Left-Wing Melancholia & the Post '67 Arab Subject with Nihal El Aasar

Josh: Hi, welcome to Monsanto and Capitalism. This is Josh. In this episode, we speak with Neha Al-Assar about her recently penned essay, Left-Wing Melancholia, the Arab Political Subject. Her essay emphasizes Palestine's importance to the Arab political subject and the need to analyze the current absence of the Arab masses in light of Israel's genocidal onslaught. She highlights the importance of Palestinian intellectual Ghassan Hanifani on her work, particularly his broader definition of the Palestinian question and the importance of not isolating it from the wider struggle against capitalism and imperialism in the so-called Middle East and beyond. She critiques the narrow framing of the Palestinian struggle vis-à-vis Israel and stresses the need to consider the wider Arab and regional dimensions of the struggle. In this conversation, we also explore the role of reactionary Arab regimes play in weakening the national liberation movement and preying on the masses' instinct towards national clasperation. Nihal provides historical context for discussing the impact of the 1967 defeat on Arab socialism and pan-Arabism and the subsequent rise of neoliberal policies that have continued to govern certain segments of the region. Through a materialist lens, she critiques the current political paralysis that can be observed throughout the Arab world, attributing it to a severe repression and systematic depoliticization. We cross-reference this paralysis and juxtapose the phenomenon across similar instances happening across the world, including for Black folks in the United States. She emphasizes the need to grapple with defeat as a material reality and learn from past struggles to reactivate the colonized masses and re-engage in political struggle. Nihal is an Egyptian writer, researcher, and radio host. She mainly writes about politics, political economy, and culture. Her work has appeared in various Arabic and English language publications. If you like what we do and want to support our ability to have more conversations like this, please consider becoming a patron. You can do so for as little as $1 a month. We bring you these conversations totally independently with no corporate state or grant funding. Now, here is Nihal discussing some of her work. I would like to start off by allowing you the space to tell the audience a little bit about yourself, the work you do, and your motivations for writing this piece that we'll be talking about today, titled Left Wing Melancholia, the Aeropolitical Subject.

Nihal El Aasar: Yeah, so my name is Nihal Asar. I am an Egyptian writer and researcher. I've been living in London for the past five years, but I was born and raised in Cairo. So I lived through, you know, the uprisings of 2011. I organized with the Pasen Youth Movement. I know we've had some of my comrades on here before. I organized in the PYM Britain chapter. And I This piece, I've been thinking about the themes in this piece for a long time, actually, like a lot of like I've been thinking about 2011 a lot and obviously Palestine as central to, you know, the Egyptian political subjects or the Arab political subjects. And in this post-October 7th moment, this question seemed integral. It seemed really crucial. And as I'm sure you've seen in the audience, I've seen a lot of people asking these questions like, where are the Arabs? What are the Arab leaders doing? They're shameful. Where are the millions? Where are the Arab masses? Because there's this expectation that Palestine is a central Arab issue. And I thought, you know, it's not enough to just, you know, lament the absence of the Arab masses, but one must take the task of analyzing where they are in this present moment and to make a distinction between the Arab states and the Arab masses as well.

Josh: Yeah, definitely. I appreciate that breakdown. This piece borrows a lot from Ghisen, kind of Fani's writing quite a bit. So can you talk a little bit about who he was for those who may be listening and may not be familiar, and also his importance to your work generally, but especially this essay?

Nihal El Aasar: Yeah, so Ghassan Kanafani, who's a Palestinian intellectual, political thinker, strategist, novelist, editor, also the spokesman or the spokesperson of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is a Marxist-Leninist organization that was under the umbrella organization, the Palestine Liberation Organization. And Ghassan Kanathani is not only one of the most famous Palestinian thinkers, but he's also one of the most famous Arab thinkers. And he was part of the movement of Arab nationalists at university. And, you know, like through his writings, most specifically, the one I'm thinking of is the 1936-1939 revolt in Palestine, which is an excellent example. text of political economy on the specific Arab revolt of the 1936-1939 that was written in the 1970s. In this text, Kamefani really focuses on the broader definition of the Palestinian question and situating the Palestinian revolution in relation to the surrounding regional dynamics of the post-Sykes-Picot Arab statehood and Palestine as embedded in this Arab world. And he defines the problem that needs to be tackled to be threefold, which is the alliance between Zionism and imperialism as manifested in the imperialist Zionist state, the local reactionary leadership or the national bourgeoisie, as Fanon would like to call it. And of course, last but not least, the role of the Arab reactionary regimes. So that's quite distinct from the way we think about Palestine today. And it's a recognition of the narrow confines within which we think about the Palestinian struggle today and that we need to expand our definitions and our horizons between the question of Palestine vis-a-vis Israel only and kind of like think about the importance of the Arab and the regional dimension. And the piece I quote from is The Resistance and Its Challenges, View of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, where Kanafani concludes through his analysis and research that, and I quote, there is no non-Arab way out. that there's no non-Arab way out of the Palestinian question. And of course, there are competing ideas about what that means. Before the huge 1967 loss, which I think we're going to get into today, it was this idea that Palestine will be liberated through Arab unity. But then after the loss of 67, other ideas began to emerge, which are that Arab unity or Arab prosperity can only come through Palestine being liberated first.

Josh: Definitely. You kind of just answered our next question, but I'll ask it anyways, just in case you have any other thoughts on it. But yeah, so in this essay, it's kind of funny, right? You're seeking to expand the question of Palestine beyond today's narrow framing as solely Palestine vis-a-vis Israel, right? A framing you call limited, stating that it is abstracted and displaced from Arab regional dynamics by separating not only the Palestinian masses from the broader Arab masses, but also Palestinians from each other and within Palestine. This approach seeks to isolate the Palestinian struggle and obscures the fact that the Arab working classes share a common political destiny, right? And so as we're seeing currently, right, Israel has very much expanded its colonial imperialist war into Lebanon, as well as, you know what I'm saying, bombing and striking Yemen and Syria as well. So talk about this a bit, right? The kind of the historical logics of this beast that we're seeing currently underway.

Nihal El Aasar: Yeah, so it is very much in the interest of the ruling class, like you said, to obfuscate the Palestinian struggle as much as possible and make it as narrow as possible. And that is done through a multitude of ways, either through the idealist argument that this is a complex centuries-old conflict mainly about religion, or through abstracting Palestine and Palestinians from the wider Arab nation and people, which it is very much a part of. And as it stands currently, there's this ahistorical view that Arabs have always lived in war zones, that they've always had sectarian strife and conflict, that it's always been a war-torn area. But that is not the case historically. In fact, history has proven that Arabs have shown time and time again how apart from faith, they've tried to come together as a unit against imperial and colonial violence. For example, if you go back in history a bit, under the Ottoman Empire, there was a budding sense of Arab identity that formed because of shared language and culture titled the Nahda or the Renaissance or Arab Awakening. And historian Palestine Oussama Makhdisi talks about this a lot that... Arab was this ecumenical identity or umbrella identity under which a lot of different political ideologies and tendencies fell under, which is to stress that Arab ideology was not based on religious identity. And I know we find it hard to believe in the West and the US and Europe, but they were left-wing and right-wing Arab Christians, left-wing and right-wing Arab Muslims, left-wing and right-wing Arab Jews, and ideologies were not based on religion solely. And what happened next was that British and French colonial rule infringed upon that. And the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1917 saw the artificial division of borders in the Middle East the same year, actually, that the Balfour Declaration saw the British hand over Mandate Palestine to the Zionist project. So this division, as well as the bloody establishment of the state of Israel, put the sectarian strain and created the binary between, you know, Arab and Jew that we see today that didn't exist before. In fact, like one thing that gets lost is that the Zionist state denied the Arab world of the formation and progression of Arab Jewish politics. and culture as Arab Jews were, you know, pushed and pulled into Israel as a result of various reasons. In fact, in Egypt, a lot of the early pre-Nasser communist parties in the 1920s were started by Egyptian communist Jews. And, you know, a lot of them wrote anti-Zionist Arab Jewish texts about the creation of the state of Israel and were opposed to it, including famously Ahmed Sadat Saad. He wrote a book called Palestine and the Clause. And it was a communist Arab anti-Zionist takedown of the bloody creation of the state of Israel. And this shows that the main critique of the Arabs in the region was not as, you know, people would like us to believe European Jewish immigration, but it was this insistence by Zionists of the creation of this ethnostate based on religion and supremacy and coercing the natives of the land to accept it. And this project of colonial Zionism was actually considered archaic and very backwards and opposed to the economical nature of the region. It was seen as anti-modern and morally regressive and inciting religious fanaticism and was very, very different than the project that a lot of the Arab nationalists at the time were trying to push forward, which is this like economical, expansive, open political project. And obviously this is not like to romanticize. It's not that the, you know, the region was not, did not have problems, but it's to emphasize that the Arab region has, in modern history, has constantly been shaped by Western influence and imperialism. And that there was always resistance to that by Arab political movements. And that continued in the modern era as well. And that's why there was a period of struggle prior to and up to the creation of the Zionist state. And that's what kind of Feni talks about. And, you know, Lebanon and Palestine have shared deep historical links before Sykes-Picot even. The same is true with, you know, Egypt and Gaza. Rafah is one city, like we hear a lot, like... Egyptian Rafah, Palestinian Rafah, but it was one city at the end of the day. And there's a lot of like families who were separated with this artificial division.

Josh: Yeah, definitely. I appreciate that so much. And kind of shifting on that same plane, but I'm going to discuss Qaddafani's critique of reactionary Arab regimes, right? And it's a critique that you actually echo as well, where you write, and I'm quoting here, he demystifies the link between Arab regimes and Arab masses, making it clear that the present Arab reality is one where imperialism and its agents in Arab regimes prey upon the masses' instinct towards national classification on equal footing. Historically and contemporaneously, this is widely considered proverbial knowledge in much of the Arab world, even without an inclination to certain ideologies. It is common to hear shopkeepers, taxi drivers, and others refer to Arab leaders as puppets and discuss ways to reclaim Palestine from the Zionists. Even instinctively, Arab streets can link liberated Palestine to the future of the Arab world." So the role of the National Bourgeoisie is one of betrayal of the racialized masses in support of capitalism and imperialism, is one that can be traced across different racial, ethnic, and national and historical contexts, of course. Can you talk a little bit about the role reactionary Arab regimes have played in weakening the national liberation movement and preying on the masses' instincts towards national and class liberation on equal footing, as you write?

Nihal El Aasar: Yeah, so I got this from Canafeni, like you said, and a quote that stands out that I would actually like to read from the 1936-1939 Palestinian revolt. It says, quote, "...the Arab countries surrounding Palestine were playing two conflicting roles. On the one hand, the pan-Arab mass movement was serving as a catalyst for the revolutionary spirit of the Palestinian masses." On the other hand, the established regimes in these Arab countries were doing everything in their power to help curb and undermine the Palestinian mass movement. The sharpening conflict in Palestine threatened to contribute to the development of the struggle in these countries in the direction of greater violence, creating a revolutionary potential that the respective ruling classes could not afford to overlook. End quote. So this quote is actually like it stood out to me because it really like throughout the Palestinian struggle and the history of the Arab-Palestinian struggle as well, you could apply this quote to any period over the last decades. It could even be applied to the current moment. And, you know, if we take that, if we kind of unpack that a bit, When we talk about, you know, obviously we know a bit about Nasser's, Gamal Abdel Nasser's project in Egypt, the Pan-Era project, the Third Worldist project. But then after the loss of 67 and after Nasser's death in 1970, Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, radically broke with these policies, first by aligning with the United States, and then by making peace with Israel in the 1978 Camp David Accords, which were only possible because Egypt won a military battle in 1973 that was able to get Israel to the table. And this dramatically isolated Egypt from the Arab world. But the kind of break between the regime and, again, the people was quite drastic during Sadat's era. Because, for example, the 1973 war that I just mentioned, historian Rima Balfadl argues that Sadat went to war largely because of... relentless student protests by Egyptian students that lasted for a couple of years, actually protesting the occupation of the Sinai and that the students wanted Egypt to go to war with Israel and wanted Egypt to regain Sinai as well. And that Sadat, after a period of repression and repressing the students, decided to go fight a limited war to kind of like appease the Egyptian masses, as well as use that as a prerequisite to make peace with Israel. Sadat, and then in the decades that followed Sadat and his successor, Hosni Mubarak, made concerted efforts to reconcile Egyptians to Israel and erode the popular commitment to Palestine. Yet, as we know, these failed to eradicate from the public consciousness both the conception of Israel as the national enemy of Egypt, as well as Egyptian's sense of connection with the Palestinian people. So Sadat endeavored to do that and prepare the Egyptian public for this dramatic foreign policy change by adopting domestic policies that aim to change the social fabric and the values prevalent in society. And this targeted particularly, and we see that until this moment, the Arab orientation commitment to Palestine that had characterized the Nasser era. So official discourse of the state media and national education curricula Under Nasser, we're all reshaped to project the logic of Egypt first and to discredit Nasser's Arab policies as costly and to have cost Egypt's economy and, you know, futile adventures. You hear the same narratives in Lebanon and Jordan as well, sometimes like Lebanon first, Jordan first, by some of the more right-wing populations there. And similar to the messaging of the political establishment in the West that we talked about, the aim is to obfuscate and isolate and sever the historical links. Like I hear a lot of Egyptians until today being like, oh, like we've done a lot for Arab neighbors. Like what has that, you know, where has that gotten us? And sometimes you hear the same from Lebanon as well. Like some people are blaming Israel's current bombardment of Lebanon for Lebanon's support of Palestine and so on and so forth. And, you know, that wasn't it wasn't only through rhetoric and discourse. So that combined this rhetoric with the sponsorship of some Islamist groups, as well as using repressive measures to counter and erode the support base of the Nasserites and the left at the same time. So under his social order, certain social groups that were under Nasser opposed Egypt's Arabist policies and support for Palestine, notably big businesses and the bourgeoisie were kind of empowered. And obviously, you know, support came in the Arab world and in Egypt and ebbs and flows. It wasn't an accepted fact. Like today, the liberation of Palestine could only come through armed struggle because at the time, some people, like a significant segment of the population thought, oh, let's give peace a chance. Acceptance was encouraged. Some people thought peace would lead to justice for Palestinians. This happened in 1978. And again, it happened in the Oslo Accords when the Oslo Accords happened. But of course, the dividends for peace never arrived in the region. In fact, the Zionist entity became more and more brutal. So that didn't remain convincing as a project. And obviously by 1981, 1982, there was public outrage at the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and compelled the rethinking of these assumptions. Opposition to peace with Israel and a commitment to the Palestinian cause continued to recur intermittently across Egypt with varying degrees of intensity in the form of anti-normalization campaigns, support for continued identification with Egypt as Arab, and so on and so forth. Of course, Israel helped those efforts as well because it can't help its expansionist and aggressive nature. So, for example, there was an Egyptian soldier whose name was Sulaiman Khater who had a kind of like hero status because he shot dead seven Israelis who had trespassed in Sinai, trespassed an Egyptian military post in Sinai in 1986. And then he was tried in an Egyptian military court. So that, again, spurred public outrage. There was a boycott movement responding to the Al-Aqsa Intifada that compelled Sainsbury's supermarkets to shut down in Egypt in 2001. And this, again, when I'm talking about this, it kind of brings us to the current moment when... There was an Egyptian soldier in June of 2023 who shot dead three Israeli soldiers before he was shot dead himself. And he's kind of also taken a kind of like martyr status. And his image is even held up in Yemen and Jordan and as well as like the mass boycott movement in Egypt right now, post October 7th. Under Mubarak as well, we could see the same tenets of Egyptian foreign policy continuing from the Sadat era. The key to both was marshalling of state resources towards normalizing Egyptian-Israeli relations, as well as preserving the orientation to economic liberalization or the open door policy or al-infatah. And Mubarak also established for Egypt this role that we see until today, the role of the regional mediator between the PA, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel, or between, you know, later on after they were created, between Hamas and Israel. And Mubarak also pushed for regional economic integration under U.S. guidance. And this included, of course, in a material sense, trade normalization with Israel. So the counter-revolution, the post-2011 moment, saw President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi take control of Egypt by a popular coup. We can see this normalization continuing, but at a more of an accelerated scale. Trade deals have continued, for example, after Egyptians have protested under Mubarak. If Egypt is selling natural gas to Israel, now Egypt is reliant on Israel for natural gas, which is an adjustment that was made possible under the auspices of international financial institutions and the push to erode Egypt's sovereignty and make it reliant on imports. as well as the thrust to turn Israel into an economic powerhouse in the region. And at the same time, enmesh the Egyptian bourgeoisie in trade deals with Israel as well. As well as, of course, security cooperation in the Sinai. After the Egyptian revolution and Sisi taking hold of power in 2013, there was a gap in his security control of the Sinai, of northern Sinai, and there were a lot of terrorist attacks by some Islamist groups. So... Sisi sought the help of Israeli intelligence, basically, to try and fight these groups. So these Palestine and Egyptian-Israeli relationship are, of course, issues that resonate powerfully amongst Egyptians. And they figured prominently in 2011 in protesters' slogans and demands. And Palestine demonstrations in the early 2000s actually were critical to the galvanization of Egyptian street politics that culminated in January 2011, as well as the issue of Palestine being one of the main presences in the square. When we talk about the square, it wasn't only, as the West would like to paint it, protests against police brutality or protests against anti-authoritarianism. But Egyptians were also really concerned with violence. in addition to economic issues and sovereignty and economic liberation, but they were also interested in anti-normalization and were ashamed of Egypt's relationship with Israel.

Josh: Shifting gears here a little bit, you quote an article that I went to read for myself while I was preparing for my conversation with you, and I thought it was excellent. But the article is called Death of the Arab Spring Subject. I want to read an excerpt from your summary of that article where you write, and I'm quoting here, the Arab political subject who participated in the Arab Spring must die to allow the subject of the Al-Aqsa flood to take their place. That is, the subject that relied on human rights organizations, NGOs, and Western institutions should be put to rest. In this place, a new political subject in the Arab world would emerge, one proposing methods of organization, resistance, steadfastness, embodying of refusal to submit to defeat, despite siege, oppression, and conspiracies. Whether true or false, it made me want to seriously grapple with the question of the state of the Arab political subject before and after Israel's genocidal assault in Gaza. So can you say a word about this dichotomy being drawn between the Arab political subject and the era of the Arab Spring versus the political subject of the Aqsa flood?

Nihal El Aasar: Yeah, when it comes to the Arab Spring in 2011, the spark was, of course, in Egypt, the murder of a young Egyptian man by the name of Khaled Saeed. And it was a murder by the police of a young Egyptian man called Khaled Saeed in the middle of the day in the street. And that was the spark. But it was about police brutality. It was about, you know, anti-authoritarianism. But it was also about the marriage of neoliberalism with increasing authoritarianism in Egypt as well. And when I talk about NGO-ization or human rights... It's really because of years of repression and the lack of organization. Egypt repressed political parties to a large extent, except for a few, the Muslim Brotherhood being one of them. And that's why they were able to win elections so easily, because other political parties didn't have the same head start. And that was for a reason. So of course, when the Arab Spring erupted, there was an absence of organization, an absence of leaders. So human rights became an attractive option. It was kind of like a knee-jerk politics of, you know, because there's repression, so a kind of like a turn towards liberal human rights as a new form of, you know, anti-authoritarian dissidence, which can unite people from multiple ideological backgrounds and provide a new strategic politics through different means after traditional methods have closed down. So the human rights orientation also provided a language for criticizing religious discourses as well as ardent right-wing nationalism. And this form of discourse of anti-authoritarianism as expressed through human rights by focusing on brutality and the absence of the rule of law, it kind of like also reached its limit as it hit the wall when it came to issues of like, for example, the loss of economic sovereignty or neoliberalization as well. And that's specifically because human rights as it exists today and after the 1970s was largely co-opted by neoliberalism and it was different from the form that it existed under in the decolonization period of the 50s and 60s and where it was somewhat useful to countries that were decolonizing. There's a thinker called Asif Bayat, who I sometimes disagree with, but in this instance, I agree with. He calls this a kind of like revolution, which is like revolution reform at the same time. And he said that this meant that like this kind of gap or this kind of like impediment that human rights have, reached meant that the classical conception of revolution as the conquest of power by popular political groups, which unite the masses through a substantive understanding of justice, was abandoned in favor of a new type of politics that prefers pluralism and unity through universal notions as rights or the rule of law. And that this in itself is a contradiction between reformist ends and revolutionary means that spelt doom for the revolution because it didn't have a theory of change. It couldn't articulate any positive vision for revolutionary change. This is the first bit of the question. Was that too theoretical?

Josh: Oh, no, it wasn't. It wasn't at all, actually. It makes sense. And I actually think the theoretical aspect, though, is what fascinates me a lot because I think about it in relation... A lot of these questions and obviously a lot of the content included in the article itself, there's like an almost... There's this ability to almost, like, apply to multiple different other contexts that I can think of specifically, whether it's U.S. context, right? And, like, as it relates to, like, colonized people, of course, right? And it's like... And I'm seeing this very similar because I think we all kind of, in some ways, because of the way that different struggles are commemorated sometimes, there's a tendency to almost... allow those struggles to keep us in that time period when those struggles took place. Does that make sense? Right? And I see this a lot, again, amongst like Black folks in the US, right? Where it's like, I feel like the civil rights movement, for example, it is, not has become, but is like this kind of I feel like we're stuck there in many ways. We're stuck during that specific period of Black political struggle. And it's something that I feel like... And we're going to talk about this later because you used the word paralysis. I think we're experiencing something very similar. And this is another reason why I feel like I connected with the article so much as I told you off the record. But... Yeah, I appreciate the theoretical aspects to it because even though it is theoretical, it is something that I think that applies based off of the ways that these histories and these histories of struggle are commemorated and celebrated and kind of propped up in a way that is... That is what we need to be doing, right? That is how... You know what I'm saying? We need to be struggling in this current moment in time and with very little consideration of the shifts... in like dynamics, right? The shifts, the adjustments that empire itself has taken. And you know what I'm saying? To adapt to those antagonisms that emerge, right? Organically through political struggle, if that makes sense. But yeah.

Nihal El Aasar: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, definitely agree. So when it comes to October 7th and Palestine, the oppression in Palestine is different, right? Especially in Gaza. And I think a lot, when I think about this distinction, I think a lot about Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abdel Fattah, who just actually had his sentence in prison extended today. He was supposed to be released today, but the Egyptian state extended it for no apparent reason. So he wrote in prison, he wrote an article called Palestine on My Mind. And he was reflecting on him going to Gaza in the brief moment of respite after 2011 and 2012, when a delegation of 500 Egyptian activists broke into Gaza, making use of the vacuum of power at the time. So he observes in the essay and he observes that Gaza, he said, and those are his words. He said Gaza is besieged, but it has not been taken captive. And he dreams about being free and an open air prison rather than in an Egyptian prison. And that's interesting to think about because obviously before, prior to this moment, Gaza was seen as an open air prison, but there was no physical Israeli soldiers in Gaza. So that was a freedom that Palestinians of Gaza had that other Palestinians in Palestine did not have, that they did not have to encounter Israeli soldiers or Israeli troops in their day-to-day lives. And then I want to read a bit from this article because I find it really interesting. So he says, quote, There are cities that inspire poets and musicians and so become immortalized in depictions that might not reflect the reality. Free Jerusalem, tranquil Alexandria, bride of the sea by route. The symbols seem more real than the cities. But Gaza and Cairo are both cities that resist romanticization and so elude song. No one sings to Cairo, but it is the capital of the Arabs. No one sings to Gaza either, but it remains the indisputable capital of Palestine. Both are always present in a crisis. The day Cairo was liberated, we thought that Jerusalem was near, and so we sped toward Gaza. The road to Jerusalem looked like it ran through Cairo, but what is certain is that it must pass through Gaza. Jerusalem is not too proud to ask for Gaza's help. Maybe Cairo should now show a little humility and do the same. The difference between siege and captivity. Do I have the right to dream of escaping to Gaza? Do I have the right to dream of a road to Cairo that passes through Gaza? Does a captive have the right to ask for help from the besieged? I know that these questions show how ancient I am, but I'm an Arab and Palestine is always on my mind. So this is really fascinating because in this is this kind of admittance from the author, from Abdel Fattah, that Gaza has a kind of like freedom that Egypt does not have by virtue of the absence of like a strong state. So the oppression manifests differently. And when we think about October 7th, I think that kind of solidified that. This was written in 2021 before this happened. And already we see Alec saying that, you know, asking, does a captive have the right to ask for help from the besieged? And this is an admittance that the people of Gaza are kind of, in the author's mind, freer than the people of Cairo because they haven't been as resolutely defeated in the same way. And this is kind of what we face now when the people in Gaza resist every day to that extent. It shows to Egyptians what is possible. And this is not absent from the minds of the rulers as well. So in January, Sisi had a press conference where he was talking about the dire economic situation in Egypt right now. And he uses Gaza as an example. And he said, you know, you complain about hunger here, but you have... we have your neighbors we can't even get food to so you should think about that and that is obviously outrageous for its own reasons obviously because Egypt participated in the siege of Gaza and Sisi's regime participated in the siege of Gaza but I think in it there is a fear as well he seems to be saying to ordinary Egyptians look what happens when you resist the The status quo, look what happens. Things can get worse if you actually dare and rise up and dare to do so.

Josh: Definitely. I really appreciate you breaking that down for us. If you can, say a word about the reactionary regimes, or as you call them, U.S. confederate states like Egypt and Jordan, which you note there being a massive gap between the nation's leadership or ruling class versus that of the general population. And also maybe say a word about the type of repression that is taking place there in response to protests against Israel.

Nihal El Aasar: Yeah, so in this, you know, counter-revolutionary moment in the post-Arab Spring moment, like, we all know historically that the first few years or the first few decades, actually, after a failed revolution are the decades where the populations that underscored these revolutions are the most defeated. And that is not that is not different in the case of the Arab Spring. And it is kind of like unfortunate that this is the time that, like the time that the Palestinians most needed the Arab masses, that was the moment where they found them. And I think that's why I thought about the essay the way I did. But then, you know, after October 7th, that kind of like, spurred the masses out of their lull a bit. We saw like in Egypt in the beginning, we saw there were spontaneous protests happening across campuses before they were severely clamped down on. Sisi even called for a state-sanctioned protest for Palestine in October. And I think the purpose was to kind of like test the waters and see where Egyptians would be at. And to his surprise, of course, to no one else's surprise is that the people who went to protest, protested for Palestine and kind of like chanted, this is not a state-sanctioned protest, and then broke into Tahrir Square outside of the authorized route and were back in Tahrir Square again after years and years. And they changed the famous which is the bread freedom social justice chant to bread freedom in an Arab Palestine. And obviously the same happened in Jordan as well, even though it's highly militarized as well. But the people of Jordan, who are 70% Palestinians, by the way, also attempted to, you know, every day attempted to march to the Israeli embassy and were met with violent repression as well. In both countries, Jordan and Egypt, which are the... Comprador states that border Palestine, we saw hundreds of arrests, hundreds of arrests of people in both countries. And those arrests continued, like there were arrests for solidarity with Palestine by their populations. And in Egypt, this continued. You know, we saw student movements try to form groups similar to those in the US, not even to do encampments, but to have like demands. And then the leaders of these student groups would get arrested. People who would go to stadiums bearing Palestine flags would get arrested. And the arrests just kept mounting. I had a mutual on Twitter, an Egyptian mutual, who on Twitter or on X, I refuse to call it X, still Twitter in my mind, in December, last December, December 2023, asked if people would be willing to answer the call from Palestine and protest in front of the US embassy in Egypt. And then his account disappeared and I asked about him and he was abducted by the state authorities. And until now, almost a year later, we don't know where he is. So the response has been quite brutal and large in scale. And that has led to other forms of kind of like adventurism. Like we see people on their own going out and protesting or chanting against Sisi. And then obviously they get picked up really quickly and arrested and isolated because they're not part of a big group. Or in Egypt, twice since October, the first time on the 8th of October, an Egyptian policeman shot Israeli tourists in Alexandria. And then an Israeli businessman was shot and killed earlier this year as well in Alexandria as well. And this all shows a kind of a massive gap between what the ruling class of these countries want and the general population. And obviously, like not so long ago, the gap increased. had already existed in 2011. The Israeli embassy in Cairo, like one of the first things that people did in 2011, the revolution, when they owned the streets, is that they took to the Israeli embassy and took the Israeli flag down once, at least like a protester called Ahmed al-Shahad, scaled all 21 stories of the embassy and took the Israeli flag down and raised the Egyptian flag to cheer in crowds and was instantly hailed as a national hero. The Israeli flag was then replaced the following day and Egyptian authorities erected a wall outside of the embassy but then the protesters did not stop and a demonstration was called again to bring down the wall and expel the ambassador and by evening protesters had brought the wall down stormed into the embassy, scaled the building, hurled documents from the windows. The entire diplomatic staff of the embassy was evacuated under Egyptian commando escort, while military police launched a large-scale clampdown that resulted in three deaths and over a thousand injuries and dozens of arrests. And until now, while the embassy exists, but the flag is not there, like there's no distinctive Israeli flag outside of the embassy. And even like there was a... brief period that the Israeli ambassador couldn't find a real estate because landlords would refuse to rent to the Israeli embassy either out of principle or fear for a while. So that is proof that this is the will of the masses and this is what they want. But obviously they were punished for it severely, punished for this severely. And the order that was, the regime that was established since then is making sure that this doesn't happen again at this very moment. Thank you.

Josh: Yeah, certainly. I appreciate that. Thank you. And we kind of touched on this a little earlier, but I think it would be worth reiterating and expanding on because it is really fascinating how in the U.S., even among self-proclaimed allies of the Palestinian cause, that there's a vast misunderstanding of the implications of Zionist colonialism in Occupy Palestine. For one, it is often treated as a single issue. And I'm always like, how can it be a single issue when Israel's presence in the region has a deadly impact on numerous nations? And I want to be clear that even if Israel as an imperialist outpost for the U.S. only impacted Palestinians, that would be enough to light the world on fire, right, in my opinion. But it is not just Palestinians who are vulnerable to the deadly assaults of the Zionist regime, but the entire region is, right? And you make this clear in your piece when you write, and I'm quoting here, as clear as it was in the 20th century, the fight is not simply about or within Gaza, rather it is fought across all Arab capitals. from Cairo to Amman to Damascus to Baghdad. And it is a cause for the mass of the region to organize around. The struggle for Palestine is a struggle for the future of the Arab region. The people of the region were aware of this in the 20th century, and they remain aware of it now, despite decades-long efforts to enforce a top-down normalization, end quote. So just talk about this a bit, the kind of multinational reverberations of the Palestinian struggle, and maybe say a word about what it would even look like to organize under such a rubric, right? Such a pan-Arabism, if that makes sense.

Nihal El Aasar: Yeah, so, you know, as we're seeing now, like Israel is proving to be a chimera of death and destruction in the region. Like only yesterday, Israel was bombing Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, obviously while conducting its operations and continuing its genocide in Gaza. Absolutely. Yeah, even there's talks of a ground invasion in Lebanon now as well. But if we take a bird's eye view and zoom out a little bit and think about the last 15, 20 years in the region, Iraq was dismantled and destroyed. Syria... There was a civil war. Libya invaded and destroyed. Egypt neutralized and under dire economic situations. So all of the countries surrounding Palestine and the Zionist state have effectively been destroyed or like destroyed by imperialism in one way or another so any like manifestation or instance of Arab sovereignty is seen as a threat to imperialism be it like I'm not even talking about whether it's a socialist or leftist project or not just any expression of sovereignty like I don't purport to support Saddam Hussein but you know he wanted a sovereign Iraq in his own way and that project had to be dismantled and the US intervened directly in that Libya, the same thing. NATO and the US intervened to destroy Libya as it existed. Some people might say that Libya had its problems, but it was a sovereign state and it was destroyed. But for the US, that's a success story because oil is not nationalized anymore and can be extracted. The same can be said for Syria. The same can be said in a different way for Egypt. The biggest existential threat to Israel, historical existential threat to Israel on its borders, the biggest Arab army neutralized in that way and having its sovereignty taken away from it. And obviously that is through like imperialism does so and through either leveraging debt or sanctions in the case of Egypt and Jordan. It's, you know, controlled by either U.S. aid or in the case of Egypt, international financial institutions and structural adjustment programs of the IMF and the World Bank that keep it indebted and keep its economy subservient to the world economy. And, you know. make it less reliant on its own on its own products and it doesn't even it's an import based economy now and that erodes the sovereignty and that's why for example Sisi refused or like did not you know lift the siege on Gaza or like did not allow delegations to go through because The more you're subservient on the U.S. economically, the more you're going to follow U.S. orders. And that is the materialist analysis here at play. It's not because Sisi hates Palestinians. It's just because his regime's legitimacy is reliant on international financial institutions in the U.S., And that's how imperialism controls the region. On the other side, countries like Iran are subject to sanctions and that cripples it in a way, but it also frees it to be openly antagonistic towards the U.S. because it's against its own national interests. So maybe you can look at the region and say, If Israel didn't exist, U.S. imperialism would have found a way to wreak havoc on it anyway. But in order for us to see if the region is going to prosper or not, then we have to defeat U.S. imperialism. And by default, it's proxy, which is the Zionist entity.

Josh: Absolutely. I appreciate that.

Nihal El Aasar: And of course, sorry, the second part of the question, which is, you say, like, what would that look like? We saw an iteration of pan-Arabism under Nasser. And, you know, pan-Arabism existed before Nasser as an idea, but he popularized it and took on the figure of pan-Arabism. And that project was, you know, with all its faults, it was defeated severely in 1967 and which was considered like a monumental loss that not only was it the biggest defeat of the Arab armies against Israel, but it also solidified how useful Israel was to the U.S. in that it was able to defeat Arab radical projects such as, you know, Arab socialism as tied to pan-Arabism, communism, Arab nationalism, because these projects were tied to the huge military defeat So then as the U.S. was busy conducting the Vietnam War, the Zionist entity was able to do its work for it in the Cold War and defeat third worldism and Arab socialism and Arab nationalism.

Josh: Absolutely. And you talk a little bit about the waning response to the genocide, specifically as it relates to the mass demonstrations. You specifically argue that the response from the Arab masses has not been sufficient to meet the political demands at the moment. I would argue, and I'm sure you would agree, that this is true for, honestly, most of our communities, ourselves included, right? But you ask a question that I think is critical, that I think, again, could imply to all of our communities today. You asked, and I'm quoting here, if pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist sentiment remains for the most part strong in the region, how do we explain this paralysis? Is severe repression a satisfactory answer if we understand the political subject as an individual with political will to deliberately intervene in the course of history? How do we shift this subjectivity from being a bystander and a witness to becoming a an agent of history, end quote. And I have my own theories about these questions as it relates to Black Africans specifically, but not limited to those in the West. But I would love for you to talk a bit about how you have come to understand this political paralysis as it relates to Arabs and Egyptians more specifically.

Nihal El Aasar: Yeah, so I talk a lot about... Ali Qadri talks a lot about this, that for imperialism and extraction to work in the region, the masses, the millions in the region must be defeated. And that is the primary goal of imperialism. And in order to do so... There are a lot of tools and a lot of factors are at play here. Like systemic depoliticization is one of its primary goals, the primary goals of repression. Political scientist Hassam Andeel talks about, in the case of Egypt, he talks about how the police state under Sadat was expanded from... So under Nasser, there was political repression, but it was only against people who were not... supportive of the state project at the time, which was like pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism. But then under Sadat, this expanded, and under Mubarak as well, this expanded to everyone, like to the working classes as well, to people who weren't even political. They started being... subjected to repression as well. So there were systems of disciplining and punishing the working class by the police and the police state, which expanded to include everyone. So everyone in the street, like Khaled Saeed, who I mentioned before, his public execution in the street sparked so much outrage because he wasn't even political. He was quite an introvert. He was a gamer. He loved cats. He was, to a large extent, minding his own business, but it didn't protect him from police brutality. And this is kind of the argument at play here. And that as the welfare state under Nasser shrank under Sadat after the open door policy and neoliberalization, the police state expanded and became a sort of a kind of like mini welfare state on its own, encompassing a lot of Egyptians. Like I think the Ministry of Interior now in Egypt employs close to three million people. So, yeah, a lot of people became benefactors in state repression while the masses or the working class in Egypt were subjected to processes of disciplining and punishing on a daily basis. And that obviously leads to large scale depoliticization and people wanting to move away from politics. Anything that might cause. And obviously part of that is the severe lack of political life. And, you know, I don't like this word, but civil society also. And now in Egypt, like in Hosni Mubarak's time, there was a civil society, but it was a sham. And Mubarak controlled the levers of it. Now that civil society has been obliterated completely and there's no political life at all. So that also, coupled with repression, caused a lot of Egyptians to not participate in political life at all. There are students who have, since 2011, have been to universities and never been in a student union. They've never voted in a student union. There are workers who've never filed a motion. So even the political memory that existed that led to 2011 through organizing for Palestine or organizing for other things, it now doesn't exist at all. So even if you'd want to organize, there aren't organizations or institutions in place or leadership that would enable you to do so. So that kind of like... narrows the ways in which you could participate in political life. And it makes you less of a political agent in that sense and more of a witness, as was mentioned.

Josh: Absolutely. In that context, you use the term melancholia, which you trace back to your case with Hannah Proctor's burnout, the emotional experience of political defeat. And I'm fascinated with how you mobilize this term in relation to defeat, where you write, and I'm quoting here, when we invoke the defeated or depoliticized Arab subjects, then we must also think about the effects of defeat. And after attempts to shape history, after the possibility of breaking with the status quo has been violently taken away, to this day, these subjects endure violent daily processes, of disciplining and ordering that only serves to further entrench this defeat. You continue by saying, I'm quoting here again, seen through the lens of melancholia, defeat is not merely about effect. This change of political subjectivity is material, not merely intellectual, but experiential. In order to change this condition, prevent lingering feelings of melancholia and re-engage in political struggle, we have to grapple with defeat as material reality." Rather than as an epical event, what then is the difference between learning from past struggles and melancholic romanticization? And I would just like for you to, you know, offer any other insights that you have on this quote, because I really think that it breaks the doll down very seamlessly. So I wanted to read it off, but yeah.

Nihal El Aasar: Yeah, so I think like a lot of materialists, I kind of like... I know it's very trendy in academia now, but, you know, affect or affect theory. So I kind of like dismissed... that before. And I thought, no, like everything is about material relations, et cetera, et cetera. But I've been reading a lot about the 1967 defeat recently. And like when I read Hannah Proctor's book, as well as, you know, like there's a book by Alam Yaziada called My Great Arab Melancholy that I also read. was reading at the time i um uh yeah so i i was thinking a lot about this question of defeat and i thought you know it doesn't have to be an affect and hannah explains it in his in her book so well and uh obviously like the title of the of this piece comes from enzo traversal's left-wing melancholia where he talks about how you know for he talks about western leftism more than anything. He talks about how we have to overcome melancholia or defeat or like seeing leftist projects as always being a failure. So this was all in my mind as I came to this piece, especially Defeat of 1967. And especially when I was thinking of 2011, I thought, you know, I can't think of political defeat in a in the post-2011 moment without going back to 1967, which arguably in the Arab world, but in Egypt specifically, because it was under Nasser, you know, who offered a great hope and a great pride for the Arabs at the time that this defeat happened, that I thought about, you know, we have to engage with this notion of political defeat. We have to think about how to explain 1967, how to explain 2011 and how to use them instead to move beyond this moment rather than, you know, confirm an understanding that the Arab masses will always be defeated, but rather like use that for learning from our mistakes and like learning what went wrong.

Josh: Definitely. No, that makes a lot of sense. And can you say a word about the 1967 loss to Israel by the Arab armies led by Egypt or Syria, an event you state that shaped the modern Middle East unlike any other and serves as a kind of central cause of left-wing melancholia in the Arab world and the benchmark against which all subsequent events are measured?

Nihal El Aasar: Yeah, so it really is not, like, it cannot be overstated how much the defeat of 1967 was catastrophic. And I remember growing up or even recently, like when thinking about left history or like when reading novels, like even supposedly like socialist novels or socialist literature and like feeling as an Arab, feeling like out of this narrative, because I would read about, you know, in this like teleological telling of history, people will talk about, you know, 68, about 68 in Europe, right? this movement, they would talk about, you know, all other important historical dates. And I found that like 67 was never mentioned. So kind of like at the risk of like invoking identity politics, but I never felt really seen or represented when my experience of growing up in the Arab world and like reading literature in Arabic, how heavily 67 is represented and how It was considered the defeat of the left before the left was even defeated and was seen to be defeated in the West, like through the fall of the Berlin Wall or the fall of the Soviet Union or so on and so forth. Because of, you know, linking the left with the military loss, there's a famous saying, Sheikh called Sheikh Shahraoui, he's really famous in Egypt, who said after the defeat in 1967, basically something along the lines of like, I pray to God because I was happy that we did not win against Israel while we were in the arms of communism. So that's how some Islamists were thinking about it. And indeed, like a lot of Arabs at the time, especially in Egypt said, you know, we strayed too far from God with all of this left ideology. And that's why we lost. Like there was a kind of like, this wasn't our ideology. This is not our tradition. Let's go back to tradition. That was only one part of it. The like more material part is that, like I mentioned before, is that Nasser's successors said that you use this, A way to suppress the left was to give rise to Islamist tendencies in Egypt, especially the Muslim Brotherhood. Images that relate to 67 are grown men crying in the streets, Nasser's famous resignation speech that had, very puzzlingly so, the Egyptian masses out in the street asking him to stay on as leader. He was only alive for three years after, until he died at the age of 52 in 1970. Coincidentally, the same day Nasrallah's death was announced, on September 28th, and the same day that Black September started. We jokingly say that after Palestine is liberated and after we win the revolution, we're going to cancel September. But yeah, so, you know, there's a really, like, I wish it was translated, but there's a really important series by Egyptian historian Khaled Fahmy called The Continuous 67 Loss. And it kind of like analyzes the loss of 67 people. in 12 episodes it's in Arabic for Arabic speakers who want to delve more into this but it's also about its reverberations that are felt until this very day and yeah I highly recommend it for Arabic speakers but I guess my argument here is that we like it's not just as much as we don't like to think in binaries of defeat and victory, but in every moment as an unfinished project. So we need to think about defeats in that way also. There's a concept in Palestine that we like to call Tarakum or accumulation. It's an accumulation of wins and it's like winning through an accumulation of wins and that nothing is in the ether. which I think Palestinian resistance factions understand as well. And that's why the symbolism of October 7th being launched on October 7th on the anniversary of the 6th victory by Egyptian forces in 1973.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. I think you kind of make that clear throughout your piece, too, about the symbolism. But I don't think that I do appreciate your mentioning that while the United States had its attention primarily pulled away during the Vietnam War, Israel made itself useful by doing the dirty work of the Cold War in the Middle East, the so-called Middle East, I should say. So Israel became a kind of primary vehicle of combating Soviet influence and fighting Third world is non-alignment and tri-continentalism in the Arab world. And you continue by saying, and I'm quoting here, not only did Israel defeat the most powerful army in the Middle East, but this defeat also delegitimized and defeated the dual project of pan-Arabism and Arab socialism as embodied by Nasser and other leftist Arab radical movements. These movements were ultimately seen as having failed to achieve victory and Arab liberation, leading to a loss of sovereignty from major states in the region. It is thus argued that the Arab left was hit with left-wing melancholy, right, three decades before the Western left, as signified by the fall of the Soviet Union and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. This melancholy was compounded by the fact that the radical Arab left movements were very much still nascent and militarized before they were suddenly ejected out of history by the 1967 loss, end quote. So can you discuss this defeat of radical Arab movements, right, in relation to other rural historical events, like the fall of the Soviet Union, for example.

Nihal El Aasar: Yeah, so as Arab states like Egypt, for example, were trying to find their way, like basically Nasser became a socialist because of the Bandung Conference. When he went to the Bandung Conference, the famous conference where the non-aligned movement and third worldism was launched in 1955, he came back and saw that as the way forward for Egypt. Some people say that's, you know, that's not a great thing for him to do, but I... um that he's not like he wasn't committed socialist from before as a kind of like indictment but i think that's completely fine if you think if your national interests at the time align with a third worldism and you see that as an opening then that like all that's a testament to you And he did. And then after that, he launched the land reform program that saw a lot of feudalism ending in Egypt. And he made education free for all layers of society. for everyone. And he really focused on like culture as a battlefront as well. Like my own grandparents were beneficiaries of that. They both did PhDs in Europe and my grandmother in music, my grandfather in art that were fully funded by the Egyptian state at the time. And they came back and participated in the Egyptian National Project through like being part of like Egyptian cinema at the time, which was like the golden era of Egyptian cinema. and they were both in like public schools they weren't like they were middle class largely middle class and they were able to do so during Nasser's time like obviously there were other like you can critique Nasser from the left easily because he suppressed a lot of communists. He banned political parties, including communist political parties. And communists were either imprisoned or you had an option to be, you would either be imprisoned or you would be subsumed and participate in the state project. And a lot of people chose the latter. And even a lot of people who were imprisoned, a lot of communists who were imprisoned, like Sana'a al-Ibrahim or Anwar Abdel-Malik, came out and still supported the Nasrat project because it was Because the left and the Arab world was more concerned with Arab nationalism first and then economistic issues second. So it was always like anti-imperialism came first, Palestinian liberation came first, and then any sort of economistic issues second. And that's why we see a lot of communists put their personal interests aside to support the project at the time. which some people seem to find hard to understand. Like, for example, Sana'a al-Ibrahim, the novelist who wrote a book about the failures of 1967, like a novel about that, and a novel called 1970, which is The Year of Nasser's Death, which was written from Nasser's point of view, which I think is quite sympathetic to Nasser. He refused to publish 1967 right after Nasser died because he didn't want it to be used by right forces and by Sadat to punch the left with. And he waited until after the Egyptian revolution of 2011 to publish it. But yeah, back to the Arab left, it was mostly, it was primarily concerned with anti-imperialism and Palestinian liberation first. And that's why the 67 loss hit so deep. And it kind of like effectively destroyed any project of Arab socialism, especially in Egypt. And why it was so easy afterwards for Sadat to come with a completely alternative approach political project that was also obviously really helped by the global turn towards neoliberalism in the 1970s.

Josh: Thank you. Yeah, that provides a lot of background that I wasn't exactly familiar with, so I appreciate that. And before I let you go, I really would love for you to talk about some of the shifts that you are seeing within the Arab world in the aftermath of the offensive on October 7th, if you would like to talk about some of the specifics that you mentioned in the essay.

Nihal El Aasar: So like I mentioned before, there was very limited but nonetheless mobilizations on the Egyptian streets that have been quite quiet. Of course. Including a very limited one even last week by some students who were actually imprisoned by Sisi and then freed again who took to the streets when the Lebanon airstrikes happened and chanted Nasrallah's name in the streets of Egypt. I mean, there were like... 20 in total, but still you see that happening. There's also Egyptian diasporic movements that have started. There's a group called Egyptian Diaspora Resist that emerged, and that's a new development in Egyptian political history. I think that an Egyptian diaspora movement has started, which is a testament to how many people have been exiled by the current regime. We're seeing, of course, it's not sufficient to meet the current moment, but we're seeing a very substantial boycott movement that is not only BDS focused, but it's a boycott movement of almost like all Western products. People are hardly drinking Pepsi or Coca-Cola and we see Egyptian brands thriving instead. which is an interesting way to show Palestine solidarity, especially in this current moment. But I think it's a way within which the public can show support with the limited weapons they have. And I say that knowing, of course, that that is not sufficient given that there's a genocide, but it's also important to note that this is happening at the moment. We're also seeing a lot of unified discourse as much as people like to... or the West tries to, like we said, obfuscate and separate Arab people from each other, there's still kind of like this unified, not uniform, but kind of unified discourse on Palestine and around the resistance, actually. There's almost like unanimous support of Palestinian resistance factions, except amongst a tiny minority of Arab liberals. And even those... have come to reckon with the fact that the rules-based order that they believed in has proven to be such a sham. So a lot of people are reconsidering that. And there's a real intellectual break with the West right now and a reconfiguration of what a lot of people thought the West is and what the rule-based order is and what the international liberal order is. And yeah, a move towards pragmatism. Yeah.

Josh: Definitely. Definitely. Well, thank you so much for this. First of all, I want to shout out the essay again because it was absolutely incredible. I think it provides so much historical context and applying it to the contemporary moment that we're in. And I really appreciate you for writing it. And I also appreciate your brilliance and our conversations. And Just being sharp when it comes to this stuff as well. So before I let you go, I would love for you to tell folks where they can find you, maybe give a shout out to something you're working on and that people should keep a lookout on or whatever the case is, just anything that you would like to share or just your last thoughts, basically.

Nihal El Aasar: Yeah, I think the best way to find me is either on Twitter or on Instagram. I'm active on both. I probably should have by now some sort of link tree or website where I have my writings, but I haven't managed to do so yet. But I'll work on that one. But until then, you can find me on Twitter or on Instagram. And thank you so much for having me. This is one of my favorite podcasts, truly. You do incredible work. And you've had some of the people I respect the most on here. So I'm really honored to be here, truly.

Josh: Thank you. It was great talking. I appreciate you so much for giving us the time and again, for writing this piece as well. And I highly recommend folks to check out your other works as well.

Nihal El Aasar: Thank you so much.

Speaker 3: so

Josh: So,

Speaker 3: Thank you.

Josh: Thank you.

Speaker 3: Bye. Bye.