Joe Kent’s Resignation Letter Is Dangerous Because It’s Half True

For those who suspect that Israel manipulated America into war, the resignation of Joe Kent, Donald Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, surely seems like confirmation.

“It is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent wrote in an open letter to the president on Tuesday. He decried a campaign by “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” to spread misinformation about Iran’s imminent threat and subvert Trump’s “America first” movement. “I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for,” he wrote.

In resigning, Kent is showing more integrity than his boss, Tulsi Gabbard, or Vice President JD Vance, both of whom have long railed against unnecessary foreign wars, only to go mostly silent when Trump launched one. Still, it’s easy enough to list all the reasons he’s not a reliable narrator.

Kent, whom I interviewed in 2022, when he was running for Congress against the Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, is a deeply paranoid man with roots on the far right. Back then, he’d said that the Jan. 6 insurrection “reeks of an intelligence operation” and called the Capitol invaders “political prisoners.” At one point during that campaign, he had a member of the Proud Boys on his payroll. It was an act of profound irresponsibility, bordering on vandalism, for Trump to make him one of the highest-ranked intelligence officials in the country.

But none of that is likely to stop Kent’s resignation from cementing the emerging narrative, on both the right and the left, that Israel has dragged America into this deeply unpopular war. It’s a powerful story because it’s partly rooted in truth, even if it taps into old antisemitic tropes about occult Jewish control.

This conflict, whose timing and purpose Trump barely bothered to explain to the American people, was probably always going to increase anti-Jewish animosity among Americans, especially when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel gloats that he’s “yearned” for such a war for 40 years. But the more it drags on, the more I worry about a full-blown American “dolchstoßlegende,” a modern version of the stab-in-the-back myth that German nationalists used to blame Jews for their humiliation in World War I.

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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.

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