“There are a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your realm. Their laws are different from those of every other people’s, and they do not observe the king’s laws; therefore it is not befitting the king to tolerate them."- Esther 3:8
The latest accusation against Israel is as old as Jewish history itself: that the Jews, or now the Jewish state, manipulated a great power into war.
This time, the charge is that Israel “duped" Donald Trump into attacking Iran. Reuters reported that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the February 28, 2026 U.S.-Israeli strikes, and ever since, critics have pushed a familiar line: America was supposedly tricked into fighting Israel’s war.
But if one is going to make so grave an accusation, then one has an obligation to prove it.
That is the missing step in almost all of these arguments. To say that Israel “controls" American foreign policy, or that Jews “drag" the United States into war, is not ordinary criticism. It is an extraordinary charge of manipulation, coercion, and subversion. Such a claim requires evidence, not slogans; proof, not insinuation; specifics, not ideological hostility disguised as analysis.
Where is the memorandum? Where is the threat? Where is the instruction? Where is the evidence that an American president, cabinet, Congress, military, and intelligence establishment acted against their own judgment because Israel compelled them?
The accusation is always sweeping. The proof is almost always absent. And for good reason. The historical record does not support it. If Israel truly controlled Washington, then successive American presidents somehow failed to notice. Eisenhower forced Israel to withdraw from Sinai after the 1956 Suez Crisis. In 1991, after Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles at Israeli civilians, President George H. W. Bush pressed Israel not to retaliate in order to preserve the U.S.-led coalition. And in 2015, the Obama administration pursued the Iran nuclear deal despite Netanyahu’s vocal and public opposition. These are not marginal details. They cut straight through the fantasy that Israel commands American policy.
The same is true of the scurrilous invocation of “the lobby." Influence is not control. Advocacy is not conspiracy. And the obsession with Israel is revealing, because the same people who fixate on pro-Israel advocacy usually ignore far larger or more active foreign influence campaigns. A Quincy Institute analysis found that since 2016 Qatar spent nearly $250 million on 88 FARA-registered lobbying and public-relations firms, and from January 2021 through June 2025 its agents reported 627 in-person meetings with U.S. political contacts-more than any other country in the world. Yet the fixation remains on one ally, and one ally only, on Israel.
This is why the current accusation is not merely analytically weak. It is historically loaded.
For centuries, Jews have been portrayed not simply as different, but as subversive: a small people secretly shaping the destinies of nations, manipulating rulers, and profiting from bloodshed. Haman’s accusation in the Book of Esther was not only an ancient political libel. It established a template. Jews were to be seen as alien, disloyal, and dangerous precisely because they remained distinct.
That template did not disappear in modern politics. It surfaced again in prewar America. In his notorious September 11, 1941 speech in Des Moines, Charles Lindbergh identified “the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration" as the principal forces pushing America toward war. The pattern is unmistakable: when danger rises, the Jew is recast as the hidden instigator.
The pattern did not end with World War II. It reappeared after September 11 in a form that was both modern and instantly recognizable. Not long after the terrorist attacks in which nearly 3,000 people were murdered in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, the lie spread that thousands of Jews or Israelis had been warned to stay home because Mossad itself was behind the operation. The Anti-Defamation League documented both the rapid spread of the false “4,000 Jews stayed home" rumor and the broader ecosystem of antisemitic claims casting Jews and Israel as the real authors of 9/11. It also warned that these theories had become a virtual industry of books, pamphlets, videotapes, websites, and speakers.
That matters because it shows the mechanism clearly. When catastrophe strikes, Jews are not merely accused of exploiting it. They are accused of secretly engineering it. The charge changes costume, but not substance. The old myth of Jewish world manipulation simply updates itself for a new century. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" gets a modern accent and a new set of talking points.
The same pattern resurfaced after the Iraq War. A vocal minority argued that the 2003 invasion was not a misguided American decision but a war conceived and driven by Jews for Israel. Because several prominent officials and intellectuals associated with the war were Jewish, they were cast not as Americans acting on their own convictions, however right or wrong, but as agents of a foreign state.
Yet that claim, too, collapsed on contact with reality. Gallup reported in 2007 that Jewish Americans opposed the Iraq War by better than three to one. A widely cited 2005 AJC survey similarly found strong Jewish opposition. Those facts do not fit the conspiracy, so they are usually ignored.
This is what makes the charge so dangerous. It is not merely criticism of Israel, nor even criticism of American policy. Nations can and should be criticized. Alliances can and should be debated. But the argument that Jews are the hidden hand behind war is something darker and older. It does not describe a policy disagreement. It revives the image of the Jew as conspirator, corrupter, and puppet master-the image that animated the Protocols and so much of the political antisemitism that followed. Britannica describes the Protocols plainly: a fraudulent document long used as a rationale for antisemitism.
What is being said today about Israel and America is not new, sophisticated, or insightful. It is the same ancient poison in modern language: the claim that Jews cannot merely defend themselves, argue their case, or pursue their interests like any other nation, but must always be scheming in the shadows, seducing empires into war for their own sinister ends.
That lie has followed the Jewish people from Shushan to Des Moines to September 11 to the present. It has justified exclusion, persecution, and slaughter. And it is resurfacing now because too many people still find it easier to believe in a Jewish conspiracy than to face the harder truth: America acts because America has interests, Israel acts because Israel is under threat, and the obsession with blaming the Jew remains one of history’s most durable forms of moral cowardice. Haman would recognize it instantly. We should too.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of The National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewry from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.