@astronomer_zero You’re literally the best confluence whenever I take a trade and see we’re doing something similar I know it’s about to be a good day thank you 🙏
One of the arguments I find myself having on this platform...
And I bet a lot of you will probably run into this too...
Is the idea that Israel controls the US.
This is the idea that Zionists, Jewish billionaires, technocrats, AIPAC, Epstein, and lobbying groups make the US power structure operate in Israel's best interests.
This is incorrect. My argument is simple and threefold:
- The US doesn't need to be compelled by Israel to maintain its foreign policy of domination and regime change all over the rest of the world like Africa, Latin America, South America, Europe, etc. The Middle East is no different.
- US foreign policy towards Israel and the Middle East would be no different if there was no 'Israel lobby' or AIPAC.
- You don't need formal conspiracies when interests already converge.
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We all know that Joe Biden has stated that if Israel didn't exist, the US would invent one to serve its interests. If you haven't, you'll be able to find it pretty quick.
He didn't go beyond that for obvious reasons, but it should be no surprise that these interests refer to the military industrial complex and the neocons that politically/domestically represent it.
The military industrial complex or 'MIC'...
Became not only the main driver of policy for the US...
But it became the *only* driver of policy.
You may ask, "Well what does Israel have to do with the MIC?"
First, understand that anyone who moved against these neocons was on the chopping block for assassinations by the different factions in the US power structure, notably JFK.
It wasn't Israel that took him out. It was just the neocons.
After WW2, the US became *the* nuclear superpower with both the capability and motivation to launch endless wars abroad where it wasted no time trying to overthrow governments all over the globe.
That wasn't foreign policy dictated by Israel. That's nonsense. It came from the US ascending to #1 in the 20th century.
This resulted in the creation and maturing of the neocon political class in Washington, who became embedded in the foreign policy decision making.
Naturally, the US power structure converged on establishing its MIC on the basis of technological innovation, creating jobs, imperial conquest, USD reserve currency status, but most importantly of all:
Profit and shareholder returns.
The US operates like any other state does at the highest of levels. Morality and ethics take the back seat behind realpolitik and nation/regime survival.
However, you need to realize that the US doesn't conduct these wars for nationalistic interests. The US is a corporate oligarchy and serves as a tool for the private sector and Wall Street.
That's why I say the US has never 'lost' a war, because that's not what's happening.
The longer wars continued on, the longer the profiteering continued.
The outcome on the battlefield is entirely irrelevant whether it was Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or anywhere.
The 20+ years of US occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan meant 20+ years of weapons orders filling up backlogs. That meant 20+ years of subsidizing the bottom lines of defense manufacturers.
You see these wars and ask, "Why do these wars continue even though lives are lost, there's little strategic sense, and US reputation is hurt?"
Like the battlefield outcomes, the lives are irrelevant to the US and it could use brute force to counteract any hits to its reputation.
So where does Israel fit into all this?
The US became invested into Israel initially as an outpost to counteract the Soviet Union in the Middle East. But the Soviet Union is long gone and the unipolar moment is also gone.
But here's the deal today in the 21st century:
Israel is a US colony. Not a country. This becomes extremely obvious when you stand back, take a deep breath, and look at where US funding is most allocated.
Now I'll break it down a bit further into parts.
Like business owners, the US makes the decision to support Israel on a cost-benefit analysis. Traditionally, Israel has been very good for business interests in the US with there being at least three main functions:
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1. To transition it from a settler colony to the 51st state of the US. Effectively, the US locks in a regional hegemon by doing this successfully and it is the most important reason for support.
The idea of 'Greater Israel' doesn't mean from the Sinai to the Euphrates, contrary to popular opinion. It simply means get rid of the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza, then annex those territories, then have the US annex *all of this.*
This is the entire point of Zionism. Labeling the people of Israel as colonizers doesn't fly in the 21st century since it's political suicide to do so, but it's very easy to garner support for Israel on the basis of 'supporting Jews.'
While Zionism is an ideology, it is NOT supported for *ideological* reasons at the state level. The people who are ideologically motivated (like the settlers in the West Bank) are only supported for rational reasons since there are converging interests with the people who *aren't* ideologically motivated.
Everyone calls Israel a 'Jewish state' to keep bringing populations of people from the US and Europe to make it populated enough to become self-sufficient, making way for the US to annex Israel as the 51st state.
This is also the reason you have 700,000+ US dual-citizens and incentives like free healthcare. The US *needs* to attract people to keep coming to Israel and to make sure they stay put and don't leave when it becomes a state.
Most Israelis aren't Jews, but rather secular citizens who come mostly from European descent. They're atheists, or kuffar as they're known by Muslims. And it doesn't stop there either.
Israel's colonial status is so blatant that Mike Huckabee even calls Israel the 436th Congressional district of the US because of the 700,000+ US dual citizens there. Never mind the Europeans and Russians who are also dual citizens that are there too.
This is not an indication or evidence that Israel controls the US. This is quite literally how a colony functions at the most basic level. However, Israel has failed to achieve self-sufficiency. It's a complete failure in this regard.
A colony like Israel is meant to extract more wealth from the colonized (Arab Palestinians) and give it to the colonizing power (US) than what is invested into it. Again, it has failed to do this as it requires US funding just to stay afloat. Israel is basically just acting like an over-glorified security force, not wealth extractors.
The US wants to bring enough of the desired population to Israel:
Whereas Israel's job is quite literally to commit genocide, ethnic cleansing, and reprehensible acts of violence to make way for the same demographics as the US.
All of this is done under the veneer of Zionism, the idea of there being a state for Jews.
That's why it's 'Jewish' settlers in West Bank, not 'American' settlers even though many of them are American Jews. See what I mean?
This is also why you saw Israel carpet bomb Gaza for 2+ years and why it targets civilians. It has absolutely nothing to do with Hamas or the hostages beyond being the *excuse* to conduct this policy on behalf of the US.
Israel MUST shake off the label of being an apartheid state by simply getting rid of all the people that it marginalizes anyway.
And:
As a colonizing power, the US understands the best way to conduct this policy of genocide/displacement is to make sure it has no direct involvement and it can use Israel as its conduit.
And yes, I am stating that the US is the one that wants Gaza cleansed, even more than Israel does for the aforementioned reasons.
Netanyahu was in a race against time to pull this off because he's at least smart enough to realize that Israel's functions for the US would end unless he succeeded. Since he fell short, the Greater Israel project is being abandoned and it'll be a relic of the past.
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2. Israel is a policy instrument of the US power structure that's used to destabilize the region. This is pretty self-explanatory.
It's been tremendously useful to the neocons in Washington when they needed information on the ground in the Middle East, notably leading up to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Israel acting as a policy instrument of Washington means that the US has a conduit to conduct campaigns, strikes, and moves to destabilize countries in the region, making it ripe for conflict perpetuation and war spending on the MIC.
But it needs a pretext for this money laundering to take place; the pretext that Israel is unsafe in the region.
That's why Iran and the Axis have been so key to Israel's viability as a policy instrument. Should the Iranian regime be changed, the Axis be dismantled, and the region stabilized, then Israel's instrumentality is fully diminished and Zionism is no longer viable.
Had Israel been in control of the US this whole time, then it would've already ascended to Greater Israel at the expense of the US long ago. This has not happened.
Because it's the US in control, it reigns Israel in because the rest of the region (namely the gulf states) could leverage their relationships with the US in a way that's detrimental.
They've controlled the conduct and (more importantly) the *pace* in/at which Israel did this. That's where the phrase 'mowing the lawn' comes from. But every time Israel's borders expanded and the people of Gaza refused to give up, that meant more people needed to be displaced.
Had the October 7th attacks happened 20+ years ago, the people of Gaza would've been expelled into the Sinai peninsula in a matter of weeks *with* GCC backing. That's because at the time, the US and Israel would've had the excuse and political support to do this with the firepower to back it up. However, in 2023, it fell on Netanyahu to do the impossible.
The best way to look at it is this: Israel was always doing this, but time was running out seeing as US decline in the region accelerated. This means that the genocide was inevitable so long as Netanyahu was there with neocon backing.
In 2023, Israel was allowed by everyone to fully engage in the Gaza genocide because it also had to fight the very Axis that it was never supposed to fight in the first place. It was forcing Israel into an impossible situation to fight on multiple fronts.
That was enough to buy Gaza the time it needed until Trump and the force he represents came to the White House. It truly is a miracle that Gaza survived 2+ years of the most brutal, vicious kind of US-backed policy.
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3. The third most important reason for US support: Israel serves as a pretext to launder money from the taxpayer to the military industrial complex (MIC).
Using Israel as a pretext to move American taxpayer money from one place to another is not the same thing as Israel bringing in new money, but it's still in the interests of the factions who benefit.
Israel is required by law to spend at least 74% of all its grant money allocations it gets every year on US weapons purchases and...
Anything beyond the $3.8 billion it gets every year is just more money it has to spend on US manufacturers at that same 74%, although it's often closer to 90% as in the case with Gaza.
The remaining 26% is part of Israel's discretionary budget that it gets from the yearly weapons grants. Most of this goes into public sector benefits programs like healthcare and education.
You can also look at Israel as just an American air force base. This is obvious when you see endless F-35s, F-16s, F-15s, etc. It's all US manufacturers who are pursuing their bottom lines.
It's also an offshore R&D hub for the Pentagon and it gives US tech companies lower taxes than in the US. Again, this is an incentive for US companies to set up shop in Tel Aviv and bring jobs and people there too.
Whenever you see politicians kissing up to AIPAC or the west wall in Jerusalem, they're not kissing up to Israel. They're kissing up to Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, etc. and the private sector donors that fund AIPAC. Everything else is PR because it's easy to pretend that supporting Israel is for a good cause.
This benefits the US. Not Israel.
Organizations like AIPAC aren't labeled foreign agents because they're NOT foreign agents. They receive no money from Israel, but rather from economic actors with profit-driven interests in the colony.
It goes like this: taxes > treasury > military industrial complex > (leftover money from) MIC aid bills > AIPAC > campaigns/ads > politicians pledge support 'for' Israel. Rinse and repeat.
Zionist billionaires aren't Zionists just for fun nor are they ideologically driven. They're Zionists because their net worth is tied Israel's success as a colony/state.
Take someone like Miriam Adelson, widow of Sheldon Adelson and a very wealthy Zionist billionaire. She's been getting lots attention these last few years because of her desire of West Bank annexation. Or at least that's the headline.
She's a billionaire that owns and runs businesses that operate in Israel, notably the 'Israel Hayom' paper. She doesn't have time to be ideologically driven.
She's Trump's single biggest donor not because Trump is or isn't a Zionist, but because she wants guarantees that there are policies that protect her economic interests. The money that enters her bank accounts doesn't discriminate whether it's from Jews, Christians, or Muslims, whites/Arabs alike.
In the same vein, she couldn't care less about extracting as much wealth as possible from Jews or non-Jews alike.
Then you have the lobby groups that are superfluous private sector organizations who make money for the people running them. But for the US power structure, they can serve to obscure who benefits from the colony. They serve the purpose of plausible deniability.
Basically, if AIPAC didn't exist, then another lobby group would take its place as a money laundering scheme for the MIC or maybe there wouldn't be one at all. It's just that it's very easy to raise capital and collect taxpayer money to make and sell weapons when you 'support' Israel.
But paradoxically, If Israel controlled the US, there would be no lobby in the first place. They wouldn't be silly enough to create lobbies with their name in them for the sake of implication. Any time someone blames Israel for 'controlling' the US, that simply absolves the US of *its* policy which is intentional.
All of the donors, factions, and sectors of the US economy have converging interests on US support for Israel.
Washington has a conduit for policy and the goal of making Israel a state, the MIC can profit from tax dollars funneled through weapons grants, the western consumer-industrial-complex (CIC) operates in Israel, the individual donors who have rational, economic interests in Israel's existence are also served, on and on.
These factions don't need a formal conspiracy because they already know what's good for business. And that's been the main reason that the US supports Israel.
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For your convenience, save this post if you need to. It will become very useful to explain the history of things to come.