Of course the suggestion that Israel was behind Trump’s attack on Iran fits in with a venerable anti-Semitic trope – the one that attributes all the world’s wars to ‘the Jews’ – and is likely therefore to encourage accusations of Judenhetze against anyone who voices it. We sympathetic but still critical philo-Semites have become used to that over the past few years, whenever for example we raise the issue of Palestine. But this ‘weaponisation’ of anti-Semitism (see Asa Winstanley’s 2023 book of that title) should not discourage us from pointing out Israel’s – or its leaders’ – crimes when we think we see them. The latest of those crimes is the IDF’s murderous bombing of Lebanon over Easter, at the very moment when a cease-fire was agreed in the US-Israeli/Iran war, which had been widely assumed to cover the Israel/Lebanon conflict too.

The evidence that it was Netanyahu who dragged Trump into the war ‘by the nose’ is not conclusive, and won’t be until historians are given access to the diplomatic records in many years’ time. But enough has already been revealed to back up this case, including some fairly authoritative press reports (e.g. https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2026/04/10/from-netanyahus-persuasion-to-vances-concerns-how-trump-took-the-us-to-war-with-iran/; and https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/iran-war-israel-trump-netanyahu-peace-unlikely). To this we might add that Israel’s motives for the war are far more understandable – they’re to defend the state of Israel from a close hostile neighbour – than are America’s. To which might be added the consideration that the Jewish religion – judging by the Old Testament (or by my reading of it) – is more open to extreme violence in the cause of Judaism, than is the New Testament (or at least the four Gospels) in the cause of Christianity. That’s not to say that all Christians are or have ever been loyal to the pacifism implied in the Gospels (at least, again, by my reading of them); as is evidenced by the religious wars of the Middle Ages, especially the Crusades, and the tribal and faux Christianity that inspires the actions of so-called ‘Christian Nationalists’ like Pete Hegseth – now self-styled ‘Minister of War’ – in the USA. Hence the present row between the American President and the American Pope; on this issue Leo being, obviously, the more Christian of the two.

PS. If Trump is as good at ‘The Art of the Deal’ as he boasts he is – it was his major electoral selling point – why hasn’t he conducted the negotiations with Iran and Lebanon personally, instead of leaving them to numpties, who have clearly failed? Was it because he knew they would fail, and wanted to avoid the opprobrium?