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The joint US-Israel military strikes on Iran have forced a reckoning that American political culture has been approaching for years, but has perhaps never had to face as head-on as it does right now. It is a reckoning that contains two urgent, legitimate, and partially contradictory imperatives – and neither should be abandoned. Let us start with one simple truth. Israel’s role in drawing the United States into military action against Iran warrants serious scrutiny. Whatever one believes about the strategic logic of the strikes, the process by which the United States came to participate in them raises profound questions about the relationship between the two countries. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has claimed that the US struck Iran partly because it knew Israel was going to act unilaterally and feared the blowback. In other words, Israeli strategic priorities shaped American military timing, and by extension, American casualties. This does not mean, as some politicians have suggested, that Israel forced the US to do something it did not already want to do. The Israeli government does not have that power over the world’s most powerful military. Nonetheless, the degree to which intelligence-sharing, lobbying pressure, and the assumption of aligned interests drove US decision-making must be considered. They are exactly the kinds of questions that democratic oversight of military action demands. Only 21% of Americans supported strikes on Iran before they began. The public deserves a fuller accounting of how we got here. Too many Jewish organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and American Jewish Committee (AJC) have suggested that this is the time to get behind the war effort and not to ask questions. But to say that Americans should not ask questions about the relationship between Israel and the United States because it might raise antisemitic conspiracy theories means handing over the tools of democratic accountability. That is too high a price. And yet. The questions are not being asked only by sober foreign policy analysts. They are being asked, in far cruder form, by people who have never needed a pretext to believe that Jewish power secretly governs American foreign policy. In the days since the strikes, social media has been awash in the language of “puppet masters”, “dual loyalties” and insinuations that Jewish money bought American blood. The phrase “Israel first” – often wielded as an insinuation that US politicians are controlled by Jews – has surged across platforms. Far-right influencers have recycled rat imagery in ways that consciously echo Nazi propaganda. What is uncomfortable about this time period is how easily legitimate questions about Israel’s role in stoking this war can slide into conspiracy theories. The lines are not always as easy to maintain as we might like. And it is at times hard to distinguish between legitimate criticism and dangerous tropes. This is the dual-edged reality of a political moment in which criticism of Israel has become newly acceptable across the American political spectrum. On the left, the shift has been building since the Gaza war of 2023–2024, which moved a generation of younger progressive voters toward a far more skeptical view of the US-Israel relationship than their predecessors held. On the right, a strand of nationalist isolationism – long present but previously subordinate – has found in influential figures such as Tucker Carlson and elements of the Maga coalition a large platform for questioning American commitments to Israel on “America first” grounds. Carlson has characterized the relationship as “deeply destructive and humiliating”, while also providing a platform to multiple Holocaust deniers. Candace Owens has called the Israeli government “not America’s ally”, while also advancing antisemitic conspiracies about the Talmud. The critiques from across the political spectrum have converged on a shared conclusion: American policy toward Israel has been too uncritical for too long. Polling bears this out: American sympathy for Israel hit an all-time low in 2025, falling beneath 50% for the first time in nearly 25 years of Gallup tracking. That convergence contains something genuinely healthy. A relationship between two countries that cannot be examined, questioned or criticized is not an alliance; it is a dependency. And at a time when the state of Israel is committing what nearly every international and Israeli human rights group considers to be a genocide in Gaza, while implementing an apartheid regime in the West Bank, the US cannot afford to simply continue to provide unquestioned financial support to the Israeli government, even to the extent of violating American human rights law to do so. But healthy critique does not exist in a vacuum. This is happening during a time of increased anti-Jewish violence – a year that included the arson of a Jewish governor’s home, a firebombing in Boulder, and a murder outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. To be sure, the lines between violence committed against the state of Israel and its representatives in the US, and violence committed against Jews, can be very difficult to parse, but this difficulty is in fact part of the challenge. This challenge is made even harder by the fact that too many of the American organizations which collect statistics about antisemitism deliberately erase the distinction between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel, making accurate statistics about rising antisemitism difficult to come by. But what we do know is that we are living in a moment when there is more criticism of Israel in American political discourse than there has been in decades, and that this represents a healthy instinct for questioning Israeli policy, and it is also creating a permission structure for greater antisemitism. Unfortunately, the two travel together, and the increased acceptability of one can at times lend cover to the other. At times, the reductive attempt to attribute all agency to Israel, and thereby minimize the agency of the United States in making its own decision to join the war against Iran, occludes a clearsighted geopolitical analysis. After the recent attack on Iran, former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Trump of “wanting to fight wars for Israel”, and Tucker Carlson referred to the war as “Israel’s war”. The real challenge here is that figures like Carlson and Greene are using genuine concerns about US foreign policy towards Israel, and whether it really serves American interests, to attract followers who might not be aware of their bigotries. It is valuable and necessary to ask questions about Israel’s role in US foreign policy. It is not defensible to praise Holocaust revisionists or to blame the Jews for killing Jesus. And the fact that the same figures can go from one to the other is part of why this moment is so dangerous, and so fraught. There is no clean solution. But anyone who tells you that the way to fight antisemitism is to stop criticizing Israeli policy, or that the way to enable honest critique of Israel is to simply tolerate the antisemitism that attaches itself to that critique, is offering you a false and ultimately cowardly choice. The only intellectually honest path is to hold both commitments simultaneously, without letting either moderate the other. We must be willing to criticize Israel as though antisemitism does not exist: that is, without softening legitimate questions about Israeli policy or American complicity in it for fear of how those questions might be misused. And we must be willing to name and fight antisemitism as though the state of Israel does not exist: that is, without treating every accusation of hatred of Jews as a defense of Israeli government policy, and without exempting anti-Israel rhetoric from scrutiny simply because it comes wrapped in the language of anti-imperialism or national sovereignty. These two commitments will sometimes feel as if they are pulling in opposite directions. They will require us to make fine distinctions in moments when fine distinctions are unpopular. They will require intellectual honesty from people who prefer the comfort of a single, unified enemy. But the alternative – sacrificing either accountability or decency – is a price a genuinely democratic society cannot afford to pay. Joel Swanson is professor of Jewish studies at Sarah Lawrence College