Guerrilla History - Lebanon vs. Zioimperialism w/ Ali Kadri & Rania Khalek

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

In this critical episode of Guerrilla History, we have a two part-conversation with absolutely terrific guests.  Ali Kadri rejoins us to give a more theoretical background on the role of Lebanon historically and in the present with regards to its relations to the West and to the Zioimperialist project, after which Rania Khalek comes on to discuss some of the recent history and analyzes the current role of Lebanon vs. the Zioimperialist project and how it relates to the struggle in Gaza.  A fantastic conversation, one you don't want to miss!  Be sure to share this with comrades you think would benefit! Also, don't miss Rania's incredible interview with Hezbollah's second-in-command Sheikh Naim Qassem! Ali Kadri is an esteemed Professor at various institutions around the world, as well as the author of many important books including Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment, The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction, and The Unmaking of Arab Socialism.   Rania Khalek is a renowned journalist at Breakthrough News and who's work has appeared in numerous outlets.  You can follow Rania's work on her website https://raniakhalek.com/ and by following her on Instagram @raniakhalek and on twitter @RaniaKhalek. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory

You don't remember Dinn-Bin-Bin-Bin-Bu? The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history, the podcast. that acts is a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined by one of my

usual co-hosts. We are joined by Professor Adnan Hussein, who of course is a historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing? I'm doing well, Henry. It's early morning, but I'm invigorated, excited for this conversation. As am I. We're not joined by our other usual co-host today, Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast, but we are sure that he'll be back on the program very soon. What we have today for you, listeners, is a very interesting episode, and it's going to be two interviews that run consecutively, one after another within this episode. So you're going to hear one guest first and then another guest on the same topic. So stay tuned for that. Before

I introduce our first guest, I'd like to remind you that you can help support the show, keep us up and running and allowing us to make more episodes like this by going to Patreon.com forward slash gorilla history, with gorilla being spelled, G-U-E-R-R-R-I-L-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that the show is doing and all of the hosts are doing by going to Twitter and looking for at Gorilla underscore Pod. again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A- underscore pod. So, like I said, we have two guests today that are going to be on consecutively, one after another.

We tried to get them on at the same time, but time zones are really a nasty thing. So today we're going to be joined by Al-I-Kadri and Rania Halet. The first guest that we have is Ali-Kadri, who is a professor, author of many books, including the unmaking of Arab, socialism, Arab development denied imperialism with reference to Syria, the accumulation of waste, and the topic of the recent conversation that we had with him on the show. And so listeners, you can go back and check out this conversation, a theory of forced labor

migration, the proletarianization of the West Bank under occupation from 1967 to 1992. Hello, Ali. It's nice to have you back on the show. Thank you. Hello. So the topic that we have today, it's a very interesting topic. And like I said, it's going to be the same topic when we also interview Rania. It's going to be Lebanon and its role in the struggle against Zio imperialism.

So I know that when we look at the news, a lot of listeners are quite intimately aware of the history between Lebanon and Israel, the so-called state of Israel. but I'm sure that many of our listeners also see in the news that, for example, there's strikes in southern Lebanon or that Hezbollah has taken some actions against the state of Israel, but they don't really know the history and the reasons behind these relations between the two states. So I'd like to open this conversation, Professor, by asking you, can you give us a brief explanation into how Israel and Lebanon has. have related to one another. I know that in the early days, actually, the relations were quite good, like surprisingly good, but that changed, of course, over time. So a brief explainer on the overview of the history, and then maybe we'll dive into each of those historical periods

and how that relationship changed over time. In a way, it's really difficult to say that the relationship was quite good. It's almost impossible for any relationship within the imperialist cap, although they might look pretty much, you know, as class allies and friends like in international relations under capitalism, this would be moribund, it was a wee ephemeral, it would be momentary, and things would turn into their opposites very quickly, and those who were friends that were time, they would become enemies. And all friends and enemies are not nation-states, in a sense, it's very difficult to confuse the nation-state. for the class, you know, the national struggles, when they overlap with class struggles, with anti-imperious class struggle, they're appreciated for what they are, for basically defeating imperialism and furthering the cause of the working class nationally and internationally.

But nations sometimes, they're made to suppress class. They're made to eliminate class from the picture, from the equation. And so in Lebanon, like all the other Arab countries, You have classes which actually mature into this crucible, which that is nurtured by Zayu imperialism, by America and by the United States and Israel, and under the auspices and the protection of the United States and Israel. And so many of the reactionary Arab regimes are basically class allies of Israel. They were classed allies of Israel before the birth of Israel,

and one needed to go into the details of history, how so many factions in the... Arab world have basically been, you know, supportive of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, you get the making of this Zionist settler state. You find those in Lebanon, you find those everywhere to a, and Lebanon to a higher degree, because Lebanon was basically, uh, sectioned out of Syria after the Sykes-Pigo treaty. and this C-section, this birth of a nation, of a country,

basically to exert pressure on the Arab masses, on Syria as a forerunner of the Arab masses, then to represent anything of advancement to the Arabs or any retention of Arab resources and Arab culture and Arab wealth, all of this which, You know, despite the fact that there are many shades of differences between Syrian governments, Syria as a whole, as a project, as a national project, after its detachment from the Ottoman Empire, has been a progressive force in the region, a force for progress and a force for cultural progress. That's why Syria is always intended for destruction. so is Iraq as well

when you become when you become when you hold the potential to basically to present yourself as a strong anti-imperialist social formation you're going to come under attack undoubtedly right

so and they did now Lebanon because the French were much more successful in instrumentalizing the sect to their interest you know we say divided rule. Colonialism divides in rules and so forth. But capital is also divided rule. I think before this conversation, we were talking about capital. And we've arrived the sort of understanding that it is a relationship of exclusion. People make things,

produce goods, produce things, make things for their own benefit. Somebody takes those things and, you know, makes them bad and sells them for his own benefit. And people, the majority of people don't benefit from that. So capital isn't the exclusion of the majority from their products, from their social product. And basically, as of late, as everyone notices, and as I've written, people have come to produce things which are bad for them and consume the things that are bad for them as well.

So there's this waste cycle that's, you know, taken over the consumer standards as well. Now, back to Lebanon, and Lebanon, as I said, you know, the French and the French and the British managed to put their hands on Syria, the British on Iraq and Palestine and Jordan. and when the French took out Lebanon and they've had a minority sectional group made up of Eastern Catholics, the Maronites, which inhabited Mount Lebanon, which is a very small part of Lebanon as it is now.

And that part has always been sort of ever since, you know, the history has it and there are many, many, many-fold stories here. But when the, you know, the leaven, the mashrik, I mean, the leaven is a pretty vernicious word. But when the masrhic, you know, this area of Western Asia was, has always been known for silk production. And this silk production is all the whole.

So, you know, it's infused through the long silk road to China. I mean, this silk production came and silk production and silk fabric production as well. Now, the French have their silk factories in Lyon, and what they've done is they've changed the land laws and the property laws of Lebanon to make the peasant, the non-owning peasant, a titular holder of land, by the amount of mulberry dreams that they grow, and other cash frauds, probably there are.

So basically the story is very typical and you've had the Eastern Christian well, not only Christian, but many Muslims as well because then that division didn't exist at a political level was pretty much still a

culture of denomination. They had been involved and, you know, they had been in subsystem farming, and they changed typically. You know, this is, you know, if you look up the history of capitalism in the developing world, you'll see cash crop being introduced, displacing subsistence crop, a situation where, you know, the cash crop is no longer sellable and exchangeable for stable commodities and the population stores. you have hunger and crisis as a result of that

so in Lebanon too you know that there's been you know much of the population I mean Muslim and Christian by then of course but the problem with Mount Lebanon there was very little land other than for cash crop to grow so when when the siege when the British and the French imposed a siege on the eastern Mediterranean to

blockade the Ottoman and German armies during the First World War there was starvation all over the the Mishrik, you know, all over the 11th and that's Mastricht, let's say the Mastricht again. And the

area most suffering was the area which has become most dependent on the French for wheat and for other stable items, which was Mount Lebanon which was actually the bigger part of the population belong to the Eastern

Christian denomination, especially the Eastern Catholic demes, the Maronite denomination. And you had as such you had the French basically introducing the Laplace was that in shifting their way of life for many of that part of the world and then blockading and starving that part of and causing the huge exodus from that part of the world.

But when the French came, they, through, you know, they used this sectarian, cultural sectarian, they empower them politically. What they've done is they've instituted through the Constitution and through their rule, the type of identity that separates, you know, that does the work of capital, best separates people from one another. So if you look at the trajectory of the development of Lebanon as a social formation, you would see as basically you have a sparsely populated area between the 1920s and up to the 1950s, 1950 to 1970, you had a situation like the rest of the developing world where you have

had more nationalist capitalist capitalist policies and development. And then, in 1975, you know, because of proximity to and propinquity with Palestine, you had the Palestinian exodus to Lebanon, and then the exodus from Jordan in 1970, and an armed conflict between the South Lebanon and Zionist. state. So he had something flaring up, you know, continuously in that part of the world. And then, of course, when the Palestinian and Lebanese progressive resistance became very strong, the former colonists moved through their political allies, which they had given them privileges in the constitutional and class privileges about all others. They moved to attack to abort this success

of the national liberation movement and of the Palestinian and the Lebanese national liberation movement because Lebanon was also a semi-colon in many respects through its proxy rulers because you had a class which basically did not identify culturally even with the rest of the Arab classes

and so you know the story boils down to this situation where you are, you know, like ours everywhere, you know, you have a concrador plus which basically will, which holds its wealth in Western coffers and it's willing to sacrifice the whole population at the altar of the imperialist war processes, which are also industrial processes. Yes, you were saying? Yeah, so just to button and turn back just a second before we get into the 70s, So as we know, the modern states of Lebanon and Israel were founded in the 1940s.

And as you were saying, there was class interests at play that were related to why the relations were, what they were in the 1940s. If we can turn back to that kind of founding era of these two modern states, can you talk a little bit about what were the relations like in the kind of 1940s, 1950s and even early 1960s. And what were those class relations? What were the class interests at play between these two states that then fed into the relations that they were having at that time? Because as we mentioned then, and as we're going to talk about as the conversation goes on, starting in the 70s, that relationship drastically changes in many ways. Lebanon as a state started out in 1920, right? I mean, it didn't start in 1948 or 49, as did the state of Israel, which was created by, unusually, by a United Nations resolution to partition Palestine.

So, and no Arab state since then could openly say that we have amicable or agreeable social relations with the state of Israel, especially at that time when the Palestinian issue was still alive and had refugees in the consciousness of the masses. And the idea of the Palestinian as separate from the Arab did not yet gen as it did when Arafat introduced the Palestinian question to narrow it down and strip it apart from the international proletariat and from the Arab question. Because Palestinians, as Syrians as Libyanese, as the majority of Libyanis, identified as Arabs. You have some Arabs who actually, who some who, because Arab, you know, in the sense that Arabism is. a linguistic group, some who speak Arabic, whose culture is Arabic, but yet you know, by pseudo-intellectualism, they

turned this around to appear French or something like that, as in more progressive, whereas had they know better, we know that the French and the English and the Americans, and this Western civilization is based on blood. They killed 900 billion people since 1500,

and it actually destroyed the planet. So if you measure civilization, by its spiritual and material advancement, Western civilization is the most barbaric civilization, this near mankind. There will not be another civilization in the next 50 years when water

levels rise and the temperature rises as a result of them being at the helm of the capital relation that reproduces the social conditions under which we live on. But back to Lebanon, liberal had never there, as I said, implicitly

there were classes in persons in Lebanon, as well as in all the Arab worlds, because class relations are not so hidden sometimes. We know that in the war on Gaza, although it is devastating in the human sense,

and for the developing world and for the international proletariat, a victory of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza is a victory for all of us. And it augurs the decline of U.S. empire. But there are of course, many in the

comparatorial classes of the Arab world, which actually have, you know, they are produced through the imperialist trends, through the money that they've actually taken from these countries and deposited in America and Europe, and their wealth is actually

transferred to America and Europe through a process of depletion, the depleting the national resource and specifically depleting the social life and the social nature of the Arab world. as they do for the rest of the third world. That's pretty important to know.

So you have, so these class interests, for instance, they sometimes surface in these servant peace deals that the state of Israel strikes with the Jordanian regime. I mean, the Jordanian kings were never really in a position of animosity to the state of Israel, the Saudi ruling class, and all the Compradorian ruling class in the Arab world is pretty much on Israel's side. So Lebanon is no exception to that.

But the masses in Lebanon, and masses at working classes, it doesn't necessarily mean people of the same sectarian color because the sect is there to actually abolish the class, to obviate the class, so that we don't see it. But the masses in Lebanon, which are composed of all sects and all classes, because the poor reproduced by losing parts of their lives when they work. That's how the poor reproduces. And that's the definition of the working class by losing much of their lives in the process of working and getting nothing to live better for the next moment. That's an ontological condition.

That's the class condition. And for Lebanon, as elsewhere in the world, what we see is these masses and these classes, they are the ones coming under combined assault by the Zionist state and by the Lebanese state and in its sectarian formation. And that's what we have to keep in mind that, and the problem is on the Israeli side, because it's a settler colonial formation, even was the supposed working. classes are not working classes because they reproduce by actually expanding and destroying the masses around them. So they are by definition an organic constituent of imperialism. They are

the embodiment of imperialism. So we cannot speak of a working class in Israel. The fact that they work is irrelevant to the fact that they reproduce the whole system reproduces by imperial strength individence, which is the cornerstone, the predicate of the whole social formation. It exists to cleanse the region of revolutionary socialism and the act of anti-appearism, and to split the region, and to make it poorer, and to deplete its resources. That's why it exists. So you have a situation where you have no working, no working class per se in Israel, because it doesn't have the potential of labor. The potential of labor exists elsewhere where people who are making a living find it difficult to live longer lives because they're being killed before their

times while they are making a living. And in order to fight for themselves and live longer and better lives, that's their potential. They have to fight imperialism. They survive. They reproduce by their fight against imperialism. Whereas the Western working classes and the Zionist working class they reproduce and their potential is then making the dividends from killing the South and destroying the working classes. And that's what I call waste. Wasting human life and the extraction of human life first. In Liberan it's no different. You have the masses struggling. I'll give you an example. In 1974, there was one separate, one-sided ceasefire from the side of the Palestinian and the Lebanese resistance against Israel. But the statistics show

then that Israel, no matter the ceasefire, kept on bombing Lebanon at almost the same rate as it did before. There is no ceasefire in this region. There can't be no peace because the act of accumulation itself is the act of war and destruction. You assure that if your rate of profit and depends on your rate of surplus value and your rate of surplus value is your rate of exploitation, then the rate at which you exploit the masses of the Arab world is the rate at which you destroy them before their time. And that happens everywhere, more so probably in this region, because it is a crucial and strategic region that are all the for resources that presuppose the expansion of mankind in the 20th century. So Lebanon is a classic.

case of Comprador versus Masses and a Comprador allied with the enemy, with imperialism, and with Zio-imperialism. It's a classic case of this. And the problem is, you know, it's just to say, you know, typically in the philosophical ideology, philosophize ancient of ideology, ideology, the idea that somebody is sectarian and he believes that he belongs, he identified, that he becomes one way. with the idea that capital has created for him. So that stupidity, oddly enough, becomes a power of its own. It becomes independent and the power, it becomes godlike, and it rules life.

And in Lebanon, it's absolutely true to, you know, it has become absolute truth. So you see that through the sect, because the state organizes social reproduction and distribution through the sect, You have people who believe in belief and educated ones who believe in the primordiality of the ethnic sect and the primordiality of everything. So, you know, it's a pretty unmatchable case of ignorance in that sense, you know. But it's not so much ignorance as cognitive dissonance in order to justify the imperialist case. You're produced by imperial strength, rents through the state. And the state now produces nothing other than being, well, it actually produces a lot in its own, in the fact that it's self-depletion, auto-depletion. People think that production is only about, I make socks and I make cups and I make pens or whatever I made.

It's not only about that. The rate of profit could rise by the rate of depletion of natural and social resources. So by killing human before their time and by destroying nature, the profit rate also arises because social nature is the source of profit. Man is subject in nature. So Lebanon actually produces a lot by its own auto destruction. And that's what I want to say. Well, that's very interesting. Yeah.

I think it's very valuable to have not only that political, economic perspective on the role of, Lebanon or the status of Lebanon in imperialism, but also that historic sense that some of these vocabularies around which Lebanese politics are organized are constructed in history. So when you mentioned the confessionalization of the state and the way in which those were politicized into giving them some kind of false reality. It reminded me very much, for example, of what happened in Iraq after the U.S. invasion is that, you know, they created a new political reality in which confessional identity became the basis for your participation in this new political reality, which then pitted, you know, Shia suddenly occurred, you know, against one another

in a way that you wouldn't say that, you know, these identities didn't exist, but they before, but they didn't have the political reality and meaning that, you know, are exploited. And so it's maybe worth connecting. And I'm wondering if maybe you can help us connect a little bit the way in which, since its foundation to this present, this metaphor of confessionalization and politics has kind of created these contradictory tensions and conflicts that allows it then to function in a particular way. It just strikes me that we've been elaborating with this current situation in Gaza, many people, many new people around the world who may not have been paying so much attention to the issue

are seeing and analyzing the way in which an ethno state, a settler colonial ethno state, you know, is wreaking devastation upon the indigenous population. And although Lebanon is, of course, not a settler colonial state, it is one that was forged in its particular form out of a colonial kind of partitioning itself by the French to create something like an ethno-religious sectarian state where there would be a dominant political class, hopefully a demographic majority, if possible at the beginning, but definitely a political reality that only envisioned accounting through its census that has never been done again to crystallize and instantiate in some kind of constitutional order a privileged ethno-religious kind of community.

that it tries to affiliate with itself, as you mentioned, the Eastern Catholic, there was a special kind of relationship where, you know, this community is sort of cultivated and encouraged to cultivate a kind of sense of itself as specially connected with the French, you know. And so how that has, you know, in its earlier history, you know, it was celebrated, you know, as Beirut, as Paris of the Middle East, as a kind of like friendly state to the West in, you know, the 50s, 40s, 50s, and so on. But that that has started to collapse. And the reason why, you know, Lebanon is undergone so much turmoil and war is because the class realities of the, you know, population have exposed and brought out, you know, those contradictions at the, at the political level so that by

the 70s, as you were pointing out, you know, some of these things are taking on a new shape. And we have, perhaps this is where you can help us help people understand that some of the, like, the 1982 Lebanon War and going, and then the Civil War. How would you characterize and portray this kind of, you know, set of conflicts within that imperialist order. Perhaps you can help us elucidate that period of history going forward. That's the immediate backdrop to the, you know, more contemporary period in the 2000s and, you know, in 2010s into our own era. You know, first of all, this is a, you know, a complicated issue, but I mean, now, going to start by simplifying it and so we're saying that looking at the exposed to facts right so

where are we now and what is phenomenal before us now i mean we now have a living in antithms right socially and economically and so on and it's being aggressed every day almost at the unbearable rates by israel and of course and you know and and so you have a situation where uh when when something like that happens you know you have out migration you know you have immense out migration of the country and you know and you also have you know the best indicator of

development is life expectancy we've seen life expectancy as a result of the recent you know the liberal was shackled with shady finance and made to collapse

and you know and the wages dropped something like 90% in some cases at least when the country depends a lot on imports you know it practically imports a tenth of what it's

of what it exports and it imports it exports a tenth of what it imports and so you have a situation of this nature yet yet it's again

you know its contribution to the global cumulative processes, through a process of self-destruction, through depletion of resources, depletion of manpower, human resources and natural resources as well.

Human is natural as well, so you have social natural resources. So how did we get here? So the confessional system is a form of class power, just like democracy in the West is a form of class power.

The confessional system is the Comprador's form of class power, and that Comprador is articulated with its former colonial masters. So it's, you know, it is a sort of the sieve that lets out just enough to maintain both the external bourgeoisie, you know, the greater financial bourgeoisie, and the smaller, its partners, its sub, you know, its partners in Libya. But you have a sort of situation which reminds of Hamza Ali's notion that some bourgeoisie's in the developing world auto-destruct. And I may add, they don't auto-destruct simply for the sake of auto-destruction. The act of auto-destruction is itself an industrial process. So you had the period between 40, 50 and 70, something like this, where Lebanon had made the significant gains, that wasn't actually, you know, an aberration in the global south. If you recall, the global south all together, that was called the Golden Age where, you know, many people implemented nationalist capitalist policies. they retained

they clamped on the flow of resources they industrialized and they retained their national base and everybody did well in that period. The respective of whether even those who claim socialists and those who claim to be capitalist when you

cut the vessels to the outside world and deep your resources inside and make them work for you inside you are going to do better. But when you open up willy-nilly and that financial capital takes fold of your real economic cycle, then you're not going to do very well because naturally those who had invested in the process not to make a profit

and they'd like to take their profits abroad where it's much more skewer and triple A bonds and better for Western financial markets. So you have a situation where things have developed. have gone so far and there's an art, you know, so in this region, I mean, one has to look at Lebanon from always from the outside in, in this region, how does this region contribute to global accumulation? Of which Lebanon is. It contributes through two intertwined channels, oil and war. And you can't have oil without having war, right? And so Lebanon is in this proximity of oil and war. And it's, in this play, this power play to

control both the war and the oil, because the war is as an economic process, it may be primary and more important than the oil process. The thing itself doesn't do things, but the power that emanates from victories in war and from the

devastation of war is far more important to the class relations, which is imperialism, which goes on to restructure the whole process of accumulation afterwards. in favor of the imperial center, right? So what we have in this situation is Lebanon is involved in this de-development process, this reverse development process that has undertaken all the region.

So if you look at them, I mean, you don't have to be an expert in economics to know that this region is either at war on severe both. The Egypt is in severe poverty, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Libya, Sudan, And, I mean, you know, with the exception of Algeria, because it has a sovereign state and anti-imperial sovereign state, it's still all together. But many, of course, in the West, are conspiring to make sure that it disappears. And so is the case with Iran. You know, they don't want also a sovereign Iran in an aspect. So, you know, whether the capital, semi-capitalist or socialist imperialism cannot stand or any sovereign state that does well for its sake.

because it keeps part of the resources that it wants for itself and wants to take every. You know, it's the war of each against all and the war of all against all what we have here. You know, so there is no such thing as friendships in this process. Just a brief comment, Professor. So one of the things that you said is that the imperialist world can't tolerate even capitalist states that operate independently. That's because we have to remember that this is a system. It's a world system that they're in interest of maintaining and not necessarily. the economic model of individual countries.

It's not about this country is capitalist, this country is socialist, this country is semi-socialist. It's about whether or not those countries are playing by the rules of the world system that the imperialist powers have constructed. And if they are willing to play by the rules of that system, it doesn't matter what economic system they function as internally.

It's about whether they play their role in the world's system. We have to think more systemically than rather than okay, well, this country is socialist and this country is capitalists, so surely the capitalist country is going to be friends with the imperialist country. No, it's about whether or not they're subservient to the imperialists or not. No, no, absolutely. There's a, what capital and capitalism and imperialism is much smarter than we think sometimes. And the rule, I mean, the rule that they play with is the simple rule is I want to maintain the rule of capital.

no matter at which cost, if I make an economic loss in the process, it's okay, so long as I maintain, the rule of capital, the rule of its ideas, the rule of its institutions, and these are all the representation of the fundamental, abstract, and universal relationship with its capital. That's for sure. I fully agree. But I was trying to basically concretize the point by saying, you know, it doesn't accept anyone playing outside. the rule. And this rule is, I'm going to keep more for myself to do better. And if I do better, I will compromise my working class may do better, may develop ideas

that needs, that keeps, that wants to enhance the social conditions all the time and undercut the social profit, the profits undercut, take a big cut out of the social product over the long

Iran and undermine the rates of profits and that's something that the rules are made to service. So true we have the rules and the primacy of politics, but they must in the end, well, that's why we say economics is determining in the last instance. They must in the end at least make sure that the profit rate is going to remain buoyant or at least positive and things like. And these guys didn't, you know, anyone who wants, you know, the macro

accounting, anyone who wants to keep a little bit for himself is going to do. But it's just this period, which was particularly obvious for the third world. You know, the third world had this period of 50, you know, to 8 to 75 or something like that

where everybody's done well. We call it the golden age. And then we have the Lennon age where we have growth rates which are the neoliberalism which haven't haven't gone well until now of course and Lebanon has both

experiences in the double impact the first the fact that it neoliberalized and it had war as well I mean you know the war neoliberalism is a sort of slow war on the poor

you know it takes away their hospitals it takes away their schools and things like that or you can't you could have a war supported by the Western Hemisphere, which actually destroys that human that's supposed to go to school and destroys its infrastructure, it destroys it the base of

its social production all together. So it's neoliberalism on speed. So it's being good. You know, it does it, it has the same effect. And liberal has experienced that thing, that neoliberalism on speed. And by the time the Soviet Union

collapsed, you need and tell people to basically harm themselves. But they didn't, you know, then the victory of the ideas of capital, that the market sold everything in the market had become sort of a mantra for everybody. So you didn't need much, you know, you didn't need to tutor anyone into what to do. The Chicago economics became the individual doing good for himself and if he's greedy. then he and he does good for himself, he will do good for others. This fictitious formal, truly as a formal thing, it's true, but nothing formal can be juxtaposed to reality because reality is a process

and anything formal is others break and forms. So nothing formal could appertain to that reality that we're talking about. And what has happened is, of course, you know, you've had an extreme model of expropriation of the poor and depletion of the public sector and depletion of the universities, of the schools, of the hospitals and you had the waste share in Lebanon declined from about 60% to about 20% almost or 25% after the Syrian refugee came.

Because then by magnitude, you know, you had about 2 million people who increased the size of the working class, which was no more than 2 million people. itself, so we double the working class overnight, but the Syrian refugees were eating so poorly that they increased the wayshare but by a mere 5 or 6%. So you can imagine

the poverty of the refugee in liberal as well. So you have a situation where where, you know, and you have the constant aggression. You have a constant military aggression from Israel. You know, it

has incursions every day. It captures, you know, if you look up the news, it's going to capture an old farmer every day. It's going to bomb here every now and then. It will do things like that, until, of course, the resistance in them had developed some deterrent. You know, then things have become different after 2006, thanks to the resistance of Lebanon, and the deterrent has developed. I mean, we haven't seen as many military incursions into Lebanon. since you. Professor, if I may, I would like to stop us for a second here because 2006 is a critical

point, but before we get there, I want to talk about the reality between 1982 and 2006 for a little bit. And also, I just wanted to highlight two things that you said earlier. So I really liked your expression, neoliberalism is a slow war on the poor. Very, very nice. I enjoyed that quite a bit. But one thing that you talked about quite some time ago was the imbalance between imports and exports in Lebanon. And just to underscore the point that, again, Lebanon was constructed by colonial powers. And this intentional manufacturing of an area that has a dramatic imbalance between imports and exports is a way of exerting pressure on this population by the imperial powers, the colonial powers, that constructed it in the first place, by maintaining their subservience to the system. that they have to rely on for many of their imports. So it's worth, you know, keeping that in mind as well.

But turning to 1982, I know that Adnan had mentioned briefly the war that took place in 82. If you can, Professor, take us back there for a moment. Talk about the class interests that were at play, what happened in 82, why that happened in 82, and then what the reality in Lebanon was like between 1982 and 2006, which you mentioned a little bit, you know, constant and current. and et cetera, and there was no real resistance that was viable at that point until 2006. So from 1982 to 2006, what were the class interests and what was the reality? Well, I mean, you see, the Palestinian resistance, you know, which was the speed-adding,

the Arab resistance, you know, had a probe with factions of the leadership of the Palestinian resistance, which are geopolitically governed by the rents that they receive from Arab reactionary regimes. So you had a revolution which was funded by petrodollars, and the petrodollars with which it was funded were meant actually to destroy to disembowel its revolutionaries. So it was entering into Lebanon in 2019, 82, was. almost a cakewalk for Israel, but in 2006, it wasn't the same. Although compared to 2006, the resources that were present there in 1982 were quite significant as well, either military resources relative to those times and financial resources. But the factions that were

at the head of the Palestinian and the Lebanese resistors, some, I mean, some exceptions, in the Palestinians and the Lebanese resistance, you had a situation where it became more of a renter-revolutionary type of resistance rather than and truly committed revolutionary resistance. And that's the mark of failure. That's because the Arab regimes who were funding these people from their petrodollars were actually class friends of this. Israel at the United States rather than those.

Whereas in the case, as things started since then, with Iran being cornered and assaulted and besieged and trying to act and find a way out of this, it has its mode of self-defense was to arm factions of resistance. some say you know it's only armed the Shiites that's not true in politics there's no such thing as you know I arm only

whoever is like in identity they are those who Sunnis or Shiites or Christians or whatever you know so long as they serve the purpose the political purpose undermining their foes their enemies in the region and this and everyone the United States

allies and so with that in mind the resistance in 2000 And since then, since 1982, the resistance was very strong in South. You know, you had first the post, the Soviet and the communist resistance and the secular resistance. And then you had, when the Soviet Union collapsed, you know, the country is always under aggression, right? So the population, the masses of the South is always anti-Israeli because, no, even if you don't aggress, they will aggress you. Because their mode of expansion and their mode of accumulation is that aggression.

And it's because, again, it's exponential. You need to address more and more in order to make more profits. You know, because this is a system than actually nils off wars and the proceeds of wars. So you have a situation where the Lebanese resistance from 1982 onwards has been, well, anyways, you know, what I'm saying. saying is that Israel should not have walked easily into them nor into the Golan Heights, nor

anyway, had there been popular resistance, had people adopted the norm of people's war, the law of people's war, arming the proletariat, arming it with ideologically,

arming the materially arming its human security, and arming it in militarily, militarily as well when you have that synergy you have a successful and you have the long stay power then you have

the success that is that we see that we see now in the resistance and the model of South Lebanon has been a model for Gaza and it will be a model for people elsewhere around the world a model of people a successful

model of people's war which is actually also modeled after the Korean War and the China War and the Vietnam War and every other people's war around the world, the world that has fared well in the struggle. So Lebanon, as I said, it doesn't export a lot, it exports very little, a tenth maybe, or 15% of what it imports.

But again, that doesn't make, it had always this problem. It had always received money from growth to bridge that deficit between its exports and imports and make money and actually earn profits and earn profits for its own nomenclature of financial class and for the financial class for a field because you have to remember that this is, a war economy. And when you have a war economy since 1975, it has been a war economy. It actually produces

two things. It produces, first of all, it reduces the society. Society lives shorter relative to what it could live at the time with which it exists.

And because of that difference, you spend on society less over that time of its life. so you have a lot more left for you so if you spent less on hospitals less on schools you'll have more of the social product going to the guy who wants it

right now you also have this that's one thing you also have another thing when you establish power one imperialism is Israel Zionism and the Comprador

and the Arab Coopradur the Arab Reapsin Enzyme which make part of the same social fabric and part of the same social class relationship but governs the region. They're going to make money out of it, too, right? Let's put it in a very simple term. How are they going to make this money?

They're going to make this money because they belong to the same financial nomenclature, global nomenclature, which actually governs the reproduction of the globe. And if they're more powerful in this region as a result of the destruction of the masses and disempowerment of the masses of this region, they're more powerful everywhere. They'll be able to take things

from everybody in Africa for cheaper prices. Take humans for cheap prices. Fight wars with more certitude and so on and so forth. So the power mesh that they made out of the destruction of the people

is pretty much going to make their life easy, not only in this area but elsewhere. So they need to be in control. They need to be hegemonic and that's why they're called the hegemon. Because all the money in the end from the rest of the world is going to flow through the dollar

to the United States present and, well, in Western financial markets in general. So you have that process where people's lives are being liquidated in order to make more liquid the money that is generated

from war to go to the sun. And it doesn't go only from Lebanon because, but since Lebanon is in a crucial region, the power repercussions the class power repercussions from the control of this region

are so profound that they can appear and they can become powerful throughout it that's it you know so you have what is happening

and so how do we then measure the revenues the what the money that, you know, that accrues to finance capital, the profits, the usurpation, the surplus drain that accrues to, to U.S., to Western capital, and to its allies in the region, you know, this is a, this is the cross-cuts and this criss-crosses all ethnicities and nationalities and things like that, because the world is, it's a single factory which

produces. When you think of that, then what is the production of Lebanon? How, what is the industry of Lebanon? What is it producing in relation to the money that Lebanon is creating abroad and creating for instance? What is the production is this process of auto-destruction. The Lebanese, because of their sectarianism, they auto-destruct and declare. all together differentially of course according to class status but the whole social environment

environment and society are declining there's no water no electricity plastics everywhere trash you know it's an appalling case of auto self decimation

so what you have here is a people who are you know all together experiencing the malaise at different degrees relative to the to the class strata to which they belong but they are all

they all have that very depletion of their lives and their nature is the industrial process it is that war process of that they are being decimated by this combination of neoliberalism and war which are both war

against the social being against society and which itself is the auto-depletion of the natural and new resources is the industry. By how much they destroy themselves is the rate of profit they generate to the Western Hemisphere and to their control. The rate of auto-destruction is the rate of profit. In a sense, right? In a sense, yeah. So in that context, I guess my question would be, how do you frame and characterize the resistance in this?

So, you know, what position do they have? Are they essentially, or perhaps you're suggesting why the resistance in Lebanon, in particular, and its coordinates and interconnections with resistance broadly in the region has such significance. You may think, you know, people may think, well, you know, we're talking about one small node, you know, in this, But in fact, actually, what you're suggesting from this broader picture is that the resistance, you know, beginning with the response to Israeli aggression, you know, an occupation in Lebanon that wasn't defeated really until 2000. So it isn't only 2006 that, you know, listeners in terms of the history should be aware of that, of course, the resistance was successful in freeing southern Lebanon, right, from direct Israeli. occupation in 2000, and it was the attempt of Israel, you know, in the conflicts that began with bombardment in Gaza, but then widened, you know, was seen as an opportunity to perhaps

to reconstitute, you know, Israel's control of the South, and that was successfully defeated since 2006. So, you know, I guess what my question is, is perhaps you can elaborate, given the model that you've been talking about, why the, you know, Lebanese resistance was so important as a counter to the larger processes that you've been talking about. Good. Well, I mean, as I said, you know, no matter what you do, if you are, you know, if you have imperialism as a neighbor, you have to fall under the pressure of its military basis or under the pressure of its direct canon, father.

cannon fire. So, you know, when imperialism expands by war, war is the pillar of the expansion of imperialism. Whoever tells you there is a soft power and a hard power. The power is indifferentialable and dissectable

and the first thing it starts with is the fact that it can bomb people into oblivion. After that, it can devise any sort of idea to basically inculcate people into submission of one form of auto destruction or another. Insofar as the auto-destruction serves as

a process of industrial production by this process of self-inflicted waste. Waste of life. Right? So you have Israel, which is the spearhead of global imperialism. And the most practically, well

everybody says it's an important reason. Let's say it's important. Let's not be sensational or say it's the most important reason. Because in an organic order everything is important, is an organically interrelated order, everything is important. But this is, you know, this is very close to a sort of juggernaut, which is the oil business. And the oil business is very important to the global population. Without the oil, we wouldn't go from one million, one billion to nine billion or eight billion,

which we are at now, right? So it's the energy that supports the production of life, and therefore it's a very crucial commodity for the existence of money. and any sort of disruption to that commodity actually your capacity to disrupt or hold steady that commodity is an immense source to the agenda and Israel is a key player in the destruction

and the notion that you know you can have others down to contrary you know or countering Israeli force and you know and undermining American interests, then, you know, you're going to have more aggression, right?

So the arithmetic and the hydraulics of this are very clear. I mean, at least, you know, and so far as the way I said, right? They cannot, there can be much more complicated, but with the historical contingency and all. But let's just say that for the sake of saying why there should be resistors, why should always there be resistance, why people always resist. Some people, people of the South. The proletariat of the South is the resisting. The peasantry and the proletariat of the South is what resist.

The North cannot resist. As I said earlier, the potential of the North is only to live off the dividends of imperialism. And that's by definition cap. So you can say they're working and they're mining and I don't know what. But in a sense, the way the wage is distributed, is through the value that is extracted from the south. And the value that is extracted from the south is through the wars that the North exercises

visits upon the city. You see? So you have a war which is a proof which is actually the first industry, the cornerstone, which is the first player. And it's a predicate. It's not because it's 50% or 20%. That's quite the small minded

when they start making statistical estimates. The empirics. that's deplorable in a sense, right? So what I'm saying here is there's evidence that the historical predicate, historical causation is without war, there can be no accumulation and without war on the sun.

Therefore, the potential of the proletariat of the sun is to exercise any form of resistance in order to gain back its life. Because what is happening, imperialism is shortening its life relative to the historically determined standards of life. We have too much medicine, we have too much food, and we have too much of everything, but people are dying.

Right? So the people who are dying must exercise a form of resistance to live, to regain. Right? And that's the potential of life. The potential of the planet. That's when the working class potentially becomes infused with revolutionary consciousness and fights.

And revolutionary consciousness and class cannot be, separate from the cultural identity of the masses. If there is Islamic, there's going to be an Islamic element. And if they're a Buddhist, there's going to be a confusion element in the process. And that's what we've noticed and successful. And if they're Bolsheviks, there is going to be a Bolshevik and a Gorkan and other elements of the vast literature and the great literature of the Soviet. And so what you have is a situation where the Arab masses are.

continuously move across. The problem with the Arab masses is the alternative revolutionary thought. We lack an alternative revolutionary thought because Western Marxism which has been co-opted and enlisted by the powers of the center to abort

the revolutionary process has polluted the Marxist-Leninist parties and working movements down. And, you know, pushed them towards the idea of parliamentarism and puritanism and messianic communism, right? We want communism tomorrow, but we don't have plows to plow the land to feed anybody.

So, you know, a lot of people think, you know, oddly enough in the Arab world, you know, a lot of people think that the hold of ideology is so, so miserably strong that many people yearn for the days of colonialism from the Contraduador. science. And they say we had good doctors and good schools. Very few people realize that there was the mass, there was a mass absence of capital, of physical capital. There was nothing. There was no machines, no hospitals, you know, and only a few, a few people who were actually a tutor by the West to set an example of Western standards to kill the culture, to to destroy the culture of the message

on the future, to make them look and of course the denial of development is itself the subject of history, the subject of the historical, of scientific advances, in fact, no social advances. It's not because the white man is smarter that he has the better machine.

It's because he kills the black man that he has the better machines. And that's what people don't understand that this machine can only, science could only occur in Europe, because Europe destroyed 400 million people by one estimate, between 1,500 and 1900 in the colonies. And that's about 10 to 20% of the population of the planet is there.

And now, you know, the issue now with the environmental crisis, each is our Trojan wars. Because with the environmental crisis, we can say, look, youth, Western capitalism destroyed the plan. It can no longer call itself civilizers. That's what we, we are at the pinnacle, and especially with China and the Chinese Communist Party, in command of the way things are happening. We have a counterbalance to the Hegem, and that's going to work in our faith. Yeah, so I know Adnan has to go right now, but I'll ask the final question of you, Ali. I know that we could, we could, I could talk with you for hours more, and we will have you back on.

certainly, but knowing that we have Rania to talk about the same topic in the continuation of this conversation that the listeners will be hearing shortly. I think we should wrap this part up here with, I guess it's a kind of a two-part question. One is that a lot of, as you said, Western Marxists, they need this kind of purity of the movement and they don't like this incursion of other ideas into their, what they see is liberatory resistance, right? You know, if it's not pure communism

and their conception of it, it's something that needs to be criticized. And this is something that we see with all of the Palestinian resistance as well as Lebanese resistance to Zion imperialism, rather than think about like, this is the cultural context

that these movements are arising from. This is the role that they play in combating imperialism, Zionism, Zionism, Zioimperialism. And saying, you know, our conception of what communism may be would be different than what these resistance movements are fighting for. But we have to take these as the role that they play within the context in which they're operating in. And this is something that we see in the case of Lebanon and Palestine quite frequently.

So I'm just going to put that on the table and then also allow you, here's the second, part, to say anything else that you want to help the listeners contextualize this relationship that we're seeing between Lebanon and Israel, as we're recording this listeners on the 12th of December, every day in the news, we see something new about what is happening between Lebanon and South Lebanon, particularly, and Israel. So is there anything else that you would like to put on the table for listeners who are thinking about? what they're seeing in the news between Lebanon and Israel to help contextualize that situation that we haven't already touched on in this conversation.

So we have the 7th of October situation, right? So we have these sessions who are living in an open prison who there is a resolution in the United Nations Resolution, Resolution 1-81, which calls for their repatriation. They're the right of return. They have to go back to the villages and home, and they have been fighting a war against occupation and the war for the right of return to their homes. So this war, it didn't

start the 7th of October. Israel is always bombing Gaza, is always besieging Gaza. The 7th of October, they managed to break through the technological barrier. They broke down the world and, you know, all the American given

super technology. And they managed to take some prisoners and order to, it's a war of national liberation. They were conducting a just war of national liberation and they managed to take them some prisoners because in Israeli prisons at one

time, I recall there were in the Israeli prisons sometimes 10% of the labor force. I know that much at one point. They've held 10% of the labor force in prison the Israelis throughout the years of occupation, apart from the fact

then they have stranded the whole population by ethnic cleansing and massive. as of 1948 so in this just war of national liberation that's

the fragility of the state of Israel came to apparent that the technological supremacy itself is no longer sufficient to basically

fulfill the Jabrotensky thesis that we have to keep on beating them up all the time because these are not like Papua New Guineas the Papuans, then they will fight back. They are a culture people,

the Arabs, and they will fight us back all the time. And in that sense, we'll be serving the empire because the empire wants to beat the Arabs, so will be the club of the empire. Continuously, because we also have a threat, we're not going to

be able to stay here if we don't beat them all the time and we don't acquire the technological difference. So it's a rest of people, constant war and aggression against the Arab world. That's by the Westport, Israel, and they say it's a better investment than anything we've made. And as soon as that

happens, you have a sleet's come, right? To carriers, the British, the Germans, you know, basically, you know, and I'd ashamed every one of them had a Nazi four bearer at one point or another, and they still speak like Nazis when they

speak about this two-state solution. and so on. So it is chauvinism which is you know become very on public display and you know the they came and they and and and

but the resistance in Gaza is not separate from the resistance in Yemen in Syria and Iraq where you know these nations were devastated if you know the death toll in Iraq is in the millions the death toll in Syria

is in hundreds of thousand plus our the population is placed. The death toll in Yemen is 250,000 at least in some estimates. So you have you know, if you think about since 1990 in some estimates it's 4 to 5 million people who died in this war on terror. So you have a reason which is devastated by the United States

and Israeli forces. What are these people going to do? They might have some differences but they're going to unite forces against the common enemy and the resistance and so. Lebanon, engaged these are English in the limited war in the North.

And the limited war, because it knows very, you know, and others, and the Yemenis engaged in a war as well. In Syria, they engaged, Syria has been parted every day at least, you know. And you have by the Israelis, and

you have the Iraqi resistance also engaging, you know, the American bases in Iraq as well. Well, these, you know, Iran has not yet been engaged, but Iran is a different story. It's too big and too powerful for this region, you know, and it's even too powerful, Israel, in some essence, if you hear the experts talk about how much.

I mean, in the end, you know, you have the Islamic world, which is powerful enough as you include Turkey, and not the regime, but the aspirations of the Turkish masses in support of the Palestinian masses, of the Arab masses. and you have this and you take this into consideration, then you have a different structure, of course. That's why you need these warships in the region. So the idea they cannot, they must redress,

and they say that openly, we must redress, you know, the power of our proxy in the region. You know, we have these Western Europeans who we slaughtered because of our racism, that we moved to Palestine to displace some people, and now they're fighting our war. So we have this both, this kill conflicts and this country, in this interest as well. The kill complex doesn't matter when it comes to imperialists. You know, they can do that again, because capitalism and racism are basically a twin.

You know, they were together very nice. They can't be without each other. So in that melting, in that pot, And that, you know, mix, very dangerous mix. You're going to have this war, basically, if, you know, whenever imperialism attacks, it needs to attack. It's not, it doesn't attack by choice. The essence of imperialism is to attack.

You know, when they say, when they say Hamas attack, well, that's, you know, rubbish really. You know, because the whole reason is being aggressed by militarily, by ideologically, by the NGOs, by all the symbolic power of imperialism and its capital by the Nantags and the Nobel Prizes. Nothing works.

If you think of the Western formation, it is a military camp. It has survived as a military camp, and it works as a military camp. So, in the U.S. You know, that industry, which we call the military war complex, not the military, that's the complex.

It's the military war industry complex. We have to end war in this. And I'm speaking well. you know, thinking loudly here now. But you're going to have, you know, the region coming together, tying up forces, galvanizing

and mastering resources to fight a war against imperialism. Imperialism cannot win. There is no way there are no settler colonial unless the Shepler Colonians exterminating. You know, they're successful in Canada and American Ossesie. Why are they successful?

They weren't successful in South Africa. They didn't yield it. where you almost kill everybody and leave a token reservation where they're dying of alcohol and disease you will but otherwise you're going to lose

you cannot win against the Arab masses I mean the Islamic masses and more importantly too the international proletariat the international proletariat feels threatened if Israel wins in it

you know for the first time would go beyond what is expected and go on the night of return for the Palestinians in the meeting that he had with the bricks right so you see that

the developing world knows the symbolism of the power that emanates from the struggle in this region and he knows it has it has to put a stop to imperialism knowing very well that when you you have a People's War.

You know, in Lebanon, unfortunately, you have a huge well section of the population, which lives off the geopolitical rents of the Comprador that actually pits it against itself, its own being. So they're not drinking good water. They don't have electricity. They have nothing, which is the case of the developing world altogether. But in the worst state scenario on the case of Lebanon, and yet they're willing to fight the other guy because, He is with Iran or with shit, you know, it's not like they know, they, it's not like they're, they don't know that the subject of history is the dominant idea and the dominant idea is the dominant class, it's a representation of the dominant class and the dominant institutions and the dominant guns and that's the United States of Europe.

these it's them and their ideas as class relations that make history and they you know sometimes sort of no it is this guy or that guy that makes history I mean they personalize history they trivialize things it's not for lack of for ignorance be history is very easy well you know that everything is is you're born into a system of power and social relations which is history, which has its own momentum and does things, and it always does things in favor of those who are at the helm of the historical structure. You're born into them, and they know them. But yet they're going to say, it's the guy who did that, that president or that chief or that tribal leader or something. They personalize it. You know, they ascribe supernatural power

to some guy, which is like, but they do it for a reason. It's because they're not really producing anything, but the more they make against each other. That's the, you know, so you are involved, your way of life, your mode of production is a mode of waste. You waste yourself and others. And that's

how you make things. Your very death and the very death of your environment, which causes your very death. Your premature death. Is itself the item and is itself the item that is going to seep and produce the user patient of the surplus that's going to go to that. That sort of system, you know, is could last so long as its ideological blinkers launch. But the problem is now the ideological blinkers cannot last in.

Why so? because China has used, indeed, it's undermining the power of the Western and the United States. People see China as a better, more social, more healthy example in which the poor are no longer poor, in which everybody works and so on and so forth,

in which the environment is being cleaned at a very high rate, recycling, and all this healthy system, you know, that the Chinese be able to produce with their own characteristics, you know, socialist characteristic socialism that's something that the world can see it's by the demonstration that the world now is going to say look you know you're no longer you have 38% of the population in the United States is in poverty and about two

percent is in jail and and it's a system that you know so alienated that most humans are depressed or bills and so on and you have a Syrian-European system, which is uglier than this, because it is still based on white supremacy. In France, in Germany, the white supremacy language remains there. It's, of course,

taken shape that we are democratic and we want to be humanitarian and so on and so forth. But it's still the same liberalism that was way back then. If he's not like us, he deserves either to die or be a slave. Now, that's the liberalism of the

of the Enlightenment. That's the core of liberalism. You know, because he's not like us. It's okay. I mean, you know, and so on. So Lebanon actually, you know, has to fight. You know, the more rational side of the says they have to fight itself defense.

The Palestinians have to fight itself. They have to fight in order to have better sanitation, better electricity, better lives, live a little bit longer and better and not be, not, you know, seeing their children and either go as, you know, dishwashers

in the north or die early in the war and poverty of their own homeland. And so what you have is just this situation. I mean, and it's, the aggression will not stop until, of course, the hegemon is, might

think, might assume a crazy character and do something unthinkable we'll have to see I mean, you know, in the case of North Korea we know about quarter of the population

in Korea and the Korean War was obliterated by the Americans and so it's not like we are unaware of you know, now maybe we're up to

two or three percent of the Gaza population that's been already killed by the Zionist, and you have and you could have much more of that in Syria and Lebanon and Iraq. So, you know, all together out of the population of the region,

you probably have between 5% to 10% that have been annihilated by imperialist wars. We're still not as high as North Korea. And the problem again is the alternative thought, the revolutionary thought, you know, the crisis

of revolution. And the The intelligence of central capital, the organized dimension of capital institutions, and the people that are attached to it that think for it, because they have incarnated them, it's mine, is that they know that, you know, the revolutionary thought needs to be curtailed. So they created their own brands of Western Marxism, you know, which basically says, again, I think I talked about this last time, you know, which they find something in the past to discredit all of socialism and think things. That's a big problem for the south is this pollution of ideas from the north. You know, the idea that you need to, in a war of national liberation against colonialism or neo-colonialism, you need to gather, to galvanize to all the forces that are anti-imperians. Together, Islamic and communists, so long as their anti-periodists, they have to fight side by side until the National Liberation War is over.

And then, you know, the way we can debate the social programs that they want to implement afterwards, the communists always want to eradicate private property, and I hope they still do. You know, the Islamists probably are not so keen on that. But let's just see, you know, let's wait until that happens. Yeah, absolutely. So, again, listeners, our guests today,

in this first half of the episode that you're listening, listening to was Professor Ali Kadri, who I think is one of the most important intellectuals around today. I really appreciate your work. I know you're very embarrassed by me saying this on air, but I do think that it's true. So Professor Kadri is author of many books, including the cordon sanitaire, the accumulation of waste, the conversation that we had last time, a theory of forced labor migration, the proletarianization of the West Bank under occupation. Again, You can listen to that episode, China's Path to Development, which is a conversation that I hope that we have soon about in the new year, I think we should talk about China. And also, we should definitely talk about the Arab Spring next year for, you know, it's 2024.

I think that's a good year for it. So, again, Professor Kadri, thank you very much for coming on the program and listeners. You will soon be hearing us cut to the conversation with Rania Halle. Thank you so much. Cheers. And listeners, we're back on guerrilla history. As I mentioned previously, we had just wrapped up our conversation with Professor Ali Kadri.

And now we are turning to a conversation which is taking place a couple days after with the esteemed journalist, Serania Holic, who, of course, you can find her work at Breakthrough News. You can find her written work all over the place. Her website dispatches from the underclass. Of course, everybody who's listening to this show is probably familiar with Rania's work somewhere or another. So it's great to have you on the show, Rania.

It's so good to be on with you. Thanks, guys, for making the time. Absolutely. It's a pleasure. Adnan, feel free to go ahead. Yeah, great. Welcome to the show. We really appreciate you making time.

I love dispatches. I think all of our listeners should, if they don't already listen to it, be listening to it. And of course, I love when you and Eugene have your discussions together, those are absolutely wonderful conversations. So what I wanted to ask you about maybe just to begin with, since we've been discussing from a kind of conceptual and theoretical perspective of how to situate Lebanon and Lebanon's history in the region and its position. you know, vis-a-vis, you know, the imperial regimes and the Zionist settler colonial entity in the region, how, you know, you think Lebanon has changed in, you know, kind of the period of the 70s and 80s. You know, its earlier history, of course, it was created as a, you know, a colonial enclave for, You know, the Maronite or Christian, it was meant by the French to be this kind of, you know, haven to try and create and establish an enclave for these Christian communities. But of course, it's a very mixed country. And as a result, there have been some real developments, shifts and changes in its position,

you might say, geopolitically, in the 70s and 80s going forward. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about how you see that. that period of transition. I mean, I think what you're saying, you're not, you're using 70s and 80s like till now or specifically. This period. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I just, I, you know, I think that I'm not like an expert on the Lebanese civil war. There are a lot of people who could talk about it much better than I can, but I have decided to adopt the position that people I respect the most have on that situation, which is that, yes, Lebanon did have a civil war, but it's actually kind of inaccurate to call it just a civil war because it was a war on Lebanon by imperialist powers, whether, you know,

led by the Americans, the French with Israel used as tools and local proxies as well. And a lot of that was initially meant as the war, a war on the Arab left. And the war, the civil war in Lebanon, you know, and I put civil war in quotes from there, had different periods, right? You have like the period of the late 70s, which was really like a war on the left. And then, you know, which continued. but then by the early 80s, like you have the Israelis coming in. I mean, the Israelis were involved in Lebanon from the beginning,

but you have the Israelis coming in and actually like invading the country, occupying, putting Beirut under siege, putting like parts of Lebanon under siege. It was brutal. And then you have the emergence of Isbala, which is probably the thing everybody cares about most, because I think that's what's most relevant today. And that's the transition, I guess. that's when we talk about what's like how they connect that to now is that with the

Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon you have the emergence of I think one of the most powerful if not the most powerful military resistance force across the Middle East and that is the organization known as Hezbollah and it kind of goes without saying that every resistance organization that the United States describes as terrorists in the region except for the, you know, like it's basically just a reaction to Israeli settler colonial aggression, whether we're talking about Hamas or Hezbollah or these groups in Iraq or, you know, and I could go on and on or just the, you know, the fact that the Iranians sort of had all this ideologically in many ways. But Lebanon is like you mentioned, it's a, it's an interesting country, it's a fractured country because initially the idea of Lebanon, I mean, let's remember the borders of this region are all colonial, right? used to just be one big region. My dad's, my dad's pretty old. My dad's like 82. So he was like seven years old in 1948. And he remembers his dad used to take, you know, when he was a little

kid, his dad used to take the train from Beirut to Yaffa to get oranges. So that was what the region was like. You travel from Palestine to Lebanon to Syria. It's like going from Virginia to Maryland to, you know, Pennsylvania. It's like these regions were all, like they have their own sort of like little distinct maybe like food items, but for the most part, culturally, they're the same. I have family in Syria. Like, for example, I have lots of family in Syria because it's just a fake border. And so, you know, the idea of Lebanon was supposed to be the, as you mentioned the French, I mean, the French kind of cut it out as, because Lebanon had a lot of Christians in it, specifically Maronites. So Lebanon cut it out to be this like

Maronite Ethno State in many ways in the kind of vision of Israel as a Jewish ethno state. And so you do have this hangover from that view. I don't think, and I'm not ascribing beliefs to everybody who's Maronite in Lebanon at all, but there are political parties that still have the idea of we want to have this like Maronite state or Maronite led state and we're a minority and we need representation. And the only way to have it is if we make sure everybody else doesn't have as many rights as we do, there is that, like, mentality and people who have that mentality are indeed like fans of normalization. And you could even maybe call them Zionists. They wouldn't call themselves that, but they kind of are. And so you have that, that like, I guess, that kind of person in Lebanon

that is represented in certain fascistic political parties that are closely aligned with the United States. And that actually collaborated with the Israelis during the civil war to massacre Palestinians and other people as well. And those political parties still exist today, but they're weak. The strongest block today in Lebanon is the block that Hezbollah is a part of politically. And I know I'm kind of moving all over the place here, but like if we talk about after the Lebanese civil war ended, Israel continued to occupy a huge portion of southern Lebanon. The majority of people who are a part of Hezbollah are, like that all of them actually are southern Lebanon. I mean, they formed as resistance to that brutal occupation that included torture prisons and

checkpoints and like all of all of the things that you see Israel engage in across Palestine is what they did in Lebanon except for moving vast amounts of settlers because it never got to that point because there was too much of a stiff resistance and so the people who experienced that fought back they fought back for years and in the year 2000 Hasbalah pushed out the Israelis and they lived. liberated land. They liberated, they've liberated Southern Lebanon minus a couple areas that are still occupied till now, like Chabaa Farms. But they liberated almost all the land. That was a first. This is the first time in history in the Middle East when it comes to Israel that any organization has been

able to liberate their land, aside from maybe October 7th when briefly, Qasam guys paraglided into their former villages and were in control for a couple of days. And you can imagine why that was so emotional for so many people. But then, you know, the Israelis, like in 2005, Hezbollah decides to enter a government to protect their weapons. And for good reason, because the U.S. was committed to this idea of using a legal framework of disarming militias across Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah. Why? Because Hezbollah is a deterrent to Israel. They fight Israel. We can't have that. Israel needs to be able to, like, be the strongest in the region and to what they want and take what they want. So Hezbollah entered government for the sole purpose of protecting their weapons. And that's what they've

basically done since that time. And in 2006, they proved the importance of that, at least then, because they fought the Israelis and successfully defeated, like, successfully obstructed them from invading Lebanon. The Israelis were incapable of invading Lebanon. And they tried so hard. But they were just incapable. And that was the Hezbollah of 2006. Since then, a lot has happened. Hezbollah's gained a lot of support in terms of making alliances with certain political parties in the Lebanese government and therefore they have been able to protect their weapons. In that time, the U.S. launched a regime change war on Syria to try to get rid of Syria's role in the axis of resistance. And Hezbollah eventually entered that war to stop the Syrian state from collapsing to ISIS and al-Qaeda and also to protect Lebanon's territorial integrity because these groups posed a threat to Lebanon and were actually coming into Lebanon. Lebanon and blowing up Shia mosques and taking over areas near the borders.

And throughout that time, there's also been an economic collapse in Lebanon due in large part to corruption from officials that the U.S. is aligned with, like central bank governor, Riazileme, and the whole Ponzi scheme economy he had created that up until everyone decided they wanted Lebanon to collapse, they all supported and applauded him for this Ponzi scheme economy that was so obviously fate. and propped up on golf money and nothing. And so when that collapsed, it was actually used by the Americans and various other Western governments through like soft power, mostly like NGOs, and then a lot of the billionaire owned media in Lebanon to try to blame it all on Hezbollah rather than the pro-American, pro-Saudi, pro-Israel officials who were responsible for it. And that actually kind of worked for a bit. Like there was an uprising in 2019 that I spent a amount of time covering initially against like a higher tax on WhatsApp, but then it coincided with the collapse of the economy and it was quickly hijacked by various Western-funded NGOs

and the U.S. tried to jump in on it, the French tried to jump in on it, the Germans tried to jump in on it to basically point the finger for the collapse on Hezbollah. It didn't really, it didn't work to unseat Hezbollah from government or the parties it's aligned with, which is what was under attack. But I think it did work in diminishing. support from a certain kind of person in Lebanon that supports Hisbalah's resistance, but then started to actually hear a lot of these ideas of, oh, it's His Bella's fault, it's His Bella's fault, and start to believe them. They're bad governance.

They're bad governance. And, you know, there's a lot to say about Hisbala governing, you know, like you can, there's plenty to criticize. I mean, they're not, you know, no one in Lebanon's good at governing. It's a messed up country. But fast forward to now. It's now 2023. There's a genocide in Gaza. And Israel's threatening to do the same thing to Lebanon. But it's been 70 days. And Israel has not done the same thing to Lebanon. Instead, they've really been limited by Hezbollah's rules of engagement, which they've stuck by most of the time, even though it's been a gradual escalation at the border. And now a lot of those people who are in 2019 were becoming convinced that Hezbollah is a part of the problem. not all of them, but a lot of them now recognize that, oh, actually Israel is still the problem.

And thank God we have Hezbollah, because if not for them, we would be Gaza. And so there's a shift in, there's a like shifts over time. I hope I explained that well. I know I was kind of all over the place. But I personally, having been here for the last six or seven years, have witnessed that kind of shift over time to see Hezbollah be criticized for its involvement in Syria and blamed for everything. And also a lot of sectarianism involved in that, a lot of anti-Shea rhetoric, anti-Shiah hatred, funded in large part by the Gulf states and their media and the Americans as well. In addition to blaming Hezbollah for the collapse, in addition to just on and on and on, to now like, oh, the most important thing we have in Lebanon right now is this organization that makes me be able to sit here from Beirut and speak to you without hearing bombs in the back. background like it's anyways go ahead no i'd like to just step in for a second and i'm going to

quickly turn back for just a moment to make one comment before i ask the question which when you talked about the civil war and how when we think about the civil war in lebanon it's important to not think about it as a pure civil war it's important to do that in most civil wars actually i know that the united states is a little bit of an isolated case actually but if you look at most quote unquote civil wars globally. And this actually relates to something that we talked about in a conversation that we had recorded with the deep program yesterday as of the time of recording. And that episode should come out on their feed and our feed around the same time that

this episode comes out actually within a week or so of each other. But one of the things that I was trying to enumerate in this conversation, which was about colonialism and imperialism, is that one of the ways that colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism operate is by installing puppet leaders in countries and also sometimes in addition to and sometimes in lieu of stoking tensions within the country that then lead to a civil war and then continue to perpetuate that civil war by funding one or more sides in some cases within that country in the efforts to destabilize it and in order to allow the imperial country to maintain some sort of,

of imperialist or neo-colonialist control over that country, depending on the given context in which that country relates to the imperialist country. I don't want to enumerate it too much because, again, listeners, we just recorded this with the D program and you'll be able to find it on our feed and their feed either right before this or right after this. But important to think about that. When we think about civil wars, like it's almost never purely a domestic conflict. There's almost never purely domestic interests that play within those civil wars and

interests that are fueling those civil wars and Lebanon is certainly an example which you touched on a little bit earlier but I do want to turn to something that you've been bringing up many times in your answer and something that actually like surprisingly we really didn't talk about with Ali which is Hezbollah so of course you know when people are seeing the news and anytime that Lebanon comes up in the media these days like it's always Hezbollah that's in the media and just having the opportunity to ask you about it is great because not only have you been talking about Hezbollah for years and would be much more knowledgeable in speaking about it than most other guests that we have had on the show to date and even possibly could get on the show.

But you've also even interviewed. I know it was at the beginning of this year, I want to say, the number two for Hezbollah Sheikh Naim Qasem. So Rania, can you just, and apologies for. for the pronunciation. I can't even pronounce my own name, right? But anyway, can you just tell the listeners a little bit about Hezbollah? Because I think that even within the kind of far left audience that we have,

there's kind of this mystification surrounding Hezbollah that is fostered by the imperial media, even amongst people that don't, you know, they take what the media says with the grain of salt or disengage from it totally, like having the ability to like actually hear about Hezbollah, the context in which they were founded, kind of the tenants that they, that they adhere to, and their military strategies. These are things that are not talked about in the West at all. So if you would be able to, in briefish terms, tell us about those things, Rania. So Hezbollah, like I mentioned, is this organization, this armed group in Lebanon that arose after the Israeli invasion and occupation. of Lebanon or in the midst of that, at least its precursor did.

And it also came into being at a historical moment when in just a few years earlier, you have the Islamic Revolution and Iran. And Hezbollah is a Shia, a Muslim organization that is based around a basically like a sort of Shia ideology of resistance, much in the same vein as Iran and what it's based around. and like this like fight for justice. And it was a way to rally people around an identity against an invader and an occupier. And Hezbollah has changed a lot over the years. I mean, it started out much more religiously, I mean, still religiously conservative,

but it started out much more conservative in the 80s than what it later evolved into being. And as a military organization, it has not only, it. has succeeded because it's learned from a lot of past failures over the decades in terms of resistance to Israel. It's learned from them in corrected mistakes. I can think you could say the same thing for all the other resistance groups that exist, including Hamas, by the way, which I know we're not here to talk about Hamas, but I would say Hamas has learned from a lot of mistakes and failures and you see a lot of that coming into play now in terms of their military abilities. But anyways, so Hezbollah emerges in this situation of occupation, of brutal, brutal

massacres in occupation, and it's also a political party. And it ended up, like I mentioned, after fierce, fierce battles, being able to liberate land in 2000 by pushing out the Israelis. And that was a huge success in Nisrella. Hassan Nisrella is the Secretary General of Hizbollah. And yes, I did get to interview his second in command earlier this year, Sheikh Nain Gresem. And that was like the coolest interview I've ever done. As far as the people I've been able to interview. And I really encourage people to go check it out because his answers were really like short and sweet. We'll link to it in the show notes as well, listeners.

Yeah. So that'd be great. So the point is, is this land is liberated in 2000. And now Hezbollah is like still got all these weapons that they've gained. mostly by being an alliance with Iran. And I want to explain something, by the way, people do like to call Hezbollah a proxy of Iran. And that is not, I would not describe it that way.

When I think of a proxy, I think of an organization or like a political party in a state that basically takes their orders from whoever that the proxy of. In the case of Hezbollah, this is a Lebanese organization made up of Lebanese people who gathered around, who organized around an identity, a majority identity, to fight back against an occupier. And I think the identity aspect of that is really, really important in terms of understanding that if people are going to fight for something, they need that.

They need some sort of identity. And so in Lebanon, that identity worked for this particular geographic location. And again, in the midst, this is following the Islamic Revolution in Iran. People took a lot of inspiration from that. It's also after the fall, like, not after the fall, but it's also we're talking leading up to the fall of the Soviet. Union. So a lot of the leftist organizations that existed in these places didn't have the same kind of funding and weapons as they did before, really ideological leadership as they did before

because the Soviet Union is like, you know, on its way to collapse and disintegration. And so Hezbollah emerges from that sort of like field. And after 2000, liberates land and then is stuck in the situation where they want to keep their weapons because Israel still exists. Israel's still a threat. Just liberating your land isn't enough. As far as those balasies as an organization, a settler colonial entity in the heart of the Middle East will always be a threat, will always be the tip of the spear of imperialism, of U.S. imperialism specifically, which is something that if you listen to Nisraelis speeches, they very well recognize. You know, they used to call, they used to, it used to be Israel's the enemy. Israel's the enemy. Then it became, no, no, no, no.

no, U.S. is the head of the snake. Israel is an arm of the U.S. And so I would actually argue that like Hizbo, okay, like Hizbo is not a leftist organization, but I would argue it's an anti-imperialist organization. And I think that that's totally possible. Like in terms of its military like a reason for existing, it exists to fight imperialism. And that is what they do. And I think that's important to recognize. I think a lot of times people in the West, like the West who are like good leftists, like they want everyone to look like Cuba. And I totally get that. I totally get that. I want everyone to look like Cuba too. Like I'm totally there with you. However, as far as military capabilities go, we do need to recognize that we live in a certain time period where a lot of the

people who are dedicated to resistance and anti-imperialism in this region happen to be organizing around a religious flavor. And does that mean that, like, at some point, if we ever liberate the world from imperialism, like, we necessarily, like, want that ideology in place? I mean, no, because we're leftists. That said, we're not there. We're not there yet. And honestly, like, Hizbollah, as far as Hizbollah is concerned, like, they're not even that interested in governing. They literally, they, like, you talk, like, they literally exist to liberate their land.

So just to go back to my point about Israel, it's like 2000 comes, they do liberate it. And then you've got the U.S. with Israel's backing and other Western countries trying to disarm them. And that's a serious threat because the second you disarm them, what's going to happen, Israel's going to come right back in and take Lebanon. So obviously, their whole modus operandi ever since then, their whole reason for existing has continued to be to protect Lebanon's territorial integrity specifically from Israel.

But during Syria, it became about more. It became about like even in Israelist speeches during the war on Syria, you would hear him say, Israel's still the enemy. But now he would talk to a lot more about the Saudis at the time because the Saudis are also the tip of the spear of U.S. imperialism in the region, or at least they have been historically. And they were funding these groups that were trying to regime change Syria. And we're also like trying to genocide anybody who wasn't like Salafi jihadists. And so Hezbollah does actually have this really, I think, important analysis of how the world works. and it really is an anti-imperialist one.

So I just want to throw that out there. I mean, I mean, I'm so glad that you elaborated on that because I think that's something very important. And this has come up, you know, very recently, of course, in the Gaza situation again, with you have so-called leftists who want to define and stipulate what the resistance needs to be like. And so, you know, essentially dissatisfaction that. Can I just say one thing?

that real quick it's also not it's also not up to people in the west to decide absolutely like it's just really yeah yeah all they're doing is fragmenting solidarity and support which is so vital now by distracting people or trying to confuse people about you know what the actual role for solidarity would be you know the solidarity is not trying to stipulate you know how the resistance should carry out and organize it under what banner and under what ideology. I mean, if you recognize the situation, there's a settler colonial, you know, invasion that's taking place and there's going to be resistance. And I think that was so important to talk about the ideological matrix. I mean, I've talked with people who are lefties in the Middle East. And it's clear that a lot of people

were communists. And then they joined, you know, some of these like resistance movements. groups that were Islamist. But yes, I mean, this was like a very common kind of pathway. They were just looking for effective movements to fight for freedom and justice. And I think it's interesting that you mentioned that Hezbollah is even not that interested in governing. And I would say also maybe from the other side, the fact that people have their critiques of Hezbollah in government is also going to be useful in a situation in the future, you know, God willing, that comes soon where, you know, you have freedom and liberation and the chance to actually have, you know, a new political arrangement. People will make their choices and decisions in that

context. And maybe, you know, the Hezbollah in Lebanon won't be the party that gets the majority in forms of government. And maybe in Palestine, you know, Hamas won't actually be that successful in elections in the future. The actual only way, if people, are concerned, it seems to me, about their vision of a society in the future is actually let them compete in regular politics without the threat of, you know, settler colonial occupation, invasion, and imperial interference in the domestic kind of environment. And so one thing I wanted to ask you a little bit also about the emergence of Hezbollah as an effective movement and organization in the 80s and in resistance to the occupation is also that in addition to, you know, being a

resistance military force and also, you know, a political party is that they also were, you know, a social service provider, you know, in an era that was abandoned in some ways by, I mean, there was no effective governance from the Lebanese state in the South. And would you say also that historically the Shia community in like the southern suburbs of Beirut and in the south were the poorer, less developed, you know, neglected parts of the country and that, you know, Hizbollah actually provided a lot of social services, you know, medical care and things like that, which is something that we see with other Islamist movements is that with the collapse and the neoliberalization of the state, sort of social organizations like that had to kind of pick up the pieces of provide.

And this is where they gained a lot of their sort of support because they were doing the kinds of things that people needed, you know, which isn't an ideological thing. It's just providing these social services. What was their kind of role in that? Well, that's, no, that's absolutely correct. I mean, look, Lebanon is a country that is split by sect politically. And that's a whole, that's a thanks to the French. and then the later, like, agreements after the Civil War.

So everybody kind of votes within their sect. And so all the parties are, most of the major, all of the major political parties are sect-based, whether we're talking about Hezbollah or ML, which is another Shia party, but different flavor. Or like the future movement or the free patriotic movement, which is a Christian party that's actually aligned with Hezbollah, or the Lebanese forces, which is a fascist party that they, you know, that also, has a militia that they you i mean all of these also have militias all of these parties have militias uh that were active during the civil war um but the point is is that Lebanon lacks a strong state and that's for a reason it was intentionally made to be that way it's intentionally made it's

intentionally been weakened uh to not have the capacity to take care of people and it it the way that the system set up by sect it actually does foster clientelism where and that's what you know they call it the states but really it's also like that's where your community goes for services. And it exists. It exists in the Drews community, too, where, you know, will lead jimblatt is, or the Jamblotte family is like the leadership there. And people go to certain hospitals, you know what I mean, associated with that and they get services through that. But Hezbollah, more than the others, has definitely provided a really nice network of services. There are clinics. There are hospitals. They pay the family, you know, they get,

they take care of the families of martyrs. And this sort of thing is very important, very, very, very very important. And this is all, by the way, being done while Hezbollah is under sanction. So, like, all these other groups that are aligned with the U.S. actually have access to more funds. But then Hezbollah might because of sanctions. But Hezbollah has been able to, like, with help from Iran. And from its own community, by the way. Because, like, people is, don't forget, Lebanon also lives off of remittances. And people are very loyal to their communities. And that's part of the reason the country isn't starving right now. And you mentioned something that I think is really important, which is. that is that historically speaking in Lebanon, the South has been poorer, where mostly Shias live in the South, not only Shias, but mostly. And it's sort of, it's been poorer. It's sort of, you know, like it's the farmers and the peasants. I mean, there's farmers and peasants everywhere. But historically speaking, it was the poorer, less developed part of the country. And there's a lot of racism against Shias that comes from that history. And then what's interesting now, though, is that, you know, the North used to be the North and, like,

the sort of Sunni North used to be, um, yeah, it's like Tripoli. Yeah, Tripoli. And then, and now that that situation, by the way, it has been like reversed. Uh, now it's the other way around where that, the Tripoli is like, I think, one of the poorest cities, if not the poorest in Lebanon. And then the south is actually much more developed. Um, and there's like all the sort of indicators of like, of like, uh, what's the word I'm thinking of like all the social indicators, uh, are higher in the south and in the north. And in the north, you also have, like, a lot of these sort of people from feudal families, because Lebanon's still very much a feudal place, where, like, you know, all these leaders of these parties are actually from feudal, like, lord families. These are the kinds of people who are in charge. These parties in the north who, like, are from there, like, they have the people, the leadership have these, like, massive houses and villas while people are living in, like, some serious extreme poverty. And so I think there's a lot of that that's fomented. some resentment, especially throughout the time where people were being flooded, like with a tsunami of nonstop anti-Shiya propaganda for a number of years. Like I mentioned, coming from Gulf-funded

outlets, especially during the peak of the war on Syria and coming from, you know, these sort of billionaire-funded Lebanese outlets. There's like a million outlets in Lebanon, which makes no sense for a country that's only like six million people. And it's all for propaganda. Like, that's because it shows you Lebanon. The only reason Lebanon's important, this will be very controversial for the Lebanese who disagree with me. The only one, the only reason anyone cares about your country is because of Hezbollah. That's the only reason Lebanon gets attention. Otherwise, what is Lebanon? It's just like a piece of the medit. It's like a piece of coastal land with very few people in it. That's why there's a million media outlets to tell you that Hezbollah is responsible for everything bad. I forget the, oh yeah, the initial question, I hope I answered. I'll take a follow. up here because I know that we've been talking about Hezbollah for quite some time. And of course, it's okay. I can do it all day. No, don't worry.

They will factor into the next question that I'm asking. So you'll have the opportunity to. But I want to reframe or refocus the conversation from Hezbollah specifically to the kind of the overarching topic of the discussion that we had between the segment that we had with Ali and the segment that we're having with you, which is the role and position of Lebanon. more broadly speaking, against Zioimperialism. We can talk about that historically. We can talk about that in contemporary, you know, a contemporary analysis of the situation.

But can we talk a little bit about Lebanon, more broadly speaking, and their position relative to the Zio imperialist project? Because I know you've touched on a couple of different aspects within this conversation already. You've touched on Hezbollah. you've touched on some of these kind of radical right-wing groups that are present within Lebanon that actually I know you called them Zionists and I'm sure that they would not like to be called that but well some of them might some of them might but if you could just take that you know kind of broad question go where you want with it maybe we'll have time for one or two follow-ups

based on that to kind of tie this conversation together okay so I'll say what I can because I want to sit here and pretend to be like an expert of Lebanese history. I'm certainly not. I can talk more about like what's happening today and a little bit about the past. But I don't, you know, I don't like to pretend I know what I don't. But in my personal opinion, from what I understand Lebanon to be today and from my own interactions with like my own family and other people I know here. And then also in the diaspora, because let's not forget, there's like, I think there's like more Lebanese in the diaspora than Lebanese in Lebanon. Because including my family, like I grew up in the States. I have a very. American accent. So Lebanon's role as far as like the Zio imperialist project, I think we can go back to like it was initially supposed to be this sort of like Maronite Christian ethno state. And that was like the vision for the region is what you divide and conquer. It's like the most basic imperialist thing ever. So you divide and conquer. You plant this Jewish ethno state in the region full of most like led by, you know, mostly European, Europeans, European settlers.

And then you co-opt a wealthy minority in a nearby country to do the same. And in Lebanon, that was the Christian Maronites. It was supposed to be their state. And, you know, there was even during the Civil War, there was a militia called the South Lebanon Army in the South that was literally funded and took its orders from Israel. And they actually, like, they were prison guards at the prisons that Israel set up. they manned checkpoints and they killed people and in 2000 when uh south Lebanon was liberated a lot of them left Lebanon and went and took Israeli citizenship so there's actually like people from the South Lebanon army who them and their descendants are now Israeli citizens and Israel even

uses them to make videos directed at the Lebanese it's like kind of crazy um and Lebanese people just laugh at them but you know certainly like look after after all of that that era ended people weren't like executed for being traitors or anything like that um so you still have you know people who stayed in lebanon and their descendants are still in the villages they used to live and if they think the same way i don't know i imagine some of them do so you could say there are still people who might at least privately identify as zionists in that respect but then you have you know there's there's political parties like there's so there's two blocks in lebanon Lebanon's a bit of a complicated place, but like there's a lot of political parties and there's two major blocks that have been important in the last, let's say, 20 years or a little bit more.

No, the last 20 years. And that's like March 8th and March 14. March 8 is like Hezbollah, M.L, the free patriotic movement. It's these parties that has belas aligned with to protect its weapons. And they all agree they'll protect his bellow's weapons. They don't really agree on much else. And that's why they can't govern together properly. But that's like the rock and the hard place, his bell is between. politically is they made the alliances they made to protect their weapons and the rest doesn't really matter right now. Then you have March 14th, which is made up of what used to be important but doesn't really matter anymore. The future movement, which was led by Sad Hariri, the son of Rafil Hariri. And the reason I'm raising this and also the like the, they're not actually socialist, but they call themselves socialist, the PSP, the Progressive Socialist Party, which is led by Willie Jim Blatt. It's a Drew's party. And, uh,

And Lebanese forces, which is the fascist militia I mentioned, that is led by a guy called Samir Jaja, who was so vicious during the Civil War. He's the only person who ever served a prison sentence for how many people he killed and for his actions. But the reason I raised that is because the people in March 14 are all, aside from Wili Jim Blutz, who switches sides whenever he feels like it, are all funded and backed by the Americans and the Saudis. The Saudis less so, now that they want more peace in the region, but also the Americans. And they basically, by proxy, might as well be Israel's allies. And it's important when I mentioned Sad Haridi because during, you asked Lebanon's like role in that Zion imperialist project is these organizations are used to have been used in Lebanon to suppress the left, to suppress any sort of attempt at having a civil state that

isn't sect based. And then they've also been used against other countries like Syria. In the case of Sad Haridi in his party, the future movement, they trafficked weapons to Syria during the latest quote-unquote civil war. That was a regime change project. A lot, like those radical crazy groups that were trying to collapse the government got weapons through Lebanon.

So that's just one of so many examples. And like the Lebanese forces at this point literally just exist to pretend they can one day fight Hezbollah, but they cannot. And then the other thing about Lebanon is the army. The reason Hezbollah also continues to exist is because Lebanon doesn't have a sovereign army that can do anything.

people everyone in Lebanon likes the army because every sect is in it but it's basically dependent on foreign funding it receives all its weapons as hand-me-downs from the u.s so it can never be powerful enough to take on Israel but then the u.s has this crazy vision this like this stupid arrogant vision that the lebanese army can be like some sort of alternative to his bala and like take out his bala at some point even though people in the army actually like many people support his bala so this is how i don't know I wouldn't say Lebanon's so important that it matters that much in terms of pushing imperialism across the region. But there are specific characters, some of who I mentioned, who absolutely do that and are completely tied into the various imperialists, mostly Gulf states that are arms of American imperialism in the region. And I guess that's how they do their damage.

But so much of it is mostly internal, except for maybe how it's impacted Syria. And the reason so much of it is internal is because it's all there to try to blunt the impact and take away support from His Bala, because that's all America really cares about when it comes to Lebanon. Yeah. I want to come to the contemporary and get some of your thoughts on, you know, how you see developments taking place in the northern front. I guess you could characterize it. And partly because I was in the West Bank in 2006 and I was deposition. and I was departing the day, the attack on the Gaza beach, Huda Ghalia, and her family were brutally killed by Israeli bombardment. And, of course, we've already talked or mentioned 2006 as a very important moment in sort of Hizbollah's development as a serious resistance force,

not only because it had liberated, but because it prevented reoccupation. militarily in 2006. And so I think, you know, a lot of people would be thinking and expecting given the Gaza attack that maybe there was a potential for widening and for Hisbalah to be involved. And of course, they are involved. But maybe you can characterize for people who see a contrast. What's changed? What are the factors that are involved now and how do you see things playing out in the relationship across the border between Lebanon? and Israel in the north part of Israel. So I think that obviously the primary front is Gaza, right?

Like that's where the real battles are. But since October 8th, the day after October 7th, Hezbollah has been acting as like a supportive, in a supportive capacity for Gaza by essentially trying to relieve some of the tension from what Hamas is having to deal with. And I actually, like, I even have, and this is actually, this is from a few weeks ago, so it may be different. But just to reiterate, like, there's been a war in southern Lebanon since October 8th.

Lebanon is at war. It's just very low level. It's nothing compared to what's happening in Gaza. Like, as soon as Israel began, it's war on Gaza. Hezbollah entered the fight. And like I said, it's to alleviate pressure on Hamas by basically redirecting part of the Israeli military apparatus to that northern front. And in terms of numbers, at least as of a few weeks ago, what does that mean? According to what Nasrallah said himself, it has met

a third of the Israeli military is present on the Lebanese border. That's huge, right? Like a third, that means Israel doesn't have its entire military capacity to focus on Gaza. You've also, that's something like it's estimated to be about 80,000 Israeli soldiers and officers. And then you compare that to 100,000 that are engaged in the war on Gaza. So almost as many in the north, right? And then half of the Israeli Navy has been deployed to the Lebanese front. And then a quarter of the Israeli airport or air force has been deployed to the Lebanese front. Half of the missile and air defense units that Israel has have been deployed to the Lebanese front.

So it's also meant to be depleting the Iron Dome. About a third of the logistical units that Israel has have been deployed to the, the Lebanese front, 65,000 is really settlers evacuated settlements in the north. But that number may have gone up, by the way, something like 70,000 evacuated settlements in what they, you know, we've called the Gaza envelope. And these people are saying they don't want to return. So this is huge. What I just described is huge.

They literally emptied out settlements in the north by just firing, you know, every day. And let me be clear. That's decolonization at work, Ryan. Right, exactly. I mean, you could say that this is. It's a contraction of Israel's territorial borders and control in a way. Exactly. And I also would add that, you know, like this, like I said, it's not, this isn't Gaza.

Like what's happening in Lebanon isn't even close to Gaza. That said, it's been a pretty fierce war. Like Israel has, we know they've targeted civilians and journalists because they're really good at doing that on purpose. They've used white phosphorus. They've killed over 100 Hezbollah soldiers. it's unclear how many Israeli soldiers have been killed because for some reason they like to hide their losses. But, you know, it's interesting whenever, like, you know, I, you notice it. I mean, if you follow all the telegram channels, Hizbella immediately puts out a banner almost immediately after one of their soldiers dies because they celebrate them.

And they celebrate that sacrifice, whereas the Israelis are like hiding it because their public doesn't know how to lose people. Well, I just say it's not only that their public doesn't know how to lose one of the main kind of call. cards of Israel. And one of the things that actually it uses as a way to sell its weaponry in many cases is this feeling of superiority and of invincibility, which is something that there was the guise of for quite some time. And so when they have the situations where they have soldiers dying, where they have Merkava's being blown up by homemade RPGs and people planting minds by hand on them that does a lot to destroy that idea of invincibility, which is something that Israel has relied heavily on for decades and decades. So it's not only that the people there are

sore losers and, you know, they don't want to admit that they, that they can lose, but they also try to project this idea of invincibility abroad. Yeah, they don't want you to know they're a paper tiger, right? Right. It's like, it's like, and then, you know, I, I just, you kind have asked me to compare now to back then. I just want to say now what's happened is the rules of engagement from 2006 to now have changed dramatically because of Hezbollah is a much more powerful organization than it was in 2006. And people are battle-hardened. They fought in Syria. They fought alongside a conventional army, by the way. They fought alongside the Russians. Like they've also been training. They have better weapons. They have precision weapons now.

Like, and Israel, no, that scares the Israelis. And Hezbollah so far, you know, initially this war, you know, at the border was contained at about five to 10 kilometers from each border. Then it became 20 kilometers. At one point, his, the Israelis did hit like 40 kilometers into Lebanon, but they just, but, but it was kind of like an exception. And now, you know, so it's been that's like tip for tat escalation, but mostly on his Bullah's terms, which is what's so interesting. And, you know, why is that? You know, back in 2006, Hezbollah, like, you meant there was this war between Hezbollah and the Israelis. It was a 33-day-long war. Israel killed, like, over 1,000 Lebanese civilians. But Israel lost 121 soldiers. And for Israel, that was, like,

not something that ever happens. That was a big deal. And so the Israelis, and the Israelis tried to invade. They literally, they would, like, try to invade a village at the border with, like, hundreds of Israeli soldiers and like five guys. I might be exaggerating a little bit, but I think there is some story about like one village where like five or ten guys were able to like make it impossible for them to invade. Like they could not get into Lebanon. And there's so many villages with this story. So like the Israelis were like crap.

And this is 2006. Again, this is like almost 20 years ago. We're living in a very different time now where Hezbollah is so much more powerful. It has more members willing to fight. it's and again they've had experience in Syria like the Israelis what do they have experience with they have experience like putting guns to grandma's head at a checkpoint in the west bank like that's what they train for that's what they're experienced in so it's very different and then you know I don't want to get too abstract here but I do think there's something to be said about the commitment

to land if it's your land you're more committed to it than the other side and there's also like Israel and Israelis have more to lose. They have so much to lose. Like, people in Gaza have, like, nothing to lose. So they will fight. I mean, that's why they're, like, fighting. They're like, you know, a Hamas guy in Gaza is willing to go up to a tank with, like, flip-lops on and put a bomb on it and run off because he's got nothing to lose, right? It's like the most extreme circumstance.

Lebanon's not quite there. But people in Lebanon know how to lose because they've been losing. Their economies collapsed. They're constantly on the precipice of war. There's not a million Western countries coming to fund anything that breaks. In fact, the opposite. They're like putting sanctions on the country and more and more and more. It's cut off from every part of the region in so many ways because it can't do business with Syria because Syria is under sanction and secondary sanctions will affect Lebanon. It's obviously not going to do business with Israel because it's a sworn enemy. So just the point to say is like when you have more to lose, it's different than when you're you've already lost so much. You're willing to fight harder. You know what I mean? And again, it's your land. And I think you're right that the guy from Brooklyn or Ukraine like, sorry, go ahead. No, no, just that's absolutely right. But I think it's also that the strategic situation is very different. I mean, Israel wanted an opportunity to try and reimpose occupation, thought maybe they could do it, we're taught a lesson. And they're not even contemplating that. It's very much

defensive in the sense that they don't want, you know, to have to actually fight an actual war with Hezbollah. Well, they also, they also aren't in a position to. I mean, they can try right now, but if I'm Israel, which thank God I not. But if I was Israel, right? Well, that's what I mean by they don't want to. They're not in any position to. We'll start to. They don't want to. And if you're going to take on an organization as powerful as Hezbollah, you definitely don't do it when you're bogged down in Gaza. That's all I mean. It's like they know the power of Hezbollah. They think they know the power of Hezbollah and they're scared enough from it that for 70 days, they haven't bombed the airport in Beirut. Like every time Israel's ever attacked Lebanon in the past,

one of the first things they do is bomb the airport. They haven't touched the airport. Why? Because they know if they hit the airport in Beirut, there's a good chance his Bala can hit. hit Ben-Gurion. And not like in the way where it shuts down for a couple hours. You know what I mean? And that's what Israel's afraid of. Isbalah has a deterrent capacity that Israel has to respect, whether it likes it or not, at least for now, especially because it's not at its strongest. And the issue here, though, is Isbala also doesn't want a war with Israel. They absolutely don't. Iran doesn't want this war to escalate. No one does. No one wants everyone wants it to end, except for the Israelis. But the problem is the longer the genocide and Gaza continues,

the more likely this wider regional war becomes. And that's because like there's red lines, his bala has red lines, right? And one of the red lines for the resistance axis is if Hamas is really faced with the threat of eradication. That has not happened so far. As far as I understand it up until today, Hamas is like, we're prepared for this. We can go on for months. They don't want to. But I mean, they have a worst case scenario contingency plan. I think that's being implemented right now. And so they're not there yet. So we'll see what happens. But so, I mean, it's almost inevitable that at some point, if Israel continues to exist the way it does, there will be some sort of war. It's like, but that war as far as Isbala is concerned is not now. And they don't

want it to be. Yeah. I'm going to make one flippant comment before I read a I know that you have to go to a live stream very, you know, shortly. But, you know, you said that Lebanon is used to losing. The economy is in tatters. The country is constantly at war. One thing you didn't mention is that even when you have massive and heartbreaking and devastating explosions, all that you get out of it is Macron visiting. So, I mean, you can't lose any more than that.

Like, if your constellation is Macron visiting and says, saying, look, I am here with you. I mean, there is no greater indignity than that in my book. So, yeah, Lebanon really is used to losing listeners. But like I said, I know that you have to get going. So we'll wrap up here. Again, listeners, our guest for this part of the conversation is journalist Rania Holic, who, of course, you can find at Breakthrough News, Dispatches from the

underclass. Everybody should definitely check out her work. And we'll have it linked in the bio. Rania, can you tell the listeners how they can follow you on social media or where you can direct them to find your work? You guys are so sweet how you describe me. Thank you so much. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at my name, Ranya Kalik, R-A-N-I-A-K-H-A-L-E-K.

But more importantly, please do follow breakthrough news. I'm so, so proud of the fact that I get to work there and of all the content that we have been able to put out in this crazy environment that we're all in. it's not just my show dispatches. Like we've got Eugene Perry per year who's amazing. I co-host a live stream with him. And he's always putting stuff out. K. Pritzker is always presenting these really great, like, shorter videos that are just like so

good kind of one oh ones on everything. And also we're constantly covering movements. Like I think that's what's most, what I love most about where I work is just we're constantly covering all of the actions and that like people around mostly the U.S. But even around the world are organizing in solidarity. with Palestine and in solidarity with oppressed groups everywhere. So please follow Breakthrough News on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, at all the places. TikTok, I think.

Yeah, TikTok. And that's all I'll say. Of course. So listeners, I hope that you enjoyed this conversation with Ali Kari and Rania. Adnan, can you tell the listeners how they can find you and your other podcasts? Sure. You can follow me on Twitter at Adnan, A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N. You can listen to my other show that.

Eventually, we will have a new episode on the history of the Oud coming up, you know, maybe in a couple of weeks, called the M-A-J-L-I-S, and it was just such a pleasure. You know, Breakthrough News is indispensable and dispatches one of the great shows for any leftist who's interested in global affairs. You've got to check it out. I absolutely echo those sentiments. And, of course, I recommend you check out Adnan's other podcasts. You can follow our co-host, Brett O'Shea, who is not able to make it for these conversations with Ali and Rania at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com.

You can find me on Twitter at Huck, 1995, H-U-C-K-1995. You can pick up Stalin, history and critique of a black legend at iscrabbooks.org, including downloading the PDF for free or picking up a print copy. I like seeing those print copies in different parts of the world. You can follow Gorilla History on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod, and you can help support the show and allow us to keep making episodes like this by going to Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, with again, guerr-R-I-L-A history, and in return, you get some bonus content.

You allow us to continue making episodes like this for political education for as many people as possible. So until next time, listeners, solidarity. So, you know, I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.