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.