Thirteen UN Security Council (UNSC) members voted in favour of a draft resolution, put forward by the United Arab Emirates on Friday 8 December for an immediate cessation of hostilities in Gaza, while the United Kingdom abstained. The United States used its veto to invalidate the vote, despite the fact that UN Secretary General António Guterres, exceptionally, invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter to bring to the attention of the Security Council a ‘matter which, in his opinion, may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.’

Seeking a resolution under article 377A of the UN Charter in the UN general Assembly (UNGA) is possible when it is felt that the UNSC “because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primarily responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression.” This is being pursued today (12 December) as Egypt and Mauritania request a resumption of the 10^th UNGA emergency special session. It could overturn the US veto, however, in the instances in the past when it was invoked (Korean War, Suez Crisis), it required a military power to impose the decision. The vote if it passes, however, would add pressure on the United States to change its stance.

The decision by the Biden administration to continue the bombing of Gaza is, however, essentially a decision to continue to endorse the Zionist imperative of systematic killing of the population of Gaza to realise the settler colonial state of Israel, which doubles as an imperial imperative that seeks to acquire strategic land for the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEEC), or Biden Corridor, that aims to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, in what can only the ultimate expression of “disaster capitalism.”

This idea, which is central to Zionism, was clarified by Edward Said in the “Question of Palestine,” when he wrote (1980: 9):

‘… in 1822 there were no more than 24,000 Jews in Palestine, less than 10 percent of the whole, overwhelmingly Arab population. For the most part, it is true, these Arabs were usually described as uninteresting and undeveloped, but at least they were there. Yet almost always, because the land was Palestine and therefore controlled, in the Western mind, not by its present realities and inhabitants but by its glorious, portentous past and the seemingly limitless potential of its (possibly) just as glorious future, Palestine was seen as a place to be possessed anew and reconstructed. Alphonse de Lamartine is a perfect case in point. He visited in 1833 and produced a several-hundred-page narrative of his travels, Voyage en Orient. When he published the work, he affixed to it a Resumé politique in the form of a series of suggestions to the French government. Although in the Voyage proper he had detailed numerous encounters with Arab peasants and town dwellers in the Holy Land, the Resumé announced that the territory was not really a country (presumably its inhabitants not “real” citizens), and therefore a marvellous place for an imperial or colonial project to be undertaken by France. What Lamartine does is to cancel and transcend an actual reality – a group of resident Arabs – by means of a future wish – that the land be empty for development by a more deserving power. It is precisely this kind of thinking, almost to the letter, that informed the Zionist slogan formulated by Israel Zangwill for Palestine toward the end of the [nineteenth] century: a land without people, for a people without land.’

The first part of the article outlines the nature of this Gaza-Israel War and how it is playing out in the wider context of the struggle between the search by the United States to impose its hegemony on the Middle East and the opposition to this by the Axis of Resistance. The section concludes that despite the hideous civilian losses perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, the military and associated social costs imposed by Hamas’ military wing on Israel will lead to Gaza maintaining its independence after a cessation of hostilities.

However, this conclusion is not possible without taking into account the broader context. Unqualified massive support of the United States for Israel brought the Axis of Resistance in behind Hamas. However, in contrast to the United States, the actions of the Axis in Southern Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen have been calculated to impose a gradually escalating economic as well as military cost on Israel that stays short of full scale war. This has been discussed in an earlier article as the consequence of a ‘New Diplomacy’ in the wake of the Chinese brokered peace deal between Saudi-Arabia and Iran that has fundamentally recalibrated relationships in the Middle East.

We have come to the end of a geopolitical and geoeconomic cycle (‘the waning of the neoliberal order’) whose chickens have come home to roost in the period of the Biden administration. It is well understood by decision-makers amongst Axis leaders that the United States cannot afford a new full-scale war in the Middle East, or anywhere else. It is struggling to arm Israel, even as it faces inflation at home, rising interest rates in the context ballooning public debt, and multiple fronts of potential conflict, which it alone has been responsible for creating.

The second part below seeks to provide a historical account of how American and Israeli interests came to be conflated and how Zionism became an article of faith in US foreign policy circles. The main point is how long-in-the-making social forces (associated in fact with the events of neoliberal turn in the 1970s) caused the political changes that caused this outcome. What American history tells us is that politics in the United States is if anything mercurial, being subject to multiple internal forces. It is worth considering the fate of Zionism in America, if the final chicken that comes home to roost is a seriously shaken belief in Israel’s mythic military and technological capacity.

I. The Gazan War in the wider context

The information war: Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to turn the tables on Israeli protesters who are pushing to free Israeli hostages held by Hamas, by invoking a new ‘war of independence’ which would trade the lives of those hostages as a contribution to the cause. An unconstrained pursuit of the Gazan bombing campaign then become possible; one the United States is fully subscribed to. This support, however, has depended on credible goals to be established for the military campaign itself, which Netanyahu has failed to do. Despite the media censorship, we now have Israeli media accounts of Hamas’ continuing control of the situation in Gaza. Reports of hospital admissions, which are outside military censorship control, bring to the surface facts about the large numbers of Israeli army casualties and the horrific nature of their injuries. If there is a crisis within Gaza’s civilian population, there is also a crisis now in Israel’s military, information about which is slowly but surely seeping into the public sphere.

US Secretary of State Blinken, meanwhile, outlines the action he says he is taking to ‘limit civilian casualties,’ as if Israel is pursuing actual military goals that require some level of “collateral damage,” rather than using the occasion to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Who is kidding who?

The fact that, at the very same time, arms control expert Josh Paul resigns from the State Department is clear commentary on Blinken’s lies. The department, according to Paul, is no longer applying normal professional standards to the arms vetting process. United States records show how truly vast its commitment is to Israel’s “security.” With the current extreme humanitarian situation, however, red flags would normally have been raised. Yet Paul tells us that never before has he experienced this kind pressure to expedite weapons deliveries to Israel.

Blinken is trying to quell anger amongst his own staff, and among White House interns, all of whom are deeply concerned if not angry about Biden administration policy on Gaza. Even members of multiple Jewish organisations complain about the policy. None of this is important enough to solicit more than empty statements.

Blinken’s hypocrisy is plain from his reaction to media coverage of the atrocities as he attacks Al-Jazeera Arabic’s full-on coverage of the events. Not that Al-Jazeera paid any attention (on this occasion). It has credibility maintain, in the face of competition from multiple Arabic satellite TV channels.

Israel, meanwhile, deals with the problem of the coverage of Arabic TV channels by targeting their journalists and reporters, 75 of whom have been killed during this current conflict. These have clearly been targeted killings. Al-Mayadeen correspondents Farah Omar and Rabi‘ Me‘mari were killed by Israeli forces in a clearly intentional “double tap” hit. The unprecedented quantity and quality of video footage backing the reporting on Israeli atrocities will be central to ending this conflict. A group of charities have filed a legal suit personally against Biden and his aides for aiding and abetting genocide. This is backed-up with mountains of evidence from this reporting.

Never before has the alignment of a US administration with Israeli action so clear. Even Henry Kissinger in his time as Secretary of State stopped the weapons air bridge to Israel that he organised (Operation Nickel Grass) to support Israel during the 1973 war when Israel didn’t comply with his demands. Never before has the reporting brought this relationship so sharply into focus.

Blinken’s role: Blinken stands at the very centre of this war. In his view, any action by Israel is justifiable. ‘The 7 October Al-Aqsa Flood attack was,’ he said upon his arrival after the attack, ‘the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.’ The policy to destroy Hamas, which is being used to ethnically cleanse Gaza is justified by the supposed “terrorist atrocities” carried out on 7 October. Once again the active reporting of the situation is important. It has shown how, in fact, those atrocities blamed on Hamas were either invented or the fault directly of the Israeli military.

Calling 7 October a terrorist action, furthermore, implies a denial that it was an Israeli military defeat at the hands of the resistance. This is deliberate. Refusing to talk about context also implicitly denies that Palestinians are rational sentient beings who act from reasons. As Josh Paul says:

‘Before we talk about the 7^th of October, I think it is important to talk about the 6^th of October. On the 6^th of October a charity called Defence of Children International – Palestine [the charity leading the suit against Biden] announced that it had been the deadliest year so far for children in the West Bank, over 42 at that point had been killed, of course it is way more now. That same day settlers rioted in the town of Hawara shotting a 19 year old [Palestinian] killing him in the chest. While his funeral was going on an Israeli minister went to Hawara and said we needed to close down the Palestinian shops in the town and build a highway around it for settlers. That same day the Washington Post reported that Israel was cutting off the supply of donkeys to Gaza and donkeys were important because fuel is in insufficient supply and donkeys have become one of the main methods of moving supplies around. So before we talk about the 7^th of October, we need to talk about the 6^th of October.’

None of this is important for Blinken. He is Zionist royalty. His grandfather Maurice Blinken was lawyer who founded the Palestine Foundation in 1946 and funded a study undertaken by several economists to prove the British wrong about their assessment that a Jewish state in Palestine couldn’t be self-sufficient. The study was instrumental in having the United States recognise Israel. Blinken is committed to the achievement of Zionist goals at any cost.

Given that it is not entirely clear the extent to which Biden is compos mentis, Blinken is in a crucially influential position. The situation now is not unlike that in 1973 when Kissinger had carte blanche to organise Operation Nickel Grass, while Nixon sat at home brooding over his possible impeachment, refusing to come to the office.

The wider war and the blindness of Zionism: Blinken now (as of 12th December) circles back to the same place that he was in at the start of his shuttle diplomacy in the wake of the 7 October events. His demands then of Arab leaders that they accept Israel’s plans to relocate Gazans to Sinai (and other Arab countries) were rebuffed in no uncertain terms. In summit after summit of Arab and Islamic countries Israel’s onslaught on Gaza was condemned as were Israel ethnic cleansing plans.

Yet Blinken is back again demanding that Egypt prepares for refugees from Gaza that he says will be the inevitable result of the continuous bombing. As he engineers thus the kind of massive disorder that could force relocation, Egypt warns of a “severing of relations” with Israel. But Blinken is blind to the fact that the Palestinians themselves won’t move. Besides, the displaced population is roughly equal in size to that of Paris, Hamburg, or Houston. It is inconceivable that it can be moved without months if not years of logistical preparations. That the fragile political situation in Egypt, which United States policy helped create in the first place, might collapse as a result of such precipitous action and even cause revolution, does not seem to occur to Blinken.

In response to the 8 December United States veto at the UNSC – effectively a decision supporting “genocide” as the brief against Biden would claim – Yemen decided to widen its sanctions on Israel-bound shipping in the Arabian and the Red Seas. Blinken appealed to Saudi Arabia to intervene, only to find the desert kingdom balking at the prospect of intervening once again in its southern neighbour. As America’s leading diplomat, is seems extraordinary that he chooses to ignore the “New Diplomacy” that merged from the Saudi-Iran peace deal of last March. *Since then (20 December) both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have refused to be dragged into the American maritme coalition against Yemen*. [*/* sentence added 13 December 2023]

Besides, direct threats aimed at Yemen seemingly are not working. Whether it is a realisation of the weakened position of the United States, or the fact that, as the Houthis say, they would relish the thought of a direct confrontation the United States is not clear. What is clear is that the Houthis understand that full scale conflict in the Read Sea would, this time, drive not just the Israeli, but the world economy into severe recession. The Yemeni decision to escalate, it is important to note, came on the tail of Iranian PM Ibrahim Raisi’s unusually long meeting with Putin in Moscow, suggesting coordination on the matter with Iran and Iran in turn with Russia.

The Axis of Resistance led by Iran is making its policy decisions within the new context provided by its peace deal with Saudi Arabia and the new diplomatic environment this has led to. This context is important for Saudi Arabia and the UAE as noted above. Both Gulf states will undoubtedly maintain their close relations with the United States in the future, but this doesn’t any longer imply enmity with the members of the Axis. The UAE has supported Israeli action against Hamas in the past in view of its economic interests. But for a régime that likes to play both ends against the middle, the new reality imposed by Hamas’ action is more than likely to make the UAE hedge its bets. Saudi Arabia, which hasn’t “normalised” with Israel yet, is likely to exact a much higher price for doing so after the latest developments, than it was planning to do. That will likely include a demand for the settlement of the Palestinian question.

Is this counting Hamas’ chickens? It is generally believed that time is on Israel’s side and not on the side of the Gazans. But a close analysis of the trap set by the Axis for Israel tells a different story. Nothing can happen in the next 65 days that hasn’t already happened in the last 65 days (since 7 October). The Qassam Brigades, Saraya el-Quds and Islamic Jihad are indefeasible in their current positions. Plans to flood the tunnels don’t take account of the extent of the tunnel system, nor of the fact that they are made up of multiple overlapping systems, nor of the fact that the pumps would be as much of a target as any tank or armoured personnel carriers, some 500 units of which, it would appear, have been destroyed so far. That is a greater number than in many set piece WWII tank battles. Israeli plans to continue to search and destroy tunnels, furthermore, doesn’t take into account the fact that the Israeli air force has provided a whole new level of defensive positions for the Gazan resistance above ground amongst the buildings that have been destroyed.

Rather than Israeli casualties dropping off in recent days, they are mounting. The denial that continues to dominate the Israeli military’s approach to its predicament works in Gaza’s favour as IDF incursions continue that expose it to even more casualties. As time passes and reality sets in as to the sheer scale of the military defeat Israel’s forces have suffered, the political backlash will be brutal. All this is not at all to minimise the terrible suffering of the civilians of Gaza. This, however, was inevitable. What the action of 7 October did was to accelarate a process that was happening in slow motion and lay bare the deceit.

But it is the mounting economic costs for Israel that the Axis is mostly focusing on. The large numbers of people leaving the country, and businesses either closing or thinking about the future is apparent. Already, the right wing “judicial” shift in Israel had caused a serious setback for the tech economy. Now the war and its brutal conduct is reinforcing the downward trend. Larger companies take time to make decisions, but when decisions are made they tend to be irreversible. The longer the war lasts the more decisions will be made to leave.

It has also become clear how important Yemen and Hezbollah are to Israel’s future. If Israel doesn’t have a working peace deal with these two actors, the risks of doing business in Israel will be too high. Yemen is showing its preparedness to disrupt supplies, while Hezbollah has displayed a new level of precision military capability that poses a serious threat. Coming to terms with these two actors requires coming to terms with the Palestinians. While Blinken is hell bent on emptying Gaza, he and Netanyahu are actually emptying Israel.

The low intensity attritive approach of the Axis to the war is highly destructive for Israel and time is on its side. But above all, it will be the ideology that made Israel that will suffer the biggest reversal. There is no doubt that a major military defeat for Israel is in the making. The ultimate irony is that for an atavistic concept like Zionism, trial by combat will have imposed its final judgement. No longer will Israelis engender the fear in their region that in the past made their services invaluable to insecure Arab tyrants and that made establishing “normal” relations with local populations and neighbours unnecessary.

We are also watching the relationship between the United States and Israel unfold in period of intense change.

II. The Christian Right and the Zionist core  of American conservatism

There has come to be an identification between the interests of the United States and Israel in policy circles, one that if denied is routinely met with accusations of anti-Semitism. This applies to any criticism of the Likud Party and policy, of the Netanyahu régime and its destructive policy toward the Palestinians.

While there is a clear prehistory of relations between the Zionist project and different states such as the United Kingdom, the United States and France, history as such, as far as the United States is concerned, actually starts in 1967 with the Six-Day War, that the Arabs call the “Naksa.” This has a separate political and social causes which would weave Zionism into the fabric of American conservatism.

The Europeans, the UK, France and Germany in particular would ultimately fall into line with the imperial American Zionist (so-called “Atlanticist”) project between 1999 and 2004 as NATO expanded into the political vacuum left by the fall of the Soviet Union. Across this new empire, especially in France, criticism of Israel became tantamount to disrespect for the Holocaust or the “Shoah,” even as Islam and the Arabs were consecrated as the enemy of civilisation in books like the 2004 An End to Evil: How to Win the War Against Terror written by neoconservative US presidential advisers David Frum and Bernard Lewis.

Before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel was the darling of liberal Europe. Members of the left would relish spending their holidays working on a kibbutz. The war turned the tables as the left and many European moderates took up the Palestinian cause, whereas Israel counted, for the first time, on the almost unconditional support of the United States.

President Lyndon Johnson decided at the time, against the views of advisers such as Dean Rusk and Walt Rostow, that the United States had to stand by Israel to thwart Soviet designs on the Middle East. This is why the United States turned a blind eye to Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty and began supplying it with fighter jets in 1968. This had as yet little to do with Zionist lobbies such as AIPAC, which would only develop as a product of social change in America.   

What changed everything was the rise of the Christian Right in the wake of the epochal demographic shift that was taking place in America as industries and their blue collar communities in the northeastern states declined, and as the sprawl of suburbs of the southwestern states began to offer white collar job positions in the electronics and service industries.

This demographic change was the consequence of the indulgent trade policies of US foreign policy élites who were intent on the execution of a “Grand Plan” for a global American commercial empire. An earlier article on the Globalshiffft website describes how their policies had allowed the competitiveness of mainstay US industries to erode in the face of competition from Japanese and German imports. US corporations meanwhile responded to this situation by increasingly shifting production abroad and disinvesting at home.

But even as the wheels of economic decline were beginning to turn, the 1960s saw the golden age of the first American empire, before the neoliberal turn, when northeastern communities thrived in their diverse white ethnic pockets* and when labour unions backed the empire’s war in Vietnam, against the left, for the jobs that it provided. This was the America depicted in Michael Cimino’s film, The Deer Hunter (Robert de Niro as Michael Vronsky returning home from Vietnam below).

The inexplicably brutal war against a peasant people and the eventual defeat of the first empire by the  Vietnamese destroyed the confidence of American communities that had built vast industries, their identity, and a new country, out of the rubble of the Great Depression, on the back of a “just war” against Hitler. The terrible loss of all of this in the face of the 1960s hippy, braless, drug-taking left wing counter-culture that rejected everything about the traditional world, led to the rise of the Christian Right, at the social level, and to the neoconservatism that would in turn emerge from that, at the political level.

The history of the relationship between these two aspects of the 1960s conservative shift began with the nomination of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican Party Convention. This convention was unusual because it was held in a western state, in Daly City in California. Goldwater ran on an “anti-state” ticket that favoured limited government and a conservative philosophy holding that ‘equality undercuts liberty.’ A new movement rose out of these ideas calling for challenging the New Deal and purging the country of “Liberals” (with a capital L, i.e. progressives), to create a strict orthodoxy of Christianity and individualism.

Goldwater would go on to be crushed by Democratic Party nominee Lyndon Johnson in the presidential election. But the 1964 convention nevertheless established the so-called “movement conservatives” who later revolutionised the Republican Party. Their anti-establishment stance was made clear at the convention when, to the outrage of convention delegates, they heckled Nelson Rockefeller. They also made their racism clear when they insulted black attendees, one of whom saw his jacket deliberately burned with a cigarette.

The loss to Johnson, the New Deal candidate par excellence, led to conservatives seeking political allies amongst the churches of the Religious Right to provide them with millions of foot soldiers for grass-roots organizing and to go to the polls. At the top of their list was Jerry Falwell who had a nationally syndicated radio and television ministry, The Old-Time Gospel Hour. However, not until 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on abortion rights in Roe v. Wade, did Falwell change his stubborn view that politics and religion didn’t mix.

The religious right had coalesced, in its early days, as a movement around the debate launched by the Scopes Trial in 1925, in Tennessee. Their creationist opposition to the teaching of Darwinian evolution in schools made them into a national butt of ridicule after the trial. This turned them into an introverted culture. Nevertheless, the preachers, as televangelists, gained millions of followers with their opposition to the secular scientific culture.

The epochal northeast to southwest demographic shift made the Christian Right a natural ally of the right wing libertarianism of the likes of Goldwater. The sharply contrasting economic environment migrants from the northeast encountered when they came west set the context for thus. The crumbling traditional communities of the northeast had been built around employment provided by private industries. In contrast, the soulless suburbs of the southwest were built around the state military-scientific-industrial complex that had grown out of WWII. This was an impersonal science-based bureaucracy whose buildings dominated the landscape. The seminal demographic shift made the Los Angeles area, as opposed to Detroit, the country’s largest industrial centre. Rudderless new arrivals would only find solace in the churches of televangelist Christian preachers like Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, Billy Graham, and Jerry Falwell.

As the same time, these new arrivals shaped and consolidated new identities as “Westerners” by consuming a vast amount of cowboy movies that mythologised settlers as rugged individuals fighting for the future of their families against the evil actions of an alien dark- skinned race. Without the cowboy movie, Hollywood would never have made enough money to become the cultural factory of America that it once was. The irony would always be that the settling of the West in the nineteenth century had always been a state-led operation.

Nevertheless, the myth thrived. Goldwater wore the Stetson (the cowboy hat) as a symbol of the importance of the cowboy image to movement conservatives. So would Ronald Reagan: it defined his persona. Reagan, with his two-term presidency between 1980 and 1989 represented the ultimate victory of movement conservatives over both the establishment in the Republican Party and over the New Deal cohorts in the Democratic Party seeking to address the plight of blacks by desegregating communities and workplaces. White workers in cowboy-mode would fight this by voting Republican. In fact, they were led in this self-destructive path by the racist leader of the AFL-CIO union body, George Meany, despite the fact that it would be Republican policy to dismantle trade unions and social security in the name of rugged individualism.

Televangelists offered these newfangled individuals a structure of thought with which to face the complex secular-scientific world they lived in, by adopting dispensational premillennialism as an ideological framework. This type of thought was a nineteenth century creation reacting against the grand totalising theories about the society and the world such as civilizational history, Social Darwinism, and Marxist historical materialism. It employed outstanding millenarian dreams about Jerusalem and associated Zionist stories, reworking them into a systematic metanarrative that would be critical of all secular theory. Dispensationalism was developed as a stage theory of history in which God acts differently towards creation in the course of different so-called “dispensations.”

University theological departments in the nineteenth century had subjected the Bible to critical analysis, most famously in the case of the group Young Hegelians that included David Strauss and Karl Marx. But where modern biblical critics submitted the Bible to history, finding the Bible wanting, dispensationalist preachers submitted history to the Bible and found history wanting. Dispensationalism read history backwards, starting with an “End Times” and the second coming of Christ, which required according, to Zionist lore, a return of all Jews to Palestine, and a period of intense hardship, persecution, disaster, famine, war (Armageddon), pain, and suffering (the “Tribulation”).

The main recruiting tool used to attract adherents to this belief system was the “rapture.” This was the recipe that televangelists offered their flocks to allow them individually to avoid the terrors of the Tribulation. The “rapture” was the going to heaven guaranteed only by firm belief in the dispensationalist narrative being presented. This was a variation on the primary Protestant principle of sola fide: that it could be only through simple faith in God and not through Church teachings that one reached heaven.

This device had been used during the Reformation to invalidate the Catholic Church’s teachings. Under this irrational belief system, no “church,” Catholic or otherwise, could have any role to play in directing individuals to do “good works,” thereby assuring their path to heaven. Predestined eschatological patterns would be deciphered from the Bible, which then fulfilled the role of a Ouija board that emitted “signs” of God’s intentions, that only be detectable by the dispensationalist preachers. This fulfilled the other main Protestant principle of sola scriptura, namely that only the Bible’s actual text could be the source of truth.

The revolution that Jerry Falwell caused after he became convinced that Christians had to shed their passivity and engage politically, cannot be underestimated. The introverted nature of evangelical Christianity before this was, as noted above, reinforced by the reaction of its adherents to the Scopes Trial, but was also a naturally intrinsic characteristic of a belief system rooted in notions of predestiny. Falwell became the spokesman for the Christian Right, through Moral Majority. This movement piggybacked on existing dispensational premillennialist churches, and redirected dispensationalism from its rationale for separation from the world, into a rhetoric of urgent engagement with the world.

Not until New Right activists recruited Falwell to run Moral Majority would they be successful in drawing evangelicals into the political sphere and guarantee the Republican revolution. The Moral Majority would back trade union disenfranchisement and the attack on the welfare state in exchange for the New Right’s protection of the literal demands of the Bible, especially that of the protection of Israel as the stage upon which God’s plan in this world was supposed to unfold.

Biblical Literalism never became a problem for the wayward politicians of the New Right as it became first and foremost a question of identity rather than a clear set of beliefs. The obvious difficulty with following the directives of the Bible, indeed the blatant violation of its mandates on matter of sex, drink and drugs never would disqualify wayward politicians from running for office, as long as they were seen as being “in a conversation with God.” The political manipulation of evangelicals would always take the form of religious posturing and not theological dogmatism. Thus political leaders never had to link their policy ideas to scripture as such. What they needed to do was to communicate successfully that they based their decisions on “heart-felt prayer.”

This brings the discussion round to the matter of the fundamental importance of rhetoric in American political culture. Just as televangelists employed rhetoric to disarm the hold of the secular scientific world view on the modern mind, so would conservative politicians who would seek to pull apart the concepts of the New Deal or the Great Society about collective responsibility, whether it be about welfare or about the environment, with mythical ideas about the free market.

The fundamental disruption of rationality in American conservative political discourse in fact comes down to what French philosopher Pierre Duhem discovered when he saw that falsifying any theory requires a whole set of circumstantial assumptions. An ideological stance that seeks to contradict any scientific finding, would always find a way to defend a religious doctrine by adjusting arguments around those circumstances. This requires rhetorical capacity, which becomes the special province of the politician. When applied it gives the impression of an anarchic, disruptive and irrational discourse.

The Six-Day War and the rise of neoconservatism: Even as the Christian Right was preparing through Falwell’s intervention to enter the sphere of politics, and the Johnson administration decided on its Cold War political alliance with Israel, dispensationalist preachers used their rhetorical powers to claim that the reunification of Jerusalem that came with the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War in 1967 was the sign of a new “dispensation,” (or a new era).

Falwell’s Moral Majority that brought the Republicans to power under Reagan also, therefore, brought Christian Zionism to maturity as the core doctrine of a new nationalism that was to regenerate an America riddled with self-doubt over its failure in Vietnam.

Ironically, the lightning rod for this repositioning of United States foreign policy was Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Senator in the Democratic Party, who opposed the views of his peers in his party to support the war in Vietnam. This was perhaps because of his closeness to military contractors, which earned him the name of the “Senator from Boeing.” Perhaps it was from conviction, although conviction is not usually the trait of a politician. Jackson, who now urged support for Israel, believed in the use of force in foreign policy ‘to confront evil.’ This became an article of faith for his aides, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Charles Horner, and Douglas Feith who would come to form the core of the so-called “neoconservative” bloc that left the Democratic Party to join the Reagan administration in 1981. Many neoconservatives were Jewish figures whose adherence to the importance of Zionism and to Israel replaced their loss of faith in their own religion.

Most important was the rise of the Israel lobby (primarily the America Israel Public Affairs Committee – AIPAC) from the populist foundation that the Christian Right now provided. Its financial and organisational might would guarantee the longevity of the neoconservatives and their repeated return to positions of influence, helped by a fraternal support for each other based on strong co-identification. This would turn them into permanent features of the political scene, in administration after administration, which in the words of Tucker Carlson characterised them as ‘bureaucratic tapeworms.’ This would put them in a position, according to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, to influence crucial decisions that ultimately had little to do with America’s national interest.

But given that there has come to be an identification between the interests of the United States and Israel in policy circles as a matter of faith, one that if denied is routinely met with accusations of anti-Semitism, this is presumably moot. In their book, Mearsheimer and Walt argue that neoconservatives were instrumental in putting pressure on the CIA to find evidence, at whatever the cost, to support the case for war in Iraq, and in helping to prepare Colin Powell’s now completely discredited briefing to the UNSC about weapons of mass destruction. This was a prime example of the conflation of American foreign policy and Israeli interests. It was one, furthermore, that was fraudulent and caused the collapse of American prestige and therefore its soft power. One could go further and argue that wasting so much treasure to no end, has also led to the erosion of America’s hard power.

Current events in Gaza have taken the same turn, except on a greater scale. This is because it follows the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the defeat of NATO in Ukraine. The combination of these prior events, a military defeat at the hands of the Palestinian resistance, Hamas, and the pursuit of mass murder of civilians under the unprecedented scrutiny of the media, means the United States is facing a collapse in its international power on a scale greater than the defeat in Vietnam.

This along with its unresolved financial problems will take it into an era of reassessment the outcome of which for this Mercurial Empire is uncertain. What is certain is that, with the beginning of reshoring in the Trump and Biden administrations, however badly the policies are executed, a process is underway that will induce social changes on the same scale as those that the country faced in the 1960s and 1970s. The unprecedented tensions in the domestic American political scene are a precursor to this. The context, meanwhile, is one of a much more interconnected world, one in which even small communities like the Gazans will have an outsize impact.

P.S. (13 December)

(1) The resolution A/ES – 10/ L.27 under article 377A of the UN Charter in the UNGA’s  78^th session (2023-24) presented by Egypt and Mauritania condemning the failure of the UNSC to effect a ceasefire in Gaza passed with 153 votes. There were 10 votes against: Austria, Czech Republic, Guatemala, Israel, Liberia, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay and the United States. And 23 countries abstained: Argentina, Bulgaria, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Malawi, Marshall Islands, Netherlands, Palau, Panama, Romania, Slovakia, South Sudan, Togo, Tonga, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay.

Notes: We see here the effect of the election of Javier Milei in Argentina’s change of stance. France is the only member of the NATO hard line European quartet to vote for the resolution (Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom abstained). Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Serbia were the only East European countries to vote for the resolution.

(2) Biden suddenly attacks Netanyahu. That is because Jake Sullivan is telling him he is likely not going to get re-elected.

The Arabs in America staddle two crucial swing states Michigan and Wisconsin, although they will only represent a fraction of the people of conscience who will refuse to vote for Biden.

(3) The only thing that is holding up a cease fire is the inability of the Israeli military to claim some sort of face saving “victory” which isn’t going to be shot down by the media. Meanwhile a catastrophic humanitarian situation is developing not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, as a result of continuing mass murder that is occurring on a scale that will have major and unpredictable consequences internationally.

P.P.S. (4 January 2024)

On Zionism’s future “eclipse” see Harvard Caps Harris Poll 12-13 December 2023. In regard to 18-24 year olds 60% think that ‘the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified.’ 50% are in favour of Hamas in answer to the question ‘In this conflict do you support more Israel or more Hamas?’ 51% argue ‘For Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.’

Lead picture: NASA [Ref: Prt 12 Post-Script 18; info@globalshiffft.com; © 2023]