Israel is not 'our friend'

Foreign nations should be treated as such, and interests, not misguided sentiment, should drive our international alignments

Donald Trump has gone to war with Iran on behalf of Israel. That conclusion, often expressed sotto voce, has hardened around the globe. It is a conflict previous presidents resisted for reasons that are becoming more obvious each day, and one that America’s allies and enemies alike regard as ‘not America’s war’.

Is it antisemitic to say so? Last week, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organisation that trains the FBI to identify extremism, declared that it was. Greenblatt lamented that blame was being ‘placed at the feet’ of the Jews, before denouncing those who claimed the Israelis had ‘whispered a few too many times in President Trump’s ear.’ These are, of course, two separate questions. Yet for Greenblatt and Israel’s most vocal advocates, ‘Jews’ and ‘Israel’ are interchangeable. A political argument is thereby transformed into a moral one; a nuanced question is wrenched into a binary in which right-thinking people can find only one correct answer. The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recognised the ruse: ‘Some Jewish leaders, alarmed by the backlash to the war, are trying to rule any discussion of Israel’s role in instigating it out of bounds… Greenblatt’s heavy-handed attempt to police the discourse is bound to fail, because it’s asking people to overlook provable facts.’

The facts are damning. Marco Rubio all but admitted that Israel, supposedly the junior partner, compelled America to go to war. Rubio’s later attempt to pretend that he said something else entirely has hardly put the matter to bed, not least because at the outset Trump and the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, gave broadly the same account. Less than forty-eight hours before the war began, Benjamin Netanyahu told Trump there had never been a better window to kill the ailing Ayatollah Khamenei — the despot, Netanyahu stressed, who had allegedly attempted to sponsor Trump’s assassination during his election campaign. The head of the Mossad assessed that a decapitation strike was likely to topple the regime, although whether Israel actually believed this on the basis of their intelligence, or said this only to try to persuade Trump, cannot be known. Three White House sources say the call was persuasive, despite Trump having already approved the war in principle.

Israel’s influence has at times been exaggerated, and it is true that Trump bears full responsibility for the decision, which he took in the wake of an audacious operation in which US Delta Force abducted the president of Venezuela, a supposedly ‘perfect’ example of regime change that he may have felt augured a similar triumph in Tehran. Yet the environment in which the decision was made was shaped at critical junctures by people who appear unwilling or unable to distinguish Israel’s interests from America’s. Trump’s special envoys, ardent Israelophiles Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, jettisoned negotiations with the Iranians that were reportedly going well. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, is a Christian Zionist who has previously called for Israelis to rebuild the Third Temple — requiring the demolition of the third holiest site in Islam — and was the first cabinet official to endorse the war.

While a solitary American interest in this war is hard to discern, Israel’s prerogatives shed rather more light on things. In the weeks before the bombing began, Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s closest confidants, coached Netanyahu on how to persuade his own president to go to war. The White House manifesto for that war, which has so far seen 50,000 American troops deployed to the Middle East, appears to have been plagiarised from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an organisation founded ‘to enhance Israel’s image in North America’. The non-profit has been described as an Israeli government asset by the director of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center director, Joe Kent, resigned over the war, claiming Iran posed ‘no imminent threat’ to the US, which, he said, ‘started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.’ Even Robert Kagan, the neoconservative hawk and ideological architect of American interventionism, struggled to fathom America’s actions. ‘Iran is a much greater threat to Israel than it is to the United States’, he told a blushing fellow neocon, Bill Kristol. The idea that Israel is ‘America’s greatest ally’ has, finally, left Kagan cold. ‘It is a great ally, in defence of Israel… It’s kind of like saying South Vietnam was a great ally in the fight against North Vietnam’, he scoffed.

The Third Gulf War is merely the most conspicuous consequence of a decades-long open secret: Israelophilia — the unconditional love of Israel — has helped to create a looking-glass world in which Western interests, freedoms, and judgment have been subordinated to the imperatives of a single foreign state. It has led avowed doves like Donald Trump to start foolish foreign wars. Self-described free speech advocates such as Marco Rubio have locked up and deported Israel’s critics. Many journalists have come to act as wartime propagandists. Through claiming a monopoly on Judaism, Israelophilia has also left Jews as a whole more divided and more vulnerable, and less willing to distinguish romanticised ideas of Israel from the reality.

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The Israelophile case for the Iran War mirrors the arguments Israelophiles have put forward for most others. The Middle East’s sole liberal democracy faces existential threats from millenarian Islamic neighbours bent on its destruction, and must therefore deploy the world’s ‘most moral army’ to act with extreme violence to ensure its survival. The West is morally bound to help with this endeavour, or at the very least to suppress its criticisms of a nation essentially cast as the goodies in a Manichaean battle between good and evil. In this telling, Israel merely happens to be on the front line of a war involving all free societies: a war of civilisation versus barbarism in which the rest of us, if anything, are not really pulling our weight. The Islamic republic needed to be toppled to contain its looming nuclear threat; the same threat Trump and Netanyahu claimed had been destroyed last year.

This version of reality does contain some elements of truth. Iran does pose a threat to Israel, and Israel’s alarm at the prospect of the Mullahs obtaining a nuclear weapon is entirely understandable. Yet Israel’s leaders have for three decades responded by exaggerating the exact nature of the threat, most recently by claiming that Iran planned to strike Europe with ballistic missiles. A subtler riff on this argument presents Israel’s fight with its neighbours as somehow linked to anxieties about Muslim immigration across the West — as if Israeli military victories are wins for us all. Yet the past quarter century of failed interventions suggests the correlation runs the other way: the more destruction in the Middle East, the greater the immigration burden borne by Europe. Chaos abroad does not necessitate or justify immigration to Europe, but our current leaders will act as though it does. Israel’s objective of destabilising Iran may in fact produce the biggest migration wave yet seen. We should therefore resist the temptation to project domestic culture wars onto foreign kinetic ones.

That entails having a clear-eyed view of the Middle East. Israel — within its Green Line borders — is the region’s most robust democracy. It is more liberal than most of its neighbours. Israel also faces complex security challenges that most of its Western peers do not. And yet none of this should obscure the profound philosophical differences between the Israeli state and its Western peers: Israel is at its core an ethno-state whose policies are, as it stands, guided by biblical claims and obligations.

These differences tend to be softened in the vision of Israel presented by Israelophiles, which closely resembles the wartime propaganda the Israeli government promotes in English for suckers — or, if you like, the Yiddish formulation that gets much mileage in Israel, the freier. The message aimed at a domestic audience in Hebrew tells a rather different story. Last year, Netanyahu told the i24 news channel in Hebrew that he was on a ‘historic and spiritual mission’, and that he was ‘very’ attached to the vision of a Greater Israel. That segment was cut from the broadcaster’s Hebrew and English YouTube channels, appearing only on its Hebrew website. As the war entered its fifth week, Netanyahu declared in Hebrew that the conflict was ‘changing the realities in the Middle East’ and ‘increasing the status of Israel as a superpower.’

Since the Iran War began, Yair Lapid, leader of Israel’s opposition, has also called for the establishment of a Greater Israel. He said he would support ‘anything that will allow the Jews a large, broad, strong land and a safe haven for us’. He added: ‘Zionism is based on the Bible. Our mandate over the land of Israel is biblical, [and] the biblical borders of the land of Israel are clear.’ This is not a Tanakh-thumping settler, but the ostensibly secular voice of centrist moderation that Israel’s liberal backers have long hung their hopes on.

Lapid’s remarks were not widely reported in the English-speaking press. The reluctance of some Anglophone journalists to cover Israel’s expansionist ambitions might stem from the fact that Israeli politicians are prone to making inflammatory statements, and linking them to imperial intent can at times carry the whiff of conspiracy theory. Other journalists have built careers linking criticism of Israel to antisemitism, a delicate art that depends on Israel appearing as benevolent and normal a state as possible. This creates genuine ethical quandaries. A fairly prominent British journalist once arrived at a dinner I attended after interviewing Israel’s Diaspora Minister, Likud’s Amichai Chikli, and relayed to me with some alarm that Chikli had spoken favourably about Greater Israel. The journalist was conflicted about whether to report statements that could be weaponised by pro-Palestine activists, and ultimately declined to publish them. This attitude towards inconvenient facts would no doubt resonate with the former head of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, who told the New York Times Magazine it was ‘naïve’ to believe that the ‘free market of ideas ultimately sifts falsehood to produce truth.’ There are times when you must put your thumb on the scales.

Israel’s conduct during this war may surprise some of its supporters abroad, yet readers of the Hebrew press will recognise it as the logical conclusion of ambitions that enjoy significant political support. Religious settlers have perpetrated more than twenty pogroms against Arabs in the West Bank with legal impunity. Judges have dismissed charges against soldiers accused of gang raping a Palestinian detainee. The men were later fêted on television programmes. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a man who once hung a portrait of the terrorist Baruch Goldstein (a physician who murdered twenty-nine Palestinians whilst they were praying in a mosque in the West Bank) in his living room, has served as Minister of National Security (almost) continuously since December 2022. His appointment preceded October 7, and must be understood as representative of wider trends in Israeli political culture, rather than as simply a radicalisation in response to those events. After his party, Otzma Yehudit, passed death penalty legislation for Palestinians who kill Jews (but not vice versa), Ben-Gvir handed out champagne in the Knesset. And that’s just the domestic front.

As religious Zionists continue to outpace secular Israelis demographically, strengthening the hand of Likud and the likes of Ben-Gvir, the gap between the Israelophile vision and Israeli reality will only widen. The foreshocks of this trend are being felt at Israel’s borders, which the state has never cared to define and yet have already been unilaterally redrawn. Israel’s invasion and displacement of one million people in Lebanon has been declared a formal annexation of the territory south of the Litani River. The Israel Defence Forces plan openly to demolish thousands of homes and commit ethnic cleansing, while right-wing activists have called for Jewish settlement in the area. Israel has bombed Iran’s energy facilities despite protests from the United States, leading the Iranians to escalate in turn by destroying energy infrastructure in the Gulf — something that will almost certainly result in a global recession. That is the same Gulf which the United States has put significant efforts in pushing towards friendlier relations with Israel, culminating in the 2020 Abraham Accords. Israel also appears to have cynically targeted officials that the US regarded as moderates or viable negotiating partners, thus foreclosing American exit routes from the war.

These actions are hard to square with the Israelophile vision of a beleaguered liberal democracy fighting for its survival. The way Israelis and their allies have framed the war to friendly audiences only deepens the contrast. Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have referred to enemies in Iran and Gaza as ‘Amalekites’, a biblical tribe the Hebrew God ordered to be eradicated down to their children and livestock. At the outset of the war, Netanyahu told a crowd in Hebrew: ‘We read in this week’s Torah portion, “remember what Amalek did to you.” We remember and we act.’ Netanyahu stopped short of the full biblical injunction. Deborah Lipstadt, the genocide scholar and former US antisemitism czar, was less restrained. ‘Those of us who were in synagogue yesterday heard… a very brief reading from Deuteronomy about Amalek’, she told an audience two weeks into the war. ‘What are we told to do? Don’t forget… remember… and wipe them out!’ Whatever Lipstadt was getting at, it seems ‘Never Again’ was far from her mind. In an appearance on Fox News, Rabbi Chaim Mentz from the mainstream Chabad sect further illuminated what acting on the injunction might look like. ‘There’s definitely going to be regime change’, he prophesied, before handing the presenter a Purim gift. ‘2,300 years ago, the entire Iran, negative people, were wiped out. And therefore we give presents.’ The show’s guests were amused by the genocidal aside.

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To unconditionally love a foreign country, it helps to believe six impossible things before breakfast. One such impossibility is that Jews and Israel are indivisible and yet also distinct. Their enemies, past and present, can be similarly fudged. Iran, Amalek, Pharaoh, and Hitler are often invoked by Israelophiles as reincarnations of the same enemy that cannot be reasoned with, only overcome through tribal solidarity and brute force. The appeal is understandable. Ancient archetypes can steady us. But the American literary critic Leon Wieseltier recognised that weaving them into contemporary conflicts can leave us blinkered. ‘Every Jewish death is not like every other Jewish death’, he wrote. ‘To believe otherwise is to revive the old typological view about Jewish history, according to which every enemy of the Jews is the same enemy, and there is only one war, and it is a war against extinction, and it is a timeless war.’

Dershowitz, like many of Israel’s defenders, takes the opposite view. He recently told his audience: ‘If Iran is allowed to develop nuclear bombs, he [sic] will do what Hitler did and there will be millions and millions of deaths… Had President Trump been in charge in 1935, 1936, I think the Holocaust would have been prevented.’ If you can believe this, as the saying goes, you will believe anything — except US intelligence reports showing Iran had not pursued a bomb in the build-up to the war. Israel and its allies have been fighting Hitler’s ghost since the founding of the state; Dershowitz has merely absorbed the canard. During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Menachem Begin, the Prime Minister, deployed the late Führer for political purposes so many times the writer Amos Oz was moved to remind him: ‘Hitler is already dead, Mr Prime Minister. Again and again Mr Begin you reveal to the public eye a strange urge to resuscitate Hitler in order to kill him every day anew in the guise of terrorists.’

Sating that urge comes at a cost. It leaves little room for what Hannah Arendt, a free-thinking Jewish writer who fell foul of the ADL and other Zionist organisations, called ‘loyal opposition’ from within the Jewish community. Since October 7, there has been an understandable closing of ranks among many Jews. But this has often entailed the closing of minds. Hillel, the largest Jewish campus organisation in America, proclaims on its website that ‘all kinds of students are invited and encouraged to bring their whole selves. Whether students keep kosher or have never attended synagogue; whether they want to participate in Shabbat or in a study group’. Everyone is welcome, that is, apart from speakers who ‘delegitimise’ Jewish statehood. As the writer Peter Beinhart points out, ‘there is no prohibition on speakers who “delegitimise” God.’ Brandeis University, bearing the name of a Jewish free speech advocate, has similarly prohibited a pro-Palestine organisation, advertising itself as a place where Jews can ‘feel safe in their Jewish identity.’

This self-ghettoisation is surely an act of communal self-harm. Jewish emancipation from rabbinical authority afforded Jews two centuries of intellectual flourishing, sustained by free thought and association. Many Israelophiles appear intent on reversing that progress by substituting God with a form of idolatry Hebrew scripture warns against: state worship, complete with new blasphemy laws and high priests claiming the power to excommunicate.

Israel’s capture of American institutions is a byproduct of a campaign that originated with the claim of Israel’s founders to represent all Jewish people, a remarkable gambit in the 1950s, when there were four times as many Jews living in America as in Israel. David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan appealed to American Jews to pledge themselves to Israel, to the exasperation of American Jewish leaders, conscious of the success of Jewish assimilation. Jacob Blaustein, head of the American Jewish Committee, said it was an ‘unheard-of request for allegiance to a foreign power.’ Almost twenty years later, following the Six-Day War, Jewish American attitudes became decisively pro-Israel, and hundreds of millions of dollars began flowing to Zionist organisations.

Pro-Israel lobbyists have even demanded this sanitisation extend to the online sphere. Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, America’s antisemitism czar, recently announced the State Department has established ‘a whole division’ to combat ‘anti-Semitism on the internet’, which encompasses accusations of dual loyalty, applying ‘double standards’ to the state of Israel, or claiming that the Jewish state is ‘a racist endeavour’. Despite the possibility that these claims may, at least in some cases, be accurate or warranted, the American government has for decades attempted to make them unutterable. For the Trump administration, this represents a clear departure from a foreign policy that professes to champion free speech. The self-same US administration that rebuked Europe for ‘Orwellian’ online speech codes forced the sale of TikTok to Larry Ellison, a major private donor to the IDF, following a campaign that alleged the platform hosted too much Israel-critical content. That content is now censored by a former IDF soldier whose brief entails a special focus on antisemitism.

The conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel was a deliberate strategic decision taken by Israel and its defenders. In 2004, as Mark Mazower documents in Antisemitism: A World History, the Israeli minister Natan Sharansky announced that ‘the State of Israel has decided to take the gloves off and to implement a coordinated counter-offensive’ against a new kind of antisemitism: anti-Zionism. That same year, America formally adopted the view that antisemitism encompassed ‘vilification of Israel’ and established numerous official bodies to combat it around the world, obligating American diplomats to ‘act on behalf of a foreign nation.’ As far as I can tell, it remains the only arrangement of its kind. Just like any other state, Israel is not a disinterested party that can be relied upon to decide where legitimate criticism ends and vilification begins. Yet Israel and America — its foremost ally — have deigned to mark Israel’s own homework, using antisemitism to advance its interests through coercive diplomacy.

Greenblatt and his ilk are the progeny of this shift, which has seen Israel’s American advocates grow bolder over time. Last year, he claimed that ‘every Jewish person is a Zionist’ and that one could not ‘take Zion’ out of Jewish identity. He went further: anti-Zionist Jews were themselves antisemitic. The danger of the game Greenblatt is playing became apparent when, on a separate occasion, his doppelganger must have asked a CNBC news anchor: ‘Why is it that Jewish people in this country get blamed for what a nation on the other side of the world is doing?’ Greenblatt was apparently unaware that his life’s work eloquently answers his own question.

Greenblatt is not alone in attempting to collapse the distinction between Jews and Israel. Addressing a pro-Israel conference in New York last year, the Times columnist Melanie Phillips urged Jews worldwide to put the ‘the Jewish people and the Jewish nation’ first. She added that ‘In Britain, they’re not just British Jews with Judaism added on… First and foremost, you are Jews. Everything else is secondary.’ That is presumably the same Melanie Phillips who complained in 2018 that ‘Jewish defenders of Israel like me were accused of dual loyalty.’ The contradiction in Phillips’s position had been less apparent in 2019, when a Conservative Party candidate remarked that ‘her allegiance is greater to Israel’. At the time, a Campaign Against Antisemitism spokesman condemned the candidate for an antisemitic slur, as per the IHRA definition adopted by the British Government: ‘Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.’

A perfectly true statement, then, can be deemed unutterable according to an expansive definition of antisemitism promoted around the world by Israel and its American allies, whom the definition conveniently shields from criticism. These guidelines constrain the freedoms not only of American and British citizens, but also Israeli moderates who might benefit from allies in their frank criticism of Israel’s trajectory. It is in this sense as useful a cudgel for Israelophiles as ‘Islamophobia’ is for Islamophiles. As Alice said to Humpty Dumpty: ‘The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ To which he responded: ‘The question is, which is to be master — that’s all.’

Greenblatt and Phillips’s quest to merge Jews and Israel is something they share, ironically enough, with genuine antisemites. The insistence that Jews identify above all else with Israel is a whisker away from blaming the Jewish people for Israel’s actions. The latter is antisemitic and nonsensical regardless of Israel’s culpability for the Iran war, not least because polling shows that most American Jews oppose it. As with the Iraq War, pro-Israel organisations have been far more bullish than the Jewish diasporas they claim to represent. As the war’s repercussions — inflation, fuel rationing, food shortages, and a probable recession — begin to set in, the question of what — and who — caused it will become impossible to avoid. There is compelling evidence pointing to Israel and its allies in America, for which they alone should be called to account.

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Since October 7 and the war in Gaza, Israel’s popularity has plummeted among Americans of all ages, with 42 percent saying they sympathise more with the Palestinians, and only 36 percent saying the opposite. This marks a reversal of the double-digit lead in support Israel enjoyed for the past quarter century, and the slide is likely to worsen as the scale of America’s blunder in Iran becomes evident. During the war, Israel’s actions — assassinating Iranian negotiators, bombing energy facilities against US wishes — have publicly undermined Washington’s stated objectives. These attempts to draw America further into an unpopular and unwinnable war have come at the price of throwing the gulf between Israeli and American interests into sharp relief. Meanwhile, Israeli politicians have already begun prematurely cashing in their winnings by attempting to frame Turkey, a NATO member state, as the ‘new Iran’.

Israel is vying for regional hegemony, and America seems to be helping it get there in the erroneous belief this is a civilisational war in which America has an equal stake. There appears to be no bridge Trump and Israel’s allies are unwilling to burn to bring this about. Lindsey Graham has called for Trump to cut ties with allies deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about the war; Trump has threatened to drop NATO, an alliance explicitly established to serve US interests, for the same reason. The self-destructive toll of confusing Israel’s interests with one’s own could find no more naked an exhibit.

And yet America is well on the road to Damascus. Prominent Democrats and Republicans are voicing criticisms of Israel that were unthinkable only five years ago. Attempting to rebuff that scrutiny with accusations of antisemitism would be to extend to a nuclear-armed regional superpower the protections and sympathies owed to a potentially vulnerable ethnic minority. It is absurd, certainly, but also counterproductive and potentially dangerous to inflate the term at a time when real antisemitism is on the rise. So long as Israel’s defenders continue to confuse the facts and muddy the waters between Israel and Western Jews, they will continue to provide their detractors with the ability to do the same. For us in the West, we should not allow a term which has been so clearly abused, including as part of explicit attempts by a foreign state to influence our policy choices, to blind us from the truth.

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This article was written by Michael Murphy, a Pimlico Journal contributor. You can find more of his work at his Substack. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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