Gaza 'Peace' Plan and War with Iran? (w/ Max Ajl) | West Asia Series #2

Ashwin: Hi everyone, welcome back to the International Solidarity Pod, which is a podcast that aims to explore current affairs and history relating to imperialism, the global south, gender, political economy, and people-to-people ties. I'm your host, Ashwin. This is the second episode of our new West Asia series, which is dedicated to covering the latest developments out of Palestine and the Arab-Iranian region more broadly. The Gaza genocide has pushed against the bounds of what humanity will allow and has heightened the contradiction between the Western system of death-making and the rest of the world's popular will for peace, development, and the right to life. So it is all the more important to continue the coverage on the situation in West Asia. This episode of the West Asia series, and hopefully further episodes going forward depending on our schedules, I'm joined by my co-host Raven, who you've seen on the program before. Today we have Max Eil as our guest. Max Eil is a researcher at the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. His work focuses on, among other things, settler colonialism, Palestine, and the Arab-Iranian region. He is also an associate editor at the Agrarian South Journal of Political Economy, which is a great journal that I'd encourage folks to check out. In this episode, we discuss the recent Trump so-called peace plan and Hamas's response to it. We discuss the two-year anniversary of October 7, prospects for war with Iran, who is in charge between Israel and the U.S., and the role of China in West Asia. Importantly, I'll once again shout out Lifeline for Gaza. This is where you can contribute money to families on the ground in Gaza. The website bumps up fundraisers that have not received a donation in the past five days. So that's at lifeline4gaza.com. I will leave that linked in the description below. You can also contribute to the Samir Project, which is a vital network in Gaza for distributing food, water, and tents. They have several campaigns going on right now that you can contribute to. And I'll leave that linked in the description below as well. Lastly, be sure to give this video a like and subscribe to this channel if you haven't already. Also, share this with others that could benefit from learning the latest updates in Palestine and West Asia. Without further ado, here's our conversation with Max Eil. All right, Max, welcome to the International Solidarity Podcast. Thank you again for your time, for being here. So, you know, Let's, you know, let's let's start here, you know, on the on West Asia with the, you know, with the recent Trump so-called peace plan. You know, so, I mean, it's been, you know, the past, let's say, like six months has been particularly acute with, you know, with the Gaza genocide, you know, even in in regional dynamics you know you can think about how uh during you know the first phase before the so-called ceasefire in january uh you know they the occupation was able to split the gaza strip into the north and south displaced people into the south when the so-called ceasefire came about um you know you had um palestinians you know returning back to the north and you know uh very significant in ways is the first time they're returning after being ethnically cleansed. And then now, you know, in the recent phase with the occupation of Gaza City, you know, you're seeing, again, a reversal of that and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians into the south and out of Gaza City. But, you know, coming back to the so-called peace plan, I wanted to get your thoughts on this. And maybe I'll, you know, just give listeners a rundown. So, Last week, the US released its so-called peace plan, which called for a ceasefire in the Gaza war and Israeli withdrawal to a certain perimeter within the Gaza Strip. as part of this, you know, this ultimatum, it started out as, you know, Hamas would give up the prisoners of wars in exchange for Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons. You know, the West and, you know, Israel was demanding the disarmament of Hamas and handing over governance to this, you know, international, they called it an peace board of some kind led by Trump and And of course, Tony Blair as a colonial viceroy or governor general. Lately, you know, and we're recording Sunday, October 5th, you know, on the Friday, Hamas responded by, you know, responded signaling that they were positive toward the plan, which was an interesting move. And, you know, primarily put their foot forward by agreeing to the formula in Trump's plan for the prisoner exchange. But, you know, obviously they took issue with a bunch of other things, including, you know, you know, the foreign governance of Gaza. You know, they said that that was a... Or, you know, they indicated that that was a red line preferring that there would be an independent body of, you know, Palestinian technocrats doing the governance. They disagreed to, you know, the disarmament of Hamas. They, you know, said that they, you know... While they were okay with not taking up governance in the Strip, they would hold, they would not give up their arms, they would hold on to their arms and then pass it on to whomever takes up the state. So in other words, you know, not allowing for a disarmed state as, you know, many of these, as was the precondition for many of these Western countries, including, you know, Canada and the UK and Canada. others in the West for recognizing a Palestinian state. So all of that said, this is sort of the gist of the back and forth and the peace plan, the so-called peace plan. How are you at this point, at least, because it's hard to be definitive about anything, but how are you reading this deal and Hamas's response to it? What stage of this war are we in?

Max Ajl: So fundamentally, it is a war of attrition on multiple scales. And how one reads the war, in part, is based on how one reads... how much the U.S. has a stake in the defeat of a sovereignist movements in West Asia and how much it is betting as an empire on Israel and how much it's invested in that. In theory, of course, it's downstream of a debate about the relative influence of the kind of poorly delineated block of power called the Israel lab, right? And whether or not, you know, it's diverting the U.S. from a different course of empire. We can get into that later, perhaps. But it seems to me that whatever the inputs into it, the U.S. is all in, right? on the destruction of sovereign projects in West Asia, right? The US is disinterested in stopping and there is no domestic political cost that's particularly high for US imperialism to continue on this path. The domestic political cost is relatively low. They did a scarily effective job of scaring all hell out of a lot of very brave people, right? And they did a very effective job of repressing and really scaring the student movement on the U.S. campuses, which did threaten to spiral into a broader crisis of governance if it had taken a certain path. But that was put down, right? That was put down by a massive... repressive apparatus that also occurs off campuses. For example, there's people who either defaced an Israeli flag or raised a Palestinian flag in Texas and are now facing a 10-year felony hate crimes charge, which is a wildly dangerous disproportionate to the scale of the crime by any kind of rationalized mindset, it's clear that whatever the inputs are, the US is extremely interested in the destruction of a sovereign state system outside the US security umbrella in West Asia. It's continuing to send aircraft carriers. It just advised its citizens yesterday to leave Iraq It looks to be treating the first major stage of missile exchanges with Iran as merely a test case. It seems to have massively upgraded Israel's THAAD batteries, which is obviously anticipatory to further missile exchange with Iran, while Iran is very busily obviously building up its own missile capacity in order to either deter or in anticipation of another hot battle or sustained hot war with the United States and Israel. So there's nothing to indicate that the U.S. is willing to let go of West Asia and what the consequences of that will be. So this kind of conditions and As I see it, this conditions how we interpret what's going on with the deal, which could hopefully merge into a segue into a hostage, a prisoner exchange between Hamas and the Zionists. There's basically two possibilities on the table. It's sad to have to hope for the more optimistic one, but the more optimistic one is that it's going to lead into a Lebanon scenario along with reconstituted South Lebanese army, that is. And there was just an announcement today or yesterday about the Israelis constituting in the north of Gaza new paramilitary mercenary battalions made up of whichever Palestinians they were able to pay off. They are constantly trying to do so elsewhere and facing very stiff, not only militarized resistance and political resistance, but really popular level resistance from the population of the Gaza Strip. So this is one possible dynamic that they move to a Lebanon scenario, which will be a lower intensity counterinsurgency whose only impetus really can be to reduce political costs. for the European governments and to allow the Israeli army time to recharge. The other option is that it's a farce, right? And we don't know, we won't know until it plays out. But the other option is that it will be a farce. There will be some prisoner exchange. And after that, the Israelis will just resume bombing, right? And either are possible, right? And this war has been... has kind of been off the rails of what those of us who have been involved for a long time trying to understand Zionist logic and the Palestinian struggle for liberation have kind of our cognitive apparatus and our theoretical apparatus, our interpretive frames for understanding what's going on. It's kept belying predictions. No one was... We can talk about it later. No one... was really prepared for this war in a certain sense, even ideologically speaking in many levels to interpret why this war was so sustained. Now, those are the two options. The impetus for the lower intensity Lebanese model, as I see it, has basically two to three sources. One is that the US is getting worried about European civil society cracking open, for example, with the general strikes in Italy. right? Italy, if Italy cracks further, Spain cracks further, Ireland cracks further, Belgium cracks further, Greece cracks further, and so forth, right? There are lots of, these are all the, relatively speaking, the weak links in the European bloc. And this would, in turn, you know, if those all shatter, then France and Germany are, to some extent, encircled. Popular opinion in France and Germany is against this genocide, right? So this is This would be the logic for it. And we can only read it through a glass darkly. But it seems to me that the armed capacity, the actual military fighting, let us say, capacity, and I don't mean the genocide capacity, the genocide capacity of the IOF is intact. the fighting capacity is not intact, right? And it's being repeated again and again and again by the Israeli generals. The extent of the shredding, we really don't know because it's top secret information and it's really being locked down by the Zionists. But it's very clear that those would be Those would be two of the impetuses. And a possible third impetus for moving to a southern Lebanese model of counterinsurgency is that the U.S. wants to redirect assets to a hardened Yemen and Iran that it prefers to take out and divert attention from Iran. from Gaza and also, of course, divert the kind of civil society mobilizations that could easily make a shift from mobilization against the war in Gaza to a broader anti-war mobilization, right? that's one possibility. And these are like, you know, we're left to kind of talk about decision trees. Like if this happens, this is why, and this is what will happen. If this happens, that's why, and this is what will happen. And it's very, again, it's very hard to know if they continue with the full intensity genocide as they're currently doing, then they are basically shrugging and saying, we want to deal with the Palestinian people. We want to just end this case as much as we can for the foreseeable future and damn the political costs, damn the possible rupture in Europe. The U.S. and Israel can basically take care of it. So these are kind of the paths that I see and the ways of thinking that animate them. But it's unreadable because we're talking about something that has confounded a lot of expectations and kind of made prognostications seem, frankly, like very stupid on all of us. Like we've messed up to try to understand what's going on at a certain level.

Raven: Thanks for that, Max. I really appreciate what you had to say about the confusion and the kind of uncertainty that a lot of us are incapable of truly understanding or predicting what it is that could happen. Speaking of something that a lot of people were not prepared for and people still are having a hard time knowing what to expect, of course, coming in just two days now, it will be the two-year anniversary of the Al-Aqsa flood military operation. Of course, people will remember the images of the fence being taken down and Palestinians standing atop Merkava tanks waving the Palestinian flag amidst other images and videos of that day. But speaking of reflection on this plan, I think we would all appreciate a bit of a... A historical reflection to think about how we got here after two years almost, what the Palestinians are saying and what the leadership within the region is expecting is to come in the future.

Max Ajl: Yeah, you know. The October 7th attacks, we have to keep in mind as a necessity due to the degree of zionist uh and u.s imperialist uh penetration of various societies which is real and there's of course penetration that goes both ways uh an attack of this scale was uh and uh you know the iranians were just discussing it yesterday an attack of this scale was necessarily a top secret secret operation right they had to keep it a secret And furthermore, there is talk, and we don't, again, we don't know the full veracity of it, but there is certainly have been statements to the effect that it was a preemptive strike. That is, that there was a fear that the Palestinians had gotten wind of Israeli operation to decapitate the entire resistance apparatus. And finally, the other thing to keep in mind, and this is something Muhammad Majdalawi said, is that at a certain point, when you've built up that much power in a society that's being tortured, eventually it's going to get used. It's very hard to keep it under a restraint. And they had kept it under a restraint for nine years. So all of this, we're talking about things that we won't know the truth of for many years. And we won't know the full truth ever because too many of the participants have been murdered by Israel to get full truths. But we're talking about things that we can't fully understand. Now, the second aspect is that in the nature of the fact that it was an operation that occurred without coordination with the other members of the resistance axis, they were having a certain lack of clarity and lack of preparedness about how to react. Hezbollah, of course, immediately opened its support front, for which it paid very, very dearly. Syria, which had been under basically a medieval economic siege with the total debauchment of its currency, people literally starving, purchasing power of the working and popular classes leveled, much of the population in flight, rebuilding impossible because of the Caesar sanctions, right? Syria was not in a position to open its own support front, because the support front would have eventually led to the leveling of its cities and the further collapse of the society, right? And then, of course, as we know, for a while, the PMF also opened a support front by attacking the U.S. military installations, and they succumbed to, you know, they are under an actual military occupation, and they're also under severe economic restraint. And one way or another, they were pressured to essentially forego that support front. And then Iran was behind it all, not really offering huge amounts of logistical arms, material support, technological support, but not engaging in hot support in the same way. And in a sense, these were countries that were not ready for a hot war in the way that that the Palestinians were ready for a hot war. There was one of the things that I think often beclouds understanding is understanding that although there was a military synchronization at a certain level between the societies in terms of understanding that they are pro-sovereign and they're oriented towards resisting Israel. The ability to deploy military capacity is conditioned on their political and social contours and geographies internally. And this they were in very different states of preparation to commit to hot wars. Iran was suffering under and still is suffering under sanctions, trying to get sanctions relief. The Yemenis actually just have a massive amount of popular support. And anti-Zionism works as a glue and a mobilizing factor in Yemeni society. So the war is not to, even when they suffer a lot from the war, it doesn't affect Ansar Allah's capacity. The Syrian government gambled that a hot war, I mean, because we don't want to undermine the fact that there were weapons companies underground weapons factories. There were troops transiting its territory. There were logistic material. All of this was present in Syria, but the society could not have sustained a Hawa, right? And then there's Lebanon, where Hezbollah is basically facing a population where 40% of the situation, where 40% of the population is deep, or 30% maybe, is deeply antagonistic to it. Right. And amongst the population that supports it, some of it supports it in terms of the retention of its weapons and less of it probably supports paying the cost of a medium heat war and a much smaller and a smaller portion would support the cost of the type of. hot war that was imposed on it through the Israeli escalation a year ago now, which led to kind of mass death and disfigurement and massive destruction in the Dahiya and elsewhere in southern Lebanon, huge amounts of pain and death from a very internationalist and humane commitment to anti-Zionism and supporting the beleaguered Palestinian people, right? So In turn, the U.S. did its best to separate the fronts, to quell the fronts that it could quell through various measures of economic political coercion, namely Iraq, to prevent the activation of other fronts, that is Syria, to And to exert sufficient force to kind of degrade Iranian deterrence slowly, which they did through various assassinations in preparation for the 12 day war of the late spring. And then finally, they pushed their advantage. took out the syrian state right which was obviously a long-standing plan uh whose details we many parties were party to that of course but of course the israelis in the us were deeply involved in that and it's very ridiculous to think otherwise right they took out the syrian state which put uh and that was right after they achieved a ceasefire uh after having caused a horrific amount of damage to the Lebanese asymmetric capacity to resist the Israelis. Meanwhile, of course, what they're doing, they've continued in Gaza on the one hand, and on the other hand, it has been at the cost of really chewing up their army. Right. With intensive degradation of combat vehicles and so forth and intensive degradation of the reserves. I mean, they said of the 60,000 people called up to participate in the current operations in Gaza City, less than half of them are actually involved. and so forth, right? Which is probably also the degradation of it is part of their vulnerability to these kind of massive ambushes which continue to take place in the Gaza Strip, right? So what we're seeing in essence is a regional war of attrition where each side is degrading each other's military capacities, right? And it also there's a kind of political attrition going on as well, where the resistance camp is basically directly or indirectly and also because of the fact that it is socially embedded, and therefore the counterinsurgency proceeds through the destruction of the popular cradle, or basically genocide, this induces a political attrition on the EU and the US, beyond the Israelis. For the Israelis, political considerations at that level don't exist, right? But for the EU and the US, it does impose all sorts of political constraints. And this is real. This is very real. This is very substantive. The fact that it's clear that the policy at some level is clearly genocide, but we should obviously use this terminology, but there's certain things that we also need to keep in mind, right? In fact, there is a starvation campaign going on, but it is not possible to fully block food going into the Gaza Strip, right? It's not possible. Logistically, it's very much possible. It's not possible politically. It's not possible politically because it is inducing huge political crises that the EU and the US ruling classes do not want to incur. They do not want to incur the political costs of being seen as complicit in the very obvious and directly murderous by the minute starvation of hundreds, if not thousands of people on the Gaza Strip, right? So they had to tamp that down. Now, this is not to undermine the frankly evil nature of these ruling classes or the Zionists, but it's to point out that political mobilization in the US and the EU And of course, we wish it were more, but this does matter, right? And it's capable of achieving some form of restraint on the barbarism carried out by these ruling classes, right? And I think this is really, I think this is something that's highly significant and should be welcomed. This is significant. This is actually how you know that this can give people a sense of not being helpless, to be honest. Of course, we all wish that we had been strong enough to stop this genocide 18 months in, and that the political crises, that we were organized enough to create political crises, right? We weren't, okay, we know it, right? But the costs that were able to be imposed and the according restrictions is also very important, right? And this is sort of how I see things. This is sort of how I see things right now. I guess the last point to keep in mind is that once it kind of... I think the scale of what happened on October 7th was something that was a little difficult to comprehend at a certain level. I mean, I think that... Even if we understood that, you know, if you've been reading like Al-Akhbar, they have a very consistent line on this, like Ali Qadri, before him Yassin al-Hafez, making clear that, you know, one of the primary roles of Israel and the U.S. in the Arab-Iranian region is to instill a sense of defeat Contrary wise, anything that represents a rupture in that sense of defeat also represents the most acute threat to these ruling classes and therefore needs to be burnt into dust and ashes, which is what they've been doing. All of that follows logically from the premises of the theory. I wrote something about that late November, 2023. And for me, the length of the genocide, not anymore, but I took seriously these peace negotiations, or ceasefire negotiations, which were occurring in the first half of 2024 nevertheless, right? Even if there was an awareness. And meanwhile, like, you had people in Al-Akhbar being like, this is a battle to the end. Right? So, this is kind of my perspective on both the kind of overall... political panorama that we have in front of us and also how different people have interpreted it and been able to react to it over time.

Ashwin: Thanks for that, Max. I wanted to maybe zoom in on the Zoom in on Iran here. You know, you talk about, you know, the U.S. and we can say this about the West, their objective to be, you know, being the destruction of sovereignty and projects that build sovereignty. That is certainly, you know, that certainly applies to Iran as well. You know, you mentioned prospects for war with Iran or, you know, sort of a return to hostilities. And, you know, there are signs for that. There's, you know, you know, sort of military buildup, reinforcements to the US's air base in Qatar into the Mediterranean Sea as well. And, you know, several analysts that I've heard talk about, for certainty, the US and Israel going back to war before the end of the year, you know. Colonel Wilkerson, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, even thinks that it might be before American Thanksgiving. All of this to say, I'm trying to get your read on this. You also mentioned that the dimensions of the regional dynamic is a war of attrition. To what extent does that dynamic change with a return to hostilities with Iran? Does it continue being sort of in this, the same tempo of this war of attrition? To what extent does that change?

Max Ajl: No, I mean, I think once Iran is involved, it is far less, I mean, it's still, it's a war, you know, it's a hot war. that it is very hard to foresee... Again, it's very hard to foresee a hot war lasting for a considerable length of time because it's very hard to foresee either of these societies... suffering under the massive degradation of their cities. And this is something also, a lot of people in the West are sort of like, why doesn't Iran do more? Iran is doing a lot, first of all. Iran is doing the most, second of all. And third of all, to do something out of ideological commitment and the knowledge that your cities are going to be leveled is... is to expect something that cannot be expected from external, without an internal consensus around it, right? You can't blame the Iranians for not willing to undergo, for not initiating a hot war that will lead to the very massive, like tens of thousands of deaths and destruction of their cities from the US and Europe. I think there's an ethical commitment, an ethical and situated part of internationalism that we have to take into account. Now, it won't be a war of attrition, really. It could turn into a war of attrition, but again, it's very hard. I mean, the Israelis cannot handle any real impact on their cities. They can't take any hits at all, right? I mean, they sued for peace after 12 days, right? With very few Iranian valleys being fired. both for a variety of reasons, which we can get into. But Iran was firing very little. It was achieving very, very high impact with its hits towards the end of the 12-day war. It was hitting, it had an extremely high penetration rate. And the Israelis could not sustain it because, you know, the Israelis are a wealthy society that is used to hurting other people and is not used to getting hurt itself for the pain it inflicts on other people. And so it's a question of really how effective... This is why they're shifting so much even more and ramping up and shifting even more air defense because they're aware of that, right? They're saying, okay, can we... can we force the attrition on the Israelis to basically be at the level of burning through air defense capacity, whereas we will be taking out the civilian support structure and popular will to resist of the Iranians and force the Iranians to sue for peace, while also degrading enough of their military capacity to make the war worth it in terms of what the Israelis and the Israeli military will suffer, right? I think that's the basic outlook. I mean, I don't, This is actually coming from the Israeli military doctrine where they thought they could operate on a mutually assured deterrence at a certain level. The new military doctrine is having to do what they call mowing the lawn region-wide perpetually. That is not allowing the buildup of sovereign industrialized military capacity because they're aware now They were aware after October 7th, and it doesn't matter how much we call that industrialized or not, they're aware that it can hit them too hard, right? The means of violence are no longer as asymmetric as they used to be. They're much more symmetrical than they used to be. not the means of genocide, but the means of violence, right? And therefore, there is an awareness that you cannot allow the Israeli brass, right? And behind them, you know, the U.S. are aware that you have to just keep on burning these societies up, burning up their capacity, not allowing them to accumulate enough that they can either deter or incursion and aggression, and that eventually you might break their willingness to actually continue to fight. I mean, that's the gamble in Gaza, right? The gamble is, you know, the gamble is that they can hope they'll eventually get them to stop fighting. I mean, and that was, to some extent, that was the successful gamble that they did with the Lebanese. They hit them so hard that eventually the Lebanese, the Hezbollah, was... Like, okay, we have to pull back a little bit. We have to reconstitute. We have to reconstitute our capacities, right? And they probably want to do something similar to Iran. And so this is what, very sadly, this is what we're likely to see in the next four months, if not sooner.

Raven: Yeah, thank you for that very necessary reality check, Max. If you would allow me just a moment to share some comments relatedly. As you were speaking, I was taking down quite a bit of notes, and I appreciate you for that because I love taking notes. But... It all made me think of, of course, two individuals who many will know, George Jackson and France Fanon. So I'll say for Fanon, you know, I'm a Westoid myself. Reading Fanon is not like... always super easy it takes real deep thought and trying to understand things from someone else's perspective but what has come through clearly since the beginning is this idea that colonialism and imperialism as systems have an undying and unquenchable thirst For constant suffering and the creation, like you said, of despair within the colonized or the oppressed. And these acts, such as Al-Aqsa flood and others, are symbols of that humanity, that human spirit still remaining alive today. a amidst these people suffering but at the same time as these colonial entities continue to cause this suffering and set up bases and settlements and things of this nature more and more the people come to see these the sites as potential military targets and the more and more that the colonizers are making themselves a potential target The second thing I wanted to say related to George Jackson is about how you said that from a genocide perspective, the imperialists have their capacity set to the max. But from a military actual perspective. battle perspective, it is crumbling. And I just wanted to point out, of course, something that George Jackson said in his writings about how as imperialism spreads and sets up these bases everywhere, it is almost impossible for them to properly staff and equip and operate these facilities while attacks are occurring without having to concentrate their forces and pull away in certain instances in order to focus on the more, quote, hot wars. And of course, that's what we're seeing in West Asia now as Israel shifts from Lebanon to Yemen to Palestine to Iran. Like you said, this is the necessity of imperialism to continue mowing the grass, as they call it. that that is the situation that we are living in. And you had mentioned the questionable logic being used and rationale from the imperialists. I just kind of wanted to get a deeper assessment in your perspective of who really is wagging the tail here, whether it's the Americans and Donald J. Trump with his, you know, 20 point plan that he's demanding is put in place, or it's the Israelis, quote unquote, themselves on the ground actively committing the genocide themselves.

Ashwin: And I might just add here, Max, that, you know, I think, I mean, I think it's an illusion for whomever insists that Israel is a separate entity from the US. This is one system with two, I guess, countries. But I guess to add to that question, is there a shift? Is there a shift between where the center of the region's policy is or the war policy for the region is? you know, to what extent is this, you know, dynamic between those in Israel and in Washington, D.C.? And, you know, is it shifting back and forth? Or, yeah, how do you see this?

Max Ajl: You know, I don't see, and people hate me for this, but I don't see a difference between Israel and America. Like, you know, there's sets of institutions that are different, right? That see things a bit differently. And there are constituencies that are different. And there's also political institutions, therefore, that have to respond in different ways to their different constituencies. And there's also people playing different roles. right um but you know and it's not like it's not that imperialism does not uh move itself that is imperialism is not outside of history and it's also not outside of human actors i mean imperialism is a stage a long-standing stage in capitalism right and it is uh a stage in capitalism, right? These are abstractions that are actually made up of relationships between people, right? And therefore, of course, there's actors that are engaged in it towards creating a certain history a certain way. That is, of course, there were Zionists who, without them, Israel would not have happened, right? Of course, right? It They weren't the carrier. It's silly to, of course, you know, and here we're going back to like the late 1800s, early 1900s. It would be crazy to say that they were a carrier of some kind of ethereal logic of history. No, like they were people engaging in a certain relationship with settler colonial dispossession at the same time as settler colonialism was a la mode, right? In all over Africa. At that moment also, right? And of course, in an earlier stage, the United States and Canada and Australia, which were U.S. was finishing its so-called Westward expansion and so forth during that period as the Israelis were getting started. So, of course, it was a necessary component to have Zionists who themselves were bundling assemblage of class interests, both amongst the Europeans, amongst the European Jewish bourgeoisie, amongst offering something to the petty bourgeoisie, the working class, the imperialists, all of it, welding it together into a project. And this is What we seek to understand is history as it was, not history as it could have been, or a hypothetical other history, right? I mean, what we're trying to interpret is history as it happened. This is kind of prefatory to get before I got to your answer, right? So I think that a lot of discussion actually is basically positing, could, is the U.S., you know, is Israel helping or hurting? U.S. imperialism. I mean, Israel in this historical moment is part of U.S. imperialism as imperialists understand their own project, right? And of course, if there had not been a Zionist movement, it would look different, right? Of course. And there was. So what we're interpreting is history as it is, not history as it could have been, because we don't have to fight against a history that could have been. We have to fight against the antagonists that made history as it is now. So this is, again, that's the other prefatory comment. I don't see, I think the brazenness of the Israeli propaganda operations alongside the brazenness of the genocide itself and the brazenness of the suppression and disruption of speech and organizing are lending people to kind of mistake the methods of engineering agreement at a certain level and disorganizing opposition to a policy to the sources of the policy itself. You know, no one, you know, look at Trump and Jared Kirshner. I mean, you know, there's no difference between the imperialists and the Zionists, in a sense. I mean, they're merged. There's a full fusion, right? And this, you know, you can go to, now you can go from the kind of disgusting and, you putrid levels of that at a certain level to the highest levels. I mean, Microsoft, Google, right? Intel are all heavily invested in Israel, have huge investments in Israel. The U.S. high-tech sector, the U.S. military industrial sector is extensively routed through Israel, right? Here we're speaking of, and here we're speaking like not of the political sociologies, or what Ali and Lenin would call, Ali Qadri and Lenin would call sociological imperialism. Here we're talking about a very kind of reductive and economistic even sense of imperialist economic relations. But all of it is fused through history. And these people are operating according to forward-looking, you know, they want to maximize investor returns. They want to maximize stock value. And their investments in Israel seem to be a suitable mechanism for that. And it's all working for them. basically. And, you know, there's a huge amount of capital stock. I mean, everything, most technology that the U.S. develops is eventually field tested in a hot environment, namely the Israeli genocide and settler colonial project, not only against the Palestinians, but more broadly. All of this is a service, but even more to the point is As the ruling class understands its own interests, it views this form of aggression as amenable to its own interests. This is clear. Are they Zionists? Yes. Of course, they're Zionists, the same way that they're imperialists and the same way that they're capitalists. Like, that's what the ruling class is. And the, you know, and we can talk, you know, there's the kind of the questions about the relative parameters or the relative back and forth about control or the relative power and the dynamic. People point to things like who is spying on who. for example, or that Israel is making a public relations mess for America, right? I don't think the US ruling class cares that much about that, to be honest. I mean, it wants to rule and it wants to make money and it wants to manage public relations. People point to things such as the fact that this prosecutor let the pedophile, who was part of a pedophile ring in Utah or something, flee to Israel. Now, it kind of raises two questions, right? I mean, first of all, the pedophile ring was in the U.S. This is the U.S. that's producing pedophile rings in the first place, right? They're fleeing to Israel. Israel is like a black box and it's like a slush fund for organized crime on a world scale. I mean, all the Russian oligarchs are also headquartered in Israel, right? The whole country is like a black box for illegal operations. It's why Epstein routed all of his operations through... so many of them through Israel as well. So I don't, you know, I don't see that this, the argument that, you know, somehow the Israelis have the U.S. executive over a, you know, bent over and doing their will somehow like in, you know, bowing to them. I just don't, I don't see how it's sustainable. It's arguing somehow that the imperialists are acting against their own interests of capital accumulation and power. That's a strong argument to make, right? And it would require considerable evidence overall, right? And does it look like, do stock market returns look, you know, look, Israel, Palestine is the major political crisis today. right? Occupying the most optics. Does it look like the U.S. ruling class measured in stock market valuations and so forth? Are they doing badly as a result of these high profile choices made by their executive committee as it is manifested in the actual U.S. executive? I don't think so, right? They're doing fine, right? They're actually doing absurdly fine. And so I It's just, it's not clear to me even, it's not clear to me that it's helpful to mistake the optics of it for the actual interests at play on the one hand. On the other, you know, the U.S. is, if the U.S. is unable to deal with armed, poor, poorly armed, poor insurgencies in West Asia, right? Relatively poor guerrilla groups or relatively poor groups that have taken state power, as in Yemen, or kind of technologically advanced only in some fields, namely missiles and drones, with powerful asymmetric deterrents like Iran. If they cannot take out these countries, how can they impose their will on China, right? And so, of course, they have to grind these forces to the ground because U.S. power is about consent through fear, right? People bow to the emperor because they're scared of what the emperor can do to them. And, you know, if it looks like subjects, imperial subjects can resist, then this mode of administering imperial rule has a rupture. And, you know, I think that on a certain level, I have, you know, I think that I understand why people come to this conclusion, but I think, you know, it blinds people to the broader imperialist operation, and it also reflects to some extent a lack of engagement with the traditions that come from the region, right? Which I find very disturbing and problematic on a certain level. Now, it could be that this hypothesis is wrong for sure, right? But okay. This is actually the full perspective of the entire Al-Akhbar newspaper, which people can now read now. If you want to plug in Google Translate, you can get the perspective of Al-Akhbar, which is the most significant leftist paper in the entire Arab region. They're all on board with this perspective, and this is guiding their work. People should at least minimally engage with and argue with the perspective of the people who are using it to guide the war they're fighting, rather than engaging with fantasms. If Israel is spying on the US, the US is spying on Israel. So people are spying on one another. Allies spy on one another all their time. Husbands and wives spy on one another. They're married. So you want to tell me it's like with this great shock that Israel and the U.S. spy on one another? Of course they do, right?

Ashwin: Okay, Max, I have, I mean, maybe a last question or two questions. I'm going to try to combine them. But I guess the first one was, you know, in your first response, you know, to the first question you were talking about the stakes with this plan, with the so-called Trump peace plan, right? as perhaps an attempt to manage dissent in Europe, especially in Europe. You mentioned Italy had the general strike. Spain also has a pretty strong movement. Greece, Ireland, these places. There's a history, and as a scholar of settler colonialism, as you are, the history of the transatlantic alliance is... You know, there's a symbiotic relationship there. Right. And, you know, settler colonialism, exporting surplus populations from Europe historically to the Americas to settle and to, you know, to colonize and dispossess indigenous peoples of their land. assisted in, you know, class struggle in Europe, right? It raised the floor for the working classes, you know, and that, you know, sort of still explains the higher standards of living, the better, you know, the social democracy and whatnot in Europe. So there is, you know, there is... I guess not an organic, I was going to say organic, but there is a, there is that historical linkage between, uh, you know, Europe and the U S to what extent is that being, you know, threatened or degraded one with the example that you mentioned, which is, uh, you know, um, The dissent around the war in West Asia, but also with the war in Ukraine, you see increasing tensions between Europe and the US, particularly under Putin. under the Republican regime, you know, trying to perhaps hand it off to Europe. European elites, I think, are still enamored, you can say, with this war. I think they see it as, or, you know, several have posited that they see this war with Russia as one of their last remaining sort of sources of legitimacy, that kind of thing. So that's, you know, these are big questions, but that's my first one about the state of the US-Europe relationship going forward, the transatlantic relationship. And then the second one is, you know, many have criticized China, you know, often coming from an anti-sympathetic, you know, place for its position on West Asia. Of course, China, you know, has, you know... done things historically, especially, but even today to support the Palestinian cause. You can think of the Beijing consensus where they brought together the 14 factions of the Palestinian resistance to Beijing to sort out their politics and internal Palestinian political cohesion. They're critical for Iran, especially in the sustainability of the political the political regime in Iran. But for China, and China's particularly interested in forward-looking internationalism, multilateralism, a new kind of international governance system, how do you see China's involvement in this regional dynamic, in the war itself, but broadly in the regional dynamics, because it also has close ties that it wants to grow with the Gulf monarchical regimes.

Max Ajl: China wants to build a world trading system where it is in a dominant position, not just with respect to its level of technology, but to a lesser but probably real extent where it's in beneficial trading relationships with the remainder of the world. And it wants to build that system through trade that is not through particularly through war. At the same time, it understands very well that the US is building that system through war and sanctions through what the scholars call weaponized interdependence. So, so far, you know, I think Iran will be the bigger test of that than Palestine. You know, the Chinese... are not operating at a level of internationalist and solidaristic sentiment that would lead them to act aggressively in support of the Palestinian cause directly. They are not. They are offering lifelines to Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, that allow these countries to escape imperialist blockades, build up sovereign, in the case of Iran, build up a relatively sovereign technological apparatus, completely shatter the sanctions regime through slightly lower cost oil imports from Iran that actually have kind of destroyed the economic logic in many ways of the sanctions. That is, the sanctions appear to be no longer impacting Iranian industrial capacity. This is what China is doing, and it's doing it primarily through its preferred mechanism, which is mutually beneficial trading systems. And in the long run, if there's not a nuclear war, then eventually the U.S. will have to reduce its share of global wealth that will be much more in accordance with its share of global production, that is, that is this kind of hierarchy that's basically enforced through imperial rent and violence and the dollar and unequal exchange. None of this is infinitely sustainable, but China's trying to overcome it through trade and especially the buildup of its internal economic base and through building building it up as much as possible and building up massive trade links. I mean, it's one of the largest trading partners with many countries in the world, especially in the third world, right? And of course, they have a vision that's associated with this along with reducing economic inequality. And this is their motto, right? It's a unique motto. It doesn't have a historical precedent, right? And it's entering a conflict with the U.S. for the simple reason that as the Chinese are reaching technological parity or exceeding the U.S. vis-a-vis technological innovation, which they're starting to do in a number of fields, the U.S. will no longer have this tech monopoly, and it will lead to a shift in the system. Will the U.S. accept that without violence? it would be very surprising, right? It would be very surprising. So the Chinese are, from their perspective, as I gather, are trying to postpone that confrontation as long as possible. So they're as strong as possible to either make it prohibitively expensive for the U.S. to carry out that violence. Or so to either make it impossible or to be able to impose enough costs that the U.S. can't sustain the violence. But, you know, I don't read as much Wallerstein as I used to at all. But like, you know, Wallerstein always pointed out that transitions within the world system are very turbulent. Right. And this is kind of Arrighi's point, too. we will enter a period of massive turbulence and the shift to a different world system, which for all its faults, if it's Chinese ladder is going to be better than the American one. This is really why China is so popular right now with young people, I think. I don't think people are that caught up on the intricacies. I think people see it as an alternative system to the kind of the worldwide barbarism sowed by the United States. And, you know, eventually, if it's strong enough, then Europe, which... is not really sovereign, but could have sovereign states in theory, if they were willing to rupture enough with the U.S., could ally with Russia and through China. And then the whole U.S. project, which has been based on kind of preventing the unification of a hostile landmass, right, will have failed. right? That that's like been the basis of us geo strategy for like 130 years that would collapse. So this is kind of how this us, I think sees the, sees this ceaseless war with, uh, with Russia operating channel through the Ukraine. Um, and this is why the us is encircling China and so forth. I mean, this is why there's such a huge China scare. This was also why, despite the Chinese, as we all wish they were doing more for, um, For Palestine, this is why even the US is summoning up linkages between the Communist Party of China and Palestine activism in the US. That is, they see it as a unified enemy. So it's not that we have to adopt the perspective of our enemies, but we should certainly try to understand the perspective of our enemies and think about why that's the case.

Ashwin: And maybe quickly on the transatlantic alliance.

Max Ajl: I mean, the Transatlantic Alliance, people are debating this. It seems to me that it's solid until cohesive enough kind of populist blocs in the European states really break with the U.S. and either move towards neutrality, move towards forms of non-alignment, or move towards an Eastern alignment. let's be honest, the U.S. would do everything in its power to prevent that. There's also all sorts of, you know, the U.K. is extremely organically linked to the U.S. vis-a-vis finance. The Europeans are also well aware that their relative share of wealth also rests on the clobbering of the third world and the U.S. allowance of, you know, all sorts of kind of terrains of super exploitation and labor extraction. Germany vastly benefits from the U.S. shatterscape that the U.S. imposes from Morocco, all the way to Afghanistan, right? The Germany is a huge beneficiary of that, right? German skilled professionals are from the, a lot of them are from the third world, right? Nevermind German imports and so forth. I mean, Germany is able to reap the benefits of US imposed unequal exchange structures. France is able, has historically been able to maintain its African empire and its Caribbean empire. If we accept the hypothesis of someone like Khadri that a lot of the service of the US is about instilling defeat amongst working classes on a world scale, Then what follows from that is that this is a strong basis for the European alliance with the US as well. And, you know, so far, I think there's no rupture, but and it would take a lot more. And I also think that's why, you know, France and Germany and the UK in particular are the hardest nuts to crack when it comes to the Palestine movement as well.

Ashwin: I think that's a good place to wrap up unless Raven, you had any, yes, Raven, go ahead.

Raven: I just had one question to ask before we conclude here. You mentioned Al-Akbar and some of the other sources of information you're drawing from to kind of complete your analysis here. And I was wondering if maybe you could share for those of us like myself and Ashwin here who are living in the West and have a more difficult time finding these different sources, if maybe you would be willing to share some of your favorites and some maybe articles or specific writings that we ought to all be reading and looking into.

Max Ajl: Sure. I mean, you know, a lot of the stuff I keep track of is one of the journals I'm associated with are both of them, Middle East Critique and Agrarian South. There's a lot of good work also from Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective coming out, but also Al-Akhbar and, you know, bless the innovations of AI, you can read something in Arabic if you want to without knowing Arabic. I'm like, there goes 10 years of my life that I spent studying Arabic. But it can be done now. And actually, Al-Akhbar relaunched its English edition, which is a real gift. And for people who are particularly interested in what's going on in the Arab-Iranian region, stay on top of it and you will learn so much. It will shift your perspective a lot.

Ashwin: I think that's a good place to leave it. Thank you so much, Max, for your time. This was a great discussion.