Framing antisemitic tropes about Jewish or Israeli influence over US presidents has a long and toxic history.
By Adam Levick
On June 22, 2025, President Donald Trump ordered the US Air Force to drop multiple bunker-busting bombs on three nuclear facilities in Iran – the Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant, the Natanz Nuclear Facility, and the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center.
The US attack – almost certainly a one-off – occurred nine days into the war between Israel and the Islamic Republic which has seen Israel’s Air Force (IAF) achieve air supremacy, allowing the military to strike hundreds of military targets, including IRGC leaders, nuclear facilities and nuclear scientists throughout Iran – over 1,000 sorties in which the IAF lost not a single plane.
However, that one American attack began to immediately be framed by some British media outlets as an example of the Israeli tail wagging the US dog, suggesting that the US president was coerced into making the decision by Israel’s prime minister. This framing, evoking antisemitic tropes about alleged Jewish and/or Israeli power and undue influence over the United States, has a long and toxic history. In recent decades, it’s been associated with the progressive left, but has also been embraced by some within the MAGA right.
Enter Edward Luce, the Financial Times’s US Editor, and arguably the most openly anti-Israel contributor at the outlet. While not justifying the October 7 massacre, Luce suggested, in an opinion piece three days after worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust, that the attacks in southern Israel were understandable. His foray into the Jewish power calumny began even before Trump made the decision.
On June 20, two days before the US strike, and amidst the debate about what Trump would do, Luce published a piece titled “MAGA’s battle with Israel for Trump’s mind”. The headline ignored the debate within the administration between isolationists (also known as the “restrainers”) like Vice President JD Vance, and interventionists like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, instead casting Jerusalem as the lone party attempting to “control” Trump’s “mind”.
The text picks up on the headline’s theme:
“Trump’s managerial style is usually to encourage squabbling between underlings. That enhances his role as the decider. But it is Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, not Trump or his loyalists, who has been dictating the agenda….”
Luce’s use of the word “dictating”, referring to the act of imposing one’s will or authority on others, leaves little doubt that he’s imputing Israeli control over US decision making. He used same word in a column he wrote after the US attack, (“Trump has opened a Pandora’s box”, June 22), which included the following:
“Trump’s brief televised address following the strikes was meant to showcase his command of the situation. In reality, Netanyahu has been dictating events. But even he, cannot predict how Iran will respond.”
This pattern persisted in an opinion piece (“Trump’s step into the dark”) by the FT’s editorial board :
“The Trump administration has allowed Netanyahu, who has long opposed diplomatic efforts with Tehran, to sideline diplomacy and drag Trump into a war he has wanted for a decade.”
It’s not just the Financial Times.
Andrew Roth, the Guardian’s global affairs correspondent based in Washington DC, wrote an analysis after the US strike also denying the US president agency, positing instead that Trump unwittingly fell into a “trap” set by Jerusalem (“What a difference a week makes: Trump falls into Netanyahu’s trap”, June 22). In addition to the headline, Roth’s piece includes the following:
“From early suggestions that the Trump administration would rein in Netanyahu’s military ambitions, it now appears that the Israeli PM has maneuvered the US into striking Iranian uranium enrichment sites directly after a series of military attacks that Washington was unable to deter the Israeli PM from.”
Further into the piece, Roth again picks up on the same theme of Israeli control over US presidents:
“While Netanyahu had been able to maneuver previous administrations into supporting his military adventures in the region, some critics of Israel began to laud Trump for his ability to resist Netanyahu’s pull.”
The Israel-centric conspiratorial mindset of Roth can’t accept that the support of previous US presidents for Israeli wars with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hezbollah, was made of their own free will, based on what they felt was in the national interest.
The Guardian’s veteran columnist Simon Tisdall advanced a similar theme of an Israeli trap (“No matter what Trump says, the US has gone to war – and there will be profound and lasting consequences”, June 22). Tisdall wrote the following:
“Trump, the isolationist president who vowed to avoid foreign wars, has walked slap bang into a trap prepared by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu – a trap his smarter predecessors avoided.”
In addition to the antisemitic pedigree of such explanations for US decisions to use military force in the Middle East, the ‘Israel controls Washington’ charge is, and has always been, the go-to narrative for intellectually lazy commentators who don’t want to grapple with the complexities of the internal debates and foreign policy decision-making processes within the White House.
Of course, to gather accurate, fact-based assessments of the Trump administration’s decision to bomb Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan would require real journalism, a far more arduous task than deploying antisemitic dog-whistles about Israeli puppeteers controlling the president of the world’s greatest power.
About the writer:
Adam Levick immigrated to Israel from Philadelphia , USA in 2009, and has been co-editor of CAMERA UK since 2012. He previously worked as a researcher at NGO Monitor and, prior to that, at the Civil Rights Division of the Anti-Defamation League. He’s had op-eds published in numerous Jewish and non-Jewish publications, published longer papers at the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs on “Antisemitism in Progressive Blogs” and “Antisemitic Cartoons in Progressive Blogs”, and was previously a member of the Online Antisemitism Working Group for the Global Forum to Combat Antisemitism. He frequently gives presentations about media bias and antisemitism, including one in 2022 at the inaugural conference of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.
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