The Shadow Government Steering America’s Iran War

While the American public remains deeply divided by electoral theater, a select coalition of Jewish organizations consistently steers the ship of state, ensuring that regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, the underlying geopolitical trajectory remains unchanged. Nowhere has this become more apparent than in the ongoing Iran war.

The Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the World Jewish Congress, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations all put out statements backing the joint U.S. and Israeli military campaign against Iran that began around February 27 and 28, 2026. Information Liberation tweeted, “The Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the World Jewish Congress, and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations* have all put out statements backing Trump and Netanyahu’s war on Iran. It’s important to state this for the record, as this places them on the opposite side of the majority of Americans, who oppose said war.”

Information Liberation also tweeted that the ADL, led by CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, and the American Jewish Committee, led by CEO Ted Deutch, backed the Iran war, as did the World Jewish Congress, led by President Ronald Lauder, which explicitly endorsed the war.

Daroff, who is CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, issued a joint statement with Board Chair Betsy Berns Korn on February 28, 2026. The statement read in full:

We stand firmly with the United States and Israel as they act decisively against the Iranian regime. We commend President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for their close coordination and clear resolve at this critical moment. Their leadership reflects the strength of the U.S.–Israel security partnership and a shared determination to halt a regime that endangers regional and global stability.

For more than four decades, Tehran armed and directed terror proxies, fueled regional instability, threatened Israel, targeted American interests, expanded its ballistic missile program, pursued nuclear capability, and oppressed its own people. Through Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, it exported violence across the Middle East.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei presided over this campaign of terror, overseeing the arming of proxy networks, the advancement of nuclear and missile threats, and the repression of the Iranian people. His death closes a chapter defined by sustained hostility and regional destabilization.

The United States and Israel now act in coordination to eliminate the regime’s capacity to threaten its neighbors through nuclear advancement, missile proliferation, and proxy warfare. Our opposition targets the regime, not the Iranian people, who deserve dignity and the opportunity to determine their own future.

We express solidarity with the people of Israel sheltering from Iranian missile and drone attacks. We also stand with citizens of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other regional partners who have endured direct Iranian missile strikes and Iranian-backed assaults on their territory.

At home, we remain in close coordination with federal, state, and local law enforcement. We urge continued vigilance across Jewish communities and encourage institutions to review security protocols and maintain heightened awareness.

We pray for the safety of American and Israeli service members and for all innocent civilians in harm’s way. We support efforts that reinforce deterrence, restore stability, and protect the security of our allies.

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, did not issue a signed press release statement that day, but the ADL published a post on X stating:

 As coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes target the Iranian regime, ADL stands with the United States, Israel and the Iranian people, who deserve dignity and freedom from a regime that murders its own citizens. 

The ADL added that it would continue to monitor threats “by the Iranian regime and its proxies against Jewish communities in the US and around the world. Similarly, Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, released a statement that morning praising the joint Israeli-U.S. operation. The statement read:

Today’s military action follows years of Iranian escalation, deception, and refusal to meet its international commitments — including the most recent inconclusive negotiations in Geneva. The responsibility for this crisis lies entirely with the Iranian Regime. For decades, American Jewish Committee (AJC) has warned leaders around the world of the consequences of the Iranian regime’s illicit pursuit of a nuclear weapons program, its systematic human rights abuses, and its constant efforts to destabilize the region, threaten U.S. interests and endanger Israel and our Arab partners. We at AJC are grateful to the brave American and Israeli forces that carried out this action. We stand with the Israeli people as they face Iranian attacks and threats of further escalation. We also stand firmly with the Iranian people in their pursuit for freedom and pray that this development can lead to a better future for them and their country. As the global advocacy organization for the Jewish people, AJC will continue to work with leaders around the world to hold the Iranian regime accountable for its escalating threats to global security. Am Yisrael Chai (The People of Israel Live).

 World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder took a similar tact by issuing a statement that day supporting the strikes and calling on the international community to “stand behind this historic effort and support further measures that end the ability of theocratic tyrants to inflict harm on the Iranian people and the world at large any longer.”

These statements echo near identical language used by AJC, ADL, AIPAC, and Jewish Federations of North America during earlier Iran and Israel escalations in 2024 and June 2025, when Jewish organizations across the ideological spectrum showed what the Times of Israel described as “wall-to-wall support” for strikes on Iran.

The Conference of Presidents is the coordinating body for dozens of American Jewish organizations, and its public statements are typically issued jointly by the Chair and CEO on behalf of the collective membership. This means when the Conference speaks, it is implicitly lending the credibility of AIPAC, the ADL, AJC, B’nai B’rith, the Zionist Organization of America, JINSA, and similarly aligned groups to a single unified message, which showcases a remarkable degree of Jewish solidarity on a geopolitical venture that the broader American populace has no real interest in participating.

The level of unpopularity of the Iran escapade among gentile America is stark. According to Pew Research, 59% of Americans said the United States made the wrong decision in using military force and 61% disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict. An AP-NORC poll determined that 59% of Americans believe U.S. military action has gone “too far,” while a Quinnipiac survey documented 74% opposition to sending U.S. ground troops into Iran. Polling from CNN and NPR/PBS/Marist confirmed comparable disapproval levels. The partisan split remains dramatic, with about 90% of Democrats opposing the action while roughly 75% to 85% of Republicans back it.

While the American Jewish Committee, ADL, World Jewish Congress, and Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations are best known for their advocacy on Israel and combatting antisemitism, their institutional histories show a much broader pattern of engagement with conflicts, human rights advocacy, and great power politics.

One of the most consequential campaigns these groups waged had nothing to do with Israel. For decades American Jewish organizations fought for the emigration rights of Soviet Jews, and the effort reshaped relations between Washington and Moscow. Groups including the American Jewish Committee, the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, and the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews built the advocacy machine behind the 1975 Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which tied Most Favored Nation trade status to free emigration.

Accepting an AJC human rights award in 2011, Representative Rep. Chris Smith (D-N.J.) credited those groups with supplying the “expertise, well-honed strategies, reliable information, and actionable intelligence” that made the law work, put the number freed at “more than 657,000 Soviet Jews between 1975 and 1991,” and argued that Jackson-Vanik “revolutionized human rights policy for the better on multiple fronts,” seeding the trafficking and religious freedom statutes he went on to author. Broader counts run higher, with roughly a million Soviet Jews reaching Israel over the same span. The campaign pioneered the use of trade and sanctions as a human rights lever, a template these organizations would reach for again in later fights, including over Iran.

The same groups have taken up the cause of Uyghur Muslims—a group notoriously used by foreign intelligences like the CIA to destabilize China. The American Jewish Committee hosted the Uyghur advocate Nury Turkel, a US Commission on International Religious Freedom commissioner and co-founder of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, on its Advocacy Anywhere platform, where he endorsed the State Department’s judgment that China’s mass detention is “the largest incarceration of any ethnic minority since the Holocaust” and called the “purposeful prevention of population growth” a legal marker of genocide. In 2021 the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the main umbrella for American Jewish community relations, passed a resolution condemning China’s policy as “genocide” and urging members to help “create a grassroots atrocity prevention movement.”

Since 2015 these same organizations have worked to block a nuclear accommodation with Iran. When the Obama administration reached the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, i.e., Iran Nuclear Deal, the American Jewish Committee announced that it had concluded “overwhelmingly that we must oppose this deal,” AIPAC poured millions into a campaign to sink it, and a range of establishment bodies, among them the ADL, the Jewish Federations of North America, and the Conference of Presidents, lobbied against it as well. The AJC statement cited “the nature of the Iranian regime and its defining ideology” as disqualifying.

That posture held across a decade. It survived Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the deal, the Biden era attempts to revive it in 2021 and 2022, and the collapse of the accord in 2025, and by the time American and Israeli forces struck Iranian nuclear and military sites in early 2026, the Conference of Presidents was pressing Washington to secure “the durable prevention of a nuclear-armed Iran” and to condition any sanctions relief on verifiable Iranian compliance, in its statement on the 2026 Memorandum of Understanding framework.

The same groups have lined up with Washington on its wider power struggles. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the ADL condemned the attack “in the strongest terms” as “a blatant violation of international law,” warned that “the ramifications of Russia’s aggression ripple far beyond Ukraine’s borders” and “pose a threat to democracy everywhere,” and steered supporters toward humanitarian aid for Ukrainian refugees. Across these disparate files, one instrument recurs. These organizations press to tie trade and diplomatic benefits to the conduct of adversary states, the logic first proven in the Jackson-Vanik Amendment and carried forward into the sanctions architecture aimed at Iran.

Ultimately, the consistency of these organizations’ influence proves that the American presidency is merely a rotating office, while the true center of sovereign power resides elsewhere. Regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, these entities maintain the structural ability to direct the nation’s security and foreign policy to suit their own strategic interests. Until this shadow government is dismantled or stripped of its institutional control, the United States will remain a blunt instrument of organized Jewry’s will, systematically deployed to sow chaos across the globe at the expense of its own citizens.

José Niño is a freelance writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can contact him via Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to his “Substack” newsletter by visiting “José Niño Unfiltered” on Substack.com.