Imperial Humiliation: Why Israel Demands Confrontation
A desperate plea to the imperialists
Editor’s Note
I did not write this in defense of the US empire. I wrote this as a rationalization of the policy demand ‘Free Palestine’. The question in my mind was: could the US imperial state be convinced that a free and sovereign Palestine is in its interests? Yes, of course, a thousand times yes. Could the US imperial state be convinced that Israeli’s rule by kahanist terrorists is a clear and present danger? I think the case can definitely and persuasively be made, and that thereby, a free Palestine is something that is imminently possible.
Right now, I’ll admit: I am not working towards undoing America’s empire, as the immediate goal. I desire it like I desire many things, but insofar as concrete, achievable-within-the-next-five-years things, it’s not on my personal list, because I know it cannot be done in that time frame, nor even how to go about doing it. I know then that in five years, the American empire will still be around. The question is, will Palestine? Will Palestinians? I think so, but only if the agents of empire can be convinced doing so is in their interests. Here then, I make my argument for their interests, and hope that this rationalization can be used once and for all to make a free Palestine a reality.
American vassalage is the most treasured status a foreign nation can hold, the envy of every other nation that does not have the same titles and claims. It means firstly, full integration into the United States global financial network: a network with nearly one hundred trillion dollars of capital floating freely every day. It means your state can create a robust social welfare network, as all your defense costs will be fully subsidized by the US government, creating long-term social stability. And it’s not just the fact that America plus her allies still constitute the strongest military in the world, but that by integrating yourself and your neighbors into that network, there is no feasible opportunity for war.
Consider France. For France, control of territory up to the river Rhine has long been a dream of many French rulers. It’s what Napoleon used to demarcate the terminus of official French territory. Conversely, to the Germans, the lands both cis and trans to the Rhine are culturally, spiritually, economically, and politically German. Die Wacht Am Rhein, the Watch on the Rhine, the nationalist song written during the 1840s, literally refers to the river as a sacred, defensible line to be held to the death by patriotic Germans everywhere. For France to be safe from an invasion from the east, the Rhine river must be held, and Germany pushed back to the Eastern bank; for Germany to be safe, the Rhine river’s banks must be held at all costs.
Knowing that, it would shock most people throughout history that it’s been nearly a century since the French or the Germans have waged war over the Rhine river. Since the time of the Romans, or even before, that river has been the source of internecine, constant strife. And today: there is no war, because in spite of still real existing tension between the two nations, they are so plugged into the American trade, defense, political, and cultural networks that to seriously consider war, a France or a Germany would need to do several things.
First, they would need their own currency, totally separate and disconnected from the dollar (so, not the Euro), while at the same time ensuring that other nations, specifically oil producers like the Gulf Cooperation Council, accept their currency as fiat. In other words, let’s take France as as example. They would need to start printing francs, and then a country like Saudi Arabia would need to accept those new francs as payment for oil. Doing so would of course invite US sanctions and trade restrictions on both France and Saudi Arabia, and so the obstacles become even more unassailable.
Assuming their financial system survives the shock, they’d next need to deal with trade and cultural isolation. France would be booted from the club, all the clubs they get to be in as part of accepting US hegemony. Cheap, tariffless trade will evaporate overnight, raising domestic prices and destabilizing their political regime. At the same time, travel bans and further sanctions ensure that their tourist sector withers and dies.
Assuming they survive that, then they need to build an army capable of contending not just with America, but with NATO, for that’s what invading the Rhine would look like. While France is capable of building domestic military goods like planes, they are incapable of building them without being integrated into the US trade network. They could, in theory, retool their industry to take Chinese and Russian components, but they would be effectively starting from scratch. This project would take years if not decades, all while the domestic political scene continues to deteriorate, especially as US pressure ramps up. In this hypothetical, the French people will have traded the social welfare state they had for maybe having a semi-decent independent army and economy in thirty years, by which point, they will all be far poorer and far less safe than if they had just accepted the status quo ante.
France, it should be said, does not dare. While French Presidents and other vassal leaders can thumb their noses in public at US leadership, behind the scenes they are as pliant, as desperate for US approval as befitting their station. Whenever a foreign ally speaks ill of America, America is typically smart enough to know the difference between pandering to a domestic populist and nationalist audience versus a true independent streak.
France, in spite of the Rhine being their sacred obligation, does not dare raise the question of the Rhine to the Americans. The same could be said of the Greeks, who don’t bring up Megali, or the Germans with Anschluss, and so on. Many of America’s best, most loyal vassals have a history of their own imperial games of conquest and annexations, and even with that history, they dare not even raise it to us.
That is what a good and proper vassal is. When America speaks, their response behind the scenes must be ‘Yes, sir’, ‘No, sir’: total obedience to our hegemony. It’s not that we do so out of hubris or protect them out of the kindness of our hearts: at the end of the day, it just benefits us. Healthy, wealthy people sending their tariffless goods to us and vice versa enriches our country. Keeping those people out of distractions and disruptions like wars of conquest keep those gains sustainable and steady.
Israel has violated this sacred understanding. They’ve long held territorial ambitions of a Greater Israel, encompassing land from Cairo to Baghdad, ambitions which they enact daily on the Palestinian, Jordanian, Syrian, and Lebanese people. Let’s be clear about why they’re doing this: American liberal guilt over the Holocaust led many that grew up in the succeeding generations feeling like they owed the Jewish people a nation and full support in that nationhood. It’s certainly what motivated President Biden in sending Israel a blank check in lethal munitions and political support, and what’s motivated most US politicians since Kennedy.
Guilt should never drive American imperial policy. Our nation was built on the backs of the genocided Indigenous populations, enslaved Black Africans, expropriated Mexicans, and our ever-glorious yet also bloody war economy, which enabled us to use the first two world wars to ensure our economic and financial preeminence over the entire world. To the extent that America cares at all about that carnage and trauma, it all amounts to a land acknowledgement, with no regard given if the people were fully wiped out or if they’re still around to receive any sort of reparations. Perhaps that will change. Perhaps domestic political concerns will force a reckoning. But even if it does, we should never bother to seek redress for guilt over another state’s actions (in this case, Germany and her allies during WW2). We didn’t build or cause that, it’s not our problem.
And so, because of this misbegotten guilt, we gave Israel the bandwidth and support it needed to first secure its independence, and then to expand and continue expanding into territory it has no legal right to. It has waged a war of genocidal conquest against the Palestinians, against our expressed desires.
America’s designs over the Levant should be the same as America’s designs over the Rhine river valley, the same as it is everywhere else: to render the entire area into non-warring, peaceful trading partners with the US, with their national security fully subsumed into the global American alliance. Israel stands in direct opposition to that goal. Not just its leaders, but its entire political economy is geared towards colonial expropriation and settlement, including over other US allies such as Jordan.
Their specific actions during Biden’s presidency alone should be considered an unforgivable breach, which alone should invite US sanctions as well as overt and covert methods to overthrow their political leadership and be replaced with far more pliant and pathetic leaders. Consider the following:
On July 24, 2023, the Israeli parliament passed a law restricting their Supreme Court, something we expressly had forbidden the Israeli government from doing.
On January 18, 2024, Prime Minister Netanyahu rejected yet again the possibility of a Palestinian state, directly contradicting long-standing US imperial policy of a two-state solution.
On January 20, 2024, Netanyahu again refused to accept a Palestinian state, this time directly to Biden.
On May 6, 2024, Israel launched a ground operation into Rafah, brazenly seizing Rafah’s border crossing with Egypt, despite Biden explicitly ordering them on March 9, 2024 not to do so.
Yes, the Israeli state also starved and massacred the Palestinian populations, rising to the level of genocide. But even had they not done so, even had they waged no war in Gaza, had not occupied and settled more land in the West Bank (as they indeed have done), these incidents alone would be cause for Netanyahu’s permanent removal from the Israeli political scene, and the fundamental restructuring of the Israeli political economy to ensure figures like Netanyahu and his coalition can never again rise to power and prominence ever again.
Of course, it’s not just the genocide and expansion of settlements in far-away places. Israel has recently emerged as an ugly wart on the global stage, as financiers and funders of international terrorism, now directly threatening our national security. It’s crucial to note the ideology of this terrorism and name it for what it is, accurately: kahanism. To those unaware, kahanism is a radical fundamentalist perversion of Judaism, invented by a madman mass killer and convicted terrorist aptly named Meir Kahane. Kahane is to Judaism what Osama bin Laden was to Islam; a cynical abuse of sacred texts to excuse the slaughter and maiming of innocents.
The entire Israeli government is in the grip of these kahanists; while the US was busy chasing Al Qaeda in the hills of Afghanistan, we missed a similar ideology to Al Qaeda gaining full foothold in one of our purported allies. Everything Israel does can be sourced back to kahanism. When Israeli settlers expel Palestinian families onto the street with nothing but the clothes on their back, that’s kahanism. When Israeli soldiers destroy every hospital, school, power and water treatment plants in Gaza, that’s kahanism. When Israeli civilians form a human chain to prevent the delivery of baby formula to starving innocent babies in Gaza, that’s kahanism. When the entire Israeli public riots to save a known Israeli rapist prison guard, that’s kahanism.
This fascist ideology has led to brazen domestic attacks against our own American population, as well as to Americans abroad. There is the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, an American journalist, assassinated by Israeli snipers while reporting in the West Bank; a killing even more brazen than Jamal Khashoggi’s murder by the Saud’s MBS. There’s the case of Jasper Nathaniel, nearly lynched by Israeli settlers several times. There’s the cases of Mohammed Ibrahim, of Irene Cho and Caleb Frost, of several other Americans who have been disappeared into the Israeli gulags, only to emerge brutalized and bearing horror stories of abuses.
At home and in our allies, we have several documented instances of Israeli and kahanist-instigated mass terror riots against American citizens. Throughout January 2024, kahanist agents deployed chemical gas, in contravention of the Geneva conventions, at Columbia University. This terrorist attack wounded and maimed dozens of US citizens. On April 28, 2024, kahanist forces sieged UCLA students during a student protest, using firebombs, bats, and other makeshift weapons, again wounding and maiming dozens of Americans.
It’s not just America. On November 6, kahanist forces instigated another mass terror riot in Amsterdam, again armed with chemical agents, firebombs, and makeshift weapons, this time wounding hundreds of innocent civilians in the Netherlands. It of course bears mentioning that the Netherlands is a treaty ally to the United States.
No other country in the world could get away with this. Israel for certain should not be allowed to. Just one of those terrorist incidents would result if not in immediate bombing, then at very least crippling sanctions and a trade blockade. And that’s just scratching the surface of Israel’s brazen assault on the American people and her interests. Their flaccid attempt to use charges of anti-semitism as a way of continuing to blackmail the US into supporting them would be laughable if it weren’t still effective.
If we are to survive as a nation, we must reject this false notion, as well as other false notions Israel has veiled over us in an attempt to achieve unequal benefits as our vassal state. They don’t share our values, they are not our allies against terrorism: their actions alone prove this. As for being a democratic state, ‘the only democracy in a sea of autocracy’, firstly America does not and should not care which countries are electoral democracies, so long as their polity is stable and relatively autonomous with little overt oppression. In addition, it’s ludicrous to reward Israel for being a democracy for that is by design. America does not allow Arab states to become democracies because if they did, they would all elect leaders hostile to Israel.
Perhaps that should change. It’s clear that the status quo must, at the very least. Overt and covert steps should be made to change domestic Israeli politics. To prevent further destabilization, all parties and states in the Levant should be subsumed into the American defense sphere, with their states focusing on social welfare for their citizens rather than dreams of expansion. This entails disarming and denuclearizing the Israeli state.
Israel will resist, even though the end result will be their defeat and immiseration. They may withstand sanctions, and survive being shut out of the global financial system. But their society is factitious: a threeway struggle between the religious kahanists and the non-religious kahanists, with a tiny minority not caring about kahanism yet having the misfortune of being born in Israel. With a push and a shove, they’ll all wind up killing each other. All America needs to do is back the winner, and emerge the victor itself.
However it is done, America will have full leeway to redraw the maps of the Middle East. It’s likely that the current core of Israeli society will be wrecked and ruined, much like Syria looks like now. As inheritors of the British mess, and as ultimate overlords over these people American suzerainty is inevitable. This can be done via resurrecting the old Mandatory Palestine, this time under a UN Mandate instead of the non-existent League of Nations.
This is not ideal, of course. It would cost more than the following scenario, where, ideally, Israelis wake up tomorrow, realize their sins, and:
Overthrow their elected leaders, handing them over for extradition and trial in the Hague
Beg a thousand and one apologies to the US President and American people on international TV
Accept full withdrawal from Palestinian lands back to the 1967 lines
Withdraw all objections to a fully sovereign Palestinian state
Hand over all Israeli nuclear warheads and refining equipment to the IAEA
Accede to a NATO conversion programme and timeline
Acceptance of a US-sponsored Constitution and legal changes
To do whatever else we ask of them, when we ask it of them
The Palestinians would of course have their own requirements:
The formation of a national army and disarming of paramilitary groups
The acceptance of NATO overlordship over their Armed Forces
The acceptance of a NATO military industrial program
The acceptance of a US-sponsored Constitution
The acceptance of US mediation on other outstanding questions of Palestinian sovereignty (right of return, the status of the Old City, etc.)
To do whatever else we ask of them, when we ask it of them
Yet despite the inevitability of their demise, the Israelis may yet choose to go the way of their fundamentalist brethren in bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. If they choose to escalate this into a kinetic struggle, we must not hesitate nor hold guilt in our hearts. We must react and coolly protect our own interests, and secure them by whatever military means necessary.
For the moral-minded amongst us, we can only pray that sense overtakes sensibility in the Israeli polity. For everyone else, take heart in knowing that a bare strip of land with some 9 million inhabitants is very much unlike Iraq’s near 30-million, half-the-size-of-Texas 2003-2011 challenge, especially when more than half of those inhabitants would rather capitulate to American hegemony than risk annihilation. They won’t greet us as liberators, but we will leave them with civilized laws, constitutions, and norms anyways, content in our efforts.