US Foreign Policy from Ferguson to Gaza: The Racial Logic of Israel-Palestine

From the streets of Ferguson to the besieged neighborhoods of Gaza, America’s politics of racialized control reveal a disturbing continuity. At home, Black Americans face systemic criminalization; abroad, Palestinians are denied self-determination under an occupation the US continues to bankroll.

Recent remarks by Trump and his allies illustrate this trend. Nick Adams, Trump’s nominee for US ambassador to Malaysia and, in his words, an ‘incredible patriot,’ declared: ‘If you don’t stand with Israel, you stand with terrorists’ (Ratcliffe, 2025). The story made headlines, just weeks before Trump criticised the UK’s decision to recognise Palestine as a sovereign state by September – a rare glimmer of hope for a people longing for liberation. “You could make the case that you’re rewarding people, that you’re rewarding Hamas if you do that. I don’t think they should be rewarded. I’m not in that camp”, Trump proclaimed (Wendler, 2025). These repeated statements by President Trump align his foreign policy unapologetically with what Hill and Plitnick (2021) describe as the “religious-nationalist settler movement” – a project rooted in the explicit denial of Palestinian self-determination. Despite the escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza, US policy continues to enable this agenda, underwriting a genocide with American taxpayer dollars. What looks like foreign policy is, in reality, the projection of America’s domestic hierarchies onto the global stage.

To date, calls for action remain scarce, even as these incidents edge the world further away from international peace and cooperation. Such conditions, driven by one of the world’s most self-serving leaders, demand fervent denunciation by American progressives, as they betray the very principles they claim to revere. Yet, in response, only a modicum of protest has unfolded. In June, 5 million people rallied under the “No Kings” banner, followed by nationwide occupations of 1,600 sites in July, condemning the Trump administration’s immigration raids (Wehle, 2025). While symbolically powerful, these moments of resistance struggle to build the sustained pressure necessary to break a system built to endure them. Year after year, the US continues to position Israel as its leading foreign aid benefactor, maintaining strong ties with its plutocratic ally (Hill and Plitnick, 2021). This poses the question: why have liberals failed to significantly disrupt Trump’s unwavering support for Israel?

Tracing the Roots of America’s Israel/Palestine Agenda

Answering this troubling question means confronting a deeper truth. US foreign policy in Israel/Palestine isn’t just a product of today’s geopolitical instability. It’s anchored in the nation’s unresolved struggles with white supremacy and Islamophobia, forces that won’t fade with sporadic protest alone, particularly in a political era where Trump isn’t dismantling these ideologies but deepening their grip. These internal systems of oppression fundamentally inform the actions America takes in the Middle East.

As a catalyst point, Itaoui and Elsheikh (2018) give attention to the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing war on terror. From this moment, a politics of fear surrounding minority groups has gripped the nation, allowing discrimination against them to seep into the heart of America’s domestic affairs. Nowhere is this more starkly reflected than in the country’s burgeoning prison system. Today, US prisons hold a quarter of the world’s incarcerated population (over 5 million people), with Black Americans making up a grossly disproportionate 2 million of those behind bars (The Sentencing Project, 2024). Even more astoundingly, 1 in 5 Black men born in the US in 2001 are projected to face imprisonment at some point in their lives (ibid.)

Source: (Carson and Kluckow, 2023)

The same structures that over-police and imprison millions of Black Americans also shape the lens through which the US engages the Middle East. The “war on terror” was not simply a foreign campaign — it reinforced a domestic system that casts entire communities as inherently suspect, guilty until proven innocent. This same logic travels abroad, justifying military aid and occupation in Palestine under the guise of “security” while simultaneously excusing systemic violence against people of color at home.

Though slavery has been formally abolished, America’s historical rendering of minorities as the perpetual “other” – judged not by their actions but solely their skin colour and perceived ideologies – continues to shape systemic discrimination both at home and abroad. In other words, it is not what someone has done, but who they are – Black, Arab, Muslim, Palestinian etc – that defines one’s presumed criminality, rendering these groups, in a grim inversion of justice, “guilty until proven innocent” (Mullin and Shahshahani, 2014).

‘From Ferguson to Gaza’ powerfully captures how this enduring logic shapes US foreign policy today (Malici, 2024). It draws a sharp parallel between the militarised crackdown on Black Americans in Ferguson and the criminalisation of Palestinian in Gaza, showing how the US both sustains and exports racialised regimes of surveillance and control, perpetuating analogous logics of white supremacy that drive American political power.

When Power Silences Progress

Against this backdrop, Silver (2025) reports a surprising shift in US public opinion, with a majority of Americans now viewing Israel unfavourably amid the ongoing conflict. And yet, US government policy remains pro-Israel on every front, signaling a jarring disconnect between public sentiment and state action. This isn’t just political inertia – its further testament to the extent to which white supremacy is baked into America’s institutions, now emboldened by Trump’s return to power (al-Omari, 2025). Evidently, US foreign policy remains trapped, more so than ever before, in an old playbook that has always clung to a status quo benefiting the elite at the expense of the “other”. As long as the US continues to deny Palestinians their right to self-determination, calls for peace will continue to echo into a void. When the moment demands progressive change, America doesn’t just stand still, it doubles down on a long-entrenched system that discards the lives of the oppressed to protect the comfort of the powerful.

Possibilities for Policy Reform

With public opinion tilting towards a more balanced view of Palestinians and Israelis, it’s the seats of authority that remain stubborn. Real change – the kind that can stop this war – needs to happen at the state level, and fast. As Hill and Plitnick (2021) remind us, governments need to “ensure that [their] involvement is based on universal humanistic values applied in a consistent manner”. This has rarely been the blueprint for US foreign policy in Israel/Palestine, where selective morality has long benefited the former over the latter. But Palestine must no longer be rendered exceptional to America’s professed values of freedom and justice. If there’s a path forward for America to enact meaningful change in this tragic saga, it begins with confronting this double standard. US foreign policy must finally align with the basic, non-negotiable rights of all people, not just those who fit its historical ‘us versus them’ narrative. From Ferguson to Gaza, the demand is the same: dignity, equality, and the right to live free from fear. Until US foreign policy reflects those principles, peace will remain out of reach.

Bibliography:

• al-Omari, G. (2025) Accelerating Israeli-palestinian diplomacy after the Iran War, The Washington Institute. Available at: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/accelerating-israeli-palestinian-diplomacy-after-iran-war
• Carson, E.A. and Kluckow, R. (2023) Prisoners in 2022–statistical tables. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 
• Hill, M.L. and Plitnick, M. (2021) Except for Palestine: The limits of progressive politics. The New Press.
• Itaoui, R. and Elsheikh, E. (2018) Islamophobia Reading Resource Pack.
• Malici, A. (2024) The Green Scare: Islamophobia, foreign policy, and the making of American identity. Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. Available at: https://yaqeeninstitute.org/read/paper/the-green-scare-islamophobia-foreign-policy-and-the making-of-american-identity 
• Mullin, C. and Shahshahani, A. (2014) From Gaza to Ferguson: Exposing the Toolbox of Racist Repression. Foreign Policy in Focus, 21.
• Ratcliffe, R. (2025) ‘an insult’: Malaysians slam nomination of ‘alpha-male’ Nick Adams as US ambassador, The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/16/an-insult-malaysians-slam-nomination-of-alpha-male-nick-adams-as-us-ambassador-ntwnfb 
• Silver, L. (2025) How Americans view israel and the Israel-hamas war at the start of Trump’s second term, Pew Research Center. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/04/08/how-americans-view-israel-and-the-israel-hamas-war-at-the-start-of-trumps-second-term/ 
• The Sentencing Project. (2024) Mass Incarceration Trends. Available at: https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/mass-incarceration-trends/
• Wehle, K. (2025) How can we stop Trump from destroying democracy?, Zeteo. Available at: https://substack.com/home/post/p-169561579
• Wendler, J. (2025) Trump brushes of European push on recognizing Palestinian statehood, Politico. Available at: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/29/trump-palestine-statehood-00482126