From the public lecture held in Portland on April 11

We hear endlessly that the State of Israel is dragging America into the conflict, that Netanyahu is manipulating Washington, that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has bought Congress, that this is Israel's war and America is being beaten along. This is everywhere: in the liberal press, in the anti-war movement, and in some sectors of the "left".

But it's fundamentally flawed. Not because the lobby is imaginary or Netanyahu lacks goals. It's flashed because it confuses the instrument with the creator. It allows Washington to hide behind Tel Aviv. We need to start not with ideology, but with economics, with the movement of capital.

The United States has provided military aid to the State of Israel since 1949, but only modest amounts until the 1973 war, when aid increased by a magnitude of order, reaching, $3 billion a year, a figure that has remained ever since. By 2009, virtually all aid was military, and civil aid was eliminated. The United States is not funding Israeli society. It is acquiring a military role in the region.

But aid isn't money. It's vouchers that can only be off at American arms manufacturers: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics. The State of Israel is required to spend the aid in the United States. Every dollar goes back to American arms capital. Even the uniforms and combat rations that could be produced in Israel are purchased by American companies because the vouchers must be off there. So when we hear that the American government gives Israel three billion a year, we should understand: it gives three billion a year to its own arms industry and ships the product to a client state. In real terms, adjusted for inflation, aid peaked in 1979 and by 2010 had failed to fifth about a. America pays less while demanding more.

In 2016, the Obama administration signed a ten-year agreement with Israel that granted it the privilege of spending a portion of the aid on its military industry, a privilege no other country has ever enjoyed. However, the agreement prevented Israel from requesting further funding from Congress for its entire duration. Israel, but not on an equal footing; the terms are subordinate.

Subordination has been proven many times. In the 1980s, Israel to attempt build its own fighter jet—the Lavi—a direct competitor to American aircraft: a bid for military-industrial independence. The United States scuttled the project. They are delayed technology licensing, a Pentagon report that inflated cost estimates by 40 percent, insisted on a veto on sales to third parties, and finally offered competing American systems for free as "aid". The project failed. Thousands of workers lost their jobs. And the entire Israeli arms industry was restructured around a new division of labor: the United States monopolizes combat platforms—tanks, jets, warships—while Israel produces only complementary components. Helmet displays for the F-15. Navigation systems for the F-16. Targeting Optics. Parts that fit into American equipment and compete with none.

AIPAC nor the neoconservatives saved Lavi. When the interests of Israeli capital actually clashed with those of American capital, Israel caved. Every time.

Excluded from the competition for basic weapons, Israel has carved out a niche for itself: the technology of repression. Surveillance systems, biometric identification, automated checkpoints, perimorial defense, and riot control—all developed through decades of military occupation, tested on a captive Palestinian population, and then marketed globally as "combat-proven". After 9/11, this niche exploded.

Netanyahu said the attacks were "good for Israel"—because the global war on terror has opened up a huge market for the very products Israeli were companies selling already. Eighty percent of Israeli arms production is exported, four times the American rate. In 2012, nearly 5 percent of the Israeli workforce depended on the arms industry—a third of the industrial sector. The military occupation of Palestinian territory is not separate from the Israeli economy. It is the engine of its most sector. Every bombing campaign is a demonstration product. Every war is a trade show.

The occupation costs the Israeli state more than it receives in American aid—that threshold was crossed around 1999. Security costs, fueled by Palestinian resistance, are nearly triple those of settle subsidies. Israeli poverty is rising, schools are declining, social services are being dismantled. But arms companies are booming. The costs are socialized, distributed across the Israeli and American working classes. Profits are privatized in arms capital, security companies, and the broader circuits of international finance. Wars in the Middle East have been shown to increase the assessment of profits of oil and arms companies globally—not just Israeli ones.

Occupation breeds permanent instability. Instability drives up oil prices. Instability increases the demand for weapons. The Palestinian question remains unresolved not because no one can solve it, but it because insolvability is profitable.

This is the structure. And within this structure, the lobby performs a real but secondary function. Let's not deny AIPAC's power. It can mobilize seventy Senate signatures in a day. It channels campaign funds through dozens of "Political Action Committees". It shapes opinion and silences critics. All documented. But the claim that the lobby dictates American policy rather than serves it inverts cause and effect. The lobby is successful because its agenda aligns with what major sectors of American capital already demand. The argument that Israel is a "strategic liability" only holds if we ask: liability for whom? For arms manufacturers, oil companies, and the homeland security sector, the relationship is enormously profitable. The liability falls on American workers and taxpayers—but their interests have never been those served by bourgeois foreign policy. This is not a distortion of the national interest. It is the normal functioning of imperialism, where costs are socialized and profits privatized.

And we note that those who most vociferously support the lobby's argument, when pressed on what they actually propose, don't call for an end to American domination of the Middle East. They demand what they call "foreign balance": control of Persian Gulf oil with fewer troops on the ground. A more efficient imperialism.

It must also be clear that we reject any conspiratorial interpretation. Our party's analysis of the "Jewish question" has always been clear: there they have always been rich Jews and poor Jews, just as there are bourgeois and proletarians of every nationality. The generalization that attributes to an entire people the characteristics of its ruling class—or worse, of a dark clique directing world events—is the oldest expedient of reactionary ideology. It has been used against Jews for centuries. Today it is used against Arabs, against Muslims against, every population that imperialism needs to demonize. We do not combat this generalization with sentimental appeals or liberal moralism. We combat it with class analysis. The Israeli bourgeoisie exploits Israeli workers. The Palestinian bourgeoisie, wearing to Fatah or Hamas badge, exploits Palestinian workers. American capital exploits them all. The issue is not about peoples, races, or religions. The issue is, as always, about class.

Let's see this in the current war. The United States is not bombing Iran because Netanyahu asked for it. The United States is bombing Iran because Iran is the last major obstacle to America's unchallenged hegemony over the Persian Gulf energy corridor, through which a fifth of the world's oil passes. Because Gulf oil, taken off the market, raises prices to the ideal level for American producers. Because this war has already led to the construction of the first new American refinery in half a century.

When Netanyahu appears to be leading—when Israel strikes first, when Israeli intelligence identifies targets—what we see is the sub-imperial executive arm enthusiastically carrying out its function. Not the servant who commands the master, but the servant who demonstrates his usefulness so that the paycheck keeps coming.

Every time someone points the finger at Netanyahu and says he's dragging America into this war, they're doing American capital a disservice. They allow Washington to hide behind its own tool. They allow the architects of the war to escape reproach and condemnation.

This confusion isn't theoretical. It's happening right now, in the midst of this war. Three weeks ago, Joe Kent—the director of Trump's National Counterterrorism Center, a Green Beret with eleven combat tours under his belt, the husband of a Gold Star, and a well-known MAGA devotee—resigned in protest. In his resignation letter, he claimed that Iran posed no imminent threat, that the war had been started "due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby", and that Israel had used "the same tactics" it used to drag America into Iraq. Tucker Carlson, who reaches tens of millions of people, called the war "absolutely disgusting and evil" and declared it "Israel's war, not the United States'". Megyn Kelly blamed the "Israel Firsters". Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others joined the chorus. A new narrative is gaining ground on the American right, that of a "stab in the back": the president was deceived by a foreign power into betraying America First.

One thing is missing from each of these criticisms: none of them who ask profited from the oil price spike; shale producers needed prices for $65 a barrel to remain, and they go on them. Kent's framework protects entirely American capital: it argues that the problem is foreign manipulation and that the solution is purer nationalism. Eliminating Israel's influence makes American foreign policy rational, peaceful, and benign.

This is false. Imperialism doesn't need to be tricked into war. It wages it on its own. War is how it resists overproduction, secures energy markets, disciplines rivals, and generates profits for the arms and oil sectors, whose interests drive policy. The Israeli bourgeoisie is a tool in this process—a willing and enthusiastic one—but destroying the tool would not stop the hand that wields it.

We have verified this submission over the decades. The national path has been exhaustively tested. In 1970, Jordan massacred while the PLO was refused to organize the Jordanian masses. In 1976, Syrian troops besieged Tell El Zaatar for fifty-two days while Israeli ships blockaded the area by sea and the PLO stood by to preserve its diplomatic position. In 1982, in Beirut, the PLO defended the city but never armed the population; they evacuated when the multinational force arrived, and Sabra and Shatila followed. In 1993, Oslo made the agreement permanent: the PLO became the Palestinian Authority, a subcontractor of the occupation, a police force that maintained order in exchange for business in Israel's shadow. Each time, workers paid with their lives, and the bourgeoisie reaped the diplomatic rewards.

We are not calling for better international politics. We are not calling for reforms or the election of better politicians or a more efficient counterbalance to the power of imperialism. These are the recipes of the bourgeoisie's own criticisms—who wants imperialism to operate economically more, more quietly, with less embarrassment. We demand the destruction of the system that produces these wars. Communists stand behind the program confirmed by a century of counterrevolution: no support for any bourgeois state, no support for any false national movement that chains the proletariat to its exploiters, no patriotic front, no sacred union, no "lesser evil". Revolutionary defeatism in every country at war. Transform the imperialist war into class war.

What is needed is the independent organization of the working class to defend its own interests alone, in unions freed from the regime's apparatus, under the leadership of its own party - the party of the communist revolution, which does not waver in the face of political trends changing and does not follow movements, but prepareds, with iron disciplines and theoretical clarity, for the moment when the crisis of capital will project the class on the stage of history.

The Arab national path has proven to be closed. This was confirmed by 1967, sealed in blood in 1970, 1976, 1982, and 1993. Iranian nationalism, nor Palestinian nationalism, nor Israeli nationalism point the way forward. Now, all they demand is that workers die for the preservation of a dying world.

Only the path to the international emancipation of the working class remains clear. The independent organization of the proletariat beyond all borders, against all states, against all bourgeoisies. Palestinians, Israelis, Iranians, Europeans, Americans, Asians: they all share a common enemy.

We said it in 1967 and we repeat it: either the proletarians of the Middle East will fight together to overthrow the power of their bourgeoisies—with the proletarians of the imperialist metropolises setting an example of a battle that knows no boundaries of race, state, or religion—or there will be war again. There and everywhere. Today and tomorrow.

But the system that imposes this war arms also the gravediggers who will end it. Our duty as communists is to be ready.