Abdel Razak Takriti and hosts Brace Belden dissect the "settler colonial" roots of Israel, tracing the British Mandate's dehumanization of Palestinians to modern US-enabled destabilization. They analyze the "weird triangle" between Washington, Tel Aviv, and Abu Dhabi, where UAE loyalty secures Israeli expansionism across Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. The narrative evolves from early nationalist movements like Fatah and Hamas, born from the Nakba and disillusionment with Oslo, to the October 7 attacks as a rejection of failed diplomacy. Ultimately, the discussion frames current atrocities not as isolated events but as the culmination of a century-long struggle against an entrenched imperial project. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to True Anon00:03:45
I know what I know really, that the history of the world is always the history of weak people fighting strong people.
Of weak people who has a correct case fighting strong people who use their strength to exploit the weak.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to True Anonymous.
My name is Brace Belden.
I'm producer Young Chomsky.
And the podcast is True Anon.
And I got to tell you this right now, and this is a little peek behind the curtain.
Producer Young Chomsky has been so brave because he's been so hungry the entire time that we've recorded this show.
And you're going to go get some food right now, right?
Yeah.
I got to eat.
I'm proud of you.
We have a hell of an episode today about Palestine.
We are joined by Abdel Razak Takriti.
And I got to tell you, This is a long episode, but it pales in comparison to the length of the episodes that he did with the great Dan Denver of the dig.
See that?
That's how you become a real podcaster.
That kind of alliterative speaking right there.
Dan Denver of the dig.
Dan Denver of the dig.
Dastardly Dan Denver of the detestable dig.
I don't know why I have nothing against the dig.
Those are just the first adjectives that came out.
No, he hates the dig.
No, I'm kidding.
No, I'm kidding.
The dig, the classic LucasArts point and click adventure.
Of course.
So, who should sue the podcast, maybe?
It is called Thara and it is available on podcast platforms.
But yeah, we have, listen, you got a lot of listening to do.
So, we're just going to get straight to it.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the main event.
I have with us today, I have with us today, I don't know if that makes sense grammatically.
With us today, let's cut the eye out of that.
With us today, we have Abdel Razak Tikridi, Palestinian historian and organizer, and somebody who put together an incredible little resource called the Thara Project.
That is T H A W R A project.com.
You can go there right now, which is a fantastic resource that accompanies.
The, what is it, like 18 episode series that you did with the dig about Palestinian revolutionary history?
I have listened to it and I gotta tell you, this is a kind of podcast like the one that you're about to be on.
I very much more enjoy podcasts of the type that you and Dan did, which is just talking about history.
But here we are and welcome to the show.
Well, it's an honor to be with you, Brace.
I wanna start off by talking about the present day because it is.
Surreal in a sense, at least for me, God knows how you feel, to see that in 2026, the Palestinian cause's centrality to so much of the central events of the day and really affecting people's lives in maybe these secondary or tertiary ways in some way,
The Strange Mandate System00:14:35
but really being something that is a central component of a lot of the political maneuverings that are going on in the world today.
It must be somewhat surreal to see that.
It's a very strange situation that we're witnessing now, Brace, because it's actually, I would say, quite a unique situation where you have a global empire controlling a region.
That's fairly typical.
The United States at the moment, if you look at the regional map of the Middle East, it pretty much has relations of dominance over the vast majority of the countries on the map, if not all of them.
And yet, it seems to be pursuing an agenda that promotes destabilization in a region in which it is dominant.
That is a highly unusual situation.
Now, the destabilizing power, the main state that has an actual official policy of destabilizing all that is around it, is the Israeli state.
And unfortunately, what we've seen over the past few decades is a process whereby Americanization.
Leads to Israelization.
It opens the way, the pathway for the Israeli state to pursue its objectives, which are basically to enshrine dominance through total collapse of all that is around it.
So, this is a very serious situation that we're seeing today, and it has resulted in a lot of death, a lot of destruction.
And let me just say, first of all, the Israeli state, when it comes to destabilization policies, Is a classic settler colonial state in that regard.
That's what, for example, South Africa was doing in the southern sphere of South Africa.
It was destabilizing Angola, it was wreaking havoc in Namibia, it was causing a lot of problems everywhere in that region.
That's the logic that's in the DNA of any settler colonial formation.
But what is kind of weird at the moment is that you have a global empire pushing for that or paving the way for that.
And that is something that for an American audience, you know, we really need to think about.
What does that mean for us?
It is sort of fascinating.
I think one of the causes that a lot of people attribute the launching of Al Aqsa flood on October 7th to was the Abraham Accords and Israel growing closer to the Gulf states.
Obviously, the Israeli relationship with the Gulf states has a topsy turvy history, you know, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but it has been good recently, especially in the focusing of sort of making an alliance against Iran that's been developing for the past maybe 10 years.
And I got to tell you, I don't know what the hell is going on right now because it is just the US Israeli attack on Iran has just led to, it seems like, a chaotic period in the Gulf that we haven't seen in decades.
Obviously, certain parts of the Gulf have had a little more chaos in them than others.
But in those really stable regimes of the UAE and in Saudi Arabia, the war with Iran has become.
I think a nuisance for them or a headache for them, and certainly for the global markets that they are very dependent on.
I mean, it is the fact that this essentially happened.
Obviously, Iran's or Israel's goals and the US's goals vis a vis Iran are not completely one in one with the Palestinian cause.
But I think that it's hard to make an argument that there would be a war with Iran that we're witnessing right now without October 7th.
And I don't know.
You know, one always kind of wants to think that maybe there's some grand plan that people have, but I really cannot tell what Trump's plan is right now.
Well, I think that the real question is what is Netanyahu's plan here?
Yeah.
And we know what his plan is.
We know that what's been going on for a long time is that the Israelis have been practicing a philosophy, a policy that was articulated early on by the first.
Prime Minister of the State of Israel, Dave Ben Gurion, which is a peripheries doctrine.
And that meant that you basically overwhelm the Arab regional surrounding, and later on that shifts to the Middle Eastern regional surrounding in the broader sense, extends to places like Iran.
You overwhelm them with internal problems.
You try to support opposition movements.
You try to support different causes that actually have roots in the society.
You know, there are cleavages there, there are national questions, ethnic questions, sectarian questions.
But you keep like, Basically, creating destabilization through supporting different elements of social collapse that lead to the weakening of the state.
And the end result is basically chaos.
Now, why is that important?
The main thing that the Israelis want to ensure is that the Palestinian cause is destroyed and that it has no allies, no supporters.
Okay, this is the number one objective.
That is the first objective of any settler colony.
In the case of the Israeli state, they knew that they were actually planted in a regional arena in which settler colonization was broadly rejected.
We know this from day one.
We know this from the day when President Wilson sent the King Crane Commission, which was sent there after the First World War to investigate the wishes of the people of this region.
You know, as to, okay, they had two questions.
One, what do you want your region to look like?
After the end of the war, you know, now that the war has ended.
And secondly, what is your attitude to the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine?
Everybody was saying we want independence for the region, actually, independence and unity.
And secondly, they were saying we don't want the mass transfer of Eastern European Jews into this part of Palestine and this transformation to a Jewish national homeland.
That's an insane idea.
Okay?
No matter what you think of the Jewish question in Europe, and of course, there were many people sympathetic in this region with the plight of.
Eastern European Jews under the Russian Empire's pogroms and discriminatory laws, etc.
But they're like, okay, that does not mean that you can come take away a part of the world that is at the core of our region, install it in the words of Arthur Balfour.
He's like, we're going to store a plucky little ulster in there and essentially create hostility not only with the Palestinian people, but also with the surrounding peoples of the region.
That see a lot in common with these people and that have a long set of connections with them.
So, this is like the first thing that you see that is really odd about this whole situation a lack of understanding that the Palestine question will never go away.
And there's been this attitude in Washington of trying to wish it away and trying to circle around it.
And, you know, they've done that through different means.
They've been trying to normalize the state of Israel.
Forever, which means, by the way, normalizing settler colonialism, saying it's okay and saying that's never going to be challenged.
First, these great powers set up the context in which settler colonialism was possible.
British occupation made sure that they could set up settler colonialism.
And they did it with international means, international mechanisms, legal mechanisms.
They used the League of Nations, which we know was just a mouthpiece for the dominant imperial powers.
Of the day, but it gave it like an air of legitimacy or, you know, of source.
For like the five years that the League of Nations was viewed as legitimate.
Exactly.
It was like five minutes.
But it wasn't legitimate in the minds of the colonized people, by the way.
And the Mandate system is a whole.
Yeah.
Or the Namibians, by the way, that were put under apartheid in South Africa and were literally like destroyed under so much pressure.
So many different people were harmed by this evil system, the Mandate system, which was.
Premise, by the way, on a civilizational hierarchy of humankind.
Now, in the case of Palestine, you have this mandate system given like a very special mandate that is very strange for the moment of its birth, which is that there were clauses in the mandate that were saying the main logic of it is to actually create settler colonials.
They use the word close colonization.
You know, for that to happen in 1922, when the mandate was, you know, documents were actually being prepared, that is quite strange.
But it was Winston Churchill behind it.
And Winston Churchill essentially compared Palestinians to dogs.
He said, the dog in the manger has no right to stay there.
I can read you the full quote if you want.
It's quite fascinating because he's comparing them to dogs.
And then he goes on in a rant saying, well, I don't think the native people of North America or Australia had a right to that land.
I think that, and then he says, like, when a higher grade race, And more worldly wise ways come in and wants to take their place, that should happen.
We have no right to say, stop that.
So, you have this logic enshrined through the League of Nations.
They set up this weird settler colony.
They start bringing in people en masse.
And then, of course, what happens by the time you get to 1948 and the British are with, or 1947, and the British want to withdraw, they send it over to the United Nations, the new thing that replaced the League of Nations.
Again, the United Nations at the time was dominated by all these colonial powers.
All the Afro Asian states that were in the few Afro Asian states that were in it, I should say, were against this establishment of a settler colonial state, which they call, by the way, the partition resolution.
That's a misnomer.
They should call it the establishment of a settler colonial state in Palestine resolution.
It was not about partitioning terror.
Honestly, these Orwellian terminologies that cover up for mass crimes are unbelievable.
It was not a solution, it was actually creating a problem, a permanent problem.
As we've seen.
As we've seen.
And it paved the way actually for the ethnic cleansing of the population.
So it was a grave crime on the part of the so called international community, these European and North American states, which are still not repented.
By the way, as a Palestinian, I should say this it is actually outrageous.
They come and lecture us on things.
And I'm like, you guys are the criminals that set this up.
You know, the Israeli state is your settler colonial frontier.
And I don't care about the reasons.
For you pursuing this, whether you were a Christian evangelical dreaming of the second coming of Christ, or whether you're somebody who was sympathetic with the plight of European Jews, which I'm sympathetic with as well, of course.
I mean, you know, but that's what's happening.
Yeah, but it's always baffled me that the solution for that was like, all right, well, we killed a bunch of you guys.
We can't have you around here anymore.
Exactly.
Some of you got to go.
And then that's that.
I think that is what, and sorry, I know I'm derailing for a moment.
It's always been so baffling to me about all of this is that.
You have the Palestinians painted as these sort of arch anti Semites, or these sort of rabid anti Semites who kind of, it's like a race sickness that they have, that they just want to kill the Jews.
When the reality was, is that obviously the greatest mass murder of Jews, by a long shot, took place at the hands of civilized Europe.
And then the sin is kind of offloaded onto these savages in the periphery.
Because we've never had a Jewish question in the Arab region as a whole, or actually the Middle East as a whole.
There's never been such a Jewish question.
And think of how many books they were writing about it in Central Europe.
You know, it's like, that's what's so crazy to me.
And so, you know, this colony is set up in 1947.
And the first thing that happens, I mean, it's just mass expulsions.
Yeah, it's mass expulsions.
But also, the other thing that is happening is there's this plot.
That both the settler colonists as well as the major European powers and the United States, of course, are engaging in, which is designed to prevent the Palestinian people from having a place at the table, of having political representation, of having any form of national sovereignty.
So they immediately say, Oh, we're all going to recognize the settler colonists.
And then they're like, Okay, as for the Palestinians, they don't exist.
The word Palestinian disappears.
They erase Palestine from the map.
Nobody talks about Palestine for like a long time afterwards.
They're talking about the Arab Israeli conflict.
Yes.
Okay.
Which, of course, first of all, let me say it's not a conflict.
This is something much bigger than a conflict.
This is settler colonialism imposing itself on a part of the world and facing actually an attempt to defend freedom against it.
You know, it's a battle for regional liberty, actually, for the whole region, not just for this little corner of it.
Well, you know, I want to hone in on one thing you said there, which is that Palestinians don't exist in 1947.
It is the Arabs versus the Israelis.
Forging a Settler State00:07:22
And this is something that you see a lot sort of repeated by.
Both hardcore Zionists and then people who are trying to make you think that they're not and that they're broad minded, which is that the Palestinian identity was invented and it was either invented by a sort of coalition of scheming Arab states or Yasser Arafat came up with Palestinians.
But you see this a lot.
And multiple Israeli prime ministers have said this.
And there was never any state called Palestine prior to that, obviously.
You know, there obviously wasn't a state called Israel prior to that, too, except for, you know, something in maybe ancient times, which doesn't at all resemble what we think of as a modern state.
Well, that would have been a state.
Exactly, yeah.
Like little tribal chiefdoms, they come and tell you, I'm going to live in the state.
Like, it's ridiculous.
Honestly, it's ridiculous.
I mean, yeah, no, it's crazy if you think about it.
But this is, I think, an important thing to reckon with because this is sort of in the beginning of the Palestinian liberation movement.
Uh, there is this, it does come out of a sort of pan Arab movement that's rising up, and you guys do a great job of describing that.
I think it can seem very complicated from afar, and obviously, it is.
There's multiple different parties and multiple different political currents that happen, you know, all throughout this region that sometimes clash with each other, sometimes ally with each other, give birth to each other.
Uh, but there is really a sense of Arab national identity that is forming at this point, as well as.
National identities and nationalism is still a relatively new concept in the grand scheme of things by the mid 20th century to begin with.
But it is sort of being forged by this settler colonial imposition of Israel.
Well, let me start by actually attacking the logic of this whole argument of like you have to be an ultra nationalist to be able to stay on your land and to be able to exercise sovereignty over it.
I'm like, no, okay, Palestinian people had a natural right to be on their land.
They've been there forever, okay?
Yeah.
They've been there before these little kingdoms, chieftains that we refer to in the ancient period there.
They've been there since the days of the Canaanites that long preceded the Israelites.
They've been there.
There's been many people inhabiting this land for a very long time.
And one thing you know if you follow its history closely is that there hasn't been a mass expulsion on this scale until 1948.
Nothing of that scale happens.
Even the Romans, when people talk about, well, the Romans sacked Jerusalem, whatever.
They punished the city, which was a classic, by the way, Roman practice.
This is what they did to Carthage, what they did to Ve'ye, like you know, when they first started their adventures.
But what about the countryside?
This is where the bulk of the people are.
What about the other locales in which there were no Jews, for example?
You know, the Palestinian coast was not exactly Judea as these Israeli politicians would want to claim now.
There's this like mad situation where we're supposed to believe that this place.
It was just inhabited by Jews, and that somehow because the Romans enacted a policy of suppressing a Jewish revolt and expelling Jews from Jerusalem, Palestinians are responsible for that.
First of all, why are the Palestinians responsible for the Roman crimes, for the German crimes, for all crimes?
I mean, what is the Grand Mufti?
It was the Grand Mufti, of course, who gave Hitler the idea to.
I mean, this is the sort of like.
There's this kind of historical witchcraft that you see to try to make a logic of what happened in 1947 to the present.
And, you know, I can tell you're frustrated even thinking about it.
It is frustrating, but it's also like it's just nonsense.
It's one of those things that I guess you have to deal with because these arguments are made.
But, like, at the end of the day, what the fuck does it matter that the Romans did?
Like, it doesn't still give the right for a bunch of people to get shipped over there.
And then to burn down a village and then claim it as a new land.
I mean, it's just, it's complete nonsense.
Look, Brace, I mean, I could say, based on the Zionist logic, I have a much stronger claim to Andalusia as an Arab person than, and as an Arab Muslim, than, like, let's say, the people who claim we have a right to the land because of the, because actually there was an Arab Muslim presence there for 800 years.
And we see still all the remains of that on mass scale.
And it's deeply ingrained into that culture.
But you know what?
Spain is for the people of Spain.
Nobody has a right to it, okay, other than them.
Okay?
Nobody has a right to come and displace them based on, oh, a few hundred years ago, or in this case, a couple of millennia ago, I was there and I'm no longer there.
And you see, there's this sleight of hand that they play, this trick.
They come to you and say, well, in my religion, it says that it's my land.
Okay?
In my religion, it says Mecca and Medina are my land.
Do I come and say we should call them Palestine now?
Like, what is this ridiculous situation?
If your religion says this is a holy land to you, you should have the right to worship there.
You should have the right to exercise your religious beliefs and treat it as a holy land.
And that was actually always respected by the Palestinian population.
Jews were always able to pray in Palestine.
Actually, the interesting thing about Jewish presidents in Palestine, it could only happen when there was Muslim rule, weirdly enough.
Before, under the Roman period, there was actually.
A banning of Jews in Jerusalem specifically.
Okay.
In the Muslim period, you start seeing there's a return of Jewish religious life.
Okay.
You have a major disruption to Jewish religious life during the Crusades.
And then you have it restored afterwards.
Why is that?
It's not because I'm not trying, by the way, to paint this crazy thing about like, oh, Muslims are great and Muslim civilization is the welcoming, happy civilization, some kind of, you know, grand conviviencia story or something.
That's not the point here.
But the point is to say that there is no specific local hostility to Jewish worship in this part of the world or Jewish presence in it.
But what you do see in that period is actually Jews are not going to the Holy Land on a mass scale at all.
Before Zionism, there was actually very little interest amongst Jewish populations to go there, especially in the Ottoman Empire.
They could have gone there.
They decided instead to be in places like Baghdad, in places like Aleppo, in places like Saloniki, which was actually.
In Greece today, Thessaloniki, you know, was one of the most vibrant Jewish cities in the world at the time.
These kind of, you know, dynamics tell you something.
Zionism is a very modern phenomenon.
Beyond the Right to Exist00:10:25
Like all of these modern nationalisms, it has these very aggrandized claims around the self, and they want to claim land very strongly to the exclusion of others.
Landed, they did not inhabit these.
These theorists from Ukraine and Poland and elsewhere in Russia, but also it's a colonial phenomenon.
It has disdain for the native and, at best, lack of care for what happens to them.
So, in that sense, it's actually an anti human phenomenon.
It only prioritizes the people that actually it considers to be part of the nation.
Anyone who's outside of the nation is not prioritized.
But not only not prioritized, their fair gain, their expulsion, their destruction, their murder.
Is okay.
And this is something that astonishes me when people talk about all of this.
I'm like, can you please, for a second, think about the people you're harming with this, the Palestinians?
And by the way, I say this, and I'm saying it as an American to fellow Americans listening to this show.
It is very painful for Palestinian Americans to be in this country, pay taxes for the destruction of our own people.
We know very well that this is an American genocide.
It's not just an Israeli genocide.
Because without years and years of support and investment and military buildup and diplomatic cover, this genocide would have never happened in Gaza.
Our people are in pain, race.
And you don't see Americans actually recognize it, even in sympathetic Americans, even people on the left.
It hasn't registered that this is American genocide.
You're not going to see anytime soon an education program to make amends for that, for example, or to apologize for it.
But then, why are we surprised?
I haven't seen anything like that when it comes to Native Americans yet.
I'm yet to see that in a real way.
So, they do land acknowledgements at big conventions sometimes.
Oh, yeah, land acknowledgements.
Yeah.
How much is it?
How serious?
I want to see land back, by the way, Brace.
I want to see serious.
I want to see indigenous communities benefiting from the land that's being stolen now by oil companies and all sorts of other special interests that dominate this country.
But, anyways, that's a different subject, I'm sure.
You have others that have talked about it on this podcast before.
Yeah, it's interesting now.
I mean, I know we're kind of skipping around time here a little bit, or timelines rather, a little bit.
But it's interesting now.
You see the rhetoric around Israel has been there's this Israeli right that has sort of hijacked the Israel project.
And you see this from our much suffering liberal Zionists here in America who try to say, oh, it's the net.
Bernie Sanders does this all the time.
Where instead of saying Israel, he'll say Netanyahu or Likud or something like this.
And I think to be as generous as possible, I think that you can see is that the Likud sort of coalition that's in power right now, it's not just them, but other members of the Israeli far right, are much more vocal about something that has been always present.
And they don't allow people to sort of.
I don't know, live with the illusion of this plucky little democratic state there anymore.
And I think that's why you see a lot of sort of the J Street types or the Bernie Sanders types, you know, become very defensive about this because now, you know, what, what, what, and I hate this.
I sound like, I don't know what.
Whenever people talk like this, I always cringe a little bit, but it's laid bare, right?
Like you see it, it is laid bare.
Like the Israeli project is fully out there.
I mean, you look at, I was looking at Ben Gavir's birthday party the other day with his noose on the cake and two guns on the cake, you know, pointing towards a picture of Israel.
And you see the foreign minister there.
You see all these heads of police from all throughout Israel there.
You see these far right people who are very, very upfront about an explicit project of ethnic cleansing there.
And there is almost, when you talk to an American politician or when you hear American politicians speak, most likely, they sort of still present Israel in this way that people were presented in the 1960s or 1970s or something.
That is absolutely no relation to what was actually happening then.
But also, certainly, no relation to what's happening now, even in rhetoric.
There is no sort of kibbutz social democratic, you know, they're just like us, sort of Israel.
They may think they are just like us in many ways.
But it's interesting that that still hasn't caught up yet in terms of many of Israel's sort of defenders here.
And I think that that is probably why I think a lot of people who even maybe didn't think about it too much anymore or prior to this, like, you know, who sort of just, oh, yeah, Israel, it's like the country with.
They're like white people in the Middle East and they have a president or whatever.
I think, even that, like some of those people have to just see the truth, which is just it is this sort of exterminationist project.
Yeah, Brace, I mean, actually, throughout your, you know, I was thinking about your saying now.
And one thing I was thinking about is the unions, for example.
And like, let's talk about the left in Palestine, really.
I really have issues with this as somebody who's been, On the left for a long time, has been involved in all sorts of struggles for a long period of time in it.
There's a lack of serious acknowledgement of the crimes of the left towards the Palestinian movement.
And actually, some of these crimes continue.
Take the unions.
We could have prevented the partition resolution, at least from the American side, American support for it, had you had the unions supporting the unity of Palestine and its independence.
You know, you could have had a situation.
Where they articulated a policy of Palestine needs to get independence and needs to be a democratic Palestine, where even, okay, the colonists can vote, but they have to accept the fact that they're, even by 1948, only 30% of the population.
Okay.
Instead, you see them advocating Zionist positions.
All these major left outputs, you know, for example, The Nation Associates, you know, which, of course, the magazine The Nation, yes.
Those were the biggest promoters of Zionism.
Actually, they had, they even used to, Write entire reports geared towards disenfranchising Palestinian refugees and saying they should never go back.
Can you believe this?
People can find this by the way.
Google it.
You'll find all this work that was happening.
The left was advocating for the creation of settler colonialism on our land.
They were advocating the theft of our land, the destruction of our people.
And they were presenting it as a great humanitarian act.
That's because on the radar of the left, Jewish life is much more important than Palestinian life.
I'm going to say it outright.
And I say it, you know, as somebody who's very connected to Jewish progressive movements.
I have had Jewish comrades all my life, you know, all of this.
But let's be very honest about it.
When they talk about anti Semitism, it has a special ring, as if it's superior to anti Arabness, it's superior to anti Palestinian, it's superior to Islamophobia.
And I understand it's an old tradition of hatred in Europe, and this is a European settler colony that we have here.
So it makes sense in terms of the historical trajectory of this settler colony, okay, to some extent.
To be very generous, yeah.
To be very generous.
But let's start from the essential premise that we're all equal.
And all forms of hatred are bad, and settler colonialism is the worst form of hatred because actually it is essentially enshrining hatred into land theft, killing, and the destruction of peoples.
Okay, it is very, very bad.
The left has supported it in different forms.
Now, you have let's talk about Bernie, and I do like a lot of the things that Bernie talks about.
I like to hear about education and healthcare and all of that.
Okay, maybe it doesn't go far enough on some of these, whatever.
But overall, I could say he's a positive development in the.
In the Senate, okay?
In the world of the Senate.
It's as good as you're going to get, okay?
I think, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, he has a sincerity to him and to his style and all of that.
But for Bernie to, for me to hear somebody like Bernie speaking those terms for so long, and he's getting better, but it's still so bad.
I'm like, Bernie, you're, come on, like, you, after all of this, you're still talking to me about Israel and all of that.
Let's start with the fact that it's a settler colonial state.
How can you even accept it?
As a settler colonial state, you have to demand an entire decolonization of the system there.
Okay, and again, some people try to then, like, oh, there's a legitimate right to exist.
He says that too, by the way.
Bernie keeps talking about this right to exist business.
I'm like, what does that mean?
As a Jewish ethnic supremacist state, as a state in which the native population has no say or sovereignty or control, but they make themselves feel more comfortable by saying, Well, we'll give the, you know, we're going to be generous.
We're going to fight for the native population to have 22% of the land or a portion of that, which is basically West Bank and Gaza.
That's how the Bernies of the world think about it.
And they'll even put all sorts of conditions on that.
It'll be demilitarized.
It'll be whatever.
It'll be this and that.
Because Israel has a right to security.
What does Israel's right to security mean?
But the Palestinians, of course, do not.
I mean, I think I want to go back to a point that you made earlier that I think is very important.
And I think that also drives a lot of people.
Honestly, I'm going to be real with you.
A lot of Jewish people are really crazy, which is the fact of the matter is, it's incontrovertible that the Jewish life is valued significantly higher than Arab life.
Western Parties Reassess Stance00:07:49
And there's a lot of factors that go into that.
I'm not defending it anyway, but that is the case, as you mentioned, historical factors, but also the political outlook of the US in the modern day as well, where Arabs are often seen as the enemy, or certainly have been writ large since the war on terror, but also prior to that as well.
You know, it is, it's sort of, I think it speaks to that period between 1945 and about 1967 when the left's orientation towards Israel was very strange.
And strange in one sense that, like, you saw a lot of left wing parties sort of supporting this settler colonial state in a way that, like, similar was.
Like, there wasn't, like, a bunch of socialist parties.
Actually, there was, but there wasn't like a bunch of communist parties like supporting South Vietnam, which was not a southern colonial state, but also in league with the imperialists in this sort of similar way.
Israel was very unique in this sense.
And then in 1965, 66, but definitely in 67, that begins to change.
And there's also the regrouping and then reorientation of the Palestinian movement as well that occurs in that period between 1947 and I guess 1965, but really prior to that as well, that launches this sort of Palestinian revolution.
And that revolution, I think, is the importance that it has on the world stage is difficult to.
I can't, I always fuck this up.
I think difficult to exaggerate would be the word there because it truly becomes this very international movement within a few short years that has massive international repercussions internationally all over the world.
And that is, that is, that is, has this legacy that I think is still very much with us, obviously, in the present day.
But it also forces, I think, a lot of these Western parties to sort of have to reassess their stance.
But by that time, a lot of these Western parties didn't really matter any much because they were already the seeds of Euro communism had already been sown in many of these, especially European communist parties.
And they didn't know what the fuck they were doing in the 1960s.
But you saw this 1960s radicalism, especially the Maoist movements, sort of orient itself.
And Palestine becomes very much a North Star for a lot of these parties.
Yeah, I mean, Palestine becomes important for these parties, but actually, what's much more important than these parties.
Is how important Palestine was to Palestinians, the surrounding region.
I mean, the Palestinian Revolution.
How important was it to Palestinians, the surrounding region, and then also the global south more broadly?
Because, look, I mean, there is this European fascination, for example, with studying all these student movements, 1968, and how Palestine was so important for them.
I'm like, you know what?
The biggest movement in 1968 was smaller than one union in the Palestinian Revolution.
You know what I mean?
It's like, seriously.
We had a situation there that was incredible.
The mobilization of almost the entirety of the people for the purpose of achieving freedom and for the purpose of achieving return.
So, liberation and return were the two main issues.
Let's remember this is a people that has been expelled en masse from this land.
So, actually, the first instinct, the immediate concern, the basic cause that everybody coalesced around was we want to go back home.
Yeah.
And it's a natural right, and it's something that also, of course, happens to be enshrined in international law.
This is why it's so ridiculous when people tell you, Yeah, well, I don't support the right to return.
I support West Bank and Gaza becoming Palestine, but I don't support the right to return because that will change the Jewish character of the state of Israel.
And I, well, guess what?
By colonizing Palestine, you change the Palestinian Arab character of Palestine.
Okay.
And you impose on it a community that is.
Actually, as far away from Judaism as I know in many ways.
Because it's like, you know, they've had to change the theology, change the whole outlook.
I mean, it's basically become settler colonialism.
They've sort of reinvented the religion to become, oftentimes by people who were themselves irreligious or essentially atheists.
The rabbis were very opposed to Zionism.
Let's remember that, Brace.
I mean, this is, you know, on a side note.
Listen, I'm with you.
Yeah.
I'm with you because there's no Messiah.
You know, you can't, but these people, they don't give a fuck.
But it is, you know, you mentioned that with the size of like one union being a lot bigger than these European parties.
I think what a lot of people associate just with the Palestinian revolution is, of course, the guerrilla groups, these sort of romantic figures, but also very daring and who fought against this big power who's backed by all this technology.
But I do want to mention the civilian aspects of this because there is this scattering of Palestinians.
You have, I guess, this diaspora that forms in Lebanon, in Syria, in Jordan, in Egypt.
And oftentimes living in refugee camps.
But you have this mass mobilization of people, I think, on this scale that is hard to compare with anything else because you have this politicization of like an entire populace, whether you wanted it or not.
You know, somebody came to your house with a gun and said, get the fuck out of here.
Like you are now part of it, whether you wanted to be or not, whether you would have been neutral in some other context or not, now you're a part of it.
And obviously, some people become guerrilla, some people become, you know, cadre in this movement.
But then there is this huge, huge, you know, formation of organizations and of unions and within the general population itself.
So, the initial moment after 1948, you're absolutely right, race.
I mean, you have these different sides developing.
And actually, in the initial few years, it's not the guerrilla aspect that is the dominant one.
Yeah.
And in a way, that is unfortunate because it meant that.
What does guerrilla mean, actually?
It means that this people has a fighting force through which it's able to project power in the surrounding region.
Without that, it is actually at the mercy of everybody else around it.
Now, the colonists' right to possess weapons was never questioned by anybody, except for, of course, indigenous people and the entirety of the people of the Middle East, but not by the European backers and the United States and all of that.
From day one, they were arming the Zionists.
Okay, that they had a right to carry weapons, they were supplied by weapons, and they were given like all sorts of armaments by the British and everybody else.
Okay, and and let's let's be real, and and and some of it came through the Soviet Union.
Oh, in 1948, definitely.
I'm not gonna talk by the way, if we start opening the Soviet file in 1948, I always say this that they they without the Soviet Union wouldn't have had a partition resolution, and without the Soviet Union, it wouldn't have had a Zionist victory in the 1948 war because it was a Czech arms deal, yeah, that was given to them that actually allowed them.
To come and overwhelm the Arab forces around them, which didn't have weapons.
Crucial Links with Metropole00:07:59
And this is a complete, not complete, but a little bit of an aside.
Also facilitated by Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Melville.
Of course, who had all sorts of shady dealings by all of these people.
And by the way, let's just be clear Epstein is Mossad.
Ghislaine Maxwell's father is buried basically in the hero cemetery for Mossad figures and all that.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that whole network.
Dershowitz, you know, like the Wexner, all of these.
Like, it's like a, it's unbelievably disgusting, the whole thing, race.
I mean, there's this whole thing, I think now people are beginning to see how dangerous this, you know, these settler colonial networks become because, again, their effort to destabilize the region and to basically ensure that there is regular support for their project from outside.
Especially from Europe and the United States means that there's this constant quest for basically achieving a major power base in these metropoles.
Yeah.
Places like Washington and New York and London and Paris.
And it has a long history.
It has a very long history.
And I'm not saying you can only reduce it to like, okay, Epstein Network or one thing.
There's a lot of forces that are at play here, including, as I mentioned earlier, like unions, unions in the 1940s are playing a role in this.
They still are.
It's a deep rooted, that's why I don't talk of Israel lobby, by the way.
I talk about it as a social and political movement.
And an intellectual movement that has deep roots in Western society.
And that is why it's quite different than, let's say, Turkey advocating for its interests in Washington or Saudi Arabia hiring a bunch of people to do that or Qatar bringing in a PR firm.
This is a different phenomenon.
This has deep social roots that come from different angles, different communities, but that lead towards the same direction, which is saying that we need to get rid of the Palestinian people, replace them with these people.
And we need to make sure that this replacement project is supported militarily and achieves actual political and military hegemony in the region surrounding it.
It's a very difficult situation.
But you still listen, people, you hear people at the left talking rubbish, being like, focusing on silly debates like, oh, is it the dog wagon tail or is it the tail?
I'm like, let's stop thinking in these terms, think a bit more seriously.
Okay, look at material reality.
This is not a normal relationship between vassal state and empire.
It's much more complicated than that.
If it was a normal relationship, the empire, by the way, does not privilege the settler colony in any setting.
What it does is it privileges the imperial system and the region is dominated.
And in this case, the imperial system, the normal thing would be to privilege the Gulf, which is a different logic.
That's the main thing in the Middle East.
There's nothing else, by the way, in terms of productive forces that's seriously important for the United States.
The oil, and then there are the different kinds of geopolitical, uh, sensitive points for world shipping.
Okay, so as Babel Mandib, Hermas, none of them happen to be Israeli control or dominant.
Okay, now you have people come and say, Well, Israel is essential for the continuation of that project.
I'm like, Yeah, that's why the oil companies were opposed to it initially.
Yeah, they're saying it's bad for the Gulf.
You know, it's quite amazing, like, okay.
If we're going to talk about this as oh, this is just capitalist interests supporting Israel to spread capitalism, I'm like, which capitalist interests are we talking about?
Is it the oil companies?
Is it somebody else?
Weapons manufacturers, sure, but that's now.
Initially, the Israeli state was not actually part of military technology or didn't have AI, military AI.
Yeah, that's a relatively new phenomenon, but also, like, I mean, yeah, I think that oil is obviously the primary thing here.
Like, our relationship with the gold states is.
In terms of the economy, in terms of capitalism as capitalism, obviously much more beneficial to those invested in the continuation of that system.
But also, Israel's sort of status, I mean, you see the Gulf states do this too, you know, with Yemen and with Sudan and stuff, you know, these sort of slaughters and these military adventures.
But on the level of what Israel is doing, I mean, it's just, it's, it's, It's hard to compare.
I mean, with Sudan and Yemen, it's a joint Israeli Emirati project, of course.
Yes, yes.
As we know.
And yes, of course, Saudi was involved in it, but even now it has woken up and been like, wait a second, what's going on with this weird Emirati Israeli axis?
Yeah.
Where there's been this reconceptualization of the Emirates as little Sparta, and they're suddenly being like, okay, our new philosophy around our own national security is going to be the junior partner to the settler colony, and that's going to be our gateway to the heart of the empire.
It's like, A weird triangle that they've created between, you know, Washington, Tel Aviv, and Abu Dhabi.
But yes, sorry, you were going to say something, Brace.
No, but I think what you said earlier sort of makes sense is that these sort of forging of strong links with the metropole is crucial for Israel as opposed to these other countries, because these other countries aren't settler colonial ones.
You know what I mean?
Like, you know, it's for as many bad things as you can say about some of the Gulf states, they're certainly not bad.
And, And, but also Israel is sort of unusual in some ways because it doesn't have like, it is not directly administered colony.
You know what I mean?
It's not like France directing, you know, directing its Indo Chinese colony or Britain in India.
It sort of has to maintain these links actively.
And to do that, it has to make people sort of see that there is Israel is a crucial part of the US's what?
Like democracy?
It's part of the US's, you know, military alliance.
It's part of the US's.
Economy, it's the 51st state, but you see this in other countries as well.
You see this in the UK.
Like you mentioned, you see this in France.
The Germans are another issue that would have to deal with many hours of psychological evaluation there that is maybe a little outside the remit of the show.
But you see these very strong relationships to these oftentimes former colonial or current colonial powers.
And it's this sort of strange, not exactly artificial, that's not really the word for it, but it's this constructed.
Uh, you know, you know, metropole relationship that they have to have, and that's why it's so crucial.
I mean, this is this is I'm sure that you know, if you if you explained how known Hamas is to you know, any random person in Gaza or whatever in the US, just based on how often people have to uh, you know, to say that they they have no support for them or they don't criticize or they you know, criticize them or whatever, if you want to say anything good about the Palestinians, it would probably blow their mind.
But it's so crucial here to maintain fidelity to Israel because if that relationship is severed, then I think that the Israelis will probably be in a little bit of trouble.
Brainwashing and Recruitment00:10:47
I mean, I don't know.
That's a complicated question.
But certainly, it would be a completely different scene there.
Well, they would be in a lot of trouble.
And of course, they'll still have the capacity to sustain themselves to some extent and they'll try to do it through other relationships.
However, I think what you've seen, Ron, actually, the first.
War with Iran that they just had a few months ago before the current iteration, you know.
Okay.
12 day war.
They can't last 12 days without, like, you know, and that was with American support, by the way.
Yeah.
It's like, and it's a simple reason.
Like, look, this is not a big state.
Okay.
But in order to maintain a crazy expansionist militaristic project of this kind, whereby you have to oppress the Palestinian people in multiple locations, by the way.
Because you're expanding into the West Bank, and actually, that requires a lot of military what's on the ground because you're helping the scepters take over villages.
You're actually monitoring every little corner in the West Bank.
You're attacking refugee camps.
By the way, the depopulated, I should tell people here because we don't hear about it in the news the northern West Bank, the refugee camps there are completely depopulated, including Jenin camp, which was the site of a major Israeli massacre during the Second Intifada.
And we're also the heroic.
Palestinian journalist Sireen Abu Akhli was murdered, you know, and where so much has happened, like in terms of Israeli atrocities over the years.
That's been completely depopulated now.
And you have similar things happening across the northern West Bank.
It's like insanity what's going on now.
What they're doing is expanding there, expanding in Gaza.
In Gaza, they control like the vast majority of the territory still.
Are continuing the genocide in the remaining part, but in a weird way where, or in an indirect way that you can't see.
Sometimes in direct ways, they're still killing people, by the way, but they're also spreading disease.
We have like, you know, how many incidents of rat bites have we've seen over the past while?
There's an infestation of rats, and 18,000 people have been suffering from rat bites.
This is not counting like the feces in the sewage system, which has been destroyed, the destruction of all hygiene, the fact that you have to.
Line up to the toilet for the toilet, like you have to line up for hours because people often, like, it would be hundreds of people sharing in one toilet that's not even working properly because there's no sewage.
It's humiliating for people, but it's also killing them.
Okay, so they're doing this in Gaza, which is a big military investment.
South Lebanon, they want to replicate the Gaza model there.
They actually are working on a genocidal premise because, and I mean it in the technical definition of the genocide race because they're targeting a certain population, and here they're targeting a religious minority.
The Shia population of Lebanon, they're basically like, okay, you have to all leave your villages.
Of course, there are some Christian villages that have been affected by this because the south is a mixed area, but majority Shia with some Christian minorities in it.
Everybody has to leave.
And then if you happen to be a Shia seeking shelter somewhere else, we'll bomb you wherever you seek shelter.
Yes.
Can you imagine this being done to Jews?
By the way, can you imagine like hundreds of synagogues being destroyed?
The whole world will be talking of how many mosques, the entirety of every single mosque in Gaza has been destroyed.
Why isn't the world talking about that?
I mean, Christian shrines in South Lebanon are being destroyed.
I mean, we hear now some people talking about that, by the way.
They're not talking about the viral video of the guy hitting the statue Jesus Christ said.
And then you have people on the right, like Tucker Carlson, or they care about Christians there.
But I mean, I'm like, yeah, and I care about Muslims too.
And I care about all religions.
Okay.
Yeah.
Everybody has a right to have their religious structures.
Like, survive.
You know, this is crazy.
But people's lives are being destroyed, and it's a big investment.
So, you have West Bank, Gaza.
There's all sorts of policing happening in 1948, Palestine, and what has been renamed as the State of Israel.
And you have like Lebanon.
You have Syria.
They're occupying Syrian territory.
Yeah.
Well, they've all been there.
And they have settlers.
They have settlers.
Yeah, they've all been in the Golan Heights, but like they also have settlers now.
Every few weeks, there's like another group of like, 20 deranged hilltop youth guys going over there and settling somewhere.
And you know that eventually they're just going to let some of them stay and it's going to extend and extend.
Yeah, it's like, by the way, a psychotic bunch.
I'm sure you see them with their goats and with all of that.
God, man.
A lot of them come from the United States, by the way.
Tweakers.
Nobody does anything about it.
There's like recruitment in this country.
There's like all sorts of brainwashing happening here.
And there's all these people who want to go on an adventure.
Be like, yeah, let me go kill some Arabs somewhere, you know?
And it's like, why are people being silent over this?
This is actually international terrorism.
These people have to be put on actual trial for this.
Well, it's crimes against humanity.
I mean, there is a close relationship, too.
I mean, there was a recent hubbub here in New York City.
About land sales that were happening at a synagogue.
It was a real estate expo at a synagogue, which is a little on the nose, I guess.
But it is a secular event that's happening there.
It's not like worship services or anything.
And there's been this big push to have this buffer space here in New York that you can't protest outside of synagogues.
Is that because people are protesting outside of synagogues every time there's a service?
No, it's because they're often selling land in Israel in synagogues.
And so the city council passed a bill.
I think it's a veto proof majority they passed it with, but the bill hasn't gone into effect yet.
And last week, I think a few days ago, I was out of town, but there was a big protest at this.
And what we saw was the people who, and they're saying, oh, there's no illegal land sales happening.
First of all, I don't give a fuck.
I'll just speak for myself.
I don't give a fuck if they're illegal.
It's still wrong to sell, it's technically illegal under international law.
Obviously, that makes it worse in some sense.
But I also don't think that you should be able to facilitate.
The moving of people from here to Israel in any sense.
You know what I mean?
Even if it's technically legal or whatever, regardless, there was this huge police presence.
And then you saw pictures and video of Kahanist with the people who were setting this up.
I mean, some of the furthest, most craziest, there's this one guy in particular, Ross Glick, who was a personal enemy of mine, or no, friend of mine, let's say.
I have a patronizing assessment of his personality.
Hanging out with the promoters there.
And so these are people who are out and open in favor of ethnic cleansing.
There's no doubt about it.
I mean, they are wearing t shirts of a, I think the only Jewish terror group that is prescribed or put on the watch list in the, or excuse me, on the terror list in the United States, the JDL.
And they're wearing these t shirts at this expo with the promoters, talking with them under the full protection of the NYPD with barricades and all these things.
And inside, they are selling apartments.
In illegal under international law settlements in the West Bank.
And now the ADL is moving to try to promote a federal law preventing protests outside of houses of worship, which obviously means protests outside of any synagogue that there is an illegal land sales going on.
Because when the fuck are people protesting outside of any houses of worship?
It's not something that generally happens.
This is really the only time it does.
And it just drives me totally crazy because there is this.
I mean, it reminds you of like the ISIS recruitment, you know, of sort of disaffected people.
And there's this recruitment of people to just go and settle.
And then there's this recruitment of also these sort of more deranged, let's say, crazy young men to go out into the West Bank and commit pogroms, like to serve as like shock troops.
And it's completely, and if you go and try to protest it, I mean, you have every politician, you know, that you can name.
Coming out and condemning you.
I mean, it's just, sorry, I know I went on for a little bit there, but it's just, it baffles me how even if I try to put myself, you know, I'm a walk a mile in every man's shoes kind of thing.
I'm trying to be like, all right, if I was pro Israel and I wanted the continuation of Israel to survive, regardless of what I thought of individual policies, I don't think this would be the best move because this is turning a lot of people away from it.
So, in a way that, you know, I am somewhat in favor of some of these really radical things that they're doing because they are.
They're isolating themselves in a way that I don't think they've been isolated for decades.
But it is just God.
And so you have Americans going out here to the West Bank, and I could go out there tomorrow.
As a Jew, I could go out there and I could just kill a guy's goat or burn down his olive grove, and I would have the full protection of the IDF around me.
But then we had a guy in this show here, a guy from fucking New Jersey, who went out there to go be with the Palestinians and to do these observation missions, and he got shot by the IDF.
And so it's like there's this racial double standard that is enshrined basically into law, not only in Israel, but the US.
And we're still supposed to treat this like it's some kind of like normal, like it's like you're supposed to talk about Israel like you would talk about like Italy or something.
I mean, it's just completely ridiculous.
Yeah, I agree with you 100%, Brace.
And actually, the Palestinians from the very beginning could see that there was this organic relationship where the Western Foreign powers, the so called international community, as they like to present themselves, were actually the problem.
It's not just that they were part of the problem, they are the problem because they've created the conditions for this thing to happen.
And I'll be very honest with you, Brace.
This was never a Jewish idea.
Cutting People from Land00:04:51
It started off as a Christian Zionist idea.
It got then adopted by Zionists who were trying to find solutions to realities happening in.
In the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe, but they were actually not the best people existing in Eastern Europe.
The best people were people like the Bundists, the communists, the anarchists.
There were all sorts of movements that were seeking freedom there and that had solutions for freedom of all types and all ideological persuasions that did not actually think of the solution as colonialism.
So let's start with that.
But then let's go back to the ground in the region.
Palestinians having given up on everything, I want to go back to your earlier question about how our people organize.
After the Nakba, such destruction of everything around us, everything that belonged to us, that our people were dispersed in these refugee camps, in the places of exile.
And remember, this is a landed people.
These are peasants, most of them, the vast majority.
And then, you know, there are, of course, very important cities and towns in Palestine.
There are like at least 18 ones that are major.
Those are also, of course, affected, and people are feeling pain.
But in the refugee camps, especially, it was a site of the peasantry, for the most part, being forced into these locations.
So they were being proletarianized, actually.
If you think about it this way, they were cut off from their land.
You no longer had access to it.
These were people who were producing their own food.
They had a very organic connection with their space.
And suddenly, They're forced to subsist on handouts.
Okay, it's similar to the scenes we see in Gaza today.
It was very painful and humiliating for people.
And I know people have this image of the peasantry that looks down upon all of that.
But actually, these farmers are proud people.
They make their own life basically around them.
Their entire life was sustained through their relationship with the land.
And I'm not trying to romanticize it, I'm being very precise here.
They're producing their own food, the surplus you sell.
And you pay the taxes for, which is, of course, there was all these parasitical British administration tax collectors that were coming in.
But at the end of the day, you still have some level of control over your life.
Suddenly, you're thrown out.
You lose your land.
You lose your possessions.
You're put in these very miserable conditions.
These tent cities emerge across the Middle East.
And they never become, by the way, real structures until much later.
They start with tents for a long time.
Then, you know, from the mid 50s onwards, you start seeing like these zinc structures, zinc roof puts in, and like mud, very basic life.
Even though if you go to any Palestinian village, you'll see these beautiful old stone houses.
Of course, Israelis have destroyed many of them and built these national parks over them to cover up.
But it's like the old Arab house is a sturdy, nicely built, like good house, even if it's a humble one for a farmer.
It still was a very habitable space.
It could accommodate an extended family.
You had lots of space outside.
The kids could play in the fields.
You know, you had this degradation of the very conditions of life happening on a mass scale.
Everybody was concentrated now.
And these were people coming from different villages.
They end up actually, even in the refugee camps, by the way, reproducing their villages.
So you'll, and if you go to any refugee camp today, you will see that actually.
Certain areas are for different.
Clans and villages, and they work that way.
There are people that are coming from Yafa, these are the people that are coming from Lid, these are the people that come from this village in the Yafa district or that village in the Lid district, and that's how the camps are organized.
But everybody congregates now in the camps, and they're trying to figure out what's the solution to this.
And the youth, especially, are thinking seriously about this.
One thing they blame is the international order, of course, they know that it's behind this, but they're focusing less on Those objective factors like that, and they're thinking more about the subjective factors.
They're thinking about, like, okay, what could have been done to stop this, to confront this imperialist reality and the settler colonial manifestation that is being planted here?
Competing Rulers and Clans00:07:50
And their immediate answer was it's a fault of the Arab governments.
Because, yes, the people of Palestine could have fought and they did fight in 1947, but they didn't have enough arms.
They didn't have enough munitions.
They did not have any training.
And theoretically, there was an Arab League decision to afford that kind of support for the Palestinian people.
But because of internal Arab politics, it was not possible to implement that.
You know, you had King Abdullah of Jordan having ambitions to annex part of Palestine.
He signed the secret agreement with the Zionist movement, you know, to actually carry that out.
He was like, okay.
I know that the, you know, he was thinking in terms of like realpolitik.
Like, I know that the Western powers have decided that there's going to be a self-colonial state, so I might as well adjust to that reality.
I want to make sure that there's a what, whatever chunk is left from that, the that would go to me, not to the establishment of, let's say, an independent Palestinian state on that part from which the struggle could then be extended to liberate the rest.
Okay, so his thinking was, I'm going to do that, which meant that.
There was a lot of the politics at the time were geared towards preventing Palestinians from actually having independent military capacity.
He was very opposed to supporting the militias that were being formed by the Palestinian leadership and that were under the control of the Mufti, who was the arch enemy of King Abdullah.
Now, what's up, King Abdullah?
Yeah.
Can I just add one thing?
You know, it seems to me that that becomes a theme from 1947 afterwards these regional powers.
Or other Arab governments, both seeing, you know, knowing that they have to commit something to the Palestinian cause, but fearing the strength of a possible well organized Palestinian militia movement.
Absolutely, 100%.
And that's a very good observation, Brace.
Now, why do they feel they have to commit something to the Palestinian cause?
Two reasons.
One is the popular pressure from below, it's massive.
Yeah.
It's huge.
And you cannot, you know, I will be very honest with you, Brace.
I don't think there's been a cause in history that has had as much moral consensus on it in this region surrounding it as Palestine.
You know, I'll give you an example.
Cuba in Latin America has a lot of moral consensus.
There's a lot of moral support in many quarters, but it would be the left in Latin America that supports it.
Absolutely.
You have the right wing that doesn't like it.
Okay.
They'll be like, I hate the Cuban Revolution.
It represents whatever.
It's a partisan issue.
Okay.
Vietnam, same thing.
You know, you have right wingers in the region surrounding it.
They don't like it.
The ones that wanted, like, you know, independence from global capitalism and the United States and all of that, they loved it.
All right.
But Palestine, there was a general moral consensus around it, like almost absolute.
You know, maybe, maybe the comparison would be actually, you know what?
South Africa and Algeria would be comparable in that sense.
In their neighborhoods, they had that.
So there was this general feeling.
That this is wrong, deeply wrong.
Nobody can possibly think it's right, okay, on what, not in this region at least, okay?
And even people that collaborated with Israelis didn't think it was right, you know, fundamentally.
You look at like, you know, people like the Zmail family in Lebanon, for example, who, you know, they're not Zionists.
They didn't think it was great that Palestinians were robbed of their homes, you know, but they might have done Faustian deals with Israelis, you know.
So there's general moral consensus on this.
And then you have another factor.
The Zionists are an actual threat to the surrounding region because you're actually seeing here a strange formation being planted that has nothing to do with this regional surroundings, but yet it's in a central location, the location connecting the Asian part of the Arab world with the African part, the location that has so many different outlets to different areas.
To different parts of the region.
It has access to the Mediterranean.
It was actually supposed to be the original logic, actually, for British occupation of Palestine was that this was supposed to be where Iraqi oil flowed to the Mediterranean.
Okay, because in the natural harbor, the good natural harbor in the eastern Mediterranean, there's two one is Alexandretta in the north, and the French always wanted that.
You know, now it's part of Turkey, but you know, initially it was part of Syria, and then you had like the Bay of Haifa.
So, to cut that off, put it under the settler colony.
Is like a direct threat to economic interests.
There's a threat to the military well being of these states.
They're worried that their lands might be gone.
They're worried that you have so much support for these colonists and they're being given such advanced technology.
They're treated differently than they will ever be.
It becomes a problem.
And we see this happening later on.
So Palestinians are dealing with a situation where there is sympathy.
But also, there are complications.
First, there's these ambitions of these competing rulers.
Then there is the fact that these competing rulers are under British tutelage at this stage.
The moment in which Palestine, the Palestinian tragedy, the Nakba, the catastrophe was born, was a moment in which Britain had the, it was called the British moment in the Middle East by one of the famous British Orientalists called it that.
British moment in the Middle East.
As in Britain had like so much control over the region at this stage.
It had defense treaties and political treaties with Iraq, it was controlling it effectively through them.
Jordan, agent.
And it had some major influence after the French withdrawal from Syria and Lebanon.
For a couple of minutes, the British actually had a lot of influence there.
They certainly controlled the entirety of the Gulf, except for Saudi Arabia, which they still had some influence in, although the Saudi Arabians decided to do a smart move and establish an independent track with the United States.
So, King Abdelaziz of Saudi Arabia was a shrewd man.
He tried to make the different imperial powers compete with each other.
And he protected himself against the British by striking an American deal.
Okay.
So, this is Britain's moment.
It runs the region.
That means also that the region cannot operate freely in terms of pursuing an interest like supporting Palestinian freedom fully.
It has to always think oh, what would the British think?
How are we going to deal with that?
Okay, because the British could basically carry out a coup any moment, you know, they've done it before when they don't like what the rulers are doing.
They could put pressure, they could actually disrupt military supplies, they could do a lot of damage.
Okay, so they were in charge of that stage, and of course, we know that their policy was against the establishment of a Palestinian state and for the establishment of a Jewish state.
So, this is like something that has to be clear to all of us.
It was clear to Palestinians.
Intellectual Currents Emerge00:05:53
Yeah, different currents then emerging to respond to that reality.
And, Brace, if I talk too much, let me know.
But do you want me to describe these currents?
I mean, listen, yes, I would love you to.
This is, I think, the thing that I like talking about the most.
But, yes.
So let's think about these currents.
You have these Palestinians operating in this arena, some of them are part of the intellectual elite now.
And by intellectual elite, I don't mean by the way, fancy people sitting, whatever.
I'm talking like ordinary students, ordinary organic intellectuals, like people like you, Brace.
You know, people like that care actually about the world around them and actually interact with it, think about it seriously, which are, by the way, most often that's more like advanced than I always say this, by the way, you'll find more intellect in any Palestinian refugee camp than most universities.
And I'm a university professor.
You know, there's a lot of serious debate that goes into those spaces.
And there the stakes are high, so actually they take ideas very seriously.
Okay, and so there were all these people emerging, are looking around them, they live in misery, they've been proletarianized, and you have like also people from different backgrounds, you know, even the ones that are from lower middle class backgrounds that just managed to get a scholarship to study somewhere like Cairo or Damascus or Baghdad.
They're starting to discuss the world around them.
High school students, by the way, they were discussing the world around them, and they were like, What are we going to do about this?
Now, one answer would have been since the Arab states are a big part of the problem, there needs to be an overthrow of the reactionary conservative regimes that control these states.
And by reactionary conservative regimes, what they meant was regimes that represent a connection with the empire and whose job was to mediate between the British Empire and the French Empire.
Than this part of the world.
If I may interrupt for one second, I have advice here to any, really any ruler of a somewhat backwards, despotic, maybe reactionary country.
Never let him go to university because, like you mentioned, it's true.
Like you don't need to be like somebody who gets 50 years in grad school or whatever to start getting ideas because we see this happen a lot throughout the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, before as well.
But really, throughout those years, especially in the Middle East and Africa, is you'll have these certain people who go to university, oftentimes a colonial university, in the cases of Africa, a bunch.
And people will start getting these, they'll start reading books and they'll start sort of getting ideas.
And then they'll come back.
And like in Ethiopia, for instance, people came back and they were like, this sucks.
This is horrible.
And certainly, you know, the ideas of nationalism inform this, yes, but also ideas of developmentalism.
And then also of just democracy, because oftentimes, like you mentioned, like these were not all of those countries, but some of these countries are ruled by kings.
And so, a student movement, if it develops, and again, this is just advice to anybody who's listening who runs a sort of some small kingdom in some backwater country don't let anyone go to university.
Haile Selassie had the right idea where he's like, we can't let anyone go to college.
Then, eventually, too many people wanted to go to college.
He had to let some people.
But it really can bite you in the ass.
And that's sort of what happens also with the Palestinian movement because you have a huge, I mean, you're mentioning this, but like there's a huge intellectual current that really begins.
And there's all these various competing journals and sort of papers that are written of people trying to assess their immediate situation.
Very true, Brace.
But I should note that the rulers on this front were damned if they do, damned if they don't when it came to the university question because.
For example, the ones that prevented people from going to university, like some dude that I wrote about, actually, my first book was on the Dufar Revolution in Oman.
You know, that was a population that was banned from going to primary school, not just university.
Okay.
And the people then got very upset because they were looking at the world around.
They were like, well, we want to have primary school and we want to have a high school.
And actually, why not?
Let's have a university even.
That might be a good idea.
And they ended up, of course, revolting.
So it's like a, it's a, it's a, for these rulers, maybe a better advice is how about like you forget about absolutist monarchical rule and maybe do constitutional rule or something like that.
A lot of, yeah, you know what?
Do you think constitutional rule?
Do constitutional for three years, those guys will get overthrown by nationalists, and you go to Monaco.
Okay, that's the best you're gonna go.
Once they start opening universities, you gotta get out of there.
Anyways, I don't think we're in the business of giving advice to reactionary regimes.
So, although maybe you would make a fine advisor potentially to the, I see you have the, you know, certain knowledge base for that.
But seriously, like when it comes to the Palestinians, they're going to these universities.
Actually, even the high schools, I'm telling you, there was some serious organizing even in primary schools.
All of these, the point is, there were these spaces where people could congregate.
And whenever you had people congregating and talking, you have something emerging.
Confusing Cultural Integration00:09:38
And that thing was different than the kind of conversations that were happening in Palestine before the dispossession of our people and their dispersion.
Because, you know, when you're not dispersed, you're still thinking about the local village issues.
You know, they could, it's not always like the big national question that's on your mind.
You're also thinking about next year's harvest, you know, and which is totally fine.
I mean, that's legit.
If you're a farmer, that's what you should be thinking about because that's your life.
Okay.
But now the only subject is how can we go back?
Because you're living in this misery and pain, and you're trying to figure out a way out of this.
You've lost relatives, you've had injuries.
You've had this horror.
Your life has been turned into horror, and there's complete disenfranchisement.
And by the way, there's also statelessness.
And this is where sometimes people confuse the Palestinian issue with other issues around it.
There are a lot of issues in the Middle East that are very important, very important, and that should be thought about seriously.
In Sudan, there's a major question.
There's been a Kurdish question as well for a long time.
There's been so many different questions.
But we should also always think about their specificity.
And one of the specificities of the Palestinian question.
That makes it slightly different than others is that suddenly, because these people are expelled from the land, they don't have a passport.
You know what life means if you don't have a passport or nationality?
It means you don't have the right to work.
It means that you don't have the right.
Of course, like with the police, you're always afraid because you don't have rights.
You're at the mercy of the host country and it can do to you whatever it wants to do to you.
Now, one only section of the Palestinian people gets citizenship.
Which is the Palestinians in Jordan.
And that's not because King Abdullah was trying to be generous.
It was because he annexed the West Bank.
So he had to have a proclamation being like, well, everybody in my territory now is a citizen of, we named everything as the Ashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
So he could have, by the way, named it the Ashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Palestine.
He chose not to.
We can talk about that later, why he chose not to.
But that was it.
The raiser of Palestine meant, okay, everybody had to become Jordanian citizens.
He embarked on a project of national consolidation.
Along those lines.
But of course, Palestinians were not interested in erasing their Palestinian identity, even though it's not because they had a problem with Jordan.
By the way, Jordan is the closest country to Palestine, certainly to central Palestine, which is the West Bank.
The districts of Jerusalem, Hebron, and Nablus have always had very strong connections with the other side of the river because it's just like literally a river between them.
So imagine if you're in Ohio or something and you have a river running, it doesn't mean that you're separate from the other places.
I mean, it's also just not a big area.
That's something that's always worth like.
I always have to remind people, like, I live in Houston, right?
So I always remind people in the Houston region.
The greater Houston region is the size of Palestine, 26,000 kilometers.
Like, if you count like Galveston and you go a little bit towards Beaumont, like, it's like 26,000 kilometers.
It's insane, you know?
Yeah.
This is a small place.
Okay.
Lebanon is even smaller, by the way.
It's like 10,000 kilometers.
So it wouldn't even, you know, be greater Houston.
Greater Houston would be almost triple the size.
So these are small places.
Okay.
And they're culturally integrated.
Okay.
But it's not of the sort that the Zionists come to you, you know, being like, oh, well, Jordanes are Palestinians.
And so what?
Let them be Jordanians.
It's like, okay.
You know, we're culturally integrated with Canada.
Okay.
People, I would say, if you're in Detroit, Michigan, you're culturally integrated with Windsor, Ontario.
I mean, that doesn't mean that the people of Windsor should be pushed off to Detroit and become Americans.
It's like, what is this crazy?
Like, or the other way around.
Like, so it's also like, okay, you might be culturally integrated with the people on the other side of this river here, but like, what about, aren't you also probably pretty culturally integrated with the people who are like on the other side of this valley from you?
Of course.
Yeah, so this field from you.
I mean, it's sort of a ridiculous thing.
I mean, that's one of the things that you still hear.
But wait, somebody from Ukraine can show up and they can lay claim to this land.
But no, not you.
You saw a couple weeks ago, there's Indians now.
There's one of the lost tribes they found.
Moved about 200 Indian Jewish people to Israel.
Of course, they'll find lost tribes elsewhere.
Don't worry about it.
They'll keep finding them.
Yeah.
I mean, it's very sad.
I mean, the whole thing is so sad.
But Palestinians, like in that moment, they're sitting there being like, okay, so we don't have papers.
And even in Jordan, where people have papers, they're like, we're unable to actually work towards the liberation of our land.
We have the majority of our land, the best coastal areas, the most fertile areas, the lands that we came from are taken over by these settlers.
And we're supposed to sit there and accept.
And by the way, the settlers take them over, expel the people, and then they say, You are not allowed to come back.
And then they deny that they did the expulsion.
Well, guess what?
The very fact that you're preventing people from going back constitutes expulsion.
You might say, oh, they were expelled as a result of war.
Well, bring them back if it's a result of war.
Okay, what are you talking about?
Allow them to go back to their homes if it's a result of war.
If you weren't really behind it.
But no, it was, of course, a result of a calculated policy.
We know this now.
There's so much archival work that's been done on this.
But there's a lot of denialism.
And this is what I want people to think about, race.
The entirety of our thought process around Israel is two things one is distortion.
Of things that actually happened and denial of things that happened.
These are the two things that are going on.
You distort and then you deny.
And all of this is geared towards one purpose to say there are no Palestinians, or yes, there are Palestinians, but good luck, tough luck to them.
Let them deal with their issues elsewhere.
Now that we have the land, it's Jewish land.
Yeah.
Really, really, really weird worldview.
And if a Palestinian protests against that, they're anti Semite.
And now, of course, now that our Jewish comrades are growing in numbers, Okay, which is a very, actually, it's a phenomenon that brings some optimism and it's a good, very good trend.
Okay, unfortunately, they don't happen to be the richer Jews in the United States.
It happens to be the ordinary Jews.
Well, actually, by the way, on a side note, we're going on a tangent race, but most of the anti Semitic tropes are created out of the billionaire class.
They actually come from it, which has always been a small minority of the Jewish population.
Everybody else has to pay for it.
And then those very same billionaires now are actually working to disenfranchise Jews from Judaism.
They're trying to expel, but they're telling you, like, if you actually exercise your humanity and you say, I don't want to use the good name, I don't want to tarnish the good name of Judaism with these crimes, they're saying, oh, well, you're no longer Jewish because I decided to.
Webster decided to, or Epstein decided to, or somebody.
I mean, there's also, I think, a kind of a tension there where probably I would say the majority of. anti Zionist, not all, but the majority of anti Zionist Jewish people are not religious.
And I think probably a majority of religious Jews, I mean, I would say without a doubt, a majority of religious Jews, and certainly almost every religious Jewish institution in the US is ardently pro Zionist.
And so you would see which is weird, which is weird by the way, a weird reversal of reality.
I know, of course, exactly.
It was the other way around initially.
The religious Jews were very opposed to this whole insane project.
Of creating the settler colonial state because it goes against Jewish doctrine.
I mean, this was like the relationship with the Holy Land is a messianic relationship.
God has a solution for that place and for whatever is going to happen there upon the arrival of the Messiah and all of that.
So, this is very clear to people.
But, anyways, we could go on on this.
But, by the way, I have a good friend, Ben Moser.
He's about to release a book on this, actually, on.
On basically anti Zionism as being a Jewish tradition.
It's going to be, you know, people should check it out when it appears.
It's going to, I think, I think it'll be released like in September or something.
But, anyways, going back to our conversation on Palestinian formations, you have one tradition then developing where people are like, what's the solution to my problem?
Anti-Zionism as Tradition00:04:55
It's to overthrow these Arab states.
And that becomes their revolutionary answer to the question of Palestine.
Now, their outlook.
Is based on the idea that you overthrow the reactionary regimes and then you unify the region.
Because actually, the reason why Palestine fell was that these states around it were weak.
The reason why they were weak is that they were divided and they were divided intentionally by colonialism.
This is the worldview, this is the basic idea of actually contemporary Arab nationalism in that iteration.
I don't think it's, yeah, I think it stands up.
But that was their view.
I will give you like competing views that.
Didn't think that stood up in a second.
But for the most part, that was a general view that was shared by a lot of people.
A lot of people thought that makes a lot of sense.
If you had Syria and Egypt and Lebanon and Jordan and Iraq united, you know, and maybe the Gulf states, who knows, like, you know, like you could have a very formidable regional force that would not have been defeated on the hands of basically these Zionist militias, which, by the way, to be fair to the Zionist militias, it was an entire army.
This was like a 90,000 person army that was.
Armed to the hilt.
We're not talking about when people think militias, there were militias, but they were actually very well organized and heavily armed and trained.
So if you had a better regional situation, this wouldn't have happened.
And that way of thinking, there's two major parties that come out of that.
One is the Ba'ath Party, which had a tradition initially outside of Palestine.
Started in Syria.
And when we say bath, by the way, it's very different than the bath of Assad and Saddam and all of these crazy military baths.
In an earlier phase, it came out of very particular characters like Michel Aflak, Salah Din Battar.
These were people who were born in the Maidan quarter of Damascus.
They were Syrian intellectuals that grew up during the time of the The first Syrian Great Revolt, 1925, 1927.
And these were, you know, the Medan area was the main area, urban area in Damascus that was affected by that revolt.
It was like where the hardcore pro revolt people were for a simple reason, which is that these people were grain merchants.
So they had a strong connection with the countryside.
And the grain producing countryside is where the revolt happened, of course.
It started in the Druze areas in the countryside, that was the main citadel of it.
So, you have these populations affected by that.
They really hate colonials.
And initially, you know, they start off as communist fellow travelers.
You know, these two people go to Paris, they study there, like with, and, you know, they have these encounters with the communists.
And they start writing for the communist press actually in Syria and Lebanon.
At the time, there was a united Syrian Lebanese Communist Party.
But with time, they get pissed off with the communists because the directives from Moscow sometimes derail local work.
Yeah.
So there was a moment when Moscow was keen on the United Front in France, and they advised their local communist parties not to fight against the French colonialists with as much ferocity in that moment.
So in Lebanon, Syria, that meant that people like fellow travelers like Salah Aflak and Salah Haddim Bata were like, what the hell does that mean?
So they start questioning the communism.
They weren't like party hardcore people, anyways, but they were in the kind of general realm of ideas.
They start advocating a certain thing like an Arab version of socialism, which is, you know, not as hardcore as the total takeover of the means of production, but like what would we call like some kind of social democracy version of sorts, okay?
Control over big industries and national resources, et cetera.
But also, they're vehemently, you know, advocating this idea of Arab unity that becomes very important for them.
Yes.
And they're saying, like, look, this Arab land cannot actually have a future without unity because it will be destroyed.
It will be taken over by the European powers.
They divided this region.
And of course, these are people that were born at a time when this region was united under the Ottomans.
Contradictions in Arab Left00:15:37
These were all Ottoman Arab territories.
This is why it's so silly when Zionists are like, there's no state called Palestine.
Yeah, there was no state called Syria or Lebanon or Iraq or anything.
It was the Ottoman Empire.
That does not mean that there is no geographic concept of Syria or of Palestine or of Iraq.
And it does not mean that the people in these areas have no rights to their lands just because they were not, again, nationalist xenophobes connected to this.
And plus, these were artificial boundaries in many ways.
Now, Palestinians joined this movement late.
Their branch starts around this in 1947.
It's established by young intellectuals.
They're in their late 20s, early 30s.
But these were people who had seasoned political experience.
I mean, particularly somebody like Bahjat Abu Gharbiya, for example.
Very famous character in Palestine because he had political experience in 1936 when he was a very young man, he participated in the revolt in Palestine there.
And in 1948, he played a key role in the defense of the eastern neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, the Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.
And had it not been for the defense he had organized, probably Jerusalem would have fell to the Zionist militias early on.
Because the Jordanian army eventually came to the defense of it.
That's one of the few arenas in which actually it fought really hard.
But you had this earlier period when people like this guy, Bazat Abu Ghrabiyah, were fighting hard.
Now he comes and he gets attracted to this idea.
You know, there are other characters I won't mention all by name because they're not well known in the US, but you get the idea.
These are teachers for the most part.
And the Bath was always like in its initial base was the school teachers.
Yeah.
It was big on that.
On the other side of the Arab national spectrum, You had a competing party born, and that came from a slightly younger crew.
It coalesced around two Palestinian Christian medical students, George Habash and Wadia Haddad.
Both of them were from LID, okay, or what the British call, you know, the LIDA, okay, or LOD, sometimes is referred to.
Okay, so LID, which is where, by the way, the airport is at, you know, Tel Aviv Airport, what they call Ben Gurion Airport, is there.
It's like Lid Airport originally.
That's the town they come from.
Their parents were like middling merchants, okay, dealing with like Lid was a logistical center, it was where a lot of trains and things were, you know, interconnected there.
So it was a good center for that kind of thing.
It's also the site of a major massacre and a very famous and nasty death march.
And actually, it was a site where George Habash, this guy who founded this current movement of Arab nationalists, He lost a sister there.
That was the biggest event in his life.
It was very painful.
Of course, he was a medical volunteer.
He had been a medical student at the American University of Beirut.
He comes back when he hears about what's going on in Palestine.
He starts volunteering in the local kind of medical dispensary or whatever.
And they have nothing.
They can't really help people.
They barely have medicine.
He sees a lot of death and horror around them.
All of this is, life is falling apart in that place, you know.
And he's like, what are we going to do?
Now, he is influenced by the thought of an American University of Beirut professor who happens to also, by the way, come from the Maidan neighborhood in Damascus and got socialized through the same process as Salahuddin Bittar and Michel Afla.
This guy was called Konstantin Zurek.
He wrote a famous book called The Meaning of the Nakba.
He coined the word Nakba, by the way, the meaning of catastrophe.
Now, this guy has a different political experience, though, than Afla and Zurich.
He was very attracted by clandestine models of organizing.
And they had this idea of establishing something they called the Arab Clandestine Group.
So, throughout the 30s and whatever, they were seeking to overthrow colonials in the Arab world through having this clandestine network.
It was mainly concentrated in intellectual circles.
But they had branches of Kuwait and Iraq and Syria.
And I feel like that's not very unusual.
For colonial or for anti colonial movements.
I mean, you do see the sort of formation of secret societies in China, for instance, both reactionary but also progressive ones, in Indochina, in India.
And there is a sort of, and it's interesting because you also see in the revolutions that took place within the European continent and in the US for that matter, also the germs of them often began in like Masonic organizations or pseudo Masonic organizations.
Of course.
Again, secret societies.
I mean, you know, it makes sense.
It makes sense.
And also, actually, for somebody like Costi's Rig, he was actually studying those experiments.
Exactly.
The biggest things that he was inspired by in the 1930s were things like the Carbonari in Italy because he was obsessed with the Risorgimento.
He's like, the division of Arab lands was a big thing, you know?
Yeah.
And again, let's remember these people were born before it happened.
So when it did happen, they were like, what the hell?
Why should we accept these boundaries?
So they were revolting against these boundaries.
But also, they were revolting and the dismemberment of a key part of this region, which is Palestine.
Like somebody like Hosni's Rig, for him, he felt it personally the loss of Palestine.
It wasn't like, oh, this is somebody else's land and I'm doing solidarity here.
No, it was much more intimate than that.
He thought of it as this is my land, actually.
These are my people.
And again, he comes from that kind of.
He goes to the Orthodox school.
It's the same school that produces this thought.
I mean, there's a whole thing.
That I can go into, but we're not going to have time for that.
About the important role of minorities, actually, being a vanguard in these movements.
Because, and it's not like some kind of, you know, minorities are always accused of like, well, they're conspiracy, whatever, and why are they doing this?
Actually, they're doing it because they have an interest in a future in which there is citizenship for all, equal citizenship for all.
And they're doing it because they have an interest in actually a strong, Sovereign reality emerging out of the colonial condition because actually, weak, dysfunctional states the first people that pay a big price under those conditions of destabilization and dysfunction and weakness are minorities.
So, we have this tradition that's long standing in this region where you have involvement of people like Kosti, Ezraic, and others.
Anyways, Zoris Habes with the Haddad, they get.
They enroll in the circle of Christus Reich.
He was thinking again about Italy, resurgimento.
He even thinks about it, discusses the German unification model, although it's not necessarily the one appropriate for this case, but studying it.
There's also studying China, interestingly.
This is why it's a bit eclectic at this stage.
They're fascinated by China, by the way.
And remember, the Chinese revolution is victorious in 1949.
And they're like, okay, how did the Chinese Communist Party do this?
And what they're fascinated by is that it was able to unify China and actually expel the foreign influence.
This they love.
They're like, even though they're not communists, it might be even anti communists at this stage, this particular current.
They are anti communists at this stage, but they love the Communist Party of China.
Because they're like, it was able to unify this country and expel the foreign invaders who were like, you know, sucking the blood of the people and all of that.
This was the language that we're using.
So you have now the movement of Arab nationalists.
That becomes the mother movement of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which I'm sure people have heard of, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Okay.
So, Baath movement of Arab nationalists, these are the people that are calling for Arab nationalism.
And they become a core current.
But they're contending with other visions.
There's the communists.
The communists, however, have a problem, which is they've been unable to build as big of a mass organization as they would have been able to because of stupid Soviet policy, idiotic Soviet policy, reactionary Soviet policy, I should say, actually, when it came to this particular issue.
And we have to contend with this, actually, on the left.
The Soviet Union did such a disservice for the Arab left.
I say this everywhere.
Sometimes people are like, oh, but you know, the Soviet Union gave help and it counterbalanced the Americans.
I'm like, sure, but it screwed the Arab left when it came to Palestine.
Yeah, yeah.
There's interesting documents about sort of how the Israeli Communist Party was able to orient itself in the years after 1947.
It's a very confused phase.
And communist parties in the region really did suffer because of this, because of this sort of.
And this was an often, I think that the.
The Soviets sort of more later found their footing throughout the 1960s, but still it always became this sort of thing.
They had this weird relationship with Israel because there was, I mean, later there was more opposition, but they also had these linkages between the two.
And also they had kind of a lot of spies in Israel as well that they needed to get stuff from.
And they sort of viewed it, they thought that they could sort of manipulate it in this, and maybe they were to some extent, but it was really, there was a host of bad policy that was made.
Very true.
And this bad policy meant that basically the communists had to accept the partition resolution.
Yes.
Against actually their original positions.
And this was a big deal in all Arab communist parties.
A lot of people opposed the partition resolution.
And then they were forced by Moscow's henchmen in the region, particularly the head of the Syrian communist party, Khaled Bikdash.
They were forced to do these awful kind of auto critiques and apologies and begging for forgiveness for betraying their revolution, for questioning Soviet policy on this.
So it was a really sad kind of situation.
But essentially, you still have the communists on the scene, and there were people attracted to their message because although they supported the partition resolution, They still had some credit because they organized against the depravity of some of the Arab regimes around this.
And they were actually opposing the imperialist policy that tied Arab regimes to the global structure that created the settler colonial reality.
So you have the communists operating, but again, they have their own scene.
What they're focused on is actually the Palestinian right to self determination within the lands that were allocated to the Arab state under the UN partition resolution.
But they're also focused on confronting.
Western imperialist schemes, particularly things like the Baghdad Pact, which was, of course, a Cold War scheme that sought to basically create a front against communism in this region, but that was really intended to promote Western interests there, the expense also of regional independence.
So the communists become very important actors in combating that.
Another current that is emerging at this time in Palestinian circles and in strong.
Ways is, you know, very different to this Arab nationalist and the communist internationalist carrot.
This is the Islamic carrot.
And really, we're talking here, the biggest formation that we're talking about is the Muslim Brotherhood.
Muslim Brotherhood, of course, is initially established in Egypt, but by the late 40s, it's being spread elsewhere.
And in the case of Palestine, they achieved good traction initially because of the fact that.
The Muslim brothers actually were the first volunteers to be sent from Egypt on a large scale.
They were very committed to fighting against the expulsion of the Palestinian people and against the Nakba.
They went and sent volunteers there.
They fought really hard.
So people were impressed by their dedication and seriousness in that regard.
And you have them establishing a strong foothold, especially in Gaza.
Which was a part of Palestine that bordered Egypt and had very strong connections with Egypt, including and especially cities that had a strong Muslim Brotherhood presence in them, like Ismaili, actually, which is not far away and is an important center for Muslim Brotherhood life and activity.
So you had these connections emerging that facilitated the growth of this current at this stage.
Now, this current has a different kind of DNA than the ones that we mentioned before.
And there is a big tension between it and the other currents, partly because at this stage in its history, it decided in the post Nakba period to not adopt a policy of overthrowing the existing regimes or of militarily.
Confronting the Israeli state.
The main focus at the stage was on something that the Muslim Brotherhoods considered to be their number one priority, which was social reform.
Interesting.
So, they were saying that Palestine failed because people had left the good ways of old Islam.
They failed to actually follow the dictates of Islam, which include social solidarity, which include people supporting each other, which include people being pious, exercising their life as an ummah, as a religious community.
Fatah Seeks Center Stage00:15:11
And until that happens, you're not going to have.
Any situation where you can have liberation.
So they were very focused on this kind of aspect of social reform or what they considered to be social reform.
Yeah.
You know, combating sin, combating, you know, going back to the mosque, being honest.
There was a focus on these kind of individual virtues that were religiously prescribed, not cheating, not.
So if you live the good life, the life of a good Muslim, then that is the first step towards becoming a better human being, but also becoming a better society.
You fix yourself from within.
There's this islaha and nafs, the fixing of the, you know, reforming the self.
And then you have the social reform.
They're doing this, but they have some contradictions emerging out of that.
By the way, they have a natural base because, of course, you have all these pious people, they like this idea.
All the mosque goers, of course, there were mosque goers that belonged to the other, you know, currents, but the other currents were secular.
Yeah, and throughout the Arab states around them, there is this divide also between oftentimes a more educated or proletarianized, more secularized working class and then upper class or middle class, and then a huge part of the working class that were also quite conservative and religious.
And then, as far as I know, like in Egypt, I'm thinking, there's also quite a lot of, in the countryside, very religious people.
That I believe also become very attracted to the Muslim Brotherhood at this time.
Yeah, although, by the way, we should note initially the Muslim Brotherhood is not a working class phenomena in terms of the original founders and whatever in Palestine.
You know, like in Gaza, for example, you know, the big figures are people from families like the Khazavdar family and the Zaini family.
These are like very powerful and notable families, okay, in the Gaza setting.
There is a thing, there's also all the pious merchants.
You know, there's a mercantile brotherhood.
Like, it's like a whole scene.
It starts from there.
In Jordan, by the way, which is important for Palestine, is people like Abdul Latif Abu Khura, who's a prominent merchant from the city of Salt, but who had also a marriage connection to the founder of the brotherhood in Egypt, Hassan al Banna.
You know, these are the people that are pushing the brotherhood initially.
So it works with their mentality because it's not an anti capitalist formation.
Okay.
Although it's saying that there should be social reform, there should be concern for the poor, it views it in terms of a model that talks about social solidarity rather than class analysis.
So it does attract that section.
But with time, they establish a base, of course, in the more popular arenas.
But again, they're not the biggest formation.
In Palestine at this stage.
And really, they have a following, but they're not the only show in town.
And in many ways, they get eclipsed by the Arab nationalist scene, especially as Nasser gains more popularity.
The majority of people actually, you know, they get fascinated by Nasser at this stage.
Yeah, well, he's quite charismatic.
He's quite charismatic, but also, you know, he's a leader of the biggest state in the region at the time, Egypt, the most important one at the time.
He has access to the radio waves.
He has Saut al Arab, the voice of the Arabs program, which people are addicted to.
Like, and it's like he's coming and talking about.
Sovereignty and freedom and liberation of Palestine and control over national resources.
And he's actually fighting the good fight.
You know, like he nationalizes the Swiss Canal.
He reorients himself away from the West and advocates on alignment.
You know, he's one of the main heroes of Bandung, et cetera.
Like all of that attracts a big following.
So, and especially after 1956 when the tripartite aggression, and again, that was an Israeli led initiative.
Attack on Egypt by speaking, by the way.
I can't think of Iran today without thinking about that.
That was the Israeli plan that was presented to the British and the French.
They convinced them that this is the way that we're going to do it and we're going to have regime change.
Mazur is going to fall and everything's going to be really easy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's going to be so good for everybody.
It's like, yeah.
So, you know, that's the general mood.
But there's an interesting thing that happens in the Muslim Brotherhood that is worth taking pause at.
Because some of their circles get disillusioned, the younger people amongst them.
You have these, especially in Gaza where they're around, you know, like there's.
Gaza becomes, by the way, a place where all politics gets intensified because pretty much 70 to 80% of the population of Gaza is not from Gaza, it's from the surrounding districts of southern Palestine.
They get expelled into it and they're concentrated.
A territory of refugees, a very tiny strip that was created for refugees.
You could think of it as a gigantic refugee camp, actually, in many ways.
Although, of course, the city of Gaza has a huge, long tradition, and there are smaller cities like Khan Yunus that have been in existence for centuries, but millennia, you know.
But the point is that you have such an incredible amount of, you know, refugee organizing taking place there.
And, um, Some of them joined the Muslim Brotherhood, you know, others joined the communists.
The communists were very strong there.
But the ones that joined the Muslim Brotherhood are disillusioned by the lack of action.
They thought that the leadership would allow them to do armed cells that would go across into the areas surrounding Gaza to try to do sabotage campaigns.
They wanted to liberate the land.
These were young people, high school students mostly.
That wanted to liberate the land.
And the leadership tells them, no, do social reform.
They're like, what?
Social reform?
What are you talking about?
What planet are you living on?
Are you on crack or what are you on?
Like, it's social reform when the whole people have been dispossessed and when we're living in misery in these refugee camps.
And, you know, it becomes like a strange idea for them.
They're like, this is ridiculous.
And some of them decide that there needs to be an alternative to this.
These include prominent people in their youth wing.
The head of the youth was Khalil Wazir, Abu Jihad.
He becomes a very important individual in the Palestinian Revolution.
He's the number two to Yasser Arafat.
The other person that's like that also is very prominent in Muslim Brotherhood organizing.
He's a guy in Gaza called Abu Iyad.
He comes originally from Yaffa.
And he ends up becoming a refugee in Gaza and he joins the Brotherhood.
And again, he's like, what are we supposed to be talking about?
What are you talking about, social reform?
That's ridiculous.
We want to fight.
We want to organize guerrilla groups and engage in armed struggle.
And they do actually carry out some missions here and there.
Anyways, those guys start connecting with students that were coming from all parts of Palestine, but especially from Gaza, there was a large number of them because Gaza had been put under Egyptian rule.
The student organizations in Cairo, the Palestinian student organizations, I had a lot of Gaza organizers in them.
One of them, and the most talented, probably, he was very talented.
He knew how to get things done, was a guy called Yasser Arafat.
Okay?
That was his specialty getting things done through.
It's a good specialty to have.
Yeah, and it's like through wheeling dealing.
He had a.
He was a bit emerged like he could do tricks, he could do sketchy moves, uh, he could do, but he knew how to maneuver.
Yeah, he had like a natural instinct for that, and he was also hyper as hell and, um, basically completely pragmatic.
Yeah, unlike the scene that we've been describing, that that basically, uh, the scene we've been describing is the rise of the ideological party, by the way, in the region, and yeah, stay inside of that.
This did not appeal to Yasser Al Fad at all.
He was like, all of these intellectuals are doing intellectual masturbation.
I don't care about that.
I want to be practical here.
This situation is intolerable.
It's really bad.
We need to be organized.
And the thing about him is, unlike, let's say, the Arab nationalists who put really their hopes in the Arab state, or the Arab communists who worshipped Moscow, they thought the Soviet Union could do no wrong.
Really, they really did.
I mean, the old saying goes like, if it rained in Moscow, people would open their umbrellas in Damascus.
You know, like it's like, you know, that was an outlook race.
He was like, I don't believe in any of these states.
He's like, the lesson that he took from the Nakba was the Palestinian people got screwed by having dependency on external states.
And they need to self organize and self organize in a way that.
Does not allow a single state to control.
This became his lifelong philosophy.
And that becomes very important for understanding the political thinking behind Fatih, which is the organization that he and his comrades eventually established.
They're coming in with this attitude.
And his actual trajectory is one of not belonging to any particular party, but of being close to the Muslim brothers when it came to the student work at the universities in Cairo.
So, Cairo is the place where the first major student organization for Palestinians is born.
And Yasser Arafat becomes like the president of that organization through essentially mobilizing the Muslim brothers against the communists and the Arab nationalists in those elections.
But yeah, tell me, Brace, you wanted to say something.
I mean, the way I've really understood Fatah is like at the beginning, especially throughout their entire existence, I guess, they really did seek to be almost at the center of the Palestinian movement by incorporating different parts of different currents.
I mean, Fatah was by their own telling.
You know, inspired in publications that they put out, they would put out these like studies of these oftentimes communist revolutions in other countries.
But then at the same time, like you mentioned, they would have these sort of deep links to sections of the Muslim Brotherhood.
And they advocated, as far as I know, for a sort of moderate socialism that wasn't really necessarily always explicated.
But they sought, I think, very clearly to become the center of.
Of Palestinian political action?
Well, I mean, I wouldn't exactly phrase it this way, Brace.
I think what it is, it's more like even when it comes to advocating socialism or advocating, actually, their main staple philosophy was we don't need to advocate any of these things.
They were a reaction to the ideological parties.
The main thing that Arafat was saying is he was looking around and he's seeing Palestinians doing a lot of work for the Ba'ath Party and doing a lot of work for the Movement of Arab Nationalists and doing a lot of work for the communists.
And even for the Muslim brothers.
And he's like, wait a second.
These parties are engaged in battles in the regional arena surrounding Palestine.
But what are they doing for Palestine directly?
Nothing.
They're engaging in this action in the hope that liberating this region or running it along the ideological lines prescribed by their respective ideological party will result in the liberation of Palestine in the long run.
And his view was like, I want to work in the present.
I'm an angry.
You know, young man, not angry by the way, in this Orientalist sense.
Of course, you hear these people that try to racialize it, being like angry Arab.
Anybody would be angry if they lost their homeland.
You know, he's like, I want action.
We need liberation yesterday, not tomorrow.
You know what I mean?
It's like this outlook.
And he was a very restless individual.
But it's not just him thinking along these lines because he's just an example.
He's leading a group in Cairo.
You have the other group that is key to the formation of Fateh, which is operating in Damascus.
And again, Damascus was the strong capital of Arab nationalism.
It was also a very strong place for communism.
It was in the 1950s, Damascus was an incredibly ideologically diverse space.
You know, there were also the Syrian socialists, there were all these Syrian social nationalist parties, there were all these people that were operating there.
And you have these Palestinian refugee students that are meeting and being like, okay, Maybe none of these parents are actually talking about the central issue because they see it as a natural, like liberation of Palestine is a natural almost result of them achieving their objectives regionally.
And that's not appealing to these young people.
They thought also that there's too much ideology and not enough action.
So those student circles actually converge into something that's called Arab Palestine.
They formed something, and these were high school students.
And sometimes middle school students.
It's a small group, but out of this group, a lot of future Fatah leaders emerge.
They're called the Arabs of Palestine.
Okay, it's a small student study.
They find like some kind of farmhouse, they start training, like they bring like a gun and start training on it.
Reorganizing Palestinian Representation00:17:41
Like, you know what I mean?
And they're doing like meetings in their refugee camp.
Yeah.
And, you know, the main person who's like coming out of this environment in Damascus and who's starting like circles, in addition to this, the circle I just mentioned, was a charismatic character called, well, or more like influential character, I should say.
Or more than charismatic, called Adil Abdul Karim.
And he's this guy who's like coming out and saying, Look, we have this situation, and somebody needs to take action.
And nobody is doing it.
His famous phrasing was he would end every meeting by saying, Who shall hang the bell?
And this is in reference to a story from a famous Arabic classical text called Kaila Wadimna, where the rats are trying to find a solution for the cat.
This aggressive cat like infestation.
You know, they saw it as like, oh, these cats are attacking us.
It's actually an old ancient Indian story that gets absorbed into Arab literature.
And they're like, okay, somebody needs to hang a bell on the neck of the cat so that we all hear it.
But the question becomes, who will hang the bell?
And it's like, this is the thing that Hadar Abdul Kayim kept on saying.
It's like, everybody knows what needs to be done.
The same people need to organize.
And They need to also be able to carry out a war of liberation for their homeland.
They can't wait for the entirety of the Arab world to be liberated before their homeland gets liberated.
But yet, who's going to do that?
So, this became like a big question.
And in the Fatih world, that becomes like a central issue.
And it takes them to a journey and a trajectory that's very different.
Eventually, Yasser Arafat and this guy, Adil Abdul Karim, both meet in Kuwait.
Okay, and like they end up founding Vatah in Kuwait.
But Yasser Arafat, when he first encounters Adil Abdul Karim, what he tells him is I want to have a revolution like the Algerian revolution in Palestine, where the people of Algeria are organized into a unified front that includes everybody regardless of their ideology.
Whether they're communists or nationalists or whatever, they have a front.
And it doesn't matter what you think the future of society should look like, okay?
It doesn't matter what you think about your latest analyses of internal Arab questions or economic systems or world alignments.
If you want to liberate Palestine, you should have a space in this front.
And that's the only thing you're going to care about.
And they strike a deal.
Okay, they come together.
They're like, okay, let's do that.
The main actual vision, I know you refer to all these communist revolutions and stuff, but the most important one for Fateh was the Algerian revolution.
Of course, there was a great deal of Arab engagement with the Algerian revolution.
Yes.
And what attracted Arafat and his comrades to that model, or actually, what they used to call brothers, actually, because they didn't use the word comrade consciously.
They wanted to distinguish themselves from From the communists and the Arab nationalists and the Baathists that use that word, Rafiq.
Here they use the akh, you know.
What made them like, what distinguished them was that they thought that the function of the Arab states is to act as a front supporting the Palestinian liberation.
And as a result, they developed this idea that the Palestinian revolution is the vanguard of the Arab revolution.
And that the road to the liberation of the Arab world starts with the liberation of Jerusalem.
So, it's not, you know, to liberate Damascus and Amman and all of that, Beirut, you need to first liberate Jerusalem.
That was their theory.
They did a reversal of the usual position of their main competitors, especially the movement of Arab nationalists around this.
So, that's the kind of situation that develops.
And eventually, this becomes the biggest current in Palestinian politics because it's the one that advocates armed struggle early, early on.
They're like, we must do armed struggle.
Now, the movement of Arab nationalists is opposed to armed struggle of that kind at this stage because they're very close to Nasser.
Yeah.
And Nasser doesn't want it.
Nasser says, we're not ready to have armed struggle because the settler colony is very well armed and it has international backing.
And if there is Palestinian armed struggle not under the control of the Arab states, what we'll end up with is a situation where they could use that as an excuse to attack.
Arab states, which is exactly what happened in 67, for example.
They were like, there are Fadai groups attacking, and then they start attacking the Arab states, which then forces Nasser to close the Straits of Tehran and remove the UN troops.
And it's like, he has to respond to this sequence.
So, of course, the movement of Arab nationalists at this stage are like, okay, we have to follow the Nasserist view on this.
That the deliberation of Palestine requires state armies.
It can't happen just through organizing the Passover people into a guerrilla warfare model.
This was the initial outlook.
Later on, they reversed that, of course.
After 67, it became clear that the Arab armies not only will not, but they cannot liberate Palestine.
They don't have the capacity to do so.
Not the military capacity, not the weapons, not the strategy, not the global support.
Not the coordination between each other.
No, but even if they did, the Soviets gave them pretty much like they armed them in a way that was.
Defensive arming.
It was not offensive.
They didn't give them the right equipment.
They didn't.
It was like, and you know, when the Soviets did decide to give them slightly better, you know, equipment that's oriented towards more offensive operations in 73, they did much better, of course.
But at this stage, it's like, it's not a very effective situation.
But, anyways, you know, then you had like a reevaluation.
Everybody was like, okay, armed struggle is the way forward, and Palestinians had to carry out that armed struggle themselves.
And like the Algerians, They'll get the support of the Arab states, but the actual leadership of the struggle has to be a Palestinian leadership.
This was basically the line that was pushed by Fateh.
And this is why Fateh became such a big formation, it's because they were advocating this kind of position.
So, obviously, this leads to the advent of an organization that I think most people probably listen to this have heard of, the PLO, Palestine Liberation Organization, which I think people maybe think of as a party, but really, as you're saying, is like a front or like a coalition of parties.
Not really.
It's something else, actually.
It's actually the sovereign body that represents the Palestinian people.
So, it's quite different than even a coalition of parties because By the way, when it's founded, it's founded as a representative organization of the Palestinian people with Arab League authorization.
Yeah.
So, this is like a, it's still not, it takes a while for the Arab League to officially recognize it as a representative because of Jordanian opposition primarily.
Because, of course, for reasons that we mentioned earlier, the Jordanians wanted control over the West Bank and they didn't have it until 1967.
So, there was a tension there.
Between Jordanian nationalism and Hashemite rule in Palestine.
But ultimately, the PLO was created as a response to a crisis in the Arab regional system.
What had happened was, you know, between 1950, look, as early as 1959, you had a sort of major clash within the Arab nationalist wing of the Arab movement as a whole.
You have the Baathists really clashing with Nasser.
And that causes a problem.
Okay.
Because, and it was all around the unity with Syria, the foundation of the United Arab Republic.
But you have then like a situation where a lot of the Palestinian Baathists, for example, they leave the Baath.
And they end up joining Fateh, by the way, incidentally.
That's how Fateh becomes more of a front as well.
Like it attracts these people that came out of the Muslim Brotherhood, that are split from the Muslim Brotherhood.
And then you had the people that split from the Baath over the clash between the Baath leadership and Abdel Nasser during the unity project between Syria and Egypt.
In any case, the unity project ends as a result of a coup.
And you have a situation where the United Arab Republic falls.
Nasser decides not to militarily intervene.
And by the time we get to 1963, There's a lot of things that are happening on the Arab arena that are very, very problematic.
One development that's happening on the Arab arena is that Israel is carrying out a project that can harm a lot of people in the surrounding region, which is the diversion of the waters of the River Jordan.
They were doing the Israel National Water Carrier Project, which, by the way, is an environmental disaster because it ruined.
Like, if you go to the River Jordan today, that was a real river.
I don't know.
Have you ever been there, Brace, today?
No, I have not.
It's a very sad situation where it's really like it looks like a stream, you know, because it's like they've diverted the waters to carry out this insane project of making the desert bloom.
Like, why would you want to make the desert bloom?
You make fertile areas desert when you make the desert bloom.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like it's crazy.
But they were so obsessed with that that they were diverting the water from the River Jordan, which of course then leads, of course, to the decline of the Dead Sea as well, which is, you know, a treasure for all humanity.
You know, there's real issues.
But it's also dangerous for the Arab states that share the Jordan Basin with the settler colonial state.
So you have Jordan and you have like, you know, Syria and you have like the original, you know, part of the river comes from Lebanon, parts of Lebanon.
So it's like this project is destabilizing for the region.
And at the same time, we have a problem because like, There's no regional formula for dealing with that.
There's no defense formula for dealing with this threat.
And you have the Israeli state militarizing further.
It's getting a lot of money from West Germany at this stage.
Like they're getting suddenly all their Holocaust reparations money and all these German like payments for it, which by the way is also a scandal because that money should have gone to Holocaust survivors, not to the promotion of this insane.
Yeah, and many of those survivors lived poor, you know, under poor conditions and died under poor conditions because the money never reached them.
It went to the Israeli militarism and mad things like that.
But yeah, that was like a big thing.
And then you have the Israeli state also acquiring nuclear weapons.
So all of this was happening, and it meant like there needed to be an Arab effort to deal with it.
Now that results in Nasser calling for the first Arab summit.
Okay.
And it's, you know, all these developments that are happening from 1961 onwards, from the fall of the UAR until 1964.
And really, it's in the beginning of 1964.
In January, you have this Nasser being like, we have to meet to talk about this, okay?
And Nasser is like having difficulty with the Palestinian case in particular because he says, Look, after the UAR falls, people are interviewing and be like, What's your solution then for the question of Palestine?
He famously says, I have no solution.
And any Arab leader that tells you that they have a solution is lying.
That becomes again another thing that gets used by Fateh.
A lot of people join Fateh as a result of that from different parties because it's saying that it does have a solution, which is our struggle.
Anyways, he decides, let's have an Arab summit to find the way forward.
And all the Arab leaders meet and they come to Cairo and they have our discussions.
They're representative of Palestine in that summit, a guy called Ahmed al Shukhari, who was close to Nasser, he had been the Saudi representative at the UN, by the way, very famous Palestinian jurist and actually a big proponent of Algeria in the UN.
Most of the greatest, some of the greatest speeches on Algerian freedom at the UN were made by him when he was a Saudi representative.
You might wonder why is it Saudi representative of the UN, a Palestinian background?
That's because Palestinians were highly educated and they got, after the dispersion of our people, absorbed into all sorts of bureaucracies and leading positions in different parts of the region.
But then Ahmed Shukhari clashes with the Saudi leadership of Prince Faisal, who later becomes King Faisal, over the question of Yemen and Egypt's participation in it.
He refuses to submit to the UN Security Council a complaint on Egyptian intervention in Yemen.
So then, Prince Faisal at the time, later King Faisal, kicks him out.
And he becomes the, then Ignacy gives him a job at the Arab League.
So he comes in and he's given a mandate to investigate the possibility of founding a representative Palestinian body.
Now, there had been a Palestinian representative body that was started during the Nakba.
It was called the Old Palestine Government.
And that could have been a transitional government that took over Palestinian territories and so on.
But it suffered from a crisis of legitimacy because Jordan and Iraq were very opposed to it, Hashemite Iraq at the time.
So Hashemites were against it.
It never got anywhere.
And around this time, the leader, around the time of the first Arab summit, the leader of that formation had died.
So, there was an opportunity to kind of reorganize Palestinian representation.
And Ahmed Zukhari was then entrusted by the Arab Summit to investigate the potential for Palestinian representation.
Now, he took this mandate and ran with it and took it much further than the mandate actually had specified because he started organizing towards what became the first Palestinian National Council meeting in Jerusalem.
In 1964.
And that was the meeting that led in which the PLO was born.
So you had, you know, he went to all sites in which Palestinians were living and he started like looking at who's politically active, which different, who is prominent, who's an ex notable, who was, it was still like a bit of an elite exercise because he was looking at the most representative in the old, you know, notable sense of like most prominent families, most influential families.
Sheikhs of tribes, mayors of camps, you know, well to do businessmen.
It was like that kind of orientation.
He had himself come out of that politics of the notables thing because, you know, he came from a notable family from Akka.
His father was the Mufti of the 4th Ottoman army, incidentally, Sheikh Asad al Shukhari.
Anyways, so this guy comes in and he's like, okay, I'm going to organize that.
Splits Within the PLO00:15:20
But it becomes like a very big meeting in which a lot of people attend.
And of course, the Jordanian authorities who were controlling Israel at the time tried to prevent it, but eventually they found out that it would be futile, it would cause too many problems.
So instead, King Hussein, being a very smart and shrewd man as usual, he went in and opened the meeting so that he can show that it's under his patronage.
But then that meeting becomes a very important milestone because it leads to the establishment of an official representative of the Palestinian people.
It also calls for the creation of a Palestinian Liberation Army as well as a Palestinian civic and diplomatic structures.
So there's a call for civic organizations to emerge and representative sectoral organizations to emerge.
This call results in the formation of, for example, the General Union of Palestinian Women.
And of course, it leads to the development of the student union, GUPS, General Union of Palestine Students, which existed before, but it comes in now into the structure.
You have all these unions emerging out of this, and they're organizing our people in their different respective sectors.
And the PLO then emerges as a kind of official body with semi official recognition.
It takes a while for it to gain official recognition that eventually is achieved like 10 years later.
Famous, like, you know, Rabat summit of the Arab League.
But it's on its way.
And had it not been for Jordanian opposition, it would have been, you know, their representative as far as the Arab region was concerned early on.
The point of that structure is that it's supposed to include the parties, but the parties had come from a different environment and they preceded the formation of the PLO.
All these clandestine movements were operating in the 50s and they were there by the time we get to the formation of the PLO in 1964.
And they see the PLO as a bit of a promise, but also a bit of a problem because it's promising, finally, there is something to represent the Palestinian people as the Palestinian people.
You know, it's one thing to be a Palestinian party, but when you're a Palestinian party, you're presenting a certain ideology or a front combining different ideologies.
Yeah, but you're not existing within a structure.
Yeah, you're not the sovereignty.
You don't hold the sovereignty of the people in you.
Yes, yeah.
But this was supposed to be that.
It had the parliament of the people in exile, it was the place for deliberation for national strategies, and it had the regional legitimacy or was on its way to gaining that.
So, It's very important.
In other words, it's a representative structure.
Now, you know, there are many problems with its representative capacity at this stage.
Arab states intervened in it in many ways.
Yes, there's a past celebration army founded, but it has no freedom of movement because each one of its units was put under the command of the Arab army in which it was operating in its territory.
So, you know, there was a past celebration army in Syria, it was under the control of the Syrian army, similarly in Iraq and elsewhere.
Like, you know, this was like, A situation where there was a lot of control over the different organs of the PLO at that stage.
But it was a step in the right direction as far as most Palestinians were concerned.
And eventually, the parties take it over after 1967.
Everything changes after 1967, obviously, because you have a situation where the original formula, which is this idea that Palestine will be liberated by the Arab states surrounding it through military, classical military means, would fall apart.
And now we have the new phase where people are saying, okay, we need an anti colonial armed struggle to be carried out, and we need to actually bring together the official representative, the PLO, and join it with the energies.
That kind of formal structure needs to combine with the more energetic grassroots structures that are brought by the parties.
I mean, and also, 1967 onwards, there's a huge upsurge of guerrilla movement.
Throughout the world, of which the PLO and the various constituent parties become a pretty integral force within as well.
I mean, it becomes the most prominent of the guerrilla struggles of the period.
You know, if the Algerian one in the Middle East was the most prominent one, like in North Africa at the time, and of course, attracted everybody across the Arab region, the Palestinian one becomes the number one struggle of that kind in this part of the world, certainly.
And it becomes part of like a family.
Of very prominent struggles globally, of which, of course, South Africa was a Southern African representative of.
You have Vietnam, you have Cuba seen as offering a model.
Of course, it was a successful revolution, but it's basically one of the core grand struggles of this period.
And the Algerians, too, very much take a lot of the Palestinians under their wing.
And I believe that's the first supporters of the Fatah model.
They arm them.
They give them, you know, and then, you know, like definitely.
Like the first Fateh carers were trained in Algeria in the Sersal Military Academy, for example.
They also take them to Europe too and introduce them to sort of the networks that they've built up.
100%.
And within France and within Germany and Spain.
In fact, my friend Mohammed Abu Mazar Abu Hatim was the representative there.
And he had been part of the Algerian movement before.
And he was, as a Palestinian, you see, the Algerian struggle brought a lot of Palestinians into it.
Palestinians were very committed to Algerian liberation.
I can't begin to talk about the strength of the connection between these two struggles.
And the Algerians, by the way, were the most loyal and committed supporters of the Palestinian struggle.
Throughout, like them and the Yemenis, it's like there are long histories there that are incredible, unbelievable.
So we see in the 60s also, you mentioned George Habdash and Wadi Haddad earlier.
Yeah, the Haddad.
Yeah, the formation of the PFLP, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the DFLP, and then also the various sort of iterations.
I think there's PFLP, external operations, PFLP, general command.
There's these sort of splits from that.
But also the integration of the more traditional, not traditional, because this is sort of the advent of it all throughout the world, but this sort of idea of what becomes the model for this communist insurgency.
But this is also functioning within these other structures as well.
And they're sort of, you know, this is what's called the golden age of hijackings, also begins with plane hijackings and some spectacular sort of operations throughout the world.
And it becomes this struggle that takes place.
Not just in Palestine, but also a lot of the Palestinian organizations start hitting targets outside of the region too that are connected to it.
Yeah, I mean, that was the PFLP philosophy in particular.
They adopt a strategy that they call, or what they consider to be a strategy.
Others were accusing them of being tactical with it.
But, anyways, that's a different conversation.
But they called it like chasing the enemy everywhere.
So, the idea was, you know.
If Europe in particular and the United States are going to be ignoring Palestinians and treating them like they don't exist while they facilitate their ongoing dispossession and they facilitate the growth of the settler colonial state that oppresses them and they're creating conditions of complete erasure,
then there should be these external operations that happen there where you hit.
The interests of these states strongly.
And they were looking really at what they considered to be low hanging fruit and weak targets.
So something like airplanes for the particularly, Wadi Haddad is the main kind of thinker behind that.
He was always like a man of action.
He didn't care for ideology, by the way, which what people don't know about PFLP, including some people that now think they know a lot about it and they talk about it because they see it as.
Representative of the past, it always had two tendencies.
There were the old nationalists like Dyke Wadi Haddad that actually did not like ideology and they didn't like Marxist ideology, you know.
But then you have the new current that came as a result of processes in the 1960s that culminated with 67 that were actually heading towards Marxism and became Marxist.
There were former Arab nationalists that became Marxist.
So these tendencies were always in the PFLP and there was a big tension between them.
Yeah.
When they had that wing, they hated the Marxist wing.
They're like, those guys talk too much, too ideological.
What the hell are they talking about?
We have tasks to do now.
In the meantime, they spend all this time on party conferences and passing resolutions and I don't know what.
And we don't want to be doing this.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, it's like, we have shit to do.
Like, we're going to go and act.
It was like that a man of action.
You know, he's the sort of guy who had seasoned political experience, but also practical experience.
Like, he organized politics.
Prison heists all the time.
Like, you know, when he was in prison in the notorious Jafar prison in Jordan, which was like a horrible desert prison in bumblefuck nowhere in the middle of the desert.
Yeah.
Like, that was a prison that was created, by the way, for the communists after the Nakba, the Jordanian authorities set it up for them and they put in it all the communist leaderships, for Nassar, everything.
Because, by the way, a funny fact to embrace Jordan had an anti communism law before the Communist Party of Jordan was even founded.
So it's like they banned communism before it even set.
Foot on and under there, and so on, anyways.
So, and then eventually, like you know, all these Arab nationalists were also ended up in this prison, including with the Haddad.
So, first thing he does is like, Oh, we're gonna dig tunnels underneath to run away.
And he, you know, it's like, it's like, you know, he's uh, he was that kind of character.
And they did manage to dig the tunnel until like somebody actually exposed them.
But that this was after like you know, a long period when they did successful operations.
And he was a doctor, so he was able to connect with all the Bedouins around the camp because he was giving them.
You know, he was treating them.
By the way, revolutionary doctors was a big theme in this era.
I should know it, but we won't be able to talk about it.
But there were so many people in this movement that were doctors because that was a whole category actually in World Revolution, not just the Palestinian Revolution.
Well, I think unfortunately, due to time constraints, we have to kind of move on to some of the other parties because I think we've covered most of the main ones, but there were two that sort of emerged later and that have become, I think, the two.
At the forefront, especially of what has happened in Gaza, which is the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.
And so, where do these come out of?
Because you'd mentioned, I mean, this is broadly from the current of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But this doesn't really cohere until sort of much later than a lot of these other parties.
Right.
So, look, the Muslim Brotherhood.
In the 50s, it faces all these splits, all these people that join Fateh.
They see that as a split, actually.
And a lot of people are like, okay, we have to continue down the social reform path.
This is not the time for revolutionary clash or anything like that.
So, and that policy stands in the 60s, even in the 70s.
But then by the time you hit the 80s, there have been some major developments taking place.
One is that you end up with a major defeat for the Palestinian Revolution as a whole, which was at this stage entirely comprised of secular forces.
Like Fateh, yes, it had a lot of former Muslim brothers in it, but they had actually pretty much secularized when it came to their politics because they're no longer focusing on the rule in Fateh you join, you throw your previous membership card in your previous political party or movement when you join.
This was the understanding.
You take an oath.
And there's, you know, this happened to the Baathists, it happened to the communists, this happened to the Muslim brothers that joined it.
So that was the rule there.
And, you know, as a result, like, you know, this was a secular kind of scene.
You know, every kind of party that was represented there pretty much was not a religious party.
Some people in it may have been pious.
Including Yasser Al Fat himself, he prayed, he believed in God, but he was like, that's not the job of the movement to be promoting prayer and promoting fasting and people going to Hajj.
The job of the movement is to liberate Palestine.
And of course, other formations like PFLP was led by a Christian, DFLP was led by a Christian, and was not even Palestinian, it was Jordanian, by the way, and his deputy was Iraqi.
By the way, again, I think people underestimate how.
How huge of a thing for the whole region this was.
Everybody wanted to be part of the struggle.
And so that's why you have leaders from across the region that were part of it.
They saw Palestine as a kind of the compass.
It's the thing that, the only thing that they had clarity on in our politics.
And people say this to this day, by the way, race.
People can be confused and they split over Syria, for example, over Iraq, over lots of causes.
On Palestine, there's a sense of like, okay, that moral consensus I referred to earlier.
If you're against it, you're sketchy.
You're doing something wrong.
Yeah.
Palestine as Political Compass00:03:51
But in 82, you get a big hit against this whole system with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the expulsion of the PLO.
And, you know, unlike, for example, Hezbollah today, for example, in Lebanon, the PLO had a difficult situation in 82 because they're like, okay, most of their military infrastructure was intact actually.
This is what people don't know.
20,000 civilians were killed by the Israelis in 1982.
But the amount of actual Fida'is, actual freedom fighters on the Palestinian side that were killed, was very small relative to the size of the forces available.
And Israelis took a lot of hits as well.
Like, you know, they'd lost like 600 and they were like, they were not doing well in general.
To progress like every meter they were fighting for would take like a day or two.
You know what I mean?
It's like fighting in Beirut was hard.
This is like urban warfare.
Initially, of course, the southern front collapsed quickly on the part of the Palestinians, and that became a big subject of debate.
And it led to a split in Fateh, actually, eventually.
And some people started attacking Yasser Arafat over this because he had ordered the withdrawal, the quick withdrawal from the south.
But in Beirut, the PLO forces fought really hard, and they were still intact after two months of siege and attacks.
Entire armies coming in, tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers.
It was like a huge operation.
It didn't work.
And yet, they were not on their own land.
So they had to, you know, and there was pressure that was starting to come from their allies.
You know, Yasser Arafat was meeting with people like George Howie, the famous Lebanese communist leader.
And when people like Mohsen Ibrahim, who was an old movement Arab nationalist leader from Lebanon, and, you know, he had been.
Very close to the Palestinian experience from day one.
But they were coming in and being like, Lebanese society cannot take it more.
Because the losses were just so big, the misery was so huge, and Beirut was not Jerusalem or Gaza or Nablus.
This is, at the end of the day, not a Palestinian city.
It's a city that has a lot of sympathizers with Palestine.
It's a city in which many of its communities had invited Palestinians to come to Lebanon and to establish bases and create Fida'i work.
You know, because there is a social base for the Palestinian revolution in Lebanon.
Of course, there was also an anti Palestinian social base there, but A large section of society is very pro Palestinian.
Those folks have had enough though at that stage, and Yazd al Arafat decides to withdraw, or better or worse.
So that's a big blow.
It means that the most Palestine organizing shifts towards the West Bank and Gaza were at a time when previously it was concentrated actually outside.
And I'm, you know, I'm writing actually a book on this race at the moment.
It's going to be a history of the Palestinian struggle, so, you know.
It'll include details about all of that.
It was a really big deal for our people to have this situation developing.
And it coincided with many other problems.
Iran Iraq war, which was a disaster for everybody, was a distraction also from the primary side of struggle, the Palestine.
You have these regional developments taking place.
You have a situation.
Religious Connotations of Struggle00:02:22
Where you had the Iranian Revolution, of course.
And the Iranian Revolution suddenly posits Islam as a revolutionary force.
When, you know, it was not associated with the revolution before, you know, at least not in the decades of the 1950s and 60s and 70s.
Suddenly, you have people saying, well, you can have an Islamic revolution.
And although that happened in a Shia country, It had influence even in a Sunni sphere like the Palestinian one.
Some of the Muslim Brotherhood people start thinking about that.
And you have people like Khalil al Shikaki, the founder of the Islamic Jihad, comes in and says the Iranian Revolution is an event that necessitates the creation of a Palestinian armed struggle group that follows the principle of an Islamic struggle.
That's why he called it Islamic Jihad.
You know, that was like meant to be like, you know, as opposed to he used the word Jihad, which is very different than the word Fida'i work.
Yeah.
The word that comes from earlier.
Jihad has a much more religious connotation ring to it.
Even though, by the way, it means struggle.
It's not like we don't want to orientalize it.
You know, you have these people appearing on US news, Jihad, ooh, like all that it means is struggle.
It's not.
But it does certainly have a religious connotation.
It can have a religious connotation.
It doesn't necessarily have to, but it can.
And it depends on how you deploy it and how you load it.
And in this case, they were loading it with a religious connotation.
But linguistically, it's much more versatile as a word, actually.
So in this application, definitely, they were intentionally using it in a religious way and they were avoiding the kind of new, more clearly secular terminology.
Like there's no religious connotation to Fida'i.
Pure.
There's no word in religion, Fida'i, but there is a word in religion called jihad, so you can see that.
Anyways, Fida' means sacrifice.
Okay.
Jihad means struggle.
Competing with Fatah and Brotherhood00:03:58
In any case, this is seen as a second split, by the way, by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Like, they're like, okay, they're hemorrhaging.
Yeah.
And they're still refusing to do anything.
They're still talking about da'wah, this, that.
Okay, they've established a university in Gaza, they've done this, that, but they're still like, And the Israelis are giving them some space for organizing at this stage because they want to encourage a base that's different than the nationalist one that was much more, obviously, radically operating against the Israelis.
So they were allowing some freedom of movement for them.
Not to suggest, by the way, some people mistakenly say that the Israelis created the conditions for, you know, they sponsored the emergence of Hamas.
No, they created conditions that made it easier.
But that's different than suggesting that it's an Israeli product or anything like that.
That's like founded by Israel.
No, it's a natural current in Palestinian society.
In any Arab society, you'll always have the same that in the United States.
You have people that believe in Christianity, they're Christian conservatives.
It's the equivalent of that.
They think of social reform, what they consider to be social reform, and their agenda is like anti abortion and whatever.
Something similar to that without, you know, but instead of anti abortion, like, you know, people should dress modestly or something like that, you know, or and go to the mosque, you know, whatever.
Anyways, at this stage, they're confronted with big developments and they don't know what to do.
And when the first intifada happens, and it's clear that as we head towards first intifada territory, it becomes clear to the Leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, particularly to a very talented preacher who was quite an interesting character because he was heavily disabled but very charismatic and he was very determined in his vision at the time.
He was a kind of a man of the people, a famous preacher called Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
He gets assassinated by the Israelis, by the way.
He decides that he's going to put his weight behind this thing of like, we have to find a Muslim Brotherhood arm.
For armed struggle, that is much more committed to the kind of idea of working towards what they called resistance.
So now they called it the Islamic resistance movement in Palestine.
They adopted the language of resistance to distinguish themselves from the language of thawrah, of revolution, which was used by the left and Fatih.
So, in any case, they found this organization and, you know, And this happens, its founding coincides with the First Intifada, and they become a participant in the First Intifada, but also a competitor to the older secular nationalist formations in it.
So they're competing with Fatah, of course, and because the Muslim Brotherhood is big in scale, especially in Gaza, they have the ability to compete, but also the zeitgeist is with them.
This was the time when every Arab news channel.
Was encouraged to pump out information about Afghanistan, talking about it as a jihad, for example.
Think about it as a great jihad that needs to be supported.
The Americans were backing this and encouraging this because they were trying to make sure that you have serious damage to the Soviet Union there.
Propaganda and American Interests00:08:11
So, of course, they and the Saudis were promoting that.
It leads to a general sense of there's a pathway forward down the religious line.
And certainly the states in the region, with US sponsorship, are encouraging that.
Ideological shift.
And in the meantime, there's a feeling that the old solutions that were offered by the secular parties are failing.
So, what did the Baath have to offer now?
The presence of Assad and Saddam Hussein?
That wasn't exactly an attractive reality at this stage.
Although, by the way, some of the Arab media were pumping out propaganda pro Saddam propaganda at this stage for the reason of confronting Iran.
But still, Like the actual ideology was not working that well at this stage, it lost its glamour.
Its glamour was the anti colonial content, yeah, was the underground content.
Once it gets bureaucratized and transformed into a dictatorial state project, that becomes very unattractive for people, okay.
Well, it's also also this is the waning days of the Soviet Union, too.
Well, that's that for the communists is a disaster, of course, exactly.
And and and but also, like.
There were all these sort of other currents, these, I mean, like the bath, but in general, these sort of other left wing currents that were sort of propped up, not directly by the Soviet Union, but sort of buoyed by the existence of it.
I mean, China had sort of exited that sort of international politics decades before, or a decade and a half before the time we're talking about.
And so there is this sort of like, I guess this is, we're reaching the end of history and people are sort of realizing it.
At 100%.
And it's causing this whole crisis with the Soviet Union, with the bureaucratization that we referred to earlier, with everything that's going on.
And at the same time, this heavy investment in this idea of politicizing religion.
And this was, of course, as we know, like a neocon project back then, also.
These were the Reagan years where he was really supporting this stuff.
And when you have all these US officials promoting Muladin, and it's like crazy.
Of course, these people later on carry out the regime change in Iraq and pushed all this agenda.
They had strong Israeli connections.
The whole thing is messed up.
But essentially, Hamas is popular at this stage.
And it's coming in with a language that a lot of people can understand.
It's the language of the mosque, it's the language of, you know, And it's coming in as like, I'm giving you innovative solutions.
Fatah has failed.
Look at their exit from Beirut.
The rest of them are failing.
And also importantly, this is, you know, 1988 is also the year where the PLO adopts, actually declares the state of Palestine.
Yeah.
So they made a step towards a two state solution, essentially, adopting a two state solution model.
And this was unpopular, by the way, to some extent, but, you know, they found a way to make it.
To give it a spin that was popular, but the actual idea of giving away the majority of historic Palestine, you know, as some kind of a pragmatic kind of solution was not very popular at its core.
But they were able to sell it as okay, at least it's not going to be like all or nothing.
Okay, so at least we get something.
What was playing in Hamas's favor is that, of course, there was no intention of giving anything on the part of the Israelis and the Americans.
So, and this became clear as, you know, in the aftermath of the end of the Iran Iraq war, the beginning of the first Gulf War, the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, the Americans, you know, destroying much of Iraq and besieging it and then like taking it out of the arena.
They're redrawing the map, establishing their bases everywhere.
You know, the byproduct of all of that is a regional situation in which Palestinians were at a very weak situation and they had a disadvantage regionally.
They didn't know what to do.
And already they were under pressure because Egypt, through the efforts of Henry Kissinger and other leading US strategists, had been taken out of the Arab arena and had signed a separate peace treaty with Israel earlier in Camp David.
Okay.
So, you have this stuff that was going on that put the Palestinians in a very difficult negotiating position.
And yet, Arafat went along and he said, he thought that there was no other option.
Because what's going to be the other option?
If all the Arab states are not going to support a more steadfast solution for Palestinians, and the whole region now is falling under American control pretty much.
And all the Arab states are scrambling to get agreements done with the Israelis.
Al-Fat did not trust the Syrians on this.
He thought that Assad was, you know, should the Israelis offer him the Zolan, the Golan Heights, then he would take it and ignore them and ignore the Palestinian struggle.
They really thought of him as a Machiavellian character, which he was, of course.
They thought, they definitely knew that the Jordanians would sign something with the Israelis.
So he was like scrambling to get a deal done.
And that, of course, results in Oslo.
But once you sign Oslo and you're committed to this notion, the idea of Oslo was you'll have a five year interim Palestinian authority, and eventually you'll have like a final status negotiations afterwards, and you get a Palestinian state over the West Bank and Gaza.
From a Palestinian standpoint, the understanding was it was going to be the 1967 borders, maybe with minor adjustments.
It became quickly clear that that was not the Israeli plan.
Their plan was actually to colonize greater swaths of the West Bank under the guise of like there's a peace process going on.
Yeah, yeah.
And to create a Palestinian Authority, yes, but a Palestinian Authority to which they would outsource the occupation.
So it was a trap.
Arafat did not know that he was getting into the trap initially.
He thought that, you know, that it would be an American interest to have a Palestinian state popped up.
That once the Palestinians presented themselves as not opposed to the U.S., as people are willing to play the diplomatic game, and they renounced armed struggle, and they renounced this and that, and they suddenly got absorbed into the whole.
He thought that the U.S. was one of the new Middle East, and that it would be in its interest to have a small, tiny Palestinian state, 67 territories, not a big price for them.
Why not?
But the unfortunate reality was that, of course, certainly this was not where things were heading, and certainly not under the Clintons, who, by the way, filled their administration with pro Israeli people who were really like, I mean, the Clintons are honestly like, I don't know what to say about the embrace.
What do you think about the Clintons?
I don't know.
I'm not a huge fan, but I've always thought of them as very strong defenders of Palestine.
Oh, yeah.
Oslo Peace Talks Fail00:06:51
They are, yeah.
I mean, I think it's fitting that now Bill Clinton is basically a prisoner trapped in his own body because he seems to be somewhat brain dead and they kind of bring him out to shuffle out to events.
I have a feeling that he had a stroke about 10 years ago and he just doesn't know what's happening anymore.
But that's my Clinton stroke there.
Yeah, but he's a disgusting human being.
And honestly, I'll never forget this awful man attending the great funeral of the great Muhammad Ali, the legend, who he comes in and, like, and when in the funeral, like Palestine was mentioned as a core thing that Muhammad Ali believed in and people were clapping.
He refused to clap.
Did you notice that, by the way?
It's like these people are filthy, honestly.
They're so disgusting and craven.
I don't know.
I think actually they're some of the worst people in history.
I mean, I can't imagine anything worse than that.
But yeah, because they pretend also to be so good.
This is the problem.
Yeah.
They cause certainly a lot of damage in Palestine.
And you have this expansion of the settlements, you have this Palestinian authority set up.
And it's like dealing with the situation, but it's clear that it's not able to get liberation or not, let alone return, which seemed to be further away on the horizon than anything.
And Hamas gets political capital out of being like, well, we're going to oppose this.
And we're going to do like, actually, we're going to respond to the settlements and the continuing occupation with bombings, in some cases, suicide bombings.
So that's the height of their adoption of that particular tactic.
And they got like, they win like some sections of the population with this.
The sections that were seeing that Oslo was failing, that this whole talk of like peace was bullshit, that what it was really was land theft under the guise of peace.
There were a lot of people that were really, really upset with the failures of Oslo in the West Bank and Gaza, let alone, of course, the refugee camps outside.
Hamas positioned themselves and presented themselves.
As people that were true to the struggle that were going to carry it out, which is kind of ironic because you know they came late to the struggle very late.
You know, it was after 40 years of people, other people doing other things, they come in, but now they emerge as the kind of uh the voice of those who refuse to be complicit in this project.
And they're able to have greater freedom of maneuver than, let's say, for example, the left.
This is right, the left is hemorrhaging at this stage, hugely.
You know, yeah, PFLP was really the second largest organization.
Inside the occupied territories by far.
It had a huge following in the West Bank and Gaza.
And they lose so much to Hamas at this stage.
Like, you know, they.
And it's because, again, they're no longer able to offer a resistance model.
They're connected to the PLO, even though they oppose many aspects of Oslo, but they're also part of the PLO structure.
They need it because their salaries come from there the salaries of the martyr families, the salaries of the prisoners, all of that stuff, like the people's pensions, the veterans' pensions.
It's really difficult for them to come and say, we're going to abandon the Palestinian Authority altogether.
Mass makes use of that and they gain ground.
And this continues as we get to the second intifada.
By the time Oslo fails completely, you have these attempts at a final negotiation under Clinton.
He has this awful Camp David summit, which, by the way, was a total sham.
And you have all these American and Israeli propagandists of a certain type.
Coming in, being like, well, Palestinians were offered a Palestinian state, but they rejected it because Ehud Barak, who, by the way, happens to be one of Epstein's closest partners, as we know, had offered a Palestinian state, but they rejected it.
Yeah.
By the way, this is like insanity.
I'm like, do you think the Palestinians would have rejected it?
Like, Yasser Arafat was a pragmatic guy.
He took so much heat.
Like, you know, Edward Said called him like, called Versailles, called Oslo worse than Versailles.
You know, he was, people suddenly attacked Yasser Al Fat from every point of passing.
Very unpopular.
Well, he was popular, but he was, he mixed up the policy with it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But only a leader like him, who had so much popularity and following, could have pulled off pushing the truth.
And then these people come and say, oh, you rejected the deal, but, and like, they give no deal.
And they were like, you're going to have to accept this no deal and say it's a great deal.
Which is madness because it's like what he wanted was a genuinely sovereign state that could achieve the bare minimum of what the Palestinians were demanding.
Nothing.
And eventually, the second intifada emerges as a result of that.
And it's actually provoked by this awful guy called Ariel Saron.
You know, it's like these people are so terrible.
But he goes and walks into the Haram al Sharif and provokes, you know, the noble sanctuary in Jerusalem.
Which in the US, they keep referring to it as a temple mount.
I think that's a very dangerous thing to do, by the way, because then you're using a historic name, but for reasons of like it's used to actually destroy the existing structure, which has been there for 1500 years now.
It's very important for the world's second largest religion.
So it's like if you want to fan the flames of religious war, keep calling it that.
You know, it's a Haram al Sharif, it's a noble sanctuary for reasons that have to do with the space itself.
Now, if you, for religious purposes, you want to call it Temple Mount in your prayers, whatever, but politically, something else.
It's a very dangerous thing to do because then you're doing like a BJP style, like let's, before this mosque, there was a temple like 3,000 years ago, let's destroy it.
You know, it's like, no, very bad idea.
You know, that's how religious wars get started.
Anyways.
Ayatollahu Alaihi Wasallam walks into this area, and that leads then to popular anger and uprising emerging.
The Noble Sanctuary Debate00:06:42
Hamas plays a big role in that.
Fateh does as well, by the way, at this stage, because Yasser Arafat decides that negotiations had failed.
And in response, the Israelis besiege him and eventually murder him through poisoning.
And we know this is the case.
There's a lot of evidence to it.
There was a Swiss lab test done that showed high doses of poison in his body.
But, you know, it's a little bit.
They're like, they've been engaging in the murder of people for years, you know, decades.
They specialize actually in this.
So here we are in 2026.
And, you know, you mentioned that a lot of these parties lost support, which is very true, but they all mostly still exist in some form.
And now we've seen with the genocide in Gaza, but the fight against the Israeli occupation, but also against the Israeli army in Gaza has been led by Hamas.
With Palestinian Islamic Jihad as sort of the second largest force, but also variations that, you know, various ex Fatah soldiers, PFLP, like, you know, some PFLP and DFLP, but Hamas is sort of the leading force these days.
I think, I think, without a doubt, in Gaza, not in the Palestinian Authority.
Yeah.
And it's outside the remit of this episode, you know, they're talking, it's a little unclear on what.
Leadership structure that the US and Israel is trying to impose on Gaza with the so called Board of Peace.
I don't know what.
I think they're just going to keep it under military occupation.
It's a disgusting plan.
And what they're doing is a mixture of warlordism, war profiteering.
Their plan is disgusting.
And it's essentially basically genocide by other means.
And I'll tell you something, Brace.
Most genocides actually happen in situations where it's not that people were being directly shelled.
It's through creating conditions of famine, disease, impossible.
Like, this is how it works, actually.
And it's like that is the cheapest and most efficient way of doing it.
You corner the people, you create impossible living conditions.
Israelis were talking about it from day one.
So there is this awful situation going on.
And I must say here, October 7, and this is like something that is worth ending on.
When people think, like, why Hamas did the October 7, They did October 7 after actually a long period from the post Second Intifada onwards of trying to actually reach a two state settlement, weirdly enough.
Yes.
So they start like after Second Intifada, they have a big reshuffling and they have a big like rethinking of their positions.
And some of their most prominent leaders, particularly Khaled Mishal at the time, who becomes very important and is a leading voice of an architect of their foreign policy at this stage, at that stage.
He's going on a program of like, okay, we have to, you know, we have to come up with a new charter that whereby, you know, because the old charter had these, you know, Quranic references to the anger of God and against the people of Israel, et cetera, blah, blah, blah, all of this kind of stuff, you know, which coincidentally, by the way,
is much milder than the stuff that is mentioned in the Torah against the people of Israel by God, you know, because in the Jewish Torah, God is very.
He's very angry with his.
Yeah, he's really rude to us in that thing.
Yeah, I mean, but that's the whole point.
I mean, what people don't understand is that that's actually part of the doctrine.
It's about like disobeying God's laws.
And the Islamic doctrine is the same.
So when they come and like, but did it have like a tinge that could have been like, I mean, like this is weird, anti Semitism, these people are psychotic?
For somebody who's not an Arabic speaker and not rooted in the study of Quranic religion, they're not going to necessarily understand what this theology is about.
You know, they'll just be seeing like, well, God, because he was so angry with them, turned them into monkeys and pigs.
You know, they're referenced to one of the stories where.
Where God is angry, so he turns the people that disobeyed him into monkeys.
You know, things like that.
Yeah.
So that was there in the first Hamas charter.
They had all these Quranic references and things referring to, you know, God's wrath around Jews and et cetera.
But of course, you should remember these are people who are under the boot of a state that claims to be the Jewish state.
So for them, Jews are the occupation.
Yeah.
They're not a minority.
Every Jewish person they've seen has been like pointing a gun at them.
That's their life, you know, and they call themselves Jewish.
It's not that they're pointing a gun at them.
They're pointing the gun at them, and they have the Star of David on their helmet.
And they're not like, hey, we're Jewish, but actually, not all Jews believe what we believe.
They're like, we're the Jews.
Hands up.
So there is this kind of thing that you see in the First Amendment Charter that has very sketchy bits that are not savory.
But is it systematic anti Semitism, Nazi style, whatever?
Absolutely not.
It's not the core ideology.
And I say this knowing that some people are like, oh, You're defending Hamas.
I'm like, I come from the left.
When it comes to social questions, every question, we come from different worldviews, including even questions of liberation.
But is it a population?
Are Hamas members part of a people that are oppressed?
Yes.
Are they trying to liberate their land?
Absolutely.
Okay.
They're not out there driven by pure hatred, and that's all what they think about every day when they wake up.
Okay.
The thing that happens is that they change their charter and they start talking about a negotiated settlement.
Now, they talk about it in terms of a long term truce, and but really, what they're looking at is a deal, yeah, a two state solution of source.
Which, by the way, Israelis keep rejecting it's the greatest deal offered by any occupied people, colonized people in the history.
Emergence of Sinwar00:03:48
Like, who gives 78% of their land away?
Both Palestinian leading parties at different stages of their development.
Give these offers.
The case of Hamas gets not only rejected, but you have this situation where they're cornered.
There's this attempt to cause a coup against a democratic election that brought them to power.
As a result of anger against increasing collaborationist tendencies within the Palestinian Authority, it really turned into a subcontractor of the occupation.
And then we end up with this situation where Hamas, Uh, is trying to uh again find like some kind of middle ground good agreement.
This is the time when they're engaging with Jimmy Carter, by the way.
He visits them, they're talking, they're trying to find uh reasonable allies, but they get snubbed every time.
And then there is a coup organized against them with the American General Dayton and and and uh the Fatah Henchman Dahlan, who's sketchy as hell, by the way.
Now he's coordinating.
Emirati policy, which is if there's anything as bad as Israeli policy in the region, it's the junior partner out of Israeli policy.
Like, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
So that's the world that we're dealing with after the failure of all of that and the failure of Hamas policy in the Arab Spring under Khaled Mishal, who he actually decides to fight Assad and to put Hamas's weight behind that.
So he breaks with Iran and breaks with Assad and causes.
Hamas' isolation as a result.
He was bidding on the idea of the Arab Spring will bring in new allies, Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt, Tunisia, whatever, maybe in Syria.
That didn't work.
Assad survives, at least at that time.
Khaled Mishal is out, and then you have Sinwar coming in.
Sinwar comes in with a very different outlook.
He's local, he's thinking in terms of the prism of his experience in the Israeli prison system.
And he's like, these people understand nothing but force.
They have no conception of the world aside from relations of raw force.
Okay.
I'm going to build a network for the long haul that will enable a forceful military answer to this state.
And he does that through extending the network of tunnels which had already existed in Eliza before to.
Because, by the way, Gaza was put under such severe siege, the greatest siege in modern history, the worst siege in modern history.
That's a condition that leads to the emergence of Sinwar.
And I'm telling you, we could go on and on about this place, but so much of this requires contextualization, thought, and above all, serious empathy with the people on the ground so that we can find a way forward for everybody in this region.
And it's becoming clear that actually the solution.
To the question of Palestine, a just solution to it is key for not just the liberation of Palestine, but the whole world.
So much of the world actually is influenced by this, as is becoming clearer and clearer, including with this war with Iran at the moment.
Well, Abdel, thank you so much for joining us.
Guys, I can tell you, you got to check out Tharaw Project.com.
A Just Solution for the World00:01:30
I don't know why I was delaying saying that.
In my head, it was.org.
And then also learn Palestine.
That is one of the craziest, most fucked up URLs I've ever seen, my brother.
I don't know what the fuck.
LearnPalestine.qah.ox.ac.uk.
What the fuck is.ox.ac?
That's Oxford University because my colleague, Carmen Abulsi, was a professor there and we hosted it there.
So we had the weirdest URLs there.
Well, guess what?
They're going to be in hyperlinks in the episode description.
Click on them from there.
And the YouTube channel, I'm going to put up too because there are incredible interviews that you conducted with members of the Palestinian Revolution from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, there, and the 1950s that are just amazing.
Thank you so much for joining us.
It's an honor and pleasure.
I'm a huge fan of this podcast.
Thank you, Brace, for including me in it.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Bryce.