Edit: The numbers for US aid and investment to the zionist project were incorrect by the misplacement of a decimal in one of the terms. Where this article formerly read that US capital accounted for one half of the zionist economy, it should actually read one fourth. Thanks to Amir for this catch.

It’s difficult to think of the so-called republic of the United States as a global empire. After all, there are elections, democracy, and all the trappings that go with them! Can a republic be an empire?

The answer, of course, is a resounding yes.

Insofar as the U.S. is a republic, what kind of republic is it?

It is a bourgeois republic. It is a republic in which, ultimately, the bourgeoisie, the class of property owners, has the decisive say on any and all political decisions. States themselves are merely a clever way of managing the economic conflicts between haves and have nots — conflicts that we might call class antagonisms. If there were not different classes — that is, if everyone had the same relationship to the real physical world and to the economy within a given society — there would be no “state” because class disputes would be impossible.

This is a difficult concept for those of us raised on the mythology of the U.S. civic religion. Most people think of the state as the postal workers, clerks, bus drivers, schoolteachers, and janitors employed using U.S. tax dollars.  The perception of the “state” as being essentially a collection of functionaries is an important part of this confusing mythologization. But when we say “the state,” we don’t mean the bus drivers, the town clerks, the registrars of voters.

The state is fundamentally composed of all the mechanisms of coercion that prevent one or more classes from overthrowing the ruling class. The state, at its core, is made up of things like intelligence services, the army, the police, prisons, and the courts. Many things which are often considered an essential part of the state, such as the functionaries described above, aren’t actually essential to it. While we may be well aware that these coercive forces are part of the state, it is not often that we consider that these forces are the state in its entirety. The administrative functions that the state performs aren’t necessary to it. 

We are speaking of “the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force. This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the split into classes…. This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds.”

We must remember that the state “has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split.”

This is pretty straightforward sounding in theory. In practice, however, there are all kinds of ways that this gets obfuscated. Things get in the way and make it hard to see this fundamental truth about class society. As long as there are classes, there must be a state. To rid ourselves of the state, we must rid ourselves of the inequality of class. But in the modern state, the ruling class is rarely united. The bourgeoisie bicker and snipe over issues of policy. The trappings of the republican state make a great pretense of “consulting the people,” but, by any metric, the lawmakers and politicians aren’t answerable to the vast majority of the people. They don’t care what people think.

So the U.S. is a republic, but it’s a republic by and for the bourgeoisie. Your voice, my voice, they don’t matter. And worse, this republic has military bases all over the world, in countries scarcely mentioned in western media, pursuing goals you never knew the state had. The media doesn’t talk about the vast network of U.S. bases all over the world. The media doesn’t ever mention, for instance, AFRICOM.

The U.S. empire used to be a direct empire, like the colonial empires of the early 20th century. After the Second World War, the colonial direct empires were forced to their tactics by a wave of national liberation and decolonization movements. Instead of fighting to retain their rule over other countries through colonial governors and deployed armies, the U.S mastered neocolonialism. Neocolonies are ruled by locals who are loyal not to their own people, but to the neocolonial master back in the imperial heartland. The U.S. empire corrupts politicians and holds them hostage in the countries it wants to control.  These locals are called compradors.  Panama is the textbook example of an American neocolony, which the U.S retains control over in order to siphon wealth out of Central and South America. Agents of the empire work unceasingly to expand their influence and secure new neocolonies. For example, since the Maidan in Ukraine in 2014 and over the course of the current proxy war, Ukraine has essentially become a NATO neocolony.

There is another kind of country part of this imperial tapestry. That’s the subject or vassal country. This country pursues its own regional goals on the ground, but does so with the explicit permission of its imperial master. The zionist state of Israel is just such a subject or vassal country. It is completely dependent on the U.S. It only survives through an umbilicus of money, weapons, and population, all transferred yearly from the United States imperial heartland to the settlements and outposts of the zionist project.

Neocolonial economies are extractive; they are dominated by the metropolis, the imperial core. Their industries are broken down and turned merely to the exportation of valuable raw materials. They don’t make policy — their policy is dictated by Washington. By contrast, subject or dependent countries aren’t controlled in this way by the metropolitan economy. They rely on the empire, certainly, but they are granted much more independence. They don’t have to ask Washington for permission, but the fact remains that if Washington really wanted to stop a dependent country, they could. The zionists didn’t run their genocidal attack on Gaza by the war planners in Washington. Instead they asked for forgiveness while continuing their genocide. Washington not only stands idly by, but gives billions in support.

Why?

The zionist state is the pet of the U.S. bourgeoisie. It’s a dog. It’s a rabid dog, one that’s broken its leash, but at the end of the day, it belongs to the U.S. empire.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

In 2021, the economy of the zionist state was $413 billion U.S. dollars. The same year, the U.S. foreign direct investment in the zionist economy was $41.3 billion U.S. dollars — fully ten percent of its economy came in the form of U.S. ownership of zionist corporate shares. The U.S. imperial government gave $3.31 billion in direct aid to the zionist state in that year. The U.S. imported $30.6 billion in commodities (goods and services) from the zionist economy in 2022. $10.6 billion of the zionist economy was represented by ownership of U.S. stock in 2022.

Of that $413 billion GDP of the zionist project, one quarter, $85.81 billion USD, was represented by aid, investment, and trade. The zionist economy is entirely dependent on trade and support from the U.S. imperial economy. Annually, the zionist occupation forces, what they call defense forces, receive about 16% of their entire budget. Since the Second World War, the U.S. imperial government has given more than $260 billion in economic aid, and $10 billion more for missile defense systems. The zionist army is allowed the right of “first access” to U.S. military hardware.

The zionist economy is functionally an appendage of the U.S. economy. It has very little in the way of natural resources that could be extracted by the imperial centers. Unlike a neocolony, the zionist economy is a net importer of raw material: petroleum, wheat, cars, diamonds, and other production inputs. It is the home of numerous multinational U.S. research facilities belonging to corporations like IBM, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, and Facebook. Intel, Microsoft, and Apple all built their first overseas research facilities there. Of the more than 300 foreign-invested research and development centers in the zionist state, two-thirds are American.

It is also a warehouse for capital speculation. The zionist economy is second only to the U.S. for the number of startup companies. These speculative ventures are high-risk investments in the technology sector and, over the last five years, have brought $95 billion into the country through venture capital.

The U.S. embassy proudly proclaims the truth about the U.S. relationship with the zionist entity: “Critical components of leading American high-tech products are invented and designed in Israel, making these American companies more competitive and more profitable globally.” Those companies include Cisco, Intel, Motorola, Applied Materials, and Hewlett-Packard. The zionist economy hosts over 2,500 U.S. firms that employ at least 72,000 Israelis. Four percent of the Massachusetts GDP is made up of zionist-funded businesses opened within that state.

More than 200,000 people with dual U.S.-zionist citizenship live within the zionist state. Roughly half a million total have dual U.S.-zionist citizenship. Thousands of U.S. citizens immigrate to the zionist state every year. In 2020 that number was 2,284; in 2021 it was 4,400; in 2022 it was 3,351. Over the course of its existence 161,744 Americans have immigrated to the zionist state. The flow of people and treasure from the U.S. to the zionist state is immense.

But why?

Why Does the U.S. Need Israel?

A complicated question like this cannot be fully answered in the space of a single article. There are myriad reasons, interlocked and intertwined. The U.S. Empire uses the zionist state as a staging point for its military presence in West Asia. It maintains at least one “secret” military base there — Site 512. The zionist war machine has served as a necessary provocateur and agent of U.S. aggression going back to the 1960s. When U.S. politicians want to strike at regions they cannot, for political reasons, target — such as Iran — the zionists do it for them.

The U.S. feeds parasitically off of the zionist intelligence agency, Mossad. The intelligence agencies of the two regimes have been collaborating since the 1940s when the CIA relied on Mossad to strike at the Soviets while maintaining deniability.

Undoubtedly the two most critical features that the zionists provide, however, are markets and investments for U.S. capital and a place to test weapons and techniques of war, counterinsurgency, and genocide.

We have seen above that U.S. corporations are made more profitable by relying on zionist workers. The zionist workforce is more highly educated than the U.S. workforce; being propped up by global capitalism, the zionist state can actually act as an exaggerated version of the U.S. state: an entire economy of highly trained technical workers with excellent social safety nets. In fact, in order to carry out their massacres and cleansing campaigns, the zionist state must provide more benefits than the U.S. state. Zionist society is highly militarized. Every citizen of the zionist state must serve its war machine at 18 or else be imprisoned. The ruling comprador class of “Israel” cannot afford to allow its people to develop a deep discontent with their government (or at least, that was their conventional wisdom until very recently).

The entire adult population of the zionist state are trained ex-military professionals, and all adult citizens are formally military reservists until the age of 40. This militarized state is a mirror of the fascist German state that helped create it; that is, essentially, the whole population is capable of bearing arms, and the totality of the zionist government is turned, more and more, to the support and deployment of the zionist occupation force. If the settler relation in the U.S. has turned a vast proportion of the workers here into labor aristocrats, it has transformed almost all of zionist civil society into the petit-bourgeoisie. Median household income in the zionist state is $41,000. Median household income in the U.S. is $30,000. The U.S. government spends roughly $3,000 per head on social welfare. The zionist government spends roughly $23,000.

If the zionist economy makes the U.S. economy more profitable through a skilled labor force and what are essentially huge government subsidies, it also provides the U.S. a market for raw materials, a production point for intermediate products, and a haven for speculation and investment in “startups.” All of this keeps the U.S. economy afloat and makes certain that capital remains profitable.

The other major benefit to the U.S. is the testing of weapons, tactics, and techniques in live fire situations. The zionists treat the Palestinian people as test subjects for counterinsurgency, dismemberment, and murder. U.S. weapons are deployed against them and data is gathered about how the weapons performed. New techniques for U.S. police to use — like the knee-choke that killed George Floyd — are developed by the Israeli Occupation Force. These are then taught to U.S. police at facilities like the “Cop City” being built in Atlanta.

The Anti-Semites Unite

It is no accident that Klan-certified police officers who would kill or remove all Jews from the U.S. go over to the zionist state for their training on how to oppress Black Americans. The U.S. empire is antisemitic. The zionist entity is antisemitic. The U.S. white supremacist colonial project has been sharpened and recapitulated in the zionist state, which is nothing more than a little United States.

Even now, the U.S. ruling class could stop the genocide unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank. Even now, it maintains that stranglehold over its vassal state. They are not incapable, but rather unwilling, to exercise that power. It isn’t profitable to do so. Indeed, the U.S. Empire needs its neocolonies and vassal states performing just as they are now. Let us take the U.S. imperial president at his word: “If there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one.”