Would the US not exist without Israel, or would Israel not exist without the US?

US President Donald Trump, at the G7 summit, said that Israel would not exist without the US. He said that he had a strong relationship with Netanyahu but warned him to show more restraint. On the same day, addressing Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said, "Without Israel, without the Jewish foundation, there would not be America.”He continued that they owed their very existence to what happened in that land. These are contrarian viewpoints held by top US officials in the same administration, so which one is true?

Would the US not exist without Israel, or would Israel not exist without the US?

The US empire and the Israeli occupation are in a co-constitutive or symbiotic relationship. Israel is a settler colonial state established with the fall of the British Empire and the rise of the US Empire. They are structurally codependent parts of a single global imperial system. Israel acts as a US proxy in the most vital, volatile and resource-rich region, which was historically called the Levant. It is the military foothold that maintains US hegemony globally. Without one, the other eventually collapses.

By internal logic, a settler colonial state has to have continuous territorial expansion and the subjugation of the indigenous population, which creates a permanent state of warfare, which can be seen since the establishment of Israel as a political entity in 1948. Settler colonialism is imperialism’s forward edge, the tip of its spear. The US and Israel both strategically need each other, even if sometimes rhetorically or even tactically they are opposed; without Israel, the US empire would lose its foothold and most important forward proxy in West Asia. Without the US and its endless stream of military and financial aid, Israel would not exist or could not justify its occupation.

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But there is an inherent contradiction within imperialism. The hegemon needs to stabilise its empire and manage its dominance, whereas the settler colony needs war to fulfil its territorial ambitions and combat its growing fear of dependency. This is why the global resistance unites against both the US and Israel because it knows that localised resistance is toothless; it seeks globalisation of the resistance, which seeks to fight the global capitalist and imperialist apparatus. This is the reason why both the US and Israel jointly target Iran, because it has managed to globalise the resistance and emerged as a blueprint of how to resist against an imperial-settler coalition.

In the eschatological view, the US ambassador was implying the Christian Zionist narrative that the US as a nation or the majority of Western nations owes their spiritual and physical survival to Biblical Israel. They imply the Abrahamic covenant, that those who bless Israel will be blessed, while those who oppose Israel will be cursed. While the traditional Christian narrative does not exactly follow the same stream, they consider that the Christian Church succeeded or fulfilled the promises made to biblical Israel through Jesus Christ. But traditional Jewish people do not consider Jesus Christ as sacred or a prophet. Hence, there exists a perpetual conflict of interest within the elites of the US empire.