Politics & Diplomacy
Ex-intelligence chief Joe Kent campaigns against deeper US military ties to Israel
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The most consequential American argument about Israel's role in United States policy is being carried by a man who ran a US intelligence agency five months ago. Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center on 17 March, and has since made that argument his full-time cause.
His resignation letter, posted publicly, made the claim that detonated the debate: "Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby." Days later he told Tucker Carlson's podcast that "the Israelis drove the decision" to strike Iran, ABC News reported.
In the letter's telling, Israeli officials and influential American media ran a misinformation campaign early in the administration to sow pro-war sentiment — and when Washington neared a deal with Tehran in June 2025, Israel convinced the president to abandon it for regime change, Responsible Statecraft reported.
The response was furious and immediate.
Senator Mitch McConnell said the letter contained "virulent anti-Semitism" and that "isolationists and anti-Semites have no place in either party," Fox News reported; President Trump called Kent "weak on security." Commentators from the Forward to Foreign Policy argued that blaming Israel lets Washington's own war machine off the hook — while PBS reported the resignation had reignited the deeper argument over Israeli influence in American decisions.
Kent's newest front is legislative. He has urged voters to demand senators strip Section 219 from the annual defense bill, describing it as merging the military's most sensitive capabilities with Israel — and he returned to the theme on X again this week.
For Palestinian readers the stakes sit underneath the noise. The question Kent forces — whose interests steer American policy in the Middle East — is the same question that decides what Washington tolerates in Gaza. An argument once confined to the margins now comes from a man who sat inside the machine, and the capital has to answer him.
