by Rima Najjar
Gaza sits at the center of that shift. It has not transformed everything, but it has done something more specific and more dangerous: it has made the system visible in real time. In doing so, it has exposed the neocolonial governing method practiced by the Israeli–American formation and characteristic of late empire — rule through permanent crisis, coercive capacity without legitimacy, and narrative control that collapses the moment it is deployed.
A governing formation is now visible that retains destructive capacity while losing the ability to stabilize the world it disrupts. The question is no longer whether this order has prevailed in the short term — it clearly has— but how long it can persist without legitimacy, consent, or a credible moral framing, and without the economic buffers that once absorbed Washington’s fallout. That vulnerability is underscored by U.S. debt approaching historic levels, persistent inflation that narrows policy options, and domestic inequality that undermines claims of a model worth exporting.
Nowhere is this collapse of narrative and exposure of method more visible than in the governing formation linking Washington and Tel Aviv.
The Israeli–American Administration
At the core of this exposure lies the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv, still commonly described as an alliance. That label now obscures a deeper convergence of governing method — a shared administrative grammar rather than a traditional partnership. The United States has long exercised coercive power abroad through spheres of influence, regime pressure, and resource control. What distinguishes the current phase is the degree to which these practices have become explicit, accelerated, and methodologically aligned with techniques refined in Israel’s settler-colonial context.
This governing method refers not to internal rule over a citizenry, but to external governance through the control of political, economic, and security constraints — where “security” functions as a justification for force, sanctions, surveillance, and military enforcement that delimit another society’s political options without granting it agency or protection.
Recent U.S. conduct in Venezuela illustrates this governing method in a particularly stark form. After years of escalating sanctions and diplomatic isolation, U.S. military forces conducted a high-risk operation on January 3, 2026, to apprehend Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in Caracas. Widely reported under the name Operation Absolute Resolve, the operation involved coordinated strikes against air-defense infrastructure and the deployment of special forces who, according to U.S. authorities and widely reported at the time, transferred Maduro and Flores to the United States to face federal criminal charges, including allegations of narcotrafficking.
This marked a sharp escalation from coercive pressure to direct military intervention, rare in the contemporary Western Hemisphere.
Greenland reveals the same governing logic in distilled form: territorial entitlement framed as strategic necessity. When the U.S. president publicly described the island as “necessary” and spoke of acquisition as conceivable, sovereignty was reduced to logistics. Territory appeared not as a political community but as an asset to be secured. Strategic desire became entitlement. This posture mirrors Israel’s political grammar in Palestine, where land is continually reclassified as security space and acquisition normalized through necessity rather than consent. What matters here is not whether acquisition succeeds, but that sovereign territory can be spoken of as administrable space, available for management, purchase, or control, without regard for the political agency of those who inhabit it.
Iran is not an exception within this governing formation but its most stable expression. For decades, the United States has treated Iranian sovereignty as conditional through a standing architecture of extraterritorial sanctions, permanent threat, and legal exceptionalism. Acting in close alignment with Israeli threat assessments, U.S. policy pursues calibration — pressure calibrated to constrain autonomy while keeping the regime intact. The United States treats Iran’s nuclear latency — the technical capacity to develop nuclear weapons without having done so — , alongside missile development and regional alliances, as grounds for activating an already-installed coercive infrastructure. The United States enforces Iran’s continued containment by conditioning economic relief and political maneuverability on compliance with U.S.-defined limits, sustained through sanctions, economic constriction, and persistent exposure to military threat.
Taken together, these cases demonstrate continuity with earlier U.S. imperial practices while marking a decisive intensification. Israel’s settler-colonial system — permanent emergency, territorial entitlement, population management, and moral exemption — no longer appears as a marginal special case. It increasingly operates as a working model. The Israeli–American administration emerges as a shared mode of external governance, increasingly explicit in its exercise of authority and evident in the circulation of surveillance, targeting, and constraint-enforcing administrative practices between the two states.
This mode of governance changes how power operates and how it is displayed. As U.S. officials move from influence to administration and from managed consent and narrative legitimacy to overt control — and as Israeli officials continue an approach long applied to Palestinians — political style hardens into performance. Official language becomes a vehicle for threat, giving way to open disregard for legal constraint and civilian protection. The figures long described as the Ugly American and the Ugly Israeli come fully into view.
The Ugly American / The Ugly Israeli
The phrase the Ugly American once named a specific pathology: arrogance, ignorance, and cultural blindness embodied in the figure of the imperial emissary — soldier, diplomat, contractor, or aid worker — who moved through other societies with power but without understanding. This figure assumed entitlement rather than accountability, operating as if presence alone conferred authority. That diagnosis rested on an important premise: that American power still sought legitimacy and therefore remained vulnerable to moral critique.
The present ugliness takes a different form. It expresses the public style of a governing method that asserts authority through display and threat rather than persuasion. U.S. officials perform this posture openly, using coercion as political language and displacing diplomacy as a governing practice. They treat international law as an obstacle to be overridden, and they render the lives of people beyond U.S. borders expendable without embarrassment. Ugliness now appears as a governing disposition, evident in how U.S. power treats sovereign territory as negotiable and how it normalizes extraterritorial enforcement, culminating in unconditional political and military backing of actions in Gaza that a growing number of legal scholars, UN experts, and human rights bodies argue meet the threshold of genocide.
Alongside this stands the Ugly Israeli, forged within a settler-colonial system that long normalized another people’s suffering as ordinary governance. Israeli political discourse openly entertains erasure and relocation of Palestians. Israeli military officials present displacement as a logistical operation, while Israeli media institutions condition publics to absorb destruction as necessity and routine. The governing structure operates openly in a register where shame does not function as a constraint.
In this moment, U.S. officials speak openly of acquiring sovereign territory as a strategic option, and Israeli ministers publicly promote the “voluntary emigration” of an entire population. The display of power becomes the objective, establishing a governing register in which shame, reciprocity, and restraint carry no weight. Territorial domination produces fear and resistance; system domination produces dependency and compliance. The Israeli–American model relies on the former in an order increasingly organized around the latter. This performance of entitlement persists even as the architecture of global power shifts beneath it, exposing a governing style increasingly misaligned with the conditions that once stabilized authority.
Pax Silica and the Misalignment of Power
Power now concentrates in technological systems rather than territorial control. Compute capacity, standards, platforms, and interoperability increasingly determine who can participate, connect, transact, and function. At the same time, the United States and Israel remain deeply invested in domination of land and bodies, governing through force, securitization, and strategic acquisition. This divergence produces a structural tension between two coercive logics: one that governs through space and physical control, and another that governs through systems, access, and dependency. In the emerging order, chips, data, protocols, and platforms shape power by regulating entry and compatibility. Sovereignty becomes conditional on technical integration, and compliance replaces consent as the dominant form of alignment.
The Israeli–American formation must be understood against this reorganization of power. It operates as a coercive project calibrated to territorial domination at a moment when authority increasingly flows through systems rather than space. Its reliance on permanent emergency, visible force, and moral exemption reflects misalignment rather than consolidation. The governing logic applied in Gaza, the treatment of Greenland as administrable territory, and interventions that condition sovereignty elsewhere all presume that control of land and bodies still converts into durable authority. In an order structured by access, standards, and integration, that presumption increasingly fails. Force remains abundant; legitimacy does not.
This misalignment is intensified by the medium through which power now travels. Control increasingly operates through technological systems that constrain without occupying — surveillance architectures, algorithmic targeting, administrative platforms, and standards regimes that shape political outcomes while evading responsibility for governance. These systems enable external actors to delimit political possibility, manage populations, and stabilize preferred outcomes without engaging consent or accountability. In Gaza, proposals for AI-managed administrative regimes, sometimes described as a “Board of Peace,” make this logic explicit, treating political life as a technical problem to be optimized rather than a collective process to be governed.
Analysts often describe this configuration as Pax Silica: an order in which power accrues to those who design, govern, and control technological systems. Within it, China operates primarily as a systems-builder, constructing parallel technological and infrastructural ecosystems — payment systems, supply chains, platforms, standards bodies — to reduce dependence on U.S.-authored and Western-dominated frameworks. China contests U.S. authorship of the global system’s technical foundations by competing over who writes the rules, sets the standards, and controls the infrastructure through which global power now circulates.
Russia occupies a different position. Lacking the capacity to build and integrate large-scale technological ecosystems, it exercises power primarily through disruption rather than governance. Military force, energy leverage, cyber operations, and political destabilization strain existing infrastructures and alliances, raising costs and uncertainty. In Ukraine, Russia has damaged energy grids, ports, transport corridors, and regional supply chains through war, producing instability without orienting force toward an ongoing project of external rule. This reflects a structural limit rather than a wartime failure: Russia fractures systems through force without converting that disruption into administration; the Israeli–American formation uses force to sustain an ongoing project of external rule.
The result is neither a stable nor unified order, but a field of contestation structured by infrastructure, access, and system compatibility rather than ideology, territory, or formal alliance. Power accumulates unevenly through systems that reward integration and punish exclusion, even as older territorial logics continue to generate resistance and instability.
Territorial domination produces fear and resistance; system domination produces dependency and compliance. The Israeli–American model relies on the former in an order increasingly organized around the latter. These architectures do not reinforce one another. They collide.
It is within this collision that the limits of the Israeli–American governing model become unmistakable.
Misalignment and the Breakdown of Governance
What follows from this collision is persistent misalignment, not transformation. The Israeli–American administration continues to govern external conflicts by treating other people’s territory as a security problem to be controlled through force — militarizing borders, reclassifying land as threat space, and managing populations through permanent emergency — even as global power increasingly reorganizes around technological systems, standards, and access rather than physical control.
Faced with declining legitimacy and diminishing political yield, U.S. and Israeli authorities increasingly resort to coercion as a substitute for influence, persuasion, and consent in their relations with other societies. Coercion fills the gap left by eroding legitimacy, signaling a late-empire drift in which emergency becomes routine and escalation replaces the ability to read political reality, register feedback, and adjust policy rather than intensify force. Without crisis, the system lacks the grammar that once structured its decisions and justified its authority.
This diagnosis does not imply terminal erosion or imminent collapse. The United States retains enormous material capacity, economic scale, and technological advantage, and it can still absorb backlash in the short term. Policy persistence — including continued military and political support for Israel despite widening public distrust — reflects that capacity. The argument here is narrower and structural: material power no longer reliably converts into legitimacy, consent, or durable political yield. Economic slack can absorb protest without resolving it. Innovation can generate growth without repairing trust. The crisis is not only one of legitimacy but of legibility: a governing system increasingly unable to interpret its own actions, capable only of escalation.
Pax Silica may reorganize influence around technology and standards, but it does not regenerate moral authority or democratic belief. What persists is power; what thins is the ability to stabilize it through consent rather than coercion.
Gaza crystallizes this mismatch. Israel deploys overwhelming force without political yield. It secures neither Palestinian compliance, nor Hamas’s neutralization, nor the pacification of the population. Violence persists. U.S. diplomatic cover frays. Legal jeopardy increases. Arab and Global South alignments continue to fracture. Domestic opposition intensifies. None of this delivers deterrence, political settlement, or regional stability.
This military mismatch is mirrored by a political one. As the doctrine fails to produce submission abroad, it simultaneously catalyzes delegitimation at home, fracturing the domestic coalitions required to sustain such policies over time.
Domestic Fracture
The erosion of legitimacy produced by coercive misalignment abroad now rebounds inward, reshaping political life within the United States as institutional fracture. The governing logic that once stabilized consent across a broad political base increasingly fails to reproduce that consent, even as it remains formally intact.
This fracture appears domestically as attrition rather than consolidation. By early 2026, a growing number of Democratic candidates publicly decline funding from AIPAC and related PACs as unconditional support for Israel becomes electorally destabilizing. In key primaries in states such as New York and Michigan, challengers elevate U.S. policy in Gaza from a marginal concern to a measure of political legitimacy. Polling in competitive districts indicates that large segments of Democratic voters withdraw support from candidates visibly aligned with unconditional military aid.
The significance of these developments lies in the weakening of an enforcement mechanism that once disciplined dissent and stabilized alignment. Funding pipelines that previously functioned as instruments of party cohesion now generate internal strain. Foreign policy positions that once anchored moral authority increasingly fragment domestic coalitions. Institutional continuity persists, yet loyalty becomes conditional rather than automatic.
Exposure defines this moment. The doctrine remains operational, but its capacity to organize consent erodes more quickly than any alternative can take shape. What loses credibility extends beyond individual policies to the broader assumption that power can govern indefinitely through enforcement without undermining the political structures that sustain it.
Across global, regional, and domestic arenas, the same pattern now consolidates: a system operating without narrative cover.
Exposure
This moment marks a threshold. Gaza forced the governing method exercised by the Israeli–American administration over other societies into view, stripping away the last layers of narrative insulation. What remains is a form of external governance that operates through coercion, constraint, and permanent emergency, revealed through its own procedures rather than through error or exception. The system now confronts itself in real time, unable to convert force into legitimacy or escalation into resolution.
Visibility does not dismantle this form of power. It alters the conditions under which it can operate. Once exposed, governance over other peoples can no longer rely on moral narrative, procedural ambiguity, or strategic silence to stabilize authority. The method persists; visibility does not end the system. What it ends is the era in which it could pretend to be something else.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher, and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
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