In 1986, then-Senator Joe Biden shot down some other senators who apparently weren’t all-in on military aid to Israel. Here’s what Biden said:
Israel “is the best $3 billion investment we make.1 Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel."2
And in June 2008, Congressman Steven Rothman (an Obama liberal) wrote that "without our partnership with the IDF [the Israeli army], the United States might need to have 100,000 or more additional troops stationed permanently in that part of the world to make up for the protection of U.S. interests and vital intelligence provided by Israel to the United States." (All emphasis added.)
When Biden and Rothman talked about “interests,” they were referring to the interests of U.S. imperialism, a system that revolutionary leader Bob Avakian describes as follows:
Imperialism means huge monopolies and financial institutions controlling the economies and the political systems—and the lives of people—not just in one country but all over the world. Imperialism means parasitic exploiters who oppress hundreds of millions of people and condemn them to untold misery; parasitic financiers who can cause millions to starve just by pressing a computer key and thereby shifting vast amounts of wealth from one place to another. (from BAsics 1:6)
In other words, imperialism is a system in which a few great powers feed off the labor and resources of billions of people around the world to accumulate tremendous wealth, while in the rest of the world there is an “accumulation” of devastating poverty and misery. And this dynamic is the basis for the higher standards of living and “democratic rights” in the capitalist-imperialist countries, and, in “normal” times at least, for greater political stability in those countries.
As part of this, the imperialists have to employ a lot of violence to retain their position: against the people of the countries they dominate, against rival local reactionary forces who want greater power in the region and clash with U.S. interests, and against rival imperialists that contend with the U.S. for control of the world as a whole.
This is where Israel’s “special role” comes in. Israel is an armed enforcer for U.S. domination in the Middle East. The Middle East is a strategic military and trade crossroads between Europe, Africa and Asia, as well as an economically crucial region where the most important single resource in the modern capitalist economy—petroleum—is concentrated.
This region had been fought over for centuries by different empires—Ottoman Turks, Russians, British, French, and Germans. It has also seen powerful movements of resistance to foreign control. But it has been dominated by U.S. imperialism for the past 75 years. And the U.S. has been able to do this in large part because of its “special relationship” with Israel, which the U.S. has built into a massive high-tech military/intelligence power, including an arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Israel’s capacity to militarily threaten and strike at any obstacles to U.S. domination in the Middle East gives the U.S. a tremendous “leg up” over its rivals in this critical part of its global empire.
And because of its character as a Zionist settler-colonial state, Israel is “bound” to the U.S. and loyal to it in a unique way.3 Israel is essentially an extension of U.S./European imperialism, and has an inherently hostile relationship with not only the Palestinians but the people of the entire region. This isolation in the region serves to “seal” Israel’s close bond with its main imperialist patron.4
So it is literally true that without Israel playing this role, the U.S. would have to deploy massive amounts of its own military forces in this crucial region to maintain control—and even that wouldn’t be as good as having Israel “right there.”
All this speaks to why the Zionist state must be overthrown, as part of overthrowing imperialism as a whole through actual revolution, in order for people to be emancipated—because that state is structured to serve the imperialist oppression of the people of Palestine and the whole region, and in so doing it serves as a linchpin of the blood-soaked worldwide U.S. empire.