Guerrilla History - Red Sea Shipping & Gaza Genocide w/ Laleh Khalili

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on the esteemed Professor Laleh Khalili to discuss Red Sea Shipping and the regional consequences of the Gaza Genocide. This conversation bridges two of the major topics of her work, and is an incredibly thought provoking and generative discussion.  We would love to hear what you find particularly useful  from this one, so let us know on Twitter once you listen! Laleh Khalili is Professor and Director of the Center for Gulf Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at University of Exeter, and author of multiple books we discussed today including Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula,  Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies, and Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration.  Follow her on twitter @LalehKhalili 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 Den Bamboo? No! 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 History, the podcast that acts as 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 as usual by my co-host, Professor Ignan Hussein, historian 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. It's really great to be with you. I'm really excited about the conversation we have today. Yeah, absolutely. I know you just got back from a really interesting sounding conference on Islamophobia, and I hope that we'll be having a conversation soon, which might go up on our Patreon first, but I would really love to have a conversation about some of the conversations that were taking place at that conference. We have a terrific

guest and topic today, but before I introduce the guests, I just want 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. And you can keep up to date with everything that Adnan and I are doing individually, as well as what the show is putting out collectively by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. So as I said, we have a really terrific guest today. We have Lala Helili, who is a professor at the University at Exeter, Director of the Center for Gulf Studies,

at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, as I mentioned. You may recognize her name from the relatively recent and terrific book, Sinews of War and Trade, which came out a few years ago, Professor Wala Halili, it's nice to have you on the program. It's very nice to be with you guys. Very nice to meet you as well.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a big fan of your work. I really loved sinews of war and trade. I unfortunately haven't been able to get your newest book corporeal life of seafaring yet, but I do plan on doing so when I am in a place that I can actually get books. But I want to open this conversation by bridging some of your earlier work with this more recent work, which you have been doing. So your first two books, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine, the Politics of National Commemoration

and Time in the Shadows, Can Find an Encounter Insurgents, really focus on political violence. And, you know, as we're talking about Palestine and we're going to be talking about the situation in Gaza, this is quite apropos of the moment. And as I mentioned with your more recent books, you're really focusing now on maritime infrastructures and transit, transport of goods and commodities, particularly through the Arabian Gulf region. and we're going to be talking about the Red Sea in the conversation today. So I would like to ask you, how has your two focuses, your previous two focuses of research, one on political violence, particularly within the case of Palestine, and then also the more recent research, which you've been doing on maritime infrastructures

and shipping. How do these two things come together to help you analyze the current situation in Gaza? because that's the topic of the day. And I really see these two things, these two tracks of your research coming together and making you somebody who's going to have very unique insights compared to people who typically would only study one or the other. Well, let's start by saying first that I'm a bit of a magpie. Magpies like shiny things.

And as soon as I see a particular puzzle or a particular political thematic that I find interesting or I want to research or learn more about, I do focus on it, which partially explains why I jump around a little bit from topic to topic, although there is a through line in everything that I have ever done, and that is that I've always been very interested in the transnational movement of forms of solidarity and forms of commemoration, in the case of Palestinians in my first book, transnational movement of counterinsurgency practices in my second book

transnational movements of cargo and capital and migrants in my third book and of course the transnational movement of ships and the seafarers on them in the fourth book and hopefully the next one will be on transactional movement of everything having to do with oil or the next two will probably have to do with that so part of what I'm interested in is that that kind of a movement across borders which in a way way challenges particular ways of thinking of history that are very nation-centric, that are based within particular borders. But I'm particularly also interested in the way that there is always a conjunction or a conjuncture between international and local politics. I think that

is hugely significant in the way that one can understand, for example, Palestinian mobilization or the counterinsurgency practices and of course insurgency practices as well as the emergence of ports in the Arabian Peninsula. In all of those cases, what is really important is that power cannot only be analyzed along one vector, whether that vector is transnational or it's local. You have to take account of both power and political economy operating on various scales. So that certainly is one of the reasons that I have been interested in that. But there's also, I think, another reason that is somewhat more personal but also somewhat more theoretical.

And that is that I grew up in a lefty family in Iran. And I grew up with revolutionary parents who were then subsequent to the Iranian Revolution, became victims of the revolution as revolutions tend to do. They eat their children. And so I, and the reason that I left Iran at the age of 17 in 1985 was because I wouldn't have been able to go to university in Iran very easily at that point. And I think that all of that, in some senses, fed into my interest in the way that cataclysmic transformations, which might in the long run actually be revolutionary in the positive sense of the revolutionary, often come. with extraordinary violence that are also cataclysmic and that rend, you know, families and communities in the fabric of affection and love and attachment to particular places. In my case,

my, you know, family has been thrown to the four winds and we've all been dispersed because of this, the particularities of post-revolutionary politics. And that kind of a, that kind of a convergence between sort of political violence and the everyday social and political and economic is something that I've always been interested in. And of course, theoretically, this all goes back to my personal sort of theoretical hero, Rosa Luxembourg, whose accumulation of capital insists, absolutely insists on the centrality of violence, and particularly of colonial or imperial violence, to the processes of accumulation of capital

beyond the bounds of the original industrial states. And it's recently I was reading the chapters that she'd written on the Swiss Canal and on the Argentine death crisis. And I was going, this could have been written, you know, like it was written, what, 100-something years ago and it could have been written yesterday. You just changed some of the names

and the politics that underlies so much of this and the analysis that underlies so much of this. And her discussion, for example, of the centrality of militarism to all of this is very clear. OK, so political economy wasn't as central to my first two projects, but it was always in the back of my mind. And so when I came to Cineas, well, when I did my counterinsurgency project and I was interviewing a bunch of people in the U.S. military, actually, for people that had been, well, that there were judge advocate generals. There were the lawyers that were often defending Guantanamo detainees. And when I was talking to these military officers, some of them quite senior, all of them quite clever, many of them would point out to a couple of things. First of all, they were all cognizant of the fact that not a single counterinsurgency war fought by a major imperial power had ever been won historically, which I thought was quite interesting hearing that from a U.S. military person.

But the second thing that they, a couple of them were really interested in sort of pushing against was that I, they felt that I was focusing quite a lot on what one of them called the sort of the bleeding edge of the war, you know, the sort of the bloody kinetic elements of the war. And one of them said, why don't you look at how the logistics and the money element of it operate behind the scenes? because that is exactly how, you know, the U.S. war machine goes to war, is that it has this entire kind of a mechanism behind it that is very significant and often quite opaque or invisible. And that initially I actually started looking at really the project that I wanted to do was really to just look at sort of the kind of dual-use logistics firms in places like Kuwait and Bahrain that did some logistics work for the United States

during its war. also actually functioned as civilian sort of distribution mechanisms for civilian goods, consumer goods even. But the more that I looked, the more it became clear that it was impossible to do a research like that without actually looking at just emergence of courts. And also because there was nothing else out there. And so the more I did that research, the more I got deeper into it. And in the end, the book became sinews of war and trade,

which, of course, it is very specifically about this constant interweaving of commerce and warmaking and the infrastructure, the maritime infrastructure that is necessary for conducting both. Now, all of this, of course, brings us to the moment, to this particular moment. And that is that, you know, that's sort of a long history of both Palestinian revolts and an Israeli counterinsurgency that are written through. my first two books, and of course the processes of, you know, everything from the Houthi attacks to today's news that Colombia's government might ban the shipment of coal to Israel, to the ridiculous peer that the U.S. built in Gaza, which ended up being damaged and was

washed north to Ashkelon and Estaud. All of this, in a sense, are, it seems like my entire... kind of academic writing career has been targeted at trying to explain these particular things that are happening right now and at this moment. And so what bridges all of them is, as I said, just my magpie interest, but also these through lines that are both personal and intellectual, or at least through lines of curiosity. Well, that's absolutely fascinating. There's so many interesting things that we could follow up on that it's almost hard to fix it. out where to start, but since you mentioned that you're interested, you know, in these

kind of logistics and mechanisms behind counterinsurgency and how those connect up with developments in global capitalism, firstly, it just reminds me so much when you say about Rosa Luxembourg as if she could be writing about, you know, today is just how many of these like long-term geopolitical kinds of problems and pivot points have existed, historically. I'm a medievalist. So it's usually pretty fruitless to try and connect things that are 800 years old to contemporary affairs. But when you look at, you know, the establishment of the Crusader states in the Levant and the way in which they seem to be attempting to gain access to the Red Sea shipping and to the Indian Ocean and, you know, and how important

I would argue, and so few people have started to argue these things, but usually they try and treat crusading as if it's somehow extraneous to Europe's development, when in fact, actually, it's totally central, is that the mobilization for war and the investments that were made in maritime shipping in the Mediterranean to ferry goods and people and arms and horses and so on for all of these multiple attacks over several hundred years really was a stimulus to developing aspects of navigation and technology and so on that are often kind of, you know, divorce from those material kind of conditions of war into somehow the inventiveness of, you know, these Europeans and that gave them the advantage. And then they went on and colonized the world and

starting with the Atlantic world. Well, you know, war and technological development, they seem to go together. So I'm wondering when we come to this as a, you know, assault and the place of Israel deal politically in its war-making functions in global capitalism of a certain sort, in empire, you know, Anthony Lowenstein's book on the sort of laboratory that Israel is, it seems that you would have some additional analysis to make for us about, you know, what are the consequences both negative and positive, you know, for, in analyzing Israel's war, on Gaza, it seems that there's a lot at stake here that goes beyond just the politics of the particular local national conflict. And since you've been so attuned to these transnational

links and networks, maybe you could tell us a little bit more how you see that situation developing and unfolding. What are its implications from that kind of a perspective that you have? First, let me start by saying that I'm completely with you on the sort of the long-dure historical, being absolutely necessary for understanding the present. I started actually reading the, when I first went on this container ship that I had to go, I had to take a few big books with me. And I took, I had already read Capital One, so I took Capital Two and Three. And I took Fernando Brodells Mediterranean and the age of Charles, whatever.

Philip II. Philip II. Which is like, which is like talking about Long Dure. I mean, that is like, but that. That is also, and also the scale of that. And I think there's something to be said about that kind of a historical account that is actually, that, that is actually promiscuous almost in its reach. That is, that is, that is, that is, that is, that is, you know, kind of curiosity for wanting to incorporate a whole lot. Because I think that in some ways, and I, I, my training was as a quote unquote political scientist in the United States.

States. And the training as a political scientist in the United States insists on something they call rigor. And for them, rigor and elegance is constantly shedding the complexities of particular cases, which goes against absolutely everything that, for example, a broadel is about, right? And so I think that has never appealed to me. And I think before we started, I was talking about how I am disciplinarily homeless. And it's partially because it doesn't appeal to me to think about things in this kind of an incredibly arid way of thinking where one or two things ends up explaining everything. I like the idea of conjunctures. I like the idea of contingencies. I like the idea that there are particular things that result in feedback loops and unintended

consequences. I like the idea that there might be familiar. I mean, to me, this is what I think, part of the reason that we continue to produce knowledge, part of the reason that we continue debating knowledge is because we don't you know, there is no kind of a universal way of understanding particular circumstances.

There are particular conceptual things we can all hang our hoax on, but I think a particular knowledge of a place with a broader sort of theoretical scaffolding is really the way to go. So within that context, there are a lot of different ways that one can understand, and in particular the Israeli genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza at this moment.

There's one particular way that one can look at this as a kind of a longer duress, as you say the sort of the crusading wars, as a kind of a Mediterranean conflict between the sort of the European states in the northern European states in the Mediterranean basin or the states in the northern European states in the Mediterranean basin or the states in the northern. part of the Mediterranean basin, wanting to continue their control in the eastern Mediterranean. We know that that was a major factor in the contestation and the imperial contestation between, for example, the British and the French in the 19th century, where the British were really worried about the Mediterranean becoming what they called a French lake, whereas the Black Sea was a Russian lake, and therefore the Red Sea had to become a British lake. And so a lot of the particularities of the ways that the British, for example,

extended their, extended and projected their power, and that also translated into the building of the Suez Canal and everything, was because of this element of required these strategic strongholds. But the strategic strongholds are strategic strongholds, not just because you're going to have naval warfare in there, but also because they are routes of transit. So the Mediterranean was really, really important because it allowed for transit to a whole lot of different regions in the Mediterranean basin, but also out of the Mediterranean basin and out to the west coast of Africa, for example, if you're going through the Gibraltar or through the east coast of Africa, if you're going through the Suez Canal. The Black Sea is a really important node because it allowed connection. And once oil was discovered, it was a hugely important note because it allowed connection to Azerbaijan and via the ports in Georgia.

And, of course, the Red Sea was really significant, not because, you know, this was long before oil was discovered, not because it was significant in terms of exploitation for its, you know, for the particular ways in which it could be exploited for extractive resources, but because it was important as a route of transit, route of transit for goods from raw materials from other places, not the Red Sea basin itself, but as a, but also a very significant route of transit for British goods to be sold in India in particular. And so there is this particular kind of history, again, of commerce and war, of strategic and extractive policies, defining, you know, the significance of the Eastern Mediterranean. We also see this because, of course, again, in the intra-imperial warfare, this was really the prize after the first world war. This was really the prize of the post-Foltenman falling apart. And so in some ways, you know, that that's part of the reason why we see the mandatory powers, you know, taking over the Levant, the Mastricht. Again, the places where you had the crusader,

you had the crusader histories in the past. Okay. So that's the long beret. But then you look at this in a much more post-second world war kind of study. And you see some of the elements that are emerging in here are elements that are familiar from other contexts. 1947, when the partition plan of Palestine is put to the United Nations, is also the year in which the partition plan of India is taking place. The idea of partition, of course, again, is rooted in particularly racializing racist modalities of 19th century British imperial thinking, British actually European imperial thinking, in which communities have to be monochrome. They have to be monoeethnic, that the idea that they are going to be multi-ethnic communities coexisting with one another is just

simply not considered a functional possibility. And this is of course something that, for example, the wonderful historian Osama Magdisi, who is also a Palestinian historian, and writes about the 19th century notions of coexistence that kind of transcended the ways in which we read sectarianism back into history of the Mashrach. But this kind of the paradigmatic population transfer or partition plans emerge out of a particular way of race thinking and transmutation of religions into race thinking,

which, again, since you brought up crusades, it goes back to, you know, the edicts issued in Spain about purity of blood, you know, post-190, actually, before 1492, the reconquist there. So there's quite a lot of, also, when you're looking at it conceptually, it's also that. And then there's like the basic geopolitical stuff, which everybody loves to talk about. Which is that, of course, as Alexander Hague said,

former state secretary under Reagan, I believe, Israel is the largest unsinkable, stationary aircraft carrier for the United States in the world. It was a strategic outpost. First, there was a strategic outpost for the British until 1956. Then it became a strategic outpost for the French until 1967. And then from 1967 onwards, once it had proven itself to be a bulwark against both socialist and anti-colonial forces in the region, it became the significant U.S. strategic outpost. I mean, this is like geopoliticals thinking.

But it itself had no extractive value, but it was an incredibly important strategic place. Now, of course, with the whole bullshit about Israel being a start-up nation, we can also look at the ways in which Israel has become a kind of not just strategic outposts, although it is that and I think it is primarily that. I really do think that. But it has also become, it's the regional gendarme and it has been so since actually from the moment that it was created and even before it when it was created. But aside from being regional gendarme. It is now also what, as you called, as you said, Anthony Lowenstein has written. It is also this incredibly important laboratory for the testing, not only of military-grade software and technologies, but also of the kind of technologies that are needed for the exploitation of human beings in a variety of things. All of the stuff that one could put under the sort of the fantasy of automation, AI bullshit. it. And also that is also, a lot of that is bullshit. A lot of that is also fantasy. And I like to

keep repeating that. It is a lot of it is fantasy. And so I think that that element of fantasy is also being introduced. So in a way, looking at Israel is really, really significant as part of these broader historical things. But then there is also a simple way in which my first book talked about Palestinian, this is all about Israel, but what about Palestinians? The Palestinian struggle has been from the moment that it began, and it began before the establishment of the state of Israel. It began when the yeshuv, the first colonies were formed in the 19th century, and certainly when the second alia began in the, in the, you know, towards the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. And from the moment in which the colonization picked up, Palestinians have been resisting this. And the modalities of resistance they have chosen have been essentially, it may not be recognized, but it has been central.

It has been pivotal to regional ways of resisting, but also importantly, in a global imaginary of resistance to empire and colonialism. Che Guevara said it. Amil Kar Kar-Kabran said it. You name it. Thomas Sankara said every single one of the revolutionaries, global revolutionaries that you think about, that looked to a transnational, translinguistic solidarity, Palestine was pivotal to that fight. And so I think it is, you know, that that I think also is what makes this moment

particularly important for us, because as people keep saying, what is being done to Palestinians now will be done to us. Their resistance is the ways in which we are going to have to contemplate resistance. Should those things be done to us? Well, speaking of resistance, I just wanted to follow up with one other kind of dimension of this, which is to talk a little bit about forms that this has taken. I mean, I think you're absolutely right that you need a multi-scaler kind of approach to really grasp these sort of transnational and global phenomenon. And in the case of resistance and solidarity, it is something that has emerged very, I think, powerfully to people's consciousness as a transnational experience. You know, we understand

that, you know, that protests taking place in London and in North America and so on have reverberated, you know, in Palestine where they are watching and feeling, you know, some kind of solidarity, you know, perhaps more than in in eras of the past where, you know, they felt very isolated and forgotten. And while they are, of course, absolutely isolated. There is some kind of, you know, connection. Something is happening in this moment that is escaping just the narrow confines of a particular locale or of a national struggle. So is to ask a little bit more about the resistance and how do you see these interacting with one another? I mean, you have on the one hand, the so-called axis of resistance that actually consciously see itself as, you know,

trying to provide a military counterweight in some sense to, you know, raise the cost of, you know, Israel's assault upon Gaza, like Ansarra, you know, blocking shipping or attacks on U.S. bases for their complicity by resistance groups in Iraq or, you know, what Hezbollah is doing from, you know, in Lebanon and the north of Israel. How do you understand? the kinds of modalities of resistance that are taking place now. And, you know, do you think that it is more effective than it has been in the past? What would give us a sense of the direction this is taking place and the implications and consequences for the future project of liberating Palestine? And as you're saying, the connected project of liberating ourselves from

these imperial structures. So if one looks at the Palestinian forms of resistance from, let's say, 1930s onwards, what you see is cyclical sort of resorts to armed struggle. You have the 1930s armed struggle underneath Azadine Gassam, the great Palestinian revolt, which took a number of different shapes in the cities. It was a general strike in the countryside.

it was forms of essentially guerrilla warfare before it was it called guerrilla warfare then and sabotage of rail line, sabotage of pipeline, sabotage of electric grids, etc. What is interesting about that is, of course, that the effective result of that was the 1937 PL Commission report, which tried to limit the emigration of new settlers to Palestine. But in the long run, what happened globally, this is again one of these things where the particular kind of political conjuncture has these kinds of effects, where it could have potentially led to the sort of the, at least ebbing, if not the complete and total canceling of the settlement project of Palestine, the Second World War and the sort of the post-second World War settlement results in the establishment of State of Israel. and so the reversal of the gains of the Great Arab Revolt. You then see the emergence of armed struggle towards the end of the 1960s and after the 1967 war

when the Palestinians, who had to some extent had hoped that there would be forms of struggle by the sort of the states in the region, began to realize that actually the states in the region often acted, even sort of Nasser's Egypt, often acted in ways that was a raison d'etat of their own countries rather than the well of the Palestinian people. And of course, this was also a great moment of international, transnational forms of guerrilla warfare.

And you had this kind of emergence of armed struggle. And you had different kinds of projects as the end point of that armed struggle. Because you had Fatah, for example, engaging in armed struggle. And what they did from very early on was sort of this idea of a independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. Whereas, for example, PFLP from very early on, the Palestinian for the popular fight for the liberation of Palestine, from the very early on, they actually could not see national sovereignty as the possible end goal. In fact, a lot of their project was that there was going to have to be revolution in the entirety of the Arab world.

And if there wasn't going to be, that sovereign Palestinian state was going to be fucked. I mean, of course, they had better analysis than, you know, my kind of colorful language. But I think that that was definitely the case. And I think that in a way, it's really, really important to realize that their analysis was absolutely spot on. That the only way that Palestinians today are going to have the possibility of some form of liberation and justice is if the Arab states that have that are essentially actively financially and militarily, you know, security-wise, supporting the state of Israel, including the Palestinian Authority, including the UAE, including Egypt, in Jordan, if the revolutionary movements also toppled those, you know, reactionary regimes. And I think that analysis in the 1960s was absolutely right. That analysis was co-opted in 1974, famously, with Yasser Arafat's Gun and the Olive Branch speech at the United Nations.

And then that gave way to, and then of course we had, you know, the comprehensive defeat of the armed groups through the extraordinarily violent Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, well, between 19, actually 76, I should say, in 19, 2000, the Israelis occupied parts of Lebanon. But in that period, the Palestinian armed groups were essentially defeated and pushed out of Lebanon, dispersed across the region. And then what you had was the shifting of the struggle to Palestine itself. In 1976, with popular struggles inside the green line by Palestinians who had by, you know, 10 years before that had become citizens of Israel. and then, of course, in 87 with the Interfather. And what is really interesting about this is that in this instance, in both instances, in both 76 and then the first Interfather

from 87 to 91, what you had was this incredibly coherent form of popular mobilization that had lots of different kinds of committees. It attempted to actually organize people wherever they were and it was remarkably successful. I mean, it is unquestionable that part of the

reason why Oslo was pushed onto Palestinians was as a way of co-opting that particular movements that emerged during the First Intifada in Palestine itself. And then of course you had the post interfaitha

the post-Oslo doldrums. Of course you had the second interfaida in 2000 and it went on to 2002, but despite the fact that in that particular and father, Palestinians probably inflicted a lot of damage against Israeli civilians, what hasn't been noted is that Israel doesn't give a shit about its civilians. What it does give a shit about is its military. And I think that targeting its military sources or its military or its armed forces or the settlements that are

its outposts, for example, in occupied, in the territories designated or occupied by international law, blah, blah, blah. But they actually care about that. I think part of the reason that Israel has been so incredibly vicious in its attack against Gaza is because of the something like 1,200 people that were killed, about 500 of them more military certain forces. And the reason that this is significant

is because Israeli state recognizes that its existence in the region depends on the munificence of its primary patron, the United States. And the United States needs Israel because Israel has, up until now, proven itself to be militarily,

better than the other Arab states surrounding it. But if Israel proves itself not to be as competence militarily, a little bit like South Africa was towards the end of its apartheid regime where it was fighting multiple small asymmetric wars with its various kinds of liberated nations, and it was showing itself to be not particularly competent at doing that, you will see a lessening of support for, or Israel, Israelis assume that they will see a lessening of support from the United States for its project of colonization.

And so I think that what we're seeing right now is this kind of a convergence of a particular moment where Hamas and its allies in Gaza have resorted to armed struggle, and they have taken advantage of the fact that those in power in Israel felt quite a lot of hubris about their power. about their intelligence and intelligence capabilities and about their military capacity and discipline. And they were wrong about all of that. And I think that recuperating the reputation is part of the reason that they are absolutely desperate and part of the reason that explains the viciousness of the particular genocidal campaign that they have.

So all of that is in the context of the Middle East. But then again, as I have written in my first book, the transnational solidities matter. Transnational solidarity matter, again, also at multiple scales. So the global solidarity, I think the fact that people have been out on the streets has been really quite significant, not only in order for Palestinians to feel that they're not alone, but also because it actually pushes the government to think about what is going on first. I think the student movements, particularly, but in particular in the U.S., have also been significant. And otherwise, they wouldn't be put down with the kind of force and violence that they have been put down. You have to sort of measure the extent to which they are considered to be disruptive by the force that ends up meeting their relatively, not relatively, they're entirely peaceful actions.

So part of the reason that that seems really scary is because it shows that there's a generation coming up and this new generation is not going to have it the way it was. But additionally, this new generation, particularly in the United States, is also. hooked in, for example, to union movements, right? Part of the reason that they have been so effective in organizing is because they've been connected to grad student unions and other forms of student unions. And also, they are connected to community movements, to community groups, particularly African-American and indigenous community groups that have been mobilized through Black Lives Matter and through anti-pipeline indigenous water rights movements in the west of the U.S.

So you've got this particular moment that is significant. But we're also in the United Kingdom. We're having all these direct action activities by anarchist groups that are attacking Elbitt's factories. They have resulted in, and it has been remarkably successful, although a number of these anarchists have ended up going to prison. A number of these factories have been shut down. And actually, one of the interesting things has been that if you track Elbitt's fortunes, on the stock market, it actually shows a downward trend, which is quite interesting. That said, again, I'll bring up Anthony Lowenstein because you brought him up and his work is

really amazing. It is really important to recognize also that this genocidal violence and the various kinds of violence that are being used are acting as a laboratory. So while Elbit is not doing great on the stock market, it nevertheless is like raising billions and billions of dollars of funds. This is a Israel is the tip of a racist class war and Palestinians

are fighting that racist global class war and they're doing so incredibly bravely and they're doing so at an unbearable cost to their communities to the families to the men, women and children who are

being decimated in a particularly brutal to a way that Israel is decimating them So it matters. It all matters, and it matters in a lot of different ways. Yeah, so many great things have been said in the conversation recently. I have a lot that I want to talk about, actually. But before I get to a couple of questions, which will temporarily lead us a field from where we are right now, but will eventually lead us back, I just want to let the listeners, remind the listeners, rather, that the book that Adnan, Brett, our former co-host and I wrote one of the forwards to

historic documents of the PLO is now available. 100% of the profits of that book are being donated to the Middle East Children's Alliance. The reason I bring this up is you were talking about differences in strategy between the PLO, PFLP, and their varying analyses of how they should engage with the struggle. We also have an upcoming book, which will be coming out very shortly after this episode does, historic documents of the PFLP, which Adnan and I will also be writing a forward for, and similarly, we'll be donating all of the profits of that book to Mecca, Middle East Children's Alliance.

Worth noting, Iskra Books always makes its PDFs available for free. You can get all of the PDFs at Iskrabbooks.org, but I highly recommend everybody pick up a physical copy because, as I said, those proceeds will be donated. or if you are somebody who prefers PDFs and you just want to download the PDF for free, do consider making a donation yourself to Mecca because otherwise, you know, it's just free and you're not contributing, which is kind of one of the points of the project anyway. You also mentioned Lebanon and the conflict between Lebanon and Israel, just to remind the listeners that we had a pretty long episode on Lebanon versus the

Zion imperialist project with two of our comrades, Rania Halleck, as well as Alikadri, not at the same time, but within the same episode. So go back and listen to that if you're interested in that history and the present situation regarding Lebanon and Israel. But now turning to a couple of the things that had come up during the conversation that I wanted to talk about a little bit, you would talk to earlier at the very beginning, actually, about how counterinsurgency doesn't really work. It reminds me of something that I had heard.

I believe it was from our friend Pavel Vorgan recently that if you look at imperialist wars in the modern era, you know, modern era broadly conceived, goes back quite a ways. There's really three modes. There's the Klauswitzian mode of war as a form of policy. There's counterinsurgency. And then there's genocidal war. And these are kind of the three primary forms of imperialist warfare. I'd also seen several genocide scholars, including many who,

who are not radicals by any form that have analyzed genocide and genocidal war as inherently being an off-branching of counterinsurgency, that all genocides have a counterinsurgency component to them. And I think that looking at, and I know that this had been analyzed in the case of the Guatemalan genocide and the Rwandan genocide, but I think that if we look at the current situation in Gaza and the conflict between Israel and, you know, the so-called state of Israel and Palestine more broadly, that looking at the quote-unquote counterinsurgent methods utilized by the Zionist state really are co-constitutive with the genocide that is being

carried out. And that analyzing these two things as co-constititive of one another is actually really vital to understanding what is going on within the region. I do have more questions. have anything that you want to say on that, feel free. Otherwise, I'll go into the next question. I'll just very briefly say that I agree with that. And I think that in part, what has been really interesting is that the fragmentation of the various bits that Israel controls, for example, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Palestinians who live inside the Green Line,

that fragmentation has allowed for the state of Israel to institute different kinds of mechanisms of control, mechanisms of discipline. And we're seeing an acceleration of the forms of violence within those. So while, for example, the Palestinians and citizens of Israel were largely subjected to sort of racist police action as kind of third class citizens, third or fourth class citizens in the country itself and excluded it from, for example, access to, you know, state allocated, state distributed social goods, et cetera. We are now seeing a far more violent police action, mass incarceration of Palestinian citizens of Israel,

if they, for example, say anything in support of their brethren cousins in Gaza or fly a Palestinian flag. We also see an acceleration of the counterinsurgency activities in the West Bank, where, for example, where Israel has always been, quite violent, but it has always used alibis of various sorts for its violence and has made a little bit of a performance of adhering to whatever, to law. All of that has been dropped now in favor of just sheer violence. And then, of course, we see the genocidal violence in Gaza, which goes on the back of what was already quite a brutal state of siege. And

you know, and episodic and periodic sort of incredibly violent attacks there, 2008, 2009, and then 2014 and 2021 and now. So I think that that is absolutely right. And I think this having these kinds of, I would say they're all along the spectrum. And the ability to move back and forth between them gives the state of Israel a kind of ability also to, you know, to sort of invoke what it's doing as a kind of, oh, well, what we're just doing is policing action, what we're doing is this or that. And it acts as a kind of an alibi. It's exactly what the US did in Vietnam.

It is exactly what the British have done in Malayan and other places. And this kind of breaking places up into smaller, smaller fragmented units and instituting different kinds of legal, military, political violence regimes there is incredibly effective form of control of those areas. of those regions, of those fragments. And I would just add in that from my side of, you know, analyzing things. As you mentioned, there's a sliding scale that they utilize in terms of, you know, moving the dial a little bit this way or that way.

But there's also multiple feedback loops that go from one side to the other. So as counterinsurgency methods increase within an area, the brutality has to ramp up, which also breeds an increased amount of resistance, but also the undergrounding of resistance. And at a certain stage, the imperialists realize that the counterinsurgent methods that they're utilizing are not going to be effective at rooting out this underground resistance. So then they resort to utilizing genocidal methods. Similarly, resorting to genocidal methods is only going to continue to breed insurgency and resistance, which then it requires you to think about how to adapt your counterinsurgent methods

until you realize that those methods are not going to be effective. And then you flip back over to utilizing genocidal methods once, again. So I agree with you entirely that this is a sliding scale that can be utilized as cover in some ways, as you're alluding to, but also realizing that there are feedback loops that go between this two sites. So it's not just a left-right scale. It's a left-right scale that as you shift to one side is going to have some impact on the other side of that. It's like having rubber bands stretched between the two poles. You know, you twist it one way and it wants to pull back the other way as you twist the scale. So I think... It's all cyclical. I think much the

same way that I mentioned that like the Palestinian resistance, arms resistance has been cyclical. I think that modalities of, you know, using these forms of extraordinary spectacular violence, a genocidal violence, is also cyclical. And I think that it is, it's important to acknowledge that. I also think that in the case of Israel, one of the things that is really interesting is that if one actually reads military histories of Israel, you begin to realize that a lot of the hype of the military, around the military and intelligence is just that. It's just really hype. And a lot of it is complete and total bullshit. And I think that the fact that nobody has actually quite figured this out up until now has been because we haven't had social media

in the ways that we've had. And so I think having this kind of a, I can't believe I'm saying this, but having this kind of a slightly more democratized method of broadcasting, I never used to think that social media would be actually the kind of a space in which you would get more information. But the very fact of the matter is that everything from the kids on TikTok to all of the incredibly brave Palestinian journalists that are constantly posting images, despite, you know, the incredible threat to themselves and to their families, is also part of this process, which shows us that it's not just, it's not just the military capacity, it's not just the political support. It's also the way.

ways in which the story of the fighting is told in real time. And I think that it is fascinating to me that Israel, which has always prided itself in being incredibly good at Hasbara, is really losing at that war. Yeah. No, absolutely. So, you know, you mentioned a few things that actually bring me to my next question, which is the point where I'm going to diverge a little bit away from the current conversation, but it will loop back, I promise. One of your things that you had mentioned was the quote about Israel being the largest unsinkable aircraft carrier, a quote that we've used many times on this show throughout our coverage and analysis of both the history as well as the current situation in Palestine. What we have to understand is that this aircraft

carrier is not an aircraft carrier in itself. It's an aircraft carrier specifically because it's propped up by the imperialist West, much in the way that an aircraft carrier without having midshipmen and aircraft being put on it and fuel being put into the ship is just a hulking mass of steel and concrete. If you don't have those inputs from abroad, it in itself is nothing. And similarly, the Zionist project without its support by the imperialist West is nothing. And so thinking about these logistics chains in terms of supporting the Zionist project is also incredibly important.

You know, there was, as you mentioned in your previous answer, there's this tendency. There was this tendency to think of Israel as this unbeatable force within the Middle East. Whereas now, because we are actually seeing this, you know, these actual footage coming out from the conflict that, no, the Israeli army is not invincible. And what we're starting to realize, what many people are starting to realize, but, you know, really should have been understood for a while, is that without the Western support, it wouldn't have even appeared it to be invincible. at any point. It is simply because of that support and therefore analyzing the logistics is incredibly important. And it's something that I've been thinking about since I read a book by one of our friends' choke points by Manny Ness and another comrade of mine, Jake Ali Muhammad Wilson, a few years ago thinking about these choke points within logistics chains. And, you know,

reading your book after reading choke points also helped solidify some of these ideas in my head as you came at it from, you know, a different angle, thinking about logistics and transit. One of the things that I want to turn to just briefly before I get us back to the current situation is thinking of choke points and thinking of workers and what they can do. So in some of your work, including sinews of war and trade, you talk about how there are places that had very strong workers' movements at docks like Yemen, which is apropos of the current moment, given that, you know, we're going to be talking about the Red Sea very soon in the current situation vis-à-vis Gaza. But you talk that there was workers' movements at the

docks, shutting down docks, going back, you know, for many, many decades, particularly in Aden. I'm wondering if you can just tell the listeners briefly, because, you know, I do realize that we want to get back towards contemporary issues. But can you talk a little bit about how the workers themselves have the ability and have historically had the ability to shut down these key logistics hubs, including in places like we're talking about at ports on the Red Sea. Now, so, I mean, the fact that the Adanese, Yemenis at that point could shut down the docks in that case for anti-colonial reasons is because they had, they were very well organized. This was, I tell the story of a 1947 strike where they shut down the docks in such a way that, like, ships that were going through Aden in order to go up to the Suez and make it to Europe.

Remember, this is like in 1947, this is still really important. There's a huge amount. The partitions going on. They're demobbed colonial officers are, you know, trying to go home on ships. and the strike results in and I then was a major refueling port and so the strike is actually quite significant because it really does throw a spanner in the works and there's, you know, in the documents that I talk about, managers in their white shirt sleeves are coming out

and having to sort of help refuel ships because the port workers are not doing that. But even in the 1960s, even in places that don't have these or organized unions or even wildcat actions, you end up getting, for example, I tell the story of a couple of places in Qatar in 1960s, where Qatari dock workers refused to unload ships because some of the cargo had the star of David on it. And so this is 1960s in Qatar, no unions. People are doing these kinds of wildcat actions. And it took like weeks and weeks and intermediation by all sorts of folks in order to sort of persuade them. to go back to work. And so there is this long history. Of course, we know about South African,

we know about the different dockers in different places that in solidarity, for example, with South African struggle against apartheid, did, you know, boycotted South African ships, but we also know about South African dock workers who, in solidarity, for example, with Palestinians have refused to unload ships. And of course, we have discussed, stop the boat movement on the west coast of the United States where Zim ships, ships owned by the Israeli Zim shipping company were dock workers and community groups essentially blocked them, blockaded them. So there is this kind of a long history of these kinds of movements. In Europe, there are particular ports that are pretty well known for their kind of radical action.

Barcelona, Genova are particularly well known for those kinds of. of radical actions. I think it's really important to say, though, that that kind of solidistic activism, which goes beyond the particular sort of bread and butter issue or beyond the national issue, sort of a transnational issue, is actually not, sadly, it's not the norm. It is often the exception. And in fact, what we find is that, for example, unions can be profoundly conservative. If a union, for example, is organizing workers in, say, an arms factory, they're going to, you're not going to find them being particularly excited about, you know, blockades of, I don't know, B.A.E. Arms manufacturing websites and, oh, websites, manufacturing sites.

And so I think that that's really important to also recognize. I do think that it's not worker power without qualification. it is worker power organized by a left in international, transnational solidarity, which is really what is effective. Yeah, absolutely. And that was something that, you know, I came away from reading choke points with is that, you know, there's this focus on wildcat action and this pivotal understanding that unions oftentimes are going to subvert the will of the members of the union in pursuit of profit for those who have power.

We have to understand that when we're doing this analysis. But to get us back to the present, like I said, this is going to wrap us back into where we were. What we've been talking about is how, in many ways, what we're focusing on within this episode as a whole is actually these choke points. And thinking about how disrupting the Zionist entity at points where we can have some impact is important. And so you mentioned the targeting of Elbit Systems within Western countries. I know that we on our sister podcast released an episode with the founders of Palestine Action. And that was then cross-published on the guerrilla history platform. So listeners, if you want to listen to that episode, I'll like the founders of Palestine Action,

which is the organization that is trying to shut down Elbit, the systems is production facilities, weapons production facilities. It's Israel's largest weapons supplier. Go back and listen to that episode. But what we also see is that in some cases we have entire governmental structures on the case of Ansarala shutting down in their attempting to fully shut down anyway, a key logistics hub in the Red Sea. And so my next question to get us back to the present is, can you talk about the impact of this shutting down, you know, this attempted shutting down of this key. logistics portal of the Red Sea to the Zionist entity, as well as, you know, if you wanted to reflect any further on Western solidarity activists targeting Elbit systems and other

complicit or even more than complicit entities in supporting the Zionist entity and its military apparatus. So for me, what's been really interesting is that I can think of three specific political actions by government type entities, which have been, which have been structured around disrupting kind of logistics for Israel. One has been, of course, the Ansar al-Hah, the Hussi activities where they have been shooting drones or missiles at ships, whose AIS, the automatic identification system, identifies them as having a cargo for or from Israel or which are owned by companies

that are registered to Israeli firms. And they have been particularly clever about this because actually a lot of the ships that they've been picking, as the global shipping operates, the owners of many of these shipping companies actually have hide themselves in multiple layers of shell companies.

So it's been fascinating to see actually how interestingly the targeted ships, in fact, are actually often earned by Israelis, even though Israel is denying some of this and or is going to or from Israeli port. So Anzala has been really particularly successful about this, something like 47% of all cargo that used to go through the Suez Canal has been rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope. So that's a huge percentage. And more significantly, if it's 47% of all cargo,

it's something like 60% of all containerized cargo. And of course, that means that containerized cargo that's coming from China that is going to Europe proper. And of course, that is cargo that could potentially be significant because they are part of just in time manufacturing supply chains and various other kinds. So it's not just consumer goods that are being. affected, but potentially manufacturing processes. And in part, that is the reason that I think

the U.S. response has been so violent and has just recently bombed Yemen in order to stop these actions. So this is one of the actions. The second one was a few weeks after Ansara law started their activities at the end of last year, the government of Malaysia under and where Abrahim came out and essentially announced that they weren't going to be refueling or re-victuring ships in transit through Malaysian ports. And what people don't realize is, of course, that Malaysian ports are quite significant for this kind of bunkering transit fueling, in part because Singapore, which is the nearest bunkering port, is often overtaxed and over-busy.

And so ships do schedule stops for either transit or resists. bunkering in Malaysian ports. And so the fact that the Malaysian government has said no to Israeli-owned ships is, I think, quite a significant element. Even if it doesn't affect the ships hugely, even if they can go somewhere else, I think it's politically it's quite significant. And then today, the news came out that the government of Colombia is now advising the board that is deciding government exports.

It is advising the board that Colombia should cease. sending coal to Israel. Now, Israel's energy needs are divided between something like 80% dependency on natural gas, most of which comes from its own Tamar fields in the Mediterranean. Three or four percent are maybe a little bit more than that of renewables. And then about somewhere between 12 and 18 percent of coal. and its number one supplier of coal is the country of Colombia. Of course, interestingly, Colombia and Israel have already broken diplomatic relations,

but I think the fact that this is actually now an economic sanction is quite important and quite significant. So I think these three activities to me are probably the most significant. What is really interesting is that, of course, the impetus between these three, activities is very explicitly political. But the effect of it is that commercial firms that really don't give a shit about politics are, you know, are doing things that Israel can't be too happy about. The fact that, for example, they have changed their NARIS identifier to say not touching Israel, literally, meaning we're not going to Israel, I think is, you know, it's a form of political isolation, which I think is quite significant. We see that also in other forms.

of boycott. Apparently, both McDonald's and Starbucks, which have been specifically targeted by the BDS movement, have seen very dramatic drops in their revenues over the course of the last seven months. And I think, mentioned Albit already, but I think that there is this kind of an interesting moment where popular action is finding some resonances also, at least with these three cases that are immediately in front of my brain, they're finding residences in these kinds of state-led action. Well, there's so many other interesting components of our previous discussion I'd love to pick up on, but conscious of time, I want to get your thoughts on some of the geopolitical situation in the

wider region, and particularly, you know, as somebody who is the chair of Gulls, study, so I'm presuming you know a lot about these Gulf monarchies and statelets. You know, they're in an interest, it's an interesting position that they're in, you know, a lot of the first reaction to October 7th and the subsequent Israeli, you know, genocidal response on Gaza suggested that this was, you know, a death blow to normalization, with Saudi Arabia and the, you know, stopping Abraham Accords in its tracks and so on. But I think there's a, you know, much deeper kind of interrelationship and community of interests between these kind of conservative elite Arab regimes and the project that Israel stands for

in the region. So I wanted to get a little bit more of a sense of what you think the geopolitical consequences of this are and the conflicted conditions, you know, and also perhaps that may help understand and explain a little bit more that while we're talking about transnational solidities globally with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation, that we're seeing complicity or silence or even if they say things, there's a deeper kind of collaboration that is preventing in some ways really an effective kind of Arab or regional solidarity, you know, at this moment, despite the fact that, of course, the populations of these countries are overwhelmingly. I mean, even when you mentioned the case of the 1960s dock workers in Qatar,

I mean, during that period, most likely many of these dock workers were actually Qataris. But, of course, we know now that nobody, you know, working in this. those kinds of fields in any of the service sectors or aspects of the economy are actually, you know, Qataris now, they're all imported labor, highly vulnerable and, you know, very difficult for them to express any of this kind of solidarity because their status is subject, you know, to their employers in the country and so on. And so things have changed. And so I'm wondering maybe you could tell us a little bit more about and how and why, you know, we have the situation of an immobilized, you know, an immobilized, you know, kind of regime, a set of regimes that are not, that are either

complicit or immobilized, you know, and can't, it seems, operate in solidarity with, with Palestine, unless they are like the Ansar al-Lah, you know, a dedicated resistance organization that fought a huge civil war against those very same forces and see their fight as connected, you know, you know, is connected with that with that struggle. I mean, I think it's really important to recognize that a lot of the Emirates and kingdoms in the region, as well as, you know, the, as they call them the gomlochie is the, the sort of a combination. Jamlakas, yeah, republics that are actually just kingships, kind of like Egypt.

what is significant about all of these is that these are deeply unpopular actually, okay, let me actually some of these states are deeply unpopular. Some of them are actually quite popular with their citizenry, but their citizenry is intentionally limited

to a very small number of the residents who actually produce those countries. And so in a, I can imagine that the Abu Dhabian population of Abu Dhabi and possibly some of the longer term, let's say, for example, Arab residents of Abu Dhabi

or Indian residents of Abu Dhabi who earn very good living, who may not have citizenship and who have long-term residency, love the politics of Abu Dhabi. The number of people that will, again, the element of class war and past solidarity here is really significant.

The number of people who love their sort of bourgeois lives in Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Qatar or Waite or Bahrain is quite high. That said, there is, as you pointed out, the popular sentiment is really for Palestine. It is just the extent to which people are demobilized by the extraordinarily repressive police states. that operates through not only surveillance and the portability of those who don't have citizenship, but then also imprisonment or exile or assassination of those who do. And we see that, you know, we see that across the Arabian Peninsula, but we see it also in places which are not dependent on migrant labor, like Egypt, for example.

So you do, or Jordan. So you do see this, there are different tactics used. against citizen and non-citizen groups. Deportation is often a quite powerful sort of incentive for people to not become mobilized because they know that they are going to be chucked out of the country and that's, of course, family livelihoods and everything depends on that. And despite all of that, people are organizing in places like Bahrain. People are organizing in Egypt.

People are actually going to prison in Egypt and Jordan. People are going to prison in Saudi Arabia for their support of power. Palestine. Why don't the states follow the sort of the popular well? Because the states for their survival depend on a series of mechanisms. One, the patronage of the United States and or other powerful states. I mean, some of them have made links to other powerful states, China, Russia, etc., in order to make sure that should the US look at them with a little bit of disfavor, they will have other kinds of patrons that they can support them. Number one. Number two, the disciplinary modes used against the populations who don't have the paperwork. Number three, disciplinary modes that are about extraordinary, you know, I mean, they stay in power through all of these methodologies in order to continue, you know, getting rich off the fat of their lands. And what we're seeing is, of course, that despite whatever reports they may put out or whatever statements they may put out, in fact, the relationships are tightening in some senses.

Just yesterday somebody was posting the fact that Saudi pictures of Palestine no longer has Palestine written on them. They've taken Palestine off of there. They haven't put Israel on, but they've taken it off. We know, for example, that United Arab Emirates just in November or some such was part of a consortium that bid for gas exploitation off the coast of Israel. The United Arab Emirates has also bought a whole bunch of land on the Mediterranean coast, which is thinking about putting together some kind of a logistical hub there that is going to connect via Israel and Egypt, as part of I2U2. And of course, they have been talking about this kind of a connection with India to produce this kind of a rival logistical route to the BRI,

to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, which one wonders how successful that's going to be, given the recent elections in India, showing Modi not being as popular as used to be, which incidentally, and I love this, it resulted in Adani value, market value valuation, market stock market valuation dropping by $25 billion in one day when news came out that Modi didn't have as big a majority as it did

as it ended up not having. And so I think that all of these things are in flux. But as PFLP did their analysis, as Palestinian lefties did their analysis in the 1960, Israel and the various kinds of authoritarian states of the region allow for the reproduction of the system. And we know even those states that are ostensibly opposed to the United States

have done the U.S.'s bidding. Syria took prisoners and tortured prisoners for the United States during the war on terror, as did Libya and al-Qadda. did the same thing. So there, you know, it's, I, as somebody who lived through a revolution, which ended up being bloody in many ways, I don't necessarily put any store in any of the states in the region, really, I, I put store in the publics and in the popular movements in the region doing the kind of action that is necessary to do this. And so I, to resist Israel. And so I think that that's really where I'm coming from on this.

Well, you know, other kinds of thoughts or questions I have is also somebody who pays attention to the region. You know, in terms of thinking about other kinds of pressure on Israel, in addition to the political, international legal, diplomatic, the kind of social cultural solidarity, yet the level of symbols, as well as, you know, the pressure of disruption on, you know, weapons manufacturers and and so on, these kind of campaigns of boycott. I'm wondering how you see Israel's economy, you know, during this, during this period, you know, shipping has been kind of cut off. They have enormous expenses and even to, you know, kind of protect against Iran's salvo of drones and ballistic missiles. They had to spend something like like a $1.3 billion worth of equipment and other costs associated with protecting the state. I'm just wondering how you see Israel's economy being affected, both in the short term and in some of the

longer terms. I mean, you did point out and mention that, of course, they are raising all kinds of capital funds, a place like Elbit Systems, even if that stock is taking a hit because more war means, you know, more opportunities to mark. their particular, you know, technology, their techniques of surveillance and social control and all of those things, you know, whether it's AI to, you know, actual arms and so on. So they're invested deeply in the economy of war globally and war in some ways can't be bad, you know, for the long term kind of project. But, you know, it's not also going that well. You know, they've had these people, you know, Drawn on reserve, businesses shut down and all of that, but they still have not been able to clear sections of Gaza that supposedly were, you know, controlled in, you know, in late October and early November. They're still back, you know, in Jabaliyah fighting and then having to withdraw. So it seems to me that it's a kind of complicated and dynamic situation. How do you see it shaking out? What do you analyze as the kind of crucial pressures on Israel's economy during this period? I mean, Israel has unlimited access to armament. I mean, the U.S. keeps sending arms, sometimes even without the scrutiny of the Congress,

which is like the most supine pro-Israeli Congress you could ever ask for. So that, I think, you know, the low of armament is good for business for Israel, and it's good for the countries which produce that. I think what's much more interesting is what you mentioned briefly at the end there, that there is a huge number of the people in Israel that have been mobilized as part of the reserve. So they just raised the cat today to 300,000 because they're anticipating a potential war with Lebanon or potential intensification of the war with Lebanon. And so that can't possibly be very good for businesses.

Everybody's moving to the front, and I think that that is one thing that is quite significant. The other thing is that almost everything is moved into bunkers, and of course, how do you conduct business in the bunkers? That's really also important, and there's also a brain drain that has started. Somebody was telling me that they have been noticing a lot more Israelis in Portugal, who are using the recent kind of the Iberian countries decided to give anybody who could provide evidence that they had been part of the Safarim. Of course not to the

Muriscos. No, no, no, no, just to the ejected Iberian Jews and there's been apparently an influx of Israelis buying farms in Portugal and so I think there's also that brain drain

is going to be quite significant in the longer term. But on the other hand I think it's really important to also recognize that post-war construction is often very good for economies. You know, there's, in that post-war construction, you end up having, you know, it's a bonanza for certain sectors. And of course, that doesn't mean for everybody.

It means for those who own the businesses, those who receive the investments, those who benefit and profit from those. And I suspect that much the same as in, you know, post-the-Lebanese civil war in 1991, that certain sections of the warlords, ended up getting really, really rich while the sectarian system was more and more

kind of solidified, and you ended up having the impoverishment of vast sections of Lebanon, you're going to have the same thing happening in Israel. So it would be interesting to see what the longer term effects are, but at the moment, everything is so in flux that I really find it difficult to predict what is going to happen.

It's just that there is going to be a hit against Israel, and there is going to be a brain drain from the country once the hostilities come to some level of low civil rather than the current genocidal sort of savagery. Yeah, I think that brain drain is kind of crucial. Of course, it's also part of the larger, you know, assessment that some have made about the demise of the Zionist project.

I mean, I heard Joseph Masa just, speaking recently on Rania Khalik's dispatches about his continuing analysis that he's had for a while, that this is really, you know, heading towards, you know, failure. Of course, the shape in which that takes and the violence that attends, you know, those disruptive processes is horrific. So it's not as if, you know, in the short term, one can look forward to that. But the overall assessment is that so many people have been getting these second citizenship, you know, whether it's the Iberian option for people who... Berlin.

Like Berlin is half Israeli. That's right. And a lot of Eastern Europe, well, a lot of EU countries in Eastern Europe have of course also, you know, as a result of their terrible history with the persecution of Jews since World War II have also done, you know, these kinds of programs. And so there's so many opportunities and outlets. They don't even need to go to the United States, you know, anymore, which used to be the favored kind of immigration point.

I think there's so many places in. Europe now for them and that that bodes, you know, ill. But, you know, one aspect of that that I was wondering about is as you have those with cosmopolitan connections, departing Israel or, you know, weakening their ties, you know, and commitments in some ways, it does leave, you know, a kind of class. And this is in some ways, you know, this is in some ways perhaps why we're seeing the emergence of such extreme right-wing fascistic Zionist groupings, even in government, these extreme parties, is that these sort of underclass laboring, many of them, of course, you know, like Yemeni Jews, those who were, you know, suffered racial prejudice within the kind of Israeli Zionist Jewish community have a very strong commitment and they don't have quite the same cosmopolitan connections to just sort of escape. And so their commitments are a lot more perhaps almost messianic

in this. Well, life and death. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I think that that is a really important thing to recognize is that there is that there are several factors at play there. They don't have the roots of return so called to the countries with which they identify Iraqis to Iraqi Jews to Iraq Yemeni Jews to Yemen and so that or Iranian Jews to Iran

and so I think that that is part of the kind of intensity of their commitment and also bloodthirstiness of some of their violence you know some of that most of that actually It doesn't come from, say, the Ashkenazis that are descendants of Europeans. And actually, a lot of that comes from those who don't have another option.

But there is also something else at work there. And that is that like any other group that has been made to feel like or has been treated, not just made to feel, but treated materially like a second-class citizen, you will have that group show a lot more commitment. in order to prove their belonging. And I think that you get that kind of an over kind of compensation for having been the second class citizen by an over intensification of belonging there.

So I think that's really quite significant. But I also think that there is something else going on here, which I hope somebody does some research on. One of the things that's really interesting to me is that a lot of their places that have been either targeted in northern Israel or in the Gaza envelope were development towns, which were essentially frontier settlements that Israel used because it could use civilians as cannon fodder and its first line of defense against an external invasion. And it has always populated those development towns with those that were racialized in the 1950s and 60s with Arab Jews in the 1980s, in the 1980s with other categories that were coming in. And so I would be very curious about as the sort of the brain drain happens, as the economy tanks, as what is going to have? happen to these development towns, because that will also mean that not only economically, but also strategically, that would require a rethinking of the way Israel places settlers

at the forefront of its defensive offensive mechanism. And I think that that is, and again, I don't know. This is just something that I've been thinking about. And I think it would be really interesting if somebody does some study of that. Because I do think that this is, when I see these images, there's one particularly regis one. circulating, which may have even been AI, of a field of sunflowers and then the ruins of Gaza Sydney behind it, I was thinking about that, is exactly who is going to be harvesting those sunflowers when there is a kind of a pole of fear hanging over these areas that are in frontier towns. And so that is also quite an, you know, to me an interesting question. Maybe somebody wants to do

a PhD on that. Come talk to me if you do. So we'll be respectful of your time. I just have one concluding question for you, which is related to the conversation, but also branches off just a little bit. But I think you'll have fun with that. Recently, I've been seeing some analyses coming out from major universities. I think Duke was one of them. Major universities in the Western imperialist world that have been analyzing the ecological impact of the blockade of the Red Sea by Ansarala. And the reason I find this quite interesting, is because, of course, I'm an environmental activist. I do, you know, actions around my local community here.

The next book that I'm co-translating and editing is an agro-ecological history of the Soviet Union and Cuba. Like, the environment and ecology is something that I'm very involved in, and we've had many episodes on this show about it. But this utilization of rhetoric about how the environment needs to be preserved and look at how bad it is for the environment that the ships are having to avoid the Red Sea and take much longer routes, and then, you know, when they fire missiles into the, you know, into the Red Sea direction at these ships, like that causes ecological impacts itself. What I see is an obfuscation of the actual purpose of this, an obfuscation of the responsibility

to prevent genocide. We don't see these institutions writing these, you know, these sorts of analyses, at least they're not getting boosted by the media as much. You know, I know that there's always people working on these sorts of papers. So I just saw an item from a lefty organization, so a good one, that's that the destruction of Gaza has been so comprehensive that even trying to return it to status quo ex ante would produce enough CO2 as of 153 countries used for like a given year. So there are also people that are saying this is like eating up, destroying lived life, releasing CO2. Every single sortie that an Israeli warplane runs consumes, God knows, however many hundreds of liters of a jet fuel. Every single building that is destroyed in Gaza destroys, essentially releases the CO2 that went into the CO2.

that went into the construction of that building into the atmosphere. So frankly, ships going around the Cape of Good Hope, it is, yeah, obfuscatory is probably the best way to think about it. Well, and you hit exactly where I was going with that question is that when we analyze war, war as a method of destruction, war as a method of waste, my friend Alicadri writes about war being a method of waste, you know, method of waste. and how that's weaponized. Waste is weaponized. This is something that they are not analyzing. These same institutions are not analyzing the ecological impacts of the genocidal war on Gaza. They are instead worried about disrupting supply chains that fuel the genocide. And I was just wondering if you had any particular thoughts on that and anything else that you would like to say in closing. I mean, I think I haven't seen that Duke report. It might not be Duke. I always call

out Duke because they had an analysis about how wood fired stoves in the Congo need to be eliminated for climate change purposes. So like Duke always jumps to my mind because of that paper. It might not have been in that them in this case, but I've actually seen a few papers from universities on us. No, I haven't seen anything so egregious, but that's probably because I've created a very nice research bubble where I don't see things that would give me a, you know, high blood pressure. But I do think that I think it is really important to say, though, that the number one biggest producer of CO2 in the world is the U.S. military in the world. And I suspect that with the number of military sorties, tanks, weaponry, et cetera, that Israel has been running,

probably for this duration of these seven months it has been fast catching up as one of the biggest producers of CO2 and I'm going to leave it at that because frankly I don't want to even dignify that idea that somehow rerouting something around the Cape of Good Hope is even comparable at all in any way or form to the kind of violence that has been wreaked has been wrought on Palestinian bodies, families, households, communities, lives, and environment. Yeah, well, I mean, then we have some leftist colleagues who are critiquing Andreas Malm's, you know, recent statement that, well, Hamas would probably, you know, exploit the oil and gas

reserves off the coast of Gaza. So we really can't support the Palestinian resistance, you know, in this form. Yeah, anyway. Yes. Henry, you were about to close us out. Yeah, absolutely. So I really enjoyed the conversation, and I appreciate you coming on for these thoughts. I know you mentioned that the U.S. military is the largest polluter listeners.

We have an episode with Mike Prysner on their upcoming documentary, Empire Files, upcoming documentary Earth's greatest enemy, which is on that very topic. So listeners, you can go back and listen to that. But again, our guest was Lala Khalili, who is a professor at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter and director of the Center for Gulf Studies. author of some books, which we've been talking about in this episode, including sinews of war and trade. Professor, it was a great pleasure to have you on the program. Can you tell the listeners where they can find your work and how to follow you online? You can find my work if you Google me. It's the best way to do it. And I won't say it, but I think all of my books are available for free for those who don't want to, you know, pay into academic presses. And

And I also write quite frequently for the London Review of Books, and you will be able to find, hopefully, some of that writing online. But I very much enjoyed this conversation, Henry and Adnan. Thank you so much. And I hope to be able to listen to some of your other episodes, now that I know about this wonderful podcast. Absolutely. By the time this episode comes out, we'll have about 170 episodes out. So you've got quite the backlog to get through. Yay.

Adnan, how can the listeners find you in your other podcast? You can find me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N, and check out the M-J-L-I-S about the Middle East Islamic World Muslim diasporas. Yes, as for me, you can find me on Twitter at H-K-N-N-N-N-N-E-C-K-1-9-5. I again recommend people to go to iscribbooks.org, get that historic documents of the PLO book, which we have the forward to. All proceeds go to Middle East Children's Alliance and keep your ice peeled for the historic documents of the PFLP,

which will be out very, very shortly after this conversation comes out. So it might even be available for pre-order at that time. Just check out Isker Books.org. And a reminder that all of the other books that Iskra puts out are available for free PDF download. You can help support guerrilla history 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. And you can follow us on Twitter to keep up with everything that we're doing individually and collectively at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Skore-Pod. And until next time, listeners,

Solidarity. You're going to be able to be. Thank you.