President Donald Trump is solely to blame for America declaring war on Iran, but a distinguished military historian believes many of his supporters are instead blaming a “handy fall guy” — one that has been viciously persecuted throughout history.
“When a nation starts a war for dubious reasons and then suffers the consequences, there is inevitably a search for scapegoats,” military historian Max Boot wrote for The Washington Post on Monday. “Conspiracy theories abound. It happened after World War I, when the favorite villains were ‘merchants of death’ and international bankers. It happened again after the Iraq War, which some blamed on ‘neoconservatives’ and Halliburton, the oil-services giant led by Dick Cheney before he became vice president.”
All of these scapegoats — the so-called “merchants of death, “international bankers,” “neoconservatives” and so on — are code words for “Jews,” Boot observed. Now the longtime editorialist opined that this is happening again because of Israel’s alliance with America in Trump’s “foolhardy war against Iran.”
“As so often happens, the Jews — or, if you prefer a polite euphemism, ‘Zionists’ or ‘the Israel lobby’ — make a handy fall guy,” Boot wrote. “What the right-wing fringe once whispered — that this was ‘a war for Israel’ — suddenly burst onto the front pages last week thanks to Joe Kent’s resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. In a blistering public letter, Kent wrote that ‘Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation’ and that ‘we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."
Jonathan Sarna, emeritus professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University and author of “Lincoln and the Jews: A History” and “When General Grant Expelled the Jews,” told AlterNet that he shares Boot’s concerns. To provide historical context, Sarna explained that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories which claim Jews control the world can be linked to an infamous 1903 hoax, one that involved forged documents published in Imperial Russia and called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
“If you go back to ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ — the great antisemitic forgery of the turn of the last century — that really began this sense that Jews are all-powerful, that they operate behind the scenes, and that whatever happens is ultimately their fault,” Sarna told AlterNet. “Before then, for centuries, the prevailing view was that Jews were persecuted and lowly because they had killed Christ, and that was what they deserved — they were powerless. That was their punishment. But ‘The Protocols’ flipped that.”
Sarna added that “especially as Jews in modernity have begun to succeed economically, it doesn't much matter what the issue is — whether it is 9/11, which some blame on the Jews, or the crash of 2008, or now the war with Iran. You can predict before it happens that people will blame Jews, because as The Protocols taught people, it's always the Jews. It's the great conspiracy theory. And even many people who have never read The Protocols believe many of the things in it — just as many people have never read Darwin, but they know the word ‘evolution.’ This is simply the latest iteration.”
As Boot pointed out in his editorial, Kent was correct to say Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. Yet not only is Kent a tainted source (he has white supremacist ties and spread conspiracy theories intended to minimize Trump's attempted coup and the January 6th insurrection), but he ignored that Trump is surrounded by many pro-Arab and pro-oil advisers that emphatically did not want war with Iran. Boot quoted a Foreign Affairs essay by Nate Swanson.
“Trump seems interested, in no particular order, in demonstrating the prowess of the U.S. military, strengthening his negotiating position, showing he was serious when he vowed in a January Truth Social post to protect Iranian protesters, and differentiating his approach from President Barack Obama’s,” Swanson wrote per Boot. Indeed, Trump threatened war against Denmark to conquer Greenland and actually waged an unprovoked war against Venezuela before his attacks against Iran, and neither of those campaigns had anything to do with Israel.
Boot then lamented that “Trump and his aides inadvertently helped foster conspiracy theories about Israel” when Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed out on March 2 that Israel was going to attack Iran anyway so the U.S. thought it should go along with it.
“The administration then tried to walk this back — and rightly so,” Boot wrote. “It’s absurd to imagine that Netanyahu would have bombed Iran if Trump had told him not to and threatened to withhold military aid if he did.”
Despite the absurdity of blaming the Iran war on “the Jews,” however, Boot predicted this will happen more frequently as the Iran war turns into a quagmire.
“The more the Iran war is blamed on Israel, the more it will do to turn public opinion against the Jewish state,” Boot wrote. “A recent Gallup poll already found that more Americans sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis. According to a YouGov poll, younger Republicans are turning against the Jewish state — a trend that’s doubtless been driven by Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank. Now imagine what will happen if American motorists blame Israel — however unfairly — for the high cost of gasoline.”
Sarna argued that many people with latent anti-Semitic tendencies struggle to apply the same logic to Israelis and the Israeli government that they regularly apply to Americans and the American government.
“I think that for a lot of people, their knowledge of Israel is so limited that it's very difficult for them to engage with it the way we would with any democracy,” Sarna told AlterNet. “But I always remind audiences: I can be critical of President Trump without being un-American. Most people who criticize President Trump or the Republicans would assure you how much they love America and hold a fundamentally positive view of it. It seems to me that it's deeply important for us to do the same with Israel — that is, to make clear that there is a huge difference between disliking the policies of the Prime Minister of Israel and hating Israel itself. If you wouldn't equate criticism of the President with hating America, there is no reason — and indeed it is wrong and wicked — to do so with regard to Israel.”
Boot and Sarna are not the only intellectuals to raise the alarm about rising anti-Semitism. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg made a similar argument earlier in March.
“For those who suspect that Israel manipulated America into war, the resignation of Joe Kent, Donald Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, surely seems like confirmation,” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote on Wednesday. She added that Kent’s claims “taps into old antisemitic tropes about occult Jewish control” and is easier to believe for many Americans as Trump bungles the Iran war.
“This conflict, whose timing and purpose Trump barely bothered to explain to the American people, was probably always going to increase anti-Jewish animosity among Americans, especially when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel gloats that he’s ‘yearned’ for such a war for 40 years,” Goldberg explained. “But the more it drags on, the more I worry about a full-blown American ‘dolchstoßlegende,’ a modern version of the stab-in-the-back myth that German nationalists used to blame Jews for their humiliation in World War I.”
Ironically, despite the argument that Trump waged war against Iran for “the Jews,” Jews have been an overwhelmingly Democratic voting bloc since the late 1920s. For the past century, Jews have consistently voted between 60 and 80 percent Democratic, with the number reaching as high as 90 percent for presidents unusually beloved by Jews (Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson) and only falling below 50 percent once (during Jimmy Carter’s losing 1980 campaign). The Democratic candidates running against Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024 garnered between 66 and 71 percent of the Jewish vote, while Trump only garnered between 24 and 32 percent in those elections. Trump himself denounced Jewish Democratic tendencies in controversial 2019 remarks.
“I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,” Trump said at the time, arguing that Republicans are more pro-Israelthan Democrats. The president added that “five years ago, the concept of even talking about this . . . of cutting off aid to Israel because of two people that hate Israel and hate Jewish people — I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. Where has the Democratic Party gone? Where have they gone where they’re defending these two people over the State of Israel?”
