chapotraphouse

For sure. Religious ideas are a product of the material circumstances around them. Christianity didn’t make the US a nation of white settlers, it was a nation of white settlers that adapted their inherited European Christianity to their own conditions of modern imperial conquest. The same can be said of Israel, where the settler colonial character of the state is making a real effort to redefine what Judaism means and adapt it to their political goals of “national rebirth” and “ethnic purity”: fash shit.

What I was trying to get across in my original comment wasn’t that the religious character of US or Israel was the dominant factor in explaining their behavior. I was trying to communicate that Israel isn’t just independently replicating the colonial success of the US with Judaism substituted for Christianity. The US usurped the entire world imperial mantle from Europe. That’s not something the Israeli state is going to do.

Even if the entire settler population of occupied Palestine were uniformly and consciously committed to the state project of replicating American Indian removal, they don’t have the independent means of doing that. An independent Israeli state acting with this level of regional belligerence would get crushed by every neighboring state, and wouldn’t have the internal productive capacity to carry out its campaign. They’d have to integrate to survive, and minoritarian ethnonationalism would become extremely unpopular under those conditions. The growth of “Jewish fascism” within the Israeli state isn’t the driving force behind the state’s behavior, it’s just the ideology that grows to fit the artificial conditions (infinite outside resources and absolute external military protection from international interference) they find themselves in.

The US state interest in creating these conditions are, at the end of the day, primarily material: it’s a forward operating base to project military hegemony on a resource rich region. The Israeli settlers are filling the role of military contractors for the US. The Israeli settlers can believe whatever they want about their own agency in the process so long as they continue to accomplish US objectives without producing US military deaths.

Most US settlers aren’t conscious of this, and also don’t share the Israeli settler priority of creating an artificial Jewish ethnostate for its own sake. I think the reason US settlers who aren’t conscious of the empire’s material objectives can be counted on to invest culturally in the Israel project in a way that they never will for Ukraine or other imperial FOBs is rooted in characteristics fairly unique to the development of the dominant forms of American Christianity: Americans don’t support Israel because they have a unique love for Jews. Jews have always been fairly low on the American ethnic and religious hierarchy, and still are when separated from the Israel project. The cultural reason you can have a country full of people that hates Jews but loves Israel is because the dominant forms of American Christianity developed a doctrinal need to bring about the apocalypse by sending the hated Jews to die killing the hated Muslims. It’s not the root material cause, but I do think it’s considerable factor in explaining the lasting cultural investment in the Israel project by US settlers that historically have no love for Jews, and don’t have this level of lasting cultural investment in other imperial FOBs.