We can finally put the rumors to rest: Josh Shapiro is not a double agent for Israel. He is, quite simply, a double-crosser.
For years, the progressive left whispered that Shapiro’s “moral clarity” regarding the Jewish state was a symptom of dual loyalty. They need not have fretted. His recent pivot—decrying the 2026 war against the Iranian clerical state as the “wrong war” and demanding a hasty retreat—proves that when the political winds shift, Shapiro is perfectly capable of abandoning a democratic ally to placate the faculty-lounge wing of his party.
The prevailing narrative, curated by the New York Times and echoed by Jessica Tarlov—the embittered voice of The Five—attempts to cast Benjamin Netanyahu as a Levantine Rasputin. In this telling, Netanyahu is an occult figure whispering instructions into the ear of Donald Trump, "leading" him into a conflict that Tarlov and the Times editorial board treat as a personal errand for Jerusalem. It is a grotesque caricature that strips an American President of his agency and revives the ancient, twisted tropes of the "Jewish puppet master." The irony is thick: Tarlov and her fellow travelers have effectively adopted the anti-Israel canards of Tucker Carlson. They have joined a "horseshoe coalition" where the isolationist right and the progressive left meet to suggest that American blood is being spilled solely at the behest of a "Zionist lobby."
Shapiro’s attempts to litigate the war’s origins reveal the mind of a man drowning in his own sophistry. He complains that we traded an "80-something-year-old Ayatollah for a 60-something-year-old Ayatollah," as if the age of the figurehead were the only metric of victory. In doing so, he willfully ignores the strategic reality: the U.S. and Israel have dismantled the Supreme Council and the IRGC command structure, decimated its industrial base, and neutralized its navy and air force. To Shapiro, the decapitation of a global terror infrastructure is a failure because the replacement tyrant has a better pulse. He treats the existential security of the West like a human resources dispute. As Carl von Clausewitz famously noted, "Victory is not just the conquest of territory, but the destruction of the enemy’s physical and moral forces." Shapiro seems to have forgotten both.
Furthermore, Shapiro has retreated to the pedantic argument that one cannot wage war while battling inflation—a claim as historically illiterate as it is cowardly. Had Shapiro been advising Lincoln during the Civil War or FDR after Pearl Harbor, he would have demanded a surrender at the first sign of a rising Consumer Price Index. Significant inflation is the frequent companion of existential struggle, driven by the mobilization required to save a civilization. To suggest that a superpower must pause its defense because the price of eggs has risen is to signal to every tyrant on earth that America’s resolve is tied to the local grocery bill. As John F. Kennedy once said, "The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it."
“If you don’t know why you’re going in, you don’t know how to get out,” Shapiro quips, as if the purpose of destroying a regime that funds the rape, murder, and kidnapping of civilians is somehow a mystery. The President did not need a teleprompter to explain why he struck the world’s leading sponsor of terror; the thousands of rockets falling on Haifa and the IRGC-funded militias targeting American sailors provided a script written in fire and blood.
The “Blame Bibi” crowd relies on the convenient fiction that Netanyahu is a rogue extremist. Yet, whether it is Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, or Yair Golan, any leader in Jerusalem shares the same strategic imperative: Iran must not have the bomb, and its proxies must be broken. Would Tarlov or the Times accuse a Prime Minister Lapid of “leading” America into war? Of course not. By focusing solely on Netanyahu, they are simply updating the blood libel—asserting that every Middle Eastern conflict is a Jewish invention.
Then there is the Shapiro alternative: to force the rotting corpse of the Oslo Accords down the throats of an Israeli citizenry that has spent decades being slaughtered by the very people Oslo was meant to empower. Contrast the Governor’s calculated hedging with his colleague from Pennsylvania, John Fetterman. While Shapiro, the shapeshifter, chose the path of dishonor, Fetterman has remained a man of conviction. He understands the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
To demand that Israel stay its hand now is not a quest for peace; it is a retreat into fantasy. Shapiro has traded the mantle of a principled leader for the convenience of a critic, proving that while he may not be a double agent, his commitment to an ally’s survival has a very short shelf life.
What Winston Churchill said about Clement Attlee applies perfectly to Shapiro: "He is a sheep in sheep’s clothing," a hapless hack who fills a much-needed gap in the moral and intellectual fiber of the American Republic.
