A century-long project reached a particular sort of peak Thursday night when Israel launched a massive, ongoing decapitation strike against Iran. As Eli Lake, proud neoconservative and contributor to the Free Press, chortled afterwards “What you guys think Zionism was? Vibes? Seminars?”

Iran retaliated in full force, and escalation has continued. On Saturday, Israel requested the United States join the war, whose goal appears to be complete regime change in Tehran.

The Trump administration has kept its cards close to its chest; American military personnel and equipment have assisted with Israel’s missile defense, but Washington did not participate in Thursday’s barrage and has not entered full belligerency status. 

Outside the White House, the response from members of Congress and governors has been near universal endorsement for Israel’s unprovoked attack. (Brave, patriotic outliers notwithstanding.) But among the general public, the question has been much more contentious, reflecting the chasm between voters and their political class on Israel–Palestine.

In the short term, President Donald Trump must resist entrapment in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of choice, continue to make (likely futile) attempts at negotiations, and defend the safety of U.S. soldiers caught in the middle—preferably by funneling them out of the region entirely. In the bigger picture, the United States must begin the process of separating fervent Zionism from its policymaking institutions.

Much of Israel’s behavior is anathema to any kind of morality or human decency. From its numerous wars of aggression and territorial expansion, to its racialist laws, to the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people from their ancestral homes and their continued debasement under a brutal military occupation (which has lasted longer than the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe), to its war of annihilation on Gaza, including the purposeful targeting of civilians and children—this is not a government that can be reasoned with.

By pledging unconditional support to Israel, the United States has been maneuvered into foreign policy disasters like the Iraq War, reaped the blowback of Islamic terrorism, poisoned its domestic politics with loyalty oaths and the suppression of speech, and lost inestimable trust and respectability with the rest of the world. Many Americans, including conservatives of both temperament and politics, anticipated these consequences. And this latest gamble by Tel Aviv to force the United States into another major war must be the final straw.

There was dissension from the outset on whether the United States should adopt Zionism as a core pillar of its Middle East policy. Both Secretary of State George Marshall and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal counseled against it. Marshall threatened to jump ship from the administration, while Forrestal worried that the decision to create a political-religious state like the Zionists desired “was fraught with great danger for the security of this country.”

But, contrary to the wisdom of his State Department and Pentagon chiefs, President Harry Truman recognized Israel and its newly seized territory—just 11 minutes after David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of independence—and signaled that the U.S. government was all in.

Today, you’ll find many Zionists defending Truman’s decision to drop nuclear weapons against the civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These measures, in violation of the human conscience, are justified as precedent for Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza.

After the Second World War, the America First Committee alumnus Henry Regnery founded Regnery Publishing as the publishing house for the Old Right, releasing seminal conservative tracts such as Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. And as progressive writer Jeet Heer has pointed out, Regnery also published a slate of books critical of the Zionist project and sympathetic to the abuse of Palestinian refugees and the dispossession of Arab lands.

Among those titles was Will the Middle East Go West (1957), written by bestselling conservative author and overseas correspondent Freda Utley. Just as illustrious, she was the mother of the late Jon Basil Utley, a publisher of The American Conservative and a wonderful gentleman.

Freda Utley came away disquieted by Israeli treatment of Arabs, recognizing that the process of dehumanization was already laying the groundwork for future atrocities:

I do not here mean to imply that Israel has perpetrated any such great crimes against humanity as Hitler. There is, nevertheless, a basic similarity in kind, although not in degree, between her treatment of the Arabs and the Nazi attitude toward the Jews. In both cases the conception of themselves as a “master race” or “chosen people” has led to the perpetration of injustices and crimes against “inferior” races.

Utley described Herut, Menachem Begin’s political party and the direct predecessor for Netanyahu’s Likud, as “near-fascist…founded by the Irgun terrorists and openly proclaiming its intention to dispossess the Arabs of more territory.”

The desire to keep American interests in the foreground, or to at least curb the worst excesses of Zionist violence, was a continuous trend among conservative political leaders. Philip Weiss, a progressive journalist and co-editor of the excellent resource Mondoweiss, has been forthright that, “for whatever reason, cultural or political, American rightwingers have done some of the best thinking on the Israel[–]Palestine issue.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to condone the Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt in 1956 and forced an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai peninsula. His Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, an East-Coast Republican internationalist of the highest pedigree, acknowledged that “we cannot have all our policies made in Jerusalem.”

During the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, President Ronald Reagan called Prime Minister Begin and commanded him to cease a massive artillery barrage on Beirut. As conveyed in his diary, his language was biting: “I was angry. I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.”

That’s a phone call neither Joe Biden nor Trump have made about Gaza, where incalculable numbers of infants and children have been left dismembered (to say nothing of buried under rubble).

The GOP’s conversion to lockstep, “unconditional” support for Israel is of fairly recent vintage. As recently as 1991, President George H.W. Bush delayed loan guarantees to Israel as punishment for its continued construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Fast-forward one generation, and Jeb Bush would be distancing his embryonic presidential campaign from his father’s secretary of state (and best friend) when James Baker expressed distrust of Netanyahu’s commitment to the peace process.

It was during this same transitional period that neoconservatives picked up the club of phony antisemitism to purge and beat down their opponents, including figures like Joseph Sobran and Pat Buchanan. Their diminishment in conservative media coincided with the ascension of militantly Zionist outlets like the Weekly Standard and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, and culminated with a new Bush administration staffed with Netanyahu advisors like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser.

In March 2003, as the first bombs began to fall on Baghdad, Pat Buchanan laid out his case in a seminal cover story for The American Conservative that Israel and its domestic sycophants were hijacking U.S. foreign policy to suit their own ends:

We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.

Each accusation rings truer following Israel’s unilateral attack on Iran and its sabotage of U.S. nuclear talks, including the assassination of Tehran’s lead negotiator. 

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The imposed Zionist consensus in politics and media, including among conservatives, is breaking under the strain of Israel’s own chutzpah. As The American Conservative’s senior editor Andrew Day examined earlier this month, public opinion is changing dramatically among young people, and new avenues are opening to safely criticize the U.S.-Israel “special relationship.”

Israel is a rogue nuclear state that is aggressive abroad and despotic at home. Like so many other bad things in the world, it is not the responsibility of Washington to fix this faraway problem. But it is a moral duty that our government cease enabling its criminal and destabilizing behavior.

Zionism and Americanism are irreconcilable.