Foreign Affairs Israel’s Qatar Strike Threatens NATO’s Credibility The foundations of the Western alliance are under threat. Israel’s airstrike on Doha earlier this month didn’t just blow up Israel–Hamas negotiations—it shifted the fault lines of regional security. The strike killed five Hamas members, including the son of a senior leader, in Doha’s Leqtaifiya district. Qatar, a major non-NATO U.S. ally that hosts the Al Udeid Air Base—America’s largest military installation in the region—condemned the attack as “cowardly and treacherous.” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended the strike as a blow against Hamas. Israel’s strike on Qatar, framed as a counterterrorism operation, raises an alarming possibility: that Turkey, a NATO member, could be next. Like Qatar, Ankara hosts members of Hamas and offers them political cover in ways Israel sees as detrimental to its security interests. Turkey also houses U.S. nuclear weapons at Incirlik Air Base and remains a cornerstone of the transatlantic alliance. If Israel was willing to bomb Doha under the pretext of fighting Hamas, it could deploy the same rationale for an attack on Turkish soil. And if Turkey, in response to such an attack, solicited American and European support under Article 5—NATO’s collective defense provision—and if such support was not forthcoming, the foundations of the alliance would be severely undermined. To fully comprehend the risks at play, one must look at the broader trajectory of Israeli–Turkish relations. Ties have steadily deteriorated since at least the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October 2023. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has even accused Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza. The deterioration of bilateral ties accelerated after Israel’s surprise attack on Iran this June. Meanwhile, both countries have expanded their military presence in Syria since the ouster last December of President Bashar al-Assad. Israel has carried out repeated strikes on Syrian airbases in Hama and Homs to block Turkish deployment of air defenses and drones that could challenge its aerial dominance. Turkish officials have accused Israel of “expansionist aims” and of undermining Syria’s fragile interim government. Reports of close encounters between Israeli and Turkish aircraft in Syrian airspace prompted “technical talks” to avoid accidental clashes. The tension between Turkey and Israel is now being exacerbated by the presence of Hamas in Ankara. Turkey, like Qatar, does not designate Hamas as a terrorist organization, and its willingness to host the group has long frustrated the Israeli government. Israel’s strike in Doha demonstrates its willingness to strike the sovereign territory of U.S. allies to decapitate Hamas. That precedent makes a future strike on Turkey no longer unthinkable. Some Mideast outlets have even reported that Israel considered striking Hamas in Turkey before opting for Qatar. The Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar said that Israel scrapped the initial plan for fear of sparking a diplomatic crisis by striking a NATO member. Any Israeli aggression against Turkey, whether through missiles and bombs or a covert operation by Mossad, would undoubtedly test NATO’s integrity. Article 5 stipulates that an armed attack against one or more members should be considered an attack against all, but would the alliance truly come to Turkey’s aid against Israel? Given the pro-Israel orientation of the Trump administration and of Washington broadly, the U.S. would not intervene militarily at Tukey’s behest against Israel. Furthermore, with European governments already stretched by Ukraine and broadly sympathetic to Israel, they too would likely offer Turkey little to no meaningful support.  If Turkey’s appeal to Article 5 were unsuccessful, the consequences could be severe. Erdoğan has long hinted at the possibility of exiting NATO; the kind of crisis imagined above could turn threats into reality. Moreover, the alliance’s deterrent power would collapse, possibly prompting other members to wonder whether devoting substantial military and financial resources to NATO is still worthwhile.  An Israeli attack on Turkey would also cast doubts upon America’s umbrella across the Middle East, doubts already shared by many following Israel’s strike on Qatar. If Washington could not stop Israel from bombing a country that hosts its largest regional base, what protection can Jordan, Egypt, or the Gulf states expect? For many U.S. partners, the strike and the Trump administration’s unwillingness to punish Israel for it raises the question of what American security guarantees mean in practice. Washington’s credibility has already eroded through its unwavering support for Israel. Since October 2023, the United States has vetoed multiple UN resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza while supplying Israel with weaponry and financial aid subsidized by American taxpayers. In the West Bank, U.S. backing has enabled settlement expansion and military raids that have displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians. In Lebanon, Israeli forces remain despite agreements for them to withdraw, and Israel has violated a ceasefire by conducting strikes that have killed dozens of civilians. By shielding Israel from accountability, Washington has tied its own reputation to Israel’s wars, whether in Gaza, the West Bank, or southern Lebanon. The Trump administration’s tolerance for Netanyahu’s Doha strike may appear to be just one more example of the close U.S.–Israel partnership, but the implications are profound. Israel has now demonstrated a willingness to strike the heart of U.S. allies. If Turkey becomes its next target, NATO could face a crisis unlike any in its history. For Americans, this is not about whether one sides with Turkey, Qatar, or Israel. It is about whether America should sacrifice its alliances and credibility to enable a client state’s reckless military decisions. By backing Israel’s new course, Washington risks undermining not only Turkey’s security but also the very alliance system that has defined Western security for generations. The main threat to NATO may come not from Moscow or Beijing, nor from declining support for the alliance in Washington, but from a small country in the Middle East that increasingly acts against the interests of its superpower patron. The post Israel’s Qatar Strike Threatens NATO’s Credibility appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs How Israel Captured TikTok The push to ban the app gained steam after pro-Palestinian content went viral. Reports that TikTok will transfer an 80 percent stake in its U.S. operations to Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz are celebrated in Washington as a strategic victory over China, where its parent company is based. But a closer examination of the deal reveals a different winner: the foreign government of Israel and its lobby in the United States. Though the first campaign to ban TikTok originated in concerns of Chinese manipulation and data theft, that effort ultimately fizzled out after TikTok agreed to hand over all user data to a U.S.-based contractor through their program Project Texas. But TikTok wasn’t out of the danger zone just yet. As Mike Gallagher—a former U.S. congressman, current “head of defense” at big data company Palantir, and author of the revived and successful effort to ban TikTok—wrote in November 2023, the reason the U.S. needed to ban the most popular app among Gen Z was not because the algorithm caused young Americans to support China but because it caused them “to support Hamas.” That same month, panic over TikTok’s “pro-terror” algorithm reached a crescendo after young people on the app discovered Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” through their “For You” page. For the first time, many Gen Zers read the Al Qaeda leader’s own explanation for why the U.S. was attacked on 9/11—an explanation that had nothing to do with hating “our freedoms,” as official Washington had long insisted, and everything to do with U.S. militarism abroad, particularly on behalf of Israel. Because too many young people learned why they really hate us, the bin Laden letter was swiftly banned from TikTok and censored from the Guardian’s own website, where it had been hosted for over 20 years.  TikTok’s capacity to totally and instantaneously shatter decades of neoconservative propaganda revealed what Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, would label Israel’s “TikTok problem”: that the app exposes a generation of Americans to too much information unapproved by the CIA and Mossad.  Israel’s representatives in the U.S. Congress moved quickly, voting to ban the app in April 2024. “There was such overwhelming support for us to shut down” the app, explained then-Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, because “if you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites—it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”  That ban is now unlikely to go into effect, not because of concerns about free speech or government overreach, but because Israel’s TikTok problem has been solved. In July, TikTok hired IDF instructor and self-declared “passionate Zionist” Erica Mindel to serve as the company’s hate speech manager. And as independent journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulson reported last year, TikTok has forged a content moderation partnership with CyberWell—an NGO closely linked to the Israeli government and staffed by Israeli spies—whose chief executive publicly boasts about the foreign lobby’s successful campaigns to suppress the free speech of Americans and restrict the information they can receive not just on TikTok but across “all major social media platforms.” The acquisition of TikTok by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz is therefore not simply a reshuffling of corporate control, but the latest step to consolidate a foreign government’s censorship regime in America. The app’s new owners openly display their affection for, and often loyalty toward, Israel.  Oracle’s billionaire founder Larry Ellison—who believes that “there is no greater honor than supporting” the foreign military of Israel—is one of the most unapologetic Zionist oligarchs in America. The Ellison family has poured millions into Israel’s tech and surveillance industries, even working with the Israeli government and its spies to monitor and disrupt Americans who use their free speech to boycott that foreign government. More recently, Larry Ellison and the heir to the Oracle fortune, his son David, have gobbled up the largest media conglomerates in America as part of their mission to shape the information system in Israel’s favor. Oracle’s acquisition of TikTok is part of that broader effort. Cofounded by the son of a famous Israel First neoconservative, TikTok’s other new owner, Andreesen Horowitz, is equally aligned with the Israeli government; the firm has rapidly become one of the most active foreign investors in Israel. Impressed by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its various wars of aggression, and its pager attacks against civilians in Lebanon, Andreesen Horowitz launched a recruiting drive to attract the “Elite IDF talent” behind each of those war crimes. Like Israel’s repression of the Palestinians and territorial expansion, its attempt to censor the free speech of Americans and control the information system goes back many decades; indeed, they go hand in hand.  Israeli officials have long understood the growing unpopularity in the West for their campaign to create a Greater Israel, yet they rely entirely on the support of Western democracies to shield and finance its construction. No longer able to secure that backing through democratic consent, Israel and its network of loyalists have sought to guarantee it through systems of anti-democratic control. The ongoing political rebellion of young Americans against our Middle Eastern protectorate, highlighted in recent polling, has shown Israeli officials and their allies that without manipulating American perceptions through hasbara and censorship, Israel will be politically isolated, weak, and unable to survive. TikTok’s capture by some of Israel’s most powerful supporters helps ensure that the Israel-skeptical sentiments of Gen Z—the most politically disruptive generation in decades—will be contained. The post How Israel Captured TikTok appeared first on The American Conservative.

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