An author and Middle East expert who resides in Israel says Israeli citizens are troubled by the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban's sudden takeover.
Joel Rosenberg, an author and journalist who has dual citizenship in the United States and Israel, said Monday on TBN's Huckabee that America's chaotic withdrawal has impacted Israel.
"Israelis are terrified by what's just happened. They are watching a surrender of an American ally [and] the world's leading superpower," Rosenberg said. "And as we face our main enemies – which is not Afghanistan but is the realm of radical Islamism, and particularly the Iranian regime – we are not seeing President Biden create confidence that he will stick with an ally. And we are being rattled by this. Everybody in the region – our Sunni Arab allies [and] Israel – is being rattled."
Rosenberg is the founder of two Middle East news websites, AllIsrael.com and AllArab.com, and the author of the new book about the region, Enemies and Allies. He and his family reside in Israel.
Rosenberg made the comments the same week that President Biden is set to meet Israel's new prime minister, Naftali Bennett. Biden and Bennett are scheduled to talk in Washington Thursday.
Bennett was sworn in this summer, succeeding Benjamin Netanyahu.
"I think he loves Israel," Rosenberg said of Biden, "but I think he doesn't get the Iranian regime. He doesn't get radical Islam. He clearly doesn't get Afghanistan and the Taliban.
"... So, the current new Israeli leadership has to figure out how do they navigate if America is retreating, and if they can't possibly trust the leaders in Washington," Rosenberg said. "That's a scary environment for Israel."
Lazar Burman, a reporter for the Times of Israel, wrote last week that the disastrous withdrawal "has left a gash in America's image abroad."
"The idea that the most capable intelligence apparatus in the world so badly misread a country it has been intimately involved with for two decades," Burman wrote, "does not inspire confidence in America's abilities to read and shape the region – especially after a string of high-profile intelligence failures in Iraq, Iran, Libya and more."
Related:
'Pray for the Christians in Afghanistan': Taliban Takeover Puts Church in Peril
U.S. Has Moral Obligation to Protect and Resettle Afghan Allies, Evangelical Leaders Say
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Nick Brundle Photography
Video courtesy: ©Huckabee
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
