Afrasianet - Mazen Al, Najjar - Nov. 2, Pentagon military planners are eager to use the Gaza massacre as a precedent for their genocidal violence to subdue future economic rivals such as China and Russia that threaten the American faith.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in occupied Palestine, entitled "From the Occupation Economy to the Genocide Economy", revealed huge trade, a psychopathic (sick) culture, and a full Western partnership in the Israeli project of uprooting and genocide, in which hundreds of major American and Western companies and institutions were involved.
The British journalist, Jonathan Cook, considers this essential to understanding why Western capitals continue to be complicit in Israel's massacres, even as Holocaust and genocide scholars – including Israelis – unequivocally agree that their actions constitute genocide.
Western ruling parties, such as the United States and Britain, rely heavily on big business to achieve their electoral success, or after winning the ballot box, to maintain their popularity by promoting "economic stability."
Keir Starmer came to power in Britain after rejecting the public funding model adopted by his predecessor in the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, and went to the corporate sector with promises that the party would be in their pockets.
His assertions were also key to ensuring that the billionaire-owned media – which viciously turned on Corbyn, constantly insulting him and calling him "anti-Semitic" because of his pro-Palestinian social democratic stances – paved the way for Starmer's path to the premiership.
In the United States, billionaires have one of them in power, Donald Trump. His campaign relied on funding from major donors such as Miriam Adelson, the Israeli widow of billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.
Adelson is among a number of major donors, who fund both major parties, and do not hesitate to assert that Israel is their number one political priority. Once in power, parties become hostage to big business in broad areas of domestic and foreign policy.
Sick culture
Taxpayers were forced to bail out the financial sector – and it remains so through "austerity measures" – after its reckless excesses led to the collapse of the global economy in the late 2000s. Western governments considered banks "too big to fail."
Similarly, Israel—the world's largest incubator of arms, surveillance, and repression industries—is too big to fail either, even as it commits genocide.
Critics of the rise of global corporations over the past half-century, such as the famous linguist Noam Chomsky and law professor Joel Bacon, have long noted the psychopathological features inherent in corporate culture.
Companies are legally obligated to pursue profit and prioritize shareholder value growth over any other considerations. Restrictions on their freedom to do so are virtually non-existent after waves of deregulation by Western governments under their control.
Paccan notes that companies are indifferent to the suffering or safety of others, and are unable to maintain lasting relationships. They lack any sense of guilt or restraint. They lie, cheat, and deceive for maximum profits. These psychopathic tendencies have manifested themselves in scandal after scandal, whether by tobacco companies and banks, or by pharmaceutical and energy companies.
Why are big companies doing well in their pursuit of genocidal-related profits in Gaza?
Bacon addresses those who confuse his argument with a conspiracy theory. Corporate psychopathic behaviors simply reflect the legal imperatives imposed on them as institutions – what Bacon calls their "logical dynamics" – to maximize profit and marginalize competitors, whatever the consequences for the wider community, future generations, and the planet.
Indulging in Genocide
The stakes in Gaza are particularly high for Western governments, because they are too great for the business world that is thriving because of Israel's genocide.
Western governments and corporations have an overwhelming shared interest in shielding Israel from scrutiny, accountability, and criticism: it is a colonial attack dog in the oil-rich Middle East, and a major source of income for the arms, surveillance, and prison industries.
This explains why Trump and Starmer, on the one hand, and university administrations, on the other, have invested so much political capital and moral prestige in crushing spaces of freedom, especially in academia, where freedom of speech and protest is supposed to be more valuable.
Universities are not a neutral party at all. Before police demolished university protest camps, student protesters sought to highlight how much universities invest in the economy of occupation and genocide, both financially and through research partnerships with the Israeli military and Israeli universities. The need to keep Israel out of scrutiny and accountability also explains the rapid moves in the West to label every effort to hold Israel, or its genocidal army, accountable as "anti-Semitism."
In July, the desperation of governments was on display, with British officials and state media sparking outrage after Punk's band chanted "Death to the Israeli army!" at Glastonbury. , referring to Israel's genocidal army.
As the accusation of "anti-Semitism" has diminished as a result of its misuse, Western capitals are redrafting their laws to classify any attempt to disrupt the genocidal economy and disrupt arms factories as "terrorism."
Morality and international law are being wasted to keep the most important Western colonial branch profitable.
Business as usual
Israel's importance to the corporate sector and the captive Western political class extends far beyond the tiny Gaza Strip. Israel plays an enormous role as an incubator for the war industry on a global battlefield in which the West seeks to ensure its continued military and economic superiority over China.
In June, Cook says, the global business elite — including tech billionaires and corporate giants, with political and media leaders, military and intelligence officials — gathered again at the Bilderberg Forum summit, hosted in Stockholm this year, away from the eyes of the media. Prominent attendees included the CEOs of major arms suppliers and manufacturers, such as Palantir, Thales, Hellsing, Andurel and SAP.
Drone warfare — used by key military agents such as Israel and Ukraine in innovative ways — has been at the top of the agenda. The increasing integration of AI into drones appears to have been a key pillar in the discussions.
The implicit headline of this year, as in recent years, has been the supposed growing threat from China and its associated "axis of authoritarianism" that includes Russia, Iran, and North Korea. This threat is seen mainly economically and technologically.
In May, Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google and a member of the board of directors of the Bilderberg Forum, wrote anxiously in the New York Times: "China is on par with the United States, or ahead of it, in a variety of technologies, particularly artificial intelligence."
Schmidt added that the West is in a race against China over the imminent development of superintelligent artificial intelligence, which would give the winner "the keys to dominating the entire world." Like other Bilderberg Forum pioneers, he predicts that the depleting needs for super-AI will lead to ever-escalating energy wars, with the West in control.
Or, as the Guardian report summed up the atmosphere at the conference: "In this desperate race, where the winner wins everything and the keys to the world, and in which the 'geopolitics of energy' becomes increasingly important, and the power plants – along with the data centers that feed them – become the number one military targets."
Thus, Israel's massacre in Gaza is seen as playing a crucial role in opening up the "battlefield."
The same companies profiting from the genocide in Gaza would benefit from a more lenient environment—both legally and militarily—that Israel has created for future wars, wars in which civilians killed by massacres count only "accidental deaths."
An April article in The New Yorker addressed a challenge facing U.S. military planners, who since the 1980s have seen themselves constrained by the emergence of a human rights community that has developed expertise in the laws of war independently of the Pentagon's selfish interpretations.
The result, the U.S. generals lament, is a "general aversion to the risk of collateral damage"—that is, the killing of civilians.
Pentagon military planners are eager to use the Gaza massacre as a precedent for their genocidal violence to subdue future economic rivals such as China and Russia, which threaten the official U.S. doctrine of "total global hegemony."
The New Yorker puts forward this thought: "Gaza does not seem to be just a rehearsal for the kind of combat that American soldiers might face, but rather a test of how well the American public can tolerate the levels of death and destruction involved in such wars." According to the magazine, Israel's genocidal violence opens up "legal maneuver" — the space needed to commit crimes against humanity in full view of all.
Cook concludes that this is where much of the motivation of Western capitals to normalize genocide — and portray it as the norm — and discredit its opponents. Arms and technology companies, whose coffers have been filled by Israel's genocide in Gaza, are on the verge of making far greater fortunes from a similarly devastating war against China.
Whatever plan is to promote public opinion, there will be no moral or existential meaning in this coming battle. As always, it will be the battle of the rich who want to increase their wealth!