The Jews Did It

Armageddon is Back!

It was a dark and breezy night in Israel in 1996. Bibi Netanyahu was running for prime minister and this was one of his closing rallies. Thousands of people in a field, a vivid demonstration of Netanyahu’s base. Three groups stood out. The largest was the Mizrahi (Sephardic, mostly Middle Eastern) poor who were tired of Ashkenazi Labor Party socialists running the country. (I’d been with Bibi when he was mobbed by supporters in a Tel Aviv slum a few days earlier.) The smallest group was the most noticeable: Falashas, black Jews from Ethiopia, who saw Bibi’s Likud coalition as the easier path to assimilation, certainly easier than the haughty, European Ashkenazis.

The third group was truly bizarre: American Evangelical Christians. There were a couple of hundred of them, making a spectacle of themselves at the right of the stage, waving banners and raising chants. Ah yes, Bibi as the avatar of Biblical end times (at least, according to the weirdest book in the Bible, Revelation). The historic restoration of Israel was an omen. Armageddon was nigh. Israel had to be strong; Jesus was coming to do battle against the Muslim forces of darkness. (Hilariously, Hezbollah’s cult of weirdo Shi’ite extremists, called the Twelvers, also believed the myth—only in their case, the 12th Imam was going to destroy us infidels.)

Actually, I was once went to Armageddon. It’s a town in the Jezreel valley, southeast of Haifa. Its Hebrew name is Megiddo…and it is a vast rolling plain of farmland—wheat, I believe—that could have served Cecil B. DeMille as the perfect set for the Final Battle. I mention this if Martin Scorsese or Paul Thomas Anderson are location-scouting. Because Armageddon is back.

Indeed, there are reports that some American military commanders have told their troops that the war in Iran is part of a divine plan. According to Middle East Eye, a London-based newsletter, one commander expostulated:

“President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

“He had a big grin on his face when he said all of this, which made his message seem even more crazy,” the NCO wrote in his complaint. “Our commander would probably be described as a ‘Christian First’ supporter. He has been this way for a very long time and makes it clear that he desires all of us under him to become just like him as a Christian.”

Now, I suspect there is less here than meets the eye. The details are sketchy—but there is a whiff of the plausible to the idea that a few wacko military commanders have done this sort of thing. The myth of Armageddon has all the delusional elements of transcendent Christian meshuggas: A warrior Jesus, a vicious and barbaric enemy…and an army of Jews! We Yids play an essential role: cannon fodder. A perfect metaphor for the enduring belief that Christians have supplanted Jews as God’s chosen people. In some Evangelical versions of the tale, Armageddon is accompanied by an event called The Rapture, during which all true Christians are seconded (“caught up”) to heaven and non-believers (i.e. Abrahamists, Jews and Muslims) are left to die on scorched earth.

Well, you had to figure that if the world is coming to an end, the Jews—who represent 0.2% of the global population had to be at the heart of it.

The Rapturists are the benign crazy uncles of the anti-semitic Iran war frenzy. There is real malignancy at foot as well, growing left, right and center. And at the root of that is the belief that Israel hornswoggled the USA into war with Iran. As the New York Times reported:

President Trump on Tuesday tried to tamp down an uproar over whether Israel had dragged the United States into a war with Iran, but he and top officials offered contradictory explanations for why, exactly, Mr. Trump had ordered military action.

Many of the president’s anti-interventionist supporters were already skeptical about the joint U.S.-Israel military campaign. The backlash exploded on Monday after Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested the United States faced an imminent threat because Israel was about to attack Iran.

If Israel attacked, Mr. Rubio explained, Iran was poised to retaliate against U.S. forces.

Now Trump quickly denied that. And Rubio did a speedy 180 as well, but that didn’t stop the left and right extremes from having a massive AHA! moment. The Jews did it! On the oleaginous left, you had Gavin Newsom, in the midst of his I’m-Not-As-Attractive-As-All-That book tour, calling Israel an “apartheid” state and wondering whether we should “rethink” our military alliance with the country. Joining in was the anachronistic left-magazine, the American Prospect, which cited Rubio—without mentioning his retraction—and called for the end of the military alliance.

On the right, there was the usual array of primates, led by Tucker Carlson, saying that the Jews were behind the whole thing. According to Perplexity:

Tucker Carlson used the Iran strikes to resurrect the antisemitic theory that Israel or “the Jews” orchestrated or had foreknowledge of 9/11 and have “orchestrated U.S. involvement in other conflicts through manufactured intelligence,” presenting Jewish influence as a “demonic” hidden force dragging America into war..

And even my old centrist pal Andrew Sullivan has expressed concern:

In plain English, this is what is in front of our nose: a corrupt, deranged monarch pursuing an illegal and immoral war primarily to benefit a foreign country. This war makes us a textbook case of how democracies stagger into tyranny and endless war.

I don’t think the story is as easy as all that, but it’s playing in the fever swamps. Of the greatest consequence is a recent Gallup poll which indicates that 41% of Americans favor the Palestinian cause and 36% favor Israel. There used to be, and should be, a natural American constituency for the democratic state of Israel, the rectification of history on the Jews’ ancient homeland. The very opposite of the Left’s colonialist oppressor-oppressed fantasy. Here, the oppressed drove out the oppressors, made the desert bloom and fought bravely against extremist enemies. That legacy was never quite as pure as it was cracked up to be, but it was a mighty story. And now it has been squandered. A possible conclusion: an arrogant and desperate Bibi Netanyahu sure screwed this up.

And what do I think?

An arrogant and desperate Bibi Netanyahu sure screwed this up.

With a few caveats.

I remain a two-state solution guy. There may be a dozen or so of us left. I also believe that a strong reaction against Hamas was necessary after October 7…but not that strong, not leveling Gaza, not Trumpist fantasizing about GazVegas. I am equally infuriated by the violence that Jewish settlers on the West Bank are visiting upon the Palestinian residents there. The Iran war gives cover to a multitude of atrocities. And, like most other people with half a brain, I have heard no reasonable theory of why Trump went ahead and did this. I don’t buy the “Bibi Made Me Do It” scenario, even though this is a war Netanyahu wanted: kick Iran when it’s down. I don’t believe Iran represented an imminent or long-term threat to the United States. Indeed, the true reasons for this war probably are lodged deep in Trump’s fervent fantasy life. The White House is—and this is truly incredible—putting out a series of hell-yeah video game-style mashups to celebrate the action. Trump has come to love war. It is the ultimate form of bullying. In his frenzied mind, it may well go like this: If I can do it in Venezuela, I can do it in Iran.

I would hope, though, that Israel would not be collateral damage to the president’s sociopathy. Not that I’ve been an unquestioning supporter of the Israeli government and certainly not of Natanyahu’s recent desperate iterations. In fact, the Anti-Defamation League once criticized me for writing about a group of “Jewish Neo-Conservatives” who had conflated Israel’s national security with our own and were pushing John McCain’s presidential campaign toward war with Iran. This had the disadvantage of being true. But to the ADL, it smacked of the anti-Semitic trope of “dual loyalty.” In other words, you can’t trust the Jews—they might seem patriotic, but they’re really out for their own interests.

Actually, I do have dual loyalty, as do most Jews. Only it’s not the conspiracy theory that the anti-semites and semitophiles imagine. It goes something like this: My primary loyalty is to America, period. At the same time, I root for Israel to survive and thrive and make peace with its neighbors—but never at America’s expense. I was proud that Joe Biden responded with passion and arms after October 7. But I would also vote to support a UN resolution backing a Palestinian state.

I have thought a lot about these issues over the past fifty years. I have visited the region frequently. I have talked to hundreds of people on both sides (including the Hamas leadership) and, on occasion, found myself in the midst of scary kinetics. But still I persist, a two-state guy, which makes me guilty of triple loyalty, I suppose. I can name a plausible Palestinian leadership that would recognize Israel’s right to exist—its leader, Marwan Barghouti, is currently in an Israeli prison for his role in the second intifada. I think the US should continue to provide Israel with arms, but only defensive weapons, like the Patriot missiles. I also think Trump’s war will turn out to be a very good thing if it ends the Islamic Republic, a truly vile concoction. But I suspect the chances of that are minimal.

Given recent—or ancient—history, we play a weak hand when it comes to anything more ambitious than pinpoint strikes (like those Trump launched last summer). Almost everything transformative we’ve tried militarily in the region has failed. The locals—Sunni and Shi’a, Arab and Aryan—see us as imperialist usurpers. And you cannot wish away the embarrassing fanaticism of parts of the American Jewish Community, especially AIPAC, which is obeisant to any nonsense Bibi proposes, including the West Bank settlements. The notion that this war might make Netanyahu more comfortable on his throne, while bringing an intermittent campaign of terror to our shores, is terrible to contemplate. But not impossible.

I’ll close with another anecdote from Israel, also from 1996. After Bibi won, I went to a ceremony in Jerusalem, welcoming new immigrants. A large theater was filled with them. Most were Russian, of course. But there were large numbers from other places, from Iraq, from Yemen, Falashas from Ethiopia…and there were Iranians, who were spectacular. Specifically, an Iranian trio, austere in white shirts and black pants—a tabla player and string player with flaming red hair, and a silver-haired singer—who simply rocked the joint, laying down a compulsive beat that escalated and mesmerized. I heard a shout: a group of Itranians seated behind me to the right were up and dancing. And then another shout, from the left side of the auditorium: the Falashas were up. And then the other Middle Eastern Jews, and finally the Russians.

And then we were all up, and dancing, and crying. All of us Jews, but different—a rootless cosmopolitan gathering, as Stalin might have noted, joyous in the realization of common roots. There is no possible way, Governor Newsom, that this could be described as apartheid: you are playing political games to appease the left at the expense of the Jewish people. I’ve not been to many countries where a trans-national epiphany like that could have happened. It might certainly happen in New York or London…but it also happens in Israel. We, as American mongrels, need to remember that Israel is a mongrel state, too, including a significant professional class of Palestinians who have been free to succeed as doctors and builders. That country deserves our support, but it needs to be very conscious that our support can not be unconditional, that “mowing the grass” in Gaza and Iran can not be part of the bargain.

This needs to happen very quickly, especially in the American Jewish community. It needs to stand up against Netanyahu; it needs to support a two-state solution. We don’t want to find out what happens if the pro-Hamas lunatics on the left and right-wing anti-semites retain any purchase on American public opinion. You don’t want a Gavin Newsom v Tucker Carlson presidential campaign in 2028.