IN Washington, Pakistan and Israel`s Nobel Peace Prize nominee, joined by Israel`s MITeducated prime minister, were recently toasting their shared success. While some differences exist, the duo considers its achievement epochmaking: the Arabs have been reduced to a defeated and demoralised lot, humbly offering as tithe a three trillion-dollar investment in America with a personal jetliner as the topping. While Israel dropped bombs from the sky over Arab lands, regular flights of Gulf carriers to and from Tel Aviv continued undisturbed.

But the victories go further: Iran was once the outlier, the last to challenge US-Israeli domination of the entire Middle East. After 12 days of war its defiance is now merely token. Months earlier its allies in Lebanon and Yemen had been decimated. Mass starvation in Gaza now just piles of rubble has eviscerated Hamas.

Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers with automatic weapons enjoy daily target practice with live ammunition on Palestinian children as they chase food trucks.

Pronouncing moral judgement on these two men may offer relief to some but to what end? Let`s recall that even the International Criminal Court was openly derided in Washington as a `kangaroo court` when it ordered Netanyahu`s arrest.

Blaming individual leaders alone misses the point. No matter how powerful, they invariably reflect what their base wants. Consider that in 2024, as Netanyahu addressed the United States Congress amidst his hospital bombing campaign, American lawmakers mostly Republicans but also many Democrats repeatedly gave him standing ovations.

We surely need to dig deeper lest we miss the systemic forces shaping the mindset of both leaders as well as Western publics. To see why Israel wants to eliminate as many Palestinians as possible is easy. Over its entire history it has deliberately cultivated a Holocaust-driven us-or-them mentality. While Hamas`s October 7 attack on Israeli civilians was morally abhorrent, Israel has systematically sought to blame all violence on the people it has conquered.

But what about America? What beef does America have with Palestinians living half a world away? In the past, American presidentspursued their political objectives in the Middle East through `gentler` covert means like CIAled coups and targeted assassinations but never through overt genocide captured on camera. The shift, I will argue below, owes to the rapid rise of Social Darwinism and evangelists of the Bible Belt.

Social Darwinism became a popular belief in 19th-century America soon after Darwin discovered the laws of biological selection. Darwin a true scientist forcefully rejected this `Darwinism` as extreme misapplication and distortion of his work. Nevertheless, the capitalist robber barons of his time found this piece of science very useful. British philosopher Herbert Spencer first coined the phrase `survival of the fittest` and advocated that this is the way things ought to be, not just how nature functioned.

Society advances, he wrote, when `its fittest members are allowed to assert their fitness with the least hindrance.` The unfit should `not be prevented from dying out`.

America`s cowboy culture readily absorbed Spencer and, in time, Donald Trump inherited this mindset from his father, a property dealer.

His political career, culminating in his presidency, was launched by his popular book, Think Big and Kick Ass: In Business and in Life. This crude title bespeaks its crude content: being self-serving and brazen brings success, and ultimately, success is all that matters, regardless of how it`s achieved.

Elon Musk the richest man in the world and Trump`s ex-sidekick couldn`t agree more.

`The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy`, he declared, adding that `woke` liberals have weaponised empathy and are `exploiting a bug in Western civilisation.

Musk trashes social insurance such as Social Security, which he calls a `Ponzi scheme.` His newly launched political party will be still kinder to America`s ultra-rich and yet harsher on ordinary people. As for starving Palestinians: the fewer the better. What do they produce, he asked rhetorically.

While heartlessness might explain why the US has stopped trying to feed the world`s hungry, it fails to explain why America helped Israel flatten Gaza. For that, we must glance at Trump`s political base. In 2024, Trump won over roughly80 per cent of white conservative, evangelical Christian voters. (Incidentally, most conservative Pakistani-Americans also voted for Trump.) During my professional visits to the United States over the decades, I`ve often found myself watching white televangelists hawk their beliefs and marvelled at their well-honed delivery skills. Their core message: the Bible commands you to give your absolute support for Israel.

Then, without batting an eyelid, they equate the Promised Land of Moses`s time with today`s nation-state of Israel.

One such preacher later disgraced because of his weakness for women I watched particularly. Jimmy Swaggart, who died last week, was a Christian Zionist who made his living off the Bible. `Israel is God`s prophetic time clock,` that heralds Armageddon and Jesus`s return to Earth, he sermonised. His son, Donnie Swaggart, carries on his mission today: `We must stand for Israel, for Jerusalem is the chosen city of God, where Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, will one day reign forever.

That Trump ordered the US embassy to be shifted from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in his first presidency was surely not accidental.

No logical exercise can ever disprove what the Swaggarts and their ilk preach. Reason can never defeat faith, particularly when it stands behind a holy book. But what about Social Darwinism? Is that unassailable too? Here one can be more hopeful. Its nonsensical pseudo-scientific claims virtuous people beget virtuous children being one are readily disproven. But more importantly, as Darwin himself insisted, cooperation within the human species is fundamental for societal well-being.

Cooperation, in turn, demands empathy. Without empathy we`d be living in a dystopic Muskian jungle populated by selfish individuals pursuing selfish needs.

To prevent more Gazas, people in every country must boldly confront their ingrained beliefs, repudiate pure selfishness, and internalise the profound truth that humanity is one. Else the scum shall continue rising to the top, eventually becoming that country`s political leaders. • The author is an Islamabad-based physicist and wnter.