As I read and watched Israel attack Tehran, implementing Gaza-like tactics to attack key military officials and several nuclear scientists while they were at home, ensuring that their families also perished in the onslaught, it became increasingly evident that as people who wish to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, the United States of Israel (neé America) are no longer an entity we should tolerate.
Whether you believe that the US had long ago become intolerable as an empire or you believe that the nation is not to blame, but its government, which has for the longest time been in the control of neoconservative agents and AIPAC-funded, Israel-first political creatures, the question would most likely have is: Why now?
A good question, one that I have been ruminating on since the attack, and as more information came to light (Trump’s tweets, for one) and more “events” shattered Israel’s military stations and strongholds in Tel Aviv, the wholly inexcusable complicity of the American government (which I see as somewhat discrete from the empire) became more and more repulsive and a stain on the entire nation’s political apparatus and civil society.
Another question: Why America? Why not the entire Western hegemony and its various universally complicit and demonstrably flaccid network of “international” organisations (the UN, NGOs, etc) which continue to ensure that the “global south” continues to retain its colonial-era dependency on Western “developed” nations, hungering and pining for precious World Bank-IMF-ADB funding or their generous seal of approval when it comes to meeting meaningless milestones via the SDGs or MDGs.
Tools of empire, these, built to subjugate postcolonial populations on whose hard resources Western empire, power, and dominance were built. It is especially rich coming from the so-called “leader of the ‘free’ world”, the land of the free, home of the brave, the American delusion, especially so after the 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, and the implementation of the Patriot Act.
This is the same allegedly “free” country that has passed laws in 38 of its states discriminating against people who decide to boycott Israel. Same country with systemic racism (“get over it already,” their political class decry) only for RFK, Jr – currently heading the Department of Health and Human Services – to release an official statement recognising “antisemitism” as a veritable disease.
Same country that has allowed Israel to dictate its foreign policy at least since Netanyahu testified before Congress in 2002 promising peace and democracy in the Middle East if the US overthrows Saddam’s Iraqi government before he unleashes those fictional WMDs (as I like to expand it: weapons of mass distraction) and, if circumstantial evidence and a strong gut feeling are anything to go by, as far back as the assassination of JFK.
The Israeli lobby’s stranglehold on the American ruling class – politics and media – is self-evident to anyone except for those whose minds are too far propagandised to see the writing on the Wailing Wall. This makes it easy to for the Palestinian movement (and isolationist, anti-war Americans) to identify the primary villain in the struggle for freedom, be it from settler colonial entities like Israel or the American Israeli Political Acting Committee who stands as the primary funder of Israel loyalists and primaries (ie, funds the opposition to) anyone critical of said Zionist project.
But: maybe that’s too easy. Israel (all of it, not just its Bibi-led coalition) and its genocidal actions and rhetoric have long surpassed parody; they have become cartoonish caricatures of themselves, openly calling every Palestinian, children included, terrorists and/or terrorist adjacent.
To put the fanatical Israeli mindset into perspective: In a list published by the Gaza Health Ministry a few weeks ago which listed every confirmed death since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on the Strip post-October 7, the age of the victim in the first 14 pages of the list was 0.
Facts such as these, dehumanising rhetoric, full backing of the American superpower empire on top – how could Israel not be the villain?
Evil country, evil people, evil deeds: they must be the primary antagonist of this brutal saga, no?
First of all, the United States is the most powerful country to have existed in the history of the world; they are not victims, in the same way Israelis never are. I find no sympathy nor any excuse acceptable, especially after so many decades and in this age of live-streamed genocide, for the stupendous mental gymnastics required to allow, and then accept, the absolute blatant control the Israeli lobby has on American politicians.
Second of all, one of the primary ways we may be flawed in broaching the subject is to be viewing the US and Israel as separate nations (which they technically are). Instead, if we understand Israel to be the supremacist settler colonial project it is, we can understand it as a project of Western imperialism. In the same way that the United States committed genocide and ethnic cleansing in order to establish itself across the Americas (looking at you, Canada), Israel is a re-manifestation of the same elements.
The Israeli project is a Western project, and the colonial mindset struggles to understand the value of Palestinian lives, which can be frustrating for people fighting for the Palestinian cause. But if we understand the inherently white supremacist (yes, white, the Israelis are not semites; they are Europeans) nature of the Israeli-American alliance, then things become a tad bit clearer that Israel is not the primary “villain” of the story.
And, finally, if we look beyond the veil of both these things, the white supremacy and the American empire, what lies beyond is the military-industrial complex. At the end of the day, it is corporatism and capitalism at the helm, whose bottom lines are being constantly fed by the genocidal massacre of the Palestinians.
And it is not only the suffering of the Palestinians that the corporations feed on: multinational corporations across the world rely on their colonial legacies to suck out resources and fatten themselves up into the likes of BlackRock and Vanguard.
To repeat: America is not a victim of the Israeli lobby, nor is it merely complicit in the suffering we witness across the world, be it through the likes of NGOs and middlemen or the massacring of Palestinians. American corporations – along with their Western imperialist colleagues, allies, and friends – are directly responsible.
As such, when we practice BDS, being merely avoidant of Israeli products does little stop its relentless march, crushing the necks of Palestinians under their boots. This is a tall ask but we must avoid the American empire altogether: working with them, visiting them, using their products and services.
It is a relationship that can no longer be morally sustained, nor ethically excused.