I recently got a DM from a childhood friend whom I hadn’t spoken to in years. We sit on opposite ends of the political spectrum – she an ardent Trump supporter since 2016, and I, well, the exact opposite of that.
She was writing to me about Israel, and how everything she was seeing — Gaza, Iran, Israel’s influence in U.S. politics, all of it — was outraging her. It wasn’t about “right or left” anymore, as she put it. Israel was a problem for all of us.
And I couldn’t agree more.
As I write this, U.S. President Donald Trump has just announced that the U.S. attacks on Iran may last another four or five weeks. Israeli leaders are celebrating their success in finally getting the U.S. to fulfill their decades-long dream of regime change in Iran. Our unprovoked and illegal acts of war have already dragged the entire region into the escalating violence, and hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed.
From a purely American perspective, it’s hard to see how this is good for us. America’s global standing is rapidly declining, American soldiers are being killed, U.S. Embassies are being attacked, American planes are being shot down, and once again, American-made and funded bombs are killing children, targeting hospitals, and creating wanton destruction in a land so far away that most Americans couldn’t point it out on a map.
It’s estimated that in the four days since we started this fight, the war on Iran has already cost American taxpayers over $1 billion. If this were to continue for the next four to five weeks, as the president supposes, we are looking at, well, you can do the math.
And so, as I sit here and look at a situation spiraling further and further out of control, I, like many Americans, find myself asking the simple yet confounding question: Why did we do this?
I think we can all start off by agreeing, given our history in the region, that we can outright disregard the government and mainstream media narrative that we are doing this to “liberate” Iranians and bring them democracy.
With that out of the way, I turn to the many alternative theories I’ve seen circulating online. Is this simply a distraction from the fact that our country is being run by a corrupt elite ring of pedophiles, and the fact that our very own president is embroiled in the biggest scandal in American history? Is it about maintaining U.S. currency dominance by ensuring that global oil is traded in dollars, a system that Iran has traditionally challenged? Is this being done in the service of our allies in the Gulf, in which the entire Trump family has billions of dollars worth of investments and profits to be made at stake? Is this being done at the behest of our “greatest ally,” Israel and its lobby, who have been pushing for U.S. intervention in Iran for decades, and whose very existence seems dependent on constant regional violence? Is this related to our illegal attack on Venezuela and the seizure of that country’s oil resources earlier this year? Is it really just about “the oil”? Or are we just doing this for the love of the regime-change game?
I am personally a fan of the unpopularly nuanced and simultaneously overly simplistic answer: it’s probably a mix of all of the above.
But I am also of the belief that for Americans like myself, there is only one of these answers that matters right now. Or at least, one that matters more than the others.
And Monday evening, our Secretary of State Marco Rubio told us exactly which one.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action…
We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
That’s what Rubio told reporters after a briefing with congressional leaders. Essentially, he admitted plainly that we started this war with Iran because we knew Israel was going to drag us into it anyway.
So, regardless of what other deeper reasons may be at play here — distracting from the pedophile files, the petrodollar theory, etc. — the most basic explanation that Israel has dragged the world into war, is, by our own government’s admission, true.
And that is where we, the average American citizens, come in.
According to the latest polls, most Americans disapprove of our attack on Iran, and it’s not just the Democrats. Similarly, this overwhelming anti-war sentiment also happens to coincide with record low support for Israel in the United States on both sides of the aisle.
In other words, at one of the most politically polarizing times in modern American history, there is a perfect confluence of global events and national domestic sentiment that has created the conditions for the left and right to actually agree on something: that this relationship we’ve got going on with Israel is no good for us.
And that is why, when it comes to this disaster of a war, the Israel angle is the one that matters most right now. Because it is the one that we actually have the power to change.
Whether your desire to consciously uncouple from Israel is motivated by anti-imperialism or good ol’ fashioned American nationalism, I implore you not to get lost in ideological battles and purity tests. Instead, I encourage us to find the common ground that clearly exists, by acknowledging a few simple truths:
- The Israel lobby, Zionist billionaires, and pro-Israel elites have far too much power and influence over our government and institutions than should be legal or morally acceptable.
- The billions of dollars that we, the American taxpayers, spend on aid to Israel can and should be used to invest back into our own country and our own communities.
- We should not be funding, supporting, and carrying out the mass killing of innocents, especially children. Not in Gaza, not in Iran.
If we can agree on these common sense principles, then we can agree that Israel has no place, and no future, in American politics. And the time is now to set that ball in motion.
So I invite my fellow Americans to seize the opportunity that this moment presents us with to free ourselves from the most toxic relationship we have ever had. And I believe we are closer to this reality than the establishment elites would like to believe.
After three years of genocide in Gaza, there is no coming back for Israel with the left. Any association, past or present, with Israel is a sure-fire way to lose voter support amongst Democrats. On the right, there is a growing movement among ‘America Firsters’, particularly young people, who believe Israel has too much control over our government. And every day that Trump bombs Iran, seemingly at the behest of Israel, it only further fuels that discontentment.
Many of our politicians can see the writing on the wall. AIPAC and the Israel lobby have become a liability. We are witnessing candidates across the country, from local to national races, refusing AIPAC money, and touting all the ways they’ll stand up to the Israel lobby as a way to court voters and score political points. And it’s working.
But as the tides shift and momentum for the breakup builds, the corrupt political and billionaire elites become more desperate. It’s why establishment Democrats and Republicans alike who are beholden to Israeli interests continue to make domestic and foreign policy decisions that fly in the face of their own constituents, curbing our most basic rights to protest, criticize, or even boycott Israel in our own country.
It’s why Zionists and the Israel lobby are thrashing, cornered and desperate, buying up every media and entertainment platform imaginable to censor the information we receive, and pouring millions of dollars to attack and unseat any politician, both Republican and Democrat, that threatens their status quo.
It’s why Israel has attacked six countries in the past year alone, putting itself and the region in a constant state of war to justify its colonial and expansionist project in the Middle East. It’s why they dragged us into this war with Iran, and why they’ve already moved on to crafting a new narrative around the latest existential threat in the Middle East; a new “threat” that no doubt will someday require more U.S. intervention, more U.S. bombs, and more U.S. taxpayer money on Israel’s behalf.
But Israel can only keep this up for so long. And every day that Americans across the political spectrum see a war that they don’t even want being committed in the service of Israel, it won’t bode well for Israel’s political future.
Virtually every person I know, from my leftist comrades and colleagues to my MAGA high school classmates, is saying the same thing: they’re tired of Israel’s shit. They’re even more tired of American politicians who care more about Israel than about the people they’ve been elected to represent.
With midterms coming up, and the left and right finally united on one key issue, I have a feeling that our breakup with Israel may be closer than we think.
