This essay is based on the lecture delivered by Sarah Raymundo and Ammar Ali Jan for the first Unit of the People’s Academy curriculum. You can receive the full program — including the recorded lecture — by signing up for The People’s Academy.

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Introduction

Capitalism is often understood as a process of bartering and trading — of securing advantage through exchange with an antagonistic party.

In fact, capitalism is a system of accumulation of value on a world scale. Distinct regions, distinct mechanisms, and distinct processes play different roles within that system. Some of those processes do not involve trading for profit or direct labour exploitation; they involve setting the conditions for labour exploitation on a world scale.

This is the political question: the question of securing the ideological basis that allows people to be exploited, that lets them submit or surrender to their exploitation and dispossession. Capitalism cannot be straightforwardly reduced to someone going to the market and haggling with the merchant over the price of a piece of bread. There is a whole set of conditions that both constitute and antedate the processes of capitalist exploitation.

It is also important to distinguish here between colonialism as a mechanism for value transfer between poorer and richer nations — the process of drain from India or South Asia to Britain, for example — and settler colonialism, in which people of European origin, within a capitalist system, colonise another people’s land. Settler colonialism immediately transports the contradiction between North and South into the process of nation-state construction itself, because that construction hits up against the friction of a people who refuse to be colonised and subjugated. Today that process is clearest in the case of Israel.

From the moment of Israel’s founding, it was understood by the ideologues who conceived it — Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and others — that Zionism would constitute a rampart, a forward post of so-called civilisation against the continents of Africa and Asia. It was understood that this would place the Zionist state in a fundamental contradiction with the people living on the land. The entire history of Zionism can therefore be productively read not only as a process of the destruction of the Palestinian people, but also as a search for an alliance with a European patron who could provide the potentially isolated Zionist state with financial, military, and political support. In return, the Zionist state would have to carry out activities that were functional, useful, and profitable for US imperialism.

The period from 1947 to 1949 saw the crystallisation of new settler property relations in historical Palestine and the establishment of a new, highly militarised state. This immediately destabilised the colonial and semicolonial regimes across the Arab region, which had been unable to defend Palestine. Nasser and the Ba’ath drew on this failure, and it pushed the Arab world in the direction of an increasingly anti-systemic form of Arab nationalism. This set the stage for what was called the Arab Cold War: Arab monarchism and increasingly Arab oil wealth — which was becoming central to US power — versus the rising tide of Arab nationalism.

For the Palestinians, the Nakba meant the fragmentation of the Palestinian people. Over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes and villages; they became refugees in the neighbouring Arab countries as well as in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The social texture of the Palestinian people was destroyed. In the aftermath, scattered throughout the Arab world, there was a need to reorganise, to overcome both social and political fragmentation, to re-establish a political framework in a context already characterised by collusion with colonial powers and by the interests of the imperialist project being implemented across the Arab region, with Palestine as its most visible symbol.

The Student Movement and the Rearticulation of Resistance

It was students who played the fundamental role in rearticulating Palestinian political analysis after 1948. They developed their analysis through confrontation, discussion, and exchange at Arab universities, where they encountered students from other liberation movements. The exchange between Palestinian students and Algerian students — particularly in Cairo throughout the 1950s and in Beirut — was especially significant for the articulation of an analysis that placed Zionism as a colonial ideology at the core of the overall imperialist project that the US and the West were implementing, not only across the Arab region but throughout the Third World.

It was through this interaction that Palestinian students moved beyond the narrow understanding of a nationalist struggle and framed their national ambition within a critical analysis that demanded a transformative effort against the entire international system, in which imperialism and capitalism were understood as fundamental to the colonial oppression Palestinians faced. Anti-colonialism was at the core of the analysis that Palestinian youth developed, and it informed the emergence and vision of the most prominent factions of the Palestinian liberation movement — Fatah, which emerged through the efforts of students at the University of Cairo in the early 1950s, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which grew out of the experience of students at the American University of Beirut.

Palestinians also reorganised their social structures. In 1955, students established the first transnational popular union — the General Union of Palestinian Students — setting the example for all other sectors of Palestinian society. By doing so, they were able to interact with international unions, such as the International Union of Students, and to voice the ambitions of the Palestinian people as representatives within the broader anti-colonial movement.

Internationalism as Joint Struggle

Zionism and the experience of fragmentation, expulsion, and ethnic cleansing were understood by Palestinians as part of the colonial ideology that remained typical of the Western world, despite any claims of a new international order emerging from the aftermath of World War II. At the same time that the international community claimed to guarantee equality and justice, it was partitioning Palestine and legitimising another colonial project — unveiling the real nature of an unbalanced international system that remained structured around capitalist interest and imperialist oppression.

Internationalism was therefore part and parcel of every effort Palestinians made throughout the following decades. The strategy was constant cooperation and exchange with other revolutionary movements, grounded in the understanding that the struggle for liberation was part of a joint effort that would bring about a transformation of the entire international system. The PLO cooperated with the ANC in South Africa, with SWAPO, with movements across Latin America, Vietnam, and Ireland. These were understood not as separate struggles but as part of the same effort: liberation required systemic transformation, because an isolated national change could not address the structural foundations of colonialism. The Palestinian revolution, as it was presented in posters and publications of the period, was framed as a fight against imperialism, Zionism, and all the reactionary powers that characterised the international scene.

In 1967, Israel played a keystone role for the United States. By attacking the frontline states — Egypt and Syria above all — it delegitimised their projects for Arab unity and the idea of combining internal redistribution with confrontation with Israel. It destabilised Egypt, the historical population centre and catalyst for radical politics in the Arab world. This was a great gift to imperialism. In return, by 1970 the US began to see Israel as a major cog in its overall machinery of accumulation — understanding, of course, that different cogs play different roles in the machine.

What role did Israel come to play after 1967? It defended settler property relationships, both directly and by supporting other countries in doing so. It defended colonialism on a world scale, in both principle and practice. It defended the inequality of nations in the world system by asserting through its very actions that some countries did not have sovereignty rights — the right to decide how they would develop and accumulate. It forced regional developmental resources to be diverted to warfare: eight to ten per cent of Iraqi and Egyptian GDP went to defensive armament against the Israeli threat. And it created a pretext for escalating the nationalist orientation of many Arab states at the expense of internal social redistribution.

Post-1967, US military aid to Israel became astronomical. US military aid in general is a mechanism through which the US budget is directly sent to US military contractors — a direct subsidy to the US military-industrial complex. In the Israeli case, uniquely, twenty-five per cent of that aid was allowed to remain in Israel to assist the build-up of a domestic military-industrial complex, which became fundamental to subsequent Israeli accumulation and its emergence as the regional power it is today. Because of the US commitment to maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge, the most advanced arms were given to Israel while vast quantities of weapons were sold to Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Jordan. Israel became a regional irritant around which arms sales became both inevitable and necessary, creating a captive market perpetually sustained by the constant state of tension Israel generated. The disruptive role of Israel was thus deeply functional for the entire articulation of the Arab region with the US Pentagon complex.

Israel also performed other services for US political engineering on a global scale. It carried out systematic military sales to settler Africa, maintaining extremely close relations with South Africa and Rhodesia and stabilising their settler-colonial property systems as long as it could — diverting the resources of the southern African cone towards militarisation rather than national popular development. Israel became central in offering military assistance to the southern cone in Latin America, supplying weapons to the fascist and anti-Semitic Argentinian dictatorship and to the sub-fascist states of Central America. It was able to bypass congressional arms embargoes — to Nicaragua, for example — and offer weapons directly to the fascist forces, assisting the maintenance of capitalist property relationships on a world scale. The entire process, especially in relation to the Arab Gulf states, promoted the diversion of oil proceeds — a historic area of contestation for Arab nationalist movements — into US weapons purchases, ensured that oil wealth remained in the hands of regional upper classes, and guaranteed that the states themselves would remain outside the control of the popular classes.

The Post-Soviet Moment

The Cold War is often understood as a process of anti-communism. In fact, it is more productive to think of it as a process of preventing delinking — the constitution of autonomous poles of capital accumulation, countries with autonomous industrial and technological capacity separate from the circuits of the United States, from whose processes the US and Europe would not be able to profit. This is why the US encouraged subordinate industrialisation in Japan and Europe while rejecting Soviet catch-up industrialisation. It is also what allows us to have a different perspective on the role of the founding of the Zionist state.

The post-Soviet period must be understood within the overall framework of the US obsession, since 1917, with engineering accumulation on a world scale and preventing rival poles of capital accumulation from arising. Part and parcel of this is the constant instilling of a worldwide sense of defeat — through the violent suppression of Third World radical nationalist movements and communist movements, but also through the non-violent engineering of political consciousness, particularly through the NGO complex, which became increasingly salient in the Arab-Iranian region.

Many of the imperatives continued in the post-Soviet period — maintaining weapons sales, the safety of the petrodollar, and constant warfare — but the mechanisms accelerated because the obstacles could be more easily targeted. Without the Soviet nuclear umbrella, the US could take out Iraq and move to systemic state collapse, which began in 1991 and accelerated across the Arab-Iranian region. It could proceed through sanctions — a form of economic quarantine and asphyxiation — used to sever forces economically from the world system. The political complement to sanctions was the terrorist designation: the severing of internationalism on a world scale by erecting political quarantines enforced with massive jail sentences, preventing political liaison between activists in the US and Europe and forces across the region, the Philippines, Colombia, and elsewhere.

Oslo and the Loss of Anti-Colonial Language

The transformation of the international system with the end of the Cold War and the Oslo Accords of the 1990s marked a turning point for the Palestinian movement. The language of internationalism was diluted within the neoliberal effort to present the Palestinian question in a pragmatic way that decontextualised Palestinian oppression from the colonial project at its basis. There was a disconnect in understanding the causes of the oppression. The anti-colonial nature of the struggle was overshadowed by a pragmatism based on negotiations, state-building, and two-state discourse. The language for explaining the Palestinian cause was replaced with a neoliberal narrative. For thirty years, the root causes of the Palestinian question were effectively excluded from the debate.

The Oslo process was in fact a process of pacification of the Palestinian national liberation movement. The terrorist lists engineered as part of that process were composed overwhelmingly of forces characterised by opposition to Zionism and Israel: Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah. These lists, alongside the NGO complex and the language of state-building, formed part of the architecture for containing the Palestinian struggle within parameters acceptable to the US and its allies.

The 1979 Revolution and the Axis of Resistance

The 1979 revolution in Iran was a populist, anti-American, and developmentalist revolution that brought Iran out of the US orbit in terms of central rent circuits — particularly oil and weapons. It was also emphatically anti-Zionist. In reaction, the US began a war on Iran that remains acutely contemporary. Iran became a buttress for the anti-systemic forces on a regional scale, including the PFLP, Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Hezbollah.

Whether these forces are anti-imperialist or radical left is not the point. The point is that they act in a logic opposed to the system as it currently exists — and the system is nothing other than the actual policy of US imperialism: ongoing semicolonialism and settler colonialism, permanent war, and a permanent sense of defeat. These forces are fighting for the defence of the political sovereignty regime that was the historic achievement of the nationalist anti-colonial struggles. They are fighting against settler colonialism in Palestine. They are building on technological sovereignty — Iran is accelerating its research base, also through technological exchanges with Russia, China, and North Korea. And they are overthrowing the sense of defeat, which is the necessary political and ideological regulator for the entire US project in the region and on a world scale.

From 1991 onwards, escalating in 2003 and reaching a fever pitch in 2011, the US waged a war on the region — not only on anti-imperialist forces but on state structures themselves. The remaining Arab-Iranian republican states, in contrast with the US-aligned monarchies, were the targets, and they were targeted as states. Why? Because there is a caricature in our movements that the state is pure repression, pure violence, fascism. In fact, the state is a crystallisation of social labour. States own and manage hospitals, public transport systems, social security, and healthcare. Even desiccated states retain these functions. States are mechanisms of social reproduction: insofar as a state prevents violence from falling on a people, it protects the conditions within which people can potentially lead lives free of externally imposed violence. In the Arab region in particular, the state is a potential articulator — a means by which people come together as equal citizens in republics. Its destruction is a mechanism for accelerating sectarianisation, dividing the working class, and keeping the region subordinate. The attack on the state is therefore a direct interest of the US ruling class.

After October 7th

While the language of internationalism was lost for three decades, what we are seeing today — in particular after October 7th — is a newly found or refound understanding of the anti-colonial nature of the Palestinian question and its connection to imperialism and capitalism. There is an awareness not merely of the failure of the international system but a critical analysis of the international system as part of the problem — as a structure established to allow the perpetuation of unbalanced power relations, exploitation, and colonialism. The global movement now understands the Palestinian question in these terms, which is why the mobilisation is framed not simply as solidarity for the Palestinians but as the necessity to fight the system that allows that oppression, that colonial violence, that colonial extermination to be implemented.

Why has the genocide been prosecuted with such ferocity, even in the face of the collapse of US liberal institutions and the potential collapse of the US human rights regime? It is about re-imposing defeat on the Palestinian people — on all the peoples of the region — and reinstilling the sense that nothing can be done about regional sanctions, regional semicolonialism, regional settler colonialism, and regional state collapse. All of this is channelled through Israel but cannot be reduced to Israel, which is why defending Israel becomes all the more important. The US and Israel are willing to impose genocide on the Palestinian people in order to protect their objectives and the means they use to secure those objectives: the ideology of dominance on a world scale.

This is where we are today, and this is what is being challenged — in the military arena, in the global movement, and in the critical analysis of a new generation that has come to understand that what is at stake is not only the fate of Palestine but the systemic foundations of the order that produced its destruction.