Support for this model is cultivated by indoctrinating people to rigidly align with the Israeli government while viewing Palestinians as sub-human. Israeli education and media teaches its citizens to bind their national identities to the supposed need for apartheid against Palestine, with the Palestinian people being portrayed as terrorists and Israel being portrayed as completely blameless. This propaganda has worked so well that when an Israeli soldier was put under house arrest last year for murdering a wounded Palestinian, five thousand protested in a Tel Aviv against the very idea of convicting the soldier.
American society mirrors this. As the United States has done everything it can to excuse its ally’s war crimes, culminating this year in a failed bill to criminalizecriticism of Israel, both of these countries’ power systems have long deteriorated into despotism and cruelty. As illustrated in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, injustice and oppression are the same no matter who’s behind them, and in the U.S. it’s done through neoliberalism.
This extreme corporate ideology, teaching that profit should be advanced at all costs, has fully encroached into our political culture. Education, health care and law enforcement have been largely turned over to private racketeers, with the Trump administration working to complete this transformation. Social services have become inadequate as nearly all of Americans’ tax dollars go to funding the military, and the wealthy pay far lower effective tax rates than others. This dismantling of the welfare state has been justified through the monumental U.S. government debt, which was created mainly because half the population is now too poor to pay taxes.
For a time during the 90’s, the Federal Reserve deliberately kept unemployment above a certain level to protect the wealthy’s assets, and while that’s been stopped, our corporate trade deals continue to deprive millions of jobs. Wages for most people have stagnated or declined as the minimum wage has been kept to a slave level of $7.25 in most areas. Half the country is officially poor and around eighty percent are in debt, while five men now essentially own as much wealth as half the global population. A year-and-a-half ago this proportion was sixty-two people holding that much wealth, implicating a near future where one or two people have most of the world’s money.
The neoliberals enforce this the same way ethnic cleansing is enforced in Israel: through dehumanizing the victims, concealing the atrocities taking place, and luring people toward nationalism. As the assault on Palestinians is excused by insisting not to call it apartheid, the suffering of the lower classes is dismissed. Articles are put out stating, against undeniable accounts of legislation almost only getting passed when approved by corporate interests, that America is not an oligarchy. The massive wealth inequality is explained as a legitimate result of business, with those opposing it being decried as “leftists”-a derogatory term in Israel as well. The poor, much like the black and Hispanic populations who especially make up that lower class, are objects of contempt and blame, portrayed as apathetics that want unearned resources.
Like how the Israeli people’s religious faith and patriotism are exploited towards support for atrocity, Christianity and the flag encompass the cult that the corporate state surrounds itself in. Siding with this cult is implicitly encouraged through the safety it can bring one from persecution. The American surveillance state, with the help of the social media companies that collude with it, has lately taken to targetingdissenting activists and censoring alternative media. Since 2005, the intelligence agencies have been directly colluding with corporations through the Domestic Security Alliance Council, which allowed for Occupy Wall Street protestors to be spied on by the FBI in 2011.
In recent years the suppression of dissent has descended into torture, with Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange having been kept in days of solitary confinement as millions of Americans vilified them for exposing truths about the government. They’re not the only ones who’ve experienced this, with the protestors who are routinely arrested being put into a prison system that can send people to solitary confinement for completely trivial reasons.
This takeover is global. It extends to many American allies like Britain, where outlets like The Guardian and BBC obediently spew the war propaganda about Syria and Russia. Along with France, where president Macron says he’ll get involved in the Syria conflict if Assad again supposedly does a chemical attack. Israel is the most dangerous aggressor in this Syria-Russia conflict, with Netanyahu routinely attacking Syria. The U.S. has been surveilling not just its own citizens, but the Afghanistan population and many world leaders, to make sure its interests are protected. New U.S. regime change missions are being carried out in several nations, including Venezuela, North Korea, and, at the risk of nuclear war, Russia.
The bill to ban critique of Israel has failed, but the project to force the population into accepting these countries’ injustices is already staggering. Facebook is colludingwith the Israeli government to judge what should be censored. Corporate media and politicians have avoided mentioning Israel’s human rights abuses while portraying it as a vital ally. This imperial coordination between the governments of Israel, America, and other increasingly oligarchic nations portends to a global dictatorship. And the generations-long suffering and genocide among the underclasses of these nations represents the moral decay that this has all come about through.
Hope is with the younger generations, whose unparalleled access to information and enlightened upbringings make them overwhelmingly immune to the nationalism this order needs to function. And they are leading that revolt, represented in the social movements, growing online alternative media networks, and transformed local communities that they and the rest of the progressive supermajority advance.
But beneath this movement remains people like the repressed Palestinians-they can’t mobilize in these ways, because they’re restricted under severe law, they’re systematically impoverished, and they’ve experienced decades of tragedy. Though when asked how they carry on, the Palestinians have said that surviving is their form of defiance. It doesn’t sound like much, but choosing to survive in desperate situations is the most pure act of dissent-it affirms that surrender is never going to happen, which means revolution will always be possible.
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