John Mearsheimer: Netanyahu & the Israeli Lobby Are Scrambling
YouTube Channel: True Divine Wisdom
Published date: September 20, 2025
In recent years, perceptions of Israel and its U.S. relationship have shifted, exemplified by conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who moved from strong support to growing criticism of Israel. Following Kirk’s assassination, conspiracy theories linking Israel to his death have flourished, despite no evidence and strong denials from Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who praised Kirk as a loyal friend of Israel. These theories echo past suspicions around events like JFK’s assassination and 9/11. The controversy highlights broader frustrations with Israel’s actions in the Middle East, U.S. support driven by lobbying efforts, and concerns about restricted discourse on Israel in America, impacting free speech and democratic values. The situation reflects increasing polarization and challenges in U.S.-Israel relations.
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MEARSHEIMER: A lot of people in recent years have begun to rethink how they view Israel and Israel’s relationship with the United States. And what happened with Kirk is that he was at one point, as Prime Minister Netanyahu describes, super supportive of Israel, but he began to change his mind. When you think about assassinations, the first country that comes to mind is Israel. And that’s the problem that Netanyahu faces here. What’s going on here is that Netanyahu is not telling the truth.
The problem is—there are two problems here. First of all, almost everybody believes that Netanyahu lies all the time. That’s true in Israel as well as in the United States. So when he says he’s telling the truth and others are lying, it’s not an argument that’s going to sell very well. The other problem that he faces, and the Israelis face more generally, is they run around the world assassinating people on a daily basis. It’s really quite stunning. So when someone like Charlie Kirk gets assassinated, or someone like JFK gets assassinated, it doesn’t take much for people with creative minds to link Israel to those assassinations. Now, I’m not saying for one second that that’s true. But in a world like the one that we live in, where it’s very hard to tell what the truth is and most people think the government—and here we’re talking about the American government—lies to us, it’s very easy for conspiracy theories to fester. And again, when you think about assassinations the first country that comes to mind is Israel, and that’s the problem that Netanyahu faces here.
Netanyahu has just issued another statement where he talks about the fact that Israel and Charlie Kirk were the best of friends and that Israel had absolutely nothing to do with Charlie Kirk’s death. Now the question you ask is: why is this the case? And the answer is there are three big events in recent American history where people believe there was a conspiracy involved, and that conspiracy involved Israel. One is the assassination of JFK. Two is what happened at 9/11. And three is the Charlie Kirk killing. This is a huge problem for the Israelis. I’m not saying that the Israelis were involved in any three of those events, but there are a lot of people who believe that the Israelis were involved in Kennedy’s assassination, what happened on 9/11. And by the way, I would note that Tucker Carlson is doing a five-part series. It’s due to come out reasonably soon on what happened on 9/11, and he will make the argument that the Israelis were involved. And then, of course, there’s the Charlie Kirk business. All sorts of people think—and this is in keeping with Max Blumenthal’s superb reporting—that the Israelis were involved in what happened to Charlie Kirk.
So what’s happening here is Netanyahu is scrambling, and he’s scrambling to go to great lengths to distance Israel from what happened with regard to Charlie Kirk. And by the way, Bill Aman, who is a mainstream supporter of Israel and was putting pressure on Charlie Kirk as well, has gone to great lengths to put out a tweet that says he had nothing but the highest respect for Charlie Kirk and had a very positive meeting with him and so forth and so on. So both the lobby, or Israel’s supporters in the United States, and Netanyahu are scrambling to avoid blame for this event.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, said that the bigger the lie, the faster it will spread. Well, somebody has fabricated a monstrous big lie that Israel had something to do with Charlie Kirk’s horrific murder. This is insane. It is false. It is outrageous. Charlie Kirk was a giant, a once-in-a-century talent who defended freedom, defended America, defended our common Judeo-Christian civilization. Charlie loved Israel. He loved the Jewish people. He told me so in a letter that he sent me just a few months ago. “One of my greatest joys as a Christian,” he said, “is advocating for Israel and forming alliances with Jews to protect Judeo-Christian civilization. He encouraged me to make the case directly to the American people about how vital Israel is to U.S. national security. He told me, ‘The Holy Land is so important to my life, it pains me to see support for Israel slip away.’ ” Now, if Charlie disagreed with a policy of mine or a decision here and there, not only did I not mind, I welcomed it. This is the essence of Charlie. This is the essence of a free country. It’s exactly what Charlie stood for. And I knew that his suggestions always came from the heart, from his love for Israel and from his love for the Jewish people. A few weeks before his death, I spoke to Charlie. I invited him to visit Israel again. And sadly, that won’t happen.
Now, some are peddling these disgusting rumors, perhaps out of obsession, perhaps with Qatari funding. What I do know is this: Charlie Kirk was a great man, and a great man deserves honor, not lies. Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.
MEARSHEIMER: It’s more than destructive of American national security. It’s reaching the point where it’s destructive of American liberal democracy as well. But let’s leave that aside for a second. The fact is that what was happening with Charlie Kirk, and it’s very well documented, is that he was changing his mind in a fundamental way on Israel and Israel’s role inside of the United States. A lot of people in recent years have begun to rethink how they view Israel and Israel’s relationship with the United States. And what happened with Kirk is that he was at one point, as Prime Minister Netanyahu describes, super supportive of Israel, but he began to change his mind. And by the way, Tucker Carlson has put out a video where he talks about his lengthy discussions with Charlie Kirk that basically tell the same story that Max tells. So, it’s quite clear that what was going on here is that Kirk had flipped on Israel and on Israel’s relationship with the United States. So, in a very important way, what’s going on here is that Netanyahu is not telling the truth.
CHARLIE KIRK: Megyn, you’re hitting on something very potent and important. The people that are attacking me are in a hyper-paranoid state because they’re at war, and war tends to make things black and white. You’re a hammer looking for a nail. I have less ability sometimes online to criticize the Israeli government about backlash than actual Israelis do. Personality types like you, myself, and Tucker—when you guys privately and publicly call our character into question, the hostile reaction is that now Megyn and Charlie are enemies. Boy, I’ll tell you, you’re going to weaken and basically deflate two of your strongest advocates.
MEARSHEIMER: All you have to do is look at what’s happening with regard to universities. There’s all this talk about anti-Semitism on campuses, and university presidents have foolishly played along with this and accepted the argument that there is anti-Semitism. There’s not anti-Semitism. What there was, was protests—significant protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And the donor class, as you call it, the lobby as I call it, went to great lengths to portray those protests against genocide as anti-Semitism. This is ludicrous. But the end result is it’s freed up President Trump and it’s freed up Congress to put their crosshairs on universities, and now they’re in the process of wrecking universities. This is absolutely horrible. The United States depends on those universities. Furthermore, you don’t want to threaten freedom of speech, whether it’s at universities or in the country at large. But that’s what’s happening.
It’s in large part because the Israelis and their supporters in the United States have a deep-seated interest in shutting down discourse about Israel, about the U.S.–Israeli relationship, and about what the lobby is doing. Steve Walt and I, who as you know wrote this famous book on the Israel lobby, in many ways were the first two people to publicly point out what the lobby or the donor class does. We understood very quickly that the lobby goes to enormous lengths to shut down any criticism of Israel immediately, and they will act in incredibly ruthless ways to do that. And that’s what you’re seeing now. Tucker Carlson, when I was on his show, said he had never met any more vicious people than those in the Israel lobby. And of course, he’s exactly right. The reason they have to go to such great lengths to shut down discourse immediately is that if you ever had an open discourse on Israel and what Israel is doing, and you allowed people to speak freely, the United States would have a fundamentally different view of Israel and a fundamentally different policy toward Israel. The reason that we have this policy toward Israel that’s so out of sync with public opinion as it’s now changed is because of the power of the lobby. You take the power of the lobby away and it’s a new ball game.
Now the problem here—just one more point. As time goes by, it will be imperative for the lobby to continue to defend Israel because it is continuing to behave in a barbaric manner in Gaza, on the West Bank, and truth be told, all over the Middle East. So the lobby really has its work cut out for it, and the end result is it is doing all sorts of things to limit discourse that threaten freedom of speech and threaten liberal values. In a very important way, Israel and its supporters here in the United States—most of whom are Jewish—are doing things that are not in the interests of Americans and, in particular, are not in the interests of Jewish people. This is a completely crazy situation. And as bad as it is today, I fear that it’s only going to get worse.
The Constitution was set up in a way that was designed to protect against that because the Founding Fathers understood, as you and I and most Americans understand, no one person is invincible. People make mistakes. They do stupid things. And the reason that you have checks and balances is so that the person at the top, or the people at the top, are limited in what they can do by themselves. Now there are obviously circumstances where the president has to take over—he is the ultimate decider, as George W. Bush said after 9/11. We understand there are those kinds of circumstances. But President Trump’s view is that he is the ultimate decider 24/7, and this is a prescription for disaster. It has nothing to do with Trump per se—it just has to do with the fact that all individuals have faults.
Our elections don’t add up to very much at all. We don’t have much say in who the candidates are. The moneyed interests in this country basically control who the candidates are. The idea that the people have significant influence on our government at this point in time is not a serious argument. And all you have to do is look at the Israel issue. If you look at how most Americans think about Israel and think about the Palestinians, more Americans support the Palestinians than they do the Israelis. The number of Americans who think that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is reported to be close to 50%, and it’s well above 50% in the case of the Democratic Party. But if you look at how those two parties and how the government acts, you’d have no idea how the people actually think. We just don’t have that much influence, certainly on foreign policy but even on domestic policy.
And by the way, this is why a lot of people voted for Donald Trump. Trump promised that he was going to fix this situation. There are a huge number of Americans out there who think the government doesn’t represent them. They think the government is run by privileged elites who have buggered the system so that it favors them and screws people down below. Trump understood that very well. He has a very good nose and he appealed to those people, saying he would change things. Of course, he hasn’t changed things, and we’re in real trouble.
But there are all sorts of other problems as well. We were just talking about the freedom of speech issue. Is there a more important issue? The protection against being searched…
REPORTER: Pam Bondi saying she’s gonna go after hate speech. A lot of people, a lot of your allies, say hate speech is free speech.
DONALD TRUMP: She’d probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they’ll come after ABC. Well, ABC paid me $16 million recently for a form of hate speech. Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech, so maybe they’ll have to go after you.
MEARSHEIMER: This violates freedom of speech. Hate speech is protected.
I think these hateful things that have been said about Charlie Kirk are absolutely horrible, but they’re protected. It’s just like Nazis marching in Skokie when we were younger—hateful thing, but the Constitution is set up to protect that. I remember when I was younger, when I went to West Point, and I would see people burning the American flag. That did not warm the cockles of my heart, as you can appreciate. But people are allowed to do that. That’s what makes America great. A lot of people don’t understand that anymore.
The idea that the President of the United States and some of his principal assistants think that freedom of speech is not that important and that they’re free to label speech they don’t like as “hate speech” and then throw people in jail or do whatever, is reprehensible.
