Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Free Palestine: The National Liberation Struggle against Zionism, Colonialism, and Apartheid

Episode Date: April 19, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Oct 21, 2023 In this critical episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on Max Ajl and Patrick Higgins to discuss some recent history and the ongoing situation regarding Palestinian resistance to the Zionist project and the ongoing bombardment on Gaza.  Max and Patrick provide some absolutely crucial information here, so be sure to tune in, and forward the episode along to anyone you think would benefit from it. Our guests recommend you to donate to the Middle East Children's Alliance, read the work of Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss, as well as follow their respective social media pages @intifada and @Mondoweiss, and keep up to date with the Palestinian Youth Movement and Within Our Lifetime. Max Ajl is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ghent University, and is author of the fantastic A People's Green New Deal.  Read Max's other written work on his Researchgate page.  Max also has a twitter page, but you must find it yourself! Patrick Higgins is a researcher at the University of Houston's Center for Arab Studies.  You can find Patrick's writings on the internet by searching for his name and his affiliation, or with the keyword Palestine. ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? 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 guerrilla history, 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 two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you? I'm doing pretty well. It's good to be with you, Hannah. Yeah, it's nice to see you again. Also joined as usual by Brett O'Shea, who, of course, is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you? Doing about as well as I can. Yeah, I think that that's probably the best that we can hope for at this moment in time.

Before I introduce our guests and our topic at hand, I would like to briefly remind the listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by subscribing to our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A history. and you can keep up to date with everything that each of the hosts as well as the show are doing by going on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-E-R-R-I-L-L-A underscore pod. So we have two excellent guests today in a very pressing topic. We're going to be talking about Palestine and we're joined by Max Isle, who is a returning guest of the program. People will remember him.

We talked about the national question and agrarian. the agrarian question. So Max Isle is a postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University and he is author of The Wonderful of People's Green New Deal. Hello, Max. Nice to have you back on the program. Great to be here. Yeah, no problem. And also we are joined for the first time by Patrick Higgins, who is a researcher at the Center of Arab Studies at the University of Houston where he specializes on Palestine. So hello, Patrick. It's nice to have you on the program. Thank you very much, Henry, for having me here. I appreciate it. Absolutely. So we are going to be talking about Palestine. We're going to be talking about the lead up to the current events that are going on in Gaza. We're going to be talking about the current events that are going on in Gaza. But before we get to that, I'd like to ask each of you to discuss how you each came to the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, because I know you both are very heavily involved with that. And I'm just curious of how you each came to it. And then we can start to talk about the history itself. But I think that the listeners might be interested to know how this topic kind of came to your attention.

and how you began to get involved, you know, years ago. So, Patrick, why don't you go first? My introductions to the Palestinian cause came, I would say, properly when I was in high school. I had a Palestinian mentor figure of my life who was very frank with me about his family experiences as refugees and the series of conversations that I had at that age definitely moved me, I would say. But there is, of course, a difference between being introduced to something and beginning to sympathize with something and then becoming vocal about something and then involved in some kind of organizational capacity to make change. So I would say that

And the actual involvement in the movement developed when I was a college student at Wayne State University, Detroit. And I was very, I was surrounded by it. It was very ubiquitous on campus. There was more or less at any time a teaching or lecture you could attend. Of course, given the large Arab and Muslim population in that area and a lot of friends involved in the cause, And at the time I was a journalism student, and I started to cover it in different capacities, write about it. One of those publications being community newspaper out of Dearborn, Arab American News. And at that point, I would say I was beginning to, I became, I guess, consumed with trying to find the origins of,

the U.S. policy there, the U.S. support for Israel, and that's led me to my current work on the scholarship side of things. But from there, I would say the development, my organizational development increased when I was a master's student at U.T. Austin, and it was there that I organized with the Palestine Solidarity Committee. We thought I was involved in SJP in Detroit. I think I increased my activities during that period and was involved in offering divestment resolution and other campus initiatives of that kind.

So at this point, I've been probably involved for over 10 years, and I think that it's been really a foremost personal, political concern of mine, all of my adult life. Max? Yeah. Thank you for that, Patrick. So I first learned, I think, about some aspects of the Palestinian cause.

Because I grew up in a Jewish family. So Israel-Palestine issue was placed on the table. in front of us from a very young age and I was pretty staunchly into occupation just speaking ideologically speaking by the time I was 12 or 13 and kind of the more I read the more I learned and I was pretty anti-Zionist by the time I was 18 I wouldn't say that I was really politically involved or writing about it publicly until I was in my mid-20s and I really got spurred into motion by what happened in the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2008-2009 during this horrible massacre. And so I got involved in kind of a wide range.

of BDS organizing, international anti-Zionist organizing. And then I spent five months with international solidarity movement in the Gaza Strip and was able to learn much more, not necessarily politically, but socially, culturally, about Palestine. and, you know, since 2013, I've been spending most of my time in Tunisia and while kind of maintaining, keeping an organizational eye on the United States and what's going on there, what it takes to support political work there, but also, I think, deepening my understanding and ideologically speaking, involvement in the Arab nationalist aspects of the Palestinian cause. Yeah, that's really helpful situating, and especially Max,

since you mentioned your solidarity work in Gaza, I think that is the subject at hand with the current Israeli assault, bombardment, and tightening of siege on Gaza. Perhaps I could ask either you or Patrick, in terms of, turn perhaps to situate us a little bit in the history going back to 2005 when, you know, there was a big change in the status of Gaza with the removal of Israeli settlements, but quickly it was put under blockade and to help us understand the conditions that have specifically led up to the most recent phase of the conflict since Gaza has been under bombardment many times, at least four to six major times. So maybe you could give us a little bit of that

context from 2005 going forward to the present day. What are the key features of the experience of Palestinians in Gaza in particular? Yeah, I would say looking at 2005, specifically. We're talking about a political landscape after which the second intifada and that period, that stormy period of resistance against Israel. It was also really a response to the con job, the facade of the peace process. And we should remember at this time that as recently as 2015, as was revealed in Hillary Clinton's emails, she openly, referred to the peace process as a Potemkin peace process. So the idea here was articulated actually by U.S. officialdom that this was a facade, okay? Moving specifically to Gaza, I think

from the very earliest stages of the Nakhba, this ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine by Zionist militias, that Gaza presented a problem of resistance towards the Zionist project it was if we look at what initially

happened there you had refugees coming from about 144 towns in the area highly concentrated at that time and about

65% of the refugees who added up there were agricultural workers so when we talk about the refugees in Gaza and their descendants, we are talking fundamentally about displaced peasants and the resistance or the military resistance, the armies that they're able to raise against

incredible odds are effectively peasant armies, albeit displaced. And even from those early stages, 1950, there were these, you know, Israel didn't occupy it militarily at the time. There were frequent air raids in order to quell different forms of resistance

and took form of demonstrations, took the form of military operations as well against Zionist expansion. When you move forward to 2005, I think that when Sharon made that decision, it was about 21 settlements at the time that were decommissions and then they withdrew. And then that's when

we see the current siege. And at the time, you know, we were using, the movement was using terms like blockade and siege. And it's not that these are inaccurate, but I think that over time it's become more apparent that the way of dealing with this resilient population has been a concentration can't model, but a concentration can't model tailored to the 21st century, 21st century technologies, techniques of surveillance, and even going so far as bio-surveillance. And I think that that's become more apparent. I think this is the word that we have to start to invoke when we are talking about what exactly they are resisting. They're resisting a highly technocratic form of enclosure on populations who do not accept this extreme form of deprivation.

And the decision that Sharon made at the time, I think that this is to understand the current Israeli campaign, the current attempt at ethnic cleansing of the area, is that this was, the Zionist project at any time always is seeking. to expand. What it wants at any given time is more land. Any time that is prevented from taking land, it is because resistance has formed some kind of equalizer, and they were forced into a sort of compromise. The compromise in 2005 was that Sharon realized or made this calculation that they were not going to win demographically in that particular area. Again, it's being highly concentrated. And so he looked at that

withdrawal as a form of demographic concentration or consolidation to make sure, and this is the sort of Nazi-like terms, of course, he and his co-thinkers were running that state. Think about it is how many babies

the various, people from various racial categories are having at a given time. There's a lot of baby counting going on in their thinking, which is, it leads them logically to depopulation campaign, like the current one. So that was a sort of concession, but they viewed it as a compromise. And if they could possibly respond to an effective military resistance operation waged against them by treating instead of a quote-to-quote Hamas problem,

a Gaza problem, then they will move forward in doing that. Now, I think that they're in for certain root awakenings with a certain attempt, but that doesn't make it any less devastating. And I think that that's what's important to keep in mind that the concentration camp model that they resorted to in lieu of actual full ethnic cleansing has always bred resistance of which groups like Hamas are only one part. It's a resistant population at large. And that is where their current thinking is going, that they want to try to settle this project by reducing it more into the current Gaza Strip by getting rid of the north part and maybe having the current population there. Yeah, maybe Max can take it up from there. Yeah, I think that was an excellent summary. And I just want to add

in a few more details. I mean, you know, I think the Holocaust imagery is apt, but I think we need to add two things to this question of the Holocaust imagery so we can connect the historical arc organ. I mean, you know, the birth of concentration camps is basically in counterinsurgency warfare and anti-colonial revolutions and the counterinsurgency against them, right? this is where the concentration camps find their origins, both for the effective concentration of rebels and suspected rebels and ripping them off from population centers, but also the concentration of populations themselves into enclosed territories where they would be less politically effications, right?

And of course, the Nazis self-consciously were inspired by earlier colonial, by their own colonial experiences in Africa and elsewhere, right? And this is why Zezer really saw the Nazi extermination attempts as really an organic continuation of the European colonial process elsewhere, right? The European barbarism finally coming home to the continent where these kind of procedures of relegating certain populations to non-humanity really came home to certain populations that had had some sort of ambiguous relationship to like Europeanness there too for, right? and, of course, now we see it in Palestine itself.

I think the other point that I would like to add to Patrick's excellent summary is just the, you know, these are kind of an effect of the lateness of the Israeli. colonial experience, right? I mean, when 1948 happened, it was to the point where it was not so easy for Israel to carry out the extermination procedures, right, that other settler colonial states had applied to their own indigenous populations in order to basically carry out a primitive of accumulation of the land, right? These extermination procedures were no longer politically feasible. They were also no longer politically feasible

because of the Arab strategic depth surrounding Palestine and that has always been a component of Palestinian strength even amidst open collaboration, you know, Shlain Masdabor, collusion across the Jordan, even amidst the most open collaboration of the reaction regimes in the Arab world, this type of extermination procedures has not been politically possible because you would see an Arab reaction. You always see an Arab reaction to the Israeli barbarities in Palestine, and that would make one that was feared, I think, that would

upset the reactionary regimes, right? So we see this kind of problem, and we see a variety modalities of trying to deal with the problem as well as deal as kind of make the best of a bad situation in some sense, right? Making the best of a bad situation was using Palestine and Gaza basically as dispossessed proletariat, right? I mean, once you carry out the process of accumulation and separate the people from their land, you then do exactly what you always do with a dispossessed landless mass, which is used them as super exploited, low-wage labor,

which was their function in Israel, carried out a stabilization of the Israeli class structure because class and race then collapsed into one another, and so it kind of contributed to the hegemony of Lekud, right, at a certain point in Israeli history, right, because they were able to kind of identify the Arabs as these external enemy while also offering something to the Mishrahi population with them becoming a petty bourgeoisie and so forth. So I think this is very significant.

Like what Patrick was saying, you know, what the challenge is that these are not just inert masses or disorganized proletarian, but they're also people in struggle, right? And so they got organized and their ability to get organized is what's produced the consequences we're seeing now. So before I turn it over to Brett to continue taking us through, you know, the history to the present, I have kind of a tight tangential question for each of you. And I'm mostly going to direct it towards Patrick because Patrick, you mentioned you were a former journalism student and this deals with journalism in some ways, which is that you had mentioned that previously the solidarity movement was using terms like blockade, but really if we're looking at it from a more real, perspective, in terms of what the situation actually is, we really do have this concentration camp model, or perhaps we could describe it as a concentrationary universe, which is something that is used throughout the Stalin book, the Lassurdo Stalin book, this concept of a concentrationary universe, which is a system of terror and systematic dehumanization.

I mean, there really can't be a better example than what goes on in occupied Palestine today of a concentrationary universe, with maybe the extent. of the reservation system in North America. And these are kind of the two examples that I typically use when we're discussing that book. But also other terms that you and Max were using were things like ethnic cleansing and extermination procedures. Of course, these are accurate descriptors of what is going on in occupied Palestine,

and particularly, you know, what is being imposed upon Gaza. But we're often pushed back against quite firmly when we try to use, these terms. And when I say pushed back against, I don't mean by people that are also within the Palestinian Solidarity Movement. I mean the polite, liberal kind of established powers. The reason I bring this up is because whilst we are pushed against for utilizing these accurate terms, we have the leaders of so-called Israel coming out and saying things like Hamas is worse than the Nazis. Or this. This is a new Holocaust what is going on.

And there's very little actual pushback. It's just reported on in terms of Israel says this, and then it is reported on. We also have this phenomenon of atrocity propaganda, which we have seen for years into years, but is ramped up to an entirely new degree now where we have things like beheaded babies, despite not having any actual evidence released of this, or mass rape. completely without evidence, or the latest. We had an MP from the UK who kind of merged these two things together and went with raped babies again. No actual evidence of this, but this is reported on in the news until days later when the retraction is made that is much, of course, quieter than the original reporting on it.

So I guess my question is, can you talk a little bit about why it's important that we be very clear when describing what is going on, what has done, on, but is going on, and why we have this kind of hegemony of this propagandistic rhetoric towards the situation in occupied Palestine, because this is one of the big fundamental roadblocks for us being able to actually break through into popular consciousness and get ordinary people who are politically disengaged from understanding what truly is going on because of these structures in place kind of preventing us from doing so. So if you have any thoughts on that,

and then I'll turn it over to Brett. Briefly, on your point, you made a comparison to the reservation system, North America, which these were the early forms of concentration camps, which you could add to Max's point. And I think that when we're talking about Gaza,

that there are some similarities to, for instance, what was done to Dakota Sue people in the Minnesota area that when they were put onto these areas when they were put into these

concentration camp there was a severing from the people in their traditional food systems which led to starvation which then led to the attack on the settlements in North America that happened 1862 and actually we saw that happen

pretty much right away in Gaza from 19 48 through 19, early 1950s, that the traditional food supplies, which they had depended on, these are the food networks that involve wheat, trade that allows them to access wheat and also grow oranges that we saw early on that there was severe food insecurity way before the year 2023. So I think that there definitely are strong parallels and probably modeling based on that. Now, moving forward from that, of course, we have something else now. After Blockade started, there were experiments in order to see what could be used

on a population and actually how far you can go to enclose and surveil a population. So we have, in some ways, it's also an unprecedented situation. Now, moving to the media operations, because this is something that I do not think it would be impossible in this conversation to clear all the fog of the propaganda operation. I think that as a general tab, what we need to do is take some sort of, make some sort of assessment of media operations through states of emergency, both declared and undeclared in the 21st century and to see. see how they've evolved and become more sophisticated because now it's directly delivered to our phone. So this would be an assessment of the post 9-11 era, and it would be assessment of post-2020 era, and it would be assessment, of course, right now. But I think that what we need to keep in mind on the major talking point that is bolstering, supplementing these specific

lies that you brought up, is that the imagery they're using, of, they use also language like pogroms is what took place in occupied Palestine on October 7th. I think the way to combat this is actually somewhat to try to bypass some of the imagery. Of course, some specific claims need to be debunked, but we need a more general education coming from the national liberation movements and how they thought about and discussed this issue. that is the majority of the world for decades now. And that includes within the Palestinian National Movement itself. Very simply, they do not oppose this population as Jewish people. They oppose them as settlers.

That is the key distinction. It was true of Algeria, true in South Africa, through in Rhodesia, and it's true here. And those are the precedents that the movement itself saw. Those are the precedents that those in solidarity from places like Algeria when they joined the PLO, not to act simply in solidarity, but as soldiers of the Palestinian cause, this is the conception. Yeah, I just had a quick point on that. Sorry, Brett, which is just since you mentioned the atrocity propaganda and Patrick, those were some helpful reorienting, I think, point. But I think just to connect it to what Max was saying is that in 1948, because this was a relatively late settler colonial movement, I mean, it wasn't possible to conduct the classic forms of colonial era, you know, classic colonial era extermination that one of the functions of this, of these atrocity, you know, stories inflated, many of them are, is precisely. Precisely because you can't really conduct such a brutal campaign of splittiesment, bombardment, and extermination, as we're seeing, without trying to somehow raise the stakes and provide some kind of cover to enable it. And that seems to be clearly the function of some of these stories, which is why it's so important to combat them, debunk them, and reorient the discourse around settler colonel.

colonialism rather than these sorts of, you know, kind of lurid tales of barbarity, you know, that are, that are meant to kind of dehumanize the Palestinians and make them appropriate, you know, victims of slaughter in this modern age when it's very difficult, you know, to try and accomplish that in front of the eyes of the world. So anyway, it just seemed like that was an important point to kind of connect what Max had been. saying about what you were just discussing about these atrocity propaganda stories that Henry raised. Brett, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah, no, that's incredibly crucial. I want to kind of touch on some of the more approximate history before getting into the current events. Some of the history leading up directly to what's happening currently, one of the things that's incredibly frustrating with the way that the Western media and the American media in particular

presents this stuff is in a vacuum, right? Like when this whole thing popped off recently, it's just presented, is bracketed off, Hamas did this, and now Israel is responding, taking completely out of the story, all of the history that led up to it, everything that happened before it, even this year leading up to this. And that's very frustrating, but it works propagandistically on a lot of naive people, especially naive liberals. We have, of course, in the proximate history here, the Great March of Return. Now, I don't believe that oppressed people, colonized people have any obligation to protest their oppression peacefully. But these are tactics in which it was a largely peaceful attempt to sort of bring consciousness to the struggle and to do this thing where they would approach this border wall over and over again, still met with extreme violence on behalf of the Israeli state. So I'm just hoping and asking if both of you can kind of walk us through the last decade or so of some of the major flashpoints that

that got us here. And even if you want to touch on some of the more incredibly recent developments like, you know, the Netanyahu government, 10 months of protest, we have the 50-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, the Ramadan War, and the attacks by settlers on Al-Akska Mosque was also a big contributing factor. There's lots here. So it's a very open question. But can both of you kind of help us understand the recent history leading up to the current event? You know, there are many streams that converge into the current event, and there's too much to cover. I kind of lift up a few flashpoints.

It seems to me that something that has really been under-remarked upon is the kind of two streams going in parallel. I mean, one of them is the kind of exponential, increase in Palestinian asymmetric resistance capacity, which has gone hand in hand with the serial military operations, right? 2008, 2009, 2012, 2014, and then this 2003 war. You know, there's an urge to push back against the propaganda by saying, okay, the occupation is constant violence, yes. Occupation is constant violence, right? But the nature of the violence, of course, is also partially dictated by the tempo and the intensity of the Palestinian resistance violence,

right? I mean, there were indeed rockets fired from the Gaza Strip that were the spur for the Israeli counterinsurgency operations in 2008, 2009, and 2012, and 2014. What, by reframing these as counterinsurgency operations, we also bring in mind that we see in a very kind of through glass darkly the organic growth of the military capacity of a national liberation, right? There's a Palestinian writer, Mohamed Mazzulawi, who has pointed out that what we've seen from 2008-2009 onwards, yeah, you see unguided rockets. They're really completely ineffective. By 2014, you actually see certain, some thousands of hardened guerrilla troops that are capable of carrying out tactical and strategic planning and also tactical and tactical and tactical.

Bushes of Israeli militarized infantry and so forth. I mean, but what you see is in fact this once, what he said is that you have this one segment of the Palestinian population or the Palestinian political forces that in fact has acquired a sovereignty of decision-making, of self-determination over its political capacity to enter the fray, that this is actually a sovereign Palestinian capacity, more or less. Keep me in mind that sovereignty is always relational, right? Of course, it has a regional and strategic depth, but it's sovereign in terms of the fact that it boosts how the Palestinians are waging their national liberation struggle. They have complete control over it in most senses

of the word and that it is acquired at an immense cost, right? It's actually been acquired through and against and during these counterinsurgency operations because you don't just develop a national liberation militarized apparatus as a gift from God, right? You don't get it just implanted in you as this kind of functional material that suddenly, oh, you know how to do it now, right? Like how people imagine that the U.S. is like sending weapons for its proxy war in Ukraine, just kind of like dropping them from God into the Ukrainian armed forces. I mean, it doesn't work there either. But it, a forturi does not work with this population that is not used to, you know, has to learn how to fight this type of war and has to learn how to actually indogously

reproduce the military technology whose diagrams and so forth that they're learning from elsewhere. There's actually the iron core of Palestinian sovereignty itself that's been developed in and through the resistance and the counterinsurgency operations, right? What I think is also significant, right? And has a lot to do with all these timings, right? I mean, we see the timing of a brutal military operation in 2008, 2009, right? Then we have another very brutal military operation in 2012, and then we have an incredibly brutal military operation in 2014.

then we don't have military operations, really. You have small things here and there, but you don't have sustained assaults until 2023. Why is that significant, right? It's that time itself has been, was in a certain sense, reappropriated from the Israelis who are controlling time, we're controlling the time, controlling the temple of action.

it had been liberated, and Israel was not capable of going into the Gaza Strip anymore. Israel was not capable of a ground insurgency except at immense cost. They were scared of going into the Gaza Strip. So Palestinians began to reconstruct time and take control of time from 2014 onwards, right? And so even during the, you know, there was this support for the nonviolent protest. And as far as I know, there were Hamas Khaday, and they were blessed by Hamas. these massive marches during the great march of return. But what was significant, right, is that all this time, the Palestinians were building up their resistance capacity.

And this really is what led up to, I think, the current events is that we are, you know, it's like Walter Benjamin's conscious to like Messianic time. Like, that's what is in play now for Palestinians. And I think this is really what, this is why you see this unbelievable ferocity from the Western world in response, right? Palestinians are doing something that you are not supposed to do if you are an anti-Zionist Arab, right? You're not supposed to be effectively carrying out military operations against the European population, right? They broke the rules of the Western moral order, and I think that's really, that's significantly what we're seeing now. I just want to add something to that real quick, and it's related to the atrocity propaganda, because when I think the function that the atrocity propaganda serves is it's a kind of psychological shock and awe directed at Western media consumers, and it tends to get employed, or deployed, rather, when the Euro-American world. order, and particularly a U.S.-led world order, is in some sort of crisis moment. So when I was

talking about forms of atrocity propaganda or propaganda operations in general, one of the things that I left off the list was the heavy, heavy campaign related to the Syria War, which was sustained for many years. And of course, that was a war designed in a covert capacity to shatter the resistance axis and the depth of support Max has been referencing around Palestine. The irony of it, of course, is these events prove that the war failed. There was disarray for a while, particularly between forces like Hamas and Hezbollah, but it appears that a new cohesion or a strategy of unity of fronts has come out on the other end.

And to refer to the media, back to the media side of that, if you remember 2016, Aleppo. There was a sustained social media campaign designed to give people the impression that the Syrian army was carrying out a genocide in Aleppo. But what had happened was the U.S. proxy forces had been expelled from the city. Okay. So that represented a really, that was the turning point in the war, that the U.S., it never really wanted to rely on covert wars, but of course it were difficult post-Vietnam to tend to overt invasion, which tends to invite economic and probably more important political crises on a domestic front. So in this case, their proxy strategy had come up against the dead end. It failed. They started to sound the alarm that there was a humanitarian crisis

in order to get people to rally around the U.S. war effort in some capacity in Syria. And right now, we're seeing is something similar, because we're seeing a blow against the U.S.-led world system. And since really post-World War II, but especially post-1970 or so, Israel has been the linchpin, the basket into which most of the American ships are put in order to sustain broader control of West Asia. And so the fact that it has these weaknesses that have come out to the four, and the weaknesses are somewhat structural, it has to do, first of all, with pan-Arab depth of coordination support, the population surrounding Israel. And it also has to do with the fact that you have a settler population for whom Israel could serve as some time as kind of a getaway spot for some people go there on birthright trips and are promised sort of a fantasy theme park of sorts and people who flock to it around the world for that reason.

not quite the same as a population that has nowhere to go and is willing to die for their cause. And to refer back to the situation in 2014 that Max is referring to, yeah, they established something like had been established in Derry in the north of Ireland. It's a no-go zone. And that showed that the Gaza resistance was steadily catching up with. matching the South Lebanon resistance that had been able to hand a defeat to Israel in 2006. And in that sense, there is a tide turning. These inherent weaknesses I'm describing in the Israeli polity or structure have been exposed. And I think that that has led to a form of hysteria in the Euro-American ruling classes

where they're going to bombard us with propaganda, where that doesn't work, because it hasn't been as successful, by the way, as previous campaigns, in my estimation. I mean, sometimes you get it, it's hard to get a sense because you're being assaulted at such a fast rate. Once one story's debunked, all of a sudden they have a new one they're able to bring to the four, and that will exist in the 24-hour news cycle.

But it hasn't been as successful, and so that's why you also see these turns to direct repression, bans on protests, doxing of supporters, and so on. And we're going to see more of that, the more that their post-World War II system and their reliance on Israel in that region is exposed to both public embarrassment and actual structural weakness. Very quick. So just speaking, since you brought up Syria and we're talking about propaganda very quickly, I mean, the way that the media works is in such a way that you are always presented with these atrocities when it is beneficial for the narrative of, Western hegemony, Western imperialist hegemony. And of course, Israel is right at the tip of that.

But on the other hand, when we were given the propaganda or when we were given a lot of, you know, very negative coverage about Syria a few years ago, particularly, every time there was some unconfirmed report, every time there was any negative speculation about Syria, it was in every single news outlet. But for comparison's sake, listeners, twice with, within the last week, Israel has had rocket attacks on international airports within Syria. And unless you follow independent media, you don't know that. It would seem as if we're talking about Syria in the news pretty frequently, you know, for a country of that size.

But only ever when there is quote unquote negative things coming out from the country. You're not told that, for example, on October 12th, both international airports in Aleppo and Damascus were struck by Israeli missiles. On October 14th, also, the Aleppo International Airport sustained more missile strikes on it. This was not reported. I mean, it was reported, but it wasn't exactly front page news. You know, you weren't being presented with, hey, here's a sovereign state of Syria that's getting missile strikes on it at the same time that, you know, supposedly the United States is having to transfer many more billions of a dollar's worth of weaponry to Israel because of, you know, incursions by Hamas. I just saw today, and we're recording on October 17th listeners,

just so you know, I just saw today that it's now coming out that the latest request by the so-called state of Israel is for $10 billion in additional aid from the United States. This is a so-called state that gets at least $4 billion in military aid per year, and they requested an additional $10 billion now as a result of this incursion by Palestinian resistance operatives. And at the same time, they're still making missile strikes on Syria,

and those are going almost completely unreported. This is exactly how the media works. This is exactly how it changes your perception of what's going on. So your perception of Syria, your perception of Israel, they're absolutely colored by the media coverage of it. This is how

propaganda works. So I just wanted to underscore that because, again, same time that we're seeing, all these stories about Israel. We are not seeing any of these stories coming out about them with active missile strikes twice in the same week on international airports within a separate country that is uninvolved with the current conflict that's going on in Gaza. So, anyway, that's just my little bit of a rant. Adnan, I am sorry for interrupting your question. I mean, I'm really delighted actually by the direction, actually, of your announcement. analysis of Max and Patrick, you know, I mean, basically I completely agree. I think that the shock of

this departure from the appropriate role of how Palestinian resistance is meant and understood to be that it violated this, you know, kind of system by being able to carry out these incredibly effective attacks inside of 1948, Palestine really have created a hysteria and a kind of reaction that goes beyond just the kind of political class and military class in Israel to this wider kind of Western kind of concern, which is why we're seeing, you know, the U.S. sending a couple carrier, you know, two aircraft carrier fleets into the region, making extreme, you know, moderating, you know, not using any of the kind of moderating two-state type language of previous incursions where they would actually make an appeal for

calm and let's, you know, be concerned about civilians and have some restraint. All of that has gone and you have this kind of panicked kind of green lighting of just the most barbaric and brutal assault on Gaza. So I agree completely with that point. And to Max's suggestion that the key question here has been the development of Palestinian resistance and their military development, you brought in also the apparent weakness of Israel's ability to really match those kinds of developments to the extent, just as Max said, They have been afraid, which is why since 2014 there hasn't been, you know, that kind of assault on Gaza, because they've been afraid to confront them on a kind of ground force level, though there is talk now about doing so, which is why I want to ask then, you know, in that case, what do you think are some of the implications and consequences of this point that you both observed of in some sense, despite.

you know, all of the vaunted, you know, high-tech, the strongest military in the region, fourth strongest in the world, supposedly despite this, you know, people on paragliders and scooters and motorcycles managed to completely evade the surveillance and the defensive, you know, arrangements. You know, what are some of the consequences of this sort of piercing? And what was the geostrategic, might you say, kind of purpose behind Hamas' attack at this time? How do you read that in light of the analysis you both have been giving? What are your thoughts on, you know, what they wanted to achieve, why they, you know, took this step at this time, and what are some of the consequences of the way it unfolded both in terms of the,

relationship between, you know, Palestinians and the Israel settler colonial state and maybe also some of the regional kinds of consequences that this might have. You know, before addressing the question, I think actually it's useful to step back a little bit. And I appreciate Patrick bringing up the point that the West had kind of poured so much of its resources and its bets into Israel after the defeat in Vietnam. When we take a step back, the U.S. preeminence of a U.S. engineered, within a U.S. engineered world system is threatened.

And when we say U.S. preeminence, I mean, this rests on the U.S. being. the major center of accumulation and not allowing any other alternative poles of capital accumulation, which are both rest on or rely on, and also reinforce alternative poles of military power. that order is broken right that order is basically broken uh you know the rise of china cannot be stopped and you know in terms of military defeat the u.s has been able to turn Ukraine into a charnel house into a meat grinder the same way I was able to do it in Syria but it wasn't wasn't able to impose unilateral military defeat on Russia in Ukraine, right?

That ambition appears to have evaporated. Now, these dynamics are also very much related to the inability of the U.S. to inflict a full-scale military defeat on the Syrian Arab Army, I mean, quite the opposite, right? Syria is not operating in a vacuum. Behind that was the Russian will to not let the Syrian state institutions collapse on the one hand. And behind that, the Iranian desire to not allow the Syrian state institutions to collapse. And Iran itself is not, I mean, Iran could stand by itself, perhaps, but Iran is certainly not standing by itself. I mean, China wants to be able to trade and It wants the petrol carbons of Iran.

I mean, and it wants Iran as part of its integrated world trading system. It actually doesn't matter for these purposes, how you characterize that world trading system. You know that we can say that it's independent from, in many ways, from the logic of the U.S., which profits essentially in great measure by the application of violence, right? So this whole dynamic is, of course, playing out in, of course, reasonably in its own way, in the sense that China is behind Iran, Iran and Russia are behind Syria.

Syria is behind the Palestinian resistance. Iran is behind the Palestinian resistance. And so these are tripwires that can lead to a regional conflict. that, in fact, most forces don't really want. Most forces are scared of it. Iran doesn't particularly want to hit. The U.S., I think, is not prepared for a regional conflagration on the one hand. But on the other hand, there are things happening that the U.S. cannot tolerate. I mean, if you want to break apart an alternative pole of accumulation, you've got to hit its outlying, kind of its outlying

geo-economic extensions. You encircle it, and then finally you rip it apart if you can. I mean, this is why there's still a lot of, you know, the U.S. is not happy with what's going on in China. I want to state that China is also sending military supplies to Israel. But this

should really be noted for people. But this, separately from this, you know, these dynamics are kind of all at play in U.S. Geostrategic planning when it comes to what's going on in Palestine and the Gaza resistance. And this question of the kind of fundamental ambiguity or the fundamental ambivalence, which is that the U.S. does not want

these forces to achieve any victories. The U.S. doesn't want to allow them to achieve above all ideological victories. And the U.S. is not prepared to enter ground war, air war, direct hot war with these forces and even doesn't want its proxy Israel to directly enter a ground war where it faces at least a substantial chance of a defeat. So these are the contributors to the contributory dynamics that kind of inform, I think, the table we have unfolding in front of us. And we don't know, like I actually could not tell you if Israel, it doesn't look to me like Israel is actually going to do the ground invasion. But it may. And if it does, then it's going to redraw the map.

On this point about the U.S. world order, do you mind if I just highlight some historical timeline points of U.S. support for Israel and where that leads them to right now? So at the end of World War II, when the United States was taking over the stewardship duties, let's say, of the world system from the British Empire, their main priority immediately, you know, because they had, broken down the trade zones, broken open rather, the trade zones of Britain, their main priority was the redevelopment of Europe, and that was based on U.S. credit, and it ended up savoring U.S. exporters, so on and so forth. In order to do this, though, Europe needed access to the petroleum supplies. were coming out of West Asia, and so that's why the Mediterranean became the foremost zone of concern for Pentagon planners in particular. And so they started having to secure the nodes

around the Mediterranean one by one. So that starts out that they have a communist revolution in Greece. They got to come up with some form of counterinsurgency there. They have a popular Communist Party in Italy. They have to come up with a way to sabotage that and keep Soviet Union out of the zone of influence. In a domino-like way, this leads them to Palestine. And a lot of the locations in the Mediterranean where the British Empire had had some kind of military base that could supply a counterinsurgency

effort against Arab nationalist uprising, anti-Zionist uprising in Palestine were being decommissioned. The U.S. was concerned about this. In Palestine itself, Britain gives them some indication that they're going to leave. Okay, they've taken on the Second World War. They are dealing with all of these anti-colonial uprisings. So the United States has to figure out what exactly to do there. The United States, as James Forrestle had been saying at the time, they had concerns that if they really wanted to get rid of the uprising,

against the Zionist movement. It could even require the entirety of the U.S. military. The U.S. military wasn't in that position the time to expend those forces. Okay. So what they end up doing is they place their bets on the Zionist movement. Now, the problem with this is the inherent weakness of this,

was that the Zionist movement would inspire resistance from Arab populations. They understood this very clearly. and the 1946 Anglo-American Committee, which they worked on in the British for this transition of power in that area, they said it very clearly that this population is not going to accept it.

So they knew that they had a possible weak point to that part of the world for the entirety of their Mediterranean project that they were developing. But what did they do? They forced it through anyway, so the partition resolution of 1947, which we have to remember

was the United States' baby. In fact, we have our, you know, there's a Belfort Declaration. We have our own declaration, say we in parentheses. That is the Johnson Declaration of 1947 because the U.S. was the lead power on the NECPA. So that being the case, they end up trying to, by creating this partition, force a square peg into a round hole, but this leads to the refugee problem. And right away, they have anxieties. This is all throughout their documents about this refugee population because they're, quote-unquote, subject to subversive influence, communist influence, the way they describe it. So they come up with these

various schemes from the UNRRA programs to large-scale irrigation programs that are designed right away in the early 1950s to get Palestinians to give up their political claim to the right of return. Go resettle elsewhere. It never happened. Instead, this is one of the most inspiring examples of willpower in the modern world. The Palestinians have steadfastly held to the principle of right of return. And they raise up their own institutions through the PLO. They raise up a revolutionary movement to declare even then a liberation war. and if you look at what happens in 1970

when one of the nodes of the U.S. order is going to fall this is in Jordan, the U.S. responded similarly. In fact, they were sending ships to the Mediterranean from as far as Puerto Rico and from the North Carolina coast to act as a striking force in case the king was overthrown.

And they understood this because if they lost, They needed to maintain a grip on West Asia in order to compensate for their loss on East Asia, which was the Vietnamese Revolution, was also another name for the victory of the Chinese Revolution in that part of the world. Israel was the striking force that could go deep into Arab territories without the U.S. directly having to do it itself,

like it did in Vietnam. So the problem that they face right now, the U.S., is very similar to the problem it faced in 1970. That is, they were, they had to do something to stop this revolution, but at the same time, if they directly intervened, they're worried about a wider conflagration, as Max is talking about, a region-wide war against their installations everywhere. So there, there is a rock and a hard place right there, right now, is they need to, they need Israel to have this technological military superiority. so they need to do something they feel. But if they do too much, they might inspire resistance.

And Israel does not have to deal with the region-wide attacks the way the U.S. installations would. And then Israel has its own problems right now, its own dilemmas, which is they're trying to deal, like I said at the beginning of the show, with the resistance by making it a Gaza problem, try to ethnically cleanse a good portion of it. And in that case, they are bypassing their hostages.

And through segments of the settler population, this is going to create a crisis of confidence, along with the fact that several moments in the El Aksa blood operation were misrepresented by the Israeli government. This has largely been a very compliant population overall up to now. But I guarantee you there is going to be a crisis of confidence and there's going to be emerging contradictions in Israeli society over this. And Israel's crisis is Palestine's opportunity. Just to briefly hop in for one second, Patrick, as you mentioned, there's contradictions in place and there. Is it crisis within Israeli society? This is something that we've seen for a couple of years at this point, almost a crisis of legitimacy of the Israeli government. I mean, the inability to form

any sort of lasting government without having to have re-elections or new coalitions, partners that are at each other's throats continuously just in order to form a government. That was already present before the current situation. And now we also see on top of that the contradictions coming into play where Israeli society is blaming the governing coalition and specifically Bibi Netanyahu for being unprepared in some ways. You know, whether or not we believe that that was them being unprepared versus how prepared and how much planning had gone into the Palestinian resistance's, you know, operation, which I think that by just saying that Israel was unprepared, it kind of infantilizes the Palestinian resistance and says, look, these people can't plan a successful operation. It can only be successful to any degree if Israel drops the ball. You know, there's nothing that they could do to be successful. I find that. logic very flawed, but that is kind of what is out there in the media right now, is that there was only able to be any sort of success because of how unprepared Israel was for this,

how disorganized they were, how unsuspecting they were. And regardless of whether, you know, how where the ball falls into the well-planned versus unprepared side, the point is Israeli society is blaming their government for being unprepared. And what we're seeing is that with early polls that have been coming out from Israel, and whether or not we believe those polls is a different question entirely, but early polls are suggesting that well over 80% are upset with Netanyahu's handling of the situation. And this is only going to further the contradictions within Israeli society that were already present before. So exactly what you were saying, Patrick, it's not just now, though. It's important for the listeners to understand

that this kind of crisis of legitimacy had been stretching back for several years, but really it is a sharp focus now, which you really laid a fine edge on in your answer. So I do appreciate that. Brett, I know you have the next question, but I just wanted to lay that out there. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I have a two-prong question. So one is a follow-up on something Max said, because right now, you know, people are wondering, will this conflict spill over into a regional war. And then, of course, the possibility of a world war. I mean, world wars have certainly been made out of less stuff. And in this current conflict, we already have a front with Ukraine and Russia already going on. Iran has come out and said that if Israel does in fact do a ground

invasion, that they're prepared to attack. Most likely, that would look like an attack from the forces of Hezbollah coming south from Lebanon as the Israeli forces begin their ground invasion of Gaza, but Max voiced some suspicion over whether or not he thinks that that ground invasion is going to happen when, you know, my read on the situation as of now seems like they're very much saying that that's going to happen. They're setting everything up for that to happen. And then if you have a situation in which they do go in, Iran and Hezbollah do respond, do we have American boots on the ground and can that spiral into a deep escalation. So I'm curious about Max's suspicion on the idea that there's going to be a ground invasion. And then I

wonder what both of you make, having, you know, spent many, many years watching and studying and observing this conflict if the mass support is on a different level. Have you seen the support? I mean, of course, throughout the global south, it's always been there to some extent. But even throughout Europe and America, there seems to be a crackdown on these protests, trying to make them illegal, a real sense of insecurity from Western governments and a huge uprising of people across the Western world and the world more broadly in support of Palestinian freedom. So, Max, can you talk about your suspicions of Israel's ground invasion and then can both of you talk about whether or not you think the mass support for Palestinians is in any way different than it's been in the

past? From my perspective, it is, it remains unclear if Israel is going to commit to a ground invasion. Now, there are several aspects to this. I mean, the first is that this is the terrain chosen by the resistance, a ground resistance. I mean, a ground invasion. The resistance, the resistance certainly sought to draw Israel into an urban warfare situation where the Israeli

infantry troops armored or whether armored or not would actually be torn apart by the Palestinian resistance, which is fighting on its own territory, on pre-prepared defensive positions, riddled with ambush positions and so forth, and where they've both trained

extensively and they're actually fighting on they're fighting from their homes or from their destroyed homes. So certainly the resistance thought there's a very substantial chance that Israel would go in for a ground invasion. Now, of course, the Israeli planners also know that. And furthermore, the Israeli planners know that a ground invasion would mean the death of thousands, if not tens of thousands of their own troops and would also, is going to incite catastrophic loss of life amongst the civilian population on a moral or ethical level. They don't care about this at all. On a strategic level, in terms of the consolidation of world public opinion,

there is some sort of concern that the U.S. should not be, the U.S. regime, I think, is very concerned about being held responsible right now in world public opinion for what, for a kind of unprecedented loss of Palestinian lives. I mean, in the South, so why they're still. age managing continuously their appearance. So I don't know, you know, it's not clear to me. It's also, you know, Iran and also the Lebanese militarized forces. Keep firing shots across the battle, both verbal and Shabalek, in the case of the Iranian political leadership, and militarized in the case of the Lebanese resistance, stating that if you keep going over these lines, we will escalate and we will escalate more and more and more to the point where, of course, Israel's

understanding very clearly, and of course even more so America is understanding that there will be massive conflagration that will ensue with great losses for both of their military assets if they engage in, if either they attempt to carry out a further escalation of the bombing campaign that would rip apart a Hamas commanded control and military infrastructure within the Gaza strip, which would require a bombing campaign that would quite dwarf the current bombing campaign, I think. Or if they carry out a grand invasion, which is actually really the seems to me the only way to actually root out Hamas from Hamas's military infrastructure, at least the organized military infrastructure from the Gaza ship, although then you would need 50,000, it would require

50,000 troops in order to actually hold Gaza. If not, Hamas just reconstitutes the military, infrastructure very quickly. I mean, you have 30,000 people who are trained fighters. They're not going to kill. It's quite impossible to kill all of them. So they melt into the population and carry out a guerrilla insurgency or Israel leaves and then they reconstitute and they retrain and they re-equip and do it on the basis of much more knowledge, which is actually the hardest thing of all is the reconstruction of knowledge itself, right? The knowledge have had to run an effective counterinsurgency. So this is to say these are my thoughts that inform my thinking about what's going on and the next steps.

But I really don't know. I do not know if Israel is going to go in or not. I don't know. It's very unclear to me. If they don't go in, it's a massive win on the part of the Palestinian resistance. And it was a huge discrediting. I mean, I read that 80% of people, settlers, in the Gaza envelope, they do not want to, will not live there, even if the war ends today.

So, in fact, the sovereignty of Israel as the monopoly of the rule of force over a territory and the free dispensation of the use of a certain territory for its own purposes has actually been rolled back beyond the Gaza envelope. This also is unprecedented in the modern history of the conflict. I want to pause because it seems that Anon has a... question and has to go. Let me just clarify one thing quick. So when you say the Gaza envelope, in case listeners are unaware of that, it's an area that's within seven kilometers of the Gaza strip border and is populated by approximately 70,000 settlers, which, as you said, a recent

poll that Kamo indicated that over 80% of them would not return even if the war ended today. So that's the area that Max is referring to. Sorry, Edna, go ahead with your final question. I'm so sorry to interrupt the flow of your excellent discussion there, Max. I just wanted to say, because unfortunately, I do have to go and I'm going to be listening to the rest of this conversation very keenly. I've really found your analysis of you and Patrick very, very helpful in Germain. But I just wanted to make some kind of comment about the kind of scale of the world protests and connected also with the question of U.S. complicity, you know, of course we know the U.S. has been such a huge supporter of Israel, but the fact that it sent these carriers that it has very obviously endorsed

a very brutal, you know, action and are sending those carriers perhaps as an attempt to try and deter involvement and intervention by, you know, Hezbollah or. Iran in other forms. I think, you know, I'm wondering what that is going to do to the U.S. position. It's seen in the region and the pressure that that will put on, putative allies already. We've seen, you know, difficulties in the U.S. Saudi relationship over, you know, oil production in support of, you know, kind of the sanctions on Russia and so on. We've seen a rapprochement taking place, a normalization of diplomatic relations between U.S. and Iran recently the first actual conversation between the leaders of those two countries.

And this seems to have deterred or at least, you know, interrupted the kind of full extension of the Abraham Accords process to Saudi Arabia, which was, of course, the linchpin of, you know, normalizing for, you know, economic kinds of reasons and political reasons that would have isolated the Palestinians. And one of the consequences that seems to me or reasons perhaps for, you know, taking this step at this time was not only, of course, the Aksa, you know, situation, which might mean a lot symbolically and religiously to religious resistance movement like Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but also, of course, to try and stop the normalization process with Saudi Arabia without it having dealt with the Palestine kind of question. So it seems to me that in this context, the U.S.'s role is something that everyone would, with justice, really, if there is huge bloodletting beyond what we've already seen, which has been so horrific.

if they actually allow the ethnic cleansing of Gaza in an obvious way with the displacement of a million or more people and tens of thousands of dead and so on, I think the U.S. is really going to be on the hook in a more direct way than it has been in previous encounters because it has intervened in such a direct way to prevent, it seems, pressure from regional partners. And it has stopped even speaking about things like being concerned about, you know, humanitarian, you know, humanitarian regard for civilians and so on. It has dropped all of that rhetoric.

They're there. They could intervene to stop and put. the constraints on Israel, I think if they allow it to go forward, it's just going to be so obvious to everybody that the U.S. has, you know, blood directly on its hands in a more overt way than has been the case in its previous sort of general support, you know, for Israel during these kind of outbursts of conflict. I'm just wondering what you think about for those situations. I'm here in Turkey in Istanbul right now, you know, all across, of course, the Middle East, Islamic world, you know, they're doing prayers on every Friday, every prayer is at the mosques or ending with, you know, appeals and calls for support. You know, there's got a lot of pressure on regional governments as this continues, but it just seems to me that the world's,

public opinion. I can't say that it would be decisive, but it seems very, very mobilized in a way that could be a real material factor for U.S. calculations and on the situation. So I'm wondering if you have any sort of thoughts on those kind of conditions and factors. Yeah, so there was an interview being conducted by, excuse me, Hamas representative Ahmed Abdojadi, he was saying that, he was saying quite confidently that the levers of the war-making operation

have been taken over by the United States. And this is another historic weakness or Achilles heel of Israel is this always frustrated Israeli leaders is the dependence on the United States for the weapons supply.

So this is another potential contradiction that begins to emerge. So to go back to that, first we could comment on the regional situation of what the U.S. faces resistance-wise.

Max described well the situation in Gaza. So, of course, it bears mentioning that we're talking about the Gaza resistance and not simply Hamas. Of course, if you look at the Alaksa flood operation, you know, this had coordination, cooperation from Islamic Jihad and the Abu Ali Mustafa brigades of the PFLP, as well as the National Resistance Brigades of the BFLP. So I think that that's one factor, but also when we look at the environs of occupied Palestine, I think that there has been developing for some time a resistance capacity that even in places like the Golan Heights, for example,

that was established under an umbrella by Hezbollah, but extends beyond Hezbollah. and to popular committees there. And if you look at, to go back to the issue of what the Israeli bombing in Syria was doing for many years, it was striking Hezbollah, yes. And it was striking them in particular for coordinating and expanding a resistance effort in collaboration with the Syrian army. And I'm thinking of the efforts by Samir Kuntar, who was, from Lebanon, had been imprisoned after his operations with the Palestine Liberation Army some years ago. And she ended up being released as part of the prisoner exchange following the 2006 war.

And then in around 2014, maybe earlier than that, 2013, he had gone to Golan to organize this larger resistance effort. And he spoke about it extensively. and before he was assassinated, he said that the networks that they had set up would live beyond his death. So if they killed him, it wouldn't make much of a difference. And then they assassinated him in 2015. So this is a concrete example of what I'm talking about, about how the war that was designed to destroy these networks. actually reestablish them in a very real way.

And the United States, as far as whether it's ready to confront this kind of, these kind of forces, and of course we know that bloodletting will be severe from U.S. and Israeli forces. We know the scale of destruction, but will they be able to achieve any political or strategicals? Both of these societies hasn't fought wars against organized guerrilla forces of this capacity for a very long time. And the United States didn't even fare particularly well in 1993 in Somalia, let alone against forces this well organized. You know, the memory of Vietnam has receded somewhat among the American public. They've been raised on action movies that glorify U.S.

military exploits in a way that are not realistic here. If they were to get involved in any significant way, there would be a very dramatic crash for segments of the American public in how I think it'll go as far as the death toll of whatever forces they commit there. And it is real, you know, they've never really seen something of the scale of Vietnam as a society. So it would be very difficult for them to be able to sustain the kind of losses that would be required over any extended period of time. This is why they, as Max was saying, withdrew from Gaza so abruptly in 2014. So to bring that now to the domestic context is, you know, it's not quite like May 2021. May 2021, there was an upswell of protests like I'd never seen before in the United States

on this issue. And what I mean by that is we had a segment of liberal opinion on side. That never really happened because, you know, liberals, sometimes it has to do with class position or whatever else. If there's a risky position to take, they're not going to take it. they kind of will they'll go with the wherever the winds are blowing if it seems like now the humanitarian opinion is is on side of Palestine then they'll march and they did to some extent in 2021. It's kind of a new development. I don't think it's quite it quite exists to that level again because of the nature of what's taken place here and the immediate fear that's spreading out. But let me say that. Let me say this right here.

The upswell right now is much more considerable than I would have thought it would be, given the intimidation techniques. I'm actually surprised by how unsuccessful this wrong intimidation has been so far. And once the initial fear dies down, it's only going, because, you know, these are things, people will act in reaction. But the thing about fear in any major crisis in the United States, it doesn't last. forever. And so I continue that outrage over U.S. complicity in the crimes of Gaza right now to continue to expand. And one reason why I'm doing this interview is that I think all of us need to speak out on whatever platforms available to us so they can play whack-a-ball with all of us who are onside of the Palestinian cause in no uncertain terms. You see what they're trying to do

to Joseph Mossade and Colombia, other people who have been very clear-eyed in their analysis. They're trying to make examples of certain figures, mostly Palestinian. And so if we want the sting to be taken out of this ideological counterinsurgency, we need to be clear ourselves, and then it'll be impossible for them to carry out these kind of intimidation campaigns against all of us.

Max, I want to make sure that you have the opportunity to also add in on this topic. But I just wanted to say the last thing that Patrick was talking about is absolutely my impression as well. So I also, some of the first activism I did was within the Palestinian Solidarity Movement. So like you, Patrick, I went to my undergrad in Southeast Michigan. I was at Eastern Michigan University. And so a lot of my activism that I was doing was coordinated through. student organizations that were involved with the Palestinian Solidarity Movement. So we had Middle Eastern Student Association, Muslim Student Association, students for justice

in Palestine, et cetera, et cetera. We had all of these groups. At the time that I was doing my undergrad, which was 2013 to 2017, when we had our protests, when we had our marches, it was almost universally Middle Eastern students that were marching. I was one of the very few white students that was that was in the crowd and the reason that I bring this up is because of course there was repression against the protests that we had I mean people were being arrested at basically every action that we had but the people who were being arrested were always the Middle Eastern students was never me even though I was at the protests with them it was never my fellow white students who were also present at these actions and but despite that you know despite this kind

of mild repression that was going on you know the occasional student or two that was locked up for the night to kind of scare everybody else and dissuade them from doing future actions. Despite the repression being relatively mild, we didn't have this giant swell of people coming into our actions. It was kind of the same core of people. Whereas today, what we see is that there is mass repression of these movements at an unprecedented scale. We have them trying to ban slogans in various countries. Like just saying from the river to the sea is now a chargeable offense in, you know, some countries like Britain, having a Palestinian flag in public is now a chargeable offense in various places. I've been making fun of the Berlin

Police Department because they ban every single action that is involved with Palestinian solidarity, even when it's coordinated by Jewish groups within the city. The last couple of protests that have been tried to be coordinated within Berlin and have been banned, have been organized by Jewish Berliners. Like literally the title of the events are Jewish Berliners for peace in the Middle East and solidarity with people in Gaza. These are the titles of their events. It's a mouthful, but you know, that's what Germans do. And what do we see is that they're still banning these events and they're criminalizing the people who are trying to do them. And despite that, Despite that repression, being ramped up to 11, we still see more and more people coming out

in solidarity with Palestine than I have ever seen, and a much more diverse group of people than we have ever seen. We are not only seeing people who are immigrants from the Middle East or students with Middle Eastern heritage anymore at these events. We are having upwards of 150,000 people marching through London despite the efforts of the British government to criminalize these sorts of actions, these sorts of protests, these sorts of slogans. So this is really encouraging for me. And I know I'm not really adding anything that you didn't already say, Patrick, but I just want to kind of underscore that point that we are seeing something that we have not seen in these past movements, despite, you know, the, as we were talking, the ethnic cleansing in the

concentration camp model being present even in the years past, we didn't see this sort of solidarity in the face of a ramped up repression far greater than we saw in the past. So there's my piece. Max, I don't know if there was anything that you wanted to add on what I said or what Patrick said before maybe Brett will go in with another question then. No, thanks. Sure. I mean, this might be slightly out of place, but I think it is helpful to set a sort of horizon of full liberation and help people who are learning about this topic, getting involved, organizing around this topic, give them a clear-sighted picture of what full liberation really looks like. And, you know, you hear things like the two-state solution peddled by liberals all the time. You know, I think I've even heard recently mouthpieces from the White House talk. I think Biden himself in a recent interview said like the long-term goal is to get Palestine in their own state. But of course, a two-state solution under the context of the British partition and the Israeli colonial apparatus already existing, that's not what I think, you know, people on the full liberationist left would like to see, nor is that the thing that the Palestinian masses would necessarily like to see. There's some confusion on this topic, though. So for both of your points of view, how do you think about the two-stage solution and what do you set as the horizon of full liberation for the Palestinian-resistant movements and for Palestinians in general?

You know, this is, this, this, it's historically a slightly difficult position, um, because, of course, the, you know, the leading nationalized force is Hamas. And Hamas is in favor of establishing a Palestinian state on the 67 territories. Um, and, uh, while, well, well, not relinquishing its claim to the remainder of Palestine, right? That is how it squares the national liberation and state sovereignty circle. Now, I support the liberation and return of the Palestinian people. What that looks like, what the state looks like, what that looks like, what, you know, what that looks like and what a liberated Palestine looks like, I don't know. And I don't think anybody can know. I think that the racial regime that racially allocates privileges

and that is based on an organic relationship with imperialism, that's what Israel is. Israel is that. And that has to go. There can be no debate about it. What comes after? We don't know. We don't know what would be a temporary acceptance of,

the temporary pathway on the road to liberation of social and economic in addition to political and anti-Zionist liberation, right? I think we have no idea. I think the keystone is the return of the refugees. And beyond that, we have no idea. I mean, I think what's fundamental is that the Israelis don't want to live as equal with Palestinians. Some of them will accept it. But in their majority, the European-born Israelis absolutely will not live as equal with Alistinians. It's very evident. And, you know, I think it's, they're a thoroughly bourgeois society. And I think you'll see a mass flight.

I don't even, I don't think it will be an ethnic cleansing. I think they'll leave quite voluntarily. large portion of the population, in any of that Palestinians will have a demographic majority and what will become is Palestine. And, you know, personally I support full civic rights for the national minorities and a liberated Palestine as part of a liberated Arab region. But beyond that, I think it's quite impossible to talk about. Patrick, anything you want to add on this question? No, I think it was a good interest.

Okay, then I'm going to hop in here and ask another question that's related to something that Max asked, but this actually might be more in your field of study, Patrick, which Max said the leading nationalist force is Hamas, which is absolutely the case at this present time. But one thing that we've been seeing is within Western media, a homogenization of the Palestinian resistance to Hamas. in terms of like this is the only resistance that is operating right now. This is the only Palestinian resistance to the Zionist occupation. This is the only resistance that is taking actual struggle against them at this present time.

And of course, that struggle is demonized as being a, you know, a bunch of crazy people who are breaking through walls and going on paragliders. But this kind of homogenization to the Palestinian resistance movement to Hamas is frankly not accurate. There is a lot of various groups that are involved within the Palestinian resistance. And it is true that Hamas is the leading edge of that right now, which, you know, for those of us on the fringes of the far left, it's probably not ideal for us. You know, we would like other groups to be the leading edge of that resistance movement, but it is what it is. And, you know, if we're supporting the Palestinian resistance movement as we are, we have to acknowledge that. But Patrick, I guess I'll

direct this to you because I know that you have done a lot of work on Palestinian resistance and you've also looked at communism within Palestine, which is a topic that we've been wanting to do an episode on for quite some time. So hopefully we'll be able to bring you back in the future to talk about communism within Palestine specifically, just that topic. What I'm wondering if you can talk about is kind of the dynamics that are at play within the Palestinian resistance movement right now, because we do. have this problem of homogenizing the movement to just Hamas without any acknowledgement of, you know, different tendencies that are operating within the resistance movement. And so

a lot of people just get this idea that by supporting the resistance movement against Zionist occupation in its present form, you are like inherently a Hamas supporter without acknowledging that there's other tendencies within the resistance movement. Yeah, I think that the way that you preface it is helpful because, you know, it's clear that this is not something that when we're acting in solidarity and living safe and comfortable abroad, that it's not necessarily our day and how these formations develop. So, yeah, just to be clear about that point is I think important. But it is helpful, I guess, also for purposes.

of broader edification to look at the Palestinian revolutionary movement in the long view and that is I mean it depends on how far you want to go back on that but I think that

there is let's start first with the PLO okay this was something that was very very difficult for Palestinian refugees and exile to establish It's organizational, its infrastructure took a very long time to set up.

It got set up under the Arab nationalist umbrella, the Arab socialist umbrella. That happened in the 1950s, mostly under the leadership of bin Ladenassar. And they were able to establish the PLO in 1964, and then by 1969, it's something that had been largely taken over. first by Theta and then later on by other groups like the PFLP got involved and then there was some friction after that. But I think that to understand Hamas's current position, it helped to contextualize what happened, the fate of the PLO. The PLO, its constituent factions for some time, had done intensive theoretical work to supplement. to supplement their organizational efforts, including unions as well as strikes and demonstrations,

and their military capacity. And their military strategy, especially in 1969 through 1972, but also some periods when it was based in Lebanon, was largely drawn from the Vietnamese experience. And People's War was the banner during those periods. But of course, when we say people's war, we're not just talking about the war of the whole people, though that's the basic definition. But a lot of manpower and brain power, man and woman power, I should say brainpower, had gone into this.

So they had something, a research center, the Palestine Research Center, where they could develop theory. and they were very much, when it came to Marxist theory, in dialogue and translating from anti-imperialist Marxist thought around the world, they translated into Arabic the studies of American imperialism and the corporate military structure in Vietnam into Arabic from monthly review, for instance. though they were very much interested in dependency theory, world systems, and unequivocal exchange.

So another advantage of the Palestine Research Center, though, they weren't just looking at theory for its own sake, is if they're to launch something like a People's War, they are able to come up with a vision of a structure of popular militias combined with people's militias, or popular militias combined with the unions, but also do things like conceptual. or make maps of historic Palestine and where strategic installations could be struck. So this is just to give you an idea of how much Marxism of a certain sort, not really the Marxism

being produced for a long time in universities in the United States, was central in this idea, in this liberation movement. And I don't think that really ever went away, although very cruelly, all these institutions, they worked very hard for, were smashed, particularly in 1982 and Lebanon. And that was the context, it's the same year where you see the cells that

end up turning into Hisbola form. Hisbola puts out its first message, 1985, the message to the disinherited of the earth. And I think that there's, I don't want to conflate these forces between the PLO that was located in South Lebanon and Hispola, but there's also some frost pollination, some exchange. There were, some of the cadres were involved in Marxist movement, brought the knowledge and lessons of the previous stages of liberation to that movement. To bring it up to date a certain sort, the Marxist-Lennonist PFLP and in its offshoot,

the DFLP have survived. these sustained waves, the two-pronged strategy of U.S. counter insurgency, the carrot and the stick. And the carrot was the normalization deals, things like Resolution 242 after that Rogers plan. More recently, things like the Abraham Accord, Senator Trump, and Oslo being the biggest of all. And Oslo, what did that do? They came up with, they invested in alternative structures from the PLO, the Palestinian Authority, adopting a policing model that had replaced the Vietnam counterinsurgency model for

the third world. And they were doing this course in places like Indonesia, Colombia, El Salvador, and then they used that model to come up with this Palestinian authority and that further hollows out any kind of revolutionary thought in the PLO.

PFLP, DFLP survived that and played major roles in resistant efforts. They've reconstituted somewhat. But of course they reconstituted under, I would say, the influence, because this is the time period after Oslo where Hamas really comes to the forefront, because they're offering a resistance option against the normalization option. And in recent years, some of this has been in flux. And we saw that

Hamas, you know, they defected to, from Syria, the Qatar in 2012, rather. And then they're ranked file never quite agreed with that. So there was a disagreement, and then there was a reconciliation process with the rest of the resistance forces. And under that broader umbrella, the PFLP and DFLP have really decided to, they said that they need a unity of fronts in order to confront the Zionist project at this moment, sometimes of existential peril, because the Nautilization deals are designed to liquidate Palestinian cause and the claim of right of return. So two things. We have a history of cross-pollination that there were Marxist cadres that later went into Hizthola and Islamic Jihad.

And then we have the fact that the Marxist-Leninist groups were able to weather the storm and survive, which for a while was a major test for them. And they're participating, contributing to the unity of front's strategy. going on right now, which includes also the rives of new forces whose shape, whose contours, we don't have a full picture yet. I'm thinking in particular of what went on in Nablis

and what went on also in Jindin, these popular militias that were forms, the lion's den, and they are a new generation of resistance influenced by thinkers like

Baselaharaj, who was assassinated a few years back, and he was combining elements of, you know, the lessons or successes of Hispola and somewhat Islamic jihad in Hamas, with also studies of Che Guevara and communist peoples war, essentially, but also communist forms of military strategy. So I hope that answers your question. It did a kind of, yeah, it'd be a mistake. It would really be remiss of us to talk about it in the terms that the monopoly media talk about it, which is Hamas Israel war. That is a simplification beyond the simplification. Absolutely. Incredibly important point. And I really owe people listening internalize that. Go back, re-listen to that,

and really take that to heart because it's really, really important to push back on that false dichotomy of it, just Israel versus Hamas and this sort of idea that Hamas is fundamentally alienated from the Palestinian masses and from the broader Palestinian resistance movement. So thank you for that. I, again, would love to have you back on to talk more in depth about that and the history of that. But you've both been incredibly generous with your time. I just have one sort of question to wrap up with here. Again, thank you both Max and Patrick for your time today and for all your knowledge and sharing that with us. It's really important. We deeply appreciate it. I guess as a last question to both of you, this might seem kind of obvious, but it's also, I think, just useful to put out there and reiterate, what can or should we in the West or outside of the immediate sphere of the conflict do to show support and solidarity with the Palestinian resistance and with Palestinians more broadly? And importantly, in this war of information, what are maybe some good resources, some good outlets, some good outlets or even organizations that people who really want the Palestinian view of the topic

or just good objective information as much as that's possible can go and check out. You can just each of you take those questions in whatever direction you'd like. You know, I think for the most broad-based analysis and also for what will keep you the most up to date, you should stay current with Electronic Intifada and Mandaweiss and follow not just their articles, but also follow their social media where you're going to get minute-to-minute updates and the transmission of news from the region as it interties with the current events in Palestine. I think this is very, very, very central. I mean, in terms of what to do, group protest, join an organization, and don't feel that it is,

doesn't matter if you go. Because if everybody thought it didn't matter if they go, then we wouldn't have 150,000, people in the United Kingdom making a beautiful, beautiful mass protest of resistance against the U.K. regime policy of supporting the destruction of Palestine. So please go to a protest and even better find your friend who you've been worried about what's going on. We've been worrying together about what's going on in Palestine and bring them to a protest. And if you are disabled and you cannot are sick and cannot make it to a protest, send $10 to Middle East Children's Alliance and tell your friend to send $10,000 to Middle East Children's Alliance.

I mean, there is something to be done, no matter who you are, where you're coming from. And so just please do it and know that there's other people doing it as well. There's a lot of other people doing it. And together we can do something, maybe not or not, but something that can make some differences. I suggest people follow the writings, the collective work that is being put out by the Palestinian youth movement, if they're, and then also to

possibly follow the events that are being put on by the Palestinian youth movement. And then also, you know, in place like New York City, you have organizations like within our lifetime. These are Palestinian diaspora-led organization that are really, I think,

the leaders of the movement as exists, particularly where I am in North America, but also places in Europe. So I think it's important to really look to follow their lead because they are, it's both in terms of information and in terms of protests, they're at the center of it. I'd also just add,

have popular, do popular education, do teaching, because this is the fora where it's possible for us to explain in detail just how wrong they've been. And by they, I mean mass media, monopoly media, to show people that in 2011, they made the claim that the Palestinian cause among the Arab masses was old news, that it was internal democracy struggles to the various states that mattered.

The world had largely passed over the people in Gaza, thought that they would just languish their trap forever and with the outpouring of support in the Arab region for the Palestinian people as an example the people storming the borders in Jordan defying the king's decrees essentially as they've existed for past half a century then we really see how wrong they've been And that is the opening through which we can see all the rest of the lies. And the lies do go back to the very beginning, as it were. Thank you.

And of course, we will link to as many of those resources as possible in the show notes. So listeners, if you want to check out any of those resources that Max or Patrick discussed, look in the show notes and we'll try to have all of that there. I also want to echo Brett's thanks to each of you for your generosity of time. I know that I really got a lot out of this conversation. And I'm hoping that the listeners did as well. I think that the point that Patrick made about having mass education is very important. So do try to organize those sorts of things.

We are the people who are going to be able to change perceptions of people that are within our proximate spheres. So find people who you get along with, people who you communicate with, people who you are in contact with, and then organize those sorts of teachings. And yes, you can use this as a resource if you want. Listeners. You know, you take this episode, use it as a starting point, and then have a discussion around it. You know, that's one other thing that you can do, particularly if you have an occupation where you are able to listen to things. I have a lot of friends that, you know, listen to the show while they're driving UPS trucks, for example. So when you hear this, you know who you are. Listeners, I'm referring to you. I'm not going to call you out by name, but you know who you are. In any case, I do also want to thank you both for your time. Max, I know that we're going to be having you on. again in the near future. We already have something planned with you and comrade Jason Moore. So listeners, I know you love Max Isle. We got very positive feedback when Max is on the show.

And we're definitely going to have you on again in the near future. So Max, thanks. Can you tell the listeners how they can find you and more of your work? Well, my collected writings are actually available as PDFs, research gates. so you just literally type my name and then ResearchGate and you can find most anything that I have written in the last couple years right there and I have a Twitter

sort of semi-public, not that public and that's that. We will link to your Research Gate in any case and listeners if you want to try to find Max on Twitter that's like your quest for today. Patrick, thank you also for coming on to the program. Hopefully, you enjoyed coming on the program and hopefully we'll be able to bring you back on again in the semi-near future to talk about the communist movement

within Palestine. That topic is quite, you know, interesting and something that we've been wanting to talk about for quite some time anyway. So can you tell the listeners how they can find you and more of your work if there's anywhere to direct them to? Yeah, I don't have a centralized place for my work right now. Perhaps I should find one. But I think that if they want to look up my work, they could look me up with University of Houston, they should be able to find my written works in a sort of dispersed fashion. And there will be more coming out soon in a scholarly capacity in the scholarly journals about this topic.

So, yeah. Excellent. Well, if you send that to us when it's coming out, Patrick, we can also put that out on our social media to help advertise it. for you. So feel free to reach out anytime that you have anything come out and we'll definitely lend a hand in that front. So listeners, for us, Adnan had to leave the conversation a little bit ago to go to a seminar, but you can follow Adnan on social media on Twitter at Adnan A Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N. And you can listen to his other podcast, The Mudge List, which is about the Middle East Muslim Diaspora and topics related with those by going to any podcast.

I've been looking for the Mudge list, but not the one that is hosted by Radio Free Central Asia, that CIA cutout. Go to the one that's hosted by Global Perspective project at Queen's University. Brett, how can the listeners find you when you're two, well, three excellent other podcasts now? I always forget about that third one because it's new. I've been so used to saying two other podcasts, but it's three now. Yeah, that one's underground. You've got to find it by doing your own investigations. But you can find everything that I do politically at Revolutionary.

Leftoradio.com. Excellent. As for me, listeners, you can follow me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1-995. You can get Stalin History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Lassorto, which Salvatore Angledamaro and myself translated and edited by going to Iskrabooks.org. You can get it in paperback, hardcover, or the PDF is available for free, which was really important to us. So if you want to download that, just go to Iskrabooks.org and look for the Stalin book.

As for the show, listeners, you can help support the show. Keep us up and running and allow us to make more content like this by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history, with gorilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history, and follow us on Twitter to keep up with each of the hosts individually as well as what the show collectively is up to by going to at Gorilla underscore pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A- underscore pod.

And until next time, listeners, solidarity. You know,