Prominent conservative figures are calling on Donald Trump to stay out of the Israel-Iran war, but is it the rebellion it seems to be?
Steve Bannon – the smart, stubborn, and irrepressible right/far-right public intellectual and once ally as well as chief strategist and bestie of US President Donald Trump – is back in the news. And in a way that speaks to much more than the ups and downs, and ins and outs, of US elite careers.
The hill he has chosen to fight on this time is resistance to the US waging another war in the Middle East in the service of Israel and its powerful lobby in America.
Bannon, make no mistake, is not taking a de facto stand against Israel because of its apartheid, genocide, and wars of aggression. He ought to, obviously, especially as a man flaunting his Christian belief. (From one sort-of-Roman-Catholic to another, Steve: Our Lord Jesus Christ really didn’t like the child killers, and I am pretty sure he would have found the lingerie-camouflage cross-dressers with machine guns rather off-putting, too.)
But then, if Bannon had principled moral objections here, he would not be Steve Bannon, a very conservative American, who will probably never shake off deeply ingrained mental habits of violence and racism.
But from Trump’s perspective – and that of the Israeli influence agents surrounding him – Bannon’s line of attack is actually more dangerous than a genuinely moral stance. Because Bannon is positioning American national interest against following Israel’s lead. By declaring that Israel pursues an ‘Israel First’ policy about as egotistically as Berlin’s ‘Germany First’ trip between 1933 and 1945, Bannon has dared to state the obvious: Israel’s interests are not identical with those of the US, and therefore, a genuine ‘America First’ policy must not obey Israel. Hence, stay out of the war against Iran. Or to be precise, get out of it.
And there Bannon is of course right and has the facts and logic on his side, which makes his challenge all the more threatening.
The background to Bannon’s sally, which as the Financial Times points out, signals a split among Trump’s domestically indispensable MAGA base, is the perfect mess Trump and his team have made over the attack on Iran. Despite their clumsy mixed messaging – really, contradictory lying and boasting – Israel’s unprovoked war of aggression against Iran can obviously only be waged because of massive American support.
In reality this is already a combined US-Israeli attack, and it makes no difference to this fact that Israel always wants even more, including – as Axios, a network with remarkably easy access to Israeli sources, has reported – open US help in attacking the key Iranian nuclear installations at Fordow.
Never mind, by the way, that deliberately striking a nuclear facility is as criminal as it gets. It constitutes a clear breach of the Geneva Conventions, as the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed ElBaradei has recently had to publicly school German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul about. The latter is clearly just as ignorant of his job’s basics as his legendarily inept predecessor Annalena Baerbock used to be.
Yet, as Bannon’s intervention shows, the key role the US plays in the assault on Iran has caused noteworthy ripple effects inside America and in particular inside the movement now known as MAGA. Originally the abbreviation was an extremely successful 2016 Trump campaign slogan – inspired by a forerunner used by Ronald Reagan in 1980 – meaning ‘Make America Great Again’.
But as a movement, MAGA has a much longer history. Its influences and ancestors include, for instance, nativism, isolationism, the original America First, and the more recent Tea Party. That’s why it is important to understand that MAGA overlaps with but is not identical with Trumpism, as often assumed. In reality, MAGA is part of an older, powerful tradition that Trump has tapped into with great success. But he is not guaranteed to always be in control of it, as the term ‘Trumpism’ may misleadingly imply.
Take for instance the perhaps greatest cleavage running through contemporary Trumpism 2.0: that between a right-wing populist orientation still aiming at, for want of better terms, ordinary Americans, and a techno-elitist wing busy with fantasies of openly establishing an AI-based rule of the richest. Things clearly remain volatile. For wasn’t it only yesterday that the would-be tech lords, represented by former “first buddy” Elon Musk, seemed to have defeated the populist tribunes of the Steve Bannon type? And yet, now Musk, the “man-child” is out (if not necessarily forever) and Bannon, the old battle axe, is making headlines again.
Warning of the “fog of war” – read that as code either for just ordinary information unreliability or for deliberate Israeli and Western disinformation – and “unintended consequences,” Bannon has been explicit: The US must not be “sucked into another major war on the Eurasian land mass, particularly the Middle East.” And yet, he added, America is already an “active combatant” by providing air defense to Israel.
For Bannon, at least in his current iteration, none of this is new. As he has also recently charged, the fundamental reason why American troops are in Iraq and thus in harm’s way is that the US government and its media, including both Republicans and Democrats, have “lied to us,” i.e., the American people, for decades. It has not been, as Bannon stressed, simply incompetence or mistakes, but the “bald-faced lies” and “spin of the neocons.”
That is of course a reference to the fact that the US and its Western accomplices started their 2003 unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq with a massive, Gleiwitz-level deception by deliberately trying to deceive the world about non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. And that, according to Bannon, was along with the financial crisis of 2008 the original sin that triggered “this movement,” clearly here meaning what we now know as MAGA.
Bannon’s history may be a little off as far as facts are concerned. The roots of contemporary American right-wing populism include a tradition of isolationism, but they are certainly not identical with a revolt against the Iraq War, insane and criminal as the latter was.
But veracity and accuracy aren’t the point here. Instead what matters is how precisely Bannon is trying to rewrite history, namely by claiming opposition to neocon “forever wars,” specifically in the Middle East (transparent code for on behalf of Israel) as not only a core value of MAGA, but as a key element of its origin story.
As for Israel’s assault on Iran, Bannon was scathing. Rhetorically exploiting the silly pretense that Israel was “going it alone” when starting the attack – which Bannon is certainly intelligent and realistic enough to know is nonsense – he called on Israel to stick to doing just that. Yet instead, he scoffed, the “going-it-alone lasted six hours” and Israel is doing everything it can to drag Americans ever deeper into another massive war.
Importantly, Bannon is not alone. As he pointed out, conservative media heavyweight Tucker Carlson has made the same point. In fact, Carlson has been even more explicit. Using his X account with over 16 million followers to claim that the key divide of US politics is between “those who casually encourage violence, and those who seek to prevent it – between warmongers and peacemakers,” Carlson started naming “the warmongers,” including “anyone who’s calling Donald Trump today to demand air strikes and other direct US military involvement in a war with Iran,” such as “Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rupert Murdoch, Ike Perlmutter and Miriam Adelson.”
Carlson added that “at some point they will all have to answer for this, but you should know their names now.” And what names they are: Of the five, three, i.e., 60 percent – Levin, Perlmutter, and Adelson – are as most Americans would know or guess, Jewish. Murdoch and Hannity, in the minority, are not.
But all of the five are staunch Zionists, Hannity having been acknowledged by the Jerusalem Post as one of “10 Pro-Israeli Christians,” i.e. a Christian Zionist. And that was in October 2024, a full year into Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. Mark Levin, an influential and extremely rightwing media personality, got his “Friends of Zion Museum ‘Defender Award’ for his steadfast support of the State of Israel and the Jewish people” in 2018.
Murdoch, the Western publishing oligarch with massive political influence, used a rambling – but who’s going to edit him, right? – 2009 Jerusalem Post article to admit he feels very flattered by frequently being misidentified as Jewish and to explain that the “free world” – old-timers’ speak for “rules-based value West” – must support Israel to the hilt.
According to Wikipedia, Ike Perlmutter is “an Israeli-American billionaire businessman and financier” – although ironically enough born in Mandate Palestine – who “through a variety of sometimes unorthodox business deals” has been “an influential investor in a number of corporations.” He also used to run Marvel Entertainment. Yes, that Marvel, the superhero story company now absorbed by Disney and perhaps the single most effective vehicle of contemporary US propaganda.
And multi-billionaire Miriam Adelson is of course not only the widow of Sheldon Adelson, the “casino mogul” and arch Zionist, but also a fanatical Zionist in her own right. Both Adelsons have been among Donald Trump’s most generous supporters. During his 2016 presidential campaign they were already among his “top donors.” In 2020 – when he lost – they made the single biggest individual contribution, a whopping $75 million. In 2024, Miriam Adelson dialed it up to eleven with $106 million. Only Elon Musk ($276 million) and rich heir extraordinaire Timothy Mellon ($150 million) gave even more.
And then there is the influential MAGA icon and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. In a long post on X, she fired a broadside against any further US involvement in wars abroad: “We are $36+ TRILLION in debt and have mountains of our own problems. We have giant planks sticking out of our own eyes while we complain about splinters in other’s eyes. Every country involved and all over the world can be happy, successful, and rich if we all work together and seek peace and prosperity.”
MTG, as she is often called, has also preemptively and rightly rejected any accusation of “antisemitism” and even of isolationism: “Taking this position is NOT antisemitic. It’s rational, sane, and loving toward all people. Taking this position of peace and prosperity for all is not isolationism, it leads to GREAT trade deals and GREAT economies that help ALL PEOPLE.”
Worst of all, from Trump’s and Israel’s perspective, she has in effect reminded her 4.8 million followers, as well as many others who will read about her post in the traditional media, of Trump’s own campaign promise to end and not start wars, because no more wars is “what many Americans voted for in 2024.”
Clearly, there are influential representatives of MAGA who are not only willing to openly challenge the perversely self-damaging hold that Washington allows Israel to have over its foreign policy, but are also beginning to be explicit about the fact that Israel’s lobby in the US – whether Jewish or not – is putting another country first, at enormous cost to Americans.
Unfortunately, there are reasons to fear that this right-wing criticism of ‘Israel First’ will not prevail. Trump may very well be so beholden to and afraid of the Israel lobby that he will make the single worst mistake of his life and get even deeper into the war against Iran.
But then the question is: What will happen next? There is a brave left-wing opposition to Israel in America – full disclosure: my sort of people – and there also is clear polling evidence that Israel’s grip on American society as a whole is finally slipping, especially among the young. Now add a right-wing, MAGA-based opposition and another great US fiasco in the Middle East backfiring on America’s home front. Israel may get its wish once again, but in the not-so-long run it should be very careful what it wishes for. And that, as grim as the news is, is a tiny speck of hope on a very dark horizon.
