Palestinian Resistance vs. The Zionist Project w/ Max Ajl & Patrick Higgins

Max Ajl: You remember Dien Bien Phu?

Brett O'Shea: No!

Patrick Higgins: The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa.

Max Ajl: They didn't have anything but a rifle.

Patrick Higgins: The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare, but they put some guerrilla action on them.

Henry Hackamacki: Hello and welcome to Guerrilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Hackamacki, joined as usual by my 2 co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian, director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you?

Adnan Hussain: I'm doing pretty well. It's good to be with you, Henry.

Henry Hackamacki: Yeah, it's nice to see you again. Also joined as usual by Brett O'Shea, who of course is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you?

Brett O'Shea: Doing about as well as I can.

Henry Hackamacki: Yeah, I think that that's probably the best that we can hope for at this moment in time. Before I introduce our guests and our topic at hand, I would like to briefly remind the listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this. By subscribing to our Patreon at patreon.com/guerrillahistory—that's G U E R R I L L A history—and you can keep up to date with everything that each of the hosts as well as the show are doing by going on Twitter at guerrilla_pod—that's G U E R R I L L A_pod. So we have two excellent guests today in a very pressing topic. We're going to be talking about Palestine. And we're joined by Max Ajl, who is a returning guest of the program. People will remember him. We talked about the national question and agrarian, the agrarian question. So Max Ajl is a postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University, and he is author of the wonderful A People's Green New Deal. Hello, Max. Nice to have you back on the program.

Max Ajl: Great to be here.

Henry Hackamacki: Yeah, no problem. And also, we are joined for the first time by Patrick Higgins. who's a researcher at the Center of Arab Studies at the University of Houston, where he specializes on Palestine. So hello, Patrick. It's nice to have you on the program.

Patrick Higgins: Thank you very much, Henry, for having me here. I appreciate it.

Henry Hackamacki: Absolutely. So we are going to be talking about Palestine. We're going to be talking about the lead-up to the current events that are going on in Gaza. We're going to be talking about the current events that are going on in Gaza. But before we get to that, I'd like to ask each of you to discuss how you each came to the Palestinian solidarity movement, because I know you both are very heavily involved with that. And I'm just curious of how you each came to it. And then we can start to talk about the history itself. But I think that the listeners might be interested to know how this topic kind of came to your attention and how you began to get involved, you know, years ago. So, Patrick, why don't you go first?

Patrick Higgins: My introduction to the Palestinian cause came I would say properly when I was in high school. I had a Palestinian mentor figure in my life who was very frank with me about his family experiences as refugees. And the series of conversations that I had at that age definitely moved me, I would say. But there is, of course, a difference between being introduced to something and beginning to sympathize with something and then becoming vocal about something and then involved in some kind of organizational capacity to make change. So I would say that the actual involvement in the movement developed when I was a college student at Wayne State University in Detroit. And I was very— I was surrounded by it. It was very ubiquitous on campus. There was more or less at any time a teach-in or lecture you could attend. And of course, given the large Arab and Muslim population in that area, I had a lot of friends involved in the cause. And at the time, I was a journalism student, and I started to cover it in different capacities, write about it. One of those publications being community newspaper out of Dearborn, Arab American News. And at that point, I would say I was beginning to— I became, I guess, consumed with trying to find the origins of the US policy there, the US support for Israel. And that's led me to my current work on the scholarship side of things. But from there, I would say the development, my organizational development increased when I was a master's student at UT Austin. And it was there that I organized with Palestine Solidarity Committee. Even though I was involved in SJP in Detroit, I think I increased my activities during that period and was involved in authoring the divestment resolution and other campus initiatives of that kind. So at this point, I've been probably involved for over 10 years. And I think that it's been Really a foremost personal political concern of mine all of my adult life.

Max Ajl: Max? Yeah. Thank you for that, Patrick. So I first learned, I think, about some aspects of the Palestinian cause because I grew up in a Jewish family. So Israel Palestine issue was placed on the table in front of us from a very young age. And I was pretty staunchly anti-occupation, just speaking ideologically speaking, by the time I was 12 or 13. And kind of the more I read, The more I learned, I was pretty anti-Zionist by the time I was 18. I wouldn't say that I was really politically involved or writing about it publicly until I was in my mid-20s. And I really got spurred into motion by what happened in the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2008, 2009. During this horrible massacre. And so I got involved in kind of a wide range of BDS organizing and international anti-Zionist organizing. And then I spent 5 months with International Solidarity Movement in the Gaza Strip and was able to learned much more, not necessarily politically, but socially, culturally about Palestine. And, you know, since 2013, I've been spending most of my time in Tunisia, and while kind of maintaining Keeping an organizational eye on the United States and what's going on there and what it takes to support political work there, but also, I think, deepening my understanding and ideologically speaking, involvement in the Arab nationalist aspects of the Palestinian cause.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, that's really helpful situating, and especially, Max, since you mentioned your solidarity work in Gaza, I think, since That is the subject at hand with the current Israeli assault, bombardment, and tightening of siege on Gaza. Perhaps I could ask either you or Patrick in turn, perhaps to situate us a little bit in the history going back to 2005, when, you know, there was a big change in the status of Gaza with the removal of Israeli settlements, but quickly it was put under blockade. And to help us understand the conditions that have specifically led up to the most recent phase of the conflict, since Gaza has been under bombardment many times, at least 4 to 6 major times. So maybe you could give us a little bit of that context from 2005 going forward to the present day? What are the key features of the experience of Palestinians in Gaza in particular?

Patrick Higgins: Yeah, I would say, looking at 2005 specifically, we're talking about a political landscape after which the Second Intifada and that period, that stormy period of resistance against Israel, it was also really a response to the con job, the facade of the peace process. And we should remember at this time that as recently as 2015, as was revealed in Hillary Clinton's emails, she openly referred to the peace process as a Potemkin peace process. So the idea here was articulated actually by US officialdom that this was a facade. Okay. Moving specifically to Gaza, I think from the very earliest stages of the Nakba, this ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine by Zionist militias, that Gaza presented a problem of resistance towards the Zionist project. It was, if we look at What initially happened there, you had refugees coming from about 144 towns in the area, highly concentrated at that time. And about 65% of the refugees who ended up there were agricultural workers. So when we talk about the refugees in Gaza and their descendants, we are talking fundamentally about displaced peasants and the resistance or the military resistance, the armies that they're able to raise against incredible odds are effectively peasant armies, albeit displaced. And even from those early stages, 1950, there were these, even though Israel didn't occupy it militarily at the time, there were frequent air raids in order to quell different forms of resistance. This took the form of demonstrations, took the form of military operations as well against Zionist expansion. When you move forward to 2005, I think that when Sharon made that decision, it was about 21 settlements at the time that were decommissioned and then they withdrew And then that's when we see the current siege. And at the time, you know, we were using— the movement was using terms like blockade and siege. And it's not that these are inaccurate, but I think that over time it's become more apparent that the way of dealing with this resilient population has been a concentration camp model, but a concentration camp model tailored to the 21st century, 21st century technologies, techniques of surveillance, and even going so far as biosurveillance. Yeah. And I think that that's become more apparent. I think this is the word that we have to start to invoke when we are talking about what exactly they are resisting. They're resisting a highly technocratic form of enclosure on populations who do not accept this extreme form of deprivation. And the decision that Sharon made at the time, I think that this, to understand the current Israeli campaign, the current attempt at ethnic cleansing of the area, is that this was, you know, the Zionist project at any time always is seeking to expand. What it wants at any given time is more land. Any time that is prevented from taking land, it is because resistance has formed some kind of equalizer and they were forced into a sort of compromise. The compromise in 2005 was that Sharon realized or made this calculation that they were not going to win demographically in that particular area. Again, it's being highly concentrated. And so he looked at that withdrawal as a form of demographic concentration or consolidation to make sure, and this is the sort of Nazi-like terms, of course, he and his co-thinkers were running that state, think about it is how many babies the various people from various racial categories are having at a given time. There's a lot of baby counting going on in their thinking, which leads them logically to depopulation campaign like the current one. So that was a sort of concession, but they viewed it as a compromise. And if they could possibly respond to an effective military resistance operation waged against them by treating instead of a quote-unquote Hamas problem, a Gaza problem, then they will move forward in doing that. Now, I think that they're in for certain rude awakenings with a certain attempt, but that doesn't make it any less devastating. And I think that that's what's important to keep in mind, that the concentration camp model that they resorted to in lieu of actual full ethnic cleansing has always bred resistance, of which groups like Hamas are only one part. It's a resistant population at large. And that is where their current thinking is going, that they want to try to settle this project by reducing it more into the current Gaza Strip, by getting rid of the north part and maybe halving the current population there. Yeah, maybe Max can take it up from there.

Max Ajl: Yeah, I think that was an excellent summary. And I just want to add in a few more details. I mean, you know, I think the Holocaust imagery is apt, but I think we need to add 2 things to this question of the Holocaust imagery so we can connect the historical arc going on. I mean, you know, the birth of concentration camps is basically in counterinsurgency warfare and anti-colonial revolutions and the counterinsurgency against them. So this is where the concentration camps find their origins, both for the effective concentration of rebels and suspected rebels and ripping them off from population centers, but also the concentration of populations themselves into enclosed territories where they would be less politically efficacious. Right? Of course, the Nazis self-consciously were inspired by earlier colonial— by their own colonial experiences in Africa and elsewhere, right? And this is why Césaire really saw the Nazi extermination attempts as really organic continuation of the European colonial process elsewhere, right? The European barbarism finally coming home to the continent where these kind of procedures of relegating certain populations to non-humanity really came home to certain populations that had had some sort of ambiguous relationship to like European-ness theretofore, right? And of course now we see it in in Palestine itself. I think the other point that I would like to add to Patrick's excellent summary is just the, you know, these are kind of an effect of the lateness of the Israeli colonial experience, right? I mean, when 1948 happened, it was to the point where it was not so easy for Israel to carry out the extermination procedures, right, that other settler colonial states had applied to their own indigenous populations in order to basically carry out a primitive accumulation of the land, right? These extermination procedures were no longer politically feasible. They were also no longer politically feasible because of the Arab strategic depth surrounding Palestine. And that has always been a component of Palestinian strength, even amidst open collaboration. You know, Avishai has the book Collusion Across the Jordan. Even amidst the most open collaboration, of the reactionary regimes in the Arab world, this type of extermination procedures has not been politically possible because this, you would see an Arab reaction. I mean, you always see an Arab reaction to the Israeli barbarities in Palestine. And that would make one that would, it was feared, I think, that would upset the reactionary regimes, right? So, So we see this kind of problem and we see a variety of modalities of trying to deal with the problem as well as deal as kind of make the best of a bad situation in some sense, right? Making the best of a bad situation was using Palestine and Gaza basically as a dispossessed proletariat, right? I mean, once you carry out the process of primitive accumulation and separate the people from their land, Right. You then do exactly what you always do with a dispossessed landless mass, which is use them as super exploited low-wage labor, which was their function in Israel and carried out a stabilization of the Israeli class structure because class and race then collapsed into one another. And so it kind of contributed to the hegemony of Likud. Right. At a certain point in Israeli history, right? Because they were able to kind of identify the Arabs as these external enemy while also offering something to the Mizrahi population with them becoming a petty bourgeoisie and so forth. So I think this is very significant. And like what Patrick was saying, you know, what the challenge is that these are not just inert masses or disorganized proletariat, but they're also a people in struggle, right?

Henry Hackamacki: Right.

Max Ajl: And so they got organized, and their ability to get organized is what's produced the consequences we're seeing now.

Henry Hackamacki: So before I turn it over to Brett to continue taking us through, you know, the history to the present, I have kind of a tangential question for each of you, and I'm mostly going to direct it towards Patrick because, Patrick, you mentioned you were a former journalism student, and this deals with journalism. In some ways, which is that you had mentioned that previously the solidarity movement was using terms like blockade. But really, if we're looking at it from a more realistic perspective in terms of what the situation actually is, we really do have this concentration camp model, or perhaps we could describe it as a concentrationary universe, which is something that is used throughout the Stalin book, the Losurdo Stalin book. This concept of a concentrationary universe, which is a system of terror and systematic dehumanization. I mean, there really can't be a better example than what goes on in occupied Palestine today of a concentrationary universe, with maybe the exception of the reservation system in North America. And these are kind of the 2 examples that I typically use when we're discussing that book, but also other terms that, you know, you and Max were using were things like ethnic cleansing and extermination procedures. Of course, these are accurate descriptors of what is going on in occupied Palestine, and particularly, you know, what is being imposed upon Gaza. But we're often pushed back against quite firmly when we try to use these terms. And when I say pushed back against, I don't mean by people that are also within the Palestinian solidarity movement. I mean the polite liberal kind of established powers. The reason I bring this up is because whilst we are pushed against for utilizing these accurate terms, we have the leaders of so-called Israel coming out and saying things like Hamas is worse than the Nazis, or this is a new Holocaust, what is going on. And there is very little actual pushback. It's just reported on in terms of Israel says this, and then it is reported on. We also have this phenomenon of atrocity propaganda, which we have seen for years and years, but is ramped up to an entirely new degree now where we have things like beheaded babies despite not having any actual evidence released of this. Or mass rape, again, completely without evidence. Or the latest, we had an MP from the UK who kind of merged these 2 things together and went with raped babies. Again, no actual evidence of this, but this is reported on in the news until days later when the retraction is made that is much, of course, quieter than the original reporting on it. So I guess my question is, can you talk a little bit about why it's important that we be very clear when describing what is going on, what has gone on, what is going on, and why we have this kind of hegemony of this propagandistic rhetoric towards the situation in occupied Palestine. Because this is one of the big fundamental roadblocks for us being able to actually break through into popular consciousness and get Ordinary people who are politically disengaged from understanding what truly is going on because of these structures in place kind of preventing us from doing so. So if you have any thoughts on that, and then I'll turn it over to Brett.

Patrick Higgins: Briefly, on your point, you made a comparison to the reservation system in North America, which these were early forms of concentration camps, which you could add to Max's point. And I think that when we're talking about Gaza, that there are some similarities to, for instance, what was done to Dakota Sioux people in the Minnesota area, that when they were put onto these areas, when they were put into these concentration camps, there was a severing from the people and their traditional food systems, which led to starvation. Which then led to the attack on the settlements in North America that happened in 1862. And actually, we saw that happen pretty much right away in Gaza from 1948 through early 1950s, that the traditional food supplies, which they had depended on, these are the food networks that involved wheat trade that allows them to access wheat and also grow oranges, that we saw early on that there was severe food insecurity way before the year 2023. So I think that there definitely are strong parallels and probably modeling based on that. Now, moving forward from that, of course, we have something else now that after blockade started, there were experiments In order to see what could be used on a population and actually how far you can go to enclose and surveil a population. So we have, in some ways, it's also an unprecedented situation. Now, moving to the media operations, because this is something that I do not think— it would be impossible in this conversation to clear all the fog of the propaganda operation. Right. I think that as a general task, what we need to do is take some sort of, make some sort of assessment of media operations through states of emergency, both declared and undeclared in the 21st century, and to see how they've evolved and become more sophisticated because now it's directly delivered to our phones. So this would be an assessment of the post-9/11 era. And it would be assessment of post-2020 era and it'd be assessment, of course, right now. But I think that what we need to keep in mind on the major talking point that is bolstering, supplementing these specific lies that you brought up is that the imagery they're using of, they use also language like pogroms is what took place in occupied Palestine on October 7th. I think the way to combat this is actually somewhat to try to bypass some of the imagery. Of course, some specific claims need to be debunked, but we need a more general education coming from the national liberation movements and how they thought about and discussed this issue. That is the majority of the world. For decades now. And that includes within the Palestinian national movement itself. Very simply, they do not oppose this population as Jewish people. They oppose them as settlers. That is the key distinction. And it was true of Algeria, true in South Africa, true in Rhodesia, and it's true here. And those are the precedents that the movement itself saw. Those are the precedents that those in solidarity from places like Algeria, when they joined the PLO, not to act simply in solidarity, but as soldiers of the Palestinian cause, this is the conception.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, I just had a quick point on that. Sorry, Brett, which is just since you mentioned the atrocity propaganda and Patrick, those were some helpful reorienting, I think, points. But I think just to connect it to what Max was saying is that in 1948, because this was a relatively late settler colonial movement, I mean, it wasn't possible to conduct the classic forms of colonial era, you know, classic colonial era extermination, that one of the functions of this, of these atrocity you know, stories inflated, many of them are, is precisely because you can't really conduct such a brutal campaign of displacement, bombardment, and extermination as we're seeing without trying to somehow raise the stakes and provide some kind of COVID to enable it. And that seems to be clearly the function of some of these stories, and which is why it's so important to combat them, debunk them, and reorient the discourse around settler colonialism rather than these sorts of, you know, kind of lurid tales of barbarity, you know, that are meant to kind of dehumanize the Palestinians and make them appropriate, you know, victims of slaughter in this modern age when it's very difficult, you know, to try and accomplish that in front of the eyes of the world. So anyway, it just seemed like that was an important point to kind of connect what Max had been saying about what you were just discussing about, about these, these atrocity propaganda stories that, that Henry raised. Brett, go ahead. Sorry.

Brett O'Shea: Yeah, no, that's incredibly crucial. I want to kind of touch on some of the more proximate history before getting into the current events. It's kind of some of the history leading up directly to What's happening currently? One of the things that's incredibly frustrating with the way that the Western media and the American media in particular presents this stuff is in a vacuum, right? Like when when this whole thing popped off recently, it's just presented; it's bracketed off. Hamas did this, and now Israel is responding, taking completely out of the story all of the history that led up to it, everything that happened before it, even this year leading up to to this, and that's. Very frustrating, but it works propagandistically on a lot of naive people, especially naive liberals. We have, of course, in the proximate history here, the Great March of Return. Now, I don't believe that oppressed people, colonized people, have any obligation to protest their oppression peacefully, but these are tactics in which it was a largely peaceful attempt to sort of bring consciousness to the struggle and to do this thing where they would approach this border wall over and over again, Still met with extreme violence on behalf of the Israeli state. So I'm just hoping and asking if both of you can walk us through the last decade or so of some of the major flashpoints that got us here, and even if you want to touch on some of the more incredibly recent developments like the Netanyahu government, 10 months of protests. We have the 50-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, the Ramadan War.

Max Ajl: Right.

Brett O'Shea: And the attacks by settlers on Al-Aqsa Mosque was also a big contributing factor. There's lots here, so it's a very open question, but can both of you help us understand the recent history leading up to the current event?

Max Ajl: There are many streams that converge into the current event, and there's too much to cover. I want to lift up a few flashpoints. It seems to me that something that has really been under-remarked upon is the kind of 2 streams going in parallel. I mean, one of them is the kind of exponential increase in Palestinian asymmetric resistance capacity, which has gone hand in hand with the serial military operations. Right? 2008, 2009, 2012, 2014, and then this 2023 war. You know, there's an urge to push back against the propaganda by saying, okay, the occupation is constant violence. Yes, occupation is constant violence, right? But the nature of the violence, of course, is also partially dictated by the tempo and the intensity of the Palestinian Palestinian resistance violence, right? I mean, there were indeed rockets fired from the Gaza Strip that were the spur for the Israeli counterinsurgency operations in 2008, 2009, and 2012 and 2014. By reframing these as counterinsurgency operations, we also bring in mind that we see in a very kind of through a glass darkly, the organic growth of the military capacity of a national liberation movement, right? There's a Palestinian writer, Mohamed Mazlouhi, who has pointed out that what we've seen from 2008, 2009 onwards, yeah, you'd see unguided rockets.

Brett O'Shea: Yeah.

Max Ajl: They really have been completely ineffective. By 2014, you actually see certain, some thousands of hardened guerrilla troops that are capable of carrying out tactical and strategic planning and also tactical ambushes of Israeli militarized infantry and so forth. I mean, but what you see is in fact this once, what he said is that you have this one segment of the Palestinian population or the Palestinian political forces that in fact has acquired a sovereignty of decision-making, of self-determination over its political capacity to enter the fray, and that this is actually a sovereign Palestinian capacity, more or less, keeping in mind that sovereignty is always relational, Of course, it has a regional and strategic depth, but it's sovereign in terms of the fact that it boosts how the Palestinians are waging their national liberation struggle. They have complete control over it in most senses of the word, and that it is acquired at an immense cost. It's actually been acquired through and against and during these counterinsurgency operations because You don't just develop a counter— a national liberation militarized— military apparatus as a gift from God, right? You don't get it just implanted in you as this kind of functional material that suddenly, oh, you know how to do it now, right? Like how people imagine that the US is like sending weapons for its proxy war in Ukraine, that just kind of like dropping them from God into the Ukrainian armed forces. I mean, it doesn't work there either. Right. But it a fortiori does not work with this population that is not used to, you know, has to learn how to fight this type of war and has to learn how to actually endogenously reproduce the military technology whose diagrams and so forth that they're learning from elsewhere. And so there's actually the iron core of Palestinian sovereignty itself that's been developed in and through The resistance and the counterinsurgency operations, right? What I think is also significant, right, and has a lot to do with all these timings, right? I mean, we see the timing of a brutal military operation in 2008, 2009, right? Then we have another very brutal military operation in 2012, and then we have an incredibly brutal military operation in 2014. And we don't have military operations, really. You have small things here and there, but you don't have sustained assaults until 2023. Why is that significant, right? It's that time itself has been, was in a certain sense, reappropriated from the Israelis who are controlling time, who are controlling the time, controlling the tempo of action. It had been liberated and Israel was not capable of going into the Gaza Strip anymore. Israel was not capable of a ground insurgency except at immense cost. They were scared of going into the Gaza Strip. So Palestinians began to reconstruct time and take control of time from 2014 onwards, right? And so even during the, you know, there was this support for the nonviolent protests. And as far as I know, there were Hamas, Kajayy, And they were blessed by Hamas, these massive marches during the Great March of Return. But what was significant, right, is that all this time, the Palestinians were building up their resistance capacity. And this really is what led up to, I think, the current events is that we are, You know, it's like Walter Benjamin's contrast to like messianic time. Like that's what is in play now for Palestinians. And I think this is really what, this is why, this is why you see this unbelievable ferocity from the Western world in response, right? Palestinians are doing something that you are not supposed to do if you are an anti-Zionist Arab, right? You're not supposed to be effectively carrying out military operations against the European population, right? They broke the rules of the Western moral order. And I think that's really, that's significantly what we're seeing now.

Patrick Higgins: I just want to add something to that real quick. And it's related to the atrocity propaganda, because what I think the function that the atrocity propaganda serves is it's a kind of psychological shock and awe directed at Western media consumers. And it tends to get employed or deployed rather when the Euro-American world order, and particularly a US-led world order, is in some sort of crisis moment. So when I was talking about forms of atrocity propaganda or propaganda operations in general, one of the things that I left off the list was the heavy, heavy campaign related to the Syria war, which was sustained for many years. And of course, that was a war designed in a covert capacity to shatter the resistance axis and the depth of support Max has been referencing around Palestine. The irony of it, of course, is these events proved that the war failed. There was disarray for a while, particularly between forces like Hamas, And Hezbollah. But it appears that a new cohesion or strategy of unity of fronts has come out on the other end. And that, to refer to the media, back to the media side of that, if you remember 2016, Aleppo, there was a sustained social media campaign designed to give people the impression that the Syrian army was carrying out a genocide in Aleppo. But what had happened— Right. Was the US proxy forces had been expelled from the city. Okay, so that represented a— really, that was the turning point in the war, that the US, it never really wanted to rely on covert wars, but of course, it's more difficult post-Vietnam to tend to overt invasion, which tends to invite economic and probably more important political crises on a domestic front. So in this case, their proxy strategy had come up against a dead end. It failed. They started to sound the alarm that there was a humanitarian crisis in order to get people to rally around the US war effort in some capacity in Syria. And right now, what we're seeing is something similar because we're seeing a blow against the US-led world system. Since really post-World War II, but especially post-1970 or so, Israel has been the linchpin, the basket into which most of the American chips are put in order to sustain broader control of West Asia. And so the fact that it has these weaknesses, that have come out to the fore, and the weaknesses are somewhat structural. It has to do, first of all, with pan-Arab depth of coordination support, the population surrounding Israel. And it also has to do with the fact that you have a settler population for whom Israel could serve as sometime as kind of a getaway spot, Where some people go there on birthright trips and are promised sort of, you know, a fantasy theme park of sorts. And people flock to it around the world for that reason. Not quite the same as a population that has nowhere to go and is willing to die for their cause. And to refer back to the situation in 2014 that Max is referring to, Yeah, they established something like had been established in Derry in the north of Ireland. It's a no-go zone. And that showed that the Gaza resistance was steadily catching up with and matching the South Lebanon resistance that had been able to hand a defeat to Israel in 2006. And in that sense, there is a tide turning. Weakness, these inherent weaknesses I'm describing in the Israeli polity or structure have been exposed. And I think that that has led to a form of hysteria in the Euro-American ruling classes where they're going to bombard us with propaganda where that doesn't work because it hasn't been as successful, by the way, as previous campaigns in my estimation. I mean, sometimes you get it. It's hard to get a sense because you're being assaulted at such a fast rate. Once one story's debunked, all of a sudden they have a new one they're able to bring to the fore, and that will exist in the 24-hour news cycle. But it hasn't been as successful. And so that's why you also see these turns to direct repression, bans on protests, doxxing of supporters, and so on. And we're going to see more of that the more that their post-World War II system and their reliance on Israel in that region is exposed to both Public embarrassment and actual structural weakness.

Henry Hackamacki: Very quick. So just speaking, since you brought up Syria and we're talking about propaganda very quickly, I mean, the way that the media works is in such a way that you are always presented with these atrocities when it is beneficial for the narrative of Western hegemony, Western imperialist hegemony. And of course, Israel is right at the tip of that. But on the other hand, when we were given the propaganda or when we were given a lot of, you know, very negative coverage about Syria a few years ago, particularly every time there was some unconfirmed report, every time there was any negative speculation about Syria, it was in every single news outlet. But for comparison's sake, listeners, twice within the last week, Israel has had rocket attacks on international airports within Syria, and unless you follow independent media, you don't know that. It would seem as if we're talking about Syria in the news pretty frequently, you know, for a country of that size, but only ever when there's quote unquote negative things coming out from the country. You're not told that, for example, on October 12th, both international airports in Aleppo and Damascus were struck By Israeli missiles. On October 14th, also, the Aleppo International Airport sustained more missile strikes on it. This was not reported. I mean, it was reported, but it wasn't exactly front-page news. You know, you weren't being presented with, hey, here's a sovereign state of Syria that's getting missile strikes on it at the same time that, you know, supposedly the United States is having to transfer many more billions of dollars worth of weaponry to Israel because of incursions by Hamas. I just saw today, and we're recording on October 17th, listeners, just so you know, I just saw today that it's now coming out that the latest request by the so-called state of Israel is for $10 billion in additional aid from the United States. This is a so-called state that gets at least $4 billion in military aid per year. And they requested an additional $10 billion now as a result of this incursion by Palestinian resistance operatives. And at the same time, they're still making missile strikes on Syria, and those are going almost completely unreported. This is exactly how the media works. This is exactly how it changes your perception of what's going on. So your perception of Syria, your perception of Israel, They're absolutely colored by the media coverage of it. This is how propaganda works. So I just wanted to underscore that because again, same time that we're seeing all these stories about Israel, we are not seeing any of these stories coming out about them with active missile strikes twice in the same week on international airports within a separate country that is uninvolved with the current, you know, the current conflict that's going on in Gaza. So anyway, that's just my little bit of a rant. Adnan, I am sorry for interrupting your—

Max Ajl: No, no, no.

Henry Hackamacki: Your question?

Adnan Hussain: Oh, no, that's, I mean, I'm really delighted actually by the direction actually of your analysis, Max and Patrick. You know, I mean, basically, I completely agree. I think that the shock of this departure from the appropriate role of how Palestinian resistance is meant and understood to be, that it violated this, you know, kind of system by being able to carry out these incredibly effective attacks inside of 1948 Palestine really have created a hysteria and a kind of reaction that goes beyond just the kind of political class and military class in Israel to this wider kind of Western kind of concern, which is why we're seeing, you know, the US sending a couple carrier, you know, 2 aircraft carrier fleets into the region, making extreme, you know, moderating, you know, not using any of the kind of moderating 2-state type language of previous incursions where they would actually make an appeal for calm and let's, you know, be concerned about civilians and have some restraint. All of that has gone. And you have this kind of panicked kind of green lighting of just the most barbaric and brutal assault on Gaza. And so I agree completely with that point. And to Max's suggestion that the key question here has been the development of Palestinian resistance and their military development, You brought in also the apparent weakness of Israel's ability to really match those kinds of developments to the extent, just as Max said, they have been afraid, which is why since 2014, there hasn't been, you know, that kind of assault on Gaza, because they've been afraid to confront them on a kind of ground force level, though there is talk now about doing so, which is why I want to ask then, Yeah. You know, in that case, what do you think are some of the implications and consequences of this point that you've both observed of, in some sense, despite, you know, all of the vaunted, you know, high-tech, the strongest military in the region, 4th strongest in the world, supposedly, despite this, you know, people on paragliders and scooters and motorcycles managed to completely evade the surveillance and the defensive arrangements. What are some of the consequences of this sort of piercing of this? And what was the geostrategic, might you say, kind of purpose behind Hamas's attack at this time? How do you read that in light of the analysis you both have been giving? What are your thoughts on what they wanted to achieve, why they took this step at this time, and what are some of the consequences of the way it unfolded, both in terms of the relationship between Palestinians and the Israel settler colonial state, and maybe also some of the regional kinds of consequences that this might have?

Max Ajl: Before addressing the question, I think actually it's useful to step back a little bit. And I appreciate Patrick bringing up the point that the West had kind of poured so much of its resources and its bets into Israel after the defeat in Vietnam that when we take a step back, The US preeminence of a US-engineered, within a US-engineered world system is threatened, right? And when we say US preeminence, I mean, this rests on the US being the major center of accumulation And not allowing any other alternative poles of capital accumulation, which both rest on or rely on and also reinforce alternative poles of military power.

Henry Hackamacki: Right.

Max Ajl: That order is broken. Right? That order is basically broken. You know, the rise of China cannot be stopped. And, you know, in terms of military defeat, the US has been able to kind of turn Ukraine into a charnel house, into a meat grinder, the same way it was able to do it in Syria. But it wasn't able to impose unilateral military defeat on Russia in Ukraine, right? That ambition appears to have evaporated. Now, these dynamics are also very much related to the inability of the US to inflict a full-scale military defeat on the Syrian Arab Army. I mean, quite the opposite, right? Syria is not operating in a vacuum. Behind that was the Russian will to not let the Syrian state institutions collapse on the one hand, and behind that, the Iranian desire to not allow the Syrian state institutions to collapse. And Iran itself is not— I mean, Iran could stand by itself perhaps, but Iran is certainly not standing by itself. I mean, China wants to be able to trade and it wants the The petrocarbons of Iran. I mean, and it wants Iran as part of its integrated world trading system. It actually doesn't matter for these purposes how you characterize that world trading system. You know that we can say that it's independent from, in many ways, from the logic of the US, which profits essentially in great measure by the application of violence, right? So This whole dynamic is of course playing out in, of course, regionally in its own way, in the sense that China is behind Iran, Iran and Russia are behind Syria, Syria is behind the Palestinian resistance, Iran is behind the Palestinian resistance. And so these are tripwires. Yeah. That can lead to a regional conflagration that in fact most forces don't really want. Most forces are scared of it. Iran doesn't particularly want it. The US, I think, is not prepared for a regional conflagration on the one hand. But on the other hand, there are things happening that the US cannot tolerate. I mean, if you want to break apart an alternative pole of accumulation, You've got to hit its outlying, kind of its outlying geoeconomic extensions. You encircle it. And then finally, you rip it apart if you can. I mean, this is why there's still a lot of, you know, the US is not happy with what's going on in China. Although China, I want to state that China is also sending military supplies to Israel. But this should really be noted for people. But this, separately from this, you know, These dynamics are kind of all at play in US geostrategic planning when it comes to what's going on in Palestine and the Gaza resistance. And this question of the kind of fundamental ambiguity or the fundamental ambivalence, which is that the US does not want these forces to achieve any victories. The US doesn't want to allow them to achieve above all ideological victories, And the US is not prepared to enter ground war, air war, direct hot war with these forces, and even doesn't want its proxy Israel to directly enter a ground war where it faces at least a substantial chance of a defeat. So these are the contributory dynamics that inform, I think, the tableau we have unfolding in front of us. And we don't know, like, I actually could not tell you if Israel, it doesn't look to me like Israel's actually going to do the ground invasion, but it may. And if it does, then it's going to redraw the map.

Patrick Higgins: On this point about the US world order, do you mind if I just highlight some historical timeline points of US support for Israel and where that leads them to right now? So at the end of World War II, when the United States was taking over the stewardship duties, let's say, of the world system from the British Empire, their main priority immediately, you know, because they had broken down the trade zones, broken open rather, the trade zones of Britain, their main priority was the redevelopment of Europe. And that was based on US credit and it ended up favoring US exporters, so on and so forth. In order to do this, though, Europe needed access to the petroleum supplies that were coming out of West Asia. And so that's why the Mediterranean became the foremost zone of concern for Pentagon planners in particular. And so they started having to secure the nodes around the Mediterranean one by one. So that starts out, they have a communist revolution in Greece. They got to come up with some form of counterinsurgency there. They have a popular communist party in Italy. They have to come away up with a way to sabotage that and keep Soviet Union out of this zone of influence. In a domino-like way, this leads them to Palestine. And a lot of the locations in the Mediterranean where the British Empire had had some kind of military base that could supply a counterinsurgency effort against Arab nationalist uprising, anti-Zionist uprising in Palestine, were being decommissioned. The US was concerned about this. And Palestine itself, Britain, it gives them some indication that they're going to leave. Okay. They've taken on the Second World War. They are dealing with all of these anti-colonial uprisings. So the United States has to figure out what exactly to do there. The United States, as James Forrestal had been saying at the time, you know, they had concerns that if they really wanted to get rid of the uprising there against the Zionist movement, it could even require the entirety of the US military. But the US military wasn't in that position at the time to expend those forces. Okay. So what they end up doing is they place their bets on the Zionist movement. Now, the problem with this is the inherent weakness of this was that the Zionist movement would Inspire resistance from Arab populations. They understood this very clearly. And the 1946 Anglo-American Committee, which they worked on with the British for this transition of power in that area, they said it very clearly that this population is not going to accept it. So they knew that they had a possible weak point in that part of the world for the entirety of their Mediterranean project that they were developing. But what did they do? They forced it through anyways through the Partition Resolution of 1947, which we have to remember was the United States' baby. In fact, there was a Balfour Declaration. We have our own declaration, or say we in parentheses, that is the Johnson Declaration of 1947, because the US was the lead power on the Nakba. So that being the case, they end up trying to, by creating this partition, force a square peg into a round hole. But this leads to the refugee problem. And right away, they have anxieties. This is all throughout their documents about this refugee population because they're quote unquote subject to subversive influence, communist influence, the way they describe it. So they come up with these various schemes from the UNRWA programs to large-scale irrigation programs that are designed right away in the early 1950s to get Palestinians to give up their political claim to the right of return, go resettle elsewhere. It never happened. Instead, this is one of the most inspiring examples of willpower in the modern world. The Palestinians have steadfastly held to the principle of right of return. And they raise up their own institutions through the PLO. They raise up a revolutionary movement to declare even then a liberation war. And if you look at what happens in 1970, when one of the nodes of the US order is going to fall, this is in Jordan, the US responded similarly. In fact, they were sending ships to the Mediterranean from as far as Puerto Rico and from the North Carolina coast. To act as a striking force in case the king was overthrown. And they understood this because if they lost, they needed to maintain a grip on West Asia in order to compensate for their loss on East Asia, which was the Vietnamese Revolution, was also another name for the victory of the Chinese Revolution in that part of the world. Israel was the striking force that could go deep into Arab territories without the US directly having to do it itself like it did in Vietnam. So the problem that they face right now, the US, is very similar to the problem it faced in 1970. That is, they were— they had to do something to stop this revolution. But at the same time, if they directly intervened, they're worried about a wider conflagration, as Max is talking about, a region-wide— Yeah. War against their installations everywhere. So there is a rock and a hard place right there, right now, is they need to, they need Israel to have this technological military superiority. So they need to do something they feel, but if they do too much, that might inspire resistance. And Israel does not have to deal with the region-wide attacks the way that the US installations would. So, and then Israel has its own problems right now, its own dilemmas, which is they're trying to deal, like I said at the beginning of the show, with the resistance by making it a Gaza problem, try to ethnically cleanse a good portion of it. And then in that case, they are bypassing their hostages. And through segments of the settler population, This is going to create a crisis of confidence, along with the fact that several moments in the Al-Aqsa flood operation were misrepresented by the Israeli government. This has largely been a very compliant population overall up to now. But I guarantee you, there's going to be a crisis of confidence and there's going to be emerging contradictions in Israeli society over this. And Israel's crisis is Palestine's opportunity.

Henry Hackamacki: Just to briefly hop in for one second, Patrick. As you mentioned, there's contradictions in place and there is a crisis within Israeli society. This is something that we've seen for a couple of years at this point, almost a crisis of legitimacy of the Israeli government. I mean, the inability to form any sort of lasting government without having to have reelections or new coalitions, partners that are at each other's throats continuously just in order to form a government. That was already present before the current situation. And now we also see on top of that the contradictions coming into play where Israeli society is blaming the governing coalition and specifically Bibi Netanyahu for being unprepared in some ways, you know, whether or not we believe that that was them being unprepared versus how prepared and how much planning had gone into the Palestinian resistance's operation, which I think that by just saying that Israel was unprepared, it kind of infantilizes the Palestinian resistance and says, look, these people can't plan a successful operation. It can only be successful to any degree if Israel drops the ball. There's nothing that they could do to be successful. I find that logic very flawed, but that is kind of what is out there in the media right now is that There was only able to be any sort of success because of how unprepared Israel was for this, how disorganized they were, how unsuspecting they were. And regardless of whether, you know, how, where the ball falls into the well-planned versus unprepared side, the point is, is Israeli society is blaming their government for being unprepared. And what we're seeing is that with early polls that have been coming out from Israel, and whether or not we believe those polls is a different question entirely, but Early polls are suggesting that well over 80% are upset with Netanyahu's handling of the situation. And this is only going to further the contradictions within Israeli society that were already present before. So exactly what you were saying, Patrick, it's not just now, though. It's important for the listeners to understand that this kind of crisis of legitimacy had been stretching back for several years, but really it is in sharp focus now. Which you really laid a fine edge on in your, in your answer. So I do appreciate that. Brett, I know you have the next question, but I just wanted to lay that out there.

Brett O'Shea: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I have a two-pronged question. So one is a follow-up on something Max said, because right now, you know, people are wondering, will this conflict spill over into a regional war? And then, of course, the possibility of a world war. I mean, world wars have certainly been made out of less. stuff than this current conflict. We already have a front with Ukraine and Russia already going on. Iran has come out and said that if Israel does in fact do a ground invasion, that they're prepared to attack. Most likely, that would look like an attack from the forces of Hezbollah coming south from Lebanon as the Israeli forces begin their ground invasion of Gaza. But Max voiced some suspicion over whether or not he thinks that that ground invasion is going to happen when my read on the situation as of now seems like they're very much saying that that's going to happen. They're setting everything up for that to happen. And then if you have a situation in which they do go in, Iran and Hezbollah do respond, do we have American boots on the ground, and can that spiral into a deeper escalation? So I'm curious about Max's suspicion on the idea that there's going to be a ground invasion. And then I wonder what both of you make, having spent many, many years Watching and studying and observing this conflict, if the mass support is on a different level. Have you seen the support? I mean, of course, throughout the Global South, it's always been there to some extent, but even throughout Europe and America, there seems to be a crackdown on these protests, trying to make them illegal, a real sense of insecurity from Western governments, and a huge uprising of people across the Western world and the world more broadly in support of Palestinian freedom. So Max, can you talk about your suspicions of Israel's ground invasion? And then can both of you talk about whether or not you think the mass support for Palestinians is in any way different than it's been in the past.

Max Ajl: From my perspective, it remains unclear if Israel's going to commit to a ground invasion. Now, there are several aspects to this. I mean, the first is that this is the terrain chosen by the resistance, a ground resistance. I mean, a ground invasion. The resistance certainly sought to draw Israel into an urban warfare situation where the Israeli infantry troops, armored or whether armored or not, would actually be torn apart by the Palestinian resistance, which is fighting on its own territory, on pre-prepared defensive positions, riddled with ambush positions and so forth, and where they've both trained extensively and they're actually fighting on They're fighting from their homes or from their destroyed homes. So certainly the resistance thought there's a very substantial chance that Israel would go in for a ground invasion. Now, of course, the Israeli planners also knew that. And furthermore, the Israeli planners know that a ground invasion would mean the death of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of their own troops. Right. And what also is going to incite catastrophic loss of life amongst the civilian population. On a moral or ethical level, they don't care about this at all. On a strategic level, in terms of the consolidation of world public opinion, there is some sort of concern that the US should not be— the US regime, I think, is very concerned about being held responsible right now in world public opinion. For what, for a kind of unprecedented loss of Palestinian lives. I mean, this is also why they're stage managing continuously their appearance. So I don't know, you know, it's not clear to me. It's also, you know, Iran and also the Lebanese militarized forces keep firing shots across the bow, both verbal and symbolic in the case of the Iranian political leadership.

Patrick Higgins: Yeah.

Max Ajl: And militarized in the case of the Lebanese resistance, stating that if you keep going over these lines, we will escalate and we will escalate more and more and more to the point where, of course, Israel's understanding very clearly, and of course, even more so America's understanding that there'll be massive conflagration that will ensue with great losses for both of their military assets. If they engage in, if either they attempt to carry out a further escalation of the bombing campaign that would rip apart Hamas command and control and military infrastructure within the Gaza Strip, which would require a bombing campaign that would quite dwarf the current bombing campaign, I think. Or if they carry out a ground invasion, which is actually really the, seems to me the only way to actually root out Hamas. Right. Hamas from Hamas's military infrastructure, at least the organized military infrastructure from the Gaza Strip, although then you would need 50,000 troops in order to actually hold Gaza. If not, Hamas just reconstitutes the military infrastructure very quickly. I mean, you have 30,000 people who are trained fighters. They're not going to kill— it's quite impossible to kill all of them. So they melt into the population and carry out a guerrilla insurgency. Or Israel leaves and then they reconstitute and they retrain and they re-equip, right? And do it on the basis of much more knowledge, which is actually the hardest thing of all is the reconstruction of knowledge itself, right? The knowledge of how to run an effective counterinsurgency. So this is to say, these are my thoughts that inform my thinking about what's going on and the next steps. But I Really don't know. I do not know if Israel's going to go in or not. I don't know. It's very unclear to me. If they don't go in, it's a massive win on the part of the Palestinian resistance. It will be a huge discrediting. I mean, I've read that 80% of people, settlers in the Gaza envelope, do not want to, will not live there even if the war ends today. So in fact, the sovereignty of Israel as the monopoly of the rule of force over a territory and the free dispensation of the use of a certain territory for its own purposes has actually been rolled back beyond the Gaza envelope. This also is unprecedented in the modern history of the conflict. I want to pause because it seems that Adnan has a question and has to go.

Henry Hackamacki: Let me just clarify one thing quick. So when you say the Gaza envelope, In case listeners are unaware of that, it's an area that's within 7 kilometers of the Gaza Strip border and is populated by approximately 70,000 settlers, which, as you said, a recent poll that Camau indicated that over 80% of them would not return even if the war ended today. So that's the area that Max is referring to. Sorry, Adnan, go ahead with your final question.

Adnan Hussain: No, I'm so sorry to interrupt the flow of your excellent discussion there, Max. I just wanted to say, because unfortunately I do have to go and I'm going to be listening to the rest of this conversation very keenly. I've really found your analysis of you and Patrick very, very helpful in germane. But I just wanted to make some kind of comment about the kind of scale of the world protests and connected also with the question of US complicity. You know, of course, we know the US has been such a huge supporter of Israel, but the fact that it sent these carriers, that it has very obviously endorsed a very brutal, you know, action and are sending those carriers perhaps as an attempt to try and deter involvement and intervention by, you know, Hezbollah or Iran in other forms. I think, you know, I'm wondering what that is going to do to the US position it's seen in the region and the pressure that that will put on putative allies. Already we've seen difficulties in the US-Saudi relationship over oil production in support of kind of the sanctions on Russia. And so on. We've seen a rapprochement taking place, a normalization of diplomatic relations between U.S. and Iran recently, the first actual conversation between the leaders of those two countries, and this seems to have you know deterred or at least you know interrupted the kind of full extension of the Abraham Accords process to Saudi Arabia, which was of course. The linchpin of, you know, normalizing for, you know, economic kinds of reasons and political reasons that would have isolated the Palestinians. And one of the consequences, it seems to me, or reasons perhaps for, you know, taking this step at this time was not only, of course, the Aqsa, you know, situation, which might mean a lot symbolically and religiously to a religious resistance movement like Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but also, of course, to try and stop the normalization process with Saudi Arabia without it having dealt with the Palestine, you know, kind of question. So it seems to me that in this context, the US's role is something that everyone would, with justice, really, if there is huge bloodletting beyond what we've already seen, which has been so horrific, if they actually allow the ethnic cleansing of Gaza in an obvious way with the displacement of a million or more people and tens of thousands of dead and so on, I think the US is really going to be on the hook in a more direct way than it has been in previous encounters because it has intervened in such a direct way to prevent, it seems, pressure from regional partners. And it has stopped even speaking about things like being concerned about humanitarian regard for civilians and so on. It has dropped all of that rhetoric. They're there. They could intervene to stop and put the constraints on Israel. I think if they allow it to go forward, it's just going to be so obvious to everybody that the US has blood directly on its hands in a more overt way than has been the case in its previous sort of general support for Israel during these kind of outbursts of conflict. I'm just wondering what you think about those situations. You know, I'm here in Turkey, in Istanbul right now. You know, all across, of course, the Middle East, Islamic world, you know, they're doing prayers on every Friday. Every prayer is at the mosques are ending with, you know, appeals and calls for support You know, there's a lot of pressure on regional governments as this continues. And it just seems to me that the world public opinion, I can't say that it would be decisive, but it seems very, very mobilized in a way that could be a real material factor for US calculations and on the situation. So I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that. sort of thoughts on those kind of conditions and factors?

Patrick Higgins: Yeah, so there was an interview being conducted by, excuse me, a Hamas representative, Ahmed Abd al-Hadi. He was saying that, he was saying quite confidently that the levers of the war-making operation Have been taken over by the United States, and this is another historic weakness or Achilles heel of Israel. Is it's and this always frustrated Israeli leaders is the dependence on the United States for the weapons supply. So this is another potential contradiction that begins to emerge. So to go back to that. First, we could comment on the regional situation of what the US faces resistance-wise. Max described well the situation in Gaza. So of course, it bears mentioning that we're talking about the Gaza resistance and not simply Hamas. Of course, if you look at the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, you know, this had coordination, cooperation from Islamic Jihad, And the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades of the PFLP, as well as the National Resistance Brigades of the BFLP. So I think that that's one factor. But also when we look at the environs of occupied Palestine, I think that there has been developing for some time a resistance capacity that even in places like the Golan Heights, for example, that was established under an umbrella by Hezbollah, but extends beyond Hezbollah into popular committees there. And if you look at, to go back to the issue of what the Israeli bombing in Syria was doing for many years, it was striking Hezbollah, yes. And it was striking Though it was striking them in particular for coordinating and expanding a resistance effort in collaboration with the Syrian army. And I'm thinking of the efforts by Samir Kuntar, who was from Lebanon, had been imprisoned after his operations with the Palestine Liberation Army some years ago. And he ended up being released as part of the prisoner exchange following the 2006 war. And then in around 2014, maybe earlier than that, 2013, he had gone to Golan to organize this larger resistance effort. And he spoke about it extensively. And before he was assassinated, he said that the networks that they had set up would be, would live beyond his death. So if they killed him, it wouldn't make much of a difference. And then they assassinated him in 2015. So this is a concrete example of what I'm talking about, about how the war that was designed to destroy these networks has actually reestablished them in a very real way. And the United States, as far as whether it's ready to confront these kind of forces, and of course we know that bloodletting will be severe from US and Israeli forces. We know the scale of destruction, but will they be able to achieve any political or strategic goals? Both of these societies hasn't fought wars against organized guerrilla forces of this capacity for a very long time. And the United States didn't even fare particularly well in 1993 in Somalia, let alone against forces this well organized. You know, the memory of Vietnam has receded somewhat among the American public. They've been raised on action movies that glorify US military exploits in a way that are not realistic here. If they were to get involved in any significant way, there would be a very dramatic crash for segments of the American public in how I think it'll go as far as the death toll of whatever forces they commit there. And Israel, you know, they've never really seen something of the scale of Vietnam as a society. So it would be very difficult for them to be able to sustain the kind of losses that would be required over any extended period of time. This is why they, as Max was saying, withdrew from Gaza so abruptly in 2014. So to bring that now to the domestic context, is, you know, it's not quite like May 2021. May 2021, there was an upswell of protests like I'd never seen before in the United States on this issue. And what I mean by that is we had a segment of liberal opinion onside. That never really happened because, you know, liberals, sometimes it has to do with class position or whatever else. If there's a risky position to take, they're not going to take it. They kind of Well, they'll go with wherever the winds are blowing. If it seems like now the humanitarian opinion is on the side of Palestine, then they'll march. And they did to some extent in 2021. It's kind of a new development. I don't think it quite exists to that level again because of the nature of what's taken place here and the immediate fear that's spreading out. But let me say that. Yeah. Let me say this right here. The upswell right now is much more considerable than I would have thought it would be given the intimidation techniques. I'm actually surprised by how unsuccessful this raw intimidation has been so far. And once the initial fear dies down, it's only going— because these are things people will act in reaction, but The thing about fear in any major crisis in the United States, it doesn't last forever. And so I continue that outrage over US complicity in the crimes of Gaza right now to continue to expand. And one reason why I'm doing this interview is that I think all of us need to speak out on whatever platforms available to us so they can play whack-a-mole with all of us who are onside of the Palestinian cause in no uncertain terms. You see what they're trying to do to Joseph Massad in Colombia, other people who have been very clear-eyed in their analysis. They're trying to make examples of certain figures, mostly Palestinian. And so if we want the sting to be taken out of this ideological counterinsurgency, we need to be clear ourselves, and then it'll be impossible for them to carry out these kind of intimidation campaigns against all of us.

Henry Hackamacki: Max, I want to make sure that you have the opportunity to also add in on this topic, but I just wanted to say the last thing that Patrick was talking about is absolutely my impression as well. So I also, some of the first activism I did was within the Palestinian solidarity movement. Like you, Patrick, I went to my undergrad in Southeast Michigan. I was at Eastern Michigan University. And so a lot of my activism that I was doing was coordinated through student organizations that were involved with the Palestinian solidarity movement. So we had Middle Eastern Student Association, Muslim Student Association, Students for Justice in Palestine, et cetera, et cetera. We had all of these groups. At the time that I was doing my undergrad, which was 2013 to 2017, when we had our protests, when we had our marches, it was almost universally Middle Eastern students that were marching. I was one of the very few white students that was in the crowd. And the reason that I bring this up is because, of course, there was repression against the protests that we had. I mean, people were being arrested at basically every action that we had, but the people who were being arrested were always the Middle Eastern students. It was never me, even though I was at the protests with them. It was never my fellow white students who were also present at these actions. And but despite that, you know, despite this kind of mild repression that was going on, you know, the occasional student or two that was locked up for the night to kind of scare everybody else and dissuade them from doing future actions, despite the repression being relatively mild, we didn't have this giant swell of people coming into our actions. It was kind of the same core of people. Right. Whereas today, what we see is that there is mass repression of these movements at an unprecedented scale. We have them trying to ban slogans in various countries, like just saying, from the river to the sea, is now a chargeable offense in, you know, some countries like Britain. Having a Palestinian flag in public is now a chargeable offense in various places. I've been making fun of the Berlin Police Department because they ban every single action that is involved with Palestinian solidarity, even when it's coordinated by Jewish groups within the city. The last couple of protests that have been tried to be coordinated within Berlin and have been banned have been organized by Jewish Berliners. Like, literally the title of the events are Jewish Berliners for Peace in the Middle East and Solidarity with People in Gaza. Like, these are the titles of their events. It's a mouthful, but, you know, that's what Germans do. And what we see is that they're still banning these events and they're criminalizing the people who are trying to do them. And despite that, despite that repression being ramped up to 11, we still see more and more people coming out in solidarity with Palestine than I have ever seen, and a much more diverse group of people than we have ever seen. We are not only seeing, you know, people who are immigrants from the Middle East or students with Middle Eastern heritage anymore at these events. We are having upwards of 150,000 people marching through London despite the efforts of the British government to criminalize these sorts of actions, these sorts of protests, these sorts of slogans. So this is really encouraging for me. And I know I'm not really adding anything that you didn't already say, Patrick, but I just want to kind of underscore that point that we are seeing something that we have not seen in these past movements, despite, you know, the, as we were talking, the ethnic cleansing in the concentration camp model being present even in the years past, we didn't see this sort of solidarity. in, in the face of a ramped-up repression far greater than we saw in the past. So there's my piece. Max, I don't know if there was anything that you wanted to add on what I said or what Patrick said before, uh, maybe Brett will go in with another question then.

Max Ajl: Uh, no, thanks.

Brett O'Shea: Sure. I mean, this might be slightly out of place, but I think it is helpful to set a sort of horizon of full liberation and help people who are learning about this topic, getting involved, organizing around this topic, give them a clear-sighted picture of what full liberation really looks like. And you hear things like the two-state solution peddled by liberals all the time. I think I've even heard recently mouthpieces from the White House talk, I think Biden himself in a recent interview said the long-term goal is to give Palestine their own state. But of course, a two-state solution under the context of the British partition and the Israeli colonial apparatus already existing, That's not what I think people on the full liberationist left would like to see, nor is that the thing that the Palestinian masses would necessarily like to see. There's some confusion on this topic though. So from both of your points of view, how do you think about the two-state solution and what do you set as the horizon of full liberation for the Palestinian resistant movements and for Palestinians in general?

Max Ajl: It's historically a slightly difficult position because, of course, the leading nationalist force is Hamas, and Hamas is in favor of establishing a Palestinian state on the '67 territories, and while not relinquishing its claim to the remainder of Palestine, right? That is how it squares The national liberation and state sovereignty circle. Now, I support the liberation and return of the Palestinian people. What that looks like, what the state looks like, what that looks like and what a liberated Palestine looks like, I don't know. And I don't think anybody can know. I think that the racial regime that racially allocates privileges and that is based on an organic relationship with imperialism, that's what Israel is, right? Israel is that. And that has to go. There can be no debate about it. What comes after? We don't know. We don't know what will be a temporary acceptance of the temporary pathway on the road to liberation, social and economic, in addition to political and anti-Zionist liberation. I think we have no idea. I think the keystone is the return of the refugees. And beyond that, we have no idea. I mean, I think what's fundamental is that the Israelis also, the Israelis don't want to live as equals. With Palestinians. Some of them will accept it, but in their majority, the European-born Israelis absolutely will not live as equal with Palestinians. It's very evident. And, you know, I think it's— they're a thoroughly bourgeois society, and I think I think you'll see a mass flight. I don't even, I don't think it'll be an ethnic cleansing. I think they'll leave quite voluntarily, a large portion of the population. In any event, Palestinians will have a demographic majority and what it will become is Palestine. And, you know, personally I support full civic rights for the national minorities and a liberated Palestine as part of a liberated Arab region. But beyond that, I think it's quite impossible to talk about.

Henry Hackamacki: Patrick, anything you want to add on this question?

Patrick Higgins: No, I think that was a good answer.

Henry Hackamacki: Okay, then I'm going to hop in here and ask another question that's related to something that Max asked, but this actually might be more in your field of study, Patrick, which Max said the leading nationalist force is Hamas, which is absolutely the case at this present time. But one thing that we've been seeing is within Western media, a homogenization of the Palestinian resistance to Hamas in terms of like, this is the only resistance that is operating right now. This is the only Palestinian resistance to the Zionist occupation. This is the only resistance that is taking actual struggle against them at this present time. And of course, that struggle is demonized as being a, you know, a bunch of crazy people who are breaking through walls and going on paragliders. But this kind of homogenization to the Palestinian resistance movement, to Hamas, is frankly not accurate. There is a lot of various groups that are involved within the Palestinian resistance. And it is true that Hamas is the leading edge of that right now. Which, you know, for those of us on the fringes of the far left, is probably not ideal for us. You know, we would like other groups to be the leading edge of that resistance movement, but it is what it is. And, you know, if we're supporting the Palestinian resistance movement as we are, we have to acknowledge that. But Patrick, I guess I'll direct this to you because I know that you have done a lot of work on Palestinian resistance and you've also looked at communism within Palestine, which is a topic that we've been wanting to do an episode on for quite some time. So hopefully we'll be able to bring you back in the future to talk about communism within Palestine specifically, just that topic. What I'm wondering if you can talk about is kind of the dynamics that are at play within the Palestinian resistance movement right now, because we do have this problem of homogenizing the movement to just Hamas. Without any acknowledgement of, you know, different tendencies that are operating within the resistance movement. And so a lot of people just get this idea that by supporting the resistance movement against Zionist occupation in its present form, you are like inherently a Hamas supporter without acknowledging that there's other tendencies within the resistance movement.

Patrick Higgins: Yeah, I think that the way that you prefaced it is helpful because, you know, it's clear that this is not something that when we're acting in solidarity and living safe and comfortable abroad, that it's not necessarily our say in how these formations develop. So yeah, just to be clear about that point is, I think, important. But it is helpful, I guess, also for purposes of broader edification to look at the Palestinian revolutionary movement in the long view. And that is, I mean, it depends on how far you want to go back on that. But I think that there is, let's start first with the PLO. Okay. This was something That was very, very difficult for Palestinian refugees in exile to establish. Its organizational, its infrastructure took a very long time to set up. It got set up under the Arab nationalist umbrella, the Arab socialist umbrella. That happened in the 1950s, mostly under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser. And they were able to establish the PLO in 1964. And then by 1969, it's something that had been largely taken over first by Fatah and then later on by other groups like the PFLP got involved. And then there was some friction after that. But I think that to understand Hamas's current position, it helps to contextualize what happened, the fate of the PLO. The PLO, its constituent factions for some time had done intensive theoretical work to supplement their organizational efforts, including unions, as well as strikes and demonstrations, and their military capacity and their military strategy, especially 1969 through 1972, but also some periods when it was based in Lebanon. Was largely drawn from the Vietnamese experience. And People's War was the banner during those periods. But of course, when we say People's War, we're not just talking about a war of the whole people, though that's the basic definition. But a lot of manpower and brainpower, man and woman power, I should say brainpower, had gone into this. So they had something, a research center, the Palestine Research Center, where they could develop theory. And they were very much, when it came to Marxist theory, in dialogue and translating from anti-imperialist Marxist thought around the world. They translated into Arabic the studies of American imperialism and the corporate military structure in Vietnam into Arabic from Monthly Review, for instance. So they were very much interested in dependency theory, world systems, and unequal exchange. So another advantage of the Palestine Research Center, though, they weren't just looking at theory for its own sake, is if they're to launch something like a people's war, They are able to come up with a vision of a structure of popular militias combined with people's militias or popular militias combined with the unions, but also do things like conceptualize or make maps of historic Palestine and where strategic installations could be struck. So this is to give you an idea of how much Marxism of a certain sort, not really the Marxism being produced for a long time in universities in the United States, was central in this idea, in this liberation movement. And I don't think that really ever went away, although very cruelly, all these institutions they worked very hard for were smashed, particularly in 1982 in Lebanon. And that was the context, is the same year where you see the cells that end up turning into Hezbollah form. Hezbollah puts out its first message, 1985, the message to the disinherited of the earth. And I think that there's, I don't want to conflate these forces between the PLO that was located in South Lebanon and Hezbollah, but there's also some cross-pollination. Some exchange. There were some of the cadres were involved in Marxist movement, brought the knowledge and lessons of the previous stages of liberation to that movement. To bring it up to date, a certain sort, the Marxist-Leninist PFLP and then its offshoot, the DFLP, have survived these sustained waves, the two-pronged strategy. Of US counterinsurgency, the carrot and the stick. And the carrot was the normalization deals, things like Resolution 242, after that Rogers Plan, more recently things like the Abraham Accords under Trump, and Oslo being the biggest of all. And Oslo, what did that do? That just, they came up with, they invested in alternative structures from the PLO, the Palestinian Authority adopting a policing model that had replaced the Vietnam counterinsurgency model for the Third World. And they were doing this, of course, in places like Indonesia, Colombia, El Salvador. And then they used that model to come up with this Palestinian Authority. And that further hollows out any kind of revolutionary thought in the PLO. PFLP, DFLP survived that and played major roles in resistance efforts. They've reconstituted somewhat. But of course, they reconstituted under, I would say, the influence, because this is the time period after Oslo where Hamas really comes to the forefront because they're offering a resistance option against the normalization option. And in recent years, some of this has been in flux. And we saw that Hamas, you know, they defected from Syria to Qatar in 2013. 2012, rather. And then the rank and file never quite agreed with that. So there was a disagreement. And then there was a reconciliation process with the rest of the resistance forces. And under that broader umbrella, the PFLP and DFLP have really decided to— they said that they need a unity of fronts in order to confront the Zionist project at this moment. Right. Sometimes of existential peril because the normalization deals are designed to liquidate the Palestinian cause and the claim of right of return. So 2 things. We have a historic history of cross-pollination that there were Marxist cadres that later went into Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. And then we have the fact that the Marxist-Leninist groups were able to weather the storm and survive, which for a while was a major test for them. And they're participating, contributing to the unity front strategy going on right now, which includes also the rise of new forces whose shape, whose contours we don't have a full picture yet. I'm thinking in particular of what went on in Nablus and what went on also in Jenin. These popular militias that were formed, the Lion's Den, And they are a new generation of resistance influenced by thinkers like Bassem Haraj, who was assassinated a few years back. And he was combining elements of, you know, the lessons or successes of Hezbollah and somewhat Islamic Jihad and Hamas. But also studies of Che Guevara and communist people's war, essentially, but also communist forms of military strategy. So I hope that answers your question. Again, it kind of, yeah, it'd be a mistake. It would really be remiss of us to talk about it in the terms that the monopoly media talk about it, which is Hamas-Israel war. That is a simplification beyond the simplification.

Brett O'Shea: Absolutely. Incredibly important point. And I really hope people listening internalize that, go back, re-listen to that, and really take that to heart because it's really, really important to push back on that false dichotomy of it's just Israel versus Hamas and this sort of idea that Hamas is fundamentally alienated from the Palestinian masses and from the broader Palestinian resistance movement. So thank you for that. And I, again, would love to have you back on to talk more in depth about that and the history of that. But you've both been incredibly generous with your time. I just have one sort of question to wrap up with here. Again, thank you both, Max and Patrick, for your time today and for all your knowledge and sharing that with us. It's really important and we deeply appreciate it.

Patrick Higgins: Thank you.

Brett O'Shea: I guess as a last question to both of you, This might seem kind of obvious, but it's also, I think, just useful to put out there and reiterate. What can or should we in the West or outside of the immediate sphere of the conflict do to show support and solidarity with the Palestinian resistance and with Palestinians more broadly? And importantly, in this war of information, what are maybe some good resources, some good outlets, or even organizations that people who really want the Palestinian view of the topic Or just good objective information, as much as that's possible, can go and check out? You can just, each of you take those questions in whatever direction you'd like.

Max Ajl: You know, I think for the most broad-based analysis, and also for what will keep you the most up to date, you should stay current with Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss, and follow not just their articles, but also follow their social media, where you're going to get minute-to-minute updates and the transmission of news from the region as it interties with the current events in Palestine. I think this is very, very, very central. I mean, in terms of what to do, go to a protest, join an organization, and don't feel that it doesn't matter if you go. Because if everybody thought it didn't matter if they go, then we wouldn't have 150,000 people in the United Kingdom making a beautiful, beautiful mass protest of resistance against the UK regime policy of supporting the destruction of Palestine. So please go to a protest. And even better, find your friend who you've been worried about what's going on, you've been worrying together about what's going on in Palestine, and bring them to a protest. And if you are disabled and you cannot, or sick and cannot make it to a protest, send $10 to Middle East Children's Alliance and tell your friend to send $10 to Middle East Children's Alliance.

Patrick Higgins: Thank you.

Max Ajl: I mean, there is something to be done no matter who you are, where you're coming from. And so just please do it and know that there's other people doing it as well. There's a lot of other people doing it. And together we can do something, maybe not enough, but something that can make some differences.

Patrick Higgins: I suggest people follow the writings, the collective work that is being put out by the Palestinian Youth Movement if they're And then also to possibly follow the events that are being put on by the Palestinian youth movement. And then also, you know, in places like New York City, you have organizations like Within Our Lifetime. These are Palestinian diaspora-led organizations that are really, I think, the leaders of the movement as exists, particularly where I am in North America, but also places in Europe. So I think it's important to really look to follow their lead because they are, it's that both in terms of information and in terms of protests, they're at the center of it. I'd also just add, have popular, do popular education, do teaching because this is the fora where it's possible for us to explain in detail just how wrong they've been. And by they, I mean mass media, monopoly media, to show people that in 2011, they made the claim that the Palestinian cause among the Arab masses was old news, that it was internal democracy struggles to the various states that mattered. The world had largely passed over the people in Gaza, thought that they would just languish there trapped forever. And with the outpouring of support in the Arab region for the Palestinian people, as an example, the people storming the borders in Jordan, defying the king's decrees essentially as they've existed for Past half a century, then we really see how wrong they've been. That is the opening through which we can see all the rest of the lies. And the lies do go back to the very beginning, as it were. Thank you.

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

Adnan Hussain: Yeah.

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

Adnan Hussain: Yeah.

Henry Hackamacki: And we're definitely going to have you on again in the near future. So, Max, thanks. Can you tell the listeners how they can find you and more of your work?

Max Ajl: Well, my collected writings are actually available as PDFs on ResearchGate. So you just literally type my name and then ResearchGate, and you can find most anything that I have written in the last couple years. Uh, right there. Um, and I have a Twitter, sort of semi-public, not that public. Um, and, and that's that.

Henry Hackamacki: We will link to your ResearchGate in any case. And listeners, if you want to try to find Max on Twitter, that's like your quest for today. Patrick, uh, thank you also for coming onto the program. Hopefully, uh, you enjoyed coming on the program, and hopefully we'll be able to bring you back on again in the semi-near future to talk about the communist movement within Palestine. That topic is quite, you know, interesting and something that we've been wanting to talk about for quite some time anyway. So can you tell the listeners how they can find you and more of your work, if there's anywhere to direct them to?

Patrick Higgins: Yeah, I don't have a centralized place for my work right now. Perhaps I should find one. But I think that if they want to look up my work, they could look me up with University of Houston. They should be able to find my written works in a sort of dispersed fashion. And there will be more coming out soon in a scholarly capacity in the scholarly journals about this topic. So, yeah.

Henry Hackamacki: Excellent. Well, if you send that to us when it's coming out, Patrick, we can also put that out on our social media to help advertise it. For you, so feel free to reach out anytime that you have anything come out. We'll definitely, you know, lend a hand in that front. So listeners, for us, Adnan had to leave the conversation a little bit ago to go to a seminar, but you can follow Adnan on social media on Twitter at Adnan A Hussein H U S A I N, and you can listen to his other podcast, The Majlis, which is about the Middle East Muslim diaspora. And topics related with those by going to any podcast app and looking for The Mudge List, but not the one that is hosted by Radio Free Central Asia, that CIA cutout. Go to the one that's hosted by Global Perspective, uh, Project at Queen's University. Brett, how can the listeners find you and your 2— well, 3 excellent other podcasts now? I always forget about that 3rd one because it's new. I've been so used to saying 2 other podcasts, but it's 3 now.

Brett O'Shea: Yeah, that one's underground. You got to find it by doing your own investigations, but you can find everything that I do politically at revolutionarylightradio.com.

Henry Hackamacki: Excellent. As for me, listeners, you can follow me on Twitter @huck1995, H-U-C-K-1-9-9-5. You can get Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo, which Salvatore Anguillimaro and myself translated and edited, by going to iskra-books.org. You can get it in paperback, hardcover, or the PDF is available for free, which was really important to us. So if you want to download that, just go to iskra-books.org and look for the Stalin book. As for the show listeners, you can help support the show, keep us up and running, and allow us to make more content like this by going to patreon.com/guerillahistory, with guerrilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A-H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. History, and follow us on Twitter to keep up with each of the hosts individually, as well as what the show collectively is up to, by going to @guerrilla_pod. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A_pod. And until next time, listeners, solidarity.

Max Ajl: Thank you.