The 'Israel controls America' myth has a long history - and an antisemitic foundation - opinion

ByMICHA DANZIGNOVEMBER 13, 2026 23:53

When Britain followed America into Iraq in 2003, the British press had a word for Tony Blair: “poodle.” The junior partner, the logic ran, trotted after the superpower. Nobody in London or Washington suggested Blair had seized control of the Pentagon or of George W. Bush.

Twenty-three years later, America and Israel went to war against Iran together, and a loud faction of the American Right reached the opposite conclusion about the junior partner. Tucker Carlson called it “Israel’s war” and said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a “hammerlock” over the American government. Since the midterms, the populist post-mortems have hardened that line into doctrine. In their telling, a country of 10 million led the world’s greatest military power by the nose.

That claim does not survive contact with the history of American coalition warfare.

The history of America's wars

Start with how America entered two world wars.

In 1917, Britain did not wait politely for American sympathy. Its codebreakers in Room 40 intercepted the Zimmermann Telegram, Germany’s offer to help Mexico reclaim Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Part of that interception ran through America’s own diplomatic cable line, which Woodrow Wilson had let Berlin use for peace messages and which Britain was quietly tapping.

To hide that it had been reading American diplomatic cables, London obtained a second copy in Mexico City and passed that one to Washington as its source. Meanwhile, Wellington House, Britain’s secret propaganda bureau, ran a dedicated campaign aimed at American newspapers, professors, and clergy. This was a foreign government spying on American communications and trying to stage-manage what Americans saw, to pull America into a war that threatened Britain far more than it threatened New York or Ohio.

Historians treat all of that as alliance diplomacy, and a shrewd piece of it. None of them describes it as British control of the American government.

When Americans later went looking for someone to blame, they found other targets. In the 1930s, senator Gerald Nye’s committee pinned the war on bankers and munitions makers, the “merchants of death.” By 1941, Nye was the driving force behind Senate hearings on Hollywood “war propaganda,” and he was naming its Jewish studio heads.

Henry Ford, an open antisemite, went further. His Dearborn Independent spent years serializing “The International Jew,” and Ford insisted that Jewish financiers had caused World War I. Britain did the actual lobbying. The Jews got the conspiracy.

The pattern repeated with more precision in 1940 and 1941. British Security Coordination, run by William Stephenson out of Rockefeller Center, conducted one of the most aggressive foreign influence operations ever mounted on American soil. It planted stories, targeted isolationist politicians, and, several historians have concluded, produced a forged “Nazi map” of a carved-up South America. Franklin Roosevelt brandished that map in his Navy Day speech in October 1941.

No one wrote that Winston Churchill was pulling Roosevelt’s strings.

Then, on September 11, 1941, Charles Lindbergh stood up in Des Moines and named the three groups pushing America toward war: the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration. Only one of those three charges depended on a myth, and that is the one still in circulation.

Across the Atlantic, Hitler had already told the Reichstag that if “international finance Jewry” plunged the nations into another world war, the Jews in Europe would pay with their annihilation. Nazi propaganda spent the next six years calling the war a Jewish war. Lindbergh told the same lie in an American accent.

Parallels in other international wars

Run the test anywhere else. In 1950, North Korea threatened South Korea’s existence and America’s only indirectly. Harry S. Truman sent troops, and nearly 37,000 Americans died. No one accused Syngman Rhee of controlling the White House.

In 1990, Kuwait’s exiled rulers bankrolled a public relations campaign through Hill & Knowlton. It put a teenage girl before a congressional caucus with a story about Iraqi soldiers tearing babies from incubators. She turned out to be the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter, and the story collapsed. That was a foreign government trying to manipulate Congress toward war, on the record. Kuwait never became a “puppet master.” It got a liberation and a thank-you.

Today, American planners openly debate fighting China over Taiwan. The island’s survival matters far more to Taipei than to Topeka or Peoria. No one claims Taiwan controls Congress.

So here is the rule of every alliance in modern American history. The senior, more powerful partner leads. The junior partner follows, lobbies, flatters, and sometimes tries to manipulate, and gets called a client, a beneficiary, or a poodle. Blair was the poodle. Rhee was the client. Kuwait was the beneficiary.

Israel is the only exception. Only with the Jewish state does the far smaller and weaker partner become the “master” and the superpower become the “dog.” No fact explains that reversal. Israel’s population is less than 3% of America’s, and its economy is about 2% the size of America’s. Its air force flies American jets, and its arsenal relies heavily on American munitions. The only thing that can turn the weaker ally into the hidden hand is the belief that Jews wield secret, outsized power over governments.

That belief has a name. The IHRA definition of antisemitism lists it explicitly: the myth of Jews collectively controlling governments. The people repeating “Israel’s war” would never apply the same standard to Britain, Kuwait, South Korea, or Taiwan. Take away the double standard and their argument has nothing left.

Their argument also erases America’s own grievance. Iran made itself America’s enemy without Israel. It held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Its Hezbollah proxy killed 241 American service members in Beirut in 1983. The State Department attributes over 600 American troop deaths in Iraq to Iranian-backed militias. Iranian agents plotted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington in 2011, and American prosecutors have charged IRGC operatives in plots against John Bolton and President Donald Trump.

“Death to America” was never a translation error. America had its own reasons to fight, written in its own soldiers’ blood.

And Israel has done what no “puppet master” would. For 75 years, from 1948 through October 2023, it fought every war without a single American combat soldier beside it.

Americans are free to argue that this war was a mistake, badly managed, or too costly. Those are real debates. “Israel made us do it” is not one of them. It is Henry Ford’s newspaper and Lindbergh’s speech, reprinted for a new audience with a podcast microphone. The “poodle” never holds the leash. Anyone who insists this one does isn’t describing Israel. He’s describing what he believes about “the Jews.”

Follow us on Google

---