America Didn’t Go to War for Israel

Blaming Israel for America's war in Iran not only ignores a mountain of evidence — it also echoes eerily familiar tropes

President Trump in Miami, March 28, 2026. White House photo by Daniel Torok.

Several days ago, I gave a guest lecture to my college Hillel director’s class on Jewish leadership via Zoom, as I do almost every semester. After sharing a few experiences and observations from the past few years in the life of Israel and the Jewish people, I opened the floor to questions from the students. As always, they were thoughtful and wide-ranging, touching on everything from the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism to the media’s treatment of Israel to how one might go about developing a career in communications.

Toward the end of the class, one of the students raised a virtual hand and posed an interesting and timely question. Do I believe, he asked, that blaming Israel for the war in Iran is antisemitic?

He noted that Israeli leaders have been advocating for military action against the Iranian regime for years; that the charge is a critique of Israeli actions and policies, rather than of the country’s very existence; and that it doesn’t seem to fit into any of Natan Sharansky’s three ‘D’s — delegitimization, demonization, or double standards — distinguishing legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitic discourse. Why, then, do some observers believe that accusing Israel of being behind the war is antisemitic?

It was a smart question, and while I offered an answer at the time, it strikes me as being worthy of a lengthier response.

Let us state the obvious: Yes, Israeli leaders have long identified the Iranian regime and its nuclear program as a threat to Israel’s existence and have openly discussed the possibility of military action to remove that threat.

In June 1995, just five months before he was assassinated, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told The Washington Post that Iran posed a major threat to Israel and raised alarm about its nuclear program. Every Israeli leader since has echoed that concern, but none as doggedly as Benjamin Netanyahu, who has made countering the Iranian threat the centerpiece of his policy agenda for decades. As The New York Times recently reported, in the leadup to the current war, Prime Minister Netanyahu pitched President Donald Trump on a military campaign against the regime for several months, arguing that delaying it would allow Iran to create a “shield of immunity” of missiles behind which it could finally build a nuclear bomb.

Early in the war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson both suggested that U.S. military action was necessitated by Israel’s determination to carry out its own campaign against the regime, which would have resulted in Iranian attacks against U.S. assets and allies in the region (Rubio immediately added that the war would have been necessary “no matter what”).

Iranian leaders have consistently called for Israel’s destruction and have created a network of terrorist proxies dedicated, in both word and deed, to achieving that goal. A weakened regime — or a new Iranian government altogether — would certainly be in Israel’s national interest.

All this is true. But it doesn’t explain why the United States chose to go to war.

The reality is that President Trump’s decision to launch the military campaign in Iran was driven by far more than any single ally’s wishes, and claiming otherwise betrays, at best, a lack of familiarity with either the facts or how consequential decisions are made by American presidents.

Put simply, no president — especially this president — would enter a war that may well define his presidency to satisfy another country’s interests. And while Israeli input may have contributed to President Trump’s decision, so did a host of other factors, including pressure from multiple allies in the region, the advice of senior administration officials and advisors, assessments by the Defense Department and intelligence agencies, the publicly stated positions of successive U.S. presidents and administrations over the past three decades, and Trump’s own longstanding and widely publicized convictions.

To focus on Israel’s role while ignoring all other factors and considerations is to ascribe to the Jewish state outsized, almost mystical influence over American policy — a modern echo of dark tropes from bygone eras.

In truth, Israel was far from alone among Middle Eastern countries urging U.S. military action against the Iranian regime. According to The Washington Post, in the month leading up to the war, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pressed for a U.S. military campaign against Iran, making multiple phone calls to Trump and dispatching his brother, Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman, to Washington to make the case in person. Despite publicly advocating a diplomatic solution — and even going so far as to declare that U.S. aircraft couldn’t use Saudi territory or airspace to attack Iran, in a clear but ultimately failed attempt to prevent Iranian retaliation — the crown prince was adamant in his appeals to Trump and other senior administration officials. “The Saudi leader warned that Iran would come away stronger and more dangerous if the United States did not strike now,” the Post reported. Saudi Arabia was the destination of Trump’s first foreign trip of his current term, during which Mohammed promised to invest nearly $1 trillion in the United States. Other Gulf states are also believed to have privately pushed for military action against Iran, which they have long viewed as a threat.

Notably, multiple countries in the region — including some that had expressed reservations about a potential military campaign and were nevertheless targeted by Iranian missiles and drones — are now urging the U.S. not to stop until the Iranian regime is no longer able to threaten its neighbors and not to make do with an agreement that preserves their ability to do so.

Numerous administration officials have also long advocated for military action against Iran.

During the 2012 talks that ultimately led to the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the JCPOA, colloquially known as the Iran nuclear deal — then-Senator Marco Rubio cautioned that diplomacy would fail to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. “At that point there’s only one country in the world that can do anything about it, and that's us,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations at the time. “I think I am in line with what the [Obama] administration has said, which is ultimately [a] military option may be necessary if everything else fails,” he added. According to New York Times reporting, Secretary of State Rubio told Trump in the lead-up to the war that a military campaign could effectively destroy Iran’s missile program.

In 2017, Pete Hegseth — then a Fox News host — called Iran “America’s mortal enemy”; a year later he said the Islamic Republic was developing “a nuclear capacity which threaten[ed] the very existential existence of America.” The Times reported that Hegseth was “the biggest proponent of a military campaign against Iran” in the Trump cabinet and that he said the U.S. “would have to take care of the Iranians eventually, so they might as well do it now.”

As the Republican nominee for vice president in 2024, JD Vance identified the Iranian regime as a threat to the United States and said, “If you are going to punch the Iranians, punch them hard,” praising President Trump for authorizing the killing of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. In the lead-up to the current conflict, Vance repeatedly said that the U.S. would not permit Iran to develop nuclear weapons and that there was evidence that Iran was trying to rebuild its nuclear program; he had previously said that President Trump has “clear authority to act” to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Other prominent figures considered close to the White House — including senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham — have also pushed for military action against the Iranian regime.

The Defense Department and the array of U.S. intelligence agencies have considered the Iranian regime a threat to the United States for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. defense officials identified Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism targeting American interests and cautioned that the country was acquiring the means to develop nuclear weapons. In 2007, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Negroponte testified that Iran’s military power “challenges U.S. interests” and identified the Islamic Republic, along with North Korea, as “the states of most concern to us” due to their pursuit of nuclear weapons. Intelligence assessments in 2010 and 2013 acknowledged that Iran already had the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon and that it possessed the largest missile arsenal in the Middle East. Also in 2013, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said his department was developing “all military options” to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power; a year later, in 2014, the Pentagon said that preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is “a top administration priority.” In 2017, DNI Daniel Coates termed the Iranian regime “an enduring threat to U.S. national interests”; in 2025, the Annual Threat Assessment grouped Iran with major U.S. adversaries China and Russia, asserting that cooperation between them “reinforc[es] threats from each of them individually while also posing new challenges to U.S. strength and power globally.”

In the months leading up to the current war, defense and intelligence officials warned that the Islamic Republic continued to pose a threat to the United States despite blows sustained during the June 2025 Twelve-Day War. Admiral Brad Cooper — who today commands U.S. Central Command — told Congress after the June war that Iran still poses a “considerable” threat. The 2026 National Defense Strategy, released just weeks before the current conflict, warned that Iran “appears intent on reconstituting its conventional military forces” and cautioned that it may try to rebuild its nuclear weapons program.

Taken together, these assessments reflect a longstanding consensus within America’s defense and intelligence communities that Iran poses a direct threat not only to regional stability, but to U.S. interests and national security.

Indeed, every Democratic and Republican president in recent decades has expressed a willingness to use military force to counter Iran and prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. President George W. Bush repeatedly said that “all options are on the table” and refused to rule out a nuclear strike to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. In defending the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, President Barack Obama explicitly left open the option of military action if the agreement failed to prevent Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons. “There are times when force is necessary, and if Iran does not abide by this deal, it’s possible that we don’t have an alternative,” Obama said at the time. As Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden echoed the president’s position. “President Obama is not bluffing,” he said in 2013. “All options, including military force, are on the table.” Later, as president, Biden said he would use force if necessary to prevent the Iranian regime from acquiring a nuclear weapon. “We will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon,” he said in 2022. “The only thing worse than the Iran that exists now is an Iran with nuclear weapons.”

Finally, of course, President Trump’s own statements about the Iranian regime and the need to use military force against it leave little doubt as to his longstanding position, which predates this war by more than four decades. In 1980, Trump called the regime’s seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and its abduction of 52 Americans “a horror” and said he would “absolutely” send U.S. troops to rescue them. Several years later, he expanded on his approach. “I’d be harsh on Iran,” he told a British journalist in 1988. “One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I’d go in and take it. Iran can’t even beat Iraq, yet they push the United States around. It’d be good for the world to take them on.”

Years later, as the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran became more acute, he said the regime must never be permitted to acquire a nuclear weapon, an approach he has maintained consistently ever since. In fact, in the lead-up to the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities last year, the White House compiled a list of more than fifty times Trump reiterated — as a candidate and as president — that Iran can never become a nuclear power. “Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons is a major threat to our nation’s national security interests,” he tweeted in 2011. “We can’t allow Iran to go nuclear.” In 2019, he threatened that Iran would face “obliteration like you’ve never seen before” if it didn’t stop pursuing nuclear weapons. In April 2025, several months before the June airstrikes, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said there would be “all hell to pay” if Iran didn’t accede to Trump’s demands that they cease pursuing nuclear weapons. In January of this year, weeks before the current war, Trump said “the military is looking at it, and we’re looking at some very strong options” to take action against the Iranian regime.

Three days after the war began, Trump flatly dismissed claims that Israel had forced the U.S. to launch it — and suggested that the opposite was true. “Based on the way the negotiation was going, I thought they [Iran] were going to attack first,” he said in the Oval Office on March 3. “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.”

The claim that President Trump took America to war for or because of Israel crumbles under the weight of both the evidence and the historical record. Israel’s prime minister may have wanted the U.S. to engage in military action against the Iranian regime, but that is not why America went to war. America went to war because multiple U.S. allies pressed for it; numerous administration officials advocated for it; America’s defense establishment and intelligence communities have long considered Iran a major and growing threat; successive U.S. presidents have threatened military action to prevent Iran from pursuing and acquiring a nuclear weapon; and the current president decided to act on his predecessors’ threats, on military and intelligence assessments, on counsel from allies and advisors, and on convictions he has expressed for nearly half a century.

All of this is on the public record. None of it is a secret. So one has to ask why so many persist in trying to blame Israel for America’s war in Iran and to convince others of the Jewish state’s culpability.

To some, the claim offers a simple, easily digestible explanation for a deeply complex reality. But it also ascribes to Israel a degree of influence over American decision-making that is at odds with how power actually works. And while some may intend merely to critique American or Israeli policy, the claim is being promoted and amplified by others who disregard, distort, or simply omit what is readily knowable. In either case, the argument itself draws on tropes with a dark and disturbing history: the notion that Jews, or the Jewish state, exercise hidden, disproportionate, and malign influence over global affairs. Like other antisemitic conspiracy theories throughout the ages, it is belied by verifiable facts.

America did not go to war for Israel. It went to war because a broad range of American, regional, strategic, and political considerations converged — and because the president of the United States decided to act on them. One can debate that decision or argue whether the considerations justified it, but to blame the Jews for it is something else entirely.

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