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Ron Jager

Ron grew up in the South Bronx of New York, making Aliyah in 1980. Served for 25 years in the IDF as a Mental Health Field Officer in operational units. Prior to retiring was Commander of the Central Psychiatric Clinic for Reserve Solders at Tel-Hashomer. Since retiring has been involved in strategic consultancy to NGO's and communities in the Gaza Envelope on resiliency projects to assist first responders and communities. Ron has written numerous articles for outlets in Israel and abroad focusing on Israel and the Jewish world.
JD Vance be advised; being Jewish is not a provocation.
Israel is fighting a just war for its very survival. On October 7th, Israel stood on the brink of annihilation, surrounded by seven military fronts with the Islamic Republic of Iran at the head of the pack. Yet, never in modern warfare, has a nation fought for its survival with such extraordinary restraint and moral discipline against an enemy that deliberately surrounds its military forces within civilian populations, using women, children, and babies as human shields. At the very same time, a relentless campaign of lies and demonization has been waged in the United States to ensure that Israel loses, and you, Vice President Vance, have become one of its leading voices. By spreading lies about Israel, do you really believe that you are serving the best interests of the United States?
Even before the ink dried on the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), between Iran and the United States, the Iranians simply couldn’t control themselves and began firing missiles and suicide drones on American military bases and adjacent Arab nations aligned with the United States, as well as hitting ships carrying oil, gas, and cargo as they attempted to pass through the Straits of Hormuz. Yet rather than call out the Iranians and confront their culture of deceit and barbaric behavior clearly and unequivocally, you Vice President Vance, chose to speak out and criticize Israel, America’s most important ally in the Middle East. You did this by stating that you are baffled by “this whole freakout in Israel", telling Israel’s leaders, “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have." Singling out Israel and inferring that the Jewish State is provoking the Iranians because it questioned whether the MOU is sustainable and suggested that an "appeasement" strategy is doomed to failure. Israel has publicly stated that the MOU will not advance American interests in the region and will not deter the Iranians from continuing to attack America's allies. The Iranians have proven this past week that this is the case.
Sadly, Vice President Vance felt the need to double down and continue to expand on Israel's seeming “ungrateful behavior". "Wake up and smell reality," Vance delivered a blunt message to Israeli officials against criticizing the MOU with Iran. "If I was in the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have" and added "Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time." Only yesterday during a Joe Rogan interview, Vance stated that some elements within Israeli ‘system’ are ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely’. Vance is very well aware that many, if not all, foreign governments try to influence the United States all the time. Israel does it as well, no different than any of the other nations of the world. Yet by singling out Israel obsessively, JD Vance is holding the Jewish nation to a different and double standard compared to other nations. Instead of blaming Israel, JD Vance should be more concerned that decision makers in the Trump administration as well as in the Department of War, and the State Department are beginning to question his "appeasement" strategy with Iran as reflected in the MOU.
By deflecting legitimate criticism that questions his claim that there is a divide in Iran’s leadership between pragmatists who want to make a deal with the US and hardliners who do not; Vice President Vance has shown that his understanding of the Iranian regime is based on wishful thinking, with a level of naivety reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s historical "appeasement" of Nazi Germany. Commentators like Bret Stephens alongside additional conservative political thinkers have explicitly compared JD Vance's stance to Chamberlain's 1938 Munich betrayal, where ceding territory to an aggressor was falsely framed as a path to peace. The only logical conclusion that can summarize Vance’s negotiating approach is that those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The Iranians are no different than the Nazi government and JD Vance seems to be no different than Neville Chamberlain.
To understand the extent to which Vice President Vance’s diminishing standing among his Republican supporters has tumbled, one needs to realize the implications for his expected run for the Presidency in 2028 in his recent comment that ‘his job was not to be a “public commentator" but to support the president, which he would continue to do as long as Trump’s decisions remain “legal and ethical," as they have been to date’. One can only understand this statement to be a subtle threat to his boss, President Trump. Recent polls show a steep decline in public support for Vice President Vance. His net approval rating stands at a historic low of -18%. This drop follows political fallout tied to foreign policy actions, such as the U.S.-Iran conflict, and fading enthusiasm in his home state of Ohio. Key details regarding the drop in support include historic lows: According to CNN, Vance's net approval dropped 21 points to a -18% rating, making it the weakest performance for a modern sitting U.S. vice president at this stage of his tenure in office. In Ohio, his net favorability rating is underwater, and he is 27 points underwater among independent voters. Polling from Navigator Research shows that a majority of Americans disapprove of his performance.
As for the 2028 Presidential elections, his position as the presumptive frontrunner for the 2028 Republican presidential nominee has also slipped. Other GOP figures like Secretary of State Marco Rubio have gained significant momentum meanwhile. During the 2016 Presidential elections which Donald Trump won, JD Vance privately compared Donald Trump to Hitler. At the time JD Vance stated he went "back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a--hole like Nixon... or that he's America's Hitler". Vance also referred to Trump as an "idiot" and a "moral disaster," and penned op-eds calling him "unfit" for office. . He has since reversed himself and described Trump as a successful president and a good leader.
Vance has explained his earlier views about President Trump by blaming negative media portrayals during the 2016 Presidential elections. When asked to explain this shift in perspective, the Vice President stated “they tricked me about Trump". The question that remains to be answered is whether, despite Israel’s significant contribution and unparalleled military cooperation with America’s war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, just maybe, JD Vance been tricked once again, this time concerning the Jews and the State of Israel.
Iran and the Islamic “ecosystem”
On February 28th, 2026 hundreds of American and Israeli warplanes took off simultaneously to launch the opening salvo of the war on Iran. For 40 days the two allies’ military partnership was intense, effective, and strategic. While the recent memorandum of understanding and interim ceasefire negotiated by the United States and Iran’s leaders may be signed bringing the Iranian war to an end, an almost immediate result has been a marked shift in the American-Israeli military partnership: Israel has been shut out of the negotiations with Iran. The agreement signed between the United States and Iran on June 17th deals with few, if any, of Israel’s concerns, ignoring the ballistic missile threat and totally ignoring the danger of Iran’s fundamentalist Islamic agenda against Western civilization.
In recent weeks as the confrontation with Iran has wavered between all-out war and the possibility of an interim ceasefire, the focus of the mainstream media has presented a stream of endless reports that are simplistic and misleading by explaining that the Iranian war is a regional Middle Eastern conflict. By highlighting exclusively the media remarks and responses by President Trump and his VP JD Vance, the danger that the Iranian regime poses for the nations of the world is marginalized and at times simply ignored.
The Iranian regime is led and comprised of extreme fundamentalist Islamic Clergy who live by a vision of Islam spreading everywhere and taking over the nations of the world. For the Iranian regime, attacking the State of Israel or closing down shipping choke points like the Strait of Hormuz a critical route for global oil exports or even attacking the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, are all part of a campaign to deflect world attention from Iran’s true intentions. The war with Iran has contributed to a renewed surge in Islamic terror throughout Western nations and has accelerated patterns of creeping Islamic fundamentalism throughout the United States and the European continent: stage by stage, neighborhood by neighborhood, school by school, sports club by sports club, and local elections by local elections.
Iran aims to impose the law of the Sharia everywhere and does not recognize other religions such as Judaism or Christianity. The Islamic leadership of the Iranian regime will use any means, barbaric as they are, to impose what they consider Islamic justice. During the early days of the Iranian war, the Iranian leadership sent Islamic military and police forces into the streets of Teheran and other cities throughout Iran to end the mass demonstrations of its own citizens protesting against their own Iranian regime. The lethal response was upwards of 50,000 killed, thousands executed, tens of thousands wounded, tens of thousands imprisoned and tortured. The Iranian regime has no hesitancy to starve its own population, idle their vehicles due to the scarcity of gasoline, live with daily electrical shortages and blackouts, limit the use of running water in home faucets. The Iranian regime has no hesitancy in sacrificing millions of its own people in never ending wars and conflicts with neighboring nations and with the United States, if necessary as it has already proven during previous conflicts with other neighboring nations. Only this week, an Iranian court sentenced a prominent singer named Parastoo Ahmadi and a group of seven fellow artists to 74 lashes each after they livestreamed a performance on YouTube, according to her videographer and local media.
If Iran had the ability to acquire or develop a nuclear capability, they would unquestionably use this weapon of mass destruction not only against Israel but against the Western nations of the world including the United States. Iran has lost her ability to threaten the United States militarily due to the massive aerial bombings by the American and Israeli air forces this past February. The Iranian loss of her nuclear option has only motivated the Iranians to intensify their efforts in undermining American society from within by participating in a broad Islamic coalition that includes Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, and assorted non-state organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood.
This radical Islamic coalition works slowly and quietly with a proven playbook that has been very effective in Europe. You start with the poor, and the forgotten, you offer a simple job, you offer a sense of community and belonging, you offer a personal development workshop run by a soft-spoken Muslim man who quotes the "Prophet". For the first time these lost souls, and alienated Muslim Americans feel cared for. Within a relatively short period these young American Muslims adopt a religious identity and have become members of the Muslim ecosystem.
This ecosystem has its own schools, clinics, legal advisors, banks, butchers, matchmakers, and funeral services. A complete Muslim society within the larger American society where you can be born, educated, married, employed, treated when sick, and buried when dead as a true Muslim. Becoming radicalized is just around the corner, and it’s inevitable.
As of 2017, 20 states in the United States, mostly in the South and Midwest reported that Islam is the largest non-Christian religion in their state. As of 2026, the three largest Muslim populations in the United States are New York metro area (724,475), California (504,056), Illinois (473,792). Today, the city of Houston, Texas has over 90 Islamic centers. To fully understand the implications of these numbers, all one has to do is see the changes in London, England, a city run by a Muslim Mayor since 2016. Today, London has been transformed into a Muslim city with veteran Londoners abandoning an environment that has more in common with the streets of Egypt or Pakistan than Britannia.
It won’t look like a takeover; it will look like civic participation. A Muslim coalition affiliated candidate runs for the local school board on a platform of community representation and educational equity. A mosque-linked association applies for a municipal grant to run a youth sports program. A soft-spoken man in a suit attends a town hall meeting and asks reasonable questions about housing policy, nothing alarming, and nothing illegal. Just citizens, participating in democracy. However, they are not there as citizens, they are there as operatives, executing a strategy to place Muslim coalition affiliated individuals inside public institutions, advance them through the bureaucratic ranks, and use their positions to redirect resources, shape policy, and gradually replace American values with Iranian and Muslim values.
This is the only end game in town.
The Pursuit of the unattainable, Israel’s “deep state”
No other country in the Western world has been forced to exist and strive under the constant shadow of endless cycles of war, terrorism, invasion, rocket fire, suicide bombings, and existential threats since its establishment 78 years ago, affecting virtually every family in Israel. While many nations have experienced wars in their history, Israel has faced continuous conflict from the very day it was established as the Jewish homeland after nearly two thousand years of exile. Hamas’ invasion of southern Israel on Oct 7th, was only the latest manifestation of the barbaric terror carried out by our Palestinian neighbors, let alone the ensuing war on seven fronts forcing Israel to defend herself, against daily attacks by Hamas, Yemen, Lebanon and Iran. Intuitively, this ongoing reality of the endless cycles of wars and terror is a product of the Arab and Islamist refusal to accept the existence of Israel in the Middle East. Yet, the rejection of Israel’s right to exist as the national homeland of the Jewish people cannot alone explain the historical phenomenon of endless cycles of wars and terror.
Judicial overreach in Israel and the butterfly effect of Israel’s judicial system has systematically weakened Israel’s security, empowered anti-Semitism within Israel and throughout the Western world resulting in global anti-Semitism that threatens not only Israel but Jews everywhere. Israel’s “deep state” personified by the judicial system prevents an end to the endless cycle of war and terror, but they are not alone. The four pillars of Israel’s “deep state” includes; the judiciary, the media, bureaucratic civil servants, and progressive political forces. Together, Israel’s “deep state” lead by unelected bureaucrats, legal advisors, and judges have thwarted the will of the people by preventing Israel’s elected government from passing laws, and ensuing policies that in most Western nations are not subservient to legal review or jurisdiction. The political bias of Israel’s “deep state” has influenced all sectors of government allowing entrenched bureaucrats in the military, the police, and Israel’s security agencies to operate with legal immunity by promoting progressive strategic policies that contradict or nullify the explicit laws and decisions passed by Israel’s elected government. Judicial activism and non-elected officials in government ministries, often termed "legal advisors," act as a "super government" preventing governmental ministers from carrying out their duties and fulfilling their political mandate, thereby expressing the will of the people who voted for them. To amplify the “deep state’s” political perspective, they use the media and journalists to control the narrative, influence policy and public opinion in the daily political discourse by disseminating disinformation extensively.
This “weaponized” legal system acts exclusively against conservative or right-wing governments that have rejected the progressive political agenda. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current court trial appearances over the past three years have given the general public a convincing glimpse into how the prosecution and investigative police units have orchestrated a witch hunt against the Prime Minister, many of his appointments of security agency heads, and political aides. Let there be no doubt, these gatekeepers; prosecutors, police, and jurists are not protecting the rule of law against executive overreach, rather they are committed to a progressive agenda that goes way beyond what is politically and morally acceptable to the general public and to the majority that voted in the current government in Israel. The deep state is systemic, it’s malignant, and it’s global. Israel’s “deep state” treats every single act or decision by Israel’s democratically elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the end of Democracy.
It was President Eisenhower who first coined the term the military-industrial complex (MIC). Many scholars describe the MIC as the American "deep state," an entrenched, unelected, and secretive network comprising military, intelligence agencies, corporate defense contractors, and Silicon Valley. This expansion reflects a permanent national security state, rather than just a military-focused industrial alliance. This entity has grown exponentially since World War II, merging with intelligence agencies and Wall Street. Defining the Deep State: The deep state, in this context, is viewed as a "state within a state," where unelected bureaucrats and industry leaders shape policy, sometimes operating independently of elected officials. Many observers maintain that the "deep state" is a real, evolving structure that perpetuates itself behind the scenes of the constitutionally elected government.
The “deep state” poses a challenge for democratic nations throughout the world including the United States, whether during the Eisenhower Presidency or today during the Trump Presidency. Yet, for Israel, the “deep state” has prevented Israel’s democratically elected government from taking the necessary steps to end the endless cycle of wars and terror. Judicial decisions by Israel’s Supreme Court have over the years prevented Israel from concluding waves of terror or wars with a decisive victory. Due to judicial intervention and overreach, ceasefires replaced permanent long term solutions, international diplomacy replaced military successes and decisive victories. Human rights and humanitarian aid for the enemy superseded the sanctity of life for Israel’s soldiers and citizens. Terror organizations were kept on a low burner, weakened but never fully destroyed. Israel’s “deep state” created a culture that espoused a political bias that embraced a progressive agenda: restrain and deterrence is preferable, manage the terror rather than eliminate it, ceasefires will evolve into long term peace or as the motto from the 60’s goes: make love not war.
What Israel’s “deep state” refuses to understand is that wars that are ended without a decisive victory will eventually return whether as terror or as a full blown war. Oct 7th and the ensuing war has taught the Israeli people that, we should not be expected to accept a reality that no other nation would tolerate. All Democracies make mistakes and not every decision by the current government has been flawless, however Israel’s political echelon has been held accountable and will have to overcome the test of elections within the coming months, something that evades the leaders of Israel’s “deep state”, they will not only be held unaccountable, but their objective of having the final say will be unattainable sooner rather than later.
Germany's Secret Nuclear Assistance to Iran
During this time of the year, we in Israel commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day and then exactly one week later, the nation commemorates Memorial Day. On Memorial Day, we in Israel mourn our fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism, halting everything as the sirens blast (cars stop, pedestrians stop, the nation literally comes to a standstill). These past weeks and months, given that Israel’s sirens were prompts to rush to bomb shelters, one can only imagine the anxiety and accompanying stress, should one of those sirens have coincided with a memorial siren.
The common denominator between these two pivotal historical events namely the Holocaust and the Iranian attack on the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and Israeli civilian population centers, is Germany’s intentional involvement and compliance. Nazi Germany’s responsibility for implementing the Holocaust is an undisputable historical fact. Yet few associate Iran’s current nuclear and military capabilities with the very same nation, namely Germany, a nation responsible for annihilating 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. Germany played a key role in the early development of Iran's nuclear program decades ago that jump-started the Iranian nuclear capability by providing German nuclear technology, training, specialized components, and machinery. Key details regarding German involvement included providing Iran with specialized equipment such as high-strength aluminum, vacuum pumps, numerical controlled machine tools and frequency Converters: critical frequency converters for thousands of Iran’s centrifugal machines.
Historically, Germany was a primary technological partner for Iran, particularly in infrastructure and energy: This transfer of technology of actual components by Germany has over the years enabled Iran to advance and transform its nuclear weapons industry to weapons grade enrichment. Despite international sanctions, approximately 77 formal agreements were initiated over the years between German and Iranian higher education institutions. These involved student exchanges and joint research in fields like physics and IT. A major treaty was signed between the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) and the West German Ministry for Research and Technology. This paved the way for the construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, originally designed and partially built by the German firm Kraftwerk Union (Siemens), a core installation for Iran’s enrichment program.
Iran has relied on dual-use German nuclear technology to enrich and produce weapon-grade uranium enabling a nuclear threshold capacity. Iranian leaders being confident that their advanced nuclear weapons industry would deter any external attempt to prevent their nuclear ambitions, interpreted the West’s apathy over the years to this emerging threat that a nuclear Iran would pose for the world. This indifference has enabled Iran to spread her tentacles of Islamist terror through her proxy Islamist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Today, the United States and additional Western nations have come to the realization that Iran poses an existential threat beyond the borders of the Middle East, with Israel being just the first step within its overall plan.
Iran’s existing constitution, formed in 1979 and subsequently amended in 1989, outlines a vision that is fully incompatible with Western principles and has guided and empowered the Islamic leaders of Iran throughout its forty-seven-year existence. It also gives meaning to what has often been mistaken for mere hyperbolic cheerleading: "Death to America" and “Death to Israel.” While America was built on notions of liberty, individual freedoms and limited government control, the Islamic Republic of Iran is based upon a global totalitarian vision. Essentially, it seeks a one-world Islamic government derived from Koranic principles and Sharia law. It set out to help all similar revolutionary efforts across the world, justifying its support for its proxies such as Hamas and other Palestinian terror factions in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Islamic terror cells throughout Europe. In addition, it was hoped that this Islamist vision of world domination would be realized by the end of the 20th century, which certainly explained Iran’s unquenchable appetite for nuclear weapons as the optimum, most accelerated pathway toward overtaking all other forms of rule.
Germany has also provided the Islamic Republic of Iran, whether intentionally or not, an additional motivational path to use their nuclear ambitions to achieve their goal of world domination. The Aryan myth closely associated with German Nazi society during the 1920s and 30s, is one of the fundamental pillars of Iranian Islamist nationalism. Iran’s Islamic leaders have used their sense of self-acclaimed Aryan superiority to demand parity with Europe and dislocate Iran from the perceived backwardness of the Islamic Sunni world. Born in early nineteenth-century Europe, the Aryan myth was a product of linguistics, of racial anthropology – a pseudo-science that today is totally discredited. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in January 1933, they began to legislate on the basis of their racist worldview. A central goal of Nazi policy was exclusion and, ultimately, the annihilation of Jews. It often claimed to empirically demonstrate the inherent superiority of Europeans over the non-European subjected ‘races’. It later became a fundamental component of Nazi ideology.
Believing in the Aryan kinship of Iranians, German Orientalists and cultural emissaries introduced the Aryan myth into Iran in the first half of the twentieth century. The convenient intellectual device produced from this curious importation is well known: Iranians are part of the Aryan race and thwarted from their glory by religious and cultural miscegenation with Semites (in this case the Jews, and Sunni Arabs). The Nazis were careful to use ‘Aryan’ themes. Erwin Ettel, a German ambassador to Iran from 1939 to 1941, emphasized the use of such themes in his “general guidelines for propaganda to Iran” while he also insisted that “Germany’s battle against World Judaism” should also be directed “against the Jews in Iran, who want to force the Aryan Iranian people under their yoke”. In 1951, Sumka, the Iranian Nation-Socialist Party, was explicitly modeled on the Nazi Party and, alongside other far-right groups such as the Pan-Iranian Party, it sponsored attacks on local Jews and leftists in Iran while boasting about the ‘Aryan’ race that the majority of Iranians supposedly belonged to. It is remarkable that although both terms ‘Aryan’ and ‘race’ have fallen into disuse in the West, they are a fundamental component of modern Iranian political thinking among Iranian leaders.
Since 1952, when diplomatic relations were established between the Federal Republic of Germany and Iranian Islamic Republic, diplomatic relations were close and resulted in numerous technological, cultural, and industrial bi-lateral agreements. However, the volume of trade has decreased significantly in recent years as a result of the sanctions against Iran, primarily from the United States’ withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the sanctions unilaterally imposed by the United States. Nevertheless, there is still considerable interest in bilateral cultural and academic exchange between the two countries’ civil societies. One can only conclude that had Germany NOT been forced to end their close bi-lateral relations with Iran due to American sanctions, not only Israel but the whole of Western societies would be under the existential threat posed by Iran on the world.
