The Historical Injustice Behind Palestinian Violence

29 December 2025

Stephen Gowans

There is a fundamental injustice at the root of Palestinian violence. In 1948, Jewish settlers stole most of the Palestinians’ country. Israelis claim that part of historic Palestine was given to them by the United Nations, but the claim is false, and even if it were true, Palestine wasn’t the United Nation’s to give away. It’s true that the United Nations General Assembly in Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947 recommended a partition of Palestine between a state for recent Jewish immigrants and a state for indigenous Palestinians, but the recommendation was rejected by the Palestinians, and was never implemented. Moreover, the United Nations had no authority to deny the Palestinians self-determination in their own land, or to confiscate part of their country to create a Jewish state. There was no moral foundation or legal basis for the creation of a state for Jews in Palestine. Israel is not the child of moral necessity and law but the product of naked aggression, land theft, and ethnic cleansing.

In 1967, Israel conquered those parts of Palestine it had not stolen from the Palestinians in 1948. Its new conquests included the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, along with parts of Egypt (the Sinai) and Syria (Golan). Since then, the newly-seized Palestinian territories have been occupied while the Sinai has been returned to Egypt (in return for Cairo renouncing Arab nationalism and becoming a US client state), and the occupied Golan has been annexed illegally with the blessing of the United States.

Today, approximately seven million Jewish settlers live in conquered Palestine, occupying about 85 percent of the country. A roughly equal number of Palestinians live in the remaining 15 percent of their homeland (while some eight million are scattered abroad, many living in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan). Israeli policy, as evidence by the country’s actions, is to gradually drive into exile as many of the seven million Palestinians who remain in historic Palestine as possible, mainly by usurping their land and making their lives miserable. The process echoes the efforts of the Nazis from 1933 to Kristallnacht of 9-10 November 1938 to drive Jews out of Germany in order to create an ethnically pure German state. The Israelis, for their part, aim to create nothing as extreme as the Nazi’s homogeneous ethnic state, but a demography that substantially favors Jews. With a rough balance of Jews and Palestinians currently living within the territory Israel controls, that means either significantly reducing the Palestinian population, or ceding a Palestinian state on the 15 percent of historic Palestine in which Palestinians are concentrated, and accepting that the land of Israel will not include what Jews of antiquity knew as Judea and Samaria. The latter option, however, is rejected, not only by the current Israeli government, but by Israeli society generally.

In the absence of any intention to concede a Palestinian state, the Zionist imperative of creating a Jewish majority within a territory in which as many Palestinians as Jews live, means either driving the indigenous people out of the country, or failing that, forcing them into an ever shrinking space, as Israel takes more and more of their land, homes, and property for the building of settlements for Jews (including newly immigrated Jews from such places as the United States, Canada, and Western Europe.) The process echoes the genocide of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and of the Slavs and Jews of the German East (the territory of Eastern Europe the Nazis sought to conquer as Lebensraum to settle the German Herrenvolk.) It also means denying Palestinians political rights in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem—in other words, apartheid.

This raises a question. Why are the Israelis so adamant about refusing the Palestinians a state of their own, especially considering that the state would comprise only a tiny fraction of the Palestinians’ original country and leave the bulk of it to the Jews? The answer is surely that, from the perspective of the Zionist project, a Palestinian state represents an opportunity cost (giving up land that could be otherwise taken from the Palestinians for the use of Jews) but offers no clear benefit. The presumed benefit is peace. With their own state, it is supposed that the Palestinians will recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state comprising the bulk of their country, making up that part the Zionists stole in 1948, plus part of the territory conquered in 1967 that has strategic value to Israel and which contains major Jewish settlements. True, the organized Palestinian resistance would gladly accept a Palestinian state in even only 15 percent of historic Palestine, but it has made clear that the realization of the two-state solution is not its end-game. Western states that back the two-state solution envisage something like a Palestinian protectorate with Israel as suzerain, controlling the state’s borders, police force, and foreign policy. The only way to persuade Israel to accept a Palestinian state, in their view, is to assure the Israelis that a Palestinian state will pose no threat to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. And the way to do that is to insist that the state of Palestine have no military and that its leaders are quislings who serve at the pleasure of either Israel or Washington or both. This reflects an implicit acknowledgement that the dispossessed will always be a threat to those who dispossess them; that the dispossessed want returned to them what is rightfully theirs; and that unless a Palestinian state has no military and is governed by stooges of Israel and its Western patrons, the Palestinians will be at liberty to use the resources of their new state to attempt to recover, by force, what they have been unjustly denied.

Of course, Israel could be strongarmed into acceding to a Palestinian state. The Zionist state depends significantly for survival on the support it receives from the United States and major US allies. By threatening to cut off or reduce arms transfers and diplomatic support, the West could compel its client state to comply with its demands to accept a state for the Palestinians. But the West has never used its leverage to force the Israelis to make any meaningful concessions to the Palestinians, and shows no sign of departing from this policy. Indeed, since the Oslo Accords of 1993, which were supposed to begin a process of moving toward the creation of a Palestinian state, the Israelis have consistently maneuvered to undermine the project, and the West has done precious little to stop them. The number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, which would form the largest part of a Palestinian state, has grown from 280,000 shortly after the Oslo Accords to 950,000 by 2023, more than a three-fold increase. [1] And Israeli efforts to sabotage a Palestinian state have only accelerated since 7 October 2023. The Zionist state unabashedly, even proudly, conducts itself in a manner aimed openly at denying the Palestinians a viable state. Western states occasionally utter protests, but fail to follow through with deeds that would induce Israel to abandon its ongoing sabotage.

Many states and political organizations in the West, including most far-left and progressive political parties, proclaim their affection for an independent Palestinian state along 1967 borders, along with the full right of return for Palestinian refugees (and their descendants) to the homes from which they were expatriated. Advocates of this position have no answer to the question of why a Palestinian state should be constituted along 1967 borders, that is, why it should comprise only the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, territory not conquered in 1948? Implicitly the position endorses the 1948 theft by Zionist forces of most of the Palestinians’ country, but condemns the 1967 theft of the remaining part of the country. In this view, the second (1967) conquest is objectionable but the first and larger (1948) conquest is not. Moreover, Israel and its Western patrons would never accept the emergence of an independent, militarized, Palestinian state, for reasons cited above. Nor would they accept the repatriation of eight million Palestinians living in the shatat, a development that would radically alter the demographic balance of Israel, turning it into a Palestinian-majority state. The proposal, thus, is not only confused morally (why reject the 1967 conquest but not the 1948 one?) but is also pie-in-the-sky, since it assumes conditions (a truly independent Palestinian state and repatriation) that are completely unacceptable to the states that would need to accede to them. Moreover, were the Palestinians strong enough to compel Israel and its Western patrons to accept an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, they would also be strong enough to press for the recovery of all their country. So why would they stop at the 1967 borders? The proposal, vaunted by its supporters as both morally defensible and pragmatic, turns out to be, on inspection, confused, inconsistent, and unrealistic.

Returning to the question of why Western states allow Israel to get away with blocking implementation of the two-state solution: The simple answer, favored by followers of the US political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, is that a lobby of Zionist Christians and Zionist Jews wields enormous political power, which it has used to hijack the foreign policy relevant to Israel and the Middle East of the United States, as well those of its major allies. If this is indeed true, the obvious question is: How did this lobby get to be so powerful that it can make Washington do what Mearsheimer and Walt claim is at odds with American interests? The answer, never spelled out, lurks within the Mearsheimer-Walt theory: The lobby is made up of enormously rich Jewish financiers who identify with Israel because they’re Jews and as a consequence place Jewish interests above those of American interests. This echoes the Nazi view that Jewish international financiers, operating in the shadows, controlled German politics, to the detriment of the German Volk and to the benefit of the Jews. If, to Hitler, German Jews were committed to Jewish interests and not those of Germany, to Mearsheimer and Walt, Zionist American Jews are committed to Jewish interests and not those of America. It could also be said that the lobby comprises fabulously wealthy Zionist Christian moneybags who identify with Israel because they’re evangelical Christians and many evangelical Christians believe that God has ordered them to support Israel; as a consequence, they place evangelical Christian theological interests above those of US secular interests. But, were we to say this, we would invite an obvious question: Aren’t these evangelical Christians also Americans? If Zionist Christians define their interests as support for Israel, then support for Israel is an interest of these Americans. Likewise, if Zionist Jews define their interests as defending Israel, then the defense of Israel is an interest of these Americans. What are American interests but the interests of a group that includes Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians as much it includes those of anyone else? To say the interests of Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians are not American interests is to say Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians are not Americans—that they operate on behalf of temporal (Israel) or spiritual (evangelical Christian) constituencies whose agendas are independent of American agendas and are therefore potentially in conflict with them. This is only a way of saying “If you disagree with me about what America’s interests are, you’re not a loyal American; you are, instead, an agent of a Church or an agent of a foreign state.”

Obviously, there are many American views of what the American interest is, so many that the idea that there is one, single, American interest—the interest that Mearsheimer and Walt claim to know—is absurd. Sociologically, what is called “American interests” are the interests of the class of people who have the means to dominate the ideological sphere and represent their own class interests as the interests of everyone else. As Marx and Engels put it, the ruling ideas [about what American interests are] are the ideas of the [US] ruling class. And the US ruling class happens to be made up of fabulously wealthy Zionist Jews and fabulously wealthy Zionist Christians, along with fabulously wealthy people who identify neither as Zionist Jews nor Zionist Christians but who happen to believe that Israel is a useful instrument for defending US ruling class interests in the Middle East. We should not, therefore, adopt a view that implies, as Mearsheimer and Walt do, that Zionist Jews are not true Americans, committed to true American interests, because they’re Jews (or that Zionist Christians are not true Americans, committed to true American interests, because they’re evangelical Christians).

A better answer to the question of why Western states allow Israel to get away with blocking implementation of the two-state solution—even though these states profess to favor it—is that the United States and its North American and European clients:

Are committed to Israel as their instrument for defending their interests in the Middle East. Indeed, the entire history of political Zionism has been one of Zionists seeking the support of Western states to establish and then maintain a Jewish state in the heart of the Arab and Muslim worlds in return for acting as the paladin of Western interests in the Middle East, and Western states accepting the proposal. The Palestinians, in this view, are a threat to achieving Western aims, since they are a threat to the West’s instrument for achieving those aims.
Don’t really believe that an independent Palestinian state, existing side-by-side with Israel, constitutes a genuine solution to the problem of two national movements vying for the same space. A Palestinian state, for reasons explained above, does not make the Palestinians’ desire for the recovery of their country, and the concomitant end to the Jewish state, vanish. If anything, it strengthens it, especially if the Palestinian state is militarized and truly independent. Palestinians won’t long be satisfied with just a small fraction of their country. The dispossessed always aspire to recuperate what they have been dispossessed of, and will use an independent state as a base from which to pursue the liberation of their country in its entirety. That is why no Western proposal envisions a truly independent, militarized, Palestinian state.
Accept the view, articulated in 1923 by Ze’ev Jabotinisky, that the only way to make a Jewish state in the center of the Arab and Muslim worlds secure from Palestinian irridentism, is to overwhelm the Palestinians by force and military strength until they give up their dreams of recovering their country as futile. This accounts for why Western states, the United States and Germany especially, have been prepared to furnish Israel with munificent military aid, to the point of giving it a qualitative military edge over all regional states. Israeli military primacy in the Middle East allows the West’s outpost in the Arab and Persian worlds to a) defend itself from Palestinian irredentism and b) take on states and movements of national assertiveness and independence that threaten the West’s domination of an important petroleum-producing region.
Conceal their commitment to the strategy of the Iron Wall behind a professed commitment to the two-state solution as a way of managing the demands of their own populations to intercede on behalf of the Palestinians. We seek justice for the Palestinians through our advocacy of the two-state solution, they say, while failing to hinder Israel in its efforts to thwart the very possibility of even a non-militarized, vassal, Palestinian state.

On top of the genocidal violence Israel has inflicted on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, it has waged a low-level war on the Palestinians of the West Bank. The war is multi-faceted: approval of new settlements; destruction of refugee camps; expulsion of Palestinians from their land and homes; settler attacks; pogroms. Almost daily, newspapers are filled new Israeli horrors.

“The United Nations has warned of an alarming surge in attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, with the number of incidents rising every year for almost a decade. This year, the U.N.’s humanitarian office, OCHA, has recorded more than 1,400 settler attacks that resulted in casualties or property damage.” [2]
“Since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers; one in every five dead was a child. In the same period, over 3,000 Palestinians say they have been displaced from their homes and lands largely because of Israeli settler violence. Anestimated40,000 Palestinians have been displaced in the northern West Bank by Israel Defense Forces operations. In the past two years, Israel has erected nearly 1,000 barriers and makeshift checkpoints across the West Bank, suffocating Palestinians’ ability to move and work freely.” [3]
“Pogroms in Palestinian villages have become routine, while the army and police stand by – or worse, assist the attackers. … These terrorists brag openly, knowing that even when settlers are filmed shooting and killing a Palestinian or beating an elderly woman with a nail-studded club, no one is prosecuted and the public remains indifferent. Settler violence isn’t outside the law – it is the law.” [4]
“Israel has also conducted extensive military operations that have uprooted entire neighborhoods in Palestinian cities. Historians and researchers say that has led to the largest wave of Palestinian displacement in the West Bank in a half-century.” [5]

Meanwhile, in Gaza, the genocide—established as a fact by the International Association of Genocide Scholars; the United Nations Human Rights Council; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; B’Tselem; Physicians for Human Rights—Israel; the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories; and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights—carries on, despite the 10 October 2025 halt to hostilities. From the start of the misnamed cease-fire through 27 December 2025, Israel killed 414 Palestinians and injured 1,142, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health/Gaza. The victims were mainly non-combatants—Palestinians who had never participated in hostilities or had but were observing the cease-fire. “When Israel targeted two cousins on Oct. 29 — it said they were both local militant commanders — overnight missile strikes destroyed both their homes,” reported the New York Times. “One of the men was killed. So were 18 other members of their extended family, including two 3-year-olds.” The report continues: “Maysaa al-Attar, 30, a pharmacy student was shot in the abdomen as she slept in her parents’ tent.” [6]

In a 19 December 2025 report on the faux cease-fire, the Israel human rights organization, B’Tselem, made the following observations:

The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas on 10 October 2025 did not lead to any meaningful change in Israel’s conduct.
Even within the territory that supposedly remained under Palestinian control beyond the “yellow line,” Israel continues to inflict extensive harm on civilians, homes, and infrastructure – often within the very area designated as the al-Mawasi “humanitarian zone,” where hundreds of thousands of displaced people currently live.
Moreover, as of November 2025, Israel refuses to open several commercial crossings through which it was supposed to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, disrupts and delays the entry of essential aid through the crossings that have opened, and continues to impose draconian restrictions on humanitarian organizations and to prevent journalists from entering devastated Gaza.
UN agencies and international organizations reported that between the agreement’s entry into force and 21 October, Israel rejected approximately 75% of all requests submitted for the entry of aid into the Strip. [7]

The conclusion, according to Martin Shaw, a sociologist of global politics, war and genocide, is that “What we have is supposed to be a ceasefire, but Israel is still killing, starving and systematically destroying buildings; people are still dying and suffering. [8]

Lamenting the Zionist war on Palestinians, especially the largely unremarked war in the West Bank, Jack Khoury, a writer with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote that “Neither the United Nations (and its agencies), nor the International Court of Justice, nor enlightened Europe, nor powerful China have been helping West Bank residents. There is also no point in trusting Arab countries.” [9] Strange that Khoury thinks any of these bodies can, or even wants to, help Palestinians. The United Nations and its agencies can’t help the Palestinians because the UN is an instrument of the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council who dominate it, three of which, as we have seen (the United States, Britain, and France) conduct their foreign policies in a manner that strongly suggests they are committed to Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall view of dealing with the Palestinian threat to their outpost in the Middle East. Any one of these veto-wielding permanent members can stay the hand of UN humanitarians who take it into their heads to help the Palestinians in any material way. Western Europe fails to help the Palestinians because it too supports the Iron Wall, as evidenced by the colossal military contributions it provides Israel. China, however powerful it is, is not powerful enough to take on the United States in the Middle East, which it would have to do were it to help Palestinians against Washington’s Zionist protégé. Moreover, China is a country that exists for the Chinese; its leadership cares as much about the Palestinians as the Americans do, which is not at all. China is not a Soviet Union, pursuing universalist ideals (and even the USSR had limits on how far it would go on behalf of internationalism.) It is, by its own admission, focused on building the Central State and not interfering in the affairs of other countries (except insofar as doing so helps advance its project of national rejuvenation.) As to the Arab countries, Khoury implicitly acknowledges that they exist as what Norman Finkelstein has recently called slaves and stooges of the United States. They won’t help the Palestinians because 1) what’s in it for them? and 2) they don’t want to displease their master. It’s true that the Arab states have to feign concern for the plight of the Palestinians in order to mollify the passion of the street for the Palestinian cause, but then so too do Western states.

Further evidence that the Western states view in Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall the correct way to manage the threat Palestinian irridentism presents to their outpost in the Middle East comes from their insistence that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” In practice this phrase means “Israel has a right to use overwhelming violence against Palestinians, far in excess of what is actually needed for defense.” Even if we accept that Israel has a legitimate right to defend itself from the recalcitrance of the people it oppresses, in the same manner that defenders of the slaveocracy of the American South might have said that the slave-owners had a right to defend themselves against the rebellion of their slaves, or fascists might have asserted a Nazi right of self-defense against the uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a critical question arises as to how much violence is necessary for Israel to provide itself an adequate defense? It is clear to all but biased observers that the level of violence Israel inflicted upon Palestinians in Gaza from October 2023 to October 2025 (with the substantial aid of arms flows and intelligence from the United States, Germany, and other Western states) was well beyond what was necessary to defend Israel. Instead, the level of violence was consistent with the aim of achieving permanent security, which is to say, annihilating the possibility of future Palestinian attacks altogether–in other words, preventive war. The threat of future rebellion can be construed as immanent in Hamas, or more broadly the Palestinian resistance, or most broadly of all, Palestinians as a whole, for it is from within the Palestinian community that the threat of violent rebellion against Israeli oppression arises. Did the Nazis have a right to defend themselves against the Warsaw uprising by annihilating the community from which the threat arose: the Jews? By the logic that underpins the slogan “Israel has a right to defend itself”, they did. The genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has argued that genocide is a quest for permanent security. The condition for genocide is an inverse relationship between the existence of one group and the existence of another. If the existence of Israel, as a Jewish state, is threatened by the existence of a Palestinian nation as a displaced people, then the Palestinians are at risk of genocide at the hands of the Israelis. Likewise, Israelis are at risk of genocide at the hands of the Palestinians, since the existence of a Jewish state in the Palestinian homeland threatens the existence of the Palestinian nation. It is for this reason that the idea of one, democratic state from the River to the Sea, in which everyone is equal, regardless of ethnicity or religion, is preferable to a struggle between two peoples to build their own ethnic states in the same space. Struggles between ethnic groups have a high potential for genocide.

One way of achieving Israel’s permanent security is to eliminate the Palestinians as a people. This can be accomplished in various ways. One way is to disperse Palestinians throughout the world in order that they become assimilated into other communities and cultures. Israel would love nothing more than for Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan to accept the Palestinian refugees living within their borders as citizens. After a time, these Palestinians and their descendants would come to identify as citizens of the countries in which they live, rather than as Palestinian refugees waiting to return home.

Another way of destroying the Palestinians as a nation is to destroy what makes them a nation—their heritage and culture; the things that bind them together as a people and make them more that just a collection of individuals. This is part of the reason why Israel has destroyed mosques, schools, universities, and other cultural infrastructure in its war on Gaza, and targeted the community’s intellectuals.

Physical annihilation of individual Palestinians is yet another way of achieving the same end, but killing every Palestinian, or even a substantial fraction of them, is too difficult to be considered a practical aim. Nevertheless, physical annihilation does have a role to play in Israel achieving permanent security. Overwhelming physical violence, along with the imposition on Palestinians of conditions that are inconducive to a thriving life—too little food; inadequate sanitation; shortages of potable water; inadequate shelter; no garbage collection; no schools; no universities; no recreation; no cultural activities; impoverished health care; i.e., the conditions that Israel has imposed on Gaza with Western backing— combine to limit population growth, if not reverse it, but more importantly, create significant incentives for self-exile. The aim of Israel’s brutal war on Palestinians qua Palestinians is to make their conditions of life in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, impossible, so that they vacate these territories to make way for Jewish settlers.

When Western states justify Israel’s massive violence against Palestinians as self-defense, they endorse their protégé’s adoption of a point of view that is no different from my telling you that if you bite my toe while I’m stepping on your head, I have a right to take a crow-bar to your skull and bash your brains in. That North American and European governments offer this justification is further evidence of their commitment to Israelis using massive reprisal violence to deter the future rebellions of the Palestinians. Massive violence as reprisal for rebellion has forever been the theory and practice of the oppressor.

If, as Khoury points out, the United Nations, the European Union, powerful China, and the Arab states, won’t help Palestinians, who will? The answer has always been no one but the Palestinians themselves. And the Palestinians have, for a very long time, asserted their own agency. They have launched massive strikes, practiced diplomacy, appealed to the conscience of humanity, invoked international law, inspired countless UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions on their behalf, and used moral suasion. They have tried making concessions. They have also used violence. Nothing has worked…yet. That the Palestinians have resorted to armed force, and will continue to do so, is assured.

Simone de Beauvoir once remarked that “All oppression creates a state of war”. I would say that all oppression is a state of war, and until the oppression of Palestinians is overcome, they will continue to turn to violence (along with other methods of struggle.) Anyone who condemns them for doing so sides with the oppressor.

1. Hamas Media Office, “Al-Aqsa Flood: Two Years of Steadfastness and the Will for Liberation”, Dec. 2025.

2. Feliz Solomon, “Israeli Settlers Burn Mosque as West Bank Violence Escalates”, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 14, 2025.

3 Mairav Zonszein, “There Is No Cease-Fire in the West Bank”, The New York Times, Nov. 11, 2025.

4. Yoana Gonen, “Creative Use of Bullshit: Why Right-wing Populist ‘Journalist’ Amit Segal Calls Haaretz Israel’s Greatest Threat”, Haaretz, Oct 28, 2025.

5. Natan Odenheimer and Fatima AbdulKarim, “How Israel’s Settlement Surge in the West Bank Is Displacing Palestinians”, The New York Times, Dec. 4, 2025.

6. David M. Halbfinger, Bilal Shbair and Aaron Boxerman, “The Truce Is 2 Months Old. So Why Have Hundreds of Gazans Been Killed?” The New York Times, Dec. 24, 2025.

7 “No Place Under Heaven”: Forced displacement in the Gaza Strip, 2023-2025,” B’Tselem, Dec. 19, 2025.

8 Martin Shaw, “Freedom of Expression in the New Age of Genocide”, Substack, Nov 13, 2025.

9. Jack Khoury, “When Did Israeli Settler Attacks Become Official Netanyahu Government Policy in the West Bank?” Haaretz, Dec. 25, 2025

What “globalize the intifada” does and does not mean

19 December 2025

Stephen Gowans

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.

Why Does Genocide Happen Again and Again?

9 December 2025

Stephen Gowans

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.

Capitalism, the US Senate, and the Zionist Genocide of the Palestinians

By Stephen Gowans

19 September 2025

What does this say about the US Senate?

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.

A Canadian diplomat once described Israel as an outpost “in the Eastern Mediterranean with close economic and cultural ties with the West generally and in particular with the United States.” Owing to these ties, it is the ideal candidate to assert US strategic interests in its region. As the late US Senator Jesse Helms, Chairman from 1995 to 2001 of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, remarked: “The United States has vital strategic interests in the Middle East, and it is imperative that we have a reliable ally whom we can trust, one who shares our goals and values. Israel is the only state in the Middle East that fits that bill.” What Helms meant by “vital US strategic goals,” is goals that comport with the interests of his class, not the interests of the larger subordinate class of which most US citizens are members.

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.)

These supports are necessary because Israel is a tiny country, both geographically and demographically, which cannot survive on its own in the middle of a much larger Arab nation, whose enmity is directly traceable to Zionist settler colonialism. Israel’s founding fathers, and “its first leaders worried greatly that without alliances with stronger regional and global powers, the Zionist project would fail.” Today, Israelis acknowledge that the backing of the United States is one reason Israel has survived.

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.

Adam Hanief, Robert Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah make this point well in their pamphlet Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine. They write:

[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.

On the Palestinian Question, Opportunism Has a Long History

June 1, 2024

By Stephen Gowans

Le Monde Diplomatique is running a review of Moscow’s stance on the Palestinian question in this month’s (June, 2024) issue, presenting a history that begins with the twists and turns of Soviet policy.

The Soviet Union’s initial position on the Palestinian question, likely formulated under the influence of the Comintern and definitely under the influence of Marxism, was that there ought to be in Palestine an independent, non-national, democratic state, in which all citizens are equal, regardless of their ethno-religious identity.

This is the same view which was initially taken up by the PLO, and is the stance of those who today “support the dismantlement of Israel’s racist structures and laws and advocate for one decolonised state, from the river to the sea, in which everyone living within it is equal before the law and does not benefit from any racial, ethnic, or religious privileges,” as Joseph Massad recently put it.

In early 1947, R. Palme Dutt, writing on behalf of the communist parties of the British Empire, demanded “the creation of a free, independent and democratic Palestinian state, which will guarantee equal rights of citizenship with full religious freedom and full opportunities to develop their culture to all its inhabitants, Arab and Jewish.”

It seems odd that a little over one year later, the USSR recognized “the state of Israel, three days after its founding,” and equally odd (or disappointing if not repugnant) that less than a year earlier it had backed the UN partition plan, which granted Jewish settlers in Palestine, who made up one-third of the population, over one-half of the Palestinian’s country.

One body, the UN General Assembly, at the time dominated by imperialist and settler colonial states, pledged more than half of the country of one nation to Jewish settlers who said they made up another. The UN General Assembly had no legal or moral authority to partition Palestine.

Worse still, Moscow was recognizing a state that had no intention of even adhering to the legally and morally invalid UN plan, having taken territory by force slated for an Arab state, and expelling 800,000 Palestinians.

It gets worse. Stalin then sent arms via Czechoslovakia to the Israeli army, and dispatched “hundreds of Jewish officers from the Red Army,” to help put down the resistance of the Palestinians and their Arab compatriots to the theft of their land and expulsion.

Soviet support helped “Israel defeat the Arab countries, then seen as British allies by the Soviets.” In the settler-native war of 1948, the Soviets were clearly on the side of the settlers and against the oppressed. Moscow’s appeal to the oppressed to join hands with workers around the world under Soviet leadership, must have seemed to be, for good reason, a bad joke.

Why did the Soviets abandon a position of opposition to settler colonialism in favor of one supporting Zionism? Raison d’etat. Realpolitick. Moscow saw advantage for the Soviet state in backing a movement it saw as against British influence in the Middle East. Since the Zionists had engaged in a war of terrorism with the British mandate authorities, and London controlled Egypt, Iraq, and Transjordan, Stalin thought that support for Jewish settlers in Palestine would deal a blow to British influence in West Asia and North Africa.

It didn’t. The British continued to wield influence in the region and Israel looked to the West for support. Soviet influence in subsequent years remained limited to a few Arab nationalist states—Syria, Iraq, Libya—which had turned to the Soviets for aid against the British and Americans, who objected to their economic nationalism.

Even then, these states were wary of getting too close to Moscow for fear of being turned into Soviet vassals. Given Moscow’s capacity to sacrifice principle in pursuit of realpolitik and its immediate political aims, their fears were not without foundation.

Moscow’s shift from endorsing a decolonized Palestine to supporting Zionist settler colonialism was an instance of opportunism—sacrificing principal and fundamental goals to short-term advantage. Lenin railed against the opportunism of the Second International; on the Palestinian question, Stalin practiced it.

Of course, it could be quibbled that the Marxist notion of opportunism is specific to working class interests, not those of an agrarian people despoiled by settler colonialism. The reply, if we confine ourselves to the Marxist canon, is to paraphrase the words of Marx. No people can be free who help enslave another. Clearly, the Soviets, at Stalin’s direction, helped Zionists figuratively enslave the Palestinians.

It is said, though the story may be apocryphal, that Stalin later recognized his error and apologized. If true, we must ask ourselves—what did he apologize for? His opportunism, or the fact that he failed to obtain even an opportunistic advantage in his abandonment of principle?

In later years, the USSR would support the two-state solution, as do some previously Soviet-aligned communist parties today, for example, the Communist Party USA, the Communist Party of Canada, and the KKE. So accustomed to blindly following the Moscow line with all its twists, turns, opportunism, and raison d’etat, the leaders of these parties long ago lost the power of independent thought, if they ever had it to begin with. So, they ape what the Soviet position was in its final years, and one suspects without the foggiest idea of what they’re supporting or why.

The two-state solution has a practical problem. Exactly where is the Palestinian state to be located, now that the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank has effectively denied the Palestinians territory on which to build a viable state? And why should Palestinians be crammed into an insignificant slice—or many insignificant, incontiguous, slices—of their own country?

But the practical problems of the two-state solution pale in comparison to the moral problem. A Palestinian state alongside Israel means the continued existence of a Jewish supremacist apartheid state, whose origin is found in settler colonialism, the theft of the Palestinians’ country, and ethnic cleansing.

Moreover, two-states concedes the legitimacy of Zionism, a racist, antisemitic, doctrine which holds that:

The Jews are a nation, rather than a religious community;
Dismisses activism against antisemitism as futile (because Zionists believe antisemitism is ineradicable, built into the DNA of non-Jews); and
Favors, as antisemites do, the emigration of Jews from the countries in which they live to Israel.

Strange that no one with even a single progressive bone in their body would have accepted anything less than the complete dismantlement of apartheid South Africa, and the creation, in its place, of a single, unitary, non-national, democratic state in which all people, settlers and natives, were equal. And yet many of the same people, including communists, continue to support a two state solution in Palestine–the companion South African arrangement to a state for whites and Bantustans for blacks.

In 1973, Louis Eaks interviewed the historian Arnold Toynbee on the Palestinian question. Eaks began by outlining what, at the time, now largely forgotten, was the dominant Palestinian goal, “a unitary and democratic state” in all of historic Palestine. Eaks observed that this would offer, “both for the Jewish settlers in Palestine and for the Palestinians, safeguards for their existence in Palestine and for their civil rights.” He lamented, however, that “there doesn’t seem to be any kind of debate about the merits of the Palestinian plan.”

Toynbee opined that the plan “has two merits. It would produce the greatest possible amount of justice, with the least possible amount of suffering for everybody. Nobody would be turned out of his home.” Then Toynbee turned to what he saw as the plan’s weakness. It is “recognized to be politically impracticable. I don’t think that the Israelis would ever agree voluntarily, and I don’t think that America would be willing to compel them to agree to this. Therefore, I don’t think it is possible to carry out this plan.”

Eaks objected. “You say that it is a plan which is now almost impossible to achieve, but the United Nations solution [of cutting the Palestinian baby into two ethnic national states, one Jewish and one Arab] seems equally impossible to achieve, and particularly that aspect which the Palestinians must consider to be the most crucial paragraph, which concerns the right of the refugees to return.”

Eaks, of course, was right. A half century later, the two-state formula remains as much an unrealizable fantasy as it was in 1973, indeed as much as it was in 1947, when it was first proposed as the UN Partition Plan. It has been rejected in deeds and in some cases words by all parties involved ever since.

Eaks continued: “Do you think it is wise in the long run to compromise with Zionism, which is based very much on racial discrimination? Do you not see any future threat to the East if one accepts this kind of racialist state.”

“Yes,” conceded Toynbee, “I think a racialist state is as bad and as dangerous in the Middle East as it is in southern Africa.”

Eaks wasn’t finished. “It seems to me,” he continued, pressing the point, “that no one who says that apartheid is wrong would say that South Africa is here to stay, and that therefore the African states should accept it and recognize it. Yet many people who say that Zionism is evil and wrong, claim that Israel is here to stay and that we must accept it. Why is there this contradiction between the attitudes towards Zionism and towards apartheid?”

As for China, the capitalist giant which occasionally sings rhapsodies to Marx to excite its gullible communist supporters in the West, its president Xi Jinping “recently reiterated his support for a two-state solution”, which is to say, for the continued existence of a Jewish supremacist state based on settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and racist institutions.

As Xi rejects a two-state solution for China—where two independent Chinese states, Taiwan and the PRC, could live side by side, in peace—he endorses a two-state model for the Palestinians. The Chinese, in his view, deserve better. They won’t concede a part of their country in the name of peace—as Xi expects the Palestinians to do.

Xi cares about China, tout court, not the global south and not the Palestinians, any more than Stalin did. As leaders of major states, Stalin then and Xi now, pursue as their priority the interests of the states they lead; everything else is secondary, available to be sacrificed in pursuit of raison d’etat, realpolitik, and opportunism.

Follow-up

In his critique of the KKE’s endorsement of the two-state solution, Jorge Martin makes many of the same arguments I do, but develops some themes more fully. Here are what I think are the parts of his analysis that are particularly relevant to my discussion above.

“[T]he two-state solution has been proven to have been impossible in practice, as we have explained in detail elsewhere. The Oslo Accords of 1993 were seen precisely as a road map towards a two-state solution by the Palestinian leadership. In fact, they were a complete betrayal and sell out of the Palestinian struggle. Israel kept control of a large section of the West Bank and of the external borders, Jewish settlers were allowed to remain in the Palestinian territory and settlements have continued to expand.

“Meanwhile, the questions of the right of return and the state of East Jerusalem were postponed to be discussed in the long distant future (read: never) and in exchange a pitiful Palestinian ‘Authority’ with no real power was created with the sole aim of subcontracting the policing of the Palestinian masses to the rotten leadership of the PLO.

…

“So as long as the capitalist state of Israel exists, the Israeli bourgeoisie will never accept the existence of a genuine viable Palestinian state as it considers it a threat to its ‘national security’. This has been proven, not in theory, but in practice. Since the Oslo Accords, the number of Zionist settlements in the West Bank has continuously increased, while Gaza remains completely blockaded by the state of Israel. Israel’s military interventions in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank, have become increasingly frequent and violent, undermining the very existence of even the limited Palestinian entity that is the Palestinian Authority.

“Furthermore, it is difficult to see how a capitalist state of Palestine would be viable in the territory of the 1967 borders, side-by-side with a powerful imperialist capitalist state of Israel. Such a capitalist Palestine, if it were possible, would be economically dominated by its powerful neighbor and remain at best its semi-colony.

“It is the practical experience of the last 30 years that has led a majority of Palestinians to reject a two-state solution. In September this year, a poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 67 percent of Palestinians reject a two-state solution, with only 32 percent in support. The same poll shows that “71 percent believe the two-state solution is no longer practical due to settlement expansion”. A separate poll conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development on 15 November found that 74 percent of Palestinians are in favor of one state, while only 17 percent want a two-state solution. An overwhelming majority of Palestinians reject the Oslo Accords altogether.

“Incidentally, even if one were to accept the idea of a two-state solution, why should a Palestinian state be established ‘on the 1967 borders’ (presumably what the KKE means is the pre-1967 war borders) which represented only 22 percent of historic Palestine? Why not go back to the 1947 UN partition plan borders, where a Palestinian state represented 44 percent? The 1967 borders represent not only accepting partition itself but also the further territorial conquests by the State of Israel in the period after it.

…

“In 1947, the Soviet Union backed the partition plan at the United Nations. This was not done in solidarity with the Jewish people .. but rather in an attempt to undermine the position of British imperialism in the Middle East. [My note: It could have been done for both reasons.] The USSR was the first country to recognize the newly created State of Israel and Stalin supplied the Zionists with weapons via Czechoslovakia. Soviet support for the setting up of the State of Israel in 1948 was a betrayal with catastrophic consequences for all the communist parties throughout the Middle East and beyond. Such a position cannot be justified and made the USSR complicit in the crime that was committed against the Palestinian people.”

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy: A Realistic Marxist View vs. Mearsheimer’s Realist View

By Stephen Gowans

May 21, 2024

Recently, Laurence H. Shoup presented data in Monthly Review that shows that the key personnel of the organizations comprising the Israel lobby, as identified by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, are also the key personnel of the leading US foreign policy think-thank, the Wall Street-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The key foreign policy members of the Biden cabinet, the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, along with the director of the CIA, national security advisor, and US ambassador to the UN, are all CFR members. Cabinets in previous administrations have also drawn heavily from the Wall Street-based organization to fill top cabinet posts.

Shoup has argued in two books and multiple articles that US foreign policy is shaped by a Wall Street power elite operating largely through the Council on Foreign Relations to serve the economic interests of the US economic elite, the country’s ruling class. This is a Marxist view.

The Marxist view contrasts with the view of John Mearsheimer who has recently argued that US foreign policy—not just that touching Israel, but all US foreign policy—is shaped by a powerful lobby of Jewish and Christian Zionist business people who have used their wealth and influence to pressure US decision-makers to put Zionist interests ahead of US interests.

These two views differ on the following questions:

Who decisively influences US foreign policy? Mearsheimer says wealthy and powerful Zionists, both Jewish and Christian. A Marxist view says that a Wall Street power elite holds decisive sway over US foreign policy, and Shoup shows that the group includes members of and overlaps the Israel lobby.

What is the aim of US foreign policy? Mearsheimer says the aim is to protect and advance the Zionist project, in contrast to a Marxist view which says it is to protect and advance Wall Street’s interests around the world.

Is Israel a foreign policy asset? Mearsheimer says that far from being an asset, Israel is a liability, because Zionism creates problems in the Middle East which demand incessant US attention, diverting Washington from devoting its full energies to containing China, its principal foreign policy threat. A Marxist view holds that defending and promoting the interests of its patrons has always been central to the Zionist project and that this makes Israel a valuable instrument to be used in defending Wall Street’s interests in the Middle East.

Mearsheimer recently presented an argument that supports the idea that the US foreign policy establishment subsumes the Israel lobby, as Shoup has shown, though it was hardly Mearsheimer’s intention to support a Marxist view. We might suppose that the Israel lobby focuses on US-Israel relations, while the ambit of the US foreign policy establishment is broader—the world as a whole. But Mearsheimer sees the lobby’s ambit as coterminous with that of the US foreign policy establishment; in his view, Israel is not the only matter that commands the Israel lobby’s attention; it is also concerned with US foreign policy as a whole. Even to Mearsheimer, then, the Israel lobby looks like the US foreign policy establishment in the breadth of the regions in which it takes an interest.

But here’s where Mearsheimer introduces a new element into his thinking. Not only does he believe that the Israel lobby has pressured the US foreign policy establishment into robustly backing Israel, he also makes an argument that can be construed to mean he believes the Israel lobby has pressured US decision-makers into adopting an interventionist foreign policy everywhere in the world. Asked whether the lobby is concerned with US-Israel relations alone, Mearsheimer replies (at 14:32):

“The fact is that the lobby is deeply interested in seeing the United States involved militarily all over the planet. The reason is, is that if the United States is intervening all over the planet, that means it will have a commitment to intervening in Israel. You don’t want a situation where the United States pulls back its forces, implements a policy, a foreign policy, of restraint, and is very reluctant to interfere in other places around the world, because if that’s the case it means that Israel may get into a conflict and the United States might not be willing to intervene on its behalf. So, the lobby has had an interest in seeing the United States pursue a very aggressive foreign policy all across the globe.”

One interpretation of the text above is that Mearsheimer believes the Israel lobby has caused US foreign policy to be globally interventionist. Another is that he sees the lobby as favoring a broadly interventionist policy, but doesn’t go so far as to suggest it has caused US decision-makers to adopt one. But if the Israel lobby is powerful enough to cause US decision-makers to support Israel unconditionally as Mearsheimer contends, we might expect it also to be powerful enough to cause decision-makers to support a globally interventionist foreign policy that supports the Jewish state. It seems likely that Mearsheimer is arguing that the Israel lobby not only causes US decision-makers to favor Israel unconditionally but that it also causes them to adopt a globally interventionist foreign policy. This extends the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis considerably, from: the Israel lobby causes US decision-makers to back Israel unconditionally to: the Israel lobby causes US foreign policy to be robustly interventionist around the world.

Mearsheimer defines the lobby as a group of wealthy and powerful people who are committed to Israel. We might ask what lies behind their commitment. Mearsheimer cites Zionist convictions. The Israel lobby comprises people who are either Zionist Jews or Christian Zionists, he argues. But is that the only reason to be committed to Israel? Could one not also be committed to a policy of the United States backing Israel owing to the role the Jewish state is able to play as an outpost of US elite interests in the Middle East? Pace Mearsheimer, could it be that US foreign policy is shaped by US decision-makers guided by a Wall Street-based power elite that perceives Israel as an asset able to defend US ruling class interests in the Middle East in return for helping it carry forward the Zionist project?

Political Zionism has always rested on the idea of a quid-pro-quo between settler Jews emigrating from the West and the governments of the Western states from which they emigrated. The former would represent the interests of the latter in West Asia and North Africa, serving as a bulwark against Arab and Muslim nationalist interests, in exchange for the latter’s support for the Jewish settler project in Palestine. That project would inevitably arouse the enmity of the natives, who would naturally bristle at their displacement and the negation of their national aspirations. A Western backer would be vital to the project’s success, and Israel would return the favor by countering forces that opposed its sponsor’s interests in the region.

Israel, of course, isn’t the West’s only choice as proxy in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Washington could look to Arab states to help police the Middle East and assert US profit-making and strategic interests in the region. Indeed, Washington has done this, establishing relations with a series of royal and military dictatorships, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait.

The trouble is that US support in the Middle East is largely limited to the autocrats Washington helps keep in power over the opposition of their populations. It would be difficult for US-backed Arab despots to mobilize their countries against other Arabs and Muslims, specifically Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Ansar Allah in Yemen—states and movements which reject US domination of the Middle East. US-backed autocrats command little support at home. Their populations are imbued with nationalist aspirations, and unlike Israeli Jews, reject the idea that the region ought to be subordinate to US leadership. Tel Aviv, in contrast, can mobilize Israeli Jews against Arabs and Muslims, who are viewed as hostile barbarians, embittered against Israel, and bent on eliminating the Jews as a people.

To put it another way, Israeli Jews, who largely see themselves as Westerners, identify with the Western world and its project of imposing US leadership on the globe, including on the energy-rich and therefore strategically important Middle East; Arabs and Iranians are far less likely to share this view. Native states are, thus, poor choices as effective proxies for US interests in the Middle East. Israel, which sees itself as the West’s outpost in West Asia and North Africa, is, in contrast, a superb choice, motivated to cooperate with the US agenda by its security concerns which can only be satisfied by the United States and its Western partners and a common Western culture and commitment to the ideas of manifest destiny, Western superiority, and the desirability of US global leadership.

Mearsheimer has been known to reply to challenges to his view by asking, “Then why does the lobby exist?” The fact of the existence of an organization with a specific aim is hardly evidence that the organization has achieved its aim. The Democratic Socialists of America exist as an organization to bring socialism to the United States. Is the United States socialist?

The reason the Israel lobby exists is to shape public opinion, media coverage, intellectual discourse, and the research agendas and curricula of the universities and schools, and where public opinion cannot be manipulated to Israel’s advantage, to discourage elected representatives from responding to public opinion by initiating legislation or government action that could interfere with Washington’s accustomed support of its Israeli client. The lobby, as Shoup points out, is largely focused on electoral contests, not on twisting the arms of the unelected Wall Street-connected personnel who occupy the consequential foreign policy roles in the state—the secretaries of state, defense, treasury, chief of the CIA, and UN ambassador, and their phalanx of deputies and undersecretaries—all of whom are largely removed from the influence of public opinion. The role of the Israel lobby is, in short, to persuade US society and its elected representatives to accept US support of a client in the Middle East whose conduct is likely to inflame public opinion against it.

The idea that the Israel lobby is able to shape all of US foreign policy, as Mearsheimer contends, is, to use one of his favorite locutions, just not a serious argument. The idea that the Israel lobby causes US decision-makers to put Israeli interests ahead of US interests, fails to grasp (i) the complementarity of the two country’s interests; (ii) the trouble that local forces of independence and national assertiveness in the Middle East can create for US ruling class interests in the region; and (iii) the role Israel plays as the “rock, an extension of the West, against which the waves of… Arab [and Muslim] nationalism will be broken,” as Moshe Dayan, an Israeli chief of defense staff, minister of defense, and minister of foreign affairs, once put it.

Mearsheimer’s view comes perilously close to the idea that a cabal of rich Jews and their Christian Zionist friends pull the strings in Washington, diverting the country’s government from pursuing US interests to pursuing Jewish Zionist interests in the Middle East. Some might say the Marxist view is hardly different; it too attributes US foreign policy to a cabal, except, in this case, a cabal of Wall Street financiers. While it might seem on the surface that this is so, the Marxist view sees US foreign policy as reflecting the character of US society—one devoted to capitalism, indeed, thoroughly dominated by it, where the idea that billionaires, wealthy investors, and top-level corporate executives exercise considerable sway over almost every aspect of US society, including public policy, is almost axiomatic. As a 2014 study of over 1,700 US policy issues by the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page showed, “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.” The Council on Foreign Relations is only one of many instruments the US ruling class uses to influence public policy. It also funds the political campaigns of candidates that will support pro-business policies; donates to universities to shape their research agendas and influence who they hire and fire; owing to its significant wealth, lobbies the legislative and executive branches of government to a degree which unions, working people, and grassroots groups, which command significantly less wealth, are unable to do; and owns and controls the mass media, allowing it to shape public opinion and set the public policy agenda. The US ruling class uses all of these mechanisms to influence US foreign policy and tilt it in favor of US ruling class interests. The Marxist view, thus, holds that a class, not a cabal, pulls the strings in Washington, using its ownership and control of the economy to fund political campaigns, lobby government, and shape the public discourse, in its interests.

In contrast, Mearsheimer’s view is hardly different from the idea that a cabal of wealthy Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians has hijacked the US state in order to use it to serve the interests of Jews in Israel at the expense and to the detriment of the citizens of the United States. This view shares similarities with reactionary views that date as far back as 1789 and continued into the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century–ideas about conspiracies of wealthy Jews operating in the background to pull strings and shape world politics to the benefit of Jews and at the expense of everyone else. If wealthy Jews were once thought by reactionaries to be behind everything they hated–the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, international capitalism–they have become, in Mearsheimer’s hands, the reason why the United States supports Israel; in other words, they have been made to reprise their role as scapegoats.

Israel is a Class Issue

The Israel Lobby and the US Foreign Policy Establishment Are Largely the Same, Reflecting the Complementarity of US Elite and Israeli Colonial Settler Interests

Israel is a Class Issue

The Israel lobby is run by the same people who hold enormous sway over public policy, the universities, and the mass media: the corporate elite

May 16, 2024

Updated May 17, 2024

By Stephen Gowans

Political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt believe Israel is a US foreign policy liability, and that the only reason Washington strongly backs the Zionist state is because US decision-making has been hijacked by a powerful Israel lobby that is able to use its vast resources to severely punish politicians and decision-makers who fail to support Israel. US politicians and cabinet officials, in their view, recognize that support for Israel is inimical to US foreign policy interests but support Israel anyway for fear of running afoul of the powerful Israel lobby.

A recent study by Laurence H. Shoup in Monthly Review shows that the organizations Mearsheimer and Waltz identify as the Israel lobby are largely led by the same wealthy patrons who lead the United States’ premier foreign policy think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The think-tank is directed by the colossi of Wall Street.

Wall Street, the Israel lobby, the CFR, the boards of universities and large mass media companies, are all interconnected as part of the same moneyed class.

The CFR regularly places its members in the top foreign policy cabinet positions. The current secretaries of state, defense, and treasury are members of the Wall Street-directed group, as well as Biden’s national security adviser, the director of the CIA, and the US ambassador to the UN.

Hence, the people who occupy the commanding heights of the US business world lead both the Israel lobby and the US foreign policy think-tank which supplies the personnel to staff the key foreign policy posts in the US government. Washington is unreservedly pro-Israel, because Wall Street is.

To illustrate the point, The New York Times reported on May 15 that “Wall Street’s big donors” are turning away from Biden owing to their “growing dissatisfaction with what [the donors] see as the White House’s hardening stance against Israel in its war on Gaza.” Biden’s pausing (not cancelling) a shipment of 2,000 lb. bombs in an effort to dissuade Israel from launching a major assault on Rafah (which was soon followed by Biden approving a major transfer of other arms to Israel), and the United States abstaining from a UN vote censuring Israel for its conduct in Gaza, hardly amount to much of a hardening stance against Israel. All the same, many “big donors are put off by [what they see as Biden’s] softening support for Israel,” the newspaper reports.

Today, the web site Responsible Statecraft posted an investigation, “Biden’s Gaza policy risks re-election but pleases his wealthiest donors“, which reveals that “over one third of the president’s top funders – those giving in excess of $900,000 to the Biden Victory Fund—appear to see little nuance in the conflict [between Israel and the Palestinians] and show overwhelming sympathy for Israel, at times verging into outright hostility to Palestinians and anti-Muslim bigotry.”

In contrast, a poll sponsored by The New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer has found that young and non-white voters are also turning away from Biden, albeit for the opposite reason: Because they deplore his support for Israel.

On May 16, The Washington Post revealed that a group of approximately 100 “billionaires and business titans” was “formed shortly after the Oct. 7” revolt in order “to ‘change the narrative’ in favor of Israel, partly by conveying ‘the atrocities committed by Hamas … to all Americans.’” The group’s self-stated mission was to “’help win the war’ of U.S. public opinion by funding an information campaign against Hamas.”

The group was formed by “billionaire and real estate magnate Barry Sternlicht.” The Post cited a November report from the news site Semafor “that Sternlicht was launching a $50 million anti-Hamas media campaign with various Wall Street and Hollywood billionaires.”

The group includes “former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital and brother to Jared Kushner, former president Donald Trump’s son-in-law.”

The business titans also include “Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik and real estate investor Joseph Sitt” who met with New York City mayor Eric Adams to pressure him to deploy the police to clear the anti-genocide encampment at Columbia University.

The obvious conclusion is that the US capitalist class—the country’s billionaires and top-level executives—are decidedly pro-Israel, while the rest of the population is either less so, or strongly opposed to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. To put it another way: Wall Street supports the genocide (and therefore so too does Washington) while many ordinary Americans are appalled.

Since the capitalist class holds enormous sway over public policy—through its funding of political campaigns; by underwriting think-tanks to recommend public policy; by placing its representatives in key positions in the state; by donating to universities to shape their research agendas and influence who they hire and fire; by means of its extensive lobbying of the legislative and executive branches of government; and by its control of the mass media—it is inevitable that public policy will reflect the corporate elite’s strong backing of Israel.

Saying, as Mearsheimer and Walt do, that the Israel lobby shapes US foreign policy conceals a more important truth. Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests both strongly support Israel and shape US foreign policy. The Israel lobby predisposes Washington to support Israel only so far as the lobby is part of, and directed by, a capitalist class that leans strongly toward the Zionist state and has the resources and connections to strongly influence US foreign policy positions.

A 2014 study of over 1,700 US policy issues by the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page found 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.”

The Israel lobby has a substantial impact on government policy because it is run by economic elites and organized business interests and because these elites are strongly pro-Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt call the Israel lobby powerful, but don’t inquire into the source of its power. The lobby is powerful because it is handsomely funded. The only class in a position to handsomely fund a lobby to make it powerful enough to decisively shape public policy is the class of top-corporate executives, financiers, and billionaire investors.

So, why is the US capitalist class overwhelmingly supportive of Israel?

Among members of the US economic elite, support for Israel may derive in some cases from Zionist convictions (either Christian or Jewish), but Zionist beliefs are far less important as the basis for pro-Israel views among members of the US capitalist class than is elite consciousness of the reality that Israel serves their class interests in an economically rich and strategically significant part of the world. US control of Middle Eastern oil provides corporate America with a rich source of profits. It also gives the corporate elite leverage over its business rivals in Europe, Japan, and China, who depend critically on Middle Eastern petroleum resources for survival. Israel helps Washington control the Middle East in a way no other state in the region is able to do.

Arab nationalist leaders have always been clear about why the US capitalist class supports Israel unreservedly. Israel is a watchdog, a snarling beast, “a dagger pointed at the heart of the Arab world,” that Washington uses to hold Arab and Muslim nationalist forces in check, to ensure the vast economic and strategic prize of Middle Eastern oil remains under the control of corporate America’s political servants in Washington and their Arab satraps, the kings, emirs, sultans, and military dictators who, to a man, loath democracy, and collaborate with Wall Street-backed US power against the ordinary people of the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Middle Eastern oil is not a prize corporate America is willing to yield to local forces of independence and national assertiveness. In return for Washington supporting Israel in carrying the Zionist project forward, Israel helps look after corporate America’s interests in the Middle East. It’s a mutually beneficial pact of Jewish nationalist forces collaborating with US business interests to keep the Arabs and Iranians down, the Americans in charge, and the Israelis supplied with arms and diplomatic support to enforce their regime of Jewish supremacy in the Levant.

The Politics of Defining Antisemitism

May 2, 2024

By Stephen Gowans

Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Education Department to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism when enforcing federal antidiscrimination laws.

The IHRA defines the following as an example of “antisemitism in public life”: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

In connection with this, it should be noted that, “the Jewish people” do not have a right to self-determination senior to, or negating, the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination on the historic territory of the Palestinians.

Israel, exercising de facto control over the traditional territory of the Palestinians from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, by the force of arms largely supplied by the United States and Germany, is an apartheid, racist, state, which enforces Jewish supremacy over the native Palestinian population. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, and other human rights organization have characterized Israel as an apartheid state.

Political Zionism, which elevates the interests of Jewish settlers above those of Palestinian natives in historic Palestine, is a racist doctrine.

Political Zionism has, from its inception, been a movement which has openly solicited the support of great powers in exchange for acting as their client and proxy in West Asia and North Africa against the interests of the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Political Zionism, Israel, and the settler colonial project in the Levant, are the instruments of great powers, and most especially, since 1967, the United States. They could not exist without Washington’s ironclad support. In return, they help keep Arab and Muslim nationalist forces in check in order to safeguard US domination of West Asia and its petroleum resources and key energy supply routes.

The IHRA does not deny that the State of Israel is a racist endeavor; it only seeks to discredit those who say it is, by labelling them antisemites.

The IHRA is far from a neutral organization. It is a political animal which represents the combined interests of the United States and its key allies, and their client, Israel, whose aim it is to police criticism of Israel and the US-backed settler colonial project in the Levant under the guise of combatting anti-Jewish racism and promoting remembrance of the Holocaust.

The IHRA and its supporters are keen to foster remembrance of the anti-Jewish genocide and are equally keen to suppress opposition to what the International Court of Justice has judged to be the plausible possibility of an Israeli-perpetrated genocide in progress against the Palestinians.

Whether the Israeli military assault on Palestinians in Gaza, on civilian infrastructure, and efforts to starve the population, along with the pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank, rise to the ICJ definition of genocide, it is clear that key Israeli decision-makers and Israeli soldiers have expressed genocidal intent and that the Israeli military campaign in Gaza is undeniably one of massacre.

The IHRA lists many examples of what it says is antisemitism but the list is open; the organization says there are other examples, which it does not enumerate. This allows the definition to expand in order to traduce critics of Israel and political Zionism’s racist settler colonial project as circumstances demand. Doubtlessly, the IHRA definition will be used, and probably already has been, to define the designation of Israel as a state plausibly carrying out a genocide as an act of anti-Jewish hatred.

Apart from the problem of the IHRA definition’s manifest political intent to intimidate critics of Israel into silence, is its logical flaw. The definition illegitimately conflates Jews and Judaism with Israelis and Israel—not all Jews are Israeli, and many Jews reject any identification with the state—so that criticism of the Zionist project is dishonestly equated to hatred of Jews. The description of Germany from 1933 to 1945 as a racist, imperialist, state, bent on genocide, hardly amounts to hate speech against Germans. By the same principle, the description of Israel as a racist endeavor, carrying out a plausible genocide against a people it has been trying to erase since 1948, is not hate speech against Jews; it is criticism of Israel and its racist project.

Israeli officials employ the legerdemain favored by the IHRA to shelter the state from criticism and opposition. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, is apt to defend every Israeli crime by labelling opposition to them as an assault on “the world’s one and only Jewish state”, as if criticizing Israel for a plausible genocide, or its apartheid, amounts to criticism of Jews as a people. Zionists would dearly love to be the spokespersons of the Jewish people, but the position is a self-appointed one, and the United States and Israel’s other patrons participate in the deception. Just as the Nazis appointed themselves as spokespeople for the Germans, over the opposition, it might be noted, of many million Germans, so too do the Israeli clients of the United States affect to be the spokespeople for the Jews (over the opposition of many Jews.).

Sadly, the frequent abuse of the word “antisemitism” for the political gain of Israel and its great power patrons, debases efforts to combat genuine anti-Jewish hatred. Stretch a definition too far, and it becomes meaningless. Still, in their zeal to defend settler colonialism in the stolen country of the Palestinians, the Zionists and their great power patrons will stop at nothing, including turning the concept of antisemitism into a politicized slur. In so doing, they impede sincere efforts to combat genuine antisemitism.

This, however, is consistent with the fundamentally antisemitic character of Zionism, a doctrine which:

a) denigrates the fight against antisemitism as pointless, since, in the Zionists’ view, hatred of Jews is ineradicable;

b) promotes the view that to secure themselves against the ineradicable antisemitism of non-Jews, Jews must emigrate from the countries in which they now live to take up residence in the Jewish state erected on the stolen land of the Palestinians;

c) defines Jews as members of a nation, rather than followers of a religion.

Points (b) and (c) are consonant with the antisemites’ belief that Jews are aliens, a nation within the nation, who must emigrate from the lands in which they live.

Thus, apart from the racism inherent in Zionism as a doctrine of Jewish supremacism in the stolen country of the Palestinians, Zionism also rejects the project of combating antisemitism and shares with antisemites their core beliefs.

Israeli election makes it difficult to deny the character of Israel as a racist state

September 20, 2019

Mainstream Western newspapers would never brand Israel as a racist state, a reality which says more about the nature of Western newspapers than about the character of Israel. But occasionally newspapers in the West do make observations which reveal the racist character of Israel, if the observations are placed within the context of liberal democracy and are compared with what is formerly tolerable within such countries as the United States and Canada.

In a September 19 report on the Israeli election, The Wall Street Journal observed that “Mr. Netanyahu and other politicians have framed Arab-Israeli politicians as enemies who would undermine Israel’s…Jewish character.”

While the statement may clearly reveal Netanyahu’s narrow racism, the broader racism of the Israeli state may not be immediately apparent. But it becomes evident if it is placed within the framework of US or Canadian politics. Imagine the parallel of white US politicians framing black US politicians as enemies who would undermine the United States’ white character, or of a Roman Catholic Canadian politician framing a Muslim politician as an enemy who would undermine Canada’s ‘commitment to Western (i.e., Christian) values.’

Formally, the United States is a state of all its citizens, not a state of white people. Formally, Canada is a state of all its citizens, not a state of the English or of Christians. In contrast, Israel is not a state of all its citizens, but one in which Jews have priority. Netanyahu makes no apologies for this, and nor do most Jewish Israelis.

Netanhyahu’s equivalent in the United States, namely, US politicians who would identify their ‘whiteness’ as a significant political category, brand black politicians as enemies, and seek to defend the ‘white character’ of the United States, would quite rightly be denounced as racists. They would almost certainly be open or covert members of the KKK, or open or covert admirers.

Likewise, the notion that the ‘white character’ of the United States must be preserved would be clearly recognized as a white supremacist concept and anyone who spoke of, or even hinted at ‘the white character’ of the United States as a normative idea would be justifiably censured as an intolerable racist whose views must be immediately renounced and corrected. Why then would the parallel view of the Jewish character of Israel as a normative concept, when expressed by Israelis or their supporters, not be denounced as racist?

The New York Times has often dismissed as unthinkable the prospect of Palestinian refugees exercising their right, under international law, to return to the homes from which they were driven or fled on what is now Israeli-controlled territory. The “refugees number in the millions, and their return,” explained David M. Halbfinger in a 2018 article, “would probably spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state.” In other words, Palestinians cannot be repatriated otherwise the ethnic character of Israel as a Jewish state will be undermined.

This is not unlike justifying an immigration policy that bars the entry of non-whites into the United States on the grounds that the influx of millions of dark-skinned people would threaten the United States as a white state, or bars Muslims in order to preserve ‘the Christian character’ of the country. Such a policy would be recognized as racist in the US or Canadian contexts, so why would the parallel policy in the Israeli context not be branded as racist as well?

The case is made stronger, if we acknowledge that the parallel is imperfect. Unlike prospective immigrants to the United States, the Palestinians are natives of the territory to which they seek entry, not aliens. They have a right to be there, and many of them are not there, because the founders of the Jewish state organized a program of demographic engineering to create an artificial Jewish majority (that is, to create a state with a Jewish character) by ethnically cleansing a large part of the Palestinian homeland. The current caretakers of the state preserve the outcome of the founders’ demographic aggression by denying the Palestinians’ their UN-mandated and UN-enjoined right of repatriation.

Hence, the Israeli policy of denying natives repatriation to their own land in order to preserve the ethnic character of Israel as a Jewish state is indefensible on multiple grounds.

It defines the natives (Palestinians) as aliens and the aliens (Jewish immigrants who carried out the ethnic cleansing and their descendants) as the natives.
It violates international law.
It preserves the outcome of a program of ethnic cleansing.
It is racist.

Calling out Israel as a racist state is countered by Israel and its supporters by the levelling of accusations of anti-Semitism against anyone who dares to proclaim the obvious. Indeed, in some circles, defining as racist the notion that Israel ought to have a Jewish character is defined as anti-Semitic. This exercise in casuistry rests on the logical error of equating Zionism with Judaism, so that criticism of Zionism becomes construed as criticism of Judaism and Jews.

But by this logic anyone who decried the racism of apartheid South Africa or white supremacist Rhodesia, or decries the KKK as white supremacist, is anti-white. And by the logic that undergirds the Zionism equals Judaism formula, all whites are supporters of the KKK and apartheid South Africa, so that anyone who denounces the KKK or racist South Africa denounces whites as a category.

Imagine a definition of anti-white racism as denial of the Afrikaners’ right to a white settler state in southern Africa on the stolen land of the natives. If you can imagine this, then you’ve imagined the growing practice of formally defining anti-Zionism as an element of anti-Semitism. Denial of the Afrikaners’ right to a white settler state in southern Africa on the stolen land of the natives is also the denial of apartheid South Africa’s right to exist, and is equivalent to denying Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state on the stolen land of Palestinians. To deplore racism while at the same time proclaiming Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is to deplore racism except when it is exercised by Zionists. By what logic is the racism of Zionism uniquely exempted as an instance of racism? By no logic at all, and instead by:

The illogic that holds that because Jews were the victims of a crime of great enormity perpetrated, not only by the Nazis, but by their European collaborators, that the actions of a state claiming to talk in the name of the Jews are beyond reproach.
The politics of power by which the United States defends Israel and allows it a free hand because it collaborates in the defense and promotion of US economic and strategic interests in the petroleum-rich Middle East.
Calumniating as an anti-Semite anyone who insists that Zionism is a form of racism.

Pointing out that Israel is a racist state that does not have a right to exist as an ethnic state for the Jews, nor as a settler colonial state whose Jewish majority is a product of demographic engineering, is not anti-Jewish racism; on the contrary, denunciation of any kind of ethnic privilege is not inherently hostile to the ethnic communities that seek it. It is, instead, inherently inimical to the assignment of rights, obligations, and privileges on the basis of ethnic hierarchies; that is, it supports universal equality and freedom from racist oppression.

Political Zionism, the ideological basis of the Israeli state, originated in an attempt to find a solution to anti-Jewish racism through separation. The trouble is that it did so by mimicking nineteenth century European nationalism, with all its racist underpinnings, and rejecting the growing movement for universal equality, which saw the solution to racism, including that of an anti-Jewish stripe, in the building of non-ethnic states of equality for all, regardless of one’s race, religion, language, and ethnicity, as well as one’s sex or possession of property. Jews were an important part of the movement for universal equality, and remain so today.

Indeed, Michael Oren, formerly an Israeli ambassador to the United States, identifies the Jewish community in the United States as belonging to the latter tradition of universal equality in contrast to Israeli Jews, who have embraced the former, Jewish nationalist solution to anti-Jewish racism. The Jewish nationalist solution is an anti-Arab racist solution to anti-Jewish racism of European origin, or of getting out from beneath one’s own oppression by oppressing someone else. The idea is inherently supremacist in defining the welfare of Jews as superior to that of Palestinians so that the welfare of Palestinians can be sacrificed in the service of the welfare of Jews. In this view, Jews and Palestinians are not equal; instead, Jewish rights trump Palestinian rights.

“The American Jewish idea is fundamentally different from the Jewish Zionist idea,” Oren told The Wall Street Journal. “The American Jewish idea is that Judaism is a universal religion, that we are not a nation or a people, that our duty is to all of humanity, and that America is the promised land, and that the Land of Israel is not the promised land,” he said.

“That fundamental gap, he added, has prompted many Israeli right-wing politicians to essentially give up on liberal American Jews and focus on friendlier constituencies such as evangelicals.” Significantly, US evangelicals, including US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, embrace Christian Zionism, the idea that the ingathering of Jews to Israel fulfills a biblical prophesy. In their view, by supporting Israel as a state with a Jewish character—that is, by colluding in racism—they’re abiding by their deity’s will.

Zionism is largely misunderstood as an exclusively Jewish ideology, when it has always also been strongly a Christian ideology, whose principal supporters have been officials of imperial states who read their bibles. This was as true in the early twentieth century when such statesmen as Arthur Balfour in England and Woodrow Wilson in the United States found support for the fledgling political Zionist movement in their reading of the bible, as it is today. Last year, Pompeo told a reporter for The New York Times Magazine that the Bible “informs everything I do.” The reporter noticed an open Bible in his office, with a Swiss Army knife marking his place at the end of the book of Queen Esther.” In the bible’s telling of the tale, Queen Esther saved Jews from being massacred by Persia (Iran’s forerunner.)

At the same time, historically, the movement for universal equality attracted Jews at a rate far in excess of their numbers in the population. As Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi wrote, Jews who fought alongside non-Jews in the struggle against racism and for universal equality “refused to limit their concerns to their own tribe. Theirs was a grander, purer dream. Salvation not just for Jews, but for the whole of humanity, and that would eliminate the ills of the Jewish condition once and for all.”

On the one hand, a pure and grand vision, dating from the French Revolution, of Liberté, Equalité, Fraternité, and the universalist idea of a state of all its citizens; on the other, the particularist idea of the ethnic state for Jews, made possible by the demographic engineering of a Jewish majority, obtained by the expulsion of the natives and denial of their repatriation, and the exercise of a racist regime over the natives who weren’t dispossessed; in short, the idea of universal equality versus the conservative tradition of hierarchy, racism, colonialism, and religious bigotry. To criticize Israel and Zionism is not to hate Jews, but to deplore the conservative tradition of ethnic privilege, racism, and colonialism from which Israel sprang and which it continues to exemplify.

Israel, A Beachhead in the Middle East

From European Colony to US Power Projection Platform

Available June 1, 2019

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One US military leader has called Israel “the intelligence equivalent of five CIAs.” An Israeli cabinet minister likens his country to “the equivalent of a dozen US aircraft carriers,” while the Jerusalem Post defines Israel as the executive of a “superior Western military force that” protects “America’s interests in the region.” Arab leaders have called Israel “a club the United States uses against the Arabs,” and “a poisoned dagger implanted in the heart of the Arab nation.”

Israel’s first leaders proclaimed their new state in 1948 under a portrait of Theodore Herzl, who had defined the future Jewish state as “a settler colony for European Jews in the Middle East under the military umbrella of one of the Great Powers.” The first Great Power to sponsor Herzl’s dream was Great Britain in 1917 when foreign secretary Sir Arthur Balfour promised British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

In 1967 Israel launched a successful war against the highly popular Arab nationalist movement of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, the most popular Arab leader since the Prophet Mohammed. Nasser rallied the world’s oppressed to the project of throwing off the chains of colonialism and subordination to the West. He inspired leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Muammar Gaddafi.

Viewing Israel as a potentially valuable asset in suppressing liberation movements, Washington poured billions into Israel’s economy and military. Since 1967, Israel has undertaken innumerable operations on Washington’s behalf, against states that reject US supremacy and economic domination. The self-appointed Jewish state has become what Zionists from Herzl to an editor of Haaretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper, have defined as a watch-dog capable of sufficiently punishing neighboring countries discourteous towards the West.

Stephen Gowans challenges the specious argument that Israel controls US foreign policy, tracing the development of the self-declared Jewish state, from its conception in the ideas of Theodore Herzl, to its birth as a European colony, through its efforts to suppress regional liberation movements, to its emergence as an extension of the Pentagon, integrated into the US empire as a pro-imperialist Sparta of the Middle East.

Stephen Gowans is an independent political analyst whose principal interest is in who influences formulation of foreign policy in the United States. His writings, which appear on his What’s Left blog, have been reproduced widely in online and print media in many languages and have been cited in academic journals and other scholarly works. He is the author of two acclaimed books Washington’s Long War on Syria (2017) and Patriots Traitors and Empires, The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom (2018), both published by Baraka Books.

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