The Trump administration is angry with Netanyahu – but it won’t break with Israel’s far right
Donald Trump and his deputy JD Vance have been stamping their feet over Israel’s continued war in Lebanon, which could stymie the US president’s only hope of extracting himself from a war with Iran he started alongside Benjamin Netanyahu.
But Vance’s slap at far-right members of the Israeli cabinet – that “You’re a country of nine million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have” – does not mean that Israel is likely to remain the dominant partner.
Clues to how powerful Israel’s religious right has been in driving American policy lie not in conspiracies, but in two widely circulated documents that have led the US to war in the Middle East twice.
One, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”, was produced, officially, as a policy paper for Netanyahu in his first term as prime minister.
Written by Americans led by Richard Perle, a former under secretary of defence, it argued that Israel should get on the front foot and use a ‘doctrine of preemption” to weaken the threat from Syria by toppling Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq (yes, it is an odd argument).
Perle served as head and later as a member of George W Bush’s Defence Policy Board Advisory Committee, up to and after Iraq being invaded by a US-led coalition in 2003. Back then, America’s allies (chief among them the UK) were taken to war on false and faked intelligence.
Many of those pro-war lies were curated by another author of a Clean Break, Doug Feith, who was under secretary of defence before and after the invasion of Iraq.
David Wurmser, who ran the main defence agency set up to devise the propaganda and spread the case for war under then vice president Dick Cheney, was also an author of the seminal paper of 1996.
Wurmser is also the co-author of a new paper that presents Netanyahu with a blueprint of Israeli foreign policy, that is being closely followed by America in 2026.
“Israel 2048: A Blueprint for a Rising Asymmetric Geopolitical Power” makes the case for Israel to support a war to topple Iran.
It says Israel should bind itself closely into western defence infrastructures and offers a Judeo-Christian “endorsement” of the racist conspiracy theory that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure” through Islamic immigration – now part of US national strategy.
It makes no mention of the vast Palestinian death toll in Gaza as a result of Israel’s bombardment after the October 7 massacres inside Israel. At least 47,000 women and children have been killed by Israel in Gaza over the last three years.
“As opposed to the US, Europe’s critical stance towards Israel will increase due to a combination of Muslim immigration and their failure to integrate and Europe’s demographic decline and loss of Christian identity,” Wurmser and co-author Barak Seener write.
“Together, these trends pose a significant threat to the future of Western civilization, leading to its decline and potential fall.”
