Lindsey Graham is right about Gaza

US Senator and professional Southern Good Ol’ Boy Lindsey Graham says the future of warfare looks like Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza. For once South Carolina’s most swivel-eyed hard-right Zionist is bang on the money. And the evidence is right under American noses…

Graham told an audience in Tel Aviv:

The wars of the future are being planned here in Israel.

He insisted that

the most clever, creative military forces on the planet are here in Israel because they have to be to survive

Adding:

So what we’re looking at is that Israel is advancing down the road to new weaponry far beyond us. And it would be nice to have a process where we could be partners.

Self-evidently, a lot of this is is garbage, including the myth of ‘poor little Israel’ fighting to survive in the midst of its enemies. The nuclear-armed settler-colonial state has been backed and armed by – and for the benefit of – Western imperial powers since the very beginning.

Lindsey Graham chats shit from Minnesota to Gaza

Graham is right though that the genocide in Gaza contain a blueprint for future warfighting. In fact, we can even see that taking place inside the US.

As +972 reported on 12 February:

ICE operations increasingly resemble Israeli occupation. That’s no coincidence.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are US president Donald Trump’s own paramilitary force. Officially their remit is to detain undocumented migrants. In reality, they are being used to discipline Trump’s enemies – using Israeli-linked tactics and AI.

Using apps like ELITE and Fortify, ICE’s occupations in places like Minnesota have mirrored Israeli methods.

The technologies supporting their operations illustrate how thoroughly ICE is following in Israel’s footsteps: both ELITE and Mobile Fortify bear a striking resemblance to mobile targeting applications Israeli forces have integrated into their policing arsenal over the last decade.

Graham may be a clown, but even the most ridiculous court jester can stumble upon profound truths.

And in a shock no nobody who has been following the news lately, Graham singled out the UAE for special praise:

Graham told his audience that butcher of Gaza ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu wanted him to tell the UAE’s leaders what a great partner the oil state had been to Israel.

I want to go there tomorrow to and acknowledge MBZ’s leadership and suggest that America improve his capability to defend the UAE and the region.

The UAE, like Israel, is currently deeply implicated in genocide. The UAE is supporting Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces in a war which has killed and displaced millions over the last three years. Here are a whole raft of articles on Sudan we’ve done lately.

Blowback

Lindsey Graham has never seen a genocide – or met a genocidaire – he didn’t like. But at the heart of his commentary there is a fundamental truth: Israel has laid the groundwork for a new scorched earth way of war powered by a deranged cocktail of old-fashioned colonial racism and new-fashioned technology.

For my first piece back at the Canary in 2025 I wrote about what Hannah Arendt would call the imperial boomerang. You can read that here.

But Arendt was merely drawing on something Aimé Césaire had developed. Césaire, a seminal anti-colonialist writer, said of Europeans that before the tactics and technologies of empire exploded back into the imperial core as 20th century fascism:

They tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, … they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.

It’s awfully late in the day, folks. But if I was you, I’d get reading…

Featured image via the Canary