The greatest heresy of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s 2006 Israel lobby paper (published by the London Review of Books because American publications turned it down), was the assertion that the lobby had pushed the disastrous Iraq war on the George Bush administration. The media called this an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Paul Wolfowitz said neoconservative was a euphemism for Jewish.
The left also dismissed the idea, saying Iraq was an imperialist war for resources, and the dog wags the tail, not the other way round.
But that was a long time ago, and the evidence of Israel’s influence over U.S. foreign policy has only mounted. Obama nullified the policy he’d laid out boldly in Cairo– of stopping the settlements– because pro-Israel groups had virtually unlimited access to the White House in the run-up to his reelection bid in 2012. Biden signed off on the Gaza genocide in evident concern for pro-Israel billionaire donors (per the Washington Post and Responsible Statecraft).
Then yesterday Marco Rubio said the heresy out loud.
In comments aimed at ending the “confusion” about American motivation for the illegal (and horrifying) war on Iran that Trump launched on Saturday, the secretary of State raised the question, “Why now?” then answered it by saying Israel was about to attack Iran.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. 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.
So the tail wagged the dog, according to Rubio.
Even if Rubio was shooting from the hip, or misspoke, as politicians always tell us a day later – his was a shocking confession inside the Establishment. On CNN last night, Sen. Mark Warner insisted he was a “strong” supporter of Israel but he does not want the U.S. to “outsource our foreign policy decisions to a foreign government.” Rep. Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio, said Rubio had given a “poor” and “very disappointing” answer (that he said recalled the influence of the warmongering neoconservatives).
The New York Times will do its best to ignore the Rubio confession, but it is galvanizing the antiwar forces. “And just like that we are no longer a nation divided by left and right, we are now a nation divided by those who want to fight wars for Israel and those who just want peace and to be able to afford their bills and health insurance,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Georgia Representative, wrote on X.
Rubio’s confession vindicates a longstanding critique by Realists, joined by the left, that Israeli influence is distorting American policy, destroying the American image overseas, not to mention terrorizing millions, from Gaza to Tehran to Beirut, and killing many of them in utter defiance of international law.
That critique is no longer a heresy, it is the most plausible analysis of U.S. actions in the Middle East.
Here are some of the data points that bear out the critique:
- Last summer Israel initiated a 12-day war against Iran with a surprise attack, unprovoked by any imminent threat, even as the U.S. was conducting negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. The U.S. joined Israel’s war. That assault also raised questions of who was making the decisions.
- A Democratic Party autopsy of the failed Harris campaign of 2024 reportedly concludes that Harris lost “significant” support in the election because of her refusal to oppose the Gaza genocide. Some on the left are demanding a release of the report. James Zogby says that polls are clear that voters “are fed up with blind support for Israeli policies. This is a fact.”
- Trump destroyed Obama’s Iran deal in 2018 and moved the embassy to Jerusalem in some large measure because his biggest donor, the late Sheldon Adelson, who was devoted to Israel, wanted him to do so. As Trump commented of the competition to get Adelson’s money in 2016, “Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet.” That puppet turned out to be Trump.
- Barack Obama campaigned for his signature foreign policy achievement, the Iran deal of 2015, by confronting Israel’s influence. “When the Israeli government is opposed to something, people in the United States take notice,” Obama said in a major speech, but it would be an “abrogation of my constitutional duty” if he sided with Israel. Chuck Schumer crossed Obama on the deal, voting against it, he said later, because of Iran’s “threat to Israel.” Schumer then got the highest leadership position in the Democratic Party– an indication of whose voice counts in Washington.
- Obama aide Ben Rhodes has said that 10 to 20 of “the usual suspects from the organized American Jewish community” had almost unlimited access to the White House in the lead-up to the 2012 election, ensuring that Obama would do nothing to stop Israel’s settlement expansion. Rhodes said that when Obama irked Netanyahu by saying that the ’67 lines are the basis for peace talks, and Netanyahu then lectured the president in the White House, Rhodes had to get on the phone to “a list of leading Jewish donors . . . to reassure them of Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides.”
- In 2002, in the run-up to the Iraq war, a former Bush foreign policy aide told a University of Virginia audience that the “real” and “unstated threat” from Iraq was not to the United States, but the “threat against Israel.” The American government, Philip Zelikow added, “doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.”
- The 9/11 attacks were prompted in part by American support for Israel, according to Osama bin Laden. That rationale was repeatedly suppressed by official American post-mortems and media reports.
I have the hope that the horrifying war that Trump has unleashed will catalyze political opposition to Israel’s influence over our foreign policy.
Polling shows that U.S. public opinion of Israel is changing dramatically in the light of the Gaza genocide. “New polling data from Gallup found that 41 percent of Americans say their sympathies are more with the Palestinians versus 36 percent for the Israelis,” per Vox. This is a total reverse of last year’s numbers (Israel 46 to Palestinians 33)
The public’s rejection of Israel as any kind of model should prompt an interrogation of media that promote Israeli delusions of military conquest transforming the Middle East. Ronen Bergman, a champion of Israel’s policies of assassinating anyone it does not like, gets a platform in the New York Times and on CNN. Today Yaacov Katz, the former Jerusalem Post editor, appeared on BBC to describe the slaughter of Iran’s political and military leadership as “magnificent.” On CNN, Dana Bash allowed an Israeli warmonger, its “liberal” president Isaac Herzog, to describe Israel as a “peace-loving nation” and to say this war will usher in a new era. Yes how many times have we heard that?
The mainstream American discourse needs to reflect left-wing and realist critiques that have been marginalized but that accurately reflect Israel’s role in the world, notably its responsibility for the “tough neighborhood” its leaders constantly complain about.
Most importantly, that discourse must include an honest discussion of a root source of instability in the Middle East: Israel’s persecution of Palestinians, through militant policies of ethnic cleansing… apartheid…occupation… all in the name of a Jewish ethnocracy.
Those values are antithetical to American values. Or they ought to be.
