Episode 4: Israel: asset or liability of American imperialism? In conversation with Max Ajl

Speaker 1: Welcome to this episode of Jadal TV. Tonight is Tuesday, 16th of April 2024, and almost 48 hours after Iranian special operation called Truthful Promise, in which Iran sent over 300 missiles, drones, and different kind of cruise and ballistic missiles over the occupied land and Israeli territories. And since then, Israeli war cabinet has promised to retaliate and somehow brought the region into a bit of heated situation. But more than that, in the last 192 or three days, if I'm not mistaken, we have seen an unprecedented genocide, which possibly for the first time has been etched to the collective memory of masses in the world, but more importantly in West Asia and in Arab and Muslim countries. And that has brought a question which, with the help of media, was suppressed in the last few decades. And that's the question regarding the existence of Israel as a colonial project and its relationship with the Western countries, especially the United States. Symbolically, even in the 14th of April operation by Iran, the Iranian missiles were deterred and intercepted, not only by Israel, who claims to have one of the most advanced anti-air missile defense systems, but also with American, British, and French missiles. interceptors, which shows we are not dealing with only a small country in West Asia called Israel with 7 or 8 million population, and instead we are dealing with the totality of Western and NATO governments. In order to discuss the details of the relationship between the United States and Israel, and this relationship specifically in 2024, and how it has been shaped, and especially throughout this historical phase, of multipolarity and the transition to the New World Order, we have invited Dr. Max Eil, who many of you possibly know, but I'm very, very glad that he's accepted my invitation. Dr. Eil is a senior fellow in the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at Ghent University and a researcher at University of Tunis. He's also with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. He's the editor. He's one editor at Agrarian South and Journal of Labour and Society and has written for Agrarian South, the Journal of Present Studies, Globalizations, Review of African Political Economy, Middle East Report, and many other scholarly and popular journals, including The Guardian's Comment is Free, Boston Review, and Monthly Review. He researches climate politics, Tunisian national liberation, agrarian politics in the Arab region, and ecological planning and Arab North African intellectual history. He is the author of a recent book, A People's Green New Deal. Good night, Mr. Eil, or if I can call you Max. Thanks a lot for accepting my invitation. I've been reading your stuff and your takes for a while, and I'm a big fan. And I'm really, really glad that we finally got this chance to have a face-to-face conversation.

Max Ajl: I'm honored by the invitation. Thank you.

Speaker 1: So let's start with this question, which is very simple, but I think it will open up a lot of horizon for discussion tonight. And that's the question relevant to this very specific moment. How does US imperialism benefit from the total destruction of Gaza in front of the eyes of global public?

Max Ajl: In fact, the preferred option for US imperialism would be for the people in Gaza to completely accept their defeat and to live quietly. on rations from UNRWA and even more so to have a political authority like the PA as it exists in the West Bank to kind of oversee them. Essentially to live in a large prison without any risk or temptation or attempt at a prison break and to be passive, quiet, docile and well-behaving prisoners. This is the ideal perspective from the perspective of the United States, as even in such a scenario, it would be logical for the United States to continue pouring weapons into Israel, to continue with its operations. counterinsurgency technology, with its development of counterinsurgency technology, with its attempts, with its constant need to armor Israel, the justification for actually a regional arms race, and so forth. That would be the ideal scenario, I think, from the perspective of U.S. power. So, What we see now is a suboptimal perspective, yet it's a suboptimal outcome, suboptimal series of events. But it's completely necessary from the perspective of US power. Now, why is it necessary from the perspective of US power? I mean, we have to look at it from the perspective of what is the US interest overall in the Arab-Iranian region? And then how does Israel fit in to the constitution of the U.S. interests in the Arab-Iranian region, right? And then this enables us, this arms us with the kind of intellectual weapons or tools we need to be able to answer the question, why is the U.S. offering its full-bore, four-square supports for the genocide? which it's carrying out, we could say Israel's carrying out, but really the US and Israel are carrying out this genocide in the Gaza Strip, right? So this is the background. We can't, in the same way that we can't take the Palestinian catastrophe and start it on October 7, we also can't take the US-Israel relationship and reset it to October 7 and say, well, why is this relationship enduring in the face of such severe perturbations, right? So let us rewind the clock. If we want to understand this relationship, first we have to understand what is Israel? Israel is, of course, a settler state, which is both akin and unakin to other settler states like Canada, like the United States. also differently, like Algeria, in the sense that the central relationship of oppression, which manifests in a settler state, is based on acquisition of the land from an indigenous population, the effect of exclusion of the indigenous people from that population, and either their ghettoization or their extirpation, that is, either confining them or killing them. Those are the two basic options in settler states that are dominated by the primitive accumulation of land. That's the first thing. But Israel is very different from many of these other settler states in that it was constituted, and this goes back to Herzl, as a class alliance between the entire class structure within that settler state and also an imperial patron. This is how the founders of Israel peddled their project to the West and Herzog said, you know, we would be a bulwark of europe against the the asian hordes right so it was understood that it would have some sort of militaristic role of course herzo and no one else could uh understand what that role what taking on such a burden would pretend for the future but that was the orientation they understood themselves as being having a natural alignment with the European Christian bourgeoisie and offering a multitude of services to the European Christian bourgeoisie. First of all, of course, allowing them to resolve their Jewish question and the threat of radicalism that especially Eastern European Jewry represented both to the Christian bourgeoisie but also to the Jewish bourgeoisie in Central and Western Europe. and so forth, and also offering the prospect of, therefore, what some authors call colonial middlemen in a region that had been a great object of British imperial interest, in particular insofar as Palestine, and therefore, and Egypt were on the route, respectively, more or less on two sides of the Suez, which was a very important British trade route. It was the route to the Indies, which were a major source of British wealth. Now, By 1948, Israel did a very good job of putting paid, of destroying or defeating the Arab armies. And this impressed the U.S. Defense Department, which said, okay, this should be one of our assets in the Arab region. Nevertheless, the relationship had complications until the 1960s. Israel was primarily a French colonial client. Its attack in 1956 during the Tripartite War was an attack on the Nazism, which was a major threat to the British Empire, even while the U.S. was still kind of trying to make nice with Nazism and to induce it to some form of neutralism that would have some pro-US aspects. Of course, that started to collapse by 1962. And in 1967, the US started to become, earlier in 1966, the US started to become highly alarmed by the Arab radicalism that was burgeoning above all in Egypt under Nasser and Syria under a very swiftly radicalizing bath. And they understood that the demands that were emerging for armed resistance to Israel, but also combining this kind of militant anti-Zionism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism with demands for domestic internal redistribution and also forms of industrialization represented a threat to Western interests. So in 1967, when Israel hammered the Arab armies, the U.S. was enthralled. And the U.S., of course, had given green light to that attack. And from that point on, after some kind of slight wavering in kind of internecine turf battles between Department of State and Department of Defense in the United States, they started to see Israel as a major strategic asset. So what it meant to be a strategic asset was, first of all, that

Speaker 1: Can I stop you? Can I stop you here? I think that's very important to have this history and actually we want to go through it. But one thing, so you pinpoint to 1967 as the historical moment in which America took its decision to become a strategic ally with Israel. Whereas you think before that, Israel was not intrinsically essential to American foreign policy in the region. So that's before and after. Can you just explain why 67? Because especially now, many people think that Israel from beginning was benefiting from overt Western American support, whereas in reality it is not. I mean, they managed to, as you said, very nicely put it, they managed to offer themselves as a useful tool and weapon to America.

Max Ajl: Sure, yes. I mean, before 1967, you know, before 1948, they were, well, until 1939, 1940, 1941, they were a useful client for the British. And then the British kind of wanted to, in the midst of the dusk of their colonial empire, wanted to offload the Palestine and Zionism. And then they, this kind of colonial burden, or the burden of not really a burden, but this kind of settler-colonial-imperial relationship and dynamic was taken up by the French, who saw a great deal of uses for Israel throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. And the Israel-U.S. special relationship really was conceived in the hot war of 1967, when Israel really hammered and not only delivered a kinetic defeat, but more importantly delivered an ideological defeat to Arab nationalism's ambition to fuse national autonomous development with a militantly anti-imperial foreign policy. right, to take non-alignment in the direction of actually anti-imperialism. So the ideological discrediting of that option in many ways in Syria and Egypt made Israel a very alluring client state, almost a unique client state, in particular because of the racism that was baked in that made it actually have a very That would enable it to be a client of the West while still maintaining a democratic facade or rather democratic institutions, democratic so long as it's assumed that the Palestinians would not be able to participate in the internal democratic processes within historical Palestine. Right. So this is a critical inflection point. And this is when U.S. armoring of Israel began to take off. So the spigot of military aid opened up with some in two thousand and twenty four dollars, ramping up to one to three billion dollars a year. And uniquely, one third of this was allowed. One quarter of this was allowed to stay in Israel. what that meant was that israel was actually able the israeli government invested in building up a state-owned defense industrial base um and some small portion of it was also privately owned and because this type of defense industrial base is cumulative this also created a fertile ground for a private uh defense industrial base so i think motorola was invested there and so forth um and so you started to develop a defense industrial base that could produce small arms that would eventually be able to do all sorts of retrofitting um and that was is the basis for israel by now being one of the world's major defense exporters and as a percentage of gdp the i think the the leading defense or so-called defense offense exporter, including the counterinsurgency technology as a percentage of GDP. This is actually a very unique arrangement. In return for this arrangement throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and later, Israel would arm all sorts of fascist governments. It was a major supporter, for example, of the fascist and anti-Semitic Argentinian dictatorship which murdered 30,000 people with a disproportionate number of them Jews. It was a major supporter of the Brazilian dictatorship, which took power to suppress land reform in 1964 in Brazil. It was a major supporter of the counter insurgencies against the peasants in Central America. It was a major supporter of the apartheid and settler colonial governments in South Africa, which was a particular special relationship for Israel, and Zimbabwe, Togo, and so forth. So it was engaged in all forms, all in some three forms of counterinsurgency, which made it a very attractive client. It was also very close with the Shah. And also, as the US armed Israel, it also created a justification for the Gulf states to say, okay, If Israel's arming itself and we're a nominal enmity to the Israeli entity, therefore we need a justification for our own arms purchases. So Israel played the role, first of all, of offering a built-in justification for wide-scale arms purchases by the Gulf states, where actually recycled, in fact, from the oil that was purchased by the Western working class, then in fact, kind of a lead to gold or gold to lead phenomenon actually would become arms purchases from the US defense industrial base by The Gulf states themselves. Right. So this is actually a very profitable irritant, a kind of pearl around which which grew around this irritant and the pearl in the form of great wealth for all forms of domestic capital accumulation in the US. Right. The other aspect that was very central during this period is that Israel is constantly hammering at the political level all sorts of anti-systemic forces. It's actually supporting the political face of reaction on a worldwide scale. When it's arming these fascist governments, it's actually supporting the forces that uphold the political architecture of capitalism on a world scale. And what's hammering the Arab nationalist government is basically giving a direct message to Arab working classes. This is what's going to happen if you resist our agenda. You are going to be militarily attacked. You aren't going to effectively resist it. And we are going to induce a state of defeat. And this is... You know, the ingrained state of defeat in the words of Dr. Ali Al-Qadri, who is kind of our major contemporary source on political economy of the Arab region. Right. So even until the until the 80s and even more recently, Israel has played a major role for U.S. accumulation.

Speaker 1: Okay, I think if we stop here, so I can ask a few of the questions. So, so far you're talking about how Israel is central to U.S. imperialism process of accumulation of wealth during the Cold War by mainly, and also the fending off the US imperialism's interest against Arab nationalism, which had some tendency towards allying itself with Soviet and with the Eastern Bloc. So from 1945, to almost 1990, when Arab nationalism was defeated, by mid-1970, possibly, if you are just double-checking your historiography. So by that time, you're absolutely right, because Egypt, Algeria, even Iran could have fallen in the hands of the Marxist or the leftist organization, and Israel was always present with either destroying those social movements through working and partnering itself with the dictatorship regimes or opening up the war against Syria, against Egypt, against Lebanon later, etc. I understand that. My problem is After Cold War, it seems that America didn't need Israel the same way that it needed before. So I want to know whether it's like a specific periodization in your historiography, because 45 to... mid-70s or 80s, maybe, you're absolutely right. Or from 80 to even 2007, 2008, we can see that U.S. imperialism comes back to the region, this time for destroying the region. And as you have called it in your piece, I think, de-development and accumulation by waste, which I'm going to ask you what you mean by that. And then finally, I think there's another period after that. So if you explain, let's go to the second period. what's the role of Israel and what's the benefit of Israel to the project of American imperialism after the end of Cold War? And when Arab nationalism was totally defeated and there was not a plausible threat anymore.

Max Ajl: Right. Okay. So, you know, again, we have to look at what does it mean when the U.S. opposed Arab nations, right? Like, what does that mean? We can discuss it. We say they opposed Nasser. We could say they opposed Salah Shadid in Syria, right? But what happens when we push a little bit below the opposition to and the destruction of these kind of political forces these political figures these political avatars these political projects and we say what does it mean why did the u.s oppose these forces right what this meant what these forces represented was the possibility basically of using national resources including labor that is the work people were doing in that country and using it for the benefit of the popular classes of that country that's what the defeat of arab nationalism meant it meant the integration of these countries into this process of worldwide accumulation, which also means claims to resources, claims to labor by the US ruling class. If one wishes to deny those claims and say, OK, a country wants to make a claim to its own labor and to its own resources and to use them for the benefit of its own people, meaning it's popular classes, it needs a political project to do that. If you don't want it doing it, you need to defeat that political project. Now, once we get to the 1990s, right, we have a few shifts. First of all, the U.S. isn't just about defeating political projects, although that's still part of it. It's also about, for one thing, even leveling the possibility of political projects, which is very logical if we think about it. If you want to defeat a political project that represents an alternative, why not take it one step further and say we want to defeat even the possibility, even the kind of scaffolding that could potentially support building such a political project, right? The scaffolding is the state. The state is the kind of scaffolding, and I'm using a building metaphor that can potentially support or incubate or the building of such a political project. So you're like, why not level the state and build a different kind of set of institutions that are even more friendly, even friendlier to the imperial project? Why not make them completely dependent?

Speaker 1: It's going to be abstract. Give us some example. For example, in a country like Egypt, which was close to America since 1979, Camp David, what do you mean by leveling off a state and replacing it with other institutions?

Max Ajl: Sure. So Egypt is a part of the example. But if you are imperial power, You don't fight everybody at once. You fight people piece by piece, and you advance in the fields where you can advance. So what the US did is it leveled the state in Iraq, right? And it said, OK, your entire interface with the world trading system, which is primarily oil, is actually going to be routed through US-controlled accounts. And we are going to level the capacity of the state to provide health care to provide education, to provide a wellbeing for this population. And we are actually, as a result, we're actually going to create a situation where your educated classes are just going to leave the country, which is exactly what happened, right? You have a massive war-created brain drain from Iraq from 1991 on, and you have basically the collapse of the state. You have the collapse of infrastructure, you have the collapse of sanitation services, you have, and so forth, right? And you have a partial partition of the country, right, already in 1991. And you have the state under an imperial siege warfare. which is sanctions, which are kind of hammering out the state. In Lebanon, you have the reconstruction of the state after the war along sectarian grounds, such that the state as a project is no longer possible as a kind of unifying identity for people. Instead, sect is built into the state itself. That's another thing that happens, for example, in Lebanon. In Egypt, right, Egypt is still too strong as a legacy of the Nasserist project. So you can't do that yet. What you can instead do is you can hollow out the state in terms of hollow out the state and the society and make it much more unequal, which makes it much weaker. So from 1991 onwards, you can read the work of, for example, Ray Bush and Habib Ayyuban. the the the degree of the the nasa's project in the countryside was basically leveled and rural poverty became close to a hundred percent so the state was still theoretically available in Egypt, which is different from Iraq as a kind of container or scaffolding for popular development. In terms of its content, this was kind of scraped out the same way you take a spoon and kind of scrape out the content from a tamarind or something, right? Guava, it was like the whole interior was scraped out, just leaving a kind of empty rhyme, right? And this is also part of the US project. So it's not looking the same in every single state of the region. I mean, each region, each field of attack has its own peculiarities. But it's uniform in that, you know, what we see is the US advancing by kind of really either one emptying out the social content of a state, or two, hammering and basically leveling the state, which we saw really advancing by 2003 in Iraq and other arenas.

Speaker 1: Okay, because the acceptable mainstream narrative, especially the narrative of promoted constantly by the Western sources in places like Iran and Iraqis, that especially after the Cold War, US imperialism came to find some form of hegemony through development. Yes, me and you might not agree with that development, but it was its tool for development. gaining more and more influence. And those countries which did not agree with that logic of development, which was globalization and its institution, then those countries were ruled out and they were punished. as examples for other countries. Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, maybe Lebanon a bit because of the presence of Hezbollah, and Venezuela, and whatever countries which did not want to abide by the rule-based order of United States. Whereas your story is different. You are saying that United States, especially in this region, didn't want any form of a strong state and didn't matter whether you are friend or foe of United States. I mean, people would immediately come and say, look at Dubai, look at Saudi Arabia, look at Turkey. They are the countries which benefited from post-1990 sort of globalization and by staying allies of United States. What would you answer to that?

Max Ajl: Yeah, I mean, the U.S. is allowing some kind of development in the countries that are fully aligned with its international policy, right? So at that time, at least. So it's allowing a form of development in Turkey, and it's allowing forms of development in the notably relatively unpopulous states like Qatar and Turkey. United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and so forth. So the US is allowing development if it maintains the control over what a country is going to do with it with its development with its wealth with it with its riches, but it's not allowing development in countries where it either does not have control or where it fears that it could lose control. This is one thing. Another thing is to bring us back, to rope us back to the Israeli role. By the 1990s, Israel is a kind of industrialized state with a huge amount of U.S. investment. right where there's a lot of transnational capital floating between the us and israel a lot of the israeli companies have been privatized and are floating on international markets you have people with dual citizenship holding uh majority or total shares in in this and so israel is just a part of the global capitalist order with a foreign policy fully aligned with the u.s foreign policy So it's logical that the U.S. is like, okay, this country is not only is our ally, but it's our most reliable ally because it's populated by a very racist population. It will always be aligned with us more or less in terms of foreign policy. There might be disagreements here or there. Of course, we want to take steps to support it, especially when they're comparatively low risk. Right. So what is the U.S. risk in supporting Israel in the 1990s? There's absolutely no risk. Right. There's no challenges to the U.S. order. So, of course, one, the U.S. is going to ensure the safety of its investments for one thing to the U.S. is very happy to. support an armed force in the Arab-Iranian region that it knows will continue to support its interests in the face of the rising threat of Iran in particular, which is obviously had a revolution that the U.S. feared and despised in 1979, almost immediately sanctioned and escalated its sanctions on throughout that period. And Israel also is a force in antagonism to a set of armed militias, including in Palestine itself, that are disruptive to the U.S. order of kind of... globalization based on widespread political defeat. Israel also offers a testing ground for a new kind of repression that no one talks about. No one talks about this new form of repression that the U.S. is trialing, which is the encirclement through law and through politics of the remaining armed forces that are antagonistic to the U.S. agenda, right? And this is through the terror lists that I believe were emerged through a presidential directive in 1996 and then were codified into U.S. law in 1997 and place a great variety of sanctions against This set against any listed force that and these forces are the forces that oppose the US order. So you have the FARC in Colombia, you have the PKK in Turkey, you have the MPA, the national peoples are in the communist guerrillas. in the Philippines. Then you have the PFLP, you have Hamas, you have Hezbollah, you have Islamic Jihad. That is, what you do is you actually have criminalized, not just opposed, but actually criminalized, made criminals of These forces that have an agenda which is manifestly antagonistic both to the U.S. and also to its central client states across the world or at least part of its kind of capitalist security archipelago. Right.

Speaker 1: You have the U S because people have talked about the fact that Israel is like peaceful to America as a laboratory of new, uh, weapon. But you are saying that is also has been laboratory of kind of logics of repression, laboratory of, uh, means of repression. And so, as you are saying that this, uh, uh, this, uh, use of sanctions that goes all the way to today. If you have seen the news today, Israelis are saying that we both want a retaliation, a military style, but also we want IRGC to be enlisted as a terrorist organization. So we want sanctions, sanctions and sanctions. So you're saying that this was first used and tested in Israel before America used this as a political tool?

Max Ajl: tool against other other organization am i correct to understand that yes these i mean not just economic sanctions which go back quite some period um including on iran itself but the sanctioning of political organizations this is pioneered through israel right and what you are doing is you're actually illegalizing politics. You're making this set of politics illegal and you're actually criminalizing internationalism. You cannot have an internationalist politic that is a politic that seeks to link people who wish to be in some form of relationship with one another on a world scale. You actually make that, you make the material support of people in the wealthier countries to people in the poorer countries, you make it a criminal act. And secondarily, you terrify people into any form of political association. So for example, when I was a Palestine activist in the United States, there were admittedly rather liberal diaspora activists who were terrified to even be associated with the image, with the imagery, with the iconography which is 100% legal, of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. They were scared to even show posters, to even show icons that emerged from that political formation. So what you have is a severing of the possibility of any form of political relationship through an instrument of repression and sowing fear amongst not just US activists, but also many of the European states have modeled their so-called anti-terror legislation. on the US legislation, right? And there's constant struggles in the EU states to echo fully the severity of the US political legislation. And of course, the economic sanctions are part and parcel of that. The economic sanctions are a form of economic asphyxiation and strangulation. The political And the political terror listing creates a form of ideological and political quarantine and embargo. Basically, they say that political force is a virus, and we are going to put it in a quarantine, and you better not touch it. And this is a very strong message, right? And so this is another thing that Israel has done that's very serviceable. to us power um and that is not part of the the discussion the very fact that it is not part of the discussion until recently is in fact a reflection of the strength of u.s power and one of the roles israel has played it's actually removed its own role in facilitating u.s repression from the intellectual and political agenda of people in the West and also beyond the West, right? This is an incredible service. And it's also something that's not at all discussed or even known about, right?

Speaker 1: But people would say, I mean, America didn't need them to teach them how to be oppressive. America has already done enough, 75 years of exercise, daily exercise on how to oppress people. But when you look at the actual practices of Israel from early 90s, trying to push Washington against Iran, talking about Iran's nuclear deal, talking about Saddam. So in a sense, they've been like... toying and tethering American politics towards more wars in the region. If you can talk about that, it would be very useful. Because I think they had a significant role in both the first Persian Gulf War and the second Gulf War, which led to the occupation of Iraq. And as they did it, immediately they complained that that's not good enough. We want to go to Iran. So removing Saddam without attacking Iran is not good enough. So explain... Because people would say, I mean, they were like part of the propaganda machine, but it was the deed and intent of Washington, not Tel Aviv. Explain what was the relation between Tel Aviv and Washington in creating the major wars and occupations in West Asia?

Max Ajl: Absolutely. So, you know... As I was discussing earlier, the US wants to eliminate any product that seeks to use the labor and resources of a country for the benefit of that country's own people. And Iran and Iraq have been major obstacles to that US project since the 1950s, as I think your viewers will well know. Iraq, when it broke out of the US orbit in 1958, uh became which is actually a major revolution if you go back and read the newspapers from 1958 this was the front page of tunisian newspapers for days and days and days and the student movements were enormously impressed by what had happened in 1958 with the iraqi revolution this was a huge inspiration to people in the region starting in 1958 right this was this national popular revolution that broke the neo-colonial grip on the country And they started discussing land reform, agrarian and sovereign industrialization, and eventually seized control by 1972 over the oil resources of Iraq and allowed it to be explored. And this is, of course, by the 1980s, the U.S. was arming both sides in the Iran-Iraq war, basically to encourage these countries to burn out their surpluses, to burn out their kind of latent developmental potential, that is the resources that could potentially be used for working class interests, they burned them up in a war with one another, right? This was to the great interest of the US to not allow these countries to use their oil capital, that is the money they could or did receive from their oil sales in order to benefit their people. Instead, they burnt it up in a huge and massively destructive war, right, that lasted eight years, that killed hundreds of thousands, huge numbers of people, right, that burnt up human capital, that is the potential of the country to develop itself, instead went to this kind of entropic, destructive warfare. right um and of course you know i talked about 1950 in iran and it's the same with uh the the iraq and there's the same with the iranian attempts to kind of assert uh national control of the oil resources led to the coup d'etat led to immediate sanctions during the 1979 revolution and so forth after the 1979 revolution in iran and so forth i mean before the 1990s the us was very consistent in saying we do not want a representative republican government within those countries that uses the resources including especially the human resources of those countries in order to deploy the capital of those countries in the service of a human development project that would improve the lives of the working class and allow them to build up their countryside so this is very consistent it didn't need israel to tell it to do this. In fact, this is a consistent aspect of U.S. policy. I mean, you know, there's the work of Irfan Abrahamian on the coup in Iran. There's the work of Brandon Wolf Hunnicutt on Iraq that shows very clearly the intense U.S. hostility to those projects and what they could have represented and did represent in a deformed form even until the 1980s and 1990s.

Speaker 1: So that's my question. And if it's possible, just let's go a bit like simpler for the general audience, because what we're discussing is what is the benefit of Israel to U.S. imperialism? And as Pax depicted, especially from 1967, when Israel... proved itself as the partner in crime for United States, as someone which can kill, destroy any project for nationalization of resources or building republic and democratic movements from below. Israel would be on the frontier to destroy them without America needing to dirty its hands. Absolutely. So we come all the way to 90s in which America suddenly gets an extra edge and extra... level of power, but becoming absolutely hegemonic in the absence of another superpower. And so from that time, this question of totalization of American imperialism. So any enclave staying outside needs to be either annihilated or co-opted into the American totalities, in which Saddam is the first one, then they come for Afghanistan, for Iraq, for occupation of Iraq, then The whole question about nuclear pressure starts with Iran, which is very interesting because who started the whole nuclear crisis? Israel. From 1993, Israelis were saying that Iran is two months away from the bomb. Until finally in 2003, they gave the documents to Mujahideen Khalq, or the Popular Front, or whatever you want, MKO. They gave it to them, and they pretended that that's the information they discovered. And again, Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon at the time, and any other government at the time, was like pushing and pushing and pushing that Iran is the main, is the biggest threat to global security and American hegemony. I understand that. But what I'm saying is, I mean, from 90s onward, almost the use of Israel should have decreased for American empire. That's my question. Is it correct to say that Israel became less important to America after 1990 or not?

Max Ajl: No, no. I mean, so first, you know, I was discussing how Israel basically lubricated the introduction of these so-called terrorists, right, which actually ideologically, institutionally, legally, politically facilitate the introduction of this very repressive political technology, we can say, that allowed for the isolation of all sorts of struggles against U.S. hegemony, right, in the Philippines, in Colombia, in Turkey, and so forth. right um second israel throughout the 1990s represented of course a major uh investment opportunity for u.s capital with very little so it was of course very useful for the u.s had no reason to oppose anything israel was doing in the 1990s other than people say oh the settlement project uh was a threat to the security or the stability of the region well Was it? I don't know. I mean, it seems that the US got very good outcomes in the region during the course of the settlement project, right? It didn't actually represent a threat. People represented it as a threat, but it wasn't actually, right? The US had the region basically under control throughout the 1990s. So this brings us, say, to the 2000s.

Speaker 1: By then, first of all, the US... Let me just ask before. That's exactly what I'm trying to understand because we're going to come to 2024. So... The fact that Israel, and I don't believe it was like the hard line, it was Israel broke the Oslo Accord. Was it in line with American interests or was it against American interests? Because what we see with like, I don't know, with the normal eyes is the fact that America wanted to have some form of peace treaty here and stabilize the situation. Whereas Israel as a Israel has its own agency and its own will as an ever-expanding colonial project and did not want to suffice itself to what it got in Oslo Accord and destroyed it. So I want to know your opinion.

Max Ajl: Sure. I mean, this was basically the settlement project was, you know, was a rational way for the israeli elite to deal with its own societal problems right it it's a bit too simple to say okay it's a kind of growing colonial project for sure it is right but what does it mean to be a growing colonial project it means that if you have poor people in your country you steal the land of the arabs and you give that land to the poor and lower middle class or even the middle class or even the upper middle class and you basically steal that real estate and you give it to your own population and you stabilize your domestic class structure right if you don't have to if you can steal it from this enemy formation, namely the Palestinians, then it makes dealing with your own social contradictions very easy. You also appeal to another constituency. You appeal to the religious right who you've been empowering, you know, since the 1960s, 1970s, really since the 1950s, but even more so since the 1960s, 1970s, you appeal to the religious right who has this messianic belief in the settlement project and is also happy to be able to get access to cheap real estate, right? You have both butter and also kind of an ideological salve for their own extremist ideologies. You kind of satiate the religious right in your own society. You also satiate, you give something for your armed forces to do, which means, you know, you've built up a society in which the generals and the whole military has an outsized influence on political affairs, right? Well, you give something to do and you justify the huge portion of the Israeli budget that is going to the military, to the IDF and the Associated Security Services, and also the military industrial plant, which the domestic Israeli military industrial plant, which benefits from that. So you have this huge constituency within Israel, which benefits from the settlement project, right? And the continued state of hostility towards the Arabs. Even if there's elements in the political, you know, the more enlightened political forces who are like, okay, we do need to arrive at a final status agreement with the Palestinians and so forth. But you have all these social forces, that is class forces, in Israeli society that are like, okay, well, yeah we hear that maybe but we benefit from this kind of settlement project we benefit from uh militarized occupation and so forth right not least in the very basic way that we benefit from stealing land which we can do because there's very little opposition to it and we as a society with the U.S. backing, not only are willing to pay the cost, but we find that the easiest social outcome, rather than kind of becoming some kind of stabilized Western-style so-called capitalist state, which has to deal with its contradictions internally, which has to deal with its tensions internally, by resolving them internally. It says, no, we are going to resolve it this way. And the U.S. is saying, okay, from our perspective, you're not really causing us that many problems. Go ahead.

Speaker 1: Deal with it. But they cause like a... more radical form of resistance to come to existence. They caused the kind of Palestinian authorities, which was disarmed and somehow castrated partner to United States, losing all its credit for Palestinian public and Palestinian masses. So in a sense, they endangered more political a more peaceful, stable, and stabilizing solution to the Palestinian problem. Well, if we're only dealing with the 1990s, I mean... 1993, 1994, after Oslo Accord, the fact that suddenly they started doubling the settlement and then, in a sense, because Israelis have... somehow destroyed any possibility and horizon for a smallest piece of land for Palestinians. So they destroyed the imaginary horizon, the horizon of even imagination of Palestinians. So they wanted to destroy it completely. And to some extent, US didn't care about it at all if it could get away with it. But when it led to weakening of US position in the region, Why would US come along? Why would not US stop Israel for that? What I'm trying to get here is the fact that do you think that US and Israel interests are completely aligned or there are some form of overlapping and there are some form of discrepancy and kind of divergences as well, which makes them have some rift and some opposition at some times. Because so far it seems that from 1965 you think Israel and America are 100% have overlapping interests. Is it how you think?

Max Ajl: No, no, I think they're mostly aligned, but I also don't think we can say that Israel internally is mostly aligned. I mean, there's protests against Netanyahu. There's huge upset within all layers of government, and including amongst the liberal class. They're saying Netanyahu carries the... Hello? We froze for a second. Can you hear me?

Speaker 1: Yeah, I can hear you well.

Max Ajl: Okay, but is the camera frozen?

Speaker 1: No, no, your camera is perfect. I mean, if you cannot see me, maybe it's because of your connection. I can disconnect and connect again.

Max Ajl: No, no, if you can see me, it's okay. My camera will recover. You know, so Israel, to say, you know, there's no 100% overlap of interest between Israel and America because there's no 100% overlap between of interest in a way between Israel and Israel, right? There's actually different interests within Israel. I mean, there was just a major op ed in Israel saying, we've lost this war. And that reflects a lot of dissension within Israeli society within the Israeli intellect, intelligentsia, and so forth, and defense intelligentsia over the handling of the war. So interests are never aligning 100%. Right? It's a mistake to see things that way, but they're aligning enough that no one wants to rock the boat particularly, and then people are willing to let it keep going.

Speaker 1: All right. But given a thing we have already talked for one hour, 57 minutes, let me just for the next half an hour, if you have time, change the direction of interview a bit and start with more like concrete contemporary problem. And then through that, you can take us back and forth. But please, I mean, if it's possible, just answer as plain as possible. So the reason I mean, I'm asking these questions about overlapping or not, as you've seen, I mean, in the title of our debate as well, is the question that whether today, Israel 2024, is it an asset or is it a liability for U.S. imperialism? And you know what better than me, people like Meir Scheimer, who believe that, yes, Israel was an asset, as you say, as many other people say, it was the biggest military base for the United States, the American Empire, but up to some degree and some time. And two things happened. One, West Asia lost its power. glamour, and if you can say, I mean, it's value for American empire, possibly because it became too expensive to be there. Six billion, according to Trump, six trillion, according to Trump, was lost in Iraq and two trillion in Afghanistan. Two very expensive wars happened. And so America lost uh thought it's more like a like a expensive thing to run than a place that we can we can go and plunder that's one thing second is like people believe that the discovery of shape of shale oil oil changed the whole logic of uh fossil resources And from 2009, 2010 onwards, America didn't need that place anymore. As Barack Obama says in that famous interview with Goldberg in Atlantic, he said, we are not part of the solution of the region, we are part of the problem, but let me just translate it, which means that the resources are not worth it anymore. We get hit by them and So from that moment onward, I think America, in my opinion, I mean, in some people's opinion, America didn't want to spend too much of its credit and its money for Israel to have this exceptional role in the region. And it wouldn't mind if Israel would manage to almost like a spoiled brat child to grow up and become more independent and become cheaper to run. as an appendix of America and as a kind of extra portion of American state. So if America could normalize Israel's relationship with other neighboring countries, say Saudi Arabia, especially United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, but other places like as they did with Egypt. So America could slowly leave the region, tilt to Asia, go and spend most of its energy towards China. and not being worried so much about this place. And Israel doesn't want that. Israel is like dragging America back into West Asia. As we've seen in the last 192 days, Biden says, we don't want a wider war. We don't want escalation in the region. We don't want to see a war with Iran. And Netanyahu says, it's not up to you, mate. You're going to see it. We will force you. We will drag you into a war. That's the image that people are portraying. And U.S. wants to go to Ukraine. I mean, especially Democrats are desperate to spend more in Ukraine, whereas Netanyahu is like dragging them back into West Asia. And that's like more like Mearsheimer and Walt theory that is because of the role of the lobby. So it's a contingent matter to America. It's like something which came out of that specific history of U.S.-Israel relationship, but it had life of its own. It was almost like an organ which became oversized. And now it's like endangering the life of the overall body. Whereas in your idea and also Ali Qadri's idea, it's not the case. And Israel is still essential to the interest of U.S. imperialism. So let's start from that. Looking back to the last 192 days, what price do you think America has paid for defending Israel in 2023 and 2024?

Max Ajl: How's the stock market doing?

Speaker 1: In what sense?

Max Ajl: Well, how's the stock market doing over the last six months? I mean, it's doing fine, right? You know, it's doing fine. So it's a very, it's a very broad brush indicator. But my point is that, you know, the stock market is one of the ways we can register the health of the perspectives of the US investor class who controls the empire, right? They're not particularly upset with this war. In fact, you know, there's elements, there's now some dissension occurring over the war. And there's, there there's different perspectives about how to continue to prosecute the war. Right. But overall, the war has not been harmful to the process of worldwide accumulation. I mean, people are generally okay with the war, not only. So that raises the question, first of all, why are people okay with the war, it's like, what's necessary to maintain the health of overall accumulation? What's necessary to maintain inequality? What's necessary to maintain capitalism? Right. These questions are I feel like these questions are very much bracketed. They're walled off. They're not entered into by people who are putting forth this hypothesis that somehow the war is damaging U.S. empire. Somehow the war is damaging U.S. capitalism. Well, what is the alternative to the war, first of all? Right. What is the alternative to the war? I mean, is the alternative Hamas pursuing a two state settlement with the U.S.? Is the alternative the U.S.? You know, what alternatives were there to war? I put it to you.

Speaker 1: Look, you're right, maybe not after the 7th of October, but nonetheless, I think if Israel had stopped halfway through November or December, it had already damaged Gaza to a large extent, but then it would not have damaged America's image so much that I think it will be detrimental to US imperialism's 75 years of investment on soft power. I mean, you know better than me, people like Panitch and Gindin who talk about the rule-based order and how it was important for American hegemony. And it seems that America is like, really, by supporting an open genocide has damaged and has made its own creation as rule-based order redundant. So tomorrow it cannot say that China is doing genocide in Uyghuristan, or Iran is damaging women. The mechanism and the machinery of American-based human rights was demolished because of what people saw in the last 193 days and its opposition to America's claim. I don't think Washington is very happy about that. I don't think the Biden administration is 100% happy about that. It seems, at least, to some extent, they are under pressure from Israel. And that's why, I mean, Israel seems to have gained too much power over Washington. And I'll just finish this one, because like Netanyahu cancelling meeting with America after America has only not vetoed the last resolution, it looks a bit different from how, for example, Israel was treated during Reagan or even Bush the father. So Washington ruled over Tel Aviv, whereas now for many people seems like Biden administration, while they need to be slightly more powerful because they don't need Israel as much as 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, but it seems to be even more docile towards Tel Aviv. And that's the image that we see. And your theory and Ali Qadir's is completely the opposite. So if you can explain this, why are you saying that 2024, still Israel is so essential to American interest?

Max Ajl: Of course. I mean, so one, what is the American interest in both the world as a whole and in particular in the Arab-Iranian region, right? If we want to say that Israel is harming the U.S. interest, we have to say, what is the U.S. interest, right? We can't discuss, if you're harming something, if you're doing something detrimental to an interest, we should know what the interest is. That's how we can kind of even conceptualize it. Maybe we can't measure it, but we can at least think about it in our heads, right? The U.S. interest is to concentrate wealth, right? Since 1991... The U.S. has just been leveling strategic obstacles to the accumulation of its wealth. And it's been going, and especially since 2001, it's been just going to war all over the world, right? It has been supporting Ukraine and turning Ukraine into a wasteland. It's poured tens of billions of weapons into Ukraine. into Taiwan to attempt to encircle China. It's poured a trillion dollars into yearly into its military budget. It's been leveling countries in West Asia, the Arab region, right? So it's actually been leveling countries and also through the sanctions regimes. It actually levels countries. I mean, it's tried to do it. It tried to do it in Iran. It kind of it didn't succeed very well. It induced depression. with huge losses in GDP per capita in Venezuela, for example, which is a major enemy. It's caused a huge economic crisis with massive poverty and hunger in Cuba. So the US is interested in kind of just leveling levels of development, that is the things that are available to regular human beings. It's been leveling that either through war or sanctions on a worldwide scale and encircling its strategic obstacles. That's right. China, China, China, China, and it still can afford to do that now. No, no, no. But so one, I have not seen a serious case. And it's it's for someone else to make the case that Israel is really an obstacle to that overall project. In the first case, I don't see it. But let me just let me let me get to let me get to your more important question, right? You say, Israel and the US could have stopped in mid, mid November, right? If they stopped in mid November, And I think it really, mid-November now, it poses a lot of the same problems. In mid-November, we don't know how much of the Hamas armed forces are still intact. But we could say in November, easily 80% of them or more were still intact. Those armed forces and the political will they represented was one of not allowing Israel to say that Palestinians could not have a future. A Palestinian future, you know, and of course for the liberation of Palestine, but we've already discussed, you know, a two-state settlement would be unimaginable from the Israeli perspective, right? For Israel to withdraw to the pre-'67 borders, would be unimaginable. There's no way Israel is going to survive the displacement and relocation of 600,000 people, right? This is the problem that Hamas represents. It represents an uncompromising and armed force defending Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian nationalist claims, whether they're for the full liberation of Palestine or even the minimalist claims of the so-called two-state settlement right this is the problem of hamas and it also represents a political option for a territory of people who are living in absolute poverty and has no future and it says okay your future is going to be achieved by force of arms this is the threat that hamas represented on october 6th and it still would have represented on november 18th if israel and the u.s had stopped the war the problem is that hamas is still representing that now. Take the most propagandistic Israeli claims, which we have great trouble believing that they've destroyed through warfare and injury of half of Hamas capacity in the Gaza Strip. I mean, these are the strongest claims I've seen, if we include both deaths and also incapacitation of casualties. I don't believe them. But suppose they're true. What you still have intact is 20,000 men who are going to quickly reconstitute themselves because there's a huge well of anger at Israel for what it did. And there is going to be both the logistical, the infrastructural, the arms-based, and the human capacity to repeat October 7th. except on a broader scale. That capacity still exists. And what is Israel going to do this time? Level Gaza? Okay, we already did that. So what is the deterrent, Israel? Israel doesn't have any deterrent anymore. That's why there's no easy exit from the war. That's why the war continues. But if Israel doesn't want, for obvious reasons that are very logical, Israel doesn't want a force that could actually adequately represent in any way, shape or form Palestinian nationalist ambitions. And because America says, Okay, we have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in Israel, Israel does all these things that we like Israel has bombing Syria, Israel is carrying out attacks on Iran, Israel is assassinating Iranian nuclear science, Israel selling repressive technology, even to forces we don't like like Lula in Brazil, let alone forces we do like like Modi in India. Israel is assisting the forces of imperialist and fascist and capitalist reaction on a world scale. We like Israel, right? Then if we like Israel, then the US is reasoning that we need to destroy any forces that don't like Israel, that are antagonistic to Israel, that actually imperil Israel. So this is the reason why the same thing, the same problematics that occurred, that were in place on October 6, would have also been in place if they stopped the war on November 18, and are still in place today. And this is why the Biden regime is willing to incinerate It's domestic political capital, right? Even probably is going to lose the election because of it, because it understands, okay, why, what happens if we let Israel lose? It doesn't know how to metabolize that in its own thought process, in its own conception of its own interest. It cannot. And this is, I haven't even discussed the fact that not just, you know, the issue has gone far beyond Palestine by now, right? Yemen is, Ansar Allah, as I'm sure all your viewers know and you know very well, they have an ideology that's in direct hostility not only to Israel but also to the United States. And they have socialists in state power. The left wing of Ansar Allah are socialists. And they are thinking seriously about economic development. And they are stating that they are not willing to negotiate their principles with Israel and the United States. And they are willing to impose their principles by force of arms on Israel and the United States. The situation is not fully under control. But also, Israel is... a component of the uncontrollability of the situation but it's not reducible to israel i mean this goes back to iraq that was a force a major force in the radicalization of ansarala right and of course no one i mean do we think iraq was also outside of u.s interests well it was a massive you know 2003 you start seeing massive inequality accelerating the u.s and a massive accumulation of wealth on the part of the US ruling class if you look from 2003 to 2025, right? And the growth of these kind of techno trillionaires and so forth amongst the US ruling class.

Speaker 1: this war was in the u.s interest so okay so okay let's let's let's just because a lot of material to unpack and i think if you want to like get something uh more like uh clear and tangible let me just kind of take you to a few of the questions first first theoretical and then we just come back to 2024 because i really want to know so is like biden based on what you say is pretending to be really unhappy about the situation by the administration, whereas some people think that there are actually discontent with the situation. I think they've lost a lot of their credit. But I go through it one by one. But before that, let me just take you through the theoretical apparatus that you have. Because you, from the very beginning, you depicted Israel as a settler colonial project, which... went through accumulation by usurpation of land. And when you were talking about Oslo Accord and after that, and the question of settlement, you were also talking about this, about the fact that they are like accumulating through taking Palestinian lands. That's my first problem with that. Because to me, Israel... is not earning, is not accumulating much wealth through planting Jaffa oranges and mandarin. There are a place in which, as you said, I mean, they are like being used as a testing ground for weaponry, they are being used for creating a regional order or disorder, which is beneficial for American imperialism, and they can create wars, but But it's also a place in which a lot of capital and global capital and capital belonging to like Zionist billionaires have come and have been pumped into it. So my first question, do you think like when you look at Israel's political economy, what's the most major element of its wealth? primitive accumulation by usurpation of land from Palestinians or the fact that Western billionaires, as you said from beginning, Jewish, British billionaires in 1940s and then later even French and then later Americans have pumped money into it. I mean, who is more important today? Sheldon Adelson or who's this guy? different kind of billionaires, or the fact that they are like using the land in order to like do stealing the land. Because that stealing the land seems to be a bit like 18th century model of accumulation. And you have brought that, you have like transposed that into mid 20th century to a country which is already part of existing advanced stage of capitalism in the West.

Max Ajl: Well, you know, first of all, I mean, when we talk about stealing land, we're not talking about agriculture, we're talking about real estate in the first place, right? And real estate is very valuable, right? Manhattan is not very big, but it's very valuable. I mean, the West Bank is not the equivalent of Manhattan, but the land value increases exponentially once you carry out a substantive real estate building. This is one thing. And there's millionaires in Manhattan who are invested in the settlement industry and the West Bank. You know, it's hard. The secondary thing is also that instead, you know, that you're able to give something, you're able to give the kind of subsidized housing to your own lower class. Right. So you stabilize your own capitalist development project. This is what Israel is doing through the settlement project. This is one of the major roles that land is playing. It's giving people a place to live at a subsidized price at the expense of the Palestinians. And it's based on the theft of land. As a percentage of GDP, I'm not sure that work has been done in terms of the settlement project. As a percentage of GDP, I mean, because it's unfolded into aggregate statistics. So you can't actually separate out. It's just considered part of Israel, right? So the construction industry, a lot of that is in the West Bank, a lot of it not. um and then you would have to separate it out by year i'm not sure that that work has been done and it would be very complicated to do because the all the settlement projects is just considered as part of the overall macro economics of so-called israel right so we don't we don't really know but i mean the israel you know so i got my answer so let me just not move on but the only thing is i want to like add a bit to your thing because so it's not only political economy it seems that the ideology

Speaker 1: matters here as well. If it wasn't the ideology of settlers and the ideology of hardline Zionists who want to leave their houses in America and go and live in settlements, this real estate economy wouldn't have existed or wouldn't be so lucrative. Am I right?

Max Ajl: Yeah, this is part of it. I mean, you know, this is how people express their interests under a social system that's founded on capitalism and also colonialism that is theft and exploitation, then people will express their interests in a certain way. So there's kind of this myth, this myth, the U S of like the cowboy frontier. And you have these aggressive racists from the United States who go and settle and do a cowboy frontier with guns in the Occupy Palestine right there. They're really carrying out a classical kind of American role play in a certain sense in occupied Palestine. And they're keeping the situation militarized also. Right. Which we were as we were discussing. The militarization of the West Bank, the militarization of the occupation is a fertile testing ground for the Israeli weapons industry, which not only serves domestic accumulation, but also serves these political goals of destroying all sorts of leftist forces historically and in the present on a world scale. I mean, and it's used for all sorts, all mechanisms of social repression. This extends, for that matter, to the domestic Zionist lobby. They're all invested in other right-wing causes. They're invested in reducing ballot access. They're invested in charter schools and privatization of education in the United States. I mean, Israel, the US, the people who fund Israel and who fund Islamophobia, that's one of their portfolios. of right-wing philanthropy, right? So they're investing wisely in a wide array of causes that further their interests. So we have to think of it together as a kind of project that all comes together rather than separating things out saying, is this the driver? Is this the driver? I think this can confuse us. It's a vehicle for a lot of people to get in and go in a direction that they like.

Speaker 1: Okay, perfect. Let's go to the second question I have regarding your theoretical approach and your methodology. You talked about worldwide accumulation. You talked about how the wars of the United States in the region helped its global accumulation and how the elite in the US benefited from that. So, and how, in that case, how basically Israel has a role, because as we know, I mean, it's leading this war machine, it's part of the war machine and it's toying it. So if tomorrow there's a war with Iran, America would intervene. And so, again, if the wars are accumulation by waste, if I have understood properly, so in a sense, Israel has a role and has to get this percentage for the services it has done. However, my understanding is, it seems like you have a, your depiction of American, this concept of accumulation that you use is a bit homogenous and doesn't have enough internal Look at like, for example, I mean, war on Iraq. War on Iraq is an example from a kind of orthodox Marxist position. You have gone there to plunder the resources of a third world country. Whereas in reality, the $6 trillion expenditure, which has gone to the pocket of certain countries, factions of American ruling class and the global capital class has gone from the taxpayers in America and later by 2008 by the financial crisis, possibly from the pockets of a lot of people across the world through changing the value of dollar. So it's not the classical colonial The story of going and plundering Iraq. You are plundering your own people as well. So some elements have benefited and some elements have not benefited. And we come all the way from the Iraq and Afghanistan war to today that it seems a part of the capitalist oligarchic class in America don't have that loyalty to the American system anymore. These techno billionaires that you say, they are willing to go tomorrow to somewhere else. They are not part of American system. So because one of our interesting point of debate is US still seems to think that America is hegemonic. You still think that America is a hegemon empire. But I think that these wars that happened in between like 2000 and onward and Israel had a role in it. made America lose its hegemonic position and it gave way to the multipolar order. So in my reading of the fact that America had a massive defeat in Iraq and possibly Iran contributed to that defeat, and axis of resistance contributed to that defeat, and Iran lost the big war in Afghanistan, and Taliban had a main role in that, it slowly exhausted US empire from within. And so it made it lose its hegemonic power. And Israel is responsible for dragging America to all these wars. So instead of being rewarded, Israel should be punished. from the point of view of the interests of American empire. So if you explain this thing, that this accumulation has not been accumulation for everyone and has not been accumulation for American empire, has been accumulation for certain factions of American empire, which seem not to be that loyal to the state and to the American system anymore. Do you agree with that? Yeah. I mean, you know, since the 1970s,

Max Ajl: Inequality has been widening in the United States while it's been an empire the whole time. Right. So, you know, 1945 to 1973, if we want to take, it was kind of a golden age for both the American empire and also the empire citizens in the sense that there was, you know, there was kind of a compromise, a compromise within the U.S. amongst its various classes such that imperialism went alongside widespread social redistribution. I could say this compromise was basically imposed by the existence of the Soviet Union. And people were very scared that the planners had some sort of fear, like Gabriel Kolko has written about this. There was some sort of fear that certain ideologies could eventually, in particular, take root in Western Europe and could eventually take root in the United States. Now, after 1973, this compromise kind of broke down and so what you saw is empire and with a declining interest or benefit from that empire for the part of the kind of middle classes with uh increasing work hours and a basically stagnating wage in real terms, right? So this use of empire as a transfer of wealth from taxpayer to the upper class started to become the normative mode of accumulation for the U.S. already in the 1970s, right? It's not 1990. And already by the 1970s, we definitely would not say Israel was dragging the U.S. into its many, many, many, many, many coup d'etat, hot wars, hidden wars throughout the world. In fact, Israel was actively assisting the U.S. wars, for example, in Central America and so forth, in the coup d'etats that I was listing. the coup d'etats and military fascists in power across the world, right? Israel was a major asset from that perspective. Now, when we talk about the wealth transfer, the cost of the war, I mean, this is how it's measured is... subject to dispute. But throughout this period, you see a massive widening of wealth inequality in the United States during this war. And I think the argument that Israel dragged the U.S. into war, for example, in Iraq or Afghanistan, I don't know if these arguments are credible or even have been elaborated in such a way that we would take them seriously. I think they're kind of asserted rather than argued, right? You know, all that's argued is that they're Zionists who saw the advantage to Israel of a U.S. war. But meanwhile, the U.S. has been and the West has practically been at war with Iraq since the 1958 revolution. Right. This is the argument I was trying to make about that. So, again, the causal sequence is not really argued and it's ahistorical. Be that as it may, you know, the accumulation process is one where the upper class in the U.S. has been getting wealthier and wealthier and wealthier. At the same time as people in the U.S., there's been widening wealth inequality in the U.S. more or less throughout the last decades. And this has been going alongside these wars that are not so much about resource grabs, but that are more about just leveling countries to the ground. So I think the real question is, why is the U.S. and Israel, why do they both have this kind of shared agenda of leveling countries to the ground? I think it's very concrete in the Palestinian case, and I explained it. They cannot allow Hamas to represent a challenge to Israel. israel and to the way israel is currently structured with its settlement project and so forth right they also cannot allow this working-class militia because that's what hamas is to inflict a defeat on the united states and israel like why would they want an army of slum dwellers armed by iran to inflict a military defeat on either israel or the united states like why would they want that right that would encourage anybody to say oh we can do the same thing if we're organized in an appropriate way and use the right means right so you've actually uh you would give a great boost i mean and it's not like some kind of pie in the sky hypothetical i mean it's the logical inference if you are people who oppose the united states agenda is oh If we have the right type of military, and any place on earth has a more favorable terrain than Gaza, if we have the right military apparatus and the right willingness, we can defeat the U.S., right? I mean, that was the lesson of Vietnam that was taken up in a certain way by Hezbollah and Iran. Ansar Allah, and Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, and Jabhat al-Shabaab, and the Popular Front in the current period, right? So I think these are important things that are totally not part of our collective discussion, right? Which is that you have working class militia, who are not communists by any means, who have fought a NATO-armed army to a standstill. Where does the U.S. accept that? The U.S. doesn't accept Russia, fighting a NATO armed army to a standstill, right? And it had quite a lot of alliances in place with Russia throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, right? So why would it accept this militia with whom it has a great deal of antagonism to defeat it, right? This is the kind of counterfactual that I always want to think is never posed in these discussions of these wars and their costs for the US. I cannot hear you.

Speaker 1: Sorry about that. But that's when I have my question, because it seems that America did accept the fact that it was defeated by barefoot Taliban in Afghanistan and left. And it accepted that it was defeated by Iraqi insurgency and left in 2010. And so it almost didn't try to escalate the the confrontation with barefoot Yemeni and Sadrullah. And so in a sense, like, it seems, I mean, am I right in understanding that there's a discrepancy of responses between America and Israel? Israel, as you say, still wants to level to ground any possibility of Hamas and wants to show the maximum possible response despite all the bloodshed and all the kind of ugly things it creates and doesn't care about the uh about the the optics whereas america seems to be avoiding escalation in the region is it tactical in your opinion or is it because as people believe america is a declining empire i mean i i think first of all i mean america was never really uh you know america still has bases in um

Max Ajl: Iraq and in Syria, first of all. So it didn't withdraw, right? I mean, it still has bases. Iraqi oil proceeds are still parked in a bank in New York. I think there was just a disclosure that ISIS actually was in direct communication with the turkish government and had uh direct lines of communication with the turkish government i think this news just came out in the last few days or maybe even today turkey is a major nato ally right so it's clear that the us knew what ISIS was doing. And we saw this in the DIA memo from 2012, that the US had no problem with the growth of ISIS and so forth. So I don't think the US accepted any form of withdrawal from Iraq. It's been interested in keeping Iraq fundamentally destabilized and dysfunctional and shattered. and with widespread warfare sweeping over the territory constantly since 1980, really, right?

Speaker 1: Or we can go back... Abundant is claimed to a state building, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. And in Iraq, it accepted the fact that it has to share with other forces, including forces close to Iran, forces close to Hashishabi. And so from... Sure, but the U.S. is not... Like 2004, it became like a... Still, it's very dominant. I mean, I've been to Iraq a couple of times. I mean, it still is like a... You can see the trace of American occupation within the Iraqi poverty structure, but In a sense, I mean, even like in the last 190 days, there were so many rocket attacks from these militia groups, and America almost like bit its lips and showed patience and didn't respond until its personnel got killed in Jordan.

Max Ajl: The U.S. is not all powerful, though. This is the other thing.

Speaker 1: That's what I'm trying to get.

Max Ajl: That's it. But I think there's a difference between the U.S. not being all powerful and the U.S. You know, the U.S. has to deal Tactically and strategically, it deals with them in a variety of ways. It does a certain withdrawal. Sometimes it accepts a temporary power sharing arrangement. Sometimes it accepts compromises. Sometimes it moves its forces to a different arena of combat after having burnt up the productive infrastructure, which is a very common theme that I want to keep coming back to. is that a very common theme in all of these theaters of engagement is that the U.S. is burning up the productive infrastructure and then accepting a power-sharing arrangement, which tells you something about capitalism under the U.S. stewardship, right? And this is the theory of Ali Qadri.

Speaker 1: Under the latest stage of U.S. imperialism, basically.

Max Ajl: Under post-Soviet imperialism and capitalism, where there's no force... that can make the U.S. behave because there isn't an adequate counter-systemic option. So the U.S. is basically not able to put in place stable political arrangements, but it is able to level developments to the ground. If you look at GDP per capita in Yemen or Syria or Palestine, it actually craters from in Gaza and I mean, you know, craters during as a result of these conflicts, the US is, you know, people have this idea that capitalism is entrepreneurs and people investing and building up things and so forth, right? The US, the US is the capitalist society par excellence. And what it does is it burns up all of these things that human beings have built, right? If it does it, and it does it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, we should assume that it knows what it's doing, and that it's doing what it means to do, which means it finds it in its interest to do so, which means that we then should try and understand what is it? How? Why does it find it in its interest to do so?

Speaker 1: Okay, So let me just stop you here because we wanted, I mean, that was like a warm-up for the main questions, and we didn't get to the main question. I want to ask you, what's your opinion about the role of Iran and access of resistance in the region and its confrontation with this destructive machine, as you call it, because if U.S.'s main modus operandi in post-Soviet time is to burn, and then accept some form of power sharing. Which I still have a problem with that because a hegemon power should not do that. I mean a hegemon power can be more confident. That seems to be more like a power which is not confident enough about building structures and doing nation building or something. But let's just leave it aside. Let's leave it aside. In your opinion, what's the role of Iran in the region's order in confrontation with the U.S. plan? Has Iran managed to replace what Nasserism was back in the 60s in order to bring some form of independent logic forward? for nationalization of resources and pushing away the imperialism from the region or not. And also, because as we see now, I mean, it's like you said something about Israel being... 10% of its GDP being based on its military industry. So what we saw on 14th of April was absolute humiliation of Israel's military capacity. I mean, if I was a client, I wouldn't order my air defense system to Israel anymore because I saw them, they were not that effective. If they were effective, they didn't need the help of US, France, UK, Jordan, and Saudi, and still half of Iranian ballistic missiles. only ballistic missiles, because the rest were supposed to be decoy. They were supposed to be burned by, to distract the Iron Dome and Davis the Slinger. But then those who were supposed to hit, half of them hit. So, and that's an embarrassment for Israel, but also for America's technology and a country, a third world country, a third world regime, right? 46 years old, 45 years old regime, who's spent 44 years of his life under sanction, and the last 10 years under massive sanction, has managed with native indigenous technology to outsmart them. And that's like, that's not good. So what... Tell me the story from the point of view of access and resistance. And would America accept the fact that the region, accept the fact that this force is becoming so powerful in the region, or not? It feels like it has to level it off and level it to the ground.

Max Ajl: You know, the threat of... The axis is the threat of political forces that have, first of all, that have an agenda antagonistic to the U.S. That's first of all. But namely that they are opposed to Israel, that they are defending political sovereignty in Lebanon, that they are seeking to establish political sovereignty in Palestine, that they are defending political sovereignty along with certain forms of Republican ideology. in Iran, in Yemen, that they are not only defending sovereignty, but are defending a kind of national development project with all its distortions and mutations in Iran, right? Iran is capable of producing its own technology. It has its own research and development programs. It is capable now of very advanced replacement for technologies that it's been barred from the U.S. I believe one of the most recent technological breakthroughs is rotors, which allows it to break through the kind of stranglehold or the bottleneck about replacement of parts for airplanes and so forth. This type of technology is one, very hard to produce endogenously, and two, technology is one of the major levers the US uses to control the world system, including especially on the military plane. The more you can develop your own independent technological systems, including the capacity to innovate, the capacity to copy, replicate, reverse engineer, the more, and this is the lesson, even a fortiori of the Soviet Union and China, the more you represent a threat to a U.S. power who's, as I just said, one of their major levers of control. It's a monopoly of technology through a concentration of research and development efforts. So this is one of the major things that Iran is producing it's also basically managed to break through with the aid of china especially it's managed to break through the sanctions blockade, right? Iran in the last two years or last year, its GDP is increasing, not decreasing, right? So it actually managed to break through the kind of shrinking effect, the deflationary effect of sanctions and say, okay, in spite of your sanctions, which are meant to destroy our country, to destroy our industry and our agriculture and our infrastructure, We're actually able to keep growing because we have a look east policy, and we're able to reorient our trade routes actually along the traditional line, which were always east, not west, right? The US project, European projects, a very new little clip on the historical map. So this is the thing. I mean, and what they're able to, now I'm quoting from a doctoral dissertation I read, is that what Iran then offers based on its own endogenous research and development capacities, is the possibility of weapons for the poor, right? It shares blueprints for free. It shares engineering specifications. It shares training, right? It shares its own capacity to defend its own national political sovereignty and extends that protective shell out of its own interests, which is the only reason anyone does anything out of their own interests as they understand them. It extends it, right, to Lebanon. to Yemen to some extent, and to some kind of extent to Iraq, which is still a contested ground, of course, and of course to Palestine, right? And to Russia. And Russia. So without the training, without the weapons, of course Palestinians would still be fighting, but they wouldn't be fighting as effectively, right? So Iran represents... material, a concrete rather, force that's underpinning these projects of sovereignty now, or fighting, these forces fighting for the defense or the acquisition of sovereignty. And sovereignty is kind of, that's the battleground chosen by the U.S. This isn't the battleground chosen by these forces. I mean, these forces used to fight for national liberation, right? You had the PFLP, which was fighting for national liberation, which was, you know, looking into the examples of North Korea, that was looking into the examples of DOFAR, that was interested in the PDRY and so forth, right? You had the Lebanese national movement in Lebanon, right? You had forces that were fighting for filling the shell, either that were agitating as in Lebanon to fill the shell of state sovereignty with social substance, right? That is projects that would serve the people. or in the case of Palestine, that were interested in fighting for sovereignty as part of a more expansive social project. Well, those forces don't exist anymore, in part because the US and Israel helped destroy them. Now the battleground, that is being contended is saying, do states have sovereignty or not? What is sovereignty? Sovereignty is, say, you have a planning apparatus like Iran does. You have universities like Iran does. You have the capacity to direct investment to industrial development. like Iran does. You have the capacity for rural extension, like Iran does. You have the capacity for rural healthcare clinics, like Iran does. And I'm talking about the lights, of course. They're shadows of Iran. We don't need to detain us right now. But that's what sovereignty means. It isn't just a flag over a statehouse. It's the way to decide how things occur in your country. And that is what the U.S. seeks to deprive deprive its antagonists of in the Arab region. So that becomes a battleground chosen by the U.S. And if someone is like, this is the battleground you're fighting on, well, you have to fight them on that battleground if you're stronger than them, unless you want to cede it to them. Do you want to cede state sovereignty to the U.S.? Then you're under a military occupation, right? Then their troops are on your territory. That's what happens if you cede sovereignty. And that's what happens also, you know, people are like, well, uh hezbollah is is uh not a not a marxist force well of course no it's a national sovereignty force in the arab region what's the alternative is that israel could be occupying you right Again, you have to go to the hypothetical to say, what is the alternative? And in all of these questions you're asking me, it's like, what is the alternative? What is the alternative outcome? What is the alternative if Israel was allegedly not involved in steering US foreign policy and so forth? These questions are never really posed in the debate. So I think we lose the opportunity to illuminate what's going on and why the US is doing what it's doing.

Speaker 1: Okay, perfect. So let me just say something about like the role of, because in your opinion, I mean, it's interesting because from one side, I mean, the debate inside Iran is absolutely the opposite. I mean, it's like the debate is engineered by Americans and possibly by Pentagon and by State Department. But the debate is... Iran, for gaining this sovereignty, is losing its horizon for development. So Iran de-developed itself, got destroyed its possibility of development because it wanted to stay sovereign, independent, or rogue, as they say. Rogue in terms of the American global order. And that's why the image is the image of like pre-revolutionary developed country, which is a big lie because, I mean, it's a joke. I mean, they show a picture of a palace and they show a picture of North Iran, which was like limited to 1% of the population in which like kind of Western style people are like in very nice clothes next to the cars and a swimming pool. And they say that was Iran and look at that now. So, so the question of development and, and sovereignty. So, Let me explain. Did Iran, for you as a development expert, did Iran have a chance of development, sovereign or non-sovereign development? Say even South Korea-style development, because at this stage, most of Iranian middle class don't care about sovereignty. But did Iran have any chance of American dependent development if revolution hadn't happened in that region?

Max Ajl: No. I mean, with all the oil Iran has, with the capacity, if it was allowed to determine its own direction, of creating such a strong and big middle class, with so much oil revenue that could be redirected from U.S. weapons to social welfare, the U.S. was never going to let Iran have a prosperous national development project. Say South Korea, why was South Korea allowed some kind of national development project? Because communist China had just had a revolution. And North Korea was on the border and had its own national development project with amazing successes in industrialization, agrarian development, and so forth, until the disasters of the 1990s. And so that's why South Korea was allowed to develop, right? It was part of a containment. It was like an iron curtain around China. That's why South Korea was allowed to develop. So who's allowed to develop in the Arab-Iranian region, right? Saudi Arabia? I mean, Saudi Arabia has huge poverty bouts, right? It's a vicious dictatorship. And huge portions of its oil monies are routed to the U.S. through treasury purchases and through arms purchases and so forth. And, you know, thousands and tens of thousands probably of poor Saudis are dying, whether or not mercenaries dying, but Saudis are dying in this war against Yemen. This is the kind of development, not even that Iran can hold on to. Iran is a much more significant population center than Saudi Arabia. But the development project you see is that you become a mercenary for the United States and have to send huge portions of your oil budget to buy Lockheed Martin and fighters that never get off the ground or that you pay US pilots. I mean, this is not a development project. This is a dependency project. Turkey? Turkey has a very different history, right? I mean, one thing is that Turkey doesn't have this side of oil revenues, right? It's the flow of oil and the price of oil has to be controlled. So when we talk about Iraq to take the other major Arab population center with major pools of oil, the war against Iraq was not about stealing Iraqi oil ever, starting from 1958, even earlier. It was about keeping Iraqi oil off the markets. Right. So oil is a commodity whose price has to be engineered by worldwide political control over the production of oil, which is part of what makes Iran so significant. Right. Iranian oil was allowed, historically allowed to come onto the market, although with the sanctions regime, you know there was a great concern with keeping basically they were like we're going to keep iranian oil off the market and we're going to bring on shale and we're going to allow saudi arabia to ramp up capacity right this question of oil which is also linked with petrodollars which is also linked with the pricing of oil and dollars this doesn't obtain in the case of turkey which also carries out you know has a huge internal internal colonized population of kurdish people who are living in destitute poverty and who are the object of vicious counter-terror on the one hand, and has a massive portion of its population that's actually excluded from the development project, right? That people are dying of... of vast environmental toxins and so forth. But yes, Turkey is a different option, but I think largely because it's NATO-based on the one hand, and on the other hand, it doesn't have oil.

Speaker 1: So it seems that you somehow agree with the resource cares, the theory of resource cares, at least for the region. I mean, as long as you're not a sovereign country, And you don't have capacity to defend yourself in a military way. Having resources, it cares. And that seems to be what comes out of your theory as well. Am I right to understand that?

Max Ajl: Yeah, I think the resources have been accursed, but also not having resources is a curse. Palestinians don't have the resources, and they've been rather cursed. You know, the situation in Tunisia is absolutely... Well, they have the land, but, you know, you always have some form of resource. But, you know, the resource curse is classically about oil. I mean, Tunisia has no oil at the level, you know, development indicators are through the floor with, you know, the middle class has been absolutely destroyed. So the curse is America. It's not oil.

Speaker 1: That's a good line. But let me just take you back to Iran, because some people believe that, I mean, what you talk about Iran is as liberating the region from imperialist forces is not true. And Iran is just pursuing its own geopolitical interests. And some even call Iran a sub-imperialist force in the region by referring to Syrian war and its intervention in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon and Iraq. What do you say about this thesis? Is Iran becoming a regional sub-imperialistic force, or is it a liberatory force helping the region to get rid of both America and its little colonizing force called Israel?

Max Ajl: You know, imperialism means that you're in a position of subjugation another nation state and making kind of the workers there basically work for the interests of your people and especially your own capitalists and that you basically import that the labor that occurs there accrues to the benefit of your own national economy, right? So this is what's called And it can be empirically measured. It's called value transfers, right? Which basically means that when you look at the trade flows, that the kind of number of labor hours embodied in the commodities that are traded over the borders, that this kind of tally is to the benefit of the imperializing country, right? Also, you know, it does not just trade, but also investments and so forth. Iran barely trades with Yemen, barely trades with Palestine, doesn't trade that much with Lebanon, and its trade with Lebanon is far below what it expands on economic and military assistance to Hezbollah. It trades very significantly with Iraq, but the Iraqi productive structure has been completely leveled by 30 years of sanctions and warfare. So the idea that Iran would then be in an imperial position by trading with its neighbor is very ludicrous in my analysis. So is Iran engaged in these countries in order to facilitate trade? the dominance of its own national economy, its own national social formation to be technical, over these neighboring social formations? In fact, no, like no one even really argues that except for the people putting forward this kind of, you know, very heterodox and kind of opaque and not really very well known thesis of sub imperialism, right? No one really argues that there's like this kind of motive of dominating the society and economy. The U.S. doesn't even really argue that. The U.S. is like it's supporting terrorism there. That's the U.S. line, right? That's the Israeli line.

Speaker 1: The lefties, the pro-imperialist lefties who were very effective during the Syrian war, but also they are effective against Iran. They try to manipulate this language and try to reverse engineer it. That's why State Department doesn't say directly because they don't use the word of, they don't use the language of imperialism or anti-imperialism, but these people who get aired in Washington-based and London-based TVs and media sponsored by American government, they use this and they try to depict Iran both for the Arab public in the region, but also for different ethnic groups population inside Iran, like Kurdish or Azeri or Arab populations inside Iran, they use Iranian imperialism, Fars imperialism, and these are the words and terminology which is being used increasingly.

Max Ajl: Right, right. So if we're dealing with the question of Iran outside of its borders, it's incredibly well established in almost every piece of social science literature outside of this kind of niche corner of regime change leftists that Iran is engaged in a policy of supporting these groups basically either as the right wing says to spread terror, as the realists say, because these proxies are how Iran sees its own defense interests in terms of arming proxies, and as Iran sees it as kind of a forward deterrent so that the war doesn't come to Tehran. So, in fact, the words change, but the core concept that it's a military endeavor explicitly designed to kind of ward off, you know, that is about the defense of Iran or it's the offense of Iran, but it's a military endeavor. It's occurring on the military plane. This is a shared endeavor. an overlap of analysis across all the normative ways of assessing what Iran is doing. And then you have these kind of niche regime changers, but they don't actually, they use Marxist categories, but they don't actually fill Marxist categories with Marxist analysis. They don't say, oh, here's how Iran is exploiting Lebanon. Here's how Iran is exploiting Syria. They don't show it. So they're just, you know, talking babble in order to fill the airwaves and actually to sow confusion amongst well-meaning people who don't fully understand the dynamics of Iranian action and also maybe looking for a more satisfying account of imperialism and on a world scale of U.S. imperialism and aren't familiar with these arguments of like Dr. Ali al-Qadri showing how the battlefield chosen by imperialism is really about state sovereigns. in the current moment which is a tragedy but it's the tragedy we're dealing with right now you know in terms of the the internal you know iran is a capitalist state and capitalism is always um uneven and it's usually um even within consolidated states, there's people with specific histories, in other words, ethnicities, who are included less or more or poorer under any capitalist regime in the entire world, right? There's very few, if any, capitalist countries that are fully homogenous in terms of the social groups. You know, you call ethnicities or nationalities. I'm not sure there's there's any um and under capitalism those inequalities manifest as different levels of economic development if you want to decide that i mean you know the internal colonialism thesis as it was um developed for example to try to apply to the us black population this was um you know did not it was kind of refuted empirically and conceptually right it wasn't um It wasn't well substantiated, actually. I don't think the internal colonialism thesis has a particular validity in most states in the world system, although there are these contradictions within consolidated capitalist nation states that... manifest in terms of ethnic inequalities and that need to be dealt with and also might manifest in cultural exclusion and claims to elicit claims of legitimate claims of cultural self-determination for national minorities. Those, I think, are legitimate claims that need to be dealt with and cannot be excluded.

Speaker 1: But cannot be translated in the language of colonialism. That's very interesting. So even the black population, which were historically part of the primitive accumulation in American history, and they were segregated and they were kept in different places, they were not... enough to legitimize the theory of internal colonization in America, let alone the question of Kurdish population in Iran, which had been part of the Iranian state since at least 1500, beginning of Safavid dynasty, seamlessly and without any time of interruption. So that's interesting. But especially, I mean, talking about how Israel does Israel is very, and I will have a program about that soon, I will go through how Israel has been promoting language of separatism in Iran and has been funding, promoting, helping and arming the separatist group in Iran. It's more than CIA, it's Tel Aviv now and Mossad who are trying to like create basically a battleground on the ethnic groups uh, chasms and ethnic, ethnic lines, but let's just move, move away from this. So that was a very, very, very useful answer that you gave me. But, uh, let me just, because we are getting to the end of the thing. You took us from 1945 and the fact that post second world war, all these attempts for development through Nazism. And I will add through Nazism, forms of Arab socialism, like Ba'ath Party in Iraq and in Syria, they were all either demolished completely to the ground or hampered by US imperialism, and Israel had a role in them. Perfect, yeah? And then, now at least in the last 40 years, it seems there is another force which has managed to, if not fully push American imperialism out of the region, but hamper its project of totalizing its power in the region. I think Hezbollah is the reason why Beirut is not part of Israel now. I think Hamas is the reason that why Gaza is not part of Israel now. And so West Bank, because if Hamas didn't exist, I think West Bank has already been annexed and settlement would have been finished. So the little compromise that Israel made towards West Bank and towards a Palestinian authority was out of the fear of Hamas, not the other way around. And I think Iran, to my opinion, without having any nationalistic favoritism towards Iran. But I think Iran managed to change America's plan of stationing itself in the region and continuing its wars of occupation. I mean, as you know better than me, from Wesley Clark, they were not supposed to only go to Iraq and Afghanistan. They were supposed to go to seven countries ending with Iran. And the fact that that didn't happen was Iran, despite all its internal contradictions and all internal infighting between its different factions of pro-Western or anti-Western forces, nonetheless, it continued with a lot of difficulty. It continued improving and creating its indigenous military and arm and defense industry and stood towards America. So my question is, it seems that the force which is leading the anti-imperialist struggle at the moment are Islamists. So neither I nor you are Islamists. What is your relationship as a lefty? to this force? Are you going to reckon? Because I think that seems to be the crux of matter, because especially the left and the secular left cannot, it's unpalatable for them to accept that we got defeated, Nasser got defeated, Marxist organization got defeated, George Habash got defeated, all of them got defeated. And this is the only one, the foremost frontier of struggle against imperialism in Israel are Islamists. And that question of taste, that question of history, that question of the cultural differences is the reason that they even deny objective reality on the ground. So if I want to ask, what's your position on the resilience of Islamism as a foremost anti-colonial political force in the region?

Max Ajl: You know, I think that... I mean, Islamism is well known, but I think is, of course, resisted to my understanding on the Iranian left. was the dominant ideology in the 78-79 revolution, which to my knowledge, following the social science on it, was not hijacked, but was actually, Islamism was the dominant ideology amongst the people who participated in its various, in its very different colors, including various forms of liberation theology. dominated amongst the cadre and the popular people who participated in that uprising. They then proceeded with a lot of oppression and persecution of leftists, to be sure, crystallized that ideology, which included liberation theology, dependency theory, kind of the afterlives of republicanism and so forth, and Arab nationalism, forms of radical republicanism and so forth. Very complicated, heterogeneous assemblage of components crystallized themselves in state power and carried out a huge variety of economic and social reforms and nationalizations. institutionalizations of the welfare state under the pressure of war and mass mobilization and so forth, right? Again, this is, I think, very well known to all the people listening. This occurred at the dusk of the Soviet Union, which then delegitimated communism as an oppositional ideology on a world scale. While what was left standing in the Arab-Iranian region was Iran, which was also, you know, not just popular there. It also was able to both materially and find ideological resonance amongst Palestinians in Lebanon, also in Tunisia. Nahda was very much influenced by the Iranian revolution and so forth. So it's natural that people would gravitate to strength rather than weakness. This is normal. And if Islam is embedded in state institutions that are offering some type of alternative with all of its lights and shadows, then people are going to gravitate to that instead of gravitating to what is widely perceived as a failed and shattered project, namely communism. I mean, I think Arab nationalism has a much more complicated legacy in the sense that communism is much more discredited than Arab nationalism, I think, amongst the Arab populations, right? at the current moment, not the youth, but, you know, amongst the majority, right? So anyway, the point is that staying power, I think the staying power is a reflection of the endurance of a functional state structure with a functional planning system and so forth, with all of its problems we know about, and its capacity to offer material support to the armed militia that are in opposition to Israel and also the United States. I mean, it's natural that people who dislike the US and who dislike Israel and who also are looking for an alternative to the way that those two states wish to structure the region would gravitate to Islam. For me, of course, you know, I'm not a religious person. And there's, I won't say I disagree with Islamic cultural values because there is not one Islamic cultural value. There's many Islams. But I don't practice Islam. And I think, you know, I think leftists need to accept that many people do. And if leftists want to shift, want to make their cultural values universal, which is a valid project. It's valid to want to make your cultural values universal. I don't think one should lie about that. I think one can tell the truth about it. Then one should think about, one, what are the sources of attraction ultimately for a different set of cultural values and especially the kind of economic, political, and even sovereignty and military things that helped make those cultural values appealing. But also, I think people should look, for example, at Cuba, where very radical political and social values, namely like a Marxist-Leninist ideology, was very widespread alongside more conservative cultural forums. And it took the communists in Cuba a very long time, including Castro himself, right? Who, when he was younger, was homophobic, for example. um and uh to shift in more accepting and pluralistic and egalitarian and uh we could say open-minded or progressive or what have you um from the perspective of contemporary progressives at least you know it took a while to shift the cuban population to shift the state policies in a different direction and they took their time doing it they didn't lead with that for example so if you want to make your cultural values universal You better be offering some other things, too, rather than making that your main battleground. And you should also accept that other people see things differently. And unless you want to go to war with them, you better be patient if you're trying to convince them that your values are superior, frankly.

Speaker 1: That seems to be the main battle inside Iran and in many, I mean, partially in Lebanon. And even like in Gaza, they were trying to pump this to accelerate the cultural contradictions and cultural differences. Because in a sense, the modernizing forces, instead of understanding the importance of national sovereignty and economic sovereignty, they diverted all their political energy into cultural battles. And I think in Iran as well. So the cultural battles, the cultural difference with Islamists somehow has sucked up all the political energy of progressive forces in the last 30 years. So the debate is not about neoliberalization and stopping the neoliberalization of economy, or it's not about how to work with a more egalitarian forces within Islamists to stop the neoliberalism but it's creating more and more contradiction and more and more opposition with the state because of cultural problem and then even aligning yourself with imperialism because they are the ones who are helping The culturally, you call it progressive or westernizing forces. So in a sense, I think that's how part of the left ends up being in the side of Washington against the government in Tehran. as part of the youth in Lebanon. But Hezbollah is culturally very open-minded, so that problem didn't happen in Lebanon. But in Gaza, they were like, every now and then, some talks about how part of the youth could be critical of Hamas, and for them the question of national liberation becomes secondary. Not now, I'm sure in the last 193 days that hasn't been the problem, but So I think that's the main question, how between different concepts and values, national sovereignty, the question of progress, modernization, et cetera, how I think someone like you prioritize national sovereignty and the question of anti-imperialism to other aspects. Am I right to understand that? So for you, I mean, it's impossible to be an egalitarian lefty with aspiration towards culturally modern or progressive values while you're living in a regional order dictated by America and Israel.

Max Ajl: Sure. And while you're living in a war zone or while you're living under military occupation. Not to mention that the most extreme reactionary, culturally reactionary forces in the region are propped up by Israel and the United States. You need the space to develop, to decide what your own affairs will look like in order to shape your own affairs. You need that space. You need that political space. You need the freedom from the U.S. and from Israel in order to determine what your society and what your future of your society looks like and to struggle about it. It doesn't mean that struggle is not important, but the idea that that can be carried out under the U.S.-Israeli overlordship, I think, is unrealistic.

Speaker 1: But aren't you worried that you inadvertently apologize for misogynistic, as you say, homophobic, and also neoliberal forces within those societies and within those states?

Max Ajl: no i mean i think this i think the struggle for example to include you know i think there can be a struggle in iran for example there should be a struggle against more pro-capitalist forces and forces who think the market is the way to resolve to distribute um goods and who think that the state should not be in charge of economic decision making. I think those ideas need to be struggled against in the context of stating that Iran should not surrender its fate to the United States. and Israel and should not abandon the Palestinians and Lebanese to their fate, right? I think as some of these people are very fond of saying, you can walk and chew gum at the same time. In other words, people inside Iran could struggle for their, your own future and what that looks like alongside not foregoing these other aspects of Iranian politics, which I consider positive. Right. So it's not about surrendering one or being apologetic for one. It's quite the opposite. The more people believe in the Iranian state project, the less susceptible they will be to imperialism using something like women's rights or queer rights or economic discontent as a weapon. that would be used not only against the Iranian state, but would actually ultimately be used as a weapon against the Iranian popular classes themselves.

Speaker 1: I think that's a very good note to end up on that. It's about two hours and 20 minutes. And I know that you've been in a conference today, but you're already tired. And I think I exhausted you even more. But that was a wonderful conversation. And I hope and I believe that's the beginning of our conversation. I think someone... like you, can be very, very vital to the debate inside Iran, the debate which unfortunately got so derailed and so corrupted and so perverted by forces who were somehow consciously or unconsciously aligned with imperialist interests, whether they were coming from universities and the academic system as the appendix of the imperialism on not knowing how the research budget and the research funding are like shifting them to here and there, or more openly because of the repression inside the country, leaving the country and allowing the resentment to push them towards working directly with American institutions or American affiliated institutions. So in a sense, especially, it's very, very sad that those forces coming from socialist background, from liberation theology background, from Marxist background in 70s and 80s, many of them got neutralized, but many of them became the frontier of the American society soft power army or Velvet Revolution builders or, I don't know, working for this like media, and then slowly and slowly change the language inside Iran. That combined with the pain and the exhaustion of sanctions in the last few years has produced a toxic environment inside the middle class in Iran, which is very sad. But, however, I don't think Iran is only that. And there are other masses that they don't get recognized and seen outside Iran. As we saw last week for the Al-Quds Day, millions of Iranians went to streets. Yes, their face and their style and their fashion is not... very kind of popular by the Western values, but I think they are the reason that still the state is there. And so I think there's another Iran, which among them, there are many forces which are, which have, anti-neoliberal sentiments we've been working with them in the last couple of years and I think even the question of neoliberalism is very open within these Islamists or like Islamic sympathetic people sympathetic to Islamism and so I invite everyone to work with them to have dialogue with them and to having an open conversation with them rather than demonizing them and turning them into others. Because a force which can be on the frontier, on the front line of resistance and a struggle against imperialism is a force that to be reckoned and to have a form of recognition. And I think I say to them as well to recognize anti-imperialist, non-Islamic, non-Islamist forces like you or me. And I hope that this moment of mutual recognition has come historically. And I think what's happening in Palestine has made this moment even more essential and necessary. If there's anything you want to add, the platform is yours. Otherwise, I hope to see you soon in the next conversation.

Max Ajl: No, just thank you so much for having me on. And thank you to the watchers and listeners for listening to such a long discussion.

Speaker 1: and I invite everyone to go and read Max Isle's recently published article called Palestine's Great Flood. The first part was published recently, and the second part is coming. It's published in Agrarian South Journal of Political Economy, and I just read it today. It's very interesting, and it's a very... thought-provoking piece, and I believe that it will contribute massively to the debate about Israel, Palestine, and why America is defending Israel so wholeheartedly. Thank you very much for watching, and I hope to have a program soon, possibly on Thursday morning. Please tune. We're going to have a live debate with Claire Daly and Mick Wallace, two members of the European Parliament. Until then, thank you and good night.