Western leaders stand by while the US has provided the bombs needed to destroy most of Gaza, concentrate two million of the population against an Egyptian wall, and kill over 30,000 people, the majority of which have been women and children. Last week’s US airdrops of 38,000 “meals” for 2 million starving people – starving because of our policy – is a bad joke.
Western leaders stand by as Israel conducts a straightforward expansion to what they tell themselves is unoccupied land, land they say God gave them to do with as they wish – and they wish to destroy all forms of non- Jewish life there. For this there is no punishment, only blessing and fulfillment of the law, made possible only by US weapons that have flowed freely, most of it funded by taxation and taxpayer debt.
Western leaders and their media are untouched by a US airman’s livestreamed self-immolation in protest of US support for Israeli- conducted genocide, collective punishment, calculated removal, extermination, and starvation of religious and ethnic groups.
The US Government has funded, is funding, and the Pentagon is surging the flow of arms and munitions, soldiers and contractors to Israel’s operation in Gaza – which is to say a genocide, collective punishment, calculated extermination and removal of a population for purely political and geographic gain. Nothing that Israel is doing in Gaza or the West Bank, or in southern Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East is improving Israel’s security. For a government to cultivate and channel fear and rage, among its own population and among its neighbors, in order to fight them, is a strategy doomed to failure in the long term, and we are witnessing that unfolding failure in real time today.
The nature of the dwindling choices remaining for Israel in Gaza are well described in a brilliant essay by Big Serge. He posits that “Israel is a Eschatological Garrison State…and a Settler-Colonial State.”
Without severe historical strain, we cannot call the US either of these, as a nation. But the leadership – the blob, the MICIMATT, the permanent bureaucracy, the swamp that inhabits Washington in order to spend money and make war of all kinds – we may classify this “government” as a Settler Colonial State, echoing Civil War themes, and 19th Century moves westward and outward, acquiring new states and dependencies in the wake of killing, assimilating and transferring native populations. Today, D.C. has spawned a new kind of ruling class – its sights set on overcoming a new brand of native – white rural Americans. They don’t have to be white, or rural – just skeptical of the ruling class.
From federal spending outposts in capital cities and locations throughout the domestic empire, federal beneficiaries, in terms of employment and pay, have become the local elites throughout the country. The richest counties tend to be those with the biggest federally contracted employers. No other class gets those benefits – state and federal subsidies for the poor only ensure and expand poverty; corporate farms rake in the bulk of farm subsidies and assistance as small farmers steadily decline, federal policy consumes small businesses, shrinks the middle classes, destroys small and regional banks, all by design. Subsidy of mass immigration is also a federal project, intended to serve the elites in power, and to grow the domestic garrison in a thousand ways.
Worthy Americans versus unworthy Americans is a shameful narrative we have seen before – but today it is the current government narrative. The Orwellian Newspeak known as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is its natural extension. We are seeing pushback, but it is far too late.
Framing an “enemy within” as sub-moral, effectively sub-human, entity, a single remaining sector of society where caricature and bald humor is not just in good taste, but mandatory – this is how it is always done by Settler Colonial States. It is congenitally impossible to integrate “those people” into the Blue Global vision held by the wealthy ruling class, these legitimate small-D democrats, these flag bearers of human rights and liberties, of equality. The promised land is for the deserving overclass, not to be wasted on the less “human” underclasses who do the productive work, but silently, eyes down. A mass chain gang – with “white and rural” holding the space for the future sub-citizen, wherever he and she may be found, regardless of epidermal tints or home of record.
In addition to the US Government’s Settler Colonialism at home, it has been necessary to also adopt the tactics and nature of the Garrison State – and from this we have the modern surveillance state, which extends to not just monitoring of locations, actions and intentions of average people, but the voracious business of shaping their very perceptions and thoughts, and manipulating “reality” in order to maintain state security. John and Nisha Whitehead have explained how this works; Cynthia Chung’s fascinating new trilogy shows how what our ruling classes have perfected abroad is also nearing perfection at home.
Big Serge, in the article quoted above, looks at the bad choices facing Zionists in Israel, as well as the bad choices facing the ruling class in the United States vis a vis Iran, and Kiev. The common thread here, beyond US funding for and sponsorship of the Zionist project, the Iran Project and Ukraine, is not race, or religion, but ruling class arrogance and path dependency.
There is another common thread, appalling and frightening, but undeniable. The Zionist project itself has been a mythological keystone for US foreign policy since the 1960s. US religious romanticization of Zionist Settler Colonialism in the 20th and 21st centuries, and the publicly promoted idea of a Garrison State in the Middle East serving US interests have paid dividends for the US oligarchy, and are promoted by every President and Congress. We can see this in neoconservative Vicki Nuland-Kagan’s decades of hate for all things Russia, and her armchair generalissimo act that never changes, and never gets old. Ukraine will be a new and larger “Israel” in the heart of Europe, they say. US Secretaries of State, as well as whole political classes, have lauded, embraced and tried to model what Israel does, publicly and privately, to its citizens and residents. While a religious influence in politics is strictly part of “white rural rage” here, our betters in Washington openly admire the discipline, population control, and surveillance tech of an angry “religious” state at constant war.
The 21st Century faces the menace of a United States elite with an ache for the 20th Century, deep in the grip of a Napoleonic fever dream. This problem of US misrule is not centered on Israel proper, but rather on US idealization of a Garrison State and the deep state’s preference for Settler Colonialism over a Constitutional Republic. Think “Single White Female,” the nation-state version.
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Israel’s reputation as a safe haven for the Jewish diaspora is collapsing, along with its economy, its brain trust, and any respect the rest of the world ever had for her. She is persona non grata in the civilized world of nations, and tomorrow will become completely irrelevant to the religious and secular alike. She will be forced to transform, probably painfully, in a way that concludes the Zionist experiment.
The US, on the other hand, is aspiring to make Israel “successful” in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. The US governing elites prop up ideas there, and here, that are not only evil, but unworkable and unnecessary – and there is no reverse gear. This too is doomed. As in Israel, Garrison State/Settler Colonialism will never be successful in America. Those who see it as a way of preserving elite gains and elite government will be disappointed, and ultimately swept away.
Meanwhile, until our governing elites reverse policy, no one is safe. Since there is no way they can reverse it, short of serious financial collapse or a defeat on various global battlefields – a defeat that shatters the federation and frees the various states and regions in North America – what can we do?
The war in Gaza – both the way it is being conducted and the purposes behind it – is something the US elites view in the same way they would a weekend how-to seminar they have sponsored. This worked, that didn’t. Risk analysis of a multi-faceted war on largely unarmed civilians – in an age where it takes a lot to shock the world – will be done. These lessons are being learned right now by the ruling class.
Murray Rothbard wrote in 1967 on what the US was becoming, vis a vis Israel.
If Israel has been the aggressor in the Middle East, the role of the United States in all this has been even more unlovely. The hypocrisy of the U.S. position is almost unbelievable – or would be if we were not familiar with U.S. foreign policy over the decades. When the war first began, and it looked for a moment as if Israel were in danger, the U.S. rushed in to avow its dedication to the “territorial integrity of the Middle East” – as if the borders of 1949-67 were somehow embalmed in Holy Writ and had to be preserved at all costs. But – as soon as it was clear that Israel had won and conquered once again, America swiftly shed its supposed cherished “principles.”
His prescient assessment: “Israel, therefore, faces a long-run dilemma which she must someday meet. Either to continue on her present course and, after years of mutual hostility and conflict be overthrown by Arab people’s guerrilla war. Or – to change direction drastically, to cut herself loose completely from Western imperial ties, and become simply Jewish citizens of the Middle East.”
Israel, as Settler Colonial and Garrison State, could choose to cut herself loose completely from Western imperial ties. That she does not – or cannot – reveals the true depth of US culpability for the ongoing Gaza genocide, what came before, and what will come after.