Analysis: Armed by America, spying on America

Reports that the Pentagon has raised Israel to its highest counterintelligence threat level confirm what its conduct across the region already suggested: Israel acts as a rogue actor, willing to work against even the patron that arms and protects it.

NBC News and the New York Times reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency classified Israel as a "critical" counterintelligence threat, the top designation in the Pentagon system and one ordinarily reserved for hostile states. US officials, according to the reporting, believe Israel sought access to the Trump administration's internal deliberations on Iran, Lebanon and ceasefire diplomacy.

The targets named by the New York Times sat at the centre of US decision making in the region: Steve Witkoff, Trump's Iran negotiator, Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon's top policy official, and his deputy Michael DiMino.

The White House and the Israeli embassy rejected the reports as false. The denial is worth little. In December, the Guardian reported that Israeli operatives had surveilled US personnel at the Civil Military Coordination Center in southern Israel, the body created to support the Gaza ceasefire. Israel denied that too. A state caught watching its allies forfeits the benefit of the doubt the second time around.

Consider what the allegation describes. Israel is among the largest recipients of US military and intelligence support on earth, weapons, funding, diplomatic cover and access to American agencies that almost no other state enjoys. It is accused of turning that access around to spy on the very administration that sustains it. A state that does that to its chief patron recognises no obligation it has not chosen for itself.

The same disregard was on display days earlier. Axios reported that Trump had to intervene personally on 1 June to stop Benjamin Netanyahu bombing Hezbollah targets in Beirut's Dahieh, after Iran threatened to abandon talks with Washington. Netanyahu stood down only when the US president forced him to. Left to his own calculations, he was ready to detonate his patron's diplomacy to pursue his own war.

This is the pattern, and it stops nowhere. The same contempt for limits runs through Israel's conduct across the region: a war in Gaza that has drawn a genocide case at the International Court of Justice, repeated strikes on Lebanon that have killed Lebanese soldiers and broken a US brokered ceasefire, and an open-ended occupation of the West Bank where Israeli fire kills civilians, including children. In every arena the logic holds. International rulings, allied requests, ceasefire terms and the laws of war are treated as inconveniences to be managed rather than limits to be obeyed.

What shields Israel from the consequences is the very depth of the relationship it exploits. The alliance is embedded in Congress, the Pentagon, intelligence sharing and decades of defence contracts, and Israel acts in the confidence that no single transgression will cost it. The structure built to bind the two states is also what licenses Israel to ignore the one binding it.

Even that confidence is starting to fray. The Gaza war, the Lebanon front and the Iran crisis have made automatic alignment with Israel costlier in Washington than at any point in decades, and Trump's own anger, however self-interested, marks a president less willing than his predecessors to indulge it. The espionage reports drive that mistrust into the most sensitive place of all, the machinery of the alliance itself.

The lesson of the past week is plain. Israel behaves, toward friend and adversary alike, as a state that answers to no one, and even its closest ally has begun to treat it as a threat to be watched.