The United States — along with its twin imperialist settler state Canada and its partnered settler states within the Latin American neo-colonies — will fall because of the defect that they share with Israel: their foundations rest not on democratic support from the masses, but on the annexation of indigenous territories and the perpetual occupation of those lands. They’ll be defeated by the forces for national liberation because in their own ways, they’re bound to produce contradictions which weaken their systems enough for the colonized populations they subjugate to prevail.
However, the “American” and “Israeli” states preside over distinct conditions, ones which are causing their downfalls to unfold in different ways. Reviewing these conditions reveals that while both states won’t be replaced by a fully post-colonial order at the exact same moments, their demises will be inextricably intertwined with each other, with the implosion of each bringing the other closer to their doom.
The most important distinction is that the American colonists have managed to grab up enough territory to keep their colonial project (for now) safe from surrounding adversaries, while Israel hasn’t and it no doubt never will. The colonization of all the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific was about achieving the American equivalent of what Hitler (who intended for his genocide to create an “Aryan” settler-colonial empire throughout Eurasia) called “Lebensraum” — where an empire grabs up a sufficient amount of land for the settler class to exercise aristocratic power, while enjoying the economic and geographic security buffer of having their empire hold control over vast amounts of conquered territory. It’s unsurprising that Hitler took direct inspiration from U.S. indigenous genocide and the Jim Crow laws. The American imperialists reached the proportions of genocide and cultural erasure that he would have succeeded in carrying out had he won World War II.
To the effect that 90% of the continent’s indigenous population got murdered through massacres, forced relocations where thousands diedtraversing unsafe migration routes, engineered starvation via the sabotage of First Nations crops, deadly Native child re-education centers, concentration camps, and deliberately proliferated European diseases, the Americans succeeded at attaining their Lebensraum, with the outcome being the unprecedented economic and military power that the U.S. is today. It’s important to note that the U.S. empire wouldn’t have subdued the indigenous resistance movement if not for the European diseases that the settlers brought to the Natives; biological warfare was the special element that allowed America’s genocide to be the most deadly, and the most successful at advancing imperial control.
Along with the colonial wealth gained from African chattel slave labor and Chinese wage slave labor, the depopulation of the indigenous peoples allowed the U.S. empire to rise. The wealth that this rogue British colony gained from its parasitism allowed it to be propelled into its current superpower status. From when the U.S. decided to become a global empire at the end of the 19th century, to the peak of U.S. power after World War II, the U.S. became the most powerful empire in the history of the world. Its unparalleled ability to gain control over markets, with it having used economic hitmen to gain total exploitative access to the Global South during the height of Pax Americana, has served as a global version of the thefts it carried out within its own borders.
While Israel wishes it could replicate this conquest success story, it hasn’t managed to so far. It only controls a range of territory small enough to comfortably fit within the state of New York, which means it lacks the territorial buffer that U.S. imperialism has been able to gain. This is why Israeli settler-colonialism is currently closer to defeat than U.S. settler-colonialism is; unlike the U.S. settlers, the Israeli settlers are regularly facing rocket fire, backed by an armed anti-colonial resistance. This is in spite of the unprecedentedly effective “Iron Dome” missile defense system that the Israelis have constructed. And Hamas, the elected authority behind this resistance, is engaged in a recently strengthened partnership with Hezbollah, an anti-Zionist resistance organization which controls Israel’s neighbor Lebanon. Hamas is also able to get funding from Iran, whose support lets Hamas get crucial financial resources.
Israel has always hoped to do the equivalent of what the U.S. did, to create a “Greater Israel” where the Zionist state has become able to exert imperial control over all of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and even Iran (since Iran has been an anti-Zionist power for the last half-century and therefore must become subdued in order for Zionism’s existence to become secure). And in the last year, Israel has been coming closer to this Zionist Lebensraum. Taking advantage of the genocidal U.S.-Saudi war on the Yemenis, it’s gained a Yemeni military footprint, as well as established settlements within Yemen. But U.S./Israeli plots have failed to achieve regime change in Iran, Syria, or Lebanon, and the anti-imperialist Houthis won’t stop winning in Yemen. This last year has shown that Israel also can’t annex the West Bank for fear of political blowback.
During last year’s failed campaign to annex the West Bank, Israel’s security experts expressed awareness that if Israel remains geographically limited to the little strip it has now, its ability to survive this generation’s strains upon it will be jeopardized. As The Times of Israel has reported, the drive to annex the West Bank was motivated by the fact that “It is hard to exaggerate the effect that the sense of American retreat has on Israeli thinking. Even if the rumors of general American decline are exaggerated or premature, Washington’s retreat is more acutely felt in the Middle East because of the American pivot toward the Pacific and the strategic challenge of China.” With U.S. hegemony “crumbling before our eyes,” as one pro-annexation Israeli defense thinker assessed last year, the Zionist state knows that achieving Lebensraum is the only way to ensure the survival of Zionism by the middle of the century.
Israel’s ongoing attempt to demolish more Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, born out of a desire to fortify colonial rule over the zones the Zionists have managed to encircle, has been provoking Palestinian resistance — which accelerates Israel’s demise by exposing to the world the indefensible measures that Israel takes to “defend” itself from those resisting Palestine’s occupation. As Israel’s narrative about being a peace-seeking “democratic” state crumbles, and Israel’s desperate attempts to pacify the Gazan population and break Palestinian solidarity continue to fail, the time draws closer when the Zionist state may get subdued into holding truly democratic elections and ending Israel’s dozens of discriminatory laws. If the state fails to negotiate in these ways, it will only make outright overthrow more likely.
Due to the strength of the anti-imperialist movement in the Arab and Persian worlds, Israel has failed to gain the security blanket of territorial hegemony that the U.S. has. And this has made it into a prelude for the kinds of tensions that the U.S. will experience when the anti-colonial struggle here escalates to the same point.
In the long story of colonialism’s demise, the U.S. empire’s success at attaining Lebensraum has bought it time. Because the genocide has made it so that only 2% of the population is Native, and because the African population remains segregated by the legacy of Jim Crow while the Native population has been segregated through getting forced into reservations, the settler majority is able to detach from the presence of the colonized nations within U.S. borders. Combined with the gargantuan scale of the occupied zones which make up the U.S. and Canada, this racial separation (which obviously also exists in Israel) creates a cultural illusion of legitimacy which is harder to get people to believe in when it comes to Israel. On a superficial level, Israel is easier to recognize as illegitimate, even though it ironically hasn’t carried out nearly as much colonial murder as the U.S. and Canada have.
The colonial contradiction is more outwardly visibile in Israel’s case, while the American settler states have been able to wrap their ongoing occupations of indigenous territories in a veneer of banality. The First Nations here have been erased in the dominant cultural consciousness, relegated to an afterthought. The same isn’t the case for Palestine, though the Zionists desperately want to make this so with their dehumanizing language about Palestinians, their narrative that Palestine “doesn’t exist,” and their attempts to depopulate Palestinian communities through bombings, wanton shootings, and blockades.
Like Hitler, Israel’s dream is to replicate the kind of spectacular success in colonial genocide which the Americans have achieved. Even the Israelis, the builders of the most technologically and tactically advanced colonial repressive state in history, envy what the Americans were able to do to the indigenous population in a far less technologically advanced era. That’s how strong the North American genocide has made the settler state we live under.
The internal section of the U.S. empire also maintains a colonial slave system through its racially discriminatory prison-industrial complex, which pays its disproportionately African prisoners in cents. Because of how big U.S. territory is, and how many colonial victims it’s been able to snatch up, this has allowed for the U.S. to build a slave system far bigger than the networks of forced Palestinian labor which assist Israeli industry; there are now more African men in U.S. prisons than there were U.S. slaves in the 1850s. The sheer amount of Native land that the empire has annexed creates an additional buffer for America’s weakening capital; recently the U.S. has been carrying out a massive oil drilling project in Alaska, which will divert the migration of caribou and hurt the ability of the local indigenous people to feed themselves.
The ability to become the largest superpower that the U.S. empire’s continental annexation has afforded it also helps delay revolution within its borders, because America is the “big house” in the plantation of global capital. The privileges of imperialism have been able to be spread out across the vast lands of the U.S. and Canada (despite the masses within these places still being exploited and subjected to austerity), further fostering the illusion that U.S. colonialism and capitalism work in the interests of the masses. Many can be led to believe the lie that capitalism in this country is self-sufficient and based on meritocracy, when in reality the U.S. economy would utterly collapse if it couldn’t lean heavily onto the labor of undocumented (i.e. indigenous) workers. U.S. capitalism has even needed to create an entire industry for detaining indigenous people at the border, with private prison companies profiting from the record incarcerations of the southern brown migrants who’ve been driven out of their homelands by U.S. imperialist destabilization in the Global South.
But as capital and empire weaken, this caveat of the masses in the core of imperialism (including the settlers) also being impacted by capitalism’s contradictions is getting more significant. The contradictions are expanding. In the last year, 1 in 4 U.S. households have experienced food insecurity and the real unemployment rate has jumped to 10%, realities which negate whatever gains American workers could see if wages stop stagnating post-pandemic; U.S. wages have been declining for the last 5 decades, and we’ll see what happens to them after the dollar crashes. The fact that colonized peoples have been hurt by these ills of neoliberalism the most reveals the growing potential for a coming confrontation on this continent between the oppressor and oppressed nations. As Journalist’sResource reported last fall, during a pandemic-related economic downturn that’s since gotten worse:
Most Latino, Black and Native American households have experienced serious financial problems during the coronavirus outbreak — and Latinos have fared worst — finds a new survey from NPR, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Nearly three-quarters of Latino households surveyed — 72% — reported serious problems paying for housing, bills and basic expenses since the coronavirus outbreak began in the U.S. in mid-March. That’s double the share of white, non-Latino households that reported difficulty affording the same things. “The findings are not what we expected,” said Robert Blendon, health policy professor at the Chan School who helped lead the study, during a Sept. 16 media briefing. “They’re actually much worse.”
As journalist Eleanor Goldfield observed this year, the government is working to obfuscate this reality of deepening misery among colonized communities:
You may have heard that the economy lost 140,000 jobs in December. What may have flown under the radar is the fact that men actually gained 16,000 jobs, while women lost 156,000. 154,000 of those were black women. This is vital information. In a nation so sharply cut along race and gender lines, you can’t have a legitimate conversation about policy without considering these facts. Not to mention the facts as to why these women lost their jobs: because they had to care for children? Because they got sick? Because their workplaces closed? We can’t talk about policy without considering these question…Official unemployment numbers aren’t even officially correct according to the people who calculate them. Looking deeper with a broader gaze, not only can we consider the uncounted and disaggregated, but we consider the very system itself — the crater of capitalism that can not be remade for us, but must be removed by us.
The settler state is papering over the rot of its contradictions, while at the same time militarizing its police through accelerating amounts of Army equipment aid to law enforcement and training U.S. officers in the repressive tactics of the Israeli armed forces. The manufactured oppressor nation of “America” is preparing for an internal war against the colonized, who are being subjugated with increasing brutality as the system reacts to its own decay. The disproportionate amounts of police violence against Africans, which also applies to Natives, is bringing the contradictions to a head. At some point within our generation, we’ll likely see the rise of a pan-African and pan-indigenous liberation movement within U.S. borders whose participants will respond proportionately to the intensifying state violence against their communities, parallel to how Palestinians have responded.
Perhaps Washington’s one revolutionary neighbor Cuba will aid this movement, like how Iran is aiding the resistance to Israel. But however uphill the battle for national liberation on this continent will be, it will have the advantage of taking place at a moment where the capital which fuels the U.S. empire has weakened more than ever. Israel only still exists because the U.S. empire is still strong enough to prop up the Zionist state. The American settler state of the near future will have the comparable advantage of controlling a lot of land, but it won’t have this advantage of depending on a strong network of capital. Should Israeli apartheid be defeated by then, U.S. capital will be in an even weaker position due to the loss of a crucial geopolitical outpost, like how the weakening of U.S. power is leaving Israel more vulnerable to revolt.
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