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THE GENOCIDAL PARTNERSHIP OF ISRAEL AND THE UNITED STATES  
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Norman Solomon
July 29, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ During this century, in the Middle East, the U.S.-Israel duo has
vastly outdone all other entities combined in the categories of
killing, maiming, and terrorizing. _

U.S. President Donald Trump (L) bids farewell to Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he leaves the White House after a
meeting on April 7, 2025 in Washington, D.C., Alex Wong/Getty Images)

 

For decades, countless U.S. officials have proclaimed that the bonds
between the United States and Israel
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ties that bind are laced with genocide
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The two countries function as accomplices while methodical killing
continues in Gaza [[link removed]], with both
societies directly—and differently—making it all possible.

The policies of Israel’s government are aligned with the attitudes
of most Jewish Israelis. In a recent survey, three-quarters
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of them (and 64% of all Israelis) said they largely agreed with the
statement that “there are no innocent people in Gaza”—nearly
half
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of whom are children.

“There is no more ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ with regard to
Israel's evilness toward the Palestinians,” dissident columnist
Gideon Levy wrote
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three months ago in the Israeli newspaper _Haaretz_. “It is
permitted to kill dozens of captive detainees and to starve to death
an entire people.” The biggest Israeli media outlets echo and
amplify sociopathic voices. “Genocide talk has spread into all TV
studios as legitimate talk. Former colonels, past members of the
defense establishment, sit on panels and call for genocide without
batting an eye.”

Last week, Levy provided an update
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“The weapon of deliberate starvation is working. The Gaza
‘Humanitarian’ Foundation, in turn, has become a tragic success.
Not only have hundreds of Gazans been shot to death while waiting in
line for packages distributed by the GHF, but there are others who
don’t manage to reach the distribution points, dying of hunger. Most
of these are children and babies… They lie on hospital floors, on
bare beds, or carried on donkey carts. These are pictures from hell.
In Israel, many people reject these photos, doubting their veracity.
Others express their joy and pride on seeing starving babies.”

While the partnership between the governments of Israel and the United
States has never been stronger, the partnership between the people of
Israel and the United States has never been weaker.

Unimpeded, a daily process continues to exterminate more and more of
the 2.1 million Palestinian people who remain in Gaza—bombing and
shooting civilians while blocking all but a pittance of the food and
medicine needed to sustain life. After destroying Gaza’s hospitals,
Israel is still targeting healthcare workers
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(killing at least 70
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in May and June), as well as first responders
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The barbarism is in sync with the belief that “no innocent people”
are in Gaza. A relevant observation
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came from Aldous Huxley in 1936, the same year that the swastika went
onto Germany’s flag: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one
set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
Kristallnacht
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two years later.

Renowned genocide scholar Omer Bartov explained during an interview
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Now!_ in mid-July that genocide is “the attempt to destroy not
simply people in large numbers, but to destroy them as members of a
group. The intent is to destroy the group itself. And it doesn’t
mean that you have to kill everyone. It means that the group will be
destroyed and that it will not be able to reconstitute itself as a
group. And to my mind, this is precisely what Israel is trying to
do.”

Bartov, who is Jewish and spent the first half of his life in Israel,
said:

What I see in the Israeli public is an extraordinary indifference by
large parts of the public to what Israel is doing and what it’s done
in the name of Israeli citizens in Gaza. In part, it has to do with
the fact that the Israeli media has decided not to report on the
horrors that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is perpetrating in Gaza.
You simply will not see it on Israeli television. If some pictures
happen to come in, they are presented only as material that might be
used by foreign propaganda against Israel. Now, Israeli citizens can,
of course, use other media resources. We can all do that. But most of
them prefer not to. And I would say that while about 30% of the
population in Israel is completely in favor of what is happening, and,
in fact, is egging the government and the army on, I think the vast
majority of the population simply does not want to know about it.

In Israel, “compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a
fringe of radical activists,” Adam Shatz wrote
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last month in the _London Review of Books_. At the same time, “the
catastrophe of the last two years far exceeds that of the Nakba
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“are already being felt well beyond Gaza: in the West Bank, where
Israeli soldiers and settlers have presided over an accelerated
campaign of displacement and killing (more than a thousand West Bank
Palestinians have been killed since 7 October); inside Israel, where
Palestinian citizens are subject to increasing levels of ostracism and
intimidation; in the wider region, where Israel has established itself
as a new Sparta; and in the rest of the world, where the inability of
Western powers to condemn Israel’s conduct—much less bring it to
an end—has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim
to uphold.”

The loudest preaching for a “rules-based order” has come from the
U.S. government, which makes and breaks
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international rules at will. During this century, in the Middle East,
the U.S.-Israel duo has vastly outdone all other entities combined in
the categories of killing, maiming, and terrorizing. In addition to
the joint project of genocide in Gaza, and the USA’s long war on
Iraq, the United States and Israel have often exercised an assumed
prerogative to attack Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, along with
encore U.S. missile strikes on Iraq as recently as last year.

Israel’s grisly performance as “a new Sparta” in the region is
coproduced by the Pentagon, with the military
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intelligence
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operations of the two nations intricately entangled. The Israeli
military has been able to turn Gaza into a genocide zone with at least
70%
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of its arsenal coming from the United States.

While writing an afterword about the war on Gaza for the paperback
edition of _War Made Invisible_ [[link removed]], I
mulled over the relevance of my book’s subtitle: “How America
Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.” As the carnage in
Gaza worsened, the reality became clearer that the Orwellian-named
Israel Defense Forces and U.S. Defense Department are essentially part
of the same military machine. Their command structures are different,
but they are part of the same geopolitical Goliath.

“The new era in which Israel, backed by the U.S., dominates the
Middle East is likely to see even more violence and instability than
in the past,” longtime war correspondent Patrick Cockburn wrote
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this month. The lethal violence from Israeli-American teamwork is of
such magnitude that it epitomizes international state terrorism. The
genocide in Gaza shows the lengths to which the alliance is willing
and able to go.

While public opinion is very different in Israel and the United
States, the genocidal results of the governments’ policies are
indistinguishable.

American public opinion about arming Israel is measurable. As early as
June 2024, a _CBS News_ poll
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found that 61% of the public said that the U.S. should not “send
weapons and supplies to Israel.” Since then, support for Israel has
continued to erode
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In sharp contrast, on Capitol Hill, the support for arming Israel is
measurably high. When Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) bills to cut off
some military aid to Israel came to a vote last November, just 19
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100 senators voted yes. Very few of his colleagues voice anywhere near
the extent of Sanders’s moral outrage as he keeps speaking out
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In the House, only 26
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out of 435 members have chosen to become cosponsors of H.R.3565
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bill introduced more than two months ago by Rep. Delia Ramirez
(D-Ill.) that would prevent the U.S. government from sending certain
bombs to Israel.

“Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign
assistance since World War II,” the Congressional Research Service
reports
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During just the first 12 months after the war on Gaza began in October
2023, Brown University’s Costs of War project found, the “U.S.
spending on Israel’s military operations and related U.S operations
in the region” added up to $23 billion
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The resulting profit bonanza for U.S. military contractors is notable.
So is the fact that the U.S.-Israel partnership exerts great American
leverage in the Middle East—where two-thirds
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are located.

The politics of genocide in the United States involves papering over
the big gap between the opinions of the electorate and the actions of
the U.S. government. While the partnership between the governments of
Israel and the United States has never been stronger, the partnership
between the people of Israel and the United States has never been
weaker. But in the USA, consent of the governed has not been necessary
to continue the axis of genocide.

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Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and
executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

* United States and Israel; Military Contractors; Genocide;
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