The Iran War Could Be Catastrophic for the US-Israel Alliance. Good.

It’s never a good idea to expect Donald Trump to stick to one argument. The president is a congenital liar who loses a little more brain function with each passing day. Inventing new rationales for terrible decisions is kind of his whole thing.

But even by that degraded standard, Trump’s ever-shifting justifications for his war on Iran are breathtaking. Every few hours seems to bring a new explanation for why the United States and Israel decided that it was a good time to launch an illegal, unprovoked, open-ended assault on another country. The two countries struck because of some undefined imminent threat! No, wait, it’s because the nuclear program Trump definitely “obliterated” last year was perhaps un-obliterated and needed to be re-obliterated! Sorry, what he really meant was that the Iranians took Americans hostage… in 1979, and it’s time someone did something about it! Hmm, scratch that—it’s to do regime change! Actually, hold that thought…

This nonsense makes Trump look like what he is: a reckless imperialist engaging in an already spiraling war of choice. It also helps create what he may feel is an encouraging level of confusion about what exactly he wants out of this catastrophe.

There’s just one problem: Other people are also talking about why we’re suddenly at war. And a lot of them are giving the same reason: because Israel wanted it. That has the potential to erode both the US-Israeli relationship and Israel’s already shaky standing with the American people. For anyone who wants to see the US-Israel alliance, with all of its inherent cruelty and oppression, consigned to the dustbin of history, this can only be a good thing.

Before we get to why that is, though, it’s important to understand how this story has unfolded over the past couple of days.

The first thing that really raised eyebrows was Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s explanation of why a war with Iran was happening “now,” that “the President made the very wise decision—we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties…”

Translation: Israel had made it plain that it was going to bomb Iran, so the US felt it had no choice but to join in. (In a sign that Rubio wasn’t going rogue, the White House’s official “rapid response” account tweeted a video of his comments.)

Rubio’s words chime with other public statements and with recent reporting. The New York Times reported on Monday that Rubio had made a similar case when briefing members of Congress days before the war began:

In the briefing, Mr. Rubio argued that, no matter if Israel or the United States struck first, Iran would respond with a powerful barrage of weapons against U.S. bases and embassies. It was logical then, Mr. Rubio said, that the United States should act in concert with Israel, since America would be dragged in anyway. And Israel, Mr. Rubio said, was determined to act.

House Speaker Mike Johnson made the same case on Monday, telling reporters, “Because Israel was determined to act with or without the US, our commander in chief and the administration and the officials had a very difficult decision to make.”

Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Monday that this was also the explanation given in a briefing after the war started. “This is still a war of choice that has been acknowledged by others, that was dictated by Israel’s goals and timeline,” Warner said.

The Times also reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had lobbied Trump intensely—and successfully—to ditch ongoing negotiations with Iran in favor of war. As if to confirm that he was on a mission that had little to do with anything happening right now, Netanyahu issued a statement on Sunday making no mention of an imminent Iranian threat. Instead, he said that the United States had helped him fulfill a decades-long dream:

We are in a campaign in which we are bringing the full strength of the IDF to the battle, as never before, in order to ensure our existence and our future. But we are also bringing to this campaign the assistance of the United States, my friend, US President Donald Trump, and the US military. This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years: smite the terror regime hip and thigh.

Awkward.

Speaking to reporters from the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump belatedly tried to put a lid on things. “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” he said. “We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they [Iran] were going to attack first.” (The same “rapid response” account that, less than 24 hours earlier, had tweeted Rubio’s diametrically opposite comments quickly tweeted Trump’s new line.) Rubio was also wheeled out to walk back his previous version of events.

Hmm. Which story should we believe: the one briefed out in public, in private, to journalists, and to elected officials for days, or the totally different one that emerged after Trump found himself in a political bind?

Now, it’s obviously important not to overstate things. The United States is not a puppet dancing mindlessly to whatever tune the Israelis play. Combine the plethora of bloodthirsty, Iran-hating psychopaths in Washington with Trump’s seeming desire to start a new conflict every week, and you already have a recipe for war before Israel even enters the picture.But the preponderance of evidence would appear to show that, at the very least, Israel played a huge part in getting Trump to pull the trigger on this war—and it’s not some antisemitic conspiracy to say so.

Why does all of this matter? For two key reasons—both of which could have the salutary effect of weakening support for Trump, Israel, and this awful war all at once.

The first is simple: It is, for want of a better phrase, an extremely bad look for top US government officials to be sending the message that the reason this country finds itself plunged into a bloody, spiraling conflict with no clear justification, no legal authority, and no end in sight is because a different country had a war itch it needed to scratch. That’s especially true when the government in question is run by a bunch of goons who can’t stop droning on about how much they love both carpet-bombing the universe and telling other countries what to do. No wonder Trump felt the need to try to claw back the narrative.

The second, more important reason is this: Israel already finds itself on the ropes with the American people thanks to widespread disgust over the Gaza genocide. Just last week, Gallup found that, for the first time ever, more Americans say they sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis. The Israel lobby’s grip on US politics, though still strong, is weakening at an unprecedented rate, with both main parties.

The implication that Israel is the driving force behind the deeply unpopular war with Iran—one that has led to the deaths of at least six American soldiers so far—only bolsters the truth that more and more people have come to understand over the past two years of genocide and repression: that, time and again, the United States does terrible things, both domestically and internationally, in service of its alliance with Israel, even if those things fly in the face of logic, morality, and basic self-interest.

The challenge now is to turn that increasing outrage into concrete change—whether that’s blocking military aid to Israel, supporting Palestinian liberation, halting the efforts to suppress criticism of Israel and its relationship with the United States, curbing the power of the Israel lobby, growing support for the BDS movement, or forcing the US and Israel to abide by domestic and international law.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have singularly failed to convince US voters that they had a duty to funnel endless amounts of money and weaponry so that Israel could slaughter children in Gaza. There’s no reason to think that those same voters now want that same money and weaponry to be used to slaughter children in Iran—not for whatever shifting motives the Trump administration keeps putting forward, and certainly not on Israel’s behalf. Trump may now be trying to force this latest unhelpful cat back in the bag, but he can’t force growing numbers of Americans to unsee what is already so clear: that the sooner the US-Israel alliance ends, the better the world will be.