Save the World, Stop Zionism

Read of Phoenix America at the end of the essay.

Save the World, Stop Zionism

I think what has to be said about Israel, Zionism, and the American role in sustaining both is often dismissed as rage when it is better understood as description. The ugliness is in the facts themselves, not in the act of speaking them. When a messenger describes a fire honestly, the right response is not to scold him for sounding alarmed, but to look at the flames.

I no longer believe America can be fixed by ordinary reform. Whatever else this place has produced, its political project is a four-hundred-year experiment in conquest, slavery, extraction, and self-deception. The pilgrims did not stumble into innocence. They arrived with a religious and civilizational story that made land appear empty and the people already living on it expendable. The theft was sanctified, the murder rationalized, and from that point forward the nation learned to wrap violence in high language.

For generations Americans have been taught to answer every indictment with a list of achievements. Yes, there was genocide. Yes, there was slavery. Yes, there was imperial war. But look at the inventions, the highways, the moon shots, the constitutional phrases, the bright machinery of modern life. Surely that counts for something. Surely the account must therefore be mixed rather than damned.

I do not believe that anymore. Human curiosity was not invented in America. Human ingenuity was not invented in America. Whatever worthwhile scientific, artistic, or practical achievement emerged here could have emerged elsewhere, under different flags and with less blood in the soil. What is distinctively American is not genius but the conversion of every genuine accomplishment into moral credit for a system that does not deserve it. The achievements become bunting on a rotten tree. The credit becomes propaganda for evil.

And in our time, nowhere is that propaganda more lethal than in the American attachment to Zionism.

The polite phrase is “the special relationship.” What it really names is an alliance between a decaying empire and a heavily armed settler state whose existence has been justified by a permanent regime of fear, dispossession, and war. Critics of Zionism have long argued that the Israeli state is expansionist by structure, not merely by leadership accident, and that its conflicts with Palestinians and neighboring peoples are rooted in a settler-colonial logic of land seizure and domination.

The United States has not merely tolerated this project. It has financed it, armed it, shielded it diplomatically, and folded it into its own strategic imagination. The U.S. government continues to define Israel as a core partner, preserve its military edge, and present the alliance as morally and strategically necessary even as the relationship becomes more divisive inside the United States itself.

This is one reason the rot of the old American project has deepened in recent decades. A nation already shaped by conquest found in Zionism a reflection of itself and then called that reflection virtue. The two projects rhyme: settlement recast as destiny, domination renamed defense, indigenous resistance translated into proof that harsher control is needed. That recognition between the two states has made the alliance feel natural to those who benefit from power, even while it has become unbearable to anyone still capable of moral sight.

Look at Gaza. Analysts of urban warfare and regional security have documented extraordinary levels of civilian harm, mass displacement, and broad regional destabilization flowing from Israel’s war, with the consequences radiating into Lebanon, Yemen, and beyond. These outcomes are not well described as unfortunate side effects of a basically defensive project. They reflect policy choices, permissive targeting logics, and a strategic culture that repeatedly shifts intolerable costs onto civilian populations while speaking the language of necessity.

And each time, the United States steps in to fund, defend, explain, or excuse. That is why Zionism matters not only to Israelis and Palestinians but to the world and to the soul, such as it is, of the United States. As long as America is bamboozled, pressured, influenced, or seduced into treating an expansionist Zionist project as a moral ally and democratic outpost, it will continue to spend blood, treasure, law, and legitimacy in service of something profoundly destructive to the region and corrupting to itself.

This does not mean Jews as Jews are to blame. That is both false and morally lazy. There is a documented history of American Jewish dissent from Zionism, and there have always been Jews who saw clearly that ethnic nationalism in Palestine would lead to dispossession and endless war. The problem is not Jewishness. The problem is Zionism as state ideology, and the network of American political, financial, military, and religious forces that chose to bind themselves to it.

If the world is to be saved from further descent into mechanized cruelty, permanent war, and the normalization of exterminatory politics, this alliance has to be broken. That means stopping the treatment of Zionism as sacred, untouchable, or synonymous with civilization. It means refusing the old blackmail in which every criticism of Israel is treated as a form of hatred while actual mass killing is presented as self-defense. It means recognizing that no humane future can be built on top of a live colonial project that still requires bombing, enclosure, intimidation, and periodic slaughter to maintain itself.

And it also means admitting something harder about America. Zionism did not create the American appetite for domination. The United States had already spent centuries cultivating that appetite at home and abroad. But Zionism has sharpened it, focused it, and supplied it with a fresh theater in which old American sins can continue under new sacred language. It has helped turn the recent phase of our four-hundred-year rot into something even more brazen and morally disfiguring.

So if one wants to save the world, one must stop Zionism. And if one wants to save anything worth saving in this country, one must stop pretending that the alliance with Israel is incidental, harmless, or morally neutral. It is one of the most concentrated points at which the oldest American lies about innocence, chosenness, and righteous violence meet their modern expression.

The answer is not to rescue the old United States as it is. The answer is to let the old mythology die and to build something else. That is the spirit behind Phoenix America. Not a reform of empire, but a replacement for it. Not another round of noble words draped over organized theft, but a new attempt to organize political life around equality, limits on wealth, land justice, public purpose, and a defense policy that is actually defensive.

Phoenix America begins where the old republic refuses to begin: with the admission that conquest is not freedom, oligarchy is not democracy, and propaganda is not moral credit. It insists that if machines and modern productivity make abundance more possible, that abundance must belong to all rather than to a tiny owner class. It insists that stolen land must be addressed as stolen land. It insists that empire abroad and hierarchy at home are parts of the same machine.

In that light, stopping Zionism is not a side issue. It is part of breaking the whole imperial spell. As long as America remains fused to Israel’s militarized nationalism, it will keep reproducing the very habits Phoenix America is meant to overcome: the worship of force, the sanctification of inequality, the branding of domination as necessity, and the moral anesthesia that lets a people watch cities burn and call it order.

If the messenger sounds severe, it is because the hour is severe. The point is not to be admired for balance while the machinery of death grinds on. The point is to say plainly what is true enough to matter: the old American order is rotten, Zionism has become one of its most poisonous modern expressions, and anything genuinely worth saving will have to begin by refusing both.

Optional source links

Optional source links

These are the source links behind the factual references in the essay.

• How America’s Alliance with Israel Became So Divisive ​

• Israel’s foreign influence is the most unrelenting in US history ​

• U.S.–Israel Strategy: From Special Relationship to Strategic Partnership 2029–2047 ​

• Israel–United States relations ​

• Why Does the United States Support Israel? ​

• War Guilt in the Middle East ​

• Reinterpreting One Hundred Years of Zionist–Arab Relations ​

• Oil, Zionism, and Western Imperialism ​

• Zionist Israel: the root cause of Middle East conflict ​

• Gaza and the Conduct of Urban War: Civilian Harm, Risk, and Responsibility ​

• Regional Consequences of Israel’s War on Gaza ​

• Israel’s Genocide in Gaza Destabilizes Yemen and the Region ​

• The forgotten history of American Jewish dissent against Zionism ​

• The Suppressed Lineage of American Jewish Dissent on Zionism ​

• Zionism and American Jews: Bringing Us Together and Pulling Us Apart ​