Victoria Coates, vice president of the Davis Institute for National Security at the Heritage Foundation and a former Trump administration official, discussed the ideological and strategic challenges Israel and the US face in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks during an interview with The Media Line.
In her newly released book, The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel and America Can Win, Coates outlines what she describes as a war not just of bullets, but of narratives—one being waged on US college campuses as much as on Middle Eastern battlefields.
“It seemed natural and right that Israel would respond to the folks who had attacked them so brutally, and that America would stand with Israel,” she told TML. “Instead, what we saw were these extraordinary demonstrations in favor of Hamas in America.”
According to Coates, such demonstrations are rooted in academic indoctrination, with students being “preprogrammed” by their professors to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. She identified a dominant ideology she calls “settler colonialism,” which she believes targets Israel first, and the US second.
This is part of a broader problem regarding Israel’s messaging, Coates argued, which includes the absence of clear messaging following past Israeli military victories.
“After the Independence War, the 1967 war, the 1973 war, we didn't just announce that Israel had won, that this wasn't some kind of stalemate or truce,” she said. “This was an Israeli victory, that they had defeated all of the nation-states that had arrayed against them, and that the nation-states themselves were going to stop doing it because it was expensive, and they lost, and they didn't like it. But the problem is nobody actually did that declaration.”
“We can be magnanimous in victory, but it has to be clear that there's a winner and a loser, or else the conflict will go on forever,” she continued. “It's now half a century since the last real war against Israel, a nation-state war against Israel, and we're still stuck in this artificial construct that the Palestinians are something that they're not.”
She also reflected on her brief tenure as head of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks under the US Agency for Global Media, a position she held during the final days of the first Trump administration.
“It was in a way set up for failure,” Coates said.
“They can only broadcast in Arabic. They don't allow translation … so Americans can't see what their dimes are paying for.” She criticized the network for drifting from its post-9/11 mission and publishing content that is “counter to our interests.”
Addressing the broader information war, Coates believes the Middle East remains a “conservative community” that is being inundated with “very liberal, very woke programming” from outlets like the BBC and Sky Arabia.
“There is potentially an information role for the US government, but we need it to be completely transparent and unapologetic about what it is,” she said.
Coates described the US–Saudi relationship on energy and security as having the potential for a “golden age,” emphasizing the strategic significance of shared energy responsibilities. “If [Iran] gets [a nuclear weapon], one of their first targets … might be Saudi energy facilities. That would be a catastrophe,” she said. Although the US no longer depends heavily on Saudi oil, Coates warned that regional disruption would spike global energy prices.