Zionist mythologies of combat-proven “innovation” profoundly mystify this story of dependence—a pattern that builds on long established precedent. Since its founding, Israel has relied on Western patrons for the necessary resources to sustain its endless aggression, but it has done so while maintaining that the West depends on Israel, an “innovator” that the West cannot afford to do without. Throughout the 20th century, these innovation myths have served to obfuscate, and indeed sustain, the fundamentally dependent nature of the Zionist project. In the 1950s, for instance, the Israelis convinced French officials like General Maurice Challe that they were (in his words) “consummate artists” at managing the unruly Arabs, and that the kibbutz offered the French an alternative “model” for the French pacification of Algeria. In the coming decades, Israel turned to America with similar stories of its supposedly unparalleled martial prowess and its role as a model—for effective counterinsurgency in the post-Vietnam moment, defending against “international terrorism” during the Cold War, and fighting “Islamic” insurgencies after 9/11. In each of these cases, accounts of Israel’s autonomous military dominance paradoxically unlocked the very Western investments Israel needed to develop and sustain such dominance. That dynamic continues to this day, with stories of Israeli AI innovation facilitating the US’s authorization of hundreds of millions of additional dollars in American government funding to Israel. These developments highlight the paradox at the core of Zionist project: namely, that its breathless claims to stand-alone innovation are part of its efforts to further imbricate itself into Western empire.
For those opposed to the ongoing violence in Gaza, then, replacing the narrative of Israeli security innovation with the story of Israeli dependency becomes a crucial task. Such a reframing helps us locate Western power as the true motor powering the Gaza genocide. It also helps us understand that when Israeli technologies, systems, and strategies are used to undermine political movements around the world, they are testaments not to Israeli innovation but to the Western patronage that ultimately underwrites them. Finally, the dependency narrative provides us with openings onto political action against the Gaza genocide as well as the Israeli state more broadly. Because if the Israeli war machine is dependent on Western backers, the sites of intervention become clear: The governments and corporations of the West.