Palestine and the decline of the US empire

The US fears a free Palestine because it sees it as the beginning of its own end.

It has been 19 months now since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza. The International Court of Justice is investigating a “plausible genocide”, while the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes. Scholars of genocide, major human rights organisations, and United Nations experts have identified what is going on in Gaza as genocide. People across the world have marched to call on their governments to act to stop it.
There is a single power that stands in the way of putting an end to this genocide: the United States. One administration has handed over to another, and yet there has been no change in policy. Unconditional support for Israel seems to be a doctrine that the US political establishment is unwilling to touch.

Various analyses have suggested that at the root of this “special relationship” are Judeo-Christian values and a shared democratic path; others have argued that it has to do with the two-party system and the donor class dominating US politics.

But the reality is far simpler. The US views Israel as a critical ally because it helps promote US global supremacy at a time when it is facing inevitable decline. Israel’s survival in its current settler-colonial form – the US elites believe – is closely tied to maintaining US supremacy.



The supremacy of US empire

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the US has been leading a unipolar world as the sole superpower.

As a continuation of Western imperial global dominance, the US empire holds much sway over global economic, political, and cultural matters, often with devastating consequences for the lives of millions of people around the world.

Like all empires, the US solidifies and expands its position of supremacy and hegemony in the world through its overwhelming military force. Through the US infrastructure of organised imperial violence, it is able to secure access to and control of resources, trade routes, and markets. This, in turn, guarantees continuous economic growth and dominance.

But in recent years, we have seen signs that US supremacy is being challenged. The momentum to do so built up in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 US financial crisis, which turned into a global one. It demonstrated the negative impact of US supremacy on the world economy and motivated powers such as China and India to take action to protect themselves from it. The BRICS coalition of economies emerged as their shared response on the economic front.

In the following years, various US foreign policy mishaps, including the US failure in Afghanistan, its waning influence in Africa and its inability to prevent the Russian invasion of Ukraine, also demonstrated the limits of US global power.

The rise of US President Donald Trump and far-right populism in the United States reflected the fact that cracks were appearing in the very core of the US-led so-called liberal order.
No empire has ever easily accepted its decline, and neither will the US. It intends to hold onto its status as the unquestionable superpower, and for that, it needs imperial outposts to stand loyally by its side.



Israel – the most reliable imperial ally

Throughout the Cold War, Western Europe and Israel stood as the US’s junior partners in its confrontation with the Soviet Union in Europe and the Middle East. Today, while the decades-old transatlantic alliance seems to somewhat falter, the US-Israeli relationship appears as strong as ever.

Israel has demonstrated loyalty as an imperial outpost. It has played a key role in supporting US imperialism in two ways.

First, Israel helps the US secure its access to and control over one of the most critical markets for any empire: the energy market. The Middle East is an important force in the global energy trade, and its oil and gas policies can have a tremendous impact on the world economy.

What the US fears the most is losing its dominance in the global energy markets to a competing power, which is why it wants to secure its interests by establishing a regional order in the Middle East that overwhelmingly favours its imperial power. This new order is about giving the US a major advantage over any competitor seeking to make inroads into the region, namely China.

For the administration of former US President Joe Biden and its successor, the Trump administration, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and aggression against neighbouring countries are about establishing this new security reality in the region by eliminating hostile groups and governments. That is why US support for them has not stopped.

Second, Israel plays a critical role in advancing US military supremacy. The US provides Israel with billions of dollars in aid, which is in fact a form of self-investment in developing military capabilities and expanding sales. The Israeli state uses these funds to buy weapons from US arms manufacturers, which then use Israel’s deployment of that weaponry in the Middle East as testing and marketing tools. The US military-industrial complex is thus able to sell more weapons and continue to innovate and grow to ensure the US has a military edge over its rivals.

In this sense, Israel is one of the most critical parts of the US imperial machinery. Without it, the US would find it challenging to maintain its imperial power in the Middle East. It is for this reason that Biden once famously proclaimed that if Israel did not exist, the US would have to invent it.



Free Palestine and global decolonisation

Over the past year, we have witnessed an unprecedented attack on the Palestine solidarity movement in the US, which has affected all public spheres, including education and healthcare. We have also seen an intensification of US threats against states, such as South Africa, for their support for Palestine.

Based on the magnitude of the resources and energy that the US empire expends on the elimination and subjugation of Palestinians, one has to wonder, what is it about a stateless people with no economic and diplomatic capital or military power that terrifies the world’s sole superpower?

The answer is that the US empire views a free Palestine as the beginning of its own end.

The US is actively working to prevent the world from doing the right thing and isolating the Israeli state economically and politically because it fears what may come next. Such isolation would make it difficult for Israel to continue its existence as a settler colonial project, and ultimately could lead to a decolonisation process. The end result of that would be Palestinians and Israelis living together under a new decolonial political system that would be integrated into the region and would no longer serve imperial power.

A decolonised entity in Palestine/Israel would be a major step in the decolonisation of the world order itself and its liberation from US imperial power. And this is what the US dreads.

In this sense, it is in the self-interest of the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations to follow this path. The future of Palestinians, who are facing the real threat of elimination and total subjugation today, depends on this. And the future of many other nations, if they wish to avoid the current unspeakable brutalities that Palestinians are facing all on their own, also depends on this.

As much as the US needs a settler colonial Israel to stave off its decline, the world, particularly the Global South, needs a decolonised Palestine to hasten US decline. Palestine, not just metaphorically but literally, stands in the way of US and Western imperialism’s onward march towards continued global supremacy.

Muhannad Ayyash
Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada

AlJazeera | Opinions | Israel-Palestine conflict

Palestine and the decline of the US empire — The US fears a free Palestine because it sees it as the beginning of its own end.