On April 12, 2026, I interviewed Max Ajl, a prominent anti-imperialist scholar. Our conversation spanned many topics, this article includes quotes from Max regarding imperialism with reference to the role of “Israel” in US imperialism. Over the last decades, this confusion has manifested in the NATO countries in the form of a weak anti-war movement with an inability to do much more than diagnose, far too late, that imperialism is the cause of wars.
Within the NATO countries, there is a confused and incomplete view of imperialism. Imperialism, in the view of the disorganized left and liberal intelligentsia, is limited to its military excursions with a crude economistic analysis of how access to natural resources–particularly oil–directs the military flows. Yet, it is important to understand imperialism as the structural basis of the capitalist world-system, the motor which drives the worldwide law of value. The conflict between the peoples of the Global South and the governments, militaries, and corporations of the NATO countries represents the primary contradiction of our time. In the 20th century, the ideological rivalry with the USSR and socialism writ large provided the US ruling class with a justification for their expansion of militarized accumulation on a world scale. This took the form of building up military bases around the world, and also vassalizing a series of states and nations at geo-strategically important nodal points around the globe. According to Max Ajl:
“Part and parcel of the US policy of militarized accumulation has also been the US contestation of any form of autonomous development. Now, autonomous development does not have to mean communist or socialist development or development proceeding to a fundamentally different law of value, no. The US does not want autonomous development, meaning internal articulation, a relationship between agriculture and industry, sovereignty over technology, and so forth.”
Iran represents one such pole of autonomous development, and as such it has been a target of US imperialism since the 1979 Islamic revolution. In an age where the challenges to US imperialism have been ideologically diverse, the left in the NATO countries–due to its disorganization and pacification–has produced an incoherent line and thus a weak anti-war movement.
Recently, the nature of the relationship between US imperialism and Zionism has been subject to these multiple competing and contradictory readings. Particularly with the war on Iran, there has been a lot of confusion. The “I’m not dying for Israel” and “the US should not be fighting Israel’s wars” narratives have been creeping into the left due to the lack of coherence in the movement. This analysis has been put forward by the likes of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and other traditionally conservative figures who are coming to anti-“Israel” positions through the ‘America First’ lens. While the growth of anti-“Israel” sentiment has grown significantly in this country, it is important that the correct analysis is always put forward by anti-imperialists. Max offers a perspective which counters this confused analysis:
“Israel itself, its role in US imperialism is to produce violence; and then the question becomes ‘is that violence incidental or constitutive of US imperialism?’…it is associated with militarized accumulation…and Israel ensures that this militarism, this militarized caste of foreign policy, this militaristic expression of imperialism continues. This is just reality.”
While this gets to the heart of the role of “Israel” in the US imperialist system of accumulation, some questions may remain. Oftentimes, the violence of US imperialism is obfuscated within the liberal and conservative intelligentsia’s political science jargon which is filtered down to the mainstream media. Such jargon and intentional obfuscation, especially around the question of anti-semitism and the ‘rights of states to exist’ (a conversation with no precedent in classical political science or geopolitics) defies the clear and concise answer to the relationship between US imperialism and the Zionist colony:
“The fact that the forward base of counterinsurgency is Zionist Jewish institutions, it leads many people to conclude that this is the force deciding policy, or [at least] entrenching policy. I think that is a hypothesis which lacks a mechanism to actually establish that it is true. It speaks to the fact that the American left is stuck on surface level explanations of phenomena. Yes, Zionism is a Jewish supremacist ideology, but Zionism is defended through the Jewish institutions in the United States that were reflective of the organization of Jewish middle and upper classes into supporting the colonial project…This is part and parcel of the enlistment of this subsector of white America into imperialism and colonialism as a specific demarcated subsector responsible for imperialism. It has a disproportionate role in ideological and philanthropic support for US-Israeli colonialism in the Arab region. All of this is very much true, and this is just history. This is the history that underpins the surface level apprehension that people have, that Israel is pushing America into wars against its own interests. No, the Zionists have been part and parcel of constituting US interests in a particular way, but they have made a case to the remainder of the ruling class and that ruling class has signed off on it.”
The surface level apprehension of phenomena by much of the Marxist left in the United States and Western Europe has to do with an historically situated class of intellectuals who, after neoliberalism divorced the left and labor, became the left-wing standard bearers of imperialism. It is not just because ‘they are wrong’, which is a tautological argument, but because of the material conditions within the empire and the accumulation of ‘historical surplus value’ regarding the production of knowledge. According to Max, this idealism has put ideology and propaganda front and center above the historical materialist understanding of imperialism:
“I dislike…an overemphasis on a declining empire, I mean the US intellectual class has been talking about a declining empire for decades, every decade they talk about the declining empire. Declining empire is sort of a fascist mobilization, to be honest, that has entered the left. It is historically a fascist trope, this declining empire, which is kind of a substrate of ‘putting Israel’s interests first’. The themes interlock. Never mind what is an ‘Israeli interest’? The Israeli nation-state is the one being bombed, not America. What it really means is fanatical ideological commitment, and if you think fanatical ideological commitment at a certain level can run this far wide of material interests, okay then you’re not a Marxist anymore, you’re an idealist.”
This emphasis on the material expression and bases of imperialism is important no more than ever as the conversation around Zionism and US imperialism is under assault by idealist misconceptions. Liberals put blame on the Netanyahu and Trump governments alone, which erases the historical nature of imperialist accumulation, while right-wing tropes such as “Israel’s war” gain traction in a subdued left. As such, Max’s contribution provides an important counterpoint to the wrongheaded and confusing analysis coming from the pliant and subdued corners of the left in the NATO countries.
Hanna Eid
Source: Al Mayadeen