News reports and viral videos making rounds this week show something people rarely see. A sitting member of the US Congress, surrounded and detained -- not by a hostile foreign army, but by armed Israeli settlers, on the very land the United States funds and defends. Ro Khanna, who travelled to a Palestinian village razed by settlers to bear witness to escalating violence, was met not with cooperation but with armed intimidation. Settler hoodlums, carrying U.S.-made M4 rifles, blocked his path and summoned the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). In a scene that defies the very nature of the U.S.-Israel alliance, the IDF sided with the settlers, not with an American congressional delegation. It took police intervention to end the hour-long ordeal. Yet the humiliation did not end there. Congressman Khanna later articulated a chilling racial reality: he was seen first as "brown," second as a "U.S. Congressman," and third as an "American citizen." If a sitting congressman can be surrounded and held by settlers and treated with such contempt with impunity, it is worth asking plainly what protection ordinary Palestinians -- stripped of any embassy, any lobby, any congressional seat-- can possibly expect on the same soil, day after day, year after year. One can only imagine the daily horrors inflicted upon the three million Palestinians living under a brutal system of apartheid.
This degradation is not an isolated incident; it is the logical consequence of a state-sponsored settler violence that has uprooted families, destroyed orchards, demolished homes, and stolen livelihoods for decades. Hundreds of illegal settlements—condemned by the United Nations and much of the world—continue to expand as state policy, systematically eroding the very foundation of the two-state solution. Palestinians are subjected to daily violence, displacement, and dehumanization while their cries go unheard. The world watches, but the world remains silent, largely because the United States has thrown its full weight behind the oppressor.
As global attention fixates on the looming U.S.-Iran conflict, the occupying regime has intensified its atrocities in Gaza and the occupied territories with shocking impunity. Over 75,000 lives have been lost—most of them women and children—with thousands more buried beneath rubble, dying not only from bombs but from hunger, thirst, disease, heat, trauma, and forced displacement. Permanent evacuation orders have turned Gaza into a death trap. Families are herded like cattle, stripped of their homes, their dignity, and their future. The thirst for blood remains unquenched, and the world’s indifference is a stain on humanity’s conscience.
This onslaught—whether in Beirut, Gaza, or elsewhere—is inseparable from American support. Israel is inconceivable without the United States. Receiving approximately $3.8 billion annually in military aid, plus supplemental packages that have surged since October 2023, Israel’s war machine is entirely sustained by U.S. resources. Its military prowess is fortified under the American umbrella, and its diplomatic immunity is secured by the U.S. veto at the Security Council. With active U.S. backing, Israel has built an impregnable defense and acquired nuclear capabilities. Remove the United States from the equation, and Israel would be stripped of its arrogance, unable to bully its neighbours or pursue its expansionist vision of a "Greater Israel." It would be forced to abandon warmongering and seek peace through diplomacy. But the U.S. continues to fuel the fire, acting not as an arbiter of peace but as a complicit partner in genocide.
The tragedy of Palestine, however, is merely the latest chapter in a long and sordid history of American interventionism that has left a trail of death, destruction, displacement, hunger, and disease across the globe. From the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 to the installation of the Shah, from supporting dictators like Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to propping up brutal regimes in Latin America, the United States has consistently prioritized its geopolitical interests over the will of sovereign peoples. In the name of containing communism, America meddled in Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, and a number of other nations, leaving behind failed states and shattered societies.
If a sitting congressman can be surrounded and held by settlers and treated with such contempt with impunity, it is worth asking plainly what protection ordinary Palestinians... can possibly expect.
In the post-Cold War era, the pattern has not changed—it has only evolved. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, justified on flimsy pretexts, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, created millions of refugees, and unleashed chaos that persists to this day. The destruction of Libya, once the wealthiest and most stable nation in Africa, turned it into a lawless haven for extremists and a launching pad for human trafficking. And now, the drumbeats of war with Iran grow louder, with the U.S. seemingly being tactfully trapped into fighting Israel’s war, a conflict that would plunge the entire region into catastrophic conflagration.
Beyond overt warfare, America’s neo-colonial posture is unmistakable. It threatens smaller nations like Greenland, it imposes crippling sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba, and it even resorted to the brazen kidnapping of Venezuela’s elected President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia, bringing them in handcuffs to the United States—an act that reeks of piracy, not diplomacy. Every weak nation that stands defiant is browbeaten into submission through war threats, tariffs, and economic coercion. Trade itself has become a weapon of intimidation, forcing nations to bend the knee or face ruin. At 250 years , America should have matured beyond such warmongering. Instead, it clings to an imperial delusion that serves only its military-industrial complex, not its people.
In stark contrast to this relentless aggression, China has charted a different course. While the United States squanders trillions on weapons and overseas military bases, China invests in roads, ports, railways, and trade networks that connect nations rather than divide them. China has lifted hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty, modernized its cities, and exported technology and infrastructure to developing countries through initiatives like the Belt and Road. It has avoided wasting its resources on endless conflicts, choosing instead to build bridges.China’s rise has not come at the expense of war; it has come through discipline, planning, and a commitment to internal development and global cooperation. If America truly aspires to greatness, it should Xmas emulate this model of constructive engagement rather than cling to the bankrupt ideology of domination.
The United States, with its vast economic power and technological prowess, has the capacity to lead the world in eradicating the true enemies of humanity: hunger, poverty, disease, unemployment, illiteracy, and climate change. Instead, it chooses to invest its wealth in the machinery of death. Every dollar spent on bombs is a dollar stolen from schools, hospitals, and clean water. Every war waged is a war against the future of our children.
The world does not need another empire. It needs a partner in peace. It needs a superpower that uses its leverage to halt genocides, not enable them. It needs a nation that upholds international law, not one that vetoes it. The United States must re-evaluate its policies towards Israel and towards the entire Global South. It must stop wasting American taxpayers’ money on a bandit colonial settler state whose hands are drenched in the blood of innocents. It must cease its regime change operations and its neo-colonial bullying. It must, at last, prioritize the welfare of its own people and the well-being of the planet.
Our collective enemies are war, hunger, displacement, disease, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and climate change. These are the battles that deserve a frontal assault, waged with the world’s collective resources—resources that truly belong to the people of this planet, not to corporations or war profiteers. The United States, at this pivotal juncture in history, must choose: it can continue its path of destruction, or it can join hands with the rest of humanity to build a future of justice, dignity, and lasting peace.