The first bill to be con­sid­ered by the 2019 U.S. Sen­ate defends Israel by giv­ing Amer­i­can state and local gov­ern­ments the legal author­i­ty to pun­ish U.S. com­pa­nies that are par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Pales­tin­ian-led boy­cott against Israel. Accord­ing to the legal advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion Pales­tine Legal, 26 states have adopt­ed anti-boy­cott mea­sures. The fed­er­al bill strength­ens the legal basis to defend those Israel-pro­tect­ing laws from con­sti­tu­tion­al challenges.

U.S. support for Israel should be seen in part as a way for the United States to subsidize America’s military industry.

Alarm­ing­ly, the bill could be used to pun­ish indi­vid­u­als, giv­en that, as The Inter­cept recent­ly explained, because ​“indi­vid­ual con­trac­tors often work for state or local gov­ern­ments under the aus­pices of a sole pro­pri­etor­ship or some oth­er busi­ness enti­ty.” This dan­ger is not the­o­ret­i­cal: Texas ele­men­tary school speech pathol­o­gist Bahia Amawi recent­ly lost her job because she refused to promise not to boy­cott goods pro­duced in Israel or ille­gal Israeli set­tle­ments. The pur­pose of this part of the bill is to pun­ish those who wish to pres­sure Israel and its Amer­i­can patrons to stop killing, dis­pos­sess­ing and dis­crim­i­nat­ing against Palestinians.

Sen­a­tor Mar­co Rubio (R‑Fla.) is a lead spon­sor of the leg­is­la­tion, which failed to pass in an ear­li­er form intro­duced by Rubio and a bipar­ti­san coali­tion that includ­ed Democ­rats such as Bob Menen­dez of New Jer­sey, Joe Manchin of West Vir­ginia and Ben Cardin of Maryland.

The bill would also cod­i­fy a 2016 deal between the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion and the Netanyahu gov­ern­ment guar­an­tee­ing Israel $38 bil­lion in ​“secu­ri­ty” assis­tance over 10 years, a pro­vi­sion that would under­mine any cur­rent or future president’s abil­i­ty to undo the arrange­ment. Such a move would ham­string what pass­es for Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy by obstruct­ing the population’s abil­i­ty to stop par­tic­i­pat­ing in the mass mur­der of Pales­tin­ian civil­ians should it wish to do so.

Observers could be for­giv­en for won­der­ing why the U.S. gov­ern­ment goes to these lengths to sup­press sup­port for Pales­tin­ian lib­er­a­tion. In the fol­low­ing essay adapt­ed from my book, The Wrong Sto­ry: Pales­tine, Israel, & The Media, I explain why the U.S.-Israeli alliance is so deep and durable.

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The U.S.-Israeli ​“spe­cial rela­tion­ship” con­sol­i­dat­ed dur­ing Israel’s 1967 war against Egypt, Jor­dan and Syr­ia though Amer­i­ca has sup­port­ed Israel for much longer. Even before the 1967 war, the Unit­ed States gave Israel more aid per capi­ta than any oth­er coun­try. In 1957, U.S. Pres­i­dent Dwight D Eisen­how­er artic­u­lat­ed the Eisen­how­er Doc­trine, a dec­la­ra­tion of U.S. sup­port for any Mid­dle East­ern gov­ern­ment that it con­sid­ered tar­get­ed by ​“overt armed aggres­sion from any nation con­trolled by Inter­na­tion­al Com­mu­nism.” Eisenhower’s Sec­re­tary of State John Fos­ter Dulles con­sid­ered states in the region allied with the USSR to be ​“con­trolled by Inter­na­tion­al Com­mu­nism” and this includ­ed Egypt, which was one of Israel’s pri­ma­ry adver­saries at the time. By 1967, U.S. plan­ners saw Israel as use­ful for pre­vent­ing the dis­rup­tion of oil sup­plies and as a CIA proxy for car­ry­ing out Amer­i­can oper­a­tions in the Mid­dle East, such as arm­ing U.S.-allied Kur­dish forces or assist­ing the secu­ri­ty forces of Iran, which was a U.S. client at the time. The 1967 war cement­ed the U.S.-Israeli rela­tion­ship as the U.S. came to see Israel as an indis­pens­able tool against the USSR’s Egypt­ian and Syr­i­an allies.

After the Shah of Iran, one of America’s most use­ful prox­ies, was over­thrown in 1979, Israel became even more impor­tant to the Unit­ed States. Start­ing with the 1967 occu­pa­tion and through­out the 1970s, Israeli mil­i­tary attacks and assas­si­na­tions dec­i­mat­ed left-wing and Arab nation­al­ist move­ments across the Mid­dle East that were threats to U.S. client states. It was with full U.S. sup­port that Israel invad­ed Lebanon in 1982 and attacked the PLO, Lebanese left­ists and the Syr­i­an army, all of whom were Sovi­et allies, to say noth­ing of thou­sands of Pales­tin­ian and Lebanese civil­ians. The Unit­ed States itself bombed Lebanon from the sea and sent troops into the coun­try as part of its effort to install a gov­ern­ment in Lebanon that would be friend­ly to the Unit­ed States and Israel. In these ways, Amer­i­can elites sup­port­ed Israeli vio­lence as a means of weak­en­ing the Sovi­et Union in the Mid­dle East and beyond, and of weak­en­ing pro­gres­sive and nation­al­ist forces in the Mid­dle East.

There are pro-Israel lob­by groups in Wash­ing­ton that urge Amer­i­can plan­ners to adopt poli­cies friend­ly to Israeli elites. How­ev­er, as Chom­sky argues, it is doubt­ful they would have much influ­ence if Israel could not be used to sup­port the U.S. rul­ing class’s ​“pri­ma­ry inter­est in the Mid­dle East region, which is to main­tain con­trol over its ener­gy reserves and the flow of petrodollars.”

The Unit­ed States has also mil­i­ta­rized Israel because of ser­vices that Israel’s rul­ing class has ren­dered beyond the Mid­dle East. Israel is one of the world’s fore­most pur­vey­ors of mer­ce­nar­ies who have shared their coun­terin­sur­gency knowl­edge with secu­ri­ty forces in Tai­wan, Indone­sia, the Philip­pines and with nar­co mil­i­tants and para­mil­i­taries in Colom­bia. Israel, fur­ther­more, helped the Unit­ed States pro­vide sup­port to an assort­ment of African dic­ta­tors includ­ing Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, Idi Amin in Ugan­da, Mobu­tu Sese Seko in the Con­go (when it was still ​‘Zaïre’), Jean-Bédel Bokas­sa of Cen­tral Repub­lic, and the apartheid regimes in Zim­bab­we (when it was still ​‘Rhode­sia’) and South Africa, despite bans against doing so in the lat­ter two cas­es. In Latin Amer­i­ca, Israel act­ed as a U.S. arms bro­ker and proxy by sell­ing weapons that, because of con­gres­sion­al leg­is­la­tion, the Unit­ed States often could not sell direct­ly to the mur­der­ous mil­i­tary regimes in Argenti­na, El Sal­vador, Guatemala, Hon­duras, and Nicaragua.

While one major goal of U.S. Cold War maneu­ver­ing was to keep the USSR from hav­ing sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence in the Mid­dle East, the end of this peri­od did not mean that the Unit­ed States changed course on Pales­tine-Israel because the Unit­ed States was in prin­ci­ple opposed to any rad­i­cal nation­al­ism, whether Sovi­et-influ­enced or not. In the post-Cold War era, Israel has remained as deeply inte­grat­ed into the U.S.-led empire as ever. Israel, for exam­ple, has observ­er sta­tus in NATO.

Elliot Sys­tems Ltd, an Israeli firm involved in build­ing the sep­a­ra­tion bar­ri­er in Pales­tine-Israel, has also con­tributed to the ​“secu­ri­ty” of the U.S.-Mexico bor­der wall. In 2002 the Unit­ed States ​“observed” the Israeli inva­sion of Jenin and ​“bor­rowed” its usage of bull­doz­ers in the U.S.-led war on Iraq. Sim­i­lar­ly, the U.S. Law Enforce­ment Exchange Pro­gram teach­es Israel’s shoot-to-kill meth­ods to Amer­i­can police.

U.S. sup­port for Israel should be seen in part as a way for the Unit­ed States to sub­si­dize America’s mil­i­tary indus­try. Between 1997and 2007, Israel signed agree­ments for $10.50 bil­lion worth of U.S. weapons imports, more than any coun­try oth­er than Sau­di Ara­bia. Israel is also the only coun­try allowed by Amer­i­can law to build its domes­tic mil­i­tary indus­try using a large por­tion of the mil­i­tary aid it receives from the Unit­ed States. This right extends to devel­op­ing Israeli weapons sys­tems based on U.S. designs and using Amer­i­can FMF mon­ey to pur­chase mate­ri­als and con­duct research and devel­op­ment for the pur­pose of devel­op­ing its own mil­i­tary sec­tor. Thus, Israel has per­mis­sion to man­u­fac­ture and upgrade U.S. mil­i­tary tech­nol­o­gy and, accord­ing to a 2007 Mem­o­ran­dum of Under­stand­ing, can spend 26.3 per­cent of the FMF it receives from Amer­i­ca on weapons sys­tems man­u­fac­tured in Israel. In these ways, U.S. aid to Israel sub­si­dizes both the Amer­i­can and Israeli rul­ing classes.

The fact that Israel is deeply inte­grat­ed into west­ern cap­i­tal­ism also helps explain the U.S‑Israeli spe­cial rela­tion­ship. Israel has, for instance, pref­er­en­tial trade agree­ments with both the Euro­pean Union and the Unit­ed States. Accord­ing­ly, the Amer­i­can rul­ing class, and the glob­al cap­i­tal­ist elite more gen­er­al­ly, have mate­r­i­al rea­sons to sup­port Israel and to make the state prof­itable. The U.S.-Israeli spe­cial rela­tion­ship can also be explained in part by the links between the two coun­tries’ elites. As Nitzan and Bich­ler point out, ​“since the 1990s, Israel has emerged not only as a favourite des­ti­na­tion for ​‘high-tech’ investors, mon­ey man­agers, and ille­gal flight cap­i­tal, but also as the source of much cap­i­tal out­flow, with local­ly based cap­i­tal­ists acquir­ing assets out­side their coun­try.” In 1995, Israel pri­va­tized Koor, a major hold­ing com­pa­ny with a stake in the mil­i­tary indus­try, by sell­ing it to the U.S.-based Dis­ney fam­i­ly. Two years lat­er, the Israeli gov­ern­ment sold its 43 per­cent share in Bank Hapoal­im (which in turn owned 20 per­cent of Koor) to a group head­ed by U.S. investor Ted Ari­son for over $1 bil­lion. In 2013, the Amer­i­can bil­lion­aire War­ren Buf­fet spent $2 bil­lion to take full con­trol of the Israeli com­pa­ny Iscar Met­al­work­ing. Face­book has an office in Tel Aviv as does Google, which also has a loca­tion in Haifa. HP has a lab in Israel that over­looks Haifa and Apple​’s sec­ond largest research and devel­op­ment cen­tre is in Her­zliya, Israel. IBM, Intel, and Microsoft have all made major invest­ments in Israel.

Amer­i­can sup­port for Israel also needs to be seen as part of U.S. capital’s broad­er strat­e­gy for dom­i­nat­ing the Mid­dle East, which involves hav­ing as many pli­able client states as pos­si­ble. Israel is one of these and so are the unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ments of coun­tries such as Egypt, Jor­dan, and the coun­tries that make up the Gulf Coop­er­a­tion Coun­cil (GCC): Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Sau­di Ara­bia and the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates (UAE). Adam Hanieh describes U.S. sup­port for Israel since the late 1980s as:

Pursu[ing] a pol­i­cy of inte­grat­ing its bases of sup­port in the region with­in a sin­gle, neolib­er­al eco­nom­ic zone tied to the U.S. through a series of bilat­er­al trade agree­ments. This vision is aimed at pro­mot­ing the free flow of cap­i­tal and goods (but not nec­es­sar­i­ly labour) through­out the Mid­dle East region. The region’s mar­kets will be dom­i­nat­ed by U.S. imports, while cheap labour, con­cen­trat­ed in eco­nom­ic ​“free” zones owned by region­al and inter­na­tion­al cap­i­tal, will man­u­fac­ture low-cost exports des­tined for mar­kets in the US, the EU, Israel, and the Gulf. A cen­tral com­po­nent of this vision is the nor­mal­iza­tion and inte­gra­tion of Israel into the Mid­dle East. The U.S. envi­sions a Mid­dle East rest­ing upon Israeli cap­i­tal in the West and Gulf cap­i­tal in the East, under­pin­ning a low-wage, neolib­er­al zone that spans the region. What this means is that Israel’s his­toric destruc­tion of Pales­tin­ian nation­al rights must be accept­ed and blessed by all states in the region.

An exam­ple of this process is the Qual­i­fied Indus­tri­al Zones (QIZ) in Jor­dan and Egypt, which were cre­at­ed through eco­nom­ic agree­ments between the Unit­ed States, Israel, Jor­dan, and Egypt. Most of the QIZs con­tain tex­tile fac­to­ries that act as sub­con­trac­tors for U.S. firms like Wal­mart and GAP and the fac­to­ries them­selves are owned by inter­na­tion­al cap­i­tal, main­ly from the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, Israel, Chi­na, Tai­wan and Korea. Most of the work­ers are migrants from South Asia who are unpro­tect­ed by labor laws, pre­vent­ed from join­ing unions, make minis­cule wages, get sex­u­al­ly assault­ed and reg­u­lar­ly beat­en, work extreme­ly long shifts, have their pass­ports con­fis­cat­ed on arrival, and are forced to live in over­crowd­ed and unclean con­di­tions. The agree­ments for build­ing the QIZs con­tain the unusu­al clause that goods pro­duced there can get duty-free sta­tus in the U.S. if a cer­tain pro­por­tion of the inputs are Israeli. The QIZs, Hanieh writes, ​“are con­struct­ed to weld Israeli and Arab cap­i­tal togeth­er, inte­grat­ing them with the U.S. mar­ket and the Amer­i­can empire, in the joint exploita­tion of cheap labour.” Sim­i­lar­ly, the gigan­tic high­ways that run across the West Bank and that con­nect Israeli cities on the Mediter­ranean with set­tle­ments in the Jor­dan Val­ley are con­duits for trade between Israel and the Gulf. Nor­mal­iza­tion between Israel and the Gulf states under the aus­pices of the US

Empire has also deep­ened in the con­text of each of these states’ hos­til­i­ty to Hezbol­lah, Iran and Syr­ia. Thus, the Unit­ed States sup­ports Israel because Israel has long been a valu­able proxy for U.S. ini­tia­tives in the Mid­dle East and beyond and because the rul­ing class­es of both coun­tries are deeply enmeshed.