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.
“It is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent wrote in an open letter to the president on Tuesday. He decried a campaign by “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” to spread misinformation about Iran’s imminent threat and subvert Trump’s “America first” movement. “I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for,” he wrote.
In resigning, Kent is showing more integrity than his boss, Tulsi Gabbard, or Vice President JD Vance, both of whom have long railed against unnecessary foreign wars, only to go mostly silent when Trump launched one. Still, it’s easy enough to list all the reasons he’s not a reliable narrator.
Kent, whom I interviewed in 2022, when he was running for Congress against the Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, is a deeply paranoid man with roots on the far right. Back then, he’d said that the Jan. 6 insurrection “reeks of an intelligence operation” and called the Capitol invaders “political prisoners.” At one point during that campaign, he had a member of the Proud Boys on his payroll. It was an act of profound irresponsibility, bordering on vandalism, for Trump to make him one of the highest-ranked intelligence officials in the country.
But none of that is likely to stop Kent’s resignation from cementing the emerging narrative, on both the right and the left, that Israel has dragged America into this deeply unpopular war. It’s a powerful story because it’s partly rooted in truth, even if it taps into old antisemitic tropes about occult Jewish control.
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. 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.
Some Jewish leaders, alarmed by the backlash to the war, are trying to rule any discussion of Israel’s role in instigating it out of bounds. In a speech on Monday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, denounced those who “pointed fingers at the Israelis who — they claimed — whispered a few too many times in President Trump’s ear.”
Greenblatt’s heavy-handed attempt to police the discourse is bound to fail, because it’s asking people to overlook provable facts. Just two days after the strikes on Iran began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but admitted that Israel had forced America’s hand, though he later walked his comments back. On March 6, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, boasted in The Wall Street Journal about working with Israel to persuade Trump to attack, gathering information from Israeli intelligence and coaching Netanyahu on what to say to Trump.
Given Israel’s deep involvement in almost every aspect of this war, it takes care and subtlety — both in short supply in our politics — to tease out the difference between reality and conspiracy theory.
A major distortion in Kent’s letter is that it presents Trump as a naïve victim of the Israelis rather than an eager collaborator. Trump has always been more hawkish than the isolationists in his orbit admit; he ordered more drone strikes in his first two years in office than Barack Obama launched in eight. It wasn’t Netanyahu who made Trump abduct the president of Venezuela, an operation that seems to have both whetted his appetite for foreign adventure and convinced him that war can be easy. This week he boasted that he can “take” Cuba and “do anything I want with it.” Long obsessed with military might and displays of masculine aggression, Trump was enamored of the idea that he could rid the world of the anti-American regimes that bedeviled his predecessors. He went to war in Iran for his ego, not for Israel.
Still, Israel clearly encouraged him, and now threatens to prolong the war, since unlike Trump, it seems determined to destroy the Iranian state. “Israel doesn’t hate the chaos,” a White House official told Axios. “We do. We want stability. Netanyahu? Not so much, especially in Iran.” I think this official is telling the truth, while also previewing the spin we’re going to hear if Iran spirals out of control: It was Israel’s fault.
If Netanyahu, so arrogant about his ability to influence the United States, ends up destroying America’s alliance with Israel, there will be a measure of poetic justice in it. But the fallout won’t be Israel’s alone, given how often both Zionists and antisemites conflate Israel with the Jewish people as a whole.
The trauma of war breeds extremism. Kent himself is a prime example. A former Green Beret, he told me in 2022 that he was propelled into politics by the 2019 death of his wife, Shannon Kent, a Navy cryptologic technician who was killed by an ISIS suicide bomber in Syria. Back then, he blamed what he called the “administrative state” for her loss, arguing that unelected bureaucrats had foiled Trump’s attempts to pull troops out of Syria. Now, he’s come to direct that rage toward the Jewish state, describing himself in his resignation letter as a “Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel.”
Israel did not manufacture the war in Iraq, which led to the rise of ISIS. Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister in 2003, saw Iraq as a distraction from the fight with Iran. But the tale Kent is peddling can’t be fact-checked away. He now emerges as a star of the Tucker Carlson wing of the Republican Party and could well mount another campaign for political office. Kent is slated to appear on Carlson’s show this evening, and then at a gala alongside Candace Owens, one of the most nakedly antisemitic figures in American public life, tomorrow. We can expect him to tell them that based on his view from the heights of American power, they were right all along.
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