As Israel’s role in promoting war against Iran becomes increasingly evident, it is up to us to turn outrage into change.
U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his Mar-a-Lago club on December 29, 2025.
(Joe Raedle/Getty Images) It’s never a good idea to expect Donald Trump to stick to just one argument. The president is a congenital liar who loses a little more brain function with each passing day. Inventing new justifications for terrible decisions is kind of his whole thing.
But even by this degraded standard, Trump’s ever-changing justifications for his war on Iran are mind-blowing. Every few hours seems to bring a new explanation why the United States and Israel decided that now was the right time to launch an illegal, unprovoked, and unlimited attack on another country. Both countries struck due to an imminent and undefined threat! No, wait, that’s because Trump’s definitively “killed” nuclear program last year was maybe not erased and had to be re-obliterated! Sorry, what’s really wrong with him? supposed is that the Iranians took the Americans hostage… in 1979, and it’s time someone did something! Hmm, forget it, it’s for a change of diet! Actually, remember this thought…
This absurdity makes Trump look like what he is: a reckless imperialist engaged in an already spiraling war of choice. It also helps create what he may view as an encouraging level of confusion about what exactly he expects from this catastrophe.
There’s only one problem: other people are also talking about why we’re suddenly at war. And many of them give the same reason: because Israel wanted it. This could potentially erode both U.S.-Israeli relations and Israel’s already fragile standing with the American people. For anyone who wants to see the US-Israeli alliance, with all its inherent cruelty and oppression, thrown into the dustbin of history, this can only be a good thing.
Before we understand why, it’s important to understand how this story has unfolded over the past two days.
The first thing that really raised eyebrows was Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s statement explanation why a war with Iran was taking place “now”, that “the president made a very wise decision: we knew there would be Israeli action, we knew it would precipitate an attack on American forces, and we knew that if we did not pursue them preemptively before they launched these attacks, we would suffer higher casualties…”
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Translation: Israel had made it clear that it was going to bomb Iran, so the United States felt it had no choice but to join in. (A sign that Rubio wasn’t going rogue, the official White House ‘rapid response’ narrative tweeted a video of his comments.)
Rubio’s words are consistent with other public statements and recent news reports. The New York Times reported On Monday, Rubio made a similar argument during a briefing with members of Congress days before the war began:
At the briefing, Mr. Rubio argued that regardless of whether Israel or the United States struck first, Iran would respond with a powerful barrage of weapons against American bases and embassies. So it made sense, Mr. Rubio said, for the United States to act in concert with Israel, since America would be drawn into that action anyway. And Israel, Mr. Rubio said, is determined to act.
House Speaker Mike Johnson made the same argument Monday: tell the journalists“Because Israel was determined to act with or without the United States, our commander in chief, the administration and officials had a very difficult decision to make. »
Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Monday that this was also the explanation given during a briefing after the start of the war. “This is still a war of choice, recognized by others, dictated by Israel’s goals and timetable,” Warner said.
THE Times also reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had intensely – and successfully – pressured Trump to abandon ongoing negotiations with Iran in favor of war. As if to confirm that he was carrying out a mission that had little to do with what is currently happening, Netanyahu issued a statement on Sunday making no mention of an imminent Iranian threat. Instead, he said the United States helped him realize a decades-old dream:
We are in a campaign in which we are mobilizing the full force of the IDF into battle, like never before, in order to secure our existence and our future. But we’re also bringing help to this campaign from the United States, from my friend U.S. President Donald Trump, and from the U.S. military. This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have aspired to do for 40 years: hit the terrorist regime in the hip and the thigh.
Clumsy.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump made a belated attempt to put a lid on things. “On the contrary, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” he said. said. “We were in negotiations with these madmen, and I was of the opinion that they [Iran] We were going to attack first. (The same “quick reply” account that, less than 24 hours earlier, had tweeted Rubio’s diametrically opposed comments. quickly tweeted new Trump line.) Rubio was also taken to go back his previous version of events.
Hmm. Which story should we believe: the one told publicly, in private, to journalists and elected officials for days, or the entirely different one that emerged after Trump found himself in a political impasse?
Now, it’s obviously important not to overdo things. The United States is not a puppet mindlessly dancing to the rhythm of the Israelis. Combine the plethora of bloodthirsty, Iran-hating psychopaths in Washington with Trump’s apparent desire to start a new conflict every week, and you already have a recipe for war before Israel even enters the picture. But the preponderance of evidence seems to show that, at the very least, Israel played a huge role in getting Trump to pull the trigger on this war — and it’s not an anti-Semitic conspiracy to say that.
Why is all this important? For two main reasons, both of which could have the salutary effect of weakening support both for Trump, for Israel and for this terrible war.
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The first is simple: for lack of a better phrase, it is a very bad idea for senior U.S. government officials to send the message that the reason this country finds itself immersed in a bloody, spiraling conflict with no clear justification, no legal authority, and no end in sight is because a different the country had a war itch to scratch. This is especially true when the government in question is run by a bunch of morons who can’t stop talking about how much they enjoy both bombing the universe and telling other countries what to do. It’s no wonder Trump felt the need to try to reclaim this narrative.
The second, more important reason is this: Israel is already on edge with the American people because of widespread disgust over the Gaza genocide. Last week, Gallup found thatfor the first time, more Americans say they sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. The Israeli lobby’s hold on American politics, while still strong, is weakening at an unprecedented rate, with both main holidays.
The implication that Israel is the driving force behind deeply unpopular war with Iran, a country that has directed to the deaths of at least six American soldiers so far – only reinforces the truth that more and more people have come to understand over the past two years of genocide and repression: that, time and time again, the United States does terrible things, both domestically and internationally, in the service of its alliance with Israel, even when those things go against logic, morality and its fundamental self-interest.
The challenge now is to turn this growing outrage into concrete change – whether that means blocking military aid to Israel, supporting Palestinian liberation, ending efforts to suppress criticism of Israel and its relationship with the United States, limiting the power of the Israel lobby, increasing support for the BDS movement, or forcing the United States and Israel to respect domestic and international law.
The Democratic and Republican administrations have singularly failed to convince American voters that they have a duty to channel endless amounts of money and weapons so that Israel can massacre children in Gaza. There is no reason to think that these same voters now want the same money and weapons to be used to slaughter children in Iran – not for the shifting motives the Trump administration continues to advance, and certainly not on behalf of Israel. Trump may now be trying to flush this last useless cat into the bag, but he cannot force a growing number of Americans to ignore what is already so clear: the sooner the alliance between the United States and Israel ends, the better the world will be.
Jack Mirkinson Jack Mirkinson is editor-in-chief at The Nation and co-founder of Speech blog.