Zionism, in addition to being an ongoing settler-colonial project, may envision an imperial destiny that reaches far beyond the borders of Israel.
The British empire, though not the first or the only imperial settler-colonizer, surpassed all its European counterparts in the far-and-wideness of its settler-colonial projects. (Together with its Asian and African non-settler colonies, Britain’s was “the empire on which the sun never sets.”) British settler-colonizing began in North America (1607, in what later became the US, and 1670, in what later became Canada); continuing in what later became Australia (1788); and in New Zealand (1840); and in southern New Guinea (1884). The British imperial settler-colonization of Palestine didn’t get off the ground until the 20th century.
The Zionist settler-colonization of Palestine, while sponsored by the British empire, consisted of settlers who were themselves not British but mostly Russian and eastern European Jews who were trying to escape pogroms and persecution. The actual establishment of the state of Israel (1948) was, therefore, a step removed from the other British settler colonies, owing its existence and maintenance to Britain—and, later, to the US—but, at the same time, existing with its own independent identity and self-perceived destiny. The ruling classes of both the UK and the US have included a contingent of Zionists (both Jewish and Christian elites) with an outsized influence on the management of both empires.
Zionism may comprise not only the settler-colonization of Palestine but also the imperial aspirations of American-Jewish elites who have been parasitizing the US neocolonial empire for decades.
Zionism and US Imperialism
The role of Jewish elites in the American empire, at least in some ways, harkens back to their role in the ancient Roman empire, which was idealized by the US founding fathers.
The aim of the founding fathers was to construct a republic like the ancient Roman republic. The US Senate is a club of mostly old rich white guys modeled after the Roman Senate, an aristocracy of landowners and moneylenders (i.e., patricians) who ruled over the working class (i.e., plebians, or plebs) by fraud and force (as do contemporary US politicians over the US working class). Both Rome and America (during its first near century) also practiced institutional slavery. And just as the Roman republic inevitably morphed into a ravenous empire, so in turn has the American republic. And both Roman and American imperial elites allied with Jewish elites during their respective times.
The ancient Roman rulers allied with a comprador class of Jewish elites (i.e., the Herodian dynasty). The role of these elites, in association with ancient Judea’s religious-professional elites (i.e., the priestly class), was to pacify the Jewish masses, using force when necessary to keep them subservient to the Roman occupation of Judea; this often required harsh suppression of the revolutionary elements (aka “Zealots”) among the common people.
For its part, the US ruling class has included (as did the UK ruling class before it) homegrown elite Jewish Zionists, who’ve proven defter than their ancient counterparts in that they (with the aid of the Holocaust; see Part I) have expertly propagandized a sizable portion of world Jewry—along with the entire capitalist world—to embrace the state of Israel. And this notwithstanding that Israel’s regional and international misdeeds have done anything but make Jews more secure in either Israel or among the other nations of the world.
A further parallel exists between ancient and modern versions of “Israel” and their relations with the imperial powers of their respective times.
In the 1st century, a circle of Jewish elites made a home for themselves in the imperial court of Rome. Most prominent among them was the Jewish historian Josephus, a former Judean commander who had surrendered to the Romans during their subjugation of Judea (66-70 CE). Josephus proclaimed the Roman father-and-son generals, Vespasian and Titus, to be “messiahs,” ordained by Israel’s god, Yahweh (see Part I), to bring judgment on his disobedient people; Josephus foretold Vespasian’s and Titus’s subsequent and successive ascensions to the emperorship of Rome (a “prophecy” very likely to have been made after said ascensions). The loyalty to Rome of Josephus and the others in this imperial circle of Jewish elites, along with their literary and administrative skills, secured their place in the heart of the empire long after the destruction of Jerusalem (70 CE).
In the 20th century, following World War II, Jewish elites became politically influential in the US, though taking a far more decisive role in the American empire than did their 1st-century predecessors in Rome. Irving Kristol, who pioneered neoconservatism in the 1970s, edited and opined in journals (the most prominent being The Public Interest), arguing for an interventionist US foreign policy with a special Zionist interest in the defense of Israel (other Jewish elites among the first generation of neocon-Zionist writers being Daniel Bell and Norman Podhoretz; Irving’s son, William Kristol, has taken his place as probably the best-known neocon-Zionist propagandist of the 21st century). Even before the emergence of neoconservatism in the 1970s, one of the CIA’s founders (1947) and head of counterintelligence (1954-1975), James Jesus Angleton, may well have been a kind of 1960s proto-neocon (according to political scientist and historian Aaron Good) in that he was in charge of the secret CIA “Israeli account” (the 2022 declassified revelation of which implicates Israeli intelligence, along with the CIA itself, in the JFK assassination). As a tribute to him for his “service,” the state of Israel has erected two statues of Angleton in Jerusalem).
Neocons-Zionists first broke into political power in the foreign policy of the Reagan and Bush administrations (1980 to 1993), but they rose to the front ranks of the US foreign-policy establishment (i.e., of US imperialism) during the George W. Bush presidency (2000 to 2009), in the persons of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Paul Bremer and Douglas Feith (a rogue’s-gallery mix of Jewish and Gentile elites): they came into their own in the wake of 9/11, in which, evidence suggests, they—along with Israeli intelligence—played a key role, and which they used to justify the US military’s invasion of Iraq and US and Israeli assaults on another half-dozen Muslim nations of southwestern Asia and northern Africa (see “Capitalism, Democracy and the American Empire Part IV”).
American neocons-Zionists have remained in the driver’s seat of US imperialism ever since 9/11. Victoria Nuland (arch-neocon wife of Robert Kagan, cofounder of the neocon thinktank, Project for the New American Century) has helped run US foreign policy in every administration (both Republican and Democrat) but one, from 1993 to 2024. Currently, the foreign-policy moguls of the Biden administration are Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, both neocon-Zionist Jewish elites; they are now the US point men for both the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the US-supported-and-supplied Gaza genocide, along with US-imperial operations throughout the rest of the world. The world-and-soul-crushing force of US imperialism long predated the rise of American neocons-Zionists to power, but their 21st-century dominance over US foreign policy is a compelling indication that Zionism has parasitized US imperialism (fitting, in a way, in that US neocolonialism fuels itself by parasitizing the economies of the Global South, ensuring those economies remained ever-undeveloped).
The Parasitic Dynamic of Zionism
Puzzling to many is the extent to which the US government goes to support and protect Israel no matter what it does. Even when the US government claims to disapprove of Israeli actions, and when those actions diminish (since October 7th to an all-time low) the international standing of the US. A point at issue among critics of US foreign policy concerns, on one hand, if the tail is wagging the dog—that is, if Israel runs US foreign policy—or, on the other, if Israel is obediently serving US imperial interests in Palestine and the rest of (oil-rich) southwestern Asia.
The former view emphasizes the financial-political power of AIPAC (i.e., the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which lobbies the US Congress on Israel’s behalf). Members of both US political parties are hugely beholden to AIPAC for campaign donations; moreover, they are terror stricken regarding the threat of AIPAC money being used against their political campaigns if they don’t toe the Israeli line. Thus, Israel can do (virtually) no wrong. (This is the general view of, among others, US foreign-policy critic John Mearsheimer.)
Concerning the latter view, Israel does the bidding of US imperialism in southwestern Asia (as it previously did imperial Britain’s). It does so by destabilizing the Arab nations with its belligerence and aggression toward its neighbors, without which the Arab peoples might unite to overthrow their (US-puppet) governments and cut off US corporate access to the region’s natural resources, especially its oil. Thus, Israel can do (virtually) no wrong. (This is the general view of, among others, US foreign-policy critic Noam Chomsky.)
But a third alternative suggests itself.
Since WWII (as noted), the US foreign-policy establishment has seen the rise of American neocons-Zionists to power to the extent that, since 9/11, they seem to have been running the empire. Accordingly, US Jewish elites (with the aid of their “Christian” Zionist counterparts; see Part I) have ascended to a position of imperial power of which their ancestral forerunners in the Roman imperial court could only have dreamed. And these American Zionists are not only embedded in the US government (especially in the State Department), but they are also (and even more significantly) among the most powerful financiers on Wall Street: 50 American Zionist billionaires (according to Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal) control, via donations and other means of financial support, many members of both political parties. (Which helps explain the near-total unanimity of the US Congress in its support for the Gaza genocide, along with its recent legislation, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which criminalizes speech directed against the Israeli government, equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism).
These facts suggest two complementary possibilities.
First, the American-Zionist element within the US ruling class is running the US government and its imperial operations. (The US political-and-media establishment, along with the US intelligence services, have long been the instruments of the heavily Zionist-populated corporate-ruling class, the US government having no independent agency of its own.) American Zionists (both Jewish and Christian) ensure virtually unconditional and uncontested financial and military support for Israel. Which is not to say that some elements of the US ruling class might not prefer it otherwise, but their Zionist counterparts (and co-conspirators) seem to have had the upper hand in the 21st century. And this to the extent that (assuming they exist) no self-avowed anti-Zionists, or even just non-Zionists, are allowed to exert influence on the US imperial-corporate-governmental system.
Second, the current imperial preeminence of ruling-class American Zionists may lead them to eventually abandon their allegiance (too strong a word, perhaps, for profit-driven elites) to Israel. Which would mean cutting Israel loose as an imperial project that has outlived its usefulness. Which, in turn, would mean that the imperial vision of Zionism—in the spirit of the biblical promise of Yahweh to exalt “Israel” (i.e., the Jewish elite) above all the nations of the world—would only necessarily be embodied in the state of Israel until Zionists have parasitically assumed ownership of the imperial organs of their American host.
If so, Zionist Jewish elites have been wildly more successful than their elite predecessors in imperial Rome in terms of their impact on imperial America. But just as the Jewish elites in Rome (like Josephus) were quite willing to see Jerusalem burn if only to ensure their own survival, their elite descendants may also be willing to kiss the contemporary state of Israel goodbye if their own ambition to rule the world requires it. Today’s Zionist Jewish elites are, perhaps, more like the Christian elites of the ancient world—worshipers of their own version of Yahweh—who, by the 4th century CE, through a similar parasitical process, had left colonial Jerusalem and Jewish Christianity far behind, in exchange for imperial Rome and Gentile Christianity, as better serving their own imperial aspirations.
Zionism’s Treatment of Its Imperial Sponsors
By the turn of the 20th century, Theodor Herzl had pledged Zionism to be an instrument of the British empire, but subsequent Jewish Zionists were not as cooperative as Herzl promised to be. During the 30 years between the Balfour Declaration and the establishment of Israel (1917-1947), when the British imperialists—attempting to mitigate Palestinian resistance—failed to step swiftly enough to the beat of the Zionist drum, Zionist militias (i.e., Irgun and the Stern Gang) conducted acts of terror on their British sponsors. By the time the state of Israel was established (1948), the British had already had enough and placed the “partition” (i.e., theft) of Palestine in the hands of the newly created, and utterly inexperienced (and imperially compromised from its beginnings), United Nations. Nevertheless, British support for Zionism continued.
Thereafter, Israel carried out its agenda of ethnic cleansing on the remaining Palestinians (more than 700,000 having been expelled from their homes in the months before and after Israel’s founding). Critical British-imperial assets (especially the Suez Canal) depended on Israeli safeguarding, which gave Israel far more leverage than the typical British colony.
When the US neocolonial empire took over sponsorship of Israel from the exhausted and rapidly fading British colonial empire in the 1960s, its imperial interests and intentions were virtually the same as Britain’s. And just as Israel had put what it perceived to be its own interests ahead of Britain’s, it has played the same game—with the support of American Zionists—with the American empire. Witness, first, the JFK assassination (1963), an operation of Israeli intelligence (in cooperation with the CIA and the Pentagon) due to JFK’s opposition to supplying Israel with nuclear weapons (approved by LBJ soon after taking office); second, the near sinking of the USS Liberty (1967), a technical research ship, which the Israeli military attacked by air and sea during the Six-Day War, to conceal its intended seizure of Syria’s Golan Heights; and, third, 9/11, which launched the “War on Terror” against multiple Israeli enemy (i.e., Muslim) states in southwestern Asia.
The nearly unconditional US support for Israel has been such that, during the Obama administration (2008-2016), when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was trying to drag the US into a war with Iran (as he has been redoing since October 7th), Zbigniew Brzezinski (non-Zionist imperialist and former national security advisor to Jimmy Carter during the 1970s) publicly protested that the US had no “implicit obligation . . . to follow, like a stupid mule, whatever the Israelis do.” Which clearly indicates that such a sense of American obligation to Israel indeed existed. (And the Gaza genocide has done nothing to alter that perception, though short of a US war with Iran. At least so far.)
All of which is to say that elite American-Jewish Zionists—in keeping with a history of Jewish elites stretching back to biblical times—have managed to sustain a progressively parasitical relationship with the Anglo-American empire.
To do this, these American-Jewish-Zionist elites have sacrificed (without a second thought) the security and liberty not only of Palestinians but also of Israelis: security for working-class Israelis who can’t afford to flee to America and Europe when it becomes clear that Israel is not as safe a haven for Jewish people as they were assured it would be (over one million Israelis having acquired dual nationalities—Israeli and American or European—during the last 20 years, according to author and Columbia University professor Joseph Massad); and liberty for the same working-class Israelis who are as locked into capitalist oppression by Zionism as are working-class Americans by US imperialism.
Zionism is arguably an imperial parasite that, having sufficiently fed off US imperialism to assume possession of the US empire, may be forging an elite Jewish imperial identity that no longer needs Israel.
(Next: “Capitalism, Democracy and Zionism Revisited Part III: The Identity Politics of Zionism”)