Jeremy Scahill

I hear from people who are talking directly to officials within the Trump administration that anyone who is a dissenting voice is afraid to even say anything.

And by dissenting voice, I mean people like Joe Kent, for instance, who just resigned as the head of the National Counterterrorism Center.

they know that they're going to have their political heads cut off and they're going to be exiled.

So there's only a handful of these people left.

And what I would say in short, when you talk about the client, is that this time around, Donald Trump has managed to combine the worst aspects of neocon foreign policy represented by Bush and Cheney in the post 9-11 world with the worst parts of American history from the CIA's early stages.

And he's combined it with a totally erratic, insane form of his MAGA

I wouldn't even say ideology, because Trump is a transactional guy.

I wouldn't even say he's ideological.

But in essence, what has happened is that what I would call the Netanyahu Mariam Adelson, Mariam Adelson, his number one campaign contributor, a citizen of Israel herself, and a very militant Zionist, he's basically sold an aspect of American policy to the Mariam Adelson Netanyahu wing of the party.

And he's put his son-in-law, Jared Kushner,

in charge of this whole project.

So what we've seen in Gaza, what we've seen in Iran, you can say in a sense, yes, this is a war for Israel, but I think that maybe is too reductive.

It's that you also have buy-in and encouragement from a very powerful segment of the American wing of Trump's movement, but it's very much driven on a tactical level by Israel.

Well, remember that Netanyahu right now is at the apex of that multi-decade career that you're talking about.

And much of that career, he has been actually the prime minister of Israel.

He had a few periods where he was out of power and he was a Fox News commentator.

And in fact, he slept in Jared Kushner's childhood bedroom at the home of Kushner's father,

in New Jersey when he was kind of out of power and was still lobbying for these wars inside of the United States.

The simplest way I would put it is that Netanyahu, even though he's not a religious man, Netanyahu represents this kind of militant Zionist ideology.

And they don't want to just wage a war of annihilation against the Palestinians who live in historic Palestine.