Philip Giraldi – The Unz Review July 4, 2025

Benjamin Netanyahu is on his way for his third visit to Washington during the first six months of the second term of President Donald Trump. Bibi requested the visit because he clearly wants something and he never likes to hear anyone tell him “No!” The American Jewish community and the state of Israel working together are already mustering their substantial resources to give the Prime Minister anything he wants, whatever that might be. If necessary, the so-called Israel Lobby, which controls many aspects of what is referred to colloquially as the United States Government, has a unique ability to lay down a serious guilt trip on anyone who tries to interfere with their prerogatives. Their ability to persuade is frequently based on repeated invocations of a semi-mythical event called the “holocaust,” which has been and will continue to be a burden on all the rest of humanity forever.

Many Jews have consequently successfully turned themselves into something like caricatures, where they are always the victims of an irrational hatred and therefore are entitled to extraordinary measures to protect themselves. Indeed, it all means that whatever happens that involves either Jews or Israel will ipso facto grant a “license to kill” in response to ensure that there will be “never again.” South African journalist Ilana Mercer describes the current process succinctly: “Israel’s ‘strategic perspective’ requires everywhere and always an enemy. This designated enemy will be tarnished by a blood libel, an abstraction: he, she or they will be said to be antisemitic, baying for Jewish blood. This blood libel ignores the truth, because when facts and reality are scrutinized, it’s Arabs that are being exterminated daily en masse, with western grants of government privilege, not Israelis. You have to hand it to Israel. It has positioned itself as the world’s cross, a curse that every individual not Jewish-Israeli is born into and must carry like an albatross.”

It is too bad that Netanyahu will be landing in Washington, where his arrival will no doubt be protected by the battalions of soldiers brought into the Capital two weeks ago to march down Constitution Avenue in their celebration of Vietnam War draft dodger Donald Trump’s birthday. If Bibi were to land in New York he just might be arrested on the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. The Democratic candidate for New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has the Israeli Lobby and assorted Jewish identity groups hounding him relentlessly in part because he is a Muslim but also because he declared that if he is elected mayor he would arrest Netanyahu if/when he showed up in the city. The declaration had me and others cheering but we also wished that there were some mechanism for also arresting Genocide Joe Biden and Antony Blinken. Presumably Donald Trump, another genocide enabler, is untouchable except by impeachment as he is in office, which is a shame as he and his own batch of war criminals to match those around Biden richly deserve a bit of hard time.

Some journalists are speculating that while at the White House, Trump will pressure Netanyahu to agree to a new sixty day truce in Gaza, but Bibi is unlikely to have asked for the meeting if he thought he might be trapped into stopping the killing of Palestinians. I have my own theory about why Netanyahu will be in Washington and apart from the part where he has his butt kissed by Trump and four hundred bought-and-paid-for congressmen, it won’t be pretty. You see, Bibi wants to establish Israeli hegemony “from the rivers to the sea,” which means from the Euphrates, Litani and Nile rivers and all along the seafront with the Mediterranean. That will require regime change in Iran eliminating that nation as an adversary but the recent short war against the Iranians has made it clear that Israel cannot do it alone unless it goes nuclear, which would do possibly fatal damage to Tel Aviv’s ability to deal with the rest of the world and could easily mean the de facto end of the Jewish state. So he has to convince a gullible Donald Trump to do it for him and is prepared to lie effusively about the threat posed by Iran to make that happen.

Obviously, the problem confronting Netanyahu is that Iran really does not pose any threat to the United States or, indeed, even to Israel if the Israelis were willing to cease their quest for dominance and regional expansion. So he will have to make something up, which admittedly he has a great deal of experience in doing. But what will happen if Trump does not take the bait, whatever that will turn out to be? Will Trump Riviera Resort Gaza be enough to sway the New York Real Estate man who is pretending to be the President of the United States? I rather think that Netanyahu will have several possible schemes in reserve if he runs into a wall in Washington, including false flag operations plausibly blamed on Iran that will kill a lot of Americans to get across the message that the Iranians pose a real danger to the United States.

To be sure, Israel has demonstrated that it is not shy and will not hesitate to kill Americans when its own interests suggest a need for extreme measures, witness the deliberate killing of 34 US Navy sailors on the USS Liberty in 1967 and the recent deaths of US citizens in Gaza which the American government has done nothing about. Israel knows it can get away with murder, both figuratively and literally, and even though the American people might be sick of the slaughter of Palestinians the Israel Lobby knows that it has the support of both Congress and the media no matter what it does.

I rather think that what Israel will do will rely on the White House’s apparent belief that renewing war with Iran will result in attacks on some of the many US bases in the Persian Gulf region. As Iran is not likely to want to carry out that kind of escalation, Israel might decide to do the job itself but leaving evidence behind that it was Iran or an Iranian proxy that carried it out. Israel has many active agents run by Mossad throughout the region, as was evident in the assassinations of senior Iranian government officials and scientists together with their entire families back when the first phase of the so-called “twelve day war” began with an Israeli attack back a month ago. So Israel will blow up an American base or two and then loudly proclaim that the deed was done by Iran to get revenge for the US bombing of the Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow nuclear facilities.

Or if one really wants to explore options on the dark side, Israel might decide to really float the false flag, so it just might use one of its own nukes to do the job, embellishing the tale by pointing out that the blast was clear evidence of the claim that Iran had and still has a secret nuclear weapons program. Clowns in congress like Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz will immediately take up the cry and loudly call for revenge. Trump will be unable to resist, or at least that is what Netanyahu will be thinking, and if a nuke was used on an American base the willingness to reciprocate in kind will be overwhelming in Washington. As both Bibi and the Donald have several times recommended that the 10 million plus folks living in Iran’s capital Tehran should evacuate their homes, it is, in my opinion, quite possible that both Israel and the US have in any event been thinking of going nuke for some time. So, if all goes well for Bibi they will get what they want, i.e. regime change in a devastated Iran and the end of the Iranian challenge to Israel. Let us hope that instead of that outcome, Trump will be listening to his better angel, if he has one, and Netanyahu will be rebuffed and will go home with his tail between his legs next week!

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

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