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What the Return of Yehuda Katz Says About Israel’s Covenant With Its People
I arrived in Israel for a gap year in August 1982. Looking back, I can hardly imagine a more consequential moment to begin my journey. Just two months earlier, Israel had launched Operation Peace for Galilee, the First Lebanon War. The war was still unfolding. Casualty lists were appearing in newspapers. Families were waiting for their sons to return home. The entire country seemed suspended between determination and grief. One battle in particular cast a long shadow over the
Ari Sacher
Our Neighbors Don’t Have to Love Us
The report was only a few lines long, but it landed with unusual force. According to recent disclosures, an unidentified Arab country that had been making peace overtures toward Israel was allegedly planning to use any agreement merely as a temporary expedient until conditions were ripe for confrontation, upon which it would attack. No names were released. Yet in a region where diplomatic possibilities are limited and carefully scrutinized, speculation was inevitable. Most pe
Ari Sacher
Resilience Should Not Be Confused With Normalcy
There is a television commercial that seems to play every fifteen minutes on North American sports channels. A man bites into an Old El Paso taco. The crunch is so powerful that it creates a visible shock wave. Buildings shake. Windows rattle. Facades crumble. It is meant to be funny. I have not found it funny. For nearly three years, my family and I have been living in a country at war. During that time, two rockets landed roughly one hundred feet from my home. Debris from a
Ari Sacher
What the Return of Yehuda Katz Says About Israel’s Covenant With Its People
I arrived in Israel for a gap year in August 1982. Looking back, I can hardly imagine a more consequential moment to begin my journey. Just two months earlier, Israel had launched Operation Peace for Galilee, the First Lebanon War. The war was still unfolding. Casualty lists were appearing in newspapers. Families were waiting for their sons to return home. The entire country seemed suspended between determination and grief. One battle in particular cast a long shadow over the
Ari Sacher
3 days ago2 min read
Our Neighbors Don’t Have to Love Us
The report was only a few lines long, but it landed with unusual force. According to recent disclosures, an unidentified Arab country that had been making peace overtures toward Israel was allegedly planning to use any agreement merely as a temporary expedient until conditions were ripe for confrontation, upon which it would attack. No names were released. Yet in a region where diplomatic possibilities are limited and carefully scrutinized, speculation was inevitable. Most pe
Ari Sacher
Aug 173 min read
Resilience Should Not Be Confused With Normalcy
There is a television commercial that seems to play every fifteen minutes on North American sports channels. A man bites into an Old El Paso taco. The crunch is so powerful that it creates a visible shock wave. Buildings shake. Windows rattle. Facades crumble. It is meant to be funny. I have not found it funny. For nearly three years, my family and I have been living in a country at war. During that time, two rockets landed roughly one hundred feet from my home. Debris from a
Ari Sacher
Aug 103 min read
Munich, Memory, and Consequence
In Munich, on a quiet hill overlooking the former Olympic Village, stands a memorial to one of the darkest days in modern Jewish history. I visited it about a year ago. The memorial overlooks the apartment building and the balcony from which one of the most iconic images of twentieth-century terrorism was taken: a member of Black September, an arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), face concealed with a sock, standing watch over eleven Israeli athletes and coache
Ari Sacher
Aug 23 min read
An Underlying Commitment
For the past two months, the obituary writers have been working overtime. According to a steady stream of headlines, social media commentary, and Israeli opposition politicians, the special relationship between the United States and Israel was in trouble. Some even suggested it was nearing collapse. The evidence, at least on the surface, seemed compelling. The fighting with Iran had stopped without the kind of decisive victory many Israelis expected. Reports suggested that th
Ari Sacher
Jul 273 min read
U.S.-Israel Defense Partnership
For decades, support for Israel has often been framed as a matter of shared values, historical ties, or moral obligation. Those factors matter. But there is another reason Congress should continue to strengthen the U.S.-Israel defense relationship: it directly advances American national security. At a time when the United States faces growing challenges from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and transnational terrorist organizations, Washington needs capable allies that can h
Ari Sacher
Jul 203 min read
Silence Is Permission
On July 2, 2026, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan described Israel as a "burden that humanity can no longer bear." To be fair, this was not an explicit call for genocide. But it came uncomfortably close. One does not speak about a nation or a people as a "burden humanity can no longer bear" without invoking some of the darkest chapters of modern history. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar immediately recognized the danger, calling the remarks "clear incitement to genoc
Ari Sacher
Jul 133 min read
Lebanon-Israel Tripartite Framework
“The United States, Israel, and Lebanon Sign the Trilateral Framework”. “Israel, Lebanon sign initial agreement after US-mediated talks”. It was a great way to turn on my phone on Saturday night after 25 hours without hearing any news. There is something deeply appealing about a clean agreement. A tripartite framework. Clear responsibilities. A sense that, this time, the pieces might align. The emerging arrangement with Lebanon has all of those qualities. It also carries with
Ari Sacher
Jun 294 min read
Israel’s Expanding Alliance
Many Israelis woke up this week with a sense of strategic vertigo. The emerging agreement between the United States and Iran has landed not as a surprise, but as a shock. The outlines are still murky, but the direction is unmistakable: Washington appears to have moved significantly toward Tehran’s position, conceding ground in pursuit of closure. For Israelis, that closure feels premature. And yet, if we are honest, none of this should be entirely unexpected. The United State
Ari Sacher
Jun 223 min read
The Cycle Must Be Broken
Deterrence is not a scoreboard. It is not measured by the number of missiles intercepted, launchers destroyed, or buildings reduced to rubble. Deterrence is measured by what does not happen. It is measured by the attack that remains unlaunched because the enemy has already calculated the cost and decided it is unbearable. The emerging cycle between Israel, Hezbollah, and Iran is dangerously familiar. Hezbollah fires at Israel. Israel strikes targets in Dahiyeh. Iran launches
Ari Sacher
Jun 153 min read
Patient Endurance
There is a quiet, pervasive feeling in Israel today that is difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore. It is not fear in the traditional sense, nor is it panic. It is something more unsettling, a sense that events are moving elsewhere, driven by actors beyond our control, and that the outcome that will determine our future will be decided without us. When Israelis speak about Iran, the conversation always circles back to Washington. Everything, it seems, hinges on whet
Ari Sacher
Jun 84 min read
The Only Path Forward
Israel is heading, once again, toward elections. The exact date remains uncertain, but the direction is clear. Sometime this fall, Israelis will be called to vote. On paper, this should feel routine. In practice, nothing about the current political moment is routine. This government has lasted longer than many expected, especially after a period in which Israel cycled through election after election, unable to form a stable coalition. For several years, politics devolved into
Ari Sacher
Jun 14 min read
Fiber-Optic FPV Drones War
The newest threat to IDF forces operating in southern Lebanon does not streak through the sky at supersonic speed or crash down as a ballistic projectile. It arrives slowly, quietly, and with unnerving precision. Fiber-optic-guided explosive First Person View (FPV) drones are an unassuming yet dangerous evolution in battlefield technology, and their appearance in Lebanon is as predictable as it is troubling. To understand the challenge, one must first understand the system. A
Ari Sacher
May 263 min read
Israeli Home Front Realities
My son owns a home in Akko, the top two floors of a three-story building. It is the kind of place Israelis buy when life feels normal: stone, sun, a view, kids running up and down the stairs. It was built before the early 1990s, before the state rewrote its building rules around a hard lesson of the first Gulf War. So it has no safe room, no reinforced concrete “mamad” built into the apartment itself. Since the early 1990s, new Israeli homes have been required to include one,
Ari Sacher
May 184 min read
Oz V’Gaon: Building Life
On Thursday night, my wife and I were staying with relatives in Neve Daniel, in Gush Etzion. Like so many Israeli Fridays, the next day unfolded with a quiet simplicity. We drove a few minutes to a place called “Oz V’Gaon” for coffee and a pastry. Families wandered the paths. Children climbed the wooden structures. A steady stream of visitors came and went, as if this place had always been there. But Oz V’Gaon has not always been there. And the story of how it came to be tell
Ari Sacher
May 113 min read
The Dreyfus Affair
More than a century ago, on a parade ground in Paris, a Jewish officer stood at the center of a carefully orchestrated humiliation. His name was Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The French Army tore the insignia from his uniform, snapped his sword, and declared him a traitor. His real crime was not espionage. It was that he was a Jew in a system that had already decided the outcome. The Dreyfus Affair is often remembered as a story about antisemitism. It was that. But it was also a st
Ari Sacher
May 43 min read
The Yellow Line
When two kites drifted from Gaza and landed inside Kibbutz Nahal Oz in recent weeks, they carried no explosives and caused no physical harm. But they landed in one of the most symbol-laden places in Israel today, and that is precisely why they matter. Nahal Oz is not an abstract point on a map. On October 7, Hamas terrorists overran the kibbutz, murdered residents in their homes, and abducted others into Gaza. Families were slaughtered steps from the border fence. Whatever il
Ari Sacher
Apr 273 min read
Concerns Regarding Recent Votes to Restrict Military Assistance to Israel
The letter below was sent individually to all U.S. Senators who voted to block arms sales to Israel. April 21, 2026 United States Senate Washington, D.C. 20002 Dear Senator, On behalf of the Board of Directors of the U.S.-Israel Education Association (USIEA), we are writing to express our profound concern regarding your recent vote to block the sale of critical military equipment to the State of Israel. As an organization that has spent over a decade educating Members of Cong
USIEA Team
Apr 242 min read
Lebanese Security Zone Analysis
Lebanese sources are circulating a map that shades a broad swath of southern Lebanon, roughly 500 square kilometers, as the likely footprint of an Israeli security zone. If the estimate is even approximately correct, this would be close to two and a half times the size of the former Gaza security zone. That scale alone tells us something important. This is not conceived as a symbolic buffer or a temporary pressure tactic. It reflects a conclusion reached the hard way, that th
Ari Sacher
Apr 203 min read
Who Won?
Passover has passed over. The guns have fallen silent, at least temporarily. For the first time since Epic Fury (in the U.S.) and Lion’s Roar (in Israel) erupted on February 28, there is space not for complacency, but for stock-taking. The question many are asking is deceptively simple: Who won? Mainstream media is, in many cases, painting this as an Iranian victory because [1] the regime survived and [2] Iran still controls the Straits of Hormuz and with it, the world’s oil
Ari Sacher
Apr 133 min read
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