To the Jews of America

Most American Jews don't know what happened on February 28, 2026, in a town called Minab in southern Iran. They weren't told. The institutions claiming to speak for you — AIPAC, the ADL, the major Jewish federations — did not make it their business to tell you.

That morning, when the United States and Israel began their assault on Iran, a missile struck a school. The school was called Shajareh Tayyebeh. The Good Tree. It was a name chosen because a school is meant to nourish, to grow the future. During classes, the building was hit with such precision that a specialized clinic fifty yards away was left untouched. One hundred and sixty-five people died. Most of them were girls between seven and twelve years old.

The analysis of the strike was forensic. The missiles hit the military base and the school but spared the clinic between them. That cannot be coincidence. It indicates whoever executed it had coordinates and maps distinguishing the individual facilities. The school took a direct, separate strike. United Nations human rights experts called for an independent investigation. Amnesty International demanded accountability. The New York Times reported that a preliminary military investigation determined the U.S. was responsible.

And the institutions claiming to represent you were silent.

Norm Finkelstein, the scholar who has spent his life documenting what happens when institutions weaponize Jewish trauma for power, is afraid. He is watching the institutions claiming to speak for you double down on a path he sees as catastrophic. And he is warning: if this is not broken from inside, if you do not refuse it in your own name, the cost will be borne by Jews.

Here's what you need to know. Here's what your institutions have done in your name.

The Mechanism

While the school burned in Minab, AIPAC and the major Jewish organizations were occupied with something else. They were quietly pushing a bill through Congress — Section 224 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. The bill's name was clinical: the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. What it actually did was fuse the two militaries past the reach of a public vote.

Here's how it works. The bill creates a permanent Defense Department executive agent — a single official whose job is to integrate Israeli defense technology into every layer of the American military. Artificial intelligence. Cyber warfare. Autonomous weapons. Biotechnology. Data fusion. Everything. And it moves that integration out of the light.

For seventy-five years, American military aid to Israel has been a public thing. Congress votes. You can see it. You can condition it. You can say no. This bill ends that. It moves the relationship from a visible annual appropriation into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition — contracts, supply chains, procurement. The kind of thing that lives in program offices, not on a roll-call vote.

And here's who controls that machinery. Two men: Mike Rogers, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, and Roger Wicker, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee. They are the gatekeepers. And here's what they've taken from pro-Israel lobbies: Rogers has received nine hundred fifty-seven thousand four hundred twenty-seven dollars. Wicker has received five hundred thirty-three thousand nine hundred twenty-six dollars. AIPAC is listed as a top donor to both.

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft assessed the Initiative plainly: it "would arguably do more to intertwine the U.S. military with the Israeli military than the more than two hundred billion dollars in military assistance Israel has received from the U.S. since its founding in 1948." The shift strips away the political and diplomatic oversight mechanisms that make the relationship publicly accountable, moving it from a visible annual aid vote into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal. The result is a defense relationship that is simultaneously deeper and less transparent.

What the War Was For

What was the war actually for? Look at who they positioned to take over.

Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran's last Shah, made a video in January 2026. He laid out what a government under his rule would do. First thing: recognize Israel immediately. Second: end Iran's nuclear program. Third: broaden the Abraham Accords into what he called the "Cyrus Accords" — uniting Iran, Israel, and the Arab world under a new order.

Israeli intelligence analysts didn't hide what they saw. A former senior officer in an Israeli military intelligence branch, now at a defense think tank, put it plainly: Pahlavi was "ticking the boxes of everything that can correlate with Trump." He was auditioning for the job. He was saying: install me, and I'll give you exactly what you want.

The war that killed the girls at the Good Tree school was, in part, a bet on that man. It failed. But the institutions that spoke for you said nothing about it.

And the institutions that claimed to support the Iranian people were elsewhere occupied. While Trump made seven separate threats over two weeks that he would intervene if Iran killed protesters — setting a public tripwire — the death toll mounted. Independent monitors counted around seven thousand confirmed. Trump, with no source cited, inflated it to thirty-two thousand, then thirty-five thousand, then forty-five thousand. A president preparing the American people for a war he'd already decided on. And the institutions claiming to represent you were silent, or they were busy with Section 224.

The Choice

You have a choice. The institutions claiming to represent you — AIPAC, the ADL, the federations — spent your moral authority on this. They did it in your name. They did it without asking you, without telling you, and without accepting that you might say no.

Most American Jews are already saying no. You're in the streets. You're on record. You're refusing it. But the ones still listening to these institutions need to hear this plainly: they are not protecting you. They are not keeping you safe. They are spending the memory of the Holocaust — the promise of "never again" — on something you would never choose if you saw it clearly.

You can refuse it. Not by marching alone. By taking back the institutions. By saying: not in our name. Not with our money. Not with our memory.

The Good Tree was cut down. But the name survives. The girls survive, in how we choose to remember them. And that choice — what you do with what you now know — is yours to make.