Why does the US support Israel's crimes?

Why does the US support Israel’s genocidal crimes against the Palestinian people, even in the face of overwhelming international condemnation, at massive expense, and to the point of totally debasing the very frameworks of human rights and international law that it pretends to uphold?

People fall back on narratives about the power of AIPAC in US elections, and other forms of Israeli political intervention in the US. That’s a real force and cannot be ignored, but the reality is that the US ruling class broadly supports Israel’s actions — with bipartisan consensus — because they see this as aligned with the interests of US capitalism. And most other Western governments (Britain, Germany, etc.) hold the same position for much the same reason.

The important thing to understand is that the capitalist economy is a world-system, where growth and accumulation in the imperial core (e.g, the US and Western Europe) relies heavily on the appropriation of cheap labour and resources from the periphery and semi-periphery, or the global South. Western states and firms need Southern states to remain subordinated suppliers of cheap labour, raw materials and consumer goods within global commodity chains.

In order to maintain this arrangement, the core states must find ways to suppress sovereign economic development in the South. Sovereign development means Southerners begin to escape their subordination, produce more for themselves, increase their wages, and consume their own output. This makes resources and inputs more expensive for the core, which constrains their consumption and makes it more difficult for them to realise profits.

This is the key point: economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core. To avoid this, the core states must constantly intervene to prevent or crush any movement or government in the periphery that seeks national liberation and economic sovereignty.

The US started to support the Zionist project in the 1960s, because they saw this as a way to have a military proxy in the Middle East, where they could stage counter-insurgency operations against the Arab socialist movements and national liberation struggles that were popular at that time. The US could not accept the prospect of sovereign development in the region: the liberation movements had to be crushed or destabilized and they used Israel to help them do it.

Israel has been instrumental in assassinating liberation leaders in the Arab region, and interfering in the political processes of the