It has been 19 months since the Israeli war against Gaza began. The International Court of Justice is investigating "reasonable genocide" and the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Genocide, scholars from major human rights groups and UN experts have identified what is happening in Gaza as genocide. People around the world are calling on their governments to take action to stop this situation.
There is a capability that has hindered the end of this genocide: the United States. One government has handed it over to another, but the policy has not changed. Unconditional support for Israel seems to be a doctrine that American political institutions are reluctant to contact.
Various analyses show that the root of this "special relationship" is the values of Jewish Christianity and the common democratic path. Others argue that this has to do with the bipartisan system and the dominance of American politics by the donor class.
But reality is much simpler. The United States sees Israel as a key ally because it helps promote the U.S. global supremacy in the face of an inevitable decline. The survival of Israel's current form of settler-believes by the American elite-is closely related to maintaining the supremacy of the United States.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the United States has been leading a unipolar world as the only superpower.
As a continuation of the global dominance of Western empires, the American empire had a great influence on global economic, political and cultural affairs, often with devastating consequences for the lives of millions of people around the world.
Like all empires, the United States consolidated and expanded its supreme position in the world through overwhelming military power. Through the American organized imperial violence infrastructure, it ensures access and control of resources, trade routes and markets. This in turn ensures sustained economic growth and dominance.
But in recent years, we have seen signs of America’s supremacy being challenged. After the U.S. financial crisis in 2008-2009, the momentum became global. It shows the negative impact of the U.S. supremacy on the world economy, as well as the drives such as China and India to protect themselves from harm. The economic alliance has a common response in terms of the economy.
The limitations of U.S. global powers have also been demonstrated in the following years, including the U.S. failure in Afghanistan, its impact on Africa and the inability to prevent Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The rise of U.S. President Donald Trump and far-right populism reflects the fact that cracks appear at the heart of the so-called liberal order led by the United States.
It would be easy to accept its decline without an empire, and neither would the United States. It intends to maintain its status as an unquestionable superpower, and for this purpose it requires an imperial outpost to stand beside it.
Throughout the Cold War, Western Europe and Israel confronted the Soviet Union in Europe and the Middle East as the junior partner of the United States. Today, although the transatlantic alliance seems to be a bit shaken for decades, U.S. relations with Israel seem to be as always.
Israel showed loyalty as the outpost of the empire. It plays a key role in supporting American imperialism in two ways.
First, Israel helped the United States ensure it enters and controls one of the most critical markets of any empire: the energy market. The Middle East is an important force in global energy trade, and its oil and gas policies may have a huge impact on the world economy.
The U.S. is most concerned about losing its competitive power in the global energy market, which is why it wants to secure its interests by establishing a regional order in the Middle East to overwhelm the power of its empire. The new order is to enable the United States to seek access to any competitor in the region, namely China.
For the management of former U.S. President Joe Biden and his successor, the Trump administration, the Palestinian Israeli genocide and aggression of neighboring countries are about establishing this new security reality in the region by eliminating hostile groups and governments. That's why our support for them has not stopped.
Secondly, Israel plays a crucial role in promoting the supremacy of the U.S. military. The United States has provided Israel with billions of dollars in aid, which is actually a form of self-investment to develop military capabilities and expand sales. The Israeli state uses the funds to buy weapons from U.S. weapons manufacturers and then deploys the weapon in the Middle East as a testing and marketing tool. Therefore, the U.S. military industrial complex is able to sell more weapons and continue to innovate and develop to ensure that the U.S. has a military advantage over its competitors.
In this sense, Israel is one of the most critical parts of the American Imperial machinery. Without it, the United States would find the challenge of maintaining its imperial power in the Middle East. For this reason, Biden once claimed that if Israel did not exist, the United States would have to invent it.
Over the past year, we have witnessed unprecedented attacks on the American Palestinian Solidarity Movement, which has impacted all public spheres, including education and health care. We also see the U.S. threat to countries like South Africa because of their support for Palestine.
According to the scale of the resources and energy that the American empire eliminated and conquered the Palestinians, one has to doubt that stateless people without economic and diplomatic capital or military power have caused the harm of the world's only superpower?
The answer is that the American empire sees free Palestine as the beginning of its purpose.
The United States is actively working to prevent the world from segregating Israeli countries economically and politically because it is concerned about what will happen next. This isolation will make it difficult for Israel to continue its colonization project as a settler and may eventually lead to a decolonization process. The end result will be that Palestinians and Israelis live together under a new non-colonial political system that will be integrated into the region and no longer serve empire power.
A decolonizing entity of Palestine/Israel would be a major step in the decolonization of the world order itself and its liberation from the power of the American empire. This is America's fear.
In this sense, following this path is the self-interest of most countries in the world. The Palestinians face real elimination of threats and a future of complete conquest today depends on that. And the future of many other countries, which also depends on this if they wish to avoid the current barbarity that the Palestinians themselves face.
Although the United States needs settlers to colonize Israel to avoid its decline, the world, especially the global South, needs a non-colonial Palestine to accelerate the decline of the United States. Palestine is not only metaphorically but literally hindering us and Western imperialism’s advance towards sustained global supremacy.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own views and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.