The notion of Jewish manipulators secretly controlling the world dates back at least as far as the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in 1903, and through the first half of the Twentieth Century. American industrialist Henry Ford and American radio broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin claimed that US finance and publishing were directed by Jewish interests, while Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime put the supposed threat to civilization represented by “world Jewry” to genocidal ends. Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels encouraged the belief that Germany’s American foe was actually presided over by “Franklin Rosenfelt” and a clique of Jewish advisers, and, as the Third Reich went down to defeat, Goebbels rallied Germans around the news that American postwar plans recommended by the Jewish Treasury Secretary Hans Morgenthau envisaged permanently reducing Germany to agrarian primitivism (these plans, of course, were never implemented).

In subsequent decades similar fears of Jewish control were tied to the state of Israel, founded in 1948. During the run-up to the first Gulf War against Iraq in the fall of 1990, US paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan complained on a TV debate program, “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East – the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” A few years later, urban legends surfaced that, for their own unspecified safety, Jewish employees at the World Trade Center had been ordered to stay home on September 11, 2001. Then in 2003, as the second Gulf War began, critics pointed to the Jewish pro-war figures advising President George W. Bush, among them Assistant Secretary of Defence Richard Perle, Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. The 2007 publication of the controversial but deeply researched book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, seemed only to confirm the dangerous and disproportionate outside pressure on American strategies that many had long suspected.

Today’s headlines reporting the “US-Israeli” or “Trump-Netanyahu” war on Iran – the two countries and two men are invariably linked in coverage of military action – certainly suggest a coordination beyond mere geopolitical alliance. Considering how the foreign policy of the current American administration has unapologetically broken many longstanding economic and diplomatic understandings with erstwhile partners like Canada and western Europe, the pointed questions and dark doubts which have festered since before World War I seem less and less extreme. What makes Israel, of all countries, so special?

One reflexive answer is that US politicians are in thrall to a super-wealthy Jewish donor class, whose financial contributions come attached with crucial strings that the recipients must unreservedly support the Jewish “homeland” in the Middle East. The American political system is definitely awash in money, lobbyists, and plain grift (never more so than under the present occupant of the White House), although the pro-Israel industry is just one of many powers wielding influence over biddable legislators and executives. Others point to the strain of Christian fundamentalism in the US right wing, whereby Israel must be constantly protected in order to fulfil Biblical prophecies which fundamentalists still take very seriously. Maybe – but again, such beliefs are among many fringe positions held by senators and congresspeople across the political spectrum; all kinds of fanatical proposals have been traced back to far-left or far-right think tanks and academic schools which ordinary citizens have never heard of. And there’s little doubt that the moral taint of anti-Semitism has long been effectively invoked by Israeli apologists to quash any objections to any campaign undertaken by any government of Israel against any regional antagonist, whether in Tehran, Beirut, or Gaza.

What’s changed this time is, a) widespread popular skepticism toward top-level decison-making on every issue everywhere, and b) a critical mass of cynicism, authoritarianism, and corruption in the leadership of both the US and Israel that’s become so blatant, so daily and hourly exposed, that trusting in the good faith of their combined efforts on anything is the least reasonable view to take. In the eras of George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton, or of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, there might have been legitimate arguments that such figures were decent people with some sense, however biased or incomplete, of public responsibility; whatever mistakes they made, they hadn’t accumulated the records of egotism, conflict of interest, and sheer dishonesty justifiably ascribed to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. If the conspiracy theories around Jewish or Israeli dominance of American affairs were at best debatable before, they’re impossible to refute now. It’s not because average Jews, Israelis, or Americans are doing anything differently. It’s because of who average Jews, Israelis, and Americans have got in charge.