“No One Wants to Fight for Israel”—So Why Does America Keep Doing It?
For generations one relationship has shaped American strategy in the Middle East—though the forces sustaining it are rarely discussed openly.
On the morning of March 4, 2026, the hearing room of the Senate Armed Services Committee was arranged in the familiar geometry of American power. Four-star generals sat in careful rows behind microphones and briefing folders. Senators moved through prepared questions. Cameras watched from the back of the chamber. The language of national security—measured, technical, rehearsed—filled the room.
Then the silence broke.
From the audience gallery a man rose to his feet. He wore the formal dress uniform of the United States Marine Corps. His name was Brian McGinnis, a firefighter from Raleigh, North Carolina. As the hearing proceeded—its subject the expanding war between Israel and Iran—McGinnis shouted across the chamber.
“America does not want to send its sons and daughters to war for Israel!”
Capitol Hill police moved quickly toward him. As they pulled him from his seat and dragged him toward the doors of the chamber, McGinnis continued shouting.
“No one wants to fight for Israel!”
At the front of the room Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana—a Republican member of the Armed Services Committee and himself a former Navy SEAL—rose from his seat and stepped toward the officers escorting McGinnis from the chamber, urging them to push the protester through the doorway. Around the room other voices erupted. Protesters shouted “shame.” The generals seated at the witness table remained motionless, their uniforms heavy with ribbons, their faces fixed in the careful stillness that official hearings demand.
Outside the chamber the confrontation ended abruptly. McGinnis was taken into custody. According to Reuters and a statement from Capitol Police, he had suffered a broken arm during the struggle and was charged with assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, and unlawful demonstration.
It lasted only a few minutes.
But moments like that rarely emerge from nowhere.
For generations the alliance between the United States and Israel has been treated in Washington as something close to unquestionable—an assumption embedded so deeply in American strategic thinking that it often appears less like a policy choice than a permanent feature of the geopolitical landscape.
Which raises a deeper question.
Why has this relationship endured with such extraordinary durability for so long?
To answer that question requires looking beyond the ceremonial language of democracy and shared values that usually defines the alliance. It requires examining the historical forces that made the partnership possible—and the political structures that continue to sustain it.
Video: Ex-Marine Brian McGinnis is removed from a March 4, 2026 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing as he shouts, “No one wants to fight for Israel.” USA Today.
The Architecture of an Alliance
For decades—quietly, steadily, and with a clarity that often went unspoken—Israel has functioned as a strategic extension of American power in the Middle East. Washington has built formal alliances across the region, normalization agreements with governments like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, diplomatic frameworks meant to signal balance and partnership. But beneath those arrangements lies a different reality of power. When American policymakers required a military partner capable of acting quickly, striking decisively, gathering intelligence with sophistication and reach, it was Israel they relied upon. Israel possesses the technological capacity, the intelligence networks, and the military infrastructure that allow it to operate as a constant anchor for American influence in a region that successive administrations in Washington have regarded as volatile and strategically indispensable.
Seen in that light, Israel’s role has never been simply that of a small nation protected by a superpower. It has been something more consequential: a state whose military strength and intelligence capacity reinforce the broader geopolitical architecture the United States began constructing after the Second World War. Since the late 1940s, American policy in the Middle East has revolved around a central objective—maintaining dominance. At first that meant displacing the old European empires, particularly Britain. Soon it meant confronting Soviet influence as the Cold War expanded into every corner of the globe. Later it meant containing Arab nationalist movements and regional governments that sought to challenge American power in their own region. Within that framework Israel emerged not merely as an ally but as a heavily militarized state embedded in Western political, economic, and cultural systems—an outpost of a larger strategic order.
The alliance between the United States and Israel endures because three forces reinforce one another: strategic necessity, political affinity, and domestic power.
Over time the relationship evolved around those forces.
Washington provided diplomatic protection in international forums, billions of dollars in military financing, and access to advanced weapons systems that few other nations received. In return, Israel supplied intelligence drawn from the region’s complex political landscape and acted as a military force capable of projecting power without requiring the deployment of large numbers of American troops. In a region where direct American intervention often carried enormous political cost, Israel became something different: a partner capable of extending the reach of American strategy while absorbing many of its risks.
Profoundly Unfree and Racially Riven Societies
Beneath the language of strategy—beneath the maps, the intelligence briefings, the diplomatic communiqués—lies another reality that rarely appears in the official vocabulary of alliances.
Both the United States and Israel are profoundly unfree and racially riven societies.
This is not how diplomats describe them when they stand before microphones and speak about shared democratic values. Yet history makes the point unmistakable. The United States emerged as a republic that proclaimed universal liberty while simultaneously constructing one of the most brutal systems of racial slavery in the modern world. From the late seventeenth century through the Civil War, millions of Africans and their descendants were held as property—bought, sold, and worked under a system whose wealth flowed directly into the economic and political foundations of the nation.
Even after slavery’s formal abolition, the system did not disappear; it reorganized itself. Across the American South a regime of racial domination took shape that historians later called Jim Crow. Black citizens were stripped of political power through poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright violence. Segregation became law. Lynchings—public spectacles of racial terror—functioned as enforcement. For nearly a century the United States operated as a democracy for some and a racial dictatorship for others.
And although the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century dismantled the legal architecture of segregation, the deeper structures of inequality never vanished. They reappeared in new forms: mass incarceration, systematic police violence, economic marginalization, and persistent disparities in housing, education, and political representation. The rhetoric of freedom continued, but the lived experience of millions of marginalized Americans revealed the distance between democratic ideals and social reality.
Israel’s political development unfolded in a different historical setting, and it did not begin in 1948. Its origins lay decades earlier, in the final years of the nineteenth century, when a new political movement emerged among segments of European Jewry confronting the violence and exclusion of the collapsing imperial order. Pogroms in the Russian Empire, the rise of modern nationalism, and the failure of Jewish emancipation in parts of Europe produced a generation of activists who concluded that security and political equality could not be guaranteed within European states. Out of that crisis came political Zionism—the argument that Jews, like other nations of the age, required a sovereign homeland of their own.
Beginning in the 1880s, waves of migrants from Eastern Europe arrived in Ottoman Palestine. They established agricultural colonies, purchased land through newly created institutions, and built cooperative settlements that functioned not merely as farms but as the early scaffolding of a national project. Schools, labor federations, land trusts, and defense organizations gradually formed a parallel civic infrastructure—an emerging society developing alongside, and increasingly in tension with, the existing Arab population that had lived in the region for generations. Land purchases displaced tenant farmers in some areas; economic separation hardened political identities. By the turn of the century, two communities were beginning to imagine incompatible political futures within the same landscape.
The First World War transformed that local tension into an international question. In 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration promising support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine while also pledging not to prejudice the rights of the territory’s existing inhabitants. When Britain assumed control of the territory under the British Mandate for Palestine, the declaration became embedded in imperial governance. Jewish immigration accelerated during the interwar years, particularly as antisemitism intensified in Europe. Zionist institutions expanded schools, militias, economic networks, and political councils—structures that increasingly resembled the administrative skeleton of a future state.
Image: Cover of the first edition, showing part of The Snake Charmer (1880), an Orientalist painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) currently held at Clark Art Institute.
For the Arab population of Palestine, these developments appeared very differently. To many Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlement looked less like national revival and more like an externally backed colonization project unfolding under imperial protection. Resistance grew accordingly. The decades of British rule were marked by recurring outbreaks of communal violence and by the large-scale Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, in which Palestinian insurgents attempted to halt both immigration and land transfer. British repression crushed the revolt, but the conflict had already hardened into a struggle between two national movements claiming the same territory.
By the 1940s the political landscape of Palestine had been transformed. The Jewish community had constructed robust governing institutions and armed organizations; the Arab political leadership had been weakened by repression and internal division. As Britain prepared to withdraw after the Second World War and the United Nations proposed partitioning the territory into two states, the unresolved struggle over sovereignty erupted into war. In the upheaval that accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948, roughly 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes in events Palestinians remember as the Nakba. The new state emerged from that war with expanded territory and a transformed demographic landscape. From that moment forward, the political structure of Israel revolved around sustaining a Jewish national homeland within a land still inhabited by another people who maintained their own claims to territory, sovereignty, and political rights.
Over time a complex system of legal and territorial control emerged. Palestinian citizens of Israel occupied a formally subordinate status within the state’s political framework, while Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza lived under varying forms of military administration, occupation, and blockade. Land laws, settlement policies, and differential legal systems created a structure in which two populations existed within the same geographic space under profoundly unequal political conditions.
Many scholars, human rights organizations, and international observers increasingly describe the resulting structure as apartheid. The term refers not merely to discrimination or unequal policy but to a durable system of governance in which political dominance is preserved through a combination of legal authority, territorial control, and institutional design. In Israel-Palestine that structure has taken the form of a layered regime combining elements historically associated with Jim Crow and apartheid.
Like the American racial order that consolidated power in the South after the collapse of Reconstruction, the system includes a population that formally possesses citizenship yet exists within a framework of enduring disparities in land access, municipal investment, infrastructure, and political influence. The structure preserves the appearance of democratic inclusion while maintaining a hierarchy in the distribution of power and resources.
Beyond the borders of Israel proper, the structure becomes more explicit. In the territories captured after the Six-Day War, two populations inhabit the same land but are governed through entirely different legal systems. Israeli settlers fall under Israeli civil law and participate fully in the institutions of the state. Palestinians living beside them are governed largely through military authority, subject to a different legal code, different courts, and different rules of movement and access to land.
The institutional logic is clear—fragmented citizenship, parallel legal regimes, and territorial administration operate together to produce a durable hierarchy between populations living within the same geographic space.
None of these realities appear in the ceremonial language of alliance.
Instead, American and Israeli leaders speak about democracy, security, and shared values. Yet the deeper historical record reveals something more complicated: two states whose political systems were forged in the crucible of racial hierarchy, territorial conflict, and the management of populations excluded from the full promise of citizenship.
That shared history does not by itself explain the alliance between the two countries. But it shapes the political imagination through which each understands the other—and the world beyond its borders.
For governments accustomed to defending systems marked by deep internal contradictions, the language of security often becomes the most powerful unifying principle of all.
The Machinery of Support
But there is another dimension to this relationship as well, one that operates alongside the strategic alliance rather than replacing it. The geopolitical alignment between the United States and Israel does not exist outside American domestic politics. It is sustained within them. Over the decades a powerful political infrastructure has developed inside the United States to ensure that support for Israel remains not merely consistent but central to American political life.
This infrastructure is extensive. A network of lobbying organizations, political action committees, advocacy groups, donors, and policy think tanks has worked carefully and persistently to maintain bipartisan support for Israel across successive administrations and Congresses. Organizations like AIPAC have played a particularly visible role in shaping congressional attitudes, advocating for military aid packages, and reinforcing strong diplomatic backing for Israeli policy. Their influence operates within a broader coalition that includes evangelical Christian organizations, Christian nationalists, segments of the defense industry, and political donors who view the U.S.–Israel alliance as strategically, ideologically, or religiously indispensable.
As a result, support for Israel does not function simply as a foreign policy position debated among diplomats or military planners. It is embedded within the machinery of American electoral politics. Members of Congress, presidential candidates, and party leaders often treat support for Israel as a political baseline. Advocacy organizations track voting records, fund campaigns, and mobilize pressure when political figures appear to question the alliance. Over time this system has helped ensure that the strategic partnership between the two countries remains reinforced by domestic political incentives.
These political dynamics do not contradict the strategic logic of the alliance; they strengthen it. In Washington and in European capitals Israel is viewed as a regional partner capable of projecting Western power and sharing intelligence. Within domestic politics, organized networks help sustain the consensus required to maintain that partnership. Both forces operate simultaneously, reinforcing one another.
Within this environment intelligence itself becomes a form of power. States capable of gathering information about influential figures—about their vulnerabilities, financial ties, and private conduct—possess a strategic advantage that often operates beyond public view. Israel’s intelligence services, particularly Mossad, have long held a reputation for aggressive and sophisticated operations. Over decades they have developed extensive global networks and demonstrated considerable skill in acquiring information that can shape diplomatic relationships and political negotiations behind the scenes.
In such a world, knowledge becomes leverage.
The Quiet Power of Intelligence
In Washington, moments of geopolitical tension have often carried a second life inside domestic politics.
When leaders find themselves surrounded by investigations, financial exposure, or legal jeopardy, the sudden emergence of an external crisis can alter the terrain on which those battles are fought. A foreign conflict shifts attention. Congressional inquiries fade from the front pages. The language of scandal gives way to the language of national security.
The pattern is not new. War has long offered politicians a different stage on which to stand.
But in the modern world another force operates quietly beside the visible machinery of diplomacy and war.
Intelligence.
For generations intelligence services have gathered information about the private worlds of influential political figures—their finances, their relationships, their vulnerabilities. Such information rarely appears in public accusations or diplomatic communiqués. It circulates elsewhere: in classified briefings, intelligence reports, and private files where it can become something more valuable than scandal.
Leverage.
Networks of wealth and influence often create the pathways through which such information travels. Social circles intersect with political circles; financial relationships intersect with diplomatic ones. Over time those intersections produce records—travel logs, financial transfers, testimonies—that begin to reveal the outlines of connections once dismissed as rumor.
In recent years the political world surrounding Donald Trump has produced an unusual volume of such documentation: investigations, court filings, financial disclosures. Among the most notorious intersections in that world was Jeffrey Epstein, whose operations moved easily through networks of financiers, politicians, and international elites.
What once seemed implausible has, in several cases, begun to leave traces—documents, testimonies, financial trails.
And in the quiet world where intelligence, power, and politics intersect, such traces are rarely accidental.
Intellectual Map
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. The Message. New York: One World, 2024.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. New York: One World, 2017.
Eberly, Keaton, and Rodney Overton. “ ‘Brian Is Finally Home’: Raleigh Man Injured During Senate Hearing Protest Released from Hospital.” CBS17, March 9, 2026. https://www.cbs17.com/news/local-news/wake-county-news/brian-is-finally-home-raleigh-man-injured-during-senate-hearing-protest-released-from-hospital/amp/.
Erakat, Noura. Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Falk, Richard. Palestine’s Horizon: Toward a Just Peace. London: Pluto Press, 2017.
Finkelstein, Norman G. Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.
Finkelstein, Norman G. Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. London: Verso, 1995.
Gorenberg, Gershom. The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977. New York: Times Books, 2006.
Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Essential Essays (Vol. 2, pp. 185-224). Duke University Press, 1992.
Khalidi, Rashid. Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013.
Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020.
Khalidi, Rashid. The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.
Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Makdisi, Saree. Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
Mearsheimer, John J. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
Mearsheimer, John J., and Sebastian Rosato. How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023.
Mearsheimer, John J., and Stephen M. Walt. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2011.
Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Morris, Benny. 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
Pappé, Ilan. A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006.
Pappé, Ilan. The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge. London: Verso, 2014.
Pappé, Ilan. Ten Myths About Israel. London: Verso, 2017.
Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
Said, Edward W. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Shlaim, Avi. Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London: Continuum, 1999.