Why does the US support Israel's crimes?

Why does the US support Israel’s genocidal crimes against the Palestinian people, even in the face of overwhelming international condemnation, at massive expense, and to the point of totally debasing the very frameworks of human rights and international law that it pretends to uphold?

People fall back on narratives about the power of AIPAC in US elections, and other forms of Israeli political intervention in the US. That’s a real force and cannot be ignored, but the reality is that the US ruling class broadly supports Israel’s actions — with bipartisan consensus — because they see this as aligned with the interests of US capitalism. And most other Western governments (Britain, Germany, etc.) hold the same position for much the same reason.

The important thing to understand is that the capitalist economy is a world-system, where growth and accumulation in the imperial core (e.g, the US and Western Europe) relies heavily on the appropriation of cheap labour and resources from the periphery and semi-periphery, or the global South. Western states and firms need Southern states to remain subordinated suppliers of cheap labour, raw materials and consumer goods within global commodity chains.

In order to maintain this arrangement, the core states must find ways to suppress sovereign economic development in the South. Sovereign development means Southerners begin to escape their subordination, produce more for themselves, increase their wages, and consume their own output. This makes resources and inputs more expensive for the core, which constrains their consumption and makes it more difficult for them to realise profits.

This is the key point: economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core. To avoid this, the core states must constantly intervene to prevent or crush any movement or government in the periphery that seeks national liberation and economic sovereignty.

The US started to support the Zionist project in the 1960s, because they saw this as a way to have a military proxy in the Middle East, where they could stage counter-revolutionary interventions against the Arab socialist movements and national liberation struggles that were gaining traction at that time. The US could not accept the prospect of sovereign development in the region: the liberation movements had to be crushed or destabilized and they used Israel to help them do it.

Israel has been instrumental in assassinating liberation leaders in the Arab region, and interfering in the political processes of the Arab countries to prevent nationalist and socialist parties from coming to power. It has a long history of attacking regional states - Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, etc - destabilizing them and forcing them to divert resources toward defensive spending instead of industrial development. This is in full alignment with US strategy.

Not only in the Middle East: Israel has a long history of providing military and intelligence support to right-wing regimes around the world. For example, Israel armed and supported Argentina’s US-backed military junta, which murdered 30,000 socialists and political dissidents. And Israel armed and assisted the US-backed genocide in Guatemala, training military cadres in techniques of torture and ethnic cleansing.

The US supports Israel for the exact same reasons that they have backed the plotters of assassinations and coups against liberation leaders across the global South since the 1950s, which deposed Mohammed Mossadegh (Iran), Patrice Lumumba (DRC), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Salvador Allende (Chile), Jacobo Arbenz (Guatemala), Sukarno (Indonesia), Thomas Sankara (Burkina Faso), etc. They do it for the same reason they invaded Vietnam, destroyed Libya, and imposed sanctions on Cuba. It is the same pattern with the same objectives.

This is why Israel is so despised around the world. Not only because Israel is hell-bent on ethnically cleansing Palestine, but because it intervenes everywhere to crush popular movements and create chaos and instability, and this is intolerable.

So Israel is not an "ally" of the US in the conventional sense of the term. It is a proxy force — an attack dog. This relationship is particularly useful to the US because it allows them to have a degree of distance from their actions, and plausible deniability. The US can send weapons to Israel and directly coordinate military strategy with them, and then claim it’s not responsible for the violence and destruction and war crimes that Israel perpetrates in the region.

The core states used South Africa in the same way. The key reason that Western powers supported the apartheid regime in South Africa — also against overwhelming international condemnation — was because it served as a highly militarized Western colonial outpost that was geared up to run counter-insurgency operations not only within South Africa (against the African National Congress and the Communist Party; remember the US listed Mandela as a “terrorist” until 2008), but also in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, the DRC, etc., causing immense violence and chaos.

The vast majority of the world—and international law itself—supports Palestinian liberation, but the US and its main allies reject this. Why? Because Palestinian liberation would remove a key US proxy, and would open the way to liberation movements elsewhere in the region. A liberated Palestine means a liberated Middle East. And a liberated Middle East — at the hinge of Africa, Asia and Europe — is strongly antithetical to the interests of Western capital.

So this is the situation we are in. The Western ruling classes are willing to back obscene violence in Gaza, and shred the liberal values they claim to believe in — resulting in breathtaking displays of hypocrisy — because they want to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation and geopolitical hegemony. This is US policy. All the handwringing by Biden in the previous administration, the discourse about “too many innocent lives lost”, was all theatre designed to defuse our outrage. Under Trump that veneer of concern is gone.

You cannot appeal to imperial power in moral terms. The only way the US will stop arming, funding and propping up the Zionist regime is when it becomes too costly for them to do so. This will come down to the strength of regional political and military opposition; the strength of the Hague Group and the movement for boycotts, divestment and sanctions; and the strength of punitive measures that can be applied by international courts.