By Prof. Gerald Sussman

Global Research, July 09, 2026

 

“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” —John Stuart Mill, 1867

“I have expressed an opinion on public issues whenever they appeared to me so bad and unfortunate that silence would have made me feel guilty of complicity.” —Albert Einstein, 1954

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Israel is no more likely to accept accords negotiated between the US and Iran than Hitler was going to abide by self-imposed limits on German expansion, as falsely assumed by Chamberlain in 1938.

However, Israel is not the industrial or military power that Germany was in that period, and thus its expansionist capabilities depend on a constant supply chain of advanced weapons and financial assistance from the US and the other war mongering states in Europe. In this regard, Israel with its brutal assault on Gaza, the West Bank, and the regional defenders of the Palestinian cause acts as a western proxy similar to the US/NATO’s unholy relationship to Ukraine.

In the early postwar period, America learned an important lesson about the Great Depression. It was that military mobilization ultimately ended the economic crisis, not the alphabet soup of assistance programs initiated by FDR. In the aftermath of World War II, the US war and economic planners colluded on a secret project, NSC-68, to maintain a high level of military spending as insurance against a possible return to a state of economic calamity and to expand the military-industrial complex (MIC). It turned out to be unnecessary for the first objective though it remained in place, the Korean War serving as a starter crisis. 

Image: The labeling used on aid packages created and sent under the Marshall Plan (Public Domain)

 

It was unnecessary because the American consumer economy overwhelmed its prewar competitors for the next 20 or so years. The American economy was so dominant that it became necessary to launch a massive welfare project for Europe, the Marshall Plan (Britain being its number one grantee), to help restore lucrative, growth-oriented trade relationships and make the US the dominant power in the West. Trump’s predecessors, most immediately Bush Jr. and Obama, kept the war dollars of Pentagon capitalism flowing with multiple US and Israel-assisted invasions in the Middle East/Central Asia.

Many pundits assume that Trump could easily turn off the spigot of military aid to Israel, but such a decision would run into conflict not only with the powerful Israel lobby and those politicians acting as “fifth columnists” for the Israeli state, but also with other powerful sections of the imperial order. The US MIC is now tightly interwoven with Israeli weapons and high-tech manufacturers, the Israeli army (IDF), and the far-reaching Israeli intelligence apparatuses. One question is, can the US afford to continue to arm Israel when its own weapons stocks are very low as a result of blowing up school children in Iran and other such strategic targeting, enabling Israel’s Gaza-style annihilationist bombing program in Lebanon, and arming another hopeless war in Ukraine?

At present, there appears to be little incentive for the White House or Congress to cut off aid to Israel. The Zionist lobby provides extensive funding to service pay-to-play American electoral politics through organizations such as AIPAC and other Zionist super PACs, and provides free trips to Israel for members of Congress and other public officials. A Jewish-Christian Zionist alliance is another formidable influence on American politics. 

In addition, Israel wields great mobilizing and propaganda power through their shills in the mainstream media (New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, et al.). Further, in collaboration with the Israeli global PR efforts known as Hasbara, Israeli propaganda finds platforms in American universities, speakers organizations, grassroots organizations, and social media. Israeli policy interests are also well represented through their advocates in think tanks, such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Institute, which has close linkages with WINEP and the Brookings Institution.

The pro-Israel attitudes of US foreign policy elites do not correspond, however, with what Americans and many other nations think of the Jewish state. Pew Research reported that in a survey of 36 countries taken from February to May 2026, a median of 67% of adult respondents held a negative view of Israel, with just 25% holding a positive view. But despite the American public’s distrust of Israel, hawks in the Senate, led by Tom Cotton, are pushing a bill that would require the president, to “expand and enhance intelligence sharing with the Government of Israel” on virtually every matter of intelligence regarding the Middle East. There would This would eliminate any separation between US and Israeli foreign policy objectives.

Pew also found that the publics in the two staunchest allies of Israel, the US and UK, now hold strongly negative opinions about the country in general and its genocide in Gaza. In the US, 60% of respondents expressed an unfavorable view of Israel, while in the UK the negative response was 69%. This strongly contrasts with the Starmer government position, which is one reason why he was forced out of the Labour leadership and prime ministership. 

And according to a May 2026 poll of the business-oriented Institute for Global Affairs (IGA), 54% of Americans blame the US or Israel for the war in Iran, whereas 28% see the Iranians as the cause. IGA also found that 62% of Americans want to cut or eliminate aid to Israel, 67% of Democratic voters seeing Israel as a liability. This is a huge shift in public opinion from just a few years ago. Irrespective of the radical change amongst its constituents, the Democratic Party’s May 2026 “autopsy report” on its 2024 failed election never mentioned the words Palestine, apartheid, genocide, Gaza, or Israel, issues that were directly connected to the rejection of Kamala Harris’s candidacy, especially among young voters, progressives, and Arab- and Muslim-Americans.  

Another major poll showed that the top issue affecting how Americans voted in 2024 was “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza,” with the economy coming in second. This is a remarkable turnaround in how Americans vote, suggesting a growing understanding of the connection between domestic and foreign policy issues. At least 29% of voters who chose Biden in 2020 and voted for someone other than Kamala Harris in 2024 said their main issue in choosing a candidate was where they stood on Israel. Economic issues, including concern about petroleum-generated inflation, were key to 24% of these voters. The pro-Israel Democrats are fixing to turn away large sections of their base in 2028, just the way they did in 2024.

It’s one thing for the public to think in this way, but for the political class, Republicans and Democrats, it’s a different story. America’s corporate capitalist electoral system has feasted on Israel and pro-Israel interventionism as a partnership in perpetuating ruling class legitimacy. The false flag of fighting American antisemitism provides cover for the perpetuation of corporate and billionaire domination of the political system. With the unregulated system of financing candidates, the door is wide open to AIPAC and other Israel-linked super-PACs to choose the country’s so-called representatives. In the 2024 American election cycle, AIPAC bragged about getting all 362 of its sponsored candidates on the ballot elected. There is no investigation of this long-standing and festering Israelgate scandal. 

Pro-Israel lobbying groups have managed to thwart efforts at the Democratic National Committee to pass resolutions critical of that country’s policy of genocide and apartheid and a ban on the sale of arms dedicated to the murder of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. To date, Israel has killed more than 20,000 children in Gaza, more than 1,000 civilians in the West Bank since the so-called ceasefire, and thousands more in Lebanon and Iran. An independent UN commission issued in June 2026 found that the killing of Palestinian children is a deliberate policy of the IDF. One cannot help but recall the murder of children in Nazi concentration camps.

Israel’s “Dahiya doctrine” calls for the bombing of civilian areas as a form of what it calls “collective punishment” (i.e., genocide) against Palestinians, Lebanese, Houthis, Iranians and all other defenders of the Palestinian cause and of regional sovereignty. It seeks not only the wholesale destruction of its enemies’ key infrastructure and economy, but also the slaughter of non-combatants, including women and children, as well as paramedics, rescue workers, journalists, and Palestinians living in Lebanese refugee camps in order to inflict maximum pain while blocking all news reportage of the atrocities. 

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A crater in Dahieh in 2008, two years after the 2006 Lebanon War (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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If the US and UK governments remain unwilling to put an end to Israel’s and their own crimes of the century, both countries stand to become, along with their Zionist ally, the most immoral state entities and the pariahs in the international system. It otherwise appears that as to the near future center of world power, as Mao predicted decades ago, the East wind is prevailing against the West wind. Israel’s intense ethno-nationalism and barbarism is a primary catalyst to this global power shift. It is the dialectic of world history.

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Gerald Sussman is professor emeritus of urban studies at Portland State University. He is the author or editor of seven books, including the most recent (2025), British and American Electoral Politics in the Age of Neoliberalism: Parallel Trajectories (Routledge). Professor Sussman can be reached at: [email protected]

 

 

 

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Copyright © Prof. Gerald Sussman, Global Research, 2026