“I just found out who really owns America!” The breathless young man on my TikTok feed could barely sit still in his excitement. His revelation was that Israel, through its lobbying operation, AIPAC, is the invisible puppet master of the US political system. It’s true that AIPAC’s political contributions, threats, media infiltration and propaganda campaigns have provided valuable leverage to the Israeli elite. Ruling power in the United States is actually located in an obscenely wealthy, white, mostly hereditary and mainly Protestant, corporate class. Lobbying enterprises, whether for Israel, oil, tobacco or armaments, play particular roles in the self-regulation of the system. There’s a parallel with the role of police ‘unions.’ People get fooled into seeing them as a main obstacle to police reform. In fact they are just the instrument with which the police system protects itself from the threat of change. Clauses that shield cops from accountability, hide data and protect false testimony, are placed in union contracts where police chiefs and politicians can claim they’re out of reach.
If we rewind several centuries of history we see how European monarchies found it convenient to set their Jewish communities up as scapegoats for when things turned sour. Blocked from owning land, many Jews were tracked into work as government functionaries, tax collectors, landlords and shopkeepers.They were the people who collected the money and posted the regulations. They were the people against whom the authorities (who actually pocketed the money) could whip popular resentment into pogroms and come out unscathed. The places where Jews were allowed to own farms were areas subject to foreign invasions. My forebears worked farmland in Ukraine, planted there as a buffer against the Ottoman Empire.
The establishment of Israel was an extension of this arrangement. The Zionists would implement imperialism’s agenda in their strategic, oil-rich region. As Senator Joe Biden famously declared in 1986, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.” Transplanted European Jews, traumatized by the Nazi genocide, would become targets for the resulting anger and would flock to the Israeli elite for protection. It provided the colonial powers a militarized surrogate in the third world while letting them wash their hands of Jewish refugees. In exchange, the west would support the Zionists’ dream of a racially pure nation-state – whatever it took.
Israel’s services to its sponsors are manifold: undermining Arab nationalism, developing surveillance, military and repressive technologies and models of policing, channeling weapons to dictatorships and intervening in US politics against progressive candidates and initiatives. The western powers have no real interest in Israel’s genocide against Palestine. But they don’t have a problem with it. They’re just holding up their side of the bargain by providing the weapons and support that make it possible.
So, no, my TikToker friend, you have not discovered who runs the US. You’ve stumbled onto a longstanding arrangement. One that protects the corporate world order while shielding those who really hold the levers of power.
(Note: This commentary, like some of the others on this blog, was first published in my monthly e-newsletter. You can sign up to receive it at https://www.rlmartstudio.com/)
Categories: history, Justice, Politics, Uncategorized
Ricardo Levins Morales
Ricardo Levins Morales Art Studio 