Zionism thrashing around in desperate crisis
By Ian Donovan
Trump and Netanyahu’s war-escapade is burying US world hegemony. It has backfired and they haven’t got a clue how to defeat Iran. There are tens of thousands of drones and missiles, many hypersonic and technologically superior to anything produced by Israel and the US, hidden deep underground beneath Iran’s sizeable topography. Iran is far bigger than any country that the US has ever fought a major, contested war with. The US has no answer to its missiles; nor does Israel, which is well within range of its firepower – Iran can manufacture more underground. It has suffered terrible losses from US and Israeli barbarism. Including the murder of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the massacre of over 170 schoolgirls on the first day of the war. But it has fought back extremely effectively. It has destroyed US bases in the various puppet Kingdoms/Emirates around the Persian Gulf. It has also destroyed whole swathes of Israeli cities; sending their inhabitants scuttling for shelters. It has overwhelmed US and Israeli air defences – the ‘Iron Dome’ is proving useless.
Hezbollah in Lebanon has revived and managed to do considerable damage with its own missile fire. Israel’s response is what it did to Gaza – massive destruction, ethnic cleansing in South Lebanon, demands that the Shi’a population leave or be killed in the South and even Beirut. They speak openly of Gaza-fying Lebanon and Iran. In the West Bank, a new death penalty law is enacted that extends Gaza’s genocide. It allows Israel to simply murder Palestinian prisoners for resisting Israeli occupation. But Israel is failing – heads of the IDF say it is close to collapse. Hundreds of thousands are fleeing the country. Galilee is once more depopulated as Jews flee Hezbollah’s missiles. The war could lead to Israel’s collapse, and despite the material overlap of Israel’s ruling class with that of the US, that bond is under massive strain.
Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement has split, with major figures Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candice Owens denouncing Trump as an ‘Israel First’ leader, not ‘America First’. Many regret supporting Trump and say MAGA was a fraud. The Jeffrey Epstein child-trafficking scandal is widely suspected to be an instrument of Israeli political control through Kompromat. Trump’s name appears more in the (heavily redacted) Epstein Files produced by the Department of Justice than Harry Potter’s name in the Harry Potter books. Trump was clearly deeply involved in this criminal sex abuse outfit. Trump and Zionism are tottering on the edge of defeat.
Major Shift on the Horizon
For 35 years at least, the US, often with such allies as Britain, France and other, mainly European imperialist junior partners, has fought wars in the Middle East for purposes that were at odds with their own imperialist interests. From Iraq in 1991 and 2003, to Libya in 2011, to Syria over 14 years from 2011, the US and allies have waged wars for Israel. They have wrecked countries that were perfectly capable of being US allies or even clients. All these US wars had in common that Israel sought the destruction of governments and states that showed some support for the Palestinians.
The February 28th attack on Iran was the ultimate example. Iran has been preparing for this for decades. It was clear when George W. Bush made his State of the Union speech in January 2002, naming Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an ‘Axis of Evil’, that the US planned to attack these countries. This was after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and the US attack on Afghanistan that followed them.
Bush’s speech was a mixture of pro-Zionist fulmination against Israel’s opponents, and imperialist hatred of North Korea as a by-product of the Russian workers revolution of 1917. Its seriousness was underlined when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. In response North Korea withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and by 2006 tested a nuclear weapon. Iran drew a different conclusion. It began preparing conventional defences against an attack which was certain to come one day. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in October 2003 publicised his earlier mid-1990s fatwa forbidding the development, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons. Iran’s decades-long development of missile technology, including hypersonics, working with other fraternal countries such as Russia and China, hidden in impregnable tunnels and bunkers, stood it in good stead for today.
This war represents a defeat for US imperialism that will far exceed that in Vietnam in 1975. The outcome in Vietnam was the victory of a social revolution in which the US played a straightforward counterrevolutionary role – and lost. But none of the wars the US has been fighting in the Middle East have been against social revolutions attacking capitalism, even locally. They have all been aimed at helping another imperialist power, Israel, dominate the Middle East in the service of its programme, Greater Israel. Its objectives are the conquest of large parts of the semi-colonial Arab and Muslim states nearby. Both the Israeli flag, with its two blue stripes (representing the rivers Nile and Euphrates), and the maps circulated by its adherents, show this aim. This was shown by the list of targets that Wesley Clark revealed in 2007: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finally Iran. Any nearby state not servile to Israel is a target, even if they would be quite prepared to be allies or clients of US imperialism, if Israel were taken out of the equation.
They proved this by helping the US/Israel against each other at times. Iraq by attacking the Iranian Islamic Republic in 1980 – that war lasted until 1988. Iran did deals with US imperialism in the Iran-Contra affair of 1986-7, aiding its counterrevolutionary war against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, in return for brokering the release of hostages held by Shia fighters enraged by US support for Israeli crimes in Lebanon. Syria served in the US-led military coalition that expelled Iraq from Kuwait 1991, after Iraqi had in 1990 been lured into invading Kuwait by US Ambassador April Glaspie. She gave Saddam Hussein the green light to attack Kuwait in a dispute about Kuwait’s rulers siphoning off Iraqi oil under the border. This led to war, against her assurances. Libya became a US semi-ally in its 2000s ‘war on terror’; a place where the US and Britain ‘rendered’ Jihadist terrorists who had exceeded their remit. The US wanted such jihadists, al Qaeda mainly, to concentrate on the US-funded war against Assad in Syria, but some who attacked Western targets were rendered to Libya. Gaddafi disposed of Libya’s nuclear programme, convinced he was on the way to becoming a US client. But in the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ the US under Obama used UN cover to invade Libya, murder Gaddafi and pulverise the country.
All these wars waged by the US or US-backed forces, often with allies such as Britain, are a product of the unusual intra-imperialist relationship between Israel and mainly, but not exclusively, the United States. To a lesser degree this phenomenon affects the imperialist countries of Western Europe. Israel is an imperialist power in its own right; an advanced capitalist, colonising power which seeks to seize territory, and enriches itself at the expense of (particularly nearby) semi-colonial countries through capital exports. Israel is unusual among imperialist powers, as it was transplanted – it is not indigenous to the Middle East region except in its own exilic mythology. A large section of its ruling class does not live in Israel, though they have the right to live there and partake of the benefits of that bourgeois-imperialist state by birth.
Material Basis of Zionist Influence
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 5001 whereas the number of Jewish billionaires in the world, according to Forbes Israel, in 2025 was 2762. 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 9023. 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 Zuckerburg, 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 rapidly 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.
Ruling Class Divisions
The US ruling class is divided as to whether this imperialist crusade against Russia – and even more China which is still a deformed workers state – is more important than its relationship with the Jewish-Zionist caste within the US imperialist bourgeoisie, described above. Trump’s attacks against Cuba and even Venezuela (which is not a workers’ state but a leftist ally of several) show he is just as anti-communist as his critics, but when forced to choose he prefers to back Israel. There is an element of bourgeois political cultism about the relationship with Zionism, because the imperialist bourgeoisie have changed their attitude to their Jewish brethren 180 degrees since Hitler’s day. In that period, the latter were regarded with suspicion by association with the strong and progressive role that Jews played in the early workers movement and in struggles for bourgeois democracy against feudal reaction. Whereas today the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie is seen by the bourgeoisie as the most class-conscious element of that bourgeois class4. This echoes Zionist strategy. Though in the early period of imperialism Jews were an oppressed group, they were never a colonised population – their oppression had its roots in pre-capitalist circumstances. The Zionists realised that the outsized Jewish bourgeoisie meant that this bourgeoisie, as leaders of ‘their’ population, had the possibility of overcoming the Jews’ oppression and becoming a distinct layer within imperialism, a strategy that ultimately proved highly successful in the 20th Century and so far in the 21st.
That is the root of the division between Trump and other bourgeois figures in both US parties over Ukraine – Trump, as a direct agent of Israel, favours Ukraine‘s resources going to Israel instead. This war, far more than the Ukraine proxy war, is his war. Other factions of the US bourgeoisie prefer a more even-handed distribution between the two – and those who object to Trump’s policy invented the ‘Russiagate’ hoax falsely accusing Trump of being in the pay of Putin, because they were too cowardly to accuse Trump of being in the pay of Israel and Likud, which is provably true and now obvious. They feared being accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ if they denounced Trump’s real allegiances.
Zionists vilify anyone who makes these points as ‘anti-Semitic’. Quite a number of leftists who claim to be opposed to Zionism echo them and even join in the vilification, claiming that it is racist to even mention facts about this that are solidly based, and that a couple of hours of research using primary sources can easily unearth and prove. But Marxism is founded on fact; as John Adams once said, and Marxism echoes, “facts are stubborn things”. If some trend, even of those that claim to be Marxist, denounce other Marxist trends for not ignoring important material facts, that is a clear sign that their views are not really Marxist.
But there is an important issue to address: the reason Jews have this top-heavy social structure that makes this phenomenon possible is not because of some inbuilt ‘racial’ essence, but because of the Jews’ history in medieval times as a people-class that represented commercial or merchants’ capital – in an historical era before the emergence of the capitalist mode of production – the society built on generalised commodity production and the extraction of surplus value. This issue is explored in depth in Abram Leon’s crucial 1942 Marxist work The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation5 and extended by us in a 2018 pamphlet Abram Leon and Zionism: Marxism and the Jewish Question.6 According to Leon’s understanding, the reason why Jews survived from antiquity whereas other such populations disappeared was because of that class-economic role. And when feudalism was supplanted by capitalism, Jews, by virtue of their previous class role, were assimilated into other classes in markedly different proportions to other populations and acquired that top-heavy structure.
World Historic Defeat
Since the foundation of Israel after WWII this issue has been a crucial factor in inter-imperialist relations, and it has been pretty much dominant since the collapse of the Soviet Union around 1990-91. But now, during a major military adventure driven by the imperialist bourgeoisie’s cult of Zionism, the US bourgeoisie is facing a world-historic defeat, which will also be a major defeat for Israel, and therefore the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste in North America and Europe. Both sides of this relationship are being plunged into crisis, and the wider imperialist bourgeoisie’s deference to the caste will inevitably be questioned. It was before this happened, but this will qualitatively exacerbate this issue. A key factor in Trump’s election both in 2016 and 2024 was the perception that he was an opponent of the ‘forever wars’ that US imperialism has engaged in since 1991, mainly, but not exclusively, on behalf of Israel. But for Trump, “America First” really meant “Israel First” as noted earlier. This is a major threat to Zionism’s hold over US and European politics – the threat to it from below, from the Palestine solidarity movements, has recently been quite brutally repressed.
In the US, where the most dramatic expression of the Palestine solidarity movement was the student movement that erupted during the Biden administration’s support for the genocide from 2023 to 2025, Trump has repressed them by aggressively deporting overseas students who protested the genocide. In some cases, the regime failed. But it also forced the sale of the popular Chinese social media video app TikTok to a consortium headed by arch-Zionist Larry Ellison, mentioned earlier. TikTok featured numerous videos of Israeli crimes and massacres in Gaza. This has now been silenced, but too late. There has been a massive shift in popular sentiment in the US away from support for Israel to sympathy for its Palestinian victims, and for the first time, support from AIPAC in elections to some candidates for political office is seen as a liability.
This has also happened in Europe – France and Germany have become notorious for anti-democratic abuses and frameups of those criticising Zionism’s crimes. In Britain, Starmer, who “supports Zionism without qualification”, showed off his complicity with his appointment of Peter Mandelson, the ideological godfather of Zionist New Labour, as British ambassador to the US, knowing full well that he was a long-time associate of Mossad’s sex trafficker, Epstein. His regime has suffered from the exposure of the Israeli-funded Labour Together operation that undermined Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and fomented the Zionist witchhunt that played a crucial role in defeating Corbyn, putting the Tories in power in 2019 and Starmer into the Labour leadership.
With Starmer as prime minister, outrageous and corrupt attacks on the democratic rights of opponents of Israel’s genocide have come thick and fast. Such as the unlawful proscription of Palestine Action on phoney allegations of ‘terrorism’, the brutal punishment with two years of racist abuse in remand prison that provoked a hunger strike, of PA militants who were then acquitted by juries. Brutal raids on Palestine activists in their homes to charge them with supporting ‘terrorism’ though actually defending resistance to genocide. The mass arrests of those protesting the proscription of PA for carrying signs saying, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”, which have now been resumed while the government appeals even though a court has ruled the proscription unlawful. Now we have the conviction of two leaders of the Palestine Solidarity movement, Chris Nineham and Ben Jamal, of a phoney public order offence when the government banned a Palestine demonstration from the vicinity of the BBC in January 2025. They were convicted on the say-so of a magistrate, sitting without a jury, who has been revealed as a member of a ‘liberal’ Jewish organisation that clearly supports Israel. This indicates clearly why this Zionist government wants to do away completely for jury trials for so called ‘minor’ offences, in the interest of political persecution and abuse.
The Zionists and Trumpists are so desperate about the collapse of their authority and their loss of world power that they are even resorting to extensive false flag attacks around the world. From mysterious missile attacks on Cyprus and Deigo Garcia, to false flag ‘anti-Semitic’ attacks by a fake ‘Iran-backed terror group’ in Britain and the Netherlands evidently aimed at drawing in European powers to the Iran War. Starmer evidently would like to join in this war; but popular opposition currently makes this impossible. The prospect however, that a decisive loss of US world hegemony where the moment of qualitative change is a politically suicidal war engaged in by the US for Israel’s interest, will lead to a major rift between Zionism’s international dimension, and the older imperialist powers. That will open up a new political situation worldwide.
Notes:
1. https://fortune.com/2025/04/02/world-record-number-of-billionaires-wealth-higher-than-most-gdp-despite-stock-market-bloodbath/
2. https://forbes.co.il/e/rankings/2025-jewish-billionaires/
3. https://www.iheart.com/content/2025-08-27-the-2025-forbes-billionaires-list-features-a-record-902-americans/
4. For a full exploration of this question, see https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/political-zionism-and-its-genocidal-hegemony-in-the-imperialist-world/
5. https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Question-Marxist-Interpretation/dp/160488116X, full text also available on line at https://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/leon/
6. https://www.consistent-democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/socialistfightpamphletno1.pdf
