Victoria Coates, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation, spoke to a September 8 Middle East Forum Podcast (video) to discuss her recent book, The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel and America Can Win. The following summarizes her comments:
Coates’s book reassesses many of her preconceived assumptions “about academia and what was happening here in the United States.” Its foreword is by her former employer, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) who, along with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), confronted presidents of America’s Ivy League universities for their collective unwillingness to address the antisemitism erupting on their campuses following the October 7, 2023, massacres in Israel. The subsequent torrent of antisemitic demonstrations, “rife in this younger generation,” that swept across American campuses in the wake of Hamas’s attack exposed a “big moment of clarity.” Confronting this poison is not “something far away [that] just has to do with the Jews in the Middle East. No, it has everything to do with what we want to do, and the society we want to have here in the United States.”
The campus chaos illustrated the point of the “Iranian-funded and fueled attack” against the regime’s designated “little Satan” was not about the Palestinians.
The campus chaos illustrated the point of the “Iranian-funded and fueled attack” against the regime’s designated “little Satan” was not about the Palestinians. Rather, the Gazan Arabs are the ayatollahs’ weaponized tool to foment antisemitism in an effort to destabilize Western democracies and America, “the big Satan”—the regime’s main target. “So, I was very struck by how much of this activity was happening in the United States.”
Her book, which Coates calls her “cri de coeur” of what she “experienced since the October 7 attacks,” is designed to answer four questions: (1) How did we get here? (2) Why is Israel the partner of choice for the United States in the Middle East? (3) Is there an alternative to Israel? and (4) What’s next?
Although the vast majority of Americans do not hold antisemitic views, 60 percent of the eighteen- to twenty-seven-year-old demographic do. The reason for this becomes clear when examining the curricula taught at major universities. Her investigation revealed that “these peer-reviewed, Cambridge University sanctioned articles” that are curated for syllabi essentially accuse “Israel of being not only racist, and imperial, but illegal.” This triple calumny is being taught in law schools “and then, at the same time, the United States is next on that list with those three characteristics.” Indoctrinated undergraduates, when told these are three of the “worst things for you to be,” will undoubtedly point the finger at Israel, and by extension, the U.S. and the West writ large.
The U.S. invests billions in the relationship with Israel not only because of shared Judeo-Christian values “that were fundamental to the creation of the United States,” but also the shared “foundation of both of our countries, both in concept and in legal code and in moral code.” It was President Ronald Reagan who established the Memorandum of Understanding outlining the security relationship between the two countries. In addition, he “initiated the intelligence relationship, the missile defense relationship, and signed the first free trade agreement with Israel.”
In the weeks following October 7, Biden showed his support for Israel by visiting the Jewish state. However, his support was short-lived, as he then pressured Israel to reach a ceasefire accommodating Hamas. Repeatedly, Biden and Harris attempted to restrain Israel from acting in Gaza, but Israel nevertheless proceeded and, in its success, proved the U.S. administration wrong. Had Biden supported Netanyahu’s message of returning all the hostages and demanding Hamas’s surrender, “I think Israel could have wrapped this up much more quickly.” The onus is always on Israel to make concessions, “so for Israel to be the one that needs to be pressured to do something after what happened on October 7 just makes no sense.”
The Palestinian Arabs “aren’t a nation and never were.” They never developed “the trappings of modern statehood” or functional institutions.
The two alternatives to Israel are the Palestinians and the Iranians. There has been a bipartisan but “undistinguished history of outreach” with the former, trying “to make the Palestinians into something they’re not.” In 1973, when the Arab countries surrounding Israel concluded that “attacking Israel had been expensive and painful and that they weren’t going to do it anymore because they didn’t like losing, nobody sent that memo to the Palestinians.” These Arab nations continued “on this trajectory” which led not only to peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994, but also to the Abraham Accords in 2020. However, the Palestinians “remained mired in the 70s.” Palestinian Arabs became a “domestic political sort of [release valve] for anti-Israel sentiments” solidifying into the Palestinian cause.
The Palestinian Arabs “aren’t a nation and never were.” They never developed “the trappings of modern statehood” or functional institutions. Instead, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) took up the task and “did it corruptly and poorly,” turning the Palestinian cause into a “doom loop of failure.”
As for Iran, President Trump’s decision to “cease compliance” with the “failed bad deal” of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action heralded by the Obama administration “was absolutely the right course.” After President Trump was re-elected, his effort to engage the Iranians diplomatically revealed that the ayatollahs were “trying to string him along,” playing for time. In June, the president “took the decisive action” to decimate the regime’s nuclear program “once and hopefully for all.”
Juxtapose the Biden administration with President Trump’s first term and the latter’s imposition of a maximum pressure campaign against Iran and his pro-Israel actions. Trump’s moving the embassy to Jerusalem, recognition of the Golan Heights annexation, legal codification of the West Bank settlements, and his administration’s signal achievement—the Abraham Accords—“have endured.”
In light of Hamas’s refusal to surrender, President Trump is done trying to offer a deal. “And the tacit threat there is ‘I’m going to support Israel going in and finishing this.’” Hamas cares nothing for suffering Palestinians and a destroyed Gaza Strip, “so this is entirely on Hamas, and it is their fault.”
The fact that the U.S. and Israel share issues that conservatives champion and Israel exemplifies, “like a strong defense, like border security,” reinforces the valued partnership.
The fact that the U.S. and Israel share issues that conservatives champion and Israel exemplifies, “like a strong defense, like border security,” reinforces the valued partnership. “The list of all the things the Unites States has gotten out of this relationship” enumerated in the book “are not talked about enough.” The false perception that Israel is “being imperial and the big bully on the block” is an “inversion of David and Goliath where Israel is actually the David and this savage global antisemitism and anti-Western force is the Goliath, but somehow it’s been reversed.”
The U.N.’s upcoming recognition of a Palestinian state will be emblematic of the state’s failure “because it is utter farce.” Such political theater will “encourage the Palestinians to keep resisting” in the failed belief they will get their state with Israel’s destruction.
As the war in Gaza enters its end phase, “it is my hope that we can find some new paths forward,” like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is working on stabilizing conditions and “on rebuilding, and then see what might be possible going forward. But the main thing is that for American, and Israeli, and broader audiences to recognize, that this is a battle both on Israel—a war on Israel—and a war on the United States, and ultimately [a battle] for Western civilization.”
