Amichai Chikli is the Israeli minister of diaspora affairs.
Israelis were told that the war with Iran was over last week, and yet the shooting continued into the weekend. At least five soldiers were killed. The fighting, initiated by the Islamic Republic’s Hezbollah proxy in Lebanon, underscored why my countrymen are alarmed by Washington and Tehran’s “memorandum of understanding.” For us, this isn’t a policy debate; it’s an existential question of survival, deterrence and the balance of power in the Middle East.
Israelis know that our interests are aligned with but not identical to those of our friends in America. We also know that the current disagreement doesn’t diminish Donald Trump’s historic support for the Jewish state. As president, he has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, extended our sovereignty over the Golan Heights, forged the Abraham Accords and waged a punishing campaign against the Iranian regime. We’ve never had a stronger ally in the White House, and we understand his recent efforts to stabilize global shipping and oil prices.
Yet ending a war is one thing. Lifting sanctions on Iran without getting much of anything in return is something else and entirely new. It constitutes a grave strategic mistake.
The Islamic Republic isn’t a normal state. It is a revolutionary, imperialist dictatorship bent on exerting its will around the globe. For 47 years, the Iranian regime has systematically lied to the international community, armed terrorist proxies, called for Israel’s destruction and brutally oppressed its own people. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead and a new cadre is in charge, but the government’s intentions haven’t changed. The West must not mistake tactical pauses for genuine transformation.
Money is fungible. Every dollar released to the regime will fuel domestic repression and nuclear weapons development, among other deadly projects. Any agreement therefore must maintain economic pressure until Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is destroyed or irreversibly neutralized. International inspectors must be given unfettered access to verify compliance, and the regime’s terror machine must be meaningfully dismantled.
Sanctions relief, however, isn’t the greatest danger. A more alarming development is the Islamist coalition, led by Turkey, that helped bring about this moment.
Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become one of the most destabilizing powers in the region, fueled by a poisonous blend of Islamist ideology and neo-Ottoman imperialism. The NATO member state seems to reject the “common values of individual liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law” for which the alliance stands. Ankara’s brutal campaigns against the Kurds in northern Syria reveal its true expansionist face. So do the state’s occupation of northern Cyprus, its challenges to maritime borders with Greece and its increasingly bellicose rhetoric, which includes at least one Turkish official musing about governing Jerusalem.
The same concerns exist in Doha and Islamabad. Qatar has perfected soft-power jihad. Between pouring money into Al Jazeera and Western academia, sports and politics, it has laundered Muslim Brotherhood ideology into the mainstream. Pakistan, the country that harbored Osama bin Laden and remains India’s foremost adversary, adds a nuclear edge to this axis. These players differ in tactics but share the same political DNA.
Syria represents the clearest and most urgent test. Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, an al-Qaeda offshoot, is being presented as a pragmatic statesman. That is a dangerous and reckless illusion. Under his former terrorist auspices, al-Sharaa fought for “al-Sham,” or a Greater Syria, a vision that often encompasses Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. Now, under his rule, the new government has struggled to protect thousands of the country’s minorities, including Alawites, Druze and Kurds. Syria is rapidly turning into Gaza 2.0: a jihadist outpost on Israel’s border, dressed up in diplomatic language — and now with military support from Turkey.
The West cannot keep appeasing Islamist actors while weakening its democratic allies. Israel learned on Oct. 7, in the most brutal way imaginable, what happens when you refuse to take your enemies at their word. We now listen carefully to the jihadist slogans of al-Sharaa’s forces, to the imperial and antisemitic declarations of Turkey’s leadership and to the Iranian regime’s contempt for the United States.
The lesson of the past 2½ years — and indeed, of the past quarter-century — is simple: Stability can’t be gained by empowering those who reject the foundations of the free world. Peace can’t be bought by rewarding regimes and movements that treat diplomacy as a tactical break between rounds of aggression. And the goal of Israel’s destruction can’t be treated as a legitimate grievance. It is a central ideological obsession — and a civilizational threat.
Israel will continue to speak the truth plainly. The Middle East punishes wishful thinking without mercy. It will do so again if the West continues to mistake Islamism for pragmatism, appeasement for diplomacy and silence for stability.
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