By Andrew Silow-Carroll
As the US and Israel engage in a joint assault on Iran, accusations that Israel or Jewish influence drove America to war are resurfacing.
They revive uncomfortable narratives, conspiratorial rhetoric and fears of an anti-Semitic backlash that shadowed the Iraq conflict of the early 2000s.
The ADL warned March 8 on X that “antisemitic and anti-Zionist groups are framing the US-Israel operation against the Iranian regime as the latest evidence of the so-called ‘Zionist war-machine’s’ efforts to co-opt American foreign policy to advance Israeli and/or Jewish interests.
“Influencers who regularly traffic in antisemitic or anti-Zionist rhetoric are leveraging the U.S.-Israel operation . . . to promote longstanding conspiracy theories about Israel, such as blaming Israel for 9/11.”
These accusations are coming from far-right and far-left accounts as well as anti-Israel groups, such as Students for Justice in Palestine. Its Instagram post read:
“Imperialism and Zionism are one enemy — the common enemy of the entire region, and indeed, the people of the world.”
Such accusations are building on statements by both Democrats and Republicans that the war serves Israel’s interest more than America’s.
“A war between Israel and Iran may be good for Netanyahu’s domestic politics, but it will likely be disastrous for both the security of Israel, the United States, and the rest of the region,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat.
“We have no obligation to follow Israel into a war we did not ask for and will make us less safe.”
Republican influencer Tucker Carlson, who reportedly met with President Donald Trump three times in the weeks preceding the war, implied in an interview last week with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee that Trump was threatening to strike Iran at the behest of Israel — a sentiment Huckabee called “offensive.”
The New York Times later reported that in one of his meetings with Trump, Carlson urged Trump to “restrain” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and that Israel’s desire to attack Iran “was the only reason the United States was even considering a strike.”
Trump told ABC News Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl:
“Tucker has lost his way. “I knew that a long time ago, and he’s not MAGA. MAGA is saving our country. MAGA is making our country great again. MAGA is America first, and Tucker is none of those things. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that.”
Pop culture is also picking up on the theme. On the “Weekend Update” segment of “Saturday Night Live,” comedian Michael Che joked that while critics argued Trump lacked authorization for the war on Iran, “he actually did: Netanyahu said it was OK.”
On March 6, Michael Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the US, called Carlson “disgusting” and “antiSemitic” for suggesting that Israel had maneuvered Trump into the war. “It’s just such nonsense to say that Netanyahu is dragging President Trump. And it’s just bordering on pornography. It’s so disgusting,” Leiter told the New York Post.
“It’s an old anti-Semitic trope: the Jews are in control. America acts in its own best interest . . . It’s so insulting. He’s insulting to the president and downright anti-Semitic to the Jews and Jewish state.”
The echoes of history are striking. In the mid-2000s, controversy erupted around the claim that the “Israel lobby” and neoconservatives — a hawkish wing of the Republican Party seen as pro-Israel and dedicated to using American military might to spread democratic values — played a pivotal role in pushing the US into the Iraq war.
The charge gained plausibility because some of the highest profile neocons were Jewish, including government officials Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Elliott Abrams and pundits like William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and Norman Podhoretz.
In 2007, political scientists Stephen Walt and John Mear-sheimer published a paper, which became a book, arguing that pro-Israel voices were “a critical element” in leading the US to war in Iraq.
Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia accused AIPAC of having “pushed” the war.
Jewish groups warned that these claims risked feeding dangerous stereotypes about Jewish power.
There were key differences between Iraq then and Iran now. Israel did not fight as a combatant in the 2003 Iraq War. While the government officially offered its support, especially for the removal of Saddam Hussein, its leadership was wary of the war, fearing it would destabilize the region and put Israel at risk of retaliatory attacks.
The Jewish community pointed out that a Jewish neocon conspiracy was baseless, since others in the administration were not Jewish, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
President Bush and his circle articulated why war was in America’s interests — most famously, in order to neutralize Saddam Hussein’s intent to manufacture “weapons of mass destruction.”
President George W. Bush said in a 2002 speech in Cincinnati:
“The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. . . . This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its citizens.”
Congress voted overwhelmingly in October, 2022 to authorize Bush to use military force against Saddam’s regime.
By contrast, Israel and the US are partners in combat in the current fighting. “Alone among US presidents that I’ve worked with,” Netanyahu said of Trump, he “took action” against the Iranian regime.
Trump himself has offered justifications for the war — ranging from preventing an imminent Iranian threat to the US to countering Iran’s nuclear weapons program to supporting Iranian freedom (“help is on the way”) — and to regarding Iran’s negotiating position prior to the war as not serious.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio inflamed the isolationist wing of the MAGA movement when he suggested March 9 that the US joined the fight because Israel was about to attack Iran (remarks he later walked back).
The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein spoke last week with Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security advisor in the Obama administration. Klein said on his podcast:
“The centrality of Israel in the operation has raised some concerns for me about what this is going to mean for anti-Semitism. You see the amount of talk . . . about Israel’s leverage over Donald Trump or that this is all just some kind of Israeli plot.”
Rhodes noted: “A lot of what we’re doing is removing threats to Israel. If it goes poorly, who is going to get blamed?”
Netanyahu dismissed the claim that he pushed Trump into the war in a Fox News interview, stating: “Donald Trump is the strongest leader in the world. He does what he thinks is right for America.”
Trump has taken a similar approach. Asked March 2 in the Oval Office if Israel had pushed the US into the strikes, he said, “No, I might have forced their hands,” referring to Israel.
The Iranians, he said, “were going to attack. If we didn’t do it, they were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that.”
Jewish groups are deeply concerned about Carlson’s growing influence, particularly among young voters, and about several outsider GOP candidates and popular right-wing influencers who have pushed the “Israel First” trope.
Like the anti-Israel left, such groups seemed primed to pin the war on Israel, especially if it goes badly.
The debate over the Iran operation illustrates a recurring challenge: distinguishing legitimate criticism of Israeli or US foreign policy from conspiracy theories that echo age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes.
It also comes with a twist unseen during the Iraq war: Global bad actors who exploit social media platforms as tools of digital warfare, using a combination of bots, spoof accounts and coordinated networks to amplify divisive narratives, spread misinformation and stoke political or social discord.
In both the Iraq war and the current Iran conflict, mainstream Jewish groups tended to support the war.
For some Jews, no matter what they feel about the war, the unease is palpable:
The historic pattern of blaming Jews or Israel for American military action is resurfacing, this time against the backdrop of a real war involving Israel at its center, and a social media landscape where hate spreads faster than facts. n
