There is a pernicious belief among certain circles in the West which posits that Israel controls the governments of the US, UK, Canada and other nations. This idea has seen a resurgence amidst revelations in the Epstein files. While there is no doubt that Israel has enormous influence over politicians and political parties, it is not “calling the shots” as one influencer put it recently.

This idea comes from a false understanding of the arrangement of power in the current world order and the nature of imperialism itself. Israel is best understood as the most important colonial asset of the United States and other Western nations. In a sense, it is the last imperial outpost of the American Empire in the Middle-East. This explains why the US has and continues to invest so much money into it.

And this gets to the heart of the matter. The United States and other white, Western nations have created a false narrative of naive innocence to explain away their own crimes and atrocities. This can be summed up in the all too common refrain “this is not who we are” when Americans try grapple with the cruelty, mendacity and viciousness of the Trump regime or of ICE thugs. But even a cursory glance at American history demonstrates that this is indeed who they are.

Israel did not exist at the time of the genocide of Indigenous North Americans or during trans-Atlantic slave trade. It did not tell the US to occupy and annex the Kingdom of Hawaii and imprison its Queen. It did not ask the US to occupy the Philippines. It had no hand in Jim Crow segregation or lynching. It did not force the US to nuke Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It did not suggest it round up Japanese Americans and put them into concentration camps. It did not persuade the US to destroy the Bikini Islands for nuclear testing and displace the local inhabitants. It did not strongarm the US into carpet bombing Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

None of this is to absolve Israel of its copious crimes. It is guilty of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, stealing land, bombing nations that never attacked it and now genocide. It has and continues to meddle in the affairs of other countries and its mass surveillance technology is being used to subvert democracy. It is the quintessential example of a contemporary colonial settler state.

But the United States has funded and supported this project willingly for decades. In short, there would be no Israel without its imperial benefactor. And if Israel were to suddenly become a real liability to the empire, all support would stop.

Israel should be condemned for its crimes. But to stop there would be idiotic. Few of its crimes, if any, would have been possible without arms and diplomatic cover provided by the United States, along with the UK, Germany, France and Canada. To deny this is to participate in a fantasy where Israelis are somehow endowed with supernatural powers. One which conveniently casts American and Western nations as hapless victims who are completely powerless and ignorant. It is an idea that stems from an old antisemitic trope that Jews control the planet.

Without a doubt, the political ideology of Zionism is the very definition of colonial settlerism. And racism is foundational to its existence. It should be opposed by people of conscience. And it needs to be reiterated that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. In fact, there are more non-Jewish Zionists than there are Jewish Zionists. And Jews have been at the forefront opposing this ideology.

But the persistence of the idea that Israel controls Western governments is not only erroneous, it makes it more difficult to stop its crimes. Imperialism counts on this obfuscation. It relies on the proliferation of theories or ideas that distract from its crimes.

In short, the greatest threat to the world or even to the Palestinians isn’t Israel, it is the power behind Israel. The one which continually arms, funds and defends it from all scrutiny. The one that has subverted democracy and installed puppet regimes throughout the Global South for decades. The one that has 800+ military bases around the world. The one which continues to fuel a machinery of dispossession and death for the profit of a few.

Kenn Maurice Orfanos, February 2026

*Title illustration is by Fourate Chahal El Rekaby.