Instead of taking Joe Kent’s claims seriously, the media is disregarding him as an antisemite

Joe Kent’s resignation as White House counterterrorism chief in a March 17 letter to the president alleging that Israeli officials and the Israel lobby deceived him into launching a war is, as it should be, the bombshell story this week.   

“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent wrote. “This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat… and should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie…” 

Kent followed up with astonishing charges in a podcast with Tucker Carlson Wednesday night. 

He said that the Israelis officials were able to push a war “agenda” on Trump by bypassing American intelligence with their own “narrative” of Iran getting a bomb soon. “The Israelis came in, they moved [the] red line,” Kent said. The Israelis argued that “enrichment is going to get them a bomb in a certain amount of time” and rightwing talking heads on TV then echoed the Israeli line. 

But in classified intelligence “we didn’t see anything of that,” Kent said. He found the process “infuriating.”  

The Israelis had a startling degree of access to the White House. “It did seem that Benjamin Netanyahu was…. in the White House quite a bit, and then his other officials as well, [Ron] Dermer, etc,” Kent said. “When you heard what they were saying, it didn’t reflect in [U.S.] intelligence channels…. There was a clear gap between the intelligence and the information the president was given and the decision the president was making.”   

Kent said that the White House overrode the “caveat” that Israeli intelligence is provided “to influence us as well as to inform us.”

Part of the problem, he said, is that Americans “feel very comfortable with Israelis.” Many of the Israelis are “dual citizens, they sound like us, they don’t feel foreign.”

Kent’s charges are too serious to be ignored. He served over 10 years in Middle East wars. His first wife, an intelligence analyst, was killed in 2019 in Syria in a war he alleged in his letter was “manufactured” by Israel. 

The liberal press soon found a way to dismiss his claims  — as antisemitic concoctions. On CNN Joel Rubin, a former Obama aide, said that people should ignore the allegation, it’s a conspiracy theory. J Street official Ilan Goldenberg  described Kent’s letter as “ugly stuff that plays on the worst antisemitic tropes,” as reported by the BBC. The New York Times also buried the Israel angle, and described Kent as a conspiracist.  

Yesterday the influential liberal talk show host Brian Lehrer on WNYC radio elaborated these points. Critics at several news organizations have shown that Trump “chose to start [the war] himself,” not under the sway of a foreign power or lobby, Lehrer said, and the claim that the lobby deceived Trump “further raised the issue of antisemitism,” as Kent “seemed to play into the trope of Jews controlling everything.” 

To be clear, Kent did not refer to Jews. The deception that prompted his resignation was carried out by Israeli officials and influential members of the American media who “deployed a misinformation campaign… that sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” he said. 

Of course Kent spoke of the Israel lobby– which to many Israel supporters amounts to antisemitic conspiracy theory. But as Lehrer acknowledged, the Israel lobby theory is catching on on the left. 

In fact, Bernie Sanders said the attention must be on the Israel lobby.  

“Kent and I don’t agree on much, but he is right: ‘Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby’,” Sanders said.

The left must take Kent’s observations seriously, despite his rightwing background. If you are on the left, if you care about human lives, then you regard this war as a crime of monstrous proportions, brimming with the suffering of children and families and risk to civilians everywhere. A sequel to Israel’s genocide in Gaza that the press also seeks to dismiss, the war has coarsened American media in a horrifying fashion. “Decapitation” and “elimination” and “taking out” are used routinely by reporters to describe the slaughter of scientists and policy-makers that if it were done to Israelis or Americans, everyone here would regard as outrages. 

It is obvious why the mainstream media try to dismiss the Israel lobby’s influence. The media do so because it fears antisemitic attacks will target Jews and Jewish institutions in our country. I get that, but this is not about Jews. These are serious and important allegations about a faction influencing foreign policy. And that faction has a track record for pushing disastrous Middle Eastern wars. 

When Lehrer says that Trump started this war on his own, he is obviously rushing to a conclusion– the same excuse offered for the Israel lobby when Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld started the Iraq catastrophe.  But officials are influenced by bad thinkers. David Halberstam wrote a whole book about such foolish influence in Vietnam — called The Best and the Brightest. 

In the Iraq war, those bad thinkers were the pro-Israel neoconservatives, who as Tom Friedman told the Israeli press, had they been stuck on a desert island, the war never would have happened. Three of Bush’s aides had worked for Netanyahu five years before urging the violent reshuffling of Israel’s eastern neighbors in the “Clean Break” fantasy.  

Who got to Trump? Or was it Trump’s own narcissism/imbalance/sociopathy that triggered this war? No one can be sure now, though Kent’s revelations are fascinating.  

We do know that: Netanyahu says he has wanted this war for 40 years, and Netanyahu has met Trump a staggering seven times in the last 13 months. 

The hawkish Senator Lindsey Graham was openly part of Netanyahu’s war campaign. He visited Israel often and met with Netanyahu, “coaching him on how to lobby the president [Trump] for action,” per the Wall Street Journal. 

“Netanyahu then showed Trump intelligence that ‘persuaded’ him to launch the joint war on Iran, said [Graham],” as Al Jazeera reports. 

And of course the first week of the war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the reason the U.S. went to war was that Israel said they were about to attack Iran. “We knew that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them, before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he said.

Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick (both Jewish) wrote in the Nation that “the tail has wagged the dog.” 

“[T]he war was born, planned, and insisted upon by Israel, and its long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” they assert. The writers go on: 

Others have echoed this causation, even in the mainstream. Former FBI intelligence analyst Michael Feinberg said on MSNBC two days ago, “There has been a lot of reporting that Israel and Netanyahu may haven been the prime movers of this war and lobbied Trump extensively to take a part in it.”

In dismissing the lobby’s influence, the media is also ignoring the “avalanche” of money that the rightwing Israel lobby will bring to the 2026 midterms.

That money surely influences Trump’s decision-making. Trump trashed the Iran deal and moved the embassy in all-but-blatant transactions with the late Sheldon Adelson, his biggest donor in the 2016 race, who had pushed the U.S. to nuke Iran. Adelson used to crawl in the windows of the White House to talk to him. Trump joked last year—“a very aggressive man, but I loved him… very supportive of me.” 

Speaking at the Knesset in Jerusalem, Trump saluted Miriam Adelson, Sheldon’s wealthy widow, and suggested she loves Israel more than the U.S. 

 “Look at her sitting there so innocently. She’s got $60 billion in the bank…I get her in trouble with this, but I actually asked her once… ‘What do you love more? The United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That might mean Israel.”

The media will ignore all these political issues. As they will ignore Kent’s most anguished claim, that the war in Syria that killed his first wife was also fomented by Israel. 

That claim goes to Israel’s existential issue. Israel is constituted as an apartheid state. It grants higher rights to Jews than Palestinians, seizes Palestinian land for Jews, and  persecutes Palestinians in countless ways. 

Many in the world hate apartheid and will strive to end it. Some will resort to violence. And Israel has adopted a vicious policy, of slaughtering those who disagree with it, including thousands of civilians – at regular intervals. “Mowing the lawn,” in the disgusting phrase now popular among American commentators. 

Wars across the Middle East serve Israel. They engage the U.S. as an aggressor on Israel’s side. They distract Americans and the world from the real problem. 

Those wars have corrupted our language and our foreign policy.