The Palestine Firsters

by Eli Lake

Thursday, December 18, 2025

 

Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama, would like the readers of the New York Times to know that Israel is no good. His answer to the problem of Israel’s no-goodnikness was presented to the Times audience on December 1, 2025. It is the same answer offered by so many of his fellow partisans on the left since October 7, 2023: Put Palestine first.

 

Rhodes’s denunciation of Israel’s badness goes back decades. In his telling, the collapse of the Oslo peace process in 2000 provided Israeli leaders with a convenient excuse to expand West Bank settlements. In 2015, after his boss forged a nuclear deal with Iran, Israel violated norms by openly lobbying against it in Congress. After the October 7 attack on the Gaza envelope, Israel launched a war of vengeance, not of justice. Israel’s right-wing government is not aligned with the values of American liberals. Its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is “now following a familiar authoritarian playbook.”

 

The purpose of Rhodes’s polemic was to illustrate how President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party “blew it on Gaza.” Once the ultimate White House insider, Rhodes was now casting himself as a dissident voice with fresh counsel for his suffering party: Democrats can and should win by openly acknowledging the bitter truth about the perfidy of the Jewish state, a truth that too many in his party still refuse to see. “If you believe a Palestinian child is equal in dignity and worth to an Israeli or American child,” Rhodes wrote, “it is no longer possible to support this Israeli government while hiding behind platitudes about peace.”

 

The problem, according to Rhodes, is that Democrats have supported Israel with a strategy designed to blunt its excesses, but that strategy has done anything but. The Biden hug after October 7 was supposed to come with handcuffs. Instead, Biden ended up hugging Prime Minister Netanyahu all the way into Trump’s embrace. It was therefore an obvious mistake for America to give its full support to Israel after Hamas chose to slaughter, rape, wound, and kidnap more than 5,000 civilians on October 7, 2023. Fealty to the U.S.-Israel alliance instead led the Biden White House “to provide a flood of weapons for Israel’s bombardment of Palestinians,” he said. Biden vetoed UN cease-fire resolutions. The Democratic president even attacked the International Criminal Court, Rhodes complained, for pursuing charges against the Israeli prime minister. Can you believe Biden had the audacity to blame Hamas for “not accepting the cease-fire terms that the Israeli government was also rejecting”?

 

This is, all in all, a wildly false history of Biden’s Gaza-war policy. I note one omission out of many: Rhodes neglected to mention that the administration did stop some arms shipments and threatened to stop even more. Rhodes’s argument holds that America should have allowed the United Nations to dictate the terms of ending the war started by Hamas—a group fully entangled with and in partial control of the UN agency designed to provide support for the “refugees” in Gaza who have resided on the Strip for four generations.

 

The cease-fire that Rhodes wishes Biden had tacitly accepted would have allowed the terrorists to keep the hostages they stole and would have made sure the Middle East remained in the status quo condition of October 2023. Had Biden successfully pressured Israel to end the war in early 2024, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah would still be alive in Lebanon today. Yahya and Mohammed Sinwar, respectively the mastermind of October 7 and his brother, would still be running Hamas. Iran would still be enriching uranium to near weapons-grade levels. Bashar al-Assad would still be ruling Syria.

 

Nasrallah, Iran, and Sinwar all had American blood on their hands. Their violent ends served America’s interests and brought justice for those Americans they murdered. The devastation of Iran and the exiling of Assad from Syria were also just acts against American enemies. But Rhodes seems to assess the Gaza war by counting the costs incurred by the side that started it. He believes that Hamas should have been rewarded instead, or at least not forced to pay any permanent penalty for its act of evil.

 

That is the meaning of his effort to get Democrats to embrace a Palestine First policy—a policy embraced not only by him but by many liberal-to-radical Democrats and intellectuals. These include the incoming mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, a growing list of Hollywood A-list celebrities, and most of the American professoriat.

 

The hostility of the Palestine Firsters toward the Jewish state has blinded them to America’s core interests, which have been well served by its alliance with Israel over the past two-plus years. Israel is today the unquestioned military hegemon in a region that only a decade ago—during the Obama presidency—was staring into the abyss. Back in the day when Rhodes had genuine influence over American policy, the ISIS caliphate was controlling territory from Raqqa in Syria to Mosul in Iraq. Obama’s failure to enforce his own red line against the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons opened the door for Vladimir Putin to handle matters in that country’s civil war. With that, the Russian military became a power player in the region for the first time in two generations. Its bombers, with the help of Iran and Hezbollah fighters, targeted ragtag rebels inside Syria who had been supported by America and its Arab allies. Eventually, the weak deal between Obama and the ayatollah that allowed Iran to keep its ill-begotten nuclear infrastructure in exchange for the promise not to enrich uranium suitable to fuel a bomb created a $150 billion cash windfall for the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.

 

Now consider the American position today as 2026 begins. Iran is humiliated. Its proxy network is largely destroyed. The Assad family is in exile in Russia. Russia’s bases in Assad’s country are no more.

 

That’s what a true America First foreign policy looks like. 

 

But the new reality in the Middle East is not meaningful or useful or worthy of praise in any way for the Palestine First crowd. They still believe that U.S. support for Israel during the Gaza war—even the very half-hearted support of the Biden administration—meant that America’s national interests had been made subservient to the interests of the Jewish state.

 

***

 

Perhaps my use of the term “Palestine First” might seem jarring to some. I intend it as an inversion of the “Israel First” slur, which posits that supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance are less loyal to America than those who would like to break that alliance.

 

The phrase “Israel First” was coined and popularized in 1990 by Patrick J.  Buchanan, the canny pundit and future Republican presidential candidate. It emerged from his attack on the first President Bush for the sin of defending Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi war machine, which had swallowed its neighbor whole. Buchanan claimed that America had adopted an “Israel First” policy on the peculiar grounds that Bush was acting against Iraq in service of the Jewish state. (In reality, Israel found itself under missile attack from Iraq and was forbidden by the U.S. to respond.)

 

This was the specific moment when paleoconservatives broke away from the Cold War Republican foreign policy consensus. They believed that with the end of the Soviet threat, our nation should pull back from the world and attend to our moral failings at home. It was also the moment that they chose to blame Jews for seducing the country’s leaders away from domestic affairs and instead pursuing supposedly ruinous interventions in far-off countries about which we knew little.

 

Later, in the 2000s, the term “Israel First” was adopted by the progressive “netroots” as a means of attacking George W. Bush and his pursuit of the 2003 Iraq War. They were joined in this attack by some conservatives, among them Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to W’s father and one of the architects of the war against Iraq in 1991. Scowcroft said that then–Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had the American president “wrapped around his little finger.” No matter that Sharon had counseled Bush against invading Iraq. Scowcroft—always hostile to Israel—wanted the world to believe that Americans who supported the republic’s alliance with Israel were to be held responsible for a war to which he was passionately opposed.

 

This was the thesis of the work of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose 2005 essay in the London Review of Books and a 2007 tome that followed blamed “the Israel lobby” for America’s monstrous adventurism. But if AIPAC, the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States, was bad, Jewish officials inside the W Bush administration may have been worse. At an anti–Iraq War rally in 2002, a young Illinois politician named Barack Obama brayed against “the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats.” Note he did not say Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld; rather, he chose pointedly to lay the blame on Pentagon undersecretaries who happened to be Jews.

 

Today, the Israel First charge has been popularized anew on the right by the heirs of Buchanan. Tucker Carlson’s podcast episode of November 12, 2025, in which he defended his soft-scrub interview of Hitler enthusiast Nick Fuentes, was titled “The Israel First Meltdown and the Future of the America First Movement.” Subtle. 

 

For Carlson, the problem with Israel is, ostensibly, that its leader is a maniac and the country that Benjamin Netanyahu leads is inimical to the very foundations of our society. In November, he called Netanyahu “an enemy of Western civilization.” Why? “Because he believes and has said out loud that we are fighting these people because of how they were born, because of their inherent evil. We don’t believe in that. We believe every person is inherently flawed, but salvageable because God made every person. Why are the Nazis bad? The Nazis are bad for that exact same reason.”

 

Carlson is saying that the democratically elected leader of the Jewish state is an enemy of Western civilization because that leader supposedly does not ascribe to the central idea of the Hebrew Bible—an idea introduced for the first time in human history in the Book of Genesis. Carlson’s caricature of Israel’s leaders was given flesh by the slander peddled by Rhodes a few weeks later. “Almost immediately after Oct. 7,” Rhodes claimed, “top Israeli leaders were referring to Palestinians in Gaza as ‘human animals’ living in an ‘evil city,’ and cutting off access to food and water while bombarding Hamas fighters and civilians alike.”

 

Both Carlson and Rhodes are deceivers and falsifiers. When Israel’s then–Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referred to “human animals,” as quoted by Rhodes, he was speaking about Hamas, the group that perpetrated the October 7 pogrom. When Netanyahu referred to “an evil city,” he was doing so to warn the civilians of Gaza that Israel would be targeting the terrorists who were hiding among them. And the initial decision to seal Israel’s border with Gaza was reversed in less than two weeks. 

 

To be fair, Rhodes did not use the phrase “Israel First.” He did not accuse American Zionists of disloyalty. Instead, Rhodes painted AIPAC as the cat’s-paw of an ungrateful client state. Rhodes is still stinging from AIPAC’s decision in 2015 to lobby against the Iran nuclear deal that Obama had hoped would be the centerpiece of his foreign policy legacy.

 

Rhodes claimed that in the Obama years, AIPAC and its allies “insisted that there be no daylight between the American president and the Israeli prime minister.” Now, hold on, there, buddy: It was Obama who used the term “daylight” in July 2009 to explain to an audience of Jewish leaders that he was determined to impose a new policy designed to create “space” between the United States and Israel.

 

After years of ill will emanating from the administration toward him and Israel, Netanyahu felt free by 2015 to excoriate Obama’s Iran deal and the administration’s brazen attempt to impose a plan for a future Palestinian state. According to Rhodes, what Netanyahu did “put many Democrats in the awkward position of seeking support from the organizations including AIPAC and its affiliated PACs, which spent tens of millions of dollars to attack a Democratic president’s policies and consistently undermined efforts to achieve a two-state solution.”   

 

That is an inadvertently valuable statement, because it shows how Rhodes assigns no responsibility whatsoever to the Palestinians for their lack of a state. He knows full well that Arabs rejected offers of partition and statehood from the British, the Jews, and the Americans—offers proffered in 1937, 1947, 1948, 2000, 2001, and 2008. He also knows that, in 2009 and 2010, Netanyahu agreed to freezing settlement expansion in the West Bank and endorsed a two-state solution. These acts, which were viewed as a betrayal by some of his staunchest supporters in Israel, had been designed as sweeteners to bring Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas back to the negotiating table. But no sweetener was ever sweet enough—either for Abbas or Obama. 

 

Today, Netanyahu’s ruling coalition is uniformly opposed to a two-state solution. By taking this stand, the coalition’s members are reflecting the view of the vast majority of Israelis. According to Gallup, fewer than a third of Israelis now support a two-state solution, down from 66 percent in 2012. The cause of the decline is not the rise of authoritarianism in Israel, as Rhodes would say, or the fact that Zionists believe that all Palestinians are born evil, as Carlson would say. It’s because every time Israel has traded land for “peace,” the Jewish state has been greeted with war in return. Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, and Hezbollah filled the vacuum and brought about a war in 2006. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas took over the Strip and built a war machine. Its relentless rocket fire led to a 42-day war in 2014 and mini-wars in 2019 and 2021 before it actually invaded Israeli territory on the ground in October 2023. For Rhodes, none of this history matters. For those who choose Palestine First, the only actor with any agency is Israel, with its mushrooming settlements, dehumanizing checkpoints, and the blockade of Gaza.

 

***

 

What Rhodes and Carlson either fail to understand or deliberately overlook is that the Palestinian national movement itself has not really changed in the past century. Despite the hope generated among some by the Oslo Accords in 1993, PLO chieftain Yasir Arafat responded to the explicit offer of statehood in 2000 with a five-year intifada that brought waves of suicide bombers to Israeli schools, markets, and synagogues. Now the youth wing of the Palestine Firsters who disrupted the comings and goings of Jewish students on campus and are seeking to prevent Jews from entering synagogues in New York and Los Angeles (for a start) want to “globalize the intifada.” Indeed, a few radicals already have, with gruesome consequences, like the murder of two young people outside a Jewish event in Washington, D.C., in May 2025.

 

The obstacle to Palestinian statehood has always been that Palestinians believe that their state cannot exist unless the Jewish state is negated. How is it in America’s interest to advance that delusion?

 

What Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have learned is that the rest of the region is no longer willing to allow the failures of Palestinian leaders to hinder the pursuit of their own national interest in normalizing ties with Israel. That was the main takeaway of the Abraham Accords, the 2020 agreements brokered by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, which forged diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab states.

 

For Rhodes, these peace agreements were themselves a failure. “After Mr. Trump abandoned the Oslo consensus and moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu and AIPAC showered him with adulation,” he writes. “Yet when Mr. Trump rolled out the Abraham Accords normalizing relations between Israel and some autocratic Arab states, many Democrats credulously heralded it as a ‘peace’ agreement even though it didn’t end any wars and it sidelined the Palestinians.”

 

That rendering of recent history is preposterous. The decision of Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates to recognize Israel came three years after Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved our embassy there. The Oslo consensus was wrong. America’s Arab allies once held U.S. foreign policy hostage by demanding the creation of a Palestinian state. But the Arab regimes have evolved.

 

Meanwhile, the Palestine Firsters are actively seeking to shift American policy in the Middle East in the opposite direction. They want to turn America against Israel just at the moment when Arab states have been engaged in an unambiguously positive turn toward the West—which involves bringing to an end the Arab world’s destructive and pointless eight-decade commitment to seek Israel’s destruction. The Palestine Firsters want the United States to pick up that diseased baton and wreck an alliance that has advanced the national interest for decades.