Israeli tanks are now rolling into Gaza City, the last section of the Strip left standing. One by one, buildings are detonated into rubble. Families are expelled at gunpoint. Gaza’s government media office has reported that Israeli forces have deployed more than 80 explosive robots inside residential structures in recent days, part of a deliberate scorched-earth strategy.
This destruction comes in the midst of a famine carefully engineered by siege. Hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children have already starved to death.
The crisis is no accident of war. It is not chaos but method. Gaza’s famine is engineered, its destruction mapped out long before the latest assault began. What is unfolding is genocide — planned in Washington and Tel Aviv.
A blueprint for ethnic cleansing
With the fall of Gaza City, the entire Strip will be under Israeli occupation. Netanyahu describes this as the “concluding moves”: the mass confinement of Palestinians in sealed camps and their eventual expulsion from their ancestral homeland.
When Donald Trump declared in February that the United States would “take” and “own” Gaza, forcing Palestinians into “other countries,” many dismissed it as unserious posturing. But months later, it is clear his words anticipated the very strategy now unfolding.
A leaked strategy document — developed with input from the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the Boston Consulting Group, and the Tony Blair Foundation — lays out this policy in the antiseptic language of corporate boardrooms. Every Palestinian life is treated as a financial liability. Expelling one person is calculated to “save” $23,000. Those who leave “voluntarily” are offered $5,000 and two years’ rent; those who die, the document implies, represent the greatest economic benefit of all.
This is genocide repackaged as financial optimization. The language of return on investment, public-private partnerships, and capital expenditures obscures the brutal reality: a population being starved, bombed, and shot down so that financiers and politicians can balance their ledgers.
Gaza and imperialism’s new geography
The extermination of Gaza is not only ideological but strategic. The document presents two direct benefits for the United States: “massive financial gains” and the acceleration of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, also known as IMEC.
IMEC, announced by Washington in 2023, is a geopolitical counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It envisions a trade corridor linking India to Europe through the Arabian Peninsula and Israel. Netanyahu himself made the connection clear at the United Nations, holding up a map of a “new Middle East” in which Israel stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, erasing Gaza and the West Bank entirely. He called this corridor “visionary.”
Weeks later, Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza. The timing was no coincidence. The strategy document calls Gaza an “Iranian outpost” threatening the corridor. Its annihilation is described as essential to securing the region for U.S. and Israeli dominance and ensuring access to trillions of dollars in natural resources.
Starvation as a weapon
This is the context for the famine now consuming Gaza. Starvation is not a byproduct of war but a weapon of it. Children with skeletal frames crowd makeshift hospitals. Families scavenge for scraps. Israeli forces open fire on crowds desperate for food aid. This is extermination by hunger, reinforced by bombardment and expulsion.
Public opinion tells a different story. Polls show support for Israel at an all-time low in the United States, including among Jewish Americans. Around the world, opposition to the genocide is overwhelming. Yet Washington and its allies continue to arm and fund the onslaught. The explanation lies not in popular will but in the deeper logic of imperialism.
Zionism and imperialism
U.S. support for Israel cannot be explained simply by the influence of AIPAC or by blackmail scandals surrounding figures like Jeffrey Epstein. It goes back more than a century, to Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, when London endorsed a Zionist homeland in Palestine as a way to fragment Arab unity. After 1948, the United States inherited this role, seizing upon Zionism as a means of dividing and suppressing the Arab world.
The Arab world, stretching across North Africa (e.g., Egypt, Libya, Algeria), the Nile Valley (Sudan), the Levant (Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine), to the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, etc.) is home to over 470 million people, vast oil reserves, and critical trade routes like the Suez Canal.
Its sheer potential for unity posed a grave threat to imperialist domination. Pan-Arabism, the movement to unite the region, emerged as a natural response. Imperialist powers answered with relentless efforts to suppress it — backing monarchies, waging wars, and installing dictatorships. Zionism became one of their sharpest tools: a settler colony used to divide and weaken the Arab nation.
Unlike Arabs, Jews in modern times lacked the shared features of a nation — territory, economy, or language. Hebrew was revived from religious use to serve as a national tongue only under Zionist direction. The State of Israel was made possible only through imperialist sponsorship. For Washington, it provided a dual solution: preventing Jewish Holocaust survivors from reinforcing labor and communist movements in the United States, and positioning them as a garrison force against Arab nationalism.
After the Soviet Red Army defeated the Nazis and freed the concentration camps, socialism was seen as a powerful force of liberation. This idea rapidly spread beyond Europe and was brought by war refugees to the United States and the rest of the world.
Reaction without exit
Today, Israeli society finds itself at a historical dead end. Like Afrikaner colonists in South Africa, settlers have become increasingly reactionary. But unlike Afrikaners, who depended on the exploitation of African labor, Israel seeks to eliminate Palestinian labor altogether. Its settler-colonial logic drives toward expulsion and extermination.
For U.S. imperialism, this logic is convenient. Israel’s crimes can be portrayed as uniquely “Israeli,” allowing Washington to deny its own hand while reaping the benefits. In reality, Israel has fought every war since its founding as a proxy for U.S. power.
The logic of finance capital
What is happening in Gaza today is not an accident. It is capitalism in its imperialist stage stripped bare. As Lenin wrote more than a century ago, finance capital does not strive for freedom but for domination. It transforms famine into a weapon, ethnic cleansing into an investment opportunity, and genocide into a growth strategy.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars has already concluded that Israel is guilty of systematic war crimes and genocide. Yet the responsibility does not rest with Israel alone. The U.S. imperialist state has armed, financed, and excused this crime. At home, the same government slashes social programs, busts unions, suppresses wages, and prepares to crush dissent.
The horror unfolding in Gaza is not just a crime against a people — it is a warning of what capitalism has in store for the world. If U.S. imperialism is willing to annihilate millions of Palestinians as the prelude to its confrontation with China and Russia, how many billions will it sacrifice in a global war?
The genocide in Gaza is inseparable from the capitalist system that created it. To fight for the survival of the Palestinian people is to fight against the global dictatorship of finance capital itself. The future of humanity depends on nothing less.
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