As we noted, denial of reality on the left is a common reflex when faced with political events that contradict their political prejudices and negate their theories of how the world ‘ought’ to work. The Healyites’ denial that capitalism had been overthrown in Cuba in the early 1960s was a case in point. Another example is the numerous people on the left who insist, against overwhelming evidence, that Israel is a strategic tool of US imperialism in the Middle East, an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’, a strategic asset, a ‘guard dog’ for the United States whose purpose is to keep the oil producing Arab and Muslim countries of the region under the control of US imperialism. This notion has been struck a mortal blow by the current US imperialist war against Iran. It is clear as day that it has resulted in a strategic defeat for US imperialism that is the greatest in its history. One piece of contemporary evidence of this, authoritative in US imperialist terms, is the article in Foreign Policy: titled: Iran Is a Bigger Defeat Than Vietnam, which opines that “A war of choice has turned into a strategic disaster for Washington” and then goes on:
“At his second inaugural, U.S. President Donald Trump pronounced his hope ‘that our recent presidential election will be remembered as the greatest and most consequential election in the history of our country.’ By losing his Gulf war, Trump has achieved that goal. His choice to launch a campaign against Iran was encouraged by others, but fully his own. It has led to a reversal that marks a strategic calamity far greater than the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.” (https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/16/iran-vietnam-strategy-defeat/)
But the idea that anything Trump did or does is “fully his own” is fanciful. The whole saga of the attack on Iran illustrates that repeatedly. Trump’s decision to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran on 17th June could be said to be ‘fully his own’ but the MOU agreed to an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon”, and that the US and Iran “…undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon” (https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/17/trump-us-iran-memorandum-of-understanding-mou-deal-read-full-text/). It also clearly designated the responsibility for administering the Strait of Hormuz to Iran and Oman “…in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz” (ibid), which are Iran and Oman. But everyone knows that Israel refused point blank to implement such a withdrawal from Lebanon, and everyone also knows that on 7th July Trump tore up the MOU at the insistence of Israel. Instead, he attempted to ride roughshod over Iranian-Omani administration of Hormuz, re-igniting the war and firing missiles at Southern Iran, in response to which Iran’s armed forces further devastated US military bases particularly in Kuwait and Jordan. As well as missile-defence batteries and radars, Patriots and THAADs, some of which were moved from East to West Asia to bolster the war with Iran, somewhat contradicting the US’s other policy of using such means to ‘contain’ China, which much of the US ruling class would consider to be a key US strategic interest. The US has now come close to depleting its stock of missiles suitable for this conflict, as geopolitical analysts flagged months ago would happen, as well as driving the world economy to the brink of a major recession, if not depression. All this for a ‘war of choice’ for Israel. This is very far from a coherent imperialist strategy, more like a Kamikaze strategy.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that this war was started on Israel’s insistence on March 28th:
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties” (https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-critics-erupt-after-rubio-suggests-it-dragged-us-into-war-with-iran/)
and Vice President JD Vance has publicly lamented that Israel has driven this war – he is quoted by the BBC as telling Joe Rogan:
“Speaking on The Joe Rogan Experience, Vance said that people within the Israeli government have been trying to shift the US away from its efforts to negotiate with Iran.
“‘I definitely think you have seen this very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign to try to derail the negotiation and try to derail the deal,’ he said, adding there is ‘exact evidence’ that some Israeli leaders ‘hate the deal’.“ (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1m107yj327o)
This opens the lid publicly on divisions in the Trump administration, which are a microcosm of the kind of issues and division that have frequently cropped up in earlier contexts. They are particularly exacerbated because both Trump administrations ran on demagogic populist ‘America First’ rhetoric, whereas the real policy and programme of Trump’s administration has been ‘Israel First’. That contradiction is expressed sharply here. It’s rare to see such public counterpositions between a President and Vice-President of the US. This is the tip of a huge iceberg: not just the 28th Feb attack and murder of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and characteristic child killing atrocity at Minab, were driven by Israel. The 12-day war in June 2025 was a joint Israeli-US effort, as is well known, but the project of war against Iran is an Israeli project, and preceded the first Trump administration, let alone the second.
The war was a simple linear extension of the campaign waged by the Israel lobby in the US, to bring to power a much more servile asset of Israel. To carry out a number of policies that the Israel lobby had sometimes managed to get Congressional support for, but proven unable to simply persuade mainstream US imperialist leaders to implement. The most important in terms of Iran was tearing up the JCPOA, the deal which the Obama administration negotiated with Iran over nuclear enrichment during Obama’s second term. Netanyahu’s visit and speech at the joint session of both Houses of the US Congress in March 2015 was a key episode in this:
“His speech, a point-by-point critique of Obama’s strategy, drew 26 standing ovations in the Republican-controlled chamber.
“Netanyahu both inveighed against the emerging deal and suggested broadening the scope of negotiations to require a change to what he described as Iran’s ‘aggressive’ regional posture – an idea swiftly rejected by the Obama administration as de facto ‘regime change’ in Tehran.” (https://www.reuters.com/article/world/israels-netanyahu-draws-rebuke-from-obama-over-iran-speech-to-congress-idUSKBN0LZ0BR/)
It was described somewhat differently by Norman Finkelstein:
“When virtually every member of the US Congress acts like a broken Jack-in-the-Box, as they give an Israeli head of state, who has barged into the Capitol in brazen and obnoxious defiance of the sitting US president, one standing ovation after another, surely it is fair to ask: What the hell is going on here? (https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/finkelstein-on-corbyn-mania/)
Coming off this, the following year, Likud, personified by the Las Vegas Israeli-American gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson, funded Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign to the tune of $25 million. He:
“…told Donald Trump in May 2016 that he would spend more than he had in any previous campaign, raising the prospect of a donation exceeding $100 million. He eventually gave the Trump presidential campaign a smaller amount, but the $25 million donation was still the Trump campaign’s largest.
“However, following the election, he gave $5 million to the committee that organized the inauguration, and he and his wife had a front-row seat at the ceremony when Trump took the oath of office in January 2017.” (https://www.newsweek.com/sheldon-adelson-donald-trump-republicans-donations-1560883)
Then:
“The couple’s total contributions for the Republican cause in the 2020 cycle were $218 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, whose figures show that the couple has given nearly $524 million since 2010—$424 million since the start of Trump’s election campaign in 2016. The couple also gave millions over the years to pro-Israel organizations. (ibid)
And so, it goes on:
“For Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign alone, Adelson gave at least $100 million to support the Republican candidate with Super PAC she established, according to federal filings.” (https://www.commondreams.org/news/adelson-trump-four-more-years)
Even trying to overturn constitutional term limits:
“Billionaire Miriam Adelson on Tuesday night suggested the legal obstacles for President Donald Trump to serve an additional term in office after 2028 are not insurmountable as the far-right Republican megadonor vowed another $250 million to bolster a run that experts say would be unlawful and unconstitutional on its face.” (ibid)
Simply calling Miriam Adelson a ‘far right Republican megadonor” is disingenuous. Her, and her late husband’s, primary loyalty is/was to Likud, not the US Republicans. She wouldn’t be handing out funding to the likes of Thomas Massey, or Tucker Carlson, or Marjorie Taylor-Greene. The reason for these Likudniks’ largesse towards Trump was the policy gains that they wanted to achieve by helping put Trump in power. These were outside what the US bourgeois mainstream had previously been prepared to implement. Like junking Obama’s JCPOA agreement with Iran over nuclear enrichment. Like moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Like US recognition for Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights. The Jerusalem Embassy Act was passed in 1995, pushed through by legislators bribed and cajoled by the Israel lobby, but three two-term Presidents: Clinton, Bush and Obama, all kicked it into the long grass and conspicuously failed to implement it. It is highly symbolic, as the Palestinians claim Jerusalem as the capital of their putative state under the vaunted ‘two state solution’.
The logic of Trump’s junking of Obama’s JCPOA was a US-Israeli war with Iran. That is one reason why he got the Likud funding. The logic likewise of the Embassy move was a big “fuck you” to anyone seeking a two-state solution. The war itself was never carried out in Trump’s first term; they had to settle for the murder of Soleimani. All these things were laying the basis for open US support for genocide against the Palestinians. Which actually began under the Biden administration, which behaved like a cut down version of Trump, dancing to Israel’s tune on virtually everything. Biden’s administration succeeded in reversing nothing of the ‘gains’ that Israel had made in Trump’s first term. It sent huge quantities of arms and intelligence aid to Israel. It repeatedly vetoed ceasefire demands in the UN Security Council, and behaved like a less flamboyant version of the Trump administration. The ‘liberal’ refinements of Obama went by the board, and were noticeable by their almost complete absence.
But that is how bourgeois politics often works. A radical-right government that shifts politics sharply to the right is usually succeeded, when it is ousted in the ordinary course of bourgeois elections, by a craven successor that maintains most of the ‘gains’ from its reactionary predecessor. Thus, the Thatcherite Tory regimes in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s were succeeded by Blairism, representing “Thatcherism with a liberal face”. Biden’s regime was no different, and duly discredited itself with its outrageous conduct over Gaza and Ukraine, which in turn paved the way for Trump to return to power. The difference was that Thatcher (and Reagan in the US) represented neoliberal reaction as a homegrown faction in bourgeois politics, whereas Trump represented the Israel lobby, and used nationalist demagogy quite cynically to promote a far-right Zionist agenda. So, Biden’s administration capitulated wholesale to its ultra-Zionist predecessor and openly aided the genocide.
However, this is only the most recent and dramatic example of the activities of the Israel lobby in US politics, and indeed parallel phenomena have long been visible in Europe and the UK. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, two ‘realist’ bourgeois geostrategic intellectuals, made a celebrated study of this, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (2007). This book contains a wealth of evidence as to the role of the Israel lobby in influencing US foreign policy regarding West Asia. And US actions, that made considerable sense from the point of view of Israeli interests, but much less from the point of view of US interests, rationally understood.
This has a terrible logic, as from the point of view of US interests, understood in this way, such crucial historical crimes as the invasion of Iraq, and the current repeated armed attacks on Iran, make little sense. Indeed, insofar as they have damaged US imperialism’s power in the world, they could be viewed as in the medium to long term likely to bring some benefits for the working class and the oppressed of the world. At the same time, Israel has barbaric interests and objectives of its own which it has managed to enlist the help of US imperialism in carrying out. We have already dealt with this in terms of the role of such events as the US Embassy move to Jerusalem, the de facto approval of Jerusalem’s annexation which this involves, as being political preparations for the genocide and the US role in arming and assisting Israel to carry this out. I will cite two earlier examples, in reverse chronological order, first Iraq, and then Ariel Sharon’s invasion of the West Bank in 2002 during the Second Intifada, and then touch on the 1991 Iraq War.
Mearsheimer and Walt: Realpolitikers with a Rich Vein of Evidence
Regarding Iraq, it is simply worth quoting in full a section of Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s major work, from p250-253. I doubt if there is anyone around politically today, who is not some kind of neoconservative extremist, who would deny that the whole outcry about ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ used to justify invading Iraq in March 2003 was a hoax and a scandal. Here is the relevant section:
“FIXING THE INTELLIGENCE ON IRAQ
“A key part of the public relations campaign to win support for invading Iraq was the manipulation of intelligence information in order to make Saddam look like an imminent threat. Scooter Libby was an important player in this endeavour, visiting the CIA several times to pressure analysts to find evidence that would make the case for war. He also helped prepare a detailed briefing on the Iraq threat in early 2003 that was pushed on Colin Powell*, who was then preparing his infamous presentation to the UN Security Council. According to Bob Woodward*, Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage*, “was appalled at what he considered overreaching and hyperbole. Libby was drawing only the worst conclusions from fragments and silky threads.” Although Powell discarded Libby’s most outlandish claims, his UN presentation was still riddled with errors, as Powell now acknowledges.
“The effort to manipulate intelligence, which was then leaked to an alarmist prowar press, also involved two organizations that were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. The Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was tasked to find links between al Qaeda and Iraq that the intelligence community supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese American who had close ties with Richard Perle. The New York Times reporter James Risen writes that “Israeli intelligence played a hidden role in convincing Wolfowitz that he couldn’t trust the CIA,” and this dissatisfaction helped cause him to rely on Ahmed Chalabi for intelligence and to create the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group.
“The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was directed to find evidence that could be used to sell the war against Iraq. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neoconservative long associated with Wolfowitz, and its ranks included several recruits from pro-Israel think tanks, like Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute and Michael Makovsky, who had worked for then Prime Minister Shimon Peres after graduating from college. OSP relied heavily on information from Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles, and it had close connections to various Israeli sources. Indeed, the Guardian reported that it “forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam’s Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorize.” The Department of Defense’s inspector general released a report in February 2007 that was critical of OSP for disseminating “alternative intelligence assessments” that “were, in our opinion, inappropriate given that the intelligence assessments were intelligence products and did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the Intelligence Community.”
“The neoconservatives in the Pentagon and the White House not only relied heavily on Chalabi and his fellow exiles for intelligence about Iraq, they also championed him as Iraq’s future leader after Saddam was gone. The CIA and the State Department, on the other hand, considered Chalabi dishonest and unreliable and kept him at arm’s length. That severe judgment has now been vindicated, as we know that Chalabi and the INC fed the United States false information, and his relations with the U.S. occupation forces soon deteriorated, with Chalabi later being accused of providing classified information to Iran (a charge that he has denied). The neoconservatives’ hopes that he would be the “George Washington of Iraq” fared no better than their other prewar forecasts.
“So why did neoconservatives embrace Chalabi? The INC leader had gone to considerable lengths to establish close ties with individuals and groups in the lobby, and he had especially close links with JINSA, where he had been “a frequent guest at board meetings, symposia and other events since 1997.” He also cultivated close ties with pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC, AEI, the Hudson Institute, and WINEP. Max Singer, who helped found the Hudson Institute, described Chalabi as a “rare find. He’s deep in the Arab world and at the same time he is fundamentally a man of the West.” When an embattled Chalabi returned to give his eighth address to the AEI in early November 2005, that think tank’s president introduced him as a “very great and very brave Iraqi patriot, liberal and liberator.” Another big supporter of Chalabi was Bernard Lewis, who argued that the INC leader should be put in charge of Iraq after Baghdad fell.
“In return for the lobby’s support, Chalabi pledged to foster good relations with Israel once he gained power. According to Feith’s former law partner, L. Marc Zell, Chalabi also promised to rebuild the pipeline that once ran from Haifa in Israel to Mosul in Iraq. This was precisely what pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear, so they backed Chalabi in return. The journalist Matthew Berger laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal: “The INC saw improved relations as a way to tap Jewish influence in Washington and Jerusalem and to drum up increased support for its cause. For their part, the Jewish groups saw an opportunity to pave the way for better relations between Israel and Iraq, if and when the INC is involved in replacing Saddam Hussein’s regime.” Not surprisingly, Nathan Guttman reports that “the American Jewish community and the Iraqi opposition” had for years “taken pains to conceal” the links between them.
“The neoconservatives and their allies did not operate in a vacuum, of course, and they did not lead the United States to war by themselves. As emphasized earlier, the war would probably not have occurred absent the September 11 attacks, which forced President Bush and Vice President Cheney to consider adopting a radically new foreign policy. Neoconservatives like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who had been urging regime change in Iraq since early 1998, were quick to link Saddam Hussein with 9/11—even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved—and to portray his overthrow as critical to winning the war on terror. The lobby’s actions were a necessary but not sufficient condition for war.
“Indeed, Richard Perle made precisely this point to George Packer in a discussion about the role that the neoconservatives played in making the Iraq war happen. “If Bush had staffed his administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker,” Perle noted, “which might well have happened, then it could have been different, because they would not have carried into it the ideas that the people who wound up in important positions brought to it.” The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman offered a similar appraisal in May 2003, telling Ari Shavit of Ha’aretz that Iraq was “the war the neoconservatives wanted … the war the neoconservatives marketed … I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at the moment within a five-block radius of this office [in Washington, D.C.]), who, if you exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.” We agree completely with Perle’s and Friedman’s observations, while recognizing that it was a combination of individuals, ideas, and circumstances that came together to produce the ultimate decision for war.”
Since I have been smeared as anti-Semitic in a previous discussion for making factual statements about which wealthy bourgeois are Jewish, and in this passage, there is a list of 27 names, many of them high state officials and participants in a variety of organisations that were aiming to push the United States to invade Iraq, I will instead name the non-Jews in the passage. They are: Colin Powell, Bob Woodward, Richard Armitage, Michael Maloof, James Risen, Ahmed Chalabi, Saddam Hussein, Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker. Of those names, two are news reporters and the rest are either targets of the war being planned (Saddam Hussein) or not involved in the lobbying effort. Only Ahmed Chalabi and Michael Maloof of these were involved in lobbying for war on Iraq. Of course, it does matter that the majority of those involved in lobbying for this war of aggression had the right to Israeli citizenship, and in many if not most cases were prominent Jewish-Americans with Israeli citizenship. Because Israel has a project of destroying every Arab and Muslim state in the region capable of challenging its project of conquest of land and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and potentially thwarting their Greater Israel policy.
There is no rational interest of the United States in the ethnic cleansing or genocide of Palestine on its own account. Anyone who claims that there is has to answer the question: “Why Palestinians? Why not Algerians, or Vietnamese, or any of many other peoples?” The US committed many bloody atrocities in its war in Vietnam, but it did not attempt to expel the Vietnamese people from Vietnam. It was trying to crush a social revolution among the Vietnamese, not to steal the land of the Vietnamese people. Only Israel, and those loyal to it as their state, have a material interest in the destruction of the Palestinian people and potentially other Arab and Muslim peoples in West Asia in order to take their land for settlers. Smearing anyone for so-called ‘anti-Semitism’ for saying this is an expression of racist contempt for the targets of this policy.
This is also revealed by another episode dealt with by Mearsheimer and Walt in the aforementioned book. This concerns the interaction between the Bush administration, and Israel and its lobbyists over Ariel Sharon’s invasion of the West Bank in 2002:
“Although the American and Israeli positions were now converging, trouble between the two states erupted again in late March 2002, when a Hamas suicide bomber killed thirty Israelis at a Passover seder. The Palestinian Authority immediately denounced the attack and pledged to prosecute those responsible. But its dismal record of punishing militants left the Israelis cold; they had had enough. Sharon launched Operation Defensive Shield in which the IDF resumed control of virtually all of the major Palestinian areas on the West Bank.25 Bush knew right away that Israel’s action would damage America’s image in the Arab and Islamic world and undermine the war on terrorism, so he demanded on April 4 that Sharon ‘halt the incursions and begin withdrawal.’ He underscored this message two days later, saying this meant ‘withdrawal without delay.’ On April 7, Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told reporters that ‘`without delay` means without delay. It means now.’ That same day Secretary of State Powell set out for the Middle East to pressure all sides to stop fighting and start negotiating.” (from ‘The Lobby Humiliates Bush’, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, p208-211)
The response from the Israelis and their proxies is gone into in depth.
“The administration soon came under fire to adopt a different approach. A key target was [Colin] Powell, who was not only considered unsympathetic, if not hostile, to Israel, but was also planning to meet with Arafat during his Middle East trip. The secretary of state immediately began feeling the heat from staunch supporters of Israel in the vice president’s office and the Pentagon, who pushed Bush and Rice to abandon the effort to restrain Israel. Rice was constantly on the phone to Powell, sometimes sounding like she was giving him a ‘dressing-down.’ He believed that her concerns reflected ‘the views of somebody in the White House’.
“Neoconservatives in the media piled on Powell as well. Robert Kagan and William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard on April 11 that Powell had ‘virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists.’ The following day, David Brooks, then working for the Weekly Standard, described Powell’s trip on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as ‘a disaster as opposed to an unmitigated disaster.’ He went on to say that Powell ‘hurt U.S. prestige … shredded U.S. policy in the Middle East … and most importantly, he hurt our moral clarity.’ [Then out of office] Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was making Israel’s case in the United States at the time, said even before Powell arrived in Israel that his trip ‘won’t amount to anything.’ He was right: the balance of power inside the administration shifted against Powell so quickly and completely that his deputy in Washington called the secretary in Israel and told him, ‘I’m holding back the fucking gates here. They’re eating cheese on you.’ Powell later said that his trip to the Middle East was ‘ten of the most miserable days imaginable.’
“Powell got the message, as reflected in his behaviour at a joint press conference he held with Ariel Sharon before leaving Israel. ‘The Secretary of State’s language, body and verbal,’ John Simpson of the Sunday Telegraph wrote, ‘certainly were not that of the paymaster coming to call a client to account. Far from it. Mr. Powell seemed ingratiating, deferential; no doubt he realizes how much support Mr. Sharon has back in Washington and how much influence his friends have there with the President. Netanyahu’s prediction proved correct. Powell’s trip did not `amount to anything`.’
“A second target was Bush himself, who was being pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were especially outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott visited the White House on April 10 and personally warned Bush to back off. On the following day, according to Time magazine, ‘a group of Evangelical leaders led by the Reverend Jerry Falwell and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer sent Bush a letter demanding that the Administration `end pressure` on Sharon to withdraw from the West Bank. After Falwell adjured his followers to do the same, the White House was flooded with calls and e-mails. The next day, sources say, senior presidential aides phoned Falwell to reassure him that Bush stood behind Sharon.’” (ibid)
What is noteworthy is that the Christian-Zionists, far from signifying a means for the United States to exercise control over Israel, as Zionist apologists on the left maintain, in fact acted as auxiliaries of Israel and the Jewish-Zionists in humiliating the Bush administration and bringing it into line with Israel. What ought to be particularly notorious about this is that the Bush administration was far from being some bunch of Carter-esque liberals. They represented a strongly right-wing strand of US imperialism, authors of the ‘war on terror’, Guantanamo Bay, the USA Patriot Act, Extraordinary Rendition, you name it. But to the Israel lobby and their pet Christian Zionists, they were too soft on Palestinians. What this in reality signified is that Bush and co. understood that treating Palestinians in general as “terrorists” was not in US interests.
The result was predictable:
“A few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission in Israel publicly proclaimed that Sharon (who was then in Washington meeting with Bush) should resist the administration’s pressure to negotiate with Arafat. Then, on May 9, a House appropriations subcommittee met to consider giving Israel an extra $200 million to fight terrorism. The White House was opposed to the package and Secretary of State Powell took the lead and met with congressional leaders in an attempt to stop it. But the lobby backed it, just as it had helped author the two congressional resolutions. Powell lost and Bush reluctantly signed the legislation, giving Israel the money.
“Sharon and the lobby had taken on the president of the United States and his secretary of state and triumphed. Chemi Shalev, a journalist for the Israel newspaper Ma’ariv, reported that Sharon’s aides ‘could not hide their satisfaction in view of Powell’s failure. Sharon saw the white in President Bush’s eyes, they bragged, and the President blinked first.’ Indeed, Bush’s humiliation was not lost on commentators around the world. Spain’s leading daily, El País, expressed the views of many outside observers when it commented, ‘If a country’s weight is measured by its degree of influence on events, the superpower is not the USA but Israel.’ But it was pro-Israel forces in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the key role in thwarting Bush’s efforts to pursue a more evenhanded policy.” (ibid)
This is only a sample, as careful reading of the book reveals, numerous such episodes are dealt with, and it would be superfluous to reproduce them all here. It is worth examining how Mearsheimer and Walt, and some of the most capable left-wing commentators who concur with key elements of their analysis, see the relationship of Israel with US imperialism, when the facts, some of which are rendered above, contradict the notions of many of Zionism’s ‘left-wing’ apologists. These insist that Israel is a tool of US imperialism, but not an imperialist force in its own right, a mere guard dog, an unthinkable aircraft carrier without agency, etc. So, in a video discussion for The Grayzone in March 2026 to celebrate 20 years since Mearsheimer and Walt’s first essay in the London Review of Books on The Israel Lobby, Mearsheimer noted of the US:
“No matter what Israel does, we support it. This is truly remarkable. This tiny country has this outsized influence in the United States. But moreover, even if it was a big country, we can’t find a big country that’s ever had this kind of influence in the United States. You just don’t see it happen. And then the $64,000 question is, why does it happen? And people in the lobby like to argue it’s because Israel is a strategic asset. The fact is, as you well know, Israel is, if anything, a strategic liability. And then when that argument fails, people will say we’re doing it for moral reasons. That’s an almost impossible argument to make today. And it was an almost impossible argument to make when we made the argument in 2006 and 2007.It’s not for moral reasons or strategic reasons that we have this unparalleled relationship. It is, in large part, because of the power of the Lobby, which is truly remarkable. (the video and transcript of the relevant part of this event, the first one hour and twenty minutes, can be accessed here: https://www.consistent-democrats.org/the-israel-lobby-20-years-later-max-blumunthal-and-arron-mate-the-grayzone-discuss-with-john-mearsheimer/)
Max Blumenthal makes similar points in his introduction to this event, when talking about the Iran war:
“The reality as it is, is very unfavourable to the United States, less so to Israel. But for the United States empire, for Donald Trump, this is a losing war. Donald Trump has already lost the war politically. He has lost the war economically. And while the U. S. military has air power that is unrivalled in human history and can continue to pound Iran, even Trump himself has acknowledged they’re sort of out of targets.
They’re just bombing civilian areas now. It’s gratuitous, and they’re not achieving anything tactically. Israel’s another matter because Israel doesn’t function like an even remotely normal country. And Israel’s objective is actually being achieved not just tactically but strategically by keeping the US in the war, by keeping Donald Trump on an escalation ladder where he is moving towards, as some senators claimed coming out of the Gang of Eight briefing, the secret briefing they have with Marco Rubio and the National Security Council, that the U. S. is edging towards troops on the ground. So maybe there will be a Delta Force raid in the near future. That’s exactly what Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu want. They want US. boots on the ground. They want dead US soldiers, lots of them.
They want the US fully entrenched in the region indefinitely. They love seeing the US Reposition THAAD air defence systems from South Korea to defend Israel. They don’t want to pivot to Asia. They don’t want the US to take on major geopolitical rivals like China as much as they want the US to fall into this trap that has been laid by Israel for decades according to Netanyahu, sort of his 40-year plan. And that’s what I’m going to discuss with John Mearsheimer. Why was this war launched? Why are we even in this war that’s driving oil to over $100 a barrel that may drive oil to $200 a barrel? Who told Trump to initiate this war? It’s the lobby. It’s Israeli influence at its apex. (ibid)
And another prominent left-wing journalist and geopolitical analyst, Matt Kennard of Declassified, makes similar points again in an April 2024 interview with the Palestine Deep Dive channel, about Britain’s involvement in support for the genocide:
“…So, because the Israel lobby is out of control, they need a deterrent to stop people speaking out about it because the Israel lobby doesn’t want to be exposed. So, a very, very powerful deterrent is people don’t want to talk about the phrase Israel lobby because they’ll get accused of being anti-Semite, which is not a nice thing. No one wants to be accused of that, and it works. There’s no truth to it. It’s a propaganda technique. It’s a way of guiding the discourse away from discussions that you don’t want to be had, but we need to have that discussion now. And we need to have it in an unashamed way because it’s, in my opinion, the major reason that the UK is providing material support to a genocide is not because it’s in our state’s interest.
I don’t think our politicians are making decisions at all times based on the interests of the British public. I think they’re making them sometimes on the interests of the Israeli state. And as that showed in the case of Alan Duncan, when a foreign power overruled the decision of the British Prime Minister about who to appoint as a minister, that’s outrageous. And we need to really… That proves in itself, and there are many, many other examples that the situation is out of control.
Another major, major scandal, which was inflamed by the Israel lobby, was the antisemitism crisis during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. That was a partnership between the Israel lobby and also various sections of the British establishment that wanted to get rid of him. It wasn’t just the Israel lobby, but the Israel lobby was a major part of it. And that and Brexit were the two main reasons that Jeremy Corbyn didn’t become British Prime Minister. So, this is really serious interference in British democracy that we have. And we need to take it head-on and not be scared. And I do think, to be honest with you, I think something has changed. At Declassified, we were the only ones really talking and investigating the Israel lobby before the genocide. But I’ve seen a lot more people have courage now to… Like you said, some people didn’t even want to use the phrase. Maybe some people still don’t want to even use the phrase. But that is part of the way they control the debate.
If you’re scared to even mention something which is clearly the case, then you’ve got massive problems. So, we need to speak openly about it, and we need to say it is extraordinarily powerful. It’s not just like a lobby, like an Oman lobby or a Brazil lobby; it’s much, much more powerful. It has… the way they work, and you can be specific about it because it’s not a really an amorphous system; there are very specific institutions. The primary ones are Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel, neither of whom reveal their funders, but you can guess who their funders are; it’s not Oxfam.
[…]
“So, Labour Friends of Israel, Conservative Friends of Israel, the way they work is to cultivate the politicians from early in their careers. So, when they join Parliament, they take them on expenses-paid trips to Israel. And in fact, I found that during the Gaza attack in 2021, I did a story at that time; Boris Johnson was Prime Minister. I looked into the expenses, or sorry, the donations to all the ministers in his cabinet. And a third of Boris Johnson’s cabinet had received funding from Israel lobby groups or Israel itself. And it’s all early in their careers. So, Boris Johnson was paid by the Israeli Foreign Ministry to go to Israel. And Labour Friends of Israel…
“…the media generally follow the priorities of the state. And the state wants the media to investigate Russian interference, which does exist as well, but it’s not even anywhere near what the Israeli interference is. So, you get millions of stories about Russian interference, a lot of them bullshit, to be totally honest with you. Some of them true, I guess, and China now. But there’s no incentive for the media to look at the Israel lobby, because firstly, it’ll get attacked for the reasons we’ve talked about. And secondly, the state’s not behind you on that. The state doesn’t want to be exposed. I sent a tweet the other day because David Cameron was celebrating that he was cracking down on Chinese interference or cracking down on China after they’d tried to hack into different government computers.
And I said, well, that’s fine. Crack down on whoever you want. But why don’t you crack down on Israel? They are interfering in our democracy. They’re basically overruling decisions made by the Prime Minister. We can’t allow that. That’s an attack on our sovereignty.
[Question: “But why is the UK allowing it? Do you think that it’s in Britain’s interest to be a strong ally of Israel, After a genocide?”]
“No. I think it’s not. There’s two arguments for why. This goes for the US as well. Why do the US and the UK support Israel so loyally? One is that it has a geopolitical function and an imperial function. It’s a little imperial outpost in the Middle East. And the other one is that the political system has been captured by the Israeli state to work in the Israeli state’s interests through various lobby groups in the US, ones like AIPAC here.
“They were friends with Israel because they were friends with Israel. I think that the former one that serves an imperial function was maybe true for the early part of Israel’s history. In fact, there’s a quote from the former British Governor of Jerusalem where he says, this is before Israel was created, but they were saying, why do the British support Zionism? And they say, we want to create a Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism. So, the idea was that Arab nationalism could kick out the Brits and kick out the imperial forces. And they needed a little Jewish state. Ulster is what they call Northern Ireland. So, they needed a little Jewish state to maintain their supremacy of the whole Middle East. And so, I think that was true for a while, but now I don’t think that’s the case, and…
“John Mearsheimer, the academic, and Stephen Walt, his colleague; they wrote a book called The Israel Lobby. This is about the US, but I think it goes here where they say that they’re not leftists or anything. They’re realpolitik people. They’re called realists. But they want to look out for US interests. And they say it’s not in the US interest anymore to have this state. And the only reason we state that we basically sponsor, and they say the only reason they do it is because the Israel lobby is out of control. And they buy the politicians. And I think that’s the same thing here. And so to go to your… I think it’s not even just neutral, it’s negative for the British and the Americans now.
“They’ve got an absolutely out of control state committing a genocide. They’re turning the whole of the Arab world and further afield against the West. I think this is a turning point in world history, and they won’t pull the plug because the Israel lobby is too powerful.”
(Video and transcript can be reached at https://www.consistent-democrats.org/exposed-zionism-the-israel-lobby-and-the-uks-role-in-the-gaza-genocide-matt-kennard/)
Matt Kennard raises the crucial question when he says: “So, we need to speak openly about it, and we need to say it is extraordinarily powerful. It’s not just like a lobby, like an Oman lobby or a Brazil lobby; it’s much, much more powerful.” It is indeed “not just like a lobby”: it’s far more than that. Which really poses the question: “What is it?” which Matt Kennard doesn’t have an answer to. Mearsheimer does not have an answer to this either, as he says:
“Let me just start by talking about what the Lobby is. The lobby is a loose coalition of individuals and organizations. You were talking about the influence of AIPAC, and I think there’s no question that AIPAC is usually influential. But there are all sorts of other groups that wield a lot of power, and there are a lot of individuals who wield enormous power. Alan Dershowitz, for example; Bill Ackman, for example, I could go on and on. So, it’s individuals and organizations who work together in a very loose way to push the United States to support Israel unconditionally.
Now, it’s very important to understand that it is not a Jewish lobby, and that there are a significant number of Jews who find what the lobby is doing to be reprehensible. I often point out that almost all of our defenders when we wrote the Lobby article and then wrote the Lobby book were Jews. They weren’t the goys; the goys had their head down in the foxhole. We were defended by Jews. That included people like you, people like Glenn Greenwald, especially Tony Judt, and especially, especially Phil Weiss. So, it’s not a Jewish lobby. But there’s no question that there are a large number of Jews in that lobby who wield enormous influence. Furthermore, there are Christians or non-Jews who are powerful players in the lobby.
And I would include Mike Huckabee in that category or the Reverend John Hagee. These are very influential people who are basically Christian Evangelicals who are profoundly committed to Israel. And in some cases, those Christian evangelicals are more supercharged about supporting Israel than Jews in the lobby are. It’s really quite remarkable. And you see that when you listen to Mike Huckabee talk. So, the lobby is this loose coalition of individuals and organizations that is very effective at influencing US foreign policy. There’s just nothing like it, and that’s why Steve and I like to say that if you look at the historical record, there is simply no other case that even comes close to this one.” (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/the-israel-lobby-20-years-later-max-blumunthal-and-arron-mate-the-grayzone-discuss-with-john-mearsheimer/)
These descriptions make a mockery of the contention, which is common on the Ziophile left, that Christian Zionists are somehow the means by which US, or Britain, or other older imperialist powers control Israel as their ‘guard dog’, or some such. Matt Kennard rightly dismisses as way out of date the hope expressed by the British imperial governor of Palestine, Ronald Storrs, that the Zionist settlements would create a “Loyal little Jewish Ulster” for Britain. This was always delusional, and was buried at the King David Hotel in 1948. Just as the US version of this, that Israel’s is the US’s ‘Guard Dog’ was buried when Israel sank the USS Liberty during the 1967 War. Christian Zionist fanatics are just as much ‘out of control’ as the lobby generally. The observation that The Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee sounds like an Israeli Ambassador to the US, rather than a US Ambassador to Israel, springs from his endorsement of Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Which he calls “Judea and Samaria” like every self-respecting Jewish settler extremist. And even more his statement that Israel should be allowed to seize the whole of its projected Greater Israel, from the Nile to the Euphrates. This puts him way outside the framework of any kind of rational US Foreign Policy!
The time period of Mearsheimer and Walt’s essay and book does not really cover the first Iraq War of 1991, and those two, as conservative realpolitik people, do not really question the rationale for that war. Max Blumenthal and Matt Kennard do not address it either. But it is evident that in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war, which ended in 1988, Israel regarded Iraq as a major threat to their regional power. Israel had previously unilaterally bombed Iraq’s French-built Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. During the Iran- Iraq War, in the main, Iraq had been treated as a client by the Reagan administration. It had supplied them with arms to fight Iran, which it generally regarded as a dangerous enemy. But after that war, there had been a rising tide of Israeli threats against Iraq to repeat the Osirak attack, or something worse. The Iraqi regime had reason to fear such an attack, but was conflicted about the US role. As well as Israeli threats, part of what it had to fear was economic warfare being waged against it by Kuwait, which was overproducing oil, exceeding production quotas set by agreement and thus forcing oil prices down when the Iraqi regime was seeking increased trade to rebuild the country after the war with Iran. As well, Kuwait was simply stealing oil, siphoning it off under the border from an Iraqi oil field which Kuwait had easy access to.
Repeated Israeli threats led Saddam Hussein to give a speech in April 1990 where he stated that if Israel attacked Iraq, Iraq was capable to setting half of Israel ablaze. Perhaps with chemical weapons, as Iraq had been supplied with such by the US to fight Iran, and had used them against Iranian troops, and also notoriously against Kurdish civilians. It also emerged at the same time that Iraq had developed a ‘supergun’ that could seemingly be very effective against Israel. All of which may have given Israel pause about such an attack, but also provided a motive for a more elaborate trap to lay the basis for US intervention on Israel’s behalf. The dispute with Kuwait was a wild-card, the Saddam regime could not be sure who the Al Sabah rulers of Kuwait were working for in their economic warfare. A major public dispute with Kuwait developed and when the US ambassador, April Glaspie, met Saddam shortly before the Kuwait invasion. she told him that the US had ‘no position’ on Iraq’s dispute with Kuwait. This caused a storm of controversy at the time, as it appeared that the US had given Saddam Hussein the green light to take action against Kuwait. This is denied, of course, but it is a credible explanation and resembles the kind of behaviour attributed to Britain (‘perfidious Albion’) in the days when Britain was a major power. Except exercised on Israel’s behalf.
These descriptions are all empirical, they do not explain what the Israel lobby actually is, but rather describe what it looks like in superficial terms, and what it does. Max Blumenthal comes closest to it when he says to John Mearsheimer:
“But I would say updating my own perception of what the Israel lobby is from the time when I first picked up your book is that it really is the Zionist movement. It’s an ideological movement that can’t be defined by organizations and is often represented by individuals who obtain influential positions like Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, the presidential son-in-law I mean, key reasons why this war is taking place. Or Tony Blinken in the Biden administration, who comes from sort of the liberal world of the Zionist movement and whose family comes from a line of Israel lobbyists. So, what do you think about that concept, that it’s actually the Zionist movement and not an actual lobby like the National Rifle Association or the AARP?” (ibid)
Mearsheimer replies that “I would call it the Zionist lobby if you don’t want to call it the Israel lobby. But I don’t think there’s a lot of daylight between you and me”. Which doesn’t really address what Blumenthal is enquiring about. Mearsheimer then continues with more empirical description of the Lobby’s activities, which is worthwhile but doesn’t really deal with the point. JM reaches the limit of these empirical descriptions. Max Blumenthal’s point about the Israel lobby being the Zionist movement gets close to the point. But then you need to investigate the class nature of the Zionist movement, and the state of Israel itself, and the relationship between the two, with Marxist tools of analysis. That was the starting point of my 2014 Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism. The discussion about whether the lobby is a “Jewish lobby”, which Mearsheimer rejects, or another disparate layer of individuals and groups, does not make use of class analysis at all. Which is hardly surprising, as Mearsheimer and Walt are not Marxists. It is clear that core of the lobby is Jewish organisations – hardly surprising as Israel is an advanced capitalist state that defines itself in ethnic term as a Jewish state. But this has to be qualified in class terms:
“Empirical observation alone shows that Israel has organised bases of support within the ruling classes of several imperialist countries, centrally the United States, and those in Western Europe (including the UK). In the US, AIPAC (American-Israeli Political Action Committee) operates with great influence in both political parties; in the UK, there are powerful ‘Friends of Israel’ factions in all three major parties; the Conservative Friends of Israel in particular embraces 80% of Tory MPs. This is a staggering level of sponsorship from the main party of the British ruling class; it is echoed in the other parties and this pro-Israel ideology has a similar level of hegemony to Cold War anti-communism among the ruling class.
“This ruling class support has a material basis, and not just in terms of old-fashioned imperialist realpolitik. As the late Israel Shahak, genocide survivor and decades- long defender of Palestinian rights within Israel, wrote in a very important work on the Jewish question:
‘US support for Israel, when considered not in abstract but in concrete detail, cannot be adequately explained only as a result of American imperial interests. The strong influence wielded by the organised Jewish community in the USA in support of all Israeli policies must be taken into account in order to explain the Middle East policies of American administrations. This phenomenon is even more noticeable in the case of Canada, whose Middle Eastern interests cannot be considered as important, but whose loyal dedication to Israel is even greater than that of the USA. In both countries (and also in France, Britain, and many other states) Jewish organisations support Israel with the same loyalty which communist parties accorded to the USSR for so long. Also, many Jews who appear to be active in defending human rights and who adopt non-conformist views on other issues do, in cases affecting Israel, display a remarkable degree of totalitarianism and are in the forefront of defence of all Israeli policies. It is well known in Israel that the chauvinism and fanaticism in supporting Israel displayed by diaspora Jews is much greater (especially since 1967) than the chauvinism shown by an average Israeli Jew…’ (Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, 1994, p102).
It is however, explained by one salient fact: Jewish overrepresentation in the US and other ruling classes. For the United States, which is the most powerful state in human history, you can easily find informed Jewish sources that place the representation of Jews among billionaires, the most powerful elements of the capitalist elite, at between 40 and 48% – nearly half… This is the only logically coherent explanation for the power of the so-called lobby. It must be faced fearlessly by Marxists, irrespective of any discomfort that may result from confronting the widespread prejudice (for that is what it is) that to mention, let alone try to analyse, such factual matters is in some way racist. To ignore them in this way is itself an act of betrayal of those on the receiving end of the crimes that result from this state of affairs, and in that sense a chauvinist position.” (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/draft-theses-on-the-jews-and-modern-imperialism-sept-2014/)
The evidence in the Theses for this overrepresentation was compelling in its time, but more compelling still is the evidence published in Red Partisan issue 1:
“Jews have an unusual, top-heavy social structure. On a world scale, in 2025 there were 3038 billionaires in the world according to the Fortune 500 whereas the number of Jewish billionaires in the world, according to Forbes Israel, in 2025 was 276. This means that, taking 2025 (last year) as the time of analysis, over 9% of billionaires in the world are Jewish, 9.055% to be more precise. Yet the number of Jews in the world is 15.8 million, which is 0.2% of the world’s population. This is approximately 45 times overrepresentation. The overwhelming majority of those Jewish billionaires live in the United States (163), Israel (39) and other imperialist countries of Western Europe, Canada and Australia (35) and a smattering elsewhere, including Russia, where a relatively lower number live (21). They are overwhelmingly concentrated in the imperialist West.
“The overwhelmingly dominant ideology among bourgeois Jews is Political Zionism, an exilic ideology centred on Israel as a supposed refuge. Israel’s racist citizenship law, which gives those born Jewish anywhere in the world the right to citizenship, has the effect of creating a partially internationalised imperialist bourgeoisie loyal to Israel, who are massively and disproportionately represented in the US and West European ruling classes. The 2025 Forbes list puts the number of US billionaires in that year as 902. As stated earlier, the number of US Jewish billionaires in 2025 was 163. Which means that 18% of billionaires in the US are Jewish, as compared to the proportion of Jewish people in the US population, which is 2%. But that is not all – because as you go up the rankings of billionaires by wealth, the disproportionate representation of Jews increases dramatically. Of the top 10 billionaires by wealth in the US, 6 of them are Jewish – Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Ballmer and Michael Dell. The other four – non-Jewish – are Elon Musk (the wealthiest), Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Jensen Huang. This can be determined by comparison of Forbes Israel with mundane US sources on billionaire wealth that do not distinguish ethnicity.
“For Marxists, who understand that power in capitalist society, exercised from above, stems from capitalist wealth, this is the basis of the disproportionate power of Israel and Zionism in the US. The law of return gives Jewish bourgeois a direct interest through citizenship – in bourgeois terms a form of ownership — any bourgeois state is the de facto collective property of its bourgeois citizens – in the Israeli bourgeois state. There is no mystery about where this power comes from. No ‘conspiracy theory’ is needed to explain this, only Marxism – historical materialism – applied to today’s circumstances. Zionism is the dominant ideology of bourgeois Jews, but there are a minority of bourgeois Jews who do not embrace it or are reluctant to do so. One of the best known is the liberal philanthropist-financier George Soros, who has for his heresy been subjected to abuse that echoes old anti-Semitic themes, by some Zionists. Including Yair Netanyahu, son of Israel’s genocidaire leader, and Victor Orban, the rabidly pro-Zionist, very right-wing Hungarian leader.
This does not make Soros a friend of the working-class movement – he is a fervent supporter of US imperialism prominent in promoting the proxy Ukraine war against Russia: against a state considered by the US bourgeoisie as still embodying elements of working-class gains that originated in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/us-hegemony-drains-away-through-israeli-achilles-heel/, references and source links are to be found within the article).
According to some anti-Marxists, it is ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘racist’ to even mention these facts. It supposedly represents an ‘anti-Semitic trope’ to even acknowledge that such facts exist, let alone base any kind of historical materialist analysis on them. According to their ideology, in order to keep yourself free of the curse of ‘anti-Semitism’, such facts must be ignored. This reasoning is itself racist, pro-imperialist and anti-Arab – a Zionist trope – and a sign that those who accept it are not Marxists, but Ziophile liberals at best, with a strong element of anti-Arab prejudice. Because if Zionist Jews are overrepresented in positions of property, power and influence in the ruling classes of the imperialist countries, then it follows completely logically that the victims of Zionism are underrepresented in such positions. The ‘anti-Semitic trope’ smear therefore is clearly racist.
These facts reveal the mechanism by which the military power of the more powerful imperialist states, centrally the US, has been used to pursue Israel’s wars against Israel’s neighbouring Arab and Muslim states, to assist Israel’s genocide itself, and to repress opposition to it in those countries, from Trump’s US to the UK, from Europe to Australia. The Jewish-Zionist layer within the imperialist bourgeoisie analysed above constitute a caste within that class with a special interest in Israel, that operates across some national lines. Its existence means that the ruling class of Israel overlaps with that of several older imperialist countries, and amply explains the outsize power of the Israel lobby that Mearsheimer and Walt point to, and which those leftists influenced by them are looking to explain. The disproportionate size, and therefore social weight of this layer is buttressed by a kind of political cult among the wider bourgeoisie, that regards this layer as the font of neoliberalism’s Thatcher/Reagan ‘revolution’ and thus the supposed saviour of capitalism itself from the capitalist crisis of the 1970s.
The defeat of the US by Iran has put enormous strain on the relationship between Israel and the United States, and therefore the relationship between the US ruling class and the lobby, which properly understood is the J-Z caste, the layer of the US ruling class that overlaps with that of Israel. The popular anger worldwide against Israel because of the attempted genocide of the Palestinians, which has spread from Gaza to the West Bank – is enormous, including in the US. Zionists are not taking this lying down, and there is now an attempt to solidify the overlapping of the ruling classes into an overlap of the Israeli and US bourgeois state, at the military and military intelligence level, which would mean that the US Congress would no longer even have to approve military aid to Israel. Section 224 of the (proposed) 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is a very unusual measure indeed for any bourgeois state to take. As Newsweek recently noted:
“Military experts described the provision as without clear precedent. Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore told The Intercept he could not recall another case of Congress formalizing the integration of critical national security technologies with a foreign power, citing the artificial intelligence and autonomous systems components as particular concerns.” (https://www.newsweek.com/ndaa-section-224-alarms-progressives-and-conservatives-heres-what-it-says-12051282)
One wonders if the various phoney anti-Zionists on the left who declare that facts about the overrepresentation of Jews in the Western imperialist ruling classes, and therefore the overlapping of the Israeli ruling class with that of the Western powers, should not be mentioned to avoid an ‘anti-Semitic trope’, will declare that mentioning and acknowledging the existence of this very unusual measure is also ‘anti-Semitic’?
