Michelle Goldberg writes:

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. In a speech on Monday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, denounced those who “pointed fingers at the Israelis who — they claimed — whispered a few too many times in President Trump’s ear.”

Greenblatt’s heavy-handed attempt to police the discourse is bound to fail, because it’s asking people to overlook provable facts. Just two days after the strikes on Iran began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but admitted that Israel had forced America’s hand, though he later walked his comments back. On March 6, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, boasted in The Wall Street Journal about working with Israel to persuade Trump to attack, gathering information from Israeli intelligence and coaching Netanyahu on what to say to Trump.

Given Israel’s deep involvement in almost every aspect of this war, it takes care and subtlety — both in short supply in our politics — to tease out the difference between reality and conspiracy theory.

A major distortion in [Joe] Kent’s letter [of resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center] is that it presents Trump as a naïve victim of the Israelis rather than an eager collaborator. Trump has always been more hawkish than the isolationists in his orbit admit; he ordered more drone strikes in his first two years in office than Barack Obama launched in eight. It wasn’t Netanyahu who made Trump abduct the president of Venezuela, an operation that seems to have both whetted his appetite for foreign adventure and convinced him that war can be easy. This week he boasted that he can “take” Cuba and “do anything I want with it.” Long obsessed with military might and displays of masculine aggression, Trump was enamored of the idea that he could rid the world of the anti-American regimes that bedeviled his predecessors. He went to war in Iran for his ego, not for Israel.

Still, Israel clearly encouraged him, and now threatens to prolong the war, since unlike Trump, it seems determined to destroy the Iranian state. “Israel doesn’t hate the chaos,” a White House official told Axios. “We do. We want stability. Netanyahu? Not so much, especially in Iran.” I think this official is telling the truth, while also previewing the spin we’re going to hear if Iran spirals out of control: It was Israel’s fault.

If Netanyahu, so arrogant about his ability to influence the United States, ends up destroying America’s alliance with Israel, there will be a measure of poetic justice in it. But the fallout won’t be Israel’s alone, given how often both Zionists and antisemites conflate Israel with the Jewish people as a whole. [Continue reading…]