War in Gaza: How Al-Aqsa Flood Changed the World

Bana Abu-Zuluf: Okay, so now, Paul, you can start too.

Lara Kilani: Thanks a ton, Carlos.

Bana Abu-Zuluf: It worked finally.

Ajamu Baraka: Okay, we're live.

Bikrum: Okay, go ahead, Bikrum. Okay, thank you. All right, sorry for the delay, everybody. Thank you for joining us this morning, afternoon, evening, wherever you may be. I'm just going to get right into it since we're a little bit behind. So welcome to War in Gaza: How Al-Aqsa Flood Changed the World. This is an event hosted by International Manifesto Group. We are— obviously you would have seen the description. This is, as it sounds, this is an event centered upon the unfolding, the ongoing unfolding genocide war in Gaza, but also thinking about Al-Aqsa Flood, thinking about the the ramifications of what's happening for broader geopolitical economy questions, broader regional dynamics, thinking about the anti-imperialist nature, the centrality of Palestine to the anti-imperialist struggle, and thinking about things like how kind of the Western order has lined up on one side, Global South states lined up on others. Those are some themes we're going to think about in today's discussion. And it also kind of is doubling as a sort of launch discussion of a special issue that many of us were fortunate to be a part of. I'm just going to put up this— I don't know if people can see— this is the EB magazine special issue for Palestine that many of the speakers here have articles within. So we're going to be building out of the discussion in this magazine. Many of the speakers will build from that as they give their presentations. So yeah, I'm going to just begin with the speakers right away since we're behind. And we have our first speaker is Louis Allday. I'm just going to introduce Louis. Louis, first thing I would like to say is Louis was the editor of this special issue. He brought everybody together, put the articles together, really kind of— I'm not sure what role you had with the brilliant design, but the COVID is also It's quite brilliant, but the articles I think were put together really nicely, so there's a lot of this is Louis's work. And I'm just gonna introduce Louis and then pass it over to him. So Louis Allday is a writer and historian. He has a PhD in history. He's the founding editor of Liberated Texts, a book reviewing and publishing project dedicated to reviewing and republishing works that have been neglected, overlooked, or suppressed in the mainstream since their publication. In his capacity as a member of the editorial board of ebb Magazine, as I mentioned, he recently edited the special issue that we're discussing today dedicated to Palestine, which was just released on January 10th. And you can order it via the ebb Magazine website. Maybe we can drop a link in the chat as well. So I'm going to pass it over to Louis. And for all speakers, just I'll say right now, if you can limit your remarks to 10 to 12 minutes, that would be excellent. Please go ahead, Louis.

Ajamu Baraka: Cool.

Bikrum: I think you're muted.

Louis Allday: Can everyone hear and see me?

Lara Kilani: Yep.

Louis Allday: Cool. Yeah, thank you very much for that, Bikrum. And thank you to the organizers for this event as well. And thank you to the other speakers who, as you said, Bikrum, many of whom contributed to the issue. Obviously, I'm biased as I edited it, but I think it's very, very good and very, very timely and important. And so I thought I would start by talking slightly about what some of the motivation behind putting the issue together was and touching on a kind of few of the themes that I think will be explored in more detail by other speakers today. I think, you know, predicting the future exactly is a fool's errand. But I think we can already say with confidence that October 7th and everything that's happened since has caused fundamental changes in the world that are probably irreversible. And I think one thing it's done particularly is, in differing and kind of interlinked ways, it's magnified clarified, and in some cases accelerated preexisting issues and trends and phenomenon. So one thing that I wanted to mention quickly today and was definitely in my mind both with the initial idea for the issue but also kind of as it came together is I think what the impact it's caused has provided an opportunity for the Palestine solidarity movement in the West. And I mean that specifically because I think what, what October 7th and the impact of it, and Israel's genocide unleashed after it has done, has made it clearer perhaps than ever before that a lot of the solidarity expressed in the West with, with and for Palestine is often for a kind of abstract notion of Palestine, and almost at times, I think, kind of fantasy Palestine that is divorced from the material reality of the situation and ignores, kind of talks over, and sometimes outright opposes very often the forces actually fighting for the Palestinian cause. And among other things, I think places too much emphasis on the Israel lobby as the explanation for the US and the collective West's support for Israel. And that's something which, for example, Max's piece in the issue is one of the things that he speaks about. And I think this attitude is revealed in a number of ways. I think one is the, you know, not unanimous— nothing I'm saying is unanimous, but I think is common— is the attitude towards armed struggle, um, in which it's quite rarely supported. It's often dismissed, um, as pointless. Um, and something, for example, that I speak about in the interview with, uh, Abd al-Jawad Ammar in the issue is that people are very, very reluctant to acknowledge that armed struggle on behalf of the Palestinians has political aims and is part of a broader longstanding strategy that, although it does not come without huge cost, is effective. And that's something, for example, that Bikrum's piece in the magazine speaks about in detail and very cogently and I would say encouragingly about the kind of the military aspect and the developments there. Occasionally, people who are supposedly in solidarity with Palestine will replicate the terminology and the judgments and the language of, for example, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, which has referred to acts of armed resistance by the Palestinians as war crimes, for example. And equates directly the violence of Israel with resistance of the Palestinians. And I think Lara and Banna might talk a little bit about the limitations of that, the human rights framing, and the kind of NGO, the steady increasing NGO influence in the movement that has had definitely been a part of this rejection of armed struggle. Another thing I think that events, both October 7th and events since, have shown is how untenable this completely dismissive position of many have towards the Axis of Resistance, you know, kind of just either completely ignoring it, or disparaging it as a so-called Axis of Resistance. That somehow uses the Palestinians as pawns, or the Palestinians are somehow being duped by Iran or whoever it is. But I think more often than not, those relationships are actually just ignored, or were. And that position was already dishonest and I think absurd, but I think it's increasingly untenable. Because not only before it, but especially after it, the leaders of the Palestinian resistance are very clear about the forces and the states that help them. And we're seeing that coordination, that very, very close coordination and collaboration. We're seeing it in front of our eyes. So it can no longer be downplayed and ignored to the extent that it, that it has been without, I think, losing kind of losing credibility, frankly. And for— so for example, that's something that me and Amal Saad— there's a transcript of an interview that I did with Amal that we did, I think, in November, just after one of Hassan Nasrallah's speeches. But it's about more broadly about the Axis of Resistance, the connection between Hezbollah and the Palestinian cause. So I would definitely recommend reading or listening to that. That was on East Is a Podcast, so you can listen to it as well. Another big issue that I think has become very— it was already there, but really come sharply into light is how so often solidarity in the West, the way in which Palestine is spoken about, it's completely abstracted from the broader context of US imperialism. And again, like I said, there's this heavy reliance on the Israel lobby as the kind of sole explanation for why the West, particularly the US and the UK, supports Israel. Or, for example, in the case of Germany, which is very much relevant now, this kind of simplistic and misleading notion that what Germany's position is dictated because of a position of guilt, as if, you know, foreign policy is made on the basis of guilt. I won't elaborate on that. But I think the broader, the broader point is that the direct connection to the broader imperialist structure is now so stark and so clear that, again, I think to talk about Palestine without acknowledging that and engaging with that, it's not, it's not tenable, basically. And again, that's something that Max has written about. And then I think the other, the other thing I've tried to do with this issue, and I've tried to do lots of things that I've either written or published, is try and place the question of solidarity with Palestine and analysis of Palestine in the historical context of analysis and writing that has already been written. And I think in many cases underappreciated or pushed, kind of pushed down or intentionally ignored in some ways, and how kind of accurate much of that analysis is. Whether it's the Afro-Asian Writers Organization, in which there's a piece in the issue about, and their analysis of the direct connection between Israel and neocolonialism and imperialism, or the analysis of George Habash, for example. There's a speech by George Habash in the magazine which is extremely relevant. So I guess what kind of coalesces and what brings a lot of these things together is an effort to try and move people away, you know, not in a way that is castigating people kind of needlessly, but trying to bring people away from this kind of abstract fantasy Palestine that is often propagated, I think, intentionally and not, to the actual material and historical reality of the situation and why What's happening is happening. Who is trying to stop it? Who is facilitating it? And not and move away from simplistic explanations of you know the Israel lobby or guilt, for example, in the case of Germany. And I think what this what this moment does, I think it's hard to be to feel kind of positive or optimistic about things generally given the ongoing horror. Although, as I've said in in other places, I do believe that Israel is in a very, very bad position, which is very encouraging. But on the— to take it back to kind of the solidarity movement, so kind of external to Palestine itself, I think this does present an opportunity to kind of move people away from this abstract notion of solidarity, which I think very often can lead to notions of kind of sympathy for victims. And becomes a kind of moral sentiment of all this is terrible, and can occasionally be kind of patronizing towards the Palestinians. Kind of move away from that to the real, to the concrete, and I think by doing that it can lead to kind of empathy rather than sympathy. And so it becomes a kind of informed political stance rather than a moral sentiment that. This is terrible. You know, obviously it is terrible, but we've got to go beyond this is terrible. You know, Israel is terrible.

Max Ajl: It's—

Louis Allday: well, the question, the more urgent and pressing questions are, how can it be stopped? Who are the forces that are actually working to stop it, etc.? And given what we all know is happening, these are kind of crucial, urgent questions. And so we can't afford to be content with vague, abstract notions of solidarity. And kind of, you know, and obviously a magazine issue is not going to solve this, but that's some of the thinking. And I think most of my collaborators in the issue would agree that that was kind of one of the intentions with our writing and generally what we're trying to do. Yeah, I think that's probably enough. Thank you again, Bikrum, everyone, and to all the contributors. And I'm looking forward to hearing your comments.

Bana Abu-Zuluf: Thank you.

Bikrum: Thank you, Louis. That was excellent. That was an excellent introduction to the issue, and I think it ties it into the broader themes we're trying to address today. So our next speaker is Bena Abu-Zuluf. And Bena is a— I'm just going to pull up your bio, one sec— is a PhD candidate in international law at Maynooth University, Ireland, and a member of the Good Shepherd Collective. And we also have Lara Kilani, who's a Palestinian-American researcher and a PhD student and a member of the Good Shepherd Collective. And I think those are our next 2 speakers, so I'll just introduce you both together and then If you're going— I know, because I know there was a collaborative Good Shepherd collective piece in the article. So however you both want to present, and, you know, I'll give you 20 minutes total for that. But please go ahead, Bana.

Bana Abu-Zuluf: Thank you so much, Bikrum, and thanks for inviting us to speak. This really, like, this issue is quite exciting, and I feel very honored to be, you know, part of this You know, very great lineup of written pieces and authors. So, as you know, we have a specific piece by the Good Shepherd Collective titled Anti-Zionism as Decolonization. We really encourage people to read it, specifically people who are critical of the solidarity movement. Our piece really came out, you know, after a lengthy discussion about the current solidarity movement. Our critiques of it, and also the blurriness of some red lines that underpin this movement. So while we aim to really center, you know, anti-Zionism as a path to decolonization, the current movement, or what we like to call the ceasefire movement, which often, you know, chants slogans like, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, has been reluctant to develop or adopt explicit explicitly and to design its politics. We see this more clearly in popular reactions to the outcome of the ICJ ruling on genocide. For many, you know, any crumb of formal recognition of Palestinian suffering is a victory. The horizons for many in the solidarity movement, you know, are narrow, but far narrower than we as anti-colonial activists would like. A tweet by attorney Stanley Cohen actually described the ICJ outcome as A victory without a win. This is correct in one sense, as the ruling really represents the first nudge towards recognition of Zionist crimes and the first breach of, you know, Zionist impunity. However, you know, the undeniable political component of the ruling is hard to dismiss. With the really banal actual demand that the court makes of Zionist entity to basically simply abide by law. So one of the very prominent observations from Palestinians and allies has been, you know, the note on the direct demand that the ICJ has made towards Hamas, basically to release the hostages. This actually was the only clear direction and demand issued to either the occupation or resistance.

Ajamu Baraka: Right.

Bana Abu-Zuluf: By the court. So within the confines of this discourse, really, we dedicated a section of our essay to look at the dynamics that are often forgotten, the dynamics between the settler and native, which has largely been, you know, overlooked by, you know, media and even our allies. So we situate settler colonialism, you know, we look at how people situate settler colonialism and response to it on the same scale of justice And we see that this is very much a standard practice in legal institutions attached to its colonial legacy. This is, of course, a recognized component of these legal institutions, and a lot of these, you know, institutions that are part of the status quo. But we still expect much more from the solidarity community that declares itself both pro-Palestinian and a torchbearer of Palestinian liberation. So when demands are both, you know, made of both sides in the same breath, they firstly address the current unfolding genocide, but they also demand its termination with slogans like equality or equal rights for all people. So when we hear these slogans, we often ask, you know, which rights can be made equal between a settler and a native? So we argue that this is simply— and we say this in our piece— this is simply their version of all lives matter. And what they do really is they disregard the reality that a settler can never become a native and contend that Palestinians should simply disregard the political and material demands of decolonization, like, you know, what Louis has already said. And that they believe that we can simply disrupt inequality within this violent system. The organizations, often NGOs, they center apartheid as their diagnosis of the Palestinian question. They often actually do betray decolonization for such slogans on equality. So that's why when we say anti-Zionists or those that profess anti-Zionism, they cannot both denounce settler colonialism and Zionism and center advocacy on the claim that settlers have equal, immutable rights. For the indigenous Palestinians, anything really short of the question of land back and right of return is not really worthy to dwell on. So the— and this legacy really of imposing solutions and answers to the question of Palestine really persists anyway. And it's mostly in the manner that is most comfortable with these professional NGOs' miscalculated principles. And this is very true, actually, of, you know, solidarity movement that still refuse until today to subscribe to anti-Zionism for the sake of this sort of subservient respectability politics. And we believe it's really cognitive dissonance to believe you can call yourself an ally with the Palestinians but flirt with elements of Zionism, like the two-state solution or both-sidism, as we, you know, analysis of the Al-Aqsa Flood that is both Zionist as well, has been, you know, part of the problem. And this is more repulsively so, we believe, because of this enduring genocide. You know, we are experiencing the most brutal elements of Zionism, and yet, you know, seemingly maybe not worthy of a firm position from these institutions against Zionism. Therefore, when we claim, you know, for those who claim to be allies, that find themselves uncomfortable with resistance, for example, like Louis was, you know, talking, like resistance by Houthis or by Palestinians in Gaza or Palestinians in general. We ask really for people to sit with this discomfort that, you know, Palestinian suffering is really not a tragic performance to sit back, watch, and normalize. It is an active dereliction imposed in this racially and you know, colonially divided world. And I've read this morning this piece by Mariame Massoud in Fikra magazine, and she wrote brilliantly about civility politics. And I quote, start of quote, I will not carry the labor of, in the words of Toni Morrison, making our subjugation palatable to those in the position to alleviate it. That our own words are contingent on the feelings of the reader from the Global North Is a testament to the colonial vestiges in not only our thinking, but our very being. If to be unpalatable is an act of violence, so be it. Let our books be violent, our stories, our speeches, our classroom discussions. Let us isolate some people. Let us force people to question the hierarchies that privilege them. Let us be violent in our confidence in academic and professional settings, et cetera, et cetera. End of quote. Therefore, when we profess our anti-Zionism, it really requires more than political organizing that is targeted at those intentionally, you know, maintaining these, you know, white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism through Zionism. It also requires that we try and we wager our access to power to dismantle directly those mechanisms of oppression. And we write in our piece specifically, and I quote, that we must stop betting on the longevity of Zionism. So what we argue really to be bold solidarity here today is one that demands most from ourselves, our institutions, and the world we live in. We must not celebrate half measures, attempts to humanize Palestinians, and, you know, the legal proceedings that come with it as victories. These processes do not conform to anti-Zionist decolonization that we subscribe to, nor will the latter become really palatable to the international community. So Palestinians, we demand 2 things really. We demand bold anti-Zionist solidarity, and we demand solidarity that celebrates resistance and any inch we all come collectively closer to Palestinian liberation. And I leave it at that.

Bikrum: Thank you. Thank you, Banna. Lara, I know I just introduced you, but Lara Kilani is also a Palestinian PhD researcher and with the Good Shepherd Collective. Please go ahead, Lara.

Lara Kilani: Thank you so much, Bikrum. I'm sorry, everyone, that I'm just joining you by audio today, but can you hear me?

Bikrum: Yes, we can.

Lara Kilani: Great.

Max Ajl: Yeah.

Lara Kilani: Okay, great. Yeah, I'm here in Palestine and my Service is a bit shaky, so I thought this was the safest move. Thank you so much, Bikram, and thank you to the organizers for inviting us to join you. And thank you, Bana. Your presentation was excellent. So hopefully I have something to add. But I think I just want to talk a bit about some of the points that Bana raised, maybe add some things. And also, this is relating to a lot of the points that Louis brought up as well. So As Banna mentioned, you know, this piece is really— the piece that we wrote, Anti-Zionism as Decolonization, is really something that we've thought about writing for such a long time. And in the days following October 7th, it became really obvious that there wasn't any— there wasn't any more time not to be explicitly talking about what is anti-Zionism, how do Palestinians understand it, how do we put it in a historical context. And how do we imagine it going forward? Because it can't be a slogan, and it can't be a way of, you know, garnering donations. It really has to mean something when we're talking about liberation and decolonization. So one of the— so I'll talk a little bit about the settler-native relationship as we discuss it, and then the 2 other sections in our article about Structural changes to support liberation and bold solidarity, which Banna brought up and already discussed a bit. So I think one of the most important pieces of our of our article, which maybe you know this is obvious to folks, but I think it's important to be said, is the relationship between the settler and the and the native, and. In general and in the unique discourse surrounding Palestine. So as we put it, these are 2 distinct classes which indicate relationships to power, privileges, and resources within the Zionist settler colonial systems and institutions. And this is important because all Israelis are settlers, and all of their privileges, power, and resources come at the direct expense of Palestinians. And this is really important because we talk more, and I'll talk more in a second, about international law, international institutions, and their uses, and the way that they really divide settlers, Israeli settlers in the context of Palestine, into good and bad, acceptable, unacceptable, and legitimize aspects of Zionism. But also since October 7th, we've seen how these class lines, and Louis talked a bit about this already, how they're illuminated not only within Israeli settler society, as we've seen Israelis across the political spectrum coming together to enact genocide, very little public resistance. Public resistance until very recently has been centered on, you know, what is politically strategic for Israelis, they're captives, things like that, and not about Palestinians, our right to resistance, our right to liberation, or anything like that. But we've also seen the way these class lines exist beyond the geographic space of Palestine. So in the Global North and South, and especially in organizations and institutions in the Global North. And as Bikram said, I'm Palestinian American, so my context is the US. So that's you know, what I'll relate to here. But we've seen how these, a lot of these institutions and organizations have fallen in line. And really, even those that purport to advocate for Palestinians use rhetoric that supports settler narratives. So we've seen things like outright condemnation of October 7th, centering Israeli deaths as above or you know, in the same context as Palestinian deaths, calling for ceasefire, as Banna discussed already, without any qualification, explanation of what that means, entertaining the analysis of terrorism or Israeli self-defense, and also in omissions, like not talking about Israeli Zionism and settler colonialism. And we also have seen today alone how this relationship between the settler and the indigenous and the resources and the rights and the privileges of the settler coming directly as a result of this theft is still playing out in very dramatic, very real ways. So today we saw, today or yesterday, the decision of 9 countries to suspend their financial support for UNRWA. And of course, we can talk about critiques of UNRWA, but we know that, you know, it was established and provides some of the resources stolen from Palestinians in lieu of their right to return and our access to our resources in Palestine. So there's a clip that went viral today by Israeli official Noga Arbel, who said in the Knesset on January 4th, it will be, quote, it will be impossible to win this war if we do not destroy UNRWA. She relates to this through the continuation of Palestinians' refugee status, which is protected by UNRWA. And she also tweeted again today to reinforce the idea that the right of return is what makes UNRWA genocidal. So she's making it really clear, right? And it's becoming increasingly clear and no longer shrouded in any discourse, in any liberal discourse. Settler colonialism can only survive as long as the violent theft of resources from the native population continues and is protected. And So, you know, in a context where Israel hasn't achieved any of its stated goals in this genocide, this is also an illuminating statement and act showing, you know, it's not about targeting UNRWA for any affiliation with resistance organizations, but really for the resources that it provides Palestinians, both the material resources sustaining livelihood, but also the legal ones that sustain refugeehood and, you know, the possibility of return. And this is just one of the ways that we see settlers explicitly acknowledging the threat of Palestinians', you know, legal status and access to resources that allow us to remain in our lands. I'll turn quickly, I know my time is running out. I'll turn, I just want to talk a bit about structural changes to support liberation, which is one of our sections in our article as well, and an important piece. Banna touched on this already, but, you know, we can see through the limited scope of the ICJ decision, the failure of the ICC to act, the ability of the US and its imperial allies to disrupt international consensus in the UN and other acts, that the existing mechanisms and law Did not serve Palestinian— Palestinians or our liberation. So, you know, that— Habana talked about this, but, you know, clinging to international law as our primary mode of analysis, or human rights, or the framework of military occupation starting in 1967, is not only unstrategic, but it's also a denial of the basic truths of Palestinian history, the struggle for liberation, and the moment that we're in right now. And we see that for too long, allies have set aside what is right, what is truthful, what Palestinians envision for ourselves, for what is politically expedient in the moment. And this comes at the expense of one group, Palestinians. And this is also important because, as we've seen play out across our screens, not only, you know, since October 7th, but long before, Palestinians are often asked to record the most tragic moments of our lives through videos, through interviews, you know, for solidarity organizations to send out for their fundraising campaigns. But we are denied the ability until this moment to politically narrate our history and talk about the future that we imagine for ourselves. And we're encouraged not only by the limited granting of resources, but also the withholding of resources on this basis, to acknowledge and legitimize settler colonialism and Zionism, often through, you know, talking about the occupation framework starting 1967, international humanitarian law, human rights, and things like that. So in our article, and in general, we talk about bold solidarity as what Palestinians deserve. And Banna and I are both members of the Good Shepherd Collective. GSC has offered creative ways to interact with existing legal structures locally and internationally— locally, sorry, in the US, not in Palestine. Which puts the power back in the hands of people rather than maintaining it in these structures. Through the Defund Racism campaign, but also now, we have been asking folks to leverage their resources, donations, and votes to pressure politicians into calling for an end to this genocide, as well as the 17-year siege on Gaza, and move towards decolonization. But I think this moment really demands that we think more broadly and more creatively and other— and I think Louis has already brought this up and Banna did, about how we build a new world, build a different world, and no longer rely on these old tactics or the NGOs that have centered themselves in Palestine, in the US, beyond, that, you know, frame themselves as our liaisons Despite the limits of their advocacy that we can see, you know, their self-interest in funding and maintaining these international law frameworks. And I think this is a question that we can, you know, imagine and discuss. What does this look like? You know, this is a big overhaul. But I think one of the things that I'm most proud of in this piece and in general in moving forward is the importance of speaking truth, you know, not to fit into these existing colonial frameworks, but really to imagine the world that we want. And this shouldn't be limited by, you know, the realities that states try to impose upon us, that settler colonialism has created, you know, the limits of international law, which we see the, you know, absolute emptiness of Zionism or quote-unquote pragmatic thinking. We really need to focus on telling the truth, telling the history, talking about our expectations, which Banna beautifully outlined, which free us to imagine what we really deserve, which is decolonization and liberation. And I'll end it there. Thank you so much for having us.

Bikrum: Thank you. Thank you, Lara. That was excellent. Our next speaker is Matteo Capasso. Matteo is a Marie Curie Global Fellow between Columbia University in the United States and the University of Venice in Italy. He is the author of Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which was published in 2023 with Syracuse. This book reconstructs the last 2 decades of the country's politics leading up to the NATO-led regime change operation in 2011 that sanctioned its fall. His current research focuses on the impact of U.S.-led imperialist policies and the political economy of war, sanctions, and militarism. He is editor of the academic journal Middle East Critique, and his work has appeared in several academic outlets, including Review of International Political Economy, World Review of Political Economy, Politics, Review of African Political Economy, and others. He is a special rapporteur of the International People's Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism, Sanctions, Blockades, and Economic Coercion. Coercive Measures. Please go ahead, Matteo.

Speaker 7: Yeah.

Matteo Capasso: Can everybody hear me?

Alan Freeman: Yeah.

Matteo Capasso: Okay. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Radhika. Thank you, Bikrum. Thank you, Louis, for having put together this fantastic special issue, which I hope everybody will buy. Considering the importance of these events, he can really provide us a guideline to think through what is happening. I've been involved with several things with Louis also throughout the special issue. And today I'm going to try to make a different type of intervention, which, you know, I hope will be helpful for, you know, for all of us to think through what is happening and these historic events that are happening right now in Palestine. And thank you, Lara and Bana, for for joining us today. So I want to start today in the aftermath of the Nazi defeat in Europe, thanks mostly to the lives that the Soviet Union Army, the Red Army, gave. Because right in the aftermath of the Nazi defeat, on May 8th, 1945, the people of Algeria which at the time was under French settler colonization, marched in various cities, especially the cities of Sétif and Guelma. And they marched asking for the release of political detainees. I hope that from now on you're going to be able to have the parallel of what I'm talking about with the events that we're seeing. They marched asking for the release of political detainees and the application of a more humanely treatment of Algerians on their national territory, which at the time was colonized. Do you know how the marches and protests were met by the French colonizers' authorities? It was a complete massacre. The entire structure of colonial violence was unleashed on the people of Algeria. To such an extent that historians, obviously depending which ones, say that the count of the bodies ranged between 20,000 to 45,000 people in a single day. The colonial regime is a regime instituted and governed by violence, where violence, whether ethnic cleansing or genocide, is foundational. To their material and ideological standing. It is always by force that the colonial regime is established. And it is against the will of the people that other peoples more advanced in the techniques of destruction or numerically more powerful have prevailed. As such, a system that is established on violence can only logically be faithful to itself. And its duration in time depends on the continuation of violence. But the violence which is in question here is not an abstract violence I'm talking about. It's not theoretical. It is not only a violence perceived by the spirit. It is also a violence manifested in the daily behavior of the colonizers towards the colonized. It is one that purposefully aims to shorten the lives of the colonized, that is, to kill them. So contempt, a politics of hate, incitement to genocide are manifestation of a very concrete and material violence. Colonialism, however, is not satisfied by this violence against the present. The colonized people are presented ideologically as a people arrested in their evolution. They are arrested in time. They are impervious and impenetrable to reason. They are incapable of directing their own affairs. So they require the permanent presence of an external ruling power. Therefore, the inherent barbaric nature of the colonized requires the constant, if not eternal, use of violence by the colonizers. Violence is in the everyday acts, Violence is against the past and the memory of the colonized. Violence is against the future of the colonized. For the colonial regime, due to its paper tiger nature, presents itself as necessarily eternal. And to do so, it needs endless violence.

Bikrum: But—

Matteo Capasso: It is an enlightened violence, one that posits the forces of light against the ones of darkness. Men, women, children, humans are all turned into flesh. No distinction exists. The colonized must be oppressed and clobbered. Their lives must be annihilated and shortened. The history of the colonized peoples then is transformed. It is transformed into what? Into a meaningless, savage, and immoral Unrest that must be condemned. Do you condemn what the colonized are doing? It is not even displaced out of history. It is always already outside of history, because the colonized, as I said earlier, lives in a dimension of arrested time. It's outside of time already. So it is very difficult to understand the violence of the colonized as long as it is taught and presented in terms of the ideas disseminated by the colonizers, the imperialists, and thus bourgeois philosophy. For them, violence is a relic of barbarism. Only humans can— human animals can do it. And it is bound to disappear under the progress of enlightenment, democracy, civilization. In fact, For all those who have been brought up under bourgeois ideology and its many, it is really natural to have a profound contempt for the people who try to explain, I don't even dare saying praising, the violence of the colonized. They are astonished to see that educated progressive people can be in agreement with the likes of barbaric, even Islamist-like forces. This is why they rush to condemn that violence. They want everybody and everyone to condemn it. How can you dare to make sense, explain, empathize with these animals? At times, they hold up a false distinction, one between civilians and terrorists. But as I said before, such a distinction never existed in the first place. It is always a twist that bourgeois and colonized legality and rhetoric adopts.

Alan Freeman: Thank you.

Matteo Capasso: What happens instead is that the colonisers look at those who explain the violence of the colonised as bad faith people, or recur to some sophistry to give an appearance of reason to the dreams of otherwise stupid, barbaric, terrorist people who are completely incapable of thought. And so one has the impression that for these people, the colonised, humanity only began with the arrival of those brave settlers. However, it doesn't take an incredibly brilliant mind, perhaps again one that is not brought up under imperialist ideology, to realize that when people are caught in a web of 3-dimensional violence, which is both temporally in the past, in the present, in the future, and spatially at the level of space, at the level of the body, at the level of the institution, at the level of the spirit, Then the colonized sooner or later is confronted with an historical necessity, which is how to end the colonial regime by any means necessary. Colonialism drives the colonized people into revolt, because in daily life the colonizers use their force in a direction opposed to the desires of the colonized. And so the colonized organize themselves under the influence of numerous causes, which is not necessarily socialism. It can be religion as well. And they elaborate the revolutionary idea in order to liberate themselves. In doing so, the colonized people respond to the colonial structure of violence, and this act incarnates a historical necessity. And it is faced at the same time With a massive daunting task of fighting, not merely to preserve their human existence, to self-preserve themselves, but also to find a way in which its instinct of self-preservation must turn into new values through morality. Their acts literally are destined to change the world, to flip it, to flip it upside down. Because they throw the bourgeois colonial ideologies right into the dustbin of history. The call and actions for freedom incarnate the struggle for decolonization, through which the colonized recognize themselves as humans endowed with the agential power, the right to self-determination, and the restoration of their right to liberate their country. The actions of the colonized underline a sense of selfhood, of freedom, Beyond the physical, the conceptual, the psychological borders of violence imposed on their being. And in the process of launching their counter-violence attack on the colonizers, on the settlers, the colonized have to demonstrate a level of careful planning and discipline that defines the aims of the revolutionary action. Unlike the colonizer, which targets children, women, Man wipes out entire families and attacks with utmost savagery any infrastructure— hospital, religious place, education, residential units. The colonized people attack army and military units. They even treat prisoners belonging to the community of the settlers with a humanity that surprises the colonizers themselves.

Lara Kilani: Thank you.

Matteo Capasso: By the way the colonizer— but the way the colonizer perceived this revolutionary call is ultimately existential. They experience what? Physical and moral fear. And this double fear translates into an aggressive and severely homicidal, genocidal conduct. We find 2 elements. First, the very powerful guilt complex Because in their heads what they say, if the colonized people should one day rule over us, they would certainly do what we colonizers have done and make us pay for our crimes. Second, they continue to have this very Manichean vision of humanity, which always divides their world into oppressors and oppressed, civilized and barbarians. So, with the heavy, heavy, heavy editing, what I actually just recounted is the speech that Frantz Fanon gave in Accra in 1960 called Why We Use Violence. It is important because 9 years After that event, when the Algerian people went on the streets, started the Algerian War for Liberation in 1954. I think we are in a historical moment that is unique. If we go through the speech and we just change the word colonizer and colonized, perhaps with words like Palestinians and Zionists, I think we are— what we are seeing and what we need to understand That there is one way to go through liberation, and we must understand on which side to be. Thank you.

Bikrum: Thank you, Matteo. Another excellent presentation, really broadening some of the discussions we've been having. Our next speaker is Max Ajl. Max is a senior fellow at the University of Ghent, an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at— I'm not even going to try to say this. I'm going to embarrass myself with my lack of worldliness. Somewhere in Europe, you can— Wageningen University. He is the author of A People's Green New Deal. He has written for Monthly Review, Jacobin, and Viewpoint. He has contributed to the Journal of Peasant Studies, Review of African Political Economy and Globalizations, And is an associate editor at Agrarian South and Journal of Labor and Society. And I really want to emphasize to people to please check out Agrarian South in particular. I think it offers a very, very distinct and important Global South anti-systemic perspective on much of what is happening. So Max, please go ahead.

Max Ajl: Thank you, Bikrum, for the introduction. Thanks to the organizers, and thank you to the previous speakers. Who already touched on a lot of what I want to touch on today, which is having to do with the inability of too much of the discourse in the West to adequately conceptualize the role of violence and the role of colonialism in our modern world. So I want to zero in more specifically on this question of Biden and also the broader imperialist state system for the destruction of Palestine and why it's happening and how we can explain it. Because superficially, I think it's useful to take seriously the argument, at least, that supporting Israel is somehow chaotic or somehow a poor decision by the imperialist system, right? And by take seriously, I don't mean believe it. I mean understand why people arrive at this idea understand what kind of presuppositions it relies upon in order to embed itself in people's consciousness, right? Because that's where we need to address it. We need to address it in part theoretically, right? Because it's, you know, the Biden government looks to be losing to Trump in the coming elections. It's about to cost him the election. There's huge protests all over the European core. I mean, the role of the actual European governments in the world system is coming into sharp relief. To their domestic populations and so forth. So this is inciting massive crises of legitimacy within the Global North states that are actually in a very cruel way converging on this consensus on the destruction of Palestine, most recently with the call for the defunding of UNRWA. So fundamentally, what is this origin of this idea that Israel is, to use the word that's often used, is an albatross for US imperialism, that it is not useful for imperialism? I mean, and I think I think it goes along with what the other presenters were generally discussing, is that it basically rests on an erasure of the role of imperialism and colonialism in constituting and reconstituting the world system, right? That even if you take some people who are closer probably to our camps, it rests on a notion of capitalism that's fundamentally shorn of violence. And when we say shorn of violence, it's also shorthand for saying shorn of imperialism and colonialism. And fundamentally, it's ahistorical. So if we want to understand the role that Israel above all, and also Israeli action within the world system, is playing in support of US imperialism, and why therefore it garners such massive support from the transatlantic ruling classes, we need a notion of what capitalism is to begin with, right? And capitalism is, of course, accumulation on a world scale. But it's more than that. It's also a historical process of accumulation on a world scale that at any given moment, it is abstracted from all the processes that are occurring, most of which are necessary for the process of accumulation on a world scale. And it's like a puzzle. It's like, how and why are those processes useful for this relentless accumulation of value? That's what we want to understand, right? And that's what theory gives us, right? And so if we take the classic works of Samir Amin, that capitalism is not just accumulation, but it's also polarized accumulation, right? And it's not just that, but it's also about following Marini or Dussel, It's also about maintaining value flows from the South to the North. That is, those value flows, those flows of surplus value, which are claims to labor hours of humanity, pile up in the North and are stolen from the South. And this is exactly why the North is developed, so-called, and the South is underdeveloped. In fact, these are two sides of one historical coin, one historical process. So what is the role of Israel therein? So from the 1950s onwards, first for France, and then following 1967 for the United States, but also for global imperialism on the whole, its role was to maintain neocolonial relationships across the Third World. And it did so by attacking or supporting attacks on Arab republicanism. It supported counterinsurgency in Algeria. It carried out the destruction of the Arab Republican frontline states in 1967. During this period, this was where neocolonialism and anti-colonial developmentalist nationalism were fighting on the battlefield in the Arab region. During this period, there was a fight for the control over the direction of the productive forces in the Arab region. But since the '70s, the central Arab articulation to world capitalism have basically been oil, finance, and war. This is how the Arab region is essentially articulated within the world system. I mean, there are some forms of production, of industrial production, there is agricultural production, but this is the core of it. So this is essentially because the US-Israeli goal of the de-development of the Arab region as productive places for people to live decent lives has been advancing since the 1970s and the 1980s. So therefore, the role of Israel is not quite the same. It's no longer at war in the same way with regional republicanism, with partial exceptions for Iran and Yemen. Instead, it has a different mandate. I mean, the mandate is actually to destroy the working class on 2 fronts. One, it's to destroy and dominate the Arab working class in the ideological level. That is, to take the words of Ali Kadri, to instill a sense of defeat. On the other hand, there's a process of the physical destruction of the working class. That is, you shorten the amount of resources needed for the reproduction of the working class, and this lessens the burden on capital within the region. And you have hundreds of millions of people who are living shorter lives and who don't need to be reproduced, and therefore, The value, the resources can be exported to the North by the neocolonial governments, right? And so this is proceeding historically in the Arab region through the whole-scale destruction, not the neocolonial usurpation, but the actual destruction of the resources of the countries as a whole, right? And so this is the sanctions regime in Iraq, and this is the actual escalating into the destruction of Iraq. And then this is the nonstop wars that have been ripping across Lebanon. And this is the US war on Syria and the US war on Libya and the de-development that was imposed upon Yemen and Iraq, who have seen— Yemen and Syria, which have seen falls in GDP per capita of around 70% since the onset of the wars on those countries, right? This is all— this is the agenda of the US. This is the agenda that's fully supported by Israel.

Bikrum: Right.

Max Ajl: Which has bombed Syria hundreds of times and maintains Lebanon in a state of constant war. And this is also part and parcel of their mission, is actually the destruction of the state itself, the state as even a theoretical horizon for Arab anti-sectarian unity, and also the state as a platform for potentially developing the productive forces. That it's gone— the matter has gone far beyond the destruction of Arab republicanism as it's crystallized in state practice and state developmentalism, it's actually advanced to the point of the destruction of the state itself, and then the reconstruction of the state along sectarian grounds and also shrunken grounds so that it's filled by ballooning NGO structures, for example, as has occurred in the so-called Arab Spring in Tunisia, which actually filled with a non-state civil society which is taking on many state-like tasks, right? So the resistance axis, therefore, and I'm going to conclude with this point, what is the threat posed by the resistance axis to this system, right? Because a lot of people who may have a sympathy with neocolonialism, what is the relationship of this neocolonial, of the resistance axis to a threat to this way of constituting the world system? And actually, I think when we pose it as a series of hypotheticals, it gets very, very obvious.

Matteo Capasso: Yeah.

Max Ajl: Right? In fact, it's so obvious that those of us who are much more sympathetic to the project don't even think about it that much, but it's so clear, right? One, if the US and Israel are trying to destroy Arab sovereignty, the resistance axis is actually trying to maintain state sovereignty and armor state sovereignty in the Arab region, right? If the US and Israel are trying to destroy Arab democracy or even the threat of real substantive Arab democracy, these forces are trying to, in fact, in essence, implant some form of potentially Arab democracy, above all in Palestine. Why would the US and Israel accept an Arab democracy in Palestine? Most centrally, and I think this is something that we maybe don't remark upon enough, is that the central merit of Israel in the US world system since 1967 has been to impose a sense of defeat, first of all, on Palestinians, through Palestine, on the broader Arab working classes, and not just in the Arab region, but also through genocidal counterinsurgency throughout the Third World, to impose a sense of defeat on the working class on a world scale so working-class people cannot fight for their interests as a class. This is why what is happening is potentially revolutionary, precisely because what is actually happening is the physical, concrete empowerment of populist regional militia who in fact are empowering the working class and who have become a beacon of empowerment, not just for popular classes in the Arab region, but also on a world scale. And this is also part and parcel of why forces like Saudi Arabia, are so apprehensive about the prospects of military victory by the Palestinians and do not even really quite dislike Hamas because these are actually populist, working-class people's militia that are capable of actually changing the whole orientation, the whole kind of sense of subjugation that the US and Israel and also their neocolonial allies in the region have successfully imposed for some decades. And this is actually turning the tide from one of ideological defeat to an ideological renaissance that can actually— threatens to really dissolve this whole sense of powerlessness that I think is one of the central ideological integuments that actually holds together the world system as a whole. So I think these are other things that we have to keep in mind when we look at what's happening in Palestine and when we look at what's happening in the region as a whole. And this is why These neocolonial and imperialist forces are willing to burn up their domestic political systems of legitimization, their political-social compacts, their domestic ideological compacts, because there's something that's fundamentally important at stake. That is, can the working class fight for itself? Can poor people and working people and peasants and slum dwellers organize to defend their interests and succeed in doing so on a world scale or not? And that, I think, is an abstract way of putting what people have been putting very concretely. It's actually the crux of what we're seeing in Palestine, but also Yemen, and also Lebanon, and also Syria in the world today. So thanks very much, and I'm going to stop there.

Bikrum: Excellent, Max. That's a great presentation again. I think we will have a lot to discuss. Okay, our next speaker is Ajamu Baraka. Ajamu is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the executive committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Antiwar Coalition. He is an editor and contributing columnist for The Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for CounterPunch. He was recently awarded the U.S. Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shim Award for uncompromised integrity in journalism. I know, Ajamu, you signed on a bit late, so we're keeping our comments to 10 minutes so we can have time for discussion after. So I'm just flagging that. So, but can you please take it away, Ajamu?

Ajamu Baraka: Thank you so much. I really appreciate this opportunity to participate in this very, very important conversation. We're having some connectivity issues here, so I'm going to actually And not even take the whole 10 minutes, but I did want to come on and say a few words. One of the things, though, I want to start off by reminding people of is I'm also one of the co-founders of the International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine.

Bikrum: That's right.

Ajamu Baraka: They've been doing a lot of work recently in dealing with this issue of the South African petition to the International Court of Justice. There's a few things we want to share from our perspective, from the Black Alliance of Peace. As many people might know, the Black Alliance of Peace is a coalition, an alliance of groups of forces in the U.S. It is part of the Black liberation movement. It is a movement or an alliance, a formation that is attempting to try to recapture the traditional radical anti-war, anti-imperialist thrust of our movement here in the US and really globally. So saying that, we want to be quite clear that even with this very, very important provisional measures coming from the International Court of Justice, we agree with some of the concerns that we've heard from other speakers in terms of the potential of overreliance on the international law component of this. Now, this is very important, what's coming out of The Hague, because it's a process that continues a process of delegitimizing the settler colonial project. And we understand also, too, is something that can also lend to and support some of the traditional opportunism we find with some of the NGO groups internationally.

Alan Freeman: Right.

Ajamu Baraka: But it's important that we understand the— what's important for this is that it helps with the fightback, with the mobilization efforts, with the identification of what should be seen as the primary contradiction and the true enemies of collective global humanity. We take the position from the Black Alliance for Peace That we don't get into a conversation about this resistance group or that among the Palestinian people. We say without apology, we support the resistance. How the Palestinians define that resistance is up to the Palestinians. One of the things we see as valuable is that this current horrific situation in Gaza has helped to completely strip away any veneer of respectability for the Israeli project, and by extension, US and Western imperialism. That the true nature of this process, this project, has been revealed. And we think that's a good thing. We say that what this allows us to do, that is global civil society, if you will, is to recenter the framework of settler colonialism and understanding of what this project represents and the global forces it represents also. It helps us to come to the position that there is no more legitimacy, no more ideological mystification that can be effectively utilized by the West around their notions of liberalism, liberal philosophy, and the liberal theoretical framework that has been completely exposed as the fraud that it's always been. That is quite clear that they have been willing to jettison international law, jettison their so-called liberal values in order to maintain global white supremacist hegemony. That, we think, is a good thing that that's been finally exposed. What's happening today affirms the, in our opinion, the terms of struggle, the terms of the war being waged by the West against the colonized peoples of the world. It helps us to, again, recenter the notion of the fight for authentic decolonization. Raising up the issues of national oppression, understanding the connection between the struggles against national oppression and class. It helps us in the US to strip away the veneer of respectability also, to remind people of the settler colonial reality of the US. And it helps all of us, in our opinion, As we sharpen our weapons for our struggle, to name the enemy of collective humanity. And we say quite clearly that the current enemies of collective humanity is represented by the powers of the West, what we refer to as the US-EU-NATO axis of domination. We understand that the material basis of what became the West started in 1492 when Europeans spilled out of Europe into the Americas, and the material basis for what emerged as so-called Western civilization was, of course, the conquering of the land and the slaughter of Indigenous people and the importation and enslavement of African people. We are now able to help people to understand that reality much better as a consequence of what is being revealed in Gaza and with the Palestinian people. So as we go toward closure, that this is a historical moment, is a moment of truth-telling, is a moment, though, that we have to recenter what has to be done. And what has to be done is building more effective structures of resistance. Black lives matter. And understanding that those structures have to be interconnected, That the task today is for organization and the intensification of the fight against Western imperialism. So we're here to take up that fight, to reaffirm our unreserved, unwavering support for the Palestinian people, and a pledging that we will deepen or attempt to deepen the relationships of struggle, of building effective organizations, so that we can in fact engage in the struggle that will result in authentic decolonization globally. And I end there. Thank you.

Bikrum: Thank you. Thank you, Ajamu. So I'm going to now offer a few comments based on my article in Ebb magazine and speaking to some of the broader themes of today, and then we'll open it up for a a Q&A discussion, a broader audience discussion. So yeah, I have an article in this special issue titled Two Logics of War: Liberation Against Genocide. I think many of the speakers have touched on many of the themes that I discuss. So just very quickly, I want to begin with things that Max, Matteo, and others have emphasized around thinking through imperialism in relation to capitalism, but thinking of imperialism as a primary contradiction of the capitalist world system, and emphasizing again what does this mean. It means this logic of the denial of sovereignty to states outside of the core capitalist countries, right? And the denial of sovereignty, as I believe Matteo really emphasized, really hinges on this question of force. And I know last time I was on an IMG panel, I emphasized the work of Samir Amin, but Amin, of course, has 2 dimensions vis-à-vis the denial of sovereignty coming through economic force and military force. And so this is the foundations of the world system from the 16th century to today, is the imposition of greater violence to essentially usurp sovereignty, to deny sovereignty, to ensure then that integrated global economic processes result in the transfer of surplus value from periphery to core. And now within this framework. This is where I think a lot of forces of contestation on the left and otherwise find themselves in moments of confusion, because the question becomes, does political action contest the level of sovereignty, or does it reinforce the denial of sovereignty? And I think there are 2 roads that open up in the struggle against imperialism. There's the confused road that actually accepts the permanent, eternal kind of maintenance of imperial force, of the imperial denial of sovereignty, and seeks recognition from the imperial sovereign. It seeks resources under the regime of imperial sovereignty. And there's another road that actually contests it at the level of force. In my own work, I call that first road— I'll often call it the Las Casas paradigm, because if you go back to the 16th century, Las Casas's work there, he'll critique Spanish imperialism, Spanish sovereignty for the abuses that they inflict on Indigenous peoples. But will never actually question Spanish sovereignty. The project becomes to secure more rights for colonized people under the sovereignty of the colonizer. And it's the other road that actually seeks to overturn that sovereign equation. That's where then the colonizer or the imperialist then allows themselves, under the rubric of law, genocidal war, right? So you see— When the Haitians actually launch an anti-imperialist struggle contesting the relation of force that enforces the denial of sovereignty— sorry, one second— so that contests the denial of sovereignty, Haiti is subjected to sanctions and a blockade, right? So that is the elemental rule of the world system that is never meant to be challenged. Now, in Palestine, which has always been, since its conquest, central to the operation of the broader imperialist world system, we've seen these And we see these 2 roads operating since its inception, right? We see how British imperialism and Zionism, as Zionists were very aware of from the beginning, relied on this equation of greater force being applied upon the Palestinians. You know, Jabotinsky's famous quote that Zionism is a colonizing venture and it stands or falls on the question of armed force, and British imperialism is key.

Lara Kilani: Right.

Bikrum: To enforcing this. Within this framework, from the beginning, you saw a Palestinian elite that accepted this equation of force and underneath it sought to press for national rights, right, under this belief that you could be recognized by the imperial sovereign rather than overturning the imperial sovereign. And so this was one road that emerged in Palestine that we can call the normalization road. And there's a second road though that also emerged in Palestine from its inception, of course, taking its strongest expression with the Palestinian Great Revolt in the 1930s, which challenges the material basis of the denial of sovereignty at the level of force. But again, here is where then the Palestinians are subject to the logic of extermination, the moment in which they challenge that fundamental question of the denial of sovereignty and the material basis Of this right now. So this has been an ongoing struggle, not just in Palestine but across those subjugated by the broader imperialist system. I want to just jump ahead though, after putting that on the table. This imperialist system, again, where Palestine is really central to it— I wanted to add to something that maybe Max mentioned when he talked about oil and water and finance. Yeah. I think in relation to U.S. imperialism, and then I'll continue, this is a bit of a side, I'm curious what folks would think about the role that Palestine and the U.S. support of Zionism plays in the maintenance of the U.S. oil-dollar complex, right, which was key to the U.S.-Saudi relationship in the 1970s and key to the U.S. projecting power even vis-à-vis its allies, right, linking the oil, the dollar to oil. So yeah, I just want to put that out there in addition to what Max emphasized. So this imperial system built upon the denial of sovereignty on these 2 legs, an economic and military leg, in our contemporary context, it kind of reaches its maximum expression at that end of history moment when the Soviet Union kind of collapses and the United States really brings forth this unipolar world order. And at that time, many critical scholars, much on the left, viewed this, again, as this permanent, irreversible condition. So you have an analysis of a world system overrun by Western finance capital, a world system overrun by overwhelming Western U.S. military power. And there's a sort of analysis that emerges that just constantly looks at maybe the victimization of the Global South vis-à-vis structural adjustment programs, looks at kind of uncontested U.S. military power that maybe you can march on the streets against, maybe you stand with the victims of that power. But what was missed out at that same time was that there was this other road. The resistance road was being crafted on both economic and military grounds from the 1980s onwards. I think— I won't discuss it now, but of course we know the story of economic globalization and imperialism. A lot of the even Marxist analysis missed out on how China was constructing a challenge from the 1980s onwards to this kind of economic imperial sovereignty. But what was happening in the region was you also had forces like Hezbollah reconstructing on the basis of armed struggle a material basis to challenge the denial of sovereignty in the region. And so this is something that I think really much— many people missed out on in the 1990s. If you have the Oslo paradigm, which is reinforced reinforcing the denial of Palestinian sovereignty, reinforcing a quasi-conception of sovereignty. You have an armed struggle road being relaunched out of southern Lebanon, which really inspires— which actually ends up expelling Zionists from Lebanon, showing to Palestinians a road to sovereign reclamation, and which is responded to by both Zionism and imperialism by endless kind of wars. The Dahia Doctrine attempts to impose an extermination genocidal logic. Again, when that question of sovereignty is actually contested in its strongest sense. So this is something that I think this is where we are at today, is that for the past 2 decades since Hezbollah's victory over Zionism in South Lebanon and again in 2006, and the Palestinians' demonstration repeatedly of a rising capacity to defeat Israel in military terms. And it's not just the Palestinians, but we see this happening in the broader region. U.S. military power, its limits are being clearly shown, whether that's in Iraq, whether that's in Yemen through the proxy war that the Saudis waged with the backing of the U.S. and the U.K. You're seeing the basis of the imperial system, right, the basis of force that enables the denial of sovereignty not just in the region, but more broadly across the Global South, we're seeing this brought to challenge in a way we haven't really seen before, right? And I think this is why you're seeing a different kind of geopolitical positioning of, say, China and Russia vis-à-vis what's happening in the region, because you can see that the economic leg that China has been advancing, the United States has responded to it with an attempt at military encirclement, with building military bases, And we can, we can get a sense of how the armed resistance in the region here is actually necessary to maintain a space for challenging the economic imperialist order that, let's say, China has been very at the forefront of doing, right? So I think I just wanted to end then with this comment of where are we in terms of this challenge of force? I think this is a really interesting time that we're at right now because The project of imperialism has been to present anti-colonial armed struggle, the anti-colonial resistance as irrational, right? So when October 7th is launched, it is presented as an irrational violence that you cannot negotiate with, that must be exterminated again, right? Now, this is for ideological reasons because it must minimize the threat that is imposed to imperial sovereignty. Now, in fact, though, if you really look at it, whether it's Yemen or Palestine, and again, like we see the Americans today presenting the Yemeni resistance as an irrational, reckless action that is threatening international commerce in the Red Sea. Now, in fact, each of the actions, whether it's by the resistance in Gaza, whether it's in Yemen, whether it's in Lebanon, they're very clearly— there's a rationality attached to them. There's a very clear sense of purpose to each of these actions that are articulated. It is, in fact, the imperialists and the Zionists who cannot really find a rational explanation to what they're doing, right? So when the United States, when they're bombing Yemen, they cannot actually get to the basis of Yemen's material power, right? The Yemeni resistance, the resistance in Gaza and Lebanon, the dialectic of their engagement with imperial force is of such that they've constructed a capacity that imperialism cannot penetrate. Now, whether this is subterranean weapons production capacity or other techniques that have been developed over decades of resistance, You can just see imperialism basically hitting its head against the wall, unable to get to the roots of anti-imperialist force. So we're seeing this dynamic unfolding. They can massacre, like Matteo was saying, massacre unarmed civilians. But the military objectives, there's simply nothing that they're achieving in terms of reinforcing the key relations of deterrence and imposing the colonial equation of force again on the peoples of the region. Which I think is opening up a broader horizon for anti-imperialism going forward. So I think I will end my comments there, and we can now shift to opening up a broader discussion. Oh, sorry. Yeah, actually, we have an announcement first from Alan Freeman, and then we'll shift to a broader discussion.

Alan Freeman: Can I just check you can hear me, guys? Yep, okay. I'm going to share a screen. This will be very brief. I just want to draw your attention to another event in the imperial world, which is the Wall Street Journal addressed the Davos conference and made an interesting admission that Emma Tucker, editor-in-chief, she said, we own the news, but we don't own it anymore. If we said it was a fact, people took it as a fact. Nowadays, she says, people can go all sorts of different sources, and there is much more questioning about what we're saying. So we have to be more transparent about what we do and how we do it. Now, the key thing there is she did not say we have to stop doing it. She did not say we have to stop taking our sources from the State Department, from the military complex, from the Zionists, and all the usual, uh, places. They just say, so we'd explain why we do it. There's no change. But what is key is that the arrival of these new sources are also changing the landscape of anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggle. So I want to see if I can go on with this here. So this is how we do it, the IMG and our many partners. We're not a business, we're not in competition with anybody, including least of all the people, the wonderful people who we're hosting today. We don't take advertising. We don't look for big corporate funders. We don't do sensationalist clicktivism. We're a grassroots organization trying to get high standards, and we're volunteer-based and supporter-funded. And I just want to briefly look through the 3 things we do because they've shown tremendous progress, and I think that's a progress that everybody has taken part in and we should all be proud of because without everybody else like you guys this would not have happened. 4 years ago, just about on the eve of the last US elections, we had our first video. All of 94 people watched it. Since then, we've had 380 videos and 527,000 views, and that's the fruit of worldwide collaboration, part of the process of the building of anti-imperialist resistance. We have a sister website which we run called New Cold War. This started immediately after Maidan.

Speaker 7: Right.

Alan Freeman: When we said this is a turning point in history because now the imperialists are saying we will use fascism and bandarism openly to suppress resistance, and we've had since then 10,000 posts, average of three a day. What are we? And where oh, what should you do therefore? This is now a shout out to ask ask for your input into this from people watching this. First of all, very simple: sign. We ask you to sign our manifesto.

Ajamu Baraka: Why?

Alan Freeman: Well, first of all, it means you can participate in our decision-making processes. We have a general meeting and so on. We can part of our teams. But secondly, it shows the extent of support that there is for broad anti-imperialist, anti-racist policies. Second, volunteer. You wouldn't believe it, but all this has been done with a Teams of sometimes 4 people, 5 people, maximum 15 volunteers. It's extraordinary. And I must give a special salute to the web team, which, which has done sterling work in all this, to Paul and his work on the videos, and to the events team and all the other people. But last of all, donate. It's very simple. We don't have Jeff Bezos, which the Washington Post has. Now, I'm very sorry for all the Washington Post journalists who have been sacked. And, you know, maybe some of them can start working with us. But that's what happens when Jeff Bezos is in control. You're in control, but to make sure you retain that control, we need that money. We need just the regular donations, $5, $10 a month, and that's what's going to keep us going. So that's it, shouting out, asking for your support. And our role, we see it, is not just to boost ourselves, but to boost everybody else in the struggle. That's why we're very proud and pleased to host this webinar, and I'll put all the links that you can access in order to donate and sign up in the chat. Thank you very much for letting me have this time.

Bikrum: Thank you, Allan. Okay, so let's switch now. We'll open up to broader discussion, questions from the audience for our speakers. So I guess, Radhika, this would normally work with people just putting their hands up. Maybe I can And I can call on folks to— so any questions, comments?

Bana Abu-Zuluf: I think you might want to say, ask people to use the raise hand function.

Bikrum: Yeah, yeah, maybe that would work best. If you can please use the raise hand function, then I can see. Okay, I see Dee Knight. Please go ahead. Oh, seems to— sorry, I was muted.

Max Ajl: Can you hear me now?

Bikrum: Yes, yeah. Uh, thanks for a great series of contributions. I want to pick up on Bikrum's last point, uh, about the potential for, um, making it bigger. What I see, and even though in various ways, especially theoretically. Several of the talks really did show how it's a global phenomenon. We're in a period when the tendency in discussion is to narrow the focus, not so much just to Palestine, but really the region. And You know, without negating for a second the central and critical role of the Palestinian liberation struggle itself, I think that we need to examine the response of imperialism to make it bigger. We have to look, for example, at the effort to define it as a war against Iran and with the bombing in Yemen to set the stage for, in effect, linking their 3 wars in the Middle East, against Russia, and against China. And look at the implications. I think that the dominant— the way of defining this seminar as how the Al-Aqsa flood is changing the world, we have to also look at how the response to it by imperialism endangers the entire world and consider the strategic implications of that. I really thank Bikrum especially for Pointing to that, and I would like to hear some elaboration on that.

Matteo Capasso: Okay, great.

Bikrum: Thank you. Thank you, Dee. Do I? Okay, I see another question. Maybe we can take one more, and then I can open it up to the speakers to respond. So, okay, I have. Is it Nabosa? Is that Nabosa?

Max Ajl: Yes, it is Nabosa.

Bikrum: Yeah, go ahead, Nabosa.

Max Ajl: Greetings from Belgrade, Serbia, former Yugoslavia. In 1967, President Tito helped to send 200 tanks to Arab countries to defend from Israeli aggression. And when Tito wanted to go to Moscow to negotiate, here liberals in Communist Party that were already, you know, bribed, corrupted by the flirting with Western capitalism and imperialism, they said to him, don't rejoin with Russians, which meant in fact, do not go back to socialist project, because socialist Yugoslavia in the '60s was already derailed from historical socialist project. Anyway, my question would be, how could— I mean, people, my biggest respect. I am middle class in this so-called semi-periphery. I would I wouldn't dare to challenge this great Western imperialist narrative. I also depend on small crumbles that fall from imperialist masters. But I really have a structural question. How on earth can Western middle class that maintains the cultural and all hegemony, in fact, how can they risk? Because Israel's is practically proxy state of American and Western imperialism. How can this linchpin of world colonialism could be endangered and entire Western middle class be deprived of its crumbles from imperialist table? Because I will just read you one sentence from the conclusion of the discussion of French Psychoanalytical Society from 2019. They were discussing how they were in fact engaged in imperialist and racist and colonial project in Israel. Just one sentence: the psychoanalytical community has allowed itself to become an active participant in a colonial endeavor and complicit in perpetuating anti-Palestinian racism. So there is awareness, there is knowledge, but there is total paralysis because of the class interests of Western middle classes. So that's my question, if there is any chance to, to have an answer now.

Bikrum: Okay, um, thank you, uh, thank you, Nabusha. Um, um, I, I know Francis is trying to put, put their hand up, uh, so I'll go Francis and then And then we'll go to the speakers, and then I'll go back. I see there's more people with hands up. So Frances, please go ahead.

Bana Abu-Zuluf: Yeah. Thanks to everyone. Fantastic panel. So, you know, even if it's not necessarily comfortable to raise it here, as a feminist scholar of Palestine and, like, transnational movements, I do think it's important to think about violence as something that, well, is forced, right, by the colonizer, the settler colonial and the imperialist. But also, I think there's a difference between fetishizing violence and violence as a method in a multidimensional liberation project. And when violence is fetishized, it does have gendered kind of consequences for kind of the building of a different kind of society. And there's just a lot of work on that. And then the, you know, grounded work. So then a comment to Dee Knight. I think there's— to your comment or question, I think there is a— Yeah. Yes, I think we can think about Iran. We can think about China. But also, the day— you know, states have different interests sometimes, and they're not the same as grounded social movements. There might be alliances. But just thinking, for example, about the role of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates In some of the— in BRICS, in a variety of projects, and their destructive role in the context of Palestine. So I think, you know, yeah, because sometimes I think the IMG leans on state power and state projects, and I'm for them. But I also think That, yeah, like October 7th did not happen in a vacuum.

Bikrum: Okay. Thank you, Francesca. And I see Jim, Yuriy, and Radhika. So I'll take those 3 maybe after just opening it up to the speakers, and then we'll come back to those 3. And I think that'll probably be it. We'll have to wrap it up after that. So I have a question. We have a question from— I'm just going to restate it for the The speakers. We have one from Dee starting us off, thinking about imperialism and its broader implications, wanting some more elaboration on this, how imperialism's impacting, I think, maybe the periphery more broadly, the threat it's posing, the imperialist response. This question about the Western middle class that Navid put on the table. And then Frances, kind of building on some of this, I'm just going to put Frances, maybe your question around violence. The way you framed it in terms of the risk of the fetishization. But, and then, and then the last point, I think, around state power, how we're conceiving it in relation to movements. I know, for example, Max, you have a paper that you've been working on specifically on this. So I think, yeah, anybody want to— do we want to maybe start from the— I don't know if Louis has left. Louis said he was going to leave, but—

Max Ajl: Yeah.

Bikrum: Yeah, otherwise we can just— maybe I can open it up from— is Louis still here? Did Louis leave? Otherwise, maybe Bana, Lara, we can go in the order of the speakers. I can open it up, and if you have something to say, otherwise we can just pass it on to the next person.

Bana Abu-Zuluf: Yeah, thank you. As far as I know, I think D-Night might have actually proposed the question to you, Bikrum. So for the first question about imperialism, I think because you mentioned something precisely very important, so I wouldn't have much to add, at least not as precise as others would add on the questions like political, economic questions. But I would like to say something about violence. And I do believe that there is often the fear to talk about violence that isn't Like, well, I do always actually refrain from using the word violence when it comes to like resistance from the oppressed, because I would never equate the violence of the oppressor and the response from the oppressed as, you know, and I would never call it violence per se. And I think starting from there is a good start. And I think what you call violent and what you name violent is very important.

Louis Allday: Yeah.

Bana Abu-Zuluf: talk about the power of naming, and the power of naming also constitutes the power of reaction to that name. So I think there is this idea that, oh, if Palestinians do resist, what type of resistance shall they partake in? I think this kind of question also, where— which group should it be? Under what premise? Under a state or under, you know, militant groups? Or should it be like an alliance?

Ajamu Baraka: Yeah.

Bana Abu-Zuluf: Or should you know, or should the Egyptians also partake in the you know what you know the Houthis have started and these things like you know I think I think that is less of you know us to ask these questions but also but these people that are part of this you know movement the people are actually making those decisions to resist and act accordingly but I would never really call that violence and I think there is a sense that. People might, might not have the proper analysis, and they might be falling— they might fall into the fetishization issue. But as far as I know, I haven't seen such, at least from people that do believe in Palestinian right to resistance as an inalienable right. I think that's all I would say, and I'd leave the rest really for everybody else to answer. Thank you.

Bikrum: Thank you, Bona. Lara, did you want to add anything?

Lara Kilani: Yeah, I think— thanks everyone for the thoughtful questions. I think I'll just speak to the question about how people can be involved, sort of like, sounds like from the middle class, from the imperial core. I think it's a big question, but we've tried to kind of discuss some of these ideas in our article, in general, in our work. GSC, like, just to tell you a bit about who we are, we try to connect what's happening on the ground in Palestine to ways people can mobilize, primarily in the US and the UK, but— and Canada, but elsewhere, you know, kind of organizing advocacy asks that will have a material effect on the ground. So one of the campaigns that I alluded to before is the Defund Racism campaign, which targets the way Israeli civil society, like charities— that's how they're registered here— that are engaged in the process of settlement building and land theft receive charitable donations from the United States. And this is just like, you know, to sort of answer the question in a very practical way, I think there are a lot of ways that folks can be involved even in using structures that already exist to alter the way capital flows into settlements here. So that's just one example of sort of the things that we've thought through on this end, because The way that that money flows and the amount of money that comes in really has an impact on the ground. If you think about the case of Masafriyata, or more commonly known, Khan al-Ahmar, from back in 2018, the people who were really pushing the displacement of that community, Khan al-Ahmar, which is east, just, I think, north and east of Jerusalem, it's a small Bedouin community, it was being pushed by one settler organization that I think at the time had something like 14 employees, and they continue to be the sole actor really pushing this displacement, which hasn't happened yet, but remains in the court just simply because of this organization. So when we think about tangible ways that people can really impact the situation on the ground, that is one that is very immediate. But I think, you know, one of the things that we talk about as well is beyond that, other local institutions that you can interact with, like churches, synagogues, you know, local charities, local organizations, and also larger institutions like in the United States, the Democratic Party and other parties. And I think Stephen Salaita published a really good article maybe a month ago about Bernie Sanders and his response to a lot of these things, and also Palestinians and other, you know, progressive or anti-imperialist response to him, and sort of the way that a lot of times in political organizing, we're maybe ready to accept a lot less than we deserve and pretend that it's not less than we deserve. And so I think that there's also this element of, in our local politics, in our daily lives, thinking about maintaining our dignity and not accepting less than we deserve and not pretending that things aren't less, you know, than we deserve. And I'll just end, as I was listening to the question, I was thinking about someone who I'm sure a lot of us have heard of here, Refaat Alareer. Who was a Palestinian poet and academic who was assassinated by Israelis on, I believe, December 6th. And something that I think a lot of us were moved about him was just his insistence on dignity and truth, even when it was inconvenient, and even despite the fact that that was the thing that got him killed. And I think also embodying that in our daily lives, you know, is one of the ways that we can participate in this. I hope that was helpful.

Bikrum: Thank you, Lara. So I'm going to go Matteo, Max, Ajamu, and I'm just mindful of time, so if you can try to keep your comments as concise as possible, please. So yeah, thank you. Thank you, Lara. That was excellent. And Matteo, go ahead.

Matteo Capasso: Bikrum, you can circle back after if you want with me.

Bikrum: Okay. Max?

Max Ajl: Yeah, so I want to touch upon just one or two points, I suppose. It's the relation of of states and movements in the world system. And I think we all, in a place like this, tend to be aware of the emancipatory limits of states while also navigating the tension that the root of attack of imperialism is mobilizing shapeless movements to attack state sovereignty itself. And what that does is it actually accelerates the metabolism of imperialism and leads to further de-development. And this happens all over. This is happening in Ecuador, it happens in Venezuela, it happens in Bolivia, it's been happening in Lebanon. It happened above all, I mean, above all, it happened in Syria and so forth. So I think that there's a wariness at this point within probably the most hardline anti-imperialists of movements, which is something that some emancipatory movements at a certain level, if they aren't sufficiently anti-imperialist, I think this is the correct position. And I think it's also correct to be aware that the states themselves, the state structures themselves generally have a conservative bias and tend towards being limited in how far they will advance to emancipatory horizons unless they are pressured from below. So this is putting it all in formulaic and abstract ways because it plays out concretely in distinct conditions. But I think we have a hard job to do to correct for the errors, especially since the Arab, so-called Arab Spring of this widespread belief in movement of movements and movements from below and so forth, which were really used to setback world development very profoundly all over the world, especially the central battlegrounds of Latin America and the Arab region. And so now we're in a process of correction from that. And I think that it's quite normal. And now we should also be paying some attention to, are we adopting positions that are historically understood as defensism or or right deviations in totally dismissing certain forms of dissent from within. It's probably, to some extent, there is some small overcorrection happening, and that's something we should be wary of as well. I totally agree with it. I think we could see it, for example, in the case of Venezuela under Maduro. I mean, that there is an imminent or endogenous criticism of the Bolivarian process that we're wise to pay attention to. to understand the dynamics on the ground. I think those dynamics, we should pay less attention to them at times of open warfare, as are going on now in the Arab-Iranian region. I think they matter, but I think they matter less and less as the war is hotter and hotter.

Bikrum: Okay, great. Thanks, Max. Ajamu? Okay, I'll circle back to Ajamu. Maybe— I know he's having connection issues. I have things I can add. I know Matteo can. But I think I'm going to open it back up to the— I've noted Dee's question and other Thank you. Thank you, everybody. That was a great discussion. I think there were a lot of good points. And, but I just wanted— I know we're kind of getting tight on time, so I just wanted to open it up. I see there's 4 hands up, and I think that this will be it for the comments from the audience, and then we'll come back to the speakers with one final round of responses. So folks asking questions, again, can you be as concise and quick to the point as possible so we have time for one final discussion afterwards? So I have Jim, then Yuriy, then Radhika, then Isaac. So Jim, can you please go ahead?

Max Ajl: Thank you, and thank you for your very thoughtful comments. I come at this as somebody who has been a working journalist in both print and broadcast covering the Middle East since 1973. So, I want to push back on the issue of Iran, you know, and how you frame it, because one could— I've been reading very carefully, following very carefully for many years Iranian foreign policy in the situation, and especially after October 7th, watching the statements by the different players as it affects the conflict that's evolving.

Bikrum: And I'm just wondering how some of you all see Iranian foreign policy, because one could argue that they acted to create a buffer. They acted to do have a Lamy effect after 1979, which is. Clearly what they did in terms of the activities of Iran throughout the Middle East.

Max Ajl: But how do you see that now? And I finish with a comment.

Bikrum: You know, I'm a director of the Pacifica Foundation.

Max Ajl: We're right now organizing about 32 hours of programming that'll be must-carry national programming on this conflict. And so, thank you so much for listening to your very thoughtful comments.

Speaker 7: Thank you.

Bikrum: Go ahead, Yuri.

Max Ajl: Thank you.

Bikrum: Can everyone hear me?

Louis Allday: Okay, perfect. All right.

Bikrum: So my question is this. Does South Africa's historic victory at the ICG on behalf of Palestine mean we will see other members of BRICS take on more anti-imperialism causes, racial and social justice causes like Haiti, indigenous self-determination in the Five Eyes alliance, West Papua, Diego Garcia, etc., and directly confront the Anglo-American pan-European imperial states.

Max Ajl: And given the global protests, the largest we've seen, as well as unprecedented outpouring of solidarity for Palestine?

Bikrum: How can we make Palestine into an electoral issue in which center-left parties, liberal parties pay a political price at the ballot box for their complicity in the dispossession and ongoing day-to-day injustices inflicting on Palestine? And as well as also advancing the democratic one-state solution, because We still see a lot of mainstream leadership, or misleadership, keep propping up the two-state delusion, which kind of goes into what comrade Ms. Kilani was talking about. And P.S., solidarity to Aboriginal Australians, rest in power to John Pilger, and free Julian Assange.

Louis Allday: Thank you.

Bikrum: Thank you, Yuri. Radhika was next, but I'm not seeing Radhika. Oh, okay.

Max Ajl: There you are.

Bikrum: Okay. I'll pass.

Bana Abu-Zuluf: Thanks.

Bikrum: Okay. So then we have Isaac.

Alan Freeman: Hello.

Speaker 7: My name is, as obviously, Isaac Saini. I'm a Cuban Black Studies specialist here in Canada teaching at a Canadian university. And of course, many people know that Cuba has played a very important, uncompromising role in supporting the Palestinian people in various international forums. I'm just interested in this discussion of how we see a reconfiguration of international power. You know, of course, I'm hesitant to talk about repeating patterns from the past. You know, first as tragedies, next as farces, as Marc said. But next year, 2025, will mark a very important anniversary, the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference and the emergence of the so-called Third World Project, which then radicalized— part of it radicalized into the Tricontinental Movement, which I've written on as well. And we have the call for a new international economic order and a whole number of other things. Which sort of seem to reflect some of the demands that are unfolding today. So I was wondering if, you know, we perhaps reflect on the historical momentum and sort of the recapitulation, right, of the Third World, of this radicalization, the tricontinental movement in the 21st century. Last point I'd like to make, and I want to come back to this point of violence, because I always think this is the issue that has always bedeviled, right, the progressive movement. And as someone who studies anti-colonial movements in Africa, and I've written on Cuba's role in the Southern African liberation struggles, but also anti-colonial struggles in Africa writ large, as well as in the revolt of enslaved Africans, particularly in the Caribbean, it's important to understand, and I always like to point out, and you all know this, that violence is always the last choice of the oppressed and the colonized. And particularly in the Caribbean, what's very interesting, and this has been borne out by people like Veron Shepherd and Cyril Beckles, who are major scholars on slave revolts. Women played central roles in these slave revolts, right? Nanny, for example, who led the Maroons, was a very important revolutionary leader of movements in Jamaica, as well as participating in revolts in Barbados. So, in a sense, this whole discussion of the fetishization of violence and the implicit idea that, you know, this violence is gendered, as we all know, women are particularly among enslaved Africans, Thank you, Isaac.

Bikrum: So now we'll come back to the speakers for one final set of responses or whatever concluding comments I think people will have. I think so. Can I ask first, maybe as far as possible, we started about 10 minutes late, so I think we have about maybe 10 more minutes. If people can just keep their comments as close to 2 minutes as possible. I'm actually— Matteo, I'll begin with you since you passed on the last round. I'm just going to just remind what's been added to the table. You can engage as you see fit. We have a question on Iranian foreign policy, on the South African ICG case, its implications for broader struggles, and then this question of the historical momentum of tricontinentalism, the implications of this. So, and then we have from earlier on the table as well. So please, Matteo, you can do the first response for this round and any concluding comments you wanted to add.

Matteo Capasso: Thanks, Bikrum.

Max Ajl: Thanks, everybody.

Matteo Capasso: I would probably like to address the one on Iran. I mean, I was also following closely and following the framework that Max has also laid out before of the world system and the moment in which we're in, what we are seeing is a regional social formation in the region that since the defeat of pan-Arabism has been rising, and that is the Axis of Resistance. So at this moment in time, and also Iran plays a fundamental role in the struggle for Palestine. It has been played in the sense that it has provided the technological know-how, also to make these different groups militarily independent. And behind Iran— not behind, but, you know, this is where we really need to understand that the world is reconfiguring differently and there is the rise of the Global South. Iran wouldn't have been able to withstand the sanctions without the economic cooperation with China. At the same time, Iran wouldn't have been able to develop its military capacities without consistent cooperation with The Democratic People's Republic of Korea. So, you know, this is where we're seeing, and the same thing goes with the tunnels in South Lebanon, in Gaza. There is Korea there. There is Iran. You know, we need to look at this seriously as the capacity of the resistance to act, to gain strategic and military independence, and to look at them really as a group, as a regional momentum. which inevitably challenges US imperialism so much. I know I have to be short, so thank you.

Bikrum: Excellent. Thank you. Thank you, Matteo. Max?

Max Ajl: I also very briefly want to speak to Iran. Matteo basically said what I want to say. But the fact is that the current anti-colonial movements in the Arab region have the benefit of industrial capacity behind them. The industrial capacity is different than when anti-colonial movements were able to benefit from Chinese and Soviet aid, but it's also different because the technological advancement is proceeding in such a way that even countries that are asymmetric at the economic level in terms of what they're able to offer, are not asymmetric, are far less asymmetric at the technological level. That is, the technological advances are allowing countries that basically to use munitions that cost a lot less to take out military installations that cost a lot more. I mean, to be very colloquial, there's a leveling of the playing field. And what that means is that these anti-colonial forces are, because they're also sharing blueprints, And there is the possibility, through Iran, as Matteo was saying, of weapons for the poor. Now, Iran has, for a variety of reasons, not entered direct military confrontation with the United States and Israel on its own territory or deploying directly its own armed forces. But its own armed forces, the senior leadership, is being regularly assassinated in Iraq, and it's also being regularly assassinated in Syria. I mean, there is an active deployment and there are active hostilities, but the hostilities are not reaching the stage of a hot war between Iran and Israel or Iran and the United States. And this is because there's a multistage military strategy and there is a risk assessment and there's also ladders of escalation. I mean, Hezbollah has also not entered a sufficiently hot war such that Israel would bomb Lebanese cities and no one would then argue that Lebanon is not involved in a war because it's not deploying all of its military capacities, except for regime changers are still arguing that Hezbollah is not involved. So this is all to say that Iran is very active. I mean, it's regularly thanked by Nizar Banet and other people in Islamic Jihad and a variety of the anti-systemic regional militia. And I think the arguments that it's not providing more are You know, I think it requires a serious assessment of what the consequences would be of making the war hotter than it already is on the part of Iran. And so that's just, and this is something we should take into our mental evaluation when we're trying to understand how far Iran has gone, why it's not going further.

Bikrum: Thank you, Max. So I think Louis and Ajamu have left, so I'll move on. I'm going to offer just a couple of comments, and then I'll turn it over to Bana and then Lara. They can maybe close us off with some comments, maybe, and I'll put maybe a couple of the questions on the table for them specifically. So just very quickly, Dee, thank you for the follow-up question and the discussion for the elaboration. Much can be said. Time is kind of limited here. I wanted to link what you were saying in relation to some of the stuff that's already been said, but maybe some of the really important questions that Frances put on the table with regards to state power. And it links to, I think, Jim's question on Iranian foreign policy, and also I think Yuri's question on South Africa. But just this building on Matteo and Max's point, I think in many ways, I really like the way Max framed the question of assessing state power, not turning away from the contradictions and the risks Right, the right turns that even kind of revolutionary states that are founded on an anti-imperialist, maybe a different even class composition, the logics that can take them towards this kind of right turn. I think this is really important to keep in mind, definitely going forward. One thing though that I think we need to be aware of is that there are movements— yes, I agree, Frances, and there's a different logic, but movements, I think there's been a tendency to over-celebrate movements that do not project power. Right? That, that, that, that, that make us feel maybe in a way, I don't know, it avoids the messiness of hard power, right? And so I think the, the key point here, like, and I'll go back to the example I brought, I was discussing in my, in my discussion, is like, where was it in any of the scholarship in the '90s and 2000s? Where was Hezbollah's place? Like, where was the theorization of what Hezbollah was actually materially doing? And that's attached to the Iranian Revolution, right? Hezbollah is not a proxy or reducible to the Iranian Revolution. But the Iranian state understood its history, right, as being under a dictatorship that was imposed by the West to enforce a certain order in the region that enables a tying of the oil to dollar, right? The dollar-oil complex through which the US projects financial power, the Iranian Revolution is a direct challenge to this. But the Iranian Revolution understands its aim is not simply national. It's about the expulsion of the United States from the region. There's no security for Iranians without this expulsion of imperialists from the region, which then also necessitates the defeat of Zionism.

Alan Freeman: Right?

Bikrum: And so the Iranians, you can see, have, I think as Max and Matteo pointed out, developed a hard power capacity in their relations with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, learning how to produce endogenous weapons production capacity that launches— again, Frances, your point is very well taken, there's contradictions and risks here, but it launches at least a scale of challenge, right, that's transferred to Hezbollah and other forces. And if you study each and every step of the way, the imperialists offered Hezbollah and Iran always an entry into the order if they abandoned and abdicated the Palestinian cause, if they abandoned this issue. But there's a reason why this is not First, obviously solidarity with the Palestinians on a range of grounds, but also clearly the Iranian project around restoring sovereignty is not quite possible without the defeat of imperialism and Zionism. So I think those are key points to keep in mind. That doesn't mean that the contradictions in each state should not be attended to and we be mindful of what's happening. But the primary contradictions are something we have to always hold in mind in each moment. So that's just something I think, and I think this attaches, Jim, to— sorry, Adi, to some of your broader points, because I think, Matteo, you mentioned this, right? But like, the— now, the Chinese project is very complex, contradictory, as we know, but the refusal of China to abide by Western sanctions in any instance, right? And we know there was even an arrest of a Chinese CEO in Canada some years ago. That is a part Part of this story too, right? Like, that the— that arrest was on the grounds of trading with Iran, right? Like, and the— okay, good point, Jim. Sorry, I shouldn't get excited about the chat, but I take your point. But this is what enables Iran to continue developing and being able to support the resistance in Gaza. And without that support, as has been mentioned, those forces would've been much more isolated. Yeah.

Alan Freeman: Right?

Bikrum: And I think Max and others have emphasized how the war in Syria and whatever really played into this dynamic as well. So I think the— this question, well, I'll just close on this question that's at stake right now again is, we see various fronts of the battle around overcoming a system in which a large majority of the world is made to be rendered dependent upon the economic and military power of the imperialists, right? And we're seeing whether it's in West Africa, whether on economic or military grounds, is really being brought to challenge. And I think in Palestine we're seeing a strong stand by the West to try to maintain this system, but I don't think it's going to succeed in that regard. So I'll stop there. I know there's more to say, but I'm just mindful of time. So Banna and Lara, I turn to you for the final comments, responses. We didn't quite get to the the response on South Africa and ICJ. I know that was addressed earlier, but with Yuri's question, so you're welcome to address those and Isaac's questions around the emergence of the Third World or any way you would like. But please go ahead, maybe a couple minutes each.

Bana Abu-Zuluf: Yeah, thank you for that. On the question of South Africa, I think, like, moving on from here, it's hard to see this, you know, without looking at the lens of what we discussed earlier, which is, you know, anti-imperialism, decolonization. And whatnot. And you, you think, you think, yes, there was obviously symbolic history, like a victory with, with ICJ, you know, South Africa being taken a lead, you know, being, you know, from the Global South and whatnot. And thinking about that opening possibilities for people to confront, you know, Western imperialism. I mean, yes, this is, this might happen. This, this is likely, you know, very possible. But But I think the better, I think, formulation or, you know, better outcome would be really is to think of the relation these powers or like Third World countries, including, you know, the Global South, the Axis of Resistance. Are they planning to take this, you know, to move next to create real and establish real relationships and endorse the Axis of Resistance? What's their relationship right now to the Axis of Resistance?

Louis Allday: Yeah.

Bana Abu-Zuluf: resistance? And I think if that question is not answered, then we will still maintain the symbolic effort, unfortunately. I think that's— I think anything short of really, at this stage in time, of really going and declaring very directly your support for the Axis of Resistance will be really just remain in the pragmatic, in the symbolic. So I think that's, that's what I would say. I don't, I don't— obviously I'm very critical of the Bandung Conference for many reasons. So I, you know, and I believe that learning is, is, is a good, you know, learning and unlearning is really good in relation to that and what we should move on to next. But this is a clear, a clear example and a clear force that is established, the Axis of Resistance, and the fact that They kind of, you know, the Third World has managed so easily to, you know, deflect that question, to deflect the question of their support or lack of support for their acts of resistance. I think that is a central question.

Bikrum: Thank you, Bana. Lara?

Lara Kilani: Yeah, I think somebody raised a question about sort of challenging, like moving center-left parties and moving away from the two-state solution. And I just wanted to say something quick about that. I think that, you know, we're moving out of this era— Bikrum, you raised these two paths forward, you know, sort of moving within, like receiving legitimacy from imperialist states and challenging them. And I think we're moving away, or at least there is a big challenge being raised very publicly. Yes. To this very pragmatic Oslo, you know, Palestinian professional class that was willing to accept Zionism, at least to a certain extent, and legitimize the state in order to build its own state and make sort of different compromises, and into a different phase where you know, there are folks— of course, there have always been folks standing with liberation and are, you know, engaging in armed struggle. But I think coming more into popular discussion are talks about decolonization and liberation. And I think that that is a really important shift, you know, away from— I brought it up before, and it's in our article— but away from what feels pragmatic within the state and under imperial rule and really raising these unpragmatic or, you know, whatever we want to consider them, expectations of what we see as justice. So yeah, I think that's really important. And I just, I don't have like maybe a very practical immediate answer to the question, but I think part of it is just Refusing to engage in these— in normalization, in the acceptance of Zionism, in the recognition of the state or settler colonialism as legitimate, and maintaining decolonization and these expectations. Sorry, I'm getting a little bit tired here towards tonight, so I'm losing some of my words. But that's— I'll end it there. Thanks, Bikrum.

Bikrum: Thank you, Lara. And thank you to all the speakers for really important presentations and to the audience and those who contributed questions and comments afterwards. I think it was a very rich discussion. And yeah, this was an important discussion on the broader implications, the centrality of Palestine to the broader world system. Really, of course, solidarity with Palestinians and everybody in the region continuing to struggle against imperialism. Thank you all again. And I I think that brings our discussion to a close. And unless, Radhika, you had anything to add, but I think we can wrap up the event. So thank you all.

Bana Abu-Zuluf: Thank you.

Matteo Capasso: Thank you.