Why is the United States at war with Iran in 2026? \u00a0Several excuses have been used by the current administration to justify the spiral of conflict and ratchet of escalation over the past five weeks.\u00a0 These include but are probably not limited to:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Iran exports terrorism across the globe.<\/li>\n
- Iran is not a democracy and we must free the Iranian people so they can have a better life.<\/li>\n
- Iran is only hours, days, or weeks from building a nuclear bomb.<\/li>\n
- Iran is an existential threat to the State of Israel, and Israel is our only reliable military\/cultural ally in West Asia.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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] \u00a0It 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 \u201cback to the stone ages\u201d (sic) rather than build a new nation from the outside in.\u00a0 This is something that we, i.e., the United States, have not managed to do anywhere in the world despite repeated attempts.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 The JPCOA held until abrogated during Trump v1.0.\u00a0 The current Director of National Intelligence said out loud last year for all the world to hear that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons.\u00a0 She would have been in a position to know this.\u00a0 President George W. Bush was mistaken when he placed Iran in his \u201cAxis of Evil\u201d with Iraq and North Korea in 2003 (thank you, David Frum [2]), thereby implying that Iran was a permanent enemy of the United States.\u00a0 Actually, until the second half of the twentieth century Iran and the United States had been friends for a hundred years.\u00a0 Imagine that.<\/p>\n
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] \u00a0An article in The Independent entitled How Trump\u2019s army of the religious right is preparing for the apocalypse by Alex Hannaford outlines the basics: Members of Trump\u2019s inner circle really believe this conflict is the harbinger or the End Times and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.\u00a0 The constitutional insanity of this \u2013 it could be called inanity but this is serious \u2013 is explained by Hannaford:<\/p>\n
Jeff Sharlet described Hegseth as a Christian nationalist who believed \u201cabsolutely in the idea of the ingathering of Israel as a stage toward the Book of Revelation in the Bible\u201d and said, \u201cHe sees Israel\u2019s war on the Palestinians as biblical prophecy and one that must be supported for the sake of Christendom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hegseth is now in charge of the US defence department, which he re-christened \u201cThe Department of War\u201d, and the primary architect of Operation Epic Fury, the bloody ongoing conflict in Iran.<\/p>\n
The American \u201cself-justification\u201d for this war suffuses both political life and religious life in the United States.\u00a0 The best single source for understanding this history may be Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance by Amy Kaplan. [4]<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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]:<\/p>\n
Exodus reenacted the primal myth of the American frontier as a tale of \u201cregeneration through violence\u201d\u2026It is the barbarism of the Other \u2013 whether Indian or Arab \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
\u2026<\/p>\n
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 \u201cweapon of justice.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, it is impossible to read Exodus today without taking offense at its overtly racist stereotypes.\u00a0 Uris\u2019s depictions came from a vast menu of Orientalism and colonialism.\u00a0 He portrays indigenous Arabs as squalid remnants of an ancient Islamic civilization and blames them for despoiling the Promised Land, turning it into \u201cfestering, stagnated swamps and eroded hills and rock-filled fields and unfertile earth.\u00a0 Arab neglect made it necessary for Zionist settlers, like Ari\u2019s father, to laboriously drain the swamps of the Huleh Valley and redeem \u201ca land that had lain neglected and unwanted for a thousand years in fruitless despair until Jews rebuilt it.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is convenient justification but it is an untrue and ahistorical story of good versus evil, civilization versus savagery.\u00a0 Manichaeism is something Americans do very well, while the disinterested study and appreciation of history is not.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s lyrics (Andy Williams\u2019s voice here) in the Oscar winning theme from the movie (\u201cThis land is mine, God gave this land to me\u2026\u201d).\u00a0 From Our American Israel:<\/p>\n
Both film and novel effaced the violent dispossession of Palestinians, with a glorified interpretation of Israel\u2019s founding as an event \u201cunparalleled in human history.\u201d\u00a0 In addition to recounting the particular history of Jewish persecution and national restoration, Exodus presents the establishment of Israel as a universal good \u2013 as the embodiment of human aspiration and fulfillment of the noblest impulses of mankind.<\/p>\n
This brings us to the theological case for the special relationship between the two countries described in Our American Israel.\u00a0 As explained by Alex Hannaford in The Independent:<\/p>\n
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 \u201cinsane to a European audience\u201d, she believes Hegseth \u201cthinks he\u2019s been chosen by God to go on a divine mission to usher in the second coming of Jesus\u201d. She adds, \u201cNot 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
This may sound \u201cinsane\u201d to European audience but it is well received by many American audiences.\u00a0 As Amy Kaplan notes, \u201clong 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.\u201d\u00a0 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries colonists named their towns Salem (Jerusalem, 1626), Jericho (1692), Canaan (1739), and Bethlehem (1741).\u00a0 More recently, in a direct if at times squiggly line from the early days of the American colonies.\u00a0 From Our American Israel:<\/p>\n
Israel has come to embody Holy Time as well as the Holy Land.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 For evangelicals who believe in Biblical prophecy, the Bible not only literally records divine history, it also accurately foretells the divine future\u2026<\/p>\n
\u2026<\/p>\n
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\u2026The significance of Israel was not in realizing the political goal of Jewish sovereignty, but in manifesting God\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Dispensationalism seems odd but it resonates strongly among fundamentalist and other Christians in the United States:<\/p>\n
(Darby) proclaimed that God had never transferred his favor and promises from Jews to the Christian Church\u2026Jews would thus have a crucial role in the final \u201cdispensation,\u201d when their return to Zion marked the beginning of the end.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 At this time, Jews would have their last chance to convert.\u00a0 A significant would accept Christ as their Messiah, but the rest would be destroyed along with other unbelievers.\u00a0 Christ would then return to defeat the Antichrist at Armageddon and inaugurate the thousand-year reign of God\u2019s kingdom on earth, ending with the Last Judgment.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 If this is not rank antisemitism, the word has no meaning.\u00a0 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] \u00a0From Our American Israel:<\/p>\n
The concept of the Left Behind phenomenon is simple: Hal Lindsey (see Note 5) meets Leon Uris.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Arcane biblical prophecies play out in a high-tech setting, and formulaic romantic plots and family dramas unfold with apocalyptic gore.\u00a0 A small band of heroic Christians deploys faith and technological know-how to outwit the devious machinations of a global evil empire. \u00a0White Americans and Israelis are the major protagonists\u2026The Israeli characters become the most pious proselytizing Christians, while Americans behave like ace Israeli commandos.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
\u2026<\/p>\n
The novels (also conveniently and) magically fulfill the (fundamental) Zionist fantasy of a land without Palestinians.<\/p>\n
The Left Behind novels were a mainstream Harry Potter-like sensation for adults of all backgrounds. \u00a0And 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.\u00a0 An acquaintance, Phi Beta Kappa and honor law school graduate, read every volume as it was released.\u00a0 This was like my young son who got his copies at the local bookstore just after midnight on the release date. \u00a0The 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.\u00a0 This often includes the implicit bigotry that goes along with the \u201cgood American\/Israeli\u201d imagery. \u00a0The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth [7] apparently have very little to do with their theology.\u00a0 Although it is not for us to judge the president about his professed Christianity, Marjorie Taylor Greene did it anyway, convincingly.\u00a0 Moreover, while Tim LaHaye \u201cglorified Israel\u2019s exceptional place in biblical prophecy and appropriate Zionist myths,\u201d he solidly rejected secular Zionism:<\/p>\n
LaHaye had warned in 1984 that Israeli Jews were \u201cstill in a state of disbelief,\u201d and that, \u2018we Christians must remember that many of Israel\u2019s leaders are Zionists: consequently, some of them are as secular as America\u2019s humanists.\u201d<\/p>\n
This seems to be little more than his endogenous antisemitism bleeding through his Christianity.\u00a0 But in 1984 something called \u201csecular humanism\u201d had Americans as worked up as the strange thing called \u201ccultural Marxism\u201d does in \u201ctrue American circles\u201d today.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
So here we are. \u00a0On 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.\u00a0 This view of Israel persists to this day.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The dominionists who are also dispensationalists we have not discussed can be added into the mix.\u00a0 Dominionism is the \u201cbelief that Christians should take moral, spiritual, and ecclesiastical control over society.\u201d Think Jerry Falwell and more recently Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.\u00a0 Under Christian dominionism:<\/p>\n
(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\u2019s education. The economy would operate without any government regulation, meaning present laws requiring the integrity of consumer goods, protecting workers\u2019 rights, and disallowing exploitative financial practices would no longer be in effect. Because in a reconstructed America Christians would have brought God\u2019s kingdom to earth through the implementation of Mosaic law, these protections would not be necessary.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Whether our slide into cultural, societal, economic, and political oblivion can be arrested is uncertain.\u00a0 This includes the State of Israel, too.\u00a0 This slide has led directly to the current Ramadan War in West Asia.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Yet, on the other hand, we have Yakov Rabkin, who suggests a way forward.\u00a0 As he notes in his current Israel in Palestine (2025, highly recommended):<\/p>\n
In rabbinic Judaism, exile and redemption are spiritual concepts of universal significance.\u00a0 Exile refers to the imperfect state of the world, or a loss of contact with the divine presence, rather than mere physical displacement.\u00a0 The founding fathers of Zionism, most of whom had abandoned Judaism, reduced the concept of exile to a literal, geographical sense.\u00a0 This allowed them to frame their movement in terms similar to European ethnic nationalism: a call for the repatriation to \u201ctheir\u201d land.\u00a0 However, most Jews, Muslims and Christians living in 19th century Palestine were hardly familiar with this modern concept of nationalism.<\/p>\n
The relationship between Jews and the Land of Israel may seem paradoxical.\u00a0 Although it occupies a privileged place in Jewish identity, Jews made no effort to settle there en masse before the rise of Zionism\u2026<\/p>\n
\u2026<\/p>\n
For most observant Jews today, the physical concentration of millions of Jews in Israel has little to do with the messianic hope.<\/p>\n
Moreover, it is largely understood that the divine promise to Abraham in no way implies the right to possess the Promised Land.\u00a0 Abraham, well aware of God\u2019s promise of the Land of Canaan, nevertheless insists on paying for a plot of land to bury his wife Sarah (Genesis 23: 3-16).\u00a0 The Promised Land belongs not to the one who receives the promise, but rather to the one who gives it.<\/p>\n
Perhaps our only hope is to recognize that Yakov Rabkin is saying something all of us must take to heart \u2013 Atheist, Christian, Jew, Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, American, Israeli.\u00a0 Not so long ago Arabs, Jews, and Christians lived together in community in Palestine.\u00a0 That this could happen again must be our hope.\u00a0 We should also remember along with Abraham, the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that The earth is the Lord\u2019s and the fulness thereof.\u00a0 It is not ours.\u00a0 Finally, if any of us are among the chosen people, that makes us special only in our obligations to all of Creation.<\/p>\n
Notes<\/p>\n
[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.\u00a0 This was used recently by President Trump as justification for saying that the US had been \u201cat war\u201d with Iran for 47 years.\u00a0 This is a bit of a stretch.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 The Shah subsequently presided over a police state through the use of torture and terror courtesy of his \u201cBureau for Intelligence and Security of the State,\u201d better known as SAVAK.\u00a0 Chalmers Johnson\u2019s analysis of Blowback should be required reading for all Americans.\u00a0 War is never the answer to a properly posed question, but it is also true that one man\u2019s terrorist can be another man\u2019s freedom fighter.\u00a0 The Sons of Liberty, Shay\u2019s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, the King David Hotel, Toussaint Louverture, Tecumseh, and\u00a0 Nat Turner come to mind.\u00a0 In a bit of realpolitik synchronicity, the American Major General Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. \u201ctrained virtually all of the first generation of SAVAK personnel\u201d in the mid-1950s.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
[2] From The American Conservative (2024): \u201cThe classification was also misguided because of the lack of any role by the \u2018Axis of Evil\u2019 countries in the tragic 9\/11 attacks.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That same ally, Saudi Arabia, was home to the mastermind of the attacks, Osama bin Laden.\u00a0 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
[3] \u201cIn November 1945\u2026Truman 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. \u2018I am sorry gentlemen,\u2019 he said, \u2018but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism.\u00a0 I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 From: Rashid Khalidi (2020) The Hundred Years\u2019 War on Palestine, p. 79.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
[4] Our American Israel may have had an interesting publication history.\u00a0 The book was first published in hard cover in 2018 by Harvard University Press.\u00a0 Amy Kaplan died in 2020.\u00a0 The first paperback edition was not published until 2025, but we can be thankful that it was.<\/p>\n
[5] Leon Uris wrote the screenplay for Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and later said \u201cYou can write westerns in any part of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
[6] The predecessor of LaHaye and Jenkins was Hal Lindsey who wrote The Late Great Planet Earth (1970).\u00a0 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 D\u00e4niken and his Chariots of the Gods (who also resonated with distressingly more than a few).\u00a0 The predecessor of all predecessors, though, was Sir Isaac Newton, who spent much of his scholarly effort parsing biblical chronologies as explanations of history.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
[7] From the Oxford Bible Commentary: \u201cRevelation is a book of profound theology, intense prophetic insight and dazzling literary accomplishment.\u00a0 But most modern readers find it baffling and impenetrable.\u00a0 They do not know how to read it.\u00a0 Nothing in the rest of the New Testament \u2013 or in modern writing \u2013 prepares them for the kind of literature it is.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
[8] Matthew 25:45-46 (KJV). \u201cThen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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