Zionism, U.S. Imperialism, and the Capitalist Ruling Elite

The two and a half year genocide against the Palestinian people and the war on Iran have laid bare the integrated nature of zionism and the U.S. imperialist ruling class.[1] A dialectical analysis of Iran's resistance exposes the imperialist character of this ruling class and the material bonds that sustain it.

It is this ruling class that has launched the war on Iran, a war being waged against the backdrop of accelerating U.S. imperialist decline and the emergence of an anti-imperialist response. This response is manifested in the consolidation of South-South strategic alignment and the construction of alternative military, economic, financial, and diplomatic infrastructure beyond the reach of Western domination. Iran has played a central role in this process. In this sense, the war on Iran is a war against South-South cooperation; it is an attempt to preserve a declining unipolar order by force, and to contain the rise of a competitor like China by denying it access to important resources and trade. The new cooperation among non-Western states and actors is helping to challenge the ability of the United States to maintain polarized accumulation on a world scale and to continue the historic drain of wealth from the Global Majority to the imperial core. The war on Iran is, therefore, the empire's desperate attempt to halt this historic transition by force.

Iran’s anti-imperialist resistance is an attack on the very infrastructure that enables U.S.-led imperialist power projection in West Asia. Nowhere is this more evident than in Tehran’s recent designation of major technology corporations as legitimate military targets, which represents a direct assault on the digital nervous system of capitalist imperialism itself. At the height of the Ramadan War, in a decisive escalation of anti-imperialist warfare, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard formally designated 18 major technology corporations as military targets. The list includes Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla, Amazon, Oracle, and Palantir. The Iranian government explained that these companies provide the artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure used by the U.S. military to track and eliminate Iranian leadership and destabilize the country. Nvidia chips run the large language models that analyze surveillance data. Google Cloud servers host the intelligence platforms that coordinate drone strikes. Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) host the cloud computing infrastructure that powers the U.S. military's AI decision-support systems—including tools used for intelligence analysis and operational planning in strikes against Iran itself. All of these companies were strategic targets as Iran sought to disrupt the enemy's technological advantage (Murphy 2026).

As the Palestine solidarity, anti-ICE, Black and Puerto Rican liberation, and abolition movements have long argued, these companies are the digital nervous system of settler colonial genocide, imperialist war, and fascist control and counterinsurgency in the belly of the beast. They are the technological backbone without which U.S. imperialist and zionist forces could not operate. Thus, Iran’s resistance is not confined to defending national and regional sovereignty; it is part and parcel of the anti-capitalist campaign to dismantle U.S. imperialism in Asia.

The United States was the first nation in the world to recognize the State of “Israel” in 1948, the same year as the founding of the apartheid State of South Africa. Since then, Western capital has been integral to the viability of the zionist entity. Far from being a “neutral” actor during the mandate system, the British fostered zionist capital accumulation through granting monopoly rights and access to credit denied to Palestinian capital (Meitan 2019). Even U.S. imperialist-aligned trade unions like the AFL-CIO participated with capital investments in pre-1948 land grabs and early industry (Labor4pal 2024). Since then, as a result of deeper integration between zionist capital and technology, those ties have only grown.

And yet, analysts across the political spectrum increasingly argue that Israel controls U.S. foreign policy in West Asia. From far right personalities like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly to progressive liberals such as John Mearsheimer, these figures believe that Israel is a burden on the United States, one that the U.S. must relinquish if it is to regain its global prominence. This analysis is convenient, for it absolves the United States of its foundational and ongoing imperialism both in North America and around the world. In this case, however, the tail is not wagging the dog. Far from benign, the rhetorical function of this narrative is to save U.S. imperialism from the zionist project that it upholds. In this essay, we outline the role of zionism in upholding U.S. imperialism and the ruling class.

The Financial Basis of Zionism

The synthesis of U.S. and zionist capital and technology do not reflect a bilateral partnership, but rather, a dense articulation of capital that undergirds U.S. imperialism—operating through a shared techno-economic and military architecture. Israeli firms are deeply embedded within U.S. circuits of capital accumulation, with dozens of them listed on the NASDAQ. These firms are structurally dependent on access to U.S. finance capital, venture ecosystems, and exit markets. Companies such as Mobileye (acquired by Intel), Check Point, and NICE exemplify how Israeli high-tech is valorized within U.S. financial markets, securing elevated valuations in sectors central to contemporary capitalist accumulation (e.g. cybersecurity and AI).

At the level of production, the relationship is similarly integrated. Israel functions as a strategic node within U.S.-aligned global supply chains. U.S. corporations, including Intel, which has invested billions in semiconductor production facilities in Israel, and Microsoft and Google, which operate major R&D centers there, anchor Israel’s role in the global technology economy while reinforcing its position as a site for the development and testing of advanced systems. This extends into rapidly expanding collaboration in drone and autonomous systems. Israeli firms such as Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, major producers of unmanned aerial vehicles like the Hermes and Heron drones, maintain deep ties with U.S. defense contractors and markets that include joint ventures, co-production arrangements, and sales to U.S. military and border enforcement agencies. These systems, marketed as “combat-proven” on Palestinians, circulate within global markets as instruments of racist surveillance, targeting, and population control, linking sites of militarized experimentation to circuits of accumulation.

This dynamic is inseparable from the settler-colonial context of zionism, in which technological development and territorial control have historically been intertwined, and where infrastructures of surveillance, border control, and population management are refined and exported as commodities within global markets. Firms such as Paragon Solutions, an Israeli spyware company founded by former intelligence officials, and U.S.-based Palantir Technologies, which has collaborated with Israeli imperialist security architecture while providing data analytics platforms to U.S. military, ICE and intelligence agencies, exemplify this fusion of private capital, intelligence architecture, and white supremacist, settler colonial state violence. These companies operate at the intersection of data extraction, predictive analytics, and coercive power, embedding both U.S. and Israeli actors within a shared architecture of surveillance and control. A settler-colonial outpost and a client state of the US, Israel preserves U.S. dollar hegemony, as it “earns its share” exporting technological militarism to share in U.S. global dominance.

The Zionist State’s Budget

Israel has been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world, receiving upwards of $300 billion . Today, nearly all of that aid goes to the Israeli military. This aid is so significant that even zionist politicians view it as an existential matter. If the U.S. were to stop supplying it with weapons, there would be no alternative for protecting and defending the zionist project (Freilich 2017).

The state of Israel receives the majority of its revenues through taxation. Almost 40 percent of the GDP is generated through income from stolen Palestinian land in the form of property. Similarly, cities throughout Israel receive a large share of revenues through property taxes, (OECD 2021) sustained by the continuous theft of Palestinian land. Revenues from income tax, value-added tax, and corporate taxes comprise the remainder of the State budget. In short, Israel’s defense apparatus is funded largely by the United States, while its industrial base is funded through expropriation of Palestinian land and wealth. The fusion of settler colonialism and U.S.-led imperialism undergirds the very existence of the zionist entity.

An analysis of Israel’s function as a U.S. military satellite and mercenary force in the region tells a similar story. Put simply, Israel does the dirty work of the U.S. in the region so that North American politicians may maintain plausible deniability. For example, after the U.S. public and politicians condemned U.S. support of the Contras in Nicaragua and made such support unlawful, the U.S. outsourced that effort to Israel. Israel ran weapons for the U.S., conducted training for the Contras, and served as a laundering hub (AISC et. al 2025) (Aviña 2024).

Zionism as Recycled Primitive Accumulation

Nowhere is the adaptability of imperialist accumulation more visible than in the military-industrial complex, where capital accumulation depends directly upon organized destruction and what Ali Kadri describes as the "accumulation of waste." Rosa Luxemburg's theory of ongoing primitive accumulation, outlined in The Accumulation of Capital (1913), argues that capitalism requires constant violent expansion to survive. She viewed violence not just as capitalism's birth process but as a permanent, systemic tool—a "continuous method" involving imperialism, war, and bloody exploitation. Primitive accumulation is ongoing, operating as the process through which "racially segregated spaces and labor hierarchies" are organized by capital to drain surplus value from the periphery, “contain surplus populations, suppress revolt, and reproduce social structure across both national and international scales” (Bein 2026). As the ideological and material anchor of imperialism, zionism facilitates ongoing primitive accumulation in the world system.

The material expression of this ongoing primitive accumulation is starkly visible in the numbers of the global war economy. Global military spending was $2.89 billion in 2025, an increase of 2.9 percent in real terms from 2024 and the eleventh consecutive year of growth (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2026). As a result, the MSCI World Aerospace and Defense Index recorded a total return of 52.99 percent in 2025, while the MSCI World Index (representing the broader market) had a total return of 15.41 percent over the same period. Lockheed Martin secured billions in new missile and air defense contracts as the United States and its allies rushed to replenish depleted stockpiles sent to West Asia and Eastern Europe. Raytheon expanded Patriot and missile production contracts tied directly to Gulf militarization, while Northrop Grumman reported major increases in orders linked to drone warfare and surveillance systems.

Drone manufacturers have especially benefited from the rapid expansion of permanent war infrastructure. U.S. firms such as General Atomics saw rising demand for MQ-9 Reaper systems, while zionist weapons manufacturers, including Elbit Systems and Rafael, marketed their platforms as “combat proven” through the genocide in Gaza (Liang et. al. 2026; Mishra 2025; PressTV 2025; Lakhwani 2026). In this sense, imperialism reveals its deeply parasitic character: entire sectors of capital accumulation increasingly depend not on productive investment, but on permanent war, surveillance, sanctions, death, and destruction—what Kadri describes as “the accumulation of waste.”

The oil industry has likewise profited enormously from the war. Brent crude prices surged following attacks in and around the Strait of Hormuz, generating windfall profits for major oil corporations and Gulf energy elites. ExxonMobil and Chevron both reported sharp increases in upstream earnings tied to elevated oil prices, while Saudi Aramco recorded hundreds of billions in annual revenue as energy insecurity drove speculative trading and supply panic across global markets (Banerjee 2025; Reuters Staff 2026).

The financial sector has proven equally capable of transforming death and destruction into profit. Wall Street investment banks have posted obscene profit surges amid the imperialist assault. Morgan Stanley reported a profit of $5.57 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up 29 percent year over year (Yahoo! Finance 2026). Goldman Sachs reported a profit of $5.63 billion, up 19 percent (Earnings Whispers 2026).JPMorgan Chase posted earnings of $16.49 billion, up 13 percent (Finanzen 2026). These banks have cited heightened trading activity, deal-making, and "robust client engagement" as drivers of their surging profits. But the more accurate explanation is that Wall Street has profited directly from the war itself, as major investors and hedge funds have placed speculative bets on its trajectory by shorting energy and shipping firms exposed to the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz while taking long positions on defense contractors, commodities, and oil futures. Insider trading has also surged, including trades placed by individuals with ties to intelligence agencies and defense contractors (Hui Jie 2026).

The artificial intelligence and technology sectors also benefited from the war economy. Microsoft, which has provided cloud and AI services to the zionist military and government through Project Nimbus and other contracts, reported strong quarterly profit growth (Davies & Abraham 2025). There is a deepening cooperation between Microsoft and zionist military intelligence, including the use of Azure cloud infrastructure by Unit 8200. Palantir Technologies, whose platforms have been used by ICE, the Pentagon, and the zionist military, also saw major revenue growth driven by rising demand for military AI and battlefield analytics systems. Palantir’s U.S. government revenue rose 84 percent year over year in 2026 amid growing Pentagon demand for its Maven battlefield AI platform (Singh 2026).

From Lockheed Martin's missile contracts to Palantir's battlefield AI, from Elbit Systems' genocide-tested drones to Goldman Sachs' war-fueled trading profits, every sector of the zionist-imperialist war economy advances the same process of primitive accumulation that Luxemburg theorized over a century ago.

Imperialist Wars Are Class Wars: Victory Belongs to the Resistance

Like the United States, which developed through chattel slavery, Indigenous genocide, and ongoing settler colonialism, the zionist entity is a product of the imperialist forces of ongoing primitive accumulation. To parrot tail-wagging-the-dog propaganda—the claim that Israel controls U.S. foreign policy rather than serving as its most reliable military satellite—is to enable the North American disavowal of ongoing exploitative imperialist processes and to abandon our comrades in the North American metropole. This recognition of imperialism as the primary contradiction is not merely theoretical; it is borne out in the concrete material dynamics of the war on Iran, where the struggle for control over the Strait of Hormuz has simultaneously struck at the heart of global capitalism while revealing the adaptability of imperialist profits.

Iran's strikes on Amazon data centers have exposed the digital nervous system of capitalist imperialism itself—a system from which Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the military-industrial complex have all profited obscenely. Wall Street banks have posted obscene profit surges amid the assault. Nvidia's stock price soared 42 percent in the first three months of 2026. Microsoft reported a 24 percent increase in quarterly profits driven largely by government war contracts. Amazon Web Services saw its defense and intelligence division revenue grow by 31 percent despite Iranian drones striking its facilities. The oil industry has pocketed windfall profits from Hormuz-driven price spikes.

Over the past two decades, advanced capitalist militaries have woven digital platforms into every stage of conflict, including intelligence gathering, drone coordination, and battlefield decision-making, all of which increasingly depend on cloud systems and artificial intelligence. Project Nimbus, the Zionist entity's multibillion-dollar agreement with major cloud providers, illustrates how private corporations now deliver advanced computing services directly to security agencies and military command structures. Technology firms no longer merely supply equipment; they maintain operational ecosystems that sustain real-time imperialist capabilities. From Iran's strategic viewpoint, this convergence transforms corporate infrastructure into functional extensions of enemy state power. Disrupting these networks offers a means of imposing costs, deterring escalation, and reshaping power imbalances without engaging in direct large-scale conventional confrontation.

These short-term profits for Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the fossil fuel industry, and the military-industrial complex cannot reverse the march of history. The petrodollar monopoly has been pierced. De-dollarization is accelerating. The ultimate victory of Iran and the Axis of Resistance lies in reversing the historic drain of surplus value from the Global South, delinking and bolstering genuine state sovereignty so that wealth can be retained within national and regional borders, and redirecting those resources away from imperialist accumulation and toward the material needs of workers and peasants. Within the class politics of the imperialist core itself, this war represents yet another instance of capitalist accumulation taking place on the backs of the working class and sub-proleterian—especially racialized and precarious workers—who will be forced to bear the brunt of inflation, austerity, supply shocks, energy price increases, and the broader social devastation generated by imperialist crisis. Imperialist wars are class wars. To recognize this is to recognize that the struggle against zionism and U.S. imperialism is inseparable from the struggle against capitalism itself.

Notes

[1] This class is popularly referred to as the “Epstein Class” because of its members’ close ties to financier and child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who is believed to have worked for, or in collusion with, the security apparatus of the zionist entity. Fused through capital, shared intelligence and military infrastructure, and white supremacist settler colonial violence, this class, as Nick Estes writes, is the “insulated stratum of wealth and power that governs modern political life” (Estes 2026).

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