US-Israel Relations: America Will Stop at Nothing to Maintain Global Hegemony

How can we even begin to summarize what has happened since October 7, 2023?

The unprecedented assault on Gaza, which continues only with the support and blessing of the US administration and its Western allies – like the gradual escalation of weapons testing and population control measures that have become a feature of life in Gaza for more than a decade – is unlike anything seen and documented in real time.

This includes Israel’s use of artificial intelligence software such as “Lavender” to increase targeting capabilities to levels never before seen; the massive destruction of universities, schools, hospitals, health facilities, water treatment plants, agricultural land, streets, roads, homes and all infrastructure necessary for civilian life; the withholding of medicines and treatments; the use of starvation as a tool of war and, most recently, the complete encirclement of the Gaza Strip through the control of the Rafah crossing and its partial destruction.

How can we catalogue these events? The mass graves, the bodies still buried under the rubble, the capture and torture of doctors, health workers and nurses, the targeted assassinations of academics and poets, not to mention engineers, journalists, aid workers, ambulance drivers, municipal employees, police officers, people looking for food or an internet connection, or simply children playing?

And all this carried out by the most technologically advanced military in the world, largely paid for by American taxpayers, with no way to declare “victory” over resistance forces fighting in tunnels without an air force, navy or mechanized units.

Those who continue to report or comment on the potentially hopeful messages from the US administration are only buying time for this destruction and genocide, while ignoring the decades-old evidence of the deep infrastructure that made it all possible.

As the US Congress once again prepares a bipartisan welcome to internationally recognized war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, the elaborate ideological gymnastics of the American electorate appear to defy the laws of gravity.

Trampling on American law

Exposed to the ambient noise of a corporate media beholden only to its paymasters, new forms of identity politics have captured every facet of a political life in which politicians have completely abandoned any pretense of representing their constituents, inciting those same constituents to kill each other on the basis of almost everything imaginable except principle.

Former free speech advocates and America First supporters are destroying the Constitution while defending “Israel’s right to defend itself,” thereby trampling on U.S. sovereignty and law.

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Liberals and progressives who applauded the collusion of all agencies and media during the Trump presidency to demonize Russia—and the subsequent collusion of Big Gov, Big Tech, and Big Pharma to censor and decree during the Covid-19 era—are suddenly alarmed that free speech has disappeared when Palestine is mentioned.

Yet many of these same liberals and progressives continue to encourage another term for “Genocide Joe,” supposedly fearing a second Trump administration.

During the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s, various commentators, pundits, analysts and ordinary citizens commonly referred to the American government as “Zog”, the “occupied Zionist government”.

While many called themselves conservatives, many did not. But all were considered “conspiracy theorists,” a vile term originally invented by the CIA to discredit anyone who questioned the premises or conclusions of the Warren Commission, ostensibly created to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

But few have discussed Kennedy’s policy toward Israel in detail. In his fight for nuclear nonproliferation, for example, Kennedy clashed head-on with then-Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion over demands for inspection and monitoring of Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor.

In a letter dated June 15, 1963, Kennedy wrote: “As I have written to Mr. Ben-Gurion, the commitment and support of this Government for Israel could be seriously compromised if it were thought that we were unable to obtain reliable information on a subject so vital to peace as the question of Israel’s nuclear efforts.”

Just three days before Kennedy’s assassination, his UN ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, continued to advocate the repatriation of Palestinian refugees, a policy Stevenson had championed as early as 1961 during the clashes with Ben-Gurion, when he went so far as to say that Israel should make a public statement accepting the principle of repatriation, as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

Light of the principle

It is impossible to know precisely what Kennedy’s policies would have been had he lived, but we do know what President Lyndon Johnson’s policies were. Support for Israel under Johnson before, during, and after the 1967 war became wholly partisan, initiating a radical change in American politics and culture.

Johnson’s cover-up of the brutal and relentless Israeli attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, in which 34 crew members were killed and 173 wounded—an incident for which survivors are still publicly seeking redress—marked a significantly new geopolitical reality.

As the American War in Vietnam raged, Israeli soldiers were portrayed as heroes and daring, taking center stage.

As American soldiers in Vietnam killed some of their own officers in rebellion against untenable orders, and as the anti-war movement among soldiers and veterans grew, they were increasingly portrayed as psychopaths and losers.

When the draft ended, the American war machine went underground, engaging in 15 years of secret warfare, knowing that the American people had had enough.

But the Gulf War, the sanctions against Iraq, the events of September 11, 2001, the immediate declaration of the “war on terror,” followed by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, new operations in Libya, Syria and so many other countries, as well as complete ideological, political and military coordination with Israel, have fully realized the 1986 statement of Senator Joe Biden, then a member of the Foreign Relations Committee: “If there were no Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect its interests in the region.”

As the generations who lived through the Vietnam War slowly fade away, and the real results of U.S. policies in Iraq and elsewhere have been scrubbed and sanitized, the real effects of government behavior—the “banality of evil,” in Hannah Arendt’s crucial formulation—must be placed in the light of principle, away from the evolutions of political efficacy and the trivialities of identity politics.

Call for global awakening

The explosive return of American bipartisanship signals a great danger, not only for the world – as Russia, China and most non-Western nations are well aware – but also for American citizens.

As Joy Gordon writes in The Invisible War: The United States and Sanctions Against Iraqone of the few books devoted to the subject: “It has not helped that all three administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, have denied the seriousness of the situation and denied U.S. responsibility for any part of it, even under pressure from members of Congress.

“But in the end, it didn’t make much difference: Congress was overwhelmingly indifferent to the suffering caused by sanctions in Iraq, regardless of the role of the United States… What is clear is that, left to its own devices, the United States was prepared to inflict an unlimited amount of damage on Iraq.”

The global awakening on Gaza has occurred almost entirely thanks to the heroic work of besieged Palestinian journalists and Palestinian citizen journalists, on alternative media and on various social media platforms.

But how long can they hold out under current conditions?

As information and free speech are under siege of a different kind in the West, and politicians and corporate media treat their citizens as invaders, there seems to be no limit to what the United States and its allies are willing to do to maintain their hegemony – their citizens and the rest of the world be damned.

To think otherwise would be a waste of precious energy, which would be better used to confront this behemoth on its own terms, rather than those we might hope for.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.