Opinion: Israel is the last vestige of European colonialism - so Trump defends it at all costs

Middle East Eye

a day ago

In a column for Middle East Eye, academic and author Kyle J Anderson argues that supporting Israel is not just a matter of American foreign policy, but is serving a proxy battle in culture wars over history, identity and the legitimacy of settler-colonialism.
He writes: "The Maga-Israel alliance should be understood as part of a broader effort to suppress the memory of colonialism's atrocities and to create a sanitised narrative of colonial history in order to resuscitate colonialism in the present.
"In the Maga version of modern global history, Israel has come to represent the symbolic last vestige of European colonialism still allowed to flourish, and Palestine stands in for the last unresolved case of anti-colonial resistance. Supporting Israel, then, is not just a normal matter of American foreign policy; it is a proxy battle in culture wars over history, identity and the legitimacy of settler colonialism.
"The Maga movement has mobilised around a common sense of nostalgia for a past in which white, western, Christian civilisation exercised global dominance. Commentators reflecting on Trump's first term often associated this notion with a desire to re-establish the belief systems of the United States in the 1950s, the dawn of the so-called 'American century'.
"In his second term, it seems more appropriate to interpret Maga nostalgia as invoking, not the era beginning in the 1950s, but rather the one that began a century earlier at the peak of Euro-American colonialism."
US President Donald Trump speaks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outside the White House in Washington, DC, on 7 April 2025 (Brendan Smialowski/AFP)