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DECOLONIZING PALESTINE IN A POST-AMERICAN CENTURY  
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Tony Karon
March 17, 2025
Rootless Cosmopolitan
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_ Why South Africa's ambassador was ousted, why USAID isn’t coming
back, and the perils and possibilities facing the Global South in the
months and years ahead _

Donald Trump at a wrestling match in Detroit in 2007 , Getty

 

_To understand Trump’s political style, it’s important to
understand that it’s grounded in the norms of pro-wrestling. It’s
beyond fact-checking or reason, but it resonates_

_===_

Those seeking global justice and decolonization don’t choose the
circumstances in which they make history, and are made by it. That’s
why it’s critically important to understand the deeper historical
shifts revealed in the turmoil of the new political order in the
United States, and how those shifts have redefined the obstacles, the
terms of engagement, and both the limits and strategic opportunities
for advance in every theater and dimension of that struggle.

It may be hard to see amid the manic daily dramas, but the Trump
moment reflects an almost two-decade historical shift that negates old
assumptions, but offers new possibilities. What it does make clear is
that the United States as the world has known it for the past 70 years
is no more; it’s an altogether different America domestically and
internationally.

President Donald Trump has contemptuously trashed core principles,
norms and certainties of U.S. hegemony in force since the Cold War —
whether in relation to NATO allies in Europe, or in the soft-power
humanitarian programs of USAID. Most U.S. allies are reeling in
bewilderment, having failed to detect the slow-moving tectonic shifts
reshaping the ground beneath their feet. Understanding both the
challenges and possibilities presented by those shifts is critically
important, not for scholarly reasons but _IN ORDER TO BE EFFECTIVE_.

The United States has been the fulcrum of the power relations that
have defined the struggle over Palestine, and the wider global
struggle for justice, over the past 70 years. That’s why it’s
critically important to grasp the long-term trends underway in the
U.S. relationship with the world, and consider the consequences for
the pursuit of Palestinian freedom.

Is the second Donald Trump presidency a dramatic U-turn, or the
maturation of a longer process? The change of style is unmistakable,
as Trump makes clear by his ritual public humiliation of long-time
allies and proxies on all fronts. On Palestine, he is willing to say
the quiet part out loud; dispensing with the empty mantras about a
“two-state solution” to sanctify U.S. enabling of Israel’s
ever-expanding occupation and war crimes. BUT TRUMP HASN’T CHANGED
THE SUBSTANCE OF U.S. ENGAGEMENT WITH ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS;
HE’S SIMPLY ADMITTED WHAT SHOULD HAVE LONG BEEN OBVIOUS: U.S.
ACTIONS OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES MAKE CLEAR THAT IT LONG AGO
ABANDONED THE GOAL OF REVERSING ISRAEL’S OCCUPATION OF PALESTINIAN
LAND, OR OF ANY MEANINGFUL POLITICAL SOLUTION. There is simply no
evidence-based case to expect the U.S. will ever take any meaningful
action to restrain, much less reverse the apartheid
settler-colonization whose qualitative and quantitative expansion it
has enabled.

Why?

BECAUSE THE U.S. HAS NO STRATEGIC INCENTIVE TO SPEND (DOMESTIC)
POLITICAL CAPITAL ON PALESTINE.

The Biden team ritually mumbled “two-state” catechisms while
making the U.S. the logistics hub, military and diplomatic shield and
p.r. firm for Israel’s genocide. Why would Trump bother with the
catechisms? In his first-term endorsement of Israel’s claim on
Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and its West Bank settlements, he was
simply calling time on the post Cold War fable that the U.S. would act
to reverse Israel’s illegal acquisition of territory by force.
(Biden, btw, declined to reverse those moves, even embracing the
delusional belief that normalizing ties between Saudi Arabia and
Israel would somehow end the struggle for Palestinian liberation.)

Trump may have ended the hollow pretense, but even Obama and Biden
had, by their actions, quietly mocked those stakeholders still
clinging to an anachronistic expectation that Washington would, at
some point, restrain Israel and produce a palatable neocolonial
outcome.

The convulsive physical discomfort visible on the face of Jordan’s
King Abdullah during his White House press availability with Trump
underscored how terrifying it has been for allies perched on fragile
Made-in-the-USA political plinths to contemplate the closure of the
post-Cold War period. The U.S. may have seen some strategic value in
at least being seen to be enforcing a political solution on Israel
when regional goodwill towards a U.S. presence hypothetically added a
layer of protection to the tens of thousands of U.S. troops deployed
throughout the region. But any such incentive, limited though it was,
evaporated with the calamitous collapse of its “New Middle East”
project in Iraq and the rapid draw-down of U.S. troop presence in the
region. Israel has, for the past quarter century or longer, been more
of a domestic political issue rather than a strategic concern in
Washington, and no U.S. government over that period has seen any
compelling national interest in overriding considerable domestic
political resistance to any pressure on Israel.

Instead, the bipartisan enabling of Israel running amok over the past
18 months is what can be expected from Washington for the foreseeable
future.

Trump is the post-Pax Americana, channeling the hostility of hundreds
of millions of voters of both parties to sending young Americans into
harm’s way on distant battlefields in the vain hope of remaking the
world on U.S. terms. His reelection marks a decisive defeat of the
liberal imperialism of both the Reagan-Bush-Bush variety and its
zombie reincarnation under Biden. It’s worth remembering that Obama
had tapped the same antiwar vein to beat Kissinger-acolyte Hillary
Clinton to the Democratic nomination in 2008. Obama then retired the
Cold War strategic doctrine that necessitated maintaining the U.S.
military at a scale allowing it to fight two wars simultaneously in
different global theaters. Obama reduced the goal to an ability to
fight one-and-a-half major wars; Trump, in his first term, revised
that down to just one. So, the trend has been visible for some time.
On Ukraine, his style may be brutal, but Trump is enforcing a reality
check (that Biden, stuck in Cold War fantasies, had evaded) –
Europeans are not prepared to die defending Ukraine’s sovereignty,
and nor are Americans. That’s what NATO membership would require;
and that’s what expelling Russia from all Ukrainian territory would
require. It’s not going to happen. Trump is simply stating the
obvious regarding the terms on which that war will end. When it does,
Ukraine – a hot mess of economic catastrophe, possibly of violent
nationalist retribution and quite possibly the renewed export of
refugees – will be Europe’s problem, not America’s.

BEHIND THE WRESTLEMANIA

The shock and horror of the Cold War liberal establishment at
Trump’s unceremonious torching of decades of their certainties is
not hard to understand. It’s as if the national security state
constructed after WW2, with all of its policy processes, imperial
norms, shibboleths and conventions was suddenly subsumed by a
bizarro-world simulacrum, as if a child had grabbed the TV remote and
switched from CNN to Wrestlemania. Trump’s rise through association
with pro wrestling is worth considering in relation to his style;
he’s clearly aware that ten times as many Americans watch WWE shows
as watch CNN in prime time. The key insight here is that the
pro-wresting audience _knows that it’s being trolled, but doesn’t
care_. Wrestling bouts are not subject to a reality audit; they’re
pure performance designed to amplify and gratify the baser fantasies
of their audience. Liberal media’s reflexive “fact-checking” of
Trump’s words, like the earnest supplications of the allies and
satraps he has slapped, are missing the point. This is not a serious
conversation. Trump’s target audiences don’t care that much of
what he’s saying is simply untrue, any more than a pro-wrestling
audience cares that most of the combat they’re seeing in the ring is
a skillfully executed pageant in which nobody is seriously hurt.
But while he rode to power surfing waves of popular discontent on a
vessel built out of the jester idioms of pro-wrestling, Trump is a
deadly serious operator out to remake American power. His actions
leave no room for doubt that the assumptions of the Cold War and
Post-Cold War eras no longer apply. How, then, to understand the
dynamics of the new historical moment we’re in? What possibilities
and challenges does the post-Post Cold War put before all who seek a
better world — a project necessarily at odds with the prevailing
forms of Western dominance?

THE STRUGGLE FOR PALESTINE IN GLOBAL HISTORY: THE COLD WAR ERA

The Zionist settler colony is a product of post-WWI British
imperialism remaking the Ottoman regional order. Its consummation as a
nation-state post-WW 2 reflected Western powers’ shame at their
failure to prevent the mass-murder of the Jews of Europe combined with
their continued anti-Semitic refusal to admit most survivors — and
their colonial contempt for Palestinians. Paradoxically, perhaps, the
Zionist settler colony achieved its legal statehood as a moment when
colonialism was in retreat everywhere else.
Europe’s colonial powers exhausted by war could not long hold on to
their “possessions” in Africa and Asia in the face of national
liberation struggles, resulting in the emergence of a Third World
comprising nation states that had thrown off the colonial yoke (but
not its legacy of impoverishment) seeking to act autonomously of the
Cold War powers.

It was the shifting balances of power within that schema that shaped
and partially transformed the U.N. and its multilateral institutions.
Although the U.S. remained by far the strongest military and economic
power, its ability to deploy that power was checked by the military
capabilities of the Soviet bloc. And the Third World countries, united
in spirit in the Non-Aligned Movement, began to push for a reordering
of global affairs (before being bogged down by the grim reality that
what Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah called “flag independence” won by
these countries did not translate into sovereign control of their
economies)

The Cold War put Israel and its neighboring Arab states on the
chessboard of the imperial Great Game, alliances shifting over the
years. (Israel did not become the USA’s monogamous bestie in the
region until after the 1967 war, and even then, Washington needed to
move the likes of Egypt, Syria and Iraq out of the Soviet camp.) But
the Palestinians hardly featured on that board. The Camp David Peace
Accords between Israel and Egypt epitomized a U.S. Cold War win —
moving Egypt into the U.S. camp by orchestrating Israeli withdrawal
from Egyptian territory in exchange for peace between the two
countries, entirely bypassing any meaningful engagement with the
Palestinian question.

Still, the emergence of autonomous Palestinian national resistance
outside of the control of Arab states coincided with the growing
influence of the Third World bloc, aligning the Palestinians with
national liberation struggles across the globe, and in particular,
opening up spaces of national recognition in the U.N. (Remember,
before the 1970s, all U.N. resolutions concerning Palestine never once
named the Palestinians; they had only referred somewhat amorphously to
the Arab states.) In November 1974, the U.N. General Assembly
recognized the PLO as “the sole legitimate representative of the
Palestinian people”, according it observer status: That was a huge
and enduring diplomatic victory, which later translated into the
“State of Palestine” seat still held by the PLO. And it was noted
at the time that the resolution, which had relied almost entirely on
the Third and Second World member states, signaled a growing influence
of what today we call the Global South on the international stage.

Two years later, the U.N. General Assembly declared Zionism “a form
of racism” — but if that resolution reflected a Cold War balance
of votes in the Assembly (72 in favor, 35 against, and 32
abstentions), the 1991 vote to rescind it reflected the new, unipolar
moment of U.S. hegemony (111 in favor, 25 against, 30
abstentions/non-votes). When Saddam Hussein misread the intentions of
his U.S. backers and invaded Kuwait, he was militarily ejected by a
U.N.-authorized coalition that included nine Arab states as well as
Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines and Senegal.

THE ‘END OF HISTORY’…

The end of the Cold War in 1990 had created a new global reality: The
collapse of the USSR had removed any peer superpower challenge to
Washington reshaping the world order, leaving the U.S. and its banks
free to leverage Third World’s post-colonial debt burdens to
globalize a neoliberal economic order to which, as Thatcher
proclaimed, “there is no alternative.”
The passing of the Cold War’s proxy logic and the ascendancy of the
Davos order also spurred concerted efforts to stabilize a number of
longstanding regional conflicts and insurgencies:

A wave of attempts at negotiating political solutions swept South
Africa, Ireland, East Timor, Aceh, Central America and the Middle
East.

And then there was the question of Palestine, whose place on the
post-Cold War global agenda had been ensured not by the exiled PLO
(dangerously isolated by its support for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait)
but by the First Intifada’s sustained mass uprising across the West
Bank and Gaza. Regardless of the parlous state of the PLO in exile,
popular resistance on the ground made the apartheid occupation seem
untenable — and a potential threat to U.S. hegemony in the Arab
region, and even to the domestic security of U.S.-aligned states.

… AND THE OSLO TERMINUS

If the post-Cold War American order — particularly as the U.S.
intervened in Iraq/Kuwait — seemed to require a political solution
in Palestine, Oslo was the answer chosen by the Israeli leadership.
This required a nod to territorial compromise, ensconcing a
Palestinian-flagged entity within the system of Arab mukhbarat
regimes, on part of the 1967 territories in which the intifada had
raged (primarily the cities), but cementing Israel’s gains of the
Nakba (and even of its illegal settlement movement). The PLO proved to
be an eager partner, having already in 1988 retired the goal of
reversing the Nakba by liberating all of Palestine and focused instead
on achieving statehood based on the 1967 lines.
The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority, an interim
administrative and security body that would relieve the occupying
power of the burden of policing and governing the cities of the West
Bank and Gaza, while Israel and the PLO negotiated a final-status
agreement to be completed by May 1999. But if Oslo began with Rabin
fearing what the GHW Bush-era Washington would require of Israel,
within three years he was replaced by Netanyahu, whose far keener
understanding of the dynamics shaping the U.S. role: Netanyahu’s
memorable “America is a thing that can easily be moved” reflected
an awareness that U.S. Israel policy was being shaped more by domestic
politics rather than by grand strategy. (That’s because, political
rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, the end of the Cold War had
also nixed Israel’s already limited value as a strategic asset to
the U.S.) And domestic politics was a terrain on which the lobbying
power of AIPAC and the growing power of an Evangelical Christianity
whose embrace of Zionist maximalism gave Israel an overwhelming
advantage.

Our purpose here is not to parse the reasons for the failure of Oslo
to produce the advertised outcome. Suffice to say that even in its
best case scenario, it relied on the U.S. to provide the pressure to
drive Israeli compliance. The shock of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and
the events they triggered effectively ended U.S. engagement in
anything beyond performative gestures on the Palestine file —
Netanyahu acknowledged in a 2008 speech how beneficial the attacks had
been in shifting U.S. political opinion in Israel’s favor.

THE END OF THE “END OF HISTORY”

The post-Cold War unipolar American moment had fostered a “peace
process” designed to contain Palestinian national aspirations within
a tiny piece of a partitioned Palestine, whose flag-statehood would
encase it in the regional system of authoritarian U.S. satraps. Even
that limited prospect pretty much ended with the 20th century. What
followed has been a protracted period of U.S.-backed Israeli
counterinsurgency; hapless floundering by the PLO as it legitimized
the PA’s role in securing the occupation; and of various forms of
armed and political resistance by Hamas and other factions. A violent
equilibrium, then, in which Palestinian resistance could not be
eliminated, but had been largely contained.
The U.S. defeat in Iraq was the last gasp of Pax Americana; Obama was
explicit in retrenching the U.S. footprint in the region, encouraging
a ‘rebalance’ that would include agreements with Iran and
encouraging regional security self-sufficiency amid a U.S. ‘pivot to
Asia’.

He launched his presidency with a 2009 Cairo speech that loftily
proclaimed America’s obligation to seek justice for the Palestinians
– but there was literally never any action behind the empty poetics
(a hallmark of Obama’s presidency) because by that point, the U.S.
had already moved on. Obama saw no value in committing
domestic-political capital to shaping the outcome of a conflict in
whose resolution the U.S. no longer held any compelling strategic
stake. U.S. forces were reducing their exposure in the region, more
reliant on small special forces operations and drone-strikes. And in
the name of “offshoring” U.S. involvement in the region, Obama
negotiated a nuclear pact with Iran and sent Israel more military aid
than any predecessor, shrugging at Israel expanding its settlements
and bombing Gaza. His goal was to stabilize the region’s status quo
and minimize the risk of the U.S. being drawn into further
entanglements.

Pax Americana, globally, was being downsized, and Washington had
effectively retired the Middle East referee’s whistle it had claimed
in the 1990s; the U.S. no longer had any strategic incentive to apply
pressure to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands.

Three decades after Oslo, the PA remains in place, operating in
service of the ever-expanding Israeli occupation without even a
plausible illusion of attaining some form of statehood. Absent the
‘political horizon’ against which it was erected, the PA could not
escape the fate of a Palestinian Vichy, proxy ruler of a small piece
of a land where its security role is protecting the occupier from the
resistance of the occupied people.
The Palestinian leadership that had placed all its eggs in the
American basket, working with Israel’s occupation forces to suppress
resistance in the vain hope that collaboration with the occupier would
eventually earn flag independence, instead found itself abandoned to
its fate, increasingly discredited and despised in the eyes of its own
people; ritually humiliated by the Israelis; its leader Mahmoud Abbas
reduced to a kind of soft-toy Quisling.

Oct 7 may have buried any residual illusions from the Oslo frame, but
less obvious, is the deeper historical shift: The historical era of
unipolar U.S. hegemony that birthed Oslo had ended years earlier.
Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of the decline of American hegemony
— the ability to lead others by convincing them that U.S. interests
are the common interest — and he is simply resetting the terms on
which America’s considerable coercive power will be exercised. There
will be no going back, not because of Trump’s preferences, but
because he reflects a tectonic shift that has been under way for many
years.

Obama’s strategic retrenchment in the Mideast presaged Trump’s
more comprehensive dismantling of the Cold War state. We might say
that Biden had slept through history if that characterization didn’t
sound as if it were special pleading in mitigation on the
genocide-enabling case he should answer at the Hague. Americans today
no longer imagine their national community around the Cold War
consensus, or any consensus at all. (Republican Cold Warriors today
find their natural political home across the aisle, as “Cheney
Democrats”.)

Multiple factors at work in the U.S. political economy explain these
shifts, and the fracturing of the media landscape (the very
precondition for imagining nationhood) is worth noting: The onset of
the Cold War coincided with the arrival of a television set in most
American households, allowing three networks to narrate a national
consensus. The neoliberal ‘90s saw the big-three being eclipsed by
the entertainment vehicle that is cable news, allowing viewers a
degree of customization of their information universes. Within a
decade, even the cable universe was being eclipsed by the mushrooming
of diverse Internet and social media platforms, fragmenting any
prospect of sustaining a common American identity. Political splits in
America are no longer about policy differences; they reflect different
imagined realities. The Cold War-liberal America that plotzes over
Trump throwing Ukraine under the bus is not even deemed properly
American by tens of millions of Americans ready to believe that planes
crash because of diversity in employment practices in air-traffic
control.

There simply is no information infrastructure on which any kind of
consensus across America’s sprawling citizenry could be rebuilt. For
the foreseeable future, the U.S. will remain politically unstable,
unable to anchor and calm its own national system, much less a global
one.

The rug has been pulled out from under regional and international
players whose inaction in the face of genocide is, whether they admit
it or not, guided by expectations of a Pax Americana eventually
restraining Israel. The referee left the field years ago, and the
Israelis are free to set the East ablaze, even supplied with the
requisite incendiaries—though they and their Arab neighbors will
have to live in the flames. Still, it’s hard to envisage any of them
acting at variance with the U.S. (as was taboo during the Pax
Americana era) to restrain Israel?

WHAT, THEN, TO EXPECT FROM A POST-HEGEMONIC U.S. SUPERPOWER?

Imperial policing is a fool’s errand in Trump’s mind. Acting
outside of international law has long been a bipartisan U.S.
consensus. But Trump dispenses even with any need to seek legitimacy,
much less consent even from close U.S. allies. His
unabashedly-declared priority is enriching America’s 1% (he
doesn’t specify which class will be enriched, but the policy
proposals are unambiguous) at the expense of everyone else, abruptly
slashing public spending at home and abroad with shocking cruelty –
and imposing tariffs that destabilize the global trade networks the
U.S. has built over the past seven decades. The goal: To generate the
$5 trillion in revenues Trump plans to gift America’s billionaires
in the form of a massive tax cut.
The U.S. will now do whatever its power (rather than law or
legitimacy) allows to enrich its billionaires, and to coerce
compliance when that enrichment is threatened, e.g. by
de-dollarization talk, or in order to seek coveted resources (the
Panama Canal or Greenland). But Trump’s post-global America has no
incentive to pursue geopolitical outcomes in settings that don’t
meaningfully threaten its mercantilist project. And as his “you
don’t have any cards” outburst at Zelensky made clear, this is an
America that will dictate terms to all who lack the power to resist
its diktat.

During the Cold War and also in the neoliberal post-Cold War, the U.S.
prioritized global hegemony -- the ability to impose its will on other
countries without using or threatening coercion, but by establishing
an ideological commonsense in which Washington’s interests are
imagined as the common good. It was willing to invest a little in
generating goodwill, courting hearts and minds in the Global South by
funding projects that aid the poorest and most vulnerable. Trump sees
no value in such investment.

Whether in response to America’s failure to militarily impose its
will on Iraq and Afghanistan, the failings of its financialized global
economic order, and the growing multipolarity created by the emergence
power centers independent of the post-Cold War Pax Americana, the
waning of U.S. hegemony has been accelerating, and increasingly
obvious. The brutal contempt for Palestinian life reflected in U.S.
arms and impunity guaranteed for Israel’s genocide is echoed in
slashing USAID programs that have provided life support to African HIV
patients. The goodwill such programs may generate isn’t worth
shrinking his tax cut for billionaires, in Trump’s mind. His America
must be feared, not loved.

It would be beyond foolish to act in expectation that America’s
Post-Cold War consensus will somehow magically be restored — Trump
is not just a bad dream or an anomaly. And the neoliberal Western
political-economy consensus (represented by the Democrats and their
centrist peers elsewhere) is unraveling across a wide front.

Trump has recognized the decline of U.S. hegemony and the “liberal
world order” through which it was expressed. In its place he
substitutes self-interested coercion — he has no hope of convincing
most of the world that U.S. control over Greenland or the Panama canal
is in their interest — just as the U.S. can’t convince most of the
world that enabling Israel’s genocide is for the greater good. No
matter; the issue is power, not rules or fairness or legitimacy.

He has taken a chain saw to the key institutions of U.S. imperial
power projection — the military and the intelligence and security
system. Trump’s choices to lead those key agencies are clearly
tasked with disrupting their continuity and reshaping them to his
domestic political needs. His overall approach to government portends
a sustained and damaging ransacking of those institutions —
weakening their internal cohesion and morale, deliberately blunting
their effectiveness as tools of global hegemony, and turning their
focus to narrow nationalist goals.

He wants his military deployed on America’s southern border to repel
a migrant “invasion” which looms large in the MAGA imagination,
not shoring up NATO’s eastern flank. Ugly demagoguery directed
against migrants was a winning card in 2024, and Trump has promised to
follow through on his promises to deport millions of undocumented
migrants. He has certainly appointed key officials who will pursue
that mission with ideological zeal, and there are signs that he has
more reason to feel far more confident in his ability to blow away
institutional restraints – whether from the courts, the legislature
or the security establishment – to enacting his promise.

Trump has already brought tremendous disruption to domestic
governance, wreaking economic havoc that will have growing, tangible
negative effects for most of his voters. His anti-migrant witch hunts
will potentially ignite both economic shock and political and social
turmoil in many American towns and cities. And Trump has declared his
intention to use the military or military adjacent forces (e.g.
national guard) for this campaign. And, as predicted, he has unleashed
increasingly fascist restrictions on protest action in support of
Palestine — red meat to his domestic political base, which includes
plenty of deep-pocketed Israel-firsters.

While it may be comforting to imagine a backlash that would restore
the old order in a matter of two election cycles, that vastly
overestimates the democratic power of the U.S. electorate, and also,
it assumes the existence of a credible popular opposition — which
doesn’t exist; the Democratic Party has been fundamentally lacking
in a vision or socio-economic program for the country since Bill
Clinton parked it in the raclette dens of Davos in the 1990s, making
it a McKinsey party of management consultants.

The U.S.-China relationship will be approached from a competitive
mercantilist perspective in which China is eating a deindustrialized
America’s lunch, rather than the regime-change/democracy one
Democrats would prefer. Trump’s talk of American “greatness” is
of an America unencumbered by foreign entanglements, laws, rules and
agreements — not the Atlanticist “indispensable nation” fantasy.
Does he care about who rules Taiwan or how Hong Kong is governed?

THE GLOBAL SOUTH IN A POST-AMERICAN CENTURY

Vacating many of its traditional imperial preoccupations has made the
U.S. an even more unpredictable ally to key partners, a suddenly
profoundly unstable pillar of the global order it had erected in the
post-Cold War. That may provide far more of an opportunity than is
obvious at first blush: The sudden termination of most USAID funding
forces governments across the Global South to compensate; to rethink
their allocation of resources and how they plan to care for their
citizenry; to rethink their relationship with America and their place
in the global order; forcing them to forge more horizontal links
across the Global South, bypassing the U.S.
Trump may be inadvertently accelerating a decolonization 2.0 moment
— and Israel, as its primary dependent, may be the biggest loser.
Israel can’t exist without the United States, but the Global South
and even Europe are being forced to learn that the world will have to
chart a future without the United States. In more ways than one,
Israel is on the wrong side of history.

The post-Cold War saw the fate of Palestine assigned, by the
international system, to the U.S. – which failed to resolve it. The
post-Post Cold War recenters the fate of Palestine in a wider
rebellion for a more just world order. And that’s a struggle that is
gaining momentum on a widening front, from Palestine to climate change
and more. So, while Palestine may no longer matter to America,
America’s ability to define the global agenda is steadily weakening.

By cutting most of the Global South adrift from longstanding systems
of dependence, the U.S. may in fact make it easier for some of those
countries to take stronger stands against Israel, no longer cowed by
the threat of its greatest enabler withdrawing his patronage because,
well, it’s not leverage if he’s already done that.

Consider the South Africa case: Trump’s nonsensical “white
genocide” charges are red meat for his base; everyone knows the
reason the U.S. wants to punish South Africa is because of its efforts
to hold Israel accountable at the International Court of Justice, and
perhaps as a warning against BRICS challenging U.S. financial
domination. The form of the sanction, however — ending USAID
funding, which hurt HIV treatments and other public health schemes;
and declining to review the preferential trade agreement AGOA —
falls within the generalized austerity imposed on all foreign aid and
preferential trade restrictions. So, there’s no amount of
self-abasement South Africa’s leaders could perform to reverse them.
Even shutting down the ICJ case would not restore those measures; the
U.S. has abandoned any need for legitimacy, and it’s priority today
is funding a massive tax cut for its billionaire class. Sending home a
South African ambassador is a WWE move designed to please the base.
What it does make clear is the U.S. offers no path of dignity or
sanity through diplomatic engagement with the U.S. – their role in
the wrestlemania show is that of cartoon villains to be ritually
humiliated by the Hulk Hogan character even if they surrender.

Perhaps, hewing to the grand historical timeline on which we
constructed this argument, it’s worth considering that the
abandonment of Cold War/Post-Cold War certainties by the U.S. also
equates to a kind of de-Decolonization. The assumptions regarding
justice, fairness and equality in the postwar global system (hollow as
they may have been) have been demolished, setting the U.S. in an
openly adversarial relationship with most of humanity.

It's long been obvious that Palestinian rights will have to be
achieved _despite_ the U.S. not with its help. Now, it is more clear
than ever that the U.S. has doubled down on a predatory colonial
approach to the rest of the world. None in the Global South or even
among Western powers can hide from the reality that the U.S. has no
intention of bringing any kind of durable stability to the Middle East
– aligning brittle Arab autocracies with Israel isn’t going to do
that, but Trump is essentially signaling indifference, making no
pretenses about the fact that he’s leaving it to Israel to decide
the fate of Palestine.

Would Trump back Israel expanding settlement of illegally occupied
land? Probably; Biden and Obama effectively turned a bind eye. Will
the prospect of normalizing ties with Saudi Arabia restrain Israel?
Could Israel give the Saudis what they need to seal such a deal? Not
clear, and what incentive does Riyadh have to help Israel out of the
hole it has dug for itself in Gaza?

The end of the U.S. hegemonic project does, however, offer an
opportunity, precisely because it shuts down the vain hope of
Washington and its partners and satraps ever delivering any kind of
sustainable political solution in Palestine, much less freedom.

Israel is in a state of deep crisis, that has some seeing the Zionist
project as on its last legs. I’d agree that the Zionist project in
its 20th century incarnation is largely done. But it succeeded in
creating a nuclear-armed and dangerous nation state and a permanent
national community to sustain it – so, even if the Western-oriented
Ashkenazi “liberal” Jewish elites have been marginalized, and many
more of them will leave for Europe or the U.S. in the coming years
than will immigrate, panicking over the net-inflow/outflow of Jews to
and from Israel may be largely a remnant of 20th century Zionism.
Those who emigrate will leave behind a belligerent berserker state,
nurtured in the plush cushioning of U.S.-guaranteed impunity and
guided by a sense of manifest destiny with scant regard for global
legitimacy (outside of its American patron, which has shown a deep,
bipartisan alignment with the settler-colonial project).

Think Jabotinsky on a cocaine bender.

That said, his stash is not infinite — his dealer is looking a
little unhinged, perhaps getting a little high on his own supply. Even
in the short term, Israel may struggle to muster the manpower to
sustain the open-ended wars it is courting. In the longer term, the
global order that has sustained Israel is drawing to a close; it’s a
moment both extremely dangerous and also quite promising in its
fluidity.

More widely, across the Global South, governments now suffering the
whiplash withdrawal of U.S. dependence mechanisms, and confronted with
the reality of being forced to make their way by forging new
relationships, alliance and pathways to pursue their needs in a
post-American world, it’s a moment fraught with both peril and
possibility.

===

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