Now that Bernie Sanders has won the New Hampshire primary, and came in second, by a hairsbreadth, in the Iowa caucuses, the possibility seems greater that the aging Jewish radical could become the Democratic nominee for the presidency. Citing the troubling parallels to the takeover of Britain’s Labor party by Jeremy Corbyn and his fellow hard-left anti-Semites, Yossi Klein Halevi believes such an outcome would be nothing short of disastrous for American Jews: :

Bernie Sanders . . . has repeatedly affirmed his support for Israel’s right to exist, though he is far more equivocal about its right to defend that right. We all know about his time on a kibbutz. . . . But more than any other leading politician, Sanders is responsible for mainstreaming the Corbynist wing of the Democratic party. The party’s anti-Zionists, like Linda Sarsour, have gathered around Sanders. And Sanders himself supported Jeremy Corbyn—ignoring the fears of British Jews, who overwhelmingly saw Corbyn as an anti-Semite. . . . Under President Sanders, those still-renegade voices within the Democratic party would have intimate access to the White House.

And then there’s the video clip of Sanders, taken during his Soviet honeymoon in 1988, sitting bare-chested in a sauna and toasting Soviet officials. That astonishing scene portrays a Jew indifferent to his people’s torment [under Soviet tyranny]. Bernie Sanders is not an enemy of the Jewish people. He simply doesn’t care enough about Jewish concerns to be considered a friend.

President Sanders would be taking office at a time when the stakes could not possibly be higher for Israel. The current low-key Israel-Iran war could transform at any moment into a full-scale, multi-front regional conflict. The IDF has repeatedly warned that, in the next phase of this ongoing war, tens of thousands of missiles and rockets will fall on Israeli cities. Israel, according to the IDF, will respond with a massive invasion of southern Lebanon and the destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure. The Israeli counterattack could widen to include targets in Iran itself.

In that entirely realistic scenario, whose side would President Bernie be on?

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.”