Key Takeaways:
- Iran is echoing America’s anti-Israel voices. Iranian officials are repeating claims from the far left and far right that Israel has dragged America into war.
- An old Jew-hating conspiracy is resurfacing. Claims that Israel controls US foreign policy revive historic accusations that Jews manipulate governments into fighting wars.
- Tehran is exploiting American divisions. Iran is amplifying anti-Israel rhetoric to undermine the US-Israel alliance and fuel Jew-hate.
On Sunday night, Donald Trump appeared on 60 Minutes to explain why his party had just been routed in the midterms. Last among his reasons, he offered this: there is “a great dislike, incredibly, for Israel.”
By Monday morning, Tehran had responded. Seyed Abbas Araghchi, the Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, wrote that Americans were “sick and tired of Israel bamboozling US administrations into Forever Wars.” In an interview with ABC News on October 19, Abdul El-Sayed, then the Democratic candidate for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat, declared: “An ally that takes your money to push you into wars you shouldn’t be fighting is not an ally.”
One sentence came from Tehran. The other came from Michigan. It is not easy to tell them apart.
Araghchi was not saying anything new. He was saying what Americans have been saying, loudly and for months, from both ends of the political spectrum. The same day, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei argued that Israel was pulling the United States into war, and The Times of Israel noted that his line echoed a message heard frequently on America’s hard left and hard right.
That is the story. Not that Iran’s regime hates Israel. We knew that, of course. The story is that the same arguments are now being made both inside America and by America’s enemies.
The Messenger
Araghchi is not a neutral observer of America. He is the chief diplomat of a regime that, in January, acknowledged that 3,117 people had died during nationwide protests while, unsurprisingly, denying responsibility for their deaths. Human rights groups say the true figure is far higher; one U.S.-based monitor had recorded more than 7,000 deaths by February. He also represents a regime with which America is currently at war.
This is the man now sharing his concern for America.
He is not alone in Tehran. When the Republicans lost the midterms, Iran’s parliament speaker and chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, wrote that Americans had said “NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message.” He warned that if Washington betrayed its own public “to serve international paymasters and blackmailers,” it would learn that Iran’s no “comes with a Nightmare.”
International paymasters. Blackmailers. These are not words about foreign policy. They are dog whistles about Jews, and every Jew who reads them knows it.
An American Chorus
On the right, the chorus of Araghchi’s message has been led by Tucker Carlson. Three days into the war, he declared: “This is Israel’s war. This is not the United States’ war.” He later told the BBC that America had gone to war at the “behest and then the demand of Israel.”
Candace Owens went further. On the day the strikes began, she posted that she stands against Israel. Within a week she was telling American servicemen and women to leave the military, because Trump “expects you to die for Israel.”
This is not a matter of a few heated posts. A study by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that Carlson and Owens had sharply increased their focus on Israel. More than 96% of Owens’ references to Israel were negative, and the researchers recorded a rise in her explicit Jew-hate.
Thomas Massie, the outgoing Kentucky congressman, announced the same day that the war was “not ‘America First’.” By July, Fox News was summarizing his argument as a nation “significantly weakened” by the war, all for Israel.
On the left, the language is often more subtle, as it has historically been. But the argument is the same.
Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of New York, called the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes “a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression” and told the world what Americans wanted: “Americans do not want this.” Araghchi, eight months later, made exactly the same move. He too claimed to speak for the American people.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, who has just won New York’s 13th district, described an “insatiable” war machine: “An American war machine, the Israeli war machine, that we fund with our tax dollars.” And El-Sayed, in his televised debate with Mike Rogers, said it plainly: “Israel has pushed us to go to war in Iran.” He then won.
El-Sayed’s record goes well beyond one debate line. Asked in that same debate whether Israel or Iran posed the greater threat to the United States, he again refused to choose. Both, he said, had proven dangerous: “One at risk of attacking us, one getting us into wars we have no business fighting.”
A man who now sits in the United States Senate could not say whether Israel, the Jewish state, or Iran, a regime openly hostile to America, posed the greater threat to his country. Now, Iran’s foreign minister is echoing the very same rhetoric.
Nor is this new for him. He has described Israel’s leadership as “as evil as Hamas” and has repeatedly declined to say directly whether Israel has a right to exist. After an attack on Temple Israel, a synagogue near Detroit, he condemned the violence, then added that “violence is a cycle” and “hurt people hurt people.” He later apologized to the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus.
Someone will tell me these people agree on almost nothing. That is true. Carlson and Mamdani would struggle to share a lunch table, let alone a platform. But on one point they speak with a single voice: the Jewish state drags America into wars America does not want. And now the Foreign Minister of Iran speaks with it too.
Strange Bedfellows
For years, Jews have warned about the red-green alliance: the coalition of the far left (red) and Islamists (green). In 2023, a study by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies found that this alliance had shielded American Islamist groups from scrutiny of their anti-Jewish statements and ideas. Its roots are often traced to 1979, when parts of the Western left greeted the Islamic Revolution in Iran as a blow against imperialism. That is the very regime Araghchi now serves.
On paper, the partners have little in common. Islamists want a religious order. The far left wants a secular one. What binds them is a shared enemy: the Jewish state, and America’s partnership with it.
That alliance has always been described in two colors, but it may soon need a third. Horseshoe theory holds that the far left and the far right, however distant they believe themselves to be, curve toward each other until they almost touch. On Jews, as the Forward has argued, the two extremes may tell different stories, but those stories follow the same script: the Jew is either the nationalist oppressor or the globalist schemer, and he is always pulling the strings.
The Iran war has bent the horseshoe almost closed. When Mamdani won New York, Carlson’s newsletter greeted the result by highlighting the minority of New York Jews who had voted for him. As the columnist Jonathan Tobin observed at the time, Carlson and his allies have far more in common with Mamdani than with the overwhelming majority of Republicans.
This is why the red-green alliance is unlikely to stay red and green. Carlson is not a socialist. Owens is not an Islamist. But on the question of the Jewish state, and of who is really steering American power, they have taken their seats on the same bench. Tehran, which has spent decades courting the far left, now finds it has admirers on the far right as well.
Even when the members of this new coalition turn on one another, Israel remains the explanation. Owens has suggested that Mamdani himself might be an Israeli plant.
That is what an obsession looks like. Whoever wins and whoever loses, the answer is the Jew.
An Old Accusation
None of this is new either. On September 11, 1941, at a rally of the America First Committee in Des Moines, Charles Lindbergh accused the Jews of pushing the United States into war. The slogan was the same. So was the accusation. Only the target has moved, from the Jews of America to the Jewish state.
This is how Jew-hate survives. It adapts. It borrows the language a society holds sacred, and today that language is anti-interventionism, affordability and the welfare of the American taxpayer. Then it points, once again, at the Jew.
The claim asks us to believe something extraordinary: that a country of ten million people can bamboozle the most powerful nation on earth into war, over and over, against its will. Nobody says Britain bamboozled America into Afghanistan. Nobody says Saudi Arabia controls the Pentagon. Only one ally is cast as the puppet master, and it is the Jewish one.
Remarkably, the president who launched the war himself rejected the claim. Trump said that if anything, he had dragged Israel in, not the other way around. It made no difference. The accusation was never about the evidence.
Who Benefits?
Tehran understands how this works better than most of the people quoted above. The most effective propaganda is the kind your enemy already believes. Iran’s regime does not need to invent a narrative about Jewish power in Washington. It only needs to repeat one. Araghchi seized on Trump’s words within hours, because the work had already been done for him.
Tehran’s officials have been candid about what they hope for. After the midterms, they celebrated the result as a rejection of the war, and Iran’s hard-line judiciary chief promised to impose “even more defeats” on Trump. They are not celebrating American peace. They are celebrating American division, and the oldest wedge they have ever had is the Jew.
For Jews in America, this is not an abstract argument. When the Jewish state is cast as the reason American soldiers die, and American families pay more at the pump, the Jews next door become its local representatives. That should trouble every person in this piece. It will not trouble all of them.
When the foreign minister of Iran can make his case simply by repeating yours, it is time to ask whose case you were making all along.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
