Genocide Syndrome by Proxy?

Many critics and commentators have characterized Ukraine as a proxy for the collective West in a geopolitical strategy against Russia. As Ramesh Thakur puts it, “Ukraine’s territory is the battleground for a proxy war between Russia and the West … that reflects the unsettled questions since the end of the Cold War.” Perhaps Israel’s position vis-a-vis Palestine and the wider Middle East belies an analogous imperative of great power politics. Israel was created under the auspices of a declining British empire, whose mantle was assumed by the United States which remains the greatest power in the world today. While Israel appears to have co-opted the United States polity in its Genocide of Palestinians and must, of course, be held responsible for its actions, it is the Americans who are ultimately answerable, as Israel is wholly dependent on their enablement.

In fact, Alexander Haig, a four-star general in the US Army who served as its vice chief of staff, as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, as United States Secretary of State, and as White House Chief of Staff under two presidents is reported to have said that Israel is “America’s largest aircraft carrier which never could be sunk.” Indeed, the United States is a great power and, as such, must be held responsible for its actions within its expansive sphere of influence on the world stage. In this light, the idea that the Israeli lobby determines US policy towards Palestine is, regardless of this lobby’s enormous influence, a profound misconception. At best it is a misunderstanding of the machinations of the United States military-industrial complex; at worst, it is yet another expression, albeit a subliminal one, of an underlying anti-semitism! 

To restate this argument as a counter-idiomatic interrogative – can the tail really wag its dog?

The image above is adapted from the perspicacious and prescient 2014 cartoon by Rob Rogers pictured below.


Note: There is a mental health disorder, that involves a behavioral pattern between a caregiver (perpetrator) and a person cared for (victim), called ‘Munchausen syndrome by proxy,’ in which a caregiver makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms in a victim to make it appear that the victim has a true physical or mental health issue.

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2014/08/11/rob-rogers-makes-the-mistake-of-expressing-an-opinion-on-israel-and-gaza/

https://www.jpost.com/International/Haig-had-a-special-feeling-for-Israel

https://brownstone.org/articles/ukraine-as-a-proxy-war-conflicts-issues-parties-and-outcomes/

https://www.verywellmind.com/munchausen-by-proxy-5071840

After Gaza?

Historian Rashid Khalidi explains how early Zionism was a self-identified Colonial project, a European colonial project backed by British imperialism (see Democracy Now interview below). He points out that up until 1958, an official Jewish Colonization Agency was tasked with the settler colonial transformation of the British Mandate by a systematic dispossession of the Palestinian population. Khalidi claims that the formation of Israel is a unique phenomenon in the annals of Colonialism in that is paradoxically a Nationalist project and a settler Colonial project at the same time. Europeans forcibly settled Arab lands while Jews established an indigenous nation-state, the Europeanness of the settlers being subsumed in their Jewish nationalism.

Today, while Gaza is being decimated and depopulated in what Khalidi has called the ‘last colonial war of the modern age’, the settlement of the West Bank continues at an accelerated pace. While I agree with Khalidi that Israel is a settler-colonial nation and that the assault on Gaza is a colonial war, I wonder if he is right about it being the last such war in the modern age – remember Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc. There is nothing to suggest that more colonial incursions are not forthcoming. Perhaps Khalidi meant to say ‘the last settler-colonial war of the Modern Age’, which I think is a more apt characterization, on the basis of his own premises. Given the extent of Israel’s ongoing aggression in Palestine, and given the history of colonial and neo-colonial incursions in the Middle East, I am surprised at the lack of meaningful opposition and intervention by the other Arab nations.


https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-12-02/israel-gaza-palestinian-american-history

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/27/israeli-settler-violence-in-west-bank-escalates-huwara

https://historyguy.com/list_of_wars_middle_east.html