something Israel almost never produces: wall-to-wall consensus.
Across the political map, Israelis agree this war is necessary, because Iran is the head of the octopus feeding every proxy around them, and October 7 was the wake-up that appeasement had failed.
The only argument inside Israel is over how the war is being fought.
And she points at an irony that stings: Israelis spent decades complaining about their own terrible PR, yet it's Washington that never explained this war to the American people.
Her real worry is the rhythm of it.
Strike, pause, ceasefire, strike again, until it becomes what she calls almost a fake war, where every pause buys the other side time.
For the regime in Tehran, survival IS victory, whatever its own people pay along the way, which is why she leans on the historian Bernard Lewis: Cold War logic never transfers to true believers.
And she reads one silence as proof of who fears whom.
In all these weeks, Iran has fired on the Saudis, the Emiratis, even Qatar, and not once at Israel.
Her hoped ending is the regime falling to its own people.
But if ground forces ever go in, "they will be Israeli boots, not American ones," an army with the will and the soldiers, still needing American air cover, bunker busters, and untied hands.
@WeTheBrandon @RuthieBlum
