Netanyahu and Israel are provoking the U.S. into attacking Iran — and the media continues to ignore it

As Donald Trump assembles an overwhelming U.S. military armada in the Middle East, the American media continues to avoid explaining that Israel has regularly tried to instigate the U.S. into a war against Iran for decades.

Reports barely mention Israel, and nowhere cite the country’s past record of sabotaging the Obama nuclear deal, which had ended any risk that Iran would get nuclear weapons. The mainstream is also not reminding its audience that Israel conducted a long sabotage campaign, which included provocative assassinations of Iranian military leaders and scientists, which was partly designed to provoke a war with America. 

This is not a new phenomenon. The mainstream American media has consistently downplayed or ignored this dangerous truth. Mondoweiss has published articles about the Israel connection at least several dozen times (here’s one, from December 2023).

Here are several recent examples of the latest media malpractice. MS Now, the network that used to be called MSNBC and is regarded as the most progressive mainstream cable news network, ran a fairly long evening segment on February 18 about the rising danger of a U.S. attack. The two guests were respected: Rob Malley, the lead negotiator in that 2015 Obama-era nuclear deal, and Michelle Goldberg, an accomplished New York Times columnist. The network’s host was Jacob Soboroff, who has done excellent reporting on the deportation crisis in the U.S.

Israel was not mentioned one single time.

[In fairness, Soboroff did partially redeem himself the following evening, February 19. He hosted again, and one of his guests, too briefly, was Ben Rhodes, the former Obama foreign policy adviser and a perceptive critic of Trump’s Iran threats. But their five-minute segment barely mentioned the vital Israel connection.]

A February 18 New York Times report was also inadequate.  It did say in the third paragraph that “Benjamin Netanyahu . . . has been pushing for action to weaken Iran’s ability to launch missiles at Israel.” But that’s basically it. The rest of the report was largely devoted to listing the U.S. military’s rising troop strength in the region and citing the types of air defense missiles that America is deploying, including (pointlessly) naming the additional “F-35, F-22 and F-16 fighter jets” that have arrived on the scene.

What about the Washington Post? Israel didn’t come onstage in its February 17 report until way down in paragraph 16: “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said in a speech Sunday that Iran must be required to relinquish all its enriched uranium and be barred from enriching more in any deal negotiated with the United States.”

That sentence begs for historical context, but the Post forgot to provide it. Here’s what actually happened: in 2015, the Obama administration negotiated a landmark nuclear deal with Iran, which capped below weapons grade Tehran’s ability to enrich uranium and mandated independent inspectors to insure compliance. Netanyahu actually flew to Washington in March 2015 and addressed Congress, in an arrogant failed effort to persuade the Senate to block the deal. 

In the event, Iran completely complied with the nuclear agreement. Netanyahu and Israel should have been happy; Iran was now prevented from ever becoming a nuclear power. But in May 2018, under vigorous prodding from the Israel lobby, Donald Trump tore up the deal. Even so, Iran patiently continued to observe it, until a year or so later.

But Netanyahu and Israel didn’t stop there. His aim all along has been to actually change the regime in Tehran, and he knew that to succeed he needed to provoke the U.S. into a war. So Israel carried out an ongoing clandestine sabotage campaign, including cyber warfare and assassinating Iranian scientists and military leaders both inside the country and in the region. Israel also surely encouraged the first Trump administration to carry out its provocative killing of the senior Iranian commander, Qasem Soleimani, in Syria in January 2020. 

Netanyahu’s instigations failed. Iran did not take the bait. 

It’s vital to recognize that what Netanyahu and his advisers have been plotting is truly evil on many levels. But what should enrage Americans of all political persuasions is that Israel’s government is surely hoping that Iran will retaliate against the 30,000 to 40,000 U.S. troops who are stationed at 13 military bases across the region, which would give Netanyahu the war that he has long wanted. He and his advisers are putting at risk the lives of American service members so that Israel can increase its dominance in the Mideast and continue strengthening its system of apartheid. 

Over the next few days, we may see if they have finally succeeded.