Ron Agam

Israel needs strength and diplomacy. Treating them as enemies is the real danger.

The central mistake of every weak agreement with Tehran is the same: it assumes that the Islamic Republic can be persuaded to behave like a normal state. 

The stakes in the confrontation with Iran extend far beyond the Middle East. If Tehran emerges from this crisis looking stronger, the damage will not be confined to Israel or the Gulf. 

President Trump understands something most diplomats refuse to acknowledge: the Middle East cannot remain a museum of old hatred. 

When leaders gather in Evian (France) next month, they will do what they always do: negotiate, issue a communiqué, and leave believing they have accomplished something. 

America has the cards. Iran is betting on its hesitation.

There are bad deals. There are weak deals. And then there are deals that dress surrender as diplomacy, and ask Israel to applaud while the knife is being sharpened.

America has to stop lying to itself about Iran. The United States is not being dragged into a war because of Israel. 

I am not a diplomat or a security analyst. My passion in life has always been to build bridges, to use whatever reach I had to move things in a positive direction. 

Israel has had friends in the White House before. Harry Truman recognized the Jewish state at its birth. Richard Nixon understood during the Yom Kippur War that delay could be fatal. Those were consequential acts, and history rightly honors them.

There is a mistake many still make when speaking about Iran. They turn the argument into theology, as if the central question were a religious word like taqiyya. 

The first falsehood to clear away is this: what Israel and the United States are doing is not a war on Iran. It is a confrontation with the Islamic Republic, the dictatorship that has ruled Iran since 1979, oppressed its own citizens, and turned a civilization of enormous depth and distinction into the instrument of a theocratic project.