Guerrilla History - Palestine 1492 w/ Linda Quiquivix

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

In this great episode of Guerrilla History, we have a discussion with Linda Quiquivix about her study and book Palestine 1492: A Report Back, which is a study of 500 years of the struggle for life in words, maps, and images in the seven cardinal directions in Mayan philosophy and in the spiral that is time.  This was such an interesting conversation, and one which we think you will find really useful! Linda Quiquivix is a geographer and popular educator of Maya-Mam roots raised by Palestinians, Zapatistas, Panthers, and jaguars. Learn more about her work at quiqui.org. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory  We also have a (free!) newsletter you can sign up for, and please note that Guerrilla History now is uploading on YouTube as well, so do us a favor, subscribe to the show and share some links from there so we can get helped out in the algorithms!! *As mentioned, you will be able to find Tsars and Commissars: From Rus to Modern Russia soon on YouTube.

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? 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 Gorilla. Rila 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 Huckmacki, joined as usual by my co-host Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Henry. I'm enjoying a really beautiful, warm day in Istanbul and savoring the view of the historic center. It's great. It's put me in a really wonderful mood. And I'm in an especially good mood because I'm really excited for the conversation we're going to have today. Yes, absolutely. As am I. We have a terrific guest and a very interesting and important work that we'll be discussing today. But before I introduce the guest and the work,

I'd like to remind you listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash Gorilla History. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Remember, your contributions there are what allow us to make this show and not have to run ads. So you'll never hear an ad on the show. Also, you can keep up to date with what Adnan and I are doing individually and collectively by following the show on various social media platforms. We're on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, Instagram, Gorilla underscore History. We have our substack newsletter, which comes out maybe once a month to let you know. what's going on. That's free. It's gorillahistory.substack.com. And I also want to make sure that I remember to tell you that we recently launched our YouTube channel. Don't worry, you don't have to see Adnan and myself. It's just audio with a really great animation that was made by a Marxist, Vietnamese artist who, I mean, she really did a terrific job on the animation that we use. But you can find the YouTube channel at Gorilla History on YouTube. So make sure that you do that.

We can definitely use a subscriber since it's a brand new channel but has absolutely no following at the time of recording. Now, with that out of the way, as I said, we have a terrific guest and a really interesting book. We're going to be talking about the book, Palestine 1492, a report back by Linda Kikovish, who is our guest today. Hello, Kiki. How are you doing today? I'm so happy to be here. It's great to have you. Can you briefly introduce yourself to our listeners?

I know this is your first time on the show. So unless they've already read your book, they may not be familiar with you and your work. Yeah, my name is Linda Kikigish. My last name is a Mayan last name. I come from a family in Guatemala that migrated to the United States in the 70s. And so much of my work, especially with Palestine, has been trying to figure out the connections with the lands here and the lands there and struggle and these questions tragically of genocide and displacement. And I studied geography as a doctorate student and my entire dissertation project was on the borders of Palestine.

You know how Palestine got the borders that were always talking about and showing. And I was in academia after graduating just for a couple of years and then decided to leave. I found it pretty restrictive what I could do on the question of Palestine, I think maybe a lot of your listeners don't even have to imagine that anymore. And since then, I've been doing a lot of grassroots organizing and, you know, talking about Palestine together with other communities and struggle and I've developed a really fruitful analysis. I think that I don't think I would have been able to really do if I would have stayed in the university. And so that's what I'm sharing in this book in this report back.

Well, you know, that's very interesting to hear about, I mean, as you said, it doesn't take much imagination now to understand that choice, but maybe a decade ago or whenever it was when you decided to leave academia. Maybe it wasn't as common and obvious to people about how restrictive academia was when it came to studying Palestine, and particularly as you do, which is not just, you know, kind of particularist and narrow way, but really looking at very fundamental questions about its constitution and its connections and, you know, really thinking about it in, we might say, global sorts of terms. And so one of the things that I found so interesting about your

innovative work here is that you characterized and called it a report back. And I was wondering, what for you was at stake in framing it that way, and what's different about approaching it as a report back, as opposed to say a book, a monograph, a study, and, you know, what did it allow you to do that you felt, you know, might not have been possible if you hadn't really thought about this kind of way of framing and categorizing your work? So what is a report back to you and in this and in this work? Thank you for that question. You know, the report book in a lot of ways is to share what I have seen and what I've witnessed and how I've accompanied struggles with other folks who are extremely interested and just cannot travel. So part of that is a duty as someone who was able to go to Palestine and have the honor of living there even while I was doing my research. It's also hearkening to the moment where I got the call to go to Palestine, which was. in my own ancestral lands in Chiapas on the border with Mexico and Guatemala, which was the original border I was going to study in my doctoral work. I was there looking for the Zapatistas,

and I didn't find them that year. It was summer 2006. I had just backpacked Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt six months before, just really out of this deep curiosity I've had for many years. I was doing a self-study on Palestine without knowing anyone and really heartbroken about what I was reading and not really believing the world anymore, not knowing what I could believe. And so my backpack trip to Palestine was part of that study without me really knowing anyone. I was just there for a few days. And the experiences there were very impactful. but it wasn't until six months later summer of 2006, where I'm in Chiapas trying to get started on my pre-dissertation research and looking for the Zapatistas because I wanted to meet the

Zapatistas as well, together with the Palestinians. That was because I hadn't known who they were and I was just learning about them just a few years back when I first started studying geography and we were studying globalization from below, meaning the resistance. to global capital that the global capital that arose, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, when everyone, every state seemed to be accepting capitalism now. And so I kept seeing that there was resistance to it and saw the initials EZLN, which I didn't know what that meant, but now I know it means the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, which is a Maya rebel group in Chiapas.

And it was thrilling for me to find out about them because my ancestry is Maya, but I had never been told that there's still a lot of resistance. So alongside with seeing the EZLN everywhere, I kept seeing free Palestine everywhere. And so I wanted to meet Palestinians and Zapatistas to better understand their perspective. And so winter 2005, 2006, I was in the Levant, and then six months later, I was in Chiapas. And that was the summer that Israel bombed the Beirut airport. And it really hit different this time because I'd been to Beirut. And, you know, it's everyday life. It was so impactful for me.

And especially being in Mexico and watching the news, there was CNN in Spanish. in Spanish, and their coverage was so different. I had my laptop, and I was reading what CNN in English and MSNBC and all the other corporate media was saying about Palestine, Lebanon, Israel, all of that summer. And CNN in Spanish, instead of beginning history that morning or the day before, as is common with corporate media, CNN in Spanish surprised me in that it had. a professor on, from Argentina, who gave a lecture for a whole hour about Palestine, beginning in 1948.

Yeah, and it was so, it was, it was just these two worlds that I feel that maybe a lot of people are experiencing that post-October 7, where they see one reality on social media and a whole other one in the corporate media, that then what it did for me was it made me just believe that everything has been a lie and I need to figure out what is the truth, you know. And so it was a massive heartbreak that was very necessary because it sent me to Palestine. And so I ended up changing my entire dissertation project from the Mexico-Watemala border over to a raffa crossing. I was not allowed to even step foot in Gaza, unfortunately, by my university. who said that if I did, I would never get my degree.

Even if I wasn't there to do research, I was not allowed to go. And I even had to sign a waiver saying that if I went to the West Bank and if I was killed, the university was not responsible. When you wonder, like, why can't I just go to Gaza then, right? Which made me realize it's really about policing research. Just like what's happening right now, Israel does not want any international journalist in Gaza because they will witness the atrocities and report back. So that is the spirit of my report back,

is what is it that we're being told that we're not supposed to know or see or being prevented even from learning? So I felt that it was a duty that once I finished my dissertation, I went into the university. I didn't it didn't feel totally right to me though even after finishing my doctorate because I had to defend it to you know my own professors who were really great but they're not Palestinian and they you know and I wanted to really make sure that my work was impactful and that it was correct but so I did the true defense in Palestine that summer after I graduated

in the refugee camps. And I realized the power of having conversations about deep history, especially about questions of borders. Borders for me were always something that I grew up being critical of because my family was undocumented and my community was undocumented. And so there was always stories of somebody crossing, getting deported. And so when I first started to learn about Palestine, I noticed. how ubiquitous the map was.

And I wanted to know, how did Palestine get those borders, though? Because I know borders are very recent. And so it's been really heartwarming, really fruitful to be able to present this kind of work, especially to Palestinians who maybe didn't know about this. So much of the leadership, especially in the generation post-oslo, kind of like stopped doing like a deeper global history or a context of Palestine like existed in the 60s and 70s. Palestine was very global in those decades. And then when the idea of creating a state in the West Bank and Gaza side by side to Israel

became the politics in the 90s, the mental maps of the way that we talk about Palestine really shrunk into just Palestine and not a global context. And so for me, someone who was coming at Palestine from the beginning in a global context, learning about free Palestine in a globalization class that was talking about resistance to global capital, it was always global to me. And I wasn't finding in Palestine studies or Middle East studies, this connection. And in fact, it was really interesting to switch from Latin American studies to Middle East studies because I realize they don't talk to each other. The area studies traditionally,

as we learn as area studies scholars, that the area studies are funded by the state department, the CIA, whatever it is that the CIA needs to know, right, that's what they fund scholarship for. So I noticed that Latin American studies focuses a lot on capitalism and neoliberalism, and Middle East studies focuses law on Islam. And what's common about that is the revolutionary movements in Latin America have been anti-capitalist and the revolutionary movements in the Middle East have been Islam. Right. And then there isn't a conversation then about the global context of struggle in Middle East studies

and in Latin American studies there really isn't much of a conversation about the things that are happening and that happen in the United States. Americas and are still happening or intensifying in the Middle East and how can we talk about those through this deep history. So that was what I wanted to do and I did feel constrained in the university about it. So what was really cool is knowing that movements themselves provide theory. They offer theory. They offer analyses. They do their own historical research, right? They they are intellectuals as well, even if they're not in the university. They are intellectuals.

And so I found while I was in the university, like a knowledge, knowledge construction from above there and then knowledge construction or production from below, which I found to be really rich, although, of course, highly under-resourced, right? So it has been an experience of having to navigate these two worlds while trying to learn from one, from the one below, from the one completely outside, or has a horizon completely outside, the dominant colonial world, while also trying to navigate the dominant world in terms of just my own survival and existence as someone without any land anymore, as a detribalized native. child of migrants. I've been trying to navigate those two worlds. And it's from that that, you know, I get this idea of writing this book. I thought that I would write an academic book at first about Palestine.

And then when I left the university, I realized I didn't need to because usually you do that for, you know, for your 10-year promotion. At the same time, I thought it would be really. valuable to contribute to the academic knowledge, you know, in that form. And I haven't given up on that. I've published articles here and there. In terms of this book, though, I wanted it to be widely read. Again, a report back for those who cannot travel, those who don't have resources to travel, right? And so I wanted to make the book affordable. I also wanted to make the book highly accessible in terms of how it's read. And so it took me six and a half years to write and to find the voice that I felt was the voice that would be in conversation side by side

with the reader, not telling the reader what to do or, you know, what they should think. But instead, it's a conversation that I hope really inspires us all to be critical thinkers and critical by critical, I just mean examining the assumptions that go unsaid. And one of those great assumptions that go unsaid that we all know in this dominant colonial capitalist world is that every time we relate to difference, we are taught to rank it in terms of superiority and inferiority. And that's even down to like the level of relationships. Like when, you know, when we meet somebody new. We often get asked, you know, where we work, where we live. Like, it's kind of like sizing people up in terms of, you know, their career and their money and

all of that. It's like, there's like this competitive strain in what, how we're taught to be as people, as of course, as individuals, not as collective, not as community. And, and that to me is something that I feel we can benefit from from speaking out loud some more. Because I don't think that we like that. You know, I think maybe that it's just difficult to maybe imagine that it could be different because we're often told that that's just the history of humanity. It's always been a dog-eat-dog kind of world. And we get pointed to the Roman Empire as proof.

That's humanity right there as if there's no other history that we can learn from. or other societies. So having myself today at this moment, this contemporary time, like actually experience other worlds in indigenous territories and in other small pockets. You know, I see that they're there, that we can live differently, that we can relate to each other by respecting difference side by side instead of above and below, which I talk about a lot in the book.

That's Zapati's said terminology. that I think is really helpful above versus below, meaning you're either at the table or you're on the menu, which actually is something commonly said in Washington, D.C. and other political circles, right? And I just wanted to, you know, to invite folks to just take some time and just critique that. Like, are we okay with that? Is that how we want to live or do we want to live otherwise? And what's so beautiful about this moment, publishing this book as well, especially, I think, after October 7, where so many masks have been taken off of the world and, like, just the bare naked structure of the world as precisely

some matter and others don't matter, right? There's some who make their lives at the expense of other lives. I think that it hits in a way post-October 7th that resonates because we're looking for, we're all looking for a different world now, seeing that this world is murderous, genocidal, and it just keeps on repeating these crimes over and over and over. So taking Palestine to 1492, 500 years back, is something that's not common, as you know in Middle East studies or in Palestine studies, right?

It usually, we try to begin the story in 1948 because there's so much misinformation about, oh, they've just been fighting for thousands of years. And so you want to say, no, no, no, no, no. This is a very specific colonial project. The state of Israel was created in 1948, right? Sometimes scholarship starts a little bit earlier with Balfour, with the Balfour Declaration when the British Empire promised Palestine to the Zionist movement in Europe. At the most, what I've seen in the historiologist,

is that the 19th century, either the early 19th century when Napoleon was in the region, you know, with his invasion of Egypt and Palestine and he lost, or the late 19th century with the first Jewish Zionists from Europe when they settled Palestine. So it is something that isn't done commonly is to go that far back with with Palestine and I realized though that I had to do it if I was going to be able to create a global analytic for Palestine and so and I'm happy to talk about what that is but yeah I just wanted to point out that 1492 also is not to say that that's like where everything begins at all as historians I imagine you know you know these these moments are bookmarks or that make possible other things of these great events.

I think that great events are really important to study because it shows that the world wasn't like that before and then it became that way showing that the world can be otherwise. So, you know, one of the great events I talk about, of course, two of them are in 1492. Another great event is the legal, formal decolonization of after World War II. And as someone, you know, focuses on these great events,

it's not in the book because it's so new and it's happening right now. I also believe October 7th is one of those great events. Absolutely. I mean, we will be talking about the consequences of that and also the reception of your work in the context of the October 7th moment. But there's so much interesting material in what you've said. It's very rich perspective here. Before getting into what I think is something to talk about much more

that you were just discussing about how you do this sort of deep history and why you reframe, you know, around 1492, which is an uncommon historiographical approach to studying the question of Palestine. And I would say, you know, that I have to plug here a series that I'm doing on my own channel, but will, you know, also come out, I think, at various stages on guerrilla history as well as a series that I did with a colleague of mine, Dr. Ariel Salzman, who teaches a course on Palestine, Israel, and did so recently, and I thought that her framing of it was, you know, really helpful because it also wasn't the kind of conventional historiographical approach. And we did a first episode that's out and available for listeners now on the channel, and we'll be on

guerrilla history as well, called the Longdure, which is actually going to 1095, and the, you know, crusader, the launch of the Crusades and the Crusader, the establishment of the Crusader states the first collective project, you might say, of European settler colonialism, which took place in the land of Palestine. and is one of those other moments. And so I think it's wonderful to have these deeper, longer duray kinds of perspectives. But before we kind of explore all that more, I wanted to come back to something earlier that you said because your book opens really very much with this Palestine diary from the period.

And that's the report back for those who can't travel about what it was like, what it meant, and situating and contextualizing the question of Palestine within your own person. experience, living there, exploring, studying Arabic, and it's so wonderful the way moments in your experience and dialogue and interaction and observations are moments where you can introduce like wider topics and bring them in. And I just wanted to, you know, kind of, you know, mention that, you know, it sounds like we were around in Palestine around the same time, not exactly overlapping, because I was there actually during that summer when you know, 2006 when the Gaza disengagement had happened fairly recently, but then there was this

attack on the beach in Gaza that wiped out the family of the single survivor of this attack. Eleven members of her family, you know, were killed and only Huda Ghalya survived. And we all saw in the region, you know, the video of, of, you know, the video of, of, you know, of her desperate crying, you know, on the beach. And that's what then led to involvement response by Hisbullah, who intervened at that time, and led to the bombing of the Beirut airport and so on. That moment is one of those turning points because it's really kind of what has happened to Gaza, you know, under the so-called disengagement, which has been as horrific, if not more,

because of successive bombardments, attacks that led up to, of course, the most latest genocidal assault upon Gaza. And so I wanted to ask you a little bit more about how you saw, you know, the biographical as connecting and also how that led you to, I think, a second meaning of the report back, which you mentioned, which was so interesting and wonderful to hear about, and I'd love to hear more about it, about reporting back to the communities themselves. So not just to those who can't travel, but once you finish the work to have a defense, to have a, well, I guess it's your dissertation

before you did this kind of book, but the fact that you wanted to share and present that in the community and report back to them. And so I'm just wondering if you could talk about that biographical and that sense of how that forged and created a sense of responsibility and connection to the communities themselves, that research, as you understood it, is not one of like studying some people and then presenting it somewhere elsewhere to a Western academic audience, but is knowledge that is useful and fruitful for the struggle. In fact, actually,

what I would say is something that I talk about all the time on this. this show is doing guerrilla history. I mean, what you've done is guerrilla history. So maybe you could tell us about that interaction and dynamic a bit more. Yeah, you know the beginning of the book, that first chapter is a collection of my diary entries that I kept while I was living in Palestine. I would write every night without fail in the morning if I was too tired. But because I realized I forget these details.

And I hadn't read that diary and the diary. since then, since 2011, and I was never going to publish it. I was just on year five of writing this book, I was trying to look for the name of a scholar who I interviewed in Palestine, and so I opened up the diary, and I started to read it. And I started to cry. I realized, wow, this is really powerful. It's just everyday life interactions. It's also these interactions where, you know, I'm talking about, like, the things that were familiar

me growing up, like the soap operas and my grandmother, like, you know, the Musal Salats, which is also something very quotidian, a very every day in Palestine. And that's when I realized that that was the voice that I wanted and I had been going through for five years, like drafts after drafts and it wasn't coming out right because I knew I wanted it to be accessible and rigorous at the same time in the models that I had for that were writing in the third person, you know, writing political theory book. And so I did start writing in the third person because I wanted to be taken seriously, especially not having institutional affiliation. I had that for a little bit. And then it went away because I

remembered who, you know, who I was and who I was speaking to. But the genesis of the book itself came from the March of Return of 2018 because my own community wanted to know about Palestine and they hadn't asked me very much about Palestine before they kind of knew that I had been there but we were just doing so much organizing work and political education for in our own context after leaving academia that you know

I would talk about Palestine but like in webinars globally not so much at home and it was when I I decided to put that diary in the front, of course, asking folks whose names appeared if it was okay and if they wanted pseudonyms and all of that because I had never, again, I'd never thought I'd publish it. That ended up, like I said, really allowing me to find my voice and it and it flavored the rest of the book.

And in fact, the book is in first person. And in order to go from third person to first person, I had to get into a fight with a Palestinian friend who was telling me you have to write in the first person. What are you doing? And my hesitation was that I didn't want to write a book that centered me. That was about my so-called adventures in Palestine. And I was really trying to prevent that. So I thought the third person would be that shield. but it made it so unpersonal that I was correct to lose the fight to my Palestinian friend.

It is, as I say throughout the book, it's important to know when to lose a fight. And so the book then ended up taking shape in four parts. The first part is Palestine from below. And the second part is Palestine from above. And now Palestine from below is my diary entries throughout that year as I'm trying to do this research on maps. It's also my work in mapping Ida refugee camp with the refugees there who asked me to map. And we make different kinds of maps that show the power from below everyday life, which had been like the goal of my doctoral research with maps. because as I was tracing the life of the map in Palestine,

I noticed that, I mean, obviously it's a colonial shape. Like all of these borders are colonial. Yet what's been so interesting with decolonization, with formal decolonization is that the peoples who have been maps use those maps as countermaps. And in fact, Edward Saeed in the 90s was the one that geographers trace. This phrase to the Palestinian intellectual Edward Saeed counter map. So in tracing the life of the map in Palestine, you see that the map is used from above

and it's also used from below, like in a guerrilla kind of way, to rally people together, like as a nation. And then with Oslo, like, it seems that power really shifts away from the below and to the professional class, the cartographers, you know, the technocrats, the politicians who are going to do politics at the level of the United Nations in that world, like that world from above. And what had been a really popular struggle, you know, the first intifada that we hear about, we read about, and is so inspiring, that was what brought up upon the Oslo

peace process. And that peace process shifted that power away from the ground and onto the professional class. So the that's why like I have a Palestine from below and also a Palestine from above. And the Palestine from above is how Palestine has been mapped as if there's a perspective from above like as if one was God or you know it could could be actually separate from the earth from the land and cut it up into pieces of objects of ownership. That's the Palestine from above. And then the book, the third part, is called the Fourth World War. And it begins with my own history, which I didn't think I would really share. But whenever I would give presentations on Palestine, you know, people would learn I'm not Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, I'm Native American, Maya, from the other side of the globe.

And the question that they always had was, how did you get involved? What was your process? This is a really difficult topic to really, to battle through. And I realize a lot of people have this question. They're going through a process. And so, you know, me sharing my process has been really impactful, even as it's so specific to me. It seems to have some kind of like universal, a universal flavor or some, a common Flavor is probably a better way to say it with others.

So in the third section, the fourth World War, it's called that to bring in also Zapatista political theory for the current moment, which is where we are right now, where I'm living. And what they say about war is one, the world map changes after world wars. That's how, you know, that's how you can tell there's been a war of war. And when they talk about World War III, which is something that's constantly on the mind of folks, and it has been constantly on the minds of folks for three decades ever since the end of the so-called Cold War. Like, when is this, are we in World War III now?

Are we starting World War III? Like, you know, this was actually a conversation just recently with October 7. Is World War III about to start? Well, according to the Zapatistas in many movements from below, World War III has already happened, and it's called the Cold War, and it's called the Cold War by those for whom it was cold, for NATO and the U.S.S.S.R. But for the rest of the world, it was very hot. That was the Third World War. We've already gone through those horrors. With the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, there was no longer a competitor to Capitol. And so, capitalism was triumphant was going to be what shaped the whole globe. And so we started getting in the 90s, right, this conversation about globalization, China's opening, Mexico, NAFTA, all of these free trade agreements. So that's the moment that the Fourth World War begins. And it's a war of capital versus anything that gets in its way. Right. And it's also characterized by,

the shift of the function of the nation-state, the state's function is no longer a welfare function to provide for its citizens. Instead, its function is to provide a good business climate for foreign investment or for capital. And what we've seen since then is there isn't resistance coming from the level of the state anymore to capital. Everyone has accepted it. And so what we're seeing is a war of capital against anything that gets in its way. And I have an entire chapter entitled Capital in my book because I believe very heavily in defining the ways that we're using words. And it's very important, you know, that folks are on the same page as me as when I'm talking about what capital is. And so I dedicate an entire chapter to that

based off of our readings of carmarks and many other critical thinkers in the parks in my hometown of Oxnard reading it line by line and trying to figure out what he said. So the Fourth World War, and right now, you know, as we're undergoing these genocides, not just in Gaza, also in Sudan, which is very close in the Congo, it is really difficult for us to talk about Sudan and the Congo using the settler colonial framework that we often use with Palestine. That settler colonial framework often just talks about other settler colonial societies in a comparative way, such as South Africa or Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the U.S., and then can't really say much about other genocides. Right now with Sudan, the UAE is funding that genocide. The UAE is the United States

in that genocide, the UAE is taking Sudan's bold. And what is happening at this moment, at this geopolitical moment, is that there is a battle against the U.S. dominance in terms of dollar hegemony around the globe. That has been the case, you know, especially since the 70s when Nixon removed the dollar from the gold standard and just made made it trust, you know, know, trust that it will be good currency and the way that, of course, that works is through the U.S. military might that forces it to be good currency or acceptable currency to be traded everywhere. That hegemony is waning right now. And the bricks, you know, Brazil, Russian,

China, South Africa, and like these other emerging economies, which now include the UAE, are trying to create their own currency that's backed by. commodities, which makes more sense to folks because, you know, if there's gold that's backing this commodity, then it's, I'm sorry, this currency. If there's gold backing this currency, then the currency will be more stable, is the idea. Or if there's like another set of commodities like oil or some other mining, you know. And so here we have an example of the Fourth World War happening before our eyes where the UAE is part of, you know, of this whole scheme to create a commodities-back currency that will rival U.S.

dollar hegemony, but where are those commodities coming from? That's the question, right? And that's an example of capital versus anything that gets in its way. So this is how we can understand Sudan in a global way, and we can understand Palestine as well. Like, There's so many examples of how Palestinians get in the way of global capital, especially in that region. And, you know, one of the most famous is when the British first started to cut up alongside the French and the Russians, Italians, and the Greeks, with a Sykes-Picco secretive agreement that cut up the region and created that first footprint of borders during World War I. the idea was to have a pipeline from the Gulf to the Mediterranean at the port of Haifa that the British would control. That pipeline has not been created because Palestinians are in the way, right? And what we saw two weeks before October 7, we have Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations holding up some maps.

And one of those maps begins, you know, with a third. a map of the region in blue is Palestine, except it says Israel, 1948, which we know is a lie, because that's not at all the shape of Israel, 1948. And we also see his next map that shows the neighboring countries like Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, with that Abraham, of course, basically normalizing Israel, right? So this is a good business climate for what comes next. Here comes Netanyahu's Sharpie, where he then draws that pipeline from the Gulf to the Mediterranean saying that it will be built now, right? So this was the eve of October 7.

I got a phone call from Palestine the day after those maps, asking, did you see Netanyahu's maps? Go see his maps. Our struggle is done. We have two years, max. That was the eve of October 7th. It was a dying struggle. October 7 was a miracle for a dying struggle in that way. And it's something that we really need to put into that context when we talk about it

so that we can better understand the operation and the new openings that that event has created for the Palestine struggle and not just Palestine. Also Congo and Sudan, everyone's learning about everything now. The whole world is now being put into question. That's something that October 7th has offered all of us, not just the Palestinian struggle. I want to take a brief moment to remind the listeners that we have an ongoing series on African revolutions and decolonization since Kiki has been talking about Sudan and Congo. We haven't put out a Sudan episode yet, but it is in the pipeline to come out in the series. But vis-a-vis Congo, we do have two episodes which are already out on.

Congo, which have come out relatively recently. I hosted a couple of conversations with Professor Georges Nzingola and Talaja on the Congo from pre-colonization by Leopold up through Mobutu's era, and then a second conversation that takes us from Mobutu through today, and particularly with a focus on where the conflict in Eastern Congo with the M23 rebels stems from who is backing at what the geopolitical interests are at play. So if you haven't listened to those two episodes on Congo with Professor Georges and Zengola and Talaja yet, I highly recommend that you do so. And also be aware that I have at least one more episode that's in the pipeline.

We have something recorded on the mining industry, and particularly the diamond mining industry within Congo and how that plays into these structures as well. So that will be coming out in the series relatively soon as well, listeners. So if you haven't been listening to the African Revolutions and decolonization series, make sure that you do that. Now, to get back to our conversation here, I want to take a step back and I'm going to ask a rather big question because at its root, it's about structure. But there's so many aspects of structure that we could talk about within the confines of this conversation. You talked a little bit about the structure of your book between east, west, south, and north, Palestine from below, Palestine from above, the Fourth World War, a world where all worlds fit. We also have these structures within Maya geography that you describe with east, west, south, north, earth, sky, and the center or the middle.

And then additionally, we also have structures that we can analyze, which you have been starting to do in which in your work you do of settler, colonialism, neocolonialism, the capitalist world system, all of these structures come to play within your work, which is what I find to be so interesting, is that, you know, when you think about structure, there's often a tendency to try to split structure away from other structures in order to analyze one structure in isolation from the others, because that is conceptually easier. here you are bringing together all of these structures within your analysis everything from Maya geography all the way to analyzing structures of colonialism various structures of colonialism which sometimes operate very closely in connection with one another and sometimes we have

structures of colonialism which are fairly divorced from one another but are still structures of colonialism nevertheless so kiki the question like I said is a rather big one but can you talk a little bit about how you went about analyzing structure when you were putting together this work. I know you said that this was a process that took you six years, if I remember correctly. And throughout this, I can imagine that just thinking about how to structure the book, how to take these various forms of structure and analyze them individually in order to concretize what you mean when you're looking at that one type of structure, but then also the interactions between the structures. I think that that will be something interesting.

I know that that was a very amorphous and rather a conceptual question, but hopefully the listeners will find it interesting as I do to think about this. Such a good question. I think that, well, one thing about the structure, the structure of the book itself, yes, it's in four parts,

and each one is one of the four directions. So east, west, south, and north. And that's the order. that we turn when we pray in the Maya world. We begin with east and then west, south, north. And yeah, Maya geography has more than just four cardinal directions. There are seven, five and six are, well, they're not in that order, but others are the sky and the earth. And then in the center is you, in the middle is you, which is part of a collective.

And that's on the cover of the book, I have Maya compass with the colors that we use. using our altars. The book itself has a map of the Maya world where I got the call to go to Palestine and the orientation of the map has east at the top. So facing Palestine, also facing the sun, which is, you know, how we begin our prayer. The book itself also has 20 chapters, which I didn't plan. I actually didn't plan the structure of the book. It just kind of happened, like as I was writing. I knew the threads that I had to weave. I just didn't know what the textile would end up looking like. But the process itself did it. And it ended up being that I had 20 chapters. And I'm studying with a Maya spiritual guide in Guatemala, one of the Maya calendars that has 20 energy signs.

And so there's all kinds of prayer embedded throughout the book that is really meaningful to me. And so there's that. Something else about structure in the book. And now this is something that early on really helped me. And it was a communique from the Zapatistas in 1994 when they first, when the world first learned about them, when they first rose up against the Mexican government. The Mexican government was trying to delegitimize their spokesperson,

subcommonante insurgente Marcos, at the time. as gay in Mexico's very machista and very machista society. And instead of Marcos saying, I'm not gay, he wrote back and said, yes, Marcos is gay. Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, Asian in Europe, and as Jew in Germany and Palestinian in Israel, which was so important for me to read when I first started accompanying the Palestinian struggle because I also wanted to accompany the Anna Franks struggle. Like she was my first political friend when I was nine years old, right? And so when you get involved in Palestine war, they start calling you all these names and, you know, like anti-Semitic

and all of this, all of this stuff to deter you from learning about Palestine. And obviously you don't want to be called that. You don't, you're not. And so it really helped me understand with that communique, that identity is not the central part that I was looking for. I was looking for the relationships between us, between identities with a context. So here we have a Jew in Germany and a Palestinian in Israel. Those are structural positions of being crushed of the below at that in that context right a Jew in Israel is not the same as a Jew in Germany a Jew in Israel is above a Jew in Germany is below in that context right so it made me realize there is no eternally oppressor identity no eternally oppressed identity there is context and the

context is a closed system and this is from the black radical tradition as well from France Spanon, especially although he doesn't use these same words, I believe that this is what he was also hearkening to, that, you know, when we have, when we have relationships between humans in a colonial context, there is the colonizer above and the colonized below, right? And then there's this line. And he talks about the police are the ones that, you know, make sure that everyone is in the place where they're supposed to be, like, in the game. or in the, in the shiny colony, et cetera. And in France Fanon as well, and especially in black-skinned white masks, that was such a

powerful book for me because it pointed out to me the problem of assimilation, which had never been problematized for me before, you know, as the one kid in the family who was born here and has citizenship, like my family really believe that, you know, I was going to be the American and help support the family, which of course involves assimilation and go up the ladder. Like there's all of these metaphors about going up. And what that going up is is continuing to crush the ones who remain below. So there is a structure where you can assimilate to the above, but you've got to be useful to the above by crushing the below. And I realize that the state of Israel is actually emblematic of this, even though it's not the only one that does this.

Like all of us seem to do this because there's incentive for it. The state of Israel itself, it took a very real need for Jewish liberation and translated it into not being the wretched of the earth anymore, as Franz Fanon talked about the below, but instead being the wretched of the empire, working for empire while maintaining the status of oppressed, you know, the Holocaust and all of that, to then deflect critique away from empire. And this happens with multicultural neoliberalism, for example, right? Like there's some from the below, some faces, brown, black faces are now able to be above, you know, through neocolonial structures, you know, where the same logic and practice continues of colonialism, yet the faces look different. And so that's why I think it's important to focus not just on identities, but on the relationship

between identities. And I think that that's how we can be able to bring different structures together in a conversation is if we're focused on the way that power is flowing or energy is flowing. our relationships are flowing, you know, between identities so that we don't begin with ex-identity is always oppressed, so we always have to accompany them or fight for them or be in solidarity with them without knowing like what they're doing, which is I think the state of Israel and Zionism has gotten that kind of blank chat for far too long precisely because it is in the name of oppressed peoples. And that's very dangerous.

just because we're oppressed, just because we're in the below, doesn't necessarily mean we're revolutionary. What I see a lot of the time, especially in organizing and especially in my personal life in the United States, has been that those of us below want to assimilate to the above. And it makes sense because we don't have land, and in order to survive, we need money. And in order to have money, we need to be employable. And in order to be employable, you have to be respected by those above, look like those above, speak like those above, go to their schools, all of that. So there are enormous incentives for us to continue crushing each other by just wanting to survive. And that's why in the book, I draw out the above

a line and then the below right under it. And I close it in a circle because it's meant to be a closed circle where you can't leave. You're either at the table or you're on the menu and no one's questioning why there's even a situation or anyone has to be on the menu. So then what I have been inspired by so much is the Zapatista women, especially because when they talk about their struggle against patriarchy, they don't talk about a world without men or a world where women dominate men. So basically, they don't want to switch the positions of domination in above below. They don't want women dominating men. They just don't want domination. Instead, what they say is we want to be together and side by side as the women that we are. We don't want to have to

become like the men in order to have equal rights. We are equal because we're different. There is no standard for getting rights or equality. Like you are who you are and that's very common in a lot of indigenous worlds where, and especially the Maya world, which I'm the most familiar with, that whenever a baby's born, you know, a child is raised, like what their special gifts are is what is always in focus to help the child develop their gifts. And their gifts are always different than others. So unlike the way that we're raised here where we all have to go to the schools and then, you know, conform into being like the A student, right? And then there we learn ranking, A, B, C, D, F, right? We learn if we're smart or if we're dumb. It's everywhere in our

everyday life, this kind of relationship. And so what I find inspiring is these other worlds where they reject relating to each other that way and have other relationships of care, of respect, of mutual aid, you know, and these other worlds exist. They still exist. Many of them are just so small in their intensities because we're putting so much energy into the dominant world.

And so the book tries to show like an escape plan for how we get out of this. which does borrow a lot of these conversations of structure from indigenous movements and the black radical tradition who I think are able to see these structures more obviously because they come up against them all the time. A lot of us come up against them all the time if we grew up working poor, right?

And that structure is the teacher who says you're dumb, the landlord who won't rent to you, the boss that fires you, the judge that puts you in prison. You know, there's structure all the time when you're poor, when you're below, when you don't have a lot of resources, when you don't have land. And for those above, they have a harder time seeing structure because like the whole world is meant to be smooth for them where they don't really have to come up against any of these kinds of obstacles, right? So those are the ways in which I try to bring in structure into the conversation while not just making it about structure. because there's also our own responsibility and the biggest question of the book

is what kind of people do we want to be? It's a question of being, right? Not a question of identity, a question of being, which is bigger than that. And so that then requires us to figure out, well, what kind of structure do we want that will reward or create incentives for us to be those people rather than being in this world

whose incentives are to be individualistic, sadly to be non-empathetic, right, sociopathic. Like we know CEOs and politicians are overrepresented in terms of sociopathy, right? Like that's like a position where you can really succeed if you don't care about other people because you've got to make these decisions to make profit, right? Or to congeal power.

So that's what I try to do, is try to do the conversation of structure together with, to make it not so overwhelming that structure is always determining what we do by showing that we have the possibility to do something else, all of us, especially at the level of everyday life, because the structures of domination are not just held up by brute force and violence, although of course that's a very important power that holds it up. It's also held up even more efficiently by our own participation in it. Yeah, that's a really amazing account of deep structures in this project. But that reminds me that I did want to come back and talk a little bit more about deep history and the kind of framing and the way in which you use both a longer duress span, in which to engage various kinds of questions. So I'm interested to hear what gets opened up when we look at it that way. But also the other vector, which, since you're a geographer,

and there's so much about borders and mapping, and there's so many amazing visual kind of ways of thinking through this in the form of the maps and the other kinds of drawings and visual materials that you put in mind to think about space. And so I just wanted to have a, you know, some kind of further reflection a little bit about these kinds of timelines and cartographies, you know, what you were trying to do with them to get at this deep history and this kind of spatial understanding. And maybe, you know, maybe we might start with the way those all come together with the idea of in the, you know, Christian crusader imagination of the centrality of Jerusalem, not only as something that they want to make a claim to because of a deep salvation, history, narrative about, you know, and construction of the region as a holy land that belongs to Christ and has to be restored to Christian control and territory, and that it is also the center of their world imagination in their you know, from medieval maps on. And so you had these great chapters about wounded Europe. And, you know, in the section on Palestine from above, about wounded Europe, about next, Jerusalem next, you know, and the ways in which this created a framework to connect the two worlds that seem so separate, but you so ably put in conversation together with Columbus's, you know, kind of crusade.

you know, schemes and the war on, you know, the peoples of the so-called new worlds, and you, you know, introduce us to some new terms of geography to reorient this. So I'm just, maybe it's not a question, but just tell us about these connections that you were exploring in this deep history and these connected geographies. And maybe it starts, as I said, with trying to think about Jerusalem as a this kind of center of a world imagination and how your analysis of that ends up, you know, I think hopefully for the reader, I think it's very successful, kind of opening up a different world, you know, kind of conception outside of that kind of colonial, imperial,

imperial Christian imagination in your work? You know, I didn't know Jerusalem was going to center so much in my work, especially because when I was first learning about Palestine, yes, of course, Jerusalem. And at the same time, my education was very secular. So, you know, it was very hard for me to really understand the importance of Jerusalem, not just to Palestinians, but to Muslims all over there. the world and not just to Muslims, but to the Abrahamic faiths, you know. And when I was studying critical cartography as a doctoral student, I kept seeing these maps, very, very famous medieval

maps that, you know, have three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, although Europe's not its own continent, as part of Eurasia, but it does show that, you know, these maps came from Europe at the time, so it showed a lot about how Europe understood itself vis-a-vis Africa and Asia, like very separate and the centrality of Jerusalem to it, which is why a Europe calls itself the West because it's West of Jerusalem and still wants us all to call it the West, even if it's not West of us, like Europe is east where I am, you know, in Abiyayala in these lands and the Americas. But, you know, it was just one of those things where I didn't think that I would, it would figure very much in my work.

I thought it was really interesting. I also thought it was really interesting that medieval European world maps had east oriented at the top as well, which is actually common in a lot of native geographies where the sun rises, if the sun rises to the east, unless you're like at the North Pole, you know, or I want to study that geography, how native people in the polls understand the sun. But I knew that I was going to have to figure out this question of Palestine in a global context. I didn't know it would take me to Granada, January 2nd, 1492. I thought I was going to start on October 12, 1492, which is what my training had been in Latin American studies, you know. And then when I started to learn more about what happened. happened in those months before Columbus's voyage by the same Queen Isabella who sent him on his voyage. In the Iberian Peninsula, Queen Isabella, Catholic monarch, was giving the final blow

to Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula that had lasted for centuries. So there had been a centuries-long holy war, as you know. And I had learned about that, but what I didn't know, is that Christopher Columbus was in Granada waiting for Granada to fall and was waiting for Granada to fall so that he could then have a conversation with Isabella that's take Jerusalem next. And that was really key because what had happened in the decades before 1492 and Adnan, you're in Istanbul right now. You know, we know that in 1453. Well, and last week I was in Granada for a conference and I talked. about like basically the genocide of the Muslims 14, you know, 92, and then their forced conversion and connected it to Palestine because there's a fantastic quote from Malcolm X when he visited Gaza and he wrote this interesting piece called Zionist Logic that was published in the Egyptian Gazette. And he has this wonderful quote from there that I used to try and kind of bring those two moments together. So I'm just totally on your wavelength, Kiki, on this. So. Go ahead. I'm so excited. I'm excited for the deep dive you're doing. I did start watching your post episode. I was really excited because I just keep getting more and more and more of threads into this story. The deeper it goes.

Yeah, there's like this whole debate among historians about when modern Europe was created and some say 1492 and others say 1453, which is when Constable. Antonopal was taken by the Ottoman Empire, right? So that's over in the east relative to where Liberian Peninsula is and Europe is, right? So the last seats of, you know, the Roman Empire officially falls in 1453 and then in 1492 over in the West on the Iberian Peninsula, Islam is defeated. And so it ends up being this enormous event that even today, like when you go to Spain, like in Granada, in Madrid, I've seen commemorations to 1492, and they all include both dates, January 2nd and October 12th.

And they begin with January 2nd, and that was enormously momentous. So Columbus himself had a similar apocalyptic fervor that we know of today from Christian Zionists, as you were mentioning, right, the idea that the world is going to end. And for him, it was going to end literally in 155 years. And so he saw his task as having to convert everybody and save everybody. And so he thought that if they sailed west, they could take Jerusalem by allying with the empires in the Indies and to the east, right, against Islam in Jerusalem. And that was the conversation that he had with Isabella, which really surprised me because the book was already called Palestine 1492 when I learned this. And I realized Palestine 1492 was written in January, you know, 1492.

And it surprised me so much because, you know, a lot of us hear that Columbus just wanted money. He was really, he wanted spices and all of that. We don't hear that that was actually secondary. Like the primary thing is Jerusalem, was Jerusalem for him. And then as you're saying, you know, this made me really. understand better those maps that I had learned about in my critical cartography classes that had the European world maps that had Jerusalem in the center. And there's one in particular. It's a Clover map from 1581 that has Jerusalem in the center, the three continents, like as

a clover with Jerusalem in the middle. And then there's the Americas in the corner like a little blob because it had just been so-called discovered, but they didn't know what to do with this because we didn't fit into that geography. So that was a great event. The map changed, the world map changed from that point on, of course, through war, sadly. And what I ended up finding was that so many of the atrocities

that befell us by the Spanish had already been happening on the Iberian Peninsula, Muslims and Jews at the hands of these Catholic monarchs, right? Like the imposition of one way of being really is what it was. Like you couldn't be Jewish anymore. You had to convert, right? Muslims had to convert. And there was the inquisition, the Spanish Inquisition that really took it to New Heights,

torturing people who were accused of fake conversions, right? Book burnings, all of this torture, you know, that took place in the Maya world. that took place all over the Americas, you know, by these same colonizers. So it was the first time that I learned that the stuff that had happened to our ancestors, Europeans had already been doing to themselves. And it made me realize there's a Europe from below as well. There's, you know, there's an above and a below. And I've only understood Europe as from above.

But there's been resistance in Europe. We just don't hear about it a lot. We tend to homogenize it. And it's something that even happens, like with decolonial studies, that there's, like, this focus on Europe only, like Europe versus non-Europe. And then there's, like, a tendency to want to, like, switch the positions of domination or superiority where non-Europe is better than Europe. And what I try to do is get away from focusing on identities too much and just focusing on the

structure, the logic of that whole thing, how energy is flowing in that whole thing. And it's above versus below. And as much as Europeans who dominate, who want to be above. Like, it seems to be like a human tendency that all of our worlds have is, do we want to dominate others or respect others, right? And I think that so many of our spiritual traditions, our ancestors, have been crippling with these questions, you know, since time and memorial. And we just don't hear about them. And we just believe that that's just the way the world is. So, yeah, so then Columbus is in Granada, and there's a statue of him, which you probably saw in Granada, right, with Isabella making a deal. And he goes and sails west to take Jerusalem next.

And, of course, lands in the Caribbean. And he was a slaver in Africa in the decades before. And so, of course, that was his tended. That's how he understood this world. It was like Africa. right? You just enslaved people and take everything. And so when he returned to the Iberian Peninsula with enslaved Thaino people and other things that he pillaged, he told the Portuguese king, who was also a Catholic monarch. But he didn't tell Isabella first and she got upset. And so the

Portuguese king and Isabella started to fight. The Pope steps in because they're not supposed to fight. They have work to do together as Catholic monarchs. And that's when we get the Treaty of Tortoise. which is this line that divides the new, the new sense of a globe divides it so that Spain, or Castile and Aragon at the time, is there known, would invade everything to the west and Portugal, everything to the east. So that's why, and it cuts right where Brazil is today, which is why in Brazil, Portuguese is spoken, right? And west of Brazil, it's Spanish. And in Africa, we see a lot of colonization from the Portuguese and also in Asia. that ends up being, the tree of Tortoiseeas ends up being the first global border. And from that point, we then get the cutting up of these lands of the new world into vice royalties

that become like the vice royalty of New Spain, which is the footprint for today's state of Mexico. We have the vice royalty of Peru, which is the footprint for today's state of Peru, right? And what I realized about these borders is that their function is a contract and agreement between invaders so that they don't fight each other, right? And that's what ends up happening all the way down to today with nation states. Like in order to have a state, you have to be accepted into that world with the agreements that you will not interfere across the line. And that's something that was invented in Europe with a piece of Westphalia in 1648. So after cutting up these lands into these homogenized spaces that are bounded and have an overseer on behalf of each empire, Europe cuts itself up too because internally it's undergoing massive wars, religious wars.

And so it cuts itself up. And so we get the beginnings of international law and the whole principle of non-interference, right? And then we get the cutting up of Africa, right? And this comes from the Germans who, quote, unquote, unified pretty late in 1871 and wanted to get into the imperial game. And so they held a conference in Berlin in the 1880s to cut up Africa. and that's where we get the Congo being gifted to King Leopold as his personal property, right? And that's why it's so important to go as far back as we need to in order to understand the present moment. And without that history of how the Congo has been treated, we're not going to be able to understand the Congo today.

And it's history that's not that old. you know, it's fairly recent, you know, in the longer duet of history. So from after, you know, after the cutting up of Africa, which is a very peaceful process for the Europeans themselves, but very violent on the ground because the way that they were able to legitimize their control over parts of Africa to other European powers is by showing that they could control it violently on the ground. After Africa is cut up, You know, at this moment, we start also getting the rise of Zionism in Europe. The idea of the nation-state arises in Europe, which is very famously pointed back to the French Revolution in 1789 with the overthrow of the monarchy.

Now you have the problem of who's going to govern. So then this idea of the people governing, the nation governing, but then the problem is the nation has to be homogenous. It has to speak the same language, same history, same everything, which means. that difference is not respected. And this is where we get programs, where we get our Jewish relatives, being completely just told that they don't belong there. And then we get the rise of the idea of political Zionism, the idea that the reason why Jews are persecuted everywhere is because there are a minority everywhere. And the solution is that they need to be a majority somewhere. And it doesn't matter where. And during the cutting up of Africa, this is where the

Uganda scheme was suggested that it would be in Uganda. It ended up being in Palestine for all of these historical reasons, made it much easier to sell. The point being is that this idea of the nation state assumes a homogenous people in a containerized bounded territory, which is why in Palestine, when Zionism invades, there's already Jewish people living there who are Palestinian, who are speaking Arabic, but they're not allowed to be Palestinian. Al-Sinian anymore, they can only be Israeli. And anyone who's living there can only be Israeli Jewish, right? So there isn't like this way of being able to share the land together anymore. There's this imposition of one way of being to everybody. That is the colonial logic since 1492. And so that's a big structure that I

focus on. We get the cutting up of the Middle East with Sykes-Picot, as we mentioned earlier, right? And then those become the footprints of today's nation states. And the nation state has been just so normalized that we believe, we grew up believing. That's just the way the world has always been. Right. And so by me just showing that it hasn't been this way, I'm hoping just to at least make it look strange and then see what comes out of that, what people can build from that, from what they see and what they experience. So we have time for about one last big question. I know we have a hard out today. Adnan is a very busy guy these days. But the last big question that I want to make sure that we get to is regarding chapter 19 of your book, strategy and tactics. And this, of course, is because it's great to have conceptual and theoretical conversations. I know we have many of them on this program. But it's also of the utmost importance that we don't. just think of this in the abstract, that we don't just think of this in the conceptual or the

academic. You know, this isn't an academic book, as you said, and, you know, you are intentional about not making it an academic book. It's important that when we're talking about structures of colonialism, of genocide, of capitalism, of the global system, that we do have a solid grounding in the theory, in the concepts, but that is not the end. And we focus on that on the show very frequently. I mean, in most of our episodes, we have at least one question that's directly related to strategy and tactics. And we have many episodes that are almost entirely devoted to strategy and tactics. Most of our case studies in the African revolutions and decolonization series, not to plug the same series again, most of the case study

episodes in there are for us to analyze not only the history that led to decolonization, but also to analyze strategies and tactics that took place in the process of decolonization and to analyze what was successful in that given context and what was not particularly successful in that given context. And then to try to make linkages between what was successful in a given context and not successful in a given context relative to these other struggles that were taking place around the African continent. And then also through, throughout the rest of the world, which we've talked about outside of the context of that series on the show. So you have an entire chapter devoted to strategy and tactics in your book. And I

think that that's in a very important thing to do. So without me talking too much more, because listeners know that I can talk plenty on my own without any prompting, let me just turn it over to you now. What is the importance for you of having a dedicated section of the book to strategy and tactics, and can you talk about strategy and tactics themselves? Again, let's not just talk about the importance of it, but let's actually talk about strategy and tactics. I love that chapter. Thank you for bringing it up. You know, that actually comes from my experience in Palestine, having conversations with Palestinians about the United Nations and law, which they were teaching me a lot about, like, how are we, you know, we're trying to navigate the United Nations.

nations, but the United Nations created the problem. So we're stuck in this place where we feel like we have to use the United Nations and then there's no way out. And I would talk to them about what I was learning about the Zapatistas in the way that they use the United Nations or international law. And very concretely, the state of Mexico is a signatory to I-O-169, which allows the autonomy of other communities to be respected. And the United States does not sign on to this, but Mexico does. And so what does Apatistas do is that they harken to international law for their rights, but they don't believe that that's going to give them autonomy at all.

The way that they use law, that law, is as an obstacle, knowing it's going to be an obstacle for the Mexican government, and then the Mexican government is going to find a way around it, like through paramilitaries, for example. So it doesn't look like the Mexican government is disrespecting the autonomy of indigenous peoples. This happens all the time, even today. And so the difference between using law as a strategy versus as a tactic is that a strategy is the bigger program of how we're going to reach a goal, right? And for the Zapathista world, their strategy is autonomy.

Their strategy is creating their own governance, their own clinics, their own education system, their own economic cooperatives. And, of course, on land that they had to violently rise up to get, to get that. Because land is the condition of possibility to be able to be autonomous from the dominant system, which wants to take all the land so that there is no autonomy. And so Badil magazine, a Palestinian refugee magazine, and much that I believe is called, they asked me to write about law as tactic. And so I wrote an essay about that in 2013, 2014, around that time. And I put the Palestinian struggle in conversation with the Zapatista struggle.

And from that moment, I started to see that. a lot of the conversation was still conflating strategy and tactics where tactics are just supposed to be the tools that you use or the methods, right, that you could then dispose of very easily if they're not advancing the strategy. But the thing is, is that if we don't have a strategy and we just use tactics, then we're working for the strategy of the dominant world because there is a strategy. And so what I did is in chapter 19, I begin by talking about Sonsu's The Art of War, which is a book about strategy, but a very specific strategy, of course, military strategy. It's about war. And what's so interesting about that text, which is 2,500 years old, is that it was not shared with the soldiers. It was only shared with the generals and the king. Because if the soldiers learned strategy, they could overthrow the generals and the kings. And so they were just supposed to learn tactics without knowing why they were doing what they're doing. And in fact, today, we're not taught strategy. And a lot of our movements just do tactics.

Tactics, meaning trying to put fires out, react here. There's so much need, of course. And we don't often step back to see, okay, what is the bigger strategy outside? of this world that is above below, what is a strategy toward a world where all worlds fit, where we can respect difference, and then how do we tactically engage the dominant world, like with one foot in each world, right? And so that's what that chapter tries to do is to kind of like outline these are two worlds, and we can conceive of it as two worlds, one the world that we want and the other,

the world that is killing us, the world that we don't want. Yet we are still so embedded in that world that we don't want. So how do we have one foot in that one, another foot in the new world that we want, and how do we then tactically engage the dominant world to strengthen this other world, right? And one way is very easily through resource extraction. I remember when I was in university, Fred Moten and Stefan O'Harnie came out with an essay called The University and the undercomments that talked about the only ethical relationship we can have to the university is theft.

And that stuck with me a lot, you know? So when I think, so that was very tactical engagement. Of course, Moten and Harney are talking about a whole other world that they want to, you know, fortify and strengthen. And so that's how I kind of lay that out in the book about having one foot in and one foot, one foot in each world to strengthen the world that we want and to delink or disengage from the world that we don't want. And it seems so overwhelming. So what I do is I show a chessboard, which is very much a game of war. It's dog eat dog. You know, it's very zero-sum game. And the

whole point is to take the other side's king and to protect your king and every other piece can die as long as the king is protected, right? that's chess. And I remember coming across an artist rendering when I was teaching. I was teaching at Brown, a graduate seminar called Space and Capital, and we were reading Gilles de Luz and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, and they had a little section in there that talked about the difference between chess and the Ngo. And go, I had never heard of, but it's a very, very famous.

strategy game where of Asia where all the pieces have the same power versus chess where all the pieces have a ranking in terms of their power right and I saw an artist rendering that kind of mixed the two together and had one line of the monarchy you know the king the queen the rook the bishop the knight on one row without any pawns protecting them and as we know with chess the pawns are the ones that are supposed to be the first to die and they have the least power and then on the other side of the board is four rows of ponds

and the chess board was called revolution and I played it I played four rows of ponds versus one row of the monarchy and you can get the king you can win with four rows of pieces that have the least amount of power

as long as you stick together and don't get taken from the sides. You know, like, and so to me, it was such a beautiful way to show that even if we don't have a lot of power, what we could do together is pretty enormous. And the way that that chess board is laid out that I didn't know of, but I was just told this at Cal State Channel Islands by the father of one of the SJP students, Abu Nadine, who plays chess. And he pointed out, you know how like chess pieces all have different points?

like 9.7 points, like the pawns have one point each, right? That it was equalized. There's 32 points versus 32 points and the pawns instill win. So I call it Gerrilla chess. So thank you Gerrilla history podcast for asking about it. Because it does allow us to, you know, we can play by the rules and breakthrough rules and reimagine new rules, you know, in that way. Just to show that the ones that don't have a lot of power, we're always told we can't do anything.

We're just disposable. We have to be sacrificed for the more powerful. What if we change that around and see that we're all valuable? And if we all take care of each other and stick together, we can make it happen. So that's my offering in terms of strategy and tactics to get folks to get us all just to imagine, like, how do we do strategy in this world outside of empire so that we can tactically engage? in the world of empire, because if we don't have a strategy outside of empire, then we're just doing these tactics, tactics, tactics, tactics inside and repeating the thing over and over and over. And that's sadly like what happens with international law, the use of international law

for so much of our, many of our movements, and including the Palestinian movement right now that I can tell and I've asked international lawyers this, is there a strategy right now outside of empire to use international law or are we just using international law because we just have to use it like that doesn't make sense

strategically. There's nothing that we have to do. Everything is strategic and tactible depending on if we're going to reach that goal that we want. Yeah, I think that's such an important conversation that those of us

who want a better world who are committed to the cause of Palestine because it's a universal cause for human justice and a different world order, and that's what we're concerned about. And we recognize, and your book is so wonderful in recognizing the way it brings together

so many of these other kinds of struggles and histories and possibilities together, why it's so important. But that this strategic thinking and strategic component is, remarkably absent and we're not good at thinking strategically. And I had recently just a conversation actually at this Granada conference that it's the International Islamophobia Studies and Research Association. And of course, what we think of Islamophobia as is not just, you know,

the targeting of Muslims as objects of discrimination, but the way it operates at a global level to maintain a certain world order of white supremacy and colonialism, you know, and the kind of really what's holding, I mean, Western politics together is nothing other than, you know, they can't come up with any project, you know, any kind of rationale other than, you know, persecution of Muslims as a way to hold things together to pursue their, you know, capitalist and white supremacist's interests. So, you know, but as we were having this conversation, you know, some conversations, We're lamenting the lack of strategy, and to this colleague of mine, you know, said, you know, well, you know, do you know, do you support or like, do you think that it was a good idea to have the, you know, Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, you know. And I said, well, you know, you know, what could he, what could they do?

Stalin had been trying to warn like, you know, the West and everybody about the rise. power of this fascism. But they did nothing because, of course, they hoped, you know, for the Nazis to take out the Soviet Union and the communists. And so he, you know, made a strategic decision to have a tactic of a temporary peace treaty to buy time to prepare for the inevitable Nazi war against, you know, against his people. And he said, that's exactly it. The point is, is that you can't evaluate what tactics are allowable and not allowable unless you have a strategic vision. And we are completely absorbed just in analyzing the tactic. Oh, this is allowable or not. This is ethical or not without actually a strategic frame that would render any of these

decisions actually strategic or not. And he pointed out the wonderful example of like how the Catholic Church, as like it itself will say, has been pro monarchy and anti-monarchy. It has been pro-democracy. It has been anti-democracy. It's been this. It's been that. And but it can do that because it has a strategic objective, which is bring about, you know, God's, you know, will on earth in the kingdom of heaven. And like, regardless of whether we believe in that strategic vision, they do. And so they know when they can make this decision and when they can make that because it's about getting to a certain goal. And we haven't done that. And that's something that I'm very hopeful that your book, you know, is reminding us and giving us some good

examples of, you know, both tactics and the need for those tactics to be within some kind of strategic goal. So I have to thank you so much for getting us to think in the ways that we need to about liberation. And, you know, so I, I don't know if that's a good way to wrap up and close, but I really want to thank you for the work that you've done and that you're doing. And I think it's going to be very valuable, not only to our listeners, but hopefully to movements for freedom, liberation, and justice around the world. Thank you so much for that. And Nan and Henry and to everyone listening. And, yeah, I hope that we can continue these conversations and talk about how it is that we can do strategy in such a dispersed global way, in a planet.

emergency, where we're at, right? Because that's the big challenge that we have. Zapatistas themselves are a very, they're an organization and they know who their membership is. So no one can speak for them but themselves. You know, national liberation movements don't really have that. Like the Palestine Liberation Organization kind of used to be that. And now that's really, it's fragmented. So we're in a context where we need to strategize in the context that we're in.

of fragmentation, of dispersal. And so that's something that I think is really exciting to think about in this moment, us doing together, because I feel like that's where we feel that we need to go. And we have so much brilliance in all of our different and all of our superpowers. I think that we can prefigure that world that we want through these kinds of interactions and strategic engagements. Thank you so much for having me on. Adnan didn't think that he would get away with mentioning Molotov-Ribbentrop without me.

coming in with a non sequitur before we close. Did he? Of course not. So just, you know, this is something I've talked about on the show ad nauseum in the past. It's something that's discussed in Stalin history and critique of a black legend, which of course I co-translated for Iskra Books into English and reminder listeners, you can download it for free at Iskrabbooks.org if you don't want to buy the physical copy. But, you know, Adnan mentioned that the Soviet Union and tried to sign all sorts of friendship and non-aggression and mutual defense pacts against Germany with what would become the allied powers before Molotov-Ribbentrop was signed and that the West continuously rejected them, rejected them, rejected them,

until the strategic decision was made to sign Molotov-Rubbentrop. But, you know, there is another side of that, Adnan, that I also like to mention, and it's been a while, which is why I'm taking the operational. opportunity to do it now. Molotov-Ribbentrop was signed in August of 1939, but there were other pacts that were signed with Hitler's Germany prior to that, which are usually not discussed, and I think also should be if we are going to discuss Molotov-Rubentrop. So there was, of course, the four powers pact or the apartheid part-partite pact in 1933 between the UK, France, Italy, and Nazi Germany. There was the Anglo-American Naval Agreement, 1935, between the UK and Nazi Germany.

There was something of a non-aggression pact that was signed in September 1938, again between the UK and Nazi Germany, as well as in December, 1938, between France and Nazi Germany. There also was non-aggression packs signed between Romania, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, all separately, with Nazi Germany all prior to August 1939 as well. It's only after all of these other states had already signed non-aggression packs with Nazi Germany and after years, mind you, of the Soviet Union trying to sign non-aggression packs with Western powers against Nazi Germany and being rejected out of hand, which, as Adnan mentioned, was in hopes that Nazi Germany would focus their efforts on the Soviet Union and collapse the Soviet Union.

Only after years of that, that Molotov-Ribbentrop was finally signed. But which of these packs do we ever hear about? Malitab-Ribbentrop, and that is all, and we don't hear any of that other historical context. So I know, again, that was a non-sequitur, but, you know, we've been doing the show for five years, Adnan. You know that when Molotov-Ribbentrop comes up, that that's going to be something I say. So with that non-sequitur being... It was a risk, but I think a helpful one, because this is a history podcast. Well, you know, it's, what can I say?

So, with that being out of the way, again, our guest was Linda Kikivish. Kiki, can you tell them? the listeners where they can find you in your work on the way out the door. Yeah, on my website, kiki.org, and that's spelled QUI-QU-I-org. And Adnan, can you tell the listeners where they can find you and your other excellent program? Yeah, you can find me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein. You know, I've got other things, substack and all that. Yeah, you can find it all.

And I do have a website, but it's not a great one, but it's adnanhussein.org. Maybe a new one may come out eventually, but you can always find everything there or on Twitter. And do check out my show on YouTube, especially because of the Palestine and the World Series. We've got two episodes out at time of recording. By the time this is published, there may be several others. But if you're eager and want to listen to all of them, At one go, you can listen to them on my patreon.com slash adnan Hussein, but in due course, they're all coming out weekly on YouTube and they're free and available. And I think it goes very well with this episode to think about the longer duet and what's at stake in a different kind of framing of the Palestine question and these histories.

And so this has been a really wonderful conversation. and I think you'll find more of these kinds of, you know, ways of analyzing them on that show and in that series. So do check it out. Absolutely. Highly recommend that. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1995. I know that I have mentioned recently, but I have another show, which is being started up and will be out by the time that this series is coming. We should have a couple episodes up by the time that this episode.

episode comes out. That show is called Tsars and Commissars from Rus to Modern Russia. It's a 25-part series on Russian history from pre-state formation all the way to the present. That'll be on YouTube as well as available on podcast apps. You can keep up to date with where that show is being posted and what episodes are up by following me on Twitter. Again, at Huck 1995. As for the show, Gorilla History, you can keep up to date with everything. that the show is doing by following it on social media. On Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A-U-R-A-U-R-L-A-U-R-R-I-L-A-U-R-R-I-L-A-U-R-R-R-N-L-R-L-A-R-L-R-L-L-L-R-L-L-R-L-L-L-L-R-R-L-R-R-L-R-R-H-R-R-R-H-R-R-H-R-R-H-R-R-H-R-R-R-H-R-R-R-H-R-R-R-H-R-R-R-S. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history.

And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.