When the Alibi Breaks |
This war has awakened not only a dispute over Israel’s right to defend itself. It has awakened something darker: the question of whether Israel has the right to exist at all as a place of Jewish life on earth. Once debate shifts from criticism of actions to doubt about existence itself, the issue is no longer policy, strategy, or proportionality. It becomes, once again, the older question Jews know too well: whether they may exist not only in the memory of others, but also in a place of their own.
When the Alibi Breaks
The Fracture in America
Earlier this month, in “Dragged in: America’s alibi politics,” I argued that the most dangerous lie in Washington was never simply the claim that America might be pulled into war by Israel. The deeper lie was procedural and moral at once: act first, then narrate the act as pressure from somewhere else. That was never analysis. It was a technique of deferred responsibility. What has changed now is that this alibi is no longer confined to commentary. It is entering the bloodstream of American politics itself.
The numbers are already severe. Support for Israel in the United States has eroded sharply, above all among Democrats and independents. The ground was already shifting before the present war with Iran had fully imposed its political cost. The war did not create the fracture. It exposed it, accelerated it, and gave it a sharper language.
Then came the more explosive signal: the resignation of Joe Kent from the National Counterterrorism Center in the Trump administration. Kent wrote that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States and that “we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful lobby.” One may accept that judgment or reject it. Either way, its significance is unmistakable. The language of displacement has crossed from polemics into the security apparatus itself. The alibi has become administrative speech.
This should alarm Israel. A state can survive criticism. It can survive hostile editorials, campus slogans, and diplomatic scolding. What it cannot easily survive is a mutation in the grammar of alliance. Once support for Israel is narrated inside the United States not as a strategic choice but as evidence of captured decision-making, the problem is no longer ordinary disagreement. It becomes a problem of legitimacy. And legitimacy, once punctured, rarely leaks in only one direction.
The war with Iran is now exposing something larger than a dispute over one campaign or one administration. In many societies it is reactivating anti-American feeling under the cover of strategic commentary. The fantasy being sold is........