Ghanem (2013) then sums up the Palestinian nationalism and illuminates how the Israeli military occupation has reinforced Palestinian nationalism for a generation that has witnessed Nakba (disaster) of 1948 and the consequences of the 1967 Six-Day War. They serve for them “as an increasingly unbearable reminder of the fact that being a Palestinian has meant being submitted to a fate determined by others” (PLO, 1984). Next, I offer insights into imperialism as an explanatory paradigm.

Imperialist Paradigm
A materialist understanding of reality appears to have lost its appeal in an era dominated by neoliberal scholarship, devoid of meta-narratives, and with a preponderance of post-modern fad. The cognition of reality is left to some form of eclecticism or pragmatism. The latter is somewhat justified by the mega data that occupies our ‘junk drawer’ in an era of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Hence, a need to develop an algorithm to filter what is objective.

The resultant obscurantism serves the interests of global capital and the exploitation of the majority of the global population. Imperialism as an explanatory paradigm belongs to the genre of meta-narratives.  

Scholarship has sought to understand the inner dynamics of the capitalist system since the Industrial Revolution in the early 17th century, when finance capital sought territories for expansion. Marx (1996) discovered capitalism’s principal law based on profit maximisation as well as its contradictions manifest in the anarchy of production in the economic cycle. To overcome its contradictions, new colonies for the migrant population and the extraction of raw materials are needed.

The resultant complex is imperialism, simply defined as the domination of one country by another. It encompasses economic exploitation and political and neocolonial control of the subject country or territory.

Lenin (1916) has outlined four economic features of imperialism, namely: creation of monopolies through the concentration of production and capital; the deployment of finance capital, a product of the merger of bank and industrial capital; prioritising the export of capital over commodity export, and the formation of a monopolist cartel that divides the world among its members; and the territorial division of the world by the dominant capitalist powers.

The above dynamics have created what Lenin identified as the political substance of imperialism. As he puts it, “Politically imperialism is disposed to seize colonies and new territories; but is, on the whole, a swing from bourgeois democracy to reaction and violence in every sphere of social life” (Lenin, quoted in Rumyantsev, A. M., et al, p. 210).

Given the substance of imperialism, Lenin ([1916] 1917) underlines its methods of contestation, which include combating rivals, depriving them of raw materials, marketing outlets, and credits, and price-cutting and the deployment of the state.

Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the rise of the Ottoman Turks, and the Thirty-Year War in Europe, the Europeans sought a solution to mediate the force theory of the state with the Treaty of Westphalia of 1688, with effect on the countries of Africa and Asia, and Latin America, the base and focus of imperialist exploitation through slavery and colonisation.

All this intensified rivalry among European powers who were scrambling for geopolitical control in order to control resources. It is within this explanatory model that I examine the Middle East crisis. I take a critical look at the dynamics of imperialism and the social forces at play in the conflict.

Robert Cox, the Canadian scholar, theorises about social forces in international relations in his article, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory.”  He sees social forces manifest in the form of classes and other identities in society, along with the state, as the motive force of history. They invariably constitute what he calls historical structures, an aggregation of socio-economic and political forces that shape a given world order, consubstantial in its configuration.

Within Cox’s theoretical schema, states are the objective outcomes of the sum of interactions of social forces that are transcendental in nature. As a critical theory, it interrogates the fundamentals of the existing order in order to transform it. In what follows, I examine the social forces in the Middle East crisis, to wit, the Jewish question, geopolitics and superpower relations, and the Trump Plan.

The Jewish question
The subjection of Jews in Europe and the robust debate it engenders was known as the Jewish question, popularised by Bruno Bauer, the young Hegelian, to which Marx had a rejoinder. The Jews were subject to racial slurs and suffered constrained civil, legal, national, and political status as a minority within the European society of the 18th to 20th centuries.

The metaphor “huckstering and money”, employed by Marx (1845), speaks to the equation of Judaism with the economic life of the Jews and the basis of anti-Semitism in Europe. Being an essential element of the Jewish question, it also provides the dynamic of the Jewish emancipation process.

Stanislawski (2017) has pointed to  the growth of anti-Semitism in multiple countries  The Jews wherever they are had an upper hand in merchant and usury capital and backlashed in anti-Semitism in the context of European socio-economic problems. The climax was the event of the Nazi experiment of extermination of the Jews as the ‘final solution’. Both Western and Eastern European countries were complicit in the holocaust against the Jews, who needed to be expelled from Europe. Black (2004) puts it poignantly:

In the 19th century religious persecution gave way to racial persecution. The Jews were seen as parasites. This change in attitude came from a volatile brew of Social Darwinism and rising European nationalism. The Jews were seen to be the outsiders who not only did not belong but needed to be removed as a threat to society

One could easily discern a dual intent in the return of the Jews to Palestine. The Europeans who wanted to rid themselves of the Jewish burden, had suggested an Eastern African destination, so-called “Uganda Scheme” in 1903 to settle persecuted Jews. It was, however, turned down by the Zionist (https://israeled.org/uganda-proposal/).

It speaks to the desperation of the Europeans to rid themselves of the Jews by any means necessary. Swartz (1970) examines Jewry in the Arab lands and their social, economic, and political integration. He compares and contrasts   the fate of the Jews in Arab-ruled Palestine and that of Medieval Europe and notes that the Jews “were progressively and systematically excluded from one sector of the economy after the other, so that by the late medieval times only the most degrading and menial occupations were open to them” (Swartz, 1970,  p. 25)
The Jews, victims of anti-Semitism, wanted to return back to their historical roots in the Levant. As Stanislawski (2017, p. 1) puts it:

Zionism as a political movement, which led to the rise of the State of Israel, was initiated at the end of 19th century. Non-religious, but political and secular, it represents the will to create a State-Nation to welcome every Jew in the world.

While nationalism writ large in the understanding of Middle East conflict, it is, however, a manifestation of  fundamental underlying factors, which are economic in nature, culminating in broad anti-Semitism in Europe, in which the Dreyfus Affair of 1897 and the Second World War holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany were defining moments.

Odion-Akhaine is a Professor in the department of Political Science, Lagos State University (LASU). He delivered this Lecture (excerpts) at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs on December 2, 2025, as part of the Institute’s Foreign Policy Lecture Series.