Analyzing the US-Israeli Alliance from an Imperial Perspective
An analysis of the imperial reason behind the convergence of shared interests, each mutually reinforcing the other, and why that truth is breaking.
Why does the United States give billions upon billions of dollars to Israel year after year? If you ask one hundred people, you will get 100 differing responses, each with their own unique claim to partial truth. There is of course the rancid conspiracies about how Jews rule the world; this is old ground, well-trod, going back centuries now. That is not the truth of which I speak, for there is no truth there (see: my critiques on Adolf Hitler for that particular trope). Rather, there are indeed genuine (if ill-begot) reasons why any American may support the government of Israel. These range from ever-present guilt (for having help do the Holocaust or for not having done enough), to familial ties (the vast predominant reason most American Jews are pro-Israel), to protestant millenarianism (the Jews must have all of Israel so that they can build the Temple so that Jesus can return and the End of Days can commence; the Jews will then be converted to Christianity or sent to burn in Hell forever), to yes, bribes and threats from the Israeli government and hangers-on. These are all valid, all true reasons why one may be a supporter of Israel, but they are not the imperial reason; they are not the reason of state.
How can we determine the reason of state, determine how the state thinks about anything? It is, after all, an amorphous blob, but therein lies the key: it is a blob, composing of mainly human actors, analysts in the various alphabet soup agencies; an imperial bureaucracy which thinks and acts in unison on matters of foreign policy. Yes they can and do frequently disagree, but once the company line has been set, it is ruthlessly followed. Employees self-police, self-reinforce this line up and down the chain of command such that if you were to stand back and take it all in, it would sound like a melody shouting the same words in unison. The few that resist, as we saw in the Biden administration resign in disgrace but the vast majority continue to do their jobs, day after day. Yes, there are Zionists in government, yes some may even be patsies for the Israeli government, but that is not the reason the American regime considers Israel an ally.
States act predominantly according to their interests when it comes to their foreign policy, and thus the question becomes: what possible benefit does Israel provide to the United States? Seemingly nothing, at first glance. Everything their tech sector does, we can do better. And looking at the history, they’ve hurt rather than helped when it comes to defending US national security. Indeed, without the baggage of the historical context, the US very likely would not be allied with Israel. We certainly wouldn’t look at the chaos of Gaza and choose to tie ourselves to the hip that policy minus the wider context.
What happened here is the eternal folly of empire: someone long ago made a bad policy decision, and then those decisions compounded into further bad policy decisions, and now here we are, in the worst of all conceivable worlds. To understand why America is so enamored with Israel, we have to turn to the Cold War, specifically, with America’s decision to wage such a war against the USSR.
At the end of World War 2, both East and West divided the world up into spheres of influence, in accordance with agreements made during the war. Both sides got what they wanted, except soon after, the UK firstly and then the US changed tacks. They were no longer willing to stomach Soviet advances, anywhere, period, in the world. Wherever Communist Parties existed, they needed to be repressed, bombed, gassed, and driven back where possible. Any scrap of dirt meanwhile that could be fortified against Communist incursion was—and that’s how we ended up with hundreds of bases on foreign soil.
The early Cold War, the period from 1945-1949, was a mad dash to achieve maximalist aims to garner the most territory, the most influence. Enter Israel: a new polity made up of genocidal settler-colonialists on the one hand, and socialists on the other. Both the Soviets and the Americans made a play for the new country, and in the end, it was America’s ties to the Israeli Jews via the diaspora that sealed the deal.
The reaction to this from neighboring countries, was, of course, swift. As Israel unleashed the Nakba on the Palestinian peoples, the whole of the Arab world rallied in apoplectic anger. Further, as America had snatched Israel from Moscow’s grips, these neighboring countries ran straight into the Soviet’s waiting arms. To many, Ben-Gurion seizing Palestinian was like Hitler seizing the Sudetenland, or Poland a year later. This was a quite natural reaction: once Palestine was gone, were they next? To listen to certain Israeli figures: yes. First Palestine, then Lebanon, then Syria, then Greater Israel, from the Nile to the Tigris, that was Israel’s manifest destiny.
Thus the first period of the US-Israeli relations became a self-reinforcing marriage of convenience. The reason why we needed to support Israel was to combat the Soviet-Arab alliance, composed of such nationalist and religious states such as Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Gulf States, Libya, and Saudi Arabia, and the reason why those states were aligned with the Soviets was because we were aligned with Israel, an existential threat to each Arab country.
Bitter and brutal fighting, alongside several wars, whet and then satisfied both the Arab and Israeli appetites for more war and ultimate victory. Hardline militant leaders like Nasser were replaced by far more ameliorating moderates like Sadat, all the while Israel seemed more secure than ever while the Arab’s Soviet patrons grew weaker and weaker by the day. Eventually, by the mid-70s, these Soviet allied states realized that coexistence with Israel was preferable to a state of perpetual war so long as they could reap the economic and military benefits from siding with America. The empire, all-too-happy to see the Soviets booted from the Middle East obliged, much to the consternation of the ever-expansionist Israeli state, which still dreamt of Greater Israel. These dreams were held by a minority in 1979 but by the mid-2010s, had formed a majority of the Israeli state. By denying their expansionist dreams, by enforcing a peace, we only made Israel more bloodthirsty and hungry for territory.
With the Soviets practically driven out of the Middle East save in Assad’s Syria and Saddam’s Iraq by 1979, the US switched to a policy of cleanup. First, we would use Soviet-aligned Iraq to wage a brutal war against Iran, which recently had an anti-American, anti-Soviet revolution. The hope was that Iraq would either break the Iranians or otherwise exhaust each other to the point that America could then swoop in and take both out with a lightning campaign. America was able to bring this goal to a partly successful conclusion in 1991, firstly by smashing the Iraqi army and state in the Gulf War. That’s not the only thing that happened in 1991, of course.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 turned a page on America’s global ambitions. Now the world would no longer be split between East and West. Now, it would all become West. Every nation in the world would align with our trade policies and requirements, fulfill our security interests, and we would reap all the benefits. At long last, we would all speak with one tongue, the holy word of the dollar. Of course, that’s not what actually happened, but that’s what the world seemed like at the time.
This made little impact to the US-Israeli alliance or indeed, much of anything to do with the Middle East at all. America had just reduced one former Soviet ally, Iraq, to rubble. Syria, Libya, and Iran were all on the operational menus, with Afghanistan having recently been liberated from Soviet dominion. In other words, the bloody work of cleanup continued apace. Were you a friend of the US before 1991? Congrats, you got to live. If not: say your prayers, for the Yanks were coming.
It was from little Afghanistan though that the next crisis sprang up, yet again, a crisis entirely in America’s own making. To combat the Soviet invasion, America contracted the Pakistani and Saudi governments to arm, train, and fund militant bands of radical Islamic terrorists. These groups of militants were radicalized on two things: yes, the overthrow of the USSR but also: the overthrow of Israel and the US, for religious and more importantly: nationalistic reasons. When it came to recruiting these forces, America far more prioritized bodies on the ground over ideological loyalty to the American imperial regime, a critical error.
With the Soviets booted from Afghanistan by 1988, these militant forces, an internationally trained cabal of killers and goons, turned their ire on Israel and the United States. Thus and therefore: 1993 WTC bombings, the USS Cole Bombings, and of course and most poignantly: 9/11, as well as everything in-between and beyond. To be clear: Israel had nothing to do with the attacks on September 11. This was not an op planned from Tel Aviv in a Mossad bunker! It was a plot wholly and totally concocted from Al Qaeda; yes false flags exist but sometimes you just need to look at the plain (pardon the pun!) evidence. Plane goes into building, building comes down. It’s that simple. If plane equals large ballistic cruise missile filled with far more explosives than even the heaviest cruise missiles can house (indeed, we should look into plane-based cruise missiles, minus the humans of course when considering explosive force), then of course a single plane can knock down a single skyscraper. Two, even, as well as third smaller structure, and indeed ruin a large portion of downtown New York. And hijacking? Well done, often done, as a tactical option by several anti-Israeli factions for decades now.
Terrorism is a cancer that comes from often obvious sources. A smoker will get lung cancer, a drinker will get liver cancer, and ethno-nationalistic genocide will get you terrorists. If you’re killing people en masse based on religion, ethnicity, or plain geographical location, you’re going to stir up resentments that cannot be resolved peacefully and peaceably. Granted, this happens often and daily throughout the world and indeed without mass resistance, but it was exactly because we gave people like Osama and his group: the weapons, training, and funding, that allowed them to evolve to seemingly existential threats.
Why did 9/11 happen? Why did Osama and his group of radicals choose to crash jumbojets into otherwise structurally sound buildings? Why did 19 people, most of them under the age of 30 and indeed some even younger than 20, choose to kill themselves by hijacking a plane and flying it into a building? Religious fervor is one component, oft-mocked as the so-called ‘72 virgins’, awarded at martyrdom for a successful religious death. Yet to get 19, thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands of willing recruits across decades requires more than just religious, cult-like promises.
There’s more, and indeed that’s exactly what Osama himself said in his infamous letter released to the press explaining why he did 9/11 shortly before the 2004 election. We needn’t not look at it ourselves now other than to admit that yes, of course US hegemony post the Cold War birthed and inflamed regional nationalistic passions. If the original sin was the decision to wage the Cold War, then the obvious conclusion of that policy, to support the Nakba and subsequent state of Israel was also a sin, for it birthed all the evils we have had to contend with in our own world. And with the death of pan-Arab nationalism as a solution to the genocidal settler-colonial state, only esoteric fascism, Jihad, remained. Thus, Al Qaeda and all the rest.
This is not some abstract problem, to be pondered at in libraries and in seminars. This is a real, living, daily concern. If you are in Palestine, or in that general region, you know that the genocidal Israeli regime may one day bomb or kill you and your entire family. In Jordan, in Saudi Arabia, in the rest of the Gulf: you live in an oppressive monarchy, where dissent is punishable by death. In Egypt, the country both closest to Israel and the one with the highest population, they will torture you first before killing you. The government policy of these states is, being puppet regimes of the American empire, to be fully loyal to American policy i.e. be loyal amongst satraps, e.g. Israel.
Thus to insult Israel is to insult the House of Saud or equivalent. We at least in the West may protest, no matter how inefficient or ineffective. No one is stopping you from banging pots and pans on your local street corner for Palestine. Do so tomorrow, and no one will notice—literally (except maybe a gangstalking network of Zionists who will try to make you unable to earn normal wages but even then they cannot actually kill you, at least, not legally)! In Arabia and Egypt and elsewhere though, such an act might get you and your entire family killed.
Kennedy’s ‘if you make peaceful change impossible you make violent revolution inevitable’ is and was forever stupid. Change is inherent, and violent revolution is never inevitable. Every violent act in history has been precipitated, and thus preventable. There is not one violent act in this entire universe which could not have been predicted and thus prevented. Only those lacking in virtue or intelligence believe otherwise. Kennedy only seems smart if the whole world is stupid, and when it comes to Israel and American relations, that’s precisely what’s happened.
Thus robbed of any other ability to resist their definite colonization, and probable genocide, millions of people flocked to the black banner of Jihad, in one way or another. And considering we trained and armed them, attacks like 9/11 seem so obvious, so trite, that it beggars the question of personal culpability on the parts of the US intelligence community. If it was just 9/11, that would be terrible enough, but no, the US relationship with Israel metastasized yet again.
Israel’s enemies have never really been America’s. Yes, they stood with us during the Cold War, but we never really wanted what Israel wanted: a colonized Middle East all under direct control from an Israeli-led Jerusalem. What we’ve always wanted are pliant, stable client states. In pursuit of that stability, we obviously oppose any form of Arab or other democracy from forming. There’s a reason why Israel is the only so-called democracy in the Middle East (for Jews, anyways); any other state having a free and fair election would see that state in total opposition to Israel. That’s exactly what happened after the Arab Spring in Egypt, when the Obama administration explicitly backed Morsi’s ousting in Egypt to be replaced by the autocratic murderer Sisi. Morsi, democratically elected, considered Israel to be an adversary of Egypt (rightly so, I daresay). Sisi, a warlord thug, returned the country to a status quo alliance with Israel-America.
Yet 9/11 changed the prior calculus, where we would roll our eyes and play along with Israel’s wars (sending them a little aid in 1967 and a bigger bundle in 1973), or otherwise sharply and harshly tamping down on their ambitions (by forcing Israel to the Oslo table, by refusing to endorse their annexationist plans of Lebanon and the West Back). No more: Israel’s enemies became America’s enemies. Hamas was no threat to America but as a fellow traveler in right-wing radical Islam, it was targeted as a proxy to Al Qaeda, even though it wasn’t. Of course, Hamas is the small example; Iraq is the largest.
The only reason we went to war with Iraq was because of Israel. Iraq has never been a threat to American interests after the fall the USSR; they only remained a threat because they opposed Israeli domination. This is a brutal calculus that every Middle East dictator must make: do they make the Chamberlain play, biding for time as Israel gobbles up more territory and more people, hoping, praying that their time won’t come? Or do they resist, knowing that will inflame in America’s ire? The choice many governments, from Egypt to the Arabian governments, and even now in Syria have made is the former, for their own reasons. And some states, like Iraq, didn’t even have a choice.
It’s not like Saddam could’ve turned on a dime, capitulated and groveled and begged forgiveness at George HW Bush’s feet, and lived another day free in Iraq. Much of the political legitimacy his regime had was wrapped entirely in his opposition to Israel; such was the nature of the Ba’athist state. Indeed, America’s outreach to Saddam after the Gulf War amounted to die, die quickly. Thus Iraq had to fall, and the Islamic State had to rise in its ruin, who, very much unlike Iraq, could and has threatened US interests by becoming a global insurgent pandemic across 6 continents, fueled entirely by our continued support of Israel.
And now the genocide, and America’s inevitable reckoning with that support. It’s not just our puppet regimes in the Middle East. It’s our puppets in Europe and Asia and even at home who have taken offense, real offense. And our control of these places is mostly fictive, if they act in unison. And they are. There is a door beyond which no policy maker in these states may cross, yet they are, increasingly every day. And not just with the genocide, of course. And as for our Middle Eastern puppets, the question is, could US mercenaries and arms keep the regimes salient in places like Jordan and Saudi Arabia? Yes, today, they are and the system works. But a regime with zero legitimacy beyond the barrel of a gun is extremely fractitious, especially when the risks of becoming a victim of genocide yourself is so near to your own borders.
America’s relation with Israel made a certain perverse sense, if you were convinced that the Cold War was worth a war worth fighting (it truly was not and stands as one of humanity’s greatest crimes of the 20th century). Even so, after the end of that conflict, we should’ve forced upon Israel a settlement with the Palestinians. A just settlement would’ve made rapprochement with even states like Iran possible. Maybe not immediately, but eventually, over the course of many years and as the haughty original revolutionary generation dies out. Instead, we were struck with hubris, understandable hubris, but hubris nevertheless. If we felled the great beast, the Soviet Union, who couldn’t we fell? Indeed, that was the Bush doctrine. First Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Iran, and finally North Korea. We’d finally clean it all up, the entire world map, at a fraction of the cost and in less than 5 years after 9/11. Then the insurgency began, and that plan went into the dustbin of history.
If our state had any rational actors behind it, it should thus realize that the time has come to cut Israel well and truly loose. We don’t want to spend the next century fighting a religious hyperwar against a protracted people’s insurgency. Nor do we want to be roiled by a thousand more Arab Springs. And really, we don’t want Israel running the Middle East, even if done so on our behalf. We want peace and stability, and we most definitely do not want a genocide (especially one carried out live on TikTok). Those that wanted that policy were driven out in 2024, and likely the same fate will befall those who support it today in 2028.
If, and hopefully when, the empire realizes this plain, the next moves should be obvious. First, let’s recognize what Israel is: a nuclear-armed state with highly unstable domestic politics and a somewhat competent high command. They have a further 700,000 stay-behind werwulf-like forces in the West Bank, ready to fight a stronghold defense against both foreign and domestic armies. Therefore, Israel’s nuclear arsenal must first be neutralized before anything else is done.
This can be achieved by inducing a select group of officers in their armed forces to achieve a military coup. The US should assist with all possible assets, to achieve elementary surprise and a total decapitation of hostile command and control assets. Once the nuclear arsenal is secured, it will then be physically transferred out of the country into joint US-IAEA control. From there, the existing government of Israel and Palestine will transfer all existing sovereignty to a new UN Mandate for Palestine, run and funded by the US (and charitable countries and other actors).
This Mandate will have the following mandates:
The rebuilding and reconstruction of Gaza and the West Bank.
The transference of illegally seized property and/or monetary compensation from 1947-present back to original title holders (or their descendants/claimants).
Dezionification: Zionism will become a banned ideology, with the broad population deradicalized through reeducation and rehabilitation.
Expulsion and elimination of terrorist West Bank werwulf elements.
The Mandate will terminate as soon as these mandates have been accomplished, with a singular, unitary sovereign state in its place. This new state will be both secular and democratic, with all citizens thereon granted equal rights and privileges. Citizenship would be open to all residents residing in the state at the time of statehood, or otherwise to direct descendants of residents of the territory. The right of return afforded to refugees and their families will also be upheld.
With that done, we can then let the dictators across the region relax their grips, and allow democratic elections once more. And maybe, just maybe, we can then tackle the global Jihadist insurgency with better politics and thus defeat it for good. And from there, who knows? World peace? Ending hunger? Yes, it’s all possible! We beat the USSR, after all. We can take Israel on.
We just need new leaders.
