Introduction

Across the Marxist left, there has been considerable debate on the relationship between the United States and Israel. This dialogue up to now, however, has been unproductive on all sides. The principal reason for this is that almost all these exchanges have been centered around whether or not U.S. support for Israel is “rational,” or, more broadly, a debate about rationality in geopolitics. I am more than willing to concede that I have certainly been more than guilty of this; I was previously mired in the static trenches of the rationality question, which has only continued in the subsequent dispute. In fact, as a whole, the debate around the “Zionist Para-State” (ZPS) and the special relationship has completely devolved into a near replication of the tired “Aircraft Carrier Thesis” (ACT) versus “Zionist Lobby Thesis” (ZLT) discourse, i.e., a question about whether support for the Zionist entity is in American interests or not.

All these theories have missed the forest for the trees. The question should not be one of rationality; it should be asking what makes the special relationship special. In the subsequent debates, proponents of the ACT have been incapable of answering it, and while the ZPS and ZLT do try to provide an explanation on this front, they have substantial flaws that make them incomplete or unsound while also falling into the “rationality trap”.

The Question

The question above we seek to unravel has been what various proponents of the theses above claim to answer. We shall see, they all fail at a comprehensive contribution and get sucked into the trap of the “rationality” debate. As I see it, understanding why Israel is in a privileged position as opposed to all other American clients, and why Western elites so fanatically adhere to forms of Zionist ideology, is an essential problem for the socialist movement to work out. To the principled proletarian internationalist organizing in the heart of empire, it should matter much less whether the barbarism of the US-Zionist axis is rational to “our” ruling class or not than comprehending why there is a special relationship of this sort in the first place; know thy enemy and the like. The circular debate around rationality gets no closer to answering the question, and instead has us arguing about US hegemony from the perspective of imperial bureaucrats. Let’s leave such problems of “rational statecraft” to bourgeois IR theorists. Before outlining my own contribution, I want to explore the deficiencies of the aforementioned theories so we can better see each one's failures.

Aircraft Carrier Thesis

The ACT can be summed up by the man who dubbed it himself, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig: “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.” From here, it is argued that this is what guides the special relationship. This theory has gained considerable purchase, from Marxists like George Habash to Islamists like Hassan Nasrallah. Many a Trotskyist and official communist/ML alike cling to the outline of the ACT. For another example, while the document explicitly claims otherwise, the adopted 2026 Marxist Unity Group Tasks and Perspectives’ relevant section falls within the camp of the ACT (see comrade Adam Hanieh’s ACT^[1] for a comparable example), maintaining that the US supports Israel as a “bulwark against declining US hegemony in the most important hub of the oil-fueled accumulation system that undergirds the current configuration of the imperialist world order.”^[2]

First, the strengths. Certainly, Israel no longer fits into the same function it used to play as a relatively straightforward proxy against radical pan-Arabism and the USSR during the Cold War. That being said, I maintain that Israel does indeed play a role for US imperialism today. While it is true, as the MUG 2026 T&P states, that Israel is at the center of “the structure of US-led economic and political integration in the region,” this is incomplete and too abstract. The Israeli regime’s more immediate and perhaps greater utility to American imperialism in the region is as an attack dog rather than a guard dog.

As Mike Macnair has astutely noted, since the start of relative American decline, given that a more “orderly” management of empire is no longer feasible, US imperial strategy has been guided by a policy of exporting destruction, de-development, Balkanization, sectarianism, warlordism, genocide, etc.^[3] From emerging “peer rivals” like China or their partners like Russia, perceived regional counter-hegemons, or weak states/non-state actors who may merely “diss” the US, the aim is the same: devastation. This fits in quite neatly with the designs of the Zionist entity, whose millenarian Jewish supremacist aims of a “greater Israel” settler colonial project make it a natural proxy in unleashing destruction upon the region. This is a risky gambit that could ultimately lead to explosive escalations and destabilization. A region-wide ground war, for example, could trigger the fall of the Gulf regimes and other US clients. The line between rational and irrational bourgeois state action is clearly not as straightforward as has been presented, further demonstrating the futility of the circular debate around it. This being said, Israel’s brutal warmongering follows the general course of US strategy since the 1970s.

It would be a grave mistake to imply that there is a neat line directly from Israel’s imperialist role to the privileged relationship it enjoys both politically and ideologically/culturally. In the ACT, we see an implicit endorsement of the idea that the American ruling class are thoroughly rational actors, fully conscious of and acting in their own interests. The “rationality trap” reveals itself. The ACT, therefore, commonly falls victim to vulgar materialism and pays little serious attention to the role of ideology, leaving the theory too abstract, mechanical, and half-baked. This is a common fault of contemporary Marxist geopolitical analysis, where a historical situation is essentially read backwards from the fact that there must be a reasoned economic determinant.

As a result of little serious engagement with ideology, the ACT is incapable of answering why Israel (and Zionism) has an outsized influence and importance in the minds of policymakers as opposed to all other US clients. Why do Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, etc., not receive the same sort of patronage despite also being at the center of maintaining US hegemony in the region? Why are US police and other domestic repressive agencies regularly training closely with Israeli ones, as opposed to Ukrainians or Taiwanese? Why have American elites had substantial debates^[4] about the utility of supporting the Ukraine proxy war concerning the policy of pivoting to China, while no such conversation is had about Israel’s colonial project seemingly (re)drawing the US deeper into the Middle East, despite, as Matthew Petti notes, the fact that “the standoff munitions^[5] and missile defense systems^[6] that the U.S. military is burning through in the Middle East are far more relevant to a Pacific conflict than the artillery and armored vehicles that Ukraine uses.”^[7] Why are anti-Zionists specifically met with ferocious ruling class crackdowns, as opposed to other domestic critics of foreign allied powers? Why is Israel practically seen by US elites as an extension of the United States, while no other country receives the same viewpoint? If it were just a question of why the US is aligned with Israel, the ACT would suffice. But for our central question, and all the subsequent ones above, the ATC offers no satisfying answers. As a result, the ZLT/ZPS are able to make a serious critique of the ACT’s inability to even approach the special relationship’s peculiarity. In short, the ACT cannot account for the specificity of Israel.

Zionist Lobby Thesis and Zionist Para-State

Of the three theories under criticism, the ZLT is the most popular. It is also the least theoretically developed, providing an easy-to-understand and relatively coherent theory of the special relationship, though remaining completely surface-level. It’s a simple, yet politically effective narrative that observes what is visible to all: the power of the Israel Lobby. Even more so than the ACT, there is no one ZLT; elements of both the left and right have adopted it. Thus, the far-right can claim that a cabal of Jewish billionaires controls US foreign policy, while dissident liberals and the state-loyalist left can decry the Israel Lobby’s defilement of American so-called “democracy”. The ZLT does, however, attempt to address the question of the US-Zionist axis’s specificity, which gives it a leg up over the ACT when it comes to explanatory power.

The orginonators of the ZLT (they call it the Israel Lobby), John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, describe the Lobby as “a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that works to move U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction…a powerful interest group, made up of both Jews and gentiles whose acknowledged purpose is to press Israel’s case within the United States.”^[8] This observation is true, given that there is indeed a Zionist Lobby of this sort, and it clearly has an enormous influence. But the more novel aspect of the ZLT is its assertion that the Lobby itself is behind the special relationship and US policy in Southwest Asia. It is argued that this is orchestrated through the immense funding (or through bribery, blackmailing, etc.) of election campaigns, think tanks, Zionist attack dog orgs, and the like.

There are many problems with the ZLT. It removes agency from American political and economic elites, putting into doubt whether or not they are true believers in the racist tenets of Zionism or simply bribed off. It often pays little attention to other structures that uphold a fanatical Zionist world view as the status quo, i.e., the press, higher education, religious institutions, cultural normalization in mass media, homegrown American white supremacy, millenarian Christian Zionism, etc. Again, it also shifts the terrain to the question of irrationality in state action; see Mearsheimer and Walt’s primary contention that the Zionist Lobby has redirected US foreign policy to serve the divergent aims of Israel as opposed to those of the US.

The Zionist entity does indeed play an important imperialist role (see above), whether US ideologues fully comprehend it or not. But we should also consider how advocates of the ZLT misunderstand the Lobby’s real purpose in the 21st century: less to “buy off” elites or what have you than to reproduce a Zionist status quo amongst the US ruling class while boxing out or stifling any perceived threats to what is practically a state ideology in the West. US elites have long been Zionist zealots; the Lobby aims to protect this Zionism.

The shallowness of the traditional ZLT has not gone unaddressed; in many ways, the ZPS is a development of the ZLT. Rob Ashlar’s ZPS thesis can be outlined as “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.”^[9]

It maintains that this ZPS developed out of empire, with imperialism being “the material basis for the emergence and strengthening of the Israel Lobby.” From here, “American political elite came to support Israel increasingly out of Zionist ideological conviction, rather than strict geopolitical assessment.”

The ZPS thesis has substantial explanatory and predictive ability. It hits on many points that are important to comprehend, most significantly: the “consanguineous and culturally co-mingled” relationship of Western and Israeli elites and the Western ruling class’s unwavering commitment to the Zionist settler colonial project. The ZPS is able to explain the specificity of Israel in a way that the ACT is incapable.

The ZPS theory nonetheless has serious flaws, however. As observed from the above-quoted passages, Ashlar focuses too much on the rationality question, elevating it to a central part of the ZPS’s own definition. This preoccupation has resulted in debates around the ZPS being diminished to problems of rationality rather than expanding on the question of the special relationship itself.

The actual terminology of a “para-state” does not work for me either. It implies a too-rigid and seemingly foreign structure “hijacking” the US empire, moving it into the realm of an almost separate state entity from that of the US and other Western countries themselves. As we shall see, it is incorrect to attribute the fanatical devotion of Western elites to the Zionist cause, or their culturally fused relationship, to a “para-state” (or Israeli) control over American imperialism.

As discussed, there is still an imperialist part for Israel to play, even if it remains more muted and/or risky to maintain. Ashlar is correct in his repeated reference of the fact that a cataclysmic regional war in the Middle East instigated by Israel (as the latest US-Zionist Axis war on Iran could be) can certainly bring with it the potential for the collapse of the US Arab clients and the Zionist settler regime occupying Palestine (it is also worth mentioning the apocalyptic aims of conquest pursued by the Israelis themselves are not particularly rational/self-preserving themselves). Again, however, the above-noted US imperialist strategy of exporting destruction onto arbitrary targets perceived as facilitating American decline carries this risk. As Macnair notes, “The 21st century has seen a deepening tendency towards nationalism and irrationalism, and towards larger and more dangerous wars” and short of a revolutionary proletarian challenge, “…the most probable outcome of the 21st century is that the more and more overt US wars of aggression will lead to human extinction through generalised nuclear exchange.”^[10] More food for thought on the question of rational bourgeois state action.

US policy has not been hijacked, even if Zionist ideology is the primary mover of the special relationship, as we shall see.

Imperialism, Ideology, and the Exclusion Colony

It is an understatement to say political and economic elites in the United States are staunchly Zionist. The Israeli settler regime occupying Palestine is viewed by the US ruling class as a practical extension of America itself. The way it is institutionalized, enforced, and defended, Zionism is for all intents and purposes a state ideology in the US, albeit taking many different forms. We have now looked at the three serious theories contending with the question of why Israel and the US maintain an unparalleled special relationship, but we still do not have a complete contribution on the score. The ACT quite simply cannot answer this question, the ZLT is too vulgar, and the ZPS’s “para-state” framework and focus on the “rationality trap” constitute serious setbacks. But all these theories have important kernels of truth. As we have seen, Israel does still play an imperialist role, the Zionist Lobby does exert immense power, and there is a fanatical devotion to and identification with Zionist ideology across the US bourgeois political spectrum. So what explains this?

Ideology plays an essential role in the sort of “great power” support received by the Israeli colony. Zionism has always marketed itself to Western imperialism as “a rampart of Europe against Asia,” to use the words of Theodor Herzl, but a particular sort of unquestioned Zionist devotion amongst the American/Western ruling class developed in the period of specifically US patronage.^[11] Western Evangelical/Christian ideological support was crucial during the British Mandate period, but it is equally true that there always existed an anti-Zionist faction within the British ruling class that opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Arguably, these perspectives found their culmination in 1939’s White Paper, which curtailed Jewish settlement after British policymakers decided the Zionists made for more trouble than could be tolerated. In the US, support for Zionism was by no means ensured, especially early on, with the then deep Arabist sympathies in the US military and foreign policy establishments.

The US-Israeli partnership was forged out of calculated Cold War realpolitik in the period between the early 1960s and the 1973 Arab-israeli War. It was in this era that the Zionist entity shifted from French to American patronage. The latter were motivated to become the settler state’s primary imperial backer after the Spartan Tel-Aviv regime had demonstrated its military-political utility to Washington by effectively confronting anti-imperialist Arab nationalism and even the USSR itself. The US and Israel thus became close allies, and with this, ideology began to be mobilized to solidify this bond. In America, Zionism had two potentially important allies: the large Jewish community, which could be molded into a cadre base of Zionists, and the massive Evangelical Christian population, who likewise would make for quite effective ideological crusaders, particularly with the church’s elevation as a result of Cold War anti-communism. More broadly, Zionist agitation soon extended beyond these communities through the mass spread of Hasbara, Cold War ideology, the development of the Zionist Lobby, cultural normalization, emotional manipulation of the Nazi Judeocide, etc. But something deeper occurred, particularly in the 1970s and 80s.

It is hard to overemphasize how the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran scarred American policymakers. The US’s then primary regional ally was Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s Iran. The Shah’s bloody regime received immense US support, and of course, was reinstalled in the first place by the Anglo-American coup of 1953. Yet, here was a case of blowback: despite maintaining a client at the top, the Iranian masses developed deep anti-American sentiments, culminating in the revolutionary overthrow of the Shah and the installation of a hostile government in the form of the Islamic Republic. An important lesson, related to answering our central question, was learned from this experience by US strategists: the clients in the Middle East were only reliable at the top, given how polarized the region's masses had become against America. Egypt, despite being in the US orbit since the 70s, has always had flare-ups of popular militancy. The Gulf monarchies are US allies through their absolute monarchies, yet remain potentially fragile, especially in the case of Saudi Arabia, with its large Arab working and middle classes. With this in mind, US policymakers have viewed almost all their clients in the Middle East with the assumption that their populations are not only unreliable but dangerous; each of these states itself carries inherent risks in the circumstance of popular mobilization (be it Islamist, nationalist, or democratic). There is one exception, however.

The Zionist entity is completely different and indeed special in this regard. As opposed to all these other states, Israel is a settler colony, more specifically, a white, Western settler colonial project. A massive proportion of Israel’s Jewish settler population hails directly from the United States, with many others holding dual citizenship with Western/European countries. As the original Zionist thinkers correctly understood, the settler population is dependent on the metropole (e.g., the United States) to materially carry on; unlike any regular US clients, the settler masses in the Israeli exclusion colony are reliant on the aid of the United States to maintain their specifically settler existence. Indeed, Zionism itself is a child of the West. Its settler footsoldiers carry with them a “Western” outlook, materially, culturally, personally, and ideologically tied to the Anglo-American “West”. Thus, an anti-American, anti-imperialist uprising of Jewish Israeli settlers is not realistically on the cards. As Zionist ideologues R. Blackwill and W. Slocombe of the Washington Institute think tank frankly state: “Israel’s people and politicians have a deeply entrenched pro-American outlook that is uniformly popular with the Israeli people. Thus, Israel’s support of US national interests is woven tightly into the fabric of Israeli democratic political culture - a crucial characteristic that is presently not found in any other nation in the greater Middle East.”^[12] As a result, Israel became not only the favored US ally in the region, but it also started to play a special role for US imperialism as its most reliable client, in a sense, a sort of US colony in the Mashriq. This would only continue to develop into a special ideological connection.

With the entity playing a unique role as a white settler outpost for American hegemony in the region, and the aforementioned domestic conditions with Christian Zionists and the Jewish American population (it should be noted that the latter only came out in a majority for Zionism after the 1967 war), led to ripe grounds for something new to sprout and mature. In the 70s and 80s, Israel's special position encouraged and promoted the deepening of already existing Zionist trends in the US. Jewish institutions were converted into mechanisms of furthering Zionist aims. Exploitation of Jewish suffering became a mainstay for Zionist indoctrination; the mutual acknowledgement of the settler colonial character of the US’s founding and expansion, and the Zionist project cannot be discounted as a factor as well. The Zionist Lobby, including its Evangelical factions, was encouraged to become enormously powerful and effective political actors as a result of Israel’s special utility. In this era, the Lobby was enabled to play a (remarkably successful) proselytizing role for the Zionist cause. US political and economic elites became true believers in the Zionist creed, and this, mixed with Israel’s established special status and dependence on the US, led to the sort of identification among the US ruling class (and the public at large) with Israelis as essentially an extension of America. The Zionist entity began to be viewed in similar terms to those which old European “great” powers viewed their respective settler populations in the colonies.

So what has developed is an allegiance to Zionism on behalf of the Anglo-American ruling class to the point where it has become a practically institutionalized state ideology. The US, and countries where similar phenomena have occurred, like the UK, Germany, France, and other Western states, along with the entity itself, constitute a sort of Zionist Bloc, united not only by the strategic military-political alliance but by the joint adoption of Zionism as a functionally “official” ideology in the same canon of state-endorsed ideologies in these various countries. This “official Zionism” signifies not a formal, united political structure, but rather those countries which fit the above description, where it could genuinely be argued that a regime, through its political and ideological support for Israeli settler colonialism, is also a “Zionist state”. This does not entail any sort of “hijacking” of these states by Israelis; American and other elites have their own agency and Zionist fanaticism, and as we have discussed, Israel does have a special utility to the United States. So how does the latter factor in?

As I see it, imperialism conditions the US-Israel relationship in the last instance. The Zionist entity is both a bulwark against threats to American interests as a loyal settler garrison and an agent of destruction, which makes it a tool in the scheme of grand imperial strategy since the relative decline of US hegemony. Over this imperialist base, a political and ideological superstructure (i.e., the many forms of American Zionist ideology, lobbies, think tanks, cultural and religious institutions, etc.) has been erected, resulting in a cross-ruling class identification with Israel as a practical extension of the United States, a fanatical adoption of Zionist ideology. Zionism is taken as unquestioned, and all imperialist strategy in the region and beyond is seen through this lens. On the one hand, unleashing the rabid Israeli dog on any perceived American rival in the Middle East, in line with the above-outlined strategy of American control, is a given for Washington policymakers. On the other hand, while creating a so-called “two-state” Palestinian Authority comprador regime in the West Bank and Gaza would’ve expedited Arab normalization with the entity, this was dead on arrival, considering Washington went into the Oslo process with no intention of providing the capitulating Arafat with anything more than a wretched Bantustan with little chance of a sovereign future. The result of the Zionist worldview in both cases.

Similar to the American “Constitutional ideology,” there is no one form of Zionism amongst the ruling class. As Petti explains, through the sort of relationship that has developed, Israel occupies “a place where American elites and large parts of the public can project all of their feelings about liberalism, conservatism, security, power, Islam, the Bible, Jewish-Christian relations, World War II, imperialism, the frontier, and more.”^[13] This captures the dynamic of domestic Zionism.

The Zionist Bloc and the Post-October 7 World

World geopolitics as normal were subjected to an enormous rupture with the prison break of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Gaza Genocide. There existed a pre-October 7 World, and now there is a post-October 7 world, where brazen genocide in the arena of “great power” geopolitics has again become a normalized means of control. Considering that this debate and my own outlined theory cannot be separated from this context, to conclude it is necessary to contend with how the “Zionist Bloc” and my contribution more generally factor in at our present moment.

What erupted in the form of the Gaza prison break of October 7, 2023, was the result of various factors that had long been boiling under the surface: the persistently wretched conditions in Gaza, the growing trend of normalization with the Abraham Accords, and the sidelining of the Palestinian question (and Palestinians themselves) by the so-called “international community”. With this, the by then political-strategic bankruptcy of the moderate Hamas Politburo gave way to the more radical Qassam Brigades, making a strategic gamble on breaking this impasse.

In the aftermath of October 7, the Israeli occupiers in practical uniformity decided upon a policy of extermination, i.e., genocide, as the means to enact a final solution to the question of Palestine. Many activists have talked about US “complicity” or “support” for the genocide, but this is improper. This is not a US-backed genocide but an American genocide just as much as it is an Israeli one. As elaborated above, October 7 was objectively a revolt against the status quo, a militant rebellion against American hegemony in the region. Two key factors are at play here. On the one hand, the policy of genocide is a catastrophic radicalization of what has been the aforementioned general strategic trend in US imperial strategy of exporting destruction to anything remotely perceived as an affront to Washington, which the 10/7 operation most certainly was. On the other hand, with resistance fighters penetrating into ‘48 occupied Palestine, this was more immediately in the minds of US policymakers (be it Biden or Trump) seen as a direct attack on the US itself, given that the settler population is de facto viewed as American colonists. The result of both is expressed in the fanatical sort of “vengeance” aiming to liquidate Gaza, which continues to animate and be the guiding policy line of the US concerning the question of Palestine.

Domestically, as a result of the above and a state of siege mentality from growing popular disillusionment with the Zionist project and support for the Palestinian cause, across the US ruling class there has been a state of even further hardline Zionist radicalization. Simultaneously, however, cracks have begun to show. The utter audacity of the Gaza genocide, so nakedly perpetrated and streamed to the whole world’s phone screens, has indeed done irreparable damage to the Zionist hegemony. For the first time since the Cold War, there has developed a critical minority ruling class/elite faction generally along two lines: a right-wing “populist” one which rhetorically opposes the special relationship to drum up nationalistic sentiment to their own ends, and a liberal/”left populist” one which criticizes Israeli policy and opposes the special relationship in a cautious “progressive” manner. It should be noted that many, if not most, of these types (Tucker Carlson, Thomas Massie, Chris Van Hollen, Ro Khana, to name a few) cannot be described as anti-Zionists in the true sense of the term, considering they argue for either a reformed Zionist entity or a reconstitution of the US-Israeli relationship on new terms. Despite this minority faction’s existence, however, the “Zionist Bloc” remains strong, and across the bourgeois political spectrum, Zionism remains, often now in even more intensified, ludicrous, and extreme forms.

The struggle for complete and uncompromising Palestinian liberation is just as much a struggle against the American regime and its ruling class as it is against the Israeli entity occupying Palestine.

1. Framing Palestine: Israel, the Gulf states, and American power in the Middle East

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2. Tasks and Perspectives

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3. From order to chaos

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4. Debate: Winning in Ukraine Is Critically Important for Deterring a War in Taiwan

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5. U.S. Strikes in Yemen Burning Through Munitions with Limited Success

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6. The US fired $500 million in top interceptors defending Israel from missile attacks, new documents show

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7. Aircraft carrier or lobby: more thoughts on U.S.-Israeli relations

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8. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 5.

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9. On the Zionist Para-State

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10. Capitalism as a star fort

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11. The Jewish State

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12. Israel: A Strategic Asset for the United States

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13. What does the Israel Lobby actually do?

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