The Far Right’s So-Called Civil War over Israel

Staged Antagonisms as Counterinsurgency in the “Fascist Arrangement”

September 15, 2026

https://doi.org/10.63478/UJG63ZG6

Over the past year, voices across the political spectrum have proclaimed a “civil war” within the US right centered on the question of US support for Israel.¹ The fracture—which came to a head at the Turning Point USA festival in late 2025—is said to be “tearing MAGA apart.”²

Voices within the Palestine solidarity movement have been quick to celebrate the apparent threat to Zionist hegemony from within one of its historical centers of gravity. Some have been lured into proposing a strategic alliance with the right, or have lent far-right anti-Israel critique a progressive sheen by referring to it as a form of “anti-zionism.”³ Others, like Steven Salaita, have convincingly urged caution on both strategic and ethical grounds.⁴ Few, however, have questioned the substance of the rupture itself.

In what follows, I assess the operation of apparently contradictory ideologies within the US right wing by thinking with George Jackson’s analysis of the multiple “faces” of the “fascist arrangement.”⁵ This framework helps refocus attention on the functional synergies between seemingly antagonistic ideologies on the right. I argue that the apparent conflict between Zionist and Israel-critical contingents on the right is best understood as a nonantagonistic contradiction, and that the exaggeration of the conflict itself is doing dangerous work. This strategy of staged antagonism aims to capture and redirect insurgent anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist energy into the current escalation of imperialist violence in ways that remain fully compatible with the aims of US investments in Zionism.

I will develop the specific mechanisms by which these apparent contradictions are managed and strategically deployed within the fascist arrangement in the present moment, I examine two of the core facets of conflict around US support for Israel on the right. First, I explore the juxtaposition of self-described “isolationist” politics alongside the Trump administration’s escalated, undisguised imperialist aggressions. I argue that the dynamic at play mirrors in significant ways what Ruth Wilson Gilmore names the “anti-state state: a state that grows on the promise of shrinking.” Following Gilmore’s model, I argue that the apparent conflict between isolationism and aggravated interventionism is in fact a kind of “anti-imperialist imperialism” that mobilizes antiwar rhetoric to build consent for the fascization of US-led imperialism’s accumulation strategies.

Second, I will turn to the fractious debate over antisemitism within the right. By marking the synergy of antisemitic and anti-antisemitic politics within the fascist assemblage, I argue here too that even this most divisive question is best understood as a strategy of staged antagonism. Drawing on the work of Alana Lentin and Dylan Rodriguez, I show how the fascist arrangement alternately deploys antisemitism and anti-antisemitism as two ways to consolidate white supremacy and of control over the “theater of lexical warfare” around antisemitism. The apparent contradiction of these dual strategies enhances their capacity to capture the entire terrain of possible discourse and critique.

Finally, I argue that the use of this staged antagonism redirects anti-imperialist momentum towards the fortification of a fascist imperialism, and that this form of counterinsurgency is not solely a project of the far right. On the contrary, many putatively progressive responses to the US-Israel genocide in Gaza have relied on the discursive and political frameworks that enable the far right to assume the mantle of anti-Israel and even anti-imperialist critique. In that way, US liberalism has not only greased the wheels for the fascist cooptation of Palestine solidarity insurgency—it has laid down the tracks.

The So-Called Civil War Over Israel

When news broke in late February 2025 of The US-Israeli war on Iran, Tucker Carlson released a video—which had 2.4 million views at the time this essay was written—outlining his view of how and why this war came about. Carlson argues that Israel secured US involvement in the war as part of a Zionist scheme to sabotage the United States and Western Europe. Israel, according to Carlson, knew that the war would trigger devastation in the Gulf region. He claimed it would turn the Gulf states against the United States and prompt them to kick the United States out of the region, thereby effectively cementing exclusive Israeli hegemony. Meanwhile, the resultant destabilization in the region would foment a crisis of Muslim immigration into Western Europe—all as part of a “spiritual war” on Christian Civilization. According to Carlson, this type of war—like “transgenderism, or love of abortion for its own sake”—is a “modern manifestation” of human sacrifice, designed to “appease the gods and to get power for yourself.”⁶ Trump, according to Carlson’s comment in another interview, didn’t want to engage in the war but felt he had no choice, as he was effectively a “slave” to Israel.⁷

Carlson’s narrative is emblematic of right wing critiques of US support for Israel, which generally center around two, related themes: an “isolationist” or anti-war stance, and a claim that US support for Israel is the result of Zionist or Jewish control over US government and politics. The first of these positions—opposition to war as such—is framed at times in moral or economic terms, and at times in explicitly white supremacist terms, as in the common refrain, illustrated by Carlson’s narrative, that wars waged overseas drive destabilization and resultant nonwhite migration into the West.⁸ Whereas some advocates express narrower opposition to “wars of choice,” “military adventurism,” or “nation-building” projects, others go so far as to position themselves as broadly antiwar or even anti-imperialist.

The ersatz anti-imperialism of segments of the far right is not a new phenomenon. As Shane Burley documents, it has its roots in the “Red-Brown alliance” phenomenon by which fascists, since the National Bolshevism and Strasserite Nazism of the 1930s, aim to infiltrate, coopt, or recruit from the left by merging some socialist or anticapitalist concepts and rhetoric with white nationalist politics.⁹ Though the strategy has a long history, the volume and intensity of antiwar or anti-imperialist rhetoric on the right has increased dramatically in the past decade, marked by Trump’s campaigning as a self-styled “antiwar” candidate. This anti-imperialist posturing is frequently associated with, but not limited to, Israel-critical positions of the far right, a subject to which I will return in more detail below.

The second, overlapping, set of claims by the Israel-critical far right is that US support for Israel runs counter to US interests, and represents an allegiance to a foreign power that can only be explained by the ubiquitous and malign interference of Zionists—or Jews—in US media and politics. These arguments, which have historically coalesced under the heading of the “ZOG” or “Zionist-Occupied Government” thesis, deploy antisemitic conspiracism as part of a broader schema of white supremacist hypernationalism, transphobia, and misogyny.¹⁰

These two, overlapping forms of right wing anti-Israel critique—the first built on a self-styled isolationist, antiwar, or anti-imperialist position and the second relying on antisemitic conspiracism as a linchpin for a broader white nationalist politics—generate apparent contradictions with the right wing establishment (which is deeply invested in Zionism as a key part of imperialist strategy to shore up capitalism) and in anti-antisemitism to shore up white supremacy.

First, right wing critiques of US support for Israel on an antiwar basis would appear to run directly counter to deep investments by the racial capitalist state (and the neoconservative factions of the right in particular) in Zionism as a critical component of US-led imperialism. Many authors have explored the ways in which the Zionist project has, from its outset, served the interests of Western colonialism and imperialism, starting with Herzl’s promise that Israel would “form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.”¹¹ Since then, the motivations for US support for Israel have been complex and overdetermined, but decidedly self-interested. They are well summarized by Max Ajl, who argues that “Israel, pound for pound, is the best investment the US has ever made. Israel is the purest expression of Western power, combining militarism, imperialism, settler colonialism, counterinsurgency, occupation, racism, instilling ideological defeat, huge profitable war-making and hi-tech development into a manticore of destruction, death, and mayhem.”¹² Though contradictions and divergences of immediate interest may exist, Zionism is a deeply integrated component of US-led imperialist strategy, which secures capitalist accumulation—in part through the violence and destruction brought by war itself.¹³

Likewise, it would seem that the increased mainstreaming of explicitly antisemitic conspiracism could pose a serious threat to the right’s longstanding investment in Zionist anti-antisemitism politics. Zionist anti-antisemitism has been a capacious tool, used to manufacture consent for the War on Terror and for the ongoing Nakbah, while repressing anti-Zionist, anti-Imperialist, and anticapitalist insurgency. As has been documented at length, Zionist organizations have worked hand in hand with the US state for decades to suppress and coopt liberatory organizing in the United States. These discursive and material interventions have included, among others: virulent Zionist attacks on radical Black, Chicano, and Indigenous Peoples’ movements in the late 1960s; intervention by multiple Zionist organizations to oppose affirmative action in the 1970s; support for the South African apartheid regime; infiltration and surveillance of progressive movements, Black liberation organizations, labor organizations, and anti-apartheid activists (sharing their findings with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the FBI, Israel, and South Africa); sponsorship of the ‘Deadly Exchange’ programs that facilitate training of US Law Enforcement personnel with Israeli military and police forces; recent attacks on Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives; and participation in attacks on the Black left in the name of ant-CRT, anti-DEI, and antiwoke movements.¹⁴

In this sense, the increasing platforming of antisemitic pundits on the right would seem to jeopardize a strategy that has been eminently useful in the maintenance of white supremacy and racial capitalism. And indeed questions of antisemitism have taken center stage in the current conflict on the right—at times quite literally, as at the December 2025 Turning Point USA conference which made headlines in part for factious debates around antisemitism.¹⁵

The end of US aid to Israel—a joint maneuver by Israel-critical and Zionist factions—is then a strategy of insulation, not just for US imperialism but for the US-Zionist alliance itself.

The battle lines between the Israel-critical and Zionist factions of the far right appear to be clearly drawn and most media coverage of the internecine conflict has taken this appearance at face value. But recent policy debates around US military aid to Israel have seen the two sides moving in jarring lockstep. This turn of events suggests a material alignment which is concealed behind a rhetorical and merely ideological contradiction.

Harmonizing the Factions: Ending US Military Aid to “Unleash” Zionist Aggression

In January 2026, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intention to wean Israel off US aid altogether over the coming decade.¹⁶ This maneuver, which surprised some onlookers, drew on a set of strategies that had circulated in the Zionist press for at least three decades, and which has been escalating in recent months.¹⁷ Zionist advocates for the end of US aid to Israel traditionally argue that it will accomplish three things: 1) it will remove constraints on Israel’s warmaking purportedly placed by the United States; 2) it will dampen critique of Israel from inside the United States, allowing Israel to sidestep the manufacture of consent; and 3) it will position Israel as a self-sufficient ally that carries its own weight militarily—using domestic austerity to support military spending.¹⁸ Underlying all three points is a shared understanding that military aid, while it benefits both countries, is far from the most critical element of US support for the Zionist project. The importance of direct aid pales in comparison to other forms of support, including diplomatic cover, the legally-instituted guarantee of a “qualitative military edge” in weapons sold to the region, the “insertion of pro-Israel conditions into [US] talks with other countries,” bilateral economic cooperation in military technology, and direct collaboration in wars of aggression against Iran and elsewhere in the region.¹⁹ US military aid to Israel is merely the most visible—but far from the most consequential—component of Israel’s utility to the project of US-led imperialism. Indeed, the push to end military aid has been accompanied in real time with maneuvers to tie the US and Israeli militaries closer together through collaboration on weapons technology.²⁰

So rather than a retreat from supporting the Zionist project, the end of direct military aid represents a strategic pivot towards “unleashing” Israeli warmaking and downplaying hegemony in favor of raw power, while appearing as a concession to defuse critique from the Palestine solidarity movement, as well as from Israel’s critics on the far right. It also helps to firmly establish Israel as a paradigm for Trump’s vision of an international order—currently being enforced on NATO and others—wherein participation in US-led imperialism demands escalated military spending coupled with neoliberal austerity.

In this sense, the elimination of US aid to Israel fits seamlessly within the context of the recent turn in US imperialism towards what Alberto Toscano calls an “openly fascistic accumulation strategy,” marked by an eschewal of pretensions of adherence to the rules-based liberal international order, alongside a purported narrowing of focus to the Western Hemisphere.²¹ Indeed, Netanyahu’s announcement came exactly one week after the US kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, an aggression which epitomized this turn toward what we might call, following Toscano’s comment, fascist imperialism. By ending military aid to Israel, the United States does not terminate its collaboration with Israel. Instead, the US stands to gain an even more emboldened, belligerent proxy, one who is willing and able to intervene forcefully in West Asia, without the United States having to dirty its hands as frequently in the region, or bother to manufacture consent.

The United States has a long history of using Israel as an effective proxy for politically unsavory imperialist interventions—for example by supporting right wing military dictatorships during Jimmy Carter’s putatively human rights-focused presidency.²² In this sense, the end of US aid to Israel—though impelled in part by right wing critique of US support—represents not a retreat from, but indeed an evolution and retrenchment of the role that Zionism has long played in Western imperialism, and one that is precisely suited to the current turn towards fascist imperialism. Right wing anti-Israel critique, by projecting responsibility for militarist violence onto Israel, functions as a disavowal, a negation, and ultimately a form of insulation for US-led imperialism, warmaking, and genocide. The end of US aid to Israel—a joint maneuver by Israel-critical and Zionist factions—is then a strategy of insulation, not just for US imperialism but for the US-Zionist alliance itself.

George Jackson on the Phases/Faces of the Fascist Arrangement

The emergent consensus between ostensibly antagonistic factions of the right on the question of US military aid to Israel invites a deeper investigation of their supposed irreconcilability. Specifically, how should we understand the fervor with which this fracture is proclaimed, its veritable branding as a “civil war?” And how might an explanation of this dynamic help us understand the relationships of white nationalist, neoconservative, and even liberal factions to fascism, imperialism, and white supremacy? To begin to address these questions, I turn to George Jackson’s analysis of the multiple “faces” of what he calls the “final fascist arrangement.”²³ I follow Jackson’s suggestion that apparently contradictory factions in this arrangement in fact work symbiotically to stabilize the racial capitalist order, and that the appearance of antagonism is itself part of their strategy.

Jackson’s analysis challenges conventional historiographies and typologies of fascism by asserting that the United States, under the guise of liberal democracy, represents “the ultimate success of fascism in its highest form.”²⁴ This argument—like others within the Black radical tradition that have identified fascism’s roots in colonialism, chattel slavery, and Jim Crow apartheid—decenters the interwar, European authoritarian regime as fascism’s ideal type and historical point of origin.²⁵ Jackson’s approach also refutes the presumed contradiction between liberalism and fascism, including with his provocation that “economic reform comes very close to a working definition of fascist motive forces.”²⁶

According to Jackson’s alternative conceptualization, fascism describes the full spectrum of counterrevolutionary strategies deployed by the racial capitalist state to protect ruling class interests from the threat of revolutionary insurgency. “The ultimate aim of fascism,” he argues, “is the complete destruction of all revolutionary consciousness.”²⁷ As such, fascism entails not only the spectacular, racialized violence of its most repressive forms, but also the strategic maneuvers of economic and political reform that create the “illusion of a mass participatory society,” offer modest wage concessions, and “[provide] the lower classes with a mass consumer’s flea market of its own.”²⁸ These reformist measures are undertaken “with the aim of creating a buffer zone between the ruling class and the still potentially revolutionary segments of the lower classes.”²⁹ Reform is thus “only a new way for capitalism to protect and develop fascism” from the threat of revolution.³⁰

However, for Jackson, it isn’t the case that reform serves as an alternative to repressive violence. On the contrary, white supremacist state and nonstate violence serve as foundations for the liberal version of the fascist state’s hegemonic projects.³¹ Jackson argues that “programmed racism…has always served to distract and defuse feelings of status deprivation suffered by the huge sectors just above the black one,” and that “racism has always been employed as a pressure release valve for the psychopathic destructiveness evinced by a people historically processed to fear.”³² That is, the hegemonic consent that is sought from certain segments of the working and middle classes is sustained in part by the racialized violence promoted, meted out or endorsed by the state. Dylan Rodriguez explains that for Jackson, “the advance of capital and the hegemony of the ruling classes are inseparable from the consolidation and expansion of the state’s policing and punishing powers….Jackson’s advanced fascist state becomes the condition of possibility for the emerging (nominally liberal-democratic) economic, juridical, and “racial” order.”³³ Carceral, anti-Black, white supremacist and genocidal violences are simultaneous to, and necessary for, the consolidation and sustenance of apparently liberal-democratic regimes.

The contradictory faces of fascist ideology are each embodied by particular factions, allowing their contradictions to play out quite visibly as conflict. Rather than a vulnerability, this conflict enhances fascism’s potency for both popular mobilization and escalated violence.

To illustrate the various forms that fascism takes in different moments and spaces—and the contradictions that may be sustained within its ideology—Jackson proposes three “phases” or “faces” of fascism. The first he refers to as “fascism out of power;” the second is “in power but not secure,” and the third is “in power and securely so.”³⁴ Fascism “out of power” for Jackson takes the form of a popular movement emerging “in a time of extreme social disintegration and economic crisis.”³⁵ It arises from a “general indictment of decadence, bourgeois decadence” and is both “anticapitalist and antisocialist.”³⁶ The second phase, fascism “in power but not secure,” is “the sensational aspect of fascism that we see on screen and read of in pulp novels.”³⁷ This phase is characterized by repressive, racialized violence designed to forcefully suppress peoples’ and workers’ movements. In the third phase, fascism “in power and securely so,” Jackson notes that “some dissent may even be allowed.”³⁸ In this phase, fascism can rely on “reformist machinations” to consolidate a “community of self-interest” built around an ”illusion of a mass society…a mass society of authoritarians whose short-term material interests are perfectly suited to the development of the perfect totalitarian state and centralized economy.”³⁹ In this way the dynamic relationship between reformist and repressive modalities of fascism can be thought of as a relationship between the second and third phases—fascism “in power,” but with varying degrees of security. Meanwhile, the first phase—fascism “out of power”—names a distinct phenomenon of fascism as a popular movement that does not (yet) hold the reins of state power, and positions itself rhetorically and ideologically as oppositional to existing power structures.⁴⁰

Crucially, Jackson recognizes that the ideological content of these three phases may be, as he puts it, “diametrically opposed.” Jackson goes so far as to insist upon the “nonimportance of ideology” in diagnosing fascism, noting that fascist ideology—which includes various ideals that are fundamentally mutually exclusive—transforms radically and opportunistically in fascism’s different forms or phases.⁴¹ It is not committed to any single internal logic or the persistence of any one of its outer expressions.

In fact, these ideological antinomies are best thought of as persistent, ongoing contradictions that remain in place even through fascism’s transformations. Jackson’s use of the term “phases” may seem at first glance to suggest a temporal progression, or even a teleology, of fascism. But Jackson uses the term “phases” interchangeably with “faces,” a term indicating simultaneity rather than sequence. And Jackson is occasionally explicit that multiple phases/faces coexist simultaneously—as when he describes Latin American regimes as being characterized by “a strange combination of the first two phases” of fascism. Likewise, as indicated above, Jackson’s description of the contemporary United States, “the ultimate success of fascism in its highest form,” rests on the simultaneity and synergy of the second and third “faces”: repressive, racialized violence and reformist pacification of segments of the middle and working classes.⁴²

Fascism, for Jackson, is thus characterized by the synergy of multiple, simultaneous but ostensibly distinct “faces,” featuring seemingly incompatible ideological content, all of which function strategically and symbiotically as part of what he calls the “final fascist arrangement” to consolidate and defend racial capitalism from revolutionary insurgency. These features make Jackson’s analysis of what he refers to as “the final fascist arrangement” particularly illuminating for the study of apparent ideological contradictions among factions whose material aims ultimately align.

Jackson’s Analysis and White Nationalisms

Returning to the landscape of the contemporary far right, there is a striking resemblance between the “out of power” face of fascism described by Jackson and the explicitly white nationalist segments of the far right who have most fervently espoused anti-Israel politics. Jackson’s “out of power” face emerges in moments of social crisis and in response to the pressure exerted by revolutionary movements. It mobilizes against the revolutionary insurgency with a political identity that simultaneously appears to offer a critique of the ruling classes. Thus it sets about not only attacking but also “diffusing a revolutionary consciousness pushing from below.”⁴³

Likewise, the segments of the explicitly white nationalist far right that have been most vocal in their critique of US support for Israel have—until relatively recently—stood intentionally apart from the conservative establishment. Their “out of power” status has been a key element of their image and their strategy. The most influential exemplar of this trend is Nick Fuentes, who gained prominence in 2019 for coordinating an effort by his so-called “groyper” followers to troll Charlie Kirk and other MAGA figures at public events by accusing them of loyalty to Israel over the United States.⁴⁴ This campaign succeeded in both pushing key figures to the right, and in distinguishing Fuentes’s politics from the mainstream by espousing an open antisemitism that remained, at the time, a sort of firewall against institutional inclusion. As Shane Burley and Ben Lorber have both discussed at length, anti-Israel politics imbued with explicit antisemitic conspiracism have helped to consolidate a dissident political identity for Fuentes—an outsider status that heightens visibility, serves recruitment strategy, and facilitates a project of pushing the Overton Window to accommodate explicit white nationalist, sexist and anti-trans positions.⁴⁵

Groups disseminating antisemitic conspiracism, as well as those pursuing a ‘red-brown alliance’ strategy that professes an opposition to imperialism—are optimized for cooptation and redirection of popular resentments and political upheavals away from liberatory movements and into fascist politics. Their outsider status is critical to this strategy. In fact, Burley notes that Fuentes’ success in pushing the US right wing further into open white nationalism may even make him a victim of his own success. By losing the dissident (“out of power”) status that has been key to his strategy and relevance Fuentes’ jeopardizes the outsider position essential to his strategy.⁴⁶

Fuentes is hardly alone in this strategy of redirection and recruitment. Other factions of the heterodox far right, according to Burley, “bring together a form of nontraditional far-right politics—a new hodge-podge that intermixes certain concessions to progressivism, whether in the form of certain types of radical feminism or support for social safety net policies, and then brings them into the larger racialized, sexist, antitrans, anti-LGBTQ, antisemitic and thoroughly fascist politics of the movement.”⁴⁷ In the present moment, Burley argues, “the explosive anger towards Israel’s genocide in Gaza provides a new social fracture from which they can draw people in.”⁴⁸ Right wing anti-Israel critique has gained adherents and visibility in recent years, not only in response to the livestreamed genocide itself, but to the Palestine solidarity insurgency that has revived anti-imperialist internationalism. The Israel-critical faction of the far right has escalated in response to this trend, using antisemitism and/or self-styled anti-imperialism to consolidate an “out of power” fascist politics that redirects antigenocide insurgency toward white nationalism under the guise of an ersatz anti-imperialism.

The “in power” faces of fascism, on the other hand, are well represented by the bipartisan establishment that remains both invested in Zionism as a component of US-led imperialism, and committed to using anti-antisemitism politics as a tool of repression. These factions wield state power within the United States and globally through both liberal-democratic hegemony and through carceral and genocidal violences. The differing strategies aim at the same racial capitalist ends. Their defense of Zionism is a component of this project, which ultimately shares the aims of the anti-Israel factions. Even when the factions disagree on strategy they share the goal of protecting white supremacy and ruling class interests. Thus while the two factions on the US right appear diametrically opposed with respect to their positions on Israel, both contingents are representative of US fascism, and both together form Jackson’s “final fascist arrangement.”

The fascist arrangement becomes particularly dangerous precisely because of the mechanisms by which it holds these faces in balanced tension, modulating between and synthesizing the aggressive white nationalist dissidence of the “out of power” face and the institutional and imperialist violence of the “in power” face. As Jackson warns against, focusing on the discordant ideology would miss how the two faces are, taken together, two faces of the same coin.

A consideration of contemporary far right’s Israel politics shows us that it’s not only the simultaneity and symbiosis of fascism’s faces that makes them effective, but the appearance of conflict between them. The “out of power” face can only achieve its goals of redirection, “diffusion,” and recruitment to the extent that it appears to be oppositional to existing power structures. As Alberto Toscano notes in Late Fascism, drawing on the insights of Nicos Poulantzas and David Edgar, fascism can be understood as “a crisis ideology that accrues efficacy by dint of its contradictory character (not the weakness a rationalist left may take it to be).”⁴⁹ He notes that “the contemporary ecology of the authoritarian far right—including in the multiplicity of its vectors of communication—can be seen to replicate fascism’s “pluralism” in less centralized form.”⁵⁰ The contradictory faces of fascist ideology are each embodied by particular factions, allowing their contradictions to play out quite visibly as conflict. Rather than a vulnerability, this conflict enhances fascism’s potency for both popular mobilization and escalated violence.

In the case of US support for Israel, the highly visible staged antagonism between the two faces in the so-called “civil war on the right” is essential to the consolidation of a dissident identity for the “out of power” segment, and therefore for their ability to divert antigenocide insurgency into a white nationalist framework. Meanwhile, the contradiction between factions is harmonized in the “final fascist arrangement” by a commitment to end US military aid to Israel, executed through a framework that in fact “unleashes Israel” to help usher in a form of fascist imperialism whose violence is both escalated and undisguised.

In what follows, I’ll further interrogate the two core elements of the far right’s so-called “civil war” over Israel as factions that work symbiotically within a single “fascist arrangement,” asking what insights might be revealed when we decline to take the narrative of irreconcilable antagonism at face value. How does “isolationist” rhetoric work in tandem with the right’s investments in Zionist aggression as a facet of US-led imperialism? And how does antisemitic conspiracism work in tandem with the right’s longstanding investments in anti-antisemitism as a tool of white supremacist mobilization and repression?

Anti-Imperialist Imperialism

In each of the last three election cycles, Trump has campaigned on a promise to end foreign wars. In so doing, he drew upon the broad unpopularity of recent decades’ neoconservative “forever wars” and corresponding nation-building projects. His rhetoric responded to and mobilized elements of the far right which had long sought to redirect this widely shared antiwar sentiment into a white supremacist “America First” narrative. This strategy of misdirecting antiwar sentiment is perhaps clearest in the aforementioned argument that foreign wars should be opposed on the basis of their tendency to drive nonwhite migration into the West. Once in office, Trump appealed to this “America First” contingent by dismantling much of the architecture of US “soft power”—by slashing funding for foreign aid and multilateral organizations—signaling an apparent retreat from US international engagement.⁵¹

A fascist arrangement that mobilizes right wing antiwar and anti-imperialist strains of anti-Israel critique to ultimately “unleash” imperialist aggression, might be thought of as a kind of “anti-imperialist imperialism.” It is an imperialism that grows—and grows more lethal—on the promise of shrinking.

But far from divesting from imperialism more generally, Trump has in fact pivoted to what has been described as a form of “gangster imperialism” or “gunboat diplomacy,” one whose brazen self-interest disregards even the semblance of deference to international legal norms or the manufacture of consent.⁵² Meanwhile, Trump called for a 50 percent increase in the military budget for 2027.⁵³ Simultaneously, the approving responses on the far right to the US assault on Venezuela and kidnapping of president Nicolas Maduro exposed the gossamer-thin reality of far right isolationism, which was easily swayed by the palingenetic renderings of this spectacular imperial violence as firm proof of US military supremacy.⁵⁴ Meanwhile—as I will discuss below in further detail—the economic infrastructure of imperialism remains unaddressed, if not obscured, by the right’s exclusive rhetorical focus on imperialism’s most spectacular military expressions. Trump’s antiwar posturing has thus translated in fact into increased imperialist violence, while mainstreaming and exacerbating explicit white nationalism in the process through the adoption of white supremacist justifications for so-called isolation. Thus, right wing critique of US support for Israel on an “isolationist” basis ends in an“unleashed” Israel as a disavowed but effective proxy of US-led imperialism, while it also accelerates white nationalism through antisemitic conspiracism.

This dynamic significantly mirrors what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the “anti-state state: a state that grows on the promise of shrinking.”⁵⁵ Gilmore documents how a rhetoric of the state as “burden” or “threat” has been deployed in recent decades by politicians and pundits who “have no intention of shrinking the state. Rather their intent has been and continues to be to remake the state to do other things.”⁵⁶ Specifically, the state has been remade to increase its carceral commitments—not only by investing in prisons and policing, but by refashioning various state functions to mirror the carcerality of the prison system.⁵⁷

Likewise, a fascist arrangement that mobilizes right wing antiwar and anti-imperialist strains of anti-Israel critique to ultimately “unleash” imperialist aggression, might be thought of as a kind of “anti-imperialist imperialism.” It is an imperialism that grows—and grows more lethal—on the promise of shrinking. As with the antistate state, anti-imperialist imperialism entails not only a shifting of budgets toward military spending, but a fascization of various functions of US diplomacy. Just as the antistate state entails the “devolution of obligations to more local levels or to parastate actors (such as charter schools or nonprofits),”anti-imperialist imperialism requires the United States’ junior partners carry a greater burden by multiplying their own military spending, paid for by domestic austerity.⁵⁸

Finally, the antistate state both draws upon, reinscribes and recalibrates racial regimes in the process of establishing its own legitimacy. As Gilmore puts it, “the state establishes legitimacy precisely because it violently dominates certain people and thereby defines them (and makes them visible to others) as the sort of people who should be pushed around.”⁵⁹ Racism is thus the outcome—rather than the driver—of the antistate state’s “[use of] the newly vast prison system’s coercive powers on some parts of the population to produce consent among others.”⁶⁰ Just as the antistate state both relies upon and reinforces racialization in its process of remaking the state, anti-imperialist imperialism draws upon and reentrenches an explicitly white nationalist form of populism in its process of fascizing imperialist accumulation.

Jackson’s framework of a fascist arrangement that can accommodate both multiple and seemingly irreconcilable faces and the analogy between anti-imperialist imperialism and the antistate state. This framework helps us think beyond the apparent contradiction of Zionist and anti-Israel politics on the far right to ask what work is being done within the space generated by that contradiction—and indeed by its naming and narration as a “civil war.” The anti-imperialist imperialism of the far right operates through a staged antagonism to redirect antigenocide insurgency into white nationalist populism and, moreover, into an escalated and fascistic mode of accumulation by warfare, expropriation and waste in which the United States and Israel remain deeply aligned partners.

The Staged Antagonism of Antisemitism and Anti-antisemitism

Among the most talked-about elements of the dissension on the right with respect to Israel is the contradiction between the right’s extraordinary investments in Zionist anti-antisemitism politics, which are ostensibly threatened by the Israel-critical faction’s open embrace of antisemitic conspiracism. In a statement emblematic of the discourse around this conflict, Ted Cruz stated that the Republican Party was “facing an existential crisis” over antisemitism.⁶¹ How might we understand even this most bitterly contested ideological fracture as part of a single fascist arrangement in Jackson’s framework?

Despite the ostensible contradiction, Zionists have long relied upon, allied with, reinforced and actively cultivated antisemitism.⁶² And indeed, antisemitism and Zionist anti-antisemitism often perform different versions of the same work. In The New Racial Regime, Alana Lentin attends to the operation of the “War on antisemitism,” as described by Anna-Esther Younes, which operates “by managing, criminalizing, and targeting migrant, refugee and of color communities with the figure of the Palestinian anti-Semite…and then by extension the Muslim/Arab anti-Semite…as its main culprit.” This “War on Antisemitism” is designed not to protect Jews as such, but to attack racialized others by posing the Jew as a proxy for the white, European subject in need of protection. As I’ve argued elsewhere, a parallel logic operates within a “War on Black Antisemitism” in the United States.⁶³ For several decades, Zionists have projected antisemitism – recoded as a form of antiwhite racism – onto Black communities. This discursive maneuver alleges the reversal of racial hierarchies, constituting white people writ large as the ultimate victims of racism, and justifying the state’s carceral violence and organized abandonment against communities of color.

Antisemitic conspiracism participates straightforwardly in the consolidation and dissemination of white supremacist ideology through its key role in “great replacement” and “white genocide” theories and their concomitant racialized violences. Meanwhile, Zionist anti-antisemitism does much of the same work. It does so by positioning the white subject as the ultimate victim of antisemitism, and of racism more generally, perpetrated by racialized others.⁶⁴ And by displacing antisemitism onto these racialized populations, Zionist anti-antisemitism actively diverts attention away from white nationalist antisemitism, providing it with political cover to grow unchecked. In this context Lentin argues that it is misleading to understand antisemitism as having been “weaponized” by Zionists. Instead, Lentin argues that antisemitism – and Zionist anti-antisemitism – should be seen as “always already in the service of the European state, and by extension, the west and white supremacy.”⁶⁵

Understanding antisemitic and Zionist anti-antisemitic discourse as fundamentally compatible, strategically aligned and even symbiotic features of a single fascist arrangement allows us to tend to the work that’s done by the increasingly clamorous discord between their respective factions. Though these two faces are ultimately quite compatible and symbiotic, the key feature of their deployment in the present moment is their presentation as an irreconcilable, vehement antagonism. Dylan Rodriguez’s concept of lexical warfare helps to understand the work that is being done by the escalating volume of dissension. Like Lentin, Rodriguez argues that “weaponization” is an insufficient framework for thinking about Zionist anti-antisemitism. Rodriguez’s proposed “lexical warfare,” offers a framework for tracking the “reorganizing and redirecting [of] entire parameters, entire theaters of conflict through the conquest and colonization of words, definitions and narratives.”⁶⁶ Rodriguez argues that Zionist organizations and institutions have “constructed a theater of lexical warfare through [their] constitution of meanings and symbols around the word antisemitism,” and that “we wage war within that terrain.”⁶⁷ For the fascist arrangement, Cruz’s announcement of an “existential crisis” around antisemitism within the Republican Party functions as a staged antagonism that crowds out antiracist, decolonial, and anti-Zionist anti-antisemitisms, whose articulation has been sharpened in the time since the escalated genocide in Gaza began in October 2023. The trumpeting of a purportedly irreconcilable conflict within the right captures the terms of anti-antisemitism within a terrain of struggle that is nonthreatening to white supremacy, capital, and the state, consolidating and extending control over the lexicon by laying claim to represent both antisemitism and its opposite.

As a brief but I think important aside, I’d like to point out that Jewish anti-Zionist writing and activism has too often centered the antisemitic implications of Zionism, and the damage done to Judaism by Zionism, as core concerns in their own right.⁶⁸ The importance of these objections pales in comparison to Zionism’s apocalyptic, genocidal violence against Palestinians. Likewise, the centering of antisemitism in discussions of fascism, racism, and state violence has long served the “proxification of anti-racism” and the exceptionalization of the Nazi Holocaust, thereby validating key elements of Zionist propaganda.⁶⁹ There is a risk—because of the near complete capture of the lexical terrain of antisemitism described by Rodriguez—that any mention of antisemitism in the current context will reentrench these harms by elevating current or hypothetical future danger to Jews above the very real and present harm being done to the primary victims of Zionism, racism and fascism. For that reason, I want to be clear that in this context I mention antisemitic conspiracism because of the specific role it plays in white nationalist ideology that manifests in racist, anti-Black, settler colonial, misogynistic, antitrans and anti-immigrant state and nonstate violence. Additionally, such open antisemitism reliably draws a loud objection from the establishment right, forming a critical component of the staged antagonism whose operation ultimately reinforces Zionist and white supremacist violence. In other words, my concern is not with antisemitism as a present or imagined potential danger to Jews, but rather with the ways that the appearance of struggle between antisemitic and Zionist anti-antisemitic politics on the right reveals the inner workings of a fascist arrangement that sustains multiple forms of actual, structural, genocidal violence.

Liberal Antigenocide Interventions and the Fascist Arrangement

While the conflict within MAGA has grabbed headlines, it is not only these two factions that participate in the redirection of antigenocide outrage into revanchist, white supremacist nationalism. Rather, Jackson’s schema of the faces of fascism demands that we also consider the imbrication of liberal, reformist gestures by the state in the maintenance of the fascist arrangement. And indeed, responses by putatively progressive or center-left politicians, pundits, and organizations to the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza have established many of the discursive foundations that enable the far right to claim the mantle of anti-Israel critique and anti-imperialism.

The far right’s aspirations of ethnic cleansing, in this sense, are facilitated by liberals’ efforts to wash the United States’s hands of genocide.

As the escalation of the genocide in Gaza has ruptured the previously unconditional, bipartisan consensus support for Israel, a growing chorus of liberal and progressive politicians— including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Senators Chris Van Hollen, Chris Murphy,and Bernie Sanders—have denounced Israel’s actions as antithetical to “American values” or US interests.⁷⁰ The necessary corollary to this rhetorical stance, whether spoken or unspoken, is the “Israel Lobby thesis.”⁷¹ That is, if indeed the United States is dedicating extraordinary economic, military and diplomatic support to a genocidal war effort that contradicts its values and material interests, the only explanation is the excessive influence of a special interest group.

This widely accepted argument constitutes what Max Ajl refers to as “misreading Palestine.”⁷² It obscures the deep alignment of interests between the United States and Israel, the utility of the Zionist project for US-led imperialism, and US complicity in the Gaza genocide and ongoing Nakba. Given the United States’ foundation of settler colonial genocide, and its centuries-long innovation of technologies of apartheid, carcerality and white supremacy, it is patently absurd to claim that Israel’s actions do not reflect “American” values. Furthermore, the claim that US investments in Zionism arise from a disproportionately powerful and ubiquitous Israel lobby—rather than aligned interests and strategic collaboration—merges quite seamlessly into the ZOG thesis, which translates conspiracist antisemitism into the narrative infrastructure for claims of white genocide and great replacement. While the “Israel Lobby” thesis and the “ZOG” thesis are by no means identical, both are premised upon a negation of the US ruling classes’ material interest in the violence of US-led imperialism, and the profound utility of Zionism for that project. Indeed, Nick Fuentes credits his reading of Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby as a formative part of his political awakening.⁷³ The far right’s aspirations of ethnic cleansing, in this sense, are facilitated by liberals’ efforts to wash the United States’s hands of genocide.

Likewise, liberals’ extremely narrow reading of imperialism enables the far right’s cooptive strategy. As Corinna Mullin explains, “Imperialism wages war not only with missiles and drones but with financial strangulation, energy manipulation, psychological warfare, propaganda, and economic siege. Sovereignty, and with it international law, is violated openly and with impunity.”⁷⁴ This impunity persists because while liberals may denounce explicit US efforts at regime change, nation-building, and “forever wars” as imperialism, they simultaneously ignore, obfuscate, and/or endorse the economic warfare of sanctions, the slow genocide and ecocide associated with the accumulation of waste,or the extraction and de-development of neoliberal income deflation and unequal exchange.⁷⁵ As Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik argue, brazen military coups against countries in the global South, which are conventionally understood as the height of imperialism, in fact represent a sort of last resort in moments when imperialism’s ability to impose income deflation on the Global South is weakened or seriously challenged. The lack of hypervisible imperialist intervention in fact signifies its strength and ubiquity.⁷⁶ It is only under these conditions of ideological obfuscation that fascists can gain credibility as self-styled antiwar or even anti-imperialist voices. The framework of “anti-imperialist imperialism”—through which the right wing reinvests in extractive warfare while leeching the energy of otherwise liberatory struggles—would not be possible without liberals’ discursive reduction of imperial domination to only its most spectacular forms.

Finally, liberal investments in the defense of the so-called international rules-based order —long after the livestreamed genocide had sapped all of that order’s credibility—have served as the precondition for the recent pivot to abandon that order in favor of an embrace of raw power. As Jake Romm and Dylan Saba argue, the United States has long used its unrivaled power to “extol the virtues of a ‘rules-based international order’ while simultaneously exempting itself from the various obligations that comprise such an order: the US refuses to sign onto the major human-rights treaties, launches wars of aggression without permission from the Security Council, and tortures prisoners of war.”⁷⁷ Israel, on the other hand, has no such strategic imperative to uphold the semblance of the rules-based order. So while it vociferously asserts its own morality, Israel routinely castigates and denigrates the entire patchwork of international bodies—from the United Nations and the ICC to the global network of NGOs that have…sprung up around them. In so doing, Israel is…challenging the very idea of international oversight and comity altogether. When its supposed enemies in the UN correctly accuse Israel of committing war crimes or the crime of apartheid…Israel retorts: we follow the law, and also there is no such thing.⁷⁸

Romm and Saba argue that “[t]he contrast between Israel’s antagonism to the institutions, treaties and juridical bodies that make up the international legal order and its stated commitment to international law has produced bizarre discursive loops for a US political elite scrambling to justify the current war effort.”⁷⁹ If the United States’s rhetorical overtures to a legal international order have stretched credulity for decades, these “bizarre discursive loops” during a livestreamed genocide have effectively squeezed dry the hegemonic power of this order, leaving it shriveled and completely incapable of manufacturing consent. Without this capability it is a short step to the wholesale abandonment of this order that characterizes the fascistic accumulation strategy of anti-imperialist imperialism.

To be clear, my argument is not that liberalism has enabled fascist imperialism by undermining the rules-based international order, which would have otherwise functioned successfully to head off the fascist turn. I’m arguing that the always already specious liberal deference to a rules-based order, along with the fascistic flaunting of that order, represent two compatible, mutually reinforcing sides of a counterinsurgent staged antagonism that captures the possible terms of struggle, crowding out more radical critique without presenting any serious challenge to US-led imperialism. The final hollowing out of the rules-based order in the face of flagrant, livestreamed genocide represents a sort of passing of the baton to white nationalist forces within the fascist arrangement.

Cody O’Rourke argues that the increasing mainstreaming of the term “anti-zionism” in the months following October 2023 has been accompanied by a hollowing out of its antisystemic political implications. According to O’Rourke, “A version of anti-zionism increasingly circulates that has been drained of its content—the imperialism, the political economy, the material demands—until what’s left really is closer to sympathy and sentiment than to a program. The word keeps its warmth while shedding its weight.”⁸⁰ If we take seriously Jackson’s understanding of fascism’s multiple faces, we might conclude that these liberal political interventions in response to genocide have not simply been woefully insufficient. Rather, they should be considered successful in laying the groundwork for the rise of the white nationalist politics designed to preserve imperialism and white supremacy. In other words, it’s not enough to examine the “deficiencies in liberalism which make fascism possible.”⁸¹ Rather, we must understand liberalism as an integral part of the fascist arrangement itself.

Conclusion

As the ruling classes are very much aware, the Palestine liberation struggle has come to represent the capacity of resistance to open up possibilities beyond the current racial capitalist and US-led imperialist order. Abdaljawad Omar commented in a recent interview that resistance itself “is a charismatic form” that can “challenge systems, deform them, perhaps dismantle them and shake them,” while simultaneously inspiring insurgency beyond the ideologies of the groups directly involved in this resistance.⁸² In another recent talk entitled “Palestine is More than Itself,” Omar argued that Israel’s spectacular and excessive demonstration of violence has attempted to arrive at a threshold beyond which collective action becomes structurally unavailable to the target population. He observed that ongoing Palestinian resistance is particularly dangerous to the dominant order because it reveals that this threshold itself does not exist, or exists only as a fiction—that it is contingent, not ontological.⁸³

If we understand the Palestinian resistance, and the global solidarity movement it has inspired, as a crisis for the racial capitalist order—one that functions to make resistance thinkable—then the conflict around US support for Israel on the right provides us real time visibility into the ways in which the fascist arrangement adapts to manage a crisis. What this scenario reveals is that the fascist counterinsurgency response is not constituted simply by the rise of far right movements promoting “palingenetic ultranationalism,” but rather by the effective collaboration of liberal, conservative and far right factions, despite—and indeed even by way of—the appearance of bitter struggle between them.⁸⁴ In this sense, the contemporary debate over US support for Israel on the right, when considered through the lens of Jackson’s multiple faces of fascism, provides a unique insight into the operation of counterinsurgency—one that I think is critical for our current moment.

We must understand liberalism as an integral part of the fascist arrangement itself.

Discussions of counterinsurgency often center on the bipolar relationship between dual strategies of coercion and consent. This is true of both official state documents and of recent, critical scholarship on counterinsurgency. The NATO Counterinsurgency Reference Curriculum, for example, advocates a collaboration between, on the one hand, “population-centric” strategies that seek to bolster state legitimacy by addressing a population’s grievances in order to “hamper insurgent recruitment among the population, and at the same time deprive the insurgents of their cause,” versus “enemy-centric” actions that prioritize the “destruction of the enemy.”⁸⁵ Likewise, Dylan Rodriguez attends to the “pacification, isolation and domestication strategies” that constitute “liberal/progressive counterinsurgency” and complement strategies of coercive state power.⁸⁶

The contemporary politics of US support for Israel, seen through the lens of Jackson’s fascist arrangement, suggests that the counterinsurgency might be better understood not as a duality with domestication placed opposite to repression, but rather as a sort of triangle of strategies: domestication, repression, and misdirection. In response to Palestine solidarity insurgency, the conservative face escalates repression to crush dissent; the liberal/progressive face offers reforms designed to placate the uprising and reestablish the legitimacy of the state; and the far right misdirects insurgency into a politics that ultimately upholds and sharpens racial capitalism, imperialism, and ultimately Zionism. Sophie Lewis describes the particular risk of seduction by this latter sort of “truncated analysis”: “It is sometimes forgotten that fascists understand themselves as an emancipatory anti-elite revolt against politics. Make no mistake: the point here isn’t that leftism is somehow closer to fascism than liberalism is, but that a fleeting radical instinct or canny inclination toward systemic analyses can, in some cases, slip, plunge, and turn into an enemy politics.”⁸⁷ The far right—aided by contemporary liberals—are making the ground slippery for just such a plunge.

Recent discourse surrounding the July 2026 Ceuta massacre has demonstrated quite clearly that the far right strategy of misdirection is having its intended effect. As Iker Suárez recounts, “On July 30-31, 2026, around 70,000 people crossed over to the North African Spanish enclave of Ceuta / سبتة (Sebta)—one of Europe’s only two land borders with Africa. The events have, so far, caused over 140 deaths, becoming one of the worst catastrophes ever in Western border politics and the single deadliest massacre in Spanish border history.” Almost immediately, a narrative began to circulate online, amplified by North American left wing influencer accounts, that Israel had engineered “an invasion” of migrants into Europe in order to punish Spain’s president, Pedro Sanchez, for his criticism of Israel. The incident not only sparked vicious and ongoing far right antimigrant attacks in Ceuta and throughout Spain, but as Harsha Walia pointed out on Instagram, it saw leftists “parrot[ing] the exact same discourse that has long shaped far right anti-migrant” politics, while amplifying calls for increased border enforcement and militarization and neglecting the structural violences and long colonial histories underlying Fortress Europe.⁸⁸

The rapid spread of the narrative that Israel engineered an nonwhite migrant “invasion” to punish and undermine Europe shows that the staged antagonism around US support for Israel on the far right is having exactly its intended effect. The far right has deployed a narrative built around the common sense of antisemitic conspiracism to misdirect antigenocide insurgency into amplifying a white nationalist great replacement theory that masks US and European racial colonial violence. Voices on the left were drawn away from a critique of the lethal violence of European border regimes—violence in which Zionism is indeed deeply and structurally implicated—and instead found themselves amplifying calls for the consolidation and expansion of border enforcement in the name of anti-Israel sentiment.⁸⁹

Ultimately, this type of slippage is facilitated by the uncritical repetition of the notion that there is a “civil war” playing out within the MAGA movement. The far right’s anti-Israel critique only has the power to coopt and misdirect to the extent that it appears to be genuinely adversarial to the existing power structure. The three strategies of the “triangle of counterinsurgency”—domestication, repression, and misdirection—are not only mutually compatible and symbiotic; this symbiosis itself depends on the appearance of conflict between one another. The staged antagonism between factions serves as the basis for the strategy of anti-imperialist imperialism and consolidates control over antisemitism as a terrain of lexical warfare.

Resistance to Zionism, and to the current fascist arrangement, must not only repudiate strategic alliance with Israel-critical elements of the far right. Just as the conservative establishment offers no protection whatsoever against resurgent explicit white nationalism, it must remain absolutely clear that neither the far right’s anti-Israel sentiment nor liberals’ antigenocide posturing constitutes any sort of challenge whatsoever to Zionism or to US-led imperialism. All these different “faces” of fascism must be identified as compatible, symbiotic, and functionally collaborative elements of the “final fascist arrangement,” in order to resist the recuperative potential of the staged antagonism between them.

Notes & References

Iker Seisdedos, “Israel Sparks a Civil War within the Maga Movement,” El País, December 29, 2025, https://english.elpais.com/usa/2025-12-29/israel-sparks-a-civil-war-within-the-maga-movement.html; TOI Staff and Agencies, “MAGA Civil War over Israel Erupts into the Open at Turning Point USA Conference,” Times of Israel, December 20, 2025. https://www.timesofisrael.com/maga-civil-war-over-israel-erupts-into-the-open-at-turning-point-usa-conference/; Esam Boraey, “Israel Is Now at the Centre of a Republican Civil War,” Al Jazeera, November 27, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/11/27/israel-is-now-at-the-centre-of-a-republican-civil-war.
Jonathan Mahler, “A Rupture over Israel Is Tearing MAGA Apart,” New York Times, December 30, 2025, updated January 14, 2026t, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/magazine/maga-israel-antisemitism-tucker-carlson.html.
Yunma Patel, “It’s Time for America to Break Up with Israel,” Mondoweiss, March 4, 2026, https://mondoweiss.net/2026/03/its-time-for-america-to-break-up-with-israel/; Matt Seriff-Cullick, “Stop Calling Right-Wing Criticism of Israel ‘Anti-Zionism,’” Mondoweiss, December 2, 2025, https://mondoweiss.net/2025/12/stop-calling-right-wing-criticism-of-israel-anti-zionism/.
Steve Salaita, “Palestine Solidarity in an Age of Reaction,” Steve Salaita: No Flags, No Slogans (blog), January 18, 2026, https://stevesalaita.com/palestine-solidarity-in-the-age-of-reaction/.
George L. Jackson, Blood in my Eye (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1996), 143–44.
“Tucker Carlson Responds to Israel’s War on Iran,” YouTube video, 145:34, posted by “Tucker Carlson,” March 2, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZxj_c0g5lU.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “What Does Tucker Carlson Really Believe? I Went to Maine to Find Out,” New York Times, May 2, 2026, updated May 4, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/magazine/tucker-carlson-interview-trump-iran.html.
Shane Burley, “How the Far Right is Reacting to Trump’s Assault on Venezeula,” Maiseh Review (blog), January 14, 2026, https://maiseh-review.ghost.io/how-the-far-right-is-reacting-to-trumps-assault-on-venezuela/.
Shane Burley, “Fascists Are Attempting to Win Followers by Rebranding as Antiwar,” Truthout, March 19, 2023, https://truthout.org/articles/fascists-are-attempting-to-win-followers-by-rebranding-as-antiwar/.
Ben Lorber, “How the Israeli Flag Became a Symbol for White Nationalists,” +972 Magazine, January 22, 2021, https://www.972mag.com/israeli-flag-white-nationalism-symbol/.
Theodor Herzl, A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question (New York: Maccabaean, 1904), available at https://archive.org/details/jewishstateanatt00herz/page/n3/mode/2up.
Max Ajl, “Misreading Palestine,” Ebb Magazine, November 29, 2023, https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/misreading-palestine.
Max Ajl, “Syrian Debates,” Middle East Critique 34, no. 4, 569–80, https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2025.2578776.
Matt Seriff-Cullick, “How White Folks Became Jews: The War on Black Antisemitism and the Recalibration of Racial Regimes,” Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, December 29, 2025, https://criticalzionismstudies.org/jcsz-how-white-folks-became-jews/#en-6869-116.
Sarah McCammon, “MAGA Divisions over Antisemitism on Display at Turning Point,” NPR, December, 29, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/12/19/nx-s1-5649521/maga-divisions-over-antisemitism-on-display-at-turning-point.
Barak Ravid, “Scoop: Israel Seeks 20-Year Military Aid Deal with U.S with ‘America First’ Tweaks,” Axios, November 13, 2025,https://www.axios.com/2025/11/13/israel-military-aid-us-billions-20-years; “Netanyahu: I want to end US military aid to Israel within ten years,” YouTube video, 1:09, posted by “The Economist,” January 9, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g7pAnlLgtRk.
A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (Washington, Jerusalem: The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, 1996), available at https://www.dougfeith.com/docs/Clean_Break.pdf..
The view that eliminating US aid to Israel will remove US Constraints on Israeli warmaking was notably articulated in “Clean Break” policy brief published by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in 1996. In a tweet with over 2.1 million views, America First pundit Laura Loomer has called this aid a pair of “golden handcuffs.” Tweet by Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer), X, Nov 10, 2025, 3:10 a.m., https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1987795574821933206?s=20.In an opinion column published in the Jerusalem Post, Lev Stesin argues that such aid is the focal point of an increasingly polarized debate in US society, which he characterizes as “deeply counterproductive to Jerusalem’s public image.” Opposition to US aid to Israel crosses both sides of the political spectrum, with Conor Echolls reporting in late 2025 that a plurality of Republicans oppose aid to Israel. Lev Stesin, “End of a Special Relationship: Israel No Longer Wants to Be America’s Political Football,” Jerusalem Post, January 20, 2026 https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-883675; Connor Echols, “Plurality of Republicans Say End US Aid to Israel: Poll,” Responsible Statecraft, December 16, 2025, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-aid-to-israel-2674403728/.The aspiration for Israel to become a self-sufficient ally was voiced by Benjamin Netanyahu as early as 1996 and provides some of the rationale for the policy prescriptions in the aforementioned Clean Break report. “Israel Prime Minister Speech,” from a C-SPAN broadcast aired July 10, 1996, video, 59:15, C-SPAN, https://www.c-span.org/program/joint-session-of-congress/israel-prime-minister-speech/57632; A Clean Break.
Matthew Petti, “Cutting US Aid to Israel Won’t Cure What Ills,” Responsible Statecraft, July 27, 2023, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/07/27/us-aid-to-israel-is-a-distraction/; Mitchell Plitnick, “Why Netanyahu Says He Wants to Stop US Aid to Israel,” Mondoweiss, January 14, 2026, https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/why-netanyahu-says-he-wants-to-stop-u-s-aid-to-israel/; Elbridge Colby, “The Threat of US-China War Requires a US-Israel Reset,” The Times of Israel (blog), July 4, 2023, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-threat-of-a-us-china-war-requires-a-us-israel-reset/.
Michael Arria, “Congress is Pushing to Integrate the Israeli and U.S Militaries on Behalf of Netanyahu,” Mondoweiss, June 11, 2026, https://mondoweiss.net/2026/06/congress-is-pushing-to-integrate-the-israeli-and-u-s-militaries-on-behalf-of-netanyahu/.
Harsha Walia and Alberto Toscano, “Lifeboats, Steampunk, and Colonialism – Fascism Today: A Conversation with Alberto Toscano and Harsha Walia,” TNI, February 3, 2026, https://www.tni.org/en/article/lifeboats-steampunk-and-colonialism-fascism-today. For an analysis of the Trump administration’s disregard for the “perfunctory legal legitimation” of the “rules-based order,” see Jake Romm’s analysis in the Nation. Jake Romm, “Why Trump’s Venezuela Attacks Matter So Much,” Nation, October 2, 2025, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-venezuela-attacks-liberal-order/. In an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that “This is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operations for adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States. “Secretary of State Marco Rubio with Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press,” U.S Department of State, January 4, 2026, https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/01/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-with-kristen-welker-of-nbcs-meet-the-press.
Eric Hooglund, Israel’s Arms Exports: Proxy Merchants for the U.S (Washington DC: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, n.d.), available at https://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC16_scans/16_ADC_IsraelArmExports.pdf.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye,143–44.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 164.
Alana Lentin, “Understanding the Relationship Between Zionism and Fascism,” Mondoweiss, December 28, 2025, https://mondoweiss.net/2025/12/understanding-the-relationship-between-zionism-and-fascism/.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 118.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 137.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 138, 118.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 119.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 119.
Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S Prison System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 132.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 125.
Rodriguez, Forced Passages, 132.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 143.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 143.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 142, 143.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 121.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 143.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 121.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 144.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 142.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 164.
Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 137, emphasis added.
Ben Lorber, “Nick Fuentes Has Officially Breached the MAGA Gates,” Nation, November 4, 2025, https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/nick-fuentes-carlson-israel-maga/.
Lorber, “Nick Fuentes Has Officially Breached the MAGA Gates”; Shane Burley, “The GOP’s Groyper Fringe Became it’s Future,” Jacobin, November 27, 2025, https://jacobin.com/2025/11/fuentes-groypers-republicans-white-nationalism.
Shane Burley, “Varieties of White Nationalism: How Richard Spencer is Rebranding as the GOP Moves Right,” Spectre, December 23, 2025, https://doi.org/10.63478/QBAHYAJF.
Burley, “Varieties of White Nationalism.”
Burley, “Varieties of White Nationalism.”
Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2023), 63.
Toscano, Late Fascism, 63.
Adrian Karatnycky, “No, MAGA Is Not Isolationist,” Foreign Policy, July 21, 2025, https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/07/21/maga-republican-trump-isolationism-ukraine-aid-russia-iran-israel/.
“Gangster Imperialism: After Kidnapping Maduro, Trump Threatens Cuba, Columbia, Mexico,” YouTube video, 133:13, posted by “Breakthrough News,” January 6, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbWWnCdEU7s&list=PLwZtBKjGSMzW-grFNiIzMyvqBYznqN2dg&index=34; Bashir Abu-Manneh, “Middle East Wars Are Still About Oil and Empire: Interview with Gilbert Achcar,” Jacobin, March 9, 2026, https://jacobin.com/2026/03/us-imperialism-mena-war-oil-economy; Romm, “Why Trump’s Venezuela Attacks Matter So Much.”
Aamer Madhani and Konstantin Toropin, “Trump Proposes Massive Increase in 2027 Defense Spending to 1.5T, Citing ‘Dangerous Times,” AP News, January 7, 2026, https://apnews.com/article/trump-defense-spending-3bbea1ccc679ee8a388386d60e651fd7.
Shane Burley, “How the Far Right is Reacting to Trump’s Assault on Venezuela,” Maiseh Review (blog), January 14, 2026, https://maiseh-review.ghost.io/how-the-far-right-is-reacting-to-trumps-assault-on-venezuela/.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, “Restating the Obvious,” in Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (New York: Verso, 2022), 276.
Gimore and Gilmore, “Restating the Obvious,” 276.
Gilmore and Gilmore, “Restating the Obvious,” 269.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, “Beyond Bratton,” in Abolition Geography, 289.
Gilmore and Gilmore, “Restating the Obvious,” 273.
Gilmore and Gilmore, “Restating the Obvious,” 286.
“Ted Cruz Issues Emphatic Warning About Right-Wing Antisemitism: ‘An Existential Crisis in Our Party,’” YouTube video, 24:17, posted by “Forbes Breaking News,” October 31, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROM-j74RoAg.
See, for example: Ronit Lentin, Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 90–103; Faris Yahya [Glubb], Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany (Beirut: Palestine Research Center, 1978); Joseph Massad, “Zionism, Anti-semitism, and Colonialism,” Al Jazeera, December 24, 2012, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2012/12/24/zionism-anti-semitism-and-colonialism.
Seriff-Cullick, “How White Folks Became Jews.”
Seriff-Cullick, “How White Folks Became Jews.”
Alana Lentin, The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy (London: Pluto Press, 2025), 224, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.28833777.
“Dylan Rodriguez on Lexical Warfare & Counterinsurgency,” YouTube video, 2:01:11, posted by “Millenials Are Killing Capitalism Live!,” June 13, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7XMGrYtMSI.
Lara Sheehi and Dylan Rodriguez, “IN SESSION #5: If it looks, feels, and acts like counterinsurgency, it’s probably counterinsurgency!,” February 27, 2026, in Psychic Militancy, Podcast, MP3 audio, 1:48:00, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-session-5-if-it-looks-feels-and-acts-like/id1865801942?i=1000751967617; “Dylan Rodriguez on Lexical Warfare & Counterinsurgency.”
Rima Najjar, “When Jewish Moral Reckoning Overshadows Palestinian Liberation,” Mondoweiss, January 25, 2026, https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/when-jewish-moral-reckoning-overshadows-palestinian-liberation/.
Alana Lentin, “Antisemitism as Exception and the Proxification of Racism,” alanalentin.net (blog), September 3, 2025, https://www.alanalentin.net/2025/09/03/antisemitism-as-exception-and-the-proxification-of-antiracism/.
Tweet by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC), X, February 6, 2026, 9:50 a.m., https://x.com/AOC/status/2019785794949349850; Chris Van Hollen, “The Hard Truth My Party Needs to Face,” New York Times, May 26, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/opinion/democrats-israel.html; Niveen Ghoneim, “Murphy Votes to Block Sale of Offensive Weapons to Israel,” CTNewsJunkie, November 22, 2024, https://ctnewsjunkie.com/2024/11/22/murphy-votes-to-block-sale-of-offensive-weapons-to-israel/; Patricia Zengerie, “US Senate Rejects Bids to Block Military Sales to Israel,” Reuters, July 31, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-rejects-bids-block-arms-sales-israel-over-gaza-2025-07-31/.
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007).
Ajl, “Misreading Palestine.”
“Tucker Carlson Interviews Nick Fuentes,” YouTube video, 2:18:46, posted by “Tucker Carlson,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efBB0D4tf1Y.
Corinna Mullin, “U.S Empire at the Point of Production: From Monroe Doctrine to Labor Imperialism,” Anti-Imperialists Scholars Collective, March 2, 2026, https://www.anti-imperialists.com/magazine/us-empire-at-the-point-of-production-from-monroe-doctrine-to-labor-imperialism.
Matteo Capasso, “Theorising Sanctions as Warfare: Insights from the US-Led Aggression on Libya,” World Review of Political Economy 14, no. 4 (2023): 555–84, https://doi.org/10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.14.4.0555; Matteo Capasso and Ali Kadri, “The Imperialist Question: A Sociological Approach,” Middle East Critique 32, no. 2 (2023): 149–66, https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2023.2176943; Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present (New York: NYU Press, 2021), http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11vc9px; Jason Hickel et al., “Imperialist Appropriation in the World Economy: Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1990-2015,” Global Environment Change 73 (2022): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102467.
Hickel et al., “Imperialist Appropriation in the World Economy,” 249.
Jake Romm and Dylan Saba, “Acts Harmful to the Enemy,” n+1, January 12, 2024, https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/acts-harmful-to-the-enemy/.
Romm and Saba, “Acts Harmful to the Enemy.”
Romm and Saba, “Acts Harmful to the Enemy.”
Good Shepherd Collective, “The Hollowed Vocabulary: Jewish Voice for Peace and the Institutional Capture of Anti-Zionism,” Call, July 28, 2026, https://thecall.ps/p/the-hollowed-vocabulary-jewish-voice.
J. P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511608988, quoted in Daniel Woodley, Fascism and Political Theory: Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2009), 2, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203871577.
Dylan Saba, Séamus Malekafzali, and M Ceniza, “Episode 10: Gaza vs. the World w/ Abdalijawad Omar,” January 20, 2026, in Turbulence, Podcast, MP3 audio, 1:26:42, https://turbulencepod.substack.com/p/episode-10-gaza-vs-the-world.
Abdaljawad Omar, “Palestine is More than Itself: On the Universal Meaning of Gaza,” (lecture, King’s College London, London, UK, March 5, 2026).
Roger Griffin. The Nature of Fascism (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1993), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315003627.
Counterinsurgency: A Generic Reference Curriculum (Brussels: NATO, n.d), 19, available at https://www.nato.int/content/dam/nato/webready/documents/deep/deep-counter-insurg-curr-en.pdf.
Dylan Rodriguez and Roberto Sirvent, “Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: An Interview with Dylan Rodriguez,” Black Agenda Report, November 2, 2022, https://www.blackagendareport.com/insurgency-and-counterinsurgency-interview-dylan-rodriguez.
Sophie Lewis, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2025), 20.
Post by Harsha Walia (@harshawalia8), Instagram, August 1, 2026, https://www.instagram.com/p/DbhHCi4GChl/?hl=en&img_index=1.
On the Zionism’s implication with border regimes, see Anonymous, “ICE and the IDF: The Transnational Nexus of Control,” Scalawag, August 28, 2025, https://scalawagmagazine.org/2025/08/ice-and-the-idf-the-transnational-nexus-of-state-control/.

Far Right, Fascism/Antifascism, Israel/Palestine, Politics, USA, Zionism

Matt Seriff-Cullick

Matt Seriff-Cullick (he/him) is an independent scholar currently based in Barcelona. He is a queer white Jew who organizes in abolitionist and Palestine solidarity formations and works as a professional chef. His recent writing has appeared in the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism and Mondoweiss.

Beyond the Labour Machine

Kyle Barrett

A New Zealand dock workers’ union just did something no major union has done in a century: voted to affiliate with a socialist party alongside Labour.

Spectacles of Fascism in an Age of Exhaustion

Benjamin Balthaser

In a reading of Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism, Benjamin Balthasar argues that today’s far right channels popular disillusionment into apocalyptic fantasies of destruction. The left, he insists, must respond with a politics of collective freedom rather than appeals to a return to neoliberal normalcy.

LA’s Left-Liberal Electoral Problem

Promise Li

Promise Li argues that Los Angeles’s left has grown stronger than ever, but without political independence, its electoral gains may never translate into working-class power.