never learn anything.
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The American Prospect
America and the World
Time to End the American-Israeli Alliance
Alliances are built on shared interests. Those do not exist here.
by Ryan Cooper
March 5, 2026
A photo illustration showing Netanyahu and Trump shaking hands in front of the US Capitol in blue.
Credit: Photo illustration by Lauren Pfeil. Sources: Alex Brandon/AP Photo; Mikhail Makarov/iStock.
If Secretary of State Marco Rubio is to be believed, Israel basically buffaloed the Trump administration into starting a war with Iran. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” he told reporters recently. “Obviously, we were aware of Israeli intentions and understood what that would mean for us, and we had to be prepared to act as a result of it.”
That doesn’t excuse Trump’s decision, of course, but it is a plausible read of the situation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu basically said as much: “This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” And as I have previously written, only an Israeli goal of turning Iran into a failed state can explain their repeated assassination of any figure who could possibly consolidate the reins of power.
More from Ryan Cooper: Can Congress stop Mad King Trump’s mad war?
All this is leading to a further acceleration of the erosion in pro-Israel sentiment in the Democratic Party. As my colleague Harold Meyerson pointed out, California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom, a shameless political weather vane if ever there was one, is now calling Israel an apartheid state and suggesting its subsidies be cut off.
Frankly, it’s long overdue.
Let’s review some history. Putin’s Russia was fervently criticized for interfering in the 2016 election by hacking the emails of the DNC and John Podesta, and dribbling them out strategically to create maximum negative media attention on Hillary Clinton, and the criticism was deserved. But Israeli officials meddle much more blatantly than that in American elections all the time. Netanyahu all but openly campaigned for Mitt Romney in 2012, and obviously favored Trump in 2024.
Netanyahu also meddles in top-level American policy decisions. He testified before Congress in 2002 supporting the Iraq invasion, and categorically promised that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons. He gave a speech in 2015 attempting to stop President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. And for decades now, he and other Israeli officials have attempted to bait the U.S. into attacking Iran.
Israeli spies also have conducted the most serious espionage against the American government of any supposed ally (with the possible exception of France), including spying on secret talks with Iranian officials back in the mid-2010s and leaking them to members of Congress, again to undermine the nuclear deal. Jonathan Pollard, one of the most notorious spies in U.S. history, was sentenced to life in prison in 1985 for selling huge quantities of classified documents to Israel. He was released in 2015 and has since moved to Israel, where he is something of a national hero, and spends his time advocating for the full-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
And now, it seems, America is conducting a full-scale war of aggression as a courtesy to our great ally.
So: Israel collects tens of billions of dollars in American subsidies, constantly meddles in American politics and steals American secrets, treats the trillion-dollar American military as its personal plaything, demands (and receives) free use of the American veto on the U.N. Security Council, so that it can contemptuously ignore U.N. resolutions to halt its illegal annexations of Palestinian land. In return, America gets … its international reputation severely tarnished by the resulting association.
Pick your foreign relations school of thought: hard-nosed realpolitik, liberal internationalism, socialist humanitarianism, or straight up brute selfishness; this “alliance” makes no sense.
From a perspective of protecting Jews, Israel is arguably doing more harm than good—particularly for American Jews, who constitute the largest Jewish population outside Israel itself. Israel and its apologists have for decades cynically leveraged the taboo against antisemitism to shut down any criticism of its behavior. This became a full-blown frenzy after October 7th, as Israel partisans desperately tried to muffle criticism of its inarguably genocidal attacks on Gazan civilians.
Accusing anyone who criticized Israeli war crimes as being akin to Hitler seriously undermined what was once the widespread abhorrence of antisemitism, and hence helped fuel a movement of outright Jew hatred that is growing all around the world, mostly on the political right but also in pockets of the left. The situation is also not helped, to say the least, by pro-Israel political organizations like AIPAC behaving like a David Duke conspiracy theory—spending millions in secret on wildly dishonest ads to install its preferred candidates.
The world’s richest man is throwing Nazi salutes at a presidential inauguration. Nick Fuentes, who openly admires Hitler, is a rising star among American conservatives, and dined with Trump. Yet instead of focusing all their energy on confronting this threat, ostensibly pro-Jewish rights organizations like the Anti-Defamation League burned up their credibility defending Israel’s indefensible foreign policy. The ADL treated Elon Musk in particular with the softest of kid gloves. It’s obscene.
Israel is not only a major hindrance to American interests, but it is also overtly opposed to the best version of America: the “mother of exiles,” a beacon of freedom and universal human rights, and a haven for all the oppressed peoples of the world, Jews very much included.
It is a sad irony that Zionism, in its current form at least, has turned out to be quite similar to other ultranationalist projects around the world, from Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia to Action Française in France, that are almost invariably fervently antisemitic. But that’s obviously what Israel has become, and where it belongs: alongside other corrupt, violent ethnonationalist states like Russia or Hungary.
Read more
Gavin Newsom—GAVIN NEWSOM!—Calls Israel ‘Sort of an Apartheid State’
And calls for stopping U.S. military aid to the nation.
by Harold Meyerson
March 4, 2026
Can Congress Stop Mad King Trump’s Mad War on Iran?
With Republicans in charge, probably not.
by Ryan Cooper
March 4, 2026
Whatever It Takes
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has gone to great lengths to cling to power.
by David B. Green
March 4, 2026
Tagged:America and the World, antisemitism, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, foreign policy, intelligence, Iran, Israel-Palestine, Middle East, Politics, United Nations
Ryan Cooper
rcooper@prospect.org
Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at The American Prospect, and author of How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics. He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs. More by Ryan Cooper
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