Editor's Notes: Israel just met the America that comes after Trump - comment

I could have written the other column in 20 minutes: The deal is bad for Israel. We were kept out of the room, told to stand down in Lebanon, and lectured by the administration that called us its closest partner – an hour before it signed a deal with the regime that spent four months trying to kill us.

All true. After the spring we had, the air-raid sirens, the nights in the mamad (reinforced safe room), I feel it the way you do. And I was not alone. The fury ran wall to wall.

Bezalel Smotrich said the deal was “bad for Israel and for the entire free world.” Itamar Ben-Gvir said Israel “is not a banana republic.” Naftali Bennett called it “a historic failure.” Ehud Barak said the war left Iran “stronger” and Israel “weaker.” The Israel Democracy Institute found 57.5% of respondents expected the deal to leave us less safe.

Benjamin Netanyahu would not even defend it; he defended himself. When a finance minister and Ehud Barak agree about something, I get suspicious.

So, I asked what the betrayal story misses. Turn it over, and the dumping looks like a promotion we cannot recognize, one that came with no warm words.

For our whole lives, the Arabs and the Turks and the Iranians held a veto over any real partnership between Washington and the Jewish state. That veto is gone. I sat with senior officers this spring who called fighting beside the American military the thing they will tell their grandchildren, and they were not being sentimental; that alliance did not exist 18 months ago.

A man very close to this White House gave me the shorthand: Money in the bank; respect, the kind that outlasts a president.

Be honest about the love we are mourning. The presidents who loved us the loudest were the ones who slow-walked our weapons for years, pressed us to carve a Palestinian state out of our land, and split Jerusalem. We were adored, and we were managed, often in the same sentence.

That style is dying. The old evangelical music that treated our return to Zion as a chapter in somebody else’s Bible is leaving Washington. Donald Trump can still tell a room: “Without me, there would be no Israel.” That is how a patron talks about a dependent.

Here is the part almost nobody here will say out loud. Look past this deal, and past Trump himself, because the relationship will not be his to define for much longer. It belongs to the two men he keeps calling his dream team: JD Vance and Marco Rubio, who will shape it for the next decade, probably from the same ticket.

We tell ourselves Rubio loves Israel, and he does. But Rubio is the last of his kind, not the first of a new one. Vance is the template now: respect; none of the old devotion; the register the party is settling into.

The detail that should keep you up is smaller: Rubio’s own counselor at the State Department, Mike Needham, reads as pure Vance – the same flat indifference to whether we are loved. When the warmth has drained even from the pro-Israel camp’s back office, it is not coming back.

The same cold front took the lectures with it. This generation feels nothing for the Palestinian cause either: no plan; no map with our name halved.

The week 99 of our Knesset MKs voted down a Palestinian state, the future of the Republican Party had already lost interest in building one. There is a real fight over whether the wing that slides into open contempt for Jews stays or goes, and the people pushing it out might lose. None of them hate us. They are indifferent with a type of indifference you can work with once you stop expecting to be loved.

The hawks have an answer, and I had it myself. What promotion? Khamenei’s regime is still standing. The uranium is buried, not gone. Hezbollah is hurt and breathing. Iranian state TV is calling it a victory. Some promotion.

It is all true, and it misses the point. We were never going to bring that regime down from the air, and the people who told us we would were selling something. The honest ceiling of this war was a humiliated Iran, its leadership decapitated, its proxies gutted, its program knocked back, with a superpower now treating us as a partner instead of a chore.

We hit that ceiling. The gap between that and what we were promised is a bill addressed to the men who oversold the war, not to Washington.

Understand what the deal was. It was an American election. Trump has a midterm in five months, the Democrats are up, and the Iranians stretched the war out to squeeze the American consumer until a president scared for the House needed it to be over. The Strait of Hormuz opens, oil moves, gasoline prices drop, the incumbent exhales.

When Vance sold it on television, he did not call it a good day for Israel. He called it “a great day for the American people.” There is our new status in one line: The deal we read as a referendum on our survival was, in the rooms that matter, a referendum on the price of gas in Pennsylvania.

The man who told me to bank it is more optimistic than I am, and this is where we part. On Megyn Kelly’s show this week, she played Vance a clip of John Podhoretz, one of the most pro-Israel conservatives in America, objecting to the deal. Vance did not blink. He said Podhoretz was “giving away the game” by caring more about Israel than about American gas prices.

Handed the hawk’s recorded objection, on the air, the man most likely to be the next president reached for the gas pump. Respect counts the votes. It does not show up at 3 a.m. when a rocket lands in Kiryat Shmona, and there is nothing in it for Ohio.

So, here is a bet you can hold me to. The respect lasts. The protection that used to come with it does not, and it gets tested before the year is out, probably in Lebanon, inside the 60-day clock that runs out around the time we vote. The morning it is tested, Washington weighs us against its own politics, and some mornings we lose.

Between now and then, the job is not to grieve and not to gloat. It is to turn respect into the one currency that ignores everyone’s mood: weapons we build ourselves, the odd new map from Somaliland to Kazakhstan, a country that has quit organizing its survival around being loved.