Photo by Nathaniel St. Clair
The Israeli army’s horrific massacres in Gaza now extend to Lebanon. Homes, schools and hospitals have been destroyed. Residents of North Gaza are again being driven south. People are starving. The US government supplies the bombs, planes and weapons.
The continuation of the war is related to US strategic interests in the region and US pretensions to world domination. War and humanitarian catastrophe will end when American aid is stopped. Some critics of the war advance positions and emphases that are distracting and do little to end the war.
They usually attribute the massacre to the expansionist nature of Zionism. For more than a century, Zionism has brought sorrow and loss to Palestinians. But criticizing that record is more likely to reinforce intransigence than change the course of events.
Highlighting an unprecedented humanitarian disaster will not in itself stop the killing or lead to recovery. It must be the object of international consensus and cooperation, as mediated through the United Nations. Underfunding and Security Council vetoes are obstacles.
Peace advocates may maintain that the more humanitarian norms are violated, the more impact moral, legal, and/or ethical criticism will have and the more striking personal testimony or civil disobedience will be. Without massive pressure to guide expectations, they become wishful thinking.
The war will not end just because the war must end. This will continue as long as vital interests are served. Israel’s interests are its own interests. Criticism from afar is unlikely to have any effect. American interests deserve attention because the war serves American purposes.
According to peoplesworld.org “Israel does completely dependent on the US. It would not be able to carry out its campaigns of aggression without American help.”
The United States is tied to Israel. The two main political parties support military aid to Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the US Congress on July 24 to thunderous applause. The American bond with Israel is worth a lot.
American involvement in Israel and in aiding the war in Israel is expressed in monetary terms: $251.2 billion (adjusted for inflation) of military aid to Israel for 66 years, $18 billion in the year leading up to October 2024, and $20 billion approved by President Biden in August 2024 and voted on in Congress in November. These are funds “that Israel should use to purchase U.S. military equipment and services.”
The commitment is such that US military aid continues to flow despite the Leahy Act’s (1997) requirement to “vet only foreign military unit to ensure it has a clean human rights record before it can receive U.S. assistance.”
Support for Israel is a crucial part of America’s strategy for the entire Middle East. This strategy is one aspect of America’s plans to manage international affairs as it wishes. American support for Israel and its war coincides with American imperialist goals.
In the past, American responses to the Holocaust played an important role in establishing American support for a Jewish state. Later, relations with Israel took on an additional transactional aspect. The US government would indeed support Israel’s relations with the Palestinians. But Israel would facilitate US policy objectives for the Middle East.
They are: control and supervision of the regions production and distribution of oil and natural gas, maintaining the role of the Middle East as “transit hub connecting Europe, Asia and Africa,” a military force is ready to intervene in return for so-called terrorism, and reducing ‘the influence of rivals’ great powers.”
There are other favors. Israel acts as a proxy fighter for the United States, for example in Syria and Iraq, and provides an annual vote in the UN General Assembly for the US economic blockade of Cuba (there is usually only one other such vote).
Israel to arrangees US right-wing allies in Latin America with military aid, training and equipment. Israel offers attractions: 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 American involvement in imperialism. Because imperialism involves conflict, military capabilities are crucial, and that also costs money. Total U.S. military spending is excessively high, dwarfing spending on the social needs of the American people. The government’s discretionary budget for the 2023 financial year included military funding 62% of the $1.8 trillion total; 38% was sufficient for everything else, including housing, education, health care and infrastructure repair.
Another caveat: Unfathomable human suffering is unlikely to stop the United States from enabling Israeli massacres in Gaza. The US government has returned to a nuclear arms race. Doing so indicates tolerance for the worst catastrophe. According to the New York Times: “General Dynamics will have that “produced twelve nuclear ballistic missile submarines by 2042 – a job expected to cost $130 billion… (and) the United States will estimated $1.7 trillion more than 30 years to renew its (nuclear) arsenal.”
The US government, with the help of Israel, is pursuing a new kind of imperialism. Far from enslaved labor, the extinction of indigenous peoples, and the occupation of foreign territories, the country relies on debt dependence and cheap labor. Under neoliberalism, wealth continues to be diverted from the peripheral regions of the world to metropolitan centers.
Conflicts persist. Rival powers are always threatening, and the United States needs a hard-boiled and militarily competent factotum at its side. The US government pays in kind, with bombs, guns, planes and missiles.
Neither the war nor the American arming of Israel will end anytime soon. What happens will depend on the priorities that serve American imperialism. American youth and others who actively demand justice for the Palestinians would, it seems, do well to prepare for the long term. They now look at American imperialism and would come to understand its origins and what needs to be done.
They would first learn that capitalism consolidated, became aggressive, and then imposed modern imperialism on the world. They would study the exploitation of workers and how it led to the glut of profit-taking that fueled the growth of capitalism. They would examine the division by social class, the necessary condition for exploitation.
Others, socialists in particular, have reversed this order, and it doesn’t matter. Beginning with Marx and Engels’ reflections on the factory system under capitalism, they learned that workers lose the surplus value of the labor they provide. The researchers became familiar with labor mobilizations and working class struggles for political power. They arrived at Lenin Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism (1916), a study of capitalists who monopolize and wage war.