Philip Giraldi – The Unz Review March 13, 2026

The extent to which Israeli interests have come to dominate US foreign policy in the Middle East can be measured in terms of its effectiveness if one considers the seven trips to the US made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during President Donald Trump’s first year in office. Bibi received a passionate reception from Congress and the media which came in spite of the fact that he was the man principally responsible for a horrific genocide being conducted against the Gazans and, more recently, unprovoked attacks on primarily civilian targets on the Palestinian West Bank as well as in neighboring Lebanon and Syria.

Admittedly, the soft landing by Netanyahu in the United States has been facilitated by the Israeli Lobby’s corruption of congress by virtue of hundreds of millions of dollars liberally distributed among both Democrats and Republicans. And the same Jewish billionaires have also been adept at buying up media outlets to make sure that the portrayal of Israelis as perpetual victims is front and center when the American public watches the news or reads a newspaper.

And Israel’s ownership of the US political class has been bipartisan, with President Joe Biden, who self-describes as a Zionist, fueling the slaughter in Gaza with money and weapons, followed by Trump’s doing more of the same. And both presidents have been generous in providing political cover in bodies like the United Nations to make sure that Israel is never held accountable for all the crimes against humanity it commits.

By virtue of the Democratic and Republican largesse, Israel has received a virtual carte blanche in US support to include ignoring Israeli bombing of schools, hospitals and religious buildings, both Christian and Muslim. America was recently appalled when a school in Iran was bombed by the US, killing 165 little girls, but Israel has killed hundreds of times that many Gazan children without any consequences at all thanks to US support and even enabling of the war crimes being committed. Israel has also demonstrated its power in Washington in more practical ways to protect its politician friends, as, for example, when dissenting Democrats sought recently to pass a bill to force the Constitutionally and War Powers Act mandated congressional vote to declare the Iran war. It should have been a no-brainer to restore “rule of law” that has been totally ignored by Trump but the Republicans and some Democrats united to defeat it without really seeking to justify it in legal or constitutional terms. Nor was any attempt made to define a national security interest to justify the phony “threat” claims which had been produced that led to the initiation of the conflict in the first place.

Secretary of State and National Security Marco Rubio has perhaps revealed some aspects of the process whereby the war against Iran came about. Israel sees the destruction of Iran as a top national priority, so one might assume that the United States under Trump would go along with that presumption. It is generally believed that a war to destroy Iran such as it is now has been on the cards ever since the twelve-day war directed against it in June of last year. Per Rubio, the timing this time around was based on Israel’s insistence that if the US did not join in an attack Israel would go it alone. There was concern in Washington that that would mean Iranian retaliation against US bases in the region whether the US was an attacker or not, so the decision was made to join Israel and preempt any Iranian “aggression.”

Donald Trump somehow has reversed the Rubio explanation by stating that he himself forced the issue and pushed the Israelis to start of the war, not the other way around, but it appears to have been a typical Trump misspeak based on ignorance of what actually occurred. Secretary of War Pete “Call of Duty” Hegseth meanwhile reportedly supported Rubio in his assessment, though insiders believe that Warrior Pete would have been eager to attack anyone anytime just to demonstrate that he and his “killers” could do it. He also would like everyone to tell him that “he is doing a very good job!”

By another reckoning, a decisive view provided to Trump that led to war came from both of his chief personal negotiators, son-in-law Jared Kushner and real estate business associate Steve Witkoff. Not coincidentally both are Jewish and close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which makes one wonder why they were selected as negotiators with Iran. Both are also regarded as passionate Zionists meaning that their commitment is to the Israeli government and all that pertains to it. The New Republic describes how the two men have no “technical understanding of uranium enrichment after they presented an assessment of Iran’s Research Reactor that made no sense” meaning that they “have no clue what they are doing.” The magazine concluded that the US went to war because Jared Kushner “is a fool.” If so, he is one of many in the Trump Administration.

Witkoff and Kushner reportedly met with Trump prior to the start of the war and urged him to act against Iran, citing the clearly false intelligence provided by the Israelis regarding the imminence of nuclear weapon development by the Iranians. That together with the Rubio warning is what is playing out now, which actually suggests that Israel “mousetrapped” Trump into going to war for them. Rubio’s case for going to war, which contradicted what the US intelligence community was reporting, was inevitably unchallenged and is in a political sense derived from how, for decades in the United States, absolute support for Israel without questioning its motives or intents has been a solid bipartisan government consensus. The only debate over Israel has been when one candidate boasted that he or she was more pro-Israel than the other.

The United States politicians, who have been corrupted by Jewish money, accept that they must always finance, arm, diplomatically protect, and use one’s own soldiers to fight for Israel if needed. This was confirmed by former President Barack “liberal except for Israel” Obama when he armed Israel to bomb Gaza in 2014 and agreed in 2016 to give the Jewish state $38 billion in cash direct from the US Treasury over 10 years. That sum expires this year and will likely be increased by congress, but it is somewhat irrelevant as special appropriations far exceeding that sum have in any event been the norm over the past few years. Joe Biden and Donald Trump have in fact both financed and armed Israel’s more recent and continuing destruction of Gaza which would not be possible without the resources coming from the White House. A similar destruction of Iran is anticipated to “turn it into Gaza,” according to at least one leading Israeli politician. Americans who criticize the White House’s devotion to Israel are meanwhile routinely subject to reputation destruction through being labeled as antisemites, which is currently underway with journalist Tucker Carlson and Congressman Tom Massie.

As of the morning of Friday the 13^th, Trump has restated in his own crude and threatening way the latest on the Iran war front. He tweeted “We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time – Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today.” If Trump is indeed looking for an off-ramp from a conflict that clearly is not going as planned he clearly is expressing himself in a way that guarantees no negotiated settlement. Netanyahu is no doubt cheering him on.

All of this has led to a growing movement among Americans to end the war whatever it takes and a particular focus has been on Israel being recognized as the driving force that produced the US involvement in the conflict in the first place. So perhaps it is a good time to pull the plug on the US relationship with Israel, which costs a fortune, will undoubtedly lead to piles of dead American soldiers, and which provides absolutely no benefit to the American people. But there is a problem with that and it is called “Trump” who may be enamored of Israel because he has converted to Judaism or due to family ties, or he may be getting blackmailed using Jeffrey Epstein material by Netanyahu.

If Trump truly believes he is allowed to start a war to benefit a foreign country without any constitutional or legal process he must be removed in any event. In an article entitled “The Madness of King Trump” John and Nisha Whitehead observe how a “wrecking-ball presidency” has meant “Dysfunction, decadence, depravity and a death cult: that, in a nutshell, sums up the mindset now at the heart of the Trump administration. Troubling reports have surfaced that apocalyptic Christian rhetoric is being used to justify the Trump administration’s attacks on Iran as part of an ‘end-times’ struggle between good and evil. President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,’ one commander told his combat unit.”

George O’Neill, writing in The American Conservative describes how “This gangster foreign policy isn’t just illegal; it’s bankrupting us morally and financially. We’ve poured trillions of dollars into these ventures, amassing a debt greater than any country’s GDP. The Greater Israel dream, with its expansionist zeal, drags us into perpetual conflict, and foreign lobbies wield our military like a personal militia.”

The risk incumbent on the “tie that binds” the US with the Jewish state is by one measure unique. Both Donald Trump and his Israeli friend Bibi have their fingers on their respective nuclear triggers and both have exhibited behavior that one might describe as reckless and, in its manifestation, “potentially catastrophically dangerous.” The Israelis even have a doctrine for the use of their weapons called the “Samson Option” which inter alia consists of Israel’s undeclared but long-assumed nuclear last-resort policy of massive retaliation that involves their nuking not only threatening hostile neighbors but also countries elsewhere in the world that did not do enough, in their reckoning, to help or protect them. Rome is, for example, presumed to be one of the targets, which includes the added benefit of destroying Roman Catholicism. Is that the kind of “kill them all” thinking that would appeal also to Donald Trump? You betcha!

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 https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org

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