THE war on Iran by the Trump Gang and Benjamin Netanyahu is furthering extreme reaction. There is the lurid Islamophobia that has accompanied a quarter-century of the war on terror. Its modern roots lie in Western panic at the 1979 revolution that overthrew the shah of Iran. Something the US ruling class has never forgotten.

The unhinged rhetoric of US Secretary of State for War Pete Hegseth marks a new low. It is shorn of even a nod to humanitarianism or the false promises of liberal democracy.

“Kill them all — let God recognise his own,” to lift an order for slaughter from an infamous massacre in medieval Europe that was also justified through a perversion of Christianity.

But Trumpism and the radical right are weaning another spawn of fascistic reaction as well. It is bubbling up from the Maga base Trump cultivated. Not for most, but for many Trump voters, his apparent promise to avoid forever wars, to put America First not foreign states or their adventures, and to fight wars only where the US is directly threatened was a reason to support him.

To those paying attention — as was the anti-war movement in Britain — it was wars already recognised as US failures, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, that he denounced. His policy of deploying crushing force and a reborn military, however, was there in his first term. It is now the US’s gangster-imperialist official doctrine. Others do failed wars: I obliterate and the world bends the knee.

There were strains in the Trump base before this war. His answer to falling working-class living standards was to boast of record stock prices on Wall Street.

Now, instead of a Venezuela-style swift decapitation strike, Trump has chosen to embark on a war with no end in sight. That and to invite ridicule and fear as he makes one fantastical claim after another.

The US military has subtly signalled its decades-long position of distance from Netanyahu’s fanaticism — shared by most Israelis, sadly — of destroying Iran as a modern state. The Pentagon’s policy has been for “containment.”

Still, Trump has gone to war. It is highly unpopular in the US. Its goals are unclear — except in the view of the far-right Israeli government: it wants to secure another territorial expansion and domination of the Middle East.

Out of consternation, an embittered Maga base has become a crucible for racist and fascist radicalisation.

The erstwhile Maga hero Tucker Carlson, whose giant media platform has encouraged talk of him running for president, last week interviewed US neonazi Nick Fuentes.

Trumpist personalities had previously been careful to maintain their distance from the openly fascist right. Now there is normalisation.

Carlson and former Trump loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene have led the argument that Trump has abandoned his America First posture due to the influence of the pro-Israel lobby, which has subverted his government so as to prioritise Israel, not the US.

We’ll turn to the Israel lobby and its role in a moment. For now, that did not satisfy the neonazi Carlson interviewed.

Carlson distinguished between a pro-Israel political lobby in Washington and Jewish people as a whole, pointing out that all sorts of countries and interests lobby for policies that suit them.

Fuentes said: “No… we are talking about Jews.”

You might count this as a success of the Israeli state and of zionism. Through insisting upon a strict identification between Jewishness and that state (and thus the conduct of horrific wars) they have given licence to out-and-out Nazis, who promulgate Hitlerism in any case.

Fuentes added that there is “no other ethnic group with such influence” or “power” in the US. From there he was on to lies about “Jewish power” and auto-loyalty. Israel accordingly is then a product of that anti-semitic falsehood of Jewishness, rather than being an imperialist, colonial distortion of what it is to be Jewish.

Vicious anti-semitism can coexist with professed support for the ethnonationalist state of Israel and its role as garrison against the Muslim and Asiatic hordes.

Joel Webbon is a Christian Nationalist pastor, Maga celebrity and in favour of a civilisational war against Islam. He is not a minor figure. He voiced this week the so-called Great Replacement Theory in which Jews are meant to be plotting to destroy the West through immigration from the global South, “race-mixing” and women’s rights in the name of equality:

“The end game in pushing egalitarianism … is because they want Western people, particularly those of European descent, AKA white people, to stop procreating. This is the destruction of the world. Egalitarianism is not baked into the scripture. It is baked in the fabric of communism, it is baked into the fabric of … Judaism, which I believe is the root of communism.”

These Nazi ideas can flow out of the seemingly more acceptable radical right of the likes of Carlson because their own explanation is fundamentally wrong.

The underlying assumption is that the US state and capitalism are naturally geared to the good of the people of the country. There may be imperfections or special interests that distort it. But America First means good things, especially for the ordinary Americans — who are put first.

When bad things happen, or you’ve been lied to, then some extraordinary explanation is required.

So the Trump Gang going to war willingly alongside Israel must — if you see that it is not in ordinary Americans’ interests — be the product of some alien imposition. Someone making the US do something that it is not in the interests of the US to do.

The fundamental problem with that is that the US, British and other imperialist states have throughout their history done things that are not in the interests of their people. That is what they do.

Imperialist states form policy through various sectional, capitalist interests “lobbying” through their structures and intervening in politics.

And that policy — tilted one way or the other — is of a great power state seeking to project the interests of the boss class it serves.

That is why Britain towards the end of the first world war looked at the disintegrating Ottoman empire and decided that a racially exclusive Jewish state in an antagonism with Palestinians would help it in ruling over the Arab East in a joint criminal enterprise with France. The one Jewish member of the British Cabinet voted against doing so.

It is why the US, which had replaced Britain and France as the great power in the region after the second world war, shifted policy after the 1967 war to make Israel a cornerstone of its approach to dominating the Middle East and its economic resources (which today include enormous investments into US capitalism and sustaining the dollar in return for promised security guarantees). The US had in 1956 used its financial might to humiliate the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Nasser’s radical Egypt.

Britain and then the US have sponsored colonial-settler Israel because it has been in their interests to do so. That does not mean that immediate interests have stayed the same or are identical with the Israeli state’s.

Israel has developed as a major power in its own right. It pursues its distinct interests. Though it is still dependent hugely on US backing. When Trump said that Israel’s open war on the people of Gaza had to stop, it did — however much it continues beneath the headlines.

The variety of pro-Israel entities and individuals who constitute a loose “Israel lobby” have an influence on US policy formation — and via that in Britain and other countries also. Israel invests heavily in it. As many scholarly works such as Ilan Pappe’s latest book, Lobbying for Zionism, explain, their critical role is in locking out alternatives to backing Israel when there is, as is frequently the case, a conflict in assessing how to pursue US or British imperialist interests in set circumstances.

That is not the same as negating or determining those interests. The late Robin Cook, who resigned from Tony Blair’s government over the Iraq war, said that the CEO of arms manufacturer British Aerospace “appeared to have the key to the garden door to 10 Downing Street.”

However true, it would be a mistake to think that British imperialism was directed by one corporation.

The contradictions and conflicts are apparent now in Britain as the Starmer government tries both to keep a distance from this disastrous war while at the same time partaking to mollify the Trump Gang – post-Suez, following the US is more deeply embedded in British state policy than any number of personal connections between politicians and Israel.

The imperialist powers in the 1930s and 1940s were capable both of riding anti-semitic prejudice to keep refugees out of their own countries and then of using the victims of the Holocaust as a mask for pursuing their own Cold War interests in the Middle East.

Thus they have favoured forces domestically and elsewhere who would wrongly blame Jewish people for the Palestinian catastrophe rather than what is an extension of European and US imperialism. Jews as two-fold scapegoats.
They could embrace the capitulationist Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, who promoted the crudest bigotry against Jews, because he moved Egypt firmly into the Western imperialist camp. They celebrated the murder of resistance leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon, who said the enemy is imperialism, not Jews.

The likes of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and their acolytes would dearly love to be cuckoos in the nest of the Palestine and antiwar movements.

They, of course, are with the failing Trump Gang when it comes to suffocating Cuba. Because they are with the gangsters Cuba threw out in 1959.

There is no anti-war movement led by the right.

We oppose Israel on internationalist grounds. They, on ethno-nationalist grounds.

Building both the Palestine and anti-war movements and the clarity and reach of the anti-war left is the surest guard against those who would love to corrupt it.

The answer to racism — including anti-semitism — is more anti-imperialism, more anti-capitalism on a socialist basis. Not less.