TEHRAN — When Benjamin Netanyahu sat for his interview with CBS News, now essentially an Israeli propaganda vehicle following Ellison’s acquisition, he delivered a performance meticulously engineered for an audience increasingly exhausted by his cycle of endless warfare and political maneuvering.

With American gas prices climbing as a direct result of the widening war on Iran, Netanyahu pitched a supposedly self-reliant roadmap: a ten-year phase-out of U.S. military aid to zero. He spoke of a “reset,” a transition from a client-state relationship to a partnership of equals. While some headlines treated it as a historic pivot, the reality is far more deceptive.

This is a masterstroke of geopolitical gaslighting designed to rebrand an unholy alliance just as public revulsion threatens to dismantle it. By stripping away the visible line item of “aid,” the two partners are attempting to bury the subsidy stigma.

The theater of mutual convenience

Netanyahu is not acting alone in this performance. He has a silent choir of American establishment figures tuning the theater to suit a skeptical public.

The pro-Israel Rahm Emanuel, the former Obama fixer and current strategic voice, has been vocal about the need for Israel to pay “market price” for its F-35s, much like Japan or other wealthy allies.

This is a smart rebranding of the empire. By turning the client into a “partner,” Washington can partly quiet domestic budget gripes. It allows the American government to maintain the appearance of some fiscal responsibility while the actual machinery of war remains fully funded through more opaque channels.

The pressure is coming from all sides of the American political spectrum. On the right, nationalist figures like Tucker Carlson have begun describing Trump as a “hostage” of Israel.

Former counterterrorism official Joe Kent and former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene have similarly blasted the “Israel First” policy, arguing that American interests are being sacrificed for a foreign power.

These voices tap into a deep and growing rage. A Pew poll from March 2026 showed that 60 percent of Americans now view Israel unfavorably. For the American right, the goal of this sudden anti-Israel pivot is not to end the empire, but to refine it.

By blaming the junior partner for regional catastrophes, they provide the deep state with a limited hangout. It functions as a performative decoupling, enabling the empire to outwardly signal a move away from Israeli interests while maintaining the U.S.-Israeli war machine’s essential trajectory.

The invisible web of transnational capital

The $3.8 billion annual aid package that Netanyahu claims he wants to “draw down” is merely the visible marquee. It is peanuts compared to the actual flood of resources. Last year alone, emergency arms surges topped $22 billion, much of it vanishing into a fog of classified deliveries.

But the real hooks run much deeper than government checks. The relationship is now anchored in the borderless interests of transnational capital.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud provides the backbone for Unit 8200’s cyber operations, while Google’s $1.2 billion Project Nimbus provides the digital infrastructure for the occupation. When Google acquired the Israeli firm Wiz for $32 billion earlier this year, it effectively laundered Israeli military technology back into the heart of the American corporate ecosystem.

This is the birth of the Technology Alliance 2.0. The move to “zero aid” is actually a move toward joint ventures in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and high-tech surveillance that are mostly off the books and harder for the public to track.

Wall Street now bankrolls 75 percent of the Israeli tech boom, with over a hundred firms riding the Nasdaq waves. This fusion ensures that even if the public subsidy wilts, the corporate veins pulse stronger than ever. The empire is going private, and in doing so, it makes itself nearly immune to democratic protest or congressional oversight.

The guilty scapegoat

A crucial part of this “reset” is the use of Israel as a strategic scapegoat. A key element of this rebranding is the calculated use of Israel as a strategic scapegoat. Throughout history, empires have used specific groups, such as what has been referred to as “the Jews,” as buffers or enforcers, only to sacrifice them when public anger boils over. Britain did it with Jewish communities during the Mandate era, using them as both vanguard enforcers and convenient buffers when costs rose.

The United States has been using this playbook. By framing the war on Iran as something Netanyahu “tricked” Washington into, the American state gains plausible deniability.

Recent reports in The New York Times suggesting that a single Netanyahu slide deck was the catalyst for the February strikes on Iran are part of this deception. They turn American aggression into something done to America, rather than by America.

However, we must be clear: the scapegoat in this scenario is not an innocent victim, quite the opposite. Israel is a willing, brutal, genocidal, and enthusiastic executioner of the imperial blueprint.

The genocide in Gaza and the wars on Lebanon and Iran are crimes that Israel owns fully. The deceptive game being played is one where the junior partner absorbs the moral flak for the boss’s long-term plan.

The war on Iran has been a fixture of U.S. foreign policy for decades, a mandate sustained by the financial elites who profit from global primacy.

A continuous line of U.S. presidents has relentlessly tightened the grip via economic warfare and sabotage, leading to the current kinetic reality. In this dynamic, Israel serves as the tactical proxy, but the initiative and the weaponry remain distinctly American, fulfilling a strategy long ago established by the centers of power in D.C. and Western financial districts around the world.

A bipartisan machine without an exit

The “hostage” narrative pushed by Carlson and others is a seductive fiction. Regardless of any leveraged secrets intelligence agencies might hold over him, Donald Trump shows no sign of being a coerced participant in the current crisis; instead, he revels in his strikes and promises nothing short of total annihilation.

The sudden turn against Israel by certain American right-wingers is a tactical disclosure of some truth to protect a deeper agenda.

Their goal is to prune the empire of its most unpopular liabilities so that the core mission of global dominance can survive. They want to sacrifice the “bad cop” to save the precinct.

The reality is that Israel cannot exist in its current expansionist form without constant and complete American support. It requires American aircraft, satellite eyes, air-refueling tankers, and the vast network of U.S. bases all around the Middle East.

Without the American forge, the Israeli blade would shatter in weeks. The mission remains the same: the preservation of an empire that refuses to die, using a partner that refuses to stop.