Stephen Gowans is the author of The Killer's Henchman: Capitalism and the Covid-19 Disaster (2022); Israel, A Beachhead in the Middle East: From European Colony to US Power Projection Platform (2019); Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea's Struggle for Freedom (2018); and Washington's Long War on Syria (2017).
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The December 14 killing of 15 Jews by two ISIS-inspired gunmen at Sydney’s Bondi Beach has given rise to calls for a ban on the use of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” on the grounds that it is a call for the killing of Jews around the world.
The New York Times reported that “Two of Britain’s largest police forces announced that they would arrest protesters for using the phrase ‘globalize the intifada,’ saying in a joint statement that a ‘more assertive’ approach was needed after the terrorist attack in Australia and a previous assault on a synagogue in England.”
In Canada, the editorial board of the country’s largest newspaper, The Globe and Mail, argued—with not a shred of evidence—that the Bondi Beach killers were driven to their murderous spree by a desire to globalize the intifada. The board harrumphed, “And if anyone was still unclear as to what the chants heard in countless rallies in Canada and elsewhere to ‘globalize the intifada’ mean, the answer is to be found in the carnage at Bondi Beach. The two gunmen heard and heeded the call to intifada.”
British authorities, court journalists, Zionists, and defenders of Israel misrepresent “globalize the intifada” as a call to kill Jews everywhere, falsely citing the slogan as the inspiration for the Bondi Beach killings.
There are two problems with their argument.
Globalize the intifada is a call to bring global pressure to bear on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories, not a call to kill Jews.
The Bondi Beach killings were not inspired by either the true meaning of the slogan or the false meaning that has been attributed to it by Israel’s supporters.
Globalize the intifada is a call to bring global pressure to bear on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories
Intifada is an Arabic word meaning “to shake off.” It was used by Palestinians to describe two of their efforts to bring an end to, or shake off, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. One of those efforts lasted from 1987-1993; another from 2000-2005.
At the heart of the word “intifada”, as Palestinians have used this term, is a political goal: an end to the occupation. However, Zionists and their supports misinterpret the word to mean violence against Jews. To be sure, violence is one way that Palestinians might try, and have tried, to achieve this goal. But calling for intifada—shaking off Israeli oppression—is a call for a campaign to achieve a political aim, not a specification of how the aim is to be achieved.
Still, political violence was part of the intifadas, but it was aimed, not at Jews qua Jews, but at Israelis. So even if the call for intifada was specifically a call for political violence—and it isn’t—it wouldn’t be a call for violence against Jews as such, but against Jewish supremacist settlers in the Palestinians’ homeland.
To say, then, that “globalize the intifada” is a call to kill Jews everywhere is false. First, there is no inherent reference to violence in the word intifada. Second, even if there was, the violence would be directed not at Jews everywhere, but at Israelis specifically, and not for reasons of blind hatred of Jews but in pursuit of a legitimate Palestinian political objective.
I say the Palestinian political objective is legitimate for two reasons.
The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal under international law. This statement isn’t even remotely controversial.
A people’s redressing its dispossession and oppression is, on moral grounds, axiomatically legitimate.
The Palestinians’ pursuit of the goal embodied in the word intifada is, thus, a legitimate political project. To globalize the intifada is to internationalize the pursuit of this legitimate political objective; it is a call for people around the world to enter the fight, in whatever way they can, to help an oppressed people achieve their legitimate political aim.
In sum, the slogan:
Is not based in the psychopathology of Judeophobia, but in a legitimate political objective.
Is not a call for violence (nor at the same time a call for non-violence; it is a call for the achievement of a political objective, not a specification of how the objective is to be achieved).
Makes no allusion to Jews as such but only to Israelis who support and enforce the denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate aims.
The slogan is not, therefore, necessarily a call for violence against Israelis, and it is most especially not a call for violence against Jews outside Israel.
The Bondi Beach killings were not inspired by either the false or true meanings of the slogan
The killers, according to Australian officials, appear to have been motivated by Islamic State ideology. Islamic State thinking is pretty simple: kill the infidel—Yazidis, Christians, Shia Muslims, Alawi Muslims, Jews, and even non-fundamentalist Sunni Muslims. ISIS militants are not choosy. If you don’t believe what they believe, you’re fair game.
In June “a suicide bomber who was a member of the Islamic State opened fire before blowing himself up during the Sunday service at the Greek Orthodox church of Prophet Elias in Damascus, killing at least 30 and wounding more than 60 Greek Orthodox Christians.”
For every Jew killed at Bondi Beach two Christians were killed at Damascus, by killers inspired by the same Islamic State ideology. Significantly, the killing of 30 Christians was a non-story, barely noticed anywhere, but the massacre of half as many Jews has widely reported and is now known by much of the world.
No one has cited the Damascus slaughter of Christians as evidence of a spike in anti-Christian hatred, or called for Christians to have their own ethno-state where they can feel safe, or demanded measures to combat a growing scourge of anti-Christian animus.
It would appear that the Bondi Beach killers did not target Jews to show solidarity with Palestinians. It is more likely that they slaughtered Jews for the reason ISIS militants slaughter anyone, including Christians and Shia Muslims: because, in ISIS’s view, they are heretics.
But even if the killers’ actions were intended as a show of solidarity with Palestinians, their decision to slaughter Jews on an Australian beach has no meaningful connection to any legitimate interpretation of “globalize the intifada.” The slogan is not a call to kill Jews as Jews, much less Jews living almost nine thousand miles away from Palestine, but to support Palestinians in their quest to overcome the opposition of Israelis to the achievement of a legitimate Palestinian political aim.
The politics of misinterpretation
Not surprisingly, the misinterpretation of the slogan comports with the political aims of Zionists, Israeli officials, and Israel’s supporters. They want to discredit the global movement which seeks to pressure Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories by identifying its motivations as rooted in the psychopathology of Judeophobia. Zionists want to do this in order to draw attention away from the political questions at the heart of the Palestinian project: settler colonialism, apartheid, genocide, and international law. Zionists cannot win in this arena, and so they attempt to shift the debate to another question.
Israeli officials are always quick to present any violence against Jews, whether directed against Jews qua Jews or otherwise, as evidence of an ineradicable worldwide Judeophobia. Zionism is predicated on the idea that non-Jews can’t help but hate Jews; that anti-Jewish violence is always simmering below the surface, ready to boil over; and that for these reasons, the existence of a Jewish state as a bulwark against the Judeophobic psychopathology of non-Jews is a moral and existential necessity. The slaughter of Jews by Islamic State killers at Bondi Beach has been dishonestly exploited by pro-Israel forces to strengthen this discourse. Violence against Jews is eternal, Zionists argue, and, what’s more, they say, it is inspired by the slogans of those who march in solidarity with the Palestinians. The argument seeks to achieve two objectives at one stroke: 1) To fear-monger in order to induce diaspora Jews to immigrate to Israel; 2) To depoliticize the Palestinians’ political project and situate it in anti-Semitism in order to discredit it.
“Globalize the intifada” is, unquestionably, anti-Zionist and expresses a point of view that is strenuously opposed to the continued Israeli denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate political aims. But it is not anti-Semitic. It is a political slogan based in opposition to the denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate political project. It is for this reason that the purveyors of Israeli hasbara invoke anti-Semitism as a smokescreen to conceal the political questions at the heart of the pro-Palestinian solidarity movement and its slogans. Having no argument to support settler colonialism, apartheid, genocide, and the continued Israeli violation of international law (condoned in deeds by the United States and its G7 allies), they conjure the red-herring of Jew-hatred. Western governments, such as the United Kingdom, and court journalists, such as the editorial board of The Globe and Mail, participate in this deception because they are as supportive of Israel and its denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate political aims as are the Israeli oppressors themselves. Support for Israel within the Western establishment is beyond question and based on the reality that the Zionist state has, from its birth, been child, extension, and outpost, of the West in the Middle East; the West’s, and especially the United States’, instrument for controlling the region’s petroleum resources and strategic position.
We can expect no honesty from Western governments and mainstream news media, anymore than we can from the Israeli government itself, on questions related to the Palestinians’ legitimate political project. The Western establishment and Israel maintain a symbiotic relationship, with Israel doing, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said not too long ago, the West’s dirty work, in exchange for the United States and its G7 subalterns, providing Israel with the political, economic, military, and diplomatic support it needs to keep the Palestinians down and West Asia under the bootheel of US imperialism.
The genocide scholar Raz Segal has written an insightful article for the Guardian (“The genocide in Gaza is far from over,” 20 November, 2025) which I am flagging because it addresses a question that is almost never asked in public discourse: Why do genocides happen?
Segal asks this question because it is clear that the Nuremberg Trials, the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and education programs designed to instil the idea of “never again”, have failed. For, in this post-Holocaust world, the slogan “never again” is belied by the reality of “again and again.”
The common understanding of genocides is that they are caused by bad people with evil in their hearts. This is The Christmas Carol version of the expunction of groups. Bob Cratchet was overworked and underpaid because his boss, Ebenezeer Scrooge, was a miser with a heart of adamant, not because he was a capitalist operating in a world of cut-throat competition. Scrooge had two choices: pay his employees as little as possible and work them as long as possible, or go under. It’s no surprise he chose the former.
How many progressives attribute the problems of the working class to the greed of corporations, as if greed can be disappeared in a poof of moral suasion, or a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future? Where does greed come from? Scrooge’s greed came, not from his heart, but from bourgeois society and the capitalist imperatives which enslaved him. “We shouldn’t despise human nature,” counseled the eighteenth-century philosophe, Denis Diderot, “but the despicable conventions that pervert it.” Scrooge’s perversion was the despicable convention of capitalism, not a lonely childhood and a love affair gone sour, as Dickens told the tale.
What are the despicable conventions that pervert human nature to produce genocides? For Segal, and others, it is a political project—one of building ethnically homogenous societies.
British settlers in Turtle Island (North America), Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand), carried out genocides against the indigenous peoples of these territories, not so much with the conscious intention of building societies of, by, and for White people, but of integrating the land and resources of the indigenous people into a growing world bourgeois system of capitalist production. Inasmuch as the indigenous peoples couldn’t be, and didn’t want to be, forcibly integrated into this system, they were eliminated as obstacles. Thus, the creation of ethnically homogeneous White Christian societies in these lands was a consequence of a capitalist driven process.
Nazi Germany carried out a genocide in Eastern Europe against people it deemed Untermenschen (sub-humans)—Slavs, Jews, Romani, Blacks, and mixed-race people. Of 18 million non-combatants killed by bullets, gas, exposure, exhaustion, and disease in the German war in the European East from 1939 to 1945, 12 million were Slavs and six million Jews. Ninety-six percent of the victims were claimed by Nazi imperialist violence—that is, violence used by the Third Reich to conquer and depopulate Slav territory in order to repopulate it with German settlers.
Significantly, most of the world’s Jews lived within the territory that was the object of the Nazis’ settler colonial ambitions. The Holocaust, in the view of Carrol P. Kakel III, a US historian who has written on the American and German genocides, cannot be separated from Nazi settler colonialism. Six million Jews were killed, not for the sole reason that Nazis hated Jews—a view ingrained in the ideological zeitgeist—but as a consequence of a political project, namely, 1) clearing the European East (where the majority of the world’s Jews lived) of non-Germans to make room for an expanded ethnically homogeneous Teutonic empire and 2) eliminating an ethnic group the Nazis believed was, through the instruments of international finance capitalism and Marxist internationalism, seeking to destroy the German people as a nation.
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who introduced the concept of genocide in his 1944 study Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, attributed the Nazi genocide of the Slavs to the German settler colonial project, but insisted that the genocide of the Jews, the Holocaust, originated in psychopathological Judeophobia, unconnected to any Nazi political aim. Lemkin’s insistence that Nazi violence toward Jews was driven by psychopathology (thus, bad people with evil in their hearts) likely originated in his Zionism. A core belief of political Zionism is that non-Jews can’t help but hate Jews. As a consequence, Jews can never safely live among non-Jews, and must therefore have their own state if they are to be safe and survive as a people. Genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has argued vigorously against the view that the Holocaust was the consequence of apolitical hatred, rooting the Judeocide instead, along with other genocides, in political projects. He criticizes the Genocide Convention for depoliticizing genocide—that is, for failing to recognize that genocides are carried out by ethnic groups against other ethnic groups they see as economic or political competitors. Often, but not always, the competition is over land. Or one ethnic group sees another as a threat to its survival.
Certainly, the origins of the genocide of the Palestinians can be found in a political project—clearing Palestine of its indigenous population to make room for Jewish settlers and the creation of a Jewish ethnic state. Zionist settler colonialism has obvious connections to the British-settler colonial genocides of the indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the Nazi political project of creating an expanded German empire in the European East comprised solely of Aryan Germans.
Segal argues that the reason we live in a post-Holocaust world of again and again is because the political project that has regularly given rise to genocide—one of creating ethnically homogeneous states—continues to be seen as legitimate. One of the reasons (though not the only or even most important reason) the United States, Britian, Canada, and the Soviet Union backed the creation of an ethnic Jewish state in Palestine, was because they believed that ethnic states were legitimate, necessary, and desirable. Self-determination, the notion that every ethnic group should have its own state, enjoys considerable esteem. Thus, the idea of a single democratic state in Palestine, from the river to the sea, where everyone is equal, is frequently dismissed in preference to the creation of two ethnically homogeneous states existing side-by-side—one Jewish, the other Palestinian. This is the two-state solution. Zionists prefer one Jewish state in all of Palestine (today’s reality) and some Palestinians would like to see a Palestinian state from the river to the sea, cleansed of its Jewish inhabitants, save for the descendants of Jews who lived in the country prior to the political Zionist waves of European immigration.
Abolishing genocide and getting to a world of never again means abolishing the idea that the ethnic state is either necessary or desirable. We don’t need ethnic states; we need civic states, where all people are equal and gender, sexual-orientation, ethnicity, national origin, religion, color, language, and all other ascriptive markers of identity have no political significance.
However, ideas are not abolished by fiat; conduct is not deduced from principle. The fact that the land of the indigenous peoples of North America and Oceania offered attractive possibilities to metropolitan Europe, and the proletarians it disgorged to the colonies, created the idea of the desirability of settler colonialism. The idea of political Zionism arose in the anti-Semitism of Europe, which in turn arose in the need of Europe’s rulers to diffuse threats to their rule by turning their subjects’ anger against a scapegoat. The war against the Jews became a substitute for the class war against Tsarist oppression and capitalist exploitation. A. Dirk Moses makes a compelling point that genocide is pursued as a solution to a political problem, but political problems arise not in the world of ideas, but in social and economic intercourse.
One of the surest ways of solving the political problem of two groups vying for political and economic resources within the same territory is for one or both of them to try to expel or physically destroy the other. So long as humanity is divided by ascriptive identity will identity groups vie for political and economic resources, and so long as identity groups vie for political and economic resources, the possibility of genocide will be ever present.
“The rich, in particular, are necessarily interested to support that order of things which can alone secure them in the possession of their own advantages.”—Adam Smith
“The enemies of the working class travel in private jets, not migrant dinghies.”—Zarah Sultana
By Stephen Gowans
US National Security Strategy documents are expressions of the interests of the world’s richest country in securing that order of things which can alone secure it in the possession of its own advantages. But more specifically, I think it is fair to say, considering that the ultrarich wield outsize influence over the US state, that US strategy is aimed at securing the advantages of the rich themselves directly, and all other Americans incidentally, if at all. Moreover, to the extent the rich are made richer by the Strategy, it may only be a result of the poor being made poorer. In the view of Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: “The affluence of the rich supposes the indigence of the many”; of Victor Hugo in The Man Who Laughs: “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor”; and Karl Marx in Capital: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole.” In line with these arguments, we might expect that in proportion as the Strategy makes the lives of the rich richer, it will make those of the working class meaner.
The National Security Strategy 2025 is a plan, as Trump’s White House puts it, “To ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come.” We can be sure that when the White House says “America” its means “America’s billionaires,” which the administration includes, in greater numbers than any other in history, and which is openly and unapologetically backed by billionaires and is ardently committed to securing them in the possession of their own advantages, through numerous blessings, from munificent tax cuts, to deregulation, to ample opportunities for corruption.
There are at least a dozen billionaires in Trump’s cabinet and among those appointed to major roles. Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Tom Barrack, Trump envoys working on key foreign policy issues, are confirmed billionaires, as is commerce secretary Howard Lutnick. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent is a near billionaire. David Sacks, a near billionaire, oversees AI and crypto, the industries in which he has accumulated his wealth. [See note 1 below.] The world’s richest people contributed to Trump’s re-election campaign, transition, and inauguration.
“There were at least 17 billionaires in attendance at Donald Trump’s second inauguration, collectively worth more than $1 trillion”, according to The Washington Post. They included the world’s top three wealthiest people: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, who “took places of honor next to Trump’s family.” Seated nearby were several other billionaires, including Louis Vuitton, the world’s fifth richest person, “Apple CEO Tim Cook, former Marvel owner Isaac Perlmutter and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.”
Billionaires back Trump because he is, himself, a billionaire—the first ever to hold the office of president; because he has loaded his cabinet with their class brethren, other billionaires, who are sure to see the world as they see it and favor their interests; and because he unapologetically caters to billionaire interests. He does so at the expense of the polloi, while aiming to maintain political and social stability by persuading a substantial fraction of the White Christian working class, that he is, notwithstanding the reality, their champion.
This isn’t to say that a cabinet with fewer or no billionaires, or even completely devoid of people of wealth, would produce a national security strategy that is any less ardently committed to securing an order of things that delivers enormous advantages to the wealthy as its priority. Politicians, whether wealthy or not, are dependent on the rich for campaign contributions and post-political-career opportunities. They naturally try to stay on the good side of the rich, and are greatly inclined to lick their boots, since servility to the wealthy eases the road to office.
In addition, the wealthy exercise an enormous sway over public opinion through their control of mass media, think-tanks, public relations firms, and the research agenda at universities. More importantly, their ownership and control of the economy give them the power to make or break governments. The only way governments can act against the interests of the wealthy and for the interests of the working class is by taking capital, enterprises, and investment decisions out of private hands and bringing them under democratic control. What this means is that capitalist control of the state is over-determined. It is affected by the participation of members of the capitalist class in key positions of the state and the class’s control of the ideological environment. But it is also affected by the influence the class exercises through its ownership and control of the economy—a power which allows it to cripple governments that fail to promote its agenda by ceasing to invest or by moving capital to other countries. No government wants to lose major investments and will kowtow to investor needs to keep capital flowing. The abundance of billionaires in the Trump administrations is an instance of the wealthy exercising direct control over public policy and the day-to-day decision-making of the White House, but even without billionaires in the cabinet, the manifold indirect influences of the wealthy class on government constrains the state to pursue capitalist class interests.
The Biden administration had far fewer billionaires and people of significant wealth, but its key players were members of billionaire-controlled and -directed think-tanks, such as The Council on Foreign Relations, and were thus loyal servants of the US capitalist class. The Biden administration’s national security strategy was no less committed to defending and promoting US billionaire interests around the world than the Trump administration’s is, though the means of accomplishing this goal and the justifications were not wholly the same. For example, the Trump White House is quite open about using its security strategy to pursue profit-making opportunities for US investors and businesses, while the Biden administration cloaked its pursuit of advantages for US billionaires and corporate America in the language of defending and promoting democracy. The New York Times, virtually the house organ of the Democratic Party, complained in a headline that “Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy“, an allusion to the allegedly loftier aims of the Biden administration’s national security strategy. In 1966, the songwriter Phil Ochs wrote a song about US national security strategy titled Cops of the World, which contained a line that perfectly anticipated the Biden administration’s approach to presenting how it would use the power of the US military to defend and promote the welfare of the US business class. The line was “the name for our profits is democracy.”
Analysis of the Security Strategy
The National Security Strategy 2025 has, for me, five salient themes.
#1. Washington will prevent any rival state from doing the following in the Western Hemisphere:
Positioning military “forces or other threatening capabilities”; and
Owning or controlling assets that Washington deems strategically vital.
While the document doesn’t spell out who the rival states are, there can be little doubt that they are China and Russia. And while the Strategy doesn’t define what strategically vital assets are, they likely include the Panama Canal and Greenland, at minimum. The White House has titled the pledge to keep competitors out of the Western Hemisphere, The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
The Monroe Doctrine, promulgated by President James Monroe in 1823, warned European powers that the United States would not allow them to acquire new territory in the Western Hemisphere or form alliances with hemispheric states. In exchange, the United States would stay out of Europe’s wars.
In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt updated the doctrine with his eponymous Roosevelt Corollary. Washington, the president warned, would intervene in any country in the Western Hemisphere that engaged in conduct of which it did not approve. Roosevelt’s corollary was a statement of the principle of suprema lex regis voluntas—the supreme law of the Western Hemisphere is the will of the US government, and, I would add, as a matter of sociology, the class that dominates it. It was also, obviously, a statement of informal empire.
Trump’s corollary is not so much a corollary as a restatement of the Monroe Doctrine, aimed not at Europe, as the original was, but at Russia and China.
#2. Washington will continue to engage in a struggle with China over control of sea lanes in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The struggle, from Washington’s point of view, will pivot on preventing Beijing from controlling Taiwan.
Washington, along with its court journalists and intellectuals, is fond of pointing out how much of the world’s shipping flows through the South China Sea. “Given that one-third of global shipping passes annually through the South China Sea,” the document declares, disruptions would have “major implications for the U.S. economy.” Were “a potentially hostile power to impose a toll system over one of the world’s most vital lanes of commerce or—worse—to close and reopen it at will,” the consequences could be catastrophic for the US economy. Hence, no US rival (i.e., China) must be allowed to control this body of water.
The tendentious character of the Strategy’s argument is evident if we consider that much of the shipping that passes through the South China Sea flows to and from China. If any state has an interest in keeping the South China Sea open, China is it. Beijing’s planners can reasonably fear that the United States, a competitor, could impose a toll system over this vital (to China) lane of commerce or—worse—close and reopen it at will, severing China’s imports of oil from the Persian Gulf, impeding the flow of raw materials from around the globe, and blocking its exports to foreign markets.
The United States controls the sea lanes of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would like to maintain its control, not because US planners are worried about threats to the US economy if control slips away, but because exercising control over the shipping lanes means leverage over China. US control of critical commercial maritime routes comports with a key goal of the Strategy: “To prevent the emergence of dominant adversaries.” A China that could be blockaded at any moment by the US military, is not likely to grow large enough to surpass the United States as the world’s supreme economic and military power. Hence, Washington has an interest in projecting prepotent military power into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. At the same time, China would like to control the very same maritime routes to protect its own economy from US blockade, disruption, and blackmail, and very likely as well, to gain power over its regional rivals, India and Japan.
The key to this struggle is Taiwan. The Chinese navy is hemmed in by a series of islands, running from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines to the Malay Peninsula, known as the First Island Chain. The islands are under the influence and control, to various degrees, of the US military. The weakest link in the chain is Taiwan. There is no meaningful US military presence on the island, and Beijing claims it as its own territory, but has yet to bring the island under its control. If Beijing achieves its ambition to recover Taiwan, it will be able to more readily project its navy into the South China and Philippine Seas, and from there to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, reducing the chances the US Navy will be able to enforce a blockade.
To keep Taiwan out of Beijing’s hands, Washington proposes to:
Preserve “military overmatch”, that is, to deploy greater firepower to the Indo-Pacific region than China can match.
Increase the US military presence in the First Island Chain.
Press Japan, South Korea, and Australia to increase their contributions of military equipment and personnel to US-led alliances in order to strengthen the US effort to keep China bottled up within the First Island Chain.
The plan is, thus, in large part, the outline of a program to use the US military to obtain an ongoing commercial advantage over China.
#3. Washington will pressure its allies to increase their contributions to the maintenance of US global military supremacy. The Strategy argues that the United States counts among its “many allies and partners dozens of wealthy, sophisticated nations that must assume primary responsibility for their regions and contribute far more to our collective defense.” It goes on to note that “President Trump has set a new global standard with the Hague Commitment, which pledges NATO countries to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense and which our NATO allies have endorsed and must now meet.”
Notwithstanding the foregoing, Washington is not asking its allies to assume primary responsibility for their regions. Japan, South Korea, and Australia, for example, are not being asked to defend themselves, or lead military efforts, against China. Instead, they are being asked to spend more money on arms (which, owing to the size of the US arms industry means much of the higher military spending will benefit US merchants of death) and on personnel, all of which are part of formal military alliances under the control of the United States. Ancient Roman armies were comprised of legionaries (soldiers from Rome) and auxiliaries (soldiers from allied states) under the command of a Roman general. When allies committed more soldiers, Rome grew in strength. Washington is simply following the same logic. What allies contribute redounds directly to US military power. Japan, South Korea, Australia, and NATO countries are being asked to contribute more money, more soldiers, and more (mainly US-purchased) equipment to their US-led military alliances; hence, to US military projects and supremacy.
The same is true of Europe. Washington makes a pretense of Europe being asked to take on greater responsibility for its defense. But that’s nonsense. The principal European military organization, NATO, is an alliance that is always under the command of a US general, as the NATO charter stipulates. NATO is a US instrument; it always has been and will always remain. Washington isn’t asking Europe to take command of NATO or the defense of Europe, nor the task of confronting Russia. That remains a US leadership responsibility. It’s being asked, nay, told, to contribute more money and troops to what will always be a US-directed project. This will allow the Pentagon to shift a significant part of its forces currently deployed to Europe to the Indo-Pacific region to help impede China’s efforts to recover Taiwan. The project of confronting Russia will remain one in which Europe contributes the bulk of the equipment and personnel, as it always has done, but it will commit more than in the past, and the US contribution will correspondingly diminish, though US leadership will continue.
Two other points, both significant.
First, it is not the case that Washington believes that Europe has underspent on its militaries and has thus left the continent vulnerable to Russian aggression. On the contrary, the Strategy document declares that “European allies enjoy a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure, save nuclear weapons.” This is obvious to anyone who has taken the time to look at the numbers. What this means is that the discourse favored by the news media, NATO’s secretary-general, and some governments, that European countries must increase their military spending, because Russia stands as a looming threat, is utter nonsense. Even the White House doesn’t believe this.
Second, the Strategy seeks to “restabilize” Europe by seeking to bring about an end to the conflict in Ukraine and, importantly, an end to “the reality of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”
#4. The White House believes that Europe is imperiled, not by Russia, but by liberal immigration policies and the suppression of White nationalist political parties and their anti-immigrant discourse. “The larger issues facing Europe,” the strategy document opines, “include”:
“Migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife”, and
“Censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”
The Strategy’s authors worry that demographic change in Europe is undermining the continent’s Western Civilizational values, noting that it “is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European” (in other words, majority non-White and Muslim). “As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.”
The fear of Eastern peoples undermining Western Civilization was a particular concern of the Nazis, who saw Jews and Communists as Eastern. The White House’s concerns about immigration are not only consistent with those of the Nazis and contemporary White nationalist parties in Europe today, but also with the Trump administration’s own racist domestic policy of mass deportations of illegal immigrants and banning immigration from such countries as Afghanistan and Somalia. The Washington Post summarized White House thinking on immigration as: “Somalis are ‘garbage,’ and ‘we don’t want them in our country.’ Migration from ‘all Third World countries’ should be halted. Any foreign national deemed ‘noncompatible with Western civilization’ must be deported.” Like the Nazis, who worked to replace Klassenkampf (the struggle of classes) with Razzenkampf (the struggle of races) in order to divert the working class from its efforts to liberate itself from the miseries and disadvantages of capitalism, the Trump administration is likewise engaged in a project of scapegoating immigrants to keep the White Christian working class from blaming its woes on Trump’s billionaire cohorts and their program of exploitation of the poor and left-behind and indulgence for the rich and comfortable.
#5. The United States will continue to dominate West Asia to ensure the region’s oil resources remain under US supervision, while at the same time maintaining the US position as the world’s top exporter of oil and gas. In this way, Washington will control a vital input into the economies of Japan and Germany, potentially threatening economic competitors, and its top rival, China. Regarding the latter, US strategy stipulates that Washington will control not only West Asia, a major source of energy for China, but also the sea lanes connecting the Middle East to China. This goes a long way toward meeting the major US strategy objective of preventing the emergence of a dominant adversary.
Finally, I will note that, as an obiter dictum, the White House says that it will continue to protect Israel. It doesn’t say why. I can’t help but think that one of the reasons is that Israel is viewed as an outpost of Western Civilization in the East and that, comprising a Jewish master race that is mostly white, it is, as a consequence, a White supremacist regime—one moreover that embodies the most repugnant aspects of the Western tradition (settler colonialism, racism, genocide, imperialism), the very foundations of US wealth and power. Israel is a model of the White nationalist golden age that appears to lie so close to the heart of the US president. In chiding the Europeans for allowing their continent to undergo an immigration-induced demographic change, and then censuring various European powers for repressing anti-immigrant, White nationalist, discourse, the Trump White House poses as a champion of Western (i.e., White Christian) Civilization. This is a civilization which, under the guidance of Trump and his Corollary, aims to keep Eastern power out of the Western Hemisphere, but claims a prerogative to impose Western power on the East. So it is that while re-asserting the Monroe Doctrine, Washington at the same time makes clear that it intends to control the Eastern Hemisphere, especially the sea lanes that connect China to the rest of the world.
The Indo-Pacific region is very important to the Trump White House. It is, the Strategy notes, “already the source of almost half of the world’s GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP), and one third based on nominal GDP. That share is certain to grow over the 21st century. Which means that the Indo-Pacific is already and will continue to be among the next century’s key economic and geopolitical battlegrounds. To thrive at home, we must successfully compete there.”
Thriving at home can be taken to mean the US billionaire class growing fatter, while it sucks the blood of the US working class, as it endeavors to keep it in a state of stupefaction by recruiting it to a campaign of saving Western Civilization from the immigration of “garbage” from the global south. Concurrently, the US state will plunder the working class of allied countries that will be forced to contribute money, equipment, and personnel to US-led military projects aimed at making Trump’s fellow US billionaires richer. At the same time, Washington will keep its boot-heel on Chinese energy sources and vital sea lanes, aided amply by its allies. This will be done in the service of the White House’s overarching goal: Ensuring that US investors and corporate America secure possession of the lion’s share of the major profit-making opportunities of the Western Hemisphere and Asia.
The New York Times’ take on the security strategy is that it reflects the “world as seen from the White House”—one in which “America can use its vast powers to make money.” I would amend the assessment somewhat. The strategy reflects a world as seen from a White House that is controlled by a battalion of billionaires, and that uses race and anti-immigrant rhetoric to divert the White Christian working class from the reality that it is being fleeced and immiserated. The world the billionaires see is one in which US investors and major US businesses use the vast power of the US state to cut Chinese enterprises and billionaires out of the action to ensure that the lion’s share of the world’s economic surplus remains in the hands of the Donald Trumps, Steve Witkoffs, Jared Kushners, Howard Luttnicks, and their friends, associates, business and golf partners, and political backers, among them Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—in other words, the US capitalist class.
1. According to The Washington Post, 13 billionaires — including Donald Trump —have held roles in the administration this year. They are:
Donald Trump, President of the United States, Net worth: $5.1 billion
Howard Lutnick, Secretary, Commerce Department, Net worth: $3.2 billion
Linda McMahon, Secretary, Education Department, Net worth: $3 billion
Steve Witkoff, Assistant to the president and special envoy for peace missions, Net worth: $2 billion
Kelly Loeffler, Administrator, Small Business Administration, Net worth: $1.3 billion
Elon Musk, Leader, U.S. DOGE Service (resigned in late May), Net worth: $342 billion
Joe Gebbia, Chief design officer, Net worth: $8.3 billion
Antonio Gracias, Volunteer, DOGE (left in July), Net worth: $2.2 billion
Tilman Fertitta, Ambassador to Italy and San Marino, Net worth: $11.3 billion
Melinda Hildebrand, Ambassador to Costa Rica, Net worth: $7.7 billion
Stephen Feinberg, Deputy secretary, Defense Department, Net worth: $5 billion
Warren Stephens, Ambassador to Britain, Net worth: $3.4 billion,
Paul Atkins, Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission, Net worth: $1.2 billion
The list omits Jared Kushner and Tom Barrack, who may not be billionaires, but near billionaires.
Canada has shelled out $22-billion of taxpayer money on assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded the country in February, 2022. [1] Might our money have been better spent on other matters?
For example, 20 percent of Canadian adults do not have a family doctor. [2] Could this money have been used to help provide Canadians with access to physicians and nurse practitioners?
“Affordable housing,” according to The Globe and Mail, “is out of reach everywhere in Canada.” [3] Could Ottawa’s generous aid to Ukraine have been spent instead on helping to solve Canada’s housing and rental crisis?
Ottawa plans to cut over 11 percent of the federal public service, a move which, on top of increasing the jobless rate—already near 7 percent—will likely mean longer wait times for unemployment benefits, passports, and government assistance programs. [4] Might future outlays slated for aid to Ukraine be better spent on maintaining public services for Canadians?
According to the government’s own statistics agency, “Over one in four Canadians live in a household experiencing financial difficulties.” [5] Could $22 billion have helped relieve these Canadians of their financial burdens?
Prime Minister Mark Carney says that “Canada will always stand in solidarity with Ukraine.” [6] In practice, helping Ukraine means doing less for Canadians. It means poorer public services, under-funded health care, less affordable housing, and more economic insecurity. Carney doesn’t say why Canadians must make sacrifices to stand with Ukraine, but knowing why is important if pressing domestic needs are to be ignored. Is the diversion of funds that could be used to meet Canadians’ needs justified?
To answer that question, we must first understand why Ottawa is backing Ukraine. The answer has a lot to do with Canada’s place in the informal US empire.
Canada is part of a US-led alliance that regards Russia as a “revisionist” power—that is, as a country which challenges the US-led world order—an order which naturally puts the United States at the top. The war in Ukraine is a contest between Washington, on one side, and Moscow, on the other. Russia is one of two states (along with China) powerful enough to challenge US ‘leadership’, or, to put it less euphemistically, US tyranny. While the word tyranny seems harsh, what else would one call a US-led global defined by Washington to, by its own admission, put US interests above all others? [7] Napoleon’s order in Europe was summed up by the watchword France avant tout, while Nazi Germany sought to create an order in Europe defined by the phrase Deutschland uber alles. Implicitly, Washington predicates its own global order on the idea of the United States above all others, or, America First.
Russia, Washington says, wants to revise the US-led world order. There’s no question that Moscow wants to do this. It has no intention of acquiescing to the will of Washington, and because it’s strong enough—unlike most other states—to challenge US primacy, it resists integration into the informal US empire. Russia prefers to carve out its own empire, where its own billionaires exercise influence and monopolize profit-making opportunities. The war is, thus, au fond, a contest over which country’s billionaires will get to exploit the profit-making opportunities Ukraine has to offer—the United States’ or Russia’s?
On a broader level, the war is being fought—with Ukraine as the tip of the US spear, or proxy—over the question of who will dominate parts of Eastern Europe that have historically fallen under Russian, or Soviet, domination. Will it be Russia or the United States? Ukraine, being the largest and most significant part of the contested territory, is the cockpit of the current struggle. The prize for the winner is lucrative investment opportunities and strategic territory, vital to the questions of a) whether the United States will continue to lead a world order as rex, and b) whether Russia will successfully resist US efforts to make it bow to US pre-eminence.
In disbursing $22 billion to the US side of the contest, instead of using the funds to improve the lives of Canadians at home, Ottawa is playing a vassal role to US investor and corporate interests and aiding, what in the end, is a project of furnishing US billionaires with investment opportunities at the expense of Russian magnates.
Defenders of Ottawa’s decision to aid Ukraine will point to a moral obligation on the part of Canadians to defend a victim of illegal aggression. To be sure, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is both a contravention of international law and an aggression.
However, Canada does not aid all, or even many, countries that fall prey to the aggression of imperialist marauders. If it did, it would soon fall out with its patron, the United States, the world’s imperialist marauder par excellence. If Ottawa genuinely stands with the victims of aggression as a matter of principle, it would have funneled military and other aid to Iran (only recently the target of a blatant and flagrantly unlawful US-Israeli aggression); to Syria, when Washington was bankrolling Al-Qaeda to bring down the Arab nationalist state (which it did do, successfully); to Cuba, the victim of a cruel six-decade-long campaign of US economic warfare aimed at ensuring that an alternative to the capitalist order will never thrive; to Venezuela today, the target of a US military pressure campaign whose object is to install a puppet regime in Caracas to better loot the country’s land, labor, and resources, especially its oil; and on and on, ad nauseum. Need I mention Korea, Vietnam, Granada, Panama, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya?
Which brings us to the Palestinians. If the Canadian government was really motivated to defend the victims of expansionary rogue regimes that flagrantly violate international law, it would have provided aid to the Palestinian national liberation movement long ago. Palestinians are the principal victims of Israel, a notorious practitioner of rapine, aggression, territorial expansion, and contempt for the UN Charter. Instead, Canada has faithfully assisted the Zionist state to carry out what the United Nations, countless human rights organizations, and top genocide scholars, have called a genocide. Ottawa has sent arms to Israel; banned Canadians from sending aid to Palestinians standing up to the aggression and demonized Palestinian freedom fighters as terrorists; lavished diplomatic support on the Zionist state; and has refused to take meaningful action to pressure Tel Aviv to abide by the countless UN resolutions directing Israel to end its illegal occupations of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.
So, no, Ottawa isn’t sending billions of dollars to Kyiv because it deplores aggression, champions international law, and feels morally bound to stand with the victims of Russian imperialism. To believe this is to close one’s eyes to Canada’s record as faithful backer of US and Israeli imperial aggressions. The reality is that Canada is furnishing Kyiv with generous aid because Ottawa’s standard operating procedure is to support—or at the very least, not get in the way of—the foreign policy preferences of its US master. If backing Washington and its proxies in West Asia (Israel) and Eastern Europe (Ukraine) means skimping on satisfying the needs of ordinary Canadians, then, from Ottawa’s perspective, so be it.
While this is bad enough, it’s about to get much worse. Ottawa has committed, along with other NATO countries, to significantly increasing its military spending to five percent of GDP from a little over one percent today. This is part of a Pentagon strategy to shift responsibility for confronting Russia from the United States to Washington’s NATO subalterns, so the US military can either turn its full attention to intimidating China [8], by one plan, favored by so-called prioritizers in the US state, or concentrate on shoring up US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, advocated by so-called restrainers [9].
The problem here is that there is no compelling rationale to increase military spending almost five-fold. The ostensible reason for the increase is to ‘deter’ Russia from further aggression in Europe. But no serious observer believes Russia is able to take on NATO, even at NATO’s allegedly paltry current levels of spending. Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that “A senior NATO official said Russia doesn’t have the troop numbers or military capability to defeat the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Europe.” [10]
The idea that the United States carries the burden of defending Europe and that Europe could not defend itself without US assistance—and that therefore Washington’s NATO subalterns must significantly boost their military outlays—is false. In point of fact, the United States contributes much less to the defense of Europe than Europe does itself. Table 1 shows that the United States spends $50 billion annually on military operations in Europe, overshadowed by the $476 billion that Europe’s NATO members spend yearly. Whereas 100,000 US troops serve in Europe, the alliance’s European members contribute over 2 million infantry, air crew, and sailors to the continent’s defense.
Table 1. Russia vs. NATO in Europe
Military spending ($B)
Military personnel
Russia
$142
1,200,000
European NATO members
$476
2,041,300
US contribution to Europe
$50
100,000
European NATO members + US contribution
$526
2,141,300
(Europe + US contribution) / Russia
3.7
1.8
Sources: Russian military spending: Robyn Dixon, “Russian economy overheating, but still powering the war against Ukraine,” The Washington Post, October 27, 2024. Russian military personnel: CIA World Factbook. NATO military expenditures and personnel: “Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries (2014–2024)” NATO. March 2024. US military spending in Europe: Steven Erlanger, “NATO Wants a Cordial Summit, but Trump or Zelensky Could Disrupt It,” The New York Times, May 26, 2025. US military personnel: Daniel Michaels, Nancy A. Youssef and Alexander Ward, “Trump’s Turn to Russia Spooks U.S. Allies Who Fear a Weakened NATO,” The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 20, 2025.
What’s more, together, NATO’s European members spend over three times as much on their militaries as Russia does on its armed forces, while the number of NATO personnel in Europe, excluding the US contribution, is almost double Russia’s (Table 2). Were Europe’s NATO members to meet Trump’s five percent target, they would exceed Russia’s military spending by a factor of eight. To be sure, this would deter a Russian offensive in Europe, but it would be overkill. When the idea of the five percent target was first broached by the incoming Trump administration, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder dismissed it as “a made-up number with no basis in reality.” He said that “European NATO members now spend three times as much as Russia does on defense, and at five percent Europe would outspend Russia by $750 billion annually, spending roughly 10 times what Russia spends.” [11] Daalder’s numbers and those of Table 2, while differing slightly in some respects, point to the same conclusion: the five percent target is far too high.
Table 2. Russia vs. NATO (European members)
Russia
European NATO members
Europe / Russia
Population
143,800,000
592,872,386
4.1
GDP ($B)
$2,021
$23,023
11.4
Military spending ($B)
At current levels
$142
$476
3.4
At 5% of GDP (NATO)
$1,151
8.1
Military personnel
1,200,000
2,041,300
1.7
Sources: NATO population: CIA World Factbook. NATO GDP, military expenditures, and personnel: “Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries (2014–2024)” NATO. March 2024. Russian military spending: Robyn Dixon, “Russian economy overheating, but still powering the war against Ukraine,” The Washington Post, October 27, 2024. Russian military personnel: CIA World Factbook. Russian population and GDP: World Bank.
Russia is militarily incapable of territorial expansion beyond Ukraine, and even in Ukraine—a country with only one-quarter of Russia’s population—its capabilities are severely tested. Russia is no match for an alliance, whose European members alone, have four times its population and over 11 times its GDP. The idea that Russia has the capability to invade a NATO-alliance member is—to use a favorite phrase of US international relations specialist John Mearsheimer—“not a serious argument.”
Despite these realities, various NATO governments, Canada among them, are trying to foster the illusion that Russia threatens Europe. They are doing so in order to manufacture consent for a stepped-up level of military spending that is far in excess of what is necessary to defend the continent from a Russian invasion. Not only is military spending at this level unnecessary, it will harm the interests of the vast majority of Europeans and Canadians. Higher defense spending will almost certainly mean cuts to public services. During a visit to Britain, the NATO secretary general warned British citizens that if they chose to funnel public-spending into maintaining the National Health Service and other public services, rather than meeting Trump’s arbitrary five percent target, they had “better learn to speak Russian.” [12] The message is clear: Important pubic services that benefit most of us, must be sacrificed in order to squander public funds on the military to meet a spurious threat. “Ramping up to 5 percent would necessitate politically painful trade-offs”, warns the New York Times. [13] Painful trade-offs mean painful for all but business owners and the wealthy. Within the current climate, the idea that higher military outlays will be underwritten by higher taxes on the rich and big business is unthinkable. Instead, the formula is: gull the public into believing a Russian offensive is imminent so they’ll accede to the gutting of public services.
Why would NATO countries commit to spending far more than necessary? There are three reasons that suggest themselves as hypotheses.
The expenditures are intended for offense rather than defense. You don’t spend 8 to 10 times as much as your rival on weapons and troops to defend yourself. Doing so would be wasteful. But you do vastly outspend your rival if your intentions are intimidation and aggression, or your aim is to arms-race your opponent into bankruptcy and submission.
Punishingly high military expenditures offer a pretext for NATO governments to ween people off public services. Public services are increasingly starved of adequate funding, often to fund tax cuts for the wealthy and increases in military expenditures. That governments routinely make these trade-offs show that they favor the wealthy, who rely little, if at all, on public services, but benefit from tax cuts. The wealthy also benefit from robust military spending, inasmuch as it provides investment opportunities in arms industries and underwrites hard-power which can be used to defend investments and trade routes and exact trade and investment concessions around the world.
Much of the increased spending will flow into the coffers of US weapons makers, to the greater profit of investors who have stakes in the arms industry, while improving the balance of US trade, a major Trump administration obsession. By diverting public funds from public services to US arms dealers, NATO’s non-US members are submitting to US economic coercion and arm-twisting in order to placate their master.
Given that the accelerated spending increases will almost certainly be financed by budget cuts to public services, Canadians will see their healthcare, education, and pensions suffer—even more than they already do—so US arms manufacturers can enjoy generous profits. Canadians, perhaps, should have expected no less for having recently elected as prime minister the former head of Brookfield, a leading global investment firm. But even if they hadn’t, Canada, like all other capitalist countries, is so thoroughly under the sway of the leading lights of the business community—as a result of the community’s lobbying and other direct efforts to influence the government and its policies, but also as a consequence of the power the community wields by virtue of its ownership and control of the economy—that it doesn’t matter who is prime minister. With or without Carney, the policy and direction of the government would be the same. The only way it is going to change is if the power of private business to dominate government and public policy is ended by bringing private industry and private investment under democratic control.
NATO governments are presenting their citizens with a spuriously inflated threat as a pretext to significantly increase military expenditures. We’re expected to believe that over 590 million Europeans are unable to defend themselves against 144 million Russians who, after almost four years, still can’t defeat 40 million Ukrainians. (Of course, a big reason they can’t defeat Ukraine is because they’re also fighting the United States and its NATO lackeys, Canada included, who furnish Ukraine with training, weapons, and intelligence.) We’re expected to believe that even though Europe’s NATO members spend three times as much on the military as Russia does, and have almost twice as many troops, that the alliance is vulnerable to a Russian invasion. These military spending increases—totally unnecessary for self-defense—will not come without a cost. Already, officials of various NATO governments have initiated a discourse on the necessity of making painful cuts to public services. The Russia threat is spurious—a stalking horse for advancing the sectoral interests of wealthy investors. If we allow this deception to stand and meekly submit to runaway militarism, all but the superrich—friends and class cohorts of the Trumps, the Carneys, the Merzs, the Macrons, and the Starmers—will pay a heavy price.
With one in five Canadians without a family doctor, one in four households in financial straits, 40,000 public servants on the chopping block, and the housing and rental markets in crisis, we are already paying a price. Unless we act now—by withdrawing from the war over Ukraine for billionaire profits, prioritizing the needs of Canadians, and bringing industry and investment decisions under democratic control—the price will grow larger still.
1. Steven Chase, “Canada buying $200-million in weapons for Ukraine from U.S. stockpile,” The Globe and Mail, 3 December 2025.
2. Tia Pham and Tara Kiran, “More than 6.5 million adults in Canada lack access to primary care,” Healthy Debate, 14 March 2023.
3. Steven Globerman, Joel Emes, and Austin Thompson “Affordable housing is out of reach everywhere in Canada,” the Globe and Mail, 2 December, 2025.
6. Bill Curry and Melissa Martin “Carney pledges support for Ukraine, unveils defence aid details at Independence Day visit,” The Globe and Mail August 24, 2025.
7. John McCain once wrote that “We are the chief architect and defender of an international order governed by rules derived from our political and economic values. We have grown vastly wealthier and more powerful under those rules.” John McCain, “John McCain: Why We Must Support Human Rights,” The New York Times, 8 May 2017.
8. Michael R. Gordon and Lara Seligman, “Pentagon Official at Center of Weapons Pause on Ukraine Wants U.S. to Focus on China,” The Wall Street Journal, 13 July 2025.
9. Yaroslav Trofimov, “A Newly Confident China Is Jockeying for More Global Clout as Trump Pulls Back, The Wall Street Journal, 2 December 2025.
10. Matthew Luxmoore and Robbie Gramer, “Marathon Russia-U.S. Meeting Yields No Ukraine Peace Deal”, The Wall Street Journal, 2 December 2025.
11. Daniel Michaels, “Trump’s NATO Vision Spells Trouble for the Alliance,” The Wall Street Journal, 8 January 2025.
12. Mark Landler, “NATO Chief Urges Members to Spend Far More on Military,” The New York Times, 9 June 2025.
Bernie Sanders is the only US senator to acknowledge the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, and even he does so post festum, and grudgingly. Only after a mountain of evidence had been amassed by multiple organizations and experts—from the ICJ to human rights groups and genocide scholars (including Israeli ones) and finally from the United Nations Human Rights Council (to say nothing of what was evident for anyone to see in the overt expressions of genocidal intent and conduct of the Israeli leadership and its revenge-ravening military)—did Senator Sanders, the soi-disant democratic socialist from Vermont, get around to acknowledging that indeed a genocide is in progress. This, after months of being pressed by his supporters to concede the obvious. Having acquiesced to both political pressure and reality, he conciliated the genocidaire by blaming Hamas for the ongoing holocaust of the Palestinians, al-Nakba al-Mustimira. On top of that, he continued to endorse arms shipments to Israel in the form of “defensive arms”, thus drawing a misleading distinction between offensive and defensive weaponry.
But forget Sanders for the moment. What about the 99 other senators who haven’t even grudgingly acknowledged the genocide?
Most senators are millionaires or multimillionaires, who are intimately interconnected familialy, socially, politically, and professionally with the top investors and leading CEOs of the most profitable US companies, on whom they rely for campaign contributions and lucrative post-political-career opportunities. Accordingly, they are devoted to upholding the systems of capitalist exploitation and US imperialist competition—the foundation of their wealth and privilege, and more broadly, the wealth and privilege of their class.
West Asia is important to the senators’ class, and largely for one reason: petroleum. While the United States, the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer, draws the bulk of its oil and natural gas from the Americas, the price of energy depends on the unhindered flow of petroleum resources worldwide. Hence, West Asia—and Washington’s outpost in the region, Israel—is vital to the smooth functioning of capital accumulation at home, and therefore to the senators’ core personal and class interests.
Additionally, China depends on access to West Asian oil to fuel its military and keep its economy running. Controlling the region gives Washington considerable strategic leverage over its leading rival. What’s more, Japan and Western Europe—key US subordinates and potential strategic competitors—are also dependent on West Asian petroleum. Controlling the Arab world’s oil and natural gas helps Washington keep these states in line.
Hence, US capitalism has an interest in dominating West Asia and suppressing West Asian expressions of national assertiveness and local sovereignty. Arab and Iranian nationalists, were they allowed to thrive, would seek to turn the region’s petroleum resources to the benefit of local populations at the expense of US capitalist class imperatives. They’ve done it before, and would, if they could, do it again.
Now, some would argue that Washington’s foreign policy is controlled by “the Israel lobby,” a group of Christian and Jewish Zionists who advance Israeli goals at the expense of US interests. To be sure, the Israel lobby has enormous influence in Washington, but key parts of this argument—articulated by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt—are often left unexamined.
When we say “US interests”, whose interests do we mean? Those of the bulk of the US population, or those of the approximately one percent of the population that owns and controls the economy and dominates the state (including the Senate)? (Mearsheimer and Walt see only one undifferentiated US interest, unmediated by class.)
Are the interests of the bulk of the US population at odds with the Zionist interests of Israel?
Do the interests of the US plutocracy mesh with the Zionist aims of the Jewish settler colonial state?
I would argue that US economic, military, and diplomatic support of Israel is at variance with the interests of the vast majority of US citizens (and therefore would agree with Mearsheimer and Walt, so far as they define “US interests” as the class interests of most US citizens—those of the employee class—as distinct from those of the US economic elite.) At the same time, I would argue that the interests of the US capitalist class mesh well with Zionist interests.
Significantly, the “Israel lobby” is largely made up of major US investors and the top CEOs of the United States’ leading companies. The group of Israel-zealots that Mearsheimer and Walt argue have highjacked US foreign policy, happen to be the elite of US capitalism, according to research by Laurence H. Shoup, whose has specialized in examining the contours of the US ruling class. If the Israel lobby has hijacked US foreign policy, then so too have the leaders of corporate America taken control of the levers of the US Departments of State, National Defense, and Treasury, along with the posts of National Intelligence Director and Ambassador to the UN. Shoup and others have shown that these key posts have long been dominated by the US capitalist elite. The Israel lobby exists, but it is a subset of the corporate lobby, a fact that points to a commonality of interest between the US capitalist class and its outpost in West Asia.
How are US capitalist and Israeli interests alike?
First, it should be noted that Israel is completely dependent on the United States. It could not survive without:
US military and economic subsidies, and US guarantees that the Israeli military will be equipped with a qualitative military edge over every other state in its region.
Unwavering diplomatic support, that allows Israel to act unconstrained by international law and over the objections of international public opinion and the expostulations of the states of the world, including US subordinates, without fear of penalty. (There are two roque states in the world: Israel and the United States. The former acts under the aegis of the latter and the latter under the aegis of its immense power.)
As a consequence of its dependence on the United States, the embattled Zionist state has no option but to pursue US goals as a condition of continuing to receive US support. The US goals it pursues include suppressing any force that might attempt to bring the region’s energy resources under local control for the purpose of uplifting the local population at the expense of aggrandizing the interests of US investors and oil companies and denying Washington control of West Asia, thereby negating US strategic leverage over China, Japan, and Western Europe. Moshe Dayan, an Israeli chief of defense staff, minister of defense, and minister of foreign affairs, is reputed to have said that Israel’s mission is “to be a rock, an extension of the West, against which the waves of…Arab nationalism will be broken.” Echoing Dayan, Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote in 1998 that Israel acts as “the West’s policeman in the Middle East.” Referring to states in West Asia that are keen to assert their independence as “militant regimes”, Netanyahu declared that Israel’s role is to “safeguard the broader interests of peace” since no other state in the region can be relied on by Washington to check either the militant states’ “ambitions or obsessive plans for armament.” Safeguarding the broader interests of peace means safeguarding the status quo of US power in West Asia.
This is the fundamental quid-pro-quo of the US-Israeli relationship: Israel helps Washington stop the emergence of another Mohammad Mosaddegh, Gamal-Abdel Nasser, Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, or Hafez or Bashar al-Assad—nationalist leaders who sought to put the interests of their own people above US capitalist class strategic interests and those of US oil companies and investors—and Washington provides Israel with the resources it needs to remain a viable state in West Asia.
It should be added, however, that Washington hardly needs to compel Israel to vigorously oppose West Asia’s nationalists. Whether expressed overtly, as a secular movement under an national liberationist label, or whether it lurks inside Islamist states or movements, like the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Ansar Allah, West Asian national liberation is irreconcilable with Zionism. The two movements are mutually antagonistic. Israel and the US capitalist elite, thus, share a common enemy. Both parties seek to despoil the peoples of West Asia of their land, labor, and resources, and West Asian nationalist forces seek to overcome the despoliation. To secure both Zionist and US capitalist class goals, West Asian nationalist movements must be crushed or at the very least contained. This makes US plutocrats and Israeli Zionists natural allies.
[S]ettler colonies are … typically highly militarized and violent societies, which tend to be reliant upon external support in order to maintain their material privileges in a hostile regional environment. … For this reason, settler colonies are much more dependable partners of Western imperial interests than ‘normal’ client states. In the Middle East, for instance, Arab governments supported by the US (such as today’s Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco) face repeated challenges from political movements within their own borders and are always forced to accommodate and respond to pressures coming from below. This is different from Israel, where the majority of the population views their interests and privileges as dependent upon continued outside support.
In upholding the interests of their class, US senators, then, naturally defend Israel, because it is a US instrument for the fulfillment of a common US capitalist class – Zionist project of dominating West Asia. Israel’s character as a settler colony — from which flows its: multifarious familial, social, cultural, and economic ties to the United States; it’s violent, militaristic character; its complete dependence on US aid and support to survive; and its shared opposition with the US capitalist elite to West Asian national liberation — makes it the ideal candidate to represent US imperialist interests in West Asia.
Given who senators are, and their position at the apex—and as the beneficiaries—of the US capitalist system, it is unthinkable that they would exhibit even the slightest degree of solidarity with the enemies of their class and the targets of their exploitation. We can express outrage that only one senator has even acknowledged the Zionist genocide against the Palestinians, but to do so would fail to recognize the capitalist reality of the United States and its governing class. Expecting senators to concede that a genocide is underway, to say nothing of condemning it and acting to stop it, is tantamount to expecting wolves to become vegetarians.
As for Bernie Sanders, his reluctantly conceding that his beloved Israel is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinians confirms what is already obvious: he is no socialist. Socialists do not defend settler colonialism, apologize for apartheid, or tolerate Zionism. Nor do they uphold the status quo of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians by arguing that Israel has a right to defend itself. (Israeli Zionists have no more right to defend themselves than slave-owners have the right to defend themselves against the uprising of their slaves.) And socialists certainly don’t vote for the continued delivery of arms to genocidaires, in the form of “defensive” weaponry, a sophism that obfuscates the reality that “defensive” weapons have a utility equal to offensive weapons in maintaining Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy. Would a socialist advocate the provisioning of “defensive” weapons to slave-owners to defend themselves from the uprisings of their slaves? As a socialist Bernie is a fraud. As a senator, committed—with the rest of the Senate—to defending the interests of the US capitalist class and its overseas outposts, he’s more believable.
In a Jacobin interview, Gilbert Achcar, a man Lenin may have characterized as a ‘social parson and opportunist’, and thus fitting as a Jacobin contributor, makes some good points about the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but offers a facile assessment of Hamas’s Oct 7 action.
A meaningful evaluation of Operation Al Aqsa Flood would answer the following questions:
Against what goals should the attack be evaluated?
What were Hamas’s goals for the Oct 7 action?
Was the attack rational, given the goals set for it and the information available to Hamas at the time?
To what degree have Hamas’s goals been met?
Is it too early to say?
Achcar addresses none of these questions. Instead, he decries the Oct 7 action as a catastrophe that handed Israel a pretext to carry out a genocide. He argues instead for non-violent resistance.
Why? Because, he says, Israel is many times more powerful than the Palestinian resistance. Armed Palestinian action will inevitably be crushed, leaving non-violent resistance as the only safe option.
Fair point.
But Achcar also believes that any gains the Palestinians make will arise from whatever pressure they can place on Israel and its allies to accommodate their demands. In his view, non-violent action is more likely to create pressure without providing a pretext for violent retaliation, and therefore, is the safer path to follow.
What Achcar misses, however, is the critical point that the catastrophe he condemns as Hamas’s child—the mass atrocities Israel is carrying out against the Palestinians—has turned world public opinion against Israel and created enormous pressure on the Zionist state to accommodate the Palestinians’ demands.
Israel’s reaction to the Oct 7 operation has left Israel greatly weakened. Its standing in world opinion is in the toilet. More and more, people have woken up and taken a hard look at what Israel really is, and they’ve come to see it, in growing numbers, as a racist, apartheid, settler colonial abomination. The abomination’s allies are no longer as keen to offer their unqualified support. Serious efforts are afoot to create a Palestinian state—efforts that had slipped from the agenda prior to Oct 7.
In the face of the undeniable reality that Palestine has perhaps never been more on the agenda, Achcar stamps his foot and cries, ‘No, no, that’s not true. The idea that Oct 7 has put Palestine back on the agenda is absurd.’
But what’s absurd, as anyone of an unbiased mind and clear perception sees, is that the only absurdity here is Achcar’s idea that Oct 7 hasn’t put Palestine back on the agenda.
Thinking about Achcar’s patent aversion to the Palestinians’ use of violence calls to mind three socialist epigrams about class struggle which apply as strongly to national liberation.
The only just war is war against slavery. – Marx
An oppressed class [nation] which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves. – Lenin
Socialism [national liberation] is not a … policy for the timid. – Oskar Lange
By Achcar’s logic, we can dismiss as ill-considered the Warsaw uprising, the French resistance, and indeed, the 1939-1948 Zionist settler war for independence from Britain, all violent movements against forces much more powerful than themselves.
NATO countries are on track to boost military spending at the expense of public services in order to deter a threat from Russia that has been vastly overstated.
By Stephen Gowans
June 11, 2025
It is almost certain that NATO governments will commit to spending 5 percent of their GDPs on their militaries and military-related infrastructure at the upcoming June 24-25 NATO summit, as demanded by US president Donald Trump. The US president has complained that the United States carries the burden of defending Europe and that NATO countries must do more to contribute to their own defense. NATO secretary general Mark Rutte has said that the 5 percent target—which would represent a substantial increase in military spending and would likely come at the expense of public services—is necessary to deter Russia from invading Europe. Russia, Rutte warns, “could mount an effective offensive against NATO in five years,” unless steps are taken now to boost military spending. [1]
The idea that the United States carries the burden of defending Europe and that Europe could not defend itself without US assistance, is false. In point of fact, the United States contributes much less to the defense of Europe than Europe does itself. Table 1 shows that the United States spends $50 billion annually on military operations in Europe, overshadowed by the $476 billion that Europe’s NATO members spend yearly. Whereas 100,000 US troops serve in Europe, the alliance’s European members contribute over 2 million infantry, air crew, and sailors to the continent’s defense.
Table 1. Russia vs. NATO in Europe
Military spending ($B)
Military personnel
Russia
$142
1,200,000
European NATO members
$476
2,041,300
US contribution to Europe
$50
100,000
European NATO members + US contribution
$526
2,141,300
(Europe + US contribution) / Russia
3.7
1.8
Sources: Russian military spending: Robyn Dixon, “Russian economy overheating, but still powering the war against Ukraine,” The Washington Post, October 27, 2024. Russian military personnel: CIA World Factbook. NATO military expenditures and personnel: “Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries (2014–2024)” NATO. March 2024. US military spending in Europe: Steven Erlanger, “NATO Wants a Cordial Summit, but Trump or Zelensky Could Disrupt It,” The New York Times, May 26, 2025. US military personnel: Daniel Michaels, Nancy A. Youssef and Alexander Ward, “Trump’s Turn to Russia Spooks U.S. Allies Who Fear a Weakened NATO,” The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 20, 2025.
What’s more, together, NATO’s European members spend over three times as much on their militaries as Russia does on its armed forces, while the number of NATO personnel in Europe, excluding the US contribution, is almost double Russia’s (Table 2). Were Europe’s NATO members to meet Trump’s 5 percent target, they would exceed Russia’s military spending by a factor of eight. To be sure, this would deter a Russian offensive in Europe, but it would be overkill. Six months ago, when the idea of the 5 percent target was first broached by the incoming Trump administration, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder dismissed it as “a made-up number with no basis in reality.” He said that “European NATO members now spend three times as much as Russia does on defense, and at 5% Europe would outspend Russia by $750 billion annually, spending roughly 10 times what Russia spends.” [2]Daalder’s numbers and those of Table 2, while differing slightly in some respects, point to the same conclusion: the 5 percent target is far too high.
Table 2. Russia vs. NATO (European members)
Russia
European NATO members
Europe / Russia
Population
143,800,000
592,872,386
4.1
GDP ($B)
$2,021
$23,023
11.4
Military spending ($B)
At current levels
$142
$476
3.4
At 5% of GDP (NATO)
$1,151
8.1
Military personnel
1,200,000
2,041,300
1.7
Sources: NATO population: CIA World Factbook. NATO GDP, military expenditures, and personnel: “Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries (2014–2024)” NATO. March 2024. Russian military spending: Robyn Dixon, “Russian economy overheating, but still powering the war against Ukraine,” The Washington Post, October 27, 2024. Russian military personnel: CIA World Factbook. Russian population and GDP: World Bank.
Russia is militarily incapable of territorial expansion beyond Ukraine, and even in Ukraine—a country with only one-quarter of Russia’s population—its capabilities are severely tested. Russia is no match for an alliance, whose European members alone, have four times its population and over 11 times its GDP. The idea that Russia has the capability to invade a NATO-alliance member is—to use a favorite phrase of US international relations specialist John Mearsheimer—“not a serious argument.”
Despite these realities, Rutte, along with various NATO governments, are trying to create the illusion that Russia threatens Europe. They are doing so in order to manufacture consent for a stepped-up level of military spending that is far in excess of what is necessary to defend the continent. Not only is military spending at this level unnecessary, it will harm the interests of the vast majority of Europeans. Higher defense spending will almost certainly mean cuts to public services. During a recent visit to Britain, the NATO secretary general warned British citizens that if they choose to funnel public-spending into maintaining the National Health Service and other public services, rather than meeting Trump’s arbitrary 5 percent target, they had “better learn to speak Russian.” [3] The message is clear: Important pubic services that benefit most of us, must be sacrificed in order to squander public funds on the military to meet a spurious threat. “Ramping up to 5 percent would necessitate politically painful trade-offs”, warns the New York Times. [4]Painful trade-offs mean painful for all but business owners and the wealthy. Within the current climate, the idea that higher military outlays will be underwritten by higher taxes on the rich and big business is unthinkable. Instead, the formula is: gull the public into believing a Russian offensive is imminent so they’ll accede to the gutting of public services.
Why would NATO countries commit to spending far more than they need to for defense? There are three reasons that suggest themselves as hypotheses.
The expenditures are intended for offense rather than defense. You don’t spend 8 to 10 times as much as your rival on weapons and troops to defend yourself. Doing so would be wasteful. But you do vastly outspend your rival if your intentions are intimidation and aggression, or your aim is to arms-race your opponent into bankruptcy and submission.
Punishingly high military expenditures offer a pretext for NATO governments to ween people off public services. Public services are increasingly starved of adequate funding, often to fund tax cuts for the wealthy and increases in military expenditures. That governments routinely make these trade-offs show that they favor the wealthy, who rely little, if at all, on public services, but benefit from tax cuts. The wealthy also benefit from robust military spending, inasmuch as it provides investment opportunities in arms industries and underwrites hard-power which can be used to defend investments and trade routes and exact trade and investment concessions around the world.
Much of the increased spending will flow into the coffers of US weapons makers, to the greater profit of investors who have stakes in the arms industry, while improving the balance of US trade, a major Trump administration obsession. By diverting public funds from public services to US arms dealers, NATO’s non-US members are submitting to US economic coercion and arm-twisting in order to placate their master.
Canada, also a NATO member, has recently pledged to significantly accelerate planned increases in military spending in order to “try to placate President Trump amid sensitive trade talks.” [5]The Wall Street Journal reported that “Canadian officials have been making the pitch to U.S. negotiators that Canada will now be in a position to make big deals with U.S. defense contractors.” [6] Given that the accelerated spending increases will almost certainly be financed by “painful” budget cuts to public services, Canadians will see their healthcare, education, and pensions suffer so US arms manufacturers can enjoy generous profits. Canadians, perhaps, should have expected no less for having recently elected as prime minister the former head of Brookfield, a leading global investment firm.
NATO governments are presenting their citizens with a spuriously inflated threat as a pretext to significantly increase military expenditures. We’re expected to believe that over 590 million Europeans are unable to defend themselves against 144 million Russians who, after more than three years, still can’t defeat 40 million Ukrainians. We’re expected to believe that even though Europe’s NATO members spend three times as much on the military as Russia does, and has almost twice as many troops, that the alliance is vulnerable to a Russian invasion. These military spending increases—totally unnecessary for self-defense—will not come without a cost. Already, officials of various NATO governments have initiated a discourse on the necessity of making painful cuts to public services. Already, US politicians are working on legislation to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and significant increases in US military spending with cuts to public services and new debt. The Russia threat is phony—a stalking horse for advancing the sectoral interests of wealthy investors. If we allow this deception to stand and meekly submit to runaway militarism, all but the superrich—friends and class cohorts of the Trumps, Carneys, and Ruttes—will pay a heavy price.
1. Mark Landler, “NATO Chief Urges Members to Spend Far More on Military,” The New York Times, June 9, 2025.
2. Daniel Michaels, “Trump’s NATO Vision Spells Trouble for the Alliance,” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 8, 2025.
3. Landler.
4. Landler.
5. Vipal Monga, “Canada to Boost Military Spending to Try to Placate Trump,” The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2025.
The United States has been dropping economic atom bombs on designated enemies for decades, in order to pressure them into giving up their sovereignty and becoming US vassals—often with Canada’s assistance. Now Washington has dropped an economic atom bomb on its “closest friend and ally,” seeking its annexation.
March 12, 2025
By Stephen Gowans
Canadians like to think of their country as the United States’ closest friend and ally. They’re now coming to the conclusion that the aphorism, “countries don’t have allies, only interests,” is true. US president Donald Trump has repeatedly said that Canada needs to become the fifty-first US state, and that he’ll use economic coercion to ensure it does. His plan is to use tariffs to severely weaken Canada’s economy, until Canadians cry uncle, and beg to be annexed.
So far, Trump has offered a dizzying array of pretexts for his tariff action, but the key one is that Canada has been allowing illegal immigrants and fentanyl to pour across the border. Trump has invoked this false motivation in order to secure a legal foundation for his tariff measures. Its falsity, however, is obvious. Few illegal migrants and little fentanyl actually flow south across the US border. What’s more, the Canadian government has taken significant steps to reduce what began as a trickle and has become a mini-trickle.
Last week, Justin Trudeau, the outgoing prime minister, decried Trump’s fentanyl reason for imposing tariffs on Canada as “completely bogus.” He’s right. Trump’s response has been to double down on the necessity of Canada becoming the fifty-first US state. The only way Canadians can avoid tariffs (and the massive economic pain they’ll bring), he warns, is to allow their country to be annexed.
If Canadians fail to capitulate, they’ll pay a hefty price. The governor of Canada’s central bank, Tiff Macklem, has just lowered interest rates as a way of providing some protection against the coming economic storm. Canadians, he said, are “facing a new crisis” and, depending “on the extent and duration of new U.S. tariffs, the economic impact could be severe.” Trudeau has gone so far as to say that Trump wants to destroy the Canadian economy, “because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”
Evan Dyer, a veteran journalist with the publicly-owned Canadian broadcaster, the CBC, has recently posted an article titled “The U.S. has covertly destabilized nations. With Canada, it’s being done in public.” Dyer talked to former members of the Canadian intelligence community to find out how US destabilization efforts work, and how Trump’s destabilization will affect Canada.
Neil Bisson, a former intelligence officer who teaches at the University of Ottawa, told Dyer that “If you have individuals who are concerned about where their next meal is coming from or if they’re going to get a roof over their head, that supersedes [their commitment to] sovereignty.” These people will be inclined to pressure Ottawa to accede to US demands for annexation. Bisson also told Dyer that “there will be individuals within Canada who could potentially be co-opted to push [the] narrative forward” of US “citizenship as the answer to [the country’s] economic woes.”
Ward Elcock, who headed Canada’s intelligence agency for a decade, told Dyer that Trump “intends clearly to try and destabilize our economy. The reality is that if Canada is really impoverished, people may start to think about it. That’s always the possibility — that not all Canadians are going to be willing to endure economic deprivation. And so, some may start to think about it as time goes along.”
It’s revealing that Dyer approached former intelligence officials, who will have worked closely with their US counterparts on destabilization operations around the world, for insight into what the United States is up to. The United States has destabilized countries economically for decades, including Arab nationalist Iraq, communist Cuba and North Korea, Islamic nationalist Iran, and Arab nationalist Syria, among others. All these countries had one thing in common: They had their own developmental agenda which excluded their becoming vassals of the United States. For that, they were punished.
Significantly, US operations against these countries shared three key features with the current operation to destabilize Canada.
They aimed at destroying the target country’s economy in order to cause enough pain that the country’s citizens would pressure their government to accede to US demands.
The overarching goal of the operations was to bring the target country under US control.
The real motivation was hidden behind a false reason given to justify the action (fentanyl in Canada, WMDs in Iraq), as well as the claim that the country’s economic difficulties were due to the government’s economic mismanagement.
Cuba is a paradigmatic case. In the wake of the 1959 Cuban revolution, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory, concluded that the only way to bring Cuba back under US supervision was to alienate internal support for the government by wrecking Cuba’s economy to cause disenchantment and disaffection among the Cuban people. The key was to make sure the blame for economic hardship was misdirected to the government’s socialist economic policies and away from US destabilization operations.
As historian Louis A Perez Jr. explained,
Mallory recommended that ‘every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba’ as a means ‘to bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of the government’. Assistant Secretary Rubottom similarly outlined the approach by which ‘the United States use judiciously elected economic pressures … in order to engender more public discomfort and discontent and thereby to expose to the Cuban masses Castro’s responsibility for mishandling their affairs.’
The expansion of the embargo was designed to deepen Cuban economic distress as a means of political change, once more an effort to use hardship as a way to foment rebellion among the Cuban people. The Torricelli and Helms-Burton laws were particularly harsh, both in timing and in kind, for they sought to visit upon the Cuban people unrelieved punishment, to make daily life in Cuba as difficult and grim as possible, to increase Cuban suffering in measured but sustained increments, at every turn, at every opportunity at a time when Cubans were already reeling from scarcities in goods and the disruptions of services in the wake of the Soviet collapse. Cubans faced a new round of shortages, increased rationing, declining services, and growing scarcities, where the needs of everyday life in their most ordinary and commonplace form were met often only by Herculean efforts. Representative Torricelli proclaimed his intention succinctly: ‘My objective is to wreak havoc in Cuba … My task is to bring down Fidel Castro.’ [1]
Now, the economic warfare used to destabilize Cuba, as well as North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela, is being turned on Canada. The irony is that Canada itself participated in US operations to destabilize many of these same countries, eagerly contributing to the immiseration of peoples who wanted to safeguard their own sovereignty, in order to soften them up for US domination. Canadians weren’t so concerned about sovereignty when that of other peoples was at stake and they were helping to undermine it. Now that the tables have turned, they’re beginning to discover that their neighbor to the south has no friends and allies, only interests—and that it doesn’t care a fig about their sovereignty.
Canadians’ outrage at Trump’s efforts to bully them into ceding their independence calls to mind Aime Cesaire’s analysis. He argued that Europeans were outraged at Hitler, not because of his Nazism, but because he had turned what Europeans collectively had done in Africa, Asia, and South America onto Europeans themselves. What the European “cannot forgive Hitler for,” wrote Cesaire, “is not the crime in itself, the crimes against man, it is … the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of Africa.” [2] Likewise, Canadians are outraged that what they have helped their “friend and neighbor” do to the Arab nationalists of Syria and Iraq, the communists of North Korea, and the economic nationalists of Venezuela, is now being done to themselves.
Finally, an explanation as to why I said the United States is dropping an economic atom bomb on Canada. The effects of economic warfare on countries are often more lethal than the consequences of conventional military coercion. Writing in Foreign Affairs, the unofficial journal of the US State Department, John Mueller and Karl Mueller showed that US economic warfare on Iraq during the 1990s produced more deaths than all the weapons of mass destruction in history, including all the chemical weapons used in the First World War and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, the political scientists found sanctions to be so devastating to qualify as instruments of mass destruction, even more injurious to civilian populations that weapons of mass destruction. For this reason, some began to talk of economic warfare as an “economic atom bomb”—a way to achieve atom-bomb levels of destruction in human terms, without incurring the opprobrium of actually dropping one.
1) Louis A Perez Jr, “Fear and loathing of Fidel Castro: Sources of US policy toward Cuba,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 34, 2002, 237-254.
2) Aime Cesaire, “Discourse on Colonialism,” Monthly Review Press,2000, p. 36.
The arrest of Palestinian advocate Mahmoud Khalil for campaigning for an end to the oppression and genocide of Palestinians, would be un-American if the US state were devoted to ending exploitation and oppression. But inasmuch as it is ruled by and for an exploiting and oppressing class, Khalil’s arrest is American to the core.
By Stephen Gowans
March 11, 2025
US president Donald Trump has ordered the arrest and deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and legal permanent resident of the United States, for espousing what Trump denounces as “anti-American views” (which apparently means views at odds with his own.) Khalil’s arrest, Trump promises, is only the first of many. The US president has pledged to deport pro-Palestinian college students on visas who participate in what he deems “illegal” protests (which is to say those the monarch dislikes.) He has also threatened US citizens with permanent expulsion from their universities and their possible arrest for protesting against Israeli apartheid and the Zionist campaign of genocide.
As a student protest organizer at Columbia University, Khalil has been a vociferous advocate of an end to the oppression of Palestinians. This is what counts, to the fervently pro-Israeli Trump, as anti-Americanism. Trump professes to be (without hyperbole for once) the most pro-Israeli president ever. There is no question that he has made signal contributions to the Zionist project of despoiling Palestinians, as well as Syrians in the Golan Heights, of their countries, land, homes, and property—perhaps more than any other president has. As far as Trump is concerned, the rape of Palestine and southern Syria can proceed unhindered except for the resistance of Palestinians and Syrians, and with his unqualified support—not only in the provision of diplomatic and military aid in repressing the native resistance, but also in repressing the resistance at home.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has denounced Khalil’s arrest as “un-American.” It would be more accurate to say that the detention belies the myth of America; it hardly stands as an exception to the reality of America. Systematically suppressing political advocacy, where it opposes the right of the wealthy to exploit labor, and the prerogative of the strong to take the property of the weak by violence, extortion, or law, has been a regular and predictable feature of US political life since the country’s birth. After all, the United States was built on a policy of manifest larceny—the theft of the country, land, and property of indigenous Americans and the stolen labor of enslaved Africans.
The 1919-20 Palmer Raids (organized by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) saw 6,000 people arrested and 556 deported for expressing views deemed anti-American (advocacy of socialism or opposition to war). Through the late 1940s and 1950s, the US engaged in widespread repression of political speech in what is now called the Second Red Scare. (The first red scare followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution).
The New York Times’ Julian E. Barnes recalled the repression of “anti-American” speech during the First World War.
Congress first passed the Espionage Act in 1917 at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson [in] a bid to quell dissent against the United States’ support for World War I…
In 1918, a set of amendments prohibited speech considered disloyal or abusive to the United States.
During the war, for example, the producer of a film, “The Spirit of ’76,” was prosecuted under the act and sentenced to prison in 1918 because the government believed the movie undermined the British, a World War I ally, and was therefore seditious.
In 1918, Eugene V. Debs, the socialist candidate for president, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a speech criticizing the wartime draft. [1]
Political speech is regularly repressed in the United States when the business-connected elite that runs the state on behalf of its class believes that the values it defines as “American”—namely, its own—are threatened.
As the philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo explained:
In reality, although protected by the Atlantic and Pacific, every time [the US ruling class] has rightly or wrongly felt imperilled, [it] has proceeded to a more or less drastic reinforcement of executive power and to more or less heavy restrictions on freedom of association and expression. This applies to the years immediately following the French Revolution (when its devotees on American soil were hit by the Alien and Sedition Acts), to the Civil War, the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cold War. Even in our day, the sequel to the attack of 11 September 2001 was the opening of a concentration camp at Guantanamo, where detainees have been imprisoned without trial, and without even being informed of a specific charge, regardless of age. [2]
Losurdo went on the point out that the principals of the US state are energetic critics of rival states that suppress political advocacy in times of crisis–for example during invasions, military occupation, and threats of nuclear destruction (often engineered by the United States itself)–yet ardently repress political advocacy within their own borders in response to crises that are far less formidable than those the United States visits upon enemy states through its aggressions.
The notion may be shocking in light of what we have been taught to believe about the United States, but the truth of the matter is that every state is a police state—the US, and other self-described “free world” and liberal-democratic states, included. States exist both to advance the interests of their society’s dominant class, and to repress the resistance of those who the dominant class exploits. The political advocacy of the resistance is policed by the state, hardly at all when the resistance is weak and quiet, and more openly and viciously when it gathers strength and raises its voice. It is in periods of political tranquility, when the resistance of the exploited class carries on as a largely silent part of everyday life, that the character of the state qua police state is hardly evident, and the state favored by quietude fosters the myth that it is not a police state at all, but a champion of political liberty. It is easy to champion freedom of political advocacy when no one advocates ideas you don’t like, or those who do are voices crying out in the wilderness. But when the quietude of the subordinate class is disturbed, when its voice begins to establish reach, when it mobilizes and its actions become disruptive, the proclivity of the class in control of the state is to repress the militants, coopt the moderates, and threaten the remainder until they return to their accustomed passivity—in other words, the inclination is to reveal the police state for what it truly is. We should not say at these times that this is un-American, or un-Canadian, or un-British, and so on, but that the veil has once again been lifted from the police state because we are once again growing strong.
It’s important to understand that:
The US state (hardly alone among capitalist states) represents the interests of its wealthiest citizens and cares only for the interests of the many so far as doing so is necessary to create stable conditions for the tranquil transfer of economic surplus from labor to itself.
US domination of West Asia, a strategic and economic area of colossal importance, is significantly aided by the presence in the region of a Jewish settler state committed, by the very demands of its own survival, to repress the Arab and Islamic opposition to both its existence as a state as well as the United States’ existence as a regional tyrant. The relationship of the United States to Israel is one of symbiosis, based on sharing a common enemy, namely, the region’s forces of independence and national assertiveness.
The United States is the largest settler colonial state in world history, and is thus predisposed by its own traditions to support other settler colonial states, ceterus paribus; that is, when it makes sense to do so in light of the strategic and profit-making interests of the United States’ wealthiest citizens.
Christian Zionists—who believe it is their religious duty to support Israel—comprise a sizeable part of the US electorate. While their views are a matter of indifference to US policy-makers, the reality that they broadly support US policy (one that, unbeknownst to them, is rooted in the economic and strategic interests of the US ruling elite), is helpful in hiding the authentic reasons for US support of Israel behind a democratic facade. It can be said, falsely, that US policy reflects, in large measure, what US voters want. In reality, it reflects what the corporate and finance elite wants.
In light of the foregoing, we can conclude that in the face of growing support for Palestinians, and in the context of increasing opposition to the Zionist project, that the inclination of the US state—despite its professed commitment to liberal democratic values—is to ignore popular opinion and to try to crush political advocacy which contradicts its policy preferences. The myth of America not only includes the notion that the state is committed to free expression and political advocacy, but that it is responsive to popular opinion. The latter myth is contradicted by two important studies.
One in 2005 by Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs, found that “public opinion has virtually no effect on foreign policy, which instead strongly tracks the preferences of internationally oriented corporations, which favor open access to trade and investment abroad. Page and Jacobs noted that experts seemed to have some effect on foreign policy, but that experts are also likely influenced by business groups.” [3]
A 2014 study of over 1,700 US policy issues by Page and his fellow political scientist Martin Gilens discovered that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impacts on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” [4]
In other words, growing popular momentum on behalf of the Palestinians and against their oppression by Israel will not turn US policy-makers into pro-Palestinians or significantly shift US foreign policy. US policy-making and US public opinion operate in non-overlapping spheres, with the former largely immune and indifferent to the latter. To paraphrase George Carlin, US policy-makers and their wealthy backers belong to a club, and 99 percent of US citizens are not in it.
Accordingly, growing support for an end to Zionist apartheid and the genocide against Palestinians will cause officials, not to shift policy in the name of democracy, but to lift the veil from their police state and to crack down on resistance to their preferred pro-oppression policy positions.
Is the state’s aversion to popular opinion and democracy and preference for repression in the face of growing opposition to its conduct, a reason to return to quietude? Hardly. It’s an invitation to look at political struggle realistically, as a class war in which violations of ostensibly cherished rights will happen, as they have always happened, when the latitude of those at the top to exploit and oppress those below is threatened by resistance. Victory is possible only if illusions are shed about the identity of the enemy and its true character. The United States, as much as any other state, is not a paladin of political liberty, but a police state standing on guard for the political and economic interests of its ruling class. For the rest of us, it is a police state, and always has been.
1. Julian E. Barnes, “What Is the Espionage Act and How Has It Been Used? The New York Times, August 15, 2022.
2. Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, Verso, 2015, p. 258.
3. Christopher McCallion, “A Better Foreign Policy Abroad Requires a Strong Labor Movement at Home”, Jacobin, May 30, 2022
4. Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics, September, 2014.
Jacobin’s Cloudy Thinking on Hamas’s Resistance and Palestinian Solidarity
“If no consideration in a political crisis has been addressed to the people of this country except to remember to hate violence and love order and exercise patience, the liberties of this country would never have been obtained.” British Prime Minister William E Gladstone [1]
November 1, 2024
By Stephen Gowans
Jacobin contributing editor BashirAbu-Manneh has written a criticism of the pro-Palestinian protest movement (“Palestine Needs Mass Support, Not Sectarian Marginalization,” Jacobin, October 30, 2024), arguing that its effectiveness is clouded by poor strategic thinking. It is not, however, the protest movement’s thinking which is clouded, but Abu-Manneh’s own thinking, which is contradictory and self-refuting. In effect, Abu-Manneh urges readers to hate Hamas’s violence, love international law, and exercise patience, while defining the Palestinian cause as the achievement of Palestinian Bantustans alongside a Zionist colonial settler state. To make his case, he deploys a series of arguments which collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. I have set out his arguments below, and show how they are based on poor—and, ultimately, anti-Palestinian—reasoning.
The Jacobin contributor begins his article by attributing what he calls the cloudy strategic thinking of the pro-Palestinian protest movement to its members’ anger and frustration at Israel’s indifference to “the wrath of global public opinion” and their being “ignored and sidelined by warmongering elites.” In his view, emotion has impaired judgment. A “very small minority of vocal activists,” he writes, “have turned legitimate anger and frustration … into a mindless embrace of violence” which is playing “into the hands of those who want to see a popular antiwar mass movement discredited.”
“Most worryingly,” he adds, “some voices in the Palestinian solidarity movement have glorified Hamas’s October 7 attacks,” quickly noting that: “There is no question that Palestinians have a right to resist foreign occupation. That is an achievement of the decolonization era enshrined in international law. But it does not follow that everything the Palestinian resistance movement does advances the Palestinian cause.”
Let’s unpack this paragraph.
Abu-Manneh attributes the Palestinians’ right to resist foreign occupation to international law. But where does international law come from? Does it exist independently of humanity, or is it written by humans? And which humans write it? International law is formulated, ignored, or enforced, by the most powerful states, at their discretion. The international system is characterized, not by “the rule of law”, in which no state stands above it, but “rule by law”, in which law is selectively applied by those who have sway over it, namely, states with permanent Security Council vetoes, at least four, and possibly all of which, can be characterized as formerly if not current colonial states. One, the United States, originated, as Israel has, in settler colonialism. [2, 3] If the states that dominate the international system, and therefore the formulation and (selective) application of international law, were to decide that the Palestinians have no right to resist occupation, would their resistance be illegitimate? By Abu-Manneh’s reasoning, it would be. This gives us the first clue about how the Jacobin contributing editor thinks about the Palestine question. He regards it not as a question of settler colonialism (the theft of the Palestinians’ country, land, homes, and property and what to do about it), but one of international law, a law over which powerful states, many of them with histories of colonial or settler colonial domination over other peoples, have always exercised an outsize influence. Palestinians may have the right of resistance in international law, but it amounts to little. Does international law, or the great powers who write and selectively enforce it, protect Palestinians as they exercise this right? On the contrary, these same powers raise Israel’s right of self-defense to an inviolable principle of the first order, while execrating, gagging, or punishing anyone bold enough to invoke the Palestinians’ right of resistance. At the same time, they sanction the killing of Palestinians who exercise their right as the necessary and desired outcome of Israel exercising its hallowed right of self-defense.
International law, in the form of the US, British, and Israeli-authored 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242, recognizes as legitimate a settler colonial Israeli state, implanted by force and by means of ethnic cleansing, on the four-fifths of a country known as Palestine which Zionist settlers conquered in 1948. This law does not grant the Palestinians the right to resist the foreign occupation of this part of their country. So, yes, international law concedes a right to resist, but it is meaningless in fact, and to make matters worse, the right is conceded for only one-fifth of historic Palestine.
We can think of Israel as a settler colonial project which has consolidated its theft of Palestinian land, homes, and property in four-fifths of Palestine. We can think of it too as seeking to extend its larceny to the one-fifth of historic Palestine that has yet to be completely plundered. We can also think of international law as a means of legitimizing the theft. Alternatively, we can, as Abu-Manneh does, fetishize international law, seeing it not as the instrument of colonial and settler colonial states, used to legitimize the existence of Israel [4] but naively, as a neutral expression of universal justice.
After accepting the Palestinians’ right to resistance based on international law (and exercisable only in the one-fifth of the Palestinians’ country which Jewish settlers were unable to capture in 1948), Abu-Manneh writes: It “does not follow that everything the Palestinian resistance movement does advances the Palestinian cause.” This is true as far as it goes, but the statement is of little value unless we know what “the Palestinian cause” is. In Abu-Manneh’s view, the Palestinian cause has nothing whatever to do with decolonizing Palestine, dismantling apartheid, and overcoming Zionist racism. Instead, the cause, in his view, is bringing to fruition the two-state solution as laid out in the 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242–that is, the achievement of a Palestinian state in one-fifth of the Palestinians’ country, alongside a Zionist colonial settler state, on the larger four-fifths.
Now that we’re clear on what Abu-Manneh thinks the Palestinian cause is, we can ask why he accepts Palestinian resistance (in the abstract) but rejects Hamas’s Operation Al Aqsa Flood (as a specific instance of Palestinian resistance.) According to the Jacobin contributor, any “reasonable cost-benefit analysis for the people of Gaza has to conclude that the price” of the 7 October attack (i.e., Israel’s retaliation) “is simply not worth it.” Owing to “a balance of power that is overwhelmingly to Israel’s advantage” the Hamas rebellion was, in his view, “a massive miscalculation.”
It is indeed true that there exists between Israel and the Palestinians a massive imbalance of power. But what does the fact that there is a massive imbalance of power mean? It means that Israel has been able to maintain an ongoing, unremitting, regime of aggression against the Palestinians, which continues the project, begun over one hundred years ago, of replacing one country, Palestine, with another, Israel, and displacing the indigenous Palestinians with transplanted Jews. This is an ongoing project. It didn’t stop in 1967, when the UN Security Council ordered Israel—without, as time has shown, the slightest intention of compelling Israel’s compliance—to withdraw from the new territories it had taken. It is not the case, as Abu-Manneh supposes, that the great imbalance of power is fixed and that the Zionist project is sated, with no further conquests on its agenda. On the contrary, before 7 October, each passing day was one in which ever more Palestinians were crushed under the wheels of the Zionist juggernaut. Settlements continued to be built in the West Bank. The Gaza blockade continued to make life miserable for Palestinians. Israel continued to threaten to Judaize the Haram al-Sharrif. Abu-Manneh assumes that there existed prior to 7 October a fixed status quo, which, however grim it was, was still better than what has befallen the Palestinians since. To the contrary, the condition of Palestinians was—despite the misplaced faith the Jacobin contributor has in international law—one of incessant weakening and deterioration. Palestinians faced, not a choice of standing still if they did nothing, or going backward if they provoked Israel’s fury, but if they did nothing, of going backward slowly, inexorably, until Palestinians and Palestine ceased to exist. It was a choice of dying on their knees or standing on their feet.
This is not to say that there are not miscalculations in struggle, and that Operation Al Aqsa Flood was not a miscalculation. It may have been. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the attack didn’t unfold quite as the Hamas leadership intended. Far greater Israeli resistance was expected, and when Hamas fighters quickly achieved their limited objectives, the operation dissolved into chaos. [5] Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who has since died in battle, remarked that “Things went out of control. People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened.” [6]
In decrying the 7 October Hamas operation as not worth the candle because the outcome has been a devastating Israeli retaliation, Abu-Manneh fails to blame the architects of the retaliatory ossuary: Israel and its principal backers, the United States and Germany, the former a veritable co-belligerent. One could argue that the carnage is due to both the provocation of Hamas (a distal cause) and Israel’s response to it (the proximal cause). Instead, Abu-Manneh chooses to lay 100 percent of the blame at Hamas’s door, removing the proximal cause (Israel and its backers and co-belligerent) from the equation altogether. This is blatant victim-blaming.
If that isn’t bad enough, the Jacobin contributing editor then denies Hamas any credit for the benefit of the 7 October rebellion. The benefit, as he puts it, is that “Palestine is now back in global political focus.” But why is it back? In Abu-Manneh’s view, “Because of Israel’s brutal genocide”, not because Hamas undertook an operation which included among its aims the rescue of the Palestinian cause from the oblivion into which it was rapidly sinking. [7] If Hamas is to be blamed for provoking Israel to accelerate the job of erasing the Palestinians—conduct hardly at odds with the history of Zionist settler colonialism (isn’t its point to eliminate the natives to make way for the settlers?)—then it must also be credited with placing Palestine back on the global agenda. Does Abu-Manneh believe that “the huge global protest movement … against colonization and occupation” and the radicalization of “a new generation of young activists,” would have occurred had Hamas or other resistance groups not carried out the Al-Aqsa Flood action or its equivalents? Palestine had fallen off the radar until Hamas acted. Now Palestine and the Palestinians are back with a vengeance. Abu-Manneh’s vaunted international law had done nothing, up to 7 October, to keep them on the agenda. Indeed, it was the failure of international law and the quietude of the Palestinian solidarity movement that galvanized Hamas to act.
Having dismissed Palestinian militant action as ill-advised in light of the enormous imbalance in power between Israel and the Palestinians, Abu-Manneh turns to international law as the Palestinians’ possible savior. In view of the fact that the UN and international law have played important roles in facilitating the Jewish settlers’ spoliation of Palestine and its indigenous people—especially UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 1947, which recommended the partition of the Palestinians’ country, and UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967, which legitimized the Zionist settler state’s capture of four-fifths of Palestine, and the ethnic cleansing of much of the Palestinian population from it—the idea that the Palestinians should look to international law for salvation is wholly unconvincing; one may as well have asked Hitler to solve the problem of anti-Semitism.
All the same, Abu-Manneh is particularly encouraged by “the July International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling (July 19, 2024) [which] has deemed Israel’s occupation illegal.” But it should be understood thar the ICJ opinion has not deemed as illegal the Zionist occupation of a country called Palestine; it has only declared illegal the occupation of the one-fifth of Palestine which the settlers failed to conquer and ethnically cleanse in 1948. What encourages the Jacobin contributor, is thus, an ICJ ruling which presses Israel to accept the two-state solution, what Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi denounces as “a one-state, multiple-Bantustan solution.” [8] And how is the two-state solution—which Israelis vehemently oppose [9], and whose history is one of a false promise designed to keep the Palestinians passive while what remains of their country is gradually taken away from them—to be brought to fruition? Through “focussed political work and organization” counsels Abu-Manneh—in other words, by mobilizing radicalized youth and the “huge global protest movement” to press countries to pressure Israel to grant the Palestinians the sop of a few Bantustans. Abu-Manneh’s favored two-state solution, “has always been meaningless, a cruel Orwellian hoax,” concludes Khalidi. It “would effectively maintain the status quo in Palestine under a different form, with an externally controlled Quisling ‘Palestinian Authority’ lacking real jurisdiction or authority replaced by a Quisling ‘Palestinian state’ similarly devoid of the sovereignty and independence that attach to a real state.” [10]
Abu-Manneh’s thinking is problematic, if not naïve and, worse, revolting, on three levels.
First, it ignores his own assessment of public opinion. Israel, he notes correctly, is “protected from the wrath of global public opinion.” Moreover, “protesters and activists” are “ignored and sidelined by warmongering elites.” If Israel is insulated from public opinion, and protestors and activists are ignored, how is “focussed political work and organization” going to compel Israel to grant Palestinians the multiple Bantustans Abu-Manneh thinks will resolve the Palestine question? The imbalance in power between Israel and the Palestinians is indeed huge, but the yawning chasm is not only a military one, but a public diplomacy one, as well. If you’re going to say, don’t take on Israel militarily, because its military power is overwhelming, don’t, at the same time, say take on Israel in the realm of public opinion, without recognizing that Israel’s public diplomacy power is also overwhelming. This is surely clouded strategic thinking.
Second, in advocating a one-state-multiple-Bantustan solution, Abu-Manneh proposes that radicalized youth and the huge global protest movement accept Jewish settler colonialism and Zionist apartheid in four-fifths of the Palestinians’ country, in return for Palestinian Bantustans on the remaining one-fifth. Were the radicalized youth who Abu-Manneh celebrates to accept his program they would immediately become de-radicalized, for there is nothing radical about Abu-Manneh’s counsel. Neither is there anything progressive about it. Would a movement against apartheid in South Africa which advocated multiple Bantustans alongside a white supremacist state be called progressive? Of course not. So why would we think the equivalent for Palestine is acceptable? Indeed, it’s difficult not to conclude that the whole point of Abu-Manneh’s intervention is to persuade the global protest movement to deradicalize, on the grounds that this will somehow (he doesn’t quite say how) pay off in strategic gains. This comports with the mild, reformist, orientation of Jacobin—a periodical of the Left devoted to hating violence, loving order, exercising patience, and bartering principle for bourgeois respectability.
Third, the energy of the global protest movement and radicalized youth—energy Abu-Manneh seeks to mobilize on behalf of his favored one-state-multiple-Bantustan solution—would hardly exist had Hamas not undertaken the very same Operation Al-Aqsa Flood he so deplores. Had Hamas accepted anything like Abu-Manneh’s counsel, Palestine and the Palestinians would now be virtually invisible and teetering on the precipice of extinction.
The Jacobin contributor believes that “glorifying” Hamas’s violence will frighten people away from joining the protest movement he acknowledges is already huge and global. In fact, the movement Abu-Manneh has set out to save from cloudy strategic thinking is huge and global despite, or perhaps because of, the “cloudy” thinking he deplores. The Jacobin contributor also fears that failing to denounce Hamas’s 7 October resistance allows Israel and its supporters to discredit opponents of the Israeli’s genocide against the Palestinians. Operation Al Aqsa Flood, was, he argues, a miscalculation that is wholly responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Yet, the operation hardly seems to have been a miscalculation from the point of view of preventing the erasure of Palestine and the Palestinians; it is responsible, at least distally, for revitalizing the pro-Palestinian movement, a revitalization Abu-Manneh welcomes, but all the same fails to give Hamas credit for. The Jacobin writer appears to believe that there are ever more legions of people ready to join the global protest movement if only a very few voices in the Palestinian solidarity movement stop glorifying Hamas’s 7 October attack. His assessment is unconvincing. If more people haven’t joined the already huge and global movement, a more plausible explanation is that they see –to invoke Abu-Manneh’s own assessment of the impotence of public opinion—little point in being “ignored and sidelined by warmongering elites” as Israel enjoys its protection “from the wrath of global public opinion.”
It is unclear why Abu-Manneh believes that failure to decry Hamas’s 7 October uprising plays into the hands of Israel and its supporters, unless he believes, notwithstanding his endorsement of resistance in the abstract, that violent resistance against Israel is illegitimate. Could it be that his reference to the right of Palestinian resistance is mere lip-service? He says resistance is legitimate, but despite this, insists that glorifying the resistance of Hamas on 7 October plays into the hands of the Palestinians’ enemies. This is a contradiction. How could glorifying a legitimate act discredit the movement? Abu-Manneh might say the reason why is because Hamas’s resistance, albeit legitimate, was a miscalculation. But how does glorifying a Hamas miscalculation play into Israeli hands? It doesn’t make sense. It seems more likely that Abu-Manneh is a supporter of violent rebellion in the abstract, as an idea alone, suitable only for discussion in university colloquia, and certainly not as a project to be carried out in the real world.
The reality is that the revitalization of the global Palestinian solidarity movement wouldn’t have happened had Hamas not launched its 7 October operation. Abu-Manneh fails to credit the very same operation whose glorification he deplores for re-igniting the mass movement he welcomes, presenting an argument that can hardly be taken seriously, namely, that the way to build mass support for Palestine is to glorify an international law which has achieved nothing for Palestinians, while defining the Palestinian cause as the achievement of an apartheid Zionist settler state in four-fifths of the Palestinians’ country, alongside multiple Bantustans in what is left over.
Abu-Manneh’s clouded thinking recalls E.H. Carr’s riposte to the advocates of peaceful change. In his Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939, Carr wrote, that the “attempt to make a moral distinction between wars of ‘aggression’ and wars of defense’ is misguided. If a change is necessary and desirable, the use or threatened use of force to maintain the status quo”—one thinks here of Israel’s vaunted right to defend itself—”may be more morally culpable than the use or threatened use of force to alter it.” [11] He continued: “The moral criterion must be not the ‘aggressive’ or ‘defensive’ character of the war, but the nature of the change which is being sought and resisted. ‘Without rebellion, [humanity] would stagnate and injustice would be irremediable.’ Few serious thinkers maintain that it is always unconditionally wrong to start a revolution; and it is equally difficult to believe that it is always and unconditionally wrong to start a war.” [12]
This isn’t to say that Hamas started a war on 7 October. The war is a long-running one, whose origins are found in the actions of Theodor Hertzl and his supporters and successors to create a Jewish state by making an existing country, Palestine, cease to exist. Hamas only opened a new battle in the long-running war on 7 October. The point is that the violent rebellion of the natives must be evaluated against the nature of the change that was sought and resisted (ultimately, the liberation of Palestine, and immediately, the arrest of the disappearance of Palestine and Palestinians.) Hamas appears to have accomplished its immediate aim and for this, for its fight against the iniquities of settler colonialism and apartheid, and for its role in helping to revitalize the pro-Palestinian movement, it deserves credit.
So, is glorifying Hamas’s 7 October rebellion strategically unsound? It may be, but not for the contradictory reasons Abu-Manneh adduces, and nor for any reason I can fathom. The Jacobin contributor has allowed his anger and frustration at Hamas’s Islamist character—which he revealed in an earlier Jacobin article [13]—cloud his judgment about the merits of the organization as a vehicle for the liberation of Palestine. I share Abu-Manneh’s opposition to Hamas’s Islamism, but I recognize the merits of the group’s Operation Al Aqsa Flood. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the political Islam of Hamas is of no relevance to the question of whether the organization’s conduct has advanced the aims of overcoming Zionist settler colonialism and apartheid. Neither Hamas nor its secular compatriot organizations will ever be acceptable to respectable opinion in colonial and settler colonial countries, and bartering away principle for respectability by denouncing Hamas or refusing to give it the credit it deserves, is a fool’s game.
1. Cited in E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939, Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, p. 193
2. Three of the five permanent UN Security Council members, the United States, France, and Britain, were once self-declared colonial countries. All retain some colonies today under various euphemistic aliases, such as regions, protectorates, and territories. Puerto Rico, for example, is a de facto US colony, while Guadeloupe and Martinique count among a number of French colonies. Bermuda, Gibraltar, and the Falkland Islands, inter alia, are British colonies. Russia and China were empires, based on the domination of conquered peoples by a metropolitan ethnic elite.
3. For more on this perspective on international law see the Third World Approaches to International Law Review, https://twailr.com/
4. Benjamin Netanyahu has called Israel “the West’s outpost in the Middle East” (and hence, the instrument of the colonial and colonial settler powers which comprise the West). Quoted in Adam Shatz, “The sea is the same sea,” The London Review of Books, (Vol. 40 No. 16, 30 August 2018).
5. “A time of painful birth and major transformation’: a senior Hamas leader reflects on October 7 and its aftermath,” Mondoweiss, October 6, 2024; Our Narrative: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Hamas Media Office; Ben Hubbard and Maria Abi-Habib, “Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gambit to Create a ‘Permanent’ State of War,” New York Times, Nov. 8, 2023; Nelly Lahoud “A Catastrophic Success for Hamas?”, Foreign Affairs, October 23, 2023.
6. Summer Said and Rory Jones, “Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas,” The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2024.
7. “Sinwar certainly achieved his goal of bringing the Palestinian issue to the center of geopolitics,” writes Yaroslav Trofimov in “Sinwar’s Bloody Gambit Changed the Middle East—but Not as He Imagined”, The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 19, 2024: “We make the headlines only with blood,” Sinwar said. “No blood, no news.” Summer Said and Rory Jones, “Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas,” The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2024.
8. Rashid Khalidi, “The Neck and The Sword,” New Left Review, May/June, 2024.
9. “The U.S., Europe and many Arab governments insist the overdue answer is the two-state solution, under which Israel and a Palestinian state would exist side-by-side. The snag is that Israelis and Palestinians no longer believe in it.” Marcus Walker, Fatima Abdul Karim and Anat Peled, “The Way to Fix the Middle East Conflict Looks Obvious—Except to Israelis and Palestinians, The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 18, 2024.
10. Rashid Khalidi, ‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine, Guardian, 11 Apr 2024.
11. Carr, p. 193.
12. Carr, p. 193.
13. Bashir Abu-Manneh, “The Palestinian Resistance Isn’t a Monolith,” Jacobin, April 28, 2024.
What's Left 