By Ameer Ali –

Dr. Ameer Ali

“Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism” (Lenin). “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk” (General Alexander Haig, American Secretary of State)

It is little over one year since Hamas fired those deadly rockets on Israel as mark of its violent struggle to liberate Gaza from Israel’s brutal colonization and apartheid.  It immediately provoked a deadlier response from “Global Israel” – a coalition of governments led by the US and the UK, sections of Western academia, mainstream media, multinational corporations and security industries. That response, which started as a war between Netanyahu’s IDF and Palestinian Hamas and fought over the narrow strip of Gaza has now escalated into a regional war drawing in Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansar Allah also known as Houthis in Yemen, Islamic Resistance in Iraq, Iran and Syria.  The possibility of other Arab and even non-Arab resistance groups joining in as Palestinian sumud or perseverance – an ideological theme and political strategy emerged out of the 1967 Six-Day War – continues should not be discounted. But more than that, this war is not simply a confrontation between Israel’s right to defend its (undefined) territories as Global Israel tries to make the world believe and Palestinian right to liberate itself from fifty-seven years of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid, but a war fought in tandem with the one between NATO and Russia in the imperial interest of the US empire of entrepreneurship. As the 30^th president of the United States, Calvin Coolidge was reported to have said in 1925, “The chief business of the American people is business”.  Business drives it economy and its entrepreneurs built the US empire.   

As the war proceeds with tens of thousands of Arabs – mostly women and children – killed, millions of Arabs driven out of their homes and looking for safe havens, and as Arab blood continues to flood the nooks and crannies of Gaza, West Bank and Lebanon, the war represents another bloody episode of the grand post-WWII imperial drama scripted by the UN and UK and currently directed by the grand master United States.  The main plot in this drama is to acquire and control the markets and resources of the Middle East and entrench US imperial hegemony in that region through one of its paramount auxiliaries, Israel. The ultimate objective is to counter the rising threat from China’s 2013 One Belt Road Initiative (OBRI) or the New Silk Road involving a massive infrastructure project connecting multiple continents across land and sea. China has already signed nearly 200 OBRI agreements with more than 150 countries and international organizations. Thus, the ME war is part of a global encounter between the East and West.   

When the imperial baton was transferred from UK to US, a nation created for promoting and protecting business, and when cheap petroleum and gas glutted Arab Middle East the new imperial master resolved not to let that region slip away from its grip at any cost, and it was as part of that determination US-Israel relations flourished as something “special” as worded by John F. Kennedy in 1962. It was since then that US started supplying missiles to Israel as part of a devil’s bargain in which Israel like a deputy sherif would take care of US interests in the region and in return Israel was given a blank cheque to expand its territories and colonize them with Jews. The Gush Emunim an ideologically driven settlement movement was founded in 1974 just for that purpose and territories captured after the Six Day War were strategically settled with Zionist Jews, thus marking the beginning of Israel’s settler colonization.     

The other half of US special relationship is with Saudi Arabia. This relationship started even before Israel was created and with a meeting between Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud in 1945 at USS Quincy in the Suez where the king was said to have described the two leaders as “twins” of a sort. That meeting initiated an oil-for-security bargain between the two leaders which continues until now. However, until 1979 it was US-Israel-Iran and not US-Israel-Saudi Arabia (SA) that kept this bargain to safeguard US imperialism in the Middle East. With Iran falling out of the trio and becoming a US adversary after the Revolution, SA filled that vacancy. The inclusion of SA virtually meant the inclusion of all Arab countries in the Gulf region.

There is a huge democracy deficit in the Gulf region and Arab regimes desperately need protection to survive against popular uprisings as happened for instance in 2011 during the Arab Spring. US was prepared to provide that security in return for oil, markets and more strategically the normalization of relations with Israel. Donald Trump’s presidency brokered the Abraham Accords in 2020 normalizing diplomatic and economic relations among Israel, UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. Biden was ready to bring in Saudi Arabia into that family by September 2023 when Hamas jeopardized the plan.     

The blatant and callous disregard by Netanyahu and his IDF to every international rule of war and their brazen acts of genocide in Gaza which is extending to Lebanon are all because of the open backing from the hegemon. US and its allies supply not only weapons and funds but also are sending military personal to provide strategic advice. War is business to Global Israel’s multinationals and security industries.

In relation to the genocidal war in Gaza the economics behind it is cleverly hidden by the media. According to a 2019 report by UNCTAD, geologists and resource economists have confirmed that Israel’s occupied Palestinian territory sits on top of a huge reserve of oil and natural gas. New discoveries in the Levant Basin in the Eastern Mediterranean region, which includes Gaza, estimate the amount of recoverable oil in the range of 122 million cubic foot while recoverable oil is estimated at 1.7 billion barrels. To exploit this resource commercially by any company or country is against international law. Palestinians have been prohibited from exploiting this resource in their own land. But the resource offers an opportunity to share about US$524 billion among different parties in the region and bring peace among belligerents. This was the secret behind the US mediated Abraham Accord, which Netanyahu hailed as a “monumental and transformative” scheme at the 78^th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in 2023.  Israel’s decision to cut off water to Palestinians is to make Gaza unliveable and therefore encourage Palestinians to emigrate. To US imperialists the war is strategically necessary and hence the blank cheque for Israel to continue the war to its logical end. How else one could explain Netanyahu’s callous disregard to all motions passed and decisions taken at the UNGA, International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice?

So, what is the grand strategy behind this war? It is to counter the Chinese OBRI to enter Europe through the Middle East. To counter that entry, US in alliance with Israel and members of the Global Israel coalition, is initiating the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) as the logical expansion of the Abraham Accord. It is a project of building a web of ports, railways, roads and other infrastructures linking India with ME and Europe. Incidentally, the Indian plan to connect Sri Lanka with road and bridge should be considered as part of this grand imperial IMEC strategy.

However, the struggle for liberation of Palestine is not going to fade away or defeated but will gather intensity as worldwide discontent against an imperial order devised by an empire built on business and entrepreneurship starts crumbling, a prediction brilliantly argued by the Dutch scholar and economist Wim Naude from Germany’s RWTH Achen University (“The End of the Empire that Entrepreneurship Built: How Seven Sources of Rot will Undo the West”, Foundations and Trends in Entrepreneurship, vol. 20:5, 2024, pp. 481-573). When that rot sets in US will meet the same fate as the Soviet Union. Hamas is not a terrorist outfit but a popular grassroot movement in Palestine. To destroy Hamas Netanyahu’s IDF should destroy every Palestinian. Eventually, not only Palestine would be liberated but the entire Middle East would be remade as a family of democratic nations in which Israel would be just one among equals.

*Dr. Ameer Ali, Business School, Murdoch University, W. Australia