The poet, essayist, and playwright Nathan Alterman (1910–1970) was read widely in Mandate Palestine and Israel in his own day, and remains so today. In 1952 he came to the U.S. to observe the presidential campaigns of Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson and even composed a poem about the two parties’ conventions, which he found to be exotic and even amusing. He focused his attention on the political habits of the Jews he met there, writes Shalom Carmy:

Alterman saw [the American Jew] shouting and cheering and valiantly trying to fit in. Yet there is something about him that doesn’t quite fit, an element of preoccupation or distance. Whence does this discomfort stem? Perhaps the American Jew is insecure because of his loyalty to his people, and particularly his Zionism. He dreads the suspicion that Gentile Americans will think that concern for his people means a lackluster commitment to America.

Yet Alterman doesn’t buy this analysis. Advocacy and boosterism for one’s ethnic group is typically American. Many Irish Americans have been militant for the Irish cause against Great Britain. Slavic-American neighborhoods in postwar America expected their politicians to fight against the Soviet enslavement of Eastern Europe, at least rhetorically if not in concrete actions. Precisely in this respect, the Jew is like other Americans.

No, says Alterman, the difference is this: the Jew may yell “I like Ike” and pump his fist and blow his whistle, but his real question is whether “Ike likes me.” This, he judges, is why the Jew looks like an outsider at the party, or, in the poet’s striking phrase, like an old man in a nursery school.

Carmy finds this position persuasive, but only after refining it somewhat:

[All] those who like Ike also want to be liked by Ike. But the ordinary American in the crowd doesn’t dwell on the difference between liking Ike and being liked by him. He cheers his candidate, and the candidate beams back at him. They are two sides of the same coin, sharing an unconscious but powerfully felt Americanism. Where the Jew differs, according to Alterman, is that in liking Ike (or Adlai) he can’t let go of his anxiety about Ike’s attitude to him. He is reflective, and to a degree anxious, where other citizens are largely confident in their reciprocal regard.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”