When We Talk About Israel, We Are Talking About Ourselves

Gaza is not a distant crisis. It is a moral reckoning for everything the American empire was built on.

THE WEST VIRGINIA HOLLER

Apr 06, 2025

Israeli and American flags flying over Jerusalem — Ahmad Gharabli, AFP, Getty Images

From Sony Thang:

When Gaza is bombed, it is not just Israel’s war.

It is a continuation of every war the American empire has waged to maintain supremacy.

Whether in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya.

This is not a malfunction of the Western order.

This is the Western order.

Israel is not an aberration.

It is a mirror.

Settler colonialism.

Racial supremacy.

Religious exceptionalism.

Genocide, marketed as self-defense.

This is not Israel’s crime alone.

It is the American blueprint—exported, perfected, and unleashed.

Gaza is not a distant crisis.

It is a moral reckoning for everything the American empire was built on.

And the world sees it now.

With terrifying clarity.

What Israel is doing is not just "not all that different."

It is the logical extension of everything the West has ever done.

Start at 1492.

Start at the Doctrine of Discovery.

Start at the ships, the chains, the crosses, the muskets.

The West didn’t just overthrow governments.

It erased civilizations.

It didn’t just install dictators.

It installed systems.

Of plunder. Of hierarchy. Of erasure.

Israel is not copying America.

Israel is America.

Same operating system. Same moral code. Same ritual violence.

A settler state sanctified by myth, guarded by nukes, built on bones.

And the language never changes.

"Security."

"Democracy."

"Peace process."

It's always peace after the land is stolen. After the children are buried.

This is not policy—it’s pathology.

Empire isn’t just about power. It’s about belief.

A belief that Western lives matter more.

That resistance is terror.

That memory can be erased.

But the empire is cracking.

Gaza ripped the mask off.

And now, all the suppressed ghosts are speaking again—Algeria, Congo, Vietnam, Iraq, Palestine.

The world hears them.

The empire does not.

Because it still thinks this is just politics.

But it’s not.

It’s a funeral.

And a mirror.

And the beginning of the end.

—

What’s unfolding in Gaza is not a break from Western values.

It is their logical conclusion.

What Israel does with missiles, the U.S. perfected with drones.

What Israel claims as "self-defense," America wrote into its foreign policy long ago.

Against Vietnam.

Against Iraq.

Against the world.

This is not a regional dispute.

This is not an isolated war crime.

This is empire, laid bare.

The playbook of racialized violence and frontier conquest never died—it just found new terrain.

Gaza is the laboratory, but the design is centuries old.

And as the images pour in.

Flattened hospitals.

Dismembered children.

Smirking justifications.

The veil slips further.

The world is not confused.

It is not deceived.

It is watching with terrifying clarity.

And it will remember who looked away.

—

From the ashes of World War II, the U.S. didn’t just inherit the torch of empire.

It rewrote the manual.

It studied Britain’s colonial collapse.

Perfected the art of narrative warfare.

Replaced redcoats with coups, sanctions, proxy armies, and permanent bases—draped in the language of "freedom."

Israel became the prototype.

A live laboratory for walls, drones, surveillance regimes, and mass civilian control—export-tested, battlefield-approved.

And Gaza is not just a graveyard of Palestinian life.

It is a mirror held to the soul of the West.

What it reflects is not only the brutality of Zionism—but the spiritual rot at the heart of Western civilization.

A civilization that cannot exist without an enemy.

Without a native to erase.

A child to cage.

A people to bomb.

A "lesser other" to bury.

So it can believe in its own reflection.

The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World [Book]

From Noam Chomsky, The Myth of American Idealism:

“American support for Israel means that Israel’s actions should rightly be understood as ‘US-Israeli’ actions. When we talk about ‘Israeli crimes,’ the framing is misleading, because they are US-Israeli crimes. Whatever Israel does is either implicitly or explicitly authorized by the US, which provides economic, diplomatic, military, and ideological support, and US presidents can alter Israeli policy and restrain Israel’s violence when they choose to do so. When we talk about Israel, we should remember that in an important sense we are talking about ourselves. Because the US arms and protects Israel, we bear responsibility for what it does.

…

The Israel-Palestine conflict is often portrayed as complicated. In fact, it is relatively simple. The conflict is centered in territories that have been under harsh military occupation for fifty years. The conqueror is a major military power, acting with massive military, economic, and diplomatic support from the global superpower. Its subjects are alone and defenseless, many barely surviving in miserable camps, who have suffered brutal terror of a kind familiar in colonial wars and have in turn committed terrible atrocities. The United States has long had a choice: will it insist that Israel operate in accordance with basic democratic values and international norms, or will it fund and encourage the immoral, illegal, and self-destructive project of building a permanent apartheid state? Only through domestic public pressure in the US can the pattern of this country’s policies be disrupted.”

From the Costs of War Project:

U.S. spending on Israel’s military operations and related U.S operations in the region total at least $22.76 billion and counting. This estimate is conservative; while it includes approved security assistance funding since October 7, 2023, supplemental funding for regional operations, and an estimated additional cost of operations, it does not include any other economic costs.

This figure includes the $17.9 billion the U.S. government has approved in security assistance for Israeli military operations in Gaza and elsewhere since October 7 – substantially more than in any other year since the U.S. began granting military aid to Israel in 1959. Yet the report describes how this is only a partial amount of the U.S. financial support provided during this war.

Related U.S. military operations in the broader region since October 7 are part of the fuller picture. In particular, the U.S. Navy has significantly scaled up its defensive and offensive operations against Houthi militants in Yemen, which the Houthis claim is related to Israel’s war in Gaza. Hostilities have escalated to become the most sustained military campaign by U.S. forces since the 2016-2019 air war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. U.S. operations in the region, including in Yemen, have already cost the U.S. government $4.86 billion (included in the overall figure, above, of $22.76 billion).

This Houthi-related conflict has also cost the maritime trade an additional $2.1 billion, because shippers have been forced to divert vessels or pay exorbitant insurance fees. U.S. consumers may experience paying higher prices for goods as a result.

This report touches on the relationship between U.S. weapons manufacturers and the Israeli government, which have maintained longstanding commercial relations. The U.S. government has cited these commercial ties as one of the reasons why the U.S. should continue to supply foreign militaries, including the Israeli military, with weapons and equipment.

The general who prophesied the Hamas attack and does not want to enter Gaza - globalter

Retired Israeli General Yirzhak Brik:

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs—it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”