<p>Analysts of US policies toward Israel typically emphasize “lobby” influence, ethnic and religious voting blocs, and geostrategic calculations—yet seldom theorize how these mediate capitalist class power. This article extends a tradition of analysis of the class project of imperialism by examining an underappreciated mechanism: the two countries’ origin myths and their contrasting treatments of pilgrimage. Since the 19th century, founding settlers of New England have retroactively been named “Pilgrims”—a usage which identified the US as a “Promised Land” while sidelining the nation-building role of non-Protestant immigrants. The “Pilgrim” myth fused landless errance, tributary voyage, and spiritual destiny into national legitimation. Zionist notions of “return” imagine a unified “Jewish people” and occlude the Zionist state’s precursors—namely, Jewish pilgrimage to Palestine and the Crusader states once tasked with protecting Christian pilgrims. This paradox suggests linking US sponsorship of Israel to the forgotten politics of pilgrimage in the history of Palestine, and to the ideological function of pilgrimage narratives in US capitalist industrialization and global ascent. Among the Europeans recruited for US capitalism were cohorts of Ashkenazi Jews, subsequently diverted to Palestine as settlers and bulwarks first for British and then US imperialism. The combined erasure and conjuring of pilgrimage has forged national attachments and justified war on the Arab world, while mystifying the class interests that drive wars of encroachment. This interplay reveals how origin myths rationalize the coordination of labor and capital across production and destruction—an arbitrage at the heart of US capitalism and Zionist expansion.</p>