US President Donald Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talk in the midst of a joint news conference in the White House in Washington, U.S., January 28, 2020. — Reuters
Twenty-one months into the protracted conflict, the Gaza massacre is marked by an ever-increasing number of innocent civilian casualties, with the death toll having surpassed 60,000, according to Reuters.
Calling it “genocide”, the former Israeli prime minister wrote a piece in Haaretz, a leftist Israeli mainstream newspaper, outlining the war crimes Israel is committing in Gaza. Now, a highly plausible threat of famine looms over innocent Gazans, with a large number being children. As the situation worsens manifold, people, both in the US and around the globe, are perplexed at the unstinted US support for Israel even when the genocide of the 21st century plays out on their TV screens.
Recently, the Trump administration announced that, in case of a natural disaster, the federal government would not assist US cities and states that boycott Israeli companies. This has led the core base of the Republican Party to question the veracity of Trump’s ‘America First’ slogan.
It is certainly difficult for Mr Trump to balance the factions within his party surrounding the issue; on the one hand, hawkish members of the administration, such as Senator Ted Cruz, routinely advocate for US involvement. On the other hand, some conservative voices in the Republican Party strongly oppose direct US interference in yet another conflict. For instance, Republican lawmaker and an influential voice in the party, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is among the very few who openly oppose Israel’s heinous actions.
It is, however, important to note that multiple US presidents, regardless of the party, have done Israel’s bidding. For instance, under the Biden administration, according to The Guardian, the US vetoed five UNSC resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza since the beginning of the conflict in October 2023, thus effectively allowing Israel to carry out genocidal actions without any ramifications and international accountability.
It is, therefore, a worthy question to ask: Why is the US blind to Israel’s genocidal policies that threaten regional peace and stability? Well, the answer to such a question is rather intricate and multifaceted: there are cultural, economic and political factors behind the US’s unconditional and sustained support for Israel.
First, elite Christian Zionism is one of the driving factors. Christian Zionism is the ancient belief among Christians, especially evangelical Protestants, that the modern state of Israel fulfilled biblical prophecy and that standing up for the state of Israel is a religious duty. It refers to the historical return of the Jewish people to the holy land.
Some of the key tenets of the ideology include: the establishment of the Temple in Jerusalem, which is a prerequisite to the arrival of Jesus; Israeli sovereignty over all of historic Palestine, including the West Bank.
With roots entrenched in ancient biblical narrative, evangelical Zionism has an overarching influence on American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East: it is mainly promulgated by conservative think tanks and right-wing political figures.
According to Dr Noam Chomsky, the extremist Zionism of the vast evangelical movement has now become “a substantial part of the Republican Party’s base”.
For instance, in a recent podcast with Tucker Carlson, a conservative media figure and former Fox News host, Ted Cruz, a Republican Senator from Texas and a former presidential candidate, stated: “Growing up in Sunday school, I was taught, from the bible, that those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed, and from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of things”.
Consequently, evangelical Zionists have become a major political force in the American political landscape, playing a pivotal role behind the US’s unwavering support for Israel. Through effective lobbying, they have influenced significant US policy decisions: the relocation of the embassy to Jerusalem – a region of profound cultural and religious significance claimed by both Israel and Palestine.
This religious fervour of evangelical Zionists has helped lay the foundation, but it is lobbying groups that turn this sentiment into legislative action. Chief among them is the American–Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has been instrumental in shaping both Republicans’ and Democrats’ positions on Israel.
Established in 1951, AIPAC began as a small advocacy group. However, since then, it has evolved into one of the most well-funded and powerful lobbies in Washington DC. While it claims to be bipartisan and focused on strengthening the US-Israel relationship, its influence often skews US foreign policy in favour of Israel – regardless of human rights or the concerns surrounding the violations of international law.
AIPAC lobbies Congress aggressively to ensure continued military aid, fiercely opposes any legislation critical of Israeli actions and promotes policies that shield Israel from accountability. For instance, it plays a key role in ensuring that Israel receives $3.8 billion in military aid. It also opposed the No Way to Treat a Child Act, which aimed to restrict US funding from being used to detain or abuse Palestinian children. Also, AIPAC supported legislation that penalised individuals and companies that boycott and condemn Israel.
In election cycles, AIPAC has funnelled millions of dollars through its affiliated Super PACs like United Democracy Project, targeting lawmakers critical of Israeli policies. In 2022, it spent heavily to defeat progressive candidates such as Rep Donna Edwards and Rep Andy Levin, both of whom supported conditioning aid to Israel. Meanwhile, it has helped elect more compliant figures by boosting their campaigns financially.
By exerting pressure through substantial campaign contributions, high-profile conferences, and mobilisation of pro-Israel political networks, AIPAC has ensured that challenging Israel’s policies comes at a heavy cost that few are willing to pay. AIPAC’s pervasive influence has led to dire consequences for the Jewish community as well. When Israel’s war crimes are justified as ‘Jewish self-defence’ – as AIPAC routinely does – it inevitably ties Judaism to the bombing of children.
The US’s unconditional support of Israel has fueled anti-American sentiment all around the world. Ignoring Israel’s ongoing atrocities in Gaza, turning a blind eye to the expansion of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and the US’s perpetual opposition to peace calls by the international community undermines the very principles the US has advocated for.
While Washington lectures Russia and China on human rights, its blanket defence of Israel’s atrocities exposes a moral bankruptcy that undermines US credibility worldwide.
If the US seeks to restore its global credibility and allow the true voice of its people to shape foreign policy, it must begin by curbing the disproportionate influence of lobbies that act in the interests of foreign governments – often at the expense of justice, democracy, and the public will.
The writer lives in New York and aspires to be a legal scholar. He can be reached at: alibilal4471@gmail.com
Western leaders offering recognition of Palestine instead of consequences as Gaza is obliterated is symbolism, not sovereignty
Protesters rally outside the White House against Israeli bombing of Gaza on 18 March 2025 in Washington (AFP)
Recognising the State of Palestine may seem, at first glance, like a moral turning point – a sign of western conscience reawakened amid the devastation of Gaza.
Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer soon followed, pledging conditional recognition. His foreign secretary, David Lammy, spoke of Britain’s “special burden of responsibility” – a nod to the Balfour Declaration, which enabled Zionist colonisation of Palestine under British protection.
But peel back the optics, and this gesture is exposed for what it is: a facade, a diplomatic performance masking business as usual.
What’s being offered isn’t statehood. It’s a demilitarised, non-contiguous pseudo-entity with no control over borders, airspace, resources, or movement. It is a ghost administration under Israeli command, tasked with managing a shattered, occupied population. Less than the Oslo Accords and more like a glorified municipality dressed up as liberation.
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And yet, Western leaders present it as bold, visionary. Why? Because this isn’t about Palestinian rights – it’s about political cover.
Absurd contradiction
France, under President Emmanuel Macron, sees the Palestinian cause as a diplomatic bridge back into the Arab and Muslim worlds, after its decline across Africa.
Macron postures as a new Charles de Gaulle, despite France’s legacy of aiding Israel’s nuclear ambitions.
Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen have exposed the cracks in the Arab facade
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is leveraging the recognition initiative to justify normalisation with Israel. It offers the illusion of progress while pulling Arab and Muslim countries deeper into the Abraham Accords.
It is not a commitment, but a tactic. He’s offered it conditionally – as leverage to coax Israel back to the “peace process”. If Israel cooperates, recognition is shelved. Palestinian statehood becomes a bargaining chip to be played – not a right to be affirmed.
It’s an absurd contradiction: if Starmer truly supported a two-state solution, recognising the second state would be the first logical step. But in the West, even symbolic gestures towards Palestine must pass through Tel Aviv.
And yet, even these hollow gestures have rattled Israel’s far-right coalition.
Foreign Minister Israel Katz scoffed that a Palestinian state should be built in Paris or London. US President Donald Trump threatened Canada with trade retaliation for considering recognition.
But that fury shouldn’t distract from the deeper truth: this initiative is a mirage, a tranquiliser for international conscience.
These are not rogue extremists – they are ministers of state, shaping official policy. And the West watches in silence, offering “recognition” instead of consequences.
Empty diplomacy
In the occupied West Bank, settler violence intensifies and military raids escalate. Between 1993 and 2023, the settler population grew from 250,000 to over 700,000 – despite the Oslo Accords’ promise to freeze expansion.
A state that exists only on paper, that must be approved by its occupier, is not a state. It’s a lie and recognition without action is not diplomacy – it’s complicity
Checkpoint by checkpoint, hilltop by hilltop, the land for a viable Palestinian state has been erased.
This is not a policy failure – it is policy.
It began in Madrid in 1991, and was formalised in Oslo in 1993. That so-called “peace process” replaced international law with endless negotiations, and justice with delay.
The Palestine Liberation Organisation, under pressure, recognised Israel and relinquished claim to 78 percent of historic Palestine, agreeing to negotiate over the remaining 22 percent – the West Bank, Gaza and occupied East Jerusalem.
In return, they were promised a state. But the core issues – refugees, Jerusalem, settlements, borders – were deferred indefinitely as “final status” matters. And in the meantime, Israel deepened its control.
Settlements multiplied. The apartheid wall was built. The West Bank was carved into a patchwork of isolated cantons. Gaza was blockaded, then bombed. The Palestinian Authority, born out of Oslo, became a subcontractor for Israeli security – tasked with suppressing dissent and policing its own people.
Khadija Sobh, 18, gives water to her seven-month-old daughter Janin Sobh in their tent in the Daraj neighbourhood of Gaza City on 3 August 2025 (AFP)
Instead of liberation, Palestinians got lockdown.
Instead of sovereignty, they got surveillance.
This wasn’t a peace process – it was pacification. And every time the Palestinian struggle gains momentum – whether during the First Intifada, the Second, or now with worldwide outrage over Gaza – the same script returns: revive talk of the “two-state solution”.
Not to realise it, but to bury the movement beneath another round of empty diplomacy. It’s a strategy of containment disguised as concern.
That’s what we’re witnessing now.
A virtual state
Gaza faces a manufactured famine, yet instead of halting the siege or sanctioning the siege-masters, the West retreats into the fantasy of a “virtual state”. Words replace pressure. Gestures replace justice.
France, Britain, and Germany continue to supply weapons to Israel. Political support remains ironclad – defended under the banner of Israel’s “right to exist”, even as Palestinians’ right to live is extinguished.
Instead of recognising ‘Palestine’, countries should withdraw recognition of Israel
Nothing fundamental has changed. Only the rhetoric.
The flow of arms continues.
The flow of funds continues.
The flow of lies continues.
If the West truly believed in Palestinian statehood, it would start by ending the military, financial and diplomatic support that fuels apartheid and occupation.
Recognition without consequences is not a step forward – it’s a step around the truth.
We’ve seen this game before. An endless “process” that leads nowhere – by design. Even now, in Gaza, negotiations are cover. A ceasefire was within reach last January. Israel shattered it in March. No consequences. Just a return to “talks”, while ethnic cleansing continues and officials speak of a “Jewish Gaza”.
Macron and Starmer talk of a Palestinian state while funding its erasure. They offer “recognition” that means nothing – except delay. What they propose isn’t sovereignty – it’s symbolism, a convenient fiction to pacify public outrage while cementing occupation.
But a state that exists only on paper, that must be approved by its occupier, is not a state. It’s a lie and recognition without action is not diplomacy – it’s complicity.
If the West won’t stop the genocide – if it won’t cut the weapons, halt the funding, or impose a single cost on Israeli war crimes – then its declarations are worse than meaningless. They are part of the killing machine.
So, for those pushing this fiction, let’s ask a simple question: Where exactly will this Palestinian state hold sway?
In Gaza, reduced to ashes? In the West Bank, carved up by walls and settlements? In Jerusalem, annexed and ethnically cleansed? In Jordan? In Sinai? In Saudi Arabia, as Netanyahu had mockingly suggested?
On Mars?
If it’s meant to exist on land occupied in 1967, then sanction the occupier.
If it’s to be built anywhere else, then call it what it is: a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, the crowning of genocide.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Soumaya Ghannoushi is a British Tunisian writer and expert in Middle East politics. Her journalistic work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, Corriere della Sera, aljazeera.net and Al Quds. A selection of her writings may be found at: soumayaghannoushi.com and she tweets @SMGhannoushi.
Many Palestinians, as well as many people within the solidarity movement for Palestine, have little faith in the current state of Palestine, as it is defined by Palestinian Authority (PA).
The geographical space of this state of Palestine is not entirely clear, given the fact it is bisected by the partition offered by the Oslo Accord: to area A (which allegedly it controls), area B, (which it co-rules with Israel) and area C (ruled directly by Israel and constitutes 60% of the West Bank).
Hence geographically recognising such a state, is tantamount to recognising a disempowered political entity stretching over less than 20 percent of the West Bank (as its role in area B is almost insignificant).
No wonder, civil societies in the world have an issue with their governments’ position on Palestine, even if they decide to recognise Palestine; deeming that the Palestine the governments will recognise is the current state of Palestine.
It should be noted that the PA demands recognition of a Palestinian state that stretches over the whole of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; a demand that is supported by those governments that had already promised to recognise the Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
From this perspective, the recognition of Palestine is of a state that is not there yet, and its foundation depends on Israel’s position, the international reaction to it and the validity of the two states solution.
Most of the political parties in Israel today are loyal to the constitutional nationality law of 2018 that stipulates clearly that there can be only one nation, the Jewish nation, and for that reason only one nation state, between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean.
In many ways this was the last nail driven into the coffin of the two states solution; a solution that has already been dead for a while.
The presence of more than 800,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the total destruction of Gaza (with a real possibility of annexation of part of it to Israel) and the political trends in Israel, leave very little hope for such a solution to be seriously discussed by Israel.
Hence, those who believe that recognising Palestine will bring nearer the two states solution are unfortunately out of touch with the reality on the ground.
And it does seem that for most of the governments which have already taken this move, the recognition is part of their unconditional support for the two states’ solution.
History, however, might be kinder to them. It could record them not as supporters of the two states solution necessarily but as standing against the current Israeli wish to expunge Palestine as a nation, a homeland and as a people.
Therefore, the timing here is crucial. Since November 2022, Israel has been ruled by a very extreme rightwing government.
Its election reflected the fundamental changes that Israeli Jewish society has undergone in the 21st century.
The move to the right of the whole society meant that a new ideological and political elite are now ruling Israel.
This new elite is messianic, some parts of it prefer Israel to be a theocracy, and all its members share deep racism towards the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular.
If there were any signs, and there hardly were any, of a significant alternative force challenging this new Israeli orientation, they disappeared after 7 October 2023.
The vast majority of Israeli Jews condone the genocide in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing operations in the West Bank, and the increased discrimination against the Palestinian minority inside Israel.
Fresh approach
The recognition of Palestine as a state is still seen by European governments as a positive contribution to future diplomacy of peace.
However, the inevitable dynamics inside Israel, and more importantly the continued genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the ethnic cleansing operations in the West Bank, call upon Europe to play a different role, and therefore in return recognise Palestine within a fresh and new approach to the Israel/Palestine question.
The fresh approach requires the European political elite to accept the historical context of the developments on the ground.
By this I mean to acknowledge that Zionism from the outset was a European project, born out of Europe’s inability to deal with its own antisemitism and opting instead for imposing a European Jewish state on the Arab world and the Palestinians.
Israelis deem themselves as part of Europe and so does Europe. Given that the current Israel openly declares a war of destruction and elimination against the Palestinian people, it enjoys so far Europe’s indifference at best and its complicity at worst.
This destructive Israeli campaign will have far reaching implications for European society itself as well as for Europe’s relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Recognising Palestine in this context, is first and foremost acknowledging Europe’s complicity in the inception of the Zionist project and its disastrous impact on the Palestinians.
Secondly, it has to be read as a commitment to defend the Palestinians, rather than involved in a diplomacy meant to “solve the conflict”.
This is a huge challenge to the political elites of Europe, which at best are not keen to confront Israel or the pro-Israeli lobby, knowing how easily the allegation of antisemitism and holocaust denial would be thrown at them.
Therefore, to expect these politicians to commit to such a moral posture, necessitates a similar moral commitment in other areas where the political elites face strong lobbies: military expenditure, fossil energy, neo-capitalism and multinational corporations.
One cannot be too sanguine about such a prospect, but one can always hope that one day politicians will show moral courage and not regard politics as a profession but rather as a vocation.
To sum up, even those among us who are not enthusiastic supporters of the Palestine Authority campaign to elicit recognition of Palestine as a state, should differentiate between the current Palestinian state (a Bantustan) and Palestine the country (which stretches from the river to the sea).
Until now the decision of how much the state will be part of the country was exclusively entrusted in the hands of the Israelis.
It is time for the Palestinians, the indigenous people of the country, and victims of more than a century of colonialism, to lead the way in determining the future of both Israelis and Palestinians in the land of Palestine.
Ilan Pappé is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Israel and Palestine. VIEW MORE ARTICLES
The first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, which drew 1,000 anti-Zionist Jews and their allies to Vienna, marked a significant moment in the rising tide against the settler-colonial state of Israel.
A billboard outside the first Jewish Anti-Zionist Conference, which was held June 13-15, 2025, in Vienna, Austria. (Photo: Daniel Friedman)
The decision to hold the first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna was significant for historical reasons – being where Theodore Herzl formed the ideology that became modern Zionism, as well as Adolf Hitler’s birthplace – and for modern reasons – Austria, alongside Germany, provides unconditional support for Israel, a symptom of its guilt over the Holocaust.
Western nations’ complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has left the supposed ‘rules-based’ order they claim to represent in ruins. The U.S., UK, Europe, and their allies have provided Israel with the means to act with impunity through weapons, which flow freely, and information, which certainly does not.
The Congress began just as Israel was bombing Iran, a reminder of the threat Zionism poses to global stability. Against this backdrop, over 1,000 anti-Zionist Jews and their allies from across the globe met in the Favoriten District in Vienna, June 13-15, 2025,at a time when the tide is turning, too slowly, but turning, against the settler-colonial ethnostate of Israel.
Israel still has its well-funded lobby groups, and far too many people still believe its hasbara. It seems it’s up to a plucky group of not-so-well-funded anti-fascist dissidents in keffiyehs to turn the tide. While we have the truth and international law on our side, at times our goals seem insurmountable. But as several speakers highlighted, we must keep going, and we do not have the luxury of despondency. I was there representing South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) alongside Roshan Dadoo, the conference’s only South African speaker and coordinator of the South African Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) coalition.
SAJFP sent me to Austria to advocate for a united, Jewish Anti-Zionist movement that is inclusive rather than Eurocentric. Our experience in fighting apartheid as South Africans is also significant, in terms of both our successes and our failures. As United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese pointed out via live stream: While the political system underpinning apartheid was defeated in South Africa, the economic and social systems that enabled it remained in place.
Ilan Pappe addresses the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, held June 13-15, 2025, in Vienna, Austria. (Photo courtesy of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress)
While the First Congress did not definitively represent the entirety of global anti-Zionism – hopefully, in time it will, as the follow-up Congress is already being planned for 2026 and is rumored to be taking place in Ireland – the turnout showed the movement is alive, well, and growing. Leading Jewish anti-Zionists in attendance included Israeli-born historian Ilan Pappe, U.S. journalist and filmmaker Katie Halper, and Hungarian/British Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos.
The voice of Palestinians, crucially, was heard there too, through the presence of people such as Gazan journalist and author Ramzy Baroud, who argued that his people should become a model of resistance against imperialism worldwide. Palestinian physician, academic, and writer Dr. Ghada Karmi was there to emphasize the right of return and Europe’s role in having “created the monster” that is Israel, as was politician Awad Abdelfatah, who has worked from within the Israeli political system, advocating for one, democratic state with equal rights for all who live in it.
Ramzy Baroud and Dr. Ghada Karmi on a panel at the first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, held June 13-15, 2025, in Vienna, Austria. (Photo courtesy of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress)
The need to reclaim Judaism from Zionism – once seen as a fringe movement within global Jewry as UK writer and activist Tony Greenstein reminded us during a discussion – was a constant theme at the Congress, as was the need to embrace the Yiddish concept of doikayt, or hereness, the idea that Jewish people can, have and will live peacefully with their neighbors in countries across the globe, rather than needing to escape to a physical homeland.
We were also reminded that we were there not just as Jews, but as human beings, and that there is no place for exceptionalism of any kind in this struggle. We must join forces with anti-Zionists across the globe, and our primary duty is to the Palestinian people. Their suffering was highlighted through a video that made many in attendance emotional, in which a surgeon from Gaza detailed his attempts to keep going amid Israel’s systematic dismantling of the enclave’s entire medical system.
The Congress demonstrated that some of the most effective opposition to the Zionist state comes from those born into it. Together with Pappe, others who were born in Israel or have lived there were heard. These included dissident activist Ronnie Barkan, filmmaker and academic Professor Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, and academic and activist Dalia Sarig. These voices provide hope that it’s possible to resist the propaganda that keeps most Israelis loyal to their state, regardless of its actions.
Some speakers were not Jewish or Palestinian but simply anti-Zionists, reaffirming that this is an issue of common humanity. Alongside Albanese was Egyptian journalist Rahma Zein, providing another much-needed African perspective, and French/Palestinian juror and politician Rima Hassan, who managed to join the Congress virtually, despite having just been released from detention after Israel abducted her and other activists on the Madleen Flotilla.
Rahma Zein speaking on a panel at the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, held June 13-15, 2025, in Vienna, Austria. (Photo courtesy of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress)
A declaration written with input from all speakers at The Congress seeks to capture the collective positions that were reached during the three days. The declaration condemns the genocide as well as Israel’s apartheid-driven policies, rooted in ethnic cleansing. The document documents Israel’s systematic war crimes in Gaza, “including ethnic cleansing, militarised apartheid, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, mass starvation”, and condemns Western governments, particularly the U.S., UK, EU, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, for enabling these actions through military and diplomatic support.
It calls for immediate sanctions, Israel’s suspension from the UN, adherence to BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), and nuclear disarmament under IAEA oversight. The declaration also affirms Palestinians’ right to resist occupation and demands an end to Zionist claims of representing global Jewry, urging Jews worldwide to reject Zionism and stand in solidarity with Palestinian liberation.
The signatories reject Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state, and note that Zionism is a racist ideology that endangers both Palestinians and Jews. They call for decolonization, the right of return for Palestinian refugees (per UN Resolution 194), and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all occupied territory since 1948.
The Congress could prove important only if all who attended absorb its message, take it back to our communities, and work hard to grow the movement. The need for greater collaboration between global anti-Zionist groups was evident, as was the need for anti-Zionist Jews to unite as one cohesive movement. Zionism is a highly funded, meticulously organized, and well-oiled machine, and we only have a chance of defeating it together.
To me, more important than anything that came out of the Congress is that it happened, that we united to continue our work, and that it symbolized a return to the roots of Judaism as a religion of peace. Despite all the damage that has been done in our name, Jews can and must be part of building a better world. I believe deep down that a day will come when we truly can celebrate our achievements as anti-Zionists, Jewish or otherwise. But who knows how long that will take? For now, all I really know is that our work has just begun.
As Israel’s global isolation grows, Berlin deepens its alliance with Tel Aviv – criminalising dissent, rewarding lobby groups, and eroding rights in the name of fighting antisemitism
A pro-Palestine activist is led away by police officers during a demonstration against Israel’s war on Gaza at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, on 7 May 2024 (Tobias Schwarz/AFP)
On 28 March, the Zionist German Jewish weekly Judische Allgemeine Zeitung happily announced that Tel Aviv would become Berlin’s newest twin city, with all factions of the Berlin House of Representatives agreeing to the decision.
A few days later, Der Tagesspiegel, one of Berlin’s so-called “quality newspapers,” declared that “the two metropolises have a lot in common”.
What an abysmal disgrace: the representatives of the self-proclaimed parties of the “democratic centre” in the Berlin House of Representatives – Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, and Greens – have decided, together with the “Left” and the fascist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), to move even closer to the genocidal butchers in Tel Aviv.
They do so even as large parts of the world are gradually distancing themselves from this regime.
Choosing a twin city is far more than a symbolic act, especially when that city is the capital of a state ruled by war criminals responsible for an ongoing genocide.
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Such a decision reflects common interests and values that supposedly bind the cities and their populations together.
And the ones on display in this partnership are telling: while one side commits genocide, the other supports, promotes, and finances it; while one carries out ethnic cleansing, the other feigns ignorance; while one deliberately targets children, journalists, and medical personnel, the other looks away and prattles on about human rights; while one starves a people to death, the other merely shrugs.
This list is far from complete, but it is already one of the most repulsive imaginable. Berlin and Tel Aviv, as the German press rightly points out, do indeed have a lot in common.
Historical amnesia
The decision by Berlin’s representatives sends a clear message to the world about what the German capital now stands for – and marks an unprecedented act of historical amnesia.
The government of a city that was under siege decades ago, and continues to invoke that experience as central to its collective memory, has now switched sides.
A city that remembers its own siege should have named Gaza City as its twin – not the capital of those enforcing one
Berlin is aligning itself with the capital of a country that has not only besieged the Gaza Strip for 17 years and created the largest prison on earth and put Palestinians “on a diet” – but has also been committing genocide for more than 18 months – a campaign fully supported by the people of Tel Aviv.
If the experience of siege were truly as significant and defining for Berlin as its politicians so often claim, with great solemnity, then there would have been only one natural and fitting twin city: Gaza City.
Unlike Gaza, however, Berlin found help when it was besieged after the Second World War. Western countries sent “raisin bombers” and supplied the trapped enclave with food, and they were not prevented from doing so by the Soviet Union – in stark contrast to the criminal starvation of Gaza’s civilian population by the settler-colonial regime in Tel Aviv.
In order to live up to their historical experience and responsibility, Berlin’s representatives should have sent “raisin bombers” to Gaza on 8 October 2023, instead of making themselves accomplices to genocide. They should not have wasted a single thought on becoming partners with the perpetrator capital.
Zionist influence
Berlin’s choice of Israel’s capital city underscores how deeply German politicians have, in recent years, allowed the Zionist lobby to shape the city’s political agenda.
In a manner incompatible with the rule of law, it now takes only the suspicion that an event or statement might be deemed antisemitic, according to the Zionist-driven IHRA definition, for the machinery of state repression to lurch into action.
From smear campaigns and police raids to the prosecution of activists and the criminalisation of humanitarian solidarity, every demonstration in support of Palestinian rights is met with brutal suppression by Berlin’s militarised riot police.
The Zionist lobby, as in other countries, does not seek to address the root causes of antisemitism. Instead, it weaponises the charge in order to pressure the German state into punishing anti-Zionist speech.
Following its electoral victory, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), submitted a “minor interpellation” to the federal government titled “Political Neutrality of State-funded Organisations”.
It consisted of over 500 questions targeting civil society organisations critical of Israel’s genocide, with the aim of stripping them of funding and charitable status if they do not conform to what the Christian Democrats define as “political neutrality.”
Unsurprisingly, the Christian parties did not include a single Zionist lobby organisation in their interpellation, even though these groups are anything but “politically neutral”.
On the contrary, they operate as propaganda arms for the Zionist cause and Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people in ways that are openly hostile to democratic principles and the defence of universalist ideals.
But perhaps more revealing is the fact that, two years ago, taxpayer funding for one of the Zionist lobby groups was almost doubled, reaching an annual total of 23 million euros ($25m).
Another openly Zionist organisation is also financially supported by the Ministry of the Interior – even though, once again, an organisation that openly represents and defends a racist ideology can hardly be considered “politically neutral.”
So what, exactly, is its public benefit?
State repression
On 19 February 2025, Berlin’s mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) deliberately pressured the president of Freie Universität (FU), Gunter M Ziegler, on behalf of the Zionist lobby to cancel an event with Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
As Forschung & Lehre reported, it was not only the mayor who exerted pressure on university’s president.
Two Zionist groups – that are anything but “politically neutral” – were also involved. Ziegler ultimately bowed to this illegitimate encroachment on the university’s autonomy and cancelled the event.
On 4 April, the right-wing Die Welt newspaper launched another smear campaign against Albanese, echoing official Israeli propaganda in advance of a UN vote on her reappointment.
The paper quoted German politicians, including Jurgen Hardt of the CDU – a staunch Zionist advocate – who parroted Israeli military lies with shameless disregard for truth or decency.
As if that were not enough, Berlin crossed a new threshold on 1 April with a Trump-like move: announcing the deportation of three EU citizens and one US citizen simply for participating in pro-Gaza demonstrations.
These individuals had committed no crime. But in Berlin, freedom of expression is already too much to tolerate, especially when exercised to defend Palestinian rights.
This sends an unambiguous warning: anyone who demands justice for Palestinians is now a target of state repression.
If the courts fail to halt this descent into authoritarianism, German citizens could soon face prison for criticising Israeli war crimes, while non-citizens will simply be deported. All will be punished not for violence or incitement, but for defending the wrong people in the eyes of the political establishment.
Institutional assault
After German parliamentarians unanimously adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism in 2017, the real consequences of this move for German democracy became clear in light of the ongoing Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people.
Two decisive resolutions passed in November 2024 and January 2025 dramatically changed German society and paved the way for even greater Zionist influence.
Germany’s support for Israel’s far-right alliance shatters its ‘denazified’ facade
The first Zionist-led attack on German democracy came in November with the adoption of the resolution “Never again is now: Protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany”.
Its passage enables the German government to intervene in social life as a matter of principle – to defame anyone, Jew or non-Jew, as an antisemite and to punish those who raise their voices against the Zionist settler-colonial-apartheid regime and its war crimes.
The second attack followed on 28 January with the resolution “Antisemitism and hostility towards Israel in schools and universities”. It was passed hastily, largely unnoticed by the public, after the end of the government and during the election campaign.
The resolution amounts to a brazen assault on the autonomy of universities and the freedom of research and teaching. Under the guise of concern over a purported rise in antisemitism at schools and universities, the charge is being weaponised to silence critical academics and students.
At a federal press conference following its adoption, German professors expressed outrage that the resolution had been drafted without the usual consultation of antisemitism experts or academic bodies.
They also criticised the fact that the drafters had ignored the objections of the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK), which had already rejected a similar proposal in autumn 2024 over legal concerns. According to one professor, it was not even clear who had authored the resolution.
The resolution is a brazen assault on academic freedom, weaponising antisemitism to silence critical voices in schools and universities
Presumably, however, the driving force is not difficult to identify. Given the resolution’s explicitly Zionist agenda – threatening students and academics who take a stand against the regime and its genocide – one need only look to current and former parliamentarians who are behind the resolution.
Volker Beck, a former Green MP, is president of the German-Israeli Society. Mathias Stein, a former MP from the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and a member of the parliamentary group behind the resolution, is one of its vice presidents.
Other current and former Bundestag members, including Marcus Faber (FDP), Lisa Badum (Greens) and Jurgen Hardt (CDU/CSU), also serve as vice presidents of the German-Israeli Society.
It is hardly surprising that academic expertise and historical accuracy were of no interest when this resolution was drafted. German parliamentarians have proven either unable or unwilling to recognise its true intent.
Rather than defending democratic rights or resisting Zionist encroachment, they have become willing accomplices to its sweeping “land grab” – one that dismantles Germany’s institutions and democracy itself.
New fascism
Once hailed as “poor but sexy,” Berlin attracted young people from around the world, along with the global cultural elite and influential scientists. That era is over.
For Germany’s political class, supporting Israel’s genocide is naked self-interest
Today, Berlin has turned to the democracy-destroying weaponisation of antisemitism, laying an axe to freedom of opinion, thought, research and teaching.
The right to criticise Israel for what it is – a genocidal, white supremacist settler colony carrying out ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, threatening Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, and endangering civilian populations across the region – is under active assault.
Through its partnership with Tel Aviv, Berlin is becoming a safe haven for Zionist supremacists and racists, for Israeli soldiers who have committed war crimes in Gaza, and for wanted officials from the Israeli government – all under the pretext of protecting Jewish life.
Instead of upholding international law or defending civil liberties, Berlin’s so-called “democratic centre” is paving the way for an emerging new fascism.
Welcome to Berlin, the capital of Zionist repression.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Jurgen Mackert is Professor of Sociology at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He was a temporary Professor for the Structure of modern societies at the University of Erfurt, Germany and a visiting professor for Political Sociology at Humboldt University Berlin. His latest books include On Social Closure. Theorizing Exclusion, Exploitation, and Elimination (Oxford University Press 2024). Siedlerkolonialismus. Grundlagentexte und aktuelle Analysen (edited with Ilan Pappe; Nomos 2024).
Published date: 31 October 2023 11:41 GMT | Last update:1 year 6 months ago
Governments have failed to condemn Israel’s disproportionate retaliation and the collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population
Protesters hold up a sign condemning French President Emmanuel Macron at a rally in Paris on 22 October 2023 (AFP)
The latest stage of the Israel-Palestine conflict in Gaza has revealed an unexpected moral bankruptcy on the part of the European Union’s institutions and almost all of its member states.
In the past, Europe used to make efforts to mitigate Washington’s blind pro-Israel stance and to advance the Palestinian cause, such as during the drafting of the 2003 Road Map to Peace. Two decades later, the EU and its top shareholders are barely recognisable.
The last 20 years of the Israel-Palestine conflict have included the Second Intifada, Israel’s destructive wars on Gaza with massive Palestinian civilian casualties, thousands of home demolitions, and creeping annexation through settlement growth in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Gaza has also been subject to a harsh blockade since 2007.
Under these circumstances, logic would dictate that European support for Palestinians should have increased. Instead, Europe has become increasingly pro-Israel, or in the best case, indifferent to the Palestinian cause.
It speaks volumes that in the last two decades, the only significant EU measure has been – brace yourselves – to request a change in the labelling of Israeli products, ensuring that goods produced in illegal settlements are labelled as such. This was less than a slap on the wrist, but it still sparked Israeli indignation.
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The EU’s political discourse on Palestinian rights has slowly adjusted to Israel’s increasingly far-right narrative, with dissent and different opinions silenced or strongly criticised by mainstream media.
The mere use of the word “occupation”, or any objection to Israeli violence, is equated with antisemitism. This charge is systematically used for character assassinations of pro-Palestinian politicians and activists through complacent media. Jeremy Corbyn, the former British Labour leader, is a prime example.
Today, the Labour leadership’s stance on Israel-Palestine is barely distinguishable from Likud’s, and Muslim voters are fleeing the party in droves.
One-sided solidarity
Other European parties across the political spectrum have followed the same path. A complete metamorphosis has taken place. Many explanations could be provided, but ultimately, European politicians stand with Israel because they seem to get in less trouble that way.
Still, no one could have imagined what European leaders would do after the events of 7 October. This is not to criticise their strong condemnations of the 7 October attacks by Palestinian fighters, nor the support they extended to Israel.
Rather, my criticism is addressed towards the past two decades of European passivity towards the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and their continuing reluctance to deal with the issue of the Israeli occupation.
This conflict did not begin on 7 October.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had to shake the Europeans from their guilty torpor by reminding them this week that “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum”. He said: “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
On the European moral scale, Israeli pain is rated higher than Palestinian pain
For these common-sense words, Israel demanded Guterres’s resignation.
Meanwhile, a procession of European leaders have rightly travelled to Israel to express their solidarity, including the presidents of the European Commission and European Parliament, the German chancellor, the French president, the British prime minister, and the Italian prime minister. But we have not seen a similar procession of visits to Ramallah as Israeli bombs continue to rain down on Gaza.
On the European moral scale, Israeli pain is rated higher than Palestinian pain – and it appears nothing is going to change that. The European position is that Hamas committed an unprovoked act of terrorism, while Israel is just exercising its legitimate right to self-defence.
Bland exhortations
However, Israel’s right to self-defence must be contextualised within its role as an occupying power for more than five decades, during which it has harassed, humiliated and killed countless Palestinians. This is the point Guterres was attempting to convey in his heavily criticised remark, especially to western democracies, those champions of the rules-based world order.
It is worth remembering that when Palestinians last held a mass peaceful protest, the 2018 Great March of Return, which followed the provocative US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem, the Israeli army fired upon thousands of Palestinians gathered at the Gaza fence. Israeli snipers killed more than 200 Palestinians, including medics and journalists, and wounded thousands more.
Israel-Palestine war: Will the West choose genocide or peace?
This was a despicable act, a crime – but no condemnation came from western democracies.
Today, European leaders have remained silent amid Israel’s disproportionate bombardment of Gaza, while implicitly condoning the murderous language being used by Israeli officials – including President Isaac Herzog, who has said there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” he said, tacitly justifying their collective punishment.
This is an especially outrageous statement coming from a descendant of the same people who suffered the most horrific collective victimisation of the 20th century: the Holocaust. It is equally outrageous for European leaders to have remained silent at Herzog’s words.
After 1,400 Israelis were killed in the 7 October attack, the Israeli flag was projected on European building facades as a legitimate show of solidarity. But despite the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians, with more than 8,000 already killed, we have seen no similar official gestures.
Of course, thousands of Palestinian flags are being hoisted by European citizens, largely unreported by mainstream media, across European capitals. People are doing what their governments will not: condemning Israel’s disproportionate retaliation and the collective punishment of Gaza’s Palestinian population through indiscriminate bombing and the cutting off of water, electricity, fuel and food deliveries.
All European institutions have been able to utter, amid heavy public pressure, are bland exhortations for Israel to abide by international law. This is too little, too late – and too hypocritical.
In Palestine, Israel has been the executioner and the United States has been the executor of ethnic cleansing and genocide, though it is those who uphold international law that are blamed, writes M. Reza Behnam.
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu with President Donald Trump in a White House press event on April 7. (White House/Flickr)
In the Orwellian world in which we now dwell, countries and groups that uphold international law are labeled terrorists or supporters of terrorism, while those that commit unspeakable crimes, flagrantly violating international and humanitarian laws, remain unlabeled and unpunished.
What the last year and a half in Gaza has glaringly demonstrated is how little the United States cares about upholding international law. And that its outpost, Israel, continues to operate lawlessly outside international rules and moral norms. In Palestine, Israel has been the executioner and the United States has been the executor of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have been breaking the law for Israel.
Unlike his predecessor, however, who attempted to hide or disguise his breach of international and U.S. laws, the Trump White House overtly and brazenly violates both.
The United States continues to provide lethal weapons for Tel Aviv’s engineered humanitarian catastrophe despite the fact that it is a signatory to the 1948 “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” known as the Genocide Convention, a binding treaty which established a “responsibility to protect” obligation on state parties, whether they ratified it or not.
The Convention defined genocide and definitively recognized it as crime. It also criminalized complicity and established duties on state parties to take measures to prevent and to punish perpetrators.
In addition to the above treaty, the 1945 U.N. Charter, 1949 Geneva Conventions, as well as other binding U.N. documents established a collective “responsibility to protect” against genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The obligation was meant to insure that the international community never again, as it did during World War II, failed to act.
History will harshly and rightly judge those countries and officials who have failed to fulfill their moral as well as their legal obligations to end the genocide. And it will heap praise on those who did.
Unfortunately, no one has asked why the United States has been battering and mercilessly penalizing countries and groups that have been faithfully upholding their obligations under Article I of the Convention to “prevent and punish genocide.”
To counteract the Orwellian distortions that frame Israel’s ongoing atrocities it is important to give recognition to those who have acted on their moral and legal obligations under international law.
In a world where powerful nations act with impunity, some have acted to end the genocide: Ansar Allah (also known as Houthis) in Yemen; Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Islamic Republic of Iran and South Africa.
Resistance to oppression has been central to their identities and it is what has united them in solidarity with Palestinian resistance movements. They have paid a great price for carrying out the mandates of international and humanitarian laws.
The United States designates any country or group that struggles against and opposes Israel as terrorists.
Ansar Allah (Supporters of God) in Yemen
Satellite photo of Bab-el-Mandeb, the strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden where Ansar Allah has targeted certain commercial ships from pro-Israel countries. (WorldWind software/Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
In response to Israel’s invasion and humanitarian blockade of Gaza, Ansar Allah entered the Gaza war on Oct. 31, 2023. It began missile/drone attacks on commercial and military vessels linked to Israel in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The attacks were halted when the ceasefire agreement went into effect on Jan.19. When Israel violated the ceasefire in mid-March and restarted its genocidal campaign and blockade of food and medicine to Gaza, Ansar Allah resumed its attacks.
“We hope it is understood that the actions taken by the [Ansar Allah military]… stem from a deep sense of religious, humanitarian and moral responsibility toward the oppressed Palestinian people and aim to pressure the Israeli usurper entity to reopen the crossings to the Gaza Strip and allow the entry of aid, including food and medical supplies.”
The U.S. corporate media has disparagingly framed Ansar Allah as a regional proxy of Tehran. They have failed, however, to report on Yemen’s historical solidarity with Palestine.
In 1947, for example, Yemeni representatives to the United Nations opposed the partition of Palestine and during the 1973 October War, the Bab al-Mandab strait was closed to ships carrying fuel to Israel. Also, the Republic of Yemen, following unification in 1990, pushed for U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization; and it extended the same rights and resources to Palestinian refugees as they did to their own citizens.
Hezbollah (Party of God) in Lebanon
Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon, May 2023. (Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Like Ansar Allah in Yemen, Hezbollah has been painted by the United States and the West as a terrorist organization. It is in reality a national political party and military force dedicated to the defense of Lebanon and Palestinians against Israeli expansion and aggression.
The Israeli invasions and siege of Lebanon in 1982 drove the resistance. Hezbollah officially announced its existence in 1985 in an “Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World.” In the letter, they declared their intent to remove the Israeli occupiers from Lebanon, Palestine and Jerusalem. The manifesto was revised in 2009 to reflect the organization’s commitment to work within the multi-sectarian Lebanese state.
Hezbollah, in solidarity with the Palestinians, began a campaign of attacks against the Zionist regime one day after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation on Oct. 7. They began shelling Israeli forces in the occupied Shebaa Farms area, opening a front in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah refused to stop the attacks until Tel Aviv ended its genocide against the Palestinians. During the brief ceasefire, they paused fighting.
Israel has assassinated a number of Hezbollah leaders, including popular secretary-general, Sayeed Hassan Nasrallah in 2024, believing it could crush the resistance.
The concept of resistance has been a guiding ideology of Hezbollah. Its image in the Muslim world has been reinforced by its example of liberating Lebanese land in 2000 and 2006 through armed struggle against the Israeli occupiers, its unconditional support for the liberation of Palestine, and in its opposition to U.S.-Israeli regional hegemony.
The ideas and ideals of the 1979 Iranian Revolution have driven Hezbollah’s evolution, which Iran has supported since the group’s early days.
Islamic Republic of Iran
Protest in Tehran against Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip, Nov. 18, 2023. (Mostafa Tehrani/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)
Iran has, since 1979, come to be defined by its culture of resistance to U.S.-Israel hegemony and its commitment to Palestinian self-determination. Resistance has been central to its foreign policy. Article 152 of the December 1979 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran declares that resolution:
“The foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran is based upon the rejection of all forms of domination, both the exertion of it and submission to it, the preservation of the independence of the country…the defence of the rights of all Muslims, nonalignment with respect to the hegemonist superpowers, and the maintenance of mutually peaceful relations with all non-belligerent States.”
Additionally, Article 154, which states that Iran will refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of other nations, underscores the country’s support for “the just struggles of the mustad’affun [oppressed] against the mustakbirun [oppressors] in every corner of the globe.”
Iran has been fulfilling its responsibilities under international law to oppose Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. Consequently, placing it at odds with U.S. administrations and under crippling economic sanctions since its history shifted from monarchy to an Islamic Republic.
Republic of South Africa
Lawyers for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at The Hague during public hearings in January 2024. (International Court of Justice)
South Africa, on Dec. 29, 2023, filed an application to institute proceedings against Israel before the judicial organ of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. It brought the case by invoking its “obligation to prevent genocide” as a signatory to the UN Genocide Convention.
In “South Africa v. Israel,” lawyers for the High Court of South Africa argued that the “The intent to destroy Gaza has been nurtured at the highest levels of the state.”
Although the ICJ ordered (Jan. 26, 2024) Israel to take all measures to prevent acts of genocide, to punish those committing such acts and to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance and basic services, Israel has never complied with the Court’s legally binding ruling.
Since its initial application, South Africa has filed three other petitions to the ICJ for additional emergency protections for the Palestinians and 13 countries have filed declarations of support.
South Africa has, furthermore, refused to be bullied by the United States. Despite threats from the current administration, including cuts to financial aid, Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola emphasized South Africa’s principled commitment to the rule of law and refusal to withdraw its case before the ICJ.
Silence of So-Called Civilized World
Ironically, while protestors on U.S. university campuses are kidnapped, illegally detained by the government for opposing the genocide in Gaza, the American president, disregarding international law, welcomes, rather than arrests, indicted war criminal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to the White House.
The obligation under customary international law to investigate and prosecute war criminals has been firmly established. It is found in a number of treaties, in numerous resolutions adopted by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, and reaffirmed on several occasions by the U.N. Security Council. In addition, the preamble to the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has confirmed “the duty of every State to exercise its criminal jurisdiction over those responsible for international crimes.”
Non-party states to the ICC, like the United States, are obliged to cooperate with the court not only in cases referred by the Security Council but also under provisions in the 1949 Geneva Conventions whereby states must “respect and ensure” deference for international humanitarian law.
With regard to the actions of Palestinian resistance movements, it should be noted that the U.N. General Assembly has passed a number of resolutions recognizing the legitimacy of armed resistance as a means of oppressed peoples to achieve self-determination and independence.
The official silence of the so-called civilized world, particularly the United States, regarding Israel’s campaign of terror and barbarity in Gaza and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has set a dangerous precedent. Rather than execute its obligations under the Genocide Convention to prevent and protect Palestinians from genocide, Washington has waged war against those who have.
The United States has, to its misfortune, invested heavily in its Zionist outpost, masquerading as a law-abiding moral country. Israel has no written constitution and no defined borders; with that, it has lived outside the rules and laws of international conventions.
As a colonial entity, Israel’s leaders have known that in order to complete their supremacist aims in Palestine, they would have to operate outside international and humanitarian laws. Unrestrained, that is what it has done for more than eight decades.
The fate of Gaza dictates the future not only for Palestinians but for Zionist Israelis and Americans as well. Most importantly, it asks the question will the new international order be one in which “might makes right” or “right makes right?”
M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East.
President Donald Trump is prayed over by Paula White-Cain (left shoulder) and other religious leaders. The official White House X account posted this photo on Feb. 8, along with the text: “As the Bible says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ And in that end, I hope my greatest legacy when it’s all finished, will be known as a peacemaker and a unifier.” —President Donald J. Trump Photo credit: @WhiteHouse on X
On October 12, 2024, tens of thousands of people thronged outside the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., for what organizers called the “A Million Women” rally. The event was staged by a clutch of leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a dynamic and fast-growing Christian Right movement that has influenced hundreds of millions of people around the world, including tens of millions in the United States.
Timed to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the themes of the gathering included winning Christian “dominion” over political institutions, mobilizing voters and — in keeping with the movement’s focus on the idea of spiritual warfare — exorcizing demons from the Capitol. But, although what limited media attention the event drew didn’t cover it, another major purpose was rallying support for Israel.
Rally organizer Lou Engle took to the stage, declaring, “You’ve got to align with the word of God! If we stand and bless Israel, He may save our nation!” Guiding the crowd in 10 hours of continuous worship on a stage bedecked with Israeli flags, rally leaders exhorted Congress to fulfill its “biblical mandate,” as one speaker put it, to “provide unequivocal support to Israel in the face of her enemies and our enemies.” At one point, the crowd sang the Israeli national anthem to rapturous applause.
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The far-flung networks of independent Pentecostal and charismatic churches and other institutions that comprise the NAR arguably represent the most significant religious movement in recent U.S. history. The movement was integral to Donald Trump’s three presidential campaigns dating back to his first run in 2015, and since his first victory, it has worked its way into the upper echelons of political power, with televangelist Paula White-Cain — also a spiritual advisor to Trump — recently installed as head of the new White House Faith Office.
The NAR is also at the cutting edge of Christian Zionism, a global movement of primarily evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic Christians who believe that the Bible mandates unqualified support for the state of Israel.
As the U.S.-Israel “special relationship” enters a dangerous new phase, the New Apostolic Reformation will play a pivotal role.
As global outrage grows against Israel’s eliminationist, expansionist agenda, Trump’s second term seems to be shaping up as even more aggressively pro-Israel than his first. In his first weeks in office, Trump called for the ethnic cleansing of more than two million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and for U.S. occupation of the beleaguered territory, which remains devastated after nearly a year and a half of Israeli bombardment and invasion. Key Trump administration appointees have also pledged support for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, including White-Cain, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who promised Trump will bring changes of “biblical proportions” to the Middle East.
Israeli leaders, for their part, know where their strongest support lies. During his February visit to Washington, D.C., Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t meet with any U.S. Jewish leaders, but made time for a 90-minute gathering with evangelical leaders. At least three of those leaders were key NAR figures, including White-Cain, who reportedly held a separate, lengthy meeting with Netanyahu and conducted an extensive interview with the prime minister for Israeli TV.
All of this makes clear that, as the U.S.-Israel “special relationship” enters a dangerous new phase, the NAR will play a pivotal role.
Apostles and prophets
The NAR isn’t just any religious movement, but, in the words of political scientist Paul Djupe, is one that represents a “fundamental shift” in U.S. Christianity, as its political vision has spread beyond the charismatic/Pentecostal camp it was born in to now dominate the far larger category of U.S. evangelicalism.
TheCall co-founder Lou Engle addresses a news conference on August 15, 2008, in Washington, D.C. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
As a cross-denominational movement that evolved from multiple roots over a century, NAR was identified and named in the mid-1990s by the late C. Peter Wagner, a professor at the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary who observed that independent or nondenominational churches were growing the fastest in both the United States and worldwide. In their explosive growth, Wagner saw an emerging paradigm shift that he and his associates eventually sought to shape, organize and lead.
This broad paradigm features networks of NAR churches and ministries that reject many historic Christian doctrines, denominations and leadership roles while gradually restoring offices of the first century church as outlined in the biblical book of Ephesians. Among those offices are the movement titles of apostle and prophet, such that Lou Engle bears the title of an NAR prophet and Paula White-Cain is an NAR apostle.
During his February visit to Washington, Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t meet with any U.S. Jewish leaders, but made time for a 90-minute gathering with evangelical leaders, including at least three key New Apostolic Reformation figures.
NAR also embodies a dynamic vision of religious and political control known as the “Seven Mountain Mandate”: a metaphorical political blueprint that charges believers with establishing “dominion” over the “seven mountains” of societal power — government, religion, family, education, media, arts/entertainment and business.
Elements of the movement often envision themselves as an End Times army, destined to wage “spiritual warfare” in the heavens via prayer, but perhaps also through physical warfare against the “demonic” forces of liberalism, democracy, LGBTQ and reproductive rights and other enemies.
That’s no mere rhetorical excess. What makes NAR and its growing political clout particularly concerning is that normal political and religious differences are seen as demonic — the work of supernatural spirits creating problems at all levels, from quotidian daily life issues to international conflicts. Such demons, to the NAR, may control anything from individual people to entire nations and are seen as the principal opposition to advancing the Kingdom of God on Earth. For example, Apostles Ché Ahn and Lance Wallnau, among others, claim that former Vice President Kamala Harris is “a type of Jezebel” — literally a demonic spirit.
NAR’s worldview is spreading rapidly. According to a 2024 survey by Djupe, more than 60% of U.S. Christians agree that “there are modern-day apostles and prophets.” About half believe that “there are demonic ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ who control physical territory” and that the church should “organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons.” And 42% directly embrace NAR’s dominionist mandate in agreeing that “God wants Christians to stand atop the ‘7 Mountains of Society.’”
As a movement, NAR also helps rally the MAGA troops. NAR leaders like White-Cain and Wallnau were some of the earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical backers of Trump’s candidacy in 2015. The same leaders were also prominent in the 2020 election denial movement, with various apostles and prophets helping build momentum ahead of the Jan. 6 riots by holding prayer rallies outside the Capitol where they called on God to smite his enemies and blew shofars — the ram’s horn used as a battlefield instrument in ancient Israel and which has been widely appropriated by NAR-influenced Christians.
During the Biden administration, Wallnau and other NAR leaders were featured speakers during stops on the “ReAwaken America” tour — a series of rallies led by former Trump adviser and retired general Michael Flynn, which mixed calls for spiritual warfare with conspiracy theories about QAnon, the election, Covid-19 vaccination and more. This past September, then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance headlined a stop on the “Courage Tour,” another political roadshow and voter mobilization training organized by Wallnau in five swing states.
While NAR influence on U.S. public life has been growing for years, with Trump’s reelection, that influence is finally being recognized more widely, including through majormediacoverage of the movement’s domestic impact. But amid this new attention, the movement’s global impact, especially in the Middle East, still remains underreported.
Israel and the End Times
For decades, Christian Zionist leaders in the United States and worldwide have worked with the Israeli Right to deepen apartheid, ethnic cleansing and domination in Palestine. In recent years, the movement has advocated for increased U.S. aid to Israel, Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, belligerence against Iran, defunding Palestinian refugee relief, suppressing criticism of Israel and other far-right policies. Put simply, Christian Zionism is the backbone of U.S. and global support for Israel. If that sounds surprising, consider that the most prominent U.S. Christian Zionist organization, the Texas-based Christians United for Israel (CUFI), claims more than 10 million members — a constituency roughly 50% larger than the entire U.S. Jewish population.
To the extent that the broader public is aware of Christian Zionism, they may know about CUFI and its leader, Pastor John Hagee. This is partly because the high-profile annual CUFI conference draws leading political figures, but also because, in late 2005, Hagee infamously suggested that the Holocaust was part of God’s plan to bring the Jews to Israel, by sending Hitler as his divinely-appointed “hunter.” “Hitler’s Nazis,” Hagee claimed in his 2006 book Jerusalem Countdown, drove Jews out of Europe “back to the only home God ever intended for the Jews to have — Israel.”
Pastor John Hagee attends a Christian United For Israel (CUFI) summit in Jerusalem on March 8, 2010. GALI TIBBON/AFP via Getty Images
Since its launch in 2006, CUFI has become the evangelical counterpart to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a key pro-Israel lobbying organization frequently associated — though often misleadingly—with the U.S. Jewish community. CUFI aggressively lobbies Congress for a range of policies favored by the Israeli Right, and Israeli leaders regularly lavish praise upon Hagee for his steadfast support.
But Hagee represents an earlier form of Christian Zionism epitomized by white evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind novels. This older form of Christian Zionism held to a “dispensationalist” vision of the End Times, wherein faithful Christians would escape apocalypse via an event called “the Rapture” while Israel and the world are engulfed in the fiery wars of Tribulation.
But with the rise of the NAR, amid the broader growth of the Pentecostal and charismatic population, the dominant Christian Right End Times theology is shifting. Rather than waiting to be raptured to heaven, many evangelicals have become more invested in building their vision of God’s kingdom on earth. This includes seeking to reclaim “territory” from demons via a form of prayer they call “spiritual warfare” as well as engaging in nuts-and-bolts electoral politics.
Christian Zionism is the backbone of U.S. and global support for Israel, with the most prominent U.S. Christian Zionist organization claiming a constituency 50% larger than the entire U.S. Jewish population.
It also involves an intensified emphasis on the role the NAR envisions Israel playing in their vision of the End Times — which they believe is currently underway. The NAR believes it can bring about the millennial utopia — 1,000 years of perfect Christian rule — by expanding Israel’s sovereignty over “biblical” land, supporting the immigration of Jews to Israel and converting Jews to faith in Jesus. Citing Genesis 12:3, where God tells Abraham, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse,” the NAR believes that only by “blessing Israel” can nations secure God’s favor.
Thus, although the NAR is often lumped in with broad notions of U.S. Christian nationalism, the central nation in their religious and political vision is actually Israel. If the United States doesn’t sufficiently back Israel, they believe, America will be doomed, whereas, if they succeed in aligning U.S. and global support behind Israel, that will — somewhat paradoxically — help realize their broader project of establishing Christian dominion worldwide. Like older forms of Christian Zionism, this tends to cast Jews and Israel as what scholar S. Jonathan O’Donnell calls theologically “overdetermined …fetish objects invested with supernatural power” — that is, ultimately mere instruments in an overarching narrative of Christian redemption.
A new Christian Zionism
The influence of NAR is evident across the U.S. pro-Israel movement. NAR pastors and congregations regularly organize and attend pro-Israel rallies and conferences and join state and federal lobbying efforts arranged by groups like CUFI. As In These Times previously reported, in the spring of 2024, NAR leaders staged impassioned protests against supposed campus antisemitism outside several universities, with protesters scaling the gates of Columbia University and hurling epithets at students. At these rallies, evocations of the End Times mixed with demonization of Muslims and calls for the conversion of Jews, highlighting the intertwined antisemitism, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim bigotry animating the NAR’s support for Israel.
When the Heritage Foundation released its “Project Esther” plan to crush the Palestine solidarity movement, most reporting missed the influence of NAR and Christian Zionism.
This past October, the Heritage Foundation’s Antisemitism Task Force released a 33-page plan, entitled “Project Esther,” to use lawsuits, surveillance and other repression tactics to crush the Palestine solidarity movement and the broader Left. Most reporting on Project Esther framed it as a Republican or Christian nationalist effort, missing the influence of NAR and Christian Zionism.
One leader of Heritage’s Antisemitism Task Force is Apostle Mario Bramnick, a Cuban-born pastor of a small church in Florida and president of the Latino Coalition for Israel, which calls itself the “largest Hispanic Pro-Israel organization in America.” Bramnick is also part of the Supernatural Global Network led by Apostle Guillermo Maldonado, a native of Honduras who hosted the 2020 launch event for Evangelicals for Trump at his Miami megachurch El Rey Jesús.
Apostle Guillermo Maldonado (far left) prays over Donald Trump, with Apostle Paula White-Cain at Trump’s right, at the launch of Evangelicals for Trump at his church, El Rey Jesus, on January 3, 2000, in Miami. Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
“We know that a lot of the efforts of the task force that we launched are now being implemented by the Trump White House,” Bramnick announced on a prayer call with other NAR leaders this February, celebrating Trump’s recent executive orders and other moves by the administration to pressure universities to deport students, stifle speech and more. (Organizers of the video prayer call initially declared it off-limits for the media, but subsequently uploaded it to YouTube.)
Bramnick’s activism in what NAR calls the “mountain” of government is extensive, and he uses his government influence primarily to lobby for increased support for Israel. A key evangelical adviser to Trump since 2016, as well as a special envoy for the White House’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative during Trump’s first term, Bramnick also often meets with Benjamin Netanyahu, including during his most recent visit this February. Following that visit, Bramnick told supporters that Trump and Netanyahu had “been called and commissioned by God” to establish the “prophetic destiny of nations.”
In 2018, after Trump fulfilled a major Christian Zionist policy goal by moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Bramnick claims to have met with at least eight other heads of state, including far-right leaders Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, attempting to convince them to follow suit.
In 2018, after Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, NAR Apostle Mario Bramnick met with at least eight other heads of state, attempting to convince them to follow suit.
During a celebration of the embassy move in 2019, Bramnick declared, “it is a miracle that God appointed Donald Trump to be a modern Cyrus,” invoking the popular NAR idea that God is using the immoral Trump to carry out his purposes, just as God once used the pagan king Cyrus to bring the biblical Israelites out of exile.
But speaking at the Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast — a gathering of influential Christian Zionist, Israeli and U.S. Jewish leaders held at Mar-A-Lago this January — Bramnick updated the biblical lens through which he views Trump’s role. Trump, he claims, has now taken on “a new mantle”: that of Cyrus’ successor, Darius. According to Bramnick, this represents a “finishing anointing” to further Israeli expansion and dominance.
“For the first time since the Six Day War, IDF is beyond enemy lines in Gaza, Southern Lebanon and Syria, supernaturally,” Bramnick declared. “We’re in a tipping point moment,” in which what God started in the first Trump administration will now be completed.
Donald Trump with Apostles Paula White-Cain (right shoulder), Guillermo Maldonado of Florida (left shoulder) and Harry Jackson of Maryland (behind Maldonado), on Oct. 29, 2019. Joyce Boghosian/White House
This March, Bramnick went further, declaring during a gathering in Jerusalem that “God has given Israel a blank check with the election of Trump.” Bramnick was speaking at the Israeli launch of the Conference of Presidents of Christian Organizations in Support of Israel, a group he cofounded with other Christian Right leaders last September in order to advance pro-Israel policy and grassroots mobilization at the federal, legislative and state levels. During March’s event, also attended by Wallnau, Israeli annexation of the West Bank was a top demand.
Bramnick isn’t the only influential NAR leader in the orbit of the new Trump administration. Not only is Paula White-Cain leading Trump’s new White House Faith Office, but two other leading apostles, Cindy Jacobs and Jim Garlow, spoke at the Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast.
“God has given Israel a blank check with the election of Trump,” Bramnick declared during a Christian Right gathering in Jerusalem this March.
“When we try to divide up the land of Israel, the land given by God, it doesn’t make God happy!” Jacobs declared, granting theological justification for Israeli annexation of occupied territory and the expansion of regional war. “Over and over we have handcuffed Israel, just when they could have gone on and finished the task.”
Meanwhile, Lou Engle, best known for leading a years-long, multi-national series of NAR gatherings named “The Call,” plans to take his new “A Million Women” campaign on the road both around the United States and the world. “A Million Women wasn’t just an event,” Engle recently declared on his website, “it was the starting line. Now it’s time to mobilize.” To that end, he has announced a major rally in São Paulo, Brazil, this October “as we go global with this Esthers movement!”
And in February, prominent Apostle Tim Sheets said in a livestream appearance that NAR prophets are visiting Trump at the White House, where they “pray over him, prophecy over him.”
“There are others in his Cabinet that are the same way. So, thank God that we have someone that’s paying attention to what the church has to say,” Sheets continued. “Miracles [are] taking place every day.”
A global movement
The strongest influence of NAR on Christian Zionism may be across the Global South, where many countries have long been critical of Israel in international forums like the United Nations but where the rapid growth of non-denominational forms of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in recent decades has created new, millions-strong movements of people who “bless Israel.”
“You can really see the Global South is awakening regarding Israel,” said Jurgen Buhler, a leading NAR apostle and president of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem (ICEJ), in a 2022 interview. With branch offices and representatives in more than 90 countries and claiming to represent tens of millions of Christians, ICEJ is the largest Christian Zionist organization in the world. In addition to coordinating extensive global church outreach, lobbying and fundraising in support of Israel, ICEJ also hosts a massive Christian pilgrimage, the Feast of Tabernacles, bringing thousands of tourists to Jerusalem during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
The strongest influence of NAR on Christian Zionism may be across the Global South, where many countries long critical of Israel now have new, millions-strong movements of people who “bless Israel.”
Apostle Rene Terra Nova, ICEJ’s Brazilian director and head of a global apostolic network of more than seven million members, has held massive pro-Israel rallies in Brazil — a country where researchers estimate there will soon be more Pentecostals and charismatics than Catholics — as well as helping lead thousands on Feast of Tabernacles pilgrimages to Israel.
Nigerian Apostle Enoch Adeboye, named by Newsweek as one of the 50 most influential people in the world, oversees a sprawling church network that they claim reaches more than five million people in Nigeria and which works to influence millions more worldwide, with outposts in more than 110 countries. Adeboye pledged his network in support of Israel after October 7 and is a regular speaker at ICEJ assemblies.
Other NAR leaders and organizations, like the Missouri-based International House of Prayer, organize coordinated global days of Israel-focused prayer and fasting, like the Isaiah 62 Fast and Global Esther Fast, which mobilize millions across Pentecostal and charismatic networks in Uganda, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, India and more.
These NAR networks represent what Rutgers professor Joseph Williams has called the “Pentecostalization” of Christian Zionism across the Global South, where the growing “international appeal” of “experience-oriented, Jewish-themed practices and identities…tied to distinctive views of Jews and Israel” helps bolster both the Israeli and transnational far Right.
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, the movement founded by Brazilian NAR affiliate Edir Macedo in 1977, inaugurated its São Paulo, Brazil, replica of Solomon’s Temple on July 31, 2014. Photo by MIGUEL SCHINCARIOL/AFP via Getty Images
In São Paulo in 2014, for example, the Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God — founded by Bishop Edir Macedo, who, as part of the wider NAR movement, has described himself as a “prophet” and has called for “apostolic governance” in Brazil — opened a new $300 million megachurch complex, which they claim is a full-size replica of Solomon’s Temple, the ancient Israelite temple in Jerusalem which, according to prophecy, will be rebuilt in the End Times. With seating for 10,000, the floor and walls of the megachurch are covered in stone brought from Jerusalem.
“We wanted to help people turn to Israel, support its existence and give them an opportunity to touch Jerusalem stones, which for them is a big deal,” explained a representative of the church at the time.
Macedo’s “Temple of Solomon” was one ostentatious manifestation of a broader rightward evangelical shift with significant political implications. While in 2014, the year the temple was opened, Brazil condemned Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip and recalled its ambassador to Tel Aviv, by 2018 Macedo helped marshall evangelical support for the election of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, a staunch supporter of Israel.
Global vision
From the Temple of Solomon to the “A Million Women” rally, the NAR’s growth exemplifies how the Right’s popular adage that “politics is downstream from culture” applies to religion as well. Indeed, religion is often at the center of culture — so much so that Pat Buchanan, the hard-right politician who launched the term “culture wars” into our political lexicon, described it as nearly interchangeable with the idea of a “religious war.”
Today, the same war continues, even if the players and the battlefield have evolved and expanded, with the Global South emerging as a major part of the fight. NAR leaders certainly understand it this way.
And as NAR continues to grow as a major religious and political global force, we can expect the Christian Zionist movement to become even more militant, aggressive and bent on what they call “world transformation.” Progressives can’t afford to lose sight of this in order to adapt our own strategies to defend democracy and transform U.S. foreign policy.
BEN LORBER works as senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank monitoring right-wing movements, where he focuses on white nationalism and antisemitism. His book Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism was released in 2024.
Published date: 24 March 2025 12:34 GMT | Last update:2 days 5 hours ago
The wide-ranging crackdown on political speech is being framed as a means of combatting antisemitism
Donald Trump is pictured during his presidential campaign in Traverse City, Michigan, on 25 October 2024 (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images/AFP)
The virus of fascism only ever lay dormant in the West after its apparent destruction during the Second World War.
Early indicators are everywhere that fascism – an ideology that espouses racist hierarchies of human value, of who should have rights and who must not – is reasserting itself in the United States and across large parts of Europe.
There is an intensifying distrust and fear of foreigners. Immigrants are seen as destroying the West from within – irreconcilable with, and antagonistic to, a “superior” civilisation and culture. In the US, a permanent resident – apparently the first of many – has been disappeared into the US prison system, pending his deportation.
Political speech in opposition to western governments and their crimes is being stigmatised and crushed with old laws and new. Supposedly liberal academic institutions are rolling over as they are menaced with legal and financial sanctions. There is little reason to assume that judicial systems will provide any meaningful check on executive power.
The West is taking the first formal steps down a different political path – one whose final destination we know from our own relatively recent history.
The far right is now setting the agenda with the same Cheshire Cat grin, whether it’s billionaire TV star Donald Trump in the US, or Westminster’s glorified used-car salesman Nigel Farage in the UK.
There are fascist-leaning parties inside the governments of Italy, Hungary, Finland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Netherlands and Croatia. Openly far-right parties are jostling for power in France, Germany, Austria, Sweden and, for the first time, Britain. That trend was reflected in a surge of ultra-nationalist delegates elected to the European Parliament last year.
The only available bulwarks are bloodless technocrats like Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Britain, President Emmanuel Macron in France, and former Vice President Kamala Harris in the US, offering more of the same failed policies that opened the door to the fascists in the first place.
Hiding in plain sight
These developments have not come out of the blue. They have been decades in the making.
This should come as no surprise, because the main repository for the West’s fascist ideas since the Second World War has been hiding in plain sight: Israel.
The West’s undisguised crackdown on the most fundamental of rights, such as political speech and academic freedom, is being carried out in the name of protecting Israel and those western Jews who cheerlead its crimes.
Fascism is stepping out of the shadows in the US and Europe as Israel ostentatiously commits a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, armed and given diplomatic cover by its western patrons.
Fascism was never going to return to Europe or the US dressed in Nazi garb. It was never going to arrive wearing jackboots and brandishing swastikas
Israel has continued, with the West’s conspicuous backing, to do the very things that western states themselves found it impossible to justify in the wake of the Second World War.
When the West was reluctantly forced into decolonisation processes in Africa and Asia, Israel was given licence and endless support to grow a violent ethno-nationalist project on another people’s homeland.
Jewish supremacism was respectable, even as white supremacism fell out of favour. Israel became ever bolder in its expulsions and segregationist policies. It herded Palestinians into ever-smaller enclaves, where they were stripped of rights and subjected to constant military abuses.
All of this continued even as, in the mid-1960s, the civil rights movement in the US finally overturned the Deep South’s segregationist Jim Crow laws. And it continued as, in the 1990s, the white leaders of apartheid South Africa, another western colonial project, were forced into a truth and reconciliation process with the black majority.
Israel remained the West’s most favoured ally, even as it pushed firmly against what was presented elsewhere as the inexorable tide of progressive change.
Monstrous behaviour
Fascism’s ascendancy across much of Europe through the 1930s and early 1940s was a wakeup call that led western leaderships to bolster international institutions, whose watchword was human rights.
The United Nations, created in 1945, was supposed to embody these values, issuing its Universal Declaration of Human Rights three years later, and spawning legal bodies such as the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court to hold rogue regimes to account.
The aim was to prevent a return to the horrors of the Second World War, from the Nazi death camps to the Allies’ fire-bombings of German and Japanese cities.
That was why Israel’s ethnic project to colonise Palestine – by removing or killing Palestinians to replace them with Jews – found itself in continuous confrontation with the new watchdog bodies, violating dozens of UN resolutions. Washington was always ready to protect it from repercussions.
It was not that other countries did not commit terrible crimes too. After all, in its struggle to remain as the global top dog during the Cold War, the US destroyed swathes of Southeast Asia in bombing campaigns related to the Vietnam War.
Trump and Netanyahu want Palestinians to capitulate. They never will
But unlike western states, Israel did not even pay lip service to the supposed principles of the post-Second World War international order. Its organising principle was directly opposed to the UN declaration. Israel explicitly rejected universal human rights, and its Basic Laws, amounting to a constitution, excluded the principle of equality.
Meanwhile, Israel’s constant military oppression of the Palestinian people was in flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions. Similar to South Africa’s apartheid era, there has not been a day since Israel’s founding in 1948 when it was not committing structural violence against the native people it seeks to replace.
There was not a day when it was not segregating Palestinians, destroying their communities, forcing them off their lands, eradicating their crops, blocking their roads, putting them in torture camps, isolating them from the world – or killing them.
It would have carried out this eradication process earlier, faster and even more shamelessly, had it not been for the restraining hand of international law and the difficult optics for the US and Europe of supporting this monstrous behaviour.
But even those restraints have all but evaporated. The current genocide in Gaza, all too visibly sponsored by the West, can only happen in a political climate where the idea of universal human rights has been hollowed out; where the idea that human life is sacrosanct has lost its meaning.
Stretched and warped
Israeli politics has ostentatiously divided itself between a so-called “liberal” faction and rightwing Zionism, as if there was some grand ideological struggle going on. But in truth, all Israeli politics is fascist in nature.
Both wings of Zionism are premised on the notion that Israeli Jews – most of them recent immigrants – have superior rights over the Palestinian natives, and that any Palestinian who refuses to submit to permanent servitude should be punished.
The debate within Zionism is not about whether this should happen. It is about where fine lines should be drawn. What is the extent of the territory in which Jews unquestionably enjoy superior rights, and how extreme should the punishments be for Palestinians who disobey?
These arguments have largely reflected secular and religious splits within Israel, with parts of society prioritising western concerns about Israel’s reputation on the international stage.
Over decades, confronted by the fact that Palestinians refuse to cooperate with its organising principle – submit or be punished – the Israeli majority shifted from a liberal Zionism obsessed with appearances to an unapologetic, triumphalist, far-right Zionism. That is why self-declared fascists proudly sit in the current government.
And it is why last month, Israel’s ruling party, Likud, became an observer member of Patriots for Europe – an alliance of Europe’s far-right parties, often with Nazi and neo-Nazi ties. At an inaugural conference in Madrid, Likud was warmly welcomed, with alliance leaders highlighting their “shared values”.
None of this happened discreetly. Israel is the West’s last major colonial outpost. It is the place where the West’s military industries test their might on Palestinians, who serve as lab rats.
It is where the strength of international law is stress-tested, its principles stretched and warped by endless abuse, and then flagrantly disobeyed.
And it is where a narrative of victimhood, of Jewish and Christian “civilisation”, has been crafted to justify a war on the Palestinian people and, more generally, Muslims.
Perfect cover story
All of this is supposed to carry on, immune from criticism or objection. The West has developed a perfect cover story for cocooning its fascist offspring: those who oppose the subjugation and brutalisation of the Palestinian people are denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination. They are thus “antisemites”.
In parallel, any Palestinian who resists subjugation and brutalisation is a terrorist. Ergo, those who ally with Palestinians are in league with terrorists.
In a further leap, because the West has cast Palestinians as part of the Muslim masses of the Arab world – even though there are many Palestinian Christians and Druze – Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression can be presented as an adjunct of a supposed Islamist threat to the West.
In truth, no Palestinian group is fighting to conquer the West, or to impose sharia law on Europe and the US. Palestinian resistance groups are seeking only to liberate their homeland from decades of colonial oppression and ethnic cleansing.
Free speech, the right to protest and academic freedom – the fundamental tenets of liberal democracy – are being hastily jettisoned
Predictably, the longer that oppression has continued, with extravagant western backing, the more Palestinians facing Israel’s abuses have been drawn to less accommodationist militant groups, like Hamas, which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK and other countries.
No matter. Israel is presented as a small, heroic nation defending the West from the Muslim hordes. In a narrative that utterly inverts reality, Israel serves as the humanist rampart against Palestinian – and by extension, Muslim – barbarism.
It is this premise that makes it possible for Michael Gove, a former British government minister, to write an article in the midst of Israel’s genocide headlined: “The IDF [Israeli army] should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize”.
It is this premise that allows a respected writer, Howard Jacobson, to demand silence at the killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza, because speaking in their defence supposedly amounts to a “blood libel” against the Jewish people.
It is this premise that means Melanie Phillips, a journalistic staple of BBC panel shows, can get away with writing: “If you support the Palestinian Arab cause today, you are facilitating deranged and murderous Jew-hatred.”
These are self-pitying, delusional narratives that our European forefathers – plundering Africa of its wealth, enslaving its “savage” peoples or killing millions who refused to accept the West’s civilisational “superiority” – would be only too comfortable espousing.
Arriving in disguise
Fascism was never going to return to Europe or the US dressed in Nazi garb. It was never going to arrive wearing jackboots and brandishing swastikas.
In fact, it was all too predictable that it would arrive in disguise, dressed in suits, telegenic, and characterising its opponents, not itself, as the Nazis.
Columbia crackdown exposes universities as tools of imperial power
That is where Israel has been so helpful once again, for it has not just served as a template for fascism, preserving and rejuvenating ideas of racial superiority, colonisation and genocide. For decades, it has also allowed western states to invest Israeli fascism with a moral legitimacy. Support for Israel’s racial hierarchies, in which Palestinian lives are entirely expendable, has been sold as necessary to “protect Jews”.
That premise has, in turn, allowed genocide to become a respectable, moral cause. It is precisely why Starmer felt able to say that Israel had a “right” to deny more than two million Palestinian men, women and children all food, water and fuel. A genocide that he would have rejected in other circumstances – indeed, has rejected – was apparently okay so long as Israel was doing it.
This is why a UN report earlier this month on Israel’s “genocidal acts” received barely any traction in western media. The report shows how Israel has routinised sexual assault and rape against the Palestinians it arbitrarily detains as bargaining chips for the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
And it is why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a wanted war criminal and fugitive from justice, is still welcome in western capitals, as are his generals who have been carrying out the genocide in Gaza.
Warped calculus
The West’s endless indulgence of Israel’s variety of fascism – Zionism – has allowed its ideas to quietly seep back into our own societies, where Zionism is still treated with near-reverential respect.
If racial hierarchies are a good thing in Israel, why are they not a good thing in the US and Europe too? This is why a large section of Trump’s base proudly call themselves “white Zionists”. They see a Jewish fortress state of Israel as a model for the US as a white fortress state against their “Great Replacement” fears.
If “protecting Jews” in Israel can justify any crime by the Israeli state against Palestinians, why can “protecting Jews” not also justify illegal behaviour by western states towards their own populations?
“Protecting Jews” means that speech critical of Israel must be outlawed, even as Israel commits war crimes and genocide, because that criticism risks offending domestic Jewish organisations that cheerlead Israel.
A protester calls for the release of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, during a rally outside the White House on 18 March 2025 (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images/AFP)
Academic freedom must be crushed too, to protect the feelings of those Jewish students and professors who think the mass slaughter of Palestinian children is an acceptable price to pay for Israel reasserting its military deterrence.
And with a self-rationalising logic, any western Jews who do not prostrate themselves before Israel enthusiastically enough are deemed to be “the wrong sort of Jews” – or “Palestinian”, in the new slur Trump has levelled against Chuck Schumer, the Jewish US Senate minority leader.
In this warped, self-serving calculus of human rights, the sensitivities of Zionist Jews are placed at the apex, and the right of Palestinians not to be murdered at the bottom.
This is precisely why US federal authorities are seeking to set a precedent by abducting and deporting a permanent resident, Mahmoud Khalil, for helping to lead student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He is being accused, without any evidence, of being “aligned with Hamas”, “supporting terrorism”, holding antisemitic views, and desiring the destruction of the West by Islamic extremism.
Responsibility for 18 months of genocide in Gaza stops with us. This is our genocide. And before it’s even complete, it is coming back to bite us
Just as Israel recruited AI to select its targets in Gaza for execution, using the broadest categories it could devise as algorithmic prompts, the White House is using AI to select as broadly as it can who is aligned with Hamas, who is a terrorist, who is an antisemite.
At the same time, US academic institutions are having their federal grants revoked on the grounds that they are supposedly not doing enough to tackle “antisemitism” by crushing the anti-genocide protests. Obedient universities are hurrying to join the government crackdown.
The Trump administration is framing these moves, and more are doubtless to come, as part of a “war on antisemitism” – the sequel to the “war on terror”.
In the process, Washington is creating grounds to demonise vast swathes of the US student population and large sections of the Jewish community, especially young Jews unwilling to let a genocide be committed in their name. All now face being vilified as having “aligned with terrorism”.
The Trump administration is far from alone. Starmer’s government in the UK, like its predecessor, has carefully cultivated a political climate in which journalists, scholars, students, protest organisers, politicians and activists – many of them Jewish – are being smeared as Jew haters, and their protests against genocide as antisemitic.
The British government has wheeled out draconian, vaguely worded terrorism legislation to investigate and charge those it accuses of expressing opinions, or stating facts, too critical of Israel – criticisms it suggests might thereby “encourage support” for Hamas.
Free speech, the right to protest and academic freedom – the fundamental tenets of liberal democracy – are being hastily jettisoned, now supposedly a threat to democracy.
Hierarchy of human worth
There is a pattern whose outline is coming ever more sharply into focus.
The Trump administration has resurrected the Alien Enemies Act, an obscure, 18th-century bit of legislation designed to give extraordinary powers to the executive to disappear foreigners during wartime without any due process.
It has only ever been invoked in three periods of history – the last time to imprison without trial tens of thousands of people of Japanese descent during the Second World War.
Trump first tested out this law on a group he assumes no one will seek to defend: people his officials are characterising as Venezuelan criminals. But one can be sure the administration is keen to stretch the legislation’s applicability far wider.
In Trump’s new order, anyone can become Palestinian
Trump’s previous administration dug out another arcane law, the 1917 Espionage Act, to use against a non-citizen, Julian Assange, treating his journalism exposing US and British war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as “espionage”. The Act was hurriedly passed during the First World War.
Washington’s goal in targeting Assange was to set a legal precedent in which it could grab anyone, anywhere in the world, and lock them away indefinitely as a spy.
One can be sure Trump’s officials are rifling through dusty statute books looking for more long-overlooked laws that can be repurposed to repress dissent and imprison those who stand in its way. But the darkest of precedents already exists, supplied by Israel.
If Israel can exterminate the Palestinian people it has been oppressing for decades to prevent what it implausibly claims to be a future existential threat from a small armed group, while receiving vigorous western support, why can the US and Europe not do likewise? They can resort to similar claims of an existential threat to normalise internment camps, deportations, or even extermination programmes.
German Jews viewed themselves as German citizens until Adolf Hitler’s government decided they were an alien element to whom different rules would apply.
That did not happen overnight. It was a gradual, cumulative slippage in legal norms that eroded the ability of targeted groups to resist their scapegoating, and of their supporters to protest, while the majority blindly followed along.
In reality, fascism never went away. The West simply outsourced it to a client state whose job was, on the West’s behalf, to advance in the Middle East the same ugly ideas of a hierarchy of human worth.
We identify with Israel because we are told it represents us, our values and our civilisation. And the truth is, it does – which is why responsibility for 18 months of genocide in Gaza stops with us. This is our genocide. And before it’s even complete, it is coming back to bite us.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at http://www.jonathan-cook.net
I am Israel. I came to a land without a people for a people without a land. Those people who happened to be here, had no right to be here, and my people showed them they had to leave or die, razing 400 Palestinian villages to the ground, erasing their history.
I am Israel. Some of my people committed massacres and later became Prime Ministers to represent me. In 1948, Menachem Begin was in charge of the unit that slaughtered the inhabitants of Deir Yassin, including 100 women, and children. In 1953, Ariel Sharon led the slaughter of the inhabitants of Qibya, and in 1982 arranged for our allies to butcher around 2,000 in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.
I am Israel. Carved in 1948 out of 78% of the land of Palestine, dispossessing its inhabitants and replacing them with Jews from Europe and other parts of the world. While the natives whose families lived on this land for thousands of years are not allowed to return, Jews from all over the world are welcome to instant citizenship.
I am Israel. In 1967, I swallowed the remaining lands of Palestine – the West Bank and Gaza – and placed their inhabitants under an oppressive military rule, controlling and humiliating every aspect of their daily lives. Eventually, they should get the message that they are not welcome to stay, and join the millions of Palestinian refugees in the shanty camps of Lebanon and Jordan.
I am Israel. I have the power to control American policy. My American Israel Public Affairs Committee can make or break any politician of its choosing, and as you see, they all compete to please me. All the forces of the world are powerless against me, including the UN as I have the American veto to block any condemnation of my war crimes. As Sharon so eloquently phrased it, “We control America”.
I am Israel. I influence American mainstream media too, and you will always find the news tailored to my favor. I have invested millions of dollars into PR representation, and CNN, New York Times, and others have been doing an excellent job of promoting my propaganda. Look at other international news sources and you will see the difference.
I am Israel. You Palestinians want to negotiate “peace!?” But you are not as smart as me; I will negotiate, but will only let you have your municipalities while I control your borders, your water, your airspace and anything else of importance. While we “negotiate,” I will swallow your hilltops and fill them with settlements, populated by the most extremist of my extremists, armed to the teeth. These settlements will be connected with roads you cannot use, and you will be imprisoned in your little Bantustans between them, surrounded by checkpoints in every direction.
I am Israel. I have the fourth strongest army in the world, possessing nuclear weapons. How dare your children confront my oppression with stones, don’t you know my soldiers won’t hesitate to blow their heads off? In 17 months, I have killed 900 of you and injured 17,000, mostly civilians, and have the mandate to continue since the international community remains silent. Ignore, as I do, the hundreds of Israeli reserve officers who are now refusing to carry out my control over your lands and people; their voices of conscience will not protect you.
I am Israel. You want freedom? I have bullets, tanks, missiles, Apaches and F-16s to obliterate you. I have placed your towns under siege, confiscated your lands, uprooted your trees, demolished your homes, and you still demand freedom? Don’t you get the message? You will never have peace or freedom, because I am Israel.
A billboard outside the first Jewish Anti-Zionist Conference, which was held June 13-15, 2025, in Vienna, Austria. (Photo: Daniel Friedman)
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