Overlap

Whether We Like It or Not

Real Time. Real shame.

I don’t usually make it a point to write about politics. Not like this.

And certainly not on days like today - Israeli Memorial Day - where we don’t go shopping for massive sales. We make it a point around the country to stop, think, feel, honor, commiserate and remember all our soldiers who fell in all our wars, and the victims of terror. And of course, the broken families they left behind.

I’m writing this off the cuff after watching Real Time with Bill Mahr and his guests Rahm Emmanuel and Jake Sullivan - because on Memorial Day, after a day of remembering young men who didn’t get to grow old, hearing a conversation like this hit me like a ton of bricks.

Not because I expect everyone to agree with Israel’s government.

I don’t. I’ve criticized my own leaders many times, publicly and without hesitation. That’s not the issue. The issue is something else.

It’s the ease with which serious people can talk about this war as though it’s some foreign mess Israel dragged America into, as though the ideology behind it isn’t aimed at the United States too, and as though the region we live in can be discussed like Belgium with better hummus.

Jake Sullivan called the war “misbegotten from the beginning,” and said it “cost American credibility, cost American lives, and cost American families at the gas pump.”

Rahm Emanuel said the days of American taxpayers “subsidizing Israel militarily” should be over, and compared Israel to allies like Britain, Japan, Germany, and South Korea. Sullivan went further and said that for Israel, “absolute chaos in Iran” would be “fine,” because it would make Israel more secure.

I want to say this respectfully because I think respect across political difference matters, especially now.

But that framing is just not serious enough for the reality we live in. Not just here, but around the world.

Israel is not Britain. This region is not Europe. And Iran is not some difficult but manageable rival that can be reduced to oil prices and electoral messaging. Iran has spent decades funding, arming, and directing a network of forces built around the destruction of Israel, hostility to America, and contempt for the Western values people in free countries like to imagine will somehow defend themselves.

It’s also important to say clearly. The regime is not the people. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the leadership in Tehran do not represent most Iranians. By most credible accounts, many Iranians are deeply opposed to the regime and have been for years. This is not a war against a people.

It’s a confrontation with an ideology and the machinery that enforces it.

So when I hear this reduced to American gas prices, I don’t hear any fucking strategic clarity. I hear distance, spin and I hear the privilege of geography.

We don’t have that privilege here. And quite honestly, unless the threat is kept at bay ie preventing Jihadists from acquiring nukes, no one else does, either.

We’ve been in and out of shelters for practically two and a half years now because of the same ideology. Hamas. Hezbollah. The IRGC in Iran. Different fronts. Same death cult. Same hatred. Same obsession with breaking the West through the Jewish state if they can, and through America if they can’t.

Israel today (Photo Mahmoud Illean)

No one here wants this war.

No one is waking up hoping for more fighting. The entire nation since last night is in mourning before our Independence Day which we shift to tonight.

The only reason most people accept this fight is because the alternative is not peace. It’s vulnerability. It’s survival. That’s the difference. We fight to protect life. The IRGC openly calls for the destruction of Jewish life and Western life. And we’ve seen where that ideology leads. September 11 attacks. Hello. Does anyone remember that? That wasn’t about borders or policy nuance. That was about a worldview that sees the West itself as the enemy. And I remember countless conversations with Americans BEFORE 9/11 happened about the very real dangers that were building up against them.

There’s also a tendency to downplay the nuclear threat as if it’s speculative. It’s not. Even the International Atomic Energy Agency and mainstream U.S. intelligence assessments have warned that Iran has enriched uranium to levels far beyond civilian need and reduced cooperation with inspectors. Iranian officials themselves have acknowledged being close to weapons-grade capability. That’s not rhetoric. That’s documented concern across the political spectrum.

I really respect Haviv Rettig Gur and he put it well. In his analysis on The Free Press, he said that until the point of divergence, Israel and America were fighting “an overlapping war with almost entirely overlapping interests.” He also said plainly that “America needs this regime not to be a disruptor in the Persian Gulf.”

In simple terms. We’re not saying our interests are identical in every moment. They’re not. But they overlap in the big things. Stopping a regime that destabilizes regions, funds terror, and pushes toward nuclear capability.

Pretending this is only Israel’s problem ignores that overlap.

And is irresponsible.

For what it’s worth, I thought Bill Maher was right on point on this subject, as usual, when he pushed back on the idea that this is somehow detached from American interests.

And on a day like today, that detachment feels worse.

Because while people talk on panels about leverage, credibility, and who dragged whom where, our men and women, people I know, are still fighting and dying. Not for some abstract adventure. But in a fight against forces that don’t just threaten Israel.

Israel Today (Photo Oded Balilty)

You can dislike Netanyahu. You can dislike Trump. You can oppose one decision or ten. Fair enough. That’s democracy. But to talk as though Israel is some reckless foreign actor whose battle has little to do with America is to badly misread both history and the present.

The Allies without America didn’t “drag” America into World War II. Evil expands which is what happened with Pearl Harbor. It expands and expands and expands until it is confronted.

From someone who’s spent years with family running to shelters because of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime, I’m pretty sure ordinary Americans have far more in common with us than with the IRGC.

Maybe that’s what deserves more airtime.


May all of our fallen rest in peace. May their families be comforted and held, find strength in their memory and be surrounded by love.