Dear editors,

The debate over the Zionist Para-State thesis has produced some sharp contributions — Ashlar's original argument, and the replies from Jean Allen, Gary Levi, and Benjamin G. Each identifies something real. But the debate as a whole is stuck, because all participants share an assumption that none of them have examined: that there exists a rational imperial baseline from which the current situation deviates. Until that assumption is dropped, the conversation will keep circling.

Allen's letter cuts closest to the problem. Their Russiagate comparison is devastating: "What is the difference to me? Foreign Russian elites are diverting the Trump administration away from my interests — would it have served me otherwise?" This is the right question, and her diagnosis — that the Para-State thesis is "a stabbed in the back myth given new paint" — follows from it. They are correct that the thesis requires us to accept "a time before the fall, when the US did operate by its national interests, and that is nonsense." Where Allen falls short is on the constructive side. Naming the problem as populism and gesturing toward "the struggle for democracy" doesn't yet tell us what a better analysis would look like.

Levi's "world settler complex" hypothesis makes progress by dissolving the question of who controls whom and instead asking what binds these projects together structurally. His observation that shared settler-colonial ideology provides the content of the bond — "the sedimented content of the extermination of Native Americans, Mexican-American war, and American invention of Apartheid" — is analytically productive. But when he reaches for "lizard brain base instincts" and "mass psychosis" to explain the current trajectory, he replaces one inadequate framework (rational imperial interests) with another (irrationality as such). The actions of the US and Israeli states are not psychotic. They follow a coherent logic — just not the logic of rational imperial management.

Benjamin G. raises a politically important point about the practical consequences of Ashlar's "Jewish communal culpability" framing, and is right that the American Jewish community contains a significant anti-Zionist tendency that the framing erases. But the letter doesn't ask why Ashlar's framework produces that conclusion in the first place, which is the more consequential question.

Let me try to answer it, because I think it clarifies the structural problem with the entire debate.

The imperial-realist identification

Ashlar's essay is organized around outrage at Zionism "sabotaging American hegemony," "destroying the US-constructed global world order," acting as a "parasitic entity on its imperialist hosts." The normative weight consistently falls on the deviation from rational imperial management, not on the imperial project itself. When he argues that a Two-State Solution and normalization with Iran "would have been in American long-term interests," he is not criticizing those interests — he is lamenting that they are being poorly served.

This is not a neutral analytical position. It is itself a form of political identification — what I would call imperial-realist solidarity. It provides a sense of orientation, purpose, and belonging: we understand how the system works, we see how it should be managed, and we are outraged that a parochial faction has corrupted it. The emotional energy of the essay comes from that identification being violated. The "hijacking" metaphor makes this explicit: hijacking only works as a concept if the vehicle was going somewhere legitimate before it was seized.

The problem is that this identification is structurally identical to what it claims to analyze. Ashlar describes how Zionism functions as a disciplined, multi-dimensional solidarity formation that outcompetes alternatives — but he doesn't recognize that imperial realism is also a solidarity formation, one that happens to be losing. The Arabist realists in the State Department, the strategists who wanted the Iran deal, the analysts who warned against regional war — they were not disinterested observers of a rational system. They were a faction whose preferred management of the imperial order was being outcompeted by a faction with deeper institutional roots, a more mobilized mass base, and a more comprehensive grip on the levers of power.

Once you see this, Ashlar's analytical errors follow predictably.

Why "irrationality" is the wrong question

The essay's central claim is that the Zionist Para-State demonstrates capitalism's capacity for irrationality. This claim is necessary only if you start from the assumption that rational imperial management is the norm. If you drop that assumption, the question dissolves.

The current war with Iran illustrates the point. From the imperial-realist perspective, the US-Israeli strikes that killed Khamenei — launched during nuclear negotiations that Iran was reportedly willing to conclude on highly favorable terms — are inexplicable. The US had a clear path to peacefully splitting Iran from China, which is supposedly its primary strategic objective. Instead, it launched a war that has closed the Strait of Hormuz, disrupted a quarter of global crude oil traffic, depleted THAAD systems faster than they can be produced, and forced Iran into closer alignment with China — the exact opposite of the stated goal.

Ashlar would say: this is irrational, therefore the Zionist Para-State must be in control. But settler-colonial projects routinely override metropolitan interests — South Africa under the British Empire, Algeria under France, Rhodesia, the American frontier itself. In each case, a settler formation with deep institutional roots in the metropole redirected imperial resources toward its own parochial ends, generated costs the metropole could not or would not control, and created sunk-cost dynamics that made disengagement progressively harder. The Zionist case is distinctive in scale and in the depth of elite interpenetration, but the mechanism is general. No special theory of "capture" or "irrationality" is needed — just an analysis of how solidarities organized around ethnic, national, and settler-colonial identification consistently outcompete formations organized around rational imperial management.

Why do they outcompete? Because they address more of what the people within them actually need. Imperial realism offers policy rationality — one dimension. Zionism offers identity, community, material advantage, cultural belonging, a sense of civilizational purpose, mutual aid networks, and concrete institutional infrastructure, all simultaneously. A solidarity formation that addresses multiple dimensions of social existence will structurally outcompete one that addresses only one, regardless of whether the latter is "more rational" in strategic terms. This is why Levi is right that the binding agent is shared settler-colonial ideology — it provides the multi-dimensional content — but wrong to call it psychosis. It is a competing solidarity doing what competing solidarities do.

What this means for the "Jewish culpability" question

Ashlar's insistence on Jewish communal culpability follows directly from his imperial-realist baseline. If the problem is that a parochial interest has subverted the rational imperial interest, then the carriers of that parochial interest become the enemy. The framing assigns collective guilt because the analytical framework demands a culprit for the hijacking.

A structural analysis produces a different — and more useful — conclusion. Jewish communities function as the mass base for Zionism in the same way that settler communities in South Africa, Ulster, and the American frontier functioned as mass bases for their respective projects: through comparable ideological discipline, institutional infrastructure, and mechanisms of social reproduction. This is not a specifically Jewish pathology. It is how ethnic-national solidarity formations reproduce themselves generally. The question is not "are Jews culpable?" but "what are the structural conditions under which an ethnic-national solidarity captures institutional machinery, and how can those conditions be changed?"

That reframing matters politically because it identifies different targets. Fighting "Jewish communal Zionism" as such — Ashlar's prescription — invites a politics of collective blame that alienates potential allies (including the substantial Jewish anti-Zionist movement Benjamin G. rightly highlights) and mistakes the mass base for the mechanism. The mechanism is the structural advantage that multi-dimensional solidarity formations have over single-dimensional ones. The organizing implication is not to attack the formation that's winning but to build formations that can compete — which means building organizations that address material reproduction, care, identity, belonging, participation, and meaning simultaneously, rather than treating class solidarity as a purely economic proposition.

What a better framework would require

Allen is right that socialists "need to do far more work if we are to develop an international relations analysis that corresponds to reality." That work would need to start from the recognition that there is no rational imperial baseline to be restored or subverted. There are structural pressures generated by class rule — the need for cheap inputs, labor discipline, surplus population management, legitimation, competitive positioning — and there is a mediating configuration of forces, institutions, and conditions that channels those pressures into specific outcomes. What determines the outcome is not whether the system is "rational" but which formations have captured the mediating configuration and what logic they operate by.

The Zionist case is an instance of a general pattern: a solidarity formation organized around settler-colonial identification, operating through a mass base with high organizational density, integrated into metropolitan elite networks, and reinforced by decades of legitimation infrastructure (the Global War on Terror), leaning on generalized orientalism, outcompeting formations that operated on narrower bases. The current war with Iran is what happens when that formation's logic — which has its own internal coherence — drives decisions that generate costs the broader system cannot absorb. This is not irrationality. It is the predictable result of a mediating configuration captured by a formation whose priorities are not aligned with the system's aggregate requirements. It happens in every imperial system that produces settler projects, and it has never been prevented by appealing to the "rational national interest" — because that interest was never the actual driver of policy in the first place.

The deeper problem this debate reveals is that much of the Marxist left still operates within a methodological nationalism it claims to have transcended. When Ashlar asks whether the US is acting in "its own interests," when Levi asks whether Israel is acting in "its own interests," when the Aircraft Carrier thesis assumes that states are coherent agents pursuing identifiable national goals — all of these take the nation-state as the natural unit of analysis and "the national interest" as a real thing that can be served or subverted. This is not a Marxist framework. It is the framework of bourgeois international relations theory, and it smuggles in political commitments that socialists should refuse: the idea that there is a correct way to run an empire, that our task is to identify deviations from it, and that restoring rational management under ‘pro-American’ nationalist control would represent progress. (And even if such a coherent faction existed, their domestic and international victims would still be unimpressed.)

Socialists have no stake in the proper management of American hegemony. We have no stake in whether the empire is run by imperial realists or Zionist para-states or any other faction of the ruling class. The question is not which faction serves "the national interest" but how class rule reproduces itself through the competing solidarities that the nation-state framework renders invisible — and how to build formations that can contest them. That requires dropping the nation-state as our primary unit of analysis, which means dropping the entire apparatus of "national interest" reasoning, including its left-wing variants. Allen is correct to point out that debate over whether the US or Israel is "really" in charge is a debate conducted entirely within the enemy's categories. We must do better – and this is especially important to keep in mind when you engage with the literatures Ashlar (often productively) engages with, which strongly pull in that direction.

In solidarity,

Foppe de Haan