Anti-Zionism Without Anti-Imperialism: The Foreign Policy of Abdul El-Sayed and The Broader NATO-Left

In the contemporary political landscape, a distinct ideological current has gained significant traction among progressives, social democrats, and mainstream liberal-left figures in Western countries. This current expresses sharp, moralized criticism of Israeli state violence against Palestinians while simultaneously aligning with, supporting, or giving critical cover to the core geopolitical objectives of Western hegemony—primarily the U.S. national security state and its multilateral military apparatus, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

This contradiction—professing opposition to Zionism while upholding the frameworks of Western empire—is not an accidental oversight. It represents a specific political tendency often characterized by anti-imperialist critics as the "NATO-Left." A clear case study of this phenomenon is Abdul El-Sayed, a prominent progressive politician, public health official, and media commentator in the United States. By examining El-Sayed’s public commentary, political positioning, and policy stances alongside the political function of the broader NATO-Left, we can understand how anti-Zionism, when decoupled from a rigorous anti-imperialist framework, ultimately serves to rehabilitate the image of Western imperialism.

Understanding the "NATO-Left"

To analyze this political phenomenon, one must first define the concept of the "NATO-Left." As explored in critical left analysis and multimedia commentary—including videos breaking down the term such as those hosted on platforms like Revolutionary Blackout Network—the NATO-Left describes self-identified progressives, democratic socialists, and left-leaning liberals who accept the foundational premise of Western foreign policy: that the United States and its NATO allies act as necessary, albeit imperfect, guardians of global order, human rights, and democracy.

While the traditional anti-imperialist movement views NATO as an aggressive arm of Western monopoly capitalism designed to enforce imperial dominance, the NATO-Left views Western intervention through a humanitarian or liberal-internationalist lens. When NATO forces bomb sovereign states under the banner of "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P), or when Washington funds proxy wars across Europe, Asia, and Africa, the NATO-Left typically frames these actions not as imperial expansion, but as defensive measures or necessary interventions to stop authoritarian aggression.

Consequently, the NATO-Left creates a strict partitioning in its worldview:

1. Local or isolated human rights abuses (such as Israel's actions in Gaza and the West Bank) can be criticized on humanitarian or legal grounds.

2. The global imperial system that enables, finances, and integrates these regional powers (U.S. grand strategy and NATO hegemony) remains fundamentally unchallenged or actively defended.

The Case of Abdul El-Sayed

Abdul El-Sayed emerged as a prominent national voice in American progressive politics through his background in public health, his 2018 Michigan gubernatorial campaign, and his work as a commentator for mainstream media outlets and progressive podcasts like Pod Save America. Highly articulate, charismatic, and positioned on the left wing of the Democratic Party, El-Sayed has frequently voiced strong opposition to the Israeli government's policies, calling out war crimes, calling for human rights protections for Palestinians, and criticizing U.S. military aid to Israel.

However, a closer look at El-Sayed’s broader foreign policy positions reveals a stark boundary. While his critique of Israeli aggression aligns with popular anti-Zionist sentiments, his analysis of global power dynamics rarely extends to a critique of U.S. imperial infrastructure as a whole.

1. Compartmentalizing Imperial Hegemony

For political figures embedded within or adjacent to the Democratic Party apparatus, criticizing Israel has increasingly become permissible, provided that the critique remains isolated. El-Sayed's commentary often treats Israeli Zionism as an isolated ideological aberration or a failure of specific political leadership (e.g., Benjamin Netanyahu) rather than as a functional, structural outpost of Western imperial dominance in the Middle East.

By treating Israel's actions as a policy error of U.S. foreign strategy rather than a central feature of U.S. global power projection, El-Sayed's framework leaves the broader architecture of U.S. militarism intact. The U.S. empire is not viewed as a global system of exploitation and warfare that must be dismantled, but rather as an entity that merely needs better, more compassionate managers.

2. Alignment with NATO’s Geopolitical Narratives

Where the NATO-Left reveals its true character is in its posture toward conflicts involving other nuclear-armed powers or U.S. geopolitical rivals. In line with the broader NATO-Left consensus, progressives like El-Sayed consistently echo official Washington narratives regarding conflicts in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Africa.

When discussing NATO's expansion in Europe or U.S. military encirclement in the Indo-Pacific, the critique of U.S. militarism disappears. Instead, the language shifts to supporting "democracy against autocracy"—the precise ideological justification deployed by the Pentagon and NATO strategists to justify record-breaking military budgets, troop deployments, and proxy warfare. This creates a glaring contradiction: one cannot coherently oppose the militarism of an imperial client state (Israel) while endorsing the core military strategy of the primary imperial state (the U.S.) that arms, funds, and protects it.

Anti-Zionism Severed from Anti-Imperialism

Why is it impossible to maintain a genuine anti-Zionist position without being strictly anti-imperialist and anti-NATO?

Zionism, from its inception as a modern political movement, sought alignment with imperial powers—first the British Empire, and later the United States—to guarantee its regional dominance. Israel's role in the Middle East has long functioned as a forward operating site for Western strategic interests, ensuring the control of critical trade routes, energy resources, and geopolitical leverage over the broader region. U.S. support for Israel is not simply the result of a domestic lobby; it is a strategic necessity for U.S. global hegemony.

When figures within the NATO-Left express anti-Zionism without challenging NATO or U.S. imperialism, several structural failures occur:

1. Rehabilitating Western Institutions: By focusing critique almost exclusively on Israel or specific right-wing politicians, the NATO-Left implies that the U.S. government, NATO, or the United Nations could act as neutral, benevolent arbitrators of peace. This obscures the fact that NATO members are the primary architects of global instability.

2. Obscuring the Global System of Warfare: NATO's operations in Yugoslavia, Libya, Afghanistan, and its ongoing militarization of the European continent rely on the same ideological mechanisms used to justify Israeli occupation: military dominance under the guise of security, civilization, and defense.

3. Channeling Resistance back into Imperial Politics: By offering a version of progressive politics that is critical of Israel but compliant on NATO, figures like El-Sayed direct grass-roots anti-war energy back into the electoral machinery of the Democratic Party—the very political party overseeing the expansion of U.S. military bases, military budgets, and foreign interventions worldwide.

Insights from Anti-Imperialist Media

Anti-imperialist and socialist media outlets have consistently critiqued the NATO-Left for its role in enabling Western state power.

Analyses published by the Black Agenda Report have repeatedly highlighted how progressive and liberal elements in Western politics utilize performative human rights discourse to cover for imperialist ambitions. From this perspective, the ruling class willingly permits localized critiques of client states to maintain the illusion of democratic debate, so long as the core apparatus of Western empire—specifically the Pentagon, NATO, and the military-industrial complex—remains unquestioned by domestic political leaders.

Similarly, commentary and historical analyses from the World Socialist Web Site demonstrate how middle-class progressive politics frequently capitulates to state intelligence and military institutions during times of geopolitical conflict. The website's critiques emphasize that true anti-militarism cannot be selective; opposing war in one theater while endorsing NATO's proxy operations or military expansion in another represents an insurmountable ideological contradiction that betrays the international working class.

The Necessity of a Unified Anti-Imperialist Struggle

The foreign policy perspectives of figures like Abdul El-Sayed exemplify the limits of contemporary social-democratic and liberal-left reformism. Anti-Zionism, when reduced to a humanitarian complaint detached from a systemic critique of global imperialism, becomes politically defanged.

For those dedicated to genuine anti-imperialist, anti-NATO, and anti-Zionist struggle, the task is clear: the critique of Israeli settler-colonialism must be inextricably linked to the struggle against U.S. global dominance and the NATO military alliance. NATO is not an instrument of peace, nor can the U.S. empire be persuaded into becoming a force for international justice. Liberating the oppressed requires a unified, uncompromising opposition to Western imperialism in all its forms, rejecting the half-measures and selective critiques offered by the NATO-Left.