U.S. complicity in Gaza genocide and military profiteering

Following is an epilogue for the book “War & Lenin in the 21st Century” by Gary Wilson. The book is available in online bookstores.

The chapters in this book were written in the year before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was launched on Oct. 7, 2023. The following genocide in Gaza by the Zionist regime has sparked a worldwide movement that includes many Jewish people against Israeli apartheid, genocide, and for Palestinian self-determination, from the river to the sea.

According to a report by Bloomberg on Nov. 14, the U.S. was secretly supplying weapons and ammunition to aid in the invasion of Gaza, separate from the official Congress-approved military aid to Israel. The Pentagon covertly increased military support to Israeli forces, providing laser-guided missiles, cannon ammunition, bunker-buster munitions, night-vision devices, and new army vehicles. These deliveries include a variety of military armaments beyond the well-known Iron Dome interceptors and Boeing smart bombs. 

There can be no question that the U.S. is fully behind the apartheid regime’s “ethnic cleansing” of the Gaza Strip, an operation that began after President Joe Biden’s theatrical public embrace of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on Oct. 18, 2023. It was the hug that launched an invasion.

Zionist-occupied Palestine — “Israel” — is an apartheid settler state, more like a U.S. colony. Joe Biden recently repeated a line he famously said in 1986: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.” Actually, they did invent one.

Although the British declared the creation of the settler colony in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, it was after World War II, with British power fading, that the Zionist state of Israel was founded (invented) with the backing of the United States. It couldn’t and wouldn’t have been done without U.S. backing. From that beginning, Israel could not have existed for even one day without U.S. financial and military support.

The United States has officially given Israel more than $260 billion in combined military and economic aid since World War II, plus about $10 billion more in contributions for missile defense systems like the Iron Dome, according to a U.S. News report. No other country in the world has received such military and economic support from the U.S. Some have even called it the 51st state of the U.S.

In a speech in December 1981, Gen. Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, said Israel is “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security” (source: NYT article, Dec. 15, 1981).

The profits of this “American aircraft carrier” go to Big Oil and the military-industrial weapons manufacturers.

Taking over Europe’s gas market

Since the 1990s, Washington and Wall Street have been trying to take over the natural gas market in Europe from Russia. The Nord Stream pipeline was the primary route for Russian natural gas, and Nord Stream 2 was built to expand capacity. Before the NATO proxy war against Russia began, Victoria Nuland, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, declared that “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” On Sept. 27, 2022, the pipeline was blown up by the U.S. military, as reported by Seymour Hersh.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the disruption of the Nord Stream pipelines a “major strategic opportunity for years to come” and highlighted that the “U.S. has become the leading supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe,” which is at a significantly higher price than the Russian natural gas.

LNG, delivered by ships, is the only alternative available right now to Russian natural gas delivered through pipelines. The top two suppliers worldwide of LNG are the U.S. and Qatar. The North Field East Project of Qatar Energy is an ExxonMobil, ENI, Total Energies, ConocoPhillips, and Shell partnership. They are talking of a pipeline across occupied Palestine to the Mediterranean to expedite deliveries to Europe.

The U.S. oil giant Chevron already plunders natural gas from the stolen waters off Palestine. Chevron operates a major natural gas facility, named Tamar, located 12 miles off the coast in the territorial waters of the Palestinian Territory of Gaza. As the New York Times reported, this has been projected to become a hub for exporting natural gas to Europe through the proposed EastMed pipeline.

Military-industrial profits soar

Never to be underestimated, “Wall Street eyes big profits from war,” was a Guardian headline on Oct. 30.

“Wall Street is hoping for an explosion in profits,” the Guardian reports.

“During third-quarter earnings calls this month, analysts from Morgan Stanley and TD Bank took note of this potential profit-making escalation in conflict and asked unusually blunt questions about the financial benefit of the war …

“Joe Biden has asked Congress for $106bn in military and humanitarian aid for Israel and Ukraine and humanitarian assistance for Gaza. The money could be a boon to the aerospace and weapons sector, which enjoyed a 7-percentage point jump in value …

“Greg Hayes, Raytheon’s chairman and executive director, responded: ‘I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking … on top of what we think is going to be an increase in the [Department of Defense] top line [budget].’”