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colonialism
Don't Be Fooled: Trump Will Still Enable Israel's Annexation Plans
Any apparent dispute between the Americans and the Israelis concerns timing and method, not the objective itself.
Oct 30, 2025
As Israel continues its genocide of the Palestinians under the new umbrella of US President Donald Trump's "peace plan," the Americans are mounting a diplomatic campaign that feigns opposition to the Jewish settler-colony's latest moves to annex the West Bank.
To secure backing for a ceasefire in Gaza—where Israel has killed at least 88 Palestinians and injured 315 others since it took effect on October 10—Trump promised his Arab client regimes last month that he would not allow Israel to proceed with annexation, a red line they feared would ignite public anger and jeopardize Washington's broader normalization project in the region.
Israel's parliament, however, gave preliminary approval last week to two bills calling for the formal annexation of the West Bank.
Trump's vice president, JD Vance, who was in the country to help the Israelis coordinate the next phase of the Gaza genocide, described the vote as "a very stupid political stunt"—and one to which he "personally [took] some insult."
Far from opposing Israel's expansionist agenda, the Trump administration has long been integral to its realization.
In an attempt to save face with Washington's Arab clients, Trump also dispatched his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to rebuke the Israelis for their ill-timed vote. While en route to Israel, Rubio issued the administration's sternest warning yet, saying: "That's not something we can be supportive of right now"—meaning the Americans would support it later.
A week earlier, Trump struck a similar tone in an interview with Time magazine, insisting that this was not the right time for annexation: "It won't happen. It won't happen. It won't happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. And you can't do that now… Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened," he said.
The key word in these pronouncements is "now." Any apparent dispute between the Americans and the Israelis concerns timing and method, not the objective itself.
Advancing Expansionism
Far from opposing Israel's expansionist agenda, the Trump administration has long been integral to its realization.
After all, during his first term, Trump's "peace for prosperity" plan, authored by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, endorsed Israel's designs to annex 30% of the West Bank.
Under that proposal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel would move immediately to annex the Jordan Valley and West Bank settlements, while generously committing to defer the construction of new settlements in areas left to the Palestinians for at least four years.
Then-US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman signaled that Trump had green-lighted immediate annexation, stating that "Israel does not have to wait at all" and that "we will recognize it." Trump reiterated his position last February, when he justified annexation by observing: "It's a small country… it's a small country in terms of land."
It would be ludicrous to think that the Arab regimes truly believe Trump's promises. They only pretend to flatter him and play along for the sake of domestic public relations.
Indeed, and to his credit, Trump had already recognized Israel's illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights in 2019, just as he recognized the illegal Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem in 2017.
Why, then, would he oppose West Bank annexation rather than simply postpone it to a more auspicious time?
In fact, the Israelis are already planning to expand beyond the West Bank, which, like East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, they already consider a done deal. They are now looking to seize more territory from their other Arab neighbors.
Just weeks ago, Netanyahu declared that he was on a "historic and spiritual mission" on behalf of the Jewish people, adding that he felt "very attached to the vision of the Promised Land and Greater Israel." This vision extends to the entire country of Jordan, as well as additional Syrian, Lebanese, Egyptian, and Iraqi lands.
Arab countries were quick to condemn Netanyahu's vision coveting their territories as future parts of Israel, just as they condemn recent Israeli moves to annex the West Bank. Yet this is little more than a pro forma performance.
The Arab regimes, following European and American orders, have in practice acquiesced de facto in every Israeli annexation since 1948—and some have even embraced them de jure, as Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Morocco, Sudan, and Bahrain did when they recognized Israel's 1949 borders, which already encompassed annexed Palestinian land.
Global legitimization
When Israel was established in 1948, it included half the area allotted by the United Nations for a Palestinian state, as well as West Jerusalem, which was meant to remain under international jurisdiction.
While the UN General Assembly, including the United Kingdom, initially insisted that Israel would only be recognized once it withdrew from these territories in accordance with the 1947 UN Partition Plan, between 1949 and 1950, the Security Council and the UK ultimately recognized the country with its new borders—expanded by conquest far beyond those contained in the 1947 UN Partition Plan—intact.
Israel initially agreed to negotiate with its Arab neighbors over the boundaries of the state, but kept the territories it occupied in violation of UN resolutions, especially those concerning its annexation of West Jerusalem in 1949. It moved its government offices there and declared the city its capital.
Israel's avarice for the land of others has always been publicly avowed and on display.
The UN, the US and all of Europe recognized Israel's annexations de facto, if not de jure, by the early 1950s, and the normalizing Arab countries followed suit in later decades.
After all, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat saw no problem in addressing Israel's parliament in annexed West Jerusalem during his 1977 visit without a word of protest.
While King Hussein never paid an official visit to West Jerusalem, as his 1994 and 1996 visits to Israel were mainly to Tel Aviv and Lake Tiberias, he did visit annexed West Jerusalem in 1995 to attend the funeral of then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and again in 1997 to meet Israeli families who had lost children when a Jordanian soldier opened fire on them.
It bears mentioning that even before signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1993, Hussein had already conceded Palestinian and Arab sovereignty not only over West Jerusalem but also over East Jerusalem, when he insisted that "only God has a claim in Jerusalem"—a statement he would reiterate many times thereafter. The Egyptian and Jordanian embassies, like those of most countries that do not recognize West Jerusalem as Israel's capital, remain in Tel Aviv.
This, however, does not mean these countries do not recognize West Jerusalem as part of Israel.
Legacy of Conquest
Lest we think that Netanyahu's recently announced Greater Israel "vision" is a peculiar obsession of his alone, it should be remembered that he has so far conquered few Arab territories and has yet to annex any—unlike his predecessors, from David Ben-Gurion to Menachem Begin, who annexed vast Palestinian and Syrian lands.
Israel's avarice for the land of others has always been publicly avowed and on display. After its 1956 invasion and first occupation of Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, Israel's founding prime minister, the secular David Ben-Gurion, waxed biblical, claiming that the invasion of Sinai "was the greatest and most glorious in the annals of our people." The conquest, he added, restored "King Solomon's patrimony from the island of Yotvat in the south to the foothills of Lebanon in the north."
"Yotvat," the name the Israelis bestowed on the Egyptian island of Tiran, had "once more become part of the Third Kingdom of Israel," Ben-Gurion proclaimed.
In the face of international opposition to Israel's occupation, he insisted: "Up to the middle of the sixth century Jewish independence was maintained on the island of Yotvat… which was liberated yesterday by the Israeli army." He also declared the Gaza Strip "an integral part of the nation." Invoking the prophecy of Isaiah, Ben-Gurion vowed: "No force, whatever it is called, was going to make Israel evacuate Sinai."
When the Israelis were finally forced to withdraw, they bided their time and invaded and occupied these areas again in 1967. Despite Israel's final withdrawal from Sinai—whose demilitarization it demanded—talk of invading and settling the Egyptian peninsula is once again in the air today.
After 1948, the Israelis proceeded with plans to steal all the land in the demilitarzsed zone (DMZ) along the Syrian border near the Golan Heights. By 1967, they had taken over the area before conquering the Golan itself.
In the first 10 months of this year, Israel expanded its illegal acquisition of Syrian territories with the acquiescence of Syria's new US-backed regime, led by the rehabilitated former al-Qaeda and Islamic State member Ahmad al-Sharaa.
The Israelis created yet another "buffer zone" on Syrian territory, and just as they did in the DMZ between 1948 and 1967, Israeli Jewish settlers last month crossed into Syrian territory to lay the cornerstone for a new settlement called Neve Habashan, or "the Oasis of Bashan," on the newly occupied Syrian territories near Jabal al-Shaykh.
They hail from Israel's Uri Tzafon "Awaken the North" movement, which aims to settle Syria and southern Lebanon, asserting religious claims to the "Bashan region"—the biblical name Jewish expansionists apply to these lands. Last year, the movement sent thousands of eviction notices to residents of Lebanese towns using balloons and drones.
While the Israeli military removed the settlers in Jabal al-Shaykh, it is only a matter of time before official Jewish settlements are established—just as they continue to be built across the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1981, the year after it annexed East Jerusalem.
Annexation Continues
In 2002, Israel built its illegal apartheid "separation wall" inside the West Bank, de facto annexing 10% of the territory, eliciting only pro forma protests from the "international" community, including the International Criminal Court.
Israel has also insisted since 1967 on annexing the Jordan Valley bordering Jordan—another 10 percent of the West Bank—a move that Trump's 2020 "peace" plan approved.
American and European acceptance, and in some cases sponsorship, of such territorial expansions is no different from their endorsement of Trump's more recent Gaza plan, which foresees Israel directly and indefinitely occupying more than half of Gaza's territory.
When Palestinians resist this international support for Israel's continued colonization, settlement, occupation, and annexation of their homeland, all these countries will feign surprise, while openly or covertly abetting the next phase of Israel's genocide.
The Arab regimes, as much as Europe and the US, know very well that Israel's annexation of the West Bank will proceed apace, even if it is tactically delayed. And this will be done with the actual blessings of the "international community"—albeit accompanied by the usual pro forma protests—with the Arab regimes (save Jordan, for its own national security reasons) at the forefront.
Rubio was explicit on this point: "At this time, it's something that we… think might be counterproductive" and "potentially threatening for the peace deal"—but clearly not at a later time, when it could be "productive" and "potentially" conducive to peace.
Indeed, the UN Human Rights Office just released a report documenting the complicity of dozens of countries—mostly European, but also Arab—in Israel's ongoing genocide. The Washington Post likewise revealed that several Arab states have upgraded their military cooperation with Israel during the genocide, including Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE.
When Palestinians resist this international support for Israel's continued colonization, settlement, occupation, and annexation of their homeland, all these countries will feign surprise, while openly or covertly abetting the next phase of Israel's genocide, just as they have done for the past two years. And as ever, they will do so in the name of "Israel's right to defend itself."
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The Oldest Colony, the Newest War: Puerto Rico as a Launchpad for War on Venezuela
The island that has lived under US rule since 1898 is once again being used as a staging ground for US militarism, this time for Washington’s latest “war on drugs” narrative.
Oct 22, 2025
When President Donald Trump announced that the CIA had been authorized to conduct operations inside Venezuela, just as US drones struck another small boat off Venezuela’s coast, few people in the United States realized that much of this militarization begins on the soil of a land denied its own sovereignty: Puerto Rico.
The island that has lived under US rule since 1898 is once again being used as a staging ground for US militarism, this time for Washington’s latest “war on drugs” narrative, masking a campaign of coercion against Latin America’s independent governments.
After invading Puerto Rico in 1898, the United States quickly turned the island into a strategic military outpost: the “Gibraltar of the Caribbean,” with naval bases in Ceiba, Roosevelt Roads, and Vieques designed to dominate the eastern Caribbean and protect the new artery of empire: the Panama Canal.
From World War I onward, Puerto Ricans were drafted into every major US war, fighting and dying for a flag that still denies them full citizenship rights. Meanwhile, the island’s lands and waters were expropriated for bombing ranges, naval training, and intelligence operations.
Puerto Rico’s place in this strategy reveals Washington's core hypocrisy: It wages wars abroad in the name of freedom while denying that freedom to the colony it still holds.
For six decades, the US Navy used Vieques as a live-fire testing ground, dropping millions of pounds of explosives and munitions, including napalm and depleted uranium. The result was environmental devastation and one of the highest cancer rates in the region. It took a mass civil disobedience movement to finally force the Navy out in 2003.
That victory proved Puerto Ricans’ capacity for organized resistance, but the structures of empire never disappeared.
Two decades later, those same bases and runways are being reactivated. In 2025, Washington quietly expanded military operations on the island, deploying F-35 fighter jets, stationing P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, and rotating Marine and Special Operations units through Puerto Rican ports and airfields. The official justification is “counter-narcotics operations,” but the timing and scale point to something far larger: a regional military buildup aimed at Venezuela.
The aggression has now extended to Colombia, where Trump has cut off all US aid and accused President Gustavo Petro of being a “drug leader.” The announcement came just days after Colombia’s president denounced the US drone strikes off Venezuela’s coast, one of which, he warned, hit a Colombian vessel and killed Colombian citizens. Instead of accountability, Washington answered with insults and economic blackmail.
The Trump administration’s designation of a “non-international armed conflict with drug cartels” gives legal cover for drone strikes and covert missions far from US territory. Puerto Rico’s colonial status makes it the perfect staging ground: a place the Pentagon can operate freely without congressional debate or local consent.
For Puerto Ricans, this militarization is not an abstract issue. It means more surveillance, more environmental risk, and a deeper entanglement in wars they never chose. It also signals a return to the same imperial logic that made Vieques a bombing range: using occupied territory to project power abroad.
Puerto Rico remains the oldest colony in the modern world, a US “territory” whose people are “citizens” but not sovereign. They cannot vote for president, have no senators, and possess only a symbolic representative in Congress. That absence of sovereignty is what makes it so useful to the empire: a gray zone of legality where wars can be prepared without democratic consent.
This is not the first time Puerto Rico has been used as a military springboard. Its bases have served as logistical hubs for interventions across the hemisphere, from the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, to Grenada in 1983, and Panama in 1989.
Each of these operations was justified through Cold War rhetoric, the defense of “freedom,” “stability,” and “democracy,” while systematically targeting governments and social movements seeking independence from US control.
Puerto Rican born Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) has warned that history is repeating itself. In a Newsweek op-ed, she reminded Washington of the lesson of Vieques: that the island’s people have already paid the price for US militarism through contamination, displacement, and neglect.
“Our people have already suffered enough from military pollution and colonial exploitation. Puerto Rico deserves peace, not more war,” she said.
Her call aligns with that of Caribbean and Latin American nations in CELAC, which have declared the region a “Zone of Peace.”
The buildup around Venezuela follows a long-standing pattern in US foreign policy: When a nation asserts control over its own resources or refuses to obey Washington’s dictates, it becomes a target. Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua are punished for exactly that. Sanctions, blockades, and covert operations function as mechanisms of domination to keep the hemisphere open to US capital and military reach.
Puerto Rico’s place in this strategy reveals Washington's core hypocrisy: It wages wars abroad in the name of freedom while denying that freedom to the colony it still holds. Its people are governed without full representation, its land is used for war, and its economy remains bound to Washington’s dictates. Puerto Rico’s demand for independence is the same demand made by Venezuela, Cuba, and every nation that refuses to live on its knees: the right to determine its own future.
The struggle for peace, sovereignty, and dignity in Nuestra América runs through Puerto Rico’s shores. When US drones take off from Caribbean airstrips to strike Venezuela, they fly over the ghosts of Vieques, over the land where Puerto Ricans once stood unarmed against an empire.
Puerto Rico deserves a future of peace, environmental healing, and sovereignty, and Venezuela deserves the same: the right to live free from siege, to defend its independence, and to build its own destiny without fear of US bombs or blockades. To defend Puerto Rico’s right to peace is to defend Venezuela’s right to exist.
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Israel's Air-Power Colonialism
Like the British empire before it, Israel is attempting to dominate the Middle East from the skies.
Oct 14, 2025
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nomination of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his hands already crimson with the blood of innocent Iraqis, to run post-war Gaza, brings to mind a distant era when London sent its politicians out to be viceroys in its global colonial domains. Consider Blair’s proposed appointment, made (of course!) without consulting any Palestinians, a clear signal that the Middle East has entered a second era of Western imperialism. Other than Palestine, which has already been subjected to classic settler colonialism, our current neo-imperial moment is characterized by the American use of Israel as its base in the Middle East and by the employment of air power to subdue any challengers.
Swarming
The odd assortment of grifters, oil men, financiers, mercenaries, white nationalists, and Christian and Jewish Zionists now presiding in Washington, led by that great orange-hued hotelier-in-chief, has (with the help of Germany, Great Britain, and France) built up Israel into a huge airbase with a small country attached to it. From that airbase, a constant stream of missiles, rockets, drones, and fighter jets routinely swarm out to hit regional neighbors.
Gaza was pounded into rubble almost hourly for the last two years, only the first month of which could plausibly have been justified as “self-defense” in the wake of the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Even the Palestinian West Bank, already under Israeli military rule, has been struck repeatedly from above. Lebanon has been subject to numerous bombings despite a supposed ceasefire, as has Syria (no matter that its leader claims he wants good relations with his neighbor). Yemen, which has indeed fired missiles at Israel to protest the genocide in Gaza, has now been hit endlessly by the Israelis, who also struck Iranian nuclear enrichment sites and other targets last June.
Some of the Israeli bombing raids or missile and drone strikes were indeed tit-for-tat replies to attacks by that country’s enemies. Others were only made necessary because of Israeli provocations, including its seemingly never-ending atrocities in Gaza, to which regional actors have felt compelled to reply. Many Israeli strikes, however, have had little, if anything, to do with self-defense, often being aimed at civilian targets or at places like Syria that pose no immediate threat. On September 9, Israel even bombed Qatar, the country its leaders had asked to help negotiate with Hamas for the return of Israeli hostages taken on October 7.
Tel Aviv is now shaping governments of the Middle East simply by wiping their officials off the face of the Earth or credibly threatening to do so.
In short, what we’re now seeing is Israel’s version of air-power colonialism.
Typically, its fighter jets bombed the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on August 28, assassinating northern Yemen’s prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahwi, along with several senior members of the region’s Houthi government and numerous journalists. (Israeli officials had previously boasted that they could have killed the top leadership of Iran in their 12-day war on that country in June.)
In reality, Tel Aviv is now shaping governments of the Middle East simply by wiping their officials off the face of the Earth or credibly threatening to do so. Israel has also had an eerie hand in shaping outside perceptions of developments in the region by regularly assassinating journalists, not only in Palestine but also in Lebanon and as far abroad as Yemen. However, by failing to come close to subduing the region entirely, what Tel Aviv has created is a negative version of hegemony rather than grasping any kind of positive leadership role.
Negative Imperialism
The massive June bombardment of Iran by Israel and the United States, destroying civilian nuclear enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow, came amid ongoing diplomatic negotiations in Oman. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the right to enrich uranium for civilian uses and no credible evidence was presented that Tehran had decided to militarize its program. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) condemned both sets of strikes as severe violations of the United Nations charter and of its own statutes. They also posed public health concerns, mainly because of the release of potentially toxic chemicals and radiological contaminants.
Those attacks, in short, were aimed at denying Iran the sort of economic and scientific enterprises that are a routine part of life in Israel and the United States, as well as Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Several of those countries (like Israel) do, of course, also have nuclear weapons, while Iran does not. In the end, Tehran saw no benefit in the 2015 nuclear deal its leaders had agreed to that required it to mothball 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program. Indeed, President Trump functionally punished the Iranian leadership for complying with it when he imposed maximum-pressure sanctions in May 2018—sanctions largely maintained by the Biden administration and in place to this day.
Those dangerous and illegal air strikes on Iran should bring to mind 19th-century British and Russian resistance to the building of a railroad by Iran’s Qajar dynasty, a form of what I’ve come to think of as “negative imperialism.” In other words, contrary to classic theories of imperialism that focused on the domination of markets and the extraction of resources, some imperial strategies have always been aimed at preventing the operation of markets in order to keep a victim nation weak.
After all, Iran has few navigable waterways and its economy has long suffered from transportation difficulties. The obvious solution once upon a time was to build a railroad, something both the British and the Russians came to oppose out of a desire to keep that country a weak buffer zone between their empires. Iran didn’t, in fact, get such a railroad until 1938.
In a similar fashion, 21st-century imperialism-from-the-air is denying it the ability to produce fuel for its nuclear power plant at Bushehr. The United States, Europe, and Israel are treating Iran differently from so many other countries in this regard because of its government’s rejection of a Western-imposed imperial order in the region.
Popular movements and revolts brought the long decades of British and French colonial dominance of the Middle East to an end after World War II. The demise of colonialism and the rise of independent nation-states was, however, never truly accepted by right-wing politicians in either Europe or the United States who had no interest in confronting the horrors of the colonial age. Instead, they preferred to ignore history, including the slave trade, economic looting, the displacement or massacre of Indigenous populations, the mismanagement of famines, and forms of racist apartheid. Worse yet, the desire for a sanitized history of the colonial era was often coupled with a determination to run the entire deadly experiment all over again.
The framers of the ill-omened Global War on Terror’s nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq during the administration of President George W. Bush would openly celebrate what was functionally the return of Western colonialism. They attempted to use America’s moment as a hyperpower (unconstrained by great power competition after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991) to attempt to recolonize the Greater Middle East.
Predictably, they failed miserably. Unlike their 19th-century ancestors, people in the Global South are now largely urban and literate, connected by newspapers and the internet, organized by political parties and nongovernmental outfits, and in possession of capital, resources, and sophisticated weaponry. Direct colonization could now only be achieved through truly genocidal acts, as Israeli actions in Gaza suggest—and, even then, would be unlikely to succeed.
“We Destroyed the Villages by Air Patrols”
No wonder imperial powers have once again turned to indirect dominance through aerial bombardment. The use of air power to try to subdue or at least curb Middle Easterners is, in fact, more than a century old. That tactic was inaugurated by the government of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti during his country’s invasion and occupation of Ottoman Libya in 1911. Aerial surveillance pilot Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti fitted detonators to two-pound grenades, dropping them on enemy camps. Though he caused no injuries, his act, then seen as sneaky and ungentlemanly, provoked outrage.
The ruthless British subjugation of Palestine, aimed at—this should sound eerily familiar today—displacing the Indigenous population and establishing a European “Jewish Ulster” there to bolster British rule in the Middle East, also deployed air power. As Irish parliamentarian Chris Hazzard observed, “Herbert Samuel, hated in Ireland for sanctioning Roger Casement’s execution and the internment of thousands following the Easter Rising in 1916—would, as Britain’s first High Commissioner in Palestine, order the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Palestinian protestors in 1921 (the first bombs dropped from the sky on Palestinian civilians).”
The most extensive use of aerial bombardment for imperial control, however, would be pursued by the British in Mesopotamia, which they derogatorily called “Mespot.” The fragile British occupation of what is now Iraq from 1917 to 1932 ended long before imperialists like then-Secretary of State for War, Air, and the Colonies Winston Churchill thought it should, largely because the armed local population mounted a vigorous resistance to it. A war-weary British public proved unwilling to bear the costs of a large occupation army there in the 1920s, so Churchill decided to use the Royal Air Force to keep control.
Unlike genuine international leadership, the Frankenstein monster of negative hegemony in the Middle East stirs only opposition and resistance.
Arthur “Bomber” Harris, a settler in colonial Rhodesia, who joined the British Air Force during the first World War, was then sent to Iraq. As he wrote, “We were equipped with Vickers Venon and subsequently Victoria aircraft… By sawing a sighting hole in the nose of our troop carriers and making our own bomb racks we converted them into what were nearly the first post-war long-range heavy bombers.” He did not attempt to gild the lily about his tactics: “[I]f the rebellion continued, we destroyed the villages and by air patrols kept the insurgents away from their homes for as long as necessary.” That, as he explained, was far less expensive than using troops and, of course, produced no high infantry casualty counts of the sort that had scarred Europe’s conscience during World War I.
Colonial officials obscured the fact that such measures were being taken against a civilian population in peacetime, rather than enemy soldiers during a war. In short, the denial that there are any civilians in Palestine, or in the Middle East more generally, has a long colonial heritage. It should be noted, however, that, in the end, Great Britain’s aerial dominance of Iraq failed, and it finally had to grant that country what at least passed for independence in 1932. In 1958, an enraged public would finally violently overthrow the government the British had installed there, after which Iraq became a nationalist challenger to Western dominance in the region for decades to come.
Of course, Harris’ air power strategy, whetted in Mesopotamia, came to haunt Europe itself during the Second World War, when he emerged as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command and rose to the rank of air chief marshal. He would then pioneer the tactic of massively bombarding civilian cities, beginning with the “thousand bomber” raid on Cologne in May 1942. His “total war” air campaign would, of course, culminate in the notorious 1945 firebombing of Dresden, which devastated eight square miles of the “Florence of Germany,” wiping out at least 25,000 victims, most of them noncombatants.
Terror from the Skies
In the end, the way Bomber Harris’ deadly skies came home to Europe should be an object lesson to our own neo-imperialists. At this very moment, in fact, Europe faces menacing drones no less than does the Middle East. Moreover, unlike genuine international leadership, the Frankenstein monster of negative hegemony in the Middle East stirs only opposition and resistance. Despite Israel’s technological superiority, it has hardly achieved invulnerability. Poverty-stricken and war-ridden Yemen has, for instance, managed to all but close the vital Red Sea to international shipping to protest the genocide in Gaza and has hit Israel with hypersonic missiles, closing the port of Eilat. Nor, during their 12-day war, did Iran prove entirely helpless either. It took out Israel’s major oil refinery and struck key military and research facilities. Instead of shaking the Iranian government, Israel appears to have pushed Iranians to rally around the flag. Nor is it even clear that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium was affected.
Most damning of all, Israel’s ability to inflict atrocities on the Palestinians of Gaza (often with US-supplied weaponry) has produced widespread revulsion. It is now increasingly isolated, its prime minister unable even to fly over France and Spain due to a fear of an International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest. The publics of the Middle East are boiling with anger, as are many Europeans. In early October, Italy’s major labor unions called a general strike, essentially closing the country down to protest Israel’s interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla, a group of ships attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. As with Bomber Harris’ ill-starred domination of Iraq, terror from the skies in Gaza and beyond is all too likely to fail as a long-term Grand Strategy.
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