A strange and ideologically incoherent coalition across the American far-left and segments of the populist right has converged on a conspiratorial worldview where everything is Israel’s fault — inflation, healthcare, war, and somehow both the radical left and the “America First” right arrived at the same absurd conclusion, like two conspiracy theorists bumping into each other in a dark alley and realizing they’re reading from the same script.

The Rise of “Israel Did It” Economics

Inflation is up. Rent is up. Healthcare is not affordable. Naturally, the explanation — according to a growing chorus — is foreign aid to Israel.

This would be compelling if it were not numerically absurd.

US aid to Israel is a rounding error in a federal budget that spends trillions annually on everything from entitlement programs to interest payments on its own debt. To argue that your grocery bill is high because of Israel requires a level of economic imagination normally reserved for conspiracy documentaries and late-night comment sections.

And yet, the claim persists.

Because it isn’t really about economics. It’s about narrative convenience. Israel has become the political equivalent of a universal adapter — plug in any domestic frustration, and somehow it fits. At this rate, every inconvenience short of bad weather will soon be traced back to Jerusalem with absolute confidence and zero evidence.

In a healthier political ecosystem, ideological extremes would at least disagree on who to blame.

Instead, they’ve synchronized.

On one end, figures like Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian, and Mehdi Hasan have long treated Israel less as a country and more as a permanent defendant in a moral courtroom.

On the other, voices like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens now echo a strangely familiar refrain — that America is being used, manipulated, compromised — a sentiment increasingly flirted with in circles around Steve Bannon and even drifting into broader conservative commentary through figures like Megyn Kelly.

Then there is the cultural middle ground — where suspicion travels fastest. In the long-form, anything-goes arena of Joe Rogan, complex geopolitical realities are flattened into “questions” that somehow always point in the same direction. Meanwhile, commentators like Glenn Greenwald and Jimmy Dore translate these instincts into a broader anti-establishment language, ensuring the message moves effortlessly across ideological borders.

They do not agree on much. But on this, they nod in unison.

It is the political equivalent of two rival conspiracy theorists independently discovering the same plot twist and deciding it must therefore be true.

The horseshoe hasn’t just snapped shut — it’s formed a bipartisan support group dedicated to blaming Israel for everything.

AIPAC: The All-Purpose Boogeyman

No conspiracy is complete without an all-powerful mechanism, and here enters AIPAC — recast in these circles as something between a lobbying group and an omnipotent shadow government.

The reality is less cinematic.

AIPAC is influential, yes — as are countless other lobbying entities in Washington representing pharmaceutical giants, tech companies, and more. But in the conspiratorial imagination, AIPAC is not one player among many. It is the player. The puppeteer. The explanation that saves one from having to understand how American politics actually works.

If AIPAC truly controlled Congress with such precision, one imagines it would at least manage to get lawmakers to pass a budget on time.

Iran — The Inconvenient Reality

In the current telling, the United States did not act — it was dragged. Pulled, apparently, into confrontation with Iran by Israel, like a reluctant bystander caught in someone else’s fight.

It’s a neat story. It’s also a remarkably selective one.

This is inconvenient — because Iran is not a theoretical threat or an Israeli obsession. It has been, for decades, an American problem. One might recall the small historical footnote known as the 1979 hostage crisis in Tehran, where American diplomats were held for 444 days. Or the equally minor episode of the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, where Iran-backed operatives killed over 200 US Marines. And that’s before we even get to the long résumé of proxies, militias, and “indirect” attacks that somehow always seem to involve American casualties.

It also requires ignoring something even more inconvenient: that even Donald Trump — long before entering politics — had been warning about the danger of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons for years, repeatedly stating that it was a threat that could not be allowed to materialize.

But acknowledging any of this complicates the narrative.

It is far easier — and far more fashionable — to treat Iran as either misunderstood or, better yet, irrelevant to the United States altogether. In this worldview, Iran is Israel’s problem. America, we are told, should simply mind its business — as if Iran has spent the last four decades politely respecting that boundary.

This is not restraint. It is strategic amnesia.

And like all forms of amnesia, it requires ignoring a rather large body of evidence — including the parts written in American blood.

Netanyahu, Puppet Master of the Free World 

Then there is Benjamin Netanyahu — a man who, according to this worldview, has spent forty years simultaneously being wrong about Iran and yet somehow powerful enough to drag the United States into war at will.

It is an oddly flattering contradiction.

Washington, a system so dysfunctional it struggles to pass routine legislation, is portrayed as effortlessly manipulated by a foreign leader thousands of miles away. American presidents, elected by millions, reduced to marionettes in a geopolitical puppet show — their decisions pre-scripted, their agency quietly erased, their sovereignty implied to be little more than a rumor.

But this is where the theory becomes even more impressive in its creativity. It does not merely claim influence — it claims control. It insists that US foreign policy is not debated, contested, or shaped by a vast and often chaotic mix of domestic interests, but rather dictated from a single external source. In this telling, a complex superpower with competing branches of government, shifting alliances, and internal political fractures behaves with the precision of a remote-controlled device.

One almost wants to admire the efficiency of it.

But the theory collapses under the slightest pressure. US foreign policy has always been driven by its own interests — sometimes wisely, often not, but rarely outsourced. And the idea that a foreign leader could unilaterally steer American military decisions without resistance from Congress, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, or the American electorate is not just implausible — it requires suspending belief in how the United States actually functions.

To believe otherwise is not analysis. It is storytelling.

And like most good stories, it says more about the storyteller than it does about the subject.

America First… Except When It Isn’t

Perhaps the most curious evolution is on the populist right.

“America First” was once a slogan of strategic restraint. It is now, in some corners, a gateway to Israel-as-scapegoat rhetoric that would feel entirely at home on the far left.

Enter figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose critiques of Israel funding arrive wrapped in the language of no more forever wars and patriotism but often land in the territory of suspicion and insinuation. Motivations, of course, are always noble — until they aren’t. Political incentives, personal grievances, even the occasional unreturned phone call (if one believes the anecdotes) have a way of producing sudden moral clarity.

Perhaps what is most ironic is that some of the loudest voices advancing these arguments in the name of “America First” are individuals who arrived in the United States relatively recently, often from regions marked by instability, yet now position themselves as authorities on American identity and direction. Some were not even born in the country they critique so fervently, and yet their certainty would suggest a far longer claim to it than many actual natives.

Foreign policy, it turns out, is now as much about internal theatrics as external reality.

And Israel, conveniently, remains the easiest prop on stage.

At some point, a critique stops being about policy and starts looking like fixation.

Israel is not merely a country in these narratives — it is the axis upon which everything turns. Economic hardship, political dysfunction, military decisions, cultural anxieties — all roads lead back to the same place. It is, in a strange way, theological. A single force blamed for all that is wrong, invoked with ritual regularity, immune to contradiction.

And like all such frameworks, it reveals more about the believer than the subject.

Because nations do not become omnipotent villains by accident. They are made so — carefully, repeatedly, and often for reasons that have very little to do with reality.

It is remarkable how a single country can, in some minds, simultaneously explain everything and understand nothing. When everything is Israel’s fault, nothing else ever has to make sense.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)