Thoughts on lobbies and atavistic violence
What You Should Know — 05/8/2025
I’ve been having a hard time writing the past few weeks. Or not a hard time writing exactly — a hard time finishing what I started writing…a hard time completing my thoughts. I have five or six things in various states of completion and whenever I return to any one of them they began to fall apart, words and ideas crawl around like slippery worms after a rainstorm. If you write, you probably know the feeling. When ideas come out, but not in the right shape…when thoughts don’t crystalize into words in the right pattern. The sensation is physical for me…like my entire nervous system is blocked and I get all jittery, unable to concentrate on anything else until I get the words out of me.
Since I can’t write anything coherent, I figured I might as well just write down some notes on a topic I’ve wanted to address as this week’s WYSK. And it’s this: Why is America so involved with the genocide in Gaza. And does the Jewish/Israel Lobby theory explain it?
I haven’t written anything about Israel’s genocide in Gaza for a while. What can I say? What do I have to add? Not much. I see death on my feed, men and women and little girls as old as my own lifeless and bloody and torn apart, and then I continue living, a feeling of lingering shame mixed with relief hovering over everything. So what is there to say? Israelis and many Jews around the world and the majority of America’s power elite have made a choice to go down this path — a path of extermination of an entire people. They’re fully committed. Others cultures and societies have taken this path before.
I get why Israel and so many Jews are doing it. They’re in the grips of an evil spiritualism — a spiritualism based on supremacy and conquest and promises made by an ancient god. They’ve been captured by this idea and it won’t let them go until they wipe out the Palestinian people and destroy themselves in the process. But why is American’s ruling class behind them?
Why is America’s power consensus so fully committed to unconditionally backing Israel’s genocide — backing it to the point of having to cannibalize its own status internationally and its own elite institutions at home. I mean, the Democratic Party gave Israel carte blanche over and over again to the point of losing an election — and they knew they would, too. And now both wings of the establishment are gutting the international prestige of elite American universities — including their own cherished Ivy Leagues. For what? What’s in it for the people in power? Why is Israel so important?
The main argument that you hear is that it’s all the fault of the Israel/Jewish Lobby — a lobby that supposedly pushes the U.S. government (and American society in general) into taking positions on Israel that go against core American interests. This is a view that was initially developed academically by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their book The Israel Lobby, and has since been taken as a basic truth by most critics of Israel. A lot of people really believe that there is something uniquely powerful about the Jewish/Israel Lobby. How else could a tiny little country control the most powerful empire in the world?
The Israel Lobby explanation never really sat well with me. It’s too simple, too reductionist, and has the smell of American Exceptionalism about it. And when distilled into its crudest and simplest form, it smells too much like the old school antisemitic conspiracies about the special demonic powers of the Jews and their plans for world domination.
I’ve argued for an explanation that basically flips this theory on its head — putting America in control. I see Israel as essentially an extension of the U.S. empire. Israel is more than a client state, it has become intertwined with America in all sorts of cultural, military, economic, technological, religious, and even familial ways for so long that, to a large section of America elites, Israel is America…an extension of their America…Israel is them. They don’t see a difference.
On top of that, America’s imperial security consensus has long believed (and I think correctly) that Israel advances American interests in the Middle East. Israel has played the role of hitman, helping attack and destroy any resistance to American power in the region: Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Nasser’s Egypt…If you look all the regimes and political movements that had stood up to American power are crushed or have been extremely contained, with Israel playing a big role in that suppression. So Israel has been a dependable attack dog — rabid and ready to do the dirty work, and take all the heat.
You can read my thoughts on the Jewish Lobby from a year ago…
…I also wrote about overlapping relationships that Israel developed with its backers going back to the 1950s: “Pretty much from the very beginning Israel fashioned itself into a helpful agent of (American and European) imperialism, offering various services in exchange for what it needed: weapons, military gear, nuclear tech, foreign political support. In all these trades, Israel developed true camaraderie with the US-European security apparatus. It became integrated into it on multiple levels — personal, political, business…”
I still think my analysis is mostly right. Israel is, among other things, a tip of the spear of American imperialism in the Middle East. But the longer that Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza goes on and the more that America keeps backing Israel unconditionally, the more I’m realizing that my pure materialist approach might not be enough to explain it.
Now I’m starting to think that there is something deeper, something atavistic about it. It’s not that Jews control America. It’s that America isn’t really America unless it is participating in some kind of mass slaughter.
A look back through America’s fairly short history shows an unending series of overlapping murder sprees — first conquering the continent and driving the autochthonous population within its expanding borders to the very brink of annihilation. In short, America did a genocide here at home. It even had investor-backed genocide squads in California which guaranteed a 7% annual return on investment by state.
Then America started taking its penchant for violence and expansion beyond the country’s borders, getting into one bloody war and conquest after another. Just some modern examples: The U.S. killed anywhere from 1 to 2 million North Koreans through bombing. General Curtis La May boasted that the U.S. killed 20% of the population and annihilated most of the country’s infrastructure. Most Americans don’t know this. All they know is that North Korea is some crazy place that hates America for some reason. In Vietnam/Laos, America murdered 2.5 to 3.5 million people. And that’s just the start of the second half of the 20th century — doesn’t include Iraq or Libya or Syria or Yemen or a century of South and Central American interventions…
These “conflicts” have been about power and empire, yes. But they’ve also been shot through with all sorts of messianic ideas that Americans have about themselves and the world. The idea that god is on America’s side. That America is holy and correct in all things, and wants only what’s best for the world, and that America’s enemies who are by default wrong and on the wrong side of god and morality. Resistance to American power, in fact, is a sign of guilt. Nothing more than that is needed.
America’s power elite has convinced itself that Israel is an extension of America. And so through Israel America is expressing its atavistic need for domination and murder and control.
To make it worse, American power is increasingly frustrated and bitter right now — faced with crumbling international power and flailing to preserve its status. It needs a win, no matter what that win. It’s needs proof that god is with America. And so Palestinians are on the receiving end of that America atavistic drive for domination.
Writing this down now. I’m not sure how much I believe it. But, really, I don’t know how else to explain it. A material analysis is maybe enough but it only goes so far. Maybe there is an atavistic need for genocide in this country’s core.
As for the Israel/Jewish Lobby theory…
Mearsheiner and Walt’s The Israel Lobby never clearly defined what “America’s interest” really means. Whose interests is the Israel Lobby forcing America to go against? The interests of the privatized imperial bureaucracy in DC, NY, and LA? The interests of Google? Of Goldman Sachs? The interests of the American working class? Well…when has America’s foreign policy apparatus acted in the interests of regular American people, anyway? Was it acting in their interests when it pushed for NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia? Or was Israel to blame for that? Was it acting in their interests when it covered most of Vietnam in Agent Orange, poisoning not just the Vietnamese but Americans as well? Or was Israel to blame for that? Etc, etc.
Noam Chomsky was not a fan of Mearsheiner and Walt’s work for the same reasons I’m not: it ignores Israel’s strategic importance to U.S. power in the Middle East, and it absolves America and whitewashes its violent history.
A lot of people are emotionally and politically attached to the idea that the United States, deep down inside, is a force of good. So a theory that blames bad behavior on malign outside influence is appealing and useful to many, including to people in power. By focusing on a foreign lobby, it blames America’s support for genocide on a bunch of sneaky foreigners. If only America could free itself of these Jews, it would be a righteous benevolent nation living in peace with its neighbors!
Anyway, here’s Chomsky — but it’s worth reading his article in full:
The thesis M-W propose does however have plenty of appeal. The reason, I think, is that it leaves the US government untouched on its high pinnacle of nobility, “Wilsonian idealism,” etc., merely in the grip of an all-powerful force that it cannot escape. It’s rather like attributing the crimes of the past 60 years to “exaggerated Cold War illusions,” etc. Convenient, but not too convincing. In either case.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was not a big fan of the Israel Lobby theory, either. Here he is speaking on the issue not long before being assassinated by Israel in September 20204. “The story about the Jewish and Zionist lobby is — forgive me for saying this — a joke invented by the Arabs so that they do not have to fight Israel.”
And another one on this very same topic — not sure when it is from: “We keep repeating this lie about the zionist lobby that Jews rule American and are the real decision makers, and so on. No. American is itself the decision maker. You have the major corporations. You have the holy trinity of oil companies, weapons makers, the so-called Christian Zionism. This is the decision at the heart of the alliance.