Jewish Groups Are Backing a War Americans Don't Want
And they’re setting up American Jews to take the blame.
Jewish Groups Are Backing a War Americans Don’t Want
And they’re setting up American Jews to take the blame.
US sailors moving weapons Friday aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, part of the fleet that attacked Iran on Saturday.
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Over the weekend, Jewish establishment groups rushed to yoke themselves to the unpopular war President Trump and the Israelis launched against Iran. Now, as it becomes increasingly clear that the US entered into this war at Israel’s urging, the cheerleading from American Jewish leaders is creating a moment of political peril for their institutions, and for the American Jews they purport to represent.
The Trump administration on Monday confirmed what had seemed apparent from the start: that Israel pushed the US into this war. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, told reporters that the “imminent threat” to which the US felt compelled to respond early Saturday was not an Iranian provocation, but rather anticipated Iranian retaliations to a planned Israeli attack. Earlier in the day, a startling *New York Times *report had depicted President Trump as having been talked into war by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Because Israel was determined to act with or without the US, our commander-in-chief . . . had a very difficult decision to make,” the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said after a Pentagon briefing.
Each of the major Jewish establishment groups have put out statements supporting the war. “We commend President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for their close coordination and clear resolve at this critical moment,” the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations said late Saturday. “Their leadership reflects the strength of the US–Israel security partnership and a shared determination to halt a regime that endangers regional and global stability.”
The American Jewish Committee affirmed in their statement that diplomacy was impossible, as Iranians had not been negotiating in good faith. The Anti-Defamation League’s initial statements were muted, expressing hope for the safety of US soldiers, Israeli civilians and soldiers, and “our partners and friends in the Gulf,” but on a conference call put on by the group Sunday night, its CEO and national director, Jonathan Greenblatt, was more forthright. “What we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the demise of the Islamic Republic makes this a safer world,” he said.
Mainstream American Jewish groups have long committed themselves to the foreign policy of the Israeli right, and their response on Saturday is by no means a surprise. This is the war, after all, that Netanyahu has been demanding since the 1990s, and the war that the hardline pro-Israel crowd has fought to get him ever since. It’s the war the neoconservative writer Bill Kristol and his Emergency Committee for Israel were begging for in 2012, when they ran attack ads against President Obama saying he should have bombed Iran, and the war AIPAC and its allies wanted in 2015, when they did their best to kill the Iran nuclear deal.
And yet their political positioning currently puts them at odds with most Americans, who think the war is a bad idea. A University of Maryland poll found early last month that just 21% of Americans favored war with Iran. Now, the conventional wisdom across the US political spectrum is that the US is fighting an unpopular war as Israel’s junior partner. “Donald Trump is so weak that he couldn’t tell Bibi Netanyahu no, so now we are at war,” the former Obama White House staffer Ben Rhodes wrote Monday. His comments rhymed somewhat with those of the former MAGA stalwart Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wrote: “We are now a nation divided [between] those who want to fight wars for Israel and those who just want peace and to be able to afford their bills and health insurance.”
The Jewish establishment wants to project an image of unified American Jewish support for this new war. And yet they do so at a moment of extraordinary political weakness, when Democrats increasingly see AIPAC as toxic, and the power that groups like Conference of Presidents were able to exert in Washington just a decade ago have been vastly diluted. They have little political capital to expend, and they’ve bet it all on a risky and unpopular foreign entanglement.
In the meantime, they are setting up American Jews to take the blame if the war goes badly, as it appears destined to do. Though left-wing and progressive Jews have tried to distinguish between Jews and Israel in the American imagination, mainstream Jewish institutions have done their best to confuse the issue, conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. On Tuesday, the ADL was busy eliding the distinction between Israeli’s political interest and Judaism itself, with a social media post that implied that Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader killed by the Israelis on Sunday, was a modern-day Haman, the villain of the biblical Purim story. “This year, the Purim story feels closer than ever,” the group wrote.
The Jewish establishment sees where the national discourse is heading, and is scrambling to divert it without dropping their support for the war. They will make the case that it was the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, not the Israelis, that pushed Trump into this war. That’s the argument Greenblatt tested out on the ADL Zoom on Sunday, saying that the fact that critics of the war were focused on the Israeli role “just underscores the antisemitism which is, unfortunately, so persistent.” Trump himself has tried, unconvincingly, to walk back the narrative: In response to the first question shot at him after an Oval Office meeting Tuesday with the German chancellor, Trump said Israel hadn’t forced his hand. “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” he said. But it was the Israelis who, according to Rubio and to Johnson, had promised to send their jets out over Tehran and set off a war with or without the participation of the US president.
Not every Jewish group has come out in favor of the war. There was opposition from the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, and from the liberal Zionist J Street, among others. J Street and JVP have both endorsed the war powers resolutions under consideration in the House and Senate, which tell the president to stop attacking Iran without Congressional authorization. (The establishment groups have not expressed positions on the war powers votes, though some AIPAC-supported Democrats, like Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio, have said since the attacks that they will oppose the resolutions.)
Jewish progressives and the Jewish left have struggled, in recent years, to cooperate with each other. I wrote on Friday about the strategic divisions between the two factions, which are rooted in deep political differences and personal resentments. In this moment, though, American Jews need a united anti-war front that can present a real alternative to the establishment propaganda, and can contest in a forceful way the notion that this is a war American Jews want.
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