Aerial view of Gaza City shows extreme devastation caused by Israeli bombardments. Photo: AFP.
By Carmen Parejo RendĂłn – May 21, 2025
The West’s support for Israel is a structural axis of its global domination. From Washington to Brussels, via Berlin and London, the Western bloc not only justifies the unjustifiable, but also finances, shields and arms an entity that can only sustain itself through the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people.
Thus, what in any other place would be recognized as a war crime or a genocide, in the West it is dressed up as “right to defense” or “proportional response.” These are not mistakes or exceptions, much less myopia: they are the expression of a geopolitical architecture founded on centuries of colonialism, racism, and imperialist violence. Where there is imperialism, there is genocide. Palestine, simply and unfortunately, is no exception.
The eastern Mediterranean, historically known as the Levant, has been a strategic crossroads for centuries. This strip, located between Europe, Asia, and Africa, concentrates key routes such as the Suez Canal, and is home to natural gas fields in the Levantine basin. In this symbolic and geopolitically decisive region, the European powers set up a colonial project with a modern face. The Zionist entity was conceived, in this sense, as a military outpost to guarantee the control of resources, block any attempt at regional sovereignty, and maintain a permanent Western presence.
Far from being born as a response to the Holocaust, Zionism emerged much earlier, in the 19th century, as a European nationalist project in the midst of European colonial expansion. While political and intellectual elites debated what to do with the “Jewish question,” European institutional anti-Semitism pushed millions of Jews to the margins. Instead of combating this exclusion, Zionism took it as its premise: it did not fight for the restoration of Jewish people’s rights in Europe, the land of their birth, but proposed their expulsion to another part of the world.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was not a gesture of reparation, but a strategic maneuver by the British Empire to consolidate its control over Palestine after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, Zionism became a tool of colonial partition: a way of externalizing the European “Jewish problem,” sowing division in the Middle East, and justifying the occupation under the guise of civilization. It was a classic colonial propaganda strategy that also served as a hiding place for European structural anti-Semitism.
After World War I, the new colonial order was formalized under the aegis of the League of Nations. France imposed artificial borders and puppet regimes in Syria and Lebanon; the United Kingdom did the same in Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine, where it actively promoted the Zionist project, legalizing the purchase of land by European Jews and facilitating the displacement of Arab peasant communities. At the same time, Zionist paramilitary militias such as Haganah, Irgun and Lehi emerged, using terror to expel the Palestinian indigenous population and consolidate territorial domination.
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Facing this double colonization—British and Zionist—the Palestinian people staged one of the first anti-colonial rebellions of the 20th century, generally silenced in history, between 1936 and 1939. The response was brutal: massive repression, executions, demolition of villages, and direct collaboration between British forces and Zionist militias. This alliance also laid the foundations of the future State of Israel: Haganah would become the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), while the Irgun would give rise to the Likud party, today headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. The continuity between those violent structures and the current political-military power in Israel is not anecdotal, but expresses the core of a colonial project that was never dismantled and that always counted on support from the Western powers.
After World War II, with Europe weakened, the United States assumed the leadership of the Western bloc. And Israel was incorporated as a strategic enclave: armed, financed and protected in all international forums. This is not a simple alliance, but a symbiosis. Washington found in Tel Aviv a permanent aircraft carrier without the need for troops. In return, Israel stopped pan-Arabist movements, sabotaged regional unity, and neutralized any attempt at sovereignty. In this sense, it is important to remember that Israel did not act—nor does it act—on its own, but as the armed wing of a global order that prioritizes the stability of capital over the rights of peoples.
In the 21st century, war has been become as a form of government, with the beginning of the decline of the unipolar world. Israel intensifies its offensive against the Palestinian people and becomes a reference for population control, militarized urbanism, and repressive technology. The techniques tested in Gaza are exported as security merchandise. At the same time, Israel participates in regional fragmentation: bombing of Syria and Lebanon, cooperation with Gulf dictatorships and support for the balkanization of Iraq. War is becoming increasingly profitable, supported by an expanding Western military-industrial complex.
In this scheme, genocide cannot be interpreted as an accident or as a reflection of the “madness” of a specific government. From the African colonies to the Plan Condor in Latin America, passing through Vietnam and Algeria, extermination has been a historical constant. Gaza is simply not, as I said at the beginning, an exception. That is why it is not shocking: because it fulfills its function. Germany’s intervention at the International Court of Justice to defend Israel confirms this. Berlin presented itself as an “authority on genocide.” As perpetrators of the Holocaust, of the Herero and Nama extermination in Namibia? Yes, they are experts in genocides, but in perpetrating them, not in preventing them.
This is how cynicism reaches its peak when the victim—the Palestinian people—is treated as the aggressor, while the victimizer as the guarantor of the law. This is the reproduction, once again, of the ideological apparatus of imperialism, which, while producing death, administers justice and, at the same time, lectures on human rights.
The West does not support “Israel” in spite of genocide, but because genocide is a means to its ends. Where capital needs subjugation, violence becomes legitimate. In Palestine, as in Vietnam and El Salvador, extermination is presented as order; occupation, as stability; and resistance, as terrorism.
Zionism was from the beginning an extension of European colonialism, and today it is a key part of the West’s global military-financial machinery. When capital needs blood, Western powers provide weapons, diplomatic armor, and justifying narratives. If we want justice, we will have to build it outside of, and against, this current world order.
(RT)
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/DZ
Carmen Parejo RendĂłn
Carmen Parejo RendĂłn is a writer and analyst for various audiovisual and written media. She is the director of the digital media Revista La Comuna. She collaborates with Hispan TV and Telesur. Her work is focused on the study and analysis of the Latin American and West Asian reality.
