Below is a presentation given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at a Zoom forum on 8th June. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here.
It has taken 21 months. But something important is changing in the world relationships that underpinned Zionism’s power in the advanced countries. We can see this in the weaselly shifts in attitudes of Western governments. Starmer’s, for one. And those of Macron, and the new Canadian government – which we all know has considerable continuity with Trudeau’s government that has been in power for the whole of the genocide. Even though it claims to be ‘new’. But Canada is the least of the issue. The Starmer leadership of the Labour Party, in and out of government, have been among the most virulent supporters of the genocide.
Outside government, Starmer publicly supported Yoav Gallant’s announcement of the policy of starving the Palestinian people, that was announced on 8th October 2023 – “There will be no food, no fuel, no water – everything will be closed, We are fighting human animals and we will react accordingly”. This was where the policy of genocide was openly announced. This was one of the key incidents that led to the genocide charge against Israel at the International Court of Justice in January 2024, the court saying there was a ‘plausible’ case that this was genocide and giving Israel toothless instructions to stop that genocide. This also led straight to the indictment of Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes against humanity at the ICC last year. That was before Starmer won the July 2024 General Election.
Since then, his government’s attacks on the democratic rights of Palestinian solidarity activists have considerably exceeded those of the Tory government that preceded it. In particular, the policy of seeking bans against Palestine solidarity marches, and the raids by ‘anti-Terrorist’ police against political activists and journalists who obviously have nothing to do with any sort of ‘terrorism’ have mushroomed, far more than under the Tories. Suella Braverman was forced to resign when she overreached herself and tried to stop Palestiine Solidarity marches on the supposed ground that they were anti-Semitic “hate marches”. A totally outrageous lie. But this policy has been much more effective – and brutal – under Starmer and Yvette Cooper than it was under Braverman and Sunak.
In France, then same Macron who signed up for the feeble, but significant criticisms of the Israeli death and starvation campaign in Gaza, carried out wholesale attempts at outright bans, and mass arrests, at pro-Palestine events in France. We are even seeing some signs of ostensible distancing from the Trump administration, even though everyone knows that even more that Genocide Joe, his predecessor, Trump was and is a creature of Likud and a president directly funded and put in power by the largesse of the Israel lobby. Likud billionaire widow Miriam Adelson, of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, funded Trump’s election campaign to the sum of $100 million. This is a repeat of his funding by her late husband, the Likud /Las Vegas gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson, in 2016. It was well known that in 2016 he was put in power to tear up Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, which Israel/Likud vehemently objected to – they simply wanted a US attack on Iran in the manner of the Bushes’ attacks on Iraq in 1991 and 2003 – which in large measure were dictated by a pro-Israeli, neocon agenda.
Today also, you can see why they wanted Trump. No one would have believed that anyone could be worse than ‘Genocide Joe’, with his massive funding of Israel throughout its starvation and mass bombing campaigns against Gaza, where several times over more bombs were dropped than on Hiroshima at the end of WWII. But Trump is visibly even worse, with his open advocacy that the US and/or Israel should ‘own’ Gaza, while its entire population are to be shipped elsewhere, while Gaza itself becomes a new Riviera – a playground for the wealthy.
Trump’s threats against Iran likewise took off far beyond what Biden had planned, which is what has forced the Iranian regime to start talking to the Trump administration about some kind of new deal, that would have them stopping all enrichment of uranium for nuclear energy purposes. It is not well known, but ought to be, that far from seeking nuclear weapons, as the Zionists and their camp followers in the imperialist bourgeoisie continually trumpet, in fact the Shia theocratic regime of Ali Khamenei has a religious pacifist, somewhat utopian, objection to Iran having nuclear weapons. In our view, the world would be a lot safer if Iran had nuclear weapons. And if it were not for Khamenei’s religious principles, and his being the Supreme Leader according to the Shia doctrine of Guardianship, no doubt Iran would by now have obtained these weapons and been much safer than it is today.
And yet … in the confrontation with Yemen over navigation in the Red Sea, Trump was forced to conclude a truce with the Amanullah movement – the Houthi – without Israel being included in the truce. The solidarity of Yemen with the Palestinians actually trumped (pun intentional) Trump’s solidarity with Israel – and Trump was forced to sue for peace. For Amanullah had made it clear that a US escalation against them, would lead to them destroying the oil production facilities of the Gulf States, obviously most notably, but not confined to, Saudi Arabia. It will be recalled that the genocidal war of the Gulf States against Yemen died down around 2020 partly as a result of the Covid pandemic, but also as a result of the increasing armed capacity of Yemen to blow up Saudi and Emirati oil production. This is also evident today, and it is why the US backed off.
But this also puts a huge question mark over US capacity to defeat Iran in a war, since it is to a very large extent Iran’s technological advances in missile technology, with a considerable degree of collaboration with Russia, that has so strengthened Yemen. If the US cannot defeat Yemen, and by concluding this truce, Trump has more or less admitted he cannot, how is he going to defeat Iran? There is talk of Israeli use of nukes, but that could be simply suicidal. Including to the world economy, as Iran has the evident capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz, where much of the World’s oil passes, from Saudi Arabia, in the main.
That is one of the key conundrums of today about the Zionist’s genocidal campaign to wipe out the population of Gaza. This is not a done deal or a sure thing, because in the military situation on the ground in Gaza, vis-à-vis the Hamas fighters. Israel has proven incapable of winning. There is a problem in carrying out a genocide in full view of the world where there is an undefeated enemy still operating in the territory that is the theatre of the attempted genocide. The problem is that every military blow to Israel reminds the world both that Israel is not victorious and brings additional attention to their genocide of civilians. The great fanfare of a few weeks ago about how Israel was going to clear out the Gaza Strip in short order has already become contradicted and tarnished. We have had the spectacle of ‘aid’ delivered in barbed-wire cages, which have become a symbol of this genocide in a manner similar to the way gas chambers became symbolic of Hitler’s genocide. What is the difference, as has legitimately been asked, between demanding that starving people enter a wire cage, and then shooting them, and demanding that an incarcerated population enter communal ‘showers’, and then gassing them? And this genocidal ‘aid’ operation is a joint operation of the Zionist regime, and the United States. Which is not so surprising, as on Middle East questions, as I noted earlier, the current US President is a sponsored puppet of the Israel lobby. See later.
That Israel is not ‘winning’ in Gaza, in spite of its newly expanded incursions, and its open insistence that it will expel the populations that it is massacring, is shown by the fact that it has had to enlist the help of ISIS gangs to help it to abuse and murder the Palestinian population. It wouldn’t need to do this if it had the military strength to clear out Gaza by itself. It doesn’t. that is another remarkable indicator of this crisis. All this is reflected in a sea change in Western public opinion about Israel itself. The Pew Research Centre survey of views of Israel in 24 countries makes sobering reading for supporters of Zionism and its lobbies:
“In 20 of the 24 countries surveyed, around half of adults or more have an unfavorable view of Israel. Around three-quarters or more hold this view in Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Turkey.
[…]
“The recent survey is not the first time Pew Research Center has asked about international views of Israel. We have asked about views of Israel before in some countries – including in the United States, where the share of adults with a negative view of Israel rose 11 percentage points between March 2022 and March 2025.
In 10 other countries, we last asked this question in 2013. In seven of these countries, the share of adults with a negative view of Israel has increased significantly. In the United Kingdom, for example, 44% had an unfavorable view of Israel in 2013, compared with 61% now.
[…]
“In some countries, younger people are more likely than older people to have an unfavorable view of Israel. This is particularly the case in the high-income countries surveyed: Australia, Canada, France, Poland and South Korea and the U.S. In fact, the U.S. has one of the largest age gaps in views of Israel.” (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/03/most-people-across-24-surveyed-countries-have-negative-views-of-israel-and-netanyahu/)
Pew Research Center is a highly ‘respectable’, ‘non-partisan’ think tank based in Washington DC. Not a ‘radical’ body at all. Its report is highly symbolic of a massive acceleration of an already-existing shift in popular consciousness in Western countries that is a huge problem for the Israel lobby, and the material forces behind it.
That is despite the material, bourgeois nature of the Israel lobby, and its strength in the older imperialist countries, which I will now address. It has been noted by an important minority of ruling class commentators in the imperialist countries, including some quite conservative, imperialist ones, that the subservient nature of the relationship between Western mainstream imperialist politics, the media, is irrational, taken abstractly, from the point of view of the interests of the main imperialist powers themselves. Nowhere is this clearer than with this genocide. The refusal of the US, and the European powers, to condemn the Israeli attempt to exterminate the Gaza population, and their insistence on continuing to arm Israel and to aid it militarily even while sometimes expressing hypocritical ‘regret’ for various particularly outrageous Israeli actions, strongly implies that this policy in the West is not freely arrived at even within the framework of imperialism.
John Mearheimer, for instance, who is among the most forthright bourgeois expounding this thesis, believes that the US should be concentrating on combatting the Chinese workers’ state, and that its involvement in supporting Israel’s crimes is both a waste of military resources and discredits US imperialism in ‘moral’ terms, destroying its ‘soft power’ to combat China ideologically. Within his own imperialist framework, this is logical and consistent. But he is marginalised, not because he is wrong within the imperialist framework, but because he is outgunned. Even though he and his ideological partner and co-author, Stephen Walt (who is Jewish), talk at length about the nefarious activities of the Israel lobby, they do not, out of fear, properly address the material basis of this phenomenon.
The material basis for it is quite straightforward, though the historical reason for it is anything but simple. I pointed it out 11 years ago in my Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism, which aroused the ire of capitulators to Zionism on the Jewish and non-Jewish left. This pointed out that Jews are massively overrepresented in the wealthiest elements of the capitalist class in most Western imperialist countries. I citied some Zionist sources that actually boasted about such disproportionate Jewish wealth and influence. Such as the World Jewish Review. A recent manifestation of this is the evidence from Forbes that 10% of the world’s billionaires are Jewish. As compared to 0.2% of the world’s population being Jewish. This is 50 times overrepresentation. It is well known that Zionism is by far the hegemonic bourgeois ideology amongst bourgeois Jews.
These are factual questions – they are either true, or not. But that it not how this was treated by the aforementioned capitulators – for them only an ‘anti-Semite’ would be interested in whether this was true or not! Such attitudes are in deep trouble with this genocide. The argument they use is that the Nazis made use of this feature of the Jewish social structure as propaganda for their genocide, and therefore this subject should not be touched by socialists. But today this is somewhat undercut by the obvious fact that this layer of Zionist-Jewish bourgeois, both in Israel and outside, is the prime mover in this Nazi-like genocide in Gaza.
Though they have many cult followers and fellow-travellers, they are the core. The top-heavy Jewish social structure has its origins in the nature of the Jews as trading ‘people-class’, the embodiment of a pre-capitalist commercial capital, under European feudalism. This was analysed in a book on The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation, by Abram Leon, a Jewish resistance fighter and Trotskyist in Belgium in WWII, who was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz. This meant that under capitalism, when that class disintegrated due to being obsolete, a much higher proportion of Jews became members of the bourgeoisie than Jews in the general population. For many decades before WWII, this layer of the bourgeoisie was regarded with some suspicion by the imperialists themselves, as linked by community ties with the radical Jewish elements of the workers movement. But ironically, it was Hitler’s genocide, which mainly wiped out that radical Jewish element, and the foundation of Israel (which would not have been possible without the Nazi genocide), which overcame that.
The attitude of the bulk of the bourgeoisie changed, from demonising and mistrusting Jews, to virtually worshipping them, particularly as the neoliberal trend that came to dominate bourgeois thought in the 1970s was mainly Jewish is in its cadre. So, there is a powerful faction, or caste, within the imperialist bourgeoise, who are loyal to the racist state of Israel which treats Jews, overseas, as having birthright citizenship in Israel. Given the bourgeois nature of Israel, this benefits particularly bourgeois Jews. This creates the material base for the Israel lobby – a powerful pro-Israel, ethnically defined faction of the ruling class in the West. That is a powerful overlap of the ruling classes, which created a strong link between Israel and the Western powers. This is a material presence, which means that Israel is much more powerful in the West than the old, white-ruled South Africa ever was.
Its power is buttressed still further by phenomena like the Jeffrey Epstein scam. For instance, Trump’s falling out with Musk involved Musk stating on Twitter that Trump is on Jeffrey Epstein’s client list of those having sex with underage girls. This is a Zionist Kompromat operation and part of the way that the Zionist lobby maintains its power in the United States. And it is matter of record that this involves senior figures in both parties, as well as British Royalty like Prince Andrew, and perhaps the likes of Peter Mandelson even. This is a strong structure. But it is not indestructible. It is being tested by this genocide. And it is showing signs of crumbling with the huge wave of popular anger that is building about this, worldwide.
We see the rifts, the hypocrisy, the beginning of defections – Piers Morgan taking on Zionists when he was previously taking on critics of Israel, is one important index of this. We need to actively encourage the deepening of this. We need to encourage mass popular movements to bring to justice perpetrators and collaborators with this genocide. And we need to make the links with capitalism – that Zionism is a bourgeois death cult. The imperialist bourgeoisie virtually worship Zionism because it believed that it saved their system in the 1970s. and given the barbarism of this genocide, it becomes clearer what the bourgeoisie will do to save their system today. To plunge the word into the kind of barbarism we are seeing in Gaza. We need to organise politically and socially to destroy their system before it destroys human existence.
