BettBeat Media
Source link
For too long, the fight for Palestinian liberation has been viewed narrowly as just a push-back against Israeli settler-colonialism and Zionism. But this framing misses the broader reality – the subjugation of Palestinians is integrally tied to upholding U.S. imperialism’s power and agenda for dominating the entire West Asia region.
At its core, the Nakba and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians facilitates the projection of U.S. military force and economic control across this pivotal, resource-rich area. The Zionist colonial project in Palestine is fundamentally backed and enabled by American military aid, weapons transfers and diplomatic impunity. Without this imperialist patronage, Israeli occupation forces could not continue their ethnic cleansing and apartheid policies against the indigenous Arab population.
As political scientist Bickram Gill explains, the colonization of Palestine is not just about crushing Palestinian self-determination – it is “part of a broader regional project that is core to the exercise of U.S. global power.” Control over Palestinian lands provides the U.S. a foothold and “proxy bulwark” from which to dominate the entire region’s politics, markets, and strategically vital energy reserves.
The 1974 U.S.-Saudi oil deal cemented the petrodollar system, whereby oil sales are denominated in U.S. currency. This entrenched American financial hegemony worldwide by forcing all nations to stockpile dollars for energy imports. But upholding this exploitative arrangement hinges on smothering threats of sovereignty in oil-producing West Asia – thus the indispensable Israeli attack dog.
If the U.S. and Israel lose to Palestinian resistance, the degree of weakness it would project would motivate all other crucial pillars to aspire for independence and escape from U.S. control. Hence, an entire people is allowed to be butchered, simply so that rich, white Western politicians and corporate elites can maintain their opulence and lavish lifestyles.
War-Profiteering
Military domination of West Asia has also taken a more naked form of endless war-profiteering by the U.S. military-industrial complex. Applying insights from Rosa Luxembourg, wars like those destroying Iraq, Libya and Yemen represent capitalist imperialism’s turn to militarism as a “province of accumulation.” Unable to infinitely extract surplus from domestic production, the U.S. capitalist class cannibalizes the Global South through cycles of violent dispossession that create, on one hand, a lucrative hunger for expensive weapons sales, and on the other, cheap, exploitable labor reserves worldwide.
Any truly emancipatory Palestinian politics must reckon with these connected imperialist structures – not just Zionist racism and displacement. The Iranian Revolution’s defiant anti-Zionism exemplifies this broader anti-imperialist vision by rejecting U.S. subjugation of the whole region.
If activists wish to build solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, we must embrace an explicitly anti-imperialist framework. Only by uprooting U.S. hegemony over West Asia can real collective self-determination and democratic sovereignty be exercised by all peoples – be they Palestinian, Syrian, Yemeni or beyond. The fight against Israel’s colonial occupation is inextricable from a revolutionary challenge to American imperialism itself.
-Karim.
Originally Published: 2024-05-22 03:46:43
Source link