Through Israel and the ideology of Zionism, western elites reinvented their ugly, racist system of control and sold it as a ‘moral’ cause. Now the game is up.
Netanyahu and Trump in Oval Office, February 2025. (Dan Scavino/Wikimedia Commons)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
Western elites don’t care what you think or say, so long as you don’t notice that they are the ones making money from a genocide, asset-stripping western economies and trashing our planet.
Inevitably, the more extreme the West’s actions – by, for example, actively aiding Israel’s genocide in Gaza – the more extreme the assumptions about the causes of that behaviour.
As a result, some are falling into an easy trap laid for them by western establishments. They assume that tiny Israel controls the West and its foreign policy, and then dedicate their energies to making the case for this analytical framework.
In a sense, the debate about whether Israel controls the West or the West controls Israel cannot be won on facts alone. It is too easy to select the facts that suit your view. It makes more sense to try to understand the context in which this debate is taking place, and address the question of “Cui bono?”, or “Who ultimately benefits?”
I published a long essay this week, which you can read here, making the case that the West uses Israel to provide a moral gloss to its own larger, colonial aims in the oil-rich Middle East – aims the West has been pursuing for more than a century, when Britain promised to implant an explicitly “colonial” entity, one it fashioned as a “Jewish state,” in the throat of the Arab world.
Jonathan Cook on X: In Gaza, Western colonialism has been unmasked. (X, Screenshot)
To be clear, the thesis that the West controls Israel, not the other way round, does not preclude the obvious fact that Israel advances its own particular aims, and meddles in western domestic politics to advance those aims. It can do so as long as those goals do not conflict significantly with the West’s larger imperial agenda of “full-spectrum global military domination” and resource control.
You can believe Israel is fully a western client state without having to dismiss the fact of a powerful Israel lobby that seeks to widen its room for manoeuvre within overall western foreign policy objectives, or the fact that some Israeli leaders, such as Benjamin Netanyahu, are more difficult for Washington elites to handle than others.
You can also square it with the fact that Israel – in so far as its aims roughly accord with the foreign policy agenda of an unseen, permanent bureaucracy in Washington – can run rings around a U.S. President trying to rein it in as part of his own myth-making, as Barack Obama signally tried and failed to do.
Political Passivity
This surface politics is what we are encouraged to see as “real politics”. It is not. Elections, as the saying goes, would not be allowed if they made any real difference. The so-called right and left in western political systems share the same basic assumptions about foreign policy: continuing western control of global resources.
Questioning the purpose of NATO, and the neo-colonialism it embodies, is itself enough of a red flag to get you designated as Public Enemy No 1, as former U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn soon found out. As will the new U.K. leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, if he starts making significant electoral inroads.
Mainstream political parties have the freedom to bicker over the details of domestic policy. That is what we are encouraged to focus on. Whether we should support extreme austerity that benefits wealth elites, or slightly less extreme austerity that also benefits wealth elites but slightly less so. Whether we support a Brexit that benefits one set of oligarchs, or a Remain that benefits another set of oligarchs.
More broadly, western elites – the billionaire class – protect themselves and the structures of power they have created to maintain their wealth by manufacturing, mainly through the establishment media, deep misconceptions about the nature of our political systems. They want us looking in the wrong places.
For many – the majority – the mistake is to think that we, the people, control the political system but that corrupt politicians have failed us.
For others, it is to imagine that powerful lobbies – like the Israel one – distort and poison what would otherwise be far more responsive and benign political structures.
Both lead to political passivity by misdiagnosing reality. Both assume that our politics can be fixed by dealing with surface issues.
In the first case, the answer is to elect a Donald Trump in the U.S. or a Nigel Farage in the U.K. who claim – in direct contradiction of their own histories positioned within western elites – to be outsiders who champion ordinary people. Not surprisingly, they want you scapegoating “illegal immigrants”, “benefit scroungers” and “the traitorous left”, not taking on the billionaire class they really represent.
In the second case, the answer is to root out a foreign agent – the Israel lobby – that has infiltrated and contaminated the political system, and thereby restore that system to health.
Both these futile chases after illusory political change simply buy more time for the billionaire class and their discredited power structures, ones pushing our and other species to the brink of extinction, to continue business as usual.
Double Boon
The “Israel controls the West” assumption is a double boon for the billionaire class, and is utterly self-sabotaging for those who want real political change.
First, it shifts our attention away from where real power lies and who it serves: the billionaire class and their hangers-on.
Second, the billionaire class, by falsely asserting that the genocidal state of Israel represents Jews, can then easily denounce the claim that Israel controls the West as the a new form of “antisemitism”. Western states, supposedly waging a battle against this “new antisemitism”, can then justify accreting stronger powers to crush free speech and expand terror laws.
?BREAKING: Hundreds arrested in Parliament Square for peaceful protest against ban of Palestine Action
When the Government is arresting people under terrorism laws for sitting peacefully in protest, something is going very wrong here in the UK.
Peaceful protest is a… pic.twitter.com/Is4SPUtWyV
— Amnesty UK (@AmnestyUK) September 6, 2025
It understands that there is a far more plausible reason why the West has provided the bombs to destroy Gaza, undermined the role of U.N. aid agencies to help Israel starve 1 million children to death, and operated spy flights over Gaza to collect intelligence to assist Israel in targeting journalists and killing aid workers.
A proper analytical framework can explain why Trump and European leaders wish to feign indignation at Israel attacking an ally, Qatar, even though it is clear that the U.S. gave Israel clearance for the attack – an attempted assassination of the Hamas negotiators who were close to signing a ceasefire deal to bring home the Israeli captives we are told Israel and the West care so much about they have had to murder and maim hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to advance these captives’ return.
The truth is that we live in a bubble of political make-believe. The media and Hollywood – the public relations arms of the billionaire class – create fairy-tale narratives designed to keep us ignorant, divided and squabbling. They don’t care what you think or say so long as you don’t notice that the billionaire class is making money from a genocide, asset-stripping western economies and trashing our planet.
The enormity of all this is too grave, too terrifying for most of us to cope with. But cope with it we must – if we are to stand a hope of changing our world for the better.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
“In a sense, the debate about whether Israel controls the West or the West controls Israel cannot be won on facts alone. It is too easy to select the facts that suit your view. It makes more sense to try to understand the context in which this debate is taking place, and address the question of “Cui bono?”, or “Who ultimately benefits?”
This is a very important thought and one which, extracted from the particular context of Zionism, can profitably be applied to many other situations. Too many smart people spend too much time trying to find proofs of things. A whole host of things, such as the existence of atoms, did not have direct proof until late in the game or, as is the case of the 4 color map theorem, never have. Evidence is always good, but it is the compactness and the organizing of odd facts into a coherent structure which allows the facts to be ‘forgotten’, replaced by the rule, which is what makes explanations accepted.
I grant that Britain has different politics, but here in the U.S. support and opposition to Zionism is part of an ongoing, sub rosa struggle by a Jewish elite for parity with the other White ethnicities in the inner party of the ruling class. White Supremacism should not be left out in any discussion of Western Imperialism. Nor should social darwinism. The Western imperialists don’t just want the resources of the rest of the world, they want to re-organize the whole planet into a hierarchy of human groups based on perceived utility to their interests.
Another in a very long line of quality journalism and analysis. Thank you Jonathan and Consortium News for providing another great independent source of truth to power.
My only question is: In the list of sources / apps to share to, why is Substack not included in the list? Or should I locate and follow you on Substack?
israel is not in control, never was, never will be. That is precisely why the USA and Europe run errands for israel.
Perspicacity for stupid times?
That criticism of the Israeli government or of Jewish individuals, no matter how outrageous their behavior or how preposterous their claims, is now defined as “anti-Semitic” will not age well. The right wing is already fracturing over Gaza. And there has long been an undercurrent of real anti-Semitism, like those signs “Jews will not replace us” at the 2017 Unite the Right demonstration. A reference to an old idea Jews want to ‘mongrelize the white race’ so the Jewish cabal can rule. It will be easy to reuse far right tropes to blame billionaire and banker Jewish people and by extension all Jews when the desperate enforcement of empire finally fails, taking the trickle up econ system down with it.
The concept of whiteness is indeed a product of empire. Words matter. I’ve seen repeatedly the term “tribal,” apparently a current intellectual fad, used to mean western political groups who hate each other. It’s not a neutral descriptor. “Tribal” was applied historically to sub-Saharan Africans, Native peoples of the Americas, and Indigenous Australians. Dark, superstitious, primitive, violent. Whereas Euros and their colonist descendants are “ethnic.” Light, rational, civilized, calm. With pride in exemplary civilized traits like destroying ecosystems, efficient methods of genocide, and employing a majority of scientists in projects like H bombs and bioweapons.
Cook makes a good point. It might also be worth considering how the agenda of the billionaires and their framing of the conflict is responsible for the beliefs and attitudes of the Israeli public.
Israel literally would not exist in its current state if it wasn’t for the tens of billions of American dollars that are pumped into Israel every single year. Stop the money, stop the genocide.
yeah nah…if you wanna know who controls you, it’s those you’re not allowed to critisize…Israel
A comedian was arrested recently in the UK for things he’d said online about trans people.
No, weak potentates must suppress criticism and mockery. Strong ones can handle criticism and mockery. Support for Israel and the current attempt by Jews for equality with other White ethnicities is weak – especially among the ruling elites. It is that weakness which is the source of the ban on criticism of Zionism.
Further, as Cook points out in this essay, support of Israel is support for the Western Imperial project. The project was on the brink of success at the opening of the 20th century. The imperialists had united to crush the Boxer Rebellion and China, the biggest and last prize of the colonization of the world, lay prostrate before its would-be conquerors. Then the imperialists fell out with one another, eventually leading to world war and Bolshevism. It is the effort to complete this project – now that there are no more rival imperialists and Bolshevism is dead – which is what is driving the West’s foreign policy and the latest extension of extremist pogroms in Israel.
I figure the West isn’t even all that worried about Israel’s atrocities. They WANT Israel to attack and subdue its neighbors. The betrayal of the Arabian monarchies is probably only a year away. The West is only worried that Israel will jump the gun, attacking Arabia before Western populations are prepared for the major war that will entail.
And institutional power rums the people in them and for them. An imaginary fairy tale created by humans that then takes then over as ideological constructs invented for to provide a religious imperative. Minds taking over the body of Planet Earth as an impersonal slave of predator evolution.
Exactly.
The holocaust and slaughter of others in the neighborhood is too profitable to stop.
Control of energy is necessary for maintenance of empire.
Late stage monopoly capitalism is undergoing a “reset.”
Absolutely spot on. Netanyahu and the IDF are not doing a single thing in Gaza, the West Bank and in southern Syria that the MIC, the foreign policy establishment, and the national security apparatus don’t want them to be doing. The West literally INVENTED Zionism. What was What was the Balfour Declaration but a way of establishing a Western foothold in the Levant — something sought since the Crusades — while at the same time providing a solution to what the elites regarded as Europe’s “Jewish problem” by encouraging their emigration to “their own” land? It is all about an Amero-centric global capitalist Empire. That history makes the conflation of condemnation of Israel with antisemiticism not just risible, but Orwellian.
What is most upsetting about the “Zionist takeover” and “Jewish conspiracy” talk (aside from that, unlike condemnations of Israel, it really does veer into antisemiticism territory) is that it is designed to undercut American responsibility for what is occuring. The United States could not be more guilty of genocide if U.S. Marines were working side by side with the IDF in Gaza. Biden, and now Trump, are as much war criminals and genocidists as Netanyahu.
Excellent comment to an equally excellent write-up. Actually, it matters little if Israel controls the US or the US control Israel ; so long as Israel IS.REAL not just Gaza but eventually the rest of the world be in trouble. To the Zionist cabal running and ruining both every non-Jew and non-“Jew” be they their fellow arab-semit, Africans, Turks, Iranians,Chinese,Japanese,Slaves, Indians, Western Europeans or even Russian Jews, they are all inferior creatures EXCEPT the billionaire classes within all of those who would be co-opted tactically till they realize effective world governance via their Greater Israel agenda. Yeah, till then billionaires can come in handy !
Root out Israeli corruption of US politics and mass media first.
Then remove the corruption of the anti-socialist and militarist oligarchs.
Both require Constitutional amendments to isolate elections and mass media from economic power.
That may require allowing China to bribe politicians to help us restore democracy.
Argued very much the same for years. I have now someone I can cite to support my thesis that Israel is merely a tool of the western political elite.
stepping stone for Empire to gain control over the ME (extraction of resources).
Right on the money Jonathan.
PragerU, hardly noted for its extreme left or anti-imperialist views, agrees clearly, wholeheartedly, and explicitly that Israel serves the Western imperialist agenda without being a vassal. See for example ‘Is Israel a Liability?’ (only five minutes) – eg. “He who controls the middle east controls the crossroads of the global economy”:
youtu.be/-YR0ix_rMcY
The Zionist power configuration is in the driver’s seat when it comes to the vast majority of the Washington empire’s Middle East policy; Middle East policy.
Not sure why Cook doesn’t want to acknowledge this truism.
Two things can be true at once: the Washington-militarist empire is truly dreadful as well as the pro Israel power bloc. There’s no distraction going on.
For further reading:
Mearsheimer and Walt: “The Israel Lobby”
Paul Findley: “They Dare to Speak Out”
James Petras: “Power of Israel in the U.S.”
Greg Felton: “Host and the Parasite”
Well said. I can not understand why Cook would not mention the percentage of Dual Israeli/USA passport holders who are power players in any US government, MIC or just general Washington bureaucracy. Makes for a nice deflection anyway.
Very astute comment. Keep up the free-thinking!