Israel regards Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, as one of its closest friends. But on March 2, as the United States and Israel intensified their military campaign in Iran, he surprised Israel with a slip of the tongue, opening a Pandora’s box that set off an impassioned debate which may yet damage Israel’s image and interests.
Speaking to reporters in Washington, D.C., Rubio suggested that Israel had pulled the United States into the current war.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” he said in a reference to reports that Israel was primed to strike Iran after the failure of U.S.-Iran talks on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
When a reporter asked Rubio to clarify whether Israel had coaxed the United States into going to war with Iran, he said no.
“This operation needed to happen because Iran in about a year or a year and a half would cross the line of immunity, meaning they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it because they could hold the whole world hostage,” he explained.
“Obviously, we were aware of Israeli intentions and understood what that would mean for us, and we had to be prepared to act as a result of it,” he added. “But this had to happen no matter what.”
Naturally, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reacted with glee to Rubio’s statements. In a social media post designed to sow division in the United States, he wrote, “Mr. Rubio admitted what we all knew: U.S. has entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel. There was never any so-called Iranian ‘threat.’ Shedding of both American and Iranian blood is thus on Israel Firsters. American people deserve better and should take back their country.”
The following day, Rubio walked back his remarks. He said that President Donald Trump had determined that the threat posed by Iran in terms of its nuclear program, its arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones, and its support of regional allies like Hezbollah and Hamas constituted an imminent danger to the United States and its regional allies.
“The bottom line is this,” he told reporters. “The president determined we were not going to get hit first. It’s that simple, guys.”
Despite his attempt at damage control, American opponents of the war claimed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had pressured Trump to declare war on Iran, to the United States’ detriment.
Vocal critics like the podcaster Tucker Carlson — a supporter of Trump who is close to Vice President JD Vance — allege that the United States has become subservient to Israel and should not have joined it in attacking Iran.
Carlson’s critique appears to be gaining ground within the ranks of the Make America Great faction of the Republican Party and among Democrats and left-wingers critical of the Trump administration.
Broadly speaking, the majority of Americans oppose U.S. participation in the war, at a moment when public opinion polls indicate that Israel’s popularity in the United States, its chief ally, has plummeted.
Two days before the outbreak of the war, a Gallup poll spoke to this seismic shift. It indicated that 41 percent of Americans sympathize with the Palestinians, compared to 36 percent who side with Israel. This was the first time in Gallup polling that Americans were more favorably disposed toward the Palestinians.
The survey, too, was surely an unmistakable sign that Americans had soured on Israel’s two-year war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which ended last October, and on Netanyahu’s consistent rejection of a two-state solution to resolve Israel’s dispute with the Palestinians.
Trump, acutely aware that Rubio had misspoken, attempted to calm the waters. He condemned Carlson, telling ABC News’ Jonathan Karl on March 5 that he had “lost his way.” And he dismissed the allegation that Israel had coerced him into attacking Iran. “No, I might have forced their hand,” he said of Israel. “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.”
And in a letter to the U.S. Congress, Trump wrote that he had gone on the offensive to advance American national interests and eliminate Iran as a regional threat to Israel and Arab states.
Carlson, an anti-Zionist with a substantial following, did not buy Trump’s rationale. “This happened because Israel wanted it to happen,” he said. “This is Israel’s war. This is not the United States’ war.”
Megyn Kelly, another leading right-wing commentator, suggested that the deaths of six American soldiers in the war so far, all killed by an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait, was a tragic waste of lives. “No one should have to die for a foreign country,” she said. “I don’t think (they) died for the United States … This is clearly Israel’s war.”
According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic and anti-Zionist groups are framing the U.S.-Israel operation in Iran as evidence that Israel has co-opted U.S. foreign policy “to advance Israeli and/or Jewish interests.”
“These accusations are coming from the far-right and the far-left and from anti-Israel groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine. As an SJP Instagram post reads, ‘Imperialism and Zionism are one enemy — the common enemy of the entire region, and indeed, the people of the world.'”
The Anti-Defamation League points out that these tropes were propagated before and after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
“Controversy erupted around the claim that the ‘Israel lobby’ and neo-conservatives — a hawkish wing of the Republican Party seen as pro-Israel and dedicated to using American military might to aggressively spread democratic values — played a pivotal role in pushing the U.S. into the Iraq war. The charge gained credibility — or at least plausibility — because some of the highest profile neocons were Jewish. They included government officials Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Elliott Abrams and pundits like William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and Norman Podhoretz.”
Two decades on, critics from across the ideological spectrum are essentially advancing a similar argument.
In a statement, Chris Murphy, a Democratic U.S. senator from Connecticut, said, “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.We have no obligation to follow Israel into a war we did not ask for and will make us less safe.”
Sara Jacobs, a Jewish progressive from California and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, put it more boldly in a tweet: “This is an unnecessary war of choice. Israel forced our hand. There was no imminent threat to the United States. And instead of talking Israel out of going to war, President Trump went along with it and put U.S. lives at risk.”
In another sign of the times, Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, a presidential aspirant and once a staunch supporter of Israel, suggested that Israel is a “sort of an apartheid state” and that the United States should reconsider supporting it militarily. Recently, he disclosed that he will never accept donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an influential pro-Israel lobbying organization.
Netanyahu vehemently rejects the notion that the war primarily serves Israel’s interests, though it is true that he lost faith in diplomacy as a means by which to pressure Iran into giving up its nuclear program and stop destabilizing the Middle East.
Interviewed by Fox News host Sean Hannity, Netanyahu dismissed the assertion as “ridiculous.”
“Donald Trump is the strongest leader in the world,” said Netanyahu. “He does what he thinks is right for America. He does also what he thinks is right for future generations … Iran is committed to your destruction. And whether people understand it or not, the leader has to understand it. Donald Trump understands it. You don’t have to drag him into anything. He does what he thinks is right, and this is right.”
Michael Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, dismissed accusations that Netanyahu maneuvered Trump into the war. “It’s just such nonsense,” he told The New York Post. “It’s an old antisemitic trope: the Jews are in control. America acts in its own best interest.”
Their argument fell on deaf ears.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican influencer from Georgia and a member of the House of Representatives until her resignation in January, expressed disappointment over U.S. military action. “Make America Great Again was supposed to be America first, not Israel first,” she said in an interview with Kelly.
With no end in sight of the war, Carlson has continued castigating it as “absolutely disgusting and evil.” The war will have a significant impact on Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, he predicted.
Carlson was already an outspoken anti-Zionist voice before Trump struck Iran, having accused Israel of pushing the United States into invading Iraq and killing Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Two weeks ago, during the course of an interview he conducted with U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Carlson impudently advised Israelis to undergo genetic testing to determine if they have a rightful claim to the land.
“Why don’t we do genetic testing on everybody in the land and find out who Abram’s descendants are?” Carlson asked Huckabee. “It’s really simple. We’ve cracked the human genome. We can do that. Why don’t we do that?”
Carlson singled out Netanyahu as an illegitimate Israeli, saying that his ancestors hail from Europe rather than Israel. “Netanyahu, on … his family’s (side) is from Poland, they’re from Eastern Europe. So how do we know he has a connection to the people who God promised the land to?”
Carlson also told Huckabee, an ardent support of Israel, that Ashkenazi Jews are the descendants of the Khazars, a Turkic minority that converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages.
Carlson’s theory has been largely been discredited with the advent of DNA analysis.
Shaul Stampfer, a former professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has conducted extensive research on the Khazars and has found no genetic links between the ancient Central Asian tribe and modern Ashkenazi Jews.
The National Institutes of Health in the United States published a genetic study in 2013, finding “no evidence from genome-wide data of a Khazar origin for the Ashkenazi Jews.”
Yet this theory has been ardently embraced in anti-Zionist and antisemitic circles, particularly since Hamas’ one-day invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023 and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
Candace Owen, an African American promotor of antisemitic conspiracy theories, has been among the propagandists who have adopted it. “The people currently occupying Israel are Khazarian Turks,” she wrote on X recently.
Huckabee hit back. Writing on X, he accused Carlson of disseminating “a dangerous conspiracy theory” from “some of the darkest realms of the Internet.” He went on to say that this theory has been “weaponized by people trying to delegitimize Jews, to strip them of their history, and to call them ‘imposters’ or ‘fake Jews.’”
The Khazar region of the Caucasus in the Middle Ages
Weighing in on the Carlson/Huckabee interview, Vance, Carlson’s longtime ally, described it as “a really good conversation that’s going to be necessary for the right.”
Vance’s refusal to criticize Carlson, combined with his belief that the Republican Party should be an open marketplace of ideas, even when it includes extremists, has alarmed Jewish conservatives.
More to the point, the notion that Israel pushed the United States into a war, an assumption that has acquired some currency in Make America Great Again circles, is even more disturbing. It is a reflection of the anti-Israel mood that has crept into conservative circles.
Be that as it may, at the end of the day the United States and Israel are in this fight together for at least one compelling reason. As the analyst Niall Ferguson wrote, “The reality is that the U.S. and Israel have mounted their joint operation because each has an interest in terminating the Islamic Republic. The Israeli interest is regional. The American interest is global.”