Zionism as the Negation of Jewish Indigeneity: Darryl Li on Racialization, Colonialism, and Resistance in Palestine

Josh: Hi, welcome to Millenium and Capitalism. This is Josh. In this episode, we speak with Daryl Lee about some of his essays. We begin by discussing his work and experiences in Palestine, his transformation from an NGO worker in the early 2000s to a scholar and political activist. Lee explores the interpolation of Jewishness into a racial category globally. He also explores the law of return, which allows any Jew in the world to not only settle in Israel, but also to enjoy superior rights to the land of Palestinians. The conversation covers the evolution of Palestinian armed resistance, particularly in Gaza, and the shifting Israeli strategies from direct occupation to economic triangulation and remote control of environment. Lee explains how Israel's reliance on Palestinian labor has fluctuated, leading to the importation of migrant workers from other countries, which has weakened Palestinian leverage in resistance negotiations. He also addresses the impact of the Oslo Accords, which created the Palestinian Authority and has since undermined anti-Zionist critique by implicitly accepting Zionism. Additionally, Lee touches on the intersection of the Black freedom struggle and Jewish assimilation in the U.S. context, noting how Holocaust memory culture in service of Zionist imperialism has helped elevate anti-Semitism above other forms of racial, ethnic, and religious antagonisms. Daryl Lee is active in Palestinian solidarity work in the United States as an organizer, lawyer, and writer. He lived in the Gaza Strip from 2001 to 2002 and made regular visits up until 2011, working for various NGOs, especially the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Daryl's day job is teaching anthropology at the University of Chicago. He's the author of The Universal Enemy, Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge to Solidarity, which was published in 2020 by Stanford University Press. If you like what we do and want to support our ability to have more conversations like this, please consider becoming a patron. You can do so for as low as $1 a month. We can bring you these conversations totally independently with no corporate state or grant funding. Now, here's Daryl discussing some of his work. I'm here with Daryl Lee to discuss some of his work. So first, I would like to start off by allowing you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself and the work you do. Thanks, Josh.

Darryl Li: It's so good to be with you on Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. So my name is Sarah Lee, and I teach anthropology and law at the University of Chicago. Separate from my sort of day job in academia, I have some experience working in Palestine. Before I joined academia, I was a sort of human rights NGO worker. So I lived in the Gaza Strip for a year. This was during the second DeFaldo back in 2001 and 2002. And I continued to visit Palestine and visit Gaza, working for different human rights organizations throughout the 2000s. So a lot of my early kind of intellectual and political formation grows out of that kind of nonprofit industrial complex scene and kind of wrestling with its contradictions and with its many, many problems. One of the things I did back in those days was that I... decided to pursue an academic career, to go to grad school, to get a PhD, but to separate my career as an academic from my sort of political work around Palestine. So as I transitioned from sort of being a nonprofit employee to being a political activist engaged in solidarity work inside the United States, I was very aware or very self-conscious to maintain the separation between my everyday academic work and my Palestine work. So I've been writing things about Palestine over this period, and some of them have appeared in academic spaces or academic adjacent spaces. But they've really been sort of notes to myself and others who I think might be in a similar situation who are trying to sharpen or clarify our political thinking around aspects of the Palestinian struggle and also aspects of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. So that's the context for a lot of my writing on palisading, which is kind of scattered in different places, but it's mostly shorter pieces that, again, I've kind of intended them to be things that would be useful to think with for those who are organizing and trying to get a handle on the situation.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. And like the length, by the way, is something that was notable to me while I was reading through some other stuff. They're all very short, but like incredibly informative. And I've been sending them around since because they've been very useful to me. But yeah, so before we get any deeper, I would love if you just talk a bit about what we mean when we say that Zionism is colonialism.

Darryl Li: Yeah, this is really important because it's good to clarify, even if you follow the situation, even if you know a lot, it's not hard to find examples of just really fucked up. of violence and racism in the context of a Zionist project, right? You just open your social media feeds and you can see these things all the time. So, you know, people often say things like, well, you know, this is racism, Zionism is racism. And I think that all intuitively makes a lot of sense. And as the sort of legacy human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and B'Tselem, as they've begun to finally follow the lead of their Palestinian counterparts in recognizing the situation in Palestine as one of apartheid, you know, this discourse is getting a lot more traction, right? And I think that, you know, that's not a bad thing at all. But I think there's something slightly different when we talk about colonialism. Or rather, I would say, you can't really have a solid understanding of racism without thinking about colonialism and vice versa. So for me, racism is not just like a situation where one group of people kind of has racism. is structurally treated better than another group of people. It's also connected, I think, to certain claims and certain ideologies about geography and biological origin and people coming from or originating from other parts of the world. And, you know, whether they are presenting themselves, you know, in this movement as in a positive sense, like where, you know, we came from one place to go to another place to bring them civilization, right? Like we're colonizers, or if we're talking about people who are seen as coming from another place and, you know, they don't belong here, right? So... So for that reason, I really want to emphasize the colonial dimension of Zionism, right? So the problem with Zionism is not just that there's a state that gives more rights to Israeli Jews than to non-Jews living under the jurisdiction of the state of Israel. It's that Zionism is about giving superior rights to the land to all Jews worldwide, no matter where they may be, and no matter what personal connection they may or may not have to that territory and to that place. So that, I think, is something that it's really, really important not to lose sight of. So it's this way of interpolating Jews worldwide into a racial category. And so unlike a situation, unlike a state that says, well, you know, that asks, were you born in this place? Or are you descended from someone who was born in this place and tries to trace it back at individual level? Zionism involves this kind of racial claim that says, you know, it doesn't really matter, right? As long as you identify as Jewish and as long as you are recognized as Jewish under Israeli law, which is a biological and racial definition of Jewishness, it's not the sort of Jewish religious law definition, then you're a subject and you have rights. And it's on that basis that you have superior rights to the land than the other people who are there, most especially, of course, the Palestinians. Yeah.

Josh: Yeah, definitely. So along those same lines, can you talk a bit about the law of return? How an article published in 2021 titled On Law and Racial Capitalism in Palestine, you distinguish this from immigration law, where you write that the law of return expresses one of the movement's core constitutional commitments, namely that every Jew in the world has a right to settle in the land by virtue of the fact that he is Jewish. It is not that the state which grants the Jews of diaspora the right to return. This right existed before the state did, and it is that which built the state. Yeah, but you also made clear that the description of Israel as that of a Jewish state is misleading because, and I'm quoting here again, Israel considers itself the state of the Jewish people. Zionism's commitment to this abstract global category of Jewishness even implicitly negates the indigeneity of Palestine's historically rooted Jewish communities as a source of rights. So if you can, just discuss this a bit.

Darryl Li: Yeah, this is really important to unpack. So, you know, sometimes people will say like, well, you know, Israel is a Jewish state, Saudi Arabia is a Muslim state, Brazil is a Christian state, like, what's the big deal? And I think that, you know, that radically misunderstands the nature of what's going on here. So specifically, when we're talking about Zionism, we're talking about the racialization of a religious category. And like I just said, it's a global category, people who identify as Jewish all around the who themselves personally may not care about Zionism, may even be opposed to Zionism. But the point is that Zionism sees them as racial subjects and gives them rights on that basis. So it's hard to think of an analogous movement that tries to racialize Muslim or Christian identity on a global basis in that way. So again, take Saudi Arabia, which is often taken as an example. Saudi Arabia might think of itself as a Muslim state or an Islamic state, but that doesn't mean that it treats all Muslims worldwide as racial subjects with superior rights. You ask any migrant worker from Bangladesh or Pakistan in Saudi Arabia, if they are enjoying superior rights simply on the basis of having shared religion with the Saudis. And of course, they'll probably laugh in your face, right? So I think it's important to be precise in how you use these terms. So the Jewish state is a bit underdescriptive. So Israel explicitly got the law in the title of the law that says, no, Israel is the state of the Jewish people. It's not just a state whose population happens to be predominantly Jewish. And it's not a state that happens to govern itself in relation to Jewish religious law, although it does do that to a certain extent. It's the state of the Jewish people in the sense that a religious category is being converted into a racial one. So the most important law to be aware of is the law of return. The law of return does what I just described. It says that any... Jewish person in the world, as defined under this law, has the right to settle in Palestine. So sometimes people say, well, this is justified because, of course, there's the Holocaust, there's long history of Jewish oppression. So it's a kind of affirmative action asylum law or affirmative action immigration law, right? That's the wrong way to understand the law of return. under the law of return, you don't have to show that you are fleeing oppression or that you're fleeing anti-Semitism, right? The law of return just says, you're a Jew, you have the right to come. And the quote that you just read is a quote from David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. He said this in the parliamentary debates around the law of return. He says that, you know, It says it's not the state which grants Jews of the diaspora the right to return. The right existed before the state did, and it is that which built the state, right? So it's the colonizing imperative, right? It's racializing in the sense that it takes all Jews in the world and sort of reduces them to a single sort of biogenetic category. And it's colonizing in that that racial category then gets attached to a sovereignty claim in a specific place. Right. So they call it the ingathering of the exiles. But I think in more general terms, we can say, you know, a racial category becomes the basis for a colonial project. And one of the ironies of this is that the law of return and Zionism actually kind of negates that. the indigenous of the Jewish communities that have been in Palestine throughout this time, right? Why is that? Because the law of return says that it applies to every Jew in the world, whether or not they were born in the territory of Palestine that became the state of Israel, whether or not they were born before or after the establishment of the state of Israel, Right. So, you know, sometimes Zionists will say things like, well, you know, there have always been Jewish communities in this place. And like, yeah, of course, that's true. But that doesn't become a basis for saying that any Jewish person anywhere in the world has rights to participate in sovereignty in this place. Right. Like that's a massive leap. So the law of return says to the Jewish communities that have historically been rooted in Palestine, it says your rights are not based on the fact that you've been living here this whole time. Because if that was the case, then there'd be kind of like a hierarchy, right? Between like the Jewish communities that were there all along and the, you know, recently arriving sort of colonizers from Europe, which is like the last thing that a Zionist project wants, right? So the law of return says to... Jewish communities that have been in Palestine this whole time says to them, yeah, you have rights in this system, but it's not because you've been here. It's not because of your, you know, quote, unquote, indigeneity here. It's because you're Jewish, period. So that's what I meant in that sentence that you read about kind of negating the indigeneity of the Jewish communities that were in Palestine, right? And of course, you know, that drives a wedge, or it's an attempt to drive a wedge between sort of Palestinian Jews who were there, you know, in the early years of the Zionist project, and of course, Palestinian Muslims and Christians, right? So anyway, this is, I think, a really central aspect to understanding Zionism. And also, it's important because it distracts from the other way that people often talk about the conflict, which is about territory, like obviously land and territory are really important. But whether we're talking about one state, a two state, whatever, as long as there's a state that has this fundamental principle that a person who is not, who was not born in or doesn't have a direct link to this land can somehow just show up and enjoy more rights than people who are actually indigenous to the place. That is the central contradiction in the Zionist project. And I think that's the thing that, you know, it's really important not to lose sight of.

Josh: Absolutely, certainly. And I think that leads us almost exactly to our next question, which is, like, if you can discuss Zionism and how it mobilizes Jewishness as a racial category, right? Our racial regime, which, as you write, functions analogously to whiteness as a form of category in U.S. naturalization law between 1790 and 1952, right? And how these racial logics intersect and provide coherence to the treatment of other racialized and ethnic groups in the region.

Darryl Li: Yeah, so early immigration law in the US was mostly based on the category of whiteness, right? So the first Nationality Act said something like, if you were a free, I mean, don't quote me on this, but it was something like free white male property owner you could be naturalized within, I don't know, a couple of years, right? So what's important here is that this was not, even though United States was set up by colonists who came from England and who seceded from the British Empire, The naturalization project was, sorry, the colonization project was broader, right? It was about whiteness more broadly. So, of course, you didn't have to be English. And the whole point of the success of the project was its ability to bring in diverse European nationalities and kind of remold them under a sort of racial category, right? So I think there's this Cornel West quote of saying, you know, if there were no black people in America, there would be no white people. There would just be like English people and Irish people and Poles. I mean, that quote sort of excludes the native question in a weird way. But I think that the general principle, you know, about this distinction between ethnicity, nationality and race, racialization, I think is important. So I think the analogy is that it's whiteness as a racial category, right? It's not about an individualized connection to a political community, right? It's not like, okay, we care about you or the people you're descended from being citizens of another place. You have this geographically nonspecific racial category of whiteness. So in that sense, I think there's a structural similarity between the way Jewishness gets represented codified in the law of return and the way that whiteness got codified in American immigration law up until 1952. So I wanted to really clear here. It's not that I think that the United States stopped being a settler colonial country after 1952. Of course, I'm not sure at all. But what I will say is that When a settler colony is in the process of trying to achieve demographic supremacy for settlers and to consolidate that control, it's unsurprising that they would have laws that would very explicitly and blatantly codify these kinds of racial categories. And maybe at a certain point, their hegemony has been secure to the extent that they feel like they can dispense with that kind of explicit discrimination because they have all these other structures in place to maintain racial hierarchy. So the state of Israel has not achieved that state or that stage of settler colonization. They don't have that. demographic supremacy between the river and the sea. So it's unsurprising that they have to resort to laws that codify these racial categories. But if there's ever a situation where those racial regimes are not explicitly written into the law, it of course does not mean that everything's fine and that decolonization has happened. And we can always look at the example of, well, not only the United States, but also South Africa in that sense. Yeah. I think there's another thing that's really important to keep in mind, and this is not unrelated to some of the social media beef that's been bubbling up, especially since Kamala Harris has kind of become the sort of presumed nominee of the Democratic Party, which is that the racialization regime of the Zionist project in Palestine, it's not seamless. It's not complete and comprehensive, it intercepts with and interacts with other logics of racialization that are in the region. And I think here, the question of Blackness is really important. For a long time, the Zionist project, so of course, as people know, the Zionist project was in many ways a response to antisemitism in Europe. And it was also deeply shaped by European, not only anti-Semitism, but racism and racial hierarchies more generally. So for a long time, the Zionist project constructed Jewishness in explicitly non-Black, if not anti-Black ways. So Jews from Ethiopia were not covered by the law of return for a while. I think it was the... the late 1970s or the early 1980s. I'm not exactly sure when this happened. And it was partially in response to pressure from Zionist communities in the United States who themselves were engaged in a kind of tactical coalition with and attempts to co-opt Black freedom struggles in the United States, right? And the civil rights movement in particular. So anyway, there's a kind of complicated story there. But the point is that the Zionist project only began to accept Ethiopian Jews as relatively late and under significant pressure. And there's always been tension, right? Because on the one hand, the Zionist project is trying to mold diverse Jewish communities that come from different places, that speak different languages into a racial category and a hierarchical racial category over non-Jews in Palestine. At the same time, the Zionist project exists in a bigger world system, right? Where there's all sorts of other racializing projects going on, especially those that are emanating from Europe or America, right? So on the one hand, you know, there's an imperative in the Zionist project to include Black Jews as Jews in a racial hierarchy. But on the other hand, there's just all the other anti-Blackness that's going on out there, right? That's structurally conditioned for all sorts of reasons that's cutting against that, right? So for that reason, you see, of course, the way that Ethiopian Jews are treated, even though they have Israeli citizenship, even though they are considered Jews, of course, you know, the kinds of structural violence, including police violence that they're exposed to is very manifest. At the same time, you have diverse communities and diverse historical trajectories of Palestinians who would be considered black, right, if they were in North America. Right. And this has to do with longer histories of migration from the African continent, as well as histories of enslavement. And there's a lot of complicated things that are going on there. But my point is that Zionism's racial hierarchy cuts against these other forms of racialization that are going on, especially when we're talking about the way that Black people are racialized in that part of the world, right? Which is in some ways shaped by Euro-American racial hierarchies, but also has longer histories. And, you know, I think this is an area where a lot more research And where I think there's kind of a challenge where, on the one hand, I think it's important to be attentive to the fact that racialization works differently in different parts of the world. On the other hand, that argument sometimes gets used as a kind of apology as well for folks in the region, like, well, we don't have racism or we don't have anti-Blackness, which is, of course, absolutely untrue. So anyway, so that's the sort of swirling cauldron of different forces and forms of racialization that, of course, have their own political economies and their own situated contexts that the Zionist racialization project is sort of bumping up against, also cutting across and sort of in friction with.

Josh: Absolutely. I appreciate that. One quick thought, because I'm thinking, I'm curious about what you would say about this, because earlier you clarified that you don't think that the U.S. stopped being a colonial state, right, in the early 1950s. But it reminds me that, like, of how many feminists would say that, you know, and how many people would argue because the U.S. is at a different level or a different stage than, say, you know, say, Occupy Palestine, that there would be some kind of, like, You know what I'm saying? Now that history no longer kind of exists in its current form. And I'm curious about what you think about how the state, in terms of racialization, but also in terms of thinking about stages, right? Stages of a state's colonial rule, if that makes sense. And how we're seeing today, right, with Palestine, there being a specific set of racialized relations that existed in the U.S. in prior years may not look the same way today, right? But it's like I'm saying in history, historically past, there's an argument to be had there, if that makes sense.

Darryl Li: Yeah, and actually you're kind of putting your finger on something, on a problem. Even this language of stages, I think, and it can kind of presuppose that there's like a linear way of doing this and that you can kind of clearly predict what's going to happen next. And, you know, that's not, you know, I don't think that's right. But at the same time, you know, there are patterns. And I think that this idea that somehow the U.S. stopped being a settler colony is, I mean, I think we've learned from all of this sort of radical indigenous thinkers, some of them have probably been on this show, that there's a way that sometimes people who will claim to be in support of Palestine can also fall into that trap and that narrative of American settler success. Yeah. I mean, the most notorious aspect of this was a quote from the Palestinian revolutionary leader, the late Yasser Arafat. At some point, he said something like, we're not red Indians. And so there's this – I think it's very important for everyone, but including those who want to be working in support of Palestine, not to lend succor to sort of extinction narratives of settler colonialism. Yeah. Like this idea that settler colonialism is complete and to basically further contribute to the erasure of indigenous people and indigenous struggles in this place. So there's this way in which sometimes people will say things like, well, what's happening in Palestine now is what happened in the US and Australia and Canada back then. We need to fight that fight. And I mean, I, you know, I can sort of understand parts, I can understand that impulse, but I think it's really important to not, you know, just, I think the problem with opposition is that it tends to mobilize the four-step analogy in an instrumental way. And, you know, I think the really important question for anyone who wants to make that kind of argument is like, well, what are you doing now? to stand with indigenous people today in this land, right? So yeah, I think that's why this language of completion has a family resemblance with the language and the objects of extinction. And I think it's really important to be attentive to that, especially as we think more and more through the concept of genocide and its own sort of theoretical baggage and its practical baggage.

Josh: Absolutely. Thank you for that, for sure. Can you talk a little bit about the uses of dispossession, land ownership, both public and private, as a means to which racialization of Arabs produces value for Zionism?

Darryl Li: Yeah. So, you know, Zionism is the project to create and maintain and defend a state for the Jewish people. It requires a territorial base and it requires grounding land. And so the flip side of creating Jewishness as a global racial category is is figuring Arabs as a racial category that's also a mobile one, right? So if Zionism is about saying all Jews in the world suddenly are treated as one category, and that's a step in the direction of bringing them, or at least giving them the right to come to this land, rendering them mobile, and also in a way separating them from the context where they live, although I think we can get back to There's a lot more to say about that. The flip side is saying, well, you know, the people who live here, the Palestinians, they're just Arabs. They're just like nomadic Bedouin people. They don't really have ties to land and they can be moved. Right. So, of course, you hear this all the time in the Zionist talking point of like, you know, there's only one Jewish state, but there's like 20 whatever Arab states and these people can go anywhere. Right. So colonization necessarily implies it's obverse, which is dispossession, right? You got to take land from some people and give it to other people. And the people who you're taking land from, if you start thinking of them and treating them as people who are just sort of movable, right? You don't have real property claims, that's sort of the dispossession. And it's from that, that value is produced. So there's a process by which land is, gets turned from territory into property, right? So if you treat a land as territory, you're kind of saying it belongs to a certain political community. And then when you turn it into property, it becomes something that, you know, can be held and sold by private individuals or families or other groups, right? One of the things that's really important to know about the situation, well, about Zionism, is that Most of the land inside the state of Israel is publicly owned. It's owned by the state, or it's owned by the Jewish National Fund, which is, its legal form is that it's a charitable organization, and it works on behalf of the Jewish people worldwide, right? So it's an explicitly Zionist organization. The Israeli government, in theory at least, works for the citizens of Israel, and that includes the 20% who are Palestinians. The Jewish National Fund doesn't even have to pretend, right? It just works for all Jews in the world. And the Jewish National Fund, together with the Israeli government, they have a committee that they've set up that controls something like 90% of the land inside the state of Israel. This might be surprising for your sort of garden variety, race blind, social democratic person who thinks that public ownership is good and private ownership is bad. And, you know, they might see a situation like the Israel inside the Green Line, where most of the privately held land is actually owned by the Palestinians in Israel, Palestinian citizens of Israel. And that's not because they're like, you know, monopoly, monopoly capitalists or like big landowners. It's just because the historical circumstances of a settler colonial state have made it such that the economies of scale and the centralization of having a state body holding the land. have made more sense for a colonizing project than to use the private market, right? So to take like a very, very, very loose example, even though there's a lot of differences, you know, we think of like the United States and colonization on the frontier, think of like the Dawes Act, right? Like the government seizes the land And then they try to develop incentives for white settlers to become property owners, right? And then later on, as the political power of indigenous groups in the United States gets reduced, there's also an attempt to make Native Americans, indigenous people in the United States, individual property owners as well, right? Again, to break up sort of political communities in the state of Israel, because they have not achieved demographic supremacy, I think attempts to move to a private land market model have run into a lot more problems. It's not for lack of trying. The Likudari Netanyahu, they have tried to do different kinds of land privatization over the years. And there's been various attempts and there's been fits and starts. But the overall pattern seems to be that if you are engaged in a colonial struggle where more than half the population living in your territory are excluded indigenous subjects, then then private land markets are not the most efficient way to maintain and expand that kind of racial domination.

Josh: Absolutely. I appreciate that. And I want to quote you at length here in a second, because you're right, and I'm quoting you again. All Palestinians under Israeli rule are subjugated in the Israeli economy in one way or another, but Israel is selective. about when it permits Jewish capital to directly employ Palestinian labor. This reflects demographic realities. Zionism has settled enough Jews on the land to avoid the South Africa scenario, where a tiny minority of colonialists built an economy based on exploiting Native labor. But since 1967, conquest to set up population has never achieved the overwhelming numerical superiority that would largely alleviate any dependency on Indigenous workers, as occurred in Canada and Australia. So for one, I would just like for you to discuss Israel's reliance on Palestinian labor, which created the conditions for the first Intifada to be effective, but also maybe say a word about how Israel was forced to outsource labor from migrants in Romania, Thailand, and elsewhere as a result of this, and how this in return has weakened the leveraging power of Palestinians.

Darryl Li: Yeah, so historically, the question of Arab labor has been a recurring tension, if not a contradiction, for the Zionist project, right? So there's always been one strand, the more kind of like socialist, almost utopian strand of Zionism that was really about... Recreating the Jewish people as workers and to not be involved in exploiting others. But the irony is that the refusal of exploitation for labor Zionism was often very compatible with leaning into dispossession. So the logic isn't like, okay, let's take over the land and force the Arabs to work for us. The logic was, let's take over the land and kick the Arabs out. So we're not exploiting them, we're just possessing them, right? Just to like, you know, sort of boil it down like that. But at the same time, there had been a lot of situations where historically for Israeli capital, that they have felt that exploiting Palestinian labor was the most viable option for them, right? Or the least bad option. So you have... At different points in the history of Zionism, the pendulum kind of swings back and forth between trying to not depend on Palestinian labor and sometimes having to depend on Palestinian labor. So what happened in 1967... When the Zionist movement completed its conquest of historical Palestine, they took over the West Bank, they took over the Gaza Strip. They decided to move towards a policy of de-developing these territories, right? Of making sure they could not develop a kind of independent economic base and of encouraging people to become independent. to proletarianize the population, right? To encourage them to work either abroad, right? So they facilitated exit out of the country so people could go work in the Gulf or work wherever, or to work in the Israeli economy as oppressed migrant workers, heavily, heavily exploited. So for about 20 years, 1967 to 1987, that was kind of the dominant model when we're talking about Palestinian labor in the Israeli economy. But of course, 1987, you have the outbreak of what's now called the first intifada in Palestine. So widespread civil disobedience, you have general strikes, people closing shops. You have all these different forms of protests that are essentially about leveraging the the economic dependency that Israel had developed on Palestinian labor over the preceding 20 years. Again, it's really basic, but when people talk about what are the different kinds of resistance that oppressed people should use and the lecturing over methods and violence and people like, where's the Palestinian Gandhi and this kind of nonsense, it's just really important to have a clear sense of the political economy and And the leverage points that exist. So in that particular time, those forms of resistance had an impact on the Israeli economy because of those relations of dependency. But like any colonial power, Israelis adapted. They recognized that they had this vulnerability. So starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they began a series of steps to gradually reduce their dependence on Palestinian workers from the Gaza Strip. And that was the beginning of the closure policy, which eventually turned into the suffocating siege that we know of today. So this idea of sealing off the borders, preventing people from leaving, and then eventually strictly regulating goods that could come in and out, this was sort of the specter here. And at the same time, they realized that they needed other people to do the kinds of labor that they wanted, especially agricultural labor and construction labor. So they started employing workers from Romania and Thailand and elsewhere. So this is what's called a circular migration model, right? So these are people who are seen as easier to deal with because they don't have political claims in this territory anymore. And because, you know, if they act up, they can be easily kicked out, right? They have a ready-made state that can accept them, right? Whereas kicking Palestinians out is complicated because it's not as if you have other states that want to accept large Palestinian populations and to, you know, facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. So that's part of that broader spectrum in terms of how the political economy of settler colonialism helps shape the possibilities and the constraints for different kinds of resistance, whether we're talking about militarized forms, less militarized forms, and so on.

Josh: Definitely. And I really appreciate that. I think that was one of my favorite aspects of your pieces that I read was that it kind of like provided this kind of historical overview of how, you know what I'm saying, Palestinian resistance struggles have been like completely incapacitated in some ways, right? But because of the Israel, the colonial power being able to adapt and, you know what I'm saying, and limit the ways that they could resist, you know what I'm saying, colonial rule, if that makes sense.

Darryl Li: So I really do agree. And the Palestinians adapting in turn, right? So there is this dialectic where you're both, you know, learning. And I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.

Josh: No, you're absolutely correct. I appreciate that. So can you talk about this evolution of Palestinian armed resistance?

Darryl Li: Okay, so if we're talking about a Gaza Strip, well, we'll have to back up a little bit. People often say Gaza. It's just kind of like this decontextualized, globally circulating symbol of suffering and humanitarian deprivation and all this. So I want to step back from that. So Gaza is a city in southern Palestine, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. And it has just longstanding historic relationships with the surrounding lands, surrounding agricultural lands and the markets that come out of that and so on. Like Gaza Strip. not Gaza the city. The Gaza Strip is an artifact of the Nekva, right, of the war and the expulsion, the cleansing of Palestine. And it's the little piece of territory on the western side of Palestine that Zionist forces were not able to conquer in the 1948-1949 war. So I think of it as a kind of amputated geography. So Gaza, then the city is kind of cut off from its historic hinterlands. A lot of the people who lived in its historic hinterlands, of course, became refugees. They were ethnically cleansed and ended up in this new entity called the Gaza Strip. So one of the important things to keep in mind is that, you know, Gaza is the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated places in the world. And you kind of hear this is part of like the standard sort of media description of that. But we have to understand what that means in the context of the political logic of Zionism, right? So Zionism wants control of maximal as much land as possible with as few Arabs as possible. So that's the logic of dispossession that we were talking about, where you want territorial maximization, but you also want demographic primacy, if not demographic purity. And that plays into all the discourses around, oh, we have to maintain our Jewish and democratic character. Whenever you hear Jewish and democratic, like Jewish and democratic state, Jewish and democratic character, you should just like... mentally insert the Freudian slip of Jewish and demographic, because that's essentially the same thing in this context, or rather you can't distinguish them. So the way of thinking about the Gaza Strip, it's not just like it's really densely populated, it's that one third of the indigenous population living under Zionist rule is being crammed into like 1.5% of the land mass, something like that. So it's an incredible demographic concentration of a large segment of the indigenous population. And so obviously, you know, that raises all sorts of problems, you know, so everything you hear about the poverty and, you know, the difficulties of being there, but also from the standpoint of colonial management, this dense concentration is also important. It's a persistent challenge. And the urban density and population density of the Gaza Strip is part of what has made it one of the beating hearts of Palestinian resistance for half a century. So Israeli generals, military planners, and so on have always had this dilemma of like, well, how do you manage this place? What do you do with this problem? And there's all these like vision documents and wish casting about like, that's why you see this in the news sometimes about like, well, what if we, you know, build a massive port? Or, you know, what if we build a massive trench? Gaza just becomes this weird like experimental playground space in the minds of Zionist planners who really just want to wish away this massive demographic concentration, even though that demographic concentration is an enabling factor for the consolidation of their settler project. Like in order to have this empty land upon which to settle colonizers, they had to have a place to put the people who they kicked off that land. And on the northern and eastern fronts, they were able to push a lot of those people into Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, but on the western front, they weren't. for various reasons, geographic, military, and so on. So the Gaza Strip represents both that kind of the Zionist victory in the Negev, but also that persistent thing of like, they couldn't get the job done. And these people are still here. And these people want to return home. And they're not going to forget what you did to them. And we saw that with the March of Return, especially. So there's that kind of paradox there. Anyway, we're getting a bit far away from your question about the evolution of Palestinian armed resistance. I guess my point is, Israel has tried different tactics for managing Gaza. And those tactics have also been responses in part to different kinds of resistance. So we saw, for example, I mean, there was significant armed resistance in the early 1970s. This is not something that is widely discussed. So there were guerrilla groups in the Gaza Strip. Of course, they were in the camps as well. And you had a really, really brutal counterinsurgency campaign. So Ariel Sharon, who later became prime minister to Israel, he was the general in charge of the Southern Command. And he had bulldozers basically plow through these densely populated refugee camps to create wider roads that jeeps and other military vehicles would be able to maneuver in. And, you know, this is a counterinsurgency tactic that's been used in other places. He didn't invent it, but he demolished thousands of homes. So redispossessed, redisplaced many thousands of Palestinians in the early 1970s. There are thousands of people who were put into internment camps, including in the Sinai Desert. So this really intense sort of counterinsurgency campaign, Iron Fist, that happened in Gaza in the 1970s. In the late 80s and 90s, we have the First Defalda, right? So we talked about that earlier. That was more of a broad-based popular resistance, not as militarized. Well, actually, sorry, let me go back because this gets to the point about sort of the dialectics of repression and resistance. In the early 1970s, the Israelis crushed the armed resistance in the Gaza Strip. And then the policy of encouraging labor mobility becomes the carrot that accompanies the stick. Right. So we're going to put all this destruction here. We're going to bulldoze all these homes. And at the same time, we're going to make it easier for people to we're going to facilitate their voluntary organization so that they can go find jobs elsewhere. So we can kind of placate the armed uprising or some of the energies around it in that way. And then fast forward 20 years to the first intifada. That counterinsurgency policy of using labor mobility and militarization to recuperate people, that becomes the pressure point or the leverage point that Palestinians can use to put pressure on Israel. And then in the 90s, you have this show just saying, okay, let's stop using people from Gaza as workers, and let's basically cage them into the Gaza Strip. So this time period in the 90s and in the second into Fallblow, early 2000s, which is the period where I spent the most time there, you have the emergence of or the reemergence of militarized resistance in the Gaza Strip. but it's very different from what's happening in the West Bank. So in the early 2000s, the form of militarized resistance that gets the most attention by far are the so-called suicide bombings, right? Or in Arabic, they're called which translates more to like martyrdom seeking operations. But the suicide bombings, if you want to call them that, Of course, they dominate Western media coverage. There are major preoccupations in the Zionist state. They elicit all the kinds of liberal hand-wringing around morality and resistance that we see versions of today. But what people often don't appreciate is that there were virtually none of these so-called suicide operations happening from the Gaza Strip. They were all coming from the West, with very few exceptions. And the reason for that is because Israel had created a hermetic seal around the Gaza Strip as part of this larger agenda of isolating the Strip and confining the population and not using the population as a labor reserve in the same way anymore. they could not create a hermetic seal around the West Bank because the whole point was to fragment the West Bank and build all the colonies in all sorts of different places around it, right? So they built a wall to ostensibly keep the suicide bombers out. But of course, everyone recognized this basically as a land grab and the wall had no, like, it didn't have a theological root on the map. It was just like different kinds of obstacles in different places because they were really about protecting these colonies and settlements that were built, between and around all of the different communities in the West Bank. So anyway, what happened in the Gaza Strip was that in the early 2000s, in the second mid-fall, you had the rise of something that looked more like conventional guerrilla warfare, right? So it was basically impossible to sneak someone into Israel to do a suicide operation. But you did have... Israeli military bases and colonies inside the Gaza Strip. They were the subject of a lot of hit and run attacks, shooting attacks, some ambushes. And the other thing that's really interesting here is that there's a human archive of armed resistance that's very strong among Palestinians, dating from the PLO and the years spent fighting in Jordan and in Lebanon. And some of those folks in the 1990s were allowed to return to Palestine and were basically absorbed into the Palestinian Authority. So they were given jobs mostly as police and security workers. When the second default law happened, the vast majority of those folks did not get involved in armed resistance. Some of them did, but most of them thought that this would jeopardize their employment and their livelihoods. So there was kind of this incredible gap, I remember, in the early 2000s between the desire for militarized resistance on the ground and the efforts of a younger generation of activists and an older generation that had a certain set of military and tactical skills, but was not necessarily going to participate or share them, with some exceptions. And there were a few operations I remember where there were significant guerrilla attacks against the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip. Like there was, for example, an attack that resulted in the destruction of a Merkava tank, I think this was like 2002 or 2003. It was the first time something like this happened in Gaza. So there were some groups, especially like the Popular Resistance Committees, where you had an older generation of folks who had that kind of combat experience in Lebanon, especially, and in other places, and who had trained in places like China or Algeria or Russia. who who could then you know impart some of that knowledge and bring it to bear in confronting the israeli army in the gaza strip at the time but those types of operations were actually um more the exception than the norm so so my second i'm not an expert on this there's other people who have studied this more so i'm just speaking anecdotally from my own perspective my sense is that From the early 2000s, there's a little bit of reinventing the wheel when it comes to the development of militarized capabilities among Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip. And in 2005... When the Israeli military pulls out of the Gaza Strip, it's another adaptation, right? Because if you're like a guerrilla fighter, you know, it's hard for you to go and like attack the other side's bases and facilities or to like ambush their troops if they're not around. Right. And in a way, the Israelis kind of like turned the logic of guerrilla warfare upside down. Right. So in a stereotypical guerrilla warfare situation, you know, the guerrillas control the hills or the forest or whatever. They wait for the army to come out and to be isolated and then they'll strike them, you know, do a hit and run, something like that. In the aftermath of the disengagement, the army wasn't there to fight, right? And if you, like, involved in the resistance, let's say you would, you know, if you tried to venture out towards the border fence so that you could try to sneak in or do an attack or whatever, you would be exposing yourself to an attack, say, from a drone or from a distance, right? So in those early years after the disengagement, the only military means for resistance kind of left was use of projectile weapons, right? Like these rockets. So at first, the rockets were pretty simple in terms of their range, their accuracy. Their main function was to deny Israel a sense of normality and victory, right? So it's not that the rockets... necessarily could be used effectively against the Israeli military, but they could be used in a way to sort of be a nuisance and to symbolize that, you know, they're still here, they're still resisting. So they had a kind of political use, if you will, but their military and tactical use, you know, was limited. From 2005, for the decade or so afterwards, there is a kind of gradual development in these rockets in terms of their range. The swaths of the population that Palestinian groups could disrupt daily life for inside the Zionist entity gets bigger and bigger, right? So it goes from just the communities that are living near the Gaza Strip to potentially communities, you know, potentially Tel Aviv, potentially Jerusalem, right? So that's kind of the sort of equation, if you will. And the Zionists, Israel decides, okay, well, If they do that, we're obviously going to respond with overwhelming force. So they have this fixation or addiction to the idea of escalation dominance, right? You hit us, we're going to hit you 10 times harder or 100 times harder because the only language that the negative understands is the language of force. And they also developed this strategic logic that people are probably aware of called mowing the lawn, right? So every once in a while, you need to rain down destruction on Gaza to remind Palestinians of their inferiority and to break their spirits. So you have these massive campaigns, 2008 to 2009, now that winter period, just after Obama's election, but before his inauguration, 2012, although that one gets cut short for interesting reasons. 2014, 2014 was a big one. And then 2021, there's another significant escalation. And this is the period where you see the shift from a traditional occupation where you've got troops on the ground running around in Palestinian population centers to a kind of like remote control occupation, right? where instead of having soldiers on the ground, face-to-face with Palestinians, where they are, of course, exposed to possible resistance actions, you instead bombard them from a distance. So obviously, the scale of fatality when it comes to Zionist violence in the Gaza Strip increases exponentially after the 2005 disengagement. You go from a situation of soldiers running around, beating people up with their truncheons, death squads going in, arresting people, torture, that kind of model of control, to a different model of control of just, we're going to drop a 2,000-pound bomb on you from above and not even get our hands dirty, as it were. So that shift kind of takes place in different ways throughout the 2000s, and it gets normalized in the 2010s, right? So that's the kind of violence, the spectacular mass militarized artillery aerial bombardment thing that people now associate with Gaza. Before, it was a different kind of violence. It was more of the, like I was saying, the sort of mass police violence, the violence from up close with a truncheon and with a rifle and with a torturer rather than that other kind of violence. So one of the weird features of that was that the number of Palestinian prisoners from the Gaza Strip actually dropped significantly in those years, because you just didn't have as many instances where Zionist forces were physically capturing people, right? It would just be more like, well, let's just bomb an apartment building instead, right? So that was the sort of status quo that people understood on October 6th, which is that you had Palestinian armed resistance at a distance through rockets, and you had Zionist colonial policing also at a distance through overwhelming massive aerial bombardment on top of just the structural violence of the suffocating siege, the control of the economy through currency, forced customs union, and all those other things, right? So that's October 6th. October 7th, of course, that's a very different stage because what we saw on October 7th for the first time was a large-scale armed Palestinian action that didn't just penetrate Israel. frontier with the Zionist entity, because that's happened at various times, but actively unsettled or de-settled, if you will, the sovereignty of the Zionist state in those areas. So for several days, you had the situation where the Israeli military and police were not confident of their control over those areas. Right. I can't think of a similar situation that's happened since 1948. That was a very, very deep, deep psychological blow, I think, for the Zionist project and helps to explain the ferocity and the scale and the relentlessness of the genocidal violence that's been unleashed. So from a sort of military tactical perspective, that sort of shattering of the sense of normality, I think, was really very striking. Whatever you think about it, it's very, very striking. And the other thing about it that was interesting is you've seen the evolution of something like aerial guerrilla warfare And again, I'm not a military expert. I'm sure there's other people who have thought about this more deeply than me. But as someone who has been watching this situation for a while, the use of drones by Palestinian resistance groups has been very interesting for surveillance. Second, for attacks that were really important for disrupting the surveillance and communications network of the Israeli army. And the reason why I think of it as aerial guerrilla warfare is that, I mean, again, traditionally, when we think about guerrilla warfare, the skies belong to the colonizer. And the guerrillas have to hide. They hide in foliage. They hide in civilian population. They may hide underground. And the thing with drones is that because they are small and slow, at least right now, in terms of where the technology is at, it seems like they're a bit harder to detect, right? Because the tendency, of course, with aircraft has been, you know, fly them faster and higher and carry more bombs. Whereas it seems like with these drones, even like the homemade ones that they use for the surveillance and attacks, it's precisely like the fact that they are not super maneuverable, right? And they don't fly super high. That makes them difficult for radar and other technologies to distinguish from birds or kites or what have you. And again, maybe there's like a technological fix to this that I'm not aware of, but it's really striking me that for guerrilla warfare, it adds a third dimension. It adds a dimension of verticality that was not really part of the tactical landscape before. And more recently, with the fighting that's been going on inside the Gaza Strip, some of the videos that have come out also incorporate drone surveillance footage. So they'll show clips taken from a drone of a neighborhood where the Israeli army is operating, and they'll sort of use that surveillance for their planning. So that is a striking development that is not something that I've seen before. Maybe it existed, but at least I was not aware of it. The other question of verticality, of course, is this whole thing about the tunnels that people have been talking about. There's been a discourse about tunnels for a long time. Usually, it was about smuggling tunnels. Back in my NGO days, I worked on a project on mass house demolitions in Rafah on the southern border of the Gaza Strip of Egypt. And there the Israelis, you know, razed thousands of homes to basically create a buffer zone along the border. And one of the excuses that they gave was that they were trying to get at these sort of smuggling tunnels. And based on different sort of military people, engineers I was talking to, that pretext didn't really make a ton of sense because the Israelis were already on the border and controlling the border. And there are various technologies you can use to detect tunnels online. as they cross the border. And I bring this up not out of the sort of like, liberal dacha, like, this is a pretextual security, like, well, like, let's just stipulate this is all part of colonial warfare and domination. But just as from a tactical perspective, that data point always stuck with me, because when we look at October 7, as far as we know, tunnels are not part of the attack methodology. Because, and again, I think suspect is because digging a tunnel underneath the frontier fence, bossing into sort of a Zionist entity would raise all sorts of detection risks that don't apply when you're talking about tunnels inside of the Gaza Strip, right? So there's something about the verticality that makes tunnels a kind of defensive technology or more valuable in defensive terms than in offensive terms in this particular set of circumstances. So anyway, all this to say is this evolution has gotten to the point where you have armed resistance that's exploiting a broader spectrum of verticality, right? That is in the air and underneath the ground at the same time. So that's a really striking departure. And it's not because we haven't seen... The other thing I should mention is that since 2005, there have been a lot of Israeli ground incursions into the Gaza Strip. Basically, along the border fence areas, they were there almost all the time. And in some of these larger campaigns, they would go into some of the villages that are kind of near the border. So in 2009, for example, they razed most of the village of Jofundik in the north. But they didn't go into the densely populated neighborhoods. Maybe a few times here and there, like around the edges of places like Shajayan, which is a very old neighborhood in the eastern part of Gaza City. But, you know, those are situations and they did that on purpose because they knew that going into the densely populated areas was harder for them and would expose them to more forms of counterattack. So they were, you know, trying to minimize their own risk profile. So we never saw like a very extended or large scale confrontation between guerrilla fighters and the Israeli army, you know, maybe a few days here and there in various neighborhoods. So... At least for me, as someone who hasn't been there since 2011 and is not as familiar with the situation as others might be, I didn't know what to expect in terms of the capabilities of guerrillas after the Israeli army went in. And yeah, just observing it and seeing the videos that have been coming out, and even if you read them with kind of a grain of salt or if you read them skeptically, it's this idea of verticality, I think that's been really striking and really interesting. Yeah.

Josh: No, absolutely. First of all, I appreciate all that background information and the way you break it down. It's excellent, truly. But yeah, we're going to ask you a question about the occupation and how it was able to trade boosts on the ground for economic strangulation and massive bombardment, but you already covered that. But in that same article, right, the 2008 article titled Disengagement and the Frontiers of Zionism, you write that, and I'm quoting here, "...Israel now treats the territory less like an internment camp and more like an animal pen, a space of near total confinement whose wardens are concerned primarily with keeping those inside alive and tame, with some degree of mild concern as to the opinions of neighbors and other outsiders." End quote. So if you will, talk a bit about the historical material conditions that bought about this specific shift in strategy and how does the territory go from being an internment camp to an animal pen?

Darryl Li: Yeah, so there's the broader picture that I mentioned of just trying to move to like a remote control model for a remote control occupation for Gaza. Now, the first version of that, plan A, if you will, from the Zionist perspective was, you know, you have a Palestinian proxy running the place for you, right? So that's the Oslo Accords and the Palestinian Authority. So in that sense, the internment camp metaphor, if you will, kind of works, I guess, right? Because you've got you know, in the tournament camp, you've got guards, you've got an authority that's kind of there on the ground sort of managing things. In 2007, Hamas takes over, right? So there's a political confrontation between the Palestinian factions. Fatah and Hamas, Fatah force dominates the Palestinian Authority and Hamas won the 2006 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, which then caused the United States, the European Union, and Israel to put sanctions on, to basically force the PA into sort of not respecting this decision and to reverse it. So there's this fraught period between 2006 and 2007 where there's attempts to have like a joint government for Hamas or to deal with this outcome. And basically it doesn't work because Israel, United States and the European Union don't want to accept the democratic outcome of that election. And so Hamas takes over the Palestinian Authority institutions in the Gaza Strip. At that point, Israel says, okay, well, we don't have reliable proxy in Baselstrip. So we're going to move from plan A to plan B, which is we're going to manage this place without directly interacting with the civil authorities who are there. And not only are we not going to directly interact with them, we have an adversarial relationship with them and put more pressure on them. So that's when the siege of what would happen starts, even though I find that term a bit misleading because even before that, there was already economic strangulation of the Gaza Strip. It's just that the economic strangulation got even tighter after 2007. And one of the ways in which it got tighter was this shift towards a kind of humanitarian logic, right? So instead of saying, okay... you can import things into the Gaza Strip. We're just going to inspect those imports and take a really long time and make the process really cumbersome. They kind of said instead, well, nothing should be allowed in unless it is on a list of goods that are permitted. So instead of saying you can bring in whatever except for the things that we say you can't, now it's the reverse, right? Where you can't bring in anything except for the things that we say you can, which is a significant step up in terms of strangulation. And the logic goes from saying, okay, they have an economy, they can bring in goods except for the ones that we don't want them to have. It moves to a logic of humanitarianism, which is like as biological human beings, right? The people in the Gaza Strip need a certain number of calories per day to survive. And we calculate how many calories that is, and we decide how much food they get. So in order to meet those standards, right? So it's a kind of like bare life logic. So again, the relationship between ceiling and floor, the relationship between warm and suction is quite different. It's more repressive. So that's the ship that happened around the 2006-2007 era. Now, what's interesting is that even in that situation, Hamas and Israel are still forced to have indirect ties. Cooperation is too strong, but indirect interaction, right? So Hamas is in this sort of contradictory position where when they decided to participate in the 2006 elections, and then they won those elections, they found themselves in a position of being both a resistance movement and and a governing authority at the same time, which is exactly the contradiction that Fatah had been in and exactly the contradiction that they had criticized Fatah for being in for very good reason. And they found themselves in that contradictory position as well. So now it seems as if, it's not clear, but it seems as if Hamas may be willing to let go of the governance function so that they can focus exclusively on being an armed resistance movement. Which, you know, again, I'm not pretty into their internal thinking. Of course, I've read the journalism on this, as I'm sure many others have, you know, which says that in the past couple of years, they decided that they couldn't maintain these two roles and that doing so is actually a dead end in the long term, so that they needed to really focus on resistance. And if that meant losing control of the civil institutions in the Gaza Strip, then so be it. I mean, so if that's the logic, that's a work, I mean, I guess that's the argument. Yeah. But yeah, just to outline that strategic dynamic that even when Hamas, quote unquote, ruled Gaza, they still had to deal with the Palestinian Authority for a lot of things in terms of like fuel supplies for the power plants. You know, there's a whole complicated scheme around paying civil servant salaries and which civil servants are being paid. Because there were a bunch of civil servants who... who stopped working when Hamas took over, but it still got their salaries from the Palestinian Authority in the one that was based in Ramallah. And then other civil servants who worked under Hamas rule, but were not getting paid by the international donor community. So you have all these like contradictory pressures that result from having a sort of proxy rule entity that got set up and then kind of got its business sort of messed with. And then we have all the adaptations that sort of arise from that.

Josh: Absolutely. And there's another piece that you wrote, actually, sometime this year, The Rising Fall of Baby Boomer Zionism. And in that article, you talk about the negotiations between the PLO and Israel, the so-called peace process, represented the official Palestinian leadership's implicit acceptance of Zionism, undermining anti-Zionist critique everywhere. So can you talk a little bit about, for one... how Israel, for one, is able to purport this image of Palestinian autonomy, but also how, you know what I'm saying, Palestinian Authority-type organizations have been able to undermine, you know what I'm saying, anti-Zionist critique.

Darryl Li: Yeah, so, I mean, obviously I'm not Palestinian, so I'm making these critiques kind of in an analytical mode, right? I'm not here to sort of say what they should or should not have done. Of course, yes. But just to say that when the PLO first got activated, it was based primarily in Palestinian diaspora communities in exile, right? So it had its base in Jordan, and then it was kicked out after the Black September War. And then had its base in Lebanon. And then the Israelis basically expelled them when they invaded Lebanon. And so in the 1980s, the PLO moved its base to Tunis. And at that point, it no longer had a significant military presence on the borders with the Zionist regime. And at that point in the 80s, the center of gravity of Palestinian politics really shifts to Palestinians living under Israeli rule, right? Those are the folks in the West Bank and Gaza, and to a much lesser extent, Palestinian citizens inside Israel itself. So the first default that results in this peace agreement, or it's not really a peace agreement, it's like an agreement to have negotiations towards a peace agreement. So that's the Oslo process, right? And in a way, it's like the political pressure that was generated by the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza gets converted into a diplomatic gain that's reaped by the Palestinian leadership that's in exile in Tunis. So with the Oslo process, the PLO recognized the State of Israel, and the State of Israel didn't recognize the State of Palestine. It recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. which is significant because before that, they wanted to negotiate with Palestinians, not directly, but through Jordan, for example, right? So it was significant as a diplomatic political gain for Palestinians, but it was an unbalanced one because essentially what you're saying is the PLO recognizes Israel and Israel recognizes the PLO as the entity that has the authority to recognize Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. That's another way of thinking about it. And the agreement between the PLO and Israel, the Oslo Agreement or agreements, because there's a series of them, created this governing entity in the West Bank and Gaza that we now call the Palestinian Authority or the Palestinian National Authority, I should say. So in theory, it's the product of this agreement between the PLO and Israel. But in practice, what happened was that the people who were in the PLO and a lot of their resources over time got redirected into the Palestinian Authority. And the Palestinian Authority is this governing body that has limited authority over power. Palestinian population senators in the West Bank and Gaza, but whose powers, legally speaking, are basically subordinated to the Israeli army, into the Israeli occupation, and which is heavily dependent on customs and import revenues that are collected by the state of Israel, and then turned over or not turned over to the PA. That's one major source of revenue. The other major source of revenue is, of course, the Western donor states. So the Palestinian Authority is highly, highly vulnerable structurally to these kinds of pressures. And with the end of the Cold War and a lot of other things, our office invasion of Kuwait, the PLO found itself in a really weakened position. So they had a whole set of bases and employees and diplomatic missions that they needed to support. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, they were in a really, really tough situation. So I'm not trying to relitigate the question of what they should or should not have done. But just to say that the structural incentives were set up. so that a lot of the PLO leadership and PLO cadres moved back to Palestine and became the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, or just became part of the Palestinian Authority, but then as a result, found themselves much more vulnerable to pressure from the United States and Israel from that point forward. Absolutely.

Josh: Yeah, thank you for that. And there's this point you make in that same article, right? That, and I'm holding here, the Black freedom struggle shaped the contours of Jewish assimilation, end quote. So can you discuss this connection and maybe touch on the rise of Holocaust memory culture and how this culture elevated anti-Semitism above ordinary and especially anti-Black racism into something even more objectionable?

Darryl Li: Yeah, so I think this is a story that many of your listeners are probably familiar with, even if they haven't read about it. It's sort of like the air we breathe as politically aware people in the United States. And that article was just an attempt to kind of like, you know, spell some of this stuff out. So... You know, you can think of the Black freedom struggle, even in kind of like the limited and co-opted variants that, you know, like the civil rights movement. But you can think of it as a kind of like reinventing of the American sort of political covenant, as it were. Like it gave rise to a whole new like set of understandings of flag equality. what the polity of the United States is about. All right. That's not to say that it was structural change that resulted in freedom or liberation. Hardly. It was about co-optation, but the changes were significant, right? And so one of the changes, I think, is this greater acceptance of the United States as a kind of multicultural and multiracial nation, right? And so... What that does is it basically, I mean, again, everyone knows this, right? Every minority group in this country has to do certain things to be recognized as a racial or ethnic or religious minority. And a lot of the grammar for that, a lot of the templates arise as a result of Black Freedom Struggles. So, I mean, this is true of Asian American politics as well, just many things. But in the case of Jews of European origin, you have this thing where you have a complicated relationship with Zionism. So Zionism is not at all a majority position among American Jews for a long time. So it's really only after 1967 where large mainstream Jewish organizations become more and more openly identified with Zionism. And that, first of all, is made possible by the geopolitics of American imperialism, right? So after the 67 War, Israel proves itself as a useful ally and surrogate in the region for US interests. Not the context in which all of this is happening, but at the same time, see, the 67 War, the politics of imperialism coincides with imperialism. the way that Black freedom struggles are shifting the terms of American politics domestically. And these two things are happening at the same time, and I think they have to be understood in relation to one another. You can't just ignore one side or the other. Zionism is a project of Jewish supremacy in Palestine, but in the United States, it contributes to a narrative of Jewish exceptionalism, by which I mean Jews of European origin in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. sort of understand themselves as increasingly and publicly are discussed as an aggrieved minority group, right, in the United States. And one that, you know, participated in the civil rights movement, you know, is part of the sort of like multiculturalism minority politics game, even though at the same time, Jews of European origin are also often interpolated as white. and are structurally positioned often in categories of whiteness with all the material entailments that are going on. So it's this double-sided nature that's going on here where there's whiteness in some respects, but then in other respects, there's the ability to draw on that grammar of multiculturalism and historical victimization. So if the new grammar, the post-civil rights movement political grammar, talks about Jim Crow, talks about slavery, or this newly reconceptualized American Jewish political identity, of course, the analog is anti-Semitism, which manifests most powerfully in the Holocaust or the Shoah. And that historical trauma, you know, again, becomes its own sort of point to sort of organize around, right? So you have like Holocaust memorialization, popular culture, things like the film Schindler's List, you know, the Holocaust Memorial Museum. And it's interesting because although we just talked about how, you know, Black freedom struggles provide a kind of template in which other minority groups in this country sort of operate. I think it's also true, of course, that it kind of runs in other directions, right? So for example, there's the Holocaust Museum is built long before the National Museums in Washington, D.C. around the civil rights movement and around the experiences of Native Americans. And even those analogs don't really work because genocide or mass atrocity is not really like a motif in the museums of Native and Black struggles because that's not acceptable to kind of the American mainstream, you know, the American mainstream narrative needs a kind of like civil rights, literal redemption arc, right? So those museums can talk about racist and colonial violence, but they have to do it in very specific and very limited ways that ultimately still feed into a kind of like American redemption narrative. But what's striking is that those museums are much more recent than the Holocaust Museum. So the Holocaust Museum opens in like 93. And anyway, so it's part of this whole set of institutions and discourses and practices that talk about mass atrocity, that talk about genocide, and that use the Holocaust as like the ultimate example of mass atrocity. And of course, this affects American public discourse in all sorts of ways. The fact that you can't compare people to Nazis unless you're doing it in a very specific way, that's deemed correct by the Lincoln census. So these are kind of like the broader sort of coordinates of public discourse that come out of this confluence between, on the one hand, the way that Israel operates. cements its place in American imperialism after 67 and the way that the Black Freedom Struggle changes the grammar of American politics also in that time period in the late 1960s. What ends up happening is because of the structural position of accessing both whiteness and the sort of grammar of minoritized politics, it allows Zionist groups to use concerns around anti-Semitism, concerns around the Holocaust, to police radicals of all stripes, especially Black radicals, and even non-radicals, even more mainstream-type politicians like Andrew Young or Jesse Jackson, the fact that they... you know, departed even in small ways from a kind of Zionist consensus and foreign policy made them targets of a particular kind of racialized backlash, right? And we see this even in like less politicized ways, like the thing that happened with Whoopi Goldberg and The View a few years ago, right? Where it's not a coincidence that the most prominent recurring targets of cultural policing around antisemitism are often Black people.

Josh: Yeah, I appreciate you adding that on. Because first of all, there's two things here that I wanted to respond to. And one is that this idea of, that I feel like Jewish participation and support of the civil rights struggles of the 50s and 60s, it kind of gets mobilized as like a weapon or a means by which to discipline as well. Like anti-Zionist critique specifically as it relates to Black folks in particular, you know? And I see it oftentimes coming like this, as you're mentioning, right? Like these accusations of anti-Semitism on the part of Black folks it gets like, a lot of times people respond to that as in, you know what I'm saying, Jewish folks supporting the civil rights struggles, if that makes sense, which I always found really incredibly fascinating.

Darryl Li: Yeah, you're a bunch of ungrateful, you know, exactly, yeah.

Josh: Yes, yes, precisely. Thank you. So, Bye. So, Thank you.