Haaretz
If the Iran war turns into a failure, Israel will transform from America’s ally into America’s alibi. Blaming Israel would keep the MAGA coalition intact, bridging the gap between hawks and the Tucker Carlson-type conspiracists – and the consequences for U.S. Jews could be severe.
On last weekend’s ‘Saturday Night Live,’ host Michael Che captured a suspicion hanging over the Iran conflict as it entered its second week. ‘Detractors are saying that Trump had no authorization for this war,’ Che said, pausing before the punchline. ‘But he actually did. Netanyahu said it was okay.’
Jokes often reveal shared but unspoken assumptions. Che’s landed because it expressed a growing sense that, whatever Washington claims now, the Iran war was more Israel’s idea than it was America’s.
Many in the United States have concluded this, and for good reason. On March 2, in his first public remarks after the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States intervened because ‘we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action against Iran that would have resulted in an attack against American forces.’
Two days later, at a Pentagon briefing, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth reinforced the impression. Describing the campaign’s early progress, he declared: ‘To our steadfast partner, Israel, your mission is being executed with unmatched skill and iron determination.’
Whether or not it was a gaffe, that ‘your’ was quite revealing.
Israelis may take such admissions as proof of their obvious and undeniable power, but they also expose a vulnerability. The Iran war is already unpopular in the United States and Europe, and if it ends in humiliation, failure, sparks terrorist blowback, an energy shock, or even just raises the cost of everyday goods, many people may blame not just Israel but also Jews in the Diaspora as well.
This wouldn’t be fair, but it would be easy. From the Book of Esther to the Dreyfus affair, antisemites have drawn on the rumor that Jews push governments into wars for their own ends.
And today, the political coalitions ready to revive that message are also large enough to make it mainstream.
The joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran come at a time when antisemitism and anti-Israel views are rising in the United States.
For two decades, American attitudes toward the Jewish state were remarkably stable and positive. From 2001 to 2023, Americans sympathized more with Israel than with Palestinians by a roughly 3-to-1 ratio – 53 percent to 19 percent on average.
After the recent Gaza war however, that balance capsized quickly. By 2026, more Americans were saying they sympathized with Palestinians (41 percent) than with Israel (30 percent), and for the first time, a majority held an unfavorable view of the Jewish state.
Antisemitism has followed a similar pattern but for different reasons. Researchers have linked its rise to economic anxiety, political alienation and the architecture of social media. Certain shocks also appear to activate older conspiracies about Jewish influence. The 2008 financial crisis and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, for example, both coincided with spikes in anti-Jewish hate speech. Finally, conflicts involving Israel seem to have an effect, too.
What’s most notable is where these attitudes are germinating. Anti-Jewish and anti-Israel views are emerging fastest among adults under 50. The journalist Yair Rosenberg recently summarized a massive body of polling data: ‘America is becoming more antisemitic because its young people are becoming more antisemitic.’ The same holds true for anti-Israel views, even among young American evangelicals.
For a rising segment of conservatives, these beliefs are not mild prejudices but tenets of a political worldview, reinforced by peers and charismatic personalities, and insulated from outside shame.
Last week, yet another racist Young Republicans group chat leaked. Those who were exposed issued the usual, scripted apologies, but it remains unclear whether any will be punished. Why would they? The congressional aide who hung a Nazi flag in his office last year still apparently works on Capitol Hill. So does the Ron DeSantis staffer who slipped Nazi symbols into a 2024 campaign video. Why expect consequences for private jokes and coded bigotry when party leaders now say and do equally gross things, proudly and in public?
Media gatekeepers seem to have lost the ability to bring these figures to heel. The news cycle moves too fast, and there are now too many incidents to cover adequately. Another segment of the media is having the opposite effect – normalizing rhetoric that was scandalous just a few years ago.
Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes – relentless critics of Israel and conspiracists about Jews – command three of the largest audiences of millennial and Gen Z conservatives. Carlson and Owens host the two most downloaded politics podcasts on Spotify. Fuentes draws a huge following of mostly young men.
This generational split helps explain the dissonance among Republicans over the Iran war’s origin story. To older neoconservatives like Rubio, steeped for decades in America’s bipartisan Israel consensus, the two countries are strategically linked. When he says we’re fighting for Israel, he means we’re fighting for ourselves.
But for a large and growing share of the MAGA faithful, the logic runs the other way. If this is Israel’s war, they assume, then it’s not ours to fight.
Recent U.S. history suggests that political coalitions rarely look inward when their foreign policy falters. Once the Iraq War became widely viewed as a mistake, figures like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth assumed the Republican party mantle and adjusted to the political winds. However, they blamed the war’s failure not on poor strategy or execution but on ‘woke’ generals and DEI – stand-ins for their domestic opponents, invoked to protect their own coalition.
If the Iran war succeeds, any emerging tension in the GOP may melt away. (Israel might even receive some credit, though Trump would likely claim it.)
But if the war fails, the search for a culprit will be heated, and the target could be obvious. This is unlike the Iraq War in which Israel did not directly fight. It’s also unlike the Gaza war, which does not endanger the entire global economy.
Because the Iran war has no articulated criteria for success so far, it also has no clear criteria for failure. The United States could avoid prolonged conflict and minimize casualties. But even if the war just depresses GOP enthusiasm in the midterms, leaving Trump a lame-duck President tied to a Democratic Congress, Republicans who opposed the bombings will have ample grounds to say, ‘I told you so.’
They will also have reason to blame Israel, and such a framework might be the only one that could keep the MAGA coalition intact as it offers hawks a ready-made excuse, while at the same time satisfying younger voters eager to break free from Zionism.
The central insight of Trump’s first Presidential campaign was that a vast gulf had opened between party elites and the base on immigration. He drove a wedge through that gap, electrifying voters with talk of walls and mass arrests while his opponents clung to slogans about amnesty.
Today, perhaps no issue in American politics reveals a wider divide between elite institutions and public opinion than the issue of Israel. Whoever emerges as Trump’s successor in the ‘America First’ movement may recognize this opportunity, especially after another unpopular Middle East war.
The consequences for Jews could be severe, too.
Already, Carlson and Owens are boosting rumors that Chabad, a U.S.-based Jewish movement, has secretly orchestrated the Iran war to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and build the Third Temple. (Never mind that Jews are less concerned with rebuilding the Temple than American evangelicals are. The claim spreads because it excites giddy fear in its largely non-Jewish audience.)
American institutions are poorly equipped for this kind of asymmetric information warfare. Our leaders rely on the same platforms – and often the same mega-wealthy, platform-owning oligarchs – that amplify these conspiracies. In a speech this week, Senator Ted Cruz conceded that Republicans ‘aren’t winning’ the battle against antisemitism and anti-Israel paranoia within their ranks.
But you can’t win a war that you refuse to fight. Cruz’s prescription didn’t cite better algorithms or new laws. Instead, he suggested that pastors should preach better sermons – a token appeal to heaven as ghoulish machinery shadows the horizon.
This war has only just begun. We can’t know how it will end, but we can see how the stage is set. Israel has joined what may become a politically toxic conflict. If it ends in failure, the Jewish state may go from ally to alibi – and the line between blaming Israel and blaming Jews may not hold for long.