"And the Egyptians did evil to us and afflicted us." So begins the Haggadah's account of how the Egyptians oppressed us. Rabbi Immanuel Bernstein, in his Haggadah, Darkness and Destiny (now available in Hebrew as well), points to a linguistic anomaly in that sentence. If the meaning was, as generally assumed, "the Egyptians did evil to us," the phrase should be "va'yarei'u lanu." But instead the verse reads, "va'yarei'u osanu" – the Egyptians turned us into something evil.
In order to secure the agreement of the Egyptian people to his plans for the Jews, Pharaoh had to first convince the Egyptians that the bnei Yisrael were an imminent and insidious threat to them. That they constituted a fifth column within that did not seek the benefit of their host country, but rather were poised to subvert it for their own selfish interests: "Let us deal cleverly with them lest they multiply, and when the time of war draws near, they will join with our enemies in order to go up from the land."
This particular section of the Haggadah begins with an introductory paragraph that alerts us that the events being described repeat themselves again and again in our history: ". . . in every generation they rise against us to destroy us."
The truth of that statement has never been clearer than today when the ancient canard that the Jews conspire to advance the interests of world Jewry at the expense of the countries in which they dwell is the daily fare of every crackpot broadcaster. In particular, a vast Jewish conspiracy is said to have lured the President Trump into a pointless, dangerous, and costly war against Iran solely for the benefit of Israel.
The charge that Jews foist wars upon the world is not a new one, even in the American context. Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent was filled with claims that "German Jewish bankers" were somehow responsible for World War I, and Charles Lindbergh's America First movement sought to prevent American entry into World War II on the grounds that American boys would be dying solely for the benefit of the Jews.
ALMOST TWENTY years ago, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, professors at the University of Chicago and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, respectively, published The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy. Because of the academic eminence of the authors the work serves as the best proof of the flimsiness of the arguments for Jewish control of American foreign policy.
Despite over one thousand footnotes, there is no evidence that the authors ever examined government archives, interviewed key policymakers, or were even familiar with the extensive secondary literature on American Mideast policy.
Their conclusion of Israel's pernicious influence was based on a single inference. In Mearsheimer-Walt's "realist" perspective the second Iraq war was so misbegotten, as to be beyond rational explanation. So, in the manner of astronomers who discovered Pluto through perturbations in the orbit of Uranus, they concluded that only the influence of a group of Jewish neo-cons – Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith in the Defense Department and vice-presidential advisor Lewis "Scooter" Libby – acting on behalf of Israel could explain President George W. Bush's decision to go to war.
They, in Mearsheimer-Walt's telling, led President George W. Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, none of whom were exactly creampuffs or even neo-con adjacent, by the nose.
But there was one enormous hole in that theory: Israel had opposed the Iraq war. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg: "The Israelis tried their best to persuade us that we were focused on the wrong enemy [i.e., Iraq instead of Iran]; they were very leery of destroying the balance of power in the Middle East."
Even more remarkable, Mearsheimer knew that. In an interview with NPR's Tom Ashbrook, Mearsheimer let slip, "In early 2002, when the Israelis caught wind of the fact that we were seriously thinking about doing Iraq, they came to Washington and told us that they would prefer we do Iran first. The Israelis very clearly thought that Iran was a greater threat than Iraq."
In fact, it was the Saudis, not the Israelis, who were pushing the war in Iraq. Bob Woodward, in his account of the decision-making process leading up to the war in Iraq, details a conversation between Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar and President Bush, in which Bandar urged the president to complete what his father started by getting rid of Saddam. A letter from Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah reiterated the same request. Richard Clarke, a participant in the administration's deliberations on Iraq and later a fierce critic of the Bush administration, has written that most of the rationales for going to war reflected "a concern with the long-term stability of the House of Saud."
Mearsheimer-Walt proceeded to extrapolate from their initial error – one that should have been evident even to them – to conclude that the influence of Israel and its American lobby is omnipresent in America's Mideast policy. But in doing so, they vastly overstated the strength of the pro-Israel lobby, in particular AIPAC, albeit relying, in part, on AIPAC's own self-serving publicity.
Yet, for nearly a century the State Department has been dominated by Arabists, whose primary Middle Eastern concern has always been ensuring the free flow of Saudi and Gulf oil. Mearsheimer-Walt simply ignored the many foreign policy battles Israel lost in making their case for Israel's stranglehold on American policy: multiple sales of the most advanced weaponry to Saudi Arabia; the 1973 arms embargo on Israel prior to the Yom Kippur War; Henry Kissinger's forcing Israel to allow the encircled Egyptian Third Army to return home without surrendering; Israel's failure to secure the release of Jonathan Pollard.
Mearsheimer-Walt blamed Israel for all the deformities of the Arab/Muslim world, and argued that the threats to America from the Middle East would disappear in the absence of Israel. As Ira Stoll remarked, to hear them tell it, Osama bin Laden would have returned to the family construction business in the absence of Israel. But that too requires ignoring Al Qaeda's long list of grievances against America having nothing to do with Israel. In a 2002 letter to America, Osama bin Laden laid out a number of America's alleged sins: attacking Moslems in Somalia; supporting Russia against the Moslem Chechnyans, backing Indian suppression of Moslems in Kashmir , and most importantly the pollution of Moslem lands, preeminently Saudia Arabia, with American military bases. Richard Clarke, the expert on Al Qaeda in both the first Bush and Clinton administrations writes: "If you look at Al Qaeda's own writing and their public statements, Israel was not a major theme. What they say is pretty clear."
Most of the major upheavals in the Middle East have had nothing to do with Israel: the Khomeini revolution in Iran; the Iraq-Iran war; Saddam Hussein's seizure of Kuwait; the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan; Arab Spring; the Libyan civil war; the Syrian civil war. Nor as the Abraham Accords prove has the failure to achieve a Palestinian-Israel peace prevented rapprochement with some of the main actors in the Arab world.
While blaming Israel for all, or nearly all, the threats to America, from the Middle East, Mearsheimer-Walt could barely conceive of any way in which Israel benefitted the United States. They sounded like Tucker Carlson today, who invariably refers to Israel as "a nation of only nine million people, with no natural resources." That, of course, ignores that a country's most valuable resource is the quality of its citizenry, and, in that respect, Israel ranks at the top of the world. It is a world leader in bio-tech, hi-tech, and every aspect of military technology. Not by accident does almost every major tech company have a major research center in Israel.
As the ongoing war proves, Israel is America's most skilled and powerful military ally, and is a force multiplier for the projection of American power in the Middle East. Israel's military strength has proven a crucial American asset in a vital and volatile region. While the United States has had to repeatedly commit hundreds of thousands of its own troops to conflicts in the Persian Gulf, Israel's presence has freed America from any such necessity in the Eastern Mediterranean. Israeli technology and intelligence have proven a great boon to its American ally. General George Keenan, a retired chief of U.S. Air Force intelligence, commented in 1986 that it would have taken 5 CIA's to supply America with the intelligence information it was receiving from Israel. Israel was also the only country to develop its own land-based missile defense.
Historian and foreign policy guru Walter Russell Mead was not quite ready to accuse the Mearsheimer-Walt of being anti-Semites, and contented himself with describing The Israel Lobby as a book "anti-Semites will love." The authors show an obsession with Jewish genealogy, not unlike that of the authors of the Nuremberg Laws – e.g., they inform readers that the wife of failed Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean is Jewish.
But their very lumping of all Jews and half-Jews together undercuts their theory of a vast Jewish conspiracy. American Jews are, unfortunately, not that aligned with one another or with Israel to form some grand conspiracy. What, for instance, do Mearsheimer-Walt make of the fact that American Jews were more opposed to the war in Iraq than any other group, given that the war is their primary proof of the control of the Israel lobby over American foreign policy.
TODAY'S PURVEYORS of vast Israeli conspiracy theories lack even the patina of sophistication of Mearsheimer-Walt. And there is nothing they will not say, without a shred of evidence. One can hear, for instance, that Israel was behind the murder of Charlie Kirk from any one of five or six podcasters, with large followings, on an almost daily basis. A gubernatorial candidate in Florida at least has fans among college students for his pledge to remove "goyslop" from school lunchrooms, as if the Jews' tentacles extend as far as school menues.
The present day-conspiracy theorists do, however, have at least one thing in their favor compared to their predecessors. Israel undoubtedly wanted the US to join Israel in a sustained attack designed to destroy Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and Prime Minister was not shy about conveying that desire to President Trump.
But to say that Israel and America have overlapping interests in removing the threat of the Iranian regime does not mean that Israel has somehow hoodwinked Trump. The latter hardly strikes one as the sort of fellow to start a war costing billions of dollars a day to help out his friend Bibi. The two Iranian plots to assassinate Trump are far more likely to have influenced his decision.
As Walter Russell Mead argues, those susceptible to conspiracy theories involving the Jews are drawn from the ranks of those with no knowledge of traditional American foreign policy concerns. There is a reason that every recent American president has declared that a nuclear Iran would be intolerable, but those not versed in foreign policy are unlikely to understand what it is.
The claim that Iran was not preparing to launch an "imminent" nuclear attack on the United States is neither here nor there. By the time such an attack is imminent, it will also be unstoppable.
Last week, Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center and formerly the top assistant to Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, provided fodder to the Tucker Carlsons and Candace Owens of the world when he resigned from his position. In his resignation letter, he blamed high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media for a "misinformation campaign" that convinced Trump to attack.
Needless to say, he did not specify any misinformation the president was given. And it is hard to identify the influential members of the media to which he was referring given the overwhelming tilt in the mainstream media against the war. There are no more Charles Krauthammers left.
Quite likely, Joe Kent is a sincere isolationist. But he also has a problem with the truth. He accused the Israelis of using the same tactic employed to "draw us into the disastrous Iraq war." But, as we have already seen, Israel did not seek to draw anyone into that war. And he wrote that his first wife, Shannon, was killed in Syria in 2019 in a suicide bombing during another war "manufactured by Israel." But the suicide bomber was from ISIS. And Israel had nothing to do with the rise of ISIS from the ruins of the Syrian civil war.
The only person who thinks otherwise, or purports to, is Max Blumenthal, a suspected Russian intelligence asset, who has written anti-Ukraine articles with Kent's current wife. In their current view, the war against ISIS, which Kent once championed, was an Israeli plot to bring about regime change in Syria.
Most likely, Kent's resignation letter fingering Israel was a preemptive strike, as he knew that he was under investigation for leaking classified information and about to be fired. What better defense than to go onto Tucker Carlson's show and present himself as a heroic victim for pointing to Israel's malfeasance.
The key takeaway is that Kent chose not to attribute his resignation to policy differences about the war of which there are many legitimate critiques. Instead, he chose to focus on Israel's malign behavior. Like the James Fishback, who is running for governor of Florida, he concluded that attacking the Jews is the best path to continuing influence and the strongest shield to exposure for leaking.
That is not exactly a cause for rejoicing among American Jews. But we should remember that such charges go all the way back to Egypt, over three thousand three hundred years ago, and have risen in every generation.
Yet all those who accused us and sought to destroy us are long gone, and we are still here to celebrate the Seder again this year.
Chag Kasher ve'Sameach