President Donald Trump joined with Israel to launch the Iran war at an inauspicious time for the US-Israeli relationship.
Just a day before the first strikes, Gallup polling had shown Americans’ views of Israel hitting a 21st century low; most strikingly, Americans for the first time didn’t sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians.
Making matters even more fraught, the right has in recent months become riven over how to deal with what many regard as a troubling rise in antisemitism in its base and influencer class. Some of the biggest names in conservative thought have increasingly — and often conspiratorially — linked Israel to all manner of American maladies.
Given Americans seemed quite skeptical of this war from the jump, it didn’t take an active imagination to surmise that some people would blame Israel and even craft conspiracy theories about that.
And that’s certainly happened. But, in a twist, that’s thanks in large part to some of the Trump administration’s rhetoric about the war.
The president and those around him have done Israel no favors with some of their claims.
On two major occasions now, the administration has gestured at Israel being mostly responsible for major inflection points in the war — even though the evidence on both counts isn’t totally clear.
Rubio’s claim about an ‘imminent’ Iranian threat
First, it was Secretary of State Marco Rubio making a kind of bank-shot case for why Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States. Rubio said Israel was going to strike Iran no matter what, and Iran was going to retaliate by striking at US targets; ipso facto, the argument went, Iran was an imminent threat to the United States.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio attends a meeting between President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio attends a meeting between President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
The political problem with this formulation, though, was that it sounded a lot like the United States government was having its hand forced by Israel.
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