Palestine, genocide, and the imperialist lie of the ‘rules-based international order’

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Ashley Smith:

Welcome to Solidarity Without Exception. I’m Ashley Smith. Blanca Ze and I are co-hosts of this podcast sponsored by the Ukraine Solidarity Network and produced by The Real News Network. Today we’re joined by Iman Abdelhadi. Iman is a Palestinian academic activist and writer who thinks that the intersection of sexuality, gender, religion, and politics. She’s an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago where she researches American Muslim communities. She’s co-author of Everything for Everyone and Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 to 2072. Over the last two years, the US and Israel have carried out a genocidal war in Gaza. They have officially killed over 60,000 people bombed Gaza cities to smithereens and displaced. 90% of its 2.1 million people. Their blockade of almost all aid has caused a famine that threatens to kill hundreds of thousands of people. And now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced plans to invade and occupy all of the territory while he GreenLights more repression and colonial settlement in the West Bank.

Most governments in the overwhelming majority of the world’s people have turned against Israel. Human rights watch categorizes it as an apartheid state. The International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and the Israeli Human Rights Organization B’Tselem have called its war in Gaza a genocide. Imperialist powers have backed Israel and committing all these crimes against humanity. Britain and the US supported the Zionists war in 1948 to dispossess the Palestinian people of their homeland, found the state of Israel and set up its apartheid regime and later occupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967. The US has backed Israel as its colonial watchdog to police the Middle East, vast oil reserves. It views them in the words of the State Department as a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history, especially since 1967 when Israel defeated Egypt and Syria.

In the six day war, Washington has bankrolled an armed Zionist state to crush any opposition to US hegemony, whether from Palestinians, Arab nationalist regimes, the left or mass popular movements for democracy and equality, the Palestinian people have waged an unrelenting struggle for national liberation against Israel. In its imperialist backers, they have used every strategy imaginable from arm resistance, a right recognized for all occupied people to mass popular uprisings like the two intifadas in 1987, 2000 and nonviolent mass protests like the great march of return in 2018. No matter what strategy Palestinians have used, Israel has responded with brute force repeatedly waging wars in the occupied territories. The US and Israel have also tried to co-opt and neutralize Palestinian resistance. For example, they offered the PLO the false promise of a Palestinian state in the Oslo Accords in 1993. But all they gave the PLO was the Palestinian authority, which they have used to enforce their dominance.

Meanwhile, Israel increased settlement in the West Bank and then laid siege to Gaza when Hamas took power there in 2007. At the same time, Washington has attempted to normalize relationships between Israel and the rest of the region states. Only Iran and its allies oppose this, but they were at best unreliable. Friends of the Palestinian people faced with isolation, siege and regional betrayal. The Palestinian resistance attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023, triggering Tel Aviv’s latest war in Gaza and throughout the region. The silver lining amidst this catastrophe as the global movement and solidarity with the Palestinian people, their struggle for liberation is the Vietnam or South Africa of our era throughout the world, including here in the belly of the beast, people have risen up to demand a ceasefire and boycott divestment and sanctions against Israel. In the face of state repression, the movement has swung global public opinion behind Palestine, especially among young people, young Jews in particular.

In this episode, Iman Abdelhadi discusses the history of the Palestinian people’s freedom struggle, its role in the regional fight for democracy and equality, Israel’s current genocidal war, and the tasks and responsibilities of the solidarity movement, particularly in the United States. Now onto the interview with Iman, we’re now almost two years into the US and Israel sponsored genocidal war on Gaza. It was started under the Biden administration and the Democratic party, and Trump has escalated it today. I think we’re in a very kind of contradictory moment. On the one hand, the US and Israel have laid waste to Gaza, increased settlement and occupation in the West Bank and weaken their regional antagonists. On the other hand, the Palestinian resistance and the international solidarity movement have remained strong and vibrant, and especially the solidarity movement has grown dramatically globally to the greatest extent I think in history. So what’s your assessment of the current conjuncture of war resistance and solidarity?

Eman Abdelhadi:

I think we’re seeing increasing pushback against Israel, not just from popular grassroots movements, but from some nation states as well. So there was this conference in Bogota where I think 12 nations committed to an arms embargo and a general boycott of Israel over the genocide. We’re also seeing even kind of mainstream, really genocide, apologists, rags like the New York Times finally sort of acknowledge that this is indeed a genocide. So increasingly we’re seeing a sort of the isolation of the US and Israel. Now, I don’t know. I think the problem is how long that isolation will actually take to end this. I mean, my sense is that the Israeli government knew that it would eventually end up in this isolated position. And the idea was to clear Raza. I think there a war to ethnically cleanse Raza and destroy it. And I think they are in a war against time.

They’re effectively saying, how much can we destroy? How many people can we kill? How many people can we displace before the world or the US or whatever imposes red lines? And I think that it’s very clear that once there’s a ceasefire or once there’s a sort of resolution to the current genocide and Reza or a pause to the current genocide, and Reza, what will happen next is a sort of wait until it’s time to do the same thing in the West Bank and expel even more Palestinians and kill even more Palestinians. So I think what we can rely on is that the logic of Zionism, the logic of the state of Israel has actually been deeply consistent and they have persisted in their strategy, which is to try to claim as much land as possible to try to expel or kill as many Palestinians as possible between the river and the sea, where they believe they have dominion.

And so I think this current conjecture, it’s hard to say exactly what’s going to happen next. The Palestinian resistance forces have just issued a statement. There was a 18 minute statement by Hamas spokesperson saying that they are prepared for a war of attrition, that they are prepared to continue to fight. The Israeli military has suffered losses in terms of its soldiers. It actually has been facing military consequences. Of course, there’s no comparison. The amount of death and destruction that’s happening on the Palestinian side in this sort of masculine of civilians is hard to put into words. So it’s not clear what happens next. It’s also especially unclear with the Trump administration is in some ways a wild card, right? Trump seems committed to being a deal maker. He keeps saying there’s about to be good news on Za. There’s about to be good news on za. The news has not shown up. And so yeah, it’s not clear what’s going to happen. What is clear is that the role of the solidarity movement, the role is to continue and to persist and to push even harder for sanctioning Israel, for cutting off US ties to Israel, really imposing consequences, economic consequences, political consequences, cultural consequences on this open air genocide that we’ve been watching for nearly two years now.

Ashley Smith:

So let’s turn to why the US is really invested in this relationship with Israel, because in many sense, the war is an outgrowth of first British imperialism and then US imperialism support of Zionism’s a hundred year long project, which you’ve just kind of gestured at in seizing historic Palestine. Why has the US been so determined to support this project in all of its brutality, its genocidal logic, et cetera?

Eman Abdelhadi:

Yeah, I mean, there’s no Israel without us support. There could never have been Israel without US support. I mean, first there couldn’t be Israel without British support. The British absolutely facilitated the colonization of Palestine. They handed, they signed the bill for declaration in secret determining that this would be a land for Jewish people. And then the US transitions into becoming Israel’s main ally. But what we’ve seen is that the US’ relationship with Israel has fluctuated. It’s fluctuated in small degrees over the decades since the sort of declaration of the Zionist entity as a Jewish supremacist state. But I think that if I were to paint in very broad brushstrokes, I would say that the US’ initial commitment to Israel was a commitment to, was one signing onto the broader Western project of trying to get rid of what they think of as the Jewish problem, right?

This sense, the US did not want to take Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. Most western nations did not. They saw this as a way to sort of make up for the crimes of the Holocaust by handing off this land that was not theirs. And then I think the US saw Israel as a potential strategic ally in a resource rich region that would sort of facilitate its access to this region. Now, I think over the past few decades, that relationship, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union and since the sort of neoliberal of the Arab world, right? Since Egypt recognizes Israel under Sade in the eighties, and you have basically a destruction, a slow destruction of the Arab left and the kind of pan arabist socialist project. And at that point, one by one, Arab nations become client states of the us. And so it needed Israel to play this role when the Arab world was somewhat united under an naite project or was trying to be united under an right project of a more USSR aligned resistance, anti-colonial struggle, part of this kind of global movement.

And once the world no longer does that, Israel strategic role becomes more and more clear. If anything, it becomes more and more of a liability. But it also becomes at the same time, you have the growth of the weapons sector. At the same time, massive financial investment in Israeli tech. Israel invests massively in developing weaponry. And you have the kind of tight loop between US weapons manufacturers that are sending money that basically tax money goes to Israel to buy weapons from US weapons manufacturers. And you have these massive financial ties that are built into Israel. And I mean, I don’t like to pose conspiracy projects, but I think it’s clear that the Israeli government and Israeli leaders and planners saw the importance of building financial investment like deep financial ties with the us. And so it makes it incredibly difficult for the US to exit, even though it’s sort of strategic interests as a nation state are not really being served by Israel.

In fact, that Israel is an enormous liability on US interest. But I think that increasingly over the last few decades, we have seen the US act less as a nation state and more as a conduit for particular for whoever in the ruling class, whoever in the corporate ruling class is able to vie for enough attention. So we see the US acting in the interest of particular not in a unified national interest, but in the interest of whoever has the ear and the financial incentives of the government. So there are many companies and many sectors, American sectors that have made enormous amounts of money off of this genocide, particularly the weapons sector has just profits have absolutely skyrocketed. And I think no student of US governance or US history would think that that sector just leaves the policy decisions that determine its profit just like up to public opinion or up to chance. And we know about the revolving door between these sectors and the US government. So here we are. So I think that’s why we are still in this mess. I think that’s why we continue to be in this mess because there are American billionaires making enormous profits off of this genocide and off of this deeply non-strategic alliance.

Ashley Smith:

One thing I wanted to ask a little bit more about was in this particular war, the kind of lockstep position of first Biden and then Trump with Israel, whatever their spats have been, which seems to be driven by an attempt to reassert US dominance and Israeli dominance in the region after the enormous setback in the Iraq war. So how much of a role do you think that kind of ambition plays in what the US and Israel have been trying to do?

Eman Abdelhadi:

Well, I think from a policy perspective, Biden and Trump have been somewhat indistinguishable on Israel and on Palestine. There was the brief moment of a ceasefire that the evidence that we have suggests that Trump pushed that through. So that’s the only kind of major difference. Whereas site news and others have reported there was no push to end this. There was no fight for a ceasefire under the Biden administration. They lied to us over and over saying they were working tirelessly for a ceasefire. They were not. And I think Biden represents an era of American politics that still sees the US as this global police force that sees the importance of military dominance. And I think for Trump, it’s really all about the dollar signs, his sort of America first policy. But I think to my earlier point, I think it’s significant that someone who sees everything in terms of the dollar signs and is not necessarily invested in fact is in some ways dismantling American Empire.

He is dismantling the tools of US global hegemony like by cutting, for example, U-S-A-I-D and all these tools. And I’m not saying that cutting them is okay. I think it’s been incredibly cruel and murderous really to cut these programs. But the long-term effect of it is that you’re going to lose global imperial domination. But I think it’s significant that someone who only sees things in terms of the immediate dollar effect is remaining in this committed relationship. So clearly this is profitable. It is profitable. So I see it as more like letting Israel run loose because there’s no, and kind of just allowing it to destroy the counterbalances in the region while trying to maintain a sort of America first dynamic. We saw a rift in the right, we’re seeing fissures in Trump’s coalition, and one of them was around the bombing of Iran. One of his lines from his first presidency was that he had not started any wars, that he was against the endless wars, that he was against foreign intervention, that he was against regime change.

So I think it’s a constant kind of calculus. But in terms of the actual policy, there’s no doubt in my mind that Biden also would’ve bombed Iran. There’s no doubt in my mind that really policy wise, the only real differences was this three month ceasefire. Now, of course, liberals in the US have traditionally been more interested in the narrative that comes out of their politicians than the reality. So they are outraged when Trump says, we’re going to turn resident into a beach front, right? But they’re not outraged when Biden effectively facilitates the complete destruction of the Reza Strip in the death of tens of thousands of people. For liberals, it’s really just about the optics of the thing. It’s about saying the right thing, not doing the right thing. And the reality is neither administration has done the right thing, and we as a movement have not had the power to force them to. That’s we need to come to terms with.

Ashley Smith:

One thing I wanted to ask too about is how other powers, both regional and international relate to this question? Because on the one hand, there’s a whole network of Arab states that have been lockstep with Israel behind the scenes while rhetorically in public critical of Israel, and there are also international powers and powers in different parts of the world that have been quietly sharply critical of Israel’s genocide, but have continued to maintain trade relations with Israel at the same time. So how do you see that or explain that?

Eman Abdelhadi:

Yeah, I mean, I think that we can’t underemphasize the destructive role of the Gulf oil states and their normalization with Israel. It’s not just symbolic normalization. There’s been a sort of, I would say UAE led effort to normalize, and it’s driven a lot by a desire for Israeli surveillance and weaponry, the technology that this battle tested technology that Israel can boast about how deeply it is surveilled Palestinian life, how systematically it could destroy an entire population. The nation states in the area cover that and are willing to pay for it. And so I think that that’s part of it. And I think part of what’s also going on in the Arab world is the aftermath of the Arab Spring, that you had this massive set of uprisings that either ended in deep counter-revolutionary setbacks like in Egypt. I mean, setback is a really, really understatement for what happened in Egypt or all out civil war and destruction like in Libya and in Syria, aided of course by the US and its allies.

So I think that once scholar calls it the melancholia of the Arab Street, we talk about the Arab Street as the Arab public, the sense that there is, first of all, the systematic destruction of social movements and anything that made social movements possible, which was already not great before the Arab Spring. But really the heavy handed repression and surveillance that has happened over the last decade and a half have made it so that there’s very little resistance from the Arab Street that governments who otherwise would have worried that they could not possibly contain the masses if they allowed this to go on now are quite comfortable. I mean, there was a report last week of massive arrests in Jordan. Jordan’s population is majority Palestinian, and people are being arrested for doing any kind of solidarity work with Reza. So that’s part of, I think, the calculus, right?

So you have the Gulf States, on the one hand kind of pushing and other things to note is that the Gulf states themselves have an imperial relationship with the rest of the Arab world. I mean, the UAE owns so much of the Egyptian economy at this point. And so the UAE has been heavily involved in the Sudan war. So yeah, we’re basically seeing a moment of global globally. There’s just not enough power on the other side. And I think that we are still in a moment, even though the US empire is self-destructing, it is not gone. It is still very much the dominant actor globally, and it does not have a real counterweight. I mean, China is an economic counterweight, but it’s been quite careful about not entering directly in these types of crises. And so there is no sort of political counterweight to us influence.

And so everybody has to walk on eggshells. And of course, many places are deeply invested in Israeli trade and trade with Israel and Israeli weaponry and either selling it or acquiring it, right? So yeah, I think that’s where we are right now. But I think, again, it brings us back to this, the need for mass movements that push governments to impose red lines, that push for boycotts, that push for sanctions, and that hold people accountable to them, that makes sure that it’s not just a verbal thing, that actually we have to do the work of figuring out where the money is going.

Ashley Smith:

So one thing I want to now turn to is the Palestinian resistance, because ever since this process of colonization, dispossession, imposition of apartheid, and now genocide, the Palestinian people have resisted and used various strategies of resistance. When you think about that, the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle, what are the kind of lessons of the various strategies that the Palestinian movement has used for today’s struggle to free Palestine?

Eman Abdelhadi:

Yeah, I think the most important thing is the concept of the popular cradle, right? The idea that effectively all forms of resistance are important and actually mutually reinforcing. So it’s not just we’re pursuing one path of resistance, but rather having a society that is committed to resistance and that recognizes that there are going to be different roles to play. So there are going to be people who pursue their legal right to violent resistance against an occupation, which is a right under legal international law, and a simple moral right, that those faced with guns and tanks have a right to take them up against the people holding them, and that there are other sectors of society who are going to be boycotting, are going to be doing social reproductive labor. So women have been an important part of both of the adas have been an important part of this building, this popular cradle.

I think that actually there’s a lot of lesson for us in the global solidarity movement where we use nonviolent resistance, that there still has to be a diversity of tactics and there has to be a lot of room for that, and that we won’t win with just one strategy or just one tactic, especially not one tactic. So I think that’s the case. I think that we have seen Palestinians struggle in every possible way under the sun. And the Zionism line is, oh, if they had done it this way, if they had done it that way, if they had, but the reality is when Palestinians have marched, they’ve been shot, when they’ve boycotted, they’ve been legally pursued, when they have hunger struck, they’ve been force fed. There is nothing that Palestinians have tried that has not been met with massive repression and death. The Zionist state does not want Palestinians to exist.

That is the most consistent thing in the history of the region. That is the only through line to all of this. And in fact, even the Palestinians pursued nonviolent resistance even in the period between the Belfor declaration and the declaration of the Zionist state, right? There was massive attempts at negotiation, boycott strikes, all of these things. So it’s really important to focus on. I love that you phrase this question as, what do we learn from this resistance struggle? But to focus on that, all of these are reactions to the persistent attacks of Zionism and the Jewish supremacist state that is Israel.

Ashley Smith:

I wanted to ask you about a quote that Palestinian Marxist George Haba used to use all the time. That is that the road to Jerusalem lies through Amman, Damascus, and Cairo. How does the Palestinian liberation struggle fit into the wider popular struggle for democracy, social justice, and equality against the various autocratic regimes in the Middle East that you were just talking about? What does this mean for the liberation struggle today?

Eman Abdelhadi:

I was in Egypt in January, and it reminded me so much of Palestine, it felt internally occupied. There were military trucks on the street, there were around the entrances to Tahir Square. There were cinder blocks blocking streets so that you could never flood into Tahir Square again. On Fridays, which are the days that hundreds, thousands, millions of Muslim men go to pray, which have often been when protests start, and often then really for the 1400 year history of Islam have been a major site of political struggle and fermentation. You have military trucks, not just police, military trucks stationed outside of large mosques. So the Arab world is internally colonized. It’s not the same thing, but the Arab world is internally colonized. We are being governed by people whose interests have nothing to do with the population who would hate to see a liberated Palestine. The reality is that a liberated Palestine would establish that you could liberate yourself in this region of the world, and that is terrifying to Assisi.

That is terrifying to the Hashemite kingdom that is absolutely terrifying to the Gulf monarchies. There is no desire for a free Palestine. All of the sort of gesturing towards Palestinian rights is only to quell these angry populations that see this. So George Hacha iss, right, that there is, we do need a regional revolution, and that revolution may very well start in Palestine, but it is hard to imagine the liberation of Palestine without the liberation of the Arab world. And it’s hard to imagine the liberation of the Arab world without the liberation of Palestine, the two go hand in hand. And when we imagine as someone who writes speculative fiction and thinks about revolutionary futures, when we imagine that liberation, we imagine it regionally, if not globally. And at the end of the day, what history tells us, and this is what gives me some hope in a moment where hope is incredibly difficult to come by, and where I really have to be very disciplined to kind of maintain my revolutionary optimism, is that history says you can only maintain this kind of oppression for so long.

I mean, when I was growing up and going to Egypt, which was, I mean, I’m 35, this was like, I don’t know, 20 years ago it was going to Egypt and the Egyptian pound was three to a dollar. Now it’s 50 to a dollar. The Egyptian social security, if you go on social security in Egypt right now, your monthly income is 2000 Egyptian pounds, 2000 Egyptian pounds, you cannot buy. You can’t buy a day’s worth of meals with that. So there’s only so much that you can commiserate a hundred million people for this long and have them watch their brothers and sisters across the border get absolutely destroyed. And what we’ve seen in Egypt is that despite this being the most repressive moment in modern Egyptian history, and despite the absolute horror, people are still organizing and still protesting and still doing everything they can and still speaking up. So I think it’s only a matter of time before the Arab masses rise once again. And the question is, are we going to have the organization and the capacity for that to turn into actual revolutionary change, or will we see even more counter revolution?

Ashley Smith:

Yes. So one of the most positive developments in all the horror of the genocide that Israel and the United States have carried out has been what you talked about at the beginning, the explosion of the Palestine solidarity movement globally. People of March, students of staged encampments, workers of disrupted armed shipments, states have charged Israel with genocide, cultural figures most recently at Glastonbury, denounced the IDF and spoke out against apartheid occupation and genocide. So what is the state of the solidarity movement today? What strategies should we adopt? What tactics are going to be the most advantageous to weaken the state of Israel from the various countries that we’re in? What kind of campaigns should we pursue and what is the role of democratic organization of the solidarity movement in the whole process?

Eman Abdelhadi:

Those are really good questions. I think that for me, there’s not going to be one strategy that wins, but I think it’s important to pursue literally everything on the table. And we now have the mass movement to do it right. The problem is we constantly criti each other as opposed to critiquing our enemy. And we need to recognize that yeah, there are going to be people who really only want to do and can only do direct action. And there are people who if you tell them that this is the only way to be in the movement, they’re not going to do it, but they will call a representative or they will do a petition or they’ll talk about this at their worker union. I think that we need all of those people. I think we need to plug people into the spaces where they either have access to others that they can mobilize and that fit their life and proclivity and training.

I think that the tactics that I’m finding most inspiring aim at these material ties that are maintaining where we are right now, that are maintaining the genocide, that aim at companies that are trading with Israel, that aim at when I see people block weapons from being shipped, when people are organizing within labor unions to say, we are as workers are not going to allow our company or university or whatever to continue to do this. Those are the actions that I think are particularly helpful. I think we’ve already, for so long, our in the movement was about conveying the history and the reality of the situation and stoking moral outrage. And we’ve done that. The American public already agrees with it. So what’s next is the material conditions, and I think the question we have to, the metric by which we should evaluate any tactic is what potential material consequence might this have for Palestinians and for this enduring relationship between Israel and the US or Israel and wherever people are organizing. And the question is, what do we do next with that? So I think that we need to de-emphasize narrative and emphasize material intervention. So that for me is the sort of what’s next and what we need to work on.

Ashley Smith:

So one of the developments over the last couple of years is that Palestine solidarity is kind of stood out as one of the only active struggles in the United States. You compare it to what happened under Biden with almost every other social movement, they all collapsed with the expectation that Biden was going to deliver on high and Palestine solidarity was active because it opposed biden’s support for the genocide. So today, Trump’s authoritarian rule has triggered the emergence of a mass popular resistance to his horrific attacks on workers and oppressed people in this country. And the question now is posed, what should the Palestine solidarity movement do to relate to this emerging resistance against Trump? How can we make Palestine solidarity, not a separate question, but a central question within the broader resistance to Trump, and how can we make Palestine a domestic issue that US workers and general public, the general public in the United States has to see as in their interest to address?

Eman Abdelhadi:

Yeah, I mean, I think the links are right there, and I think more and more people see them, right? We are ultimately fighting the same fight, right? In some ways, Palestine came up in Palestine exposed so many of the contradictions of the society that are now even more full-blown under Trump, and it really exposed the ways Democrats opened the door for that, right? By calling students antisemitic, by sending police to students, they opened a door that trumped and marched through. And similarly, all of these restrictions that sinus and their supporters have been willing to place on our civil rights, the attacks, our education, the attacks on our basic freedoms, the willingness to use immigration law, all of that is actually wrapped up and you can see in the Palestine issue. So I think that our movement needs to work hand in hand with all of the, I think that all of these struggles are interrelated.

Our enemy is the same. Our enemy is the billionaire class. Our enemy is authoritarian rulers. Our enemy is the corporate parties that don’t care about our opinions, that render any population that they feel like disposable, whether it’s Palestinians or farm workers, or Haitian refugees or people in the Congo. Our enemy is actually the same. And what we need to do is get together and fight our enemy. And to go back to the tactics question, if we are fighting the tactics, we are fighting the companies that are enabling this genocide. Those same companies are enabling the genocide in the Congo. Those same companies are enabling the genocide in Sudan. So it’s not even about billing these as separate issues. I think that in fact, what we need to be doing is fighting on all fronts. There is no scenario in my mind where Palestine is free tomorrow and we all sit down and we then assimilate into American middle class life.

There’s no turning back. We are in struggle. We have to be in struggle on all fronts. And so for me, those links are very clear, and I actually think that people are making those links. Yesterday I was at this mayday movement convening here in Chicago, and it was just very clear from the organizers they were talking about all of these things. In the same breath, it was Stacey Davis Gates gave a shout out to the NEA for cutting ties with the A DL and affirming Palestinian rights. So I think actually I, we’re all on the same page. We just have work to do and we just have to do it. Take a deep breath and get to work.

Ashley Smith:

Exactly. So the US and Israel have suffered a profound crisis of legitimacy that you referred to earlier as a result of this genocide. Their response has been to carry out vicious repression of the solidarity movement and launched this new McCarthyism, specifically targeting Palestinians, Palestine solidarity activists on campus at workplace with doxing firing censorship. Trump has tried to arrest jail and deport many, many activists, but failed to succeed so far. Most recently, Mahmud Khalil, who is suing the Trump administration for $20 million for defamation and wrongful imprisonment, but Trump will continue the witch hunt. He’s shown every sign that he’s going to do that. So what should we expect, and how should the movement respond to this wave of repression?

Eman Abdelhadi:

I think we need to get smart about our strategies. I think it’s okay to adjust our strategies or to adjust our tactics and our strategies to the new environment. I don’t think we need to, I don’t think it’s smart to just keep doing the same thing no matter what is happening all around us. However, we need to keep our eye on the long term, which is that in the long term, this doesn’t work, right? This kind of the cat’s out of the bag on Zionism, the cat’s out the bag on Israel, the cat’s out of the bag on Trump, the cat’s out of the bag on Democratic party. The cat’s fucking out of the bag. You’re not going to be able to put the cat back in the bag. It’s just not going to happen. And so there’s only so much, they’re sort of trying to plug holes into a wall, not to mix metaphors, but into a wall in which that’s about to collapse.

And what we need to do is to be ready to build a completely different wall where that wall comes down. And I think part of that is about not getting distracted by their tactics, not getting so caught up in the day-to-day bullshit that they throw at us, and more keeping our eye on the horizon and recognizing that we’re in this moment of mass transformation. And what can come next is something even worse than what we had before, or what could come next is something much, much better than what we had before. They are selling the American public on a vision and a sadistic vision of the future that built on nostalgia and a weird kind of contradictory desire for American Empire as it’s destroying itself. We need to sell a vision of the future that is liberated, that is equitable, that is a society that is abundant and can share that abundance so that we all lead better lives in which no group can just be rendered disposable. And if we get too caught up in their day-to-day tactics, we don’t do that long-term visioning, and we don’t do that long-term advocacy. So I think it’s very important for us to stay focused.

Ashley Smith:

Now, let’s turn finally to a last question I had for you, which is about the relationship of the Palestinian struggle for liberation to other struggles for self-determination, which are global, which all around the world there are these emergent struggles against various imperial and regional powers from Puerto Rico to Kashmir, Taiwan, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo. You named several others as we’ve been talking. So each of them are different and face different antagonists, oppressors, regional powers, imperial powers. How can we relate the different struggles for self-determination and liberation with each other? How can we build solidarity between them? What does it mean for building a kind of progressive internationalism for the 21st century?

Eman Abdelhadi:

Well, I think the answer is in the question. We need a progressive internationalism for the 21st century. One that recognizes that our enemy isn’t just the nation state or a particular nation state. Our enemy is a global, somewhat unified ruling class. It’s not fully unified. There are a lot of fissures that we can exploit and pull through, but that in effect, the ruling class has been able to, at least since the eighties, consolidate itself as a global force. And in some ways, it’s much more transnational than we are as we fight it, right? They are very good about being transnational and borderless in how they move money, resources, how they fight for each other. And we need to do the same thing. Obviously, our resources and our capacity to do that are very different. But I think in some ways, this is a moment where I think there’s more clarity than ever before.

When I compare this to even 10 years ago, the ways that people talked about struggles as these sort of discrete, independent things, whereas now it’s just much easier to be like, the bad guy is Palantir, the bad guy is like this. It’s actually becoming more and more clear that our enemy is the same. If our enemy is united and our enemy is clear and our enemy, it’s the same enemy in Haiti. It’s the same enemy in the Congo. It’s the same enemy here. It’s the same enemy in Palestine. It’s taking different forms, and it’s taking different logics, and it’s operating differently. And of course, we have to pay attention to that. We have to work with that, but we have to have a very clear global vision of what that enemy is. And that’s very different than I think, the nineties era way that folks, not everyone, of course, there were always people on the left who sort of had it right. But I think it’s becoming more and more popular to see the world this way, to see that the interlinks between these things, rather than assume that if we just, that liberation can happen in these tiny, discrete bubbles in various places. So I think that’s the, as a movement intellectual, if I may call myself that, right? I think that’s the role of movement intellectuals in some ways, is to keep that vision clear, to keep that vision alive, even as I’m also an organizer, right? Even as we work locally to enact changes.

Ashley Smith:

Thanks to Iman Abdelhadi for that insightful discussion of the Palestinian liberation struggle, the solidarity movement, and their central role in our collective liberation throughout the world. To hear about upcoming episodes of solidarity without exception, sign up for the Real New Network newsletter. Don’t miss an episode.