Israel-United States relations
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John Kiriakou first visited Israel as a tourist in 2022, saying he was shocked the Israeli government granted him a visa given his professional profile, though he reports no problems at Ben Gurion Airport. He characterizes Israeli operational policy as a willingness to destroy an entire city block of apartment buildings to kill a single Hezbollah leader or Iranian scientist, confident that the United States will not object and that other countries' objections carry no practical consequence.

Kiriakou's central claim about the relationship is structural: U.S. foreign policy, he says, has never actually been "America first", it has always been Israel first, often at the expense of American national interests, a pattern he says he watched play out daily both at the CIA and later as senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where staff were never permitted to do anything that might anger the Israelis and had to think about Israel's interests before America's own. He has felt the cost of saying so publicly: an article in the Middle East Forum, written by the political advisor to the Israeli foreign minister, called him "vehemently anti-Semitic" for his criticism of Mossad and of Israeli conduct in Gaza, which he has called a genocide. Kiriakou argues Benjamin Netanyahu has successfully convinced much of the West, and especially the United States, that opposing his personal policies is inherently antisemitic, a framing Kiriakou calls ridiculous, since most American Jews are of European rather than Semitic descent, while Gazans, he notes, are themselves a Semitic people.

Money, lobbying, and the CIA's blind spot

Kiriakou traces U.S. support for Israel largely to money and politics. He says the Citizens United decision made the dynamic worse, pointing to Miriam Adelson's $150 million donation to an RNC super PAC and AIPAC's practice of spending members of Congress out of office in primaries the moment they cross Israel on even minor points. He traces the clearest example of that pressure to the embassy's move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem: in 1993, Congress, under AIPAC pressure, passed a law ordering the move but froze it pending an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty, and every president kept that freeze in place until Trump ended it, closing the PLO's Washington office and expelling Palestinian diplomats just before the Abraham Accords were signed. He extends the same picture below the federal level: individual U.S. states, cities, and counties send their own money to Israel as line items in their budgets, citing San Marcos, Texas, a county he says was found to be sending millions of dollars to Israel, seemingly without legal challenge. Structurally, he notes the U.S. intelligence relationship with Israel is uniquely asymmetric: there is a standing, "written in stone" policy against CIA spying on Israel, unlike the Five Eyes alliance, where intelligence is shared freely and openly rather than merely withheld from surveillance, the U.S. has, in his words, "never opened the books" for Israel the way it has for Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Kiriakou says the asymmetry shows up in accountability, too: American citizens killed by Israelis are routinely ignored by the U.S. government, citing an American killed by settlers in the West Bank a week before one interview, with no diplomatic pressure and no calls for prosecution. He points to Jared Kushner as a case study in blurred loyalties, noting Guardian reporting quoted diplomats at the Iran negotiations describing Kushner as an "Israeli asset," and 2017 New York Times reporting that Netanyahu would sleep in Kushner's own bed during U.S. visits, with Kushner moving to the basement. He has also noted a Florida congressman who wore an IDF uniform on the floor of the House, and that Netanyahu's own son was reportedly hiding out in Miami Beach during the Iran war.

Evangelical support and the Second Coming

Kiriakou argues evangelical support for Israel is not really love of Israel at all, but a desire to hasten the Second Coming: the Book of Revelation says the Messiah returns once all Jews have returned to Israel, so evangelicals pursue Israeli statehood as a way to "squeeze the timeline." He cites Mike Huckabee's habit, in a Tucker Carlson interview, of using the word "we" when describing Israeli policy, as symptomatic of a belief common among American evangelicals, one he calls "ridiculous" and "not grounded in gospel", that helping Jews move to Israel hastens the coming of Christ.

Christian Palestine and the Orthodox churches

Kiriakou has said Palestine used to be roughly 10 percent Christian, and that nearly all of those Christians now live in Michigan after being forced out, a pattern he calls, alongside the treatment of Palestinian Muslims, the literal definition of ethnic cleansing. He separately faults the U.S. State Department under Hillary Clinton for having been instrumental in splitting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the Russian Orthodox Church after a thousand years of shared communion, calling the split a mistake.

Regional alignments: Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey

Kiriakou has described how Greece and Cyprus's alignment with Israel is a relatively recent and reactive development. When he first started visiting Greece, the Greeks were very close with the Arab world, Palestinian groups kept representatives in Athens, while Turkey and Israel were the close allies, each keeping an embassy in the other's capital. That flipped almost overnight once Erdoğan broke with Israel, pushing Greece and Cyprus toward Israel as a hedge against Turkey. The relationship deepened further after an offshore natural-gas discovery: Israeli, American, French, and British companies became involved in extracting it, and when Turkey demanded a share and was rebuffed, Turkey, France, and Israel each sent a battleship to the area before Turkey backed down.

The India hedge and the Iran-bombing pattern

Kiriakou says a recurring, bipartisan U.S. strategy, one he traces back to Bill Clinton rather than crediting to Trump alone, is to strengthen ties with India as a large, populous ally that can help offset the difficulties of the Middle East relationship built around Israel. He says every Israeli prime minister since the mid-1980s has asked visiting U.S. presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan, to bomb Iran, and that every one of them refused, until Donald Trump. Kiriakou warns that if Israel drags the U.S. into a longer war rather than a short bombing campaign, the U.S. will be forced to seriously reassess what it actually gets out of the relationship, since he says he understands exactly what Israel gets out of it, but not the reverse.

European diplomatic pressure

Kiriakou has noted that European governments have moved further than the United States on the underlying Israeli-Palestinian dispute: Ireland recognized Palestine as an independent state roughly six months before one interview, prompting Israel to withdraw its ambassador, and several EU countries signed a letter threatening sanctions on Israeli leaders unless Israel allowed the free flow of food, water, and medicine into Gaza.

The request to join the invasion

Kiriakou draws a sharp line between the two Iraq wars. The first Gulf War was "crystal clear": Iraq invaded Kuwait, and Saddam miscalculated in assuming the United States would not come to the aid of a country it was not especially close to, Kuwait was then a member of the non-aligned movement.

The 2003 war he calls "an entirely different animal", and the Israeli posture toward it is his illustration. "The Israelis begged us to let them join in the attack on Iraq", and everybody they approached, at the Pentagon, at the White House, at the CIA, said absolutely not. He describes them as excited "to the point of giddiness" at the prospect of being involved in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

On what happened anyway, Kiriakou stops short: they "tried to get a couple of shots in" on the day American forces crossed the border, "I won't say more than that." He does not elaborate, and the record here goes no further than he does.

The outcast argument

Asked what the closeness of the alliance looks like from a former intelligence officer's chair, Kiriakou answers in terms of exposure rather than affection: it "is extraordinarily dangerous for the United States over the long term."

The basis he gives is Israel's relationship to law rather than its conduct in any single episode. "Israel is an outcast nation around the world. It is not a signatory to the IAEA convention. It is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice. It It just doesn't believe that it needs to follow international law. And so it does anything it wants." From which, he says, it follows that more often than not Israel's actions are not in the interest of the United States.

On the 2026 war he makes a specific attribution of persuasion: "I'm confident that Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Donald Trump that the Iranian government was a house of cards" which would collapse as soon as the first missiles flew, "and that was just simply not true."

He places it in a pattern of congressional testimony rather than treating it as a one-off misjudgement: as soon as we took out Saddam Hussein there would be peace in the Middle East; as soon as we took out Muammar Gaddafi there would be peace in the Middle East; as soon as we took out the Iranians there would be peace in the Middle East. "Nothing that he tells us is true. Nothing."

The bill he draws is domestic. "And now we've got Americans coming home in body bags and for what? For Israel's foreign policy? There's no upside for the United States being involved in this war. None. And if Israel wanted to wage war against Iran, then Israel should have waged war against Iran. It shouldn't have been up to the United States to do Benjamin Netanyahu's dirty work for him."

Two things that surprised him about the second Trump term

Kiriakou, who is generally unsparing about both parties on this subject, named two developments early in Trump's second term that he had not expected and rated positively. The first was rhetorical and, on his reckoning, close to unprecedented: Trump said publicly that the ceasefire would probably not hold and criticised Israeli war crimes, "that's the first time since George H. W. Bush that a president has criticised Israel in a meaningful way." He contrasts this with his assessment of the predecessor, arguing there was "never any chance that Joe Biden was going to stand up against Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people," and that treating Biden as a peacemaker in the region was "a fool's errand."

The second was an appointment he calls "an inspired choice" despite conceding the nepotism charge against the administration generally. The envoy for the Middle East was Tiffany Trump's father-in-law, a billionaire, and, as Kiriakou stresses, a Greek Orthodox of Lebanese origin rather than an American Jewish businessman, which he treats as the material point. His reasoning is procedural and drawn from the region's own preferences: the Saudis, he says, always insist that the U.S. ambassador be a political appointee rather than a career diplomat, "because they want somebody who has direct access to the president", and on that test a relation by marriage outranks any diplomat. Kiriakou reaches for the Greek term for the relationship and notes there is no English equivalent. "All he has to do is pick up the telephone."

On that basis he counselled patience rather than endorsement, proposing to give the administration's foreign-policy team "the benefit of the doubt for the first six or 12 months" to see whether any plan for Palestine, or any willingness to "smack the Israelis down a peg or two" over the West Bank, actually materialised.

See also

- MOSSAD
- Iran 12-Day War
- Benjamin Netanyahu
- Israel's rightward shift
