By Mohamed El Mokhtar

Gaza is not an aberration. It is a mirror. And in that mirror, young America no longer sees empire — it sees its moral ruin.

Not long ago, in a courteous written exchange, an American friend — Anglo-Saxon, an attorney by profession, graduate of George Washington University and Yale — shared with me a conviction he believed to be lucid: in his view, Israel far surpassed the Arab world in diplomacy, strategy, and technology.

As for American Jews, he said, they excelled in navigating the levers of power — not through privilege, but through merit. What he saw was not domination or capture, but the rightful fulfillment of political modernity.

I read his message attentively. Then I responded, soberly. I do not dispute the resilience of a people, nor their achievements. What I question is how a particular ideological loyalty — Zionism — has become a tacit orthodoxy at the very heart of American power. A reflexive dogma, where any nuance is suspect and every question deemed heretical.

I made sure to draw a distinction our era seems to have forgotten: to criticize a structure of power is not to target a community. To illustrate the ideological saturation now governing American institutions, I cited — carefully, and with critical distance — a troubling phrase once uttered about “Jewish domination of the West.” Not to echo it, but to expose its falseness. The real subjugation is not to a people, but to a pro-Israel lobby: structured, strategic, effective — and, unlike other powerful interest groups (in defense, energy, pharmaceuticals), uniquely shielded by symbolic impunity.

This is not about identity, but about power. About a narrative machinery built on moral intimidation, reputational disqualification, and the sanctification of memory. A memory hardened into armor. An impunity enshrined as a doctrine.

My friend declined to explore this complexity. A few days later, he ended our correspondence. Not out of disdain, but out of fear. Fear of certain words. Fear, too, of upsetting the domestic balance: his wife was Jewish, and Gaza was already a cursed word. He wasn’t fleeing an idea, but a climate. The climate of an age where doubt is fault, and thought, transgression.

That says it all. America no longer thinks. It recites. It no longer governs. It bows.

What it now venerates is a binary and brutal vision of the world — the vision of an empire that still thinks like a frontier. This posture is not new. The Anglo-Saxon elite, forged in expansion, never needed lobbies to wield violence. But without the current ideological grip, it might have hesitated more, and struck with more restraint.

This is a nation of self-righteous cowboys, convinced every conflict is a duel and every dissenting voice, betrayal. The Middle East is not a region to understand, but a stage to dominate. In this mental theatre, Israel plays a familiar role: enforcer, moral outpost, flattering reflection of an America enamored with its own imperial image.

This reflex is not a deviation. It reveals a deeper deficiency: a country without an aristocracy of the mind. Jackson was born in a log cabin. Truman never attended university. Reagan played the presidency like a role. Bush Jr., despite Yale, embodied privilege devoid of culture. As for Trump, he is the raw child of a frenzied empire — wealth without nobility, power without restraint, vulgarity without shame.

Beneath this vacuum lies a deeper unease: a WASP elite, long dominant but rarely erudite, destabilized, for decades now, by the rise of Jewish American elites: more cultivated, more cosmopolitan, more strategic, and deeply Zionist. Supported by an influential, doctrinaire evangelical base, these elites have mastered the narrative. The white Protestant elite, rather than compete, aligned itself. Some out of conviction; many out of fear or quiet resignation.

And so the story changed hands. Not by conspiracy. But by surrender — and by imposture.

And that surrender kills. In Gaza, it kills bodies. In America, it kills minds. There, hospitals collapse. Here, consciences do. What remains is not diplomacy or thought, but political liturgy. And those who utter the word “genocide” — students, artists, journalists — are dragged to the scaffold.

The moral fracture is wide open. A generation—educated, critical, often Jewish itself—now sees what the ruling class can no longer name: that Israel has become a genocidal war machine, and America, its dispenser of impunity.

This complicity is bipartisan. Sometimes it bears the name Biden, sometimes Trump. One embodies soft submission, the other, brutal blindness. Trump was not a mistake — he was a verdict. A revenge against the betrayal of universal principles. He did not merely dismantle institutions; he revived white supremacism, reawakened latent antisemitism.

A tragic irony: In defending Israel blindly, America endangers the moral future of its own Jewish citizens.

More broadly, the country has surrendered to lobbies, especially the pro-Israel lobby. From progressives to conservatives, this submission transcends party lines — it has become a bipartisan rite.

Its foreign policy is no longer autonomous. It is bought, captured, and executed.

And this submission rests on deeper foundations: a rotten electoral system where money dictates the agenda, and loyalty to Israel matters more than any platform, principle, or nation.

Since the Citizens United ruling, corporations can fund Political Action Committees and flood campaigns with dark money. Corruption does not stop at Congress — it reaches the Supreme Court itself.

Nancy Isenberg has shown that America was never a meritocracy, but a hierarchy of humiliation. Richard Slotkin reminds us that its founding mythology rests on redemptive violence. And Alexander Hinton teaches that genocide does not begin with bombs, but with silence.

Gaza is not an aberration. It is a mirror. And in that mirror, young America no longer sees empire — it sees its moral ruin.

Yet even fractured, the country is still crossed by currents of resistance: lucid intellectuals, principled journalists, visionary artists. But these voices remain scattered, uncoordinated.

Across from them, the conservatives know how to lock down the narrative, dictate the agenda, and occupy the space.

The war in Gaza did not only redraw a map. It revealed a generational rupture. A young, educated, connected, critical America is rising. And it speaks a language the political elite no longer understands.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.