On the heels of the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, it may be instructive to examine how history repeats itself. This is especially true when it comes to empire and imperialism. While the Christian story, for example, speaks to the brutal injustice of the Roman Empire, it also channels the subjugation of the Jewish people over several thousand years. Empires such as Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and Greece all found their way to Palestine, and found it hard to leave. For Christians, Rome is just the climax of the two texts, the inevitable butting of heads between the God of Israel and the authority of Caesar.
As a result, the story speaks to all form of imperialism, and could just as easily be applied to the modern American Empire as any other. The most interesting intersection in this wider continuous narrative is that the “holy land” of Israel/Palestine has been at the nexus of Empire since the enslavement of the ancient Hebrews by the Egyptians. Islam conquered the holy land over a millennium ago, while the Ottomans inherited the fiefdoms of Islam’s political collapse. The British found their way to the holy land, if not just as an adjunct to protect the vital Suez canal, eventually establishing the state of Israel as an imperfect solution to the new “Jewish question” after the horror of the holocaust.
This brings us to today. Israel is now a modern liberal democracy, which boasts an open and free society rivaling the rest of the western world. Except for all of those Arabs who were displaced by the founding of Israel. We call them Palestinians, but they are now the new inhabitants of the land of Empire, Palestine, taking up the story of the ancient Israelites, this time at the mercy of modern Israel.
It is not, however, Israel that constitutes this new Empire. The United States provides 2.4 billion dollars in aid annually for Israeli defense. While this is only around a quarter of Israeli defense-spending, it means that Israel receives the most aid out of any country in the world–even the poorest nations of the world requiring dire assistance. The US continues its support of Israel, in fact, even though it is the largest debtor nation in the world. This suggests that their motivations are either humanitarian reasons at play (protecting “the Jews” from another supposed holocaust) or it is in the best interests of the American Empire to have a satellite state in the Middle East to offset the interests of perpetual spoilers Iran and Syria? Since rational self interest is the underlying philosophy in the American psyche, it is probably the latter.
