Speed the Collapse

On wealth pumps and proxies

Though religion certainly animates and inspirits the political actions of all three nations, the war on Iran isn’t Jews and Christians against Muslims. Instead, it’s a very large imperial power (the United States) and a smaller regional power (Israel) working together to destroy another local power (Iran) that has been undermining and blocking their hegemonic influence.

In other words, it’s a game of empire. The United States is an imperial power that can only sustain that power by siphoning off resources from other nations. In order to do so, though, it must exert political influence over resource-rich countries to ensure they’ll keep pumping that wealth in the direction of the US and not towards rival powers. And as you know, a vast amount of the most important resource of all, oil, happens to be in the Middle East.

(I made this essay free because of its importance. Please share widely).

Yesterday, the overly-vaunted “No Kings” protests occurred again in the United States, so you probably missed the news of a much more important protest occurring yesterday. That was in Israel, where tens of thousands of Israelis defied government bans and faced down violent police to protest¹ against Netanyahu and his war on Iran.

In my last post, I detailed a bit of the reason why you might not have heard of this protest (and it’s not the first of its kind). Israel heavily censors both national and international journalists, using state of emergency laws to suppress dissent in the name of protecting the homeland. Also, I mentioned that this isn’t a rare situation: Iran does this, too. So does Ukraine, which is why you can get the impression that Ukraine is always winning against Russia, despite constantly needing to beg money from the US and Europe to keep Zelensky in power. And, of course, the UAE has been jailing social media influencers and even regular tourists who post unflattering photos of Iranian missile damage in Dubai.

American and European news stories parroted a survey from 3 March — based on only 500 people² — that concluded 93% of Israeli Jews supported the war, to which a writer for Israel’s center-left newspaper, Haaretz, said, “Where in democracy do you have such figures? Ninety-three percent? Supporting a war of choice? This is a North Korean figure.”³ In other words, either the conclusion of the poll was wrong (and again, its sample size was only 500 people) or dissent had been so crushed within Israel that the far-right government’s propaganda was working.

If that latter situation was the case, it most certainly isn’t now. As I mentioned, it’s illegal to protest in Israel right now — all public gatherings are banned. Protesters not only risked getting beaten and arrested (22 were jailed) but also being caught without shelter during a missile strike.

There’s a few reasons I bring this protest up. First of all, there’s the reason I’ve already mentioned, the propaganda on the part of the Israeli government to portray its Jewish citizens as fully supportive of the war. There’s a second tier of this propaganda, which is the attempt to make all Jews everywhere feel invested in and also appear complicit with whatever the Israeli government does. So on the one hand, Jews with no interest in the nationalist project called Zionism nevertheless feel pressured to defend its existence, because attacks on it can feel like attacks on Jews themselves. On the other hand, non-Jews angry about what Israel is doing falsely blame Jews for Israel’s actions, and some take this contorted political anger out on non-Israeli Jews, and those attacks then feed back into the propaganda.

In other words, the Israeli government uses the very same identity politics mechanism that the American false-left adopted: reducing all members of a group to their identity category, erasing all significant differences between them, and then claiming (just like a self-appointed social justice activist might) to represent the entire category. And aligned organizations help to maintain this game.

One such organization is the Jewish People Policy Institute, which is the Israeli-based think tank that published a survey on the 9th of March about American Jewish opinion of the war on Iran. That poll, which claimed to show that 68% of “connected” Jews in American supported the war, was then reported widely in US media outlets with barely an explanation of what was meant by “connected.”

In fact, according to Jewish Currents, the JPPI’s polling sample isn’t a sample at all, but rather a group of recruited volunteers. The resulting conclusions of their polls, therefore tend to skew wildly from more “scientific” polling where at least some modicum of effort is made to match samples with larger populations.

But what it means in practice is that JPPI has set up a tool that will return survey results that are reliably more politically right-leaning and supportive of Israel than polls of Jews that use standard methodologies. Its track record bears that out: Last October, 25% of respondents to a JPPI poll said that Israel had committed war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza, a month after the Washington Post poll of American Jews found that 62% thought that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza. And in November, 70% of respondents told JPPI they identify as Zionist, vastly more than Jewish Federations of North America’s March 2025 survey, which was weighted to reflect the Jewish population as a whole, and found that only 37% of American Jews identify as Zionist.⁴

That’s why its crucial that you know about the protests in Israel and also about Jewish dissent against the war around the world. No identity group is monolithic, and any attempt to represent the entire group will erase all difference and dissent within the group.

And you need to understand this in order to understand something much more important. Though religion certainly animates and inspirits the political actions of all three nations, the war on Iran isn’t Jews and Christians against Muslims. Instead, it’s a very large imperial power (the United States) and a smaller regional power (Israel) collaborating in an attempt to destroy another local power (Iran) that has been undermining and blocking their hegemonic influence.

In other words, it’s a game of empire. The United States is an imperial power that can sustain that power by siphoning off resources from other nations. In order to do so, though, it must exert political influence over resource-rich countries to ensure they’ll keep pumping that wealth in the direction of the US and not towards rival powers. And as you know, a vast amount of the most important resource of all, oil, happens to be in the Middle East.

Though certainly no Zionist would ever admit it and no anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist would ever believe it, Israel has, since its founding, functioned not just as an ally of but also as a proxy for the United States in the Middle East. The US needs Israel as much as Israel needs the US, and like mutually-abusive spouses, the leaders of both nations constantly manipulate each other into staying together by creating crises in the Middle East to which the other will inevitably respond.

To be clear, again, when I write of Israel I do not mean Jews, anymore than I mean Christians when I speak of the United States (and here it’s also worth remembering that there are more Jews living in the United States — 7.5 million — than there are living in Israel —7.2 million). Religion in both places functions more as an aesthetic of governance and a force that animates political actions, rather than determining them. Sure, there are millions of Christian Americans who believe that Jesus can only come back when Israel is full of Jews, and there are Jewish Israelis who believe that rebuilding the third temple will usher in the messianic age, but they are only a reliable fringe constituency for far-right governments in both places, rather than the ones actually determining geopolitical policy.

The same is true also for Iran. Shiite Islam is the animating force for the political decisions of the government there, and hard-line Muslims are a reliable constituency for the government, but the kinds of political decisions made by Iran are the same kinds every other state makes. Iran has cultivated and supported non-state proxies in the very same way the United States does. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are no different from the countless non-state “rebel groups” — the Contras, the mujaheddin, the rebel soldiers in Syria and Libya, etc. — that the United States has funded in the last few decades to fight proxy wars against regional powers that don’t bend immediately to American will. The only difference, really, is that Iran has never successfully gained a client state to use as a proxy.

There’s something else important to remember about all these proxy groups: they’re all extremist, and that applies to both to the Iranian proxies as well as the ones the US has funded over many decades. The Contras and the mujaheddin were both explicitly right-wing groups fighting and murdering leftists as well as completely uninvolved villagers, while the rebels funded in Syria and Libya were primarily Islamic extremists. Iran, likewise, funds extremist, far-right leaning groups⁵, almost as if both nations are using the very same playbook.

Of course, the proxies that Iran has cannot attack the United States directly, because there’s a continent and then a large ocean between them. At best, all they can do is attack US “assets” (military bases) and the US’s state proxy in the region, Israel. And that’s a shit situation for the ten million people living in Israel.

If that number surprised you, then I’ve another number that might surprise you more: 93 million. That’s the number of people living in Iran, nine times more people than Israel, as many as the combined populations of California, New York, and Florida, and more than 20 million more than live in the United Kingdom and 20 million more than the amount of people who voted for Trump in 2024.

I bring up both those population numbers to give you a sense of how really absurd and impossible this war is. Trying to change the government of 93 million people from the outside with bombs is hardly something you can really do, so if that was truly the original goal, then it’s most definitely not worked. If the goal was to make the ten million people in Israel safer, it most definitely isn’t doing that, either. And if the US’s goal was to remove the one state blocking its dominance in the Middle East in order to expand the wealth pump, it’s failing miserably.

In fact, as lots of people are beginning to notice, Iran is kind of winning. Here’s the best analysis I’ve seen on this so far:⁶

Iran’s strategic doctrine has a phrase at its center: survive and exhaust. The goal is not to defeat the United States or Israel in any conventional sense. It is to show them both that the cost of confronting Iran is militarily, economically, and politically unsustainable. Tehran’s job is to survive punishment long enough, and to inflict enough damage in return, that U.S. and Israeli will for continued conflict collapses.

This strategy is working for now. Iran is absorbing strikes and continuing to function. Its military command has decentralized, and a new generation of commanders is even more willing than the old one to fight. Its economic campaign is threatening the Gulf order that Washington spent decades building. The wedge between the United States and its Gulf partners is widening, even as those partners reluctantly consider joining Washington in the war. If these trends continue to move in Tehran’s favor, the war could end with the Islamic Republic battered but intact while the U.S.-Gulf alliance fractures, threatening to limit the United States’ regional power projection for years to come. Iran would emerge weakened in its conventional capabilities but stronger in the one currency that has always mattered most to Tehran: the demonstrated ability to defend its sovereignty against the most powerful militaries in the world.

That’s probably why we’re also seeing constant news stories of new US troop deployments to the region, and also why there’s been such a tight control over what we’re allowed to know. Iran’s choke hold on the imperial wealth pump of Middle Eastern oil (and natural gas, and fertilizer, and helium) is threatening capitalism itself, and the US will either decide to make things much, much worse by making this a land war, or declare a fake victory and then leave.

For Israel, though, things won’t be so easy. The US can just leave, but Israelis cannot. Actually, this is even worse than it sounds: the government banned flights of more than 50 people at once leaving the country. Ostensibly, this move was to protect people, but there’s another reason, too. People have been leaving Israel in droves, over 160,000 in the last two years and over 200,000 since Netanyahu’s latest far-right alliance came to power — even before the Hamas attacks. And many of those people fleeing are skilled professionals, leading to a shortage of doctors in Israel.⁷,⁸ In other words, Israel under Netanyahu’s government is now so far from the utopian and safe dream crafted by early political Zionists that many Jews don’t want to live there any more.

While it might certainly be nice to see “regime change” in Iran, Israel needs one just as desperately. So, of course, does the United States, which was kind of the point (kind of) of those No Kings protests. But changing a regime doesn’t change the structure of the power itself. Getting rid of Trump won’t make the American empire go away, any more than killing Khamenei made Iran more compliant to US dominance in the Middle East. Getting rid of Netanyahu won’t do much, either. Instead, Israelis will need to change all the mechanisms of power that propel extremist politicians into office and then into senseless and self-destructive wars.

In other words, Israelis, and also Americans, and also Iranians, will need to have a revolution, that dusty old dream most of us barely dare speak of any more. And while they’re at it, perhaps the rest of the world might like to try one, too. And maybe we will as prices for everything soars and capitalism’s newest crisis starts to make everyday life unlivable for everyone.

1. It’s remarkably hard to find coverage of this. Haaretz (paywalled) wrote about it, and here’s the longest video I could find of it.

2. Here’s an article from a right-leaning Israeli news source about it.

3. Quoted in this article (no paywall)

4. Article is here.

5. Israel, of course, also helped create and cultivate Hamas in order to prevent left-wing Palestinian political parties from reaching prominence there.

6. The whole article is here and free if it’s your first article. It’s really worth your time to read it.

7. See this article (no paywall) and this one (paywalled).

8. Not just doctors, but also soldiers are scarce.