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.[1] 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.[2]
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.[3] 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.[4] 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.[5]
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.[6] 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.[7] 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.[8] 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.[9]
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.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12]
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.”[13] 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.[14]
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.[15] 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.[16]
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.[17] 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.[18]
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.[19] 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.[20] 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.[21]
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.[22]