I returned to Israel this month for the second time. The first visit was in December of 2025. Eight months is not a long stretch on a calendar, and yet so much has changed. The two visits felt like they were ages apart.
The country I found this time is tighter, quieter, and more watchful. More concerned. More cynical. In December, most of my conversations with Israelis meandered around optimism for the future. This time, they seemed to snap back to the same two things: national security, and a sense that they are increasingly on their own.
The Israelis I met included IDF reservists, business owners, and parents who have already sent their children to the army. They are exhausted and bracing for what comes next. There was a phrase I heard repeated often: “this is the calm before the storm.”
The drones and ballistic missiles from the Houthis and Iranians are not coming like they once did. Still, no one is so naive to think they won’t be back at some point. Hezbollah has been degraded, but remains dangerous like a wounded and cornered predator. Hamas is rearming amid a shocking amount of public support from Palestinians. And the Palestinian Authority is so weak under the leadership of 90-year-old Mahmoud Abas, a civil war between Fatah and Hamas seems inevitable when Abbas dies, which could be any day now. The scary fact is that Hamas could control Gaza and the West Bank at some point in the near future.
When Israelis talk about the coming storm, they do not say it theatrically. They say it the way people who live in tropical climates describe a barometric pressure drop they can feel in their bones before a hurricane.
The Islamic Republic remains the organizing threat. The February campaign that killed Ali Khamenei and smashed much of Iran’s senior military leadership did not start a democratic revolution as we hoped. It has opened a new chapter for the Islamic Republic: wounded, but still armed, still capable of closing the Strait of Hormuz, still reconstituting missiles, still connected to proxies that refuse to stay dead.
Israelis understand they won a battle with Operation Rising Lion. They do not believe they’ve won the war. The conflict with Tehran is now treated as a chronic condition of life, not a short episode. One of the heavy costs of this condition is borne by Israel’s reservists and their families. The IDF’s reserve force is stretched past any pre-war definition of sustainability. Combat reservists have served 170 days and more since October 7. The pre-war expectation was 25 days across three years. Commanders speak privately of an army “struggling to keep up with current demands.” Dropout rates are rising.
The mental health strain is no longer a sidebar story; it is a serious readiness problem. Israel is asking the same finite pool of citizens to hold back forces in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and the Iranian threat all at once. They are doing it. Somehow, like Israel has always done, they keep defying the odds. But they cannot do it forever at this tempo.
Over all of this looms Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman project is no longer just an academic talking point. It is a strategic fact. Ankara’s deepening hold on the new Syria, its hostility to Israel, its courtship of Washington, and the burning question of acquiring advanced American weapons are all daunting concerns.
Israelis watch the U.S.–Turkey relationship with a particular kind of dread: seeing a NATO ally treated as an indispensable partner while that ally talks about the “liberation” of Jerusalem and plants flags in the neighborhood. When Israel struck a Syrian air base this month to send a message about Turkish military entrenchment, it was a statement that some red lines will be enforced even when they complicate the Israeli relationship with America.
Syria itself is the great unknown. Ahmed al-Sharaa is the president. Before, he was known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the jihadist commander of an Al Qaeda affiliate that deposed dictator Bashar Assad.
Israelis ask questions about Syria the way people ask about a man who has changed his clothes, but cannot change his soul: Is he Sharaa, or is he still Julani? He has courted Washington, talked reconstruction, spoken of a security arrangement with Israel, and consolidated power with the speed and methods of a man who cannot be underestimated or trusted, yet.
No one I met claimed to know what al-Sharaa’s core motivations are. Everyone agreed that guessing wrong would be expensive and deadly.
Another phrase I heard a lot from Israelis about their neighbors: “we’ll judge them by their capabilities, not their intentions.”
Benjamin Netanyahu remains the most polarizing figure in the country. The polls are ugly right now for Bibi. Rivals have risen. The public is exhausted by wars that produced military achievements but no clean ending. Yet the same public has watched the alternatives and concluded, for better or worse, that the man who has spent a generation navigating this neighborhood still may be the best man to lead them again. That is not an endorsement. It is a pragmatic verdict delivered with a shrug and a grimace. And a sense of resignation about what Israel’s voters need over what they want.
Israelis also know they are losing the argument about Gaza. I saw the aid with my own eyes: trucks, convoys, volume that Israeli officials say exceeds assessed humanitarian needs by a factor of three. Hamas still interferes, diverts, and smuggles. The images the world consumes are not those trucks. Instead, the world sees carefully choreographed propaganda from Hamas-affiliated “journalists” and lazy establishment press too ignorant to challenge the narrative. Their charge is genocide. But when you see the situation up close, it becomes obvious that if Israel wanted to commit genocide, they could, and it wouldn’t be hard.
The country that is still reeling from the aftermath of October 7th is told it is the villain of the peace. Israelis do not expect fairness from that debate anymore. The best way to describe the lingering sadness of October 7th is to compare it to the sadness we felt after 9/11. But almost no one defended Osama Bin Ladin or Al Qaeda. The other difference here is geography. Israelis live next door to the people who planned October 7th, the people who cheered it, and the organizations that have spent two years trying to rebuild the capacity to do it again.
The IDF’s current chief of staff put it in the language Israelis now use as a vow: they will not return to the doctrines of October 6. The scars are not only graves and hostages that will never come home alive. They include the end of a certain Israeli illusion: deterrence was a settled fact and that the neighborhood could be managed indefinitely on autopilot.
But despite all this, the beat goes on. Personally, I was floored by the spirit of Israelis who can talk openly about the clear and present dangers surrounding them, then in the next moment, break out in song. That actually happened while I stopped for a beer at one of the stalls in Jerusalem’s Mahaneh Yehudah Market.
The pioneer’s stubbornness is still there. It’s one of the personality traits that the U.S. and Israeli have always shared. It’s obvious not just in Jerusalem, but also on beaches and in the bars of Tel Aviv. It’s palpable in the Golan Heights and the Gaza envelope. It is in the start-ups that keep raising money between ballistic missile and rocket sirens. It is in the reservist who finishes a tour and goes back to a lab or a farm. It is in the blunt, argumentative democracy that somehow still functions while every neighbor is some combination of failed state, theocracy, or revivalist empire.
Israel built the only truly functional democracy in the Middle East out of dessert, malaria swamps, refugees, and a wager that a people without a country could make one that worked. That wager has never been cheap or safe. It has also never been more necessary.
Some of history’s most successful societies have been built by people who look at an empty, hostile map and decide to build something there anyway. And then refuse to apologize for defending it. Right now, Israel is tense, tired, and staring at the next storm. It is also still very much itself. And I find that deeply inspiring.
John Bachman is the host of John Bachman Now on Newsmax.
