‘This war is the result of a coup’

The Israeli regime’s deep penetration into the US government is not a new story, if this is not to state the obvious. Via the Zionist lobbies in Washington, Israel more or less owns both houses of Congress. The same is emphatically true of the Trump administration itself: Israel and its Zionist supporters in the United States have groomed Trump since he began his rise in national politics 11 years ago. Wealthy American Jews acting in Israel’s behalf donated 90 million US-dollar to Donald Trump’s first campaign for the presidency, in 2016, and at least 100 million US-dollar to his second. Israel owns Donald Trump.

These are known facts. But one must look very hard to find reference to them in mainstream media or in America’s public discourse altogether. No, Israel’s corruption of American politics and power is part of what I call the Great American Unsayable – a collection of truths too bitter to be acknowledged publicly other than rarely.

The ‘Great Unsayable’

I realise that this state of affairs may seem peculiar to non–Americans, but the “Great Unsayable“ has been with us a long time, swelling to its currently grotesque size since the policy cliques in Washington set about consolidating an empire after the 1945 victories – an empire Americans are not supposed to see and, so, are not supposed to speak of. The consequence of this collective unconsciousness is the “empire of illusion,” a phrase I borrow from Chris Hedges’s 2009 book¹, within which Americans live.
    I come to a recent entry in the inventory of Great Unsayables. It is evident to anyone paying attention that “Trump’s war,” as the US–Israeli aggression against Iran is commonly termed, is not Trump’s war: It is Bibi Netanyahu’s war. But this cannot be said other than in dissident circles and in independent media. To call this Bibi’s war, or Israel’s war, would be to acknowledge that Americans are wasting billions of dollars to fight a foreign country’s fight, that the United States is daily breaching international law in behalf of this foreign country, and that Americans are already dying to advance the expansionist ambitions of an immoral regime dedicated to a brutalising dominance over its West Asian neighbours.

The White House under direct control

Most of all, and not to be missed, to call the US-Israeli operation “Israel’s war” or “Bibi’s war” instead of “Trump’s war” would be to say in two words that the Zionist regime, after decades of intervention into American politics, is now in direct control of the White House. And this has been very high among the “Great Unsayables” since Trump began his second term in office – as it was, indeed, while Joe Biden enabled the Zionists’ genocide in Gaza.
    And now at last this “Great Unsayable” has been said. Now Americans have had Israel’s takeover of the Executive Branch of the US government forced in their faces. Decades of insidious Israeli subterfuge had already begun coming to the surface, and now there can be no more flinching, no more denials, no more leaving this bitter truth unsaid. In the best outcome, Americans can begin the work of purging their crumbling republic of the poison Israel and its numerous American allies have injected into it since the State of Israel declared itself 78 years ago next month.

On the role of the ‘New York Times’

This important moment came suddenly and from an unlikely source. “The New York Times” has long been known among Americans as “the hometown paper of American Jewry,” as one of its senior reporters put it some years ago², and it has assiduously avoided critical coverage of “the Jewish state.” But, reflecting an ever-more-evident divide among American Jews since the Netanyahu regime began taking Israel to extremes of barbarity and criminality, it is “The Times” that has finally forced the shocking extent of Israel’s influence in American politics, all the way up to the White House, into public discourse – from the Unsayable to the Sayable, to stay with my terminology.
    Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, two “Times” White House correspondents, published a long investigation into the Trump regime’s Iran deliberations on 7 April under the headline, “How Trump Took the US to War With Iran.”³ I know little of Swan, who joined “The Times” only recently. Of Haberman I have long been critical for her apparent inability to keep her ad hominem contempt of Trump out of her work. But she and Swan have produced an exceptional piece of journalism, well-deserving of the worldwide attention it has received since “The Times” published it.

Netanyahu conducted in the Situation Room

Reporting with singular diligence, Haberman and Swan begin by reproducing the scene in the White House Situation Room on 11 February, during the most recent of Bibi Netanyahu’s numerous visits to the United States since Trump took office 15 months ago. On this occasion the Israeli prime minister laid out his case for the joint US-Israelis attack that began 17 day later.
    It is unheard-of, I should note, for a foreign leader to be permitted into the Situation Room, the sanctum sanctorum of those who plan and execute US policy. This meeting was highly classified such that Trump’s cabinet beyond his innermost circle knew nothing of it. Congress, legally responsible for authorising war, knew nothing of it. And here we see the Israeli prime minister not only present at this momentous occasion: He was in charge of it.
    “The Times’s” correspondents, by way of numerous interviews with those present, bring readers right into the room as Netanyahu presents his proposed plan for the operation. What they recount is shocking. This is the moment when Bibi Netanyahu, long adept at manipulating America’s pitifully manipulable 47^th president, set the course for the 28 February attack.
    Here is Haberman and Swan’s description of the gathering:
    Mr Trump sat down, but not in his usual position at the head of the room’s mahogany conference table. Instead, the president took a seat on one side, facing the large screens mounted along the wall. Mr Netanyahu sat on the other side, directly opposite the president.
    Appearing on the screen behind the prime minister was David Barnea, the director of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, as well as Israeli military officials. Arrayed visually behind Mr Netanyahu, they created the image of a wartime leader surrounded by his team.
    What follows is an account of the case Netanyahu made for a war against the Islamic Republic. It consisted of a four-part progression: The operation would assassinate the Iranian leadership, destroy the nation’s military, provoke a popular uprising, and complete a “regime change” that would put in place new leaders favourable to Israel and the West. The Israeli leader was unsparing with the fear-mongering to which he always resorts in his dealings with American officials: Iran was a week away from possessing a nuclear weapon, its missiles would be capable of hitting Europe with it, and soon after that it would be capable of attacking the United States.

‘Sounds good to me’

Others in the room – chief among them Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Daniel Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – questioned Netanyahu about potential risks, but none expressed their conclusions. The key moment belonged to Trump.
    “Sounds good to me,” Haberman and Swan report him as saying.
    In those four words – casually delivered, in the American idiom the words of someone shrugging in deference to the superior knowledge of others – we can read the extent of Donald Trump’s subservience to the power Israel has exerted over him the whole of his career in national politics.
    There were more meetings among those present at the Israeli prime minister’s 11 February presentation. With the single exception of Hegseth, a fanatical warmonger as obsessed as Netanyahu with Iran’s destruction, all of those just named judged the prime minister’s four-part plan one or another degree of reckless. Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, called parts of it “farcical.” Secretary of State Rubio called it “bullshit.” But none of those who questioned Netanyahu’s fanciful projections shared their views with Trump. All of them, as well as others in the room, owed their political careers to the Zionist lobbies and wealthy Jewish donors. They were, in American parlance, Israeli “cutouts.” Israel owns them, too.

No strong objection

On 26 February a final meeting took place in the Situation Room. J. D. Vance, Trump’s vice-president and the only figure in Trump’s inner circle explicitly to oppose an attack against Iran, had been absent from the earlier sessions but was present this time. Trump went around the table asking for the advice of others. He got back the mildest of hesitations but no more. “The Times” quotes Vance saying, “You know I think this is a bad idea, but if you want to do it, I’ll support you.”
    Haberman and Swan on the meeting’s final minutes:
    Everyone deferred to the president’s instincts. They had seen him make bold decisions, take on unfathomable risks and somehow come out on top. No one would impede him now.
    “I think we need to do it,” the president told the room. He said they had to make sure Iran could not have a nuclear weapon, and they had to ensure that Iran could not just shoot missiles at Israel or throughout the region.
    General Caine told Mr. Trump that he had some time; he did not need to give the go-ahead until 4 p. m. the following day.
    Aboard Air Force One the next afternoon, 22 minutes before General Caine’s deadline, Mr Trump sent the following order: “Operation Epic Fury is approved. No aborts. Good luck.”

They talk about ‘Trump’s war,’ even though they know better

“The New York Times’s” work on what led up to the decision to attack Iran has opened a lot of American eyes and shifted the terms of the American debate on Israel. But read the headline atop the Haberman and Swan piece: “The Times” still ascribes to Trump the decision to go to war. It is still “Trump’s war,” so far as The Times has it, even as Netanyahu dictated its terms and Trump did no more than sign the order authorizing the Zionists’ plan.
    Old illusions die long deaths.
    Neither did “The Times”, as is so often its wont, provide the history and context of the 11 February meeting in the Situation Room and the deliberations that followed. There is no mention of the Zionist connections of everyone present during these events, or the Israelis’ cultivation of Trump since he appeared on the national scene as the most likely American political figure to oblige the Zionist regime in its long effort to persuade the Americans to attack a war against the Islamic Republic. 11 February, if readers will forgive an old cliché, was the tip of an iceberg and must be understood as such – the culmination of a subterfuge operation that has been under way for decades.

‘Everyone around Trump represents Israel’s interests’

Max Blumental, the founding editor of The Grayzone, has done superlative work exposing this long history. A 19-minute interview he recently gave to CGTN, the English-language channel of China Global Television Network⁴ “Everyone around Trump represents Israel’s interests,” Blumenthal remarks at one point.
    And here, discussing the 11 February meeting among much else, is part of a 40-minute interview Blumenthal gave Glenn Diesen⁵ over the weekend:
    That meeting was the product of years and years of cultivation, manipulation, grooming, threats, rewards, carrots and sticks from Israel and its cutouts in the United States, who are the very figures who surround Trump. It was essentially a coup, and this war is the result of a coup.
    Shortly after “The Times” piece appeared Mark Warner, a conservative Democratic senator from Virginia, accused Trump of “outsourcing US foreign policy.” This is further than anyone in the mainstream parties has previously gone in saying the Unsayable. There is now talk on Capitol Hill and among liberal Jewish organisations of imposing limits on US arms shipments to Israel.
    Senator Warner’s perfectly accurate assertion remains merely a phrase for now. And as Max Blumenthal has pointed out on “X,”⁶ proposals to circumscribe weapons supplies to the Zionist state so far amount to politically convenient “deceptions” that leave US military support for Israel more or less intact. But there is movement now on a question wherein there has been none for many decades. I do not see how the influence of Israel and its Zionist supporters in the United States can any longer remain among America’s Great Unsayables. The truth of the US-Israeli relationship, as it has devolved over many years has at last been named. And naming things properly, even if cautiously or circumspectly, is a prerequisite to acting upon them.
    Note: During his failed negotiations with the Iranians in Pakistan last weekend [11/12 April], J. D. Vance consulted not only with President Trump – 11 telephone calls in the 21 hours of talks – but reportedly also with Netanyahu in Jerusalem. In a videoed appearance subsequently broadcast on Israeli television, the Israeli leader boasted – this in Hebrew – that Vance called him while en route back to Washington to give a full account of what transpired in Islamabad and noted that he, Vance, and other members of the Trump regime, “report to me daily.” •

¹https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spectacle/dp/1568586132?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
²https://www.cjr.org/feature/the_times_and_the_jews.php?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
³https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-war.html of 7.4.2026
⁴https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DwDZ8KsF0A
⁵https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVmTEA9ViNU
⁶https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/2043557534091358314?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

First published on https://globalbridge.ch/dieser-krieg-ist-das-ergebnis-eines-staatsstreichs/ of 14 April 2026, and in The Floutist of 15 April 2026 (slightly adapted to this version)

* Patrick Lawrence is a long-standing foreign correspondent, mainly for the “International Herald Tribune”. He is also a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His penultimate book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century, Yale 2013. His new book Journalists and Their Shadows was published by Clarity Press (ISBN 978-3-85371-543-7) in 2023. His website is patricklawrence.us. Support his work via patreon.com/thefloutist.