ANALYSIS | USIEA

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

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

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

Silence Is Permission

Ari Sacher

11 hours ago3 min read

Lebanon-Israel Tripartite Framework

Ari Sacher

Jun 294 min read

Israel’s Expanding Alliance

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

Finish It or Lose It

President Trump wrote on Truth Social this week that the United States is in serious discussions with “a new, and more reasonable, regime” to end military operations in Iran. Before that deal is struck, one question cuts through everything else. Is this truly a new regime, or the same one rebranded? Any honest answer begins with a number: 30,000. That is the approximate number of Iranian citizens murdered in one week by their own government during the January protests. They

Joan Leslie McGill

Apr 23 min read

Iran's Cluster Munitions

Since February 28, 2026, Iran has launched dozens of ballistic missiles at Israel. Strikingly, about half of these missiles have carried cluster warheads – at least 19 cluster-bearing missiles have penetrated Israeli airspace and struck urban centers, causing at least nine fatalities and dozens of injuries. These attacks are not just a tactical escalation; they are a deliberate violation of international humanitarian norms. Cluster munitions differ fundamentally from regular

Ari Sacher

Mar 303 min read

True Measure of Success

This morning, many Israelis awoke in a funk. Saturday, March 21, was a difficult day. Since the fourth day of the war, Iran has still been managing to fire between 10-20 missiles a day at Israel. Out of the 400 or so missiles fired on Israel in this span, there have been 6 direct hits. Two of them happened yesterday. Both of them in the south of the country: One in the town of Arad and the other in the town of Dimona. In both cases, two interceptors were launched to shoot dow

Ari Sacher

Mar 234 min read

The Switchboard For Global Trade

For the past several weeks, Iranian missiles and drones have been flying across the Persian Gulf toward the United Arab Emirates. Air defenses have intercepted the vast majority of them. The damage on the ground has been limited. The headlines come and go. But focusing only on the military exchange misses the larger story. What is happening to the UAE may be an early signal of something much bigger. If the conflict with Iran is part of the emerging global rivalry between the

Ari Sacher

Mar 173 min read

Light Faster Than Drones

Since the opening of the Epic Fury / Roar of the Lion war last week, Iran has made its strategic choice clear. It is not trying to win the air war in a classic sense. It is trying to bankrupt its adversaries. Wave after wave of low-cost Shahed suicide drones have been launched toward the Gulf States – at the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait – with the UAE bearing the brunt. By the end of the first week of battle, more than 1,300 drones had been fired at the Emirates alone. Most were

Ari Sacher

Mar 93 min read

Gotta Run. Alarm. Here We Go Again...

Wars are often described in terms of power: who has more of it, who used it first, who escalated. That framing is comforting to those who want moral symmetry where none exists. Operation Lion’s Roar (Operation Epic Fury in the U.S.) is not about symmetry. It is about choice. Specifically, how power is used, and what a society believes is worth protecting. On Saturday morning, Israel and the United States acted. Not theatrically. Not impulsively. They acted after Iran had exha

Ari Sacher

Mar 53 min read