{"id":33426,"date":"2025-08-25T07:14:26","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T07:14:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cissar.com\/?p=33426"},"modified":"2025-08-25T07:14:27","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T07:14:27","slug":"israel-is-the-last-vestige-of-european-colonialism-so-trump-defends-it-at-all-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cissar.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/25\/israel-is-the-last-vestige-of-european-colonialism-so-trump-defends-it-at-all-costs\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel is the last vestige of European colonialism – so Trump defends it at all costs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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At a July rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Donald Trump<\/a> used a telling turn of phrase. While touting the benefits of his recently passed tax-and-spend bill, the American<\/a> president remarked<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cNo death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker – and in some cases, Shylocks and bad people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShylock\u201d is, of course, a reference to the Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare\u2019s The Merchant of Venice<\/em> <\/a>and is widely recognised as an antisemitic trope. The Anti-Defamation League, for example, called<\/a> the president out for his comment, while Trump, for his part, later claimed ignorance of the term\u2019s anti-Jewish connotations.<\/p>\n

It might be possible to write this off as an isolated comment, but Trump\u2019s gaffe is part of a larger pattern of antisemitism linked to his Make America Great Again (Maga)<\/a> movement. In May, NPR identified<\/a> three administration officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists, including a man described by federal prosecutors as a \u201cNazi sympathiser\u201d and a prominent Holocaust denier.<\/p>\n

More recently, Trump\u2019s erstwhile ally Elon Musk<\/a> has come under fire for antisemitism once again when his Grok AI bot launched<\/a> into antisemitic tirades praising Adolf Hitler.<\/p>\n

All of this contrasts sharply with the Trump administration\u2019s stated goal of combating antisemitism and its unapologetically pro-Israel posture<\/a>. On 29 January 2025, Trump signed<\/a> an executive order titled \u201cAdditional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism\u201d, \u00a0providing a pretext for his administration to pursue deportations of pro-Palestine student activists like Mahmoud Khalil<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One month before his gaffe in Des Moines, Trump followed<\/a> the Israeli military\u2019s lead by bombing Iran<\/a> and pulling out of negotiations over their nuclear programme.<\/p>\n

Even Musk felt obliged to make pro-Israel gestures when he toured <\/a>the sites of the 7 October Hamas attack in a highly publicised visit in November 2023.<\/p>\n

Odd alliance<\/h3>\n

How do we explain this alliance between the seemingly antisemitic Maga movement and Israel<\/a>? Analysts usually point to two major factors. First is the power and influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups, donors, media figures and political operatives, famously analysed<\/a> by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.<\/p>\n

Second is the role of Christian Zionists in the Maga movement, including<\/a> prominent figures like the current American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee.<\/p>\n

Huckabee has explicitly stated<\/a>\u00a0that his pro-Israel approach is rooted in his belief that the rapture is imminent and that Israel will be the site of unfolding Biblical prophecy during the end of days.<\/p>\n

While these factors both play an important role in shaping the Maga-Israel alliance, neither explains the deep intensity of the Trump-era American right\u2019s attachment to Israel.<\/p>\n

The core of the Maga-Israel alliance is not about votes, theology or even security: it is a project of historical amnesia. It seeks to erase the moral and political lessons of decolonisation<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I believe a more foundational impulse is at work, one tied not only to theology or lobbying power, but to historical memory. This impulse lies at the intersection of multiple programmes currently underway – all intent on rehabilitating colonialism\u2019s reputation.<\/p>\n

These include suppression of teaching and speaking about the colonial past, active justification of colonialism\u2019s historical crimes, efforts to undermine recognised international humanitarian law and struggles against active decolonial movements.<\/p>\n

The Maga-Israel alliance should be understood as part of a broader effort to suppress the memory of colonialism\u2019s atrocities and to create a sanitised narrative of colonial history in order to resuscitate colonialism in the present.<\/p>\n

In the Maga version of modern global history, Israel has come to represent the symbolic last vestige of European colonialism still allowed to flourish, and Palestine <\/a>stands in for the last unresolved case of anti-colonial resistance. Supporting Israel<\/a>, then, is not just a normal matter of American foreign policy; it is a proxy battle in culture wars over history, identity and the legitimacy of settler colonialism.<\/p>\n

The Maga movement has mobilised around a common sense of nostalgia for a past in which white, western, Christian civilisation exercised global dominance. Commentators reflecting on Trump\u2019s first term often associated<\/a> this notion with a desire to re-establish the belief systems of the United States in the 1950s, the dawn of the so-called \u201cAmerican century\u201d.<\/p>\n

In his second term, it seems more appropriate to interpret Maga nostalgia as invoking, not the era beginning in the 1950s, but rather the one that began a century earlier at the peak of Euro-American colonialism.<\/p>\n

Colonial land grab<\/h3>\n

As a recent article in the Monthly Review pointed out<\/a>, it was no accident that – after opining about the possibility of adding Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal as new American territories – Trump hung a portrait of James K Polk <\/a>in the Oval Office.<\/p>\n

Polk served as president from 1845-49 and oversaw the largest territorial expropriation of land in US history after the Mexican War. In the Maga worldview, the era of Anglo-American power ushered in by colonial land grabs at this time brought order, democracy and prosperity in its wake.<\/p>\n

The post-World War Two era marked a decided turn in the other direction, and the massive movement for decolonisation in the 1950s and 60s upended the worldview of Polk and others like him.<\/p>\n

The United Nations (UN) Charter was drawn up at this time and was based on the principle of sovereign equality among all nations. This implied that unequal relationships of domination and extraction between nations, such as the relationship between coloniser and colonised, should be undone.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n
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Article 2 prohibited member states from using force to acquire territory and foresaw the resolution of disputes undertaken in a manner that ensures international peace as well as justice.<\/p>\n

By the 1970s, the number of UN member states had more than quadrupled. The British, French, Russian, German, Dutch and Portuguese empires were dismantled, and their territories returned to governments representing the indigenous inhabitants from the pre-war era.<\/p>\n

Because of the United States\u2019 unique role in creating and sustaining the post-World War Two order, Maga supporters imagine their country can sidestep critiques of the decolonisation movement.<\/p>\n

I have written <\/a>elsewhere about how the circumstances of the battle between colonial powers on the one hand and the Nazi regime on the other have allowed for a kind of global amnesia to take place with regard to the legacy of racism in creating the world we inhabit today. The Maga narrative is just one particularly virulent example of this broader western cultural tendency.<\/p>\n

Middle America is obsessed with World War Two, as we can see in popular culture like the History Channel. A survey conducted<\/a> in 2016 found that fully 70 percent of military history programming on the network dealt with the single conflict of World War Two.<\/p>\n

The Maga movement plays on this popular fixation on “the good war” to whitewash American history and deny any link between nationalistic pride in their own country and the kind of antisemitism associated with the Nazi movement it fought against.<\/p>\n

Israel’s role<\/h3>\n

The importance of Israel\u2019s role in this story is in inverse proportion to its small territorial size. The creation of a state for the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust has allowed Maga republicans – along with the broader western world – to imagine that history\u2019s most uniquely horrific crime has been answered for in the American-led postwar order.<\/p>\n

This narrative element produces a double effect for those who retell it. On one hand, the creation of a Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust allows western powers to imagine themselves as just and righteous, even as many of those same powers had collaborated in or turned a blind eye to its unfolding.<\/p>\n

The foundation of the state of Israel is a form of symbolic restitution, allowing western culture to wash its hands of the stain of antisemitism and to imagine that they have made amends to the aggrieved Jewish people.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, excessive focus on the Holocaust as a singular crime in need of restitution deflects attention from the many other atrocities committed on a similar scale by western colonial empires.<\/p>\n

Palestine is not just a contested land; it is the last mirror in which the West might see the truth of its colonial past<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For example, scholars estimate that upwards of 10 million people were killed<\/a> due to King Leopold\u2019s forced labour regime in the Congo Free State, while the Bengal famine caused by official policy led to<\/a> the deaths of 3 million people in British India.<\/p>\n

In the US, scholars have called<\/a> the loss of life associated with American colonisation an \u201cIndigenous Holocaust\u201d, estimating the number of Native American deaths from 1492 onwards at 4.5 million.<\/p>\n

Making amends for these crimes and others like them would require political and social reorganisation on a world scale.<\/p>\n

Instead of coming face-to-face with this global reckoning, western culture has chosen to hyperfixate on one specific case in a small bit of territory on the Levantine coast.<\/p>\n

Israel as we know it today took shape in the context of the Mandate for\u00a0Palestine<\/a>, founded in the wake of the First World War (1914-18), when Britain and France split up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire among themselves.<\/p>\n

But while the rest of the Mandates were eventually returned to governments representing the indigenous inhabitants of the territory from the pre-war era, in Palestine, Jewish settlers from Europe – who had created a new political identity of their own based on historical-religious claims – were recognised as sovereign.<\/p>\n

Today, Palestine is the only colony founded in the late imperial period that has never undergone a decolonisation<\/a> process. Algeria<\/a>, Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa were all sites of European settlement and indigenous dispossession from 1850 to 1950, and all eventually experienced some version of decolonisation.<\/p>\n