Opinion...
The puppeteer’s paradox: In the US–Israel relationship who is the master and who is the slave?
December 1, 2025
United States President Donald Trump (R) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) shake hands as they leave following a joint press conference in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., United States on February 04, 2025. [Kyle Mazza – Anadolu Agency]
by Jasim Al-Azzawi
In the complex calculus of American foreign policy, few relationships are as contentious as that between the United States and Israel. Two competing theories attempt to explain it, each proposing a starkly different solution to a fundamental question: Who is really in charge of whom?
In my recent podcast, JasimAzawiShow, I posed the question to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson—a man who worked for years in the engine room of American power as Chief of Staff to the late US Secretary of State Colin Powell—whether Israel dictates US ME foreign policy or merely plays this role. He paused, as he often does when guiding the listener to an unpleasant truth. He recalled Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, on the US Senate floor, shouting, “Come on, people! If Israel doesn’t do it, then we have to do it!” The tantrum, Wilkerson stated, revealed what Washington would prefer to conceal: that Israel is the United States’ “forward operating base,” a willing implementer of policies Washington itself cannot openly pursue. The US, Wilkerson implies, uses Israel as a smokescreen, a prop, and an alibi so that it can say: we cannot act differently because Israel dictates our domestic policy.
Wilkerson’s contention—that Israel is a surrogate instead of a master—is an interesting inversion of the conventional narrative. Israel’s power, to him, is not structural but functional: it does America’s dirty work in the area, from confronting Iran’s ambitions to containing Arab nationalism and overseeing regional oil flow. Yet that same contention runs directly into the face of one of the most controversial claims in modern political science.
Then, in 2007, University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer and Harvard Professor Stephen M. Walt published “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.“ The book detonated like a controlled explosive in the American academy. They argued that AIPAC and a constellation of pro-Israel organizations “have managed to shape and sometimes dictate” US Middle East policy in ways harmful to American strategic interests. The lobby’s influence, they maintained, was “unmatched by any other foreign interest group in Washington,” with the ability to stifle debate and punish critics of Israeli policy.
That tension—Wilkerson’s “America behind the mask” vs. Mearsheimer’s “America under the thumb”—has fueled decades of debate over who actually makes US foreign policy in the Middle East. It’s an old question, but one that refuses to die.
Few represented this ambivalence more viscerally than Richard Nixon, the ultimate realist. On one Nixon Presidential Library tape, the president is heard fulminating: “I hate it, it’s what the Zionist lobby is doing to me. They want to make people do what they want. I hate it!” The voice is shrill, face contorted, outrage real, and a sense of entrapment evident. Years later, in another interview, the same Nixon, calm and logical, delivered a judgment shattering in its finality: “Contrary to all beliefs, Israel is not an asset. Israel is a liability.”
Between those two statements exists the essence of the puppeteer’s paradox. Washington depends on Israel to project its strategic will across the Middle East; Israel depends on Washington to survive the backfire that this power projection creates. Each purports to be the master of the other—and each, in a sense, is right.
Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, mocked the endless speculations over who is in charge. “One week they tell us Israel is dominating the United States,” he told reporters. “And the next week, they tell us the United States is dominating Israel. This is rubbish. We have a relationship, a partnership of allies who share values and share goals.” Yet as any foreign policy expert knows, alliances are very rarely between equals. They are marked by leverage, dependence, and the power of saying no.
Netanyahu’s “shared values” argument has often been rhetorical camouflage for asymmetry. While Israel receives over $3.8 billion in yearly US military aid and unmatched diplomatic shelter at the U.N., Washington remains hostage to a domestic political consensus in which backing Israel is a patriotism litmus test. When a member of Congress steps out of line, a political price is swiftly and publicly extracted.
Wilkerson, after decades of observing the power machinery in action, phrases it differently. Congress, for him, is less under Israel’s control than under fear—fear of being charged with disloyalty. A republican expert told Tucker Carlson on his show, “Every Republican member has a Zionist babysitter, telling him how to vote”. The result is paralysis: a legislature not prepared to delink US interests from Israeli ones, for fear of ending a political career.
The strategic asset approach accurately accounts for cases in which Israeli behavior aligns with American interests in containing competing powers and projecting regional influence. It cannot, however, account for why the United States sends billions of dollars in military aid each year to a nation with a strong economy, or why US administrations consistently defend Israel from international condemnation even when it interferes with other foreign policy goals.
This dynamic reached its apex in 2015, when Netanyahu, at the invitation of Republican leaders, addressed a joint session of Congress to denounce President Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran. Members of Congress erupted into applause—43 standing ovations for a foreign leader who was quite openly confronting the sitting US president. The symbolism was not hard to read: the tail wagging the dog.
And yet, Mearsheimer’s theory is not cast in iron in every instance and occasionally merits scrutiny. If Israel truly controlled Washington, it would have prevented Obama’s nuclear deal, prevented the US from selling arms to Arab rivals, and secured automatic American backing for each Gaza war. That has not always happened. Israel may push, prod, and provoke—but it cannot dictate absolutely. The interests of the two partners may sporadically collide.
As Nixon’s tapes remind us, America’s presidents have long grappled with the cost of that engagement. “Israel is a liability,” he cried, but Washington has not reached the point of complete severance. The paradox endures because it suits both sides—politically, strategically, and psychologically. Each can claim control; each remains, in fact, the other’s captive. The reality is less conspiratorial, more symbiotic. The two are thus not connected as puppeteer and puppet, but as two actors trapped in a drama they can no longer rewrite.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
United States President Donald Trump (R) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) shake hands as they leave following a joint press conference in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., United States on February 04, 2025. [Kyle Mazza – Anadolu Agency]
by Jasim Al-Azzawi
In the complex calculus of American foreign policy, few relationships are as contentious as that between the United States and Israel. Two competing theories attempt to explain it, each proposing a starkly different solution to a fundamental question: Who is really in charge of whom?
In my recent podcast, JasimAzawiShow, I posed the question to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson—a man who worked for years in the engine room of American power as Chief of Staff to the late US Secretary of State Colin Powell—whether Israel dictates US ME foreign policy or merely plays this role. He paused, as he often does when guiding the listener to an unpleasant truth. He recalled Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, on the US Senate floor, shouting, “Come on, people! If Israel doesn’t do it, then we have to do it!” The tantrum, Wilkerson stated, revealed what Washington would prefer to conceal: that Israel is the United States’ “forward operating base,” a willing implementer of policies Washington itself cannot openly pursue. The US, Wilkerson implies, uses Israel as a smokescreen, a prop, and an alibi so that it can say: we cannot act differently because Israel dictates our domestic policy.
Wilkerson’s contention—that Israel is a surrogate instead of a master—is an interesting inversion of the conventional narrative. Israel’s power, to him, is not structural but functional: it does America’s dirty work in the area, from confronting Iran’s ambitions to containing Arab nationalism and overseeing regional oil flow. Yet that same contention runs directly into the face of one of the most controversial claims in modern political science.
Then, in 2007, University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer and Harvard Professor Stephen M. Walt published “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.“ The book detonated like a controlled explosive in the American academy. They argued that AIPAC and a constellation of pro-Israel organizations “have managed to shape and sometimes dictate” US Middle East policy in ways harmful to American strategic interests. The lobby’s influence, they maintained, was “unmatched by any other foreign interest group in Washington,” with the ability to stifle debate and punish critics of Israeli policy.
That tension—Wilkerson’s “America behind the mask” vs. Mearsheimer’s “America under the thumb”—has fueled decades of debate over who actually makes US foreign policy in the Middle East. It’s an old question, but one that refuses to die.
Few represented this ambivalence more viscerally than Richard Nixon, the ultimate realist. On one Nixon Presidential Library tape, the president is heard fulminating: “I hate it, it’s what the Zionist lobby is doing to me. They want to make people do what they want. I hate it!” The voice is shrill, face contorted, outrage real, and a sense of entrapment evident. Years later, in another interview, the same Nixon, calm and logical, delivered a judgment shattering in its finality: “Contrary to all beliefs, Israel is not an asset. Israel is a liability.”
Between those two statements exists the essence of the puppeteer’s paradox. Washington depends on Israel to project its strategic will across the Middle East; Israel depends on Washington to survive the backfire that this power projection creates. Each purports to be the master of the other—and each, in a sense, is right.
Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, mocked the endless speculations over who is in charge. “One week they tell us Israel is dominating the United States,” he told reporters. “And the next week, they tell us the United States is dominating Israel. This is rubbish. We have a relationship, a partnership of allies who share values and share goals.” Yet as any foreign policy expert knows, alliances are very rarely between equals. They are marked by leverage, dependence, and the power of saying no.
Netanyahu’s “shared values” argument has often been rhetorical camouflage for asymmetry. While Israel receives over $3.8 billion in yearly US military aid and unmatched diplomatic shelter at the U.N., Washington remains hostage to a domestic political consensus in which backing Israel is a patriotism litmus test. When a member of Congress steps out of line, a political price is swiftly and publicly extracted.
Wilkerson, after decades of observing the power machinery in action, phrases it differently. Congress, for him, is less under Israel’s control than under fear—fear of being charged with disloyalty. A republican expert told Tucker Carlson on his show, “Every Republican member has a Zionist babysitter, telling him how to vote”. The result is paralysis: a legislature not prepared to delink US interests from Israeli ones, for fear of ending a political career.
The strategic asset approach accurately accounts for cases in which Israeli behavior aligns with American interests in containing competing powers and projecting regional influence. It cannot, however, account for why the United States sends billions of dollars in military aid each year to a nation with a strong economy, or why US administrations consistently defend Israel from international condemnation even when it interferes with other foreign policy goals.
This dynamic reached its apex in 2015, when Netanyahu, at the invitation of Republican leaders, addressed a joint session of Congress to denounce President Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran. Members of Congress erupted into applause—43 standing ovations for a foreign leader who was quite openly confronting the sitting US president. The symbolism was not hard to read: the tail wagging the dog.
And yet, Mearsheimer’s theory is not cast in iron in every instance and occasionally merits scrutiny. If Israel truly controlled Washington, it would have prevented Obama’s nuclear deal, prevented the US from selling arms to Arab rivals, and secured automatic American backing for each Gaza war. That has not always happened. Israel may push, prod, and provoke—but it cannot dictate absolutely. The interests of the two partners may sporadically collide.
As Nixon’s tapes remind us, America’s presidents have long grappled with the cost of that engagement. “Israel is a liability,” he cried, but Washington has not reached the point of complete severance. The paradox endures because it suits both sides—politically, strategically, and psychologically. Each can claim control; each remains, in fact, the other’s captive. The reality is less conspiratorial, more symbiotic. The two are thus not connected as puppeteer and puppet, but as two actors trapped in a drama they can no longer rewrite.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
MASTER / SERVANT DEPECHE MODE
Human Rights Day in the age of Gaza
December 1, 2025
Volunteers organize an event in the Jawazat area of western Gaza City to entertain children and help them momentarily escape the effects of war through various performances and games, on November 28, 2025. [Khames Alrefi – Anadolu Agency]
by Eko Ernada
Human Rights Day, commemorated annually on 10 December, is intended to reaffirm the principles of dignity, equality, and universal protection enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Yet in the age of Gaza, these principles ring hollow. The world marks Human Rights Day with speeches and ceremonies, even as an entire civilian population endures bombardment, displacement, starvation, and the collapse of basic infrastructure—with almost complete impunity.
Gaza has become the starkest mirror of our time. It reveals a world in which “universal” rights are selectively defended, in which civilian lives can be extinguished during declared humanitarian pauses, and in which the international system proves unable—or unwilling—to enforce its own norms. The tragedy is not only that Gaza burns, but that it burns while the world insists it still believes in human rights.
The bitter paradox of Gaza is that even a “ceasefire” no longer guarantees safety. Israel announces pauses in fighting, yet strikes hospitals, refugee shelters, and residential blocks hours later. These are not accidents or isolated incidents; they signal a global shift. We live in an era where restraint has eroded, legality has weakened, and the protection of civilians has become politically negotiable. Each broken ceasefire broadcasts a dangerous message: the laws of war no longer function as limits for those powerful enough to ignore them.
Political theorist Carl Schmitt once argued that the sovereign is the one who decides the exception. Israel’s conduct in Gaza reflects this logic with unsettling clarity. By invoking “self-defence” without temporal or ethical boundaries, it asserts the authority to determine when international law applies and when it can be suspended. This produces a permanent state of exception—an elastic zone where lethal force can be justified regardless of circumstances, even during declared humanitarian pauses.
The post–World War II international order, built on the promise that war would be limited and civilians protected, now appears fragile and deeply inconsistent. The UN Charter and Geneva Conventions were meant to bind all states equally. Gaza shows that they do not. Instead, the enforcement of international law has become hierarchical and contingent on geopolitics rather than principles. Human Rights Day, intended as a celebration of universality, arrives as a glaring reminder of selective morality.
The double standards reveal themselves with painful clarity. Violations of ceasefires in Ukraine generate swift Western condemnation and calls for accountability. When similar violations occur in Gaza, they are reframed as “security measures,” “precision targeting,” or unfortunate collateral damage. This asymmetry destroys the credibility of the so-called “rules-based order” and reduces human rights to political rhetoric. It exposes a disturbing truth: rights are vigorously defended for some populations and quietly disregarded for others.
Israel’s repeated breaches of truces must also be understood as a philosophical act. Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the state of exception—a space where the law is suspended while still invoked to legitimise violence—describes Gaza with eerie accuracy. Ceasefires are transformed from humanitarian obligations into strategic intervals: time to reposition forces, tighten control, and resume bombardment. The truce becomes a tool of war rather than a reprieve from it.
Layered onto this political and legal impunity is a new technological dimension of violence. Israel’s military operations increasingly rely on AI-assisted targeting, biometric surveillance, predictive analytics, and real-time data extracted from Palestinians. Warfare is merging with digital governance; civilian life becomes a set of data points, and killing becomes “efficient.” Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” has evolved into a digital form—violence rendered algorithmic, bureaucratic, and shrouded in technological inevitability.
This raises a profound question for Human Rights Day: can human rights survive in a world where death can be administered through algorithms, where narratives are weaponised globally, and where geopolitics shields one state from accountability? Gaza suggests that without radical change, the answer may be no.
The UDHR proclaims the right to life, dignity, medical care, protection from collective punishment, and freedom from arbitrary violence. Yet in Gaza, families are bombed in their homes, displaced repeatedly under fire, denied water and electricity, and deprived of medical treatment even inside hospitals. These are not mere violations—they are the unravelling of the moral foundation on which Human Rights Day rests.
The crisis is not confined to Gaza. The collapse of enforcement in one place accelerates the decay of norms everywhere. When international law becomes optional for one state, it effectively becomes optional for all. The precedent now being set—that mass civilian casualties can be justified through political alliances—will reverberate globally. Other states will follow the model of impunity, confident that geopolitical alignment can shield them from scrutiny.
The Middle East has already begun to absorb the consequences. Across the region, the publics witness the destruction in Gaza with a sense of moral injury and political disillusionment. Trust in the international system—already strained by decades of selective intervention and unfulfilled resolutions—has further eroded. The perceived hypocrisy of global powers deepens instability and fuels the belief that justice cannot be obtained through institutions supposedly designed to deliver it.
Human Rights Day, in this context, risks becoming an empty ritual. States will issue statements praising the UDHR while declining to defend its principles in practice. International organisations will call for accountability, yet they are structurally unable to enforce it. And global powers will continue to speak the language of human rights while acting in ways that betray them.
In the age of Gaza, the meaning of Human Rights Day must be re-examined. It cannot remain a commemoration of ideals disconnected from reality. It must become a call to confront the political, legal, and technological structures that have allowed rights to erode so dramatically. That means addressing the paralysis of the UN Security Council, the political shielding of certain states, and the growing use of digital systems that dehumanise the populations they surveil.
Ultimately, the question for this Human Rights Day is not whether Israel has crossed the limits of lawful conduct. That question has been answered repeatedly, with every bomb dropped during a ceasefire, every hospital struck, and every civilian family buried. The real question is whether humanity still believes that limits must exist at all. If the world continues to tolerate the destruction of Gaza under the language of security and self-defence, then universality—the core promise of human rights—will not survive.
In Gaza, a city burns. And with it burns the credibility of the global human rights order. Whether Human Rights Day remains meaningful or becomes mere symbolism will depend on how the world chooses to respond to this moment.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
