The American Maginot Line, Part 3

The Gringo Dome and the Palestine-Mexico Border.

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“This border control
Congesting our soul
Taking its toll on us all
we gonna dissolve
this Mexico Bethlehem Wall
If you hear us heed the call.”
47Soul, “Border Ctrl”

Less than a week after taking office earlier this year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order entitled “The Iron Dome for America.” Citing the “threat of attack” by advanced missiles and other “aerial” means as “the most catastrophic threat” facing the country, Trump called for the development of a “next generation missile defense shield.” This, of course, is not the first time that the US government has engaged in “pioneering” the colonization of the stratosphere in the attempt to fortify all dimensions of the American Maginot Line. I discussed some earlier attempts in the first two parts of this series. Indeed, Trump cites Ronald Reagan’s 1980s “Star Wars” fantasy as a precedent to his own equally fantastical plan. “Peace through strength,” the warmongers like to say. Tacitus called out this type of peace long ago.

From a big, beautiful wall to a now-renamed American “Golden Dome,” the imperial boomerang has not stopped its elliptical travels. This time the journey takes us from occupied Palestine to the US stratosphere, from what the Asian-African Conference of 1955 at Bandung called a “bridgehead of Western colonialism” in West Asia to the multidimensional borderlands of the US empire. This Gringo Dome is a farcical repetition of the Israeli stratospheric settler colonial missile border wall that exists and remains only partially effective (as Ansar Allah has demonstrated) because of US taxpayer funds, research, technology, and military munitions. During his first term, Trump cited Israel’s apartheid walls as an effective border model to emulate. Benjamin Netanyahu responded in a tweet, celebrating the wall he “built along Israel’s southern border” as a “great success” and “great idea.” The wall had “stopped all illegal immigration.”

Donald Trump unveiling his “Golden Dome” plan in the Oval Office on May 20 (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Trump now wants his own version of the Israeli Iron Dome to continue the forever war that is the US-Mexico border—an old, permanent frontier counterinsurgency against individuals and communities that since the early 1800s the US has accused of trespassing and waging “irregular warfare.” Even as the US became a global empire, infamous for not respecting the borders and sovereignty of other nations, it used the “invading” purveyors of “irregular warfare” to justify settler colonialism and imperial expansion abroad, border militarization and undemocratic practices at home. In the nineteenth century it was the Seminoles; today it’s the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. Fascist expressions exist in the US and they began at the frontier/border—more precisely, they began in the late eighteenth century settler colonization of the Ohio Valley. There, historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, “we find the germ of the Monroe Doctrine.”¹

Jackson Turner’s frontier was always the blood meridian. And now, as historian Greg Grandin writes, “the blood meridian is everywhere, nowhere more so than the border itself, a place where all of history’s wars become one war.”²

Today, that blood meridian includes the Palestine-Mexico border, a term coined by journalist Jimmy Johnson back in 2012. And it too is everywhere, past and present, in material and ideological manifestations: from the fixed surveillance towers built by Israeli defense company Elbit Systems in Arizona to the dozens of university campuses where administrators and donors weaponized antisemitism, criminalized anti-genocide speech, and called in police to violently eradicate encampments created by their own students. This border extends to private, for-profit migrant prisons in Louisiana—deemed “black holes” by human rights organizations—where university students Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk and Alireza Doroudi suffer unjust detention for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza.

For now, I’ll focus on what the Palestino-Mexico border looks like and how it functions in Arizona, the state where I live. Gaza and the Sonoran Desert are intertwined, as my comrade-geographer Taylor Miller reminds us, bound by “the logic of Western imperialism” and fueled by the profitability of the technologies of occupation and colonialism. She constantly reminds me that borders are quite profitable. Grandin also argues that talking about frontiers necessitates talking about capitalism.³

“This is our Gaza”

For some of the border vigilante Minutemen who “guarded” the American Maginot Line during the 2000s, they too saw little difference between southern Arizona and Palestine. They quite clearly imagined a Palestine-Mexico border. “This is our Gaza,” a Minuteman named “Earl” told sociologist Harel Shapira as he pointed to the Sonoran Desert. (His 1980s predecessors, sporting assault rifles and Israeli night vision goggles, might have called the desert “Vietnam” or “Central American communism.”) Another named “Jack” showed the sociologist an “Israeli style” fence that the Minutemen were building along the border. He admired the walls built in the West Bank and Gaza, deeming them worthy of replication in Arizona. The Minuteman fence directly followed the building specifications of those settler colonial walls.⁴

The Palestine-Mexico border in Arizona embodies past and ongoing histories of violence and settler colonialism. It is a series of physical natural geographies—from Gaza and the West Bank to the Arizona-Mexico borderlands—scarred, plundered, made, and remade by shared genocidal technologies of counterinsurgency and “border security” that profit from destroying local pasts and denying future possibilities. Indeed, the Israeli security and defense companies in Arizona—in particular Elbit—tout their surveillance technology as proven and tested in occupied Palestine. In 2012, the promotional brochure for the Hermes 450 drone included a bright yellow stamp that read “battle proven.” “We have learned lots from Gaza,” IDF Brigadier General Roei Elkabetz explained during a border technology fair in Texas in late 2012, “it is a great laboratory.”

Some of those lessons began arriving in Arizona during the early 2000s. Elbit’s “battle proven” Hermes drones started their aerial patrols over the US-Mexico border for the Customs and Border Police (CBP) in 2004. By 2007 and 2008, as journalist Todd Miller has reported, the Golan Group (composed of former IDF soldiers) had begun training Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP agents in Krav Maga, counter-terrorism, and border security.⁵ Inveterate racist Sheriff Joe Arpiao contracted NICE Systems (also founded by ex-IDF soldiers) for a closed-circuit television camera network to monitor a jail run by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department. Other “border control” companies like Magna BSP also won contracts from the US government around the same time.

But it was Elbit that won the big prize in the early 2010s during a moment of increased migration flows that Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama referred to as a “border surge.” The contract paid Elbit hundreds of millions of dollars to essentially build a “smart wall,” organized around fifty-three integrated fixed surveillance towers outfitted with the latest surveillance technology (cameras that included heat sensing, motion sensors, radar systems, and a GPS system). A border patrol agent told Miller that one tower was a “force multiplier” capable of doing the work of “100 agents.”⁶ This type of integrated smart wall technology had been tested and forged in the West Bank before making its way to Arizona.

Yet Elbit is just one part of a broader border security complex in southern Arizona that includes numerous multinational Israeli and US defense contractors in this profitable forever war that links the Sonoran Desert to Palestine. Some, like Anduril Industries and Palantir Technologies, are explicitly animated by a fantasy of “defending western civilization”—a defense that starts at the border. Plugged into this complex, public universities like the University of Arizona and Arizona State University (entities that continue to profit from plundered indigenous lands) have received government contracts to develop border security technology and think tanks. Army forts and Air Force bases, too, participate in the making of the Sonoran Desert into a bellicose and profitable border workshop of technological terror and subjugation.

This has been the plan for years—at least according to Bruce Wright, CEO of the University of Arizona Tech Parks, back in 2012. That year, he informed Miller that “his operation was trying to form the largest cluster of border-technology companies in North America” in southern Arizona. Miller followed up by asking him where the largest cluster in the world existed. “Wright didn’t hesitate: Israel.”⁷

Barbarians at the Gates

Despite all of Trump’s talk of invading Canada or even Greenland, it’s the US-Mexico border—as a perpetually open demarcation of US civilization walls and brown “barbarians at the gate”—that animates the president and his political-social base. It matters not that we have seen historically low numbers of undocumented migration since late 2023. It matters not that physically the US-Mexico border is the most dangerous migrant route in the world, awash in counterinsurgent military technology, border police who brutalize migrants with impunity, and weaponized landscapes like the Sonoran Desert. It matters not that militarizing the borderlands and border enforcement policies since the 1970s shut off the circular migration flows of mostly male Mexican workers who crossed the border for seasonal employment and thereby generated a millions-strong population of undocumented migrants forced to remain inside the US “golden cage.” It matters not that past and present US imperial policies and economic warfare against Latin American and Caribbean countries also generate the very refugees that the Palestine-Mexico border works to violently keep out.

The southern border is and must remain a perpetual Maginot Line, always open and infiltrated, capacious enough to include new threats like those that haunt the work of borderologist and frontier colonial policing expert Taylor Sheridan. When the CIA protagonist of his show Lioness explains to her daughter why she works for the Company after a violent incident at the US-Mexico border, she says “I do this so you don’t have to learn Chinese or Russian.”

The frontier-border is closed and the many barbarians are allegedly storming the gates. As (now former) Congressman Duncan Hunter told a crowd south of San Diego in December 2017, while standing in front of Trump Wall prototypes: “Yemenis, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Chinese, name your former Soviet satellite states, they all come in through Mexico…they come across the border here and that’s what the wall stops and that’s why we need the wall.”

As imagined by the imperialists and genociders who have spent almost two years denying genocide while simultaneously reveling in it (think here of Matt Miller’s Joker grin) and justifying the unjustifiable, the Palestine-Mexico border is a civilizational divide that protects civilization from barbarism; the “West” from the barbaric Rest; the gardens from the jungle; “human” from “subhuman.” It is the global, colonial “color line” that ensures, to recall W.E.B. Du Bois, that “whiteness is the ownership of the world forever and ever, Amen!”

To maintain that ownership has required, and continues to require, the mass death of peoples on the wrong side of the color line. “Exterminate all the brutes,” said Kurtz. “Kill them all” says Senator John Fetterman, during one of his brief and fleeting moments of mental acuity—a lucidity achieved via his genocidal desires.

The world is upside down; time is out of joint. We are told that the live streamed genocide we watch is not a genocide; that Israeli settler colonialism is at best a fabrication, at worst antisemitic blood libel; that the extermination of Palestinian children is a collateral accident, not a systematic campaign to snuff out the future of Palestine; that hospitals in Gaza are actually Hamas bases; that Red Crescent medical workers are Qassam fighters; that exploding pagers that maimed children in Lebanon constitute a “daring” Israeli military operation, not a horrific violation of international humanitarian law.

(International law, by the way, what is that? Where is this international liberal rules-based order they keep talking about? That chatter has lessened of late.)

Conversely, Palestinian efforts to live, to survive—to exercise their natural and legal rights to resist tyranny using a variety of methods including armed struggle—cannot and must not be understood on their own terms, much less supported or deemed worthy of solidarity. Any support for or expressions of solidarity within Western countries must be criminalized, and Palestinian expressions of resistance to genocide in order to exist must be antisemitic. Even minimalist calls for a ceasefire, as the Texan city of San Marcos recently made, can produce political and economic blackmail from genocide supporters like Governor Greg Abbott. The Palestine-Mexico border also runs through Texas.

I naively believed that limits to genocide existed. Never Again, though, has an asterisk. The extermination of Palestinians perpetrated by Israel is allowed, cheered, fueled, armed, financed, and supported by those geographer Linda Quiquivix refers to as the heirs of “Columbus and Them.”⁸ More than five hundred years of genocide. The “problem from hell” is not an aberration but a structural feature of empires and settler countries founded by Columbus and Them.

These US accomplices and collaborators of genocide really seem to think that they can smash, violate, and brutalize their way out of this foundational contradiction. That waging and supporting genocide in Gaza has no consequence. Perhaps they are right in the short term. But to do so has required them to burn down their own houses—our houses—as they continue to build more political, ideological, and material borders. They are furiously trying to expand the Palestine-Mexico border.

In the next installment, we’ll take a look at what the Palestine-Mexico border looks like immediately south of the American Maginot Line.

1. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Ohio Valley in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (Henry Holt and Co., 1920), p. 168.

2. Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (Metropolitan Books, 2019), p. 266.

3. Grandin, The End of the Myth, p. 8.

4. Harel Shapira, Waiting for José: The Minutemen's Pursuit of America (Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 12, 103-105.

5. Todd Miller, Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World (Verso, 2019), pp. 76-78.

6. Miller, Empire of Borders, pp. 78.

7. Miller, Empire of Borders, p. 80.

8. Linda Quiquivix, Palestine 1492: A Report Back (Wild Ox Books, 2024), pp. 70-71.