Joe Biden loves Israel, and he expressed his love on October 13, with more than two thousand Palestinians dead, the State Department released an internal memo<\/a> directing diplomats to not use the words or issue press pieces using the terms \u201cceasefire,\u201d \u201cend to violence\/bloodshed,\u201d \u201crestoring calm,\u201d and \u201cde-escalation\/ceasefire.\u201d<\/p>\n Ten days later with more than five thousand dead, and thousands injured, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said<\/a>, \u201c[W]e don\u2019t believe that this is the time for a ceasefire.\u201d Two days ago, with ten thousand dead, Biden was asked about a possible ceasefire, and his response<\/a> was \u201cNone. No possibility.\u201d<\/p>\n Five hundred and eighteen out of the 535 sitting members of Congress oppose a ceasefire. But it is not just that they oppose a ceasefire. They actively aid and abet Israel\u2019s ongoing genocide of Palestinians with the various bills moving through Congress, including the $14.5 billion supplemental funding for refilling Israel\u2019s weapons that passed in the House, loyalty oaths in proclaiming support for Israel aggression, Senate bills<\/a> condemning of all things campus Student for Justice in Palestine organizing, amending policy<\/a> to allow Israel greater access to U.S. weapons, and the racist censuring of Rashida Tlaib for saying \u201cfrom the river to the sea.\u201d<\/p>\n I think it is only mildly stating it to say that the U.S. state, largely incapable of doing anything to provide anything in the form of services and support that people in this country need, is currently basically functioning only as an arms trader and booster and facilitator of mass murder and genocide. Every one of them who oppose a ceasefire, and every member of Biden\u2019s administration, is, in my opinion, a war criminal. That includes Bernie Sanders, who once was thought of as the savior of the socialist movement by many and now functions as the champion of the bullshit language of \u201chumanitarian pause\u201d\u2014the perverse neologism that Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu cooked up to try to cover the fact that they have no regard for a single of the 2.3 million lives crammed into the concentration camp of Gaza.<\/p>\n I am also glad that there are 17 congresspeople who are calling for a ceasefire [as of December 2<\/a>, sixty members support a ceasfire], but I think we should also not forget that many of them, including Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), voted in 2021 in favor of the $4.3 billion in direct military aid to Israel, the largest amount given in at least forty years, which is a number to be dwarfed should the $14 billion increase that Biden has asked for pass through Congress.<\/p>\n But it is important that we ground our understanding of why what is happening apart from the personal failings or beliefs of Genocide Joe. While I think that Congress is generally a racist institution, it is not just simple racism that motivates the support for Israel and the abetting of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Rather the fact that support for Israel has been one of solemn bipartisan agreement since at least the 1960s. From Democrat John F. Kennedy to Republican Donald Trump, every U.S. president has avowed the \u201cspecial relationship\u201d between the United States and Israel. What motivates this is U.S. imperialism and the fact that Israel is a central pole in the competition of the U.S. ruling class with the ruling classes of other states. And it feels a bit strange in the midst of the crisis to then shift in my presentation to talking about history and theory, but I think painting a picture of imperialism\u2019s motivating role is essential for understanding what is happening and also what is required of us.<\/p>\n Israel for most of its existence has been the military outpost for the United States\u2014Netanyahu in 2017 described Israel as the \u201cmighty aircraft carrier.\u201d Direct military funding to Israel makes up 59 percent of all the foreign military funding spent by the United States. And twenty percent of Israel\u2019s defense budget\u2014Israel spends a greater percentage of its gross domestic product on defense than most countries in the world\u2014is paid by the United States. The United States and Israel have a memorandum of understanding<\/a> in which this amount was guaranteed for a decade.<\/p>\n While the military angle is the clearest expression of U.S. support, imperialism is not exerted through the threat of war power alone, but by economic and political power. The U.S. government\u2019s use of its veto in the Security Council in the court of pointless pageantry of the United Nations, used more than thirty times in support of Israel, and its shielding of Israel<\/a> against the International Criminal Court [The United States and Israel, along with Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria are not state parties<\/a> to the Rome Statue treaty that established the ICC]\u00a0 are examples of this. The United States also expresses its dominance not in just backing Israel as the rabid watchdog of its interests, but in \u201cholding the leash\u201d as the dominant power and through its political and economic activity to integrate Israel into the global order.<\/p>\n Ensuring the stability and dominance of Israel in the region has meant the sacrifice of Palestinians to the gods of imperialism. This historical feature has deepened even further in the past few years. After the end of the Cold War, the United States worked to draw the entire region into a single economic zone characterized by free trade and investment flows under the thumb of U.S. economic power. The question of Palestine was a fly in the ointment of this project because the cause of Palestine is tremendously popular among the Arab masses. So implementing some kind of \u201cpeace process\u201d was necessary to give cover for the despots of the Arab states. But the \u201cpeace process\u201d was purely a white rag of surrender forced into the mouths of Palestinians. This peace process was only the first step of a decades-long move to integrate the markets and circuits of capital in the region between Israel and the Arab states.<\/p>\n One year after Oslo, en route to a Middle East and North African joint economic summit, Bill Clinton\u2019s secretary of state proclaimed<\/a>, \u201cThe Middle East is open for business.\u201d While this has been the bipartisan strategy of successive presidents since Clinton brokered Oslo, it was Donald Trump who rapidly accelerated this process with the official normalization efforts that came out of the Bahrain Conference and his so-called Deal of the Century, or what some call the Abraham Accords. And Biden has picked up where Trump left off. In order to compete with China\u2019s trillion-dollar Belt and Road initiative to connect up Chinese economic and political spheres of influence, Biden is launching projects like his announcement of the new IMEC trade corridor<\/a> connecting India with the European Union via the Middle East. That includes the construction of transport infrastructure culminating in Israel<\/a>.<\/p>\n Securing stable control of the Middle East is key for the exertion of U.S. capitalist power. This has fueled the normalization of diplomatic and economic relations between Israel and the states of the region. Israel is increasingly being integrated into the region through trade deals, security cooperation, transport, and beyond. The goal, to quote<\/a> the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, is \u201cto truly tap into the major potential of these markets.\u201d This process of normalization with settler-colonial Israel strengthens the investment of the United States and regional powers in maintaining the Israeli state. The normalization advances in the past couple of years\u2014literally paid off with trade and arms deals\u2014have meant that the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco have all normalized relations and more will follow. Saudi Arabia\u2019s normalization process with Israel, the golden goose for U.S. imperialism, has started, though the current events in Palestine have temporarily put it on pause. What drives this is the competition between the capitalist class of the United States and that of China. The economic rivalry between these two countries profoundly shapes the global geopolitical framework.<\/p>\n All this is because the Middle East region is of prime global importance. It is rich in capitalism\u2019s favorite fuel\u2014oil. And here the U.S. interest is not just access to oil\u2014the United States is a fossil fuel exporter\u2014but because it wants to control a natural resource that is essential to China\u2019s economic engine. The Middle East is geographically positioned at the axis of global shipping. Ships carry not only the essential fuel to the factories of the world, but are also the waypoint of the shipping of goods through the Suez Canal and via Dubai\u2019s Jabra Ali port in what Laleh Khalili calls a \u201cmaritime silk road.\u201d<\/a> The massive oil monies reaped by the Gulf States have been a boon for a new finance sector and new flows of investment.<\/p>\n One example<\/a> of this is the 2016 joint Saudi-Japanese venture to launch the world’s largest private equity fund with the creation of the $100 billion dollar SoftBank Vision PE firm, a sum larger than the total amount that U.S. venture firms made over a two and a half year period. Israel being integrated politically and economically into regional trade and capital flows only deepens the connection already established by its military role. And this directly invests regional states and capital in the maintenance and support of the stability of Israel. The stability of Israel in turn means the continued erasure of Palestinians and the furtherance of the settler-colonial project, which has been expressed in the dramatic escalation in settler violence and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Israel\u2019s stranglehold over Gaza.<\/p>\n Additionally, the role that the Oslo Accords have established the Palestinian Authority <\/a>(PA) in managing the occupation in the West Bank actually integrates the burgeoning Palestinian capitalist class and PA bureaucracy into a regional economic relationship with their occupiers and oppressors in the Israeli state. The PA largely functions as an NGO siphon for aid money from the major Western capitalist countries and a police force (largely funded by the United States) collaborating with Israel to repress Palestinian resistance and anger.<\/p>\n This picture hopefully paints a clear picture of the current situation. U.S. imperialism has been so far successful in building up Israel and backing it with the full force of the world\u2019s most powerful military, defanging the Palestinian resistance by establishing a client in the PA, and further isolating Palestinians by integrating settler-colonial Israel with its Arab neighbors. But October 7 was a massive blow to Israel\u2019s mythological invulnerability. The \u201cIron Dome\u201d was punctured, and the wall briefly fell. That represented a massive threat to this core pillar of U.S. interest in the region, which is why Biden has leaped to Israel\u2019s defense and sent two aircraft carriers to the Eastern Mediterranean to join the other aircraft carrier based there\u2014the State of Israel. It also explains why the Arab regimes surrounding Israel have given at best lip-service to the Palestinian cause, hoping to deflect mass sentiment in solidarity with Palestine held by the Arab working classes. While Bahrain has withdrawn ambassadors and Saudi Arabia has paused the normalization process, the response has been useless to Palestinians.<\/p>\n A whole month after the escalation of October 7, the Saudi\u2019s convened an emergency conference of the Arab League that was attended by the Iranian president. They passed some verbose rhetoric but nothing will come of it, and a conference is not what the Palestinians need right now. Egypt, Gaza\u2019s other jailer, criminally allows their border to Gaza to be mostly closed, and the trickle of aid allowed in is a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi carried out a wave of arrests of those who demonstrated in solidarity with Palestine weeks ago, and Jordanian police physically beat protesters attempting to get to the border.<\/p>\n What drives all of this is the regional economic and political connections facilitated by U.S. imperialism. This is also why regional actors like Iran and Hezbollah have similarly carried out a small number of rocket attacks that, despite Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah\u2019s boasts of \u201cexhausting Israel\u2019s defense systems,\u201d are more akin to what Israeli journalist Zvi Ba\u2019rel described<\/a> as a \u201cmeasured and precise \u2026 campaign of mutual responses.\u201d<\/p>\n China has also taken a measured position of neutrality in its appeal to international law and a precise \u201cviolence on both sides line\u201d with its own imperialist interests in mind. Israel\u2019s largest trade partner after the United States is China, and China is invested in the illegal settlements, has defended the Jewish-only nature of the Israeli state, and has its own security\/surveillance state interconnections with Israel, such as the Chinese corporation Hikvision\u2019s development of the facial recognition cameras<\/a> that cover the West Bank, which were tested on China\u2019s oppressed Muslim Uyghar minority.<\/p>\n While the endgame in Gaza is unclear, the United States, as Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has indicated, has a clear desire to facilitate some sort of transfer of whatever is left of Gaza to its loyal Palestinian Authority and to apply the model of Area B of the West Bank, where Israel maintains a strong security presence, to Gaza. Internal Ministry of Intelligence documents show, on the other hand, that Israel is entertaining the idea of moving the entirety of Gazan Palestinians to Egypt\u2019s Sinai. I say this not to speculate about the likely outcome, but to underline that what will happen to Palestinians is not being determined by Palestinians but jointly by the United States and Israel.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/gaza_2023-1024x576.jpeg\")
\nNormalization looks like everything from the symbolic\u2014the Israeli flag has been hoisted over regional sporting events, yet the Palestinian soccer team is refused travel visits\u2014to the $28 billion in trade between the Gulf Cooperation Council and Israel, to the existence of qualified industrial zones (QIZ) that pay off duty-free access to U.S. markets in exchange for a percentage of inputs being sourced from Israel. These makeup huge sectors of the economies, with seventy percent of Jordanian exports coming from QIZ\u2019s and one-third of Egypt\u2019s total exports to the United States, as well.<\/p>\n
![Wafa<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWhile the military angle is the clearest expression of U.S. support, imperialism is not exerted through the threat of war power alone, but by economic and political power. The U.S. government\u2019s use of its veto in the Security Council in the court of pointless pageantry of the United Nations, used more than thirty times in support of Israel, and its shielding of Israel<\/a> against the International Criminal Court [The United States and Israel, along with Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria are not state parties<\/a> to the Rome Statue treaty that established the ICC]\u00a0 are examples of this. The United States also expresses its dominance not in just backing Israel as the rabid watchdog of its interests, but in \u201cholding the leash\u201d as the dominant power and through its political and economic activity to integrate Israel into the global order.<\/p>\nEnsuring the stability and dominance of Israel in the region has meant the sacrifice of Palestinians to the gods of imperialism. This historical feature has deepened even further in the past few years. After the end of the Cold War, the United States worked to draw the entire region into a single economic zone characterized by free trade and investment flows under the thumb of U.S. economic power. The question of Palestine was a fly in the ointment of this project because the cause of Palestine is tremendously popular among the Arab masses. So implementing some kind of \u201cpeace process\u201d was necessary to give cover for the despots of the Arab states. But the \u201cpeace process\u201d was purely a white rag of surrender forced into the mouths of Palestinians. This peace process was only the first step of a decades-long move to integrate the markets and circuits of capital in the region between Israel and the Arab states.<\/p>\nOne year after Oslo, en route to a Middle East and North African joint economic summit, Bill Clinton\u2019s secretary of state proclaimed<\/a>, \u201cThe Middle East is open for business.\u201d While this has been the bipartisan strategy of successive presidents since Clinton brokered Oslo, it was Donald Trump who rapidly accelerated this process with the official normalization efforts that came out of the Bahrain Conference and his so-called Deal of the Century, or what some call the Abraham Accords. And Biden has picked up where Trump left off. In order to compete with China\u2019s trillion-dollar Belt and Road initiative to connect up Chinese economic and political spheres of influence, Biden is launching projects like his announcement of the new IMEC trade corridor<\/a> connecting India with the European Union via the Middle East. That includes the construction of transport infrastructure culminating in Israel<\/a>.<\/p>\nSecuring stable control of the Middle East is key for the exertion of U.S. capitalist power. This has fueled the normalization of diplomatic and economic relations between Israel and the states of the region. Israel is increasingly being integrated into the region through trade deals, security cooperation, transport, and beyond. The goal, to quote<\/a> the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, is \u201cto truly tap into the major potential of these markets.\u201d This process of normalization with settler-colonial Israel strengthens the investment of the United States and regional powers in maintaining the Israeli state.\nNormalization looks like everything from the symbolic\u2014the Israeli flag has been hoisted over regional sporting events, yet the Palestinian soccer team is refused travel visits\u2014to the $28 billion in trade between the Gulf Cooperation Council and Israel, to the existence of qualified industrial zones (QIZ) that pay off duty-free access to U.S. markets in exchange for a percentage of inputs being sourced from Israel. These makeup huge sectors of the economies, with seventy percent of Jordanian exports coming from QIZ\u2019s and one-third of Egypt\u2019s total exports to the United States, as well.<\/p>\nThe normalization advances in the past couple of years\u2014literally paid off with trade and arms deals\u2014have meant that the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco have all normalized relations and more will follow. Saudi Arabia\u2019s normalization process with Israel, the golden goose for U.S. imperialism, has started, though the current events in Palestine have temporarily put it on pause. What drives this is the competition between the capitalist class of the United States and that of China. The economic rivalry between these two countries profoundly shapes the global geopolitical framework.<\/p>\nAll this is because the Middle East region is of prime global importance. It is rich in capitalism\u2019s favorite fuel\u2014oil. And here the U.S. interest is not just access to oil\u2014the United States is a fossil fuel exporter\u2014but because it wants to control a natural resource that is essential to China\u2019s economic engine. The Middle East is geographically positioned at the axis of global shipping. Ships carry not only the essential fuel to the factories of the world, but are also the waypoint of the shipping of goods through the Suez Canal and via Dubai\u2019s Jabra Ali port in what Laleh Khalili calls a \u201cmaritime silk road.\u201d<\/a> The massive oil monies reaped by the Gulf States have been a boon for a new finance sector and new flows of investment.<\/p>\nOne example<\/a> of this is the 2016 joint Saudi-Japanese venture to launch the world’s largest private equity fund with the creation of the $100 billion dollar SoftBank Vision PE firm, a sum larger than the total amount that U.S. venture firms made over a two and a half year period. Israel being integrated politically and economically into regional trade and capital flows only deepens the connection already established by its military role. And this directly invests regional states and capital in the maintenance and support of the stability of Israel. The stability of Israel in turn means the continued erasure of Palestinians and the furtherance of the settler-colonial project, which has been expressed in the dramatic escalation in settler violence and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Israel\u2019s stranglehold over Gaza.<\/p>\nAdditionally, the role that the Oslo Accords have established the Palestinian Authority <\/a>(PA) in managing the occupation in the West Bank actually integrates the burgeoning Palestinian capitalist class and PA bureaucracy into a regional economic relationship with their occupiers and oppressors in the Israeli state. The PA largely functions as an NGO siphon for aid money from the major Western capitalist countries and a police force (largely funded by the United States) collaborating with Israel to repress Palestinian resistance and anger.<\/p>\nThis picture hopefully paints a clear picture of the current situation. U.S. imperialism has been so far successful in building up Israel and backing it with the full force of the world\u2019s most powerful military, defanging the Palestinian resistance by establishing a client in the PA, and further isolating Palestinians by integrating settler-colonial Israel with its Arab neighbors. But October 7 was a massive blow to Israel\u2019s mythological invulnerability. The \u201cIron Dome\u201d was punctured, and the wall briefly fell. That represented a massive threat to this core pillar of U.S. interest in the region, which is why Biden has leaped to Israel\u2019s defense and sent two aircraft carriers to the Eastern Mediterranean to join the other aircraft carrier based there\u2014the State of Israel. It also explains why the Arab regimes surrounding Israel have given at best lip-service to the Palestinian cause, hoping to deflect mass sentiment in solidarity with Palestine held by the Arab working classes. While Bahrain has withdrawn ambassadors and Saudi Arabia has paused the normalization process, the response has been useless to Palestinians.<\/p>\nA whole month after the escalation of October 7, the Saudi\u2019s convened an emergency conference of the Arab League that was attended by the Iranian president. They passed some verbose rhetoric but nothing will come of it, and a conference is not what the Palestinians need right now. Egypt, Gaza\u2019s other jailer, criminally allows their border to Gaza to be mostly closed, and the trickle of aid allowed in is a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi carried out a wave of arrests of those who demonstrated in solidarity with Palestine weeks ago, and Jordanian police physically beat protesters attempting to get to the border.<\/p>\nWhat drives all of this is the regional economic and political connections facilitated by U.S. imperialism. This is also why regional actors like Iran and Hezbollah have similarly carried out a small number of rocket attacks that, despite Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah\u2019s boasts of \u201cexhausting Israel\u2019s defense systems,\u201d are more akin to what Israeli journalist Zvi Ba\u2019rel described<\/a> as a \u201cmeasured and precise \u2026 campaign of mutual responses.\u201d<\/p>\nChina has also taken a measured position of neutrality in its appeal to international law and a precise \u201cviolence on both sides line\u201d with its own imperialist interests in mind. Israel\u2019s largest trade partner after the United States is China, and China is invested in the illegal settlements, has defended the Jewish-only nature of the Israeli state, and has its own security\/surveillance state interconnections with Israel, such as the Chinese corporation Hikvision\u2019s development of the facial recognition cameras<\/a> that cover the West Bank, which were tested on China\u2019s oppressed Muslim Uyghar minority.<\/p>\nWhile the endgame in Gaza is unclear, the United States, as Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has indicated, has a clear desire to facilitate some sort of transfer of whatever is left of Gaza to its loyal Palestinian Authority and to apply the model of Area B of the West Bank, where Israel maintains a strong security presence, to Gaza. Internal Ministry of Intelligence documents show, on the other hand, that Israel is entertaining the idea of moving the entirety of Gazan Palestinians to Egypt\u2019s Sinai. I say this not to speculate about the likely outcome, but to underline that what will happen to Palestinians is not being determined by Palestinians but jointly by the United States and Israel.<\/p>\n](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Damage_in_Gaza_Strip_during_the_October_2023_-_30.jpg\"){kind=link}