Rob Ashlar’s articles on the “Zionist Para-State” have inspired some discussion and debate in various left circles. Here I would like to endorse some elements of the arguments made while offering a distinct analysis that posits both less coherent policy on the part of the state of Israel and also a greater capacity for “internally-driven irrationalism” on the part of America.

The operational question seems to be an analysis of the driving factors of U.S. policy, especially military, in West Asia, with the implications being both how we can anticipate future policy decisions and even more to the point, effectively oppose imperial policy.

The current parameters of the debate have been loosely between 1) the “aircraft carrier” (or “strategic asset”) thesis, which is that U.S. policy in support of the Israeli state directly serves U.S. interests in imperial dominance and projecting its power, and can be explained as such and 2) the “zionist para-state” thesis, which is as Ashlar has put it, “the complete merger of the Western elite and Israeli population into one transnational political entity with its own aims which instrumentalizes Western imperialism in service to Jewish settler-colonialism, regardless of the latter’s strategic costs to the former.” The two theses are in a sense duals. The former suggests the state of Israel is a U.S. proxy, and the latter that the relationship has been inverted and the U.S. state has become a proxy of the interests of the state of Israel.

There is good reason to set aside the “strategic asset” thesis. While it provides a very sound explanation for the relationship between the U.S. and Israel over past decades – both in terms of observed actions and the self-professed strategical analysis and objectives of the imperialists, it does not account well for the actions of the U.S. since especially 2023 and the brutal zionist campaign of destruction in the wake of October 7, where the U.S. did not provide even the minimal sort of “third party broker and mediator” role it has in the past, however biased towards Israel. It is hard to make a case that the policy under Biden, much less Trump, has been in some sense “strategic” – both in terms of the observed outcomes, and also in terms of what we know of the internal planning and discussion. There are doubtless those who have advocated for and desired the current set of policies, but it is hard to view their motivation as “sound strategic analysis” when it is a combination of direct war profiteering and millenarian christian eschatology. (i.e. could General Ripper or Dr. Strangelove be said to be effective advocates of imperial policy interests?). Moreover, the carrying out of a wholesale destruction and extermination of a people, be it in the Nazi concentration camps or in Gaza, is in some sense an intrinsically insane act, which cannot be accounted for by any sort of “rational, interest based” analysis but only as a form of extreme ideologically driven mass psychosis.

But there is also good reason to be wary of the ZPS thesis. To ask if the U.S. is acting in the interests of Israel immediately poses the question: is Israel acting in the interests of Israel? Some of the same third-worldists who advocate ZPS-like analyses would be the first to agree that the current course of the Israeli state is ultimately as suicidal as it is bloodthirsty, relentlessly pushing towards a regional conflagration from which all will emerge devastated – driven on by crazed fascistic settler-ideology and a president who knows that only through permanent war can he retain power and avoid prison. Further, one must bear in mind that whatever the forces are behind U.S. policy, in terms of purely objective analysis, the U.S. as such remains in the “drivers seat” of the relationship to Israel – it holds the financial and military might, and it remains U.S. aid and military support that makes the continued regional power (and perhaps even existence) of the Israeli state possible.^[1]

As Marxists, our impulse and desire is to explain things in directly economic terms – there is a class that exploits others in pursuit of profit, and dominates the world in the pursuit of exploitation and profit. Its actions internationally thus are in pursuit of its dominance and capacity to further and better exploit and extract. Ninety percent of the time, this is true every time. But since 2016, it has been less true, though I do not have space here to dwell on it. The problem with both the “aircraft carrier” and “ZPS” theses is they posit some sort of direct explanation through classical political economy of two state actors, both of which are in fact acting in complicated unhinged ways, both of which have unreliable strongman leaders holding together fragile coalitions of interests out of which there are some economically driven actors, and some actors driven by different sorts of extreme national-religious ideology. What is necessary is a historical materialist account that is not directly economic, though of course ultimately subject to the cunning of history’s reason: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”

In the volumes of Capital, Marx describes many situations where madness enters capitalist “rationality” – and particularly how the sum total of individually “rational” and self-interested market decisions can lead to bubbles, overproduction, and crisis. But in his political writings, such as Eighteenth Brumaire Marx discusses also how on a higher scale the tendencies within the political structures generated by capitalism can lead to leaders embarking on decisions that are not even “individually rational”. On driving factor of this is the contradiction between a mode of production and system of commerce that “knows no borders” and the necessary ideological organization of states being on the basis of peoples and nations, with nationhood and identity being essentially flexible and historically contingent ideological constructs, while states themselves are structured and concrete accretions of power.

Here I want to suggest the “world settler complex” hypothesis as an account of the current “special” relationship of the U.S. and Israel.^[2] Along with asking “who builds the bombs” and “who calls the shots” we have to interrogate the idea that these are fully distinct entities at all. The historical situation is of two powers, one of which is the hegemon of western imperialism, and the other of which is a significant regional adjunct to it. In the past, there had been a strategic relationship on both ends, from the U.S. side in projecting power and influence, and on the side of Israel in essentially serving as a client-state and proxy in return for money, military support, and special economic treatment. But over time, beginning arguably with the Iranian revolution, cemented by the Iraq war, and now since October 7 in overdrive, there has been a structural growing together (a progressive knotting into) of the social, political, and ideological bonds. While the state apparatuses are distinct, the deep ties between the U.S. and Israeli state range from defense contractors and security apparatus, to shared intelligence, shared police trainings and counterinsurgency exercises, common foreign policy institutions, and even joint-venture extra-state intelligence and military vendors. This has created a situation where the apparatus of the U.S. state feels socially (and practically) bonded with the apparatus of the state of Israel and where Israel is not just seen and felt by many in the U.S. state apparatus (policy and military circles, etc) as a proxy or ally of the U.S. but “culturally and morally” a part of the United States.

What binds these groups together, and also binds the extreme right fringe in both countries together is a shared ideology that is not simply nationalist, but sees the national projects of the U.S. and Israel as both part of an essentially white-supremacist “civilizing” and colonizing order – i.e. they are seen as two leading states in a world settler-colonialist project, in a common front in Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” – exemplified for example in Ben Shapiro’s exalting shared “Judeo-Christian” values. Rather than suggesting either the U.S. or Israel must be in charge, perhaps a better analogy is to Leopold and Loeb or Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris – pairs of insane killers spurring one another on in shared psychopathy and delusion.

There are different material driving forces in the U.S. and Israel. On the part of the latter, the overarching factor is the logic, as analyzed by Machover and Matzpen, of a small settler-colony seeking to consolidate itself over and within a surrounding region with already established peoples, cultures, and economic structures, reliant on outside forces for support. This could not lead to a liberal and peaceful state as some early Zionist-socialists may have dreamed, but only a progressively more violent, reactionary and fascistic militarized society in a cycle of escalation and war, consumed by genocidal fantasies.

On the part of the U.S., there are many reasons one might speculate. Personally, I tend to think it is a country whose ideological structure and modes of population control were shaped by the Cold War, and which found itself unable to reconfigure a new balance following, essentially due to a concerted but undisciplined rebellion by individual capitalists who no longer felt the need to subordinate their individual profit-taking to some greater collective project (such as defeat of the USSR). In turn, these individual capitalist actors strain against the world order the U.S. itself built, and effectively unleashed and fomented right-wing populism as a way to force its reconfiguration, though they themselves cannot agree how it should be reconfigured but only seek disruption for its own sake.

Regardless, both sets of circumstances have created societies not governed in any sense by a policy apparatus with a long-term set of strategic analyses and definite interests, nor even any short term tactical sense (as the current war in Iran ably demonstrates). Governed by “lizard brain” base instincts which can play to the sentiments and resentments of the petty-bourgeois middle classes, they have turned to an ideological base of “civilizing” settler-colonialist ideology mixed with religious fervor, and yielded strategic planning to those elements of the state apparatus that have what most resembles a vision – those who have planned and strategized war exercises, and now are thrilled, simply from their own standpoint as functionaries, at the opportunity to set these loose (a la Dr. Strangelove).

An underlying historical dynamic making this possible is that both societies emerged as settler-colonial powers, for whom racial and national supremacy, displacement, and dehumanization are part of their founding national myths and broad political identity. As Adorno observed, form is sedimented content, and the form of ideological unity between the U.S. and state of Israel is the sedimented content of (among other things) the extermination of Native Americans, Mexican-American war, and American invention of Apartheid in the Jim Crow South. In the contemporary moment what also links these projects is the need to invoke ethno-nationalist mass mobilization as a way to cohere a sense of national cross-class cohesion in the face of internally fragmentary and dispersive economic and social forces as driven by the conditions of the capitalist market and imperial project – i.e. to use militarism to regiment the population, draw it behind the ruling class, and suppress dissent.

Yes, these states are acting against long-term strategic interests. But perhaps it was only a brief accident of history that capitalism ever generated states which might act otherwise, and here we return to the historic norm of swashbuckling nationalism, religious zealotry and war of all against all – one in which the U.S. and Israel feel tied not by common strategic interests, but blood and soil and bigotry.

Gary Levi

1. A secondary but legitimate concern is that the framing of ZPS opens the way to other forces attempting to twist it in an anti-semitic direction, even though Ashlar’s attempt is to wrest the framing away from such ideas. This concern should not stand in the way of objective analysis, but should caution us in how to conduct such analysis with care.

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2. This coinage is not intended to reference Sakai so much as the Settler-Colonial analysis of scholars such as Patrick Wolfe in “Traces of History,” fused to an international relations standpoint. While it also evokes world-systems analysis, that should be taken as no more than a suggestive coincidence, and instead the term is more in the spirit of the “prison industrial complex”.

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