“We make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve got a lot of them. And we’ve given a lot to Israel, frankly ... But you used them well. It also takes people that know how to use them, and you obviously used them very well.”
These were Donald Trump’s boastful words to Israel’s parliament in October 2025. But he was saying only what the whole world already knew: that the United States has played a critical role in enabling the Gaza genocide. Why? What motivates the world’s pre-eminent power, and states all over the world, to offer full-throated support to the eradication of Palestinian life and society in Gaza, already one of the poorest patches of earth on the planet?
One of the most common explanations, that the US (or Australia) has been misled by a powerful pro-Israel lobby to act against its interests, falls short. Proponents of this argument include Josh Paul and Tariq Habash, former advisers to President Joe Biden, who resigned over his Gaza policy and established their own rival lobby group, A New Policy. Paul and Habash argue that “the relationship with Israel is not, on balance, in America’s interest in its current form”, and that “overcoming the reach of organizations like the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) ... can only begin when the narrative about the US-Israel relationship is corrected”.
While there is certainly a pro-Israel lobby that advocates for the relationship, this fact does not explain why the US government would listen to it more than any of the thousands of other lobby groups. Lobbying is a surface-level explanation, which in its worst forms arrives at a conspiratorial world view that the most powerful empire in world history has been hijacked by savvy salesmen.
The underlying assumptions of the lobbying argument are wrong. They assume that the US has no essential affinity with Israel, and often simply conclude that the answer lies in establishing a new lobby to advocate for different foreign policy positions. But there are plenty of pro-Palestine lobbyists, whose appeals for a more humane foreign policy routinely fall on deaf ears, just as climate lobbyists are battered out of the equation by the dull economic compulsion of fossil fuel extractivism.
The much more sinister truth is that the United States and many other states around the world support Israel because their interests converge with those of a genocidal ethno-state. The United States, the pre-eminent global power, has a direct stake in controlling the Middle East and its vital trade routes and vast oil reserves, as do local Israeli allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Jordan. Israel has simply proved an invaluable asset to them—not through corrupting the spirit of the US empire, but by developing into one of its most loyal attack dogs. And for much of the world, like Australia, Britain and Germany, being close friends with the United States means welcoming its genocidal ally as a pledge of loyalty.
Imperialism and the Middle East
Marxists call this geopolitical wrestling part of imperialism. It is a fundamental feature of modern capitalism, in which economic and state competition are intertwined. Just as corporations scramble for market share, states fight to establish geopolitical spheres of control and influence: who controls which trade routes, markets, international institutions and so on. These aren’t two separate processes; economic competition and military conflict are like conjoined twins. Without navies to keep canals open and governments to negotiate trade deals, companies can’t move their commodities in and out of markets. Without advanced economies with high-tech manufacturing, communications and research capabilities, it is impossible to build the cutting-edge militaries to stay on top.
For nearly two centuries, this process has scarred the globe, producing two cataclysmic world wars in which the largest military-industrial powers fought one another, annihilating human life on a scale unknown before in the history of our species. First, it was Britain and Germany; then, the United States and the Soviet Union; and today, China’s rise has ushered in a new period of great-power rivalry over who will dominate the globe. Beneath these large powers, there are small and medium powers like Australia, jockeying to bump themselves up the pecking order by making powerful allies and dominating their neighbours. To our rulers, the whole world is a chessboard in which whole nations, like Palestine, can be sacrificed for power and position.
Palestinian suffering is ultimately a consequence of their existing on land that is important to this system of insatiable competition for money and power. The Middle East sits at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa, and is traversed by critical trade arteries. According to the US Naval Institute, the Suez Canal, which passes through Egypt, carries 12 percent of all world trade and 30 percent of container transport, at an annual value of approximately US$3.8 trillion. Likewise, the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway, connects the region’s immense oil and gas producers to the world market.
These resources are the other key feature of the Middle East’s strategic importance. Oil, modern capitalism’s lifeblood, vital for energy, manufacturing and militarism, is abundant. International Energy Agency figures demonstrate that, as of 2019, the Middle East produced a huge share of global energy resources, with 31 percent of oil and 16 percent of natural gas production. Oil juggernaut Saudi Aramco, the world’s fourth largest corporation, boasts a staggering annual revenue of US$480 billion. Controlling these resources and waterways provides enormous strategic leverage in the battle for both economic and geopolitical supremacy in modern capitalism.
The Middle East has mattered since well before the creation of Israel. Since the discovery of oilfields in the early twentieth century, ravenous international competition has shaped the region. The establishment of corporations such as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now known as BP) at the beginning of the century gave way to open military conquest within a decade. During World War One, Britain and France waged a deadly campaign to carve up the Ottoman Empire, producing the infamous 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement that handed Britain control of Palestine, which would eventually be the basis for the 1947 partition.
In 1956, a major crisis erupted when Israel, Britain and France invaded Egypt to force open the Suez Canal and Strait of Tiran for their ships. More recently, the Australian government spent twenty years alongside the US and Britain brutally occupying Afghanistan and Iraq in an attempt to establish what advisers described as a “new American century” of dominance. According to the Watson Institute’s Cost of War Project, these wars killed more than 900,000 people and indirectly caused at least 3.6 million further deaths. Perpetual war is no accident, but a product of the strategic centrality of the Middle East to the world system.
Our rulers are open about the capitalist logic behind imperialism. During the 1990 Gulf War, when the US went to war with Iraq over oil-rich Kuwait, former assistant defence secretary Lawrence Koth candidly explained, “If Kuwait grew carrots, we wouldn’t give a damn”. During the Gaza genocide, Anthony Albanese had a similar moment of clarity. In a statement explaining Australia’s intelligence contribution to the joint British-American bombing of Yemen, he justified it on the basis that Yemen’s Houthi rebels “threaten lives, the global economy, and the free flow of commerce in the region’s critical waterways”.
And so goes the jig. Places like Yemen, which the World Bank ranks among the ten poorest countries in the world, can have missiles and bombs rained down on them by the world’s most powerful militaries simply because they stand in the way of profit. A whole region can be subjected to well over a century of invasion, occupation, genocide and slaughter simply because there is oil beneath their feet and trade routes traversing their land. So pro-Israel lobbyists didn’t need to convince world powers that the Middle East mattered. But Israel did, over time, manage to provide a compelling answer to the question of how best to dominate it.
Israel: attack dog
Understanding the Western powers’ unconditional support of Israel starts with the unique role that it plays in the infrastructure of conquest and control in the Middle East. It is the most important outpost of the United States-led geopolitical bloc in the region. This is crucial to understanding the “special relationship” between Israel, the United States and, by extension, the rest of the US-led bloc. It underlies why Israel has become, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, the largest recipient of US aid in history, at a cumulative US$300 billion, adjusted for inflation. This is no swindle, but a handsome retainer to be made good on when required, by attacking neighbouring states and acting as a powerful anchor for US interests.
Various high-profile US politicians have highlighted Israel’s strategic importance. In the 1980s, Joe Biden declared: “If there was not an Israel, we would have to create one”. Reagan-era Secretary of State Alexander Haig described Israel as the “largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk”. This is the real rationale behind the United States’ virtually unconditional support for Israel, and why it is a bipartisan article of faith in US politics and foreign policy circles. It is a permanent base for the world’s most powerful state to fulfil its objectives in one of the most contested arenas of the global chessboard. For US allies like Australia, supporting Israel comes as part of a package deal.
When Israel was first conceived, its supporters understood that the project of setting up a brand new state in the middle of Palestine could not succeed unless it attached itself to a major power. The founding father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, first appealed to the British Empire for support on that basis: “England with her possessions in Asia should be most interested in Zionism, for the shortest route to India is by way of Palestine ... I believe in England the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea, should be easily understood”. This sense of reciprocal benefit, between the Zionist project of colonising Palestine and the imperialist project of dominating the Middle East, was and is the cornerstone of the “special relationship”.
After British power began to decline, it took time for Israel to find a new significant other in the form of the US. The fundamental driver of this new partnership was not ideological affinity nor suave lobbyists, but sheer pragmatism. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, US strategists sought alliances with all sorts of regimes in the region, including the new Arab nationalist states and the Pahlavi monarchy in Iran. Israel had to prove its practical worth. The US viewed the Arab regimes as unreliable friends, but the watershed moment came in 1967, when Israel routed the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian militaries in the Six-Day War. After this, the money started to flow from Washington. Aid increased by 450 percent in 1968 and continued to climb in the following decades. The overthrow of Pahlavi in 1979 left Israel as the United States’ most trusted and loyal ally.
Even today, when the US has formed close relations with the Gulf monarchies and former foes like Egypt, Israel is an outlier. Its colonial nature and lack of independent oil wealth make it uniquely dependent on its Western sponsors to survive. The increasing strategic centrality of Israel to the US also helps to explain why it receives carte blanche to oppress, terrorise and massacre Palestinians. Conquering Palestine is core to Israel’s success, and Israel is core to the Americans’ success. Palestine has also become a proving ground for Israel’s destructive capacities: literally as a place for high-tech weapons to be “battle tested” on civilians, as Anthony Loewenstein’s Palestine Laboratory documents. But also, by proving its murderous credentials in Palestine, Israel can menacingly project Western power across the region.
The Gaza genocide
This history puts the genocidal war on Gaza, and its global enablers, into perspective. To normal people appalled by the way that global governments have participated in this murderous frenzy, the search for the source of this moral rot is understandable. But our rulers haven’t been duped by lobbyists. Horrifyingly, Israel has been supported in its bloodletting because the Western powers understand that Israel’s success is their own success. Since the offensive began in October 2023, Israel has received record-breaking US assistance, amounting to US$34 billion. This money has flowed from all sides of the political spectrum, from “democratic socialists” Jamaal Bowman and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, through to far-right Republicans like Trump himself.
Western support for the genocide is about more than eradicating the Palestinians, though. Tellingly, in October 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not only declared that he would “turn Gaza into a deserted island”. He also pledged to “change the Middle East”, indicating a broader strategic vision behind the war. And Israel has done so. Since 7 October, Israel has carried out military operations in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran and Qatar. The war on southern Lebanon resulted in Hezbollah, one of the last remaining obstacles to American regional supremacy and a key rival of Israel, being pummelled into submission. Iranian nuclear facilities, long opposed by the United States, were obliterated in June 2025. Again, Israel proved its worth. In the words of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Israel was doing the “dirty work for us” by attacking Iran.
Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza is the sharp edge of an imperialist order that has, for over a century, subjected the people of the Middle East to untold misery. Understanding the deep structural roots of Western support for Israel is important, because it sheds light on the gravity of what is required to confront it. To confront this system, far greater power will be required than persuasive lobbyists of our own. We must break not just the global military-industrial supply chain that provides the bombs, missiles, jets and weapons for Israel to commit its crimes. We must also challenge the underlying logic of a system rooted in power, profit and rivalry, which shamelessly tramples on human life in the pursuit of trade routes and resources.
