If you thought AIPAC was a problem, then Section 224 of the “United States-Israel Defence Technology Cooperation Initiative” should really have you concerned. The Israeli government is increasingly aware of the American people’s pushback against AIPAC money in US politics; it has become like a festering sore on US politics, especially after the start of the Iran War, which many see as the US pandering to the foreign policy objectives of Benjamin Netanyahu.
It reminds me of when Bill Clinton reportedly said of Netanyahu, after his first meeting with him in 1996:
“Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”
Thirty years later, it seems Trump should be asking himself the same question, because right now, it appears Israel dictates US Middle East policy.
There’s now plenty of evidence to suggest that Netanyahu played a major role in convincing Trump to strike Iran. Nobody can say with any certainty that Netanyahu was the catalyst for Trump’s decision, but history shows that since the mid-1990s, Netanyahu had been on a mission to encourage the US to remove the Iranian regime. So vociferous has Netanyahu been with his obsession with Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb that it has become an international joke, as he rolls out cartoon depictions of a bomb at every available opportunity.
Much has been written about Netanyahu being the cause of Trump pulling the trigger on February 28th 2026. I believe one of the best accounts comes from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in a New York Times piece, which centres on research for their upcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” I would strongly recommend that you read the piece linked above, which is paywall-free.
In it, they note:
Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.
It goes on:
Mr. Netanyahu delivered his presentation in a confident monotone. It seemed to land well with the most important person in the room, the American president.
Sounds good to me, Mr. Trump told the prime minister. To Mr. Netanyahu, this signaled a likely green light for a joint U.S.-Israeli operation.
It was a deadly cocktail of Netanyahu, the master manipulator, painting the picture of a glorious victory to a malignant narcissist president emboldened by his seizure of Venezuelan oil, on which he looked set to make a pretty penny. Be in no doubt, Netanyahu was NOT going to miss an opportunity he had been waiting 30 years to seize. I would note that while I believe his presentation in the Situation Room sealed the deal, no decision was made until days later.
As you would expect, the intelligence community, led by the CIA, carried out an analysis of Netanyahu’s presentation. Haberman and Swan’s reporting took into account the CIA analysis :
They had broken down Mr. Netanyahu’s presentation into four parts. First was decapitation — killing the ayatollah. Second was crippling Iran’s capacity to project power and threaten its neighbors. Third was a popular uprising inside Iran. And fourth was regime change, with a secular leader installed to govern the country.
The U.S. officials assessed that the first two objectives were achievable with American intelligence and military power. They assessed that the third and fourth parts of Mr. Netanyahu’s pitch, which included the possibility of the Kurds mounting a ground invasion of Iran, were detached from reality.
Nowhere in his presentation does it appear that the critical question of the likelihood of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz arise. With regard to the wider Netanyahu presentation, John Ratcliffe:
The C.I.A. director used one word to describe the Israeli prime minister’s regime change scenarios: “farcical.”
At that point, Mr. Rubio cut in. “In other words, it’s bullshit,” he said.
Mr. Ratcliffe added that given the unpredictability of events in any conflict, regime change could happen, but it should not be considered an achievable objective.
I would absolutely recommend you read the full report, which is excellent, as you would expect from Haberman and Swan.
There’s no question that when Trump pulled the trigger to inflict this act of global economic madness, he saw it as what would be another smash and grab of oil, as had been the case in Venezuela. There’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind that Netanyahu had sold Trump a tantalising, quick, glorious win that would paint him as a hero. Despite warnings from those who knew better, hubris led him to give the green light.
Given the lack of planning for the day after in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, you would have expected that lessons had been learned. Alas, in the words of Netanyahu’s useful idiot:
“They weren’t supposed to go after these other countries in the Middle East …. They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait. Nobody expected that”
I’m afraid EVERYBODY expected that, Mr President, just as they expected them to close the Strait of Hormuz. The most generous assumption that could have been made was that Iran would capitulate before it had the opportunity to close it. But you would have to be a lunatic to make that assumption.
As a measure of the strategic disconnect from reality, Marco Rubio told Fox Business:
“It’s economic suicide for them if they do it, and we retain options to deal with that.”
One can only assume that this represented either strategic incompetence or an arrogance amounting to a dereliction of duty. I simply don’t accept that US military planners didn’t advise that this was exactly what would happen. From Rubio’s statement, I can only assume that he assessed that the US could use military force to reopen it, yet here we are. Trump has no options; he has burned every bridge with allies; the Gulf States are left with a huge trust deficit when it comes to US protection; and the US military refuses to admit there’s a problem.
In further reporting in the New York Times on June 2nd, Michael Crowley noted:
In mid-February, shortly before President Trump launched the war on Iran, the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps conducted live-fire drills in its coastal waters. Iranian state media publicized the exercise, whose official name made its purpose clear: “Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz.”
The exercise amounted to a flashing red warning light to the Trump administration — one that, for reasons that are still not fully clear, went largely unheeded.
We must then return to the arrogant assumption that nobody can defeat the mighty US military, so there’s no need to be concerned. I’m sure that’s exactly what Trump’s buddy and indicted war criminal Putin thought on the day he crossed the Ukrainian border.
Crowly notes that for years, the US had run simulations on a US attack on Iran, and the conclusions were always the same:
Over and over, participants say, they concluded that Iran would respond to a major American attack by closing the strait of Hormuz.
“Every single time, the first thing we focused on was the strait — without exception,” said Dennis B. Ross, a senior national security official in the Obama White House.
Trump now finds himself paralysed with no escape route but to release billions of dollars in Iranian frozen assets and lift sanctions; even then, once Iran achieves its objectives, what’s to stop it from closing the Strait again whenever they want to apply pressure on Israel? The war is lost, Netanyahu is now facing elections later in the year, along with Trump, and this debacle is catastrophic for both.
Iran has proved that they hold the cards to stop Israel advancing North of the Litani River. They demonstrated this by walking away from peace talks with the US until Trump put Netanyahu back on the leash; they proved that far from having no cards, they hold all the cards. In addition, Iran proved once again that they can attack their neighbours at will, as demonstrated by their attacks on Kuwait and Bahrain, in response to the US attacking a tanker heading to Iran. I really don’t understand what it is about. There is no military solution to this problem that people are struggling with. Take a look at the graph below; this is what a bleeding-out global economic crisis looks like.
If you take all of the above in the round, it is hardly surprising that support for Israel has tanked, not just in the US but across Western democracies as a whole. Never in recent history has the world given a rogue nation such free rein to murder its enemies with little to no consequences. I certainly can’t think of a single example where the murder of tens of thousands of civilians deemed by the International Criminal Court to be a crime against humanity is free to redefine murder as ‘self-defence ’.
As a testament to the power the Jewish Lobby’s hold over the US government, we are about to witness the most egregious act of deception on the American people. An attempt to redefine the relationship between the US and the Israeli military. The move, if passed, will redefine US military strategic posture and the geopolitical order for the foreseeable future. You know there is something strange going on when, as reported by Daniel Edelson of ynetnews.com:
[A] proposal, advanced by Republican Reps. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana and Abe Hamadeh of Arizona, would end direct military assistance when the current U.S.-Israel security agreement expires in 2028 and establish a new framework centered on Israeli purchases of American weapons.
If you’re unhappy with the current $3.8 billion no-strings-attached military aid supplied every year, you might want to do your happy dance. Before you get too excited, the regime is about to quietly address the growing disquiet. They intend to shift the military aid model to a ‘trade model.’ This allows the US government to shield joint ‘classified’ ventures from oversight and inquisitive reporters. As noted by Haley Fuller from military.com on June 3rd:
A provision tucked into the House Armed Services Committee’s draft version of the Fiscal Year 2027 defense policy bill could move the U.S.-Israel military relationship beyond traditional aid and into a far deeper form of defense-industrial integration.
Her reporting continues :
[Section 224] would require the defence secretary to designate an executive agent to coordinate U.S.-Israel defence technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration and industrial cooperation. It specifically describes the provision as covering bilateral defence technology work, integration and industrial cooperation.
… it would move the relationship beyond traditional military aid and into a far deeper system of defense-industrial integration that would be harder for Congress, taxpayers, and even future administrations, to monitor or unwind.
If you would like a more detailed analysis of the move, I highly recommend Ben Freeman’s piece for Responsible Statecraft from May 29th 2026. Freeman writes:
…It would give the Israeli government the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in U.S. politics: jobs in the U.S. By expanding or starting new co-production facilities like it already has in Mississippi and Arkansas, the Israeli government could boast of providing jobs on U.S. soil, thereby securing allies among members of Congress who represent the districts where those jobs lie.
The result could well be a U.S. political system even more susceptible to the whims of an Israeli government that seemingly has no qualms about drawing the U.S. into military conflicts in the Middle East.
For reference, Ben is Director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute and the author of "The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home" (2025)
If you want to read the actual draft of the bill, you can find it here. I’ll conclude this important piece by saying, do not believe this regime when it tells you it’s taking steps to cut military aid to Israel; it is just reimagining it in a far more dangerous and opaque way that will shift the relationship into the shadows with little by way of oversight. Every American should be raising objections to this move with their elected representative. Be assured, as many Democrats will be prepared to support it as Republicans; that’s a measure of how much influence Israel has in US politics.
Netanyahu finely found a corrupt orange clown to do his bidding
Chilling, in its documenting our subservient relationship with Israel