Blaming the Jews, Again

By James Kirchick

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

In his letter of resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, sent to President Donald Trump on March 17, Joe Kent declared that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” The rationale for Operation Epic Fury, he wrote, was cooked up by “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” who “deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.” This “echo chamber,” Kent continued, “was used to deceive” the president just as it had been employed two decades earlier “to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.” Kent told the president that he had “lost my beloved wife Shannon” — a U.S. Navy intelligence chief killed in a 2019 ISIS suicide bombing in Syria — “in a war manufactured by Israel.”

 

Kent is hardly the first person to blame the Jewish state and its American supporters for personal or national misfortunes, and he won’t be the last. His variant of antisemitic incitement — that Jews start wars for their own material benefit — has a long and ignominious history. In 1919, Henry Ford told a group of friends sitting around a campfire that the Jews caused the Great War; this idea and others like it featured prominently in the weekly newspaper he went on to publish, the Dearborn Independent. More than 20 years later, Charles Lindbergh infamously said that “the three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” When an inebriated Mel Gibson was pulled over for speeding in Malibu and arrested on a drunk-driving charge, he demanded to know whether the officer was of the Hebraic persuasion and then flat-out declared that “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”

 

With his allegation of Jewish warmongering designed to drag the United States into a Middle Eastern war, the figure whom Kent most resembles is Pat Buchanan, the political commentator who worked in the Nixon and Reagan administrations. “There are only two groups that are beating the drums . . . for war in the Middle East,” Buchanan said in an August 1990 appearance on the political TV talk show The McLaughlin Group, as the United States assembled a global coalition to reverse Iraq’s usurpation of Kuwait: “the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” Later, in his syndicated column, Buchanan identified four prominent members of that choir: New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Continuing with the portentous surname theme, Buchanan in a subsequent column contrasted these Jewish cheerleaders for war with the poor Gentiles who would actually have to fight it, “kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown.”

 

Buchanan was widely denounced for these comments, most prominently by William F. Buckley Jr. in these pages. Though Buchanan furiously denied the charge of antisemitism, he went on to prove his critics right by publishing a series of books of revisionist history that soft-pedaled Hitler. Three and a half decades later, Buchanan’s message has found new adherents, with an array of commentators across the spectrum parroting a former senior government official’s claims of Jewish perfidy at the highest echelons of American power.

 

Buchanan was right that the Gulf War was fought, in part, to advance the interests of a foreign country. But that country wasn’t Israel. It was Kuwait, which Saddam Hussein had annexed as Iraq’s 19th province. It was Kuwaiti (and possibly Saudi) independence — and the larger goal of preserving the international order — that Americans were fighting and dying for, while Israel endured Scud missile attacks from Iraq and, at the behest of Washington, refrained from responding. And while Buchanan tried to portray those in favor of military action against Iraq as limited to Israel and its American supporters (a constituency that included, as he put it, the “Israeli-occupied territory” of Capitol Hill), at the time he made these statements over 70 percent of Americans backed the use of force. Forty-two nations — not only most of Europe but non-Western countries including Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Pakistan — ultimately joined the Washington-led coalition against Saddam. The run-up to the First Gulf War was a model of international coalition-building yet to be repeated.

 

George H. W. Bush didn’t need convincing from anyone that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the world order, and the notion that Donald J. Trump, of all people, was unduly pressured into bombing Iran is even more absurd. One does not need to be an especially keen observer of the American political scene or a psychiatrist to recognize that the 47th president of the United States is not the type of person who goes against his own will. This obduracy applies to matters of international importance and personal pique, whether refusing to back down on tariffs or on the demolition of the East Wing. Intelligent people must have advised Trump not to broadcast the cockamamie idea of annexing Greenland. He didn’t care.

 

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Rather than confront the disturbing possibility that the man they have supported unconditionally doesn’t agree with them, much less listen to them, the isolationists on the right have undertaken a hunt for scapegoats. In this fantasy, someone, or some entity, other than the commander in chief must be to blame for taking the nation to war. It’s a coping mechanism reminiscent of the adage spoken by Russian peasants suffering under the yoke of a cruel and decrepit monarchy: “If the tsar only knew!”

 

Take the podcaster Megyn Kelly. Last summer, when Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, she was exultant: “This required massive balls. The guy’s got a very steely spine and zero F’s to give. He can’t be pushed around; he can’t be scared.” Fast-forward nine months to Operation Epic Fury: “We need to know exactly who talked him into it, and what representations were made to convince the president that this was a good idea. Who? Who specifically?” She rattled off a list of names that began with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If the president only knew!

 

A day after quitting his job, Kent appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, where he revealed himself to be even more of a conspiratorial crackpot than was apparent in his resignation letter. As Carlson sat in exaggerated shock, Kent told a disturbing story in which Charlie Kirk stopped him in a West Wing hallway to “very loudly” tell him, “Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran.” Three months later, the youth activist was assassinated, and while Kent did not explicitly accuse Israel of the crime, he made clear where his suspicions lay. Seeking to explore “foreign ties” to the alleged killer Tyler Robinson, Kent claimed that the FBI prevented him from doing so. (Some of Kirk’s friends worry that such musings about a government cover-up could prejudice the jury in Robinson’s upcoming murder trial.) Kent also insinuated that the Israelis may have been involved in the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pa., as a demonstration of their ability to kill him if he does not carry out their orders.

 

Another way in which right-wing critics of the war have been pinning the blame on Israel is by claiming that Trump’s base opposes it. “The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project,” predicted Christopher Caldwell in The Spectator. What power could have overcome the special bond between the president and his most devoted followers? Caldwell doesn’t explicitly say, preferring to ventriloquize through what he describes as a sort of MAGA group consciousness. “For a growing part of Trump’s own base,” he writes, “while Iran remains the bigger threat to America’s global position, Israel is the bigger threat to America’s democracy.” Yet polling has shown as close to total support for Operation Epic Fury among self-described MAGA voters as one is likely to find in a free country.

 

Oddly, for people who claim to adore the man, the right-wing isolationists blaming Israel for the war have clearly not listened to Trump all that much. Aside from his enthusiasm for tariffs, there is no issue on which Trump has been more consistent during his five-decade career in public life than opposition to the Islamic Republic. In a 1980 television interview, Trump endorsed putting troops on the ground to rescue the hostages held at the American embassy in Tehran. Seven years later, talking to ABC’s Barbara Walters, he made the same sort of imperialist noises that he does today, threatening to “take” the country’s oil. In his 2015 presidential-campaign announcement, Trump promised that he would “stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons,” a vow that became a constant refrain over the ensuing decade. Figures like Kent, Carlson, and the other influencers can’t seriously claim to have been betrayed by Trump. They either weren’t listening or pretended to hear something else.

 

Many of the right-wing podcasters and online conspiracy theorists spinning tales of Israeli skullduggery are too young to remember the Iran hostage crisis of 1979–81, a national trauma that had a profound effect on Trump. The era of the late ’70s through the ’80s shaped his views on everything from international affairs and economics to architecture and media relations. Just as Trump still acts like the New York tabloid fixture he was circa 1986, he has always been wary of the Islamic Republic and its leaders — and rightly so. The same cannot be said of his critics on the right, who are often too cowardly to criticize him by name and who see Israel, not Iran, as the main agent of destabilization in the Middle East.

 

To understand the intellectual caliber of Kent and his promoters, just consider the fact that Kent has said, with a straight face, that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons because the (now dead) Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa against it, a fiction long peddled by the regime’s fellow travelers in the West. At one point during his interview with Carlson, prefacing a claim that the ayatollah was “moderating” Iran’s nuclear program, Kent said that he was “no fan of the former supreme leader.” Christopher Hitchens once noted a similar impulse among critics of the Iraq War who would rush to acknowledge that Saddam was a “bad guy” before sermonizing about how George W. Bush was the real threat to international peace and security. The rhetorical throat-clearing, Hitchens said, was a “dead giveaway” that “someone didn’t know what they were talking about.”

 

Compare the domestic political debate surrounding the Iran conflict with the 2011 American-led NATO intervention in Libya. During the early stages of the uprising against Moammar Qaddafi, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron started pressuring Barack Obama to intervene against the Tyrant of Tripoli. The famously conflict-averse Obama was skeptical, viewing the unrest in Libya as primarily a European problem. It was Sarkozy who first declared that Qaddafi “must go,” and when Obama finally came around to supporting military strikes, he did so by, in the confusing words of an administration official, “leading from behind.” While Obama later blamed the Europeans for the “mess” and “sh** show” Libya had become, one did not see the sort of wild accusations of deception, venality, and blackmail that swirl around the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu.

 

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There is one striking difference between the Buchanan and Kent episodes. When Buchanan made his accusations about Jewish dual loyalty, he found very few allies on the left. Today, many prominent progressives have been receptive to Kent’s message, which they point to as yet further confirmation of Israel’s pernicious hold on the United States. Portraying Trump as the cat’s-paw of a foreign power isn’t much of a stretch for Democrats, considering how long they touted the theory that Vladimir Putin was blackmailing him with a video involving prostitutes at the Moscow Ritz. But the claim that Netanyahu is Trump’s puppet master presents a problem for the left, as it contradicts another narrative they’ve spent the past decade propagating: that the twice-elected president is a dictator. If it’s true that Trump is an autocrat, how could the leader of a country of 10 million people force him to do something as serious as launch a major war in the Middle East? Is Trump an authoritarian in every arena of presidential responsibility save the one in which the Jewish state has an interest?

 

Hardly anyone on the left cares to reconcile the dueling narratives of Trump-as-dictator and Trump-as-Israeli-patsy. Acknowledging that “Kent and I don’t agree on much,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders nevertheless averred that Kent’s theory of Israeli puppeteering was “right.” A year to the day before praising Kent for being “willing to acknowledge the truth” that Iran did not pose “an imminent threat,” Virginia Senator Mark Warner condemned Kent on the floor of the Senate, stating that he had “aligned himself with political violence, promoted falsehoods that undermine our democracy and tried to twist intelligence to serve a political agenda.” Doggedly seeking to put himself at the center of attention, Congressman Ro Khanna of California used Kent’s resignation to tauten the imaginary connection between the war and his own twilight struggle against what he terms the “Epstein class.” Khanna’s blasé denial that this term, evoking a shadowy group of international sex criminals, has any antisemitic connotations was rendered moot once Iranian regime propagandists started using it. In one AI video posted on the official Telegram account of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a young girl standing on the late financier’s island looks to the sky with hope as an intercontinental ballistic missile hurtles its way toward the Statue of Liberty. It was a preposterous visual, stupid and malevolent in equal measure, and a perfect encapsulation of the deranged political moment we’re in.

 

It says something about their growing hatred of Israel that the one issue for which some liberals are willing to absolve Trump of full responsibility is the war against Iran. That, they’re blaming on the Jews. In a joint statement, four Democrats running for a Chicago-area congressional seat criticized Trump for dragging the United States “into an unnecessary and illegal regime change war fully backed by AIPAC” — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an American lobbying group like any other. Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, a purported moderate and likely 2028 presidential candidate, asked, “So Netanyahu now decides when we go to war?” Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas alleged that “Israel put U.S. forces in harm’s way.”

 

The belief that secret, sinister forces from afar are in control of one’s country is a feature of the third world. To see such mental habits grow among American citizens, left and right, is a depressing development, one that does not bode well for our politics or our society.