In the face of the endless, intellectually asymmetrical war between the United States and Iran, as well as the many subregional conflicts accompanying it, the disputes within Israeli society may seem trivial. Certainly, on a geopolitical level, Israel assumes a monolithic character as the chaotic attack dog. Now this is not exactly wrong, per se, but it does overlook the incredibly important internal fracturing taking place in the colonial state. Sides are being chosen, battle lines are being drawn, and something very consequential is on the horizon. The settlers are beginning to turn on each other.

On Sunday, August 2^nd, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz went on Channel 14, Israel’s mainstream right-wing TV station, for an interview on the incredibly popular fascist roundtable panel, HaPatriotim (The Patriots). In a shocking move, Katz took the opportunity to fire the IDF’s chief of Central Command, Avi Bluth, live on air.1 He announced that he was replacing him with Maj. Gen. Dado Bar Khalifa, a surprise to everyone, including Bluth and Bar Khalifa themselves. This was met with immediate uproar; Israeli society — particularly the commentariat — was aghast.

“Israel Katz likes the image of himself as a bulldozer. But, since he entered the Defense Minister’s office on the 14^th floor [of the IDF’s General Staff building in Tel Aviv], it seems like the bulldozer has lost both its brakes and its steering, and it is simply running over the IDF. He is dismantling the statehood of the most important institution for the people of Israel.”

- Avi Ashkenazi, in Maariv (my translation)

Following the backlash from the pundit class, Israeli politicians stepped in. Realizing that this was becoming a disaster for Likud, prospective PMs Gadi Eisenkot and Naftali Bennett issued multiple scathing statements decrying Katz. To Likud’s chagrin, the controversy was so polarizing that even West Bank settler leaders had to intervene. The Yesha Council, the body that oversees all of the West Bank’s illegal settlements, came out in strong support of Bluth keeping his job. It became apparent that Katz’s strange coup was dead on arrival, and the entire ordeal has become an embarrassment for Likud. In fact, Netanyahu still has yet to make a statement.

This has led to an odd situation, where Katz is now claiming that he never actually fired Bluth, despite the very widely shared and viewed footage of him doing so. Katz is claiming that he was actually just relaying a message from IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, and he never wanted to fire Bluth in the first place. Zamir naturally denies this. Now, the two are locked in a heated game of hot potato, issuing contradicting statements back and forth.

So, why should we care about this? The Katz/Bluth saga, when taken in isolation, may seem to be one of those too-common, ignominious political spats initiated by firebrand right-wingers to win some political clout. You can find these everywhere, from Poland to Peru, and they are ultimately inconsequential and fleeting. However, while this may look that way on the surface, in reality it is indicative of a much bigger break in Israeli society. Katz and Bluth are part of the exact same far-right, fundamentalist settler project, and their fighting should be viewed in the context of the broader, breakneck changes taking place in Israel.

The truth is that Israel, while far from collapsing, is mobilizing against itself. There has never been more disunity and fighting among its Jewish racial class. This is building towards something. What that looks like specifically, I cannot say for sure. But I can tell you that it will involve a lot of settlers eating each other.

Over the millennia, the land of Palestine has been ruled by innumerable civilizations. Many have names lost to time, and many likely had no name at all. Some we do know: The Canaanites, the Israelites, the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, Seleucid Greece, and Achaemenid Persia. Then the Romans, who we later called the Byzantines, until they were overthrown by the Islamic Caliphates, who vied for control with the European Crusaders. Then came the Kurdish Ayyubids, who gave way to the Mamluks, who in turn gave way to the Ottomans. More recently, the British tried their hand at colonizing the land, before cutting their losses and ceding control to the European Jews. Throughout most of this, while the rulers may have changed, the people who actually live on the land have not.

Despite that fact, Zionists assert an interesting claim. They say that, due to their religious identity, which tenuously claims exactly one of the aforementioned groups, they have a greater claim to Palestine than its continuous inhabitants. Their exact justification is a bit too longwinded and mosaic to get into here, but when you boil it down, it rests on the existence of a Jewish presence in Palestine, including, most importantly, a historical Jewish rule.

Now, the problem here is that the entire concept of a ‘Jewish rule’ is thwarted by the fact that Judaism has meant something very different across the centuries.2 Still, the Zionist narrative denies this, and instead relies on an ethereal, formless core that exists at the heart of Judaism. This core exists beyond definition, and in fact beyond the boundaries of practice, ethnicity, borders, and history. It is a twisting, confusing peoplehood, supposedly shaped by very real resistance and tragedy, but wholly separate from historical and material reality. Like I said, very mosaic.

In the Zionist’s view, Israel has always existed. Israel is that innate Jewish self-determination. Israel is Samson’s suicidal final stand against the Philistines, Zedekiah’s doomed rebellion against the Babylonians, and Bar Kokhba’s heroic revolt against the Romans. Israel, according to the Zionist, is any resistance by the native population of Palestine against foreign occupiers… Well, almost. Israel was that, until some Palestinians left for Anatolia 1,600 to 1,800 years ago. Supposedly, they brought that idea of ‘Israel’ with them, even as they travelled further, intermarried, and shed all connection to the land over a hundred generations. The group that stayed? The ones that continued to develop and practice their indigenous Abrahamic faith, even rebuilding the Temple? Somehow, according to the Zionists, they lost their connection to the very land they were living on.

While Israel, in the view of Zionism, is a continuous project whose form changes throughout the millennia, it crucially rests on the veneration of the times when there has been real ‘Jewish rule,’ meaning an actual Jewish political entity. According to the Zionist, that has happened twice before the State of Israel. The first time was in the 11^th century BC, in what is known as the United Kingdom of Israel. This kingdom was ruled by Saul, David, and Solomon. The actual evidence for it existing is sparse, but the story goes that it was a powerful polity that faced ruin just as soon as it entered its 80^th year. Its eighth decade was rife with instability and infighting, culminating in a conflict between Jeroboam and Rehoboam, Solomon’s ward and son, respectively. The kingdom split in two, Israel and Judah, and the fighting between the brother-states led to their demise, and the scattering of the mythical ‘ten lost tribes of Israel.’ Though they each existed for some time after, it is generally regarded as that eighth decade that led to their ruin.

The second polity has much more historical evidence, but it is still shrouded in myth. Many centuries after the Assyrians and Babylonians had destroyed and conquered Israel and Judah, the Seleucid Empire occupied the land during the Second Temple period. The anti-Hellenistic Hasmoneans, with their army the Maccabees, rebelled, driving out the Greeks and establishing the second Jewish kingdom, Judea. The kingdom existed under the brutal Hasmoneans for over 70 years, until fighting broke out in its eighth decade. Warring brother Hyrcanus and Aristobulus each appealed to the Roman general Pompey, who marched his forces into Judea, ultimately betraying the brothers and turning the kingdom into a Roman vassal.

It is the stories of these two kingdoms that has created an anxiety for Israelis, whose political understanding is often inseparable from mythology and superstition. The ‘curse’ of the eighth decade has become a common refrain, exponentially so as the state, which is in its 78^th year, approaches that infamous milestone. It is especially foreboding to them now that the country is so divided. Even the shared hatred of Palestinians can no longer unite Israelis, who have been conditioned for generations now to be ever militant and bloodless. Nothing within their state, as it exists, can be labelled stable or functional. Its borders shift, its political trajectory is always uncertain, and its makeup is increasingly composed of groups that despise each other.

Earlier, I said that Katz’s move was an unprecedented one. That is true, in the specificity of the move itself, but it actually follows in the footsteps of many of Katz’s other actions as Defense Minster. Since being given the role after its previous occupant, Yoav Gallant, quit due to squabbling over how to commit genocide, Katz has become notorious for wielding the title in an incredibly partisan way. He refused to allow for the promotion of IDF chief spokesman Daniel Hagari, and dismissed him due to the latter’s public opposition to a piece of legislation that decriminalized passing classified military information directly to the Prime Minister. This was followed by a series of similar decisions, where Katz refused to promote candidates who were at all critical of Likud, and quickly pushed through a number of his hand-picked candidates.

Katz’s actions are typical of the current government, which itself is indicative of the breakdown of Israel’s ‘democratic’ society. Figures like Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and Minster of Finance Bezalel Smotrich have radically redefined their roles, acquiring vast new powers, particularly as it relates to the ongoing annexation in the occupied West Bank. This follows the broader Netanyahu/Likud project, which has spent years now attempting to consolidate power in the Israeli executive.

Behind the Katz saga, there is a much more important story, and I’m not referring to the chicanery of Israeli political ghouls. It is a harrowing story of injustice, oppression, occupation, land theft, sexual violence, and the degeneracy at the heart of a settler colonial society.

In March of this year, settlers broke into the home of my dear friend, Qusai Abu al-Kebash, who lives in the Area C hamlet of Khirbet Humsa, in the northern Jordan Valley, in the occupied West Bank. These settlers had been terrorizing Qusai and his family for a long time.3 That night, more than twenty surrounded Qusai’s farm, and broke in armed to the teeth. They tied up him, his family members, including very young children, and two foreign solidarity activists who had been there to help the community keep watch. They severely beat not only the men, but also the activists, who were both young women, Qusai’s wife, and his elderly father.

Then they sexually assaulted him. “They cut my belt off with a knife, as well as my boxers. They zip-tied my penis, tightened it and then dragged me all around the village,” Qusai told CNN. Throughout the ordeal, they forced one of the tied-up activists to keep her eyes open and watch as they assaulted Qusai, and at one point tried to make moves to remove her pants as well, before stopping. The settlers then destroyed much of the farm, stole all of Qusai’s sheep, and also pilfered all cash, jewelry, phones, and other valuables that they could find.

The way these thugs acted is almost beyond belief. They slammed a three-year-old to the ground by her head, passed gas in their hostages’ faces for fun, and ripped hijabs off of women’s heads. “If you don’t leave, we will burn you. We’ll hit you. We’ll take your children, and we will rape your women.” These were the words the settlers said to the family before they left.

Thanks to the work of the activists from the International Solidarity Movement, as well as Qusai’s bravery, the attack was made public, a rarity for stories from the West Bank. The sheer, unimaginable brutality quickly caught the international public’s eyes, and reluctant, comprador media outlets like CNN and the New York Times were forced to report on it. Due to this, an investigation was actually launched by the Israeli police, another rarity.

One of the twenty alleged perpetrators, Tal Yinon Dardik, was placed under investigation and sent orders to stay under house arrest at his mother-in-law’s residence.4 Dardik refused the order, citing religious reasons, and ignored the house arrest. After repeated warnings, he was taken into Israeli custody, and held under administrative detention, a form of indefinite holding that is almost exclusively used on Palestinians.

Dardik’s arrest immediately became a galvanizing issue for West Bank religious settlers. They began furiously calling for his release, even staging a hunger strike. Katz has been a settlement hardliner for years, typical of many longtime Likud members. Playing to his base, Katz actually went to prison to privately meet with Dardik. He then lobbied hard for Dardik’s release. Due to a technicality, the hold order was repealed, and the military was set to issue a new one. Katz wrote Bluth, instructing him not to issue it. Bluth did not listen and renewed it anyway. Katz, angry at having been ignored, went on Channel 14, a favorite among West Bank settlers, and the rest is very recent history.

Bluth, of course, is not a bleeding-heart liberal. He is as much of a monster as any of the perpetrators of the Gaza genocide. He fought in the occupation of southern Lebanon, and participated in the brutal Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, which killed thousands of innocent Palestinians. He is a career war criminal, and took his current post in July 2024. All of the IDF escalation in the West Bank in the past two years has been under his supervision and orders. He is responsible for the rising civilian death toll, including of children, the systematic ethnic cleansing of the southern Jordan Valley, and Operation Iron Wall, the 2025 campaign that demolished the homes of 40,000 Palestinians in the Nur Shams, Tulkarem, and Far’a refugee camps. He is also a literal West Bank settler himself. Bluth lives with his family in Halamish, just north of Ramallah.

Avi Bluth is a radical settler. Israel Katz is a radical settler. Their fight is an attempt to out-settler the other. This is important because it is a pattern. Increasingly, the West Bank settler bloc has become one of the most important factions in Israeli politics. A decade ago they were still seen as a group of fringe radicals, but now they are completely mainstream.

I mentioned up top that the Yesha Council issued a statement expressing support for Bluth. They also gave praise to Katz, in an apparent attempt to mediate. Many other settlement leaders followed suit, including mayors and regional leaders in the illegal movement.

What is of note, though, is that the response was not monolithic. Shai Alon, head of the Beit El settlement council, a very mainstream and influential body in settler politics, instead took the opportunity to back Bluth but condemn Katz, calling his decision “disconnected from the reality on the ground.” Alon publicly urged Netanyahu to fire Katz for the ordeal. Going in a completely different direction, MK Zvi Sukkot, a member of Smotrich’s Tkuma (Religious Zionist) party, chose to back Katz, but outright denied that he ever fired Bluth. He tried to spin the story as fake news.

In yet another wild divergence from the Yesha Council’s position, MK Limor Son Har-Melech, another influential settler politician who is in Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, fully backed Katz, and called on Netanyahu to fire Bluth.5 “Instead of focusing all his forces on fighting terror, he chose to turn the hilltop youth and pioneers into the enemy,” she said of Bluth.

All Israelis are positionally settlers, of course, and infighting is nothing new in Israeli politics. However, it would be a mistake to overlook this unprecedented incongruity across the usually homogenous settler bloc. Similarly, it would be a mistake to dismiss the escalation battle between Bluth and Katz as unremarkable. This growing nuance within the movement is indicative of a power struggle that is taking place specifically as the settler movement grows more powerful and Israel grows more desperate.

A new paradigm is asserting itself in Israeli politics, emerging from the past three years of all-out war and violence. Traditionally, the country has prioritized what it deems its ‘internal and external security.’ The former means the maintenance of its Jewish supremacist society within the 1948 borders and within its extraterritorial Jewish communities across the Western world. The latter means a continued destabilization of surrounding states, in an attempt to maintain a status quo of Israel’s regional military and technological dominance.

Now, however, a new dynamic is taking precedence. Zionism has always been defined primarily by expansion, but the acceleration perpetuated by both Israel’s violence and the resistance of endogenous actors has now firmly cemented a necessity on the part of Israel to expand without the ability to strategically retreat, once a core tactic in its playbook. Territory can no longer be leased back to defanged enemies, as was the case in the past. Instead, conquest has gone from an important tool to nearly the only one.

The West Bank thus becomes a critical battlefield for Israel’s survival, even more so than it used to be. The ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population now needs to be expedited. Settler support thus becomes crucial.

This is dangerous for a state whose international legitimacy is deteriorating from an already flimsy baseline. While it is still able to sustain some stability by promoting itself to powerful countries as an economic and security partner that is too entrenched and volatile to lose, it is rapidly abandoning the ability to claim itself as one they can trust. The prominence of West Bank settlers has much to do with this.

The promotion of West Bank annexation is traditionally seen as political suicide for many establishment politicians in Western countries. The economic returns of settlements are dubious as well, given the sheer instability of the project, not to mention its history. The settlers themselves are perhaps the hardest sell. They are lawless religious fanatics who attack foreign diplomats and journalists. The fact that they have a penchant for sporadically attacking IDF troops and bases — almost unthinkable, given that their presence is there to provide assistance to their expansion — is an additional embarrassment for Israel.

The settlers also destroy the image that Israel has spent decades cultivating. The notion of the ‘liberal oasis in the desert,’ free from the ‘conservative and backwards fanaticism’ of Islam, is certainly more difficult to champion when one of the most influential groups in the country are dirty, bearded religious fanatics with ultra-conservative social politics.

Israel’s gamble in promoting and mainstreaming the settler movement is a sign of its growing weakness. This is apparent in the fact that its traditionally liberal, secular base is losing influence, despite that group historically being one of its greatest assets. This turn should not be mistaken for a strategy that has long been in the works. Instead, it should be seen as Israel’s society radicalizing out of desperation. This phenomenon is apparent outside of the settler movement, as well.

The battle lines that are being drawn extend to 48, as well. Cosmopolitan Israeli society, historically a haven for settlers who want to play progressive, is itself in disarray. Secular Israelis are feeling the effects of the rapidly shifting social order in their domestic lives.

For those unfamiliar with Israel, these fights are not taking the forms you would think they would. For one, racial politics is largely confined to the realm of Palestinian apartheid. While historically, Mizrachi Jews faced some amount of oppression, this is no longer the case to any meaningful degree. Now, the majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrachi, at least in part. Ethiopian Jews do still face some amount of structural racism, but there are not enough of them in the country for this to make much of an impact, and they are heavily insulated by the fundamentally Jewish supremacist, as opposed to white supremacist, character of Zionism.

Neither is the battle in Israeli society one of a traditional left/right split. This is due to the fact that there is fundamentally no Israeli ‘Left’ to speak of. No meaningful political manifestation exists that strongly opposes the neofascist oppression of the Palestinians. While there is certainly much disagreement about how to manage Israel, its citizens are overwhelmingly right-wing and anti-Palestinian. In mid-2025, an Israeli survey found that 82% of the country’s Jews supported the forcible transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza. Polling also shows that support for the two-state solution has rapidly dwindled. 32% of Israelis said this year that they supported stripping Palestinian citizens of Israel of their right to vote, and one of the aforementioned surveys found that 56% supported punitive expulsion of 48 Palestinians. Polling from around the same time shows that 75% of Israelis identify with the statement “there are no innocents in Gaza.”

This is not the result of some powerful gerontocracy. Israelis are actually becoming more conservative the younger they are. A poll from this year has 75% of first-time Israeli Jewish voters identifying themselves as right-wing, as opposed to 5% identifying as left-wing. This is higher than among older voters, where by Israeli standards there is more nuance.

The right absolutely dominates Israeli politics. Likud has been the biggest player in the game for decades now, and the recent rejection of the party is not due to any left opposition, but rather the perception of Netanyahu as an unstable leader. The alternatives that most Israelis are turning to are Beyachad (Together), a right-wing opposition, and Yashar! (Honest!), a ‘centrist’ opposition that would be considered right-wing by any normal standards. Its leader, Gadi Eisenkot, is against the two-state solution and a hawk who pioneered the genocidal Dahiya Doctrine. The other centrist party, polling far below these, is HaDemokratim (The Democrats), which is also highly militaristic and supports West Bank annexation and a continuation of the genocide in Gaza. The rest of the parties in the upcoming election, save for the small coalition of Arab parties, are right-wing choices tailored to settlers, Mizrachim, Soviet Jews, and the Haredim. The only actual left-wing Israeli option is Makom LeKulanu (A Place for Us All), a joint Israeli-Palestinian party that is itself problematic, which has so little support that mainstream polls are not even including it.

No, the real divide in Israeli Jewish society is neither racial nor traditionally political. It is the fight between the religious and the secular. The main driver of this is the overwhelming growth of the Haredi population. Haredim today make up around one-fifth of the Israeli Jewish population, and by 2050 they will balloon to one-third of it. The Haredim do not work in traditional sectors if they work at all, receive massive government subsidies, and have special exemptions from the military draft. In the newly formed State of Israel, PM David Ben-Gurion gave the Haredim, then a very small number, an exemption from the draft in order to study Torah. Now that their number is so large, the exemption has become a major, long-lasting political debate. The issue has reached the Supreme Court many times, and has become a thorn in the side of figures like Netanyahu, who seek to appease both the religious and secular right-wings. This has led to a massive movement of draft dodgers among Haredi Jews.

The Supreme Court recently cut funding for yeshiva students who refuse to serve, which has ignited a huge protest movement. For the Haredi, it is very serious. “We are truly at war, and we must fight for this war,” said Rabbi Moshe Hillel Hirsch, an American-Israeli rabbi who is a major figure in the community. The protests have been a headache for Israelis, caused devastating amounts of property damage, and even led to more than a few deaths.

In 2024, the Attorney General’s office was given permission to seek harsher punishment for Haredi draft dodgers. The opening move was revoking their childcare subsidies. This led many Haredi families to start using so-called ‘child warehouses,’ where babies would be stored for the day, while their mothers worked and their fathers studied Torah. Pretty quickly, this led to tragedy. Two babies died, and 53 others were sent to the hospital for respiratory disease, dehydration, and heat exhaustion.

In May, the Israeli police announced that they would start routinely rounding up draft dodgers, which prompted a massive response. A group of young Haredi men, most of whom lived west of al-Quds, drove into the West Bank in the middle of the night, and broke into the illegal settlement of Alon Shvut, near Bethlehem. Their target was the home of Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg. They ransacked the jurist’s home and destroyed his car, leading to 60 arrests. When the group drove back home, they were greeted by thousands of cheering Haredim in the streets. In the past, this would have resulted in establishment Haredi figures and politicians condemning the attack and apologizing to Sohlberg. However, this time they were silent. Sohlberg’s wife, who was hiding in their home as the attack took place, went so far as to compare the attack to Kristallnacht, which is ironic for someone living in an area where pogroms are committed daily.

The violence has taken on some interesting forms. Based on Red Alert, an Israeli missile warning app that is used by almost all Israelis and Palestinians, the Haredim created ‘Black Alert’, a hotline service that informs them when and where a draft dodger is arrested. When they get the call, hundreds of them will rush the area, attacking the police and extracting the young man.

The Haredim are a considerable force, and this does not just apply to their draft protests. The biggest story in Israeli society right now, even eclipsing the entire Katz ordeal, is the controversy surrounding Cafe Basimta, a coffee shop in the center of al-Quds. Basimta opened at the end of May, and has immediately become the site of daily, fierce protests. Haredi residents are irate because the cafe is open on Saturdays, while secular Israelis see this as a chance to fight back against the growing influence of the religious. The protests have become violent, and there is frequent spitting and slapping, as well as the throwing of eggs and feces. In the fifth week of the protests, Haredi men tried to bum-rush the cafe, causing property damage before the police came and a brawl ensued.6

As elections draw closer, the cafe has become a convenient soapbox and photo op for campaigning politicians, particularly those running on secular hatred of the Haredim. It has taken over social media, and become a major talking point on Israeli TV. The issue, for the secular Israelis, has become one of freedom, patriotism, and even LGBTQ rights. The only movement it has not connected to is the genocidal settler colonial project upon which their society exists.

“Those draft dodgers who show up week after week to shout, threaten, riot, and clash with soldiers and civilians need another place to let their energy out - against Hamas, against Hezbollah, and against the Houthis.”

- Avigdor Lieberman, Member of the Knesset and leader of the Yisrael Beitenu (Israel is Our Home) party

It is difficult to overemphasize the vitriol that exists between secular and Haredi Israelis. The two groups have long been at odds, but what has been happening these past few years is a major escalation, and it is highly unlikely to abate. Israel has always been a society defined by levels of practice, but these informal, once primarily demographic divisions have become polarized ideological strains.

The Hiloni, or secular, are the Herzlian inheritors of Political Zionism. They are now threatened, as they watch their society, defined to them by its freedoms and liberal values, crumble in the face of their hyper-militarism and bloodthirst coming home to roost. The Dati, or religious, are mostly settlers or settler-aligned, and constitute a powerful, hungry base of frontiersmen and zealots, whose mythological delusions based in racial supremacy seek to transform their state in a way that it seems increasingly strained by. The Haredi, meanwhile, wait in the wings, a population that cannot lead a society, but merely by existing threaten to overtake it entirely.7 None of this bodes well for the colony at the center of geopolitics, particularly as the outside world turns against it.

Israeli society is being split between these groups, whose hatred for each other grows and calcifies each day. Practically the only thing they can agree on is their hatred for the Palestinians. Absent their indigenous enemy, though, they would turn on each other in a heartbeat. This is a society built and sustained on a violence carried out by all its citizens, after all.

Israel is a settler colony, regardless of some ancient religious, mythological or even genetic claims by its settlers. They are foreigners enacting a European colonial project, nothing else. Those who came dug up their existing roots in dozens of other countries, arriving in Palestine with the vain hope of replanting them, a functional impossibility. Like all settler societies, it must destroy and supplant the natives in order to thrive, or fail to destroy them and wither because of it. The problem with Israel is that it began its colonialism late, and in a country where the natives were societally and technologically advanced and had already developed a strong national identity. Try as they might, their oppression only made Palestinian nationalism stronger.

While it has survived thus far on an inventive brutality, Israel has accomplished relatively little in the grand scheme of things. To be sure, it has inserted itself into important industries, and comfortably sits in the middle of the tower of cards that is Western hegemony, thus mandating the rest of the Imperial Core to back it and overlook its expansionist campaigns. However, it has never achieved a true level of stability, and thus has spent its entire existence fighting for legitimacy against an adversary with a better claim. Just look at how easily, over the last three years, the image that Israel had carefully crafted for itself has entirely inverted.

The oppression of the Palestinian people has only strengthened their national identity, but it has also reflected back on the Israelis, creating a powerful, settler identity. As Fanon writes, “The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother-country.” Israelis have no unified “mother-country.” Though it is far from true, in the Israeli consciousness, they see nowhere else that they can go. The manifestations of this are varied between the three competing groups outlined above, but all of them are equally desperate and violent. As the Palestinian claim strengthens, so too does the Israeli ‘resistance’ become more violent. This necessitates a constant, hyper-vigilant state. Naturally, any dissent, any straying from one’s perceived ideal method, becomes a threat. The settlers are primed to turn on each other.

Now, by no means am I advocating some radical optimism. Israel is not going to crumble and die just yet. When we look at the Zionist project, we should see a very acute danger. Its desperation is not cause to celebrate, but instead something that should prompt us to be more alert, more militant, and in fact more scared. The stakes are the safety and lives of the people of Palestine and the entire region. As a powerful, nuclear state, it even threatens the entire world, to some degree. However, in our opposition to Zionism, we should see the settlers turning on each other as what it is: an opening.

Israel is growing desperate. It has been exposed, and now the accusations that its victims have long levied at it are consensus among the majority of the world. In its desperation it becomes angrier, and in its anger it seeks control through the only outlet it has ever known, violence. That violence is uncontrollable, though. This leads it to make mistakes. The promotion of the volatile, delusional West Bank settler bloc, the tensions between the ultra-conservative Haredim and the increasingly embarrassed seculars, all of this is symptomatic of the same growing rot. That rot threatens to overtake the false paradise, tainting its ill-gotten goods, and leaving its class of sinners and plunderers starving. In time, that starvation will overtake all civility, and the settlers will have no choice but to eat each other.

Israel is a terrorist state. You have likely heard this phrase at least a couple times over the past few years, whether from social media or protest chants. However, while the refrain is certainly an effective tool for conveying frustration, within it lies a more complex discussion. For starters, what exactly is terrorism?

The exact parameters of the “terrorist” designation are difficult to pin down, and this is by design. The contemporary term has become a weapon wielded by the Global North, with the purpose of containing and delegitimizing counterhegemony, traditionally from the Global South. In a previous article on this Substack, I posited that it was the Cold War with the Soviet Union that caused the United States to gain its global dominance, and that in the wake of the USSR’s collapse, the US sought to perpetuate its hegemony, which still necessitated a war on the developing world, by adopting from Zionism the racialized criminalization of anticolonial struggle. This became what we now know as the “Global War on Terrorism.”

What officially designates an overseas group as “terrorist” in the US is its inclusion on the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list. This emerged during the post-Cold War restructuring of the world, in 1997, and greatly expanded after the September 11^th al-Qaeda attacks on New York and the subsequent passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001. The US’s use of “state sponsors of terrorism” is even more murky, originating in 1979 as a means of sanctioning and punishing states that fell outside of the American sphere of influence. Its real potency only came after it was absorbed into the broader GWOT at the turn of the century.

Israel has a much longer history of this form of criminalization. In its 1948 founding, Israel passed the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance as a response to the assassination of UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte. The Count was assassinated by the notorious Stern Gang, one of the three paramilitary groups that would later become the Israel Defense Forces. Despite these origins, the law became a powerful legal tool for Israel in its criminalization of Palestinian nationalism, with amendments throughout the 1980s retailoring the law to specifically target Palestinians. In 1967, Israel used Military Order 101 to criminalize all support for over 400 Palestinian groups that it deemed illegal in the West Bank. In these ways, Israel set the stage for the US legal regime that was to come.

Postcolonial scholars increasingly advocate for the rejection of the terrorism paradigm. Dr. Rabea Khan asserts in an article for the Critical Studies on Terrorism that terrorism should be “acknowledged as a racially infused, colonial, and gendered concept whose utterance and use in discourse has facilitated neo-colonial rule, racial violence, and global punishment in the modern-colonial world.” I completely agree with this; the term is irredeemable and imperialist. However, acknowledging that, we have the ability to delegitimize it by poking holes in its foundational logic.

With as objective a lens as we can assume, Israel should be considered a state sponsor of terrorism. As I noted earlier, the IDF was founded by the merger of three militias, all of which committed innumerable war crimes that led to the State of Israel’s founding. When viewed impartially, these acts should be considered terrorism. Since that foundation, Israel has continued to succeed through its flagrant, continuous breaking of international law. Now, it is committing unabated genocide against the peoples of Palestine and Lebanon.

What has changed in Israel in the last few years is not its sudden transformation into a genocidal state. It has retained this character from its violent settler colonial inception to the current moment. What has changed is instead its increasing candor about this fact. In just a few short years, the long-cultivated image of the IDF as “the most moral army in the world” has disintegrated.1 Now, most are familiar with the intentional destruction of almost all of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and the mass depravity of the IDF, who boast about and document their own crimes on social media. At the same time, the image of the Israeli government as a rational actor struggling for peace has crumbled as well. The rapid, brutal annexation of the West Bank through violent military occupation and the employment of illegal settlements has forever tarnished that image.

This fascistic acceleration necessitates an abandonment of the traditional reputation laundering. As proof of this, I present to you Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. Leiter is the new face that Israel is presenting to the US; a face that is merciless and openly genocidal. He is also, by every definition, a terrorist.

Standing on the Shoulders of Monsters

Before we can unpack the life and career of terrorist Yechiel Leiter, it is important to understand that he is no anomaly. The changes in Israeli politics reflect the evolution of its colonial project. Leiter is the present culmination of a long process, not necessarily always linear, but with the end goal of fascistic extremism.

It was Anwar Sadat who said that Israel gets everything from the United States, “from a loaf of bread to a Phantom jet.” That sentiment was true when Sadat said it over fifty years ago, but it is far truer now.2 It follows from this that the role of Israeli ambassador to the US is one of the most important positions in the nation. For most of Israel’s 20th century existence, until the 1990s, those who occupied this role were moderate figures by Israeli standards, often career diplomats. This was intentional, as the relationship between the United States and Israel, at the time, required a level of tact and compromise that is a far cry from the current arrangement.

The one exception to this was Moshe Arens, Israel’s first “controversial” ambassador to the US. In 1977, Menachem Begin defeated three decades of uninterrupted rule by HaAvoda, the Israeli Labor Party. This victory over social democracy by the right-wing was known as the Mahapach, or “revolution.”3 Much of this period was defined by Begin testing the waters; seeing how he could rock the boat. For the first five years of his premiership, his ambassadors were traditionally safe choices. It was only in his last year in office that he appointed Arens to the role. Arens was a hard-liner, utterly opposed to the Camp David Accords and peace with Egypt. Born in Latvia, he grew up in the United States, and was a leader of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement, Betar. He became a devoted follower of Jabotinsky and one of the earliest mainstream adherents to the Greater Israel project. He also became the beloved mentor to one Benjamin Netanyahu, a young up-and-comer who he took under his wing. His combative ambassadorship proved incredibly controversial, and only lasted for one year, before he was replaced by another “safe” diplomat.

What I posit here is that Arens was the blueprint for a fundamental realignment of the role of Israeli ambassador to the US. This falls under the broader theory of the GWOT’s intrinsic Zionism, and the subsequent merger of the United States and Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union. As evidence of this, I put forward that we can see a marked change in the role of Israeli ambassador during the period coinciding with the fall of the USSR and the beginning of US intervention in the Middle East.

After Arens, the role was filled by Meir Rosenne, followed by Moshe Arad. Both were career diplomats. In 1990, under Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, one Zalman Shoval was placed in the role. Shoval oversaw the relationship during one of its most strained periods. At the time, there were tensions between Israel and the George H.W. Bush administration over both West Bank and Gaza settlements and the Gulf War. Shoval was an intentional provocateur. Though not a '67 settler himself, he was a settlement absolutist, advocating indefinite Israeli military occupation and expedited settlement construction. Shoval proved a headache for the Americans, and was replaced in the government of Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin by Itamar Rabinovich, a rather dull academic who served mostly as a go-between while the Oslo Accords were being negotiated.

In 1996, Eliahu Ben-Elissar took up the role. He was a Polish immigrant who first arrived in Palestine at age ten, before joining the aforementioned Stern Gang as a teenager. In 1950, he fled the country due to his illicit activities. The Mossad managed to track him down in Paris some years later, where rather than apprehend him, they offered him a job. He became a go between for European agents working in the Middle East, which eventually led him back into Israeli society. Notable for being Netanyahu’s first ambassador, most of his time was spent railing against the new Oslo Accords and publicly denouncing the Americans’ role in the agreements. For unknown reasons, he was quietly made ambassador to France in 1998, and Shoval took up the role again for one year.

In reaction to Netanyahu’s first term, Labor took over once more, this time under Ehud Barak. He chose David Ivry, another uninteresting figure, whose career was defined by the failure of the Camp David talks, which led to the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada.

Next was Danny Ayalon, ambassador under Arik Sharon, who was a vociferous defender of West Bank settlers. Unlike Shoval, he cultivated a very close relationship with his Bush, who was a far more ardent defender of Israel than his father. Ayalon was still an agitator, though, and often publicly lambasted Democratic opposition to Israel’s actions. Today, he is perhaps best known for his YouTube videos, in which he would “debunk” lies about Israel and push for West Bank annexation.

Sallai Meridor marks an important point in the history of ambassadors to the US. He was the first ambassador to have actually been a West Bank settler. The son of Irgun commander Eliyahu Meridor, Sallai helped found the settlement of Kfar Adumim. While he was of course an extremist by our standards, Meridor was actually a so-called “moderate settler.” He was critical of Likud’s push for settlements in East al-Quds, and in 2018 penned an open letter for J-Street to his settlement, in which he called for its residents to not evict their Palestinian neighbors and treat them with respect. Truly inspiring, I know.4

Meridor was replaced by Michael Oren, yet another important point in our journey to Leiter. Michael Oren was, for the first time since Arens, an American. Born Michael Bornstein in New York, he spent his life in the Tri-State Area before making aliyah as an adult. He served as a paratrooper in the 1982 Lebanon invasion, before becoming an academic and writer. Oren was a smooth talker, and managed to cultivate strong bipartisan relationships in D.C. He was beloved by Republicans, naturally, but Democrats adored him too. According to an article in The Forward, Oren would have “late-night jam session at the ambassador’s residence with [Maryland] Gov. Martin O’Malley on guitar and Ambassador Oren playing the bodhran, an Irish drum.” During his tenure, he used his political clout to push boundaries while retaining respectability. He declined to publicly speak at J-Street events, and frequently branded the United Nations as antisemitic, particularly for their concerns over the blockade on Gaza. In 2010, he labelled the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which was violently raided by the IDF and resulted in the deaths of ten activists, as an “Assault, Cloaked in Peace” in The New York Times.

After leaving office, Oren shocked his D.C. friends by becoming a far more partisan, combative figure. He infamously targeted Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi and her family, accusing them of beign foreign, paid “Pallywood” actors and launching an official Knesset subcommittee investigation into their ancestry. He also relentlessly attacked Barack Obama, and became a proponent of the “birther” conspiracy. In attacking Obama for signing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), he theorized that it was the “rejection by not one but two Muslim father figures” that compelled Obama to seek rapprochement with Iran.

Oren was replaced by yet another American: Ron Dermer. The son of an Israeli mother and an American father who was once mayor of Miami Beach, Dermer also made aliyah as an adult. He hitched his wagon to Netanyahu early on, and the two became inseparable. He worked as an advisor and in a number of liaison positions, before becoming his 2009 campaign strategist. When Netanyahu was elected, Dermer became his senior advisor. In 2013, Netanyahu replaced Oren with Dermer, who would hold the role for a nearly unprecedented eight years. During his tenure, he secured a 10-year $38 billion aid package for Israel from the Obama administration, and successfully waited out Obama’s tenure without having to give on settlements. However, Dermer’s biggest victories were during the first presidency of Donald Trump. Dermer and Netanyahu successfully got Trump to recognize occupied Jerusalem/al-Quds as the capital of Israel, and also recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Dermer has long served as a ghostwriter for Netanyahu, and is often seen as his partner in crime. Netanyahu has floated him many times as a potential successor. One of his biggest moves was coming up with and writing Netanyahu’s infamous 2015 speech before Congress denouncing the Iran deal, widely seen as a major, provocative slight against Obama and the Democrats. Dermer’s eight years as ambassador are regarded as an unprecedented, partisan move by Likud. Even Michael Oren was shocked by Dermer’s actions, saying “Every ambassador forges his own role. While I saw mine as being the representative of the Israeli people to the American people, Ron saw his as being Bibi’s representative to the White House.”

Eventually, the oversight body behind confirming ambassadors denied Dermer another term in the role, and Netanyahu replaced him with Gilad Erdan. Another fundamentalist, Erdan barely got to serve out the year he held the job, due to simultaneously acting as Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. Erdan was also a proud racist, and loyal Likudnik, who spent much of his career spearheading the fight against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. His few months actually spent as ambassador to the US were defined mostly by sparring with the Biden administration, before Netanyahu’s short-lived government collapsed and he lost the job.5

In the brief disaster that was Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid’s joint premiership, they appointed Michael Herzog, brother to current president Isaac Herzog, to the role. Widely seen as a nonpartisan, safe choice, Herzog remained in office even after Netanyahu regained power. This was mostly due to his close relationships in D.C., as well as a general competence. Herzog worked quietly, mainly bent on keeping bipartisan support for Israel strong as the Israelis began their genocide in Gaza. When 88 House Democrats made the meagerest move and signed an open letter to Biden expressing that the administration should make sure that Palestinians being slaughtered should not have food, water, and medicine withheld, Herzog countered with his own letter accusing them of antisemitism. He also worked to get UNRWA shuttered, and garnered support in Washington for the Israeli invasion of Rafah.

While Herzog was certainly a useful figure for Netanyahu, the two often sparred. As the early, turbulent period of the genocide abated for Israel, Netanyahu worked behind the scenes on replacing him. The return of Donald Trump to the presidency gave him a perfect opportunity for this, and in January of 2025, Yechiel Leiter would assume the role.

The Terrorist In the Room

Yechiel “Michael” Leiter was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, living there until he was 18 years old. Barely old enough to vote, Leiter made aliyah and went to school first at yeshiva, and then at the University of Haifa, earning a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy. He served as a soldier in the 1982 Lebanon invasion, before becoming an activist. More on that later.

While a teenager, Leiter was a member of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a violent vigilante organization deemed a “right-wing terrorist group” by the FBI. The group was founded in 1968 by infamous far-right rabbi Meir Kahane. The goal of the JDL was “Jewish self-defense,” which really meant vigilante violence against those opposed to Zionism. Kahane’s catchphrase was “Every Jew a .22,” and he would often make public death threats against pro-Palestine individuals. Throughout their early years, they would sent death threats to Arab diplomats, engage in violence against protestors, and commit major acts of vandalism and disruption. In 1970, members of the group were arrested at JFK International Airport for attempting to board a plane with loaded guns and grenades, with the intention of hijacking the plane and diverting it to Israel.

The JDL became best known for their bombings. Throughout the '70s and '80s, the JDL was linked to dozens of bombings that caused multiple deaths and many more injuries. Over the years, they attempted to kill many activists and politicians. Their most well known assassination was the 1985 murder of Palestinian activist Alex Odeh, for which no one was arrested, despite an exorbitant amount of evidence.6

Leiter’s exact actions during his stint in the JDL are unknown, but we can safely say that he was a card-carrying member of a terrorist organization. And his views did not change upon leaving. After moving to occupied Palestine, Leiter joined Kach, Kahane’s fascist, Jewish nationalist party. Kach would take the Israeli political world by storm, gaining an immense amount of popularity before being classified a terrorist organization and forcibly disbanded after one of its members killed 29 Palestinian civilians praying at the Ibrahimi Mosque in al-Khalil/Hebron.

By our count, Leiter has been a member of two different terrorist groups. Leiter joins other Kach alumni in the current Israeli government, including current minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, one of the most extreme figures in Israeli political history, as well as far-right politician Avigdor Liberman.

Leiter’s activist career was, predictably, just as fundamentalist as everything else in his life. After going to a settler yeshiva, in 1984 he founded the settlement of Admot Yishai in Hebron. Admot Yishai joins a network of other illegal Israeli settlements surrounding the Palestinian city. Hebron settlers are widely known as some of the most ideological and violent settlers in the West Bank.

Soon after founding the settlement, Leiter helped found an organization promoting the settlement of the whole city, called the Hebron Fund. The Hebron Fund has raised untold tens or hundreds of millions over the years, both from the Israeli and broader Jewish community. In 2003, it was estimated that 45 percent of the Hebron settler community’s funding came from American donations through the nonprofit. In 2009, they hosted a New York fundraiser so large that it had to be held at Citi Field, the Queens-based Mets stadium. An article in The Guardian from the same year quotes the then-Executive Director of the organization as saying “democracy is poison to Arabs,” as well as “you’ll never get the truth out of an Arab.”

His work soon got him elected to the head of the Committee of the Jewish Community of Hebron, a group that oversees the broader annexation project and acts as the municipal body of all settlements in the city. This committee oversees everything related to settlement in the city, and is closely tied to the Hebron Fund. They are also directly responsible for the weekly military-backed “settler incursions” into the Old City of Hebron, which have resulted in the deaths and injuries of Palestinians, the regular destruction of property, and the decimation of the local economy. Leiter headed the committee from 1989 to 1992, during which times he was referred to as “mayor” of the Jewish community.

In 1994, Leiter founded yet another nonprofit, this one the One Israel Fund. This became one of the biggest and most profitable settlement nonprofits in Israel and the United States, raising $26 million in the United States alone between 2001 and 2014. Most of the money goes towards settler infrastructure, but much of it goes to settler security across the West Bank; meaning this money directly goes to the violent thugs expelling Palestinians from their land. The fund provides them with tactical gear, weapons, surveillance tools, and vehicles. For the organization’s 30^th anniversary gala, Mike Huckabee addressed the Israel Fund, less than five months before becoming US ambassador to Israel. He is quoted as having said, “Tonight Judea and Samaria goes mainstream. It’s okay to come out and say, ‘I support the heartland of Israel and it should remain the land of the Jewish people.’”

Leiter’s work led him to gain a reputation as a renowned settler activist and writer, and today he holds a number of high-level positions on the boards of right-wing think tanks and forums. At one point, he was on the board of the Yesha Council, the highest authority for the West Bank settler movement, overseeing all settlements and settler activity in the territory. Leiter “established the international desk and…has since been a key partner in the English-language advocacy for Judea and Samaria.” The Yesha Council is the successor group to Gush Emunim, the former main body of settlers that had to be dissolved due to its founding of the Jewish Underground, a terrorist organization responsible for assassinations, bombings, and school shootings. That’s three terrorist groups linked to Leiter, if you’re counting.

Over the years, Leiter’s views have largely stayed the same. From railing against the Oslo Accords in the '90s, to writing extensively since about the imperative to annex what Israelis call “Judea and Samaria,” Leiter is a far-right zealot who has spent his life advocating the breaking of international law and the violent ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. There are countless international laws that explicitly forbid Israel’s actions in the West Bank, including the Fourth Geneva Convention. None of this has stopped Leiter.

So far, Leiter’s tenure as ambassador has been predictably troublesome. He is not quite at the point where he vocally encourages outpost settler violence, but he constantly repeats the totally disproven lie that outpost settlers are a small group of violent teenagers. In fact, they are a large coordinated and state-backed paramilitary force.7 Aside from aggressively pushing West Bank annexation, Leiter has been heading negotiations with Lebanon, driving Israel’s equally illegal and expansionist aims there. In these talks, he has openly expressed a desire to see Lebanon act in a neutered role, subservient to Israel. This would, presumably, be accompanied by Israel getting to keep some of the Lebanese territory it currently occupies.

In addition, Leiter has predictably been an outspoken voice for a continuation of the genocide in Gaza. He has stated that Israel’s campaign will only end with “a Gaza that’s free of Hamas.” He has continued to peddle the lie that the IDF are not withholding any aid in Gaza, and that any shortage is in fact because of Hamas and the UN stealing the aid for themselves. Gaza is a particularly personal genocide for Leiter, whose son, Moshe, died while committing it.

Finally, the freshman ambassador has been lobbying hard in Washington. He holds regular meetings with Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and has been trying to save Israel’s floundering reputation by putting out social media statements, videos, and even booklets. In May, he put out the booklet “Manufacturing a Modern Blood Libel: Genocide, Starvation, and the Language of Dehumanization.”

The True Face of Israel

We have seen that since the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Global War on Terrorism, the role of Israeli ambassador to the United States has changed drastically. What was once just a high-level diplomatic post has become one of the most integral positions in the maintenance of the world’s most dangerous and consequential imperial undertaking.

The Mahapach in 1977 shattered the social democratic, labor-oriented facade of Israeli colonialism. It created a period of turbulent transformation, which manifested as a tug-of-war between the outdated labor “left” and the more honest face of Israel: an ultranationalist, openly racist far-right. Begin’s victory, alongside Arens’ ambassadorship, broke the floodgates. However, it was the beginning of the the modern “special relationship” and the onset of the GWOT that really propelled this new movement to power. Starting with Shamir, Likud leadership terms became longer, while Labor terms, like those of Rabin and Peres, became shorter, before dying out entirely. In the era of Netanyahu’s entrance into the political arena, which pushed Likud even further right, new centrist oppositions, led by Barak and Olmert respectively, tried to assert themselves. These failed miserably, and Netanyahu gained immense power, leading for an unprecedented period of time. His only opposition became the meager center-right alliance of Bennet and Lapid, which died as soon as it tried to mount a real resistance.

As we saw, Likud’s ambassadors became more extreme and antagonistic as the years went on. This coincided with the office taking on a new role, far beyond that of a typical ambassadorship. Meanwhile, the opposition’s ambassadors attempted to turn back the clock on the new mandate, but lost steam quickly. With the consecutive and progressively more radical tenures of Ayalon, Meridor, Oren, Dermer, and Erdan, it became clear that going back was no longer an option. Herzog was the opposition’s last stand: a figure who was nonpartisan but hawkish enough to slip through the cracks. Yet, in the era of Israel’s imperial death drive, even he proved too moderate to last.

Yechiel Leiter is the face that Israel now wants to present to the US and the world. This is because he is the perfect emblem of Zionism. He is a terrorist, by every objective definition of the word, who has been a member of or aligned with illegal, far-right extremist groups for quite literally every moment of his adult life. While Muslim Middle Easterners remain the face of so-called terrorism, Leiter, a white American settler whose career is marked by illegal bombings, assassinations, and land grabs, reveals the double standard.

The Zionist project was always going to become an overtly fascist one. The end form of settler colonialism is, after all, fascism. Just like the fascist projects of Mussolini or Hitler, Zionism seeks to constantly expand its reach with maximum violence and torture, and it rests on the maintenance of a racial hierarchy. This is American-Israeli imperialism; the complete collapse of the Middle East and its replacement with an exogenous, totalitarian order.

The appointment of Leiter is a sign that the synthesis of the United States and the State of Israel has reached a dangerous new level. No longer does Israel require a laundered image that belies its grave crimes. Now, it freely reveals its true form: terror. The man who stands as the bridge between the two poles of this empire is both an American and an Israel. He is a man who has spent decades in terror groups, and has overseen vast colonial projects that reach across the globe. He flagrantly violates international law, and celebrates war crimes and genocide. Yechiel Leiter is a terrorist, because Israel and the United States seek to impose a regime of pure terror upon the world.

Far, far away from occupied Palestine, deep in the woods, there are Israeli soldiers. Every summer, they come by the thousands to forests across the United States, Canada, Latin American, and Europe, to spend two or three months hanging out with children, unsupervised. After a year of committing mass slaughter, overwhelmingly against children, these soldiers see fit to spend their summers as teachers and guardians. They regale these children with stories about their genocidal military service, then have the children simulate being in the IDF. I know I sound crazy.

This is Israel Inescapable, a series about the inability to separate Judaism from Zionism, where we go institution by institution to find out how modern American Judaism works to support the ongoing project of genocidal Zionist expansion. Last time, we looked at the role of Jewish education in propagandizing young Jews throughout their childhoods. In this part, we’ll be examining what is perhaps an even more pernicious institution of Zionist indoctrination: the Jewish summer camp.

Make no mistake, these are political institutions, designed to instill a uniform Zionist vision in impressionable young minds. At Jewish day schools, some amount of bureaucracy exists to mildly impede the brainwashing. Jewish summer camps are free from those constraints. These strange little outposts exist to simulate and romanticize Israel, specifically a version of Israel that conveniently leaves out the occupation of Palestine and subjugation of the Palestinians.

Some History

Oddly enough, Jewish summer camps were one of the earliest institutional proponents of Zionism. As you might know, American Jewry was fairly divided on Zionism in the years post-World War II. It wasn’t until 1967, in the wake of the Naksa and the US’s rapid alignment with Israel, that a unified position materialized. However, by that point in 1967, Jewish summer camps had already been militantly Zionist for a good two decades. The first reason for this is because the entire project of Jewish summer camps is a Jewish nationalist one.

In the aftermath of World War II, Jews began moving to integrated white areas, particularly the suburbs, en masse. This was largely due to the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, also known as the GI Bill. While it excluded almost all Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American veterans from its benefits, the GI bill granted Jews, Italians, Irish, and other “white ethnics” access to higher education, home ownership, and business loans, propelling these groups into the middle class. This massive flight led Jewish communities to make many structural shifts to their existing institutions, reorienting to what sociologist Herbert Gans calls “child-centered Judaism.” As we learned in Part II of this series, one of these shifts was the creation of the Jewish day school. Another was the Jewish summer camp.

Summer camps had existed prior to this, and most of the ones in and around New York were already de facto or semi-explicitly Jewish. However, there weren’t very many of these camps, and their purpose was actually very different than that of their successors. The camps that existed prior to the 40s popped up mostly at the turn of the century, with the goal of Americanization; educating young Jewish immigrants on how to assimilate into the social fabric of the United States. The new camps, which dwarfed the old ones in number, size, and funding, were designed with a very different mission. Their goal was to stem the influence of assimilation, and preserve a unique Jewish identity.

Some of these camps arose out of Zionist youth movements, many of which had very established presences in the US. The most well known are Young Judaea, Habonim Dror, Hashomer Hatzair, and Betar. These youth groups were instrumental in instilling Zionism in young European and American Jews in the first half of the 20^th century. Almost all of Israel’s founding settlers came from this milieu, including Ben-Gurion, Begin, Shamir, and Meir. The goal of these groups was to create a generation of “pioneers” who would immigrate to and settle the land, and this remained the case even in the wake of Zionism’s successful colonization. Palestine was sold as a newly conquered frontier, rough and barren, but on which hardworking young Jews could build a utopia.

The layout of a summer camp proved perfect for this job. Most were relatively isolated, often with little in the way of infrastructure. The lack of gentiles and the rugged accommodations created an ideal mirror to the kibbutzim, the foundational settlements which Zionism used to colonize Palestine. These camps simulated only the most idealized aspects of the kibbutz, of course, and little mention was made of Palestinians. The camps would also immerse campers in Israeli culture, teaching them Hebrew and familiarizing them with the burgeoning Israeli way of life. Camp Massad, one of the last century’s biggest Jewish summer camps, was founded in the Poconos in 1941 by the HaNoar Ha’Ivri movement. It became the first camp to have a institute full Hebrew-language immersion.

Alongside Zionist youth movements, Jewish summer camps also began appearing as arms of the non-Orthodox Jewish denominations. In 1952, the Reform Movement founded its first summer camp. The movement had originally been explicitly anti-Zionist, but officially adopted Zionism in 1937. Up until 1967, there would be a sizeable minority of Reform Jews who were skeptical of Zionism, and it is perhaps for this reason that these camps varied on their Zionist programming until the end of the 60s. Some camps were outwardly very Zionist, while others took a less overt stance.

On the other hand, the Conservative Movement had adopted Zionism at the turn of the century. In 1947, the first Camp Ramah was founded by the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. The camp was Hebrew-immersive, and had integrated Jewish and Zionist education. It became a major arm of the Conservative Movement, and by the time the Six-Day War came, there were already six large camps, with catchment zones across the United States and Canada, as well as two day camps and a “Ramah Israel Seminar.”

The Continuity Crisis

The Jewish summer camp continued to act as an integral arm of Zionist indoctrination for the next four decades, but it was in the 1990s that things took an even more drastic turn.

By the time the '80s rolled around, the state of World Jewry had changed dramatically. For one, that anti-Zionist current that I mentioned earlier had been effectively neutralized. The mainstream Jewish community had nestled into a comfortable Overton Window, which did not include within it space for those opposed to Israel’s existence. The other big change was that Jews were assimilated. In just a few short generations, those immigrants who needed special Americanizing camps had become settled suburbanites.1

The rapid assimilation of Jews in the West manifested a new set of fears within the community. Not only was atheism becoming more in vogue, intermarriage rates were skyrocketing. Rabbinic Judaism was traditionally a mostly closed religion, with a rigorous and unforgiving conversion process. The religion rested on matrilineal descent, and intermarriage was very much a threat to that fragile system. Pretty soon, the animating question in the Jewish press, academic circles, and casual conversation became: how long until a majority of Jews are intermarried?

These fears were exacerbated in 1990, when the Council of Jewish Federations sponsored the groundbreaking “National Jewish Population Survey,” headed by Dr. Barry A. Kosmin. The study confirmed the worst, finding that 52% of American Jews were in interfaith relationships. Intermarriage had already become the majority.

This sent shockwaves through the Jewish community, kicking off what became known as the “Jewish continuity crisis.” One of the most important figures of the crisis was the Chief Orthodox Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Baron Jonathan Sacks. Sacks and Kosmin became partners on a number of further studies, and the former wrote excessively on the topic, including his highly influential book, Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren?2 Sacks stressed the inextricability of continuity and Zionism. In his 1995 book, Community of Faith, he writes:

"Jewish continuity is to the 1990s what Zionism was to the 1890s. Both are central to the Jewish people and its survival in the modern world. The difference is that while Zionism addressed itself to hostility outside, continuity focuses on indifference within. Zionism was about the saving of Jewish lives. Continuity is about the saving of Jewish life. Zionism was about Jewry as an am [nation]. Continuity is about Jewry as an edah [community]. A century ago Jews had faith but not a land. Today we have a land but we are beginning to lose the faith."3

Continuity became the central driver of World Jewry’s Zionism. The oft-called “Second Holocaust” of intermarriage would be averted if all Jews were instilled with an even deeper connection to Israel. Thanks to the efforts of Rabbi Sacks, one of the most influential figures in the Jewish world, continuity soon turned into the cause célèbre of Jewish billionaires and financiers. As a direct response to the crisis, some of the wealthiest Jewish figures in the world created Birthright Israel, and hundreds of other “Israel trip” programs soon followed.4 Long moribund organizations like Hillel International and BBYO had hundreds of millions poured into them for the same purpose.

The absolute scale of the money involved in this whole ordeal is difficult to convey. A lowball estimate puts the total money held by Jewish funding organizations between 2000 and 2015 at $46.3 billion. This is roughly equivalent to the revenue of the 70^th largest company in the United States in 2020.5 Jewish philanthropy had already long been a racket, but it was the continuity crisis that really gave it the enormous purchase that it has today.6

This efficacy of this push is pretty indisputable. The '90s and 2000s were the era of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and generally a massive new appraisal of Palestinian liberation by left-wing activists. Yet, support for Israel among American Jews was steadfast, even as Israel gained a new face as a consequence of its actions during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. On the home front, intermarriage rates trended downwards for a long time, and the rate of children in interfaith households being raised Jewish increased. American aliyah rates also rose yearly until well into the 2010s.

One of the other key arenas that gained new life was the summer camp. The reason for this was pretty simple: Jewish summer camps worked. The Foundation for Jewish Camp’s 2011 study, Camp Works - the Long-Term Impact of Jewish Summer Camp, found that alumni of Jewish summer camps were 10% more likely to marry a Jewish partner, 26% more likely to belong to a synagogue, 25% more likely to give to Jewish charities, and of course, 55% more likely to feel emotionally attached to Israel.

While it’s a well known fact that programs like Birthright encourage sexual activity, particularly between participants and Israelis, fewer know that Jewish summer camps have a similar reputation. In fact, it’s rather notorious. A common refrain, usually uttered with a wry, ‘what-can-you-do’ sort of nonchalance, is “the purpose of Jewish camps is to make Jewish babies.” Counselors rarely discourage campers’ sexual activity, and many encourage it. This isn’t due to any specific training, but rather the broader culture of the camps. In fact, counselors are pushed to find a partner at camp, even more than campers. The point is to make more Jews, after all.

Usually this phenomenon is dismissed as simple “hookup culture.” However, as you can likely deduce, encouraging young people to explore their sexuality in an isolated environment with few real adults is a recipe for disaster. It’s for this reason that many Jewish summer camps have an additional reputation for their prevalence of sexual assault. If you do some research on the subject, you’ll realize pretty quickly what I’m referring to. The purpose of these camps is not to keep children safe, it’s just to make more children. As for why that is?

It isn’t too difficult to see how this culture of teen matchmaking is the fulfilment of Sacks’ Zionist dream. Zionism is a nationalist movement, predicated on a racial hierarchy. Much like its predecessor movements, both settler colonial and fascist, racial purity and fertility are essential. In her book The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America, Sandra Fox puts it best: “That adolescent campers would arrive interested in dating and sexuality from the mid-20th century onward was all but inevitable and obvious; that camp leaders would fuse those inevitable interests with communal and ideological goals—curbing assimilation, imbuing children with Jewish nationalist sentiments or religious identity, and combating rising rates of interfaith marriage—was specific to the Jewish camp.”

The Israel of it All

The connections between Birthright and Jewish summer camps run deeper than both being products of the continuity crisis. Like many seemingly disparate parts of the American Jewish community, a little bit of research will reveal that they are actually closely connected projects from the same small grouping of nonprofits and foundations. Birthright was created by Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt through the Jewish Agency for Israel, the largest Jewish nonprofit in the world.7 The trip was launched under a massive collaborative program between the Jewish Agency and the Jewish Federations of North America, called Partnership2Gether (P2G). P2G established a globe-spanning network of cooperative initiatives between Israeli municipalities and Jewish communties across North American, Latin America, Europe, South Africa, and Australia. This is where the Israeli soldiers come in.

One of the flagship components of the Jewish Agency’s work in non-Israeli Jewish communities are what it calls shlichim, or emissaries. Shlichim are a little known but integral aspect of Zionism abroad. They are handpicked, trained representatives of Israel, dispatched to almost every Jewish community. In 2025, the Jewish Agency sent a record 3,000 shlichim to communities across the West.

Some shlichim are what are known as shinshinim, or high school graduates on a gap year. They act as more general representatives for Israel, volunteering or speaking at Jewish community centers, day schools, or cultural and religious events. They might also get put to work at senior centers or youth groups. The vast majority of shlichim, though, are 20- to 30-year-olds who have just finished their IDF service. They are dispatched usually as both general representatives and in specific roles. These include acting as resident Israelis at Hillel chapters, liaisons between local Jewish Federations and Israel, and what is by far the most common, summer camp counselors. An estimated 2,000 of the total 3,000 shlichim dispatched in 2025 were sent as summer camp counselors.

These Israelis are present at every Jewish summer camp, and at many, the policy is to include one in every camper bunk. Their goal is to integrate hasbara into the summer camp experience. This is from a Jewish Telegraph Agency article on Jewish camps, citing then National Ramah director Rabbi Mitch Cohen: “Cohen said the camps’ top priority is fostering a sense of affection in campers toward Israel as a Jewish homeland.”

One ubiquitous practice at Jewish summer camp, almost always spearheaded by the Israeli counselors, is gadna (a Hebrew acronym for ‘Youth Battalions’). The practice often involves campers participating in some of obstacle course that simulates IDF training, brandishing nerf guns or water pistols. Campers learn Israeli training maneuvers and Hebrew military commands straight from IDF veterans. As discipline, kids are either humiliated by their ‘drill sergeants’ or made to do some sort of physical punishment, like pushups. You can probably guess how well that goes over with chubby Jewish kids from Wisconsin and their helicopter parents. Many camps have been forced to scale back the program for kids below a certain age in the last half-decade.

Gadna is based on a real program that Israeli high schoolers undergo, but reenactment itself is a broader tool used by Israeli summer camp shlichim.8 Some of you may have seen the documentary Israelism, where one alumnus of Jewish summer camp recalls being woken up in the middle of the night and made to undertake a surprise mock stealth mission. In a 2018 article from The Forward, a particularly odd reenactment is recounted, in which incoming 10th graders are each assigned a specific Israeli veteran of the Naksa/Six-Day War to research and emulate, all of whom were taken from profiles in Yossi Klein Halevi’s book, Like Dreamers. Here’s how that activity went:

“The campers conducted political debates their soldier was involved in, including on the settlement issue as well as whether Israel should be governed by secular or Jewish law. Some campers even constructed settlements of their own before being told by the “Israeli government” that they must be dismantled. They then discussed whether it was appropriate to forcibly evacuate Jews from their homes in pursuit of peace, as Israel has done numerous times.”

At most Jewish summer camps, another common initiative led by shlichim is Yom Yisrael (Israel Day). Regular programming is put aside for one day each session for a special celebration of Israeli culture and history. Israeli flags will fly in every corner of the campus, and shlichim will lead recreational and education activities all day that focus on Israel. The focus of the day is usually to make Israel seem as fun as possible to these impressionable children, presented by cool older role models. Nothing, of course, is taught of the Palestinians and other Arabs who have had to contend with a century of Zionism occupation and mass murder.

To think that the shlichim are the driving force behind the Zionism at these camps would be to miss the bigger picture. They are tools, brought in to enforce the image of Israel that the camps want to drill into campers’ minds. Every morning, campers line up and recite Hatikvah (the Israeli national anthem) around the Israeli flag. After every meal, campers say grace, which includes a blessing for IDF soldiers and for the State of Israel. Many camps mandate daily Israel education. Most name camper bunks or camp areas after Israeli landmarks, towns, and kibbutzim. In the year between being a camper and a counselor, they are encouraged to go on a summer Israel program, like the Conservative Movement’s “Ramah Israel Seminar” or the Reform Movement’s “Yallah! Israel.” All the while, from kindergarten through high school, they are accompanied by IDF soldiers, fresh off careers enforcing occupation or murdering civilians, with whom they form lifelong bonds.

How Would You Rate Your Experience?

I am an alumnus of Jewish summer camp (alongside most Jewish institutions). The insanity that I experienced growing up in that environment could take up another article or two, but I’ll spare you most of that and relay just a few notable memories. The Ramah camp that I went to had a specific reputation for being progressive; we did things like celebrate Juneteenth and there were weekly LGBTQ+ events. When Roe v. Wade was overturned, the camp director made us all pray for women who couldn’t get abortions and take a moment of silence. I’m pretty sure he cried. This progressive stance, though, did not translate to the camp’s position on Israel.

Much like the interviewee from Israelism, I remember being woken up in the middle of the night by counselors. We were frantically told that we had to get to the firepit on the other side of the camp, and then other counselors appeared in costume, chasing us down the road, yelling things like “Jew” and “kike” at us. At one point, one counselor on a horse appeared to chase us. Even though we knew it wasn’t real, I remember some of the other twelve-year-olds being pretty understandably frightened. When we finally got to the firepit, all the counselors stopped chasing us and froze in place. Waiting for us by the fire was the director of Israel programming, an Israeli in his thirties. He explained to us that all the people we were running from were the Cossacks, the Nazis, the Spanish Inquisition (I guess that explains the horse), and all the other forces that have persecuted Jews throughout the centuries. The fire represented Israel, the one place where no one could hurt Jews.

Another memory is a yearly tradition that would take place each Yom Yisrael. Campers of all ages would be taken to a field, where we were given pinecones and water balloons and told that they were guns and grenades. Then counselors would come out with towels wrapped around their heads and unibrows drawn in sharpie. They were Arabs, we were told, and we had to kill them before they harmed Jews. Whoever “killed” the most Arabs was rewarded with extra dessert after dinner.

The last memory I’ll share is one from when I was a counselor. This was when I was a JVP-type, who thought it was possible to separate Judaism and Zionism. This would have been in late May or early June of 2022. An event was put on for counselors, most of whom were between the ages of 18 and 23, where we listened to a panel of Israelis tell us about what it was like living in Israel. I tried to get out of it, but they wouldn’t let me. At one point, someone in the audience asked them what it was like hearing the American media lie about Israel all the time. This set them all off, in particular one of them who was a big jarhead combat soldier. He was practically foaming at the mouth, screaming about how the media had lied about the “terrorist journalist” who had been killed. I realized immediately that he was talking about Shireen Abu Akleh, who had been shot in the head by IDF snipers in the Jenin refugee camp while covering a raid for Al Jazeera. He went on about how the media twisted her killing and the IDF attack on her funeral, which he claimed was one of the most common places for “terrorists to gather.” At that point I ran out.

Despite thinking I blocked every email list the camp had me on, I received one from them for the first time in years, just last week. I thought ending the article on this would be an illustrative experience, lest you think I’ve embellished or lied at any point throughout this.

The email is a survey from the Ramah Camping Movement, with the goal of “exploring Ramah’s lasting effect on its alumni community and learning more about how your Jewish identity, community involvement, leadership, and life choices may have been shaped by your time at Ramah.” It starts off asking basic questions: how old are you, what is your occupation, were you a camper or counselor or both, what camp did you go to, etc. It continues on like this for a while, just normal survey questions. Then it starts to get weird.

First, there is a section with the question, “To what extent did Ramah experience influence or shape the following aspects of your life?” This is followed by these categories:

• Importance of being part of a Jewish community

• Approach toward parenting

• Choice of neighborhood

• Connection to Israel

• Friendship and social circles

• Integration of Hebrew in your life

• Choice of college/university

• Choice of Jewish institutions or organizations to engage with

• Desire to volunteer or give back to the Jewish community

• Overall values and worldview

After a few questions about how I practice Judaism, and then roughly the same amount about how I donate my money, it begins to ask about relationships. The questions are as follows:

• How many of your closest friends are Jewish?

• In terms of your relationship status, are you currently: [followed by options]

• Does your spouse/partner consider themselves Jewish?

• Did you meet your spouse/partner through Ramah, either at camp or through a Ramah friend group?

The last third of the survey is about Israel. It begins with big bold text stating “The next few questions focus on your relationship to, and involvement with, Israel.” This is strange, as there weren’t any other bolded demarcations in the first two-thirds of the survey. Here are the questions:

• How many times have you visited Israel?

• How emotionally attached are you to Israel?

• Do you donate to Israeli organizations or causes?

• How frequently are you in touch with Israelis that you met through Ramah?

• Looking back, how well did Ramah prepare you to think about and engage with Israel?

• What, if anything, might change about Ramah’s approach toward Israel education?

I think the content of the survey speaks for itself. Jewish summer camps are a major facet of Jewish life. They are also cesspools of Zionism. While they emerged from relatively innocuous institutions, they have become tools of indoctrination, shaping generations of young Jews and manufacturing a single-minded devotion to the State of Israel. They do this through intentional isolation, attempting to keep Jews unassimilated and tribal.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into Jewish institutions aimed at children. Absurd militarism is drilled into them from a young age so that, by the time they first encounter any anti-Israel speech, it is overridden by memories of camp counselors putting them to sleep with stories of vanquishing terrorists. They are encouraged to marry within their “ethno-religious group,” and told that creating more Jews is paramount to the safety of their people. If I still have to spell it out, this is not normal. These are not neutral institutions. It might seem ridiculous when you first hear it, but as you’ve seen in the course of this article, children’s summer camp is used as a cover to normalize occupation and genocide.

What I want to accomplish with this series is not just to prove that Zionism is inherent to all Jewish institutions. I also want this to be a nonlinear but comprehensive explanation of just how Judaism got to this point. Highlighting the history of things like the continuity crisis and the magnitude of the endless programs and nonprofits and foundations is integral to this. These things tell use just how it is that this strange little insular world came to dominate our politics and dictate the direction our society is going in. Judaism is no longer a religion, it has become a national project, supported by a collective delusion. That delusion has the backing of the most powerful forces on the planet. And everything, from the billionaires at the top, to the seemingly innocuous, forgotten little pieces at the bottom, is Zionist. From synagogues to schools to summer camps, Israel is inescapable.

For most of you, hearing “Jewish school” likely conjures images of either a group of black-hatted Yeshiva students waddling down the street in their heavy overcoats, or else a cheap win for your middle school basketball team. You know what I mean with the latter; nerdy semi-religious Jewish kids whose parents sent them to a school that woefully fails at socially equipping them for public high school or college. This is all true, by the way, but it belies the far more insidious reality of these institutions. As with much of American/Western Judaism, behind the goofy exterior lies a den of Zionist indoctrination, institutions explicitly tied to the Israeli occupation.

This is Israel Inescapable, a series about the inability to separate Judaism from Zionism, where we go institution by institution to find out how modern American Judaism works to support the ongoing project of genocidal Zionist expansion. In Part I, we went into the role of the synagogue, which despite presenting itself as the beating heart of religious Judaism, is in actuality a powerful legitimating force in tying together the modern State of Israel with the dead religion whose skin it now wears. In this part, we examine the educational arm of Zionism abroad: the Jewish school.

Jewish education takes on a number of forms, from the part-time Hebrew school to the full-time Jewish day school. What these both share is an emphasis on — above all else — Zionist education. A shocking level of uncompromising Israeli nationalism is fed to young children living in a country that is, at least on paper, independent from the State of Israel.

The Jewish Enlightenment

The present manifestation of Jewish education arose parallel to the advent of Zionism. Both are products of the Haskalah, aka the Jewish Enlightenment. In fact, most of Judaism as you know it, both in the late Rabbinic and Zionist eras, comes from this movement.

The Haskalah emerged in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1770s, precipitated by the European Enlightenment, and lasted roughly until the final decades of the 19th century. This was a revolution, brought about in response to the relatively lethargic, segregationist status quo of Jewish existence. Before the Haskalah, Jewish life was mostly confined to the shtetl, emphasizing rigid adherence to tradition and closed continuity. The Haskalah upended this, and its followers, the maskilim, encouraged immigration to cities and assimilation into secular society. This was not, however, an attempt to erase Jewishness, the movement instead sought to rework Judaism to thrive within the boundaries of the secular state. These attempts spawned the creations of the Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox movements.1

To many, myself included, the Haskalah has been reinterpreted as the direct antecedent to Zionism. The movement spawned the formation of Jewish nationalism, and the end of the Haskalah is generally dated to the period of Zionism’s formalization. In fact, from the rise of Jewish banking dynasties like the Rothschilds and Montefiores, to the civil and military integration that would lead to incidents like the Dreyfus Affair, all major factors that led to the creation of the State of Israel derive from the Haskalah.

Just as Jewish nationalism traces its origins to the exodus from the shtetl, Jewish education finds its predecessor in the cheder. In line with the spread of universal primary education across Europe, children in the shtetl began to receive their education at cheders, Jewish schoolhouses in which Torah and Talmud were taught. However, despite being a product of the early Haskalah, later maskilim would come to disdain the cheder, deriding it as too isolationist and lacking a requisite secular education.

The cheder thus evolved into two divergent branches of assimilated Jewish education, heavily coinciding with early Jewish immigration waves to the United States. The first form this took was the Hebrew school, modelled after the Christian Sunday school. Jewish children would be educated in Judaism after school or on weekends, so as not to interfere with their secular education. The second form it took was the Jewish day school. By the first decades of the 20th century, Jewish communities started to form schools that functioned as private alternatives to public schools, offering both Jewish and secular studies. While the creation of day schools predates the formation of the State of Israel by a few decades, the real boom in their popularity came after the Nazi holocaust. This invigorated push for Jewish secular education cemented in the '40s through the '60s, coinciding with the adoption of Zionist ideology by the vast majority of American Jews, and day schools rapidly developed their pedagogy around the promotion of Jewish nationalism.

Today, Jewish day schools can be found across the non-Israeli Jewish world. They are insular and very well-funded, like most private schools, but offer generous subsidies for Jewish children. These schools serve as incubators for children, starting in kindergarten and usually going through the end of high school, often all in the same building. They are typically among the highest ranking schools in their districts, and have extraordinary matriculation rates. Yet, all of this obscures their Zionist nature, and their private status allows them an incredible amount of freedom to indoctrinate their students.

Indoctrination Centers

Among non-Haredi Jews, day schools are typically either Modern Orthodox, meaning affiliated with the assimilated Orthodox community, or they are “pluralistic,” meaning that they are usually somewhat joint ventures of the local Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and non-affiliated community members. It will come as no surprise that Modern Orthodox schools are quite politically conservative and incredibly Zionist. As an example, let’s take the largest such school in New York City, Salanter Akiba Riverdale (SAR) Academy and High School. Upon a visit to their website, we are immediately greeted by smiling children waving Israeli flags, and a click through their website inundates us with propaganda about the importance of Israel education. Still, what’s perhaps more interesting is that the Zionism of pluralistic Jewish day schools, despite the overwhelmingly liberal communities that they serve, is just as fervent and unapologetic.

The largest pluralistic day school in New York City is the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, or Heschel, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.2 The school is unabashedly liberal, hosting yearly LGBTQ+ panels, and incorporating Critical Race Theory into its curriculum. Yet, as with all of liberal and progressive Judaism, Zionism is the exception.

The school’s website is very open about curricula and structure. On the “Early Childhood” page, we see a dropdown menu of school subjects. Alongside the likes of “Language Arts” and “Science,” there is a section entitled “Hebrew Language and Israel.” This section contains the passage:

"The Jewish people are bound in heart, mind, and history to Israel. Bringing a far-away land and culture to the understanding of young children is our goal. Enjoying Israeli music and food, and sharing stories and pictures help children to connect to the vibrancy of Israeli life and culture. One of the highlights of the school year is the celebration of Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day), a time when Kindergarteners transform the roof into an Israeli market for students and faculty to visit."

Yom Ha’atzmaut, or Israeli Independence Day, is a highly militaristic holiday in Israel and contemporary Judaism, in which the Nakba is celebrated as a victory for the Jewish people over tyranny (read: Palestinians living on their rightful land). The “Israel market” referred to here is the shuk, an appropriation of the Arab souk that has been incorporated into Israeli society.3 This is what they do with five-year-old children.

Another section in the same dropdown is entitled “Judaic Studies,” which at first appears to be a huge win for those who want to separate Judaism and Zionism. That is, until one reads the opening line, “The goal of our Judaic Studies program is to celebrate the joy of Jewish living and connect to the land and people of Israel.”

Skipping Elementary School, which is more of the same, we go to the “Middle School” page. Students in this level will learn about “Israel past and present” in Hebrew Language class, and in Social Studies learn about “Ancient Egypt, the Silk Road, the United States Constitution, the Civil Rights Movement, the Holocaust, and the History of the State of Israel.”

This Zionist education is in service of the end of Middle School “Israel Trip,” which has the 8th grade students go on a weeks-long tour of occupied Palestine. They travel the country from top to bottom, learning a false history and being sold lies about Zionism straight from IDF soldiers and Israeli settlers. A key part of the trip is hammering home the indoctrination they’ve been fed for so many years, teaching them revisionist lies about their “history as a people in Israel from biblical to contemporary times through all its rich and varied manifestations.” This trip is overtly nationalist, teaching students to worship the State of Israel, as they “[celebrate] her many awesome accomplishments and [reflect] upon the significant challenges she faces.” Ask anyone who went to Jewish day school and they will tell you that their school had one of these trips. These are features of almost every day school, designed to give these American children a sense of colonial ownership over a foreign land.

Heschel’s “High School” section continues the boasting about its Zionist propaganda, promising parents that their children will be “engaging students in conversations about their relationships with The State of Israel…” Hebrew classes are still a requisite, because “Hebrew language remains key to understanding Israeli society and culture today.” The most interesting section, though, is labeled “Hesed Days,” which detail special theme days that high schoolers spend outside of the school, “learning about ways to be agents for change in our broader New York community.” At first this seems unrelated to Israel, but the paragraph goes on to say the following, “Led by students on the Hesed & Tzedek Council of the Student Government, the High School also creates many educational tzedakah opportunities, raising funds for local and Israeli causes throughout the year.”

This is clearly a case of not only indoctrinating students, but also using education as a pretense to fundraise for Israel and spread hasbara throughout the community. The ingenious part is that, if questioned on this, the school can give the excuse that this is about community engagement, or else that it is a student led and designed activity.

From instilling overt colonial nationalism in children throughout their most formative years, to interspersing false and revisionist Zionist history into their secular education, all elements of the Jewish day school are in the service of Israel. The trip to Palestine is a crucial aspect of this. For many students, it’s their first time in the country, and the trip is tailored to their naivete, hence why it is typically done in middle school. The goal is that this will be their first trip, and in high school they have opportunities to go on any of the many “Israel programs,” all of which have generous subsidies. The trips, like the March of the Living, are not conducted through the school, but day schools will nonetheless schedule the curriculum around the larger programs’ dates, and exempt homework and tests for those who go on them.

The goal of this series is to use facts that are widely available to prove this linkage, and so I hesitate to employ personal anecdotes. However, I would be remiss if I did not mention that I have experienced this system of indoctrination firsthand. I spent ten out of my thirteen years in school attending five pluralistic Jewish day schools across North America, and all of them were virtually identical to Heschel. My early childhood and elementary education was heavily Zionist, and in middle school I was taken on a propaganda tour of occupied Palestine. In high school, many classmates did further Israel programs, and were encouraged to participate in numerous local Zionist initiatives. We even had a dedicated, year-long class called “Israel Advocacy,” where we were given preparation on how to effectively counter pro-Palestine activism when we got to university.

If you don’t believe my anecdotes, and think I’ve been cherry-picking from Heschel, then I first encourage you to watch these two videos prominently featured on their website, which take place in Washington DC and New York City, respectively. Then, we’ll take a look at the “Alumni” section. Aside from a job board and a link to join the alumni association, the website spotlight fifteen former students. Of them, five moved to occupied Palestine after graduating from Heschel. Out of a sample of former Heschel students, one third decided to become settlers. One “decided to pursue her Master’s Degree at Reichman University… in Counterterrorism and Homeland Security Studies” and then went into cybersecurity. Another is in the corporate world, working to “bring big corporate Israeli leaders together in one platform together with Jewish foundation heads” and do work like “helping to revive cities in the North and South Israel.” Another one runs a Hebrew language rip-off of This American Life. You get the idea. A cursory glance through the social media accounts of the remaining ten shows that all are still staunch Zionists.

The Bigger Picture

Of course, Jewish day schools do not account for the majority of American Jews. A sizeable minority attend them, yes, but the majority still go to secular institutions. Jewish day schools tend to hemorrhage students as they get older, with parents typically moving them to non-Jewish schools at the end of elementary or middle school. However, this does not mean that those American Jews who do not attend day schools are not propagandized. Hebrew schools act as supplemental, extracurricular version of the day school. Almost every family that is a semi-active part of their local Jewish community sends their children to some form of Jewish educational institution, where this brainwashing takes place. Add to this the very common, entrenched institutions of Jewish summer camp and Jewish youth group, and we can see that the Zionist inculcation of children is an indelible part of American Jewish life.4

The importance of childhood indoctrination in fascist and colonial projects cannot be overstated. From the use of youth groups to supremacist education programs, the early etching of supremacy into the brains of children is one of the most effective tools in the employ of nationalist endeavors. This has always been the case for Zionism, which has historically relied on fascistic, explicitly colonial programming for children and teens. Almost all of the early Zionist leaders, as well as the first few generations of Israel’s leadership, underwent this as children.

As these projects gain legitimacy, though, they are able to dissipate somewhat as the ideology they promote integrates into mainstream education. Zionism, being a neo-imperialism that extends beyond just the borders that it claims, has accomplished this not only in occupied Palestine, but also within the Jewish communities of the world, which exist for the purpose of imbedding its influence in strategic countries.

This is not a conspiracy theory. On June 28^th, the Israeli government unanimously approved $59 million, in order to “strengthen Jewish education in Diaspora communities.” This money is part of a “national plan” that is meant to update and strengthen the existing “Aleph-Bet” initiative that seeks to bolster Jewish education outside of occupied Palestine. This iteration “aims to expand the scope of formal Jewish education, with an emphasis on North America, and to strengthen Jewish identity, the sense of belonging to the Jewish people, and the connection to the State of Israel among the younger generation.” The statement from the Prime Minister’s office goes on to use “the October 7 [sic] terrorist attack” to justify “removing barriers that limit the expansion of Jewish education.”

Once again, this is clearly no conspiracy. It is apparent that, coming from this particularly fascistic government, the aim is to bolster support for the State of Israel through Jewish education. Very few would disagree with this. However, to those liberal Zionists who claim that Netanyahu and Likud are the sole problem, why would a government that you claim is so incongruous with the supposed majority of Zionism be so confident in an endeavor that places control of Zionist education in the hands of non-Likudniks? Let’s extrapolate that further. To those soft Zionists who claim that Israel is not representative of Judaism, why would a state that you believe is separate from ‘diasporic’ Jewry give millions to educational institutions in that same alleged diaspora?

The answer is simple. Jewish education is Zionist education. Netanyahu, in his statement on the education initiative, says it himself: “Since its establishment, the State of Israel has been an anchor for the security of the Jewish people. Today, we are also strengthening one of its most important anchors for the future, Jewish education.” Extrapolating from this, we can see that what Netanyahu is plainly saying is that Jewish education is vital to maintaing support for Israel.

We need to reject the framing that they give us. These are not innocent, religious educational endeavors. Jewish day schools and Hebrew schools are nationalist outposts that serve as indoctrination centers for children, instilling in their vulnerable minds the drive to colonize Palestine. In rejecting Zionism, we must dismantle the structures that uphold it. In order to do that, we must open our eyes to the insidious ways in which this pervasive ideology manifests, and fight against them accordingly.

Here we are, New York. The primaries came and went, and the good people of this city chose socialism over barbarism. They saw the first real shot at socialist representation that the United States has seen in decades, and decided to finally make their voices known, after so long that they’d almost forgotten how. No more to Trumpian fascism! No more to the militarized police state! No more to the United State’s destructive decline! Now is the time of socialism!

Except not really. Turns out calling something socialism doesn’t automatically make it that. Tuesday’s results were heartening, but they weren’t the rumblings of the United State’s left-wing revolution. Once the dust settles, it will be pretty obvious that what this election showed was 1) the intense fear of ICE that many communities here are feeling, 2) the growing unpopularity of the Israel lobby, 3) a major dissatisfaction with Trump and his war in Iran, and 4) a lack of confidence in the current leadership of the Democratic Party.

Americans are dissatisfied, and they know where to direct their anger. That’s a good thing. However, acting like progressive victories during a historically unpopular Republican presidency are unprecedented is more than shortsighted. This fervor is good to see, but it’s not being channeled properly. That’s mostly because of who is doing the channeling.

The Democratic Socialists of America are riding high off of these wins, and who could blame them? A substantial number of Americans chose candidates that the DSA endorsed over the centrist establishment. This does not equate a turn to socialism, though. Nor does it signal an actual “DSA victory.”

The truth of it is that the DSA hasn’t really had any real wins, not ever. It’s been nothing but a very vocal spectator to the, ultimately, pretty even wins and losses of the United States’ most progressive politicians (don’t laugh!), who they always endorse. AOC’s victory wasn’t a “DSA victory,” it was a victory for left-of-center progressive politics generally.

I can hear you, though: What about Mamdani?

Well, try as so many voices might to convince you otherwise, Mamdani’s win was not a DSA victory either. Mamdani’s election was exactly like Tuesday’s primaries. Rather than being indicative of the mass’ thirst for socialism, it was indicative of 1) a frustration with the broader Democratic Party, 2) the unpopularity of Andrew Cuomo, and 3) the personal charm and political acumen of Zohran Mamdani. The endorsement of the DSA didn’t propel Mamdani to victory. In fact, Mamdani publicly distanced himself from the DSA on multiple occasions. Furthermore, Mamdani’s marriage to the Left is already starting to show cracks. While he delivered on some easy progressive wins, the growing issues that are his rightward turn on Zionism and his total capitulation to Tisch and the NYPD are obvious ticking time bombs. Mamdani isn’t the DSA’s revolutionary leader, he’s just an ambitious — but independent — political actor with a self-important fan club.

Still, I won’t fault you for thinking that the DSA are really the trailblazing bunch of changemakers they claim to be. After all, it isn’t just them telling you that they are. Both the liberal media, representing the dying old guard of the Democratic Party, and the conservative media, representing the haggard Zionist faction of the Republican party, have inaugurated the group as their joint boogeyman. Zohran Mamdani is a useful punching bag for both sides. For stalwart, older Dems, he is a too-confident nepo baby who threatens to rock the boat with his big, impossible ideas. For longtime Republicans, he is a Muslim, immigrant socialist. In other words, he’s the perfect way to mobilize a dying, reactionary base, whether they be center-right or far-right. Similarly, Hasan Piker, a popular “streamer” from “Twitch,” who is “Turkish,” is also a great bête noire for the establishment.

Most importantly, these two sides find equal villains in the pro-Palestine protest movement, which reminds the US bourgeoisie of the brief whiffs of danger they sensed from Occupy and BLM. This movement, though, targets Israel, and thus threatens the entire world-system that the West’s leaders sit atop. The union between these unlikely allies — centrist Democrats and conservative Republicans — may come as a surprise, but it really shouldn’t. What we have seen in the United States these past few years has been the lifting of the veil, and the revelation that these two factions are merely the same stewards of neoliberalism and Zionism, miming a diminishingly believable performance of push-pull.

Since the movement is far less organized than it is popular, in order to give a face to this specter, the DSA are made the false vanguard of Palestine solidarity. As most are no doubt aware though, if the DSA were to disappear tomorrow, opinion of Palestine and the organizing that has shaped it would be totally unchanged in the US. The same goes for the hypothetical disappearances of Mamdani or Piker.

This is because the DSA are not behind the movement that has been built these past few years in the US. Nor are they the party of the people. They are in fact not a party, and that is precisely the problem. Their grassroots facade masks an unfortunate reality: the DSA cannot have any victories, and that’s by design.

So then, what is the DSA?

The Left Wing of the Possible

The answer to that question is both a little more complicated and a lot less conspiratorial than most DSA-haters would like to believe. First we need to break it down into a couple smaller questions, starting with: who were the DSA historically?

The DSA’s cofounder and intellectual forefather is Michael Harrington, Old Left activist, writer, and founder of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), which the DSA would be birthed from in a merger of the former with the New Left-affiliated New America Movement (NAM). Harrington came into the political world a conservative and a Catholic, but was swayed over to the left by the Catholic Worker Movement, before eventually dropping Catholicism altogether. His real political awakening, though, came when he discovered what for many a precocious, First World, quirked up white boy is the most powerful and dangerous weapon around: Trotskyism.

I joke, obviously, but Harrington did become a Trot, joining the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), which was led by a Trotskyist, and was actually the youth wing of the Socialist Party of America (SPA), which was explicitly not Trotskyist but majority controlled by Trotskyists. Honestly, I’m not going to get into this, it would take far too long to do justice to the history of American Trotskyism. Just know that the entire socialist US Left, in every incarnation for about a century now, can trace its origins back to Trotskyism.

While Trotskyism as an ideology may be totally dead and inapplicable now, it’s greatest legacy is the inscrutable history of the US Left. The most important thing to know about Trotskyism for this article is the concept of “entryism,” wherein Trots will infiltrate a larger, more established party or organization, with the intent of rising up in its leadership and subverting it until it becomes a Trotskyist party. The advantages of this, over forming a brand new party, are the existing membership, infrastructure, and resources of the infiltrated organization.

Entryism has proven itself strategically impossible many times over. From its “French Turn” origins to today, the tactic has always failed for the same reasons. The larger and more powerful host always either absorbs or expels the smaller parasite. Take the example of the Trotskyist group Militant in the UK. They successfully infiltrated the Labour Party just as it entered the Thatcher era, and the group was able to successfully position a number of its members in key leadership positions. However, the more powerful Labour leadership found out about this, and easily expelled all of its members, in what remains one of the biggest controversies in Labour history.

Back to Harrington, he eventually split from the YPSL along with his mentor, Trotskyist Max Shachtman, to form the explicitly Trotskyist Independent Socialist League (ISL). In time, it would be reabsorbed into the SPA, with Harrington now a respected writer and activist who strongly advocated for entryism. His idea of entryism was a departure from the traditional US Trot version, though. Harrington thought that the ideal way to bring about socialism in the United States was by eschewing entirely the concept of a socialist party, and instead accepting the US two-party duopoly. He believed that the key to success was to run socialist candidates within the Democratic Party, slowly transforming the party from within. This led to his ubiquitous catchphrase, “the left wing of the possible.”

As he moved up within the ranks of the SPA, Harrington and the party would both move to the right. For US socialists, despite their Trotskyist origins, the idea of communism soon came to be synonymous with the USSR. The “third-camp” against both the USA and the USSR became a (somewhat) distanced backing of the United States in the Cold War. SPA leader Norman Thomas, alongside Shachtman, would eventually lead the party into explicit anti-communism. The SPA reoriented, positioning itself in lockstep with the anti-communist, CIA-backed AFL-CIO under its rightist president, George Meany, coincidentally at the same time as Thomas and the rest of the party’s leadership were starting to themselves take money from the CIA.1

This phenomenon of a swathe of longtime Trots all turning spook in unison had the interesting effect of creating a post-Marxist Trotskyist current on the US Left. Gone was Leon Trotsky’s Marxism, what remained was the unique recipe of deceit and party-building that Trotsky and his followers had cooked up during his years of exile. Communism took the place of Stalinism, and anti-communist social democracy became the stand-in for the vague Trotskyist tendencies that had previously ruled American working class politics.

Harrington’s move away from socialism marked the most successful period of his life. He ascended the ranks of the party, and in 1962 published his best-selling sociological study, The Other America, which exposed poverty in the United States. It was this same year that members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) drafted the “Port Huron Statement,” a manifesto widely considered to mark the beginning of the student-led New Left movement. The statement, while not explicitly communist, denounced the anti-communism and repression of the Old Left, as well as the liberalism of the Democratic Party. Harrington, who had been sent as an observer, was enraged, and got into a highly publicized clash with the SDS. Indeed it was this moment that marked the rift between the Old and New Left.

The Other America put Harrington into the national spotlight and secured him a role on Lyndon B. Johnson’s anti-poverty task force. It is perhaps for this reason that he became pro-Vietnam War. From the beginning, Harrington refused to condemn Johnson’s invasion, and would spend five years instead condemning the Viet Cong, warning that their victory would be no better than an American one. He wrote publicly about the need to kick communists out of the anti-war movement, and advocated for the official position to be supporting the anti-communists ending the war through negotiation and free elections. By 1970, thanks to the defections of many in the SPA, he finally denounced the war, tepidly calling for American withdrawal and “negotiated settlements.”

The Vietnam War would tear the SPA apart, as most found themselves drifting into various factions within the Democratic Party. Harrington was no different. He still believed firmly in the power to affect change within the Democratic Party, and his breakaway group, the DSOC, continued with that mission, giving up the “party” pretense altogether. Of course, they never did reform that Democratic Party, which only moved further away from the working class.

In 1982, Reagan was president and the New Left era had ended. This was represented by the creation of the DSA, which saw the two outdated left-wing currents merge into one organization (Harrington still had to issue a profuse apology for the 1962 incident). The DSA established itself as a toothless cheerleader of the Democratic Party, working in the service of some of the US’s most odious and chauvinist union bosses, with “socialism” present only in its name. It also explicitly outlined its support for the State of Israel in the merger. Over time, the DSA would fade into irrelevance, as the Cold War ended and neoliberalism destroyed the world.

So, who were the DSA? As we can see, they were a group founded on anti-communism and suppression of anything left enough to cause real problems for the bourgeois establishment in the United States. Their project was social democracy, but with a (rather trite) name change. The only problem was that the US, as the global hegemon engaged in an unending fight for total suppression of the Left, didn’t have room for social democracy like many post-war European countries did.

Now, this is where many would take issue with my selective use of history. I have merely outlined the old DSA, not the burgeoning new one. So the next of our questions is this: who are the DSA now?

False Promises

In 2016, Bernie Sanders ran for president. To give you the cliff notes version, he tried really hard to use non-violent populism to overload the machinery of the Democratic Party, but was easily dispatched by that very same machinery. What Bernie 2016 did accomplish was energizing many within what can generously be called the US Left. The DSA, which endorsed Bernie and campaigned heavily for him, became a catchall for aimless left-wingers around the country. It drew heavily from Bernie 2016, as well as traditional entrenched left-wing spaces in the US, like the pro-Palestine movement. It skyrocketed in membership, going from just over 6,000 members to its peak of 94,000. While the increase in members was more than welcome, a problem soon presented itself. Those aimless left-wingers came from all across the left-of-center spectrum, and didn’t always get along.

In order to account for this big tent structure, the DSA formed caucuses. Unlike its more official working groups, caucuses are inherently ideological and largely informal. These factions include Bread and Roses, which is labor-oriented reformist, and believes in the “democratic road to socialism”; the Socialist Majority Caucus, which are more Democrat-aligned, advocating “mass politics”; Groundwork, a newer group of reformist ecosocialists with some Marxist leanings; the Marxist Unity Group, a Kautskyist group advocating for the DSA to become an independent revolutionary socialist party; Red Star, a Marxist-Leninist contingent also committed to mass party building; the Libertarian Socialist Caucus, who are anarchists; Reform and Revolution, who are Trotskyists; and many more.

Aside from the influx of members and the creation of caucuses, another one of the biggest changes to the DSA was the shift in its electoral strategy. While the official goal of the organization was still to run progressives within the Democratic Party, the desire for an independent party amongst members quickly asserted itself. Thus, the new strategy became “kick the can down the road,” or as DSA members call it, “the break.”

“The break” broadly refers to the DSA’s eventual goal of becoming an independent party. Like all things in the organization, this has quickly become a point of factionalism, as many call for contradictory version of this hypothetical event. Some advocate for the “dirty break,” which is a future split with the Democrats and the creation of a new, independent party. They aim to work within the Democratic Party until it becomes untenable, at which point they will switch to… something. Alternatively, there are those who fall into the camp of the “clean break,” advocating an immediate severing of ties from the Democrats. Then there are those who quietly advise against leaving the party altogether. This leaves the DSA in a sort of stasis, essentially directionless, forever eyeing the break, but with no coherent strategy on how or when it will be achieved. Internally, this is called the “dirty stay.”

If you’ve been paying attention, then no doubt you’ve made the connection between the DSA’s current strategy and Trotskyist entryism. In many ways, the break strategy is a return to Trot form from Harrington’s reformist loyalty to the Democrats. The problem, as I stated before, is that entryism as a party-building tactic ignores the realities of the very power imbalance it seeks to subvert. An entryist party or organization lacks the structure and militancy necessary to both carry out its mission and simultaneously retain its original shape. To participate in entryism, one must embrace imbalance.

No organization has done this quite like the DSA. By embracing imbalance, the DSA strategically weakens itself in order to become more flexible. The problem, of course, becomes that resultant weakness. The organization’s strengths, those being its ability to pull in members and assert a degree of legitimacy, are ultimately going to be its biggest deficits. After the aforementioned peak in 2021, the DSA lost well over a third of its membership in just a few years. It became clear that the movement, as it were, was following Bernie Sanders. When the DSA once again surged in the past two years, it was because of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral run. This presents an obvious problem. Next time the DSA aren’t actively running a popular figurehead, it could once more face a membership crisis.

However, this isn’t necessarily a death sentence. The fact that this was the case before doesn’t mean that the DSA hasn’t built enough legitimacy within the party to retain more members than it did in the previous go-around. The real problem becomes these figures’ very visible rightward shift.

Bernie Sanders was never really totally in line with most of his core base. As a longtime Zionist and a former settler in occupied Palestine, Sanders stands in stark contrast to the many pro-Palestine voices in the organization. This is to be somewhat expected, it’s not really as if Bernie did a heel turn, after all. He has always been open about his Zionism, and his exclusive, chauvinist focus on the US. The issue is that he is not an aberration.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, next to Mamdani the biggest figure in the movement, took a disgraceful position after Hamas’ Toofan al-Aqsa operation in October 2023. She loudly and repeatedly condemned Palestinian resistance, and explicitly endorsed Israel’s “right to exist.” She fell into the Zionist position of decrying the made-up “crisis of antisemitism,” while ignoring the Palestinian right of return and right to resist. All in the midst of a genocide. If this wasn’t bad enough, she went on to take abominable positions that made her directly complicit in the genocide, including voting against an amendment that would have cut funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile system. While campaigning for Joe Biden, architect of the Gaza genocide, she lied and stated that Biden was trying to end the genocide. She mirrored this again when she claimed that Biden’s successor, Kamala Harris, was “working tirelessly for a ceasefire,” which was untrue. To add final insult, AOC, progressive hero that she is, refused to call Israel’s invasion and mass killing campaign in Gaza a genocide until March of 2024.

Many in the DSA were rightfully enraged. There was a call for her censure, which immediately provoked backlash from NYC DSA, the organization’s biggest chapter, who saw AOC as too valuable to lose. This led to months of controversy and infighting, which eventually did culminate in AOC committing to not vote for any more arms spending to Israel. This shows some amount of pressuring is possible within the DSA, but it should be noted that before she made this new commitment, competing petitions circulated in the DSA in April 2026, regarding the question of her endorsement. The petition supporting her candidacy received far more signatures.

Even if she changed one position, AOC has continuously refused to recognize the Palestinian right to resist, and has consistently condemned protestors who demonstrate outside of illegal real estate sales of Palestinian land in the West Bank. Despite that, she retains the support of the majority of the DSA, including Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani himself has had a quick turnaround on Palestine. While he used to be a fierce critic of Israel and a passionate advocate for the Palestinian people, his candidacy and subsequent mayoral term have seemingly ended that. From backing down on the use of “globalize the intifada,” to denouncing those same land sale protestors, to even condemning his wife’s pro-Palestine activity on social media, Mamdani is far from the Palestine activist he used to present as. He cavorts with liberal Zionists, kept rabid Jewish supremacist billionaire Jessica Tisch on as police commissioner,2 constantly launders the false “crisis of antisemitism,” courts the right-wing Zionist organization Chabad, and let fascist, genocidal architect of the ongoing annexation of the West Bank, Bezalel Smotrich, lead the massive “Israel Day” march through New York. Add to that his backsliding on police reform, and Mamdani’s “historic” mayoralty is indistinguishable from Bill de Blasio’s.3

The issue of Palestine, which has become the center of the global Left, remains the biggest challenge for the DSA. A 2025 resolution was drafted with the intention of creating a set of red lines regarding anti-Zionism, with the end goal of expelling Zionists from the DSA. When brought to the National Political Committee, they severely watered this down, until “immediate expulsion” turned into “expellable offenses are subject to a two-thirds vote by the National Political Council after fair and ample opportunity for education.” Further, the original draft’s support for the Palestinian resistance became a murky and spineless support of merely “the right to resist.” This tepid final draft was put to a vote, where it passed with only 56.3% of the vote. That means nearly 44% of members in the biggest left-wing organization in the US (self-described ‘socialists’) voted against the barest red lines regarding support for an active genocide! This is because red lines go against the DSA’s core strategy. Trading strength for flexibility means that principles take a backseat to accruing members and influence. In other words, quantity over quality.

This is the precise problem with the DSA. As an arm of the Democratic Party, it must be beholden to the whims of the Democrats. This isn’t just the case for Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani. Brad Lander, one of the three DSA-affiliated, Mamdani-backed candidates who won his primary on Tuesday, is an outright Zionist. He should be part of no left movement, and the celebrations over his victory are shameful. All they do is continue to normalize Zionism in an organization that is already rife with it. Avila Chevalier, who will genuinely be one of the most progressive representatives in US history, has, in the course of her candidacy, had to walk back justified statements about Kamala Harris, and condemn Hamas. How soon until the machinery of the Democratic Party remolds her into another AOC?

The point is that the DSA, by design, stifles the potential of the Left. While the organization is gaining legitimacy, it is not getting any closer to breaking from the Democrats. Its undesirable aspects, like the rampant Zionism, continue to flourish, and it seems to have no ability to reign them in. Meanwhile, its most radical elements delude themselves into thinking that they, in fact, will also build power as the organization does. This brings us to our final question: can the DSA become revolutionary?

A Prison of Their Own Making

To cut right to the chase, no. The DSA are not, nor will they ever be, revolutionary. The DSA as an organization takes the scattered pieces of what could be a real left movement, and turns them inert and harmless. The DSA, whether or not its members think this, is foremost loyal to the Democratic Party, and to the bourgeois establishment in the United States.

A large portion of the DSA has no tangible interest in leaving the Democratic Party, and truly seeks to reform it. Yet we know that a smaller configuration cannot overwhelm a party literally built on stifling genuine socialism. There is no world where any “stay,” dirty or otherwise, works out in the long term.

Then there are the rest. Real socialists, who see the DSA as imperfect, but also want to be realistic. They see this as a stepping stone to an independent party. The only problem is that this contingent doesn’t have any real power. They have deluded themselves into existing within a troubling contradiction; they simultaneously acknowledge the elements of the DSA that are not their own (and will eventually be hostile to them), and yet also celebrate the DSA’s victories as their victories. If you are a communist and an anti-Zionist, how can you see the election of Brad Lander as anything other than a massive blow to your movement?

This is where their persistent delusion kicks in. They say that the victory is really the “moving of the Overton Window.” This is convincing only to those who have no knowledge of history. Social democratic movements have, historically, presented grave threats to socialist movements. This is because many times in history, smaller socialist groups have aligned themselves with more powerful social democrats, only to lose themselves in the process. Nothing about the DSA points to this case being any sort of exception. It is important for us to not be so blinded by the shock that is left-of-center legitimacy in the US. We need to instead see this as part of the holistic picture that it is.

Turning back to Britain, we can look at the example of a movement similar to the one that birthed the DSA. Just like Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn was a longtime outsider in his party, sitting on the very edge of what could be considered legitimate politics. Corbyn amassed a popular base, who like the DSA, configurated themselves into an arm of the party, this one called Momentum. Corbyn, unlike Sanders, even had control of his party. Still, though, Labour turned against him, sabotaging his candidacy and then eventually working to expel him from his own party. Momentum became meaningless and lost all of its prestige.

Now, Corbyn is nothing more than a tertiary, unimportant figure. Meanwhile, the state of British politics has changed rapidly. Britain’s duopoly has been torn asunder, and a multiparty system has taken its place. This includes an actual left representation in the Green Party. At first, this might seem like cause for celebration. Yet, the Greens are hardly an overwhelming force, and they present themselves as nothing more than an ideologically half-baked social democratic party. Meanwhile, far-right Reform UK has 26% percent support in the UK, while the even more extreme Restore Britain is also gaining steam.

This trend is how we should view the broader rise of the social democratic left. The American Empire is in decline, and as a result, fascism is surging across the Imperial Core. Those vulnerable to the nationalist rhetoric that is quintessential to the success of fascist movements seek a tent of shelter, and turn to social democracy as a result of there being no genuine socialist counterweight to the far-right.

However, no social democratic movement is designed for this purpose. The lessons of history have taught us that social democracy attempts to build dominance on a different plane than fascism, leaving it wide open to the overwhelming militancy and violence that fascism eventually employs.

Whether the DSA successfully reforms the Democratic Party or becomes its own new party is inconsequential, because the result will be the same either way. There is no chance for the revolutionary current of the DSA to take control of the hypothetical party, because it is designed to remain toothless. Whatever the method, the end result will always be social democracy. Right now, we can’t afford social democracy. Not when what’s coming demands so much more.

What Must be Done

The DSA preys upon those communists who have become disillusioned after the failure of a socialist left to materialize in the Core. This cannot be allowed to continue. These people have to remember what they are fighting for. Party-building is hard work, yes. So is socialism! There are no shortcuts, no “dirty” anything that will result in the disciplined, material movement that we need to build.

We must remember what we are, and that means remembering where we are. We are in the belly of the beast. We sit in the center of the Empire, and our task is not to be the brave underdogs who defeat it alone. We are still the global one percent. Our comrades in the Global South are fighting for their existence in a world that has been shaped to destroy them, and it is our task to reject our comforts and support them in that endeavor.

This is not a call to eschew US electoral politics. Far from it, we need to utilize the electoral system that sits before us, the one that so many in this country still give power to. However, it would be suicide to place that power into the hands of yet another social democratic party of chauvinists and compradors. We need to build a truly internationalist party, one that condemns the existence of Israel and explicitly supports Hamas. If the consequences of this are the imprisonment of some, then that is the price we must pay. Political prisoners are a feature of any successful revolutionary movement.

We need to build a party that recognizes the primacy of China and the collapse of unipolarity. We need to build a party that calls for the total dismantling of all overseas bases, and an end to all current US military operations. We need to recognize the present climate catastrophe we are in, and call for a dramatic overhaul in energy usage. We need to recognize the fascist movement building itself in front of us, and create a plan of action in order to deal with it. We need to find a solution not only to the existence of paramilitary groups like ICE, but also to the existence of those who willingly join up with them.

In May of this year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will likely be the DSA’s nominee for President of the United States, gave an address at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. There she claimed that “America was founded… in revolt of British aristocracy. The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time. And we are declaring independence from such an extreme marriage of wealth and power and the state that the voices of everyday people did not exist.” Ocasio-Cortez, like the rest of the DSA, seeks to paint the United States of America, past and present, as something flawed but ultimately venerable.

We cannot engage in that fantasy. We need a party that acknowledges, however unpopular it may be at first, that the United States is not venerable. The United States of America was founded on genocide, colonialism, and slavery. We cannot recognize the reality of Israel, and the reality of what needs to be done to Israel, if we cannot recognize that about the United States. As the martyred Palestinian revolutionary Basel al-Araj said, “It is impossible to gain an American into our camp unless he also opposes the very idea of the United States, and so do not bother stirring the emotions of Americans and trying to jerk their tears over us. What’s more useful is to dismantle the idea of the United States…”

The Democratic Socialists of America are leading the newly emboldened US Left down a dangerous path. They assume a responsibility that they have not earned. They have not been out in the streets with us, they have not organized the actions, facilitated the movement that they now seek to take charge of. The DSA are not the real Left, because what they stand for is antithetical to what the Left must be. We need a party that takes no shortcuts, that is truly internationalist, and has no discomfort in dismantling the idea of the United States.

The past three years have brought Zionism to the forefront of anti-imperialist discourse in the West. The majority of the politically conscious have, if little else, a general awareness of the stranglehold that Zionism has on the political machinery of the United States and its allies. The electoral arena is in a state of disarray thanks to the public’s rejection of the Israel lobby, and universities across the Imperial Core are being forced to answer for their incredibly close ties to Israeli industries (both of these examples speak more to a shift in public opinion, I’m pessimistic about the efficacy of these long-term pressure campaigns against both AIPAC and the universities). Rejections of Israel’s genocide and even parts of its many occupations can be seen disrupting every level of society, reminiscent of the mass popular rejection of apartheid South Africa that took place in the '80s and '90s. Yet, unlike with South Africa, the wider discussion of Israel’s influence remains perpetually insufficient, as the precise nature of Zionism remains uninvestigated. We continue to ignore the uncomfortable reality that is the Zionist pathogen flowing unimpeded within our bloodstream. This would be the Jewish community.

Assuming you read my last article, you’ll recall that the Jewish community outside of ‘Israel’ has been reconstituted from its relatively inert previous incarnation, now taking the shape of a powerful fascistic exoskeleton, with the sole purpose of supporting Israel’s imperialist aims. The monolithic community moves ever rightward as Israel continues along its genocidal course, providing it with exponentially greater sums of money, legitimacy, and — when needed — warm bodies. Contrary to the accusations I’ve received since the last piece’s publication, this is not a call to violence. As a diehard fan of people not dying, my preferred solution to this problem is a sea change within global Jewry. All it would take to kickstart that would be a lot of Jews apologizing and admitting they were wrong (unfortunately both sins within the Judaism).

Since that doesn’t seem to be on the horizon, and the meager ‘pro-Palestine’ Jewish Left is laughably ineffectual and in denial about its latent Zionism (the subject of a future article), I’ve taken it upon myself to play Flavius Josephus and expose the hidden truths of the Jewish community. The myth that Judaism as it exists today can be separated from Zionism is contradicted by the fact that every Jewish institution, and thus Jewish life, is complicit in Israel’s crimes.

In this series, I will go institution by institution, revealing the ways in which Israel pervades every aspect of Judaism. I found it fitting to begin with the cornerstone of traditional Jewish life, the synagogue.

The Synagogue

The origins of the Jewish synagogue are murky, as various pre-Second Temple exilic and diasporic Jewish communities likely established houses of worship that functioned as extensions of the Temple, which was the center of the sacrificial Jewish religion. However, the synagogue gained its more familiar liturgical form in the wake of the Second Temple’s destruction in 70 CE. Judaism, having lost its axis mundi, was forced to rapidly democratize worship, adopting the model established by already decentralized Judaic cults like the Pharisees and Essenes. The most convenient way to maintain both hierarchy and community in this tumultuous process was to establish a network of devotional hubs. Evolving concurrently with the church, and later the mosque, the synagogue came to function as not only a place of prayer, but also the heart of the community.

Fast forward to today, and the synagogue under Zionist Judaism still plays a major role in maintaining Jewish interconnectivity, much as it did during the age of Rabbinic Judaism. However, its specific primary function is not to connect Jewish communities through shared ritual, but rather through shared blood and soil.

Synagogues have become a major topic of conversation in the past year, due to a controversy in which several New York City synagogues have publicly held “land sales.” These are real estate events in which property is sold in the occupied West Bank. The controversy has, shockingly, been less about these events being held in the first place, and more so about the largely peaceful demonstrations that have been held outside of the perpetrating synagogues. In a rare rhetorical semi-victory for the Zionists — who have otherwise faced less-than-ideal returns on the past three years of hasbara — many normal people have been successfully convinced by the consent-manufacturing apparatus that protests should not be held outside of “houses of worship.”

There are two main reasons that these people have been successfully duped. The first is that many are unaware that under international law it is uncontestably illegal to sell land in an occupied territory, which the West Bank has been deemed by the United Nations. The second reason is that there has been a massive effort to conflate protesting synagogues that sell stolen land with protesting Jewish worship. Now, that doesn’t actually make much sense when you stop and think about it, but the entire mainstream media sphere, alongside most public officials (including darlings of the Left like Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Mayor Mamdani), have run with it. New York City has now proposed so-called “buffer laws,” which make it illegal to protest within a certain distance of any religious institution. This obviously presents a lot of worrying implications — namely the fact that any event could now be strategically held at a synagogue as a way to avoid protest — but the progressive wing of the New York political establishment has been mum on the issue, leaving it entirely to the grassroots protestors to reckon with. As always, antisemitism remains the Palestine solidarity movement’s biggest Achilles’ Heel.

Last month, Maura Finkelstein wrote an article for Mondoweiss, in which she argued that not only should we be protesting synagogues that are complicit in land sales, but also all synagogues that actively support Israel. I urge you to read the full article, but by far the most important point she makes is that 99% of Jewish institutions worldwide are Zionist, with only four American synagogues out of thousands being explicitly anti-Zionist. She goes on to highlight some of the ways in which American synagogues act as normalizing proxies for Zionist causes.

I want to take this a step further. The synagogue in the era of Judaism’s total capture by Zionism acts as nothing more than a Zionist outpost, with the primary purposes of lauding Israel’s genocidal project and lending it legitimacy.

Prayers & Services

We’ll begin with the least important aspect of the modern synagogue: the prayers. Holiday turnout is somewhat insulated, but the past few decades of American Judaism have seen exponentially lower attendance on Shabbat, while weekday services are usually so sparsely attended that they often don’t meet the liturgical quota necessary to perform them. As a rule, non-Haredi Jews — those in the Modern Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform movements — have been rapidly secularizing with each generation.

Still, the existence of a religious Judaism is crucial to the maintenance of the Zionist Entity. The most obvious example of this is within the borders of Palestine, where the Haredi not only serve a vital role in bolstering Jewish Israeli demographics, but also perform the crucial function of lending Israel the atavistic, Oriental image that is its spiritual legitimacy. One of Zionism’s most powerful rhetorical weapons is Judaism’s “ethno-religious” status. The Haredi and dati (religious) reinforce this lie within Israeli society. In the non-Israeli Jewish world, this is maintained in a subtler fashion, i.e. through the synagogue. Most members of the community hold a reverence for the synagogue, the clergy, and the rituals, even if they themselves have no interest in regular participation (polls show that only 10-15% of U.S. Jews regularly attend synagogue). The wealthy among them, despite spending little time within its premises, will nonetheless regularly donate large sums to the synagogue.

Rabbinic Judaism, unlike other evolutions of Temple Judaism,1 did not establish a singular replacement for the Temple. The decentralization of the faith meant that the Temple’s spiritual role was replaced by that of all synagogues, and the authority in Jerusalem by the local or regional authority of rabbis (alongside the categorical authority of the Talmud). The synagogue was the beating heart of Rabbinic Judaism, and thus its prayer services were regularly attended. Contrasting this, Zionist Judaism has asserted a political and religious centrality in Israel, meaning the congregational rabbi has become little more than a mascot, and the local synagogue a beloved event space.

As window dressing for the Zionist project, this new Judaism transforms every aspect of the liturgical service into a celebration of the genocidal State of Israel. The most obvious ways are in the outright references to Israel. All mainstream congregations perform the “Prayer for the State of Israel” at the spiritual climax of the service, when the Torah has been taken out from the ark (Sephardi) or just after it has been read and is being returned (Ashkenazi). The prayer was penned during the Nakba by Polish-Irish settler and Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, who was also the father and grandfather of genocidaires Chaim and Isaac Herzog. In more recent decades, it’s been paired with a separate “Prayer for IDF Soldiers,” written by Haganah and IDF Nakba perpetrator, Shlomo Goren. These are recited weekly on Shabbat, on all major holidays, and shorter versions are in the Birkat Hamazon (grace after meals). The spiritual significance of when the prayers are recited cannot be overlooked; the melding of the ancient in the Torah with the modern in the Sate of Israel is meant as a deliberate conflation.

Yet it isn’t just the inclusion of these new prayers within the old that makes the service irredeemably Zionist. It is also the radical recontextualization of Judaism that retroactively taints every once innocuous invocation. “Israel” is constantly evoked in Jewish liturgy, never traditionally referring to the State of Israel. The word instead refers to one of the following: Am/Bnei Yisrael (the biblical Israelites); the historical Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel); or the promised, metaphysical kingdom, often referred to as Tzion (Zion). The last one is the most important. Rabbinic Judaism was a millenarian religion, centered around a connection not to a relatively accessible land, but to that land in a hypothetical capacity. Practitioners of Judaism were only meant to return to Zion after the messiah’s appearance on earth. When a Jew prayed for a return to Israel, they were not pleading with God to allow them to embark on a journey to Palestine. Instead, these were poetic supplications for deliverance from sin or persecution. “Israel,” in this context, meant the version of the land that existed at a specific period in time, representing a golden age of Jewish existence.

In the age of Zionist Judaism, the same prayers are said in the service. Now, though, they take on new meaning. Prayers for safety in “Israel” are not meant to evoke a historical golden age, but rather safety from any one of the “threats” that the State of Israel faces. Prayers for deliverance from persecution now refer to an imagined persecution by Muslims and Arabs, or perhaps even the “antisemitism” of social media or college students. The Jewish service, like all of Judaism, has taken on a new role, but disguises this in its old skin. Concepts like “Jewish safety” and “Jewish continuity” are sanctified by their place in prayer, and contextualized as inextricable from Israel’s existence.2

The Role of the Rabbi

The collective non-Israeli synagogues of the world create a powerful shield for Zionism by granting it an impenetrable religious veneer. In a very savvy way, the maintenance of religious Judaism in the “diaspora” that is so vocally supportive of Israel actually creates the outward appearance of a separation between the two. Judaism and Zionism are presented as distinct but inseparably linked. This is where we get the contradictory hasbara that is no doubt familiar to everyone reading this. To conflate Israel and Judaism is an act of antisemitism, but Israel is nonetheless the most important thing that has ever happened or will ever happened for Jews. To proudly proclaim one’s undying loyalty to the state by way of their Judaism is fine, but to accuse that same person of being loyal for the exact same reason becomes antisemitic.

This blatant fallacy persists because of the complex apparatus that upholds it. This, as we know, comprises the voices of the vast majority of Jews. However, in order to sell this contradiction effectively, those espousing it must be totally bought in. For those who may, due to circumstance, not have a close connection to Israel, this needs to be manufactured. How do you sell the notion of Israel as integral to Jewish existence, when Jews exist comfortably outside of it? This is where the role of the rabbi comes in.

Rabbis act much like televangelists, assuming the role of a learned holy man in an effort to peddle wares. In this case, they sell Israel. The job of a modern congregational rabbi is to act as a spokesman not for a specific version of Israel, but rather for an imagined, timeless iteration of it. This Israel is at once political and spiritual, new and old and beyond age. This allows its immediate actions to seem smaller, no matter how grievous they are. Judaism is an ancient, unbroken tradition, and Israel is its physical manifestation as much as the collective Jewry are.

The process of becoming a rabbi is simple. One must attend a rabbinical school for four to six years, and receive the equivalent of a Master’s degree. The biggest non-Orthodox rabbinical schools in the US are at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College, the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, and the pluralistic Hebrew College. An integral part of the curriculum for each of these programs is an Israel education, which is reinforced continuously. In addition to this, each of these schools mandates that its students spend time in occupied Palestine. At JTS, rabbinical students from each of the school’s three American campuses must go to al-Quds (Jerusalem) for one year of study. This is not just focused around al-Quds, but also the country as a whole. According to their website, the program also “features travel and study around the country.” HUC has a nearly identical program.

Hebrew College, which has only had a rabbinical track for just over two decades, has made a name for itself as a pluralistic, progressive alterative to the traditional rabbinical school. In this vein, its ‘Balevav’ program reimagines the stuffy, outdated Israel program:

“Almost all North American rabbis spend an extended period of time studying in Israel as part of their rabbinic training so they can provide thoughtful and well-informed educational and communal leadership on the subject of Israel. But many rabbinical students in Israel remain relatively isolated within an ‘Anglo bubble,’ where they spend much of their time in classes with other visiting students from America, and do not engage fully with the rich diversity and vitality of Israeli society.”

— from Hebrew College’s website

Now, this would appear to many to be the very opposite of progressive, in that it seeks to further implicate American rabbinical students in the settler society actively conducting multiple genocides. In fact, the only way that the program addresses Palestine is by stating that its students are encouraged to “engage with peers from Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, and elsewhere in an immersive setting and explore their role as future religious leaders in responding to today’s pressing environmental challenges.” We can see that “progressive” rabbinical education is just as Zionist as its conservative alternatives.

After rabbinical school, rabbis are placed in congregations based on their denomination. Many are able to go back to Palestine, as there are many careers available there. For those that want to stay in the US, Canada, or wherever, there are still opportunities to act as occupiers. Many post-graduate programs and rabbinical retreats are held in the country, and most rabbis are encouraged to take sabbaticals at some point in their career. This involves the synagogue paying for them to live temporarily in Palestine.

Within the synagogue, the rabbi acts as a holy bridge between the congregation and Israel. Their connection to the land lends them their Judaic authority, which they use to infuse everything religious with Zionism. Rabbis use their weekly d’var torah (sermon) to connect the events of that week’s Torah portion to contemporary events. These typically relate to Israel. This completes the circle, connecting the stories of Abraham or Moses to the contempaory Israel. Even the disagreeable actions of, say, Netanyahu or the IDF can be compared to the mistakes biblical figures or Bnei Yisrael. Judaism becomes one long chain, including the Five Books of Moses, the kingdoms that existed in Palestine, historical persecution outside of Palestine, and the glorious return. Along the way, the religious and the political become one.

The Tunnel From New York to Tel Aviv

As I mentioned earlier, the synagogue is not just a house of worship, it is a community space. All Jewish events and programming for a particular congregation will take place through, and usually at, the synagogue. Most of these have to do with Israel. As we’ve already covered, all of Judaism is tied up with Israel. However, many would be shocked to learn just how overt the average synagogue is about its connection to a state built and sustained through occupation and genocide.

Park Avenue Synagogue is the largest Conservative synagogue in New York City, and perfectly emblematic of the average Conservative congregation. It is egalitarian, meaning women are allowed to participate in the same religious capacity as men, and are also eligible to be rabbis. It allows interfaith couples, and specifically welcomes all, “regardless of age, race, financial means, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression.” Its membership is likely politically identical to the majority of American Conservative Jews, meaning that they lean socially liberal and are a stalwart Democratic Party base. These are educated, upper middle class to wealthy liberal New Yorkers. Yet a quick look through their website reveals the shamelessness with which they launder Israel.

Immediately upon opening the website for PAS, we are greeted by the smiling faces of community members young and old. In three of the six photos, nothing untoward is taking place. Children are cooking in a kitchen, teenagers are taking a group photo, and a group of older women gathers at a shul table for lunch. However, in the other three, we see a parade float for NYC’s Israel Day Parade, a group of young girls waving teddy bears dressed in Israeli flags, and three men of varying ages dressed in merchandise for both the synagogue and the State of Israel.

Learning more about the synagogue, we can go over to the section for “Shabbat Services.” Here we see the synagogue’s clerical staff seated on the bimah (front stage in the sanctuary), which prominently features the aron hakodesh (Torah’s ark), the lectern, a large menorah, and — front and center — an Israeli flag.

Say we wanted to join PAS. We go over to their membership page, where we are informed of the following regarding their core values:

As a member, we’ll be entitled not only to religious programming, but also member-only events, youth programming, senior activities, Women’s Network, Men’s Club, and of course, the chance to travel with the synagogue to Israel.

PAS conducts regular Israel trips, including ones just for adults, as well as youth and family trips. Separately, there is also a Bnei Mitzvah family trip, hosted by one of the rabbis and his son. PAS offers myriad opportunities to explore occupied Palestine in the midst of several active campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

To the earlier point about the role of the rabbi, PAS graciously records all their sermons and uploads them alongside a caption. They deal with such ancient Jewish topics as: rising antisemitism on college campuses, the legacy of October 7th, and how to best support the Israeli war effort.

Again, these are liberal rabbis. This is a liberal synagogue. Yet, everywhere we look we find an almost comical devotion to a far-right genocidal state otherwise despised the world over for its illegitimate existence and unyielding bloodlust. Here are a couple more finds from the PAS website.

This is the average American synagogue. A safe haven for supporting the reviled settler-colonial nation at the heart of our terminal world-system’s violent death rattle. If you think that Park Avenue Synagogue is the exception, it is not. I won’t overload you with more pictures, but if you still have doubts, peruse the websites for NYC’s biggest Reform synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, or the massive non-denominational synagogue on the Upper West Side, B’nai Jeshurun. Every synagogue is like this, save for four or five exceptions, all of which are either tiny unaffiliated communities or congregations that equivocate and condemn Palestinian resistance.

The synagogue is a tunnel for American Jews, who otherwise are safe, wealthy, largely Ashkenazi, and totally assimilated, to transport themselves — literally and figuratively — to occupied Palestine. If we want to confront Zionism, we need look no further than institutions like these, which exist for the sole purpose of propagating it. The fact that they choose to dress up their Zionism in this particular way should have no effect on how hard we fight against them.

Yes, you read that right. A conflation of Judaism and the Jewish state, coming from the Left. No doubt you’re already on hold with the movement leaders over at Jewish Voice for Peace, ready to report this problematic substack. Just for a second, though, try opening your mind to the possibility that maybe there’s something to this. This isn’t an endorsement of Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes. Nazis are very bad, on that (I hope) we can agree. This is merely an objective analysis of Judaism, as it exists today, and its absolute complicity in the crimes of Zionism. It’s a plea to those on the Left – from the Left – to stop engaging in the practice of Judeophilia, which dilutes our movement and silences the voices that matter the most. If you’re still not willing to engage, then at least keep reading until that call goes through. Fair warning, I think JVP has another one of their “radical singing and wearing matching t-shirt” protests today, so it might take a while.

Let’s get the most important part out of the way. Jews are not oppressed. They haven’t been for a very long time. We need to do away with the notion that there is a “Crisis of Antisemitism,” an outright fabrication that for some reason remains an incessant refrain amongst many on the Left. Those statistics you see about threats to Jewish safety are totally falsified. Over half of the incidents on the ADL’s yearly audit are explicitly tied to anti-Zionism, and the bulk of the others are minor infractions like teenagers drawing swastikas on the sides of buildings.

A large, monied, and very compromised media apparatus has a vested interest in making you think there is a crisis that there isn’t. In Australia, there was a coordinated effort to fake a series of antisemitic attacks. Once exposed, it was quickly buried, and the first actual attack on Jews, in December 2025, was immediately used to justify sweeping anti-Palestinian solidarity measures and a general sentiment of Islamophobia. In England, Islamophobia has been pushed to the mainstream, with the explicitly anti-Muslim Reform UK party emerging as one of the strongest electoral forces in the country. The rapid increase in Islamophobic attacks gets relatively little coverage, while the few antisemitic attacks become front page news for weeks. The most notable of these was in Golders Green, where the media mass reported that two Jewish men were stabbed by a Muslim man, conveniently leaving out that the perpetrator was mentally ill, and appallingly failing to report that there was a third victim who was Muslim. Similar galling incidents of Islamophobia and Judeophilia have played out across Europe, with incidents like Amsterdam locals attempting to prevent Israeli soccer hooligans from engaging in mass vandalism and anti-Arab racism being branded a “pogrom.”

In the Great Satan, we’re especially inundated with daily propaganda about the scourge of antisemitic violence. Here are a couple of the most widely condemned attacks: the Pennsylvania Governor’s Residence was set on fire because of Governor Josh Shapiro’s support for the genocide in Gaza; a mentally ill man in the process of converting to Judaism drove his car into the door of the Chabad headquarters, injuring nobody; and two Israeli embassy staffers (one of whom was not Jewish) were shot in response to the genocide in Gaza. See, these are a worrying pattern of religiously motivated violence. The fatal shooting of three men at a mosque? The attempted assassination of a prominent Palestinian Muslim activist by a member of an explicit Jewish terrorist group? The murder of a Palestinian-American six-year-old? Pure coincidence. Do you get how this works yet?

The uncomfortable truth is that Jews are the single wealthiest group in the United States, and disproportionately represent nearly a third of American billionaires. There is no systemic oppression against Jews, who also disproportionately occupy the upper echelons of business, law, medicine, entertainment, publishing, and media. The “Crisis of Antisemitism” is nothing more than a very obviously manufactured moral panic used to garner support for the American-Zionist project of imperialism, of which Jewish supremacy is as integral an arm (tentacle?) as white supremacy.

The populist Right, a group famous for their ability to recognize but not diagnose, has been rapidly adopting a lens that ascertains — in their crude, childish way — that cries of antisemitism are, to use their parlance, an “op.” Now, this isn’t to laud them; it’s quite apparent that they hate Muslims and Arabs more than anyone. It’s merely to point out how behind the Western Left is. Palestine has become our focal point, the Vietnam of our era, and deservedly so. Yet, a stubborn trend of equivocating and centering the voices of Jews who falsely claim oppression remains. The truth needs to prevail and an actual line needs to be established if we are ever going to build effective strategy. Right now, by playing into this myth, we give the other side all the ammunition they need to kill us.

Despite all of this, some real progress has been made. You’ll hardly ever come across any serious voices on the left still playing the “condemning Hamas” game, and the general collective perspective has moved far from the pre-Toofan al-Aqsa myth of the existence of an anti-Zionist Israeli Left. However, much more needs to be done. We still need to kill the beast that is Judeophilia. To do that, a very bitter pill needs to be swallowed. The time has long since come for us to acknowledge that Judaism as it exists now is Zionism.

On Antisemitism

For many on the Left, merely hearing something like that induces repulsion. In the Imperial Core, the idea of antisemitism as an ancient, atavistic form of hate, one that perpetually seeks to lure in gentiles with its intoxicating influence, is drilled into all of us. As someone from a very Jewish background (my estranged father is an Israeli rabbi), this notion was instilled in me throughout my life. What opened my eyes was Toofan al-Aqsa and its consequences, the war that has engulfed the planet, burning everything green and dry. The state of the world after that monumental day showed me, someone who lived deep in the heart of Judaism, the true form of the Zionist Entity. Now I reject Judaism alongside Zionism, for the simple reason that the two are totally inextricable.

This is not me trying to “As a Jew.” Neither my ethnic background nor my religious upbringing confer upon me a special ability to deem anything right or wrong. Instead, I tell you in the hopes that you’ll understand that I’m not coming from a place of ignorance. I was a JVP-type once, fingers perpetually in my ears, furiously shaking my head and screaming as soon as anyone dared commit the crime of putting two and two together. Now I know better. What I ask of you is that you open your mind, not for me, but for the Palestinians who have been saying this for a hell of a lot longer. If you’re reading this and you don’t trust me because you would rather never have to listen to another Jewish voice, and would rather only listen to Palestinians, then you’re one of the people whom I respect most in this world, and you’re not who I’m speaking to with this article. However, if you’re someone who has ever found themselves assigning reverence to the bravery of anti-Zionist Jews, then you need to keep reading.

To be a Jew is to be complicit. Such a controversial statement, and yet, when the same is said of whiteness, the only argument you’ll hear is from reactionaries on the Twitter short bus. The same people who rend their garments in denunciation of their white privilege find the idea of Jewish privilege to be sacrilegious.

With all that being said, I’ll clarify that antisemitism does technically exist. It poses no harm to anyone, but it’s certainly real. It also has no useful application, and that’s not even for any moral reason. The main reason is just because it’s kind of dumb. Antisemitism is a fairly continuous and unbroken tradition of anti-Jewish sentiments, stretching back to a time when Jews were actually a very marginalized group, and continuing into today’s completely antithetical age of Jewish exceptionalism. It’s muddied, contradictory, and often pretty esoteric. As such, it conflates very real critiques of Judaism with some rather unhelpful ones. When we critique Judaism for being nothing more than an extension of the Zionist entity, we cannot implicate those Jews who lived and died before the advent of Zionism itself. This is a hard line to walk, but a necessary one. Go too far on one end, and you’re stuck in a world that mixes real critique with reactionary conspiracy. Go too far on the other and you’re right back to condemning “problematic conflations.”

The trick to it is to recognize that a very real religion called Judaism once existed, and it was once the victim of those selfsame external bigotries that all faiths are subject to, though it was more susceptible to harm than many (though not all), due to a variety of factors. Starting in the late 19th century, that old version of Judaism started to die, finally perishing sometime in the middle of the 20th century. What exists now is an evolution of Judaism that is in every way complicit in the displacement, occupation, and genocide of the Palestinian people, as well as the century-long destabilization of of Southwest Asia and North Africa.

Instead of antisemitism, a collection of truths and lies thrown carelessly together, I suggest anti-Judaism, a more targeted approach that focuses on the contemporary iteration of the religion. If you struggle with the implications of that, imagine I said “anti-whiteness.” Many rightly champion anti-whiteness as a natural extension of anti-colonialism, and the same can and should be done with anti-Judaism. Whiteness and Judaism are abstractions that uphold imperialist structures. This isn’t a call for violence based on identity, it is a call to recognize a fundamental truth.

Judaism by the Numbers

If you spend a lot of time on Twitter (which you most likely do), then you’ve likely not only come across many a brave Jewish voice yapping about peace, but also heard every leftie non-Jew’s anecdotal experience of “never having even met a Zionist Jew before.” I’m exaggerating, of course, but many people seem to be of the belief that anti-Zionism is at least a somewhat common position amongst non-Israeli Jews. I’m here to tell you that it’s not.

The first thing for you to understand is what Judaism is. More specifically, what it was before Zionism. Most are under the impression that Judaism, historically, occupied a unique, inscrutable categorization, simultaneously a religion and an ethnicity. This is a revisionist Zionist lie. A purely Yemeni Jew is genetically… a Yemeni Jew. Shocking, I know. That Yemeni Jew is going to have no ethnic overlap with a German Ashkenazi Jew, with whom they potentially have a common ancestor two thousand or more years ago. Just like how Egyptian Copts and Assyrians are distinct ethnic groups that nonetheless practice a similar religion, the same is true of Moroccan and Iranian Jews.

It is true that many Jewish communities have intermarried throughout the years, particularly the Sephardic community, who fled from Spain and found refuge in both the Ashkenazi and North African Jewish communities. It is also true that the original Russian Jewish community and the Ashkenazi community have a long history of intermixing. However — here’s the mind-blowing part — this is true of non-Jews as well. People travel, people marry and have children in other places, and yet ethnic boundaries nevertheless remain. The Sephardic, Ashkenazi, North African, Iraqi, Kaifeng, and pretty much every other Jewish community were, historically, ethnically distinct.

So what was Judaism, then? Easy, a religion. Practiced in different ways by different people across many places. There were a set of rites, practices, and beliefs that made one a Jew, same as in any other religion. Today, that’s no longer the case. Religiosity is completely untethered from Jewish identity. There are many Jewish atheists, and even Jews of other faiths. What makes one a Christian is a belief in Trinitarianism. What makes one a Muslim is summed up pretty handily in the shahada. No central tenet unites Jews. Save for one.

What Israel did to Judaism was an irreversible coup, turning it unambiguously into a transnational national identity. I’m not mourning that fact, only stating it. Zionism made Jews one people, united under Israel. To pretend this is not the reality is to deny one of the primary tools of the Zionist Entity. Existing as an active participant in the Jewish national identity without fighting against it is tantamount to being a Zionist, since it takes the Jewish connection to Palestine as fact. So then, next time you’re speaking with an “anti-Zionist” Jew, see if they mention the word “diaspora” or refer to “the Jewish people.” Maybe they offhandedly refer to Palestine as the “Holy Land.” If they do any of those things, it means that they are a Zionist.

Zionism is difficult to define, precisely because it needs to be. It must expand its definition, as it is a project of pure expansion. That expansion is a Jewish supremacist one, meaning that anyone who goes around denying Jewish supremacy’s existence, or pretending that there is a “Crisis of Antisemitism,” is also a Zionist. In truth, Zionism can be defined only by what it opposes, and that is the total control over Palestinian land by the Palestinian people.

One reason that many, in the post-2023 moment, still brandish the myth of the silent plurality of anti-Zionist Jews is because of the public changes that the Jewish community has undergone. Plenty of media has been devoted to the many polls that have come out regarding shifts in non-Israeli Jewish sentiments. The most recent high-profile survey (that’s been covered ad nauseam) comes from early this year, conducted by the Jewish Federations of North America. In the Time of Israel, it’s findings are touted as, “Even most Israel-supporting US Jews don’t identify as ‘Zionists,’ JFNA survey finds.” Immediately, there’s a contradiction. How can someone not be a Zionist, but still support Israel? A read through the actual study will tell you that, in fact, the only noticeable change in the Jewish community has been an increased understanding that the label of “Zionist” is bad for online dating and making new friends. Despite only a third of American Jews calling themselves Zionists, 88% still “support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and Democratic state.” That overlaps almost entirely with the 87% who believe that “Israel has valid reasons for fighting Hamas.”

Only 7% of respondents in the survey oppose Israel existing as a Jewish state. This lines up almost exactly with the statistic stating that “94% of Jews agree [that] the way Hamas carried out its 10/7 attack was unacceptable,” meaning 6% believe Hamas was justified. These numbers further correlate with the statistic showing that only 7% actually identify themselves as explicitly “Anti-Zionist,” and also with the statistic that gives us 6% “[indicating] that following October 7^th they avoided Jewish institutions more.” We can pretty easily surmise that these are the same people.

6 to 7 percent. Out of all American Jews. I’ll inform those who are unaware that American Jews account for at least 40% of the world’s Jewish population, and 75% of the non-Israeli Jewish population (these numbers come from before Oct. 7, and are likely to be higher now). When one adds France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Argentina (all countries with strikingly similar polling) to the US’s numbers, this accounts for just shy of 90% of the total non-Israeli Jewish population.

Now, if you don’t at least see a problem with that, I don’t know what to tell you. What I see, though, are further questions. How many among those 6 to 7 percent are “Holy Land” types themselves? How many do not believe in unilateral Palestinian land-back, but instead some tepid, “power-sharing” arrangement that pretends at democracy? How many, in their heart of hearts, believe truly in the total dismantling of the Israel state and the full sovereignty of Palestinians over the land of Palestine? For that, I’ll admit I don’t have the polling data. However, my gut and my anecdotal experience tell me that it’s at least not most of them.

Yet, whether it is every single one of that meager percentage, or next to none, it would not matter. This is because Judaism is not merely a group of people. The collective body of Jews are, of course, but the religion itself is by definition institutional. That “ancient, sacred religion” you’re defending is pretty much a collection of nonprofits. You might think I’m being glib, but I’m really not. The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the Union for Reform Judaism, and the Orthodox Union are all literally 501(c)(3)s. Ditto every Jewish organization within the United States, save for those that are actually for-profit, of which there are many.

Don’t get me wrong here, this is typical of American religious institutions. However, what makes Judaism unique is that each of those large, interconnected umbrella organizations has an affiliated equivalent within all other countries with major Jewish populations. Put together, these groups operate as complex machines that funnel money and support to Israel. Synagogues within the Conservative movement, for example, are explicitly Zionist. As someone who grew up in a half-dozen Conservative Jewish communities, I can tell you that my Jewish communal experience was incredibly Israel focused. Conservative synagogues not only have prayers for the State of Israel and the IDF, they have special services, memorials, and even three holidays dedicated to Israel. Holidays that are older are retroactively inflected with a shiny new Zionist lens. At the end of almost every Shabbat service, the president of the synagogue will typically take the stage to try and raise money for Israeli groups, if not the IDF itself. Any Conservative synagogue you walk into is going to be full of Israeli flags, posters advertising Israel programming or Israeli charities, and so much more. To add to it all, most Conservative communities organize annual (if not more frequent) trips to occupied Palestine. All of this is also true of Modern Orthodox and Reform congregations.

It isn’t just the synagogues, either. Jewish summer camps, day schools, men’s clubs, women’s associations, and youth groups are all the same. In most egalitarian, non-denominational Jewish day schools, K-12 students will take “Judaic Studies” courses that center Israel, and high school students take “Israel Advocacy” classes in order to indoctrinate them further. These schools will almost always additionally take their students on trips to Palestine, usually when they are in high school (this separate from the many ‘Israeli trip’ programs). That is what it means to be a Jewish institution.

I know, you’ve heard online about anti-Zionist rabbis and institutions. Allow me to correct the record; the anti-Zionist rabbis you’ve heard of are an infinitesimal group. “Rabbi” is not a mystical title, it requires a degree from an accredited institution, all of which fall under the umbrella of the aforementioned Zionist organizations. As part of their training, rabbinical students typically have to go and spend at least one year in occupied Palestine. For the most part, those people you follow on Twitter are ordained rabbis who have broken with the Jewish community, often having undergone cherem (Jewish excommunication) for being vocally pro-Palestine, and now no longer serve in a clerical capacity. Most are also two-staters. Those “anti-Zionist” synagogues? Well, to officially be a synagogue, you — again — must be part of one of the broader organizations. To call yourself a “community” or a “congregation” though, you can be a handful of people who meet up to pray. That’s precisely what the ones you’ve heard of are.

Am I in any way saying that there is no world in which someone could come along, call themselves a Jew, and be truly anti-Zionist? No, I am not. However, in order to actually be anti-Zionist, that person would in fact need to either create a wholly new religion, or revive a previous incarnation of Judaism. That would require totally detaching from all institutions and individuals who now identify as Jewish. This has not happened to any meaningful degree. As it stands, Judaism is Zionism.

Comparing Holocausts

With all that being said, the most important question is this: How does anti-Judaism help us? I argue that it is beneficial in a number of ways, all of which further the causes of the Left. The shedding of Judeophilia benefits the pro-Palestinian movement, and the explicit adoption of anti-Judaism alongside anti-whiteness serves to benefit the broader anti-imperialist currents that are crucial in Western Left discourse.

To free ourselves from Judeophilia means to center Palestinian voices. I live in the heart of the Imperial Core, New York City, where — most are aware — pro-Palestine sentiment and organizing run strong. Yet, I have been to more events and actions that bring out Jewish speakers than those that do not. I want to be clear, this is not the fault of Palestinian groups, like the Palestinian Youth Movement or Within Our Lifetime, that often put on these events. These organizations, composed of the marginalized and oppressed, are just utilizing the solidarity available to them. The fact that they must center Jewish voices in order to attract that solidarity is an indictment of all of us non-Palestinians.

To many, Palestine stand out as a peculiar case of settler-colonialism. While in some ways it is very accessible, in others, many have difficulty grasping what should come across as a straightforward project of imperialism. Unsurprisingly, a lot of this has to do with the oppressors (if you have engaged with the great canon of Palestinian academics, this will be well-tread territory). In Western pro-Palestinian spaces, the Nazi holocaust is upheld as the arch-comparison to the current genocide being conducted in Gaza, as well as to the broader occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. In reality, the oppression of the Ashkenazi Jews by the Nazis is a poor analogy for the oppression of the Palestinians by the Jews. Sure, both contain ethnic marginalization, criminalization of identity, and mass systemic death. However, this analogy belies by far the most crucial aspect of the oppression of the Palestinians: Palestine.

Land is the center of the Palestinian struggle. Land is at the heart of every injustice committed against Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, in 48, and across the world. Thus, the genocide of the Ashkenazi is perhaps the single worst historical point of comparison, given that almost every other genocide contains within it that crucial component that is land. The Nazi holocaust has far more in common with the genocides of the Yazidi, Darfuri, Tutsi, Circassians and the Bosniaks. Meanwhile, the genocide of Palestinians is a distinctly colonial one, more reminiscent of the genocides of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australian Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, and the colonized peoples of Africa, Asia-Pacific, and the rest of the Arab World. By crippling our historicity to placate Jews, we do a massive disservice to Palestinians, one that actively harms them.

The situation in Palestine is, in actuality, not a complex one. However, by so often going out of our way to contextualize the Jewish colonization of Palestine, we normalize it. It is as if, in discussions of the colonial genocide in Australia, we constantly felt the need to preface that the First Fleet was mostly made up on unwitting convicts. This is true, of course, but it does not absolve any settlers of their participation in the colonization of Australia. Many pro-Palestinian voices who consider it their solemn duty to bring up the legacy of the Nazi holocaust in discussions of Palestine have little sympathy in their hearts for the Boers or pieds-noirs. By constantly invoking the trauma of the Nazi holocaust, we participate in the imperialist Holocaust Industry, setting Jewish suffering apart, and thus relieving the colonizers of the Palestinians of a portion of their responsibility. We further obscure the reality that Zionism predates Nazism; the Haganah began its colonial operations over twelve years before the Nazis took power.

The victims of the Nazi holocaust are dead, and the legacy of that tragedy does not reverberate in the form of its victims’ descendants continued suffering. In other words, that genocide has fully ended. However, its omnipresence in pro-Palestinian spaces does a major degree of harm, obscuring the nature of Palestine’s colonization. The situation in Palestine is as straightforward as the situations in Algeria or Canada, yet Judeophilia tells us otherwise. In discussions of Palestine, the Palestinian struggle becomes secondary to a long-dead European catastrophe. Palestine becomes a stranger in its own home.

Jewish Land Theft

Whiteness is pervasive in every aspect of social existence, using many intersecting systems to maintain a default state of racial oppression. Judaism functions in much the same way. A prime example is the Jewish monopoly on real estate. Here in New York, there exists a predatory, Jewish hold over commercial and residential real estate. That might touch a nerve, but its an indisputable fact. A disproportionate number of the largest real estate firms in New York are Jewish-owned, many are Israeli as well. However, for the purposes of this piece, we’ll focus only on the Hasidic community, which controls billions in Brooklyn residential real estate alone.

First, let’s clear up some misconceptions. Haredi is synonymous with ultra-orthodox, of which the Hasids are merely one type. They look mostly the same, they act mostly the same, but the big difference is that Hasids follow specific dynastic teachers. In occupied Palestine, Hasids make up a sizeable minority of the total ultra-orthodox community, while in New York, they make up the vast majority. The misconception that either the Haredi or Hasids are largely anti-Zionist stems from two places. The first is that, historically, they were opposed to the creation of the State of Israel, for the religious reason that — theologically — Jews are not supposed to go to Zion until the messiah arrives. Some dynasties, like the Satmar, still subscribe to this tenet. This does not make them anti-Zionist. They oppose a Jewish state in Palestine irrespective of the Palestinian people, and many live in occupied Palestine. The second source of this misbelief is their protesting of the draft. Within Israeli society, Haredi are very against the mandatory draft. Once again, though, this is not out of a sympathy for Palestinians. They just really hate having to do anything that isn’t studying Torah.

In actuality, the only truly pro-Palestinian Haredi group are the Neturei Karta (the ones from all the protests), who number in the low thousands worldwide. The Neturei Karta have been condemned numerous times for their activism by other Haredi sects, including by all of the major Hasidic groups. This includes the Satmar and the Bobov, who compose the majority of NYC’s Hasids, alongside Chabad-Lubavitch and Ger, who are explicitly politically Zionist. Chabad and Ger even encourage participation in the IDF, which Haredi are typically exempt from. In summary: Haredi are Zionist, Hasids are very Zionist.

Another common misconception that many have is that Hasids in New York and surrounding areas are very poor. This belief is understandable, largely because, in a sense, they are. Hasidic households often fall below the poverty line, but this obfuscates a more complicated truth. They fall below the line mostly because they are single income homes that typically have a very high number of children. The women will not work, and the men will almost always work within the economic enclave of the community. Most money will go to the broader community, which allows each household to apply for welfare (there have been many fraud cases that stem from this). However, Hasids have the support of their larger communities, which control billions in capital. Those who have passed through Hasidic towns or neighborhoods can attest to the fact that they have their own self-contained economic ecosystems, with Hasidic industries, businesses, schools, hospitals, ambulance services, vigilante police services, television networks, and everything else you could imagine.

Unlike the rest of the Jewish community, the ultra-orthodox population is growing fast. In accommodation of this, there is a widespread phenomenon of towns across the northeast being “taken over” by Hasids, with non-Jewish residents being largely driven out. In NYC, this is taking place on the level of individual neighborhoods, primarily through what amounts to illegal expansion.

With all that being said, allow me a brief story. In early 2025, shortly before I went to the occupied West Bank and witnessed the depravity of Jewish supremacy in Palestine, I attended a local protest in Flatbush. I was one of the only non-Black attendees, and it was a far cry from the well-funded, packed actions I was used to. These were residents of Flatbush with deep roots in the neighborhood, protesting the active depopulation of the neighborhood’s Black community through deed theft and unlawful evictions. Hearing them speak, I was shocked at how open they were in their rhetoric. There was none of the gymnastic elocution I was used to hearing at those larger protests, here they named their persecutors outright. It was the Jews. Even more to the point, I was heartened to hear how strongly they sympathized with the Palestinian struggle, comparing their misfortunes at the hands of Jewish supremacy to those of the people in Palestine who they were seeing in the news.

It’s been a year and change since then, and some things have certainly shifted. When I went to that Flatbush protest, few people outside the affected communities were talking about deed theft or racially motivated evictions. Now, far more voices in activist spaces are willing to touch the issue. More and more, concerned citizens of New York are becoming aware of the fact that thousands of cases of deed theft have been occurring in historically Black neighborhoods, and that illegal, racially motivated evictions are an epidemic in this city.

However, what hasn’t changed is the Judeophilia. Few outside the Black community are admitting that the perpetrators are all Jewish. When Black protestors identify their tormenters as Jews, they are not joined by non-Black allies. Similarly, those Palestinians who choose to identify Judaism as an integral element of their oppression are met only with uncomfortable stares. The message is clear: If a Jew is oppressing you, you get support so long as that fact is concealed. This comes back to the vaunted falsehood that is the “Crisis of Antisemitism”. In the United States of America, we are taught that the single wealthiest religious group is as oppressed as the Black community, who live as second-class citizens in a country that was built on their subjugation. Due to this fabrication, Jews are allowed to operate on a special plane, treated as the oppressed while carrying out the actions of the oppressor, mirroring the fallacy that undergirds the question of Palestine.

Jewish Fascism

Judaism is Zionism. What was once a movement that invoked a religion has become the religion itself. Those fighting against Zionism overwhelmingly buckle when confronted with the “Crisis of Antisemitism,” a fictionalized tool used to stifle pro-Palestinian speech. As I said earlier, antisemitism does little to further the pro-Palestinian cause. However, it is an understandable outlet in an era of totalizing Jewish supremacy, particularly when Judaism is not being properly scrutinized. What we need is anti-Judaism, by which I mean a similar rejection of Jewish supremacy as the one we assign white supremacy. We need to maintain an across-the-board denunciation of supremacism based in ethnically-aligned social constructs. This requires a sober acknowledgement of the extant racial and ethnic hierarchies, and an end to the Jewish exception.

One more story. Not long after the Flatbush protest, I attended one of those aforementioned well-funded actions, this one a live event in support of a Palestinian activist who had been illegally kidnapped by ICE on the orders of the president. After what I had seen in Flatbush, you can imagine the jolt that it was to hear, at an event for an abducted Palestinian activist, a different student organizer brought up and lauded incessantly for being a “Jew of conscience.” This activist had not been arrested or kidnapped, but rather expelled from school and his union for his work at the Columbia encampment. Yet, little mention was given to this, and he was instead extolled for his Jewish bravery. There was also no discussion of the fact that the activist who the event was purportedly in support of had been kidnapped directly by an administration full of powerful Jewish supremacists working alongside white supremacists.

The current Trump administration is filled with overt fascists, many of them just as strong proponents of Zionism as they are of white supremacy. People like Stephen Miller, Stephen Feinberg, and Jared Kushner hold high-level positions in the administration, and have a direct say in executive decisions. The rest of the administration is made up of staunch ideological Zionists, to say nothing of the powerful Jewish capitalists that have the president’s ear.

It’s time to face the facts. On every level, the manufactured “Crisis of Antisemitism” has been used to grant Jews explicit protections and privileges that elevate them to a status of legal supremacy that matches their economic and social supremacy. This should not be ignored simply because the language of oppression is invoked. Judaism is protected by the forces of global imperialism and capitalism because it is one of those forces. The religion that was Judaism has been thoroughly transformed, now existing as little more than a supremacist identity used to justify hierarchy and oppression.

As we saw earlier, this is not just true of Judaism, it is also true of the vast majority of Jews. This mirrors the reality of whiteness, wherein most Whites are complicit in the crime of white supremacy. Of course, this does not mean that no White people can fight against white supremacy. Recall all the White activists who fought alongside Black South Africans to end apartheid. The same is true of those pro-Palestinian activists that come from a Jewish background. The key difference, though, is that those White activists were not constantly praised for being “Whites of conscience,” nor was there a consistent attempt to separate whiteness from South African colonialism. Instead, the opposite was true. An acknowledgement of the nature of white supremacy in colonialism was integral to the fight against apartheid.

For the sake of the Palestinian struggle, we on the Left need to platform and center Palestinian voices, and we cannot simultaneously elevate the voices of those who champion the oppressor ideology. Anti-Judaism is a progressive force, elucidating the simple colonial nature of the occupation of Palestine. It further allows us to view Zionism as the expansionist force that it is, one that centers on Palestine’s destruction, but at the same time transcends borders and is tied on every level to global capitalism and imperialism.

I’ll leave it off with this. In September of 2023, eleven days before October 7^th, the acclaimed Palestinian writer Mohammed el-Kurd wrote an article in Mondoweiss entitled, “Jewish settlers stole my house. It’s not my fault they’re Jewish.” In the article, el-Kurd, whose family was forcefully evicted from their home in the al-Quds neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, writes about the unfair responsibility placed on Palestinians in navigating the minefield that is identifying the Jewish supremacy of their oppressors, for fear of being labelled antisemites. Inspired by illustrious Black writer James Baldwin’s 1967 article, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” el-Kurd expresses a frustration at not being able to call Jewish supremacy what it is.

“Here is where I stand. There is a Jew who lives–by force—in half of my home in Jerusalem, and he does so by “divine decree.” Many others reside—by force—in Palestinian houses, while their owners linger in refugee camps. It isn’t my fault that they are Jewish.”

— Mohammed el-Kurd

The Left is quick to acknowledge that the fight at home and the fight everywhere relies on a clearheaded assessment of imperialism and its manifestations. Yet, right now we stand unprepared to engage in the most pressing form of that assessment. Let’s not force Palestinians, nor any of the other marginalized people being oppressed by Judaism — whether they be Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian, or Black — to go through this humiliating, pointless song and dance every time they need to speak up about their persecution. Let’s call out Judaism as we call out whiteness, not from a place of hate, but from a duty to those who live under injustice and tyranny.

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In part one of this article, we explored the apparent nature of the United States’ “special relationship” with Israel. Donald Trump, the Yeltsin of the sinking American ship, is proudly delivering Israel everything it has presumptuously demanded; money and arms for its genocidal lebensraum, the demolition of the United Nations, and a civilizational conflict plunging the entire world into chaos. Yet Trump, dutiful Noahide though he may be, is merely engaging in the manner of the naturally occurring present iteration of the American-Israeli alliance that we are living through. Biden completely capitulated to Israel as well, granting them carte blanche from his sleepy throne. Every president since 1967 has moved closer to Israel than the last, in the process of a total fusion of the American Empire and Zionism.

American foreign policy has been one of post-war global hegemony, motivated by its long “cold” war against the forces of socialism and a nominal age of consent. In its failures to enact a lasting domination over Latin America, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, the US had put all of its hopes into the so-called Middle East. This battle necessitates Israel.

In this section, we seek to definitively answer the question of whether Israel is merely an invaluable “aircraft-carrier,” or whether there is something more conspiratorial at play.

How Israel Won the West

Imagine it’s nighttime, the air is perfect, and in the distance you hear ocean waves, maybe a seagull squawking. Where you are the late evening traffic is zooming down the freeway at worrying speeds. Every other car is honking, every third window is rolled down to reveal identical faces the texture of slightly wet cigar paper, eyes obscured by Oakleys, mouths flapping inscrutable curses at passing drivers. The music you hear, coming from seemingly every direction, is hard to pin down into one genre, maybe it’s Techno, maybe it’s Electronic, maybe it’s Funky-Disco Party-Time Jams. Billboards display badass combat soldiers shielding babies from bullets or tearing down mosques. Somehow these are ads for car insurance. As you walk down a single block, you see a record four blonde, leathery women screaming at Palestinian men on scooters, who are delivering for an Uber Eats knockoff called Voofie or something. Now imagine you’re a young woman. Younger. No, I’m serious, even younger than that. Twelve guys in jorts rush towards you at the same time.

Israel is the worst place ever. I’m sure you know that. Yet, you might not know just how hard it fought to become the arms trafficking hub and pedophile haven that it is today. In the postwar world, settler colonies were out and burger imperialism was in. It took a while for the traditional settler colonies to die, but most of them did. On the other hand, Israel thrived. This was largely due to the unique features that separated it from traditional settler colonies.

The first feature unique to Zionism is that, while it was doing the settling, someone else was doing the colonizing on its behalf. The British occupied Palestine first, and when it came time to throw all of their costly colonies off the lifeboat, they gave it over to the Jews. Up to that point, the Jews were nonstate militants, conducting bombings on civilians and committing pogroms in vulnerable villages. When the British handed them the keys, the Jews got to pick up where the Mandate government left off. These militants didn’t have a metropole to report back to, and they had a lot of European Jews to replace Arab workers, so it made the task of ethnic cleansing relatively straightforward. All of the benefits, none of the costs.

The second feature is even more important. Israel was founded by a group of bloodthirsty stormtroopers whose raison d’être was to watch innocents die at their hands, and it all began long before the Nazi Holocaust. The Haganah and Irgun were founded in 1920 and 1931, respectively. However, postwar Zionism had the benefit of acting on the behalf of a population composed of war torn refugees. These refugees were, of course, complicit in the displacement and ethnic cleansing of the very populated, very settled land of Palestine. Being refugees doesn’t absolve them even slightly of their crimes, of which they had full knowledge. What it did do, though, was afford them a level of flexibility in their settling. They weren’t attempting to transpose any specific, existing national culture so much as create a new one. Or pretend one had always existed. Ask any Israeli and they won’t know which one it is, or even the difference. But you probably shouldn’t be asking an Israeli anything.

Zionism manifested as the stubborn assertion of pure fantasy. It was a reclamation, sure, but a reclamation from the savage Arabs, who — presumably through some strange, Eastern magic — concealed the true, Jewish character of Palestine. See, Palestine was really a facade, obscuring the Jewish state that had always existed (even when there weren’t any Jews living in it). Never mind all the empires that had conquered it from time immemorial, or all the religions that had dominated it both before and after Judaism. In this way, it was the ultimate colonial project; an endeavor to supplant not only people, culture and architecture, but to supplant history itself. It was an attempt to rewrite the very DNA of the Jews enacting it; names were changed to sound more indigenous, old languages were quickly abandoned, “traditional” dress and mannerism were methodically adopted.

This presented an interesting contradiction. Internally, Zionism colonized Palestine by asserting these ancient religious and ethnic claims. However, externally, it was almost the complete opposite. Zionism was represented to the rest of the imperialist world by bourgeois, thoroughly European leaders, who sold it as a project of naked Western colonialism. So, while the Zionists on the land were playing dress-up and practicing their guttural sounds, the Zionists in leadership positions and back in Europe were trying to convince everyone that they were creating Paris in the desert.

The project, though, was a European one, no matter how you square it. While there may have been delusions of nativity, this didn’t translate to the material reality that played out on the ground. In the early decades of the 20th century, European Jewish immigrants set up settlements on Palestinian land and stole Palestinian jobs, before eventually forming the types of settler-terror militias prevalent across the colonial world. This European character was on display in the in the ‘30s and ‘40s, when the settlers began committing mass acts of ethnic cleansing. It was on display during the Nakba of 1948, when Zionists killed or displaced the vast majority of Palestinians. It was still on display in 1956, when Britain and France joined Israel in attacking Egypt. The Sinai War, as it was known, was a disaster, resulting in humiliating defeat for the two former world hegemons. It was also when Israel first laid eyes on the United States.

The Middle East was an important region to get under imperial control, as it contained a lot of oil and some of the most important shipping arteries in the world. The US had just finished destabilizing Iran, having forced out the popularly elected Mossadegh and replacing him with the puppet Shah, and they wanted to stick to this defter approach to hegemony. They knew European-style wars were out, and so they forced the British and French to knock it off. The Israelis liked the cut of the US’s jib, but unfortunately for them, Americans wanted nothing to do with old-school colonies. Little did they know that this worked perfectly for Israel. Like a 50-year-old divorcée, the Israelis cast off stuffy old Europe and fully entered their Orientalist era. Lots of impractical flowy clothing, badly cooking other cultures’ foods, and an obsession with cherry tomatoes. Israel was finally going native.

1967 was the chance for the Israelis to prove themselves, and not only against countries in the region. It was also an attempt to woo the US, the thinking being that, if the new big imperialists stomping across the world saw value in Israel, their continuity would be guaranteed. It was also an attempt to prove Israel’s legitimacy, its land claim. It accomplished all of this. 1967 was sold as an attack on the one, tiny Jewish state by a coalition of aggressive Arab belligerents, who surrounded it on all sides (never mind that the Israelis struck first). This narrative would be recycled for every subsequent Israeli aggression. The defeat of the Arab states was so decisive that the US came to Israel eagerly. So it was that the “special relationship” was born.

The relationship was a reciprocal one, built on that 1967 fulfillment of each side’s needs. Israel may have taken and displaced the Sinai Desert, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (the Naksa), but to the rest of the world they had merely protected what was theirs. They were no longer some weird anachronism from a rapidly dying colonial order, instead they were the rightful owners of a tiny piece of land, shielding it from backwards ethnic and religious fundamentalists. The Israelis had become Middle Eastern, with the consent of approximately 0% of the Middle East.

The Americans, for their part, now had a handy proxy in West Asia, allowing them to concentrate their energy on the other regions mentioned above. There was no need for the Latin American model of juggling never-ending CIA operations, and funding coups and death squads. Nor was there a need to put boots on the ground, as the US was increasingly becoming loathe to do as the ‘70s rolled in. Israel was a potent tool, in both its offensive and neutral postures. Its mere existence was a constant threat to the Arab world. Plus, even if Israel got dinged up a little, that didn’t hurt the US at all. 1973 was the perfect example of this: The Arab States attacked Israel in retaliation for the Six-Day War, Israel got hit a lot harder than six years prior but came out the technical winner, and a few years later — as a direct result — they gave up the Sinai and the US got an obedient Egypt willing to drop the Soviets.

Another major shift post-1967 was the position of the “Diaspora” Jewish community. Prior to the Six-Day War, most American Jews were pretty ambivalent to Israel. After it, though, there was a total flip. Israel soon became the cornerstone of Jewish identity. Aliyah rates skyrocketed, and raising money for Israel was soon the primary goal of all Jewish institutions. Communal Judaism restructured itself, with Zionist organizations (WZO, JNF, Jewish Agency, etc.) morphing into one giant, omnipotent force that quickly subsumed the religious and cultural elements of Western Judaism and made them mere appendages of its larger body. The Israel lobby rose quickly, becoming the most powerful political lobby in the United States. The Zionists had control of everything, from politics to media to global finance. While Israel was at this point certainly still a vassal of the US, it was a vassal with unprecedented bargaining chips and the most powerful men in the world as its cheerleaders.

Now, after reading that egregious paragraph, your gut reaction is likely to jump out of your chair and accuse me of antisemitism (I know it’s probably not, but just pretend for me, please). “You don’t understand,” I hear you say, “Jews are one of history’s most oppressed groups, and that’s still the case! It’s due to sheer chance that CEOs and top executives of all the largest companies, banks, and media corporations are disproportionately Jewish! It’s a coincidence that a third of the United States’ billionaires are Jewish! Pointing out these things is engaging in an ugly act of stereotyping and bigotry!” Of these things, the only truth is that Jews are a historically oppressed group. That’s not the case today, and Jews now are one of the wealthiest and most structurally secure and powerful groups in the world. A major reason for that is the purchase that Zionism has, and in that way at least, claims of a “Zionist-occupied government” are inarguably true. However, what is missing from that analysis is the inherently American nature of modern Zionism.

Colonialism , as a manifestation of imperialism, relies on expansion. The land must be taken. Every inch of it controlled, if not outright occupied. The people must be controlled too, subdued if necessary, and they, with their inherent connection to the land, must be made to understand that they now serve its new owner. The colonial age ended, and it ushered in neocolonialism. This was not a distinct entity, but rather an evolution of the previous method of conquest. Neocolonialism holds the world in its grasp, picking and choosing when and how to deploy the myriad means of asserting and expanding its control. Neocolonialism is the modern imperial order. The modern imperial order is the United States.

“Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.”

— Frantz Fanon

Zionism is an ideology of pure, stateless expansion. It is the most advanced, most refined, and perfectly tailored version of neocolonialism. What allowed Zionism to survive was that it was the harbinger of the new order, heralding the incoming age. It was rootless from the start, not beholden to any fleeting land or monarch, but only to a timeless, formless existential goal. It tolerated the old colonial system, but effortlessly shed it when that moment passed. From then on, it was a doctrine of rapid growth and infection.

Its land expanded, yes, but that was only part of it. It expanded into every field of science and technology, until it occupied an irreplaceable top spot in the defense and surveillance industries, not to mention scientific research, medicine, and high tech. It expanded financially, becoming not only wrapped up inextricably in the upper echelons of capital flow, but also becoming one of the foremost concerns of the very men who controlled capital. It expanded rhetorically, coming to metastasize in the popular imagination until its role become the vanguard of Western Civilization, and the bulwark against oppression and desolation.

The United States of America, founded on traditional settler colonialism, lucked its way into inheriting the world. What followed was a new world, built on constantly holding a gun to the victims of colonialism, not out of fear that they may seek revenge, but in order to further exploit them. Through trial and error, the US learned how to wield this new form of hegemonic control, clumsy as that process may have been. It perfected its techniques of tireless, never-ending extortion. Zionism, something far savvier, is a neocolonial undertaking that arose totally independently of the United States, but ultimately from the same colonial fountainhead. When the two formed their alliance in 1967, it was not a strategic move but an inevitability. The United States could not control a force whose modus operandi was and is controlling everything. So the US needed to become one with Zionism. The relationship grew closer and closer, until we got to where we are now, with a president literally beholden to the whims of Israel, at the cost of all American stability.

It may seem that something like Zionism is unstoppable, but that would be wrong. The reach of Zionism has been obstructed many times, and usually by the same people, to whom we owe everything.

A Thorn in Their Throat

“She was called Palestine. She still is Palestine.” It is one of the most incredible lands to ever exist. In its religious significance, of course, but in every other way as well. It is a land lived on a million times over, each of its roads has been a thousand other roads, paved from the footprints of uncountable travelers. However, it is not a time capsule, it is a continuous, eternal being. Every olive tree born from another born from another, its root stretching back before history. Every home built from the bricks of another. Each Palestinian is their father and their mother and the story of continuity. Palestine sits at the crossroads of civilizations, so storied that its countenance is unmistakably a quiet, learned humility. It is Yafa, for centuries one of the liveliest ports on the Mediterranean. It is al-Quds, the spiritual and pilgrimage center of the world. It is the steep stony hills of Nablus, and the winding little streets of al-Khalil. It is the fellahin in a field of knee-high grass in the blazing sun, eyes set in a permanent squint, as he prays with his back to the flock that was his father’s and will be his son’s. Then it was all interrupted.

Try as they might, the Israelis could never become what they wanted to be. They fooled the world, but could never convince themselves. It was their hatred of the Palestinians that did it. The Israelis learned to hate every fiber of them, and thus could never truly love the land that shaped them. Palestine is its people, who can be shot or incinerated or expelled, who can be knocked to the ground in every way imaginable, as many times as need be, but who can never lower the mirror they hold up to the invader. He cannot look away from that mirror, he cannot exist on the land without at every moment being reminded of what he is to it.

It is not just the Palestinians’ culture, or the Palestinians’ religions. It is not just their physical presence. What stays the hand of Zionist expansion is the existence in this world of the Palestinian. The suffering of Palestinian Arabs made the invader unquestionably repulsive to the broader Arab world. The hatred their crimes elicited amongst the Arabs made them global pariahs from the start. As the battlefield shifted, and Zionism expanded politically, so too did the Palestinian resistance adapt. It became an organized movement and a global rallying cry, for the oppressed around the world. The downtrodden and the dispossessed, the wretched and the starving, the sympathetic and the righteously outraged, all cried out in one voice for Palestine. For as far as Zionism infected the treetops, Palestine seeded the earth just as much. For as much as Zionism is pure force, sumud is its complete antithesis.

They fought, on every front that one could fight on. They fight now, no nearer to giving in. They fight because they love their land, they fight because they have children, they fight because they know they will be killed if they do not. And, even if it is an injustice to them, they fight for every single one of us.

To the American Empire, invested as it was, the problem was apparent. They saw that Zionism was stymied by the Palestinians. They saw the societal and psycho-affective blows of the Palestinian fedayeen to the Zionist entity throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. They saw the challenges Israel faced in Lebanon, their inability to hold onto the land because the sumud had flourished, imbued now in the next group that the Israelis menaced. They saw the righteous wrath of the First Intifada, and the tireless strength of Hezbollah in Lebanon. The US had given Israel all the funding, all the weapons, all the political clout, everything they could ever need. Yet still, they were never able to put a dent in the sumud. So, desperate, the Americans tried a new tactic. “Peace.”

The Americans needed Israel to give it returns on its investment, but Israel had yet to deliver much of anything since Egypt. If the Palestinians were the obstacle, and Palestinians were unkillable, then the Palestinians had to be dealt with another way. The American thinking was that, if Palestine could be stripped of its inherent resistance, it would be effectively neutralized. It would mean Israel, for the first time in its history, could exist absent the question of Palestine. No effort was spared in this endeavor, the network of money and power that went into Oslo is too vast to catalogue. The US neglected one crucial detail, however, a consideration that cost them everything: Zionism is incompatible with peace.

Israel is a society of reaction, constructed as an antithesis to Palestine. It is a rejection of indigeneity, a total embrace of imperialism. Its original settlers may have leaned socialist, in the model of the European left tradition. As soon as they became settlers, though, this started to erode. Israel, only a half-century into its existence, was a society dominated by the right-wing, by reactionaries and conservatives, and by outright imperialists. Solving this is no mystery. Their education, their media, their entertainment, their religion; all of it is designed to foment hatred for a people whose sin — they are taught — was being born. Each one of them is destined for military complicity, and so their society is built to worship the military. They do not believe in righteous death, but strength absent moral calculus. Each Israeli is born into and brought up in a society in which the murder of innocents is justified a million times over, and by the time they are old enough to hold a weapon (while their brains are still malleable), they are drafted into the never-ending war. This was never a society that wanted peace. Peace means weakness and defeat.

Oslo failed, the two-state solution (a fantasy) became nothing more than a lifeless mantra mumbled by political hopefuls and nervous UN reps. Each side learned from this that the “liberal-international order” and its way of doing things was a lie. The Palestinians adopted a more overt and unapologetic resistance posture, the Israelis a more naked imperial bloodlust. Israeli society continued down the path of total degradation. The United States learned a lesson, too. It learned that it needed to embrace Zionism fully, and that if it wanted to get rid of the Palestinians, it would need to do it the Israeli way.

Jerusalem Syndrome

By the turn of the millennium, the West was forced to grapple with two uncomfortable truths: A peaceful resolution to Israel-Palestine was officially no longer an option, and a new cold war was brewing.

The United States’ posture in the developing world was, in a word, embarrassed. The Soviet Union was a decade dead, and the US was the undisputed hegemon, but their actual control over those ultra-important regions was lacking. A lot of this was due to an easy-to-overlook player called China, the biggest country in the world. Realpolitik genius Henry Kissinger had thought that the optimal strategy for that other, even bigger and angrier communist country was to be nice to them and give them whimsically-named bovine (a pair of musk oxen, Milton and Mathilda). His calculus was that, if you pretended China didn’t exist, it would presumably just kind of stop existing. However, in an unforeseen turn of events, China only continued to exist.

So, as millions of Americans donned their novelty New Year’s Eve glasses, and millions more huddled in backyard bunkers because they thought that computers were going to eat them or something, the Chinese Century went off with a bang. China already had a firm grasp over their backyard in Southeast Asia, which no amount of US military presence could counter. At the same time, populist Pink Wave leaders in Latin America were already beginning to court the Chinese. Africa, now long-abandoned by the US, was more than keen to welcome in the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and all of the investments that came with it.

What the US had left was the Middle East, which was proving trickier to beat into submission than they’d hoped. Saddam was still around, and the US about-face had turned him into a dedicated player-hater. Iran, turns out, didn’t love the last 50 years of the US swooping in and meddling in their country, and thus also had some mixed feelings about the Great Satan. Syria and Libya were still hostile too, and to add to it all, the US also had to deal with the rise of Middle Eastern non-state actors as well. Israel had firmly rejected that peace the Americans had cooked up for it, and in fact was also in the process of getting booted out of Lebanon. But, stubborn as an on-loan musk ox at the Beijing Zoo, the US dug its heels in and decided to pursue maximal lethality in the region, rather than once more suffer the sting of humiliation.

The cowboys in the baby Bush administration concluded that peace in the Middle East was gay (a common pejorative from the era that I would never dare use), and figured that the only thing that would work would be that thing that didn’t work in Southeast Asia. So our brave, beautiful boys kissed their mothers on the cheeks for the last time and went to die in Afghanistan and Iraq for the maintenance of empire. The Bush strategy included a historic acquiescence to the fact that Israel’s potency was hampered by the presence of Palestinian resistance and its ripple effect in the region, but their workaround for this was adding American firepower alongside Israel, thinking this would kind of overload resistance capabilities. As it turns out, adding more things to resist against really only achieves the opposite effect.

This bullheaded strategy was a major step in the Israelification of America. Statecraft was becoming an antiquated concept in the post-Soviet age, but the transition to launching multiple ill-conceived wars with little oversight and no end dates was straight out of the Zionist playbook. The US’s most Zionist move, though, was the way in which it framed these campaigns. In the aftermath of the all-too-convenient attack on the World Trade Center, George Bush went before Congress in a televised appearance and announced an unlimited existential war on what essentially amounted to Islam. Radical Islam, to be specific, with the definition of “radical” subject to the US’s discretion. If you really want a point where you can definitively say, “This is when the United States of America and Israel became totally aligned,” is would be that speech. America had been founded on a war of racial animosity and subjugation, and came to rule the world in its transcendent conceptual war of the 20th century, but this was something different. This was a war on a region, a war on a racial group, and a war on a belief system, all wrapped up into one. It was also a war that Israel had already been fighting for a long time.

We’re all now well aware that the Obama presidency was actually just a massive scheme to secure a lucrative Netflix deal and hang out with celebrities, but there was actually a time when people thought Barack Obama wanted to end the War on Terror. He seemed smart and it was a good bet that he didn’t hate brown people, plus he was the closest thing the US had gotten to a Muslim president since Thomas Jefferson (RA). This prediction turned out to be very, very wrong. Maybe he just had a genuine belief in the American experiment, or maybe at some point Justin Timberlake told him it would be swag, but whatever the case, Obama loved the War on Terror. People pleaser that he was, he tepidly attempted to satisfy the left by enacting some partial pullouts in the Middle East. This only made things worse, and he ended up having to go back into Iraq in 2014. He collapsed the Libyan state, and got further involved in Syria and Yemen. Under Obama, the drone strike program, absolutely integral to the War on Terror, increased, alongside Special Forces raids.

While Obama was working out his daddy issues in the Arab world, he was a bit more lucid when he cast his gaze further eastward. He saw how rapidly China was catching up to the US, and under him the US tried to counteract this with the disastrous “Pivot to Asia.” Obama and some lady named Hillary tried to convince Americans that they could pull off a new NAFTA, all so that the United States could regain a strategic posture in Southeast Asia, in the vain hope that this would temper the dragon’s rise. This, naturally, didn’t work. What it did do was solidify China’s position in East Asia, forcing the US to officially strike the region from its list.

Then Donny Deals entered the White House, in a period of history that would perhaps fall low on the list of transformative eras if not for its sheer stupidity. Trump I was characterized by its unprecedented ignominy and an all-consuming need to fellate Israel. While the previous two presidents had each moved closer to Israel merely by the sheer magnetism of Zionism to American imperialism, Donald Trump intentionally accelerated it. The first Trump administration was filled with millenarian evangelicals, skeevy real estate moguls, pedophilic Hollywood execs, and a ton of Jews (but I repeat myself).

The Trump people loved Israel, maybe a little more than America. While they didn’t get much else done, they were able to make impressive strides in normalizing Israel’s exceptional status to the international community. The US moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a city not recognized as the capital of Israel and in fact officially under illegal military occupation. In the same vein, they reversed the official policy towards West Bank settlements, the “Hansell Memorandum,” effectively recasting settlements — which were a legal red line — as a legal grey area. They recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, forced the closure of the PLO’s Washington mission, and even left a number of key UN bodies because of an “anti-Israel bias.” It doesn’t need to be said at this point, but the decision to leave the JCPOA was inarguably a move for Israel as well. Remember though, it’s antisemitic to say “ZOG.”

In one of their most brazen moves, the Trump admin even attempted to reverse American support for the Two-State Solution, instead adopting the “Trump Peace Plan,” a glaringly stupid proposal authored by Trump’s heterosexual son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The plan would see the PA officially become a subordinate semi-state under Israeli authority. As part of this, Palestinians would fully cede West and East Jerusalem to Israel, and the West Bank would be cut up into a series of tiny bantustans in order to accommodate the — now legal — settlements. For good measure, the entirety of the Jordan Valley would also be handed over to Israel. The immediately recognizable absurdity of the plan, alongside Trump’s negligible political capital, meant that it was never formally adopted, but it did pave the way for the Abraham Accords, a set of normalization agreements between Israel and a series of Muslim states, most notably the United Arab Emirates, the most morally bankrupt of the already impressively evil Gulf countries.

When Biden came in, it looked like things might change. Not for the better, of course, but at least they could go back to the status quo of steady encroachment towards the US swearing total fealty to Israel. Instead, Sleepy Joe spent every one of his waking hours sloppily sucking off the Jewish State. In the first two years and nine months of his presidency, he didn’t reverse a single one of Trump’s moves, and massively increased funding to Israel. Then came October 7th, 2023, and you know the rest.

What the US did accomplish over the last decade was a strategic reconfiguration in Latin America, with the Trumpian “Donroe Doctrine,” reinstituting all of the old policies that the US had used to keep the region under its control, and largely kicking China out. They bullied countries economically, and used their classic espionage tactics to tighten their grip over particularly left-wing states like Bolivia and Venezuela. This has created an anti-Pink Wave movement of far right populist leaders in the vaguely Trumpian model coming to power in rapid succession.

On the reverse side, the US has lost any hope of countering Chinese influence in Africa, if there ever was any. The continent has undergone infrastructure developments and energy overhauls on a massive scale, and Chinese-African trade has ballooned. China’s intervention doesn’t come from a benevolent place, but it has proved a lifeline for most African countries, particularly after the markets oopsies of 2020 and 2022 and the US shuttering USAID.

The battle lines are being drawn, and most likely literally. The US was able to lock Russia into a wasteful war against NATO, and other major players like India and Pakistan are timidly playing both sides, waiting for the outlook to become a little clearer. Some states, like Canada, are hunkering down for strategic neutrality. The rest of the world is being drawn into those two great hostile camps once more, as the superpowers iron out wrinkles like Venezuela (and likely soon Cuba and Taiwan). China has become a major — if not the biggest — trading partner to most of the world, while the United States has rapidly devolved into an approach of gunboat diplomacy. The war that’s brewing is gearing up to be one of influence versus force, with the crucial deciding factor being which side is able to effectively wield both. This means the United States will have to take advantage of what political capital and market confidence they still have, and China might actually have to ever do anything (a process that Chinese analysts strongly advise against).

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Middle East. China is a quiet partner to many countries in the region, and the place is filled to the brim with American GIs. While Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia having more or less settled into their camps, the Middle East remains contested. With the war in Iran, it’s gone from very likely to assured that this will be one of the deciding battlefields of the new Cold War. This isn’t exactly a surprising outcome, either. For most of recent history, the so-called Middle East and Europe were at comparable levels of development, and the borders between the two have always been far more fluid than the history we’re sold today indicates. Yet, one of the global hubs of science, art, literature, philosophy, architecture, and every other prized Western ideal has been held in a headlock for over one hundred years now. That seems to have reached a breaking point.

The United States’ strategy is an unabashedly Zionist one, firstly in its general approach. Look no further than the kidnapping of Maduro to see that the US has learned that international law is an avoidable obstacle, and sovereign borders are a suggestion. The US retains some vestige of its laughable “spreading democracy” rhetoric, but every succeeding conflict sheds it a little more. What is replacing it is the naked rhetoric of announcing blatantly illegal, destructive military operations, vaguely justified as preserving some nebulous “security.” A growing ineptitude amongst rank and file American soldiers is counterbalanced by an increased focus on air power and special operations. All of this is immediately familiar to anyone with knowledge of the IDF’s traditional wartime (see: all-time) conduct. It isn’t just militarily, either. The political climate in the United States is shifting. That isn’t to rewrite the history of genocide, slavery, and barely veiled racial hierarchy. It just means that it’s evolving. The average patriotic American (never famous for being very tolerant) is starting to resemble an Israeli, more so by the day.

The second way that the US is waging a Zionist campaign is less general. You remember the Miriam Adelson thing, right? The American strategy should be in keeping the people happy. If you were at your weakest in a century while also gearing up for the war to end all wars, you’d probably want to be catering to the people within your country, a lot of whom have guns. Yet, the US is doing the opposite. The least popular war ever, right before the midterms. Approval numbers dropping, trust from the international community falling, hundreds of billions shot out of the sky like so many F-15s. All for Israel. I probably can’t spell it out any more by this point.

“So, which is it then,” you ask. “Aircraft carrier or ZOG?” The answer is both, or neither, I guess. Each fails to consider the total picture before us. The former’s view is obstructed by some amount of not wanting to be antisemitic and an analytical framework that isn’t adequately Third-Worldist. The latter is pure reaction, accurately diagnosing the disease, but with no assay of its pathology. In truth, Israel is the United State’s greatest aircraft carrier, and Zionists occupy every part of the government. Both miss the most important parts.

The implications are global. The war to come will be made up of many devastating wars, and I’m not doomsaying here. It’s already started. The world system that exists will be completely restructured, at the cost of uncountable lives. The United States will likely be the source of most of the brutality, as it launches a Zionist war of merciless aggression, the lines blurred between combatant and civilian, guilty and innocent, adult and child. Here in the Core, our task needs to be to support the Third World. Most importantly, it needs to be the liberation of Palestine.

Palestine has weathered Zionist aggression from the very beginning. Palestine has protected you and everyone you know from a world where the genocidal Israeli lebensraum is fully unleashed, and you owe them for it. If Palestine is gone, Israel takes the Middle East, and soon enough the imperial boomerang will whip around and hit your child in the head just like it did to the children of Palestine. The United States of America and Israel will destroy this world, we need to stop them before that happens. That means supporting Palestine, supporting Iran, and supporting resistance to Empire everywhere. By any means necessary.

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At the time of my writing this, the US-Israeli war on Iran has just entered a tentative ceasefire. The United States spent nearly six weeks engaged in this baffling campaign, in which they accomplished exactly zero of their strategic objectives. Though it’s still early, Iran has emerged the cautious victor, arriving now at the negotiating table with what look to be all of the cards. While Iran masterfully utilized every tool at their disposal, the American end of this war was mired in chaos and incompetence from the start.

If you’re of the same general political persuasion as myself, then the buildup to this war was likely a time of overwhelming anxiety and premature defeatism. For those of us who were paying attention, the United States was repeating — with shocking transparency — the exact farce that led up to the unprovoked Israeli bombardments in 2025; the so-called “Twelve-Day War.” A bogus series of negotiations loosely aimed at achieving a comprehensive nuclear deal, led by the president’s golf buddy and resident Arabist, Steve Witkoff, joined this time by Trump’s wraith-like son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Additional and totally unreasonable demands, like Iran scrapping their ballistic missiles program, materialized just as the first talks were set to commence. A prolonged process of strategic ambiguity from the administration as the negotiations went on, while Israel, all the while, goaded and threatened. Then, finally, an unprovoked attack by the Israelis, who employed the audacious justification of “preemptive self-defense.” And then America joined in and yada yada, if you’re reading this you know the rest.

Things are certainly different now. The official negotiations phase hasn’t started yet, but the way things stand, it looks like the US is stuck. They’re likely hundreds of billions down with nothing to show for it, and running dangerously low on crucial interceptors. Khaleeji murmurs indicate a reassessment of American military presence in the region, and all signs point to Iran establishing a semi-permanent tollbooth in the Strait of Hormuz. Add to that the sanctions relief, and there’s a solid case for Iran being the bona fide winner of this whole thing.

While last year’s “Twelve-Day War” was hastily halted by an anxious Trump, who’d only months earlier been chewed out by billionaires the world over for molesting the money too much in April, this current conflict had to be brokered by outside forces (China wearing a Pakistan mask). Trump, corpulent toddler that he is, took the “TACO” moniker to heart, and in the war’s early stages defiantly refused to pull back at the opportune moment. From then on, the US was basically in constant check. Ending the war without admitting defeat was impossible, since the Iranians still had all their enriched uranium, control of the Strait, a more-than-functioning ballistic missiles program, and a Khamenei in charge.

It’s fair to say that Donald Trump is living his worst nightmare: the whole world sees him as a loser. The consequences of the world’s most important shipping artery being closed for a month and a half is that now we’re all staring down the barrel of an oncoming economic crash, and every finger is pointing to Donny. Crude oil prices are down to around $95, but for most of the war they were hovering around $100-120. The ceasefire has come about too late, and neither oil nor other affected markets, like agriculture, are going to come back from this any time soon. During the war, the bottleneck led to massive scrambling on the part of oil-importing countries. Most of the Asia-Pacific had to take drastic moves, from decreasing the work day to banning fuel sales for personal vehicles. Europe is furious at the US both for fucking with the money and for bullying them throughout most of the conflict. They also don’t love that Russia, no closer to ending its half-decade war with Ukraine, has partially emerged from its pariah status due to its massive reserve of cheap oil. Adding to all, Trump’s domestic standing has never been worse. The Peace President dragged the US into yet another pointless and costly Middle Eastern war – its least popular war ever – only months before what were already supposed to be decisive and especially contentious midterms.

The only thing that this regime of bloodless business tyrants and Crusader larpers has achieved is the slaughter of innocents. Thousands of good, innocent Iranians were brutally and unnecessarily killed, and tens of thousands more were wounded by the mad, dying empire. The same is still happening in Lebanon, where a clearly genocidal campaign is attempting to rid the country of its Shia population.

At the end of the day, the question must be asked, why? Why would the United States, a global empire that nearly everyone agrees is in terminal decline, risk accelerating its demise for nothing more than momentary blood sport? What could have pushed them into this shortsighted, reckless gamble? What is this all for? Who is this all for?

You’ve probably already guessed the answer.

The Israel Exception

In October of 2025, Donald Trump triumphantly landed in Tel Aviv. He was set to deliver a victory speech to the Israeli Knesset for brokering a “peace deal” between Hamas and Israel, to great fanfare. When he arrived, he was met with massive billboards across the city. One depicted him with a faux-Nobel Peace Prize, the words “You are Our Winner,” emblazoned above. Another bafflingly proclaimed him the second coming of Cyrus the Great. A beach in Tel Aviv was laid from end-to-end with a massive banner, reading only “thank you,” and the word “home” in both English and Hebrew. Trump was awarded Israel’s Presidential Medal of Honor, shortly before arriving in Jerusalem, where he faced a premature standing ovation from nearly the entire Knesset. In his speech, he lauded both the Israeli Defense Forces and the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The latter returned the favor by proclaiming him “the greatest friend that the State of Israel has ever had in the White House.”

Trump’s speech was one of heretofore unprecedented historical revisionism on the part of an American president. He framed the invasion of Gaza as the ultimate battle in a 3,000 year civilizational conflict, one that essentially cemented a Jewish victory against Islam. While the word “peace” was thrown around quite a bit throughout the entire spectacle of Trump’s visit, the point of the speech wasn’t peace at all. It was conquest.

"So Israel, with our help, has won all that they can by force of arms. You’ve won. I mean, you’ve won. Now it’s time to translate these victories against terrorists on the battlefield into the ultimate prize of peace and prosperity for the entire Middle East. It’s about time you were able to enjoy the fruits of your labor."

It was also a speech detached from the reality of Israel’s actions, not through any repudiation of the world’s outcry, but rather through a presumably intentional avoidance of it. He did not seek to delegitimize or wave off the accusations of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and countless violations of all international norms and laws. Instead, they weren’t even a part of the conversation. The crimes didn’t matter, not to the victor. What mattered was that strength had triumphed over insurgency. The speech, in its bombast and ethical perspectivism, was decidedly Israeli.

One of the most memorable moments of the speech was Trump’s salute to billionaire — and Mavs owner — Mariam Adelson, who sat amongst the MKs in the crowd. Adelson, who gave the 2024 Trump campaign $100 million (matching her late husband Sheldon’s 2020 contribution) seemed surprised and embarrassed by the shoutout. Trump hailed Adelson as his guiding light on Israel, recounting how she and her husband would take frequent trips to visit him at the White House and lobby for the country. Then, in a classic Trumpian maybe-slip, he revealed a question he had once asked Adelson.

"I’m going to get her in trouble with this — but I actually asked her once, ‘So Miriam: I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer."

You’ve probably seen that moment. In fact, you’ve probably seen a lot of moments that have given you pause. Maybe you landed on the idea that Trump is just a personal fan of Israel. Or maybe you figured there’s a couple Israel-aligned billionaires who bought the President off. It’s not the worst assumption; he wanted their money, so he staffed his administration with Israel-lovers, and his ardor is merely an expression of the same transactional relationship he has with Qatar, Saudiya, or any other country willing to bribe him with a plane or a little girl (for legal reasons, this is a joke — the president’s plane was bought legally). Yet this assumption belies a much larger, much more complex picture.

The picture is one of a firmly rooted policy of unlimited support for Israel, and it’s one that has existed for a long time. Let’s begin with President Joe Biden, perhaps marginally less overt, but just as ardent an ideological Zionist as Trump. A widely shared clip of the oft-sleepy Biden from 1986 quotes the then-senator as saying, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel.” The subsequent decades did not temper Biden’s devotion to Zionism. Over the years he took millions from pro-Israel donors, and he has been on nearly a dozen visits to the country.

However, it was in the wake of Toofan al-Aqsa (Hamas’s Oct. 7 operation) that the limitlessness of Biden’s allegiance became clear. When Israel imposed an illegal siege on the Gaza Strip, Biden did nothing. When they attacked and demolished hospitals, he did nothing. When they publicly, brazenly telegraphed their use of starvation as a weapon, he did nothing. When Israel flagrantly ignored Biden’s own administration’s command that Israel ensure that the civilians in northern Gaza be given food, he said absolutely nothing and backed down from the 30-day deadline he had given them. And when Israel wanted arms to continue their genocide? He gave them everything they needed in order to carry it out.

Okay, so maybe we just had two presidents who really loved Israel. Well no, not so fast. While Barack Obama had an icy relationship with Netanyahu, he too gave Israel his full-throated support. This included awarding them a record $38 billion aid package for 2019-2029. Obama may have talked an awful lot about the two-state solution, but he never took any steps (not even symbolic ones) towards enacting it. Perhaps inspiring his Veep’s future administration, Obama never once leveraged any of the billions in aid or weapons that the US supplied Israel in order to get them to even moderately ease the occupation.

The story stays largely consistent with each preceding president. The United States was “Israel’s oldest and best friend,” according to George Dubya Bush. Slick Willy pledged that “The United States will always stand with Israel.” Poppy Bush rather famously declared, “We are with Israel today. And we will be with Israel in the future. No one should doubt this basic commitment.” So on and so forth, pretty much all the way back to 1967, when Israel first proved to the powers-that-be that it could run with the big dogs.

Not too long ago, questioning the nature of the “special relationship” and its hold over the American political class was considered taboo. To bring up that the Israel lobby has long been the biggest political kingmaker in electoral politics was a matter for reproach. To mention Anti-BDS pledges or Israel loyalty oaths was to engage in bad faith antisemitism. The past two and a half years have largely destroyed this prohibition.

In a recent poll by Data for Progress, 41% of American voters surveyed agreed with the statement, “The Trump administration is pursuing this primarily for Israeli interest,” regarding the war in Iran. This is compared to only 50% who believe that the war is being pursued for American interests. When it came to the statement “President Trump is more responsive to the interests of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than the interests of the American people,” 46% agreed, compared to 47% who believed the inverse.

In a March poll of American voters by Democracy Institute and Irish Star (one conducted during the current campaign in Iran), it was found that almost two-thirds (63%) of Americans agree that Israel has “too much influence over American foreign policy,” with 32% disagreeing. In the same poll, 63% of Americans also expressed a belief that the Iran war was a “costly mistake.” As the US heads towards the midterms, all signs point to support for Israel being a divisive — if not outright losing — issue.

The collective awakening of the Western public to the sheer magnitude of Israeli influence has spawned two primary of schools of thought, each attempting to rationalize this bizarre and troubling phenomenon. Much has been made of the “aircraft carrier” theory, which is the idea that Israel is merely a strategic asset of the United States. According to this theory, in support of its broader imperial ambitions, the US has molded what was once a burgeoning movement of socialism and pluralistic coexistence into a hateful campaign of violence, displacement, and genocide, using the world’s perennial scapegoat — the Jews — in a manner they never truly consented to. This explanation has come into direct conflict with the notion of the Zionist-Occupied Government, affectionately referred to as “ZOG”. Though its name may have its origins in America’s homespun neo-Nazi movement, it is merely the idea that the US government is controlled at every level by Zionists, whose chief concern is the project of the State of Israel.

While these two theories initially appear to have a pretty clear left-right orientation, many on the Western Left (such that it exists in a unified capacity) have increasingly opted to view current dynamics through the lens of the latter theory, often eschewing the former altogether. It isn’t hard to see why. In an era of ironclad American deference to Israel even in the face of its incredible unpopularity, “America wants to invest in its attack dog” doesn’t really cut it anymore. Yet, such a rudimentary and — let’s face it — reactionary interpretation of world events as ZOG really fails to grasp the nuances and complex dynamics that have led to this moment and continue to influence it. So, this begs the question, which is it? Does the dog wag the tail, or does the tail wag the dog? Do we live in a world that can be explained by an undergrad IR class, or one best elucidated through a Brazilian-made ChatGPT video of Trump in a gimp suit being paddled by Benjamin Netanyahu? For that, we’re going to need to step away from Israel for a moment, and go over just a little bit of world history.

How the West was Won

Let’s keep this simple, at least relatively. In the wake of the Second World War and the reconfiguration of the world along the lines of Pax Americana (which really emerged in the interwar period, but I said simple), the Core of our world-system shifted from Britain and Western Europe to the United States. The aforementioned became crony states, closely orbiting America’s spout of imperial superprofits alongside Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. The rest of the world existed - to varying degrees - along the periphery of these states, providing cheap resources and low-cost labor to their former colonial overlords.

The imperial world-system remained, but this time without the overt colonialism (though removing this proved trickier than anyone anticipated). Instead, the former slaves became pliant workers and valuable customers, as capitalism reached a yet-newer “highest state.” While one may be forgiven for thinking the new boss’s rhetoric of democracy and freedom would translate to the rest of the world, this wasn’t really the case. See, this whole thing doesn’t really work if someone isn’t ripping someone else off. While that may not have been a great deal, the promise to the masses of the colonized world that all they had to do was fall in line, and suddenly the killing and violence would end, was enticing. That, naturally, didn’t happen either. This whole thing also doesn’t work if nobody is getting slaughtered, turns out. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

What’s come to be known as the “liberal international order” is propped up with a million rules and regulations, all built to scaffold the US’s imperial chokehold on the world. If you can close your eyes and pretend it’s all fair, then great, you might get something out of it. However, if you point out the nakedly unfair dynamic for what it is, you’ll be told that, like it or not, this is the only way that a world can be run. The problem with that, though, is that it’s a lie. That’s because, for the first half of this whole Pax Americana deal, an alternative was being proposed.

The Soviet Union offered a vision of a different world, messy and half-baked as that vision was. Now, our story isn’t about the Soviet Union, loathe as I am to type out those words. What our story is about, however, is the American Empire’s response to the threat that the Soviet Union and its competing project posed to global hegemony. That response manifested primarily in the Imperial Core’s targeting of key strategic regions. These regions needed to be transformed into battlegrounds, which, once won, could immediately be further transformed into pliant vassals. In order to fulfill this requirement, the regions needed to already possess the following characteristics: they were majority composed of recent colonial subjects, they existed along or near to crucial trading routes, and their robust populations were divided along state borders that – while having rough origins in endogenous demarcations – were formalized by their colonizers. These regions naturally would not be within the developed Core itself, nor within the direct Soviet sphere of influence. They also couldn’t be within the largest formerly colonized states like India, China, or Brazil, who constituted geographical and cultural regions in their own rights, largely because their relative levels of post-colonial solidarity made them too risky to violently target. Only four loose regions met the above criteria: Latin America, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the so-called Middle East. These regions would become the no-holds-barred arenas for the bloodiest campaigns waged by the American Empire.

Perhaps the most straightforward exertion of hegemonic dominance was in Latin America. Where the imperialism in the New World began as a free-for-all between the colonial heavyweights (Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and even Russia and Denmark), the Age of Revolution swept out most of the old European players in a matrix of independence wars and revolutions conducted by bourgeois settlers and indigenous groups. The United States created a powerful new empire across the continent in the first half of the 19th century, setting the stage for its globe-spanning activities a century later. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine was, in theory, an attempt to banish European influence from the Americas once and for all. However, in actuality, it functioned as a counterrevolutionary power projection against the indigenous and non-settler movements south of its borders, and today serves as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the US’s strategy of domination.

After the Spanish-American War, the US spent the next half-century in the kitchen trying out new recipes that blended varying degrees of gunboat diplomacy and covert influence. It wasn’t until after World War II, when the US took its place as head chef, that it finally got the recipe down. The Rio Pact served as a handy way to shed the imperialist label, ostensibly delegating equal responsibility for hemispheric security to all signatories. However, the US was bigger, stronger, and had all the money, so you can probably figure out how that one went.

The history of US counterinsurgency in Latin America is the history of the CIA. Latin America was primed for communism, and the US knew that. So they set to work quashing revolution, country by country. For decades, they ruthlessly killed or disappeared every soul who so much as hummed the Internationale or accidentally stopped to talk to a Trotskyist. Operation Condor was particularly brutal, and its legacy is still felt today, as semi-fascist strongmen with second homes in Miami rally their immortal armies of industry titans, drug traffickers and white Latinos to carry out their eternal mission of killing protestors and trade unionists until their economies crash and they go to prison on charges of Bugatti-laundering.

In a pattern that will become familiar throughout the rest of this brief history lesson, the US repression, while certainly having left its mark, failed to hamper the people’s determination. The Pink Wave, a response to the decades of iron-fisted extranational policing, burst forth in the late '90s from the cracks within the dam the US had built to stymie the Latin American Left. The Soviet Union was gone, and the comprador-custodians that the Americans had put in charge had grown fat and largely unable to adapt to the shifting counterhegemonic political strategies that the USSR’s death spawned. Many former guerillas put down their arms and chose to fight their battles through democratic socialism and large populist electoral movements. These Yankee-hostile leaders chose to divest in large parts from American loans and investments, resulting in the undoing of much of what the US had built in Latin America over the preceding six decades.

The US got its first taste of the Asia-Pacific in its embarrassing attempt to colonize the Philippines, but it was World War II that really introduced the American pest on a wider scale. A hotbed of communism, the US stuck around after the fighting was over to make sure that the rest of the macroregion didn’t get any bright ideas from the USSR and China (and Mongolia, their wasian son). They failed, and pretty soon the Americans were embroiled in another Asian war, this time with a fractured Korea. While the Americans didn’t win this one, per se, some combination of not having really lost and the high of WWII made it so that the sting of defeat wasn’t too devastating. Enter Vietnam.

The Americans thought they could redo Korea, but this time against a bunch of farmers, and that they’d be able to dually quell the spread of communism and get a much needed confidence boost. It seemed easy enough. They drafted every military-aged man and devoted every resource, covert and overt, into the war. The bulk of the fighting took place in Vietnam, while at the same time they conducted the Secret War in Laos and Operation Menu in Cambodia, devastating aerial bombing campaigns that coincided with rapidly training and funding anti-communist forces on the ground. Vietnam was, as I’m sure you’re aware, a bloodbath. Villages were annihilated. Mass graves poured over. The US military raped and murdered their way through the country like they were the Crusaders. They conducted themselves like that because they knew how sure their victory was. That is, until they remembered who won the Crusades.

Despite a decade of wreaking destruction on Vietnam, the Americans were unable to break the will of their adversaries. Vietnam was reunited, and the US was unable to prevent communism from reaching Southeast Asia. They were, of course, able to notch some wins in the region, and their sweaty handprints could be found everywhere from economic coercion in Thailand to right-wing death squads mass murdering civilians in Indonesia. However, involvement in the region subsided after the Red Menace big dogged them in the '60s, and the Americans stuck to the safer route of influencing elections and picking on the Philippines, with only a hundred thousand or so troops stationed nearby as a kind of “Plan B.”

US policy towards Africa was, for a time, quite intensive and hands-on. From the late 1940s until 1960, the “Year of Africa,” the continent saw mass decolonization. Alongside the liberation of so many oppressed nations came the global emergence of a giant population base, nonaligned and imbued with a newfound sense of autonomy. For the Soviet Union, this meant that 8% of the world was primed and ready to fight against capitalism and imperialism. For the United States, this meant that 8% of the world had never been sold a used car before and was now on the market.

So began the second Scramble for Africa, this time ditching all of the tiresome European cousin politics and neatly splitting up the players into two great hostile camps. The US made one of its most consequential opening moves with the assassination of Lumumba, but learned soon to take a defter touch, and for some time stuck to enticement and promises of assistance in nation-building, as in the cases of Nkrumah and Touré. This changed as the battlefield expanded, and the US under Nixon and Kissinger adopted the aptly named “Tar Baby” policy, whereby the US chose to align itself totally with apartheid South Africa as its hegemonic proxy in the region. This led to the US supporting Pretoria’s intervention in Angola, as well as arming and supporting groups like RENAMO and UNITA.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the Americans quickly lost interest in sub-Saharan Africa. From a 1995 Defense Department assessment: “Ultimately, we see very little traditional strategic interest in Africa.” The '90s were a time of rapid and disastrous disengagement from the region (we all remember Black Hawk Down). The 2000s saw a lot of renewed US engagement in Africa, but that engagement was entirely militaristic, and came in the form of the Global War on Terror, a policy of Islamophobic racism which manifested in the unrelenting starvation and bloodletting of everyone who has ever uttered the shahada. Every new “foreign terror” group the US targeted spawned twenty more, prompting an interesting question that no one was really too keen on answering. With the prosecution of the GWOT and the creation of AFRICOM, Africa became a place for the US to conduct its bloodiest wars, exploit NATO-backed insurgency movements in order to extract massive reserves of cheap resources, and play around with unregulated medical experimentation.

Some may take issue with my use of “sub-Saharan Africa,” a term based more in ethnic absolutism than any extant cultural or geographical distinctions. I completely agree. However, the Global War on Children was, again, a campaign born of a libidinal need to actualize semi-dormant racial animosities first and foremost. So, to the Americans, the distinction was very real. To this day, the wars in Black Africa are seen as merely runoff from an even scarier, eviler, and more bearded threat. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US needed a new existential enemy. Someone whose distorted visage could quickly and seamlessly seep into the unconscious mind of Joe America, convincing him that this new enemy had actually always been the greatest threat to American civilization (Waffle House and killing yourself in motel rooms). Since an inordinate amount of your childhood was likely spent in video games diffusing IEDs or shooting brown guys in the head, and half the movies that have come out in your lifetime have inexplicably taken place in amber-tinted deserts, you probably know who the Americans chose.

You shouldn’t leave here thinking US involvement in the Middle East (scholars define its borders as comprising the “center part” of “East”) only began in the era of Russia’s suspicious over-airing of Swan Lake. No, the US was already well acquainted with the region. They had long been involved in Iran (for oil-related reasons), and the specter of Nasserism haunted the minds of American spooks even in the heyday of the Cold War. However, direct intervention certainly appeared more limited that in any of the previously mentioned regions. It was only thanks to a proximity to the Islamic Republic that the rough beast of American imperialism finally slouched its way into the Arab World, just as the Soviets were heading out the door. The US’s onetime best friend, Saddam Hussein, had gotten a little too handsy with Kuwait. This was the perfect excuse for the American ruling class, who, bolstered by the 1991 defeat of their eternal enemy (anti-human trafficking laws in Eastern Europe), put aside any domestic spats and banded together for Operation Make Muslims Scary. Thus, a new enemy to freedom was created, in the form of the Arab “terrorist.”

However, like I said, until the fall of the Soviet Union, direct US involvement in the Middle East was minimal. Could it really be the case that between the early '60s and the '90s, the US had so little purchase in such an important region of the world? No, of course not, you’re smarter than that. See, in the Middle East, the US had a trump card it didn’t have anywhere else. An avatar of pure imperial conquest and colonial expansion: Israel.

Part 1 of 2.

Next week: How Israel Won the West, a Thorn in their Throat, and Jerusalem Syndrome.

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