Netanyahu and Trump Are Trying to Have It All

In the early morning hours of June 13, Israel launched an attack that had been prophesied in some form or another for nearly 20 years: a full-blown assault on Iran’s nuclear program and, in a move that shocked many observers, its entire military structure. The top brass of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and of Iran’s Armed Forces as a whole, has been assassinated. Critical nuclear facilities at Natanz and Fordow were bombarded with the intent to destroy. On Friday, Iran retaliated with multiple rounds of ballistic missiles in the heart of Tel Aviv, targeting Israel’s Ministry of Defense and reportedly other military bases in the area.

Israel’s justification for its attack hinged again on the specter of the “preemptive strike.” It’s a mythos dating back to the fiction that Egypt was planning an imminent attack on Israeli forces in 1967, and thus Israel was justified in “preemptively” destroying Egypt’s military power and occupying the Sinai, the Golan, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Here, the stakes are treated as just as high. Videos from the Israeli military extoll that they are fighting for the West’s future and that they had “no other choice” but to act against an existential threat — not just against the State of Israel, but against every country within range of Iran’s vast missile arsenal. 

Israel’s propaganda machine has been running full steam, lobbing claims about the amount of weapons-grade uranium Iran allegedly possesses, how many nuclear bombs it could thus produce, and how urgently Israel needed to strike at a perceived moment of weakness. This cavalcade almost obscures the extent to which the narrative surrounding the outbreak of this war has become one obscene contradiction, in which what one sees from President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can mean everything to everyone.

By finally igniting the war the Israeli establishment has been dreaming of for decades, Netanyahu can both work toward achieving the long-term goal of subjugating the region and, in the short term, shift domestic and international attention away from the horrors his military is committing in Gaza. Now the focus will be on war with Tehran, the capital of an adversary unparalleled in the Western mind. Reservists can be called up en masse not to do another tour in what is known to be an untenable quagmire, but for a higher cause — one that has not yet proven un-winnable.

Any prevailing concerns about religious parties in the Knesset overthrowing the Netanyahu cabinet can be put aside, as can worries about his corruption trial or his desire to overhaul the judiciary. Even the growing fear that Israel’s war machine is destroying its reputation can be overlooked for now. How, the thinking goes, can Israel be a pariah state if it is working in full coordination with the United States for its own self-defense?

By casting this new warfront as a bold move to preempt a fictional attack from a nonexistent nuclear bomb, Netanyahu can even confer the benefits of being a supposed peacemaker driven to reluctant action. He will be boosted by the narrative that he is the one pushing for a deal that was good for Israel, despite trying to assassinate one of the primary negotiators, Rear Adm. Ali Shamkhani, in one of the strikes on Tehran.

Trump, for his part, is also attempting to play both sides. Despite Netanyahu’s statement claiming U.S. coordination on the attack, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed it was a unilateral Israeli decision but one, of course, that America fully supported. Even so, Trump’s communications since the attack have indicated nothing short of full, unbridled support, acting as if he had no hand in an assault that achieved all of America’s preexisting objectives.

Like Netanyahu, Trump can continue to claim he still wants a diplomatic solution: for Iran to return to talks. After all, the “hardliner’s” are “all DEAD now,” as he wrote on Truth Social, so they should accept terms before it is too late. Both the faux anti-war crowd who backed Trump and the pro-war hawks have gotten what they wanted at the same time: an America supposedly uninvolved in difficult regime change wars that unleashed a proxy as an attack dog to slaughter Iranians however it sees fit.

The deceit that has led to this moment has been open and unabashed. “Trump and his aides were only pretending to oppose an Israeli attack in public,” Barak Ravid writes in Axios, “and didn’t express opposition in private. ‘We had a clear U.S. green light,’ one claimed.”

The question remains now how long this massive contradiction in messaging can sustain itself. A potential war with Iran has always been the quagmire of all quagmires, a maelstrom which all previous U.S. and Israeli administrations have avoided speeding into. Now that the bombs are falling, it’s clear the sails have been set. Can such a ship survive reality?