“Is US support for Israel principally caused by the ruthless pursuit of imperialist interests, or is it caused by the influence of Jews on US foreign policy?”
Richard Medhurst is one of the best Palestine journalists in the West. The police agree: this is Medhurst describing his arrest:
https://x.com/richimedhurst/status/1825663412904288585.
As a result, his tweets about electronic security are worth reading as well as his analysis of Palestine and the world. Medhurst is also the most effective defender of the view that support for Israel is in the interests of US imperialism.
My point here is not to disagree with his May 1st 2026 essay:
https://richardmedhurst.substack.com/p/how-the-us-pulled-off-an-armed-robbery.
It seems very convincing. I don’t have the resources to check it. What I’m saying here is to do with the argument that this shows Israel does not rule the USA. In several tweets recently, Medhurst has made it clear he sees his ‘oil’ theory as an alternative to the ‘Israel’ hypothesis.
Part of his argument is the claim that the USA is just as bad as Israel, and if you can’t see this, it’s because you’re scared of this ‘reality’:
“Many are afraid to accept this reality about the West, or that the US is itself a settler-colony founded on genocide.”
I responded
“Even more are afraid of the “Jewish power” hypothesis. @richimedhurst’s explanation is more comfortable than this idea. So don’t accuse us of cowardice.”
I’ve dealt with the question “Is US support for Israel principally caused by the ruthless pursuit of imperialist interests, or is it caused by the influence of Jews on US foreign policy?” several times before, first in 2010 in a response Noam Chomsky:
https://thejayreport.com/2020/05/17/an-article-of-mine-from-2010/
then in several essays at https://thejayreport.com.
But Medhurst is more coherent than Chomsky.
He locates US policy of supporting genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, and war against Iran, within the framework of oil politics. He gives many examples of why that is. If he’s right, my question –
US Imperialism or the Jewish Lobby?
https://thejayreport.com/2024/03/01/us-imperialism-or-the-jewish-lobby/
is a false dichotomy: Israel’s interests just happen to coincide with those of the USA.
“In October 2023, I warned that this war was never about hostages or Hamas — it was about plundering Gaza’s resources.”
https://richardmedhurst.substack.com/p/how-the-us-pulled-off-an-armed-robbery
Medhurst backs up his argument in a YouTube documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nt1CgQsgpI
At this point, I want to say something which most pro-Palestine people never say:
The West is much better than Israel.
The USA abolished segregation and abandoned apartheid. Britain is so anti-racist it’s gone too far the other way, and forced the police to conform to the principle that a racist incident is
“any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person” – https://thejayreport.com/2026/06/06/henry-nowak-a-victim-of-woke-policing/.
Meanwhile, Israeli racism has overtaken the Nazis. Most of its Jewish population explicitly supports genocide. If you don’t believe this, there is no point in continuing to read this article.
For most of us, president Trump is a buffoon. For Medhurst, he appears to be playing three-dimensional Go:
“In just 90 days, the US have executed an energy blitzkrieg decades in the making:
Hundreds of strikes on Russian tankers and refineries
Disrupting a third of China’s oil and LNG supply
Capturing the largest oil reserves on the planet
Establishing a global naval blockade from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean”
https://richardmedhurst.substack.com/p/how-the-us-pulled-off-an-armed-robbery.
This brings me to how I evaluate evidence.
The evidence doesn’t show that my argument is correct. It just shows that my argument is the most parsimonious way of describing the data. Other ways of describing it are more complicated.
In the case of the causes of US support for Israel, the alternatives are either
- Jews are very powerful in the USA, and some of them use that power to make politicians grovel to Israel, or
- The people who run the USA pretend to grovel to Israel in order to persuade us to believe antisemitic conspiracy theories.
On June 8th 1967, Israeli planes attacked the USS Liberty, killing 34 sailors and wounding 171. You don’t get much more imperialist than a warship. To this day, every president, every administration, and every Congress, has failed to hold Israel to account. If you believe Israel is a tool of the USA, all of this evidence is a charade, designed to make us believe in Jewish power. In other words, the hypothesis ‘Israel is a tool of US imperialism’ hypothesis immediately leads to absurdities.
There are new examples every day. It’s in your face. It could hardly be clearer if they put giant neon signs advertising the “Zionist Occupation Government” on the roofs of Congress and the White House.
Support for Israel doesn’t usually help the oil lobby. The energy industry would be better off if Israel didn’t exist. Michael Neumann figured this out over 20 years ago:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2005/11/18/the-palestinians-and-the-party-line/.
If Chevron does eventually exploit a gas field off the shore of Gaza, or pump oil through Lebanon, this is just as compatible with saying they took advantage of a situation, as saying they persuaded the government to cause it to happen. The ruling class isn’t just the oil magnates. The current crisis in West Asia is a disaster for America’s rulers, who will be known for ever as “the Epstein class.”
If America would do what it’s doing in West Asia without the Lobby buying politicians who pass laws which violate the Constitution, why would the Lobby bother? Congress recently briefly considered a bill which would provide for twenty years’ imprisonment and a one million dollar fine for advocating a boycott of Israel:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/867.
This is just the most extreme of thousands of examples of facts which illustrate the complete submission of the United States to the interests of Israel. There are those who accept this, but would hesitate to call it “Jewish power.” Responding to that would be another essay.