Why is the United States at war with Iran in 2026? Several excuses have been used by the current administration to justify the spiral of conflict and ratchet of escalation over the past five weeks. These include but are probably not limited to:
- Iran exports terrorism across the globe.
- Iran is not a democracy and we must free the Iranian people so they can have a better life.
- Iran is only hours, days, or weeks from building a nuclear bomb.
- Iran is an existential threat to the State of Israel, and Israel is our only reliable military/cultural ally in West Asia.
In response to these points, examples of Iran-backed terror are usually disputable, especially when compared to the undisputed terrorism of certain other groups. [1] It is none of our business how the government of Iran operates as an Islamic Republic in the twenty-first century, but going to war with Iran will not improve life for the peoples of Iran (NSFW and unseemly from anyone, much less a president of the United States), as the president also echoes General Curtis Lemay by saying he will bomb them “back to the stone ages” (sic) rather than build a new nation from the outside in. This is something that we, i.e., the United States, have not managed to do anywhere in the world despite repeated attempts.
The previous Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Hosseini Khamenei (assassinated along with members of his family during the early days of the current war of choice begun by the United States and Israel) had agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons. The JPCOA held until abrogated during Trump v1.0. The current Director of National Intelligence said out loud last year for all the world to hear that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons. She would have been in a position to know this. President George W. Bush was mistaken when he placed Iran in his “Axis of Evil” with Iraq and North Korea in 2003 (thank you, David Frum [2]), thereby implying that Iran was a permanent enemy of the United States. Actually, until the second half of the twentieth century Iran and the United States had been friends for a hundred years. Imagine that.
The fourth point gets closer to the real justification, but this history is complex and much more deeply embedded in the beliefs of a substantial number of Americans than warranted by a military alliance between the US and Israel, which goes back to the instantaneous recognition of the State of Israel by President Truman during his one election campaign in May 1948. [3] An article in The Independent entitled How Trump’s army of the religious right is preparing for the apocalypse by Alex Hannaford outlines the basics: Members of Trump’s inner circle really believe this conflict is the harbinger or the End Times and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The constitutional insanity of this – it could be called inanity but this is serious – is explained by Hannaford:
Jeff Sharlet described Hegseth as a Christian nationalist who believed “absolutely in the idea of the ingathering of Israel as a stage toward the Book of Revelation in the Bible” and said, “He sees Israel’s war on the Palestinians as biblical prophecy and one that must be supported for the sake of Christendom.”
Hegseth is now in charge of the US defence department, which he re-christened “The Department of War”, and the primary architect of Operation Epic Fury, the bloody ongoing conflict in Iran.
The American “self-justification” for this war suffuses both political life and religious life in the United States. The best single source for understanding this history may be Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance by Amy Kaplan. [4]
As a matter of politics and society, the State of Israel is the country that is always the victim, but a victim that can never be vanquished. This is the origin story of the State of Israel as told by Leon Uris in his novel Exodus that was the sensation of 1958 (biggest bestseller since Gone With the Wind in 1936). The book was followed by a movie produced and directed by Otto Preminger in 1960 that starred Paul Newman as the hero Ari Ben Canaan. According to Kaplan, Exodus was basically a western, perfectly pitched to the American public as a tale of good versus bad in black and white [5]:
Exodus reenacted the primal myth of the American frontier as a tale of “regeneration through violence”…It is the barbarism of the Other – whether Indian or Arab – that forces the hero to become violent; he adopts their methods in order to defeat them, and to establish a border between legitimate and illegitimate violence.
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In this morality tale, Uris portrays Arabs (memorably called Uris-Arabs in Newsweek in 1984 by Jerry Adler) less as noble savages than as uncivilized hordes who exist outside the realm of law and must be kept in line by frontiersmen wielding the “weapon of justice.” Indeed, it is impossible to read Exodus today without taking offense at its overtly racist stereotypes. Uris’s depictions came from a vast menu of Orientalism and colonialism. He portrays indigenous Arabs as squalid remnants of an ancient Islamic civilization and blames them for despoiling the Promised Land, turning it into “festering, stagnated swamps and eroded hills and rock-filled fields and unfertile earth. Arab neglect made it necessary for Zionist settlers, like Ari’s father, to laboriously drain the swamps of the Huleh Valley and redeem “a land that had lain neglected and unwanted for a thousand years in fruitless despair until Jews rebuilt it.”
This is convenient justification but it is an untrue and ahistorical story of good versus evil, civilization versus savagery. Manichaeism is something Americans do very well, while the disinterested study and appreciation of history is not. We have discussed this before in War Is Never the Answer to a Properly Posed Question, and this history is illustrated very well in Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine before the Nakba, which also lists the 418 Palestinian villages that were destroyed during the Nakba. Still, the civic and political view of many Americans of the State of Israel comes straight out of Leon Uris, with the help of Pat Boone’s lyrics (Andy Williams’s voice here) in the Oscar winning theme from the movie (“This land is mine, God gave this land to me…”). From Our American Israel:
Both film and novel effaced the violent dispossession of Palestinians, with a glorified interpretation of Israel’s founding as an event “unparalleled in human history.” In addition to recounting the particular history of Jewish persecution and national restoration, Exodus presents the establishment of Israel as a universal good – as the embodiment of human aspiration and fulfillment of the noblest impulses of mankind.
This brings us to the theological case for the special relationship between the two countries described in Our American Israel. As explained by Alex Hannaford in The Independent:
Rachel Bitecofer, a Democratic political strategist who has been warning of an authoritarian threat from the Trump administration in her newsletter The Cycle, tells me, that while it may sound “insane to a European audience”, she believes Hegseth “thinks he’s been chosen by God to go on a divine mission to usher in the second coming of Jesus”. She adds, “Not all evangelical Christians are white Christian nationalists, but all white Christian nationalists are evangelical. And they believe in the rapture, the apocalypse, and the Second Coming.”
This may sound “insane” to European audience but it is well received by many American audiences. As Amy Kaplan notes, “long before the State of Israel was founded in 1948, American Christians of all denominations had identified its territory with the Biblical geography of the Holy Land.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries colonists named their towns Salem (Jerusalem, 1626), Jericho (1692), Canaan (1739), and Bethlehem (1741). More recently, in a direct if at times squiggly line from the early days of the American colonies. From Our American Israel:
Israel has come to embody Holy Time as well as the Holy Land. Since the rise of the Christian Right in the late 1970s, evangelical Christians have become fervent supporters of Israel, and many of them have looked to Israel both as the setting of the second coming of Jesus Christ, and as the primary actor in hastening that event. For evangelicals who believe in Biblical prophecy, the Bible not only literally records divine history, it also accurately foretells the divine future…
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The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 proved to believers the accuracy of the ancient prophecy that God would restore the Jews to Zion and that this ingathering would trigger a chain of events culminating in the end of days…The significance of Israel was not in realizing the political goal of Jewish sovereignty, but in manifesting God’s sovereignty and making it possible for some Jews to convert to Christianity to correct the fatal mistake they had made in rejecting Christ two millennia ago.
This Christian Zionism, which has roots much earlier than the twentieth century, is the source of the most vocal American support for the State of Israel, and its adherents include the current US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee.
These beliefs originated in the nineteenth century premillennial dispensationalism of the Irish evangelical Christian John Nelson Darby, who popularized the doctrine in the United States before the rise of the secular Jewish Zionist movement. Dispensationalism seems odd but it resonates strongly among fundamentalist and other Christians in the United States:
(Darby) proclaimed that God had never transferred his favor and promises from Jews to the Christian Church…Jews would thus have a crucial role in the final “dispensation,” when their return to Zion marked the beginning of the end. Darby introduced the idea of the Rapture. Christians would be swept up to heaven without dying before the Tribulation and the rule of the Antichrist, when immense devastation, foretold in the Book of Revelation, would bring human society close to annihilation. At this time, Jews would have their last chance to convert. A significant would accept Christ as their Messiah, but the rest would be destroyed along with other unbelievers. Christ would then return to defeat the Antichrist at Armageddon and inaugurate the thousand-year reign of God’s kingdom on earth, ending with the Last Judgment.
Jewish Zionists have welcomed this support for reasons of political exigency, but Christian Zionists are not friends of the Jewish people, who are to them only instruments for fulfillment of the extreme prophecies of the Book of Revelation. If this is not rank antisemitism, the word has no meaning. Perhaps the most straightforward way to understand this view of the world is through the Left Behind novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (1995-2007). [6] From Our American Israel:
The concept of the Left Behind phenomenon is simple: Hal Lindsey (see Note 5) meets Leon Uris. American and Israeli characters unite as natural allies in these futuristic action-thrillers about the seven years of Tribulation between the Rapture and the Second Coming. Arcane biblical prophecies play out in a high-tech setting, and formulaic romantic plots and family dramas unfold with apocalyptic gore. A small band of heroic Christians deploys faith and technological know-how to outwit the devious machinations of a global evil empire. White Americans and Israelis are the major protagonists…The Israeli characters become the most pious proselytizing Christians, while Americans behave like ace Israeli commandos. Together they form a mighty guerilla group bent on saving souls for Christ and thwarting the tyranny of the Antichrist on the road to Armageddon. Where Puritan settlers once conceived of America and the new Israel, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the Left Behind novels reimagine Israel as the new America.
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The novels (also conveniently and) magically fulfill the (fundamental) Zionist fantasy of a land without Palestinians.
The Left Behind novels were a mainstream Harry Potter-like sensation for adults of all backgrounds. And like the Harry Potter series, these books were popular with all readers, including those who did not usually read very much, in addition to those who read a lot. An acquaintance, Phi Beta Kappa and honor law school graduate, read every volume as it was released. This was like my young son who got his copies at the local bookstore just after midnight on the release date. The Rapture is very real to these people, and they might know just enough of the Book of Revelation [7] to fall in with the narrative. This often includes the implicit bigotry that goes along with the “good American/Israeli” imagery. The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth [7] apparently have very little to do with their theology. Although it is not for us to judge the president about his professed Christianity, Marjorie Taylor Greene did it anyway, convincingly. Moreover, while Tim LaHaye “glorified Israel’s exceptional place in biblical prophecy and appropriate Zionist myths,” he solidly rejected secular Zionism:
LaHaye had warned in 1984 that Israeli Jews were “still in a state of disbelief,” and that, ‘we Christians must remember that many of Israel’s leaders are Zionists: consequently, some of them are as secular as America’s humanists.”
This seems to be little more than his endogenous antisemitism bleeding through his Christianity. But in 1984 something called “secular humanism” had Americans as worked up as the strange thing called “cultural Marxism” does in “true American circles” today. Forty-two years later, Tim LaHaye would probably have a different view, given that non-Zionist Jews, secular and pious, are unheard and often considered beyond the pale by the powers that be in Israel and the United States, plus several other countries in the so-called Global North.
So here we are. On the one hand we have a culture that has lionized Israel as the exemplar of military prowess and western civilization in the Levant, beginning with the war on Palestine in 1948-1949 and extending through the Six-Day War in June 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. This view of Israel persists to this day. And on the other hand, we have an Israel whose part in this drama is only to act as the handmaiden of sorts for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The dominionists who are also dispensationalists we have not discussed can be added into the mix. Dominionism is the “belief that Christians should take moral, spiritual, and ecclesiastical control over society.” Think Jerry Falwell and more recently Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Under Christian dominionism:
(S)ociety would be reconstructed so that the male-headed family and local church fulfill the roles that currently belong to the government, which would have the authority only to protect private property and punish capital offenses. Families and churches, as the cornerstones of the reconstructed society, would implement Mosaic law, with Christ as king over what would have become a Christian nation. Without government welfare, churches would carry the responsibility of aid to the poor, and without public schools, families would be responsible for their own children’s education. The economy would operate without any government regulation, meaning present laws requiring the integrity of consumer goods, protecting workers’ rights, and disallowing exploitative financial practices would no longer be in effect. Because in a reconstructed America Christians would have brought God’s kingdom to earth through the implementation of Mosaic law, these protections would not be necessary.
Again, this is constitutional insanity in the United States, but it is not clear we have remained a constitutional republic through the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Whether our slide into cultural, societal, economic, and political oblivion can be arrested is uncertain. This includes the State of Israel, too. This slide has led directly to the current Ramadan War in West Asia. Given the continuing Truth Social posts of our current president, as I write this on Tuesday, 7 April 2026, Armageddon might well be just over the time horizon.
Yet, on the other hand, we have Yakov Rabkin, who suggests a way forward. As he notes in his current Israel in Palestine (2025, highly recommended):
In rabbinic Judaism, exile and redemption are spiritual concepts of universal significance. Exile refers to the imperfect state of the world, or a loss of contact with the divine presence, rather than mere physical displacement. The founding fathers of Zionism, most of whom had abandoned Judaism, reduced the concept of exile to a literal, geographical sense. This allowed them to frame their movement in terms similar to European ethnic nationalism: a call for the repatriation to “their” land. However, most Jews, Muslims and Christians living in 19th century Palestine were hardly familiar with this modern concept of nationalism.
The relationship between Jews and the Land of Israel may seem paradoxical. Although it occupies a privileged place in Jewish identity, Jews made no effort to settle there en masse before the rise of Zionism…
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For most observant Jews today, the physical concentration of millions of Jews in Israel has little to do with the messianic hope.
Moreover, it is largely understood that the divine promise to Abraham in no way implies the right to possess the Promised Land. Abraham, well aware of God’s promise of the Land of Canaan, nevertheless insists on paying for a plot of land to bury his wife Sarah (Genesis 23: 3-16). The Promised Land belongs not to the one who receives the promise, but rather to the one who gives it.
Perhaps our only hope is to recognize that Yakov Rabkin is saying something all of us must take to heart – Atheist, Christian, Jew, Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, American, Israeli. Not so long ago Arabs, Jews, and Christians lived together in community in Palestine. That this could happen again must be our hope. We should also remember along with Abraham, the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof. It is not ours. Finally, if any of us are among the chosen people, that makes us special only in our obligations to all of Creation.
Notes
[1] Yes, in a horrific response in 1979 to Jimmy Carter allowing the deposed Shah of Iran to come to the United States for medical care (naturally at the behest of Henry Kissinger, a previous Nobel Peace Prize laureate), the US Embassy in Iran was overrun and Americans were held hostages for 444 days, only to be released after noon on January 20, 1981, when Ronald Reagan had become president. This was used recently by President Trump as justification for saying that the US had been “at war” with Iran for 47 years. This is a bit of a stretch. Actions have consequences, and the distant but fundamental cause of the hostage crisis goes back to 1953, when the United States and the United Kingdom managed a coup against the democratically elected leader of Iran who planned to nationalize Iranian oil. Shah Reza Pahlavi was placed in control of Iran, to rule rather than reign (his son has been mooted as his successor after the US makes Iran great again). The Shah subsequently presided over a police state through the use of torture and terror courtesy of his “Bureau for Intelligence and Security of the State,” better known as SAVAK. Chalmers Johnson’s analysis of Blowback should be required reading for all Americans. War is never the answer to a properly posed question, but it is also true that one man’s terrorist can be another man’s freedom fighter. The Sons of Liberty, Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, the King David Hotel, Toussaint Louverture, Tecumseh, and Nat Turner come to mind. In a bit of realpolitik synchronicity, the American Major General Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. “trained virtually all of the first generation of SAVAK personnel” in the mid-1950s. His son, with four stars instead of two, presided over the Coalition of the Willing armed forces during the famous victory that was Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
[2] From The American Conservative (2024): “The classification was also misguided because of the lack of any role by the ‘Axis of Evil’ countries in the tragic 9/11 attacks. The real culprit was a U.S. ally on the Persian Gulf whose nationals were among the hijackers of the American Airlines planes that crashed into the Twin Towers and Pentagon. That same ally, Saudi Arabia, was home to the mastermind of the attacks, Osama bin Laden. The question of why Bush had to come up with a list of three extraneous culprits to put on public trial for the deadliest trauma afflicting the American people on American soil speaks volumes about the ideology then dominating the Republican Party.”
[3] “In November 1945…Truman bluntly revealed the motivations behind this major shift (in support of Zionism) when a group of American diplomats presciently warned him that an overtly pro-Zionist policy would harm US Interests in the Arab world. ‘I am sorry gentlemen,’ he said, ‘but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.’” From: Rashid Khalidi (2020) The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 79. Others have pointed out that even then, long before Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, President Truman really meant big campaign donors instead of constituents.
[4] Our American Israel may have had an interesting publication history. The book was first published in hard cover in 2018 by Harvard University Press. Amy Kaplan died in 2020. The first paperback edition was not published until 2025, but we can be thankful that it was.
[5] Leon Uris wrote the screenplay for Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and later said “You can write westerns in any part of the world.”
[6] The predecessor of LaHaye and Jenkins was Hal Lindsey who wrote The Late Great Planet Earth (1970). During my university days Lindsey was influential among an odd subset, even though he always seemed to be in the same league with Erich von Däniken and his Chariots of the Gods (who also resonated with distressingly more than a few). The predecessor of all predecessors, though, was Sir Isaac Newton, who spent much of his scholarly effort parsing biblical chronologies as explanations of history. This is covered exceedingly well in Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton by Rob Iliffe (Oxford University Press), especially in Chapter 7: Methodising the Apocalypse.
[7] From the Oxford Bible Commentary: “Revelation is a book of profound theology, intense prophetic insight and dazzling literary accomplishment. But most modern readers find it baffling and impenetrable. They do not know how to read it. Nothing in the rest of the New Testament – or in modern writing – prepares them for the kind of literature it is. Moreover, they are often not sure it is worth attempting to understand, since they most readily associate it with eccentric and event dangerous sects addicted to millenarian fantasy. Yet this is a book that in all centuries has inspired the martyrs, nourished the imagination of visionaries, artists, and hymn-writers, resourced prophetic critiques of oppression and corruption in state and church, sustained hope and resistance in the most hopeless situations.”
[8] Matthew 25:45-46 (KJV). “Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.”
