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What Does the US’ Increasing Emulation of Israel Augur for the Country’s Future?

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The wars always come home. The early days of the never-ending ‘War on Terror’ under Bush the Younger built the foundation of the police state and institutionalized torture and illegal aggression. The Obama years gave bipartisan blessing to this monstrous architecture. And the Trump and Biden years are doing the interior decorating with heavy input from neo-Nazis and Zionists.

From where will the teardowns come? On the issues of support for genocide and aggression abroad and the police state at home there is near-universal support across the two-party system despite the heavy public opposition. And should Israel restart its war with Iran tomorrow and Tehran be successful in fulfilling Bob Vylan’s viral Glastonbury chant, Zionism would still be with us as Israel is only the tip of fascist spear.

And unwavering US support for Israeli policies across the board have helped usher in an America of heirarchalism and eugenics. The Trump administration, in its many desperate attempts to rebuild American supremacy, has first and foremost overseen the wedding of Silicon Valley and Zionism.  

Israel helped show the techno-fascists and other US oligarchs a world of possibilities—one they are eager to duplicate everywhere. It’s what Bibi calls “authoritarian capitalism”, i.e., fascism. In both Israel and the US  there are obvious religious, racial, and I.Q. branding to this  ideology that is above all about the embrace of economic plunder and the idea that those who are more ruthless, with the bigger guns and better tech should simply take what they want by any means necessary.

It’s a logical destination following decades of neoliberalism, it interlocks neatly with tech hierarchicalism, and while America is exceptional in its own brand of Zionism (some Christian Zionists might support Israeli violence while simultaneously being anti-Semitic, for example), at this point it’s getting difficult to tell the two sides apart, which leads to strange times in MAGA world:

Our current fascist American moment finds the tech loons wed to the police state, waging a class war behind a government that espouses fake economic populism mixed with real social rhetoric combined with racism. But of course if one correctly saw MAGA for its true intentions—to make American oligarchs great(er) again—the embrace of Zionism makes a lot more sense.

While the early war on terror years brought home the hardware:

The genocide in Gaza is bringing home the Zionist ideology. And so it’s probably a good time to start comparing the US path to one already blazed by the Zionists. As Obama said, “we don’t look backwards, we look forward.” Let’s.

Goodbye Freedom of Speech and the Press

While those in the US protesting Israel’s genocide are now deemed terrorists and anti-semitic and shut down — or worse — this is nothing new in Israel, which has long had little in the way of freedom of the press, speech or peaceful assembly (and that’s for Jewish Israelis).

Israeli news media must routinely submit their work to censors for approval prior to publication. Increasingly, Israeli-affiliated censors play a role in what Americans can or cannot say. As just one example, the Department of Homeland Security used an anonymous pro-Israel site to target activists for deportation. 

These rights in the US were already on life support due to a corrupted mainstream media, tech giants, and previous crackdowns on protest, but what we’re seeing now is still new territory. The threat of expulsion. The kidnappings by masked agents. De-platforming and de-banking.

It’s important to note that these powers will not be reserved solely for those who oppose genocide, those who are immigrants, and others caught with brown skin. They will eventually be for everyone, including workers, protestors, and anyone that stands in the way of Western oligarchic plunder at home and abroad.

Gaza as a rights-free open air prison, source of cheap labor, and laboratory for population control and murderous technology, offers a glimpse into the future for the US homeland for anyone on the wrong side of the hierarchical forces reorganizing our societies.

They are openly telling us this is only the beginning:

Zionists—in Israel and the US— believe tech population control will allow them to surveill, silence, disappear, or kill all opposition.

Expanded Police State

While Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” made cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, it also marked a new stage in the military-technology complex drawing on Israel as a model.

While the military-tech complex has decades of history, what is new is how it’s being increasingly turned on the population inside the US. While the Trump administration (and Biden before it) is wed to the Zionists at the highest levels, it extends on down the state food chain as scenes at university protests remind us:

Israel tests out surveillance, population control, and military technology on the captive population. It has been reported that the Israeli Defense Forces’ use of artificial intelligence has aided in the current brutal war against Palestinians. Israel testing out new technologies to surveil and kill Palestinians is unfortunately nothing new, as described by Antony Loewenstein in his book, “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World.”

Israel benefits from having a captive population on whom to constantly test its weapons and surveillance technology. We see this burgeoning system in the US as Americans are increasingly surveilled using the very same technologies that Israel uses on Palestinians and Silicon Valley tech billionaires dream of a world where democracy is stamped out. There’s also the embrace of AI and algorithmic decision-making at all levels of government, and  items like Anduril taking over autonomous border surveillance, social media policing, Waymo cars spying on protestors, rounding up people based on algorithms and throwing them in illegal hellholes:

Sean Maguire, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital behemoth Sequoia Capital, recently created a mini-controversy with his labeling of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani as an “Islamist.” Some tech figures joined in condemning the comments; others backed Maguire. But largely omitted from the coverage is the real scandal: that Sequoia returned to Israel last year and that its dozens of investments there are centered around defense tech and cybersecurity and are oftentimes headed by veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces Unit 8200—the central collection unit of the intelligence corps— and the Israel Air Force’s Shaldag Unit, which specializes in clandestine operations and military intelligence. This type of Israeli tech is frequently used and tested in an ongoing genocide and other acts of illegal aggression. Sequoia, like much of the big money in Silicon Valley, has long supported the Israeli apartheid regime where its products can be tested, and they are of course betting that these technologies developed in blood can be brought to scale in the U.S. and around the world.

Slave Labor 

The economic components that have served as the dehumanizing foundation to Israel’s current genocide are often overlooked, but let’s examine the many similarities with working Americans and migrant laborers who are treated as disposable in the US.

The occupation of Palestine was always an exploitative endeavor. That plan was summarized by Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defense minister during the June 1967 war, which resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, describing the territories as:

“…a supplementary market for Israeli goods and services on the one hand, and a source of factors of production, especially unskilled labor, for the Israeli economy on the other.”

Prior to the genocide there were more than 200,000 Palestinian laborers, including those without permits, who work inside Israel and the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu’s government has resolved to replace them with other laborers who can be exploited – a massive proposed influx from countries like India and Sri Lanka.

There are economic goals to Israel’s current policy in Gaza. If we’re talking about plunder, we cannot forget that there’s a modern colonial twist of beachfront condos to consider, as well as plans with regards to the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor that would see an Israeli-centric economic order (and ideological alignment) across the region.

The embrace of the Zionist model also comes at a time when neoliberal capitalism is in crisis visible in the West’s economic stagnation, climate breakdown, ever-rising inequality, and subsequent political instability.

One option would be to build a more equal, sustainable society—in other words, break with neoliberalism. Instead the quest for endless growth and economic dominance is leading towards the fascistic option B.

Even if Western oligarchs don’t necessarily hold Zionist positions, the quest for profit would likely pull them in that direction. David de Jong’s 2022 book Nazi Billionaires is instructive. It follows five families – the Quandts, the Flicks, the von Fincks, the Porsche-Piëchs and the Oetkers – through their closeness to the Nazi regime and postwar, where they remained among the country’s wealthiest families.

What stood out was that they weren’t necessarily believers in anything at all to do with Aryan superiority or Jewish and others’ inferiority. They believed in money. And thought they could make more with Hitler, and as Adam Tooze has pointed out, they did – for a time:

As Western capitalists are once again rebuffed in their effort to conquer and exploit the vast prize that is Russian resources, we’re seeing a turn on local populations and a determined effort to crack down on workers—at least until they can be replaced by AI machines.

There’s a lot of noise around the administration’s ICE raids, but if we look past Alligator Alcatraz, its merch, and all the other cruelty, there is a strategy, as unions are pointing out.

In addition to cracking down on dissent, there are two primary components to Trump’s ICE goons kidnapping people and sending them to gulags: anti-union and pro-slave.

Not only is the Trump administration not going after the employers of undocumented labor, but it is instead targeting union members who were legally living and working in the US. Team Trump is doing so by cancelling humanitarian parole,  revoking the visas of many graduate student union members, and other ICE actions that target individuals in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin color and potentially the wrong outlook on capital-labor relations.

Unions are increasingly sounding the alarm that the ICE agents snatching people off the street is part of the administration’s wider crackdown on organized labor, which threatens the constitutional rights of every worker.

Let’s start with Trump’s businesses, which  rely on and continue to seek H-2B non-agricultural “guest” workers. A crucial difference between the H-2B and H-2A  agricultural workers versus individuals who worked in the US under temporary protected status or humanitarian parole is that the latter two categories didn’t have their ability to stay in the country legally tied to their work.

That made them less exploitable. They were free to change jobs and unionize.

Guest workers, on the other hand, are loved by Trump and many employers because they are basically indentured servants. Even the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security “acknowledge that H-2B workers face structural disincentives to reporting or leaving abusive conditions, and often lack power to exercise their rights in the face of exploitative employment situations.”

H2-A guest workers faced a major setback in their fight to organize last year when a District Court Judge issued an injunction in August that blocked them from unionizing in 17 states. Meanwhile, the guest worker program features labor trafficking, and rampant wage fraud, illegal recruitment fees, wage theft, and illegal threats of retaliation. Abuse is made easy by the fact that it’s almost impossible for workers to quit their jobs since their visas are tied to a single employer. Mike Rios, a DOL regional agricultural enforcement coordinator, describes the H2 program as the “literal purchase of humans.”

Notably, Trump and his ICE goons are not going after H2 workers, but they are targeting those who try to organize them. And while the administration goes after Temporary Protected status and Humanitarian Parole (it should be noted that covered countries were in recent decades the recipient of US destabilization or war), a White House official told NBC News that Trump wants to “improve” the H-2A and H-2B programs, although it’s unclear what exactly that means. If his first term is any indication, it means “improve” for the employers. During Trump 1.0 the temporary work visa programs steadily grew a total of 13 percent larger, and he used the Covid emergency to help make it happen.

With more emergencies arriving on multiple fronts, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a replay. Should the Trump administration succeed in replacing temporary protected status, humanitarian parole, and others with guest workers, it would make it that much harder to organize. As Noah Zatz, a law professor at UCLA notes:

…work under threat of incarceration outside of criminal punishment, or racialized state violence outside incarceration—also highlight continuity with immigration detention and deportation. This continuity is particularly important because labor advocates and the labor movement have come to understand—through a long and still-contested process—how employers gain power to intimidate, retaliate against, and divide workers when the state’s deportation threat hangs over them and can be invoked by employers.

And while the ICE raids garner most of the attention, let’s not forget that With Trump and DOGE’s gutting of the National Labor Relations Board, the Labor Department, attacks on federal workers unions, Gold Cards, and promotion of H-2 workers, the goal is to make all workers more like the guest worker slaves.

No Red Lines in Wartime or Peacetime 

Exploding pagers, sexual violence and genocide, sneak attacks on Russian nuclear bombers, blowing up Iranian scientists’ apartments with their families inside, and so much more show that nothing is off limits in conflict for the US-Ukraine-Israel axis.

The same is increasingly true on the home front, as new depths are being plunged daily. Ten years ago much of this seemed like the stuff of dystopian sci-fi. The signs were all there, however. The deaths of despair, the illegal wars, the market worship.

Just consider that the wealth of 19 households in the US grew by one trillion dollars in 2024. Meanwhile there are 447,000 US kids under 3 were unhoused at last count with Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” set to send both numbers even higher. It has long been economic violence on a massive scale.

We’re at the logical endgame of neoliberalism in which not only is there no place for anyone who can’t make money for the oligarchs, but they’re taking a more aggressive approach in “cleansing” society.

And in that sense, Palestine isn’t as far away as some like to pretend.

The Resistance

The good news is that there is overwhelming opposition to this state of things. And in some ways we have been here before, as Adolph Reed Jr. mentions in his survey of the terrain:

Trumpism and the other fascist-authoritarian tendencies are from one perspective expressions of neoliberalism’s success. They are partly responses to the popular immiseration and insecurity that neoliberalization produces. For that reason, this reactionary turn, reprehensible and dangerous as it is, may be more like neoliberalism 2.0 than a wholly new political development.42Neoliberalism 1.0 (and I do not intend to argue for adoption of that terminology) would refer to the historically specific capitalist counterattack beginning in the 1970s and 1980s to undercut the gains workers had made via de facto class struggle during the postwar decades, gains that had been won within the already narrowed framework imposed by the capitalist counterattack that pushed back against the momentum toward socialization generated by the successes of the working class between the Depression and the end of World War II. 

And what is the path out of this madness?

Countering the effects of a half-century of barely challenged neoliberal hegemony will require a great effort of political education and organizing to combat the weaponized lies and subterfuge that define American politics today. This will have to be conducted largely through slow, face-to-face processes that rely on establishing relations of trust and standing with others not already on our side. (On the electoral front, non-candidate, issue-based ballot campaigns can be a useful component of such organizing, as they can do political education and issue-shaping on a wider scale and facilitate making direct contacts with workers. And left-oriented initiatives have been instructively successful even in states that routinely spurn Democratic candidates.) As the late Jane McAlevey argued and demonstrated so forcefully, there can be no shortcuts in building the sort of movement necessary to challenge the dangerous forces arrayed against us.45 The effort required is therefore not reducible to electoral dynamics; we cannot elect our way out of this horrible moment. We can hope only to keep the worst at bay while we organize the alternative political force. And I shall disclose here the not-so-secret punch line of my book, which the last eighty years of American political history demonstrate and with which I know Jane would also agree: there is no effective substitute for an anti-capitalist left. And the most serious political work ahead of us for the foreseeable future is to throw everything we can into generating one.

And here we can see why the establishment is losing its mind over Zohran Mamdani victory in the New York City Democrat primary.

One can be leery of placing to much faith in one candidate (the exit from our current dystopia requires much more coordinated action outside of just politics), and Mamdani has already gone out and hired Jeffrey Lerner, a former political director of the Democratic National Committee. Not good:

One can also acknowledge that the organization behind his victory (tens of thousands of people knocking on millions of doors having hundreds of thousands of conversations) is part of what will be needed as well as evidence that the repressive Zionist-fascist forces in the US are far from invincible.

As Norman Finklestein points out, that was a blow to the Zionist lobby in the US.

And as John Ganz and Max Read point out, that represents anti-Thiel (as in youthful blood connoisseur billionaire lunatic Peter Thiel) politics, which is of course a bi-partisan politics.

And as Adam Tooze points out, it is a politics that is for workers.

Yet, a single individual can be cowed, as was perhaps the case with Mamdani:

Now if the same organizational energy that went into getting one individual elected could be channeled into sustained actions such as rent strikes, widespread worker stoppages, boycotts, etc. it could rely on the following wisdom:

Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.

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10 comments

  1. Colonel Smithers

    Thank you, Conor.

    This applies to Blighty, too. Yesterday Yorkshire Rose attended a fund raiser for Palestine in Terry Flynn country. A bakery organised the event. There was Palestinian food and crafts, activities for children and music. It was a family day out. The baker received a visit from the local police, who I will let Terry pipe up about, and was warned that the event would be under surveillance.

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  2. DJG, Reality Czar

    Moderators: I can’t get the comment to “stick” — and I’m not getting an error message, either.

    So if I posted twice, please delete the duplicate(s).

    Sorry for the mess.

    Reply ↓
  3. Skip Kaltenheuser

    Good gatling gun.

    I’ve been thinking a lot on tangential issues, ever since “liberal” Democratic Senator Ben Cardin proposed a draconian law in 2017 with fines up to a million dollars and prison sentences up to twenty years for advocating Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), attempting to crush the First Amendment at the behest of a foreign power. Schumer rewarded his treachery by making Cardin chair of foreign relations. Cardin’s effort has become a bipartisan template.

    Israel has trained not just thousands of US police officers – and who knows how many more those officers trained? – but has also trained ICE agents. What could go wrong?

    This is part of a sustained effort to desensitize America and make it a mirror of Israeli society, the easier to manipulate us and put authoritarians in the driver’s seat.

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    1. Colonel Smithers

      Thank you.

      For the past two decades, Israel and the UK have cooperated over training, weapons development etc, not just for military, but police use, too.

      It’s rumoured that Israeli personnel were involved in the police’s fatal shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes in 2005. There are also rumours that Israeli personnel were involved in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and miners strike in the 1980s.

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  4. Carolinian

    To ask Stalin’s question “how many divisions” do the Zionists have you still receive the answer “not that many.” Israel is a tiny country with 9 1/2 million Jews–maybe fewer following the 12 day–and the cadre of their American supporters is also quite small if financially powerful and ubiquitous, seemingly, in the MSM. So the premise of the above is that a small group of people who may or may not even be religious will be able to take over and command the billions. Here’s arguing that the reason the Israeli lobby has gotten this far–and it’s very far indeed–is because it has operated in the shadows. Recall that Mearshimer’s book on The Lobby was declared controversial for even suggesting there was such a thing.

    So Trump’s open embrace of Zionism and fascist tactics are shocking but also counterproductive when it comes to “manufacturing consent.” Even the Nazis were smarter than this and offered a degree of genuine populism and economic recovery.

    Of course the fantasy of many Dems is that Handmaid’s Tale and a religious takeover of America are right around the corner. But from this pocket of the Bible Belt I don’t think so. That book was written decades ago when the country was far more religious than it is now. These days people spend more time with their iPhones than the Bible and the churches that show the most life are in our black and Hispanic communities. The latter undoubtedly are the factor in the much larger Catholic church on my town’s main street. The retro right is trying to revive the Cold War Fifties, but the country has changed from that WASP-y time. IMO it isn’t going to work.

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  5. Kilgore Trout

    Thank you for ending this brilliant and concise essay on a hopeful (or at least positive) note. Despite many signs of encroaching fascism since Bush 2, the pace of the takeover is brazen and shameless. “Masks off, hoods on” it is.

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  6. Jeff H

    Thanks for bringing up Jane, I keep reminding those that think they can initiate a change just through electoral politics (especially at a national level) are engaging in fantasy.

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  7. Thuto

    The US consulate here in South Africa recently issued a notice to prospective visa applicants advising them that they’ll have to toggle their social profiles privacy settings to “public”. This latest example of fascist impulses becoming actual policy is ostensibly aimed at facilitating national security (that go-to scare phrase) and immigration screening reviews but in reality, this is a sinister carrot and stick ploy to sanitize online spaces of criticism of Israel’s genocide and US complicity by getting people to self-censure before posting (or mass delete past critical posts) so they can create, as part of their perception management and narrative building, a make believe world where we are all merrily moving along with not a peep about what the Zionists are doing in Gaza. Their army of paid trolls and bots has lost the infowar as the constant stream of horrific imagery coming out of occupied territories has booted Israel and its western backers out of the halls of global legitimacy, so they’re now deploying the tactical nuke of mass censorship to turn the tide.

    As an aside, I find it puzzling that all this supposedly all-powerful Israeli tech can’t do something as basic as locate the hostages.

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  8. AG

    re: de-banking in Germany

    This is a German-language overview from early July of some victims in the last 20 years.
    Not paywalled so it can be quickly translated. (My archiving again wouldn´t work.)

    De-banking of government critics: A chronology of terminated bank accounts

    In recent years, the bank accounts of opposition journalists, politicians, and private individuals have increasingly been closed without explanation. There has been no outspoken criticism of this practice from journalists’ associations, established media outlets, or politicians. Multipolar has, for the first time, chronicled this largely hushed-up phenomenon in German-speaking countries – and will update this article regularly.

    (Last updated: July 11, 2025)

    HAKON VON HOLST , July 8, 2025, 5 comments

    https://multipolar-magazin.de/artikel/de-banking-chronik

    comments also mention:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-banking

    Reply ↓
  9. Mikel

    “Let’s start with Trump’s businesses, which rely on and continue to seek H-2B non-agricultural “guest” workers. A crucial difference between the H-2B and H-2A agricultural workers versus individuals who worked in the US under temporary protected status or humanitarian parole is that the latter two categories didn’t have their ability to stay in the country legally tied to their work.”

    Indeed, C.G…
    This is what I expressed once in a previous post. The administration very well understands the importance of cheap labor to businesses in the current global economic order. It’s going for a system that is actually pro-migrant worker – in then out and next. And it is a system better suited for keeping those detainment centers filled. The overseers on the new plantation system will be the fintech and the other tech that is surveillance.

    Reply ↓

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