Afrasianet - Jamal Wakim - The Israeli aggression against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples has been ongoing for more than a year, contrary to the estimates of most political analysts, who used to measure what is happening today in previous rounds of conflict, which did not exceed a maximum of one month, with the exception of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, where the occupation army penetrated deep into Beirut in the summer of 1982, before withdrawing to the occupied border strip in early 1985, and then returning and withdrawing from most of the Lebanese territory in 1982. 2000

Factors on which Israel's power is based

To understand the prospects for the current course of conflict, we must understand the dimensions of this conflict. It is worth mentioning that the Zionist entity considers its current war a war of existence for it, and this may be the result of its awareness of the changes taking place in the international and regional arenas that make it feel worried about its future. Since its inception, the Zionist project has been linked to three foundations on which it was based.

The first factor constituted the rise of Western hegemony over the world about three centuries ago, as its colonial powers viewed the Zionist project as a spearhead for its hegemony in the Arab Mashreq region, which since the dawn of history has been the region where international trade and transportation routes intersect, by virtue of the fact that it connects three continents: Asia, Europe and Africa, which formed the main axis of human history during the previous ten thousand years, and until the sixteenth century at the very least.

The second factor was the rise of the Anglo-Saxon powers, led by Britain, between the mid-eighteenth century and World War II, whose dominance was based on a naval power seeking to contain a land power, the Russian Empire, which was expanding south across land towards the Ottoman, Persian and Afghan control towards India, which was considered the jewel in the British crown, to be inherited by the United States as a naval power looking at the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and Russia, China and Iran in the post-war era. cold as land powers that threaten their global dominance.

The third factor was the rise of financial capitalism, dominated by secular Jewish families who viewed the Torah not as a scripture of a heavenly religion, but as a history book of an imagined Jewish people.

The Rothschild House and the Zionist Project

In this article, we will focus on the Zionist entity's association with Jewish financial capitalism, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's awareness of the decline of this financial hegemony, and its impact on shaking one of the pillars on which the Zionist entity was based.

In the eighteenth century, the Rothschild family emerged as a wealthy Ashkenazi Jewish banking family originally from Frankfurt. The family's influence was demonstrated by the growing wealth of Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812), a German court employee in Hesse-Kassel in the Frankfurt Free Zone and who launched his banking business in the sixties of the eighteenth century. As his business expanded, Mayer Rothschild sent his five sons to the five Western European capitals, where they established banks in Paris, Frankfurt, London and Vienna. and Naples.

The rise of the family was accompanied by the end of mercantile capitalism, of which France was the last leading power, and the launch of industrial capitalism in Great Britain. During the nineteenth century, the influence of financial capitalism, in which the Rothschilds were the leading family, escalated, until the end of the nineteenth century when financial capitalism was able to take the lead from industrial capitalism, which was noted by the Russian thinker Vladimir Ilch Lenin in his book "Imperialism: The Last Stages of Capitalism", in which he talked about the transition of At the beginning of the twentieth century, the world pointed to the dominance of financial capital, although he did not mention the pivotal role of Jewish families, led by the Rothschilds, in controlling financial capital.  

The rise of the Zionist movement during the nineteenth century was closely linked to the rise of the Rothschilds, who dominated the European financial space. It was the Paris-based Rothschilds who financed Napoleon's wars, which was one of the factors that led Napoleon to consider establishing a Jewish entity in Palestine after the failure of his campaign against Egypt, believing that this entity could be an extension of French influence in the Levant. French sponsorship of the Zionist project continued until the time of Napoleon. The third, which rethought a Jewish entity in Palestine after obtaining the concession to dig the Suez Canal in 1859 to serve as a line of defense for the Suez Canal against the Ottoman Empire, at a time when Egypt enjoyed great independence and strong relations with France.

As for what made the Rothschild think about establishing a national entity for the Jews on the land of Palestine, it was influenced by the Protestant movement that rehabilitated the Old Testament in the framework of its challenge to the Catholic Church and the Roman heritage that it inherited from the Roman Empire, and the Rothschild family, as well as others, was influenced by the positivist school that began during the eighteenth century, and prevailed during the nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century, which focused on the material dimension in science, which made the Rothschild family affected by that, and look at the Old Testament. However, it is a book of history of the Jewish people that must be taken literally.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also witnessed a social movement that drove the Jew out of the ghetto and opened up new dynamics that made him integrate into Western European societies, contrary to the interests of the Jewish financial bourgeoisie, which saw itself as distinct from the surrounding society by virtue of its elite economic and financial role. This reflected a secular nationalist movement based on religious heritage that contemplated the establishment of a Jewish national home similar to the entities that originated in Western Europe, the basis of which was the concept of the nation-state.

As Napoleon III's project to establish a dominant empire on the European mainland after his defeat by the German in 1870, the Rothschilds decided to move their center of gravity to London, while retaining their strongholds in the aforementioned Western European capitals.

As the family's decision-making center moved to London, patronage of the Zionist project passed to the British Empire. Hence, it was natural for the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, to issue his famous promise to the Jews to establish a national home in Palestine, although his letter was not addressed to the leader of the Zionist movement at the time, Chaim Weizmann, but to Baron de Rothschild.

Transfer of the center of financial capitalism to America

The period of British patronage of the Zionist movement and the financial capital dominated by the Rothschild was accompanied by an industrial revolution in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, which necessitated the Rothschild to look for allies that could bring them into the American market, so their alliance was with a Protestant family, the Morgan family.

However, the second half of the nineteenth century will see the rise of a large number of Ashkenazi Jewish families emigrating from Europe to the United States, led by the Goldman and Schiff families, as Daniel Shulman talks about in his book "The Kings of Money." They would establish the Federal Reserve System in 1913 as the institution that protected the interests of financial capitalism whose center of gravity was beginning to move to the United States.

At that time, Britain had imposed its mandate on the land of Palestine, and began to facilitate the process of Jewish immigration and the control of the land of Palestine by the Zionists. By the end of World War II, the Zionist movement had shifted its center of gravity to the United States, which became the center and sponsor of financial capitalism, which began to expand its influence in the world through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund launched by the Bretton Woods Agreement signed in 1944.

The dominance of financial capital and its impact on the rise of Israel'  s influence

Beginning in the fifties, the dominance of financial capitalism centered in the United States and with it the influence of the United States in the world. At the same time, the Zionist entity expanded from the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1948 to control the entire territory of historic Palestine, along with the occupied Syrian Golan and the Sinai Peninsula in 1967. Israel's withdrawal from Sinai after 1974 was nothing but a cover to shackle Egypt with the Camp David Accords until Israel completes its project in the Arab Mashreq and the entire Arab region.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the United States proposing its project for global hegemony under the name of unipolar system, financial capitalism began without limits to propose its project of global hegemony through the name of globalization. In parallel with the launch of global financial hegemony over its territory in the nineties of the last century, Zionist dreams of controlling the entire Middle East were also launched, whether through Shimon Peres' project for the new Middle East, or through Benjamin Netanyahu's vision of Israel's dominant role in the region, which he put forward In his book "A Place Under the Sun".

But today, with the rise of world powers challenging American hegemony, led by Russia and China, and with these two powers proposing two international bloc projects to confront Western hegemony through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which was established in 2001, and the BRICS organization, which was launched in 2009, Washington is facing forces that want to maintain their independence in the face of American hegemony. Perhaps the most important tool of American hegemony was the domination of the financial space through its sponsorship of global financial capitalism.

Conclusion

Russia, China and their partners are determined to challenge U.S. financial dominance by launching a single BRICS currency and also dealing with local currencies, which will be adopted at the BRICS summit held in Kazan from October 22 to 24.

Therefore, Netanyahu, who is aware that Israel has been based over the past two centuries on the patronage of global financial capitalism for Israel, will find this foundation shaken after the adoption of a single BRICS currency.

This may be one of the factors driving Netanyahu to adopt excessive violence in an attempt to impose a regional order now under Israeli domination, because he understands that over time the pace of decline of global financial capitalist dominance that underpins Israel will accelerate.

...Professor of the History of International Relations at the Lebanese University