And then suddenly, there was a ceasefire — as if by divine miracle!
Was the ceasefire declared because Israel had finally accomplished its declared goals?
No.
Was it because Israel was on its knees and could no longer go on with the war?
No.
We have a ceasefire because the United States of America decided that it was time for one. Period.
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?
The answer is an emphatic – yes!
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’t until a few days ago.
The New York Times reported on October 9, 2025, that the Trump administration had brokered a “momentous breakthrough” between Israel and Hamas: A 72-hour ceasefire, hostage exchanges, and partial troop withdrawals. Within a day of Washington’s green light, Netanyahu’s cabinet convened, approved the order, and is from all indications halting the bombing. No divine intervention, no complex diplomatic ballet — just an abrupt shift in Washington’s calculus.
In short: The genocide stopped because the U.S. willed it to stop.
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 – and in fact, for decades – by an obstinate, ruthless, greedy, ingrate ally, hostage to an all powerful lobby that grips the US government with an iron fist?
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 – and has never – been reluctantly following Israel: It has been directing it, always and all along.
Let’s examine the basic glaring facts: From the onset of the war in October 2023 to this latest ceasefire, American support of Israel’s 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 – 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 — enforced starvation signed off by bureaucrats in Washington.
But this pattern – 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 – is not new.
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 “rare show of backbone” 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.
The pattern repeated two decades later. In November 2012, during Israel’s eight-day assault on Gaza (“Operation Pillar of Defense”), 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’s insistence — reinforced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emergency shuttle diplomacy between Jerusalem and Cairo — Israel halted its bombardment within hours. The timing wasn’t moral; it was strategic. Washington wanted calm before the Thanksgiving news cycle and to protect Egypt’s newly installed Morsi government. Israel obeyed. Once again, when the U.S. said stop, it stopped.
Even Obama’s later “tensions” 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’s term, U.S. military aid had reached record levels, including a $38 billion package — the largest in history. Even in moments of public friction, the underlying hierarchy remained untouched: Israel’s defiance was theater; the dependency was structural.
When one traces the pattern — the timing of truces before G20 summits, escalations before U.N. votes, sudden humanitarian “surges” when cameras are rolling — 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.
Clinging to the “Israel-controls-Washington” 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.
Reframing the picture heliocentrically, so to speak — with the United States at the center — 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 “rogue” act fits within a strategic perimeter drawn in Virginia and Tampa.
And yet, there is indeed one tail that is wagging a very large dog.
But it’s not Israel wagging America. It’s the tail of the U.S. defense industry, intelligence bureaucracy, and revolving-door officials wagging the American people.
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 – and the silence.
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.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.
