The Israeli military’s horrendous massacres in Gaza extend now to Lebanon. Housing, schools, and hospitals are destroyed. Residents of Northern Gaza are being herded south, again. People starve. The U.S. government, meanwhile, supplies the bombs, planes, and weapons that make it all possible.
The war’s continuation is directly related to the pursuit of U.S. strategic interests in the region and U.S. imperialism’s pretensions to world domination. The war and the humanitarian catastrophe it’s brought can only be ended by ending U.S. assistance for Israel.
Some of the war’s critics, however, present views and emphases that distract and offer little help toward actually ending the carnage. They commonly ascribe the carnage solely to the expansionist nature of Zionism. For a century and more, Zionism has indeed visited grief and loss upon Palestinians. But simply criticizing that record is more likely to reinforce intransigence on the part of Israel’s backers than alter the course of events.
Neither will highlighting the unprecedented nature of the humanitarian disaster by itself stop the killing, or bring about repair. It needs to be the object of international consensus and cooperation, as mediated through the United Nations. Underfunding and Security Council vetoes –especially by the U.S. – remain impediments.
Peace advocates may insist that the more humanitarian norms are violated, the more impactful moral, legal, and/or ethical criticism will be and the more telling will be personal witness or civil disobedience. Without mass pressure to accompany expectations, though, they become wishful thinking.
The war won’t end just because the war should end. It will continue as long as vital imperial interests are being served. Israel’s interests are her own. Criticism from afar is likely ineffectual, though solidarity with those inside Israel who are fighting the war is certainly warranted. U.S. interests, however, are those where activists in this country should focus their attention because the war undeniably serves U.S. imperialism’s purposes.
As a recent article in People’s World put it: “Israel is completely dependent on the U.S. It would be incapable of carrying out its campaigns of aggression without U.S. help.”
Israel is bound to the U.S., that’s true, but the United States is also bound to Israel. Both of the country’s two major political parties support military aid for Israel and regularly court domestic political support on that basis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the U.S. Congress on July 24 to rapturous applause from both sides of the aisle.
The U.S. commitment to Israel, and to assisting with Israel’s war, can be measured in a number of ways.
The easiest is by money: $251.2 billion (adjusted for inflation) in military aid to Israel during 66 years, $18 billion in the year prior to October 2024, and $20 billion approved by President Joe Biden in August 2024 and being voted on in Congress in November.
But don’t just mistake this as an outflow of funds; the bulk of them bolster the profits of corporations here at home. Israel is usually required to use most of the funds it’s given “to purchase U.S. military equipment and services.”
The commitment of U.S. politicians and of the military-industrial complex to Israel is such that military aid continues to flow in defiance of the Leahy Act (1997) requirement that the government “vet any foreign military unit to ensure it has a clean human rights record before it can receive U.S. assistance.”
No doubt, the Israel Defense Forces would fail any such vetting.
Beyond the profits at stake, support for Israel is also a crucial part of U.S. strategy for the entire Middle East. That strategy is one aspect of plans for arranging international affairs to the U.S. imperialism’s liking.
Decades ago, U.S. reactions to the Holocaust might have arguably been foremost in determining U.S. support for a Jewish state. Later, however, relations with Israel took on an additional transactional aspect. The U.S. government would indeed support Israel’s dealings with Palestinians, and Israel in exchange would facilitate U.S. policy objectives for the Middle East.
Among the latter: control and supervision of the region’s production and distribution of oil and natural gas, maintenance of the Middle East’s role as a “transit hub connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa,” providing a military force ready to intervene against so-called terrorism, and an outpost to push back against “the influence of rival great powers.”
There are other favors. Israel also serves as proxy warrior for the United States, for example, in Syria and Iraq, and in the UN General Assembly, it provides a yearly vote for the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba. Further, Israel furnishes U.S. right-wing allies in Latin America with military aid, training, and equipment.
Israel offers even more attractions that pique the interests of U.S. capital: a proposed canal through the Negev Desert bypassing Egypt and offshore deposits of oil and natural gas.
A side note: Money is also the measure of U.S. commitment to imperialism. Because imperialism involves conflict, military capabilities are crucial, and they cost. Overall U.S. military spending is exorbitant, dwarfing outlay for the U.S. population’s social needs. In the government’s discretionary budget for fiscal year 2023, military funding amounted to 62% of the $1.8 trillion total; 38% sufficed for everything else, including housing, education, healthcare, and restoration of infrastructure.
Another side note: Unfathomable human suffering will not likely deter the United States from enabling Israeli massacres in Gaza. The U.S. government has returned to the nuclear arms race. Doing so signals tolerance for the worst kind of catastrophe. According to the New York Times: “General Dynamics will have “produced 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines by 2042 – a job that’s projected to cost $130 billion … [and] the United States is set to spend an estimated $1.7 trillion over 30 years to revamp its [nuclear] arsenal.”
The U.S. government, with Israel’s help, pursues a new kind of imperialism. Distant from enslaved labor, die-offs of indigenous peoples, and occupation of foreign territories, it relies on debt dependency and cheap labor. Under neoliberalism, wealth is still being drained from the world’s peripheral regions to metropolitan centers.
Conflict remains. Rival powers are ever threatening, and the United States needs a hard-boiled and militarily competent factotum at its side. The U.S. government pays in kind, with bombs, guns, planes, and missiles.
Neither war in the Middle East nor the U.S. weaponization of Israel will end any time soon. If and when it happens will depend on priorities serving U.S. imperialism. As discouraging as it might feel, young people in the U.S. and others actively demanding justice for Palestinians would do well, it seems, to prepare themselves for the long haul. They are looking at U.S. imperialism as it’s functioning in the moment, but beating it requires an understanding of its origins and long history.
The movements against the Gaza genocide need to learn, first, that capitalism consolidated, turned aggressive, and then thrust modern-day imperialism upon the world. To truly grasp how imperialism works, they will need to study worker exploitation and how it led to the profit-taking abundance that fuels the growth of capitalism. They should explore how the system divides us all by social class, the necessary condition for exploitation.
Begin with Marx and Engels’ reflections on the factory system under capitalism and see how workers lose out on the surplus value of the labor they provide. Then become familiar with the history of class mobilizations and workers’ struggles for political power. If they do, they’ll arrive at Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), a study of how capitalists monopolize the economy and make war in pursuit of their interests.
That will be a good start to understanding the logic of imperialism.
As with all op-ed articles published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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