So You Think Trump is Manipulated by Israel?

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The U.S., we are told with the knowing tone of those boldly revealing “open secrets,” is merely the executor—why not the auxiliary, while we’re at it?—of “Israel’s war.”

I don’t deny that the two countries have converging interests, or that their military and intelligence agencies are operating in close coordination. But that is called an alliance.

Would anyone have said that Franklin D. Roosevelt was being manipulated by Charles de Gaulle? Or that Winston Churchill—who in 1919 said Bolshevism should be strangled in its cradle—became Stalin’s puppet 22 years later? Of Alexander the Great that he acted on behalf of the Greek cities of Asia that he had freed from Persian rule? Or of the Roman Republic, during the Third Punic War, that it was acting under the orders of Massinissa, king of Numidia? The idea is absurd.

In this case—and however much it may displease conspiracy theorists—there is no mystery. Israel has one concern: neutralizing a threat that it rightly considers existential. The U.S. has its own concerns: defending its allies (Arab countries as well as Israel), weakening a strategic axis that runs from Tehran to Moscow and Beijing, and washing away the humiliation that has remained, for 47 years, like an open wound in the side of every administration since Jimmy Carter’s—the invasion of the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and holding of American hostages for more than a year.

All this follows a logic of interests that have their own consistency but could diverge in the weeks or days ahead.

To fail to understand this? To believe that a country the size of New Jersey could twist the arm of a country of 350 million, equipped with the most powerful military and the most sophisticated network of bases in history, and governed by a president of unrivaled egotism? To imagine that Donald Trump—who everyone knows never decides anything that doesn’t first serve his own interests and those of the U.S.—would have given any foreign prime minister the gift of a war of this magnitude? It is simply grotesque.

Imagine the Oval Office scene: A diffident Mr. Trump agonizes, wavers, ruminates—then makes up his mind only when his friend Bibi tells him what to do.

It took two years to prepare the Normandy landings. Six months to prepare the Gulf War in 1991. One year to prepare the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Who can imagine that the Pentagon improvised in a few days the deployment of two aircraft-carrier strike groups, the repositioning of hundreds of combat aircraft, the establishment of a refueling network 6,000 miles from its shores? The accumulation of colossal quantities of fuel and ammunition required? Not to mention the intelligence capabilities indispensable for such an operation?

Who can believe that the American president, however impulsive Mr. Trump may be, would have committed such an armada without seeing further than the tip of his nose, and that Benjamin Netanyahu would have had to explain to him, over a hamburger, the strategy and meaning of it all? The reasoning is childish.

But the more serious problem lies elsewhere. This fable revives a very old and toxic lie.

This is how people thought in the 1930s—those who saw in “the Jews” a community of conspirators pushing nations toward war, pulling the strings of catastrophe, and scheming to provoke conflicts from which they expected to profit.

In France, this was the theme of the infamous 1942 pamphlet by Lucien Rebatet, “The Ruins.” According to him, it was the “Jewish warmongers” who pushed France into war with Germany and were therefore the real architects of the ruin described in the book’s scenes of exodus, fire and apocalypse.

It was the central thread of three pamphlets by Louis-Ferdinand Céline: “Trifles for a Massacre” (1937), about the “Jewish plot”; “School for Corpses” (1938), denouncing the machine of “indoctrination” preparing peoples to fight and die “for Israel”; and “The Fine Mess” (1941), claiming that Jews had dragged France into “their war.”

In the U.S., it was the obsession of Father Charles Coughlin, who denounced in his radio broadcasts the “Jewish finance” supposedly pushing America toward confrontation with Hitler, and of Charles Lindbergh, who in his September 1941 speech in Des Moines, Iowa, opposed the first “America First” movement to the “Jewish interests” he claimed were fomenting a global conflagration.

The Jew as a warmonger is an old cliché of antisemitic propaganda. It would be wise to take that terrible poison out of circulation today.

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