A rich country leads the receiving end of U.S. foreign aid, including help for waging wars in the Middle East. This is the case of Israel, whose illegitimate origin is today considered throughout the world as the clearest of all states. Even a large part of the world’s population who do not consider themselves libertarian see Israel as an illegitimate state, while they do not think the same of the state of their own nation. At any rate, zionism, leaving aside its history as the political movement responsible for the creation of the state of Israel, can be briefly defined as unrestrained support for the state of Israel, its legitimacy, and expansionism (e.g. foreign policy).
In the United States, zionism is one of the main characteristics of the bipartisan system in American politics. This was seen immediately after Hamas’ attack in October 2023, when the overwhelming majority of congressmen rushed to proclaim their full support for Israel. Even most of the growing number of congressmen opposed millions of dollars for Ukraine supported the urgency of sending millions to Israel. And in November 2023, when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were slaughtering innocent people in Gaza, Rep. Thomas Massie was the lone member of the U.S. House of Representatives to vote against a bill that equated anti-zionism with anti-semitism—which expressed that denying the state of Israel’s “right to exist” was tantamount to hating the Jewish people.
There is something special about the U.S. relationship with Israel that does not exist with any other country. Even when most countries would vote against Israel at the United Nations, the U.S. government will defend Israel. By having this relationship, the U.S. government has sacrificed the good reputation the country once had in the Middle East until the middle of the last century, which began to fade away when American imperialism went global—then turned into U.S.-zionist imperial collaboration, since zionism has been an unmistakable feature of U.S. foreign policy for decades.
This American relationship with Israel ranges from usual politics to evangelical associations. There is even an organization specialized in the promotion of zionism among Christians, Christians United For Israel (CUFI). The famous pastor John Hagee is its founder. In this sense, take, for example, the pastor Jim Staley saying, “Opposition to Israel is opposition to God.” And several years ago, Hagee would even preach the idea of preemptive military strikes against Iran to avoid a “nuclear holocaust” in Israel and a nuclear attack on the United States. Notable support for Israel can be found extensively in many evangelical and political leaders in the U.S., showing a clear-cut intention to inculcate the defense of Israel as a Christian-dual-nationalist dogma.
While the Republican Party takes the lead, politicians from both sides of the aisle, and most people occupying prominent seats in the U.S. government, have demonstrated a minimum and habitual consensus when it comes to Israel for decades. Not surprisingly, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in the past, “Israel is grateful for the support of the American people and American presidents, from Harry Truman to Barack Obama.” And Obama expressed on his part, “I’m proud to say that no U.S. administration has done more in support of Israel’s security than ours.”
When we watch the news and Islamic extremism occurs, U.S.-zionist imperialism is in fact the main cause of it. In this context, U.S. wars in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and the covert war against the Syrian government between 2011 and 2017 contributed to the spread of political and religious radicalism and violent conflict throughout the Middle East. And when U.S. forces responded indiscriminately after the events of 9/11, this served to advance the cause and increase the number of U.S. enemies. Every time that U.S. troops or Israeli zionists commit unjustified attacks against innocent people in the Middle East, Islamic extremism receives more acceptance and legitimacy and more people become eager to join it. In the end, the crimes of each side fuel the desire for blood and strengthen the worst elements of both. However, the main victims of this strengthening are not exactly the leaders of one side or the other, but the civilian population. In this sense, as Ryan McMaken recalls, there is nothing unique about the general shape of these conflicts. The elements are quite familiar:
“…a minority native population is increasingly cornered and impoverished within a limited territory; factions of young men within the group resort to violence—what we now call ‘terrorism’—as revenge in response to a long list of real crimes committed by settlers and their governments; the majority settler population reacts to this with overwhelming force and further destruction of the minority group’s territories and legal rights; women and children on both sides often suffer the most.”
So when the IDF bombs the Gaza Strip, driving people out of their homes and cities, this is not essentially different from reactions to tribal attacks on settler villages in the nineteenth century United States. Many recognized that there was no one worthy of support as long as both sides continued to kill innocents. In such cases, as McMaken says, a starting point was to refuse cheering for either side.
Nevertheless, the U.S. ability to destabilize the Middle East goes beyond the conflicts and carnage of the nineteenth century. It is sufficient to recall the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, whose fall and that of Muammar Gaddafi at the hands of NATO (led, of course, by the United States), created power vacuums in the Middle East that were occupied by the Islamic State and jihadist groups. One also can mention the U.S. support for Syrian jihadists against Bashar al-Assad.
Of course, Hussein was not a threat to the American people, nor to any sensible idea of national defense, but he was certainly a threat to the state of Israel. The rest is history. The domestic neoconservatives and Israel’s lobbyists, if they are not always the same, lied to Americans and propped up a second war in Iraq. Once Baghdad was conquered by U.S. troops and Hussein’s rule ended, a new government was installed in Iraq. The supreme power became the U.S. Army. But in order to last, this government had to gain legitimacy among Iraqis. Yet, contrary to American propaganda, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was not an act of liberation. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains:
“If A frees B, who is held hostage by C, this is an act of liberation. However, it is not an act of liberation if A frees B from the hands of C in order to take B hostage himself. It is not an act of liberation if A frees B from the hands of C by killing D. Nor is it an act of liberation if A forcibly takes D’s money to free B from C.
Accordingly, unlike genuine liberation, which is greeted by the liberated with unanimous assent, the U.S. occupation has been met with much less than universal enthusiasm by the ‘liberated’ Iraqis. Even many of Saddam Hussein’s opponents, who gladly saw him overthrown, still consider the U.S. an uninvited invader.”
These are just a few examples of U.S. interventionism in a region from which no army has ever crossed the ocean to set foot on U.S. soil. But, for the moment, the U.S. government does not plan to learn or change anything. In addition, establishing liberal democracy in the Middle East by destroying cities and ending thousands of lives is not classical liberalism, but rather the cause of the constant instability in the region. And if freedom and human rights matter so much to the U.S. government, then it should not give support to anyone to slaughter innocents in the Middle East, regardless of religious denomination. Besides, it was never right to mediate disputes by force or initiate wars there in order to establish any form of government.
And lest there be any doubt as to the willingness and ability of the U.S. government to keep the fires of war burning, a few days after the Hamas attack, Biden said on TV that they can handle the wars in Ukraine and Israel and still maintain their overall defense. To top it off, he said, “We have the capacity to do this, and we have the obligation to.” But how does this war funding work? In part, as Jonathan Newman expounds:
“The fact that the Fed can whip up trillions of dollars does not negate the fact that wars are expensive. Waging war requires a massive amount of real resources like steel, textiles, food, human labor, and computers. These things do not magically appear once the government decides to issue a new bond that eventually gets bought by the Fed with newly printed money. When these resources are commandeered for war, Americans pay for it in the form of higher prices. This inflation tax, while subtle, performs the same function as other taxes: it extracts resources from the private economy for the state’s purposes.”
The truth is that almost everything wrong in multicultural Europe and the troubled Middle East has been caused—with the necessary amount of public acceptance—by Western welfarist, imperialist, zionism-protective statism over the last half century. A summary explaining part of the situation is the following by McMaken:
“The U.S. and its allies have settled into a predictable pattern in foreign policy over the past thirty years: force the taxpayers to pay for the regime’s wars which involve bombing various poor foreign countries ‘back into the stone age.’ Then, once the refugees start pouring out…Western regimes then tell the taxpayers back home to cough up even more money to pay for resettlement of all those refugees whose countries were needlessly destroyed by the bombs dropped by Washington and its allies.”
As a matter of fact, apart from the millions of deaths, it has been estimated that at least thirty-seven million people became refugees due to the Global War on Terror by 2020 . And where have all these people gone? Of course, many go to the richer countries of Western Europe, as geography prevents U.S. taxpayers from suffering a larger burden than the one already imposed by their government with its wars. To explain further, since George W. Bush launched the Global War on Terror in 2001, U.S. forces have waged wars or participated in other combat operations in at least twenty-four countries.
Unfortunately, as the most recent circumstances in the Middle East have shown, things are not getting better and could get much worse at any time. And the chance of counteracting all this is still far on the horizon if most of the Western world—and especially if most of the American people—do not recognize the overwhelming guilt that rests on their political leaders—and on the influence of zionism—in order to make them pay as soon as possible for this appalling situation.
