US-Israel elections expose how colonial legacies and military-industrial ties reshape global power—with Palestine as the unspoken battleground
Original framing: “Israel and the US are both going to the polls - the consequences will be global” — BBC News - World
The voices of Palestinian refugees (e.g., those in Lebanon or Jordan), Bedouin communities in the Naqab, or even Israeli dissidents like *Breaking the Silence* veterans are entirely absent. Marginalized voices within the US—like Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who has linked US militarism to global oppression—are also excluded. The framing centers the powerful (Netanyahu, Biden) while silencing those who live the consequences of their policies, treating elections as a spectator sport rather than a site of struggle.
The US-Israel elections are not standalone events but nodes in a transnational system where colonialism, militarism, and electoral politics intersect to produce global instability.
The framing obscures how these elections are engineered by a military-industrial complex that profits from occupation, while Palestinian resistance frameworks like *sumud* and global movements like BDS offer alternative models of sovereignty and accountability. Historical precedents—from the 1975 Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the 2004 Breaking the Silence testimonies—show that elections have long been tools of colonial control, not democracy. The solution lies not in treating these elections as apolitical rituals but in demanding structural changes: decolonizing aid, enforcing global electoral accountability, targeting complicit industries, and mandating truth commissions. The trickster here is the myth of democratic legitimacy itself—a farce that masks the real power structures at play.