America's New Forever War? Yonah Jeremy Bob on the US-Israeli Conflict With Iran

“I’m a military correspondent, but I would be totally happy if there was world peace and I had to change jobs.” — Yonah Jeremy Bob Oil hit $100 a barrel (again) today. Donald Trump confessed, with uncharacteristic honesty, that the Iran war won’t end until after the November elections. And while Israel’s war with Iran ended back in April, America’s hasn’t, with the US and Iran shooting at each other most of the time since February. So, with the 25th anniversary of 9/11 tomorrow, is this about to become America’s new forever war? Yonah Jeremy Bob is the senior military correspondent at The Jerusalem Post and co-author of In the War Room, the inside story of Israel’s fight against the Iranian “axis.” The Baltimore-born and Jerusalem-based journalist confesses that he watches this conflict with “two brains.” For Israelis of both left and right, it’s a war of survival. His US brain, however, has the more down-to-earth reading of a conflict that offers no existential threat. So is this the new forever war? America after 9/11 “was at war for about a decade,” Bob responds. A nation in post-traumatic shock. A quarter of a century later, most Americans think of today’s Iran war in terms of domestic gas prices. Thus Trump’s presentation of the conflict in the context of an election calendar is not a forever war. Like all things Trumpian, it’s just another transactional campaign. As for the senior military correspondent himself, he’d be totally happy, Bob confesses, if world peace put him out of a job. Five Takeaways •       The Split Screen. Bob — Baltimore-born, Jerusalem-based — says he watches this war with two brains, and they see different wars. The American brain sees a US-Iran conflict that hasn’t stopped: strikes, sabotage, and bombing traded almost nonstop since February 28. The Israeli brain sees a war that ended on April 7 — one 24-hour exception aside — leaving Israel calmer about Iran than Washington is. What actually agitates Israelis this week is diplomatic: Britain and a dozen mostly European countries (plus Canada) sanctioning the West Bank — not Israel proper, but a stain and a loss all the same. On Witkoff and Kushner, whom Ed Luce’s FT column accused of “blind amateurism,” Bob’s ledger is mixed: genuine credit for ending the Israel-Hamas war in October 2025 and bringing home all 250 hostages — the war’s forgotten center of gravity for most Israelis — against failure to close any Iran nuclear deal and near-nothing on Ukraine.•       The Transactional Ally. Bob’s three-level model of the Trump-Netanyahu relationship: lower-official criticism gets ignored; a direct Trump request gets “yes, but”; and a genuine Trump threat gets obeyed — every time. The astonishing exhibit: Israeli aircraft already en route to bomb Iran, recalled mid-flight after Trump tweeted “those aircraft better come back.” Bob can list three or four such episodes; Netanyahu backed off in all of them, because American support is more essential now than ever — which is the second story: Israel’s worst diplomatic isolation in decades, with bipartisan American support frayed and Europe largely gone. The counterweights: India, whose closeness to Israel — military, intelligence, and AI agreements — has never been higher, and the UAE, now closer to Israel than Egypt or Jordan. The original Abraham Accords held through the war; the grand prize didn’t — MBS was publicly “weeks away” from normalization in September 2023, and stopping that clock, Bob believes, is very possibly why Sinwar invaded when he did.•       The Book Bibi Doesn’t Like. In the War Room’s revisionist core: the early-war Netanyahu was the hesitant man in the room — it took roughly three weeks for the rest of the war cabinet to convince him to invade Gaza at all, consistent with a career of avoiding big ground operations — until, with victories in northern Gaza and Khan Younis behind him, he flipped in spring 2024 into the war room’s most aggressive member, pressing on to Hezbollah and Iran as his own defense chiefs turned toward ending it. Netanyahu, Bob reports dryly, dislikes exactly those chapters: “we’re in touch… we got an earful” — from both political directions, which the authors take as evidence they nailed it. On October 7 itself: warnings — including one relayed from the UAE — were ignored by everyone, Netanyahu, the IDF’s Halevi, and the Shin Bet’s Bar alike, all captive to the concept that Hamas was deterred; Bob’s author’s note says all of them should have resigned, as their 1973 predecessors did. The conspiracy theory that Bibi wanted the invasion gets “an unequivocal no.”•       Between Genocide and Mistakes. Andrew put Al Jazeera’s headline to him directly, and Bob — Boston University Law before journalism — answered as a lawyer: on genocide, “unequivocally no,” for want of intent (Bret Stephens’s point: a state that wanted genocide had the bombs to commit it in weeks, and wouldn’t have spent the war moving civilians out of the way). Then he did the arithmetic against his own side’s comfort: of roughly 70,000 dead, about 25,000 were Hamas and 3,000–5,000 were killed by Hamas itself — leaving 35,000 to 45,000 Palestinian civilians. “I think that’s too much.” The army has 150 criminal probes and some 3,000 disciplinary ones open; the World Central Kitchen strike — armed figures misread as Hamas boarding the trucks — stands as his anatomy of a terrible mistake that may yet be prosecuted as gross negligence. The insiders he talks to are genuinely sad about the civilian toll, and on the settlers he goes on record for the brass: top IDF and Shin Bet officials say the police under Itamar Ben-Gvir simply won’t crack down on Jewish extremist violence in the West Bank. “I point the mean finger at” Ben-Gvir — their words, he says, sounded out to the world.•       The Nuclear Scorecard — and the Clock. His Jerusalem Post exclusive, summarized: what triggered June 2025 wasn’t just enriched uranium (Iran had ten weapons’ worth for years) but progress on the “weapons group” — the metallurgy and hemispheres needed to put a warhead on a missile. Today that weapons work is destroyed or inoperable, the vast majority of Iran’s 20,000 centrifuges are gone, and the 60-percent uranium sits under bombed rubble, watched by intelligence services Bob judges too deeply embedded for Iran to move it unseen. Rebuild in one to three years? Theoretically — if Israel and America fall asleep. The strategic errors he’d correct: selling regime change (the IRGC and Basij command hundreds of thousands of hardcore supporters; the messaging failure is now “an element of the current elections”) — and the split verdict stands: Israel’s war succeeded on its existential terms; America’s depends on Hormuz and the program’s end. On 9/11’s eve, his forever-war answer: America itself “was at war for about a decade” after the towers fell, but this one has a clock — Americans feel gas prices, not danger. And the sign-off: a military correspondent who’d be totally happy if world peace cost him the job. About the Guest Yonah Jeremy Bob is the senior military correspondent and analyst at The Jerusalem Post, with unparalleled access to top...