Is this Trump’s war? Or Netanyahu’s? – It does seem to be more rational from the latter’s point of view, and in line with his thinking for many years. (Trump keeps changing his rationale, which suggests that for him the war’s main purpose is simply to give him something to boast about.)

For some time now we’ve been aware of the influence of ‘Israel lobbies’ in the USA and elsewhere, including the UK, driving support for the Israeli (or Zionist) cause among legislators and others; and to what appears to be good effect. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Foreign_Policy.) Iran has long been in Netanyahu’s sights, for understandable reasons: its leaders’ extreme anti-Israel rhetoric, its military strength and very likely its oil. So the idea that it’s Netanyahu, not Trump, who is the leading figure behind the current war, dragging the US along behind him, isn’t to be casually dismissed. A majority of Americans might even agree. And anti-Semites are almost bound to.

That’s one of the problems. The idea that Israel is the one manipulating America into this war fits uncomfortably with the long-standing ‘conspiracy theory’, which places ‘the Jews’ at the centre of a vast international plot to control the world, no less, by various secretive and underhand means. (The classic version, of course, used to be this one: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion; but it was also rife in Tsarist Russia and Nazi Germany, and on the British Far Right, until they opportunistically changed sides.) Anyone suggesting that the Israeli ‘lobbies’ are influencing American foreign policy to this extent can easily be tarred with the ‘anti-Semitic’ brush, even in the face of evidence of the Israeli government’s, and its secret services’, efforts, at the very least, to do just that (https://www.mossad.gov.il/en). You can see in Britain and the US currently the way in which pro-Palestinian marches and demonstrations are routinely accused of Judenhetze, even when anti-Netanyahu Jews are involved. It’s a difficult accusation to shake off.

It also obstructs attempts to discover exactly how and why Israel manages to exert whatever influence it has in the USA, when only 2.5 per cent of the latter’s population is Jewish or of Jewish origin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews). To that figure however we can probably add another 30-odd per cent of so-called ‘Christian Nationalists’ – supporting an American war in order to hasten the Jewish Apocalypse as a prelude to Christ’s Second Coming (https://prri.org/research/support-for-christian-nationalism-in-all-50-states/); which makes up a pretty hefty minority overall. To this extent we can probably put some of the blame – or credit – on the shoulders of two of the Abrahamic religions; with the third of them – Islam – of course sharing much (most?) of the responsibility, on the other side.

Alternatively, of course it might after all be God’s will. To which I can only react – not anti-Semitically, I assure you – with Hilaire Belloc’s pithy little verse: ‘How odd of God/ To choose the Jews’. It will be interesting to examine how this one minority congregation could have come to accrue such influence over present-day international politics. There are several possibilities. But in any case, it must illustrate the extreme danger of bringing dogmatic and tribal religions into politics, at any level.