No.<\/p>\n
Was it because Israel was on its knees and could no longer go on with the war? <\/p>\n
No.<\/p>\n
We have a ceasefire because the United States of America decided that it was time for one. Period.<\/p>\n
The next question to ask then is this: If so, then could we have had a ceasefire say six months ago, or a year ago, or even two years ago?<\/p>\n
The answer is an emphatic \u2013 yes!<\/p>\n
We could have had a ceasefire because the U.S. could have declared that it wanted it at any point in time. This is now obvious. But it didn\u2019t until a few days ago.<\/p>\n
The New York Times reported on October 9, 2025, that the Trump administration had brokered a \u201cmomentous breakthrough\u201d between Israel and Hamas: A 72-hour ceasefire, hostage exchanges, and partial troop withdrawals. Within a day of Washington\u2019s green light, Netanyahu\u2019s cabinet convened, approved the order, and is from all indications halting the bombing. No divine intervention, no complex diplomatic ballet \u2014 just an abrupt shift in Washington\u2019s calculus.<\/p>\n
In short: The genocide stopped because the U.S. willed it to stop.<\/p>\n
So then what is one to make of the widely held notion that the United States government has been helplessly dragged along for the last two years \u2013 and in fact, for decades \u2013 by an obstinate, ruthless, greedy, ingrate ally, hostage to an all powerful lobby that grips the U.S. government with an iron fist? <\/p>\n
As the past two years have shown, the notion of a United States held hostage by Israel is a convenient and useful stubborn myth. The United States has not \u2013 and has never \u2013 been reluctantly following Israel: It has been directing it, always and all along. <\/p>\n
Let\u2019s examine the basic glaring facts: From the onset of the war in October 2023 to this latest ceasefire, American support of Israel\u2019s daily slaughter of the trapped and caged Gazans has been the sine qua non enabling constant of this genocide. Weapons, logistics, and diplomatic cover have flowed with machine-like precision, under both Biden and Trump \u2013 even as the whole world, morally shocked, rose up in sustained outrage, even after a warrant for the arrest of the Prime Minister of Israel was issued by the International Criminal Court. Even famine has been policy, it seems, not an accident \u2014 enforced starvation signed off by bureaucrats in Washington.<\/p>\n
But this pattern \u2013 Israel appearing to be doing as it pleases, a tail seeming to be wagging a big dog, until the dog decides that the wagging needs to stop \u2013 is not new. <\/p>\n
When President George H. W. Bush confronted Yitzhak Shamir in 1991 over settlement construction and threatened to withhold $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, the Israeli government blinked. The White House, in the middle of assembling a coalition for the Gulf War, demanded a halt to settlement expansion and pressed for the Madrid Peace Conference. Israel complied. The American press framed it as a \u201crare show of backbone\u201d against the Israel lobby. But in truth, it was another reminder of who holds the leash: Washington could squeeze at will, and Israel could only yield.<\/p>\n
The pattern repeated two decades later. In November 2012, during Israel\u2019s eight-day assault on Gaza (\u201cOperation Pillar of Defense\u201d), President Barack Obama personally called Netanyahu and demanded that he accept an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire. Netanyahu initially resisted, wanting to continue the operation. But after Obama\u2019s insistence \u2014 reinforced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton\u2019s emergency shuttle diplomacy between Jerusalem and Cairo \u2014 Israel halted its bombardment within hours. The timing wasn\u2019t moral; it was strategic. Washington wanted calm before the Thanksgiving news cycle and to protect Egypt\u2019s newly installed Morsi government. Israel obeyed. Once again, when the U.S. said stop, it stopped.<\/p>\n
Even Obama\u2019s later \u201ctensions\u201d with Netanyahu followed the same script. His brief standoff over settlement freezes, culminating in the 2011 Oval Office dressing-down, was portrayed as proof that the Israeli prime minister could defy a U.S. president and get away with it. Yet by the end of Obama\u2019s term, U.S. military aid had reached record levels, including a $38 billion package \u2014 the largest in history. Even in moments of public friction, the underlying hierarchy remained untouched: Israel\u2019s defiance was theater; the dependency was structural.<\/p>\n
When one traces the pattern \u2014 the timing of truces before G20 summits, escalations before U.N. votes, sudden humanitarian \u201csurges\u201d when cameras are rolling \u2014 it becomes clear that Israeli military tempo bends around American diplomatic needs. When Washington needs calm, Israel delivers it. When it needs pressure, the bombs resume. The much-publicized quarrels between Netanyahu and successive U.S. presidents are political pantomime, useful for both sides: Israel plays the defiant underdog; Washington plays the reluctant enabler. Both roles sustain the same imperial arrangement.<\/p>\n
Clinging to the \u201cIsrael-controls-Washington\u201d narrative has not only become empirically untenable, it also traps advocates for Palestinian rights in a moral cul-de-sac. It transforms Israel into a mythic omnipotent actor while absolving Americans of responsibility. Worse, it exposes critics to accusations of antisemitism (shadowy Jewish control) and disempowers movements that might otherwise target the true seat of policy: The Pentagon, the State Department, and the vast military-industrial bureaucracy that profits from endless war.<\/p>\n
Reframing the picture heliocentrically, so to speak \u2014 with the United States at the center \u2014 reveals Israel not as the master but as a satellite. It acts with aggression, yes, but aggression licensed, funded, and shielded by Washington. Every bomb dropped over Gaza has a congressional signature behind it. Every blockade is underwritten by American taxpayers. Every \u201crogue\u201d act fits within a strategic perimeter drawn in Virginia and Tampa.<\/p>\n
And yet, there is indeed one tail that is wagging a very large dog. <\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not Israel wagging America. It\u2019s the tail of the U.S. defense industry, intelligence bureaucracy, and revolving-door officials wagging the American people. <\/p>\n
The public, overwhelmingly opposed to war and genocide, is told that their outrage should be directed at a foreign capital rather than at the one that authorizes the planes, the fuel, the billions of dollars \u2013 and the silence. <\/p>\n
When Washington decided to stop the slaughter, the killing stopped. The simple physics of power could not be clearer. The question that must be asked now is not whether Israel will obey the next order, but whether the American people will finally recognize where the orders originate and why those orders defy, time and again, the basic, declared will of the people<\/a>.<\/p>\n