Genocide Capitalism: From 'Manifest Destiny' to Gaza

By Ali Hassan Mourad – Sep 29, 2025

Understanding the current American support for the Zionist war of extermination against the Palestinian people in Gaza requires returning to the very foundations of the United States itself. The American and Zionist colonial projects not only resemble one another but at times overlap entirely. Remembering this is essential for any clear framework of analysis.

“Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” These words were written by John O’Sullivan, later a diplomat, in his article Annexation, published in the July/August 1845 issue of United States Magazine and Democratic Review. From that moment, the phrase spread widely, enshrining the myth that God had chosen white Protestant European settlers to seize a supposedly “empty” land, cultivate it, and establish what O’Sullivan described as moral dignity and human salvation on earth.

From the beginning of the Zionist war of extermination on Gaza in October 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government rushed to issue sovereign bonds at an accelerated pace to cover war expenses. Yet these bonds could not have reached global markets without the underwriting of seven major investment banks, mostly US banks, tasked with marketing them and attracting investors. These institutions included Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Barclays, and JPMorgan Chase.

Between October 2023 and January 2025, these institutions helped the Israeli entity raise nearly $19.4 billion, with Goldman Sachs alone underwriting more than $7 billion. Asset managers purchase these bonds for their own funds as well as for clients, including pension funds, insurance companies, and others. In other words, you could be a US citizen supporting the Palestinian cause, demonstrating against the war, while your retirement savings are simultaneously financing the Zionist genocide in Gaza. The American Zionist jurist Louis Brandeis captured this paradox in his book Other People’s Money And How the Bankers Use It (written before he joined the Supreme Court): “They control the people through the people’s own money.”

Historians note that the United States underwent several stages of European settlement, beginning after Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the late fifteenth century. Over four centuries, white Protestant settlers gradually took control of the eastern seaboard, the South, and parts of the Midwest—less than half of today’s United States. But in 1803, when the US government purchased the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million, the nation’s landmass doubled, covering fifteen future states and expanding to two-thirds of its current size. This fed the appetite of settlers eager to push westward beyond the Mississippi River, toward lands they believed God had granted them.

Mexico’s misfortune struck in 1848. Just one week before the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the two-year US-Mexican war (1846–1848) and forced Mexico to cede Alta California, James Marshall discovered gold along the American River in Coloma, northeastern California.

The discovery triggered the Gold Rush, unleashing a massive westward migration. Between 1848 and 1855, hundreds of thousands of settlers flooded into California, disregarding the rights and resources of indigenous peoples. Driven by dreams of instant wealth, prospectors devastated rivers and valleys essential to tribes such as the Yuki and Maidu. From California’s vast territory emerged the states of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and Nevada, with the remainder forming modern California.

Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Tactics in Gaza City

By 1850, when state authorities were established, the white population had already soared from around 1,000 in 1848 to 100,000. By 1854, some 300,000 settlers had arrived from the eastern and southern United States, Hawaii, China, the Ottoman Empire, and Latin America (though the majority were white Americans). To secure control of land and resources, settlers organized armed militias that attacked indigenous villages, escalating into systematic massacres openly sanctioned by California’s new state government.

California’s first governor, Peter Burnett, made his position explicit in his January 6, 1851 State of the State address: “A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct.” Records show the catastrophic consequences. California’s indigenous population plummeted from roughly 150,000 in 1848 to about 30,000 by 1870.

Infrastructure was central to settler expansion. Since most Gold Rush migrations had taken place by sea, the construction of a transcontinental railroad became essential to sustain migration and capital flows. Beginning in 1862, the project was heavily subsidized through federal bonds and vast land grants, most of it indigenous land, to companies such as Union Pacific and Central Pacific. Railroads enabled further seizures of land and destruction of resources, accelerating the near-extermination of the buffalo herds on which many tribes depended for survival. They became the backbone of a settler-colonial order that imposed both cultural and physical genocide.

The Central Pacific Railroad, in particular, was controlled by the so-called Big Four financiers—Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. Having profited from retail trade and speculation during the Gold Rush, they turned federal subsidies into vast private fortunes. For them, the presence of natives along railroad routes was nothing but a “risk” to be eliminated in the pursuit of profit.

Their companies hired professional hunters to slaughter buffalo herds, not only to feed railroad workers but to starve native tribes and force them to migrate. They also relied on military intervention; the US Army frequently protected railroad construction, unleashing further terror and massacres against the natives. To these financiers, westward expansion was a business enterprise, and indigenous lives were merely obstacles to profit.

The financiers bankrolling today’s genocide in Gaza are direct heirs of those who funded the ethnic cleansing of California’s local population in the nineteenth century. Then, Wall Street banks and railroad companies amassed wealth through the uprooting and slaughter of Native communities they called “red Indians.” Today, US banks and financial institutions are repeating the same process by bankrolling the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The essence of genocide capitalism has not changed. Capital thrives on the subjugation of peoples, transforming wars of extermination into opportunities for investment and profit.

(Al-Akhbar English)