Episode 302 – Gaza Genocide & Empire with Jason Hickel

Steve Grumbine

00:00:37.445 – 00:03:11.925

All right, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese.

As I’m sure most of you know, I have become very, very focused in pretty much everything that I do these days on what’s going on in Gaza right now. On what’s happening with US Empire and how the pursuit of capital has created a very, very warped understanding, a warped view of not only ourselves, but the world around us. And the slaughter. The genocide that is occurring in Gaza right here, right now, not in some future state, not in some other administration.

The current administration right here, right now, fully funding – I believe it’s 70% of all the bombs and other military offerings the United States can provide – have been to Israel. Israel has been able to somehow or another get things that US Citizens could never dream of, like health and a decent life.

They’re being given everything by this administration.

All efforts to make this administration stop funding a genocide have been met with very, very gaslighting-type arguments of what do you want, Trump or this, that and the other. And this is not an electoral conversation.

This is a conversation about doing the right thing. About standing up for the little guy. About ending oppression. About ending slaughter. About ending genocide. About ending an apartheid state that we’re watching livestream before our very eyes. And so I brought on my friend and repeat guest, Jason Hickel, who, you know, I jokingly say is my spirit animal. This guy is really principled.

I’ve never seen him take a position that I did not somehow or another find myself in.

And so I wanted to bring him on so you could hear from someone who I believe is a man of honor and integrity, who wants to see the world change, who wants to fix the climate crisis, who wants to end oppression in the Global South. And he wants to bring an end to the slaughter for the Palestinian people, in particular in Gaza, which is an open air prison. It’s horrible.

And so, without further ado, my guest, Jason Hickle. He is the professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the author of the Divide and Less Is More. Welcome to the show, sir.

Jason Hickel

00:03:12.425 – 00:03:14.845

Thanks very much, Steve. It’s good to be with you again.

Steve Grumbine

00:03:15.715 – 00:04:59.035

Yeah, I wish this could be like a real super joyful conversation, because every time I get an opportunity to talk to you, I’m really looking forward to it. But it’s hard for me to eat. I’m not sleeping well. I cry at weird times in the middle of my work day. I think I’m so powerless.

What can I do about this? And when I talk to my friends who are just standard Democrats, they tell me I’m myopic. They tell me that I’m missing the forest for the trees.

And I’m like, I don’t know how there could be anything else more important. I mean, what was happening, you know, with Hitler and the Jews During World War II, we’re witnessing happening again today.

Except this time, the difference is instead of us sending military to Normandy to storm the beach, we’re the ones funding the genocide. And I can’t in good conscience accept that. I can’t accept that, and yet I have no power to fix it.

I see you leading the charge out there, and I know, believe me, before you deprecate on yourself, because I know you’re a very humble man.

I know there are a lot of people, lots and lots of people that are doing this, and some that are in-theater, that are risking their very lives right now. But people like you, Jason, allow people like me who are not huge, who are just conscientious people that see this and want to change it.

You allow us to speak with bold authority. And the way you present things is always tied together with other things. It’s not just myopic. It’s the environment. It’s peace.

It’s bringing about a way of life that everyone can thrive in. And so that’s why I find you fascinating, and I wanted to have this conversation with you.

Jason Hickel

00:04:59.415 – 00:06:52.655

Thanks, Steve. Yeah, that’s really interesting to hear. And I completely resonate with your sense of feeling, well, disgusted and also powerless.

I mean, I feel the same way. I think that for a lot of us, the past year has just been wretched.

The things that we’re seeing live-streamed in front of us every day are very clearly like the worst things that are possible to imagine, right? The worst things that, certainly, I’ve ever seen in my conscious life. And it is striking – the sense of powerlessness that everybody feels, right?

Because it’s almost like we were all kind of under the impression that if we just voiced our outrage, then it would stop. And clearly, that’s not the case.

And I think that what this has really revealed is that these are Western countries that are effectively, in most cases, aiding and abetting or actively, in the case of the US, actively supporting what’s going on. And it’s remarkable because they call themselves democracies, right?

And yet it’s very clear that even while the majority of their voting population strongly objects to what is being carried out, people are unable to get the state to change course. And that is a profound – instills a profound sense of powerlessness. Of powerlessness that I think we need to reflect on, right?

I mean, clearly we do not live in real democracies. If we had even a shred of meaningful democracy, clearly, this is such an important issue that we be able to have some kind of collective deliberation about it. Realize that we collectively object, and immediately change course. But that’s clearly not the case. Our ruling classes have decided this is the course they’re taking and nothing will stop them.

And in the US where there’s this ridiculous two-party system prevents any meaningful alternative approach to US foreign policy. And it’s a massive disaster. I mean, for me, the October surprise in this election is that you have this so-called progressive candidate.

The so-called progressive candidate is in the middle of actively supporting and arming a genocide. And that’s striking. I’ve never seen anything more disgusting in the middle of an election season.

And it’s amazing to me that they think that that doesn’t have an effect on voters morale, on turnout, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, we’ll see what happens. But to me it looks like a disaster.

Steve Grumbine

00:06:53.355 – 00:08:41.115

Well, what you said, something that I think is very profound. We don’t have a democracy. I mean, this is no democracy at all.

And during the quote-unquote “primary period,” I mean, in the United States, both parties are private corporations that have by-laws that they can do whatever they want. They’re not accountable. Yet,they have a monopoly or a duopoly, if you will, on the political space.

And they control the elections, they control the debates, they control absolutely everything down to candidate selection. And you know, I’ve grown to believe that voting does nothing for us in this nation, because every single thing . . .

You know, just think about this, going back to 2016 when Bernie Sanders ran for the first time, and then even in 2020 when Bernie Sanders ran again. Now, mind you, Bernie’s busy telling us to ignore genocide and, you know, vote for Kamala, which, you know –

And again, I’m not here to talk about politics because I don’t feel like it matters. I don’t feel like we have a real stake in the game because whatever happens is out of our control. You’ve named it. The Oligarchs, the ownership class have made their decision. But within that space everybody’s trying to tell you that you’re the bad guy for focusing on it while you just, literally, see three-year-old children with half their head blown off or legs missing, et cetera. And I say to myself, how can somebody look past that? How can someone even possibly have the chutzpah to look at someone and say you’re being myopic?

I’ve got nine children. Five boys, four girls. And I think about it all the time. What would happen if someone were blowing my babies up? How would I feel and how would I react?

And watching this happen and knowing full well that there are people out there trying to tell us we got to save democracy.

Jason Hickel

00:08:41.235 – 00:08:42.347

Yeah, it’s horrendous.

Steve Grumbine

00:08:42.451 – 00:08:44.495

How do you reconcile this, Jason?

Jason Hickel

00:08:44.915 – 00:09:52.667

Yeah, it’s really wild to me what the political class is doing right now with this just extraordinary gaslighting, right?

And I think that we need to try to cut through some of this and ask ourselves, like, why actually is it that the US is actively supporting the Israeli genocide and its war crimes? Even in the face of what is very clearly massive international condemnation, including massive resistance from within their own populations, right? To the point of having to suppress student protests and throw a bunch of people in jail and et cetera, et cetera.

Also, at massive expense to the US economy and to the point of totally debasing international law, right? Why would the US administration do this?

It’s interesting because I think that most people tend to fall back on explanatory narratives like the power of AIPAC in US elections, et cetera, et cetera, which is definitely real. I mean, there’s no question that AIPAC is clearly playing a key role here. But at the same time, I think that that doesn’t capture the whole story.

I think the reality is that the US ruling class broadly supports Israel’s actions because they see in this the interests of US capitalism. Okay, so let me try to explain what I think is going on here. The first key thing to understand is that the capitalist economy is a world system,

right? And this is something that we’ve discussed on your show before.

Steve Grumbine

00:09:52.731 – 00:09:53.043

Yes.

Jason Hickel

00:09:53.099 – 00:16:42.895

Where growth ends, capital accumulation in the Core states –

so the US, Britain, Germany, other parts of Western Europe, [the “Core,” hereafter] et cetera, et cetera – relies very heavily on the appropriation of cheap inputs and resources from the Global South, right? This is the way the world system operates. Capital has relied on this imperial arrangement for the entirety of its 500-year history.

Obviously, this arrangement was clear during the colonial period, right?

But then what’s interesting is that, in the middle of the 20th century, it faced a massive challenge in the form of national liberation movements across the Global South that were overthrowing the imperial occupiers and bringing in socialist governments or otherwise, nationalists – nationalist governments aimed at regaining sovereign control over productive capacity and organizing it more around national development.

Okay, now what’s interesting is that we know that this posed a massive threat to Western capitalism because sovereign developments in the periphery in the Global South was cutting off their supply of cheap labor and raw materials which they had relied on for several hundred years prior. And it’s crucial that people understand this fact.

When the South pursues sovereign development, it means that they begin to produce for themselves and they consume their own resources. When they do that, it makes inputs more expensive for the Core, which constrains the consumption and their profits, right?

So this effectively poses a crisis for capital accumulation in the Core. And as far as capital is concerned, that cannot be allowed to happen. So we know how this played out, right?

Western powers responded to the national liberation movements with absolutely extraordinary violence during the ’50s and ’60s

they intervened militarily to depose and often even assassinate progressive liberation leaders like Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Sukarno in Indonesia, Salvador Allende in Chile, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. I mean, we can go on all day about the assassinations and coups that occurred.

And in most cases, of course, they replaced these progressive leaders with right-wing dictatorships that were more or less willing to maintain the peripheral economy in a kind of subordinate position to Western capital. And of course, they also went on to do the same thing to, like, Vietnam, Cambodia, more recently Iraq, Libya, et cetera, et cetera, right?

So, okay, that’s the background. The crucial thing is that we have to understand US support for Israel as part of this history.

This is crucial because the US started to support the Zionist project in the 1960s because they saw it as a way to have a massive military base in the Middle east and North Africa where they could stage counter-revolutionary interventions against the Arab socialist and national liberation struggles that were gaining traction at that time, right? The US, fundamentally, could not accept the prospects of sovereign developments in the Middle East and North Africa.

The liberation movements in that region had to be crushed. They had to be destabilized, and they used Israel to accomplish these objectives. This is clear when you look at how Israel has been instrumental in coordinating the assassination of liberation leaders in the Arab region, right?

In direct alignment with US interests.

It also constantly attacks the frontline states – like the states just east of its borders, north and south of its borders – destabilizing their societies, destabilizing their economies.

And what this does is it forces them to divert their resources and productive capacities towards defensive buildup rather than industrial developments. This is a US strategy.

It’s effectively a de-development strategy where the idea is the more you can destabilize the society, the more you can get them to fracture internally and have to divert their capacities to defensive buildup, the less they’re going to be developing sovereign industrial capacity, et cetera, et cetera, which would allow them to achieve the kind of development that the West is ultimately very against. So this is the crucial way to understand it: Israel is not an ally of the US in the conventional sense of the term. It’s effectively a proxy, right?

And it’s particularly useful to the US because it allows them to basically have a degree of plausible deniability. And this is what we’re seeing, right?

The US can send Israel weapons and directly coordinate military strategy with them around agreed military objectives, such as the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but then claim that it’s not responsible for the violence that Israel is inflicting in the region, right? And this is particularly useful when you’re trying to avoid backlash from your voters, right?

Like you can say, it’s not us, it’s Israel doing it. In fact, we’re trying to restrain Israel. But of course, that’s bullshit. All of this is coordinated.

There’s no way that Israel does anything of any military significance without direct US knowledge and approval. So, by the way, this is why Israel is so hated in the region.

It’s not only because Israel is, obviously, hell bent on ethnically cleansing Palestine – which by the way, causes massive destabilization in the region because you’re pushing all these Palestinians across borders; other societies have to absorb them as refugees – but also Israel is constantly intervening to create chaos and instability across the region.

And this is clearly intolerable. And everybody in the region can see that fact.

I mean, this is why Israel is regarded as such disdain. Because it basically just sows chaos and violence everywhere it goes.

Now, what’s interesting is that there’s a direct historical analogy for this because the Core states used South Africa in exactly the same way, right? And think about this. When you look back, you recognize that the US and Britain supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, right?

Even against overwhelming international condemnation because it was useful to them as a kind of highly militarized Western colonial outpost in that region that was geared up to run counterinsurgency operations not only against revolutionary movements within South Africa, but also against liberation struggles in Angola, in Mozambique, in Zimbabwe, in Namibia, in the Congo, even further afield.

So South Africa was used as a staging ground for counterinsurgency operations by the west, and that’s why they supported it, even though it was obviously an evil regime. So we’re in the situation now,

coming back to the question of Palestine, where the vast majority of the world and international law itself supports Palestinian liberation, but not the US but not Germany, but not Britain. Why?

The reason is because Palestinian liberation would effectively remove a key US proxy and would also, inevitably, open the way to regional liberation movements in North Africa and Middle East. So a liberated Palestine effectively means a liberated Middle East.

And a liberated Middle East with sovereign economic power, which would be able to control its own resources, develop its own resources, consume its own resources, is strongly antithetical to the interests of Western capital. It, basically, cannot be allowed. This is, basically, a reality, right?

The Western ruling classes are willing to back absolutely obscene violence in Gaza in the face of all of us.

They’re willing to shred the liberal values that they claim to believe in because they ultimately want to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation and US geopolitical hegemony. So I think we have to understand this as, like, core US policy, these are decisions that have been made.

And to me, like all of the hand wringing that we see from Biden and Harris, like, the constant discourse about, you know, we want to see a ceasefire and we’re negotiating for a ceasefire, and too many innocent lives are being lost. All of this is just theater. It’s just theater that’s designed to diffuse our anger, to give them plausible deniability.

But ultimately, I think we have to understand that this is – effectively – in line with U.S. policy.

Steve Grumbine

00:16:43.055 – 00:17:12.049

You know, I guess Bill Clinton went to Michigan, of all places, a place that is heavily Muslim. And I guess he was sent out there with the talking points of the Harris administration. And he lectured them, basically telling them, hey, I’m sure you’re tired of seeing all these dead babies, but you got to remember, look at what Hamas did to Israel. And spent the entire time lecturing them on how, you know, what would you do?

And it might have been the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

Jason Hickel

00:17:12.137 – 00:17:13.017

That’s horrible.

Steve Grumbine

00:17:13.121 – 00:18:54.605

Just shockingly tone deaf. But it’s not a matter of feedback. I don’t believe they’re looking for feedback.

I believe this is the manufacturing consent part of the script that they run. Where they’re going to go out there and they’re just going to repeat these things because they know low-information folks – people that are stressed or people that are just sycophantic to the party – will just repeat it. And that’s enough. That’s all they need to worry about.

That’s how this echoing, gaslighting occurs.

And as I’m looking at the concept of capital – I mean, going back to when Bill Clinton got elected – he spent his time doing everything he could to distance himself from labor, from actually caring about the oppressed, to literally, becoming the New Democrat with triangulation and the Third Way to basically co-opt Ronald Reagan’s space. So everything that they hated about Ronald Reagan, they became.

I mean, Chris Hedges is famous for saying, you know, the genius of Bill Clinton was that he basically turned the Democrats into the Republican Party and made the Republicans turn into, I guess, MAGA, right? But that’s assuming this whole smoke and mirrors game of politics is even real.

That, like, this is not just meant for us, who really have no voice, to, kind of, be guided through the kill zone. To basically, be brought to slaughter ourselves and just ignored. Help me understand why it is that people fall for this.

I know the Hasbara is significant when it comes to Israeli propaganda, but why do you suppose people . . . is it just too much to handle? Do you think that they are incapable of this kind of consequential understanding?

Jason Hickel

00:18:55.225 – 00:23:08.411

Yeah, I mean, it’s so difficult to say. Look, I think you have to understand that, that most Americans are fairly low-information on this issue, right? And so it becomes very easy for the ruling class to play to simple prejudices, right?

I mean, even just the mention of something like Hezbollah or Hamas . . . I mean . . . these words have become sort of, in US discourse, like synonymous with evil to the extent that, like, even to be Palestinian is, effectively, synonymous with evil. And any amount of violence is, sort of, justified automatically in response. I mean, this is a deeply racist framework, I think, to begin with.

I think there’s other, like, deeper issues which, for example, like – people assume that Israel is a normal country, right?

Like, a normal country that has, kind of, always been there and is now being attacked and, therefore, has the right to defend itself, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, there’s so much going on here. Like where do you even start to unpack it?

But I think the crucial thing is, okay, let’s take the discourse on Israel’s right to exist. This, to me, is an extremely interesting claim.

It’s amazing the work that this does in our public discourse – it’s effectively a trump card that silences all dissents. So we end up stuck with the notion that Israel is somehow a natural, legitimate entity and we’re not even allowed to question its existence.

So I think that’s really the starting point, right? But if we think about this more carefully, all sorts of questions arise. Do states actually have a right to exist?

Did the apartheid state in South Africa have a right to exist? Did the settler colonial regime of Rhodesia have a right to exist? Did the Nazi state have a right to exist, right?

I mean, clearly in all of these cases, the answer is no. States that rely on apartheid and genocide, clearly, do not have a right to exist. People have a right to exist, but states do not.

So I think that this sort of brings us into the territory of thinking about Israel, right? It’s not at all, a process of legitimate state formation.

So Israel was, of course, like a Zionist settler-colonial project that was established on the territory of Palestine on other people’s lands with the active support of Britain and other Western powers. Why did the West support it back in the early 20th century? Because they saw an opportunity, first of all, by the way, to remove Jews from Europe.

I mean, this is like a deeply antisemitic European ruling class that saw an opportunity to effectively get rid of Jews from their own territory. I mean, we have to understand the alliance that Zionism had with European antisemitism. This is very well documented.

And then their second obvious interest was that they saw an opportunity to build a Western outpost in what they knew was a strategic region in the Middle East.

Now, note that the settler-colonial project in Palestine was only possible because the British exercised colonial power – power over the Palestinian territory. So they actively collaborated in increasing Zionist settlers in the region.

And then in 1948, they partitioned Palestine into two countries, creating a new state out of nothing. And the state was called Israel. Israel was given the majority of the land of Mandatory Palestine, even though they had a minority of the population, and then the rest was allocated to Palestine.

Now, what’s interesting is that proponents of Israel, defenders of Israel, will say, wait a second,the partition plan was voted on and approved by the UN General assembly in 1948, right? Albeit by a slim margin. But there are two things to keep in mind about this.

The first is that at that time – remember, the majority of countries in the global south were still colonized and therefore did not have a seat at the UN or a right to vote – Right? So they were not allowed to participate in this key question. This is during the colonial period.

So the major powers, of course, are the colonial powers, and they’re the ones that are overdetermining this process.

And then second, for Global South countries that were in the UN, we know that they reported that the US and its Western allies, during the voting process, strong-armed them into voting for the partition plan by threatening to cut them off from Western finance or increase interest rates on whatever it might be, right? So they were effectively strong armed into voting for this.

But regardless of what happened during that process, the new Israeli state, basically, immediately sets out on a campaign of violent ethnic cleansing, which we know today is called the Nakba.

During the Nakba, they destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages. They massacred thousands of people. They forcibly removed 750,000 human beings from their land and from their homes. Literally stealing their houses, pushing them into refugee camps, denying them the right to return.

Oh, and by the way, it’s important that people know this:

The majority of people who live in Gaza today are refugees or descendants of refugees who were expelled during the Nakba and have never been allowed to return, right?

Steve Grumbine

00:23:08.523 – 00:23:09.203

Wow.

Jason Hickel

00:23:09.379 – 00:25:57.095

So by the end of this process, later, the Nakba, Israel controls nearly 80% of the Palestinian territory. And then after 1967, they occupy most of the rest, of course, exercising virtually total sovereignty over the whole territory, right?

So the key thing to draw from this history is that Israel was founded on the back of colonization and on the back of ethnic cleansing.

And it continues to exist as an entity only because it exercises apartheid power by effectively preventing millions of people within the territory from voting over the sovereign entity that controls the territory. And so, does such a state have a right to exist? I think that’s the question we have to ask ourselves. And, clearly, the answer is no.

I think that we need space in our public discourse to have an honest conversation about this. This raises the question of, what is the proper response once we understand this reality?

Of course, the Western liberal political class continues to ramble on about a two-state solution. But I think it’s important that we recognize that the two-state solution has always been a kind of ruse, right.

It was a promise that was intended to effectively buy time, to suppress the resistance and buy international approval and buy time while Israel effectively continued to establish facts on the ground. Right. Expanding the settlements which are illegal, continuing the process of ethnic cleansing.

And today we’ve reached the point where a two-state solution is just clearly not viable. And Israel itself has officially rejected the prospect of a two-state solution. Right. What they want is they want ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

This is very clear Israeli policy. Now. And so I think that we have to have a conversation, right?

If the two-state solution is dead and if we don’t want to support ethnic cleansing and apartheid, then what is the alternative? Like what is the actual solution for this region? And I think we have to be clear. The alternative is democracy.

The alternative to apartheid is democracy. Democracy and equal rights for all people in the land of Palestine – from the river to the sea. And we have to start thinking about what this means.

It means the disestablishment of the State of Israel and the disestablishment of its institutions and establishing in their place a new government and new institutions. This is not, actually, a difficult thing to imagine. For some reason, this is, like, beyond . . . I mean, people don’t even discuss this.

But this is exactly what South Africa did after they abolished apartheid, right? They disestablished the apartheid state. They disestablished the apartheid institutions.

They ensured equal rights and democracy for all within the territory. And I think that we have to start creating room for people to imagine this and prepare for its realization and start calling for it, actively.

The State of Israel is not a legitimate entity, and it is 100% correct to call for its disestablishment and its replacement with a system of democracy and equal rights.

If we believe – if we claim to believe in democracy and equal rights – then it is imperative that we call for this in the lands of Palestine over which the US effectively operates a kind of proxy control, right? This must be part of our discourse and must be part of our demands.

Intermission

00:25:58.715 – 00:26:18.925

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Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now, back to the podcast.

Jason Hickel

00:26:22.105 – 00:26:56.595

And of course, in addition to democratization, which has to be the

Core demands, there’s also, of course, several other things that have to happen.

Like, obviously, the illegal settlements have to be removed. Palestinian refugees must have the right to return to their homes and lands, and they have to be supported in doing that.

They have to receive full rights within the territory. And of course, those who have perpetrated war crimes and genocide have to be brought to trial and to justice. This is the way forward.

I think that this is what we have to start talking about and leave aside the idea of a two-state solution, which was always a ruse to begin with, and be serious about what the future of the region can be.

Steve Grumbine

00:26:57.095 – 00:28:23.231

Number one, all the states outside of [the] US and Israel have been condemning this.

And yet, at the same time – because of the US’s veto power – they have been able to, basically, shut down any kind of meaningful efforts to rectify this, at all.

I mean, there has been tons and tons and tons of condemnation of calling Netanyahu a war criminal and, literally, trying to bring him up for war crimes. And the US has stopped it dead in its tracks.

And let me take it a step further . . . and we talked a little offline about this . . . but the academics in America, and this is very America-centric, so forgive me because I know this extends around the world. You, being an academic as well, may be able to shed some light on this.

Harvard recently censured, I think it was, 25 of its professors and students for having a simple reading in the library. I mean, we’re talking about . . . they are shutting down the very discourse you’re claiming needs to happen to be able to get to a peaceful settlement to any form of workable peace. The universities are kowtowing to their donors, which many of them are Zionists, and they are, literally, shutting down the right to . . . I mean, colleges and universities used to be the place for those discourses. It is being shut down. You rightfully talked about the student protests and they were beaten down in a way that felt very Kent State-like.

I mean, it was alarming. The brown-shirted kind of tactics.

Jason Hickel

00:28:23.303 – 00:28:23.751

It was.

Steve Grumbine

00:28:23.823 – 00:29:06.515

How do you propose with the UN, largely, a toothless dog, given the fact that the United States has veto rights and the fact that the universities are taking a step further and shutting it down? And let me take it a step further:

[Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer [D-NY] recently came out and said that when the election’s over, they are going to do broad-based laws to prevent anyone from criticizing Israel. And broad-based was the way they said it. So, in other words, it would catch anything like, “Zionists,” that would throw that in there as antisemitic.

Any other word that is in any way, shape, or form, targeting what we just talked about. They’re looking to criminalize that speech in the United States. This is terrifying to me.

Jason Hickel

00:29:07.495 – 00:32:24.535

Yeah, no, it is very disturbing to see.

And I mean, to me, this is evidence of the fact that, you know, they really recognize the Palestinian liberation struggle as, like, a fundamental threat to core US interests. It’s quite striking, actually, right? So. But in terms of the UN, yeah, I think a couple of things have broken over the past year.

The kind of assumption that our international institutions are functional and democratic? That illusion has been shattered, right?

I think that there’s a growing recognition among the majority world that these institutions are not really fit for purpose.

Like, what are you supposed to do when you have repeated votes in the UN General assembly with dramatic popular support, right? Consensuses that call for dramatic change when it comes to, say, removing the illegal settlements and ending the occupation, et cetera, et cetera . . . and this just results in nothing, right? Just empty.

And then, of course, you have the UN Security Council, where UN Security Council resolutions can be vetoed by the US – even if the rest of the Security Council wants to go ahead with it. So this is, clearly, too much power for a single country to have.

And I think that people recognize that we can’t be in a situation where we can see something as blatant and horrendous as genocide unfolding and not be able to stop it with our institutions.

Those institutions have to be reformed in such a way that, if this occurs again, there can be an immediate intervention. And that’s just going to have to happen. There has to be a reckoning on this,

otherwise international law is meaningless. Which, I think, has been another illusion that’s been shattered. The idea that we’re governed by international law, but clearly, if you’re the US and Israel – then you can violate it with impunity. This is, clearly, not acceptable.

So I think that it’s very evident that, going forward, some major change is going to have to happen. I think this is clear for the majority world.

I don’t know what that looks like exactly. But I think that, at minimum, you’re going to have to see more power handed to the UN General assembly which has a proper democratic process.

And even in the UN Security Council, either there’s going to have to be removal of the veto power as it currently exists, or some other kind of democratization process that makes that institution more responsive and democratic. I think that’s just the reality. Like, we can’t function under this arrangement anymore.

In terms of the US, it’s very dismal because you can see that it seems that in official political spaces there’s no room for any real substantive debate on the question of Israel and Palestine. However, I think on the street there is. This is interesting. And, of course, there’s a massive backlash against it. Attempts to suppress, et cetera, et cetera.

But I think that what’s interesting, and this is the third thing that’s broken in a way, right, is this illusion that Israel is a normal country and behaving in a normal way. I think there’s been a radical acceleration in people’s popular consciousness about the issue.

I mean, you can see on social media, you can see people, like as soon as the genocide began, you could see people learning in real time, right? Figuring out what’s going on. What is Gaza? How did it come to exist? What is Israel? How did it come to exist? What is the occupation? How did it come to exist?

And this has been, I think, really powerful and ultimately changes the game in some crucial respects. It means that going forward, the sense of impunity that Israel has, I think, will eventually be eroded.

I think that Israel, in this sense, is kind of on its last legs. Because one of its strongest points was that it could fall back on the ignorance of the world, right? On the ignorance, particularly of Americans. And I think that’s not actually really possible in the same way anymore.

I think that something has changed, especially with the younger generation. So, I don’t know what that means in the near term, but in the long term, I think that Israel’s days are numbered.

Like some dramatic shift is going to have to occur. You can’t commit genocide in the eyes of the world like this and then expect to, kind of, go back to the status quo ante.

Something is going to change now.

And I think in this respect, from the perspective of Zionists, they’ve really shot themselves in the foot because their biggest smokescreen is now gone, is the reality.

Steve Grumbine

00:32:24.655 – 00:34:17.325

I think the most troubling thing about this is that what we just talked about had absolutely nothing to do with Jews. It had absolutely nothing to do with Judaism. It had nothing to do with hating Jews.

It had nothing to do with anything antisemitic in any way, shape, or form.

And yet, the weaponization of that term, antisemitism, would possibly take the things we’ve just said as antisemitic. Which is tragic because people don’t understand. And to your point, I’m really grateful that the younger generation has been focused on TikTok, has been watching this and realizing: Oh, my goodness.

Because I knew when I was growing up everything you said: Yeah, Israel is a nice place. They’re good people. Oh, it’s perfectly natural. We’ve got to defend Israel because . . . that just was the narrative. And that narrative is crumbling before our eyes.

I know for me, I’m 55, and, you know, I spent most of my life believing otherwise. So this is, in fact, very, very amazing to see the awakening, not only in myself, but in many. I just am very concerned about the lack of agency.

Let me flip to some of the tactics. I mean, obviously, the US through NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] has been the big bullies on the big stage.

They have used their power, if you will, to make other countries bend a knee. And in the case of Israel, it’s never been more clear that the long arm of the US empire is guiding this.

What kind of resistance is occurring around the world that you see effective in fighting back against this kind of NATO strategy? I mean, I see a lot groups working towards the BRICS. I believe it’s premature to celebrate that at this time.

And there’s still a lot of things that could be wrong, and there’s still a lot of things that have to happen for that to have any kind of teeth to it. But I’m curious as to what your thoughts are on both NATO and the BRICS and how they relate to one another.

Jason Hickel

00:34:17.865 – 00:38:22.997

Yeah. Oh, yeah, let’s talk about that. But first, I want to pick up on a couple things you said earlier. One was the distinction between Judaism and Zionism.

I think this is so important. And look, I think this is one of the things that’s crumbled, actually, in terms of the public discourse, recently.

There was a time when any criticism of Israel would have been considered antisemitic. And I think now people can very clearly see that that’s not the case.

You can be legitimately critical of Israel as a Zionist settler-colonial projects. People understand that now. And they understand that this is, fundamentally, separate from Judaism.

Judaism is an ancient and very beautiful religion that can be celebrated while also condemning Zionist project. And in fact, many of the most vocal opponents of Zionism are prominent Jewish people.

I mean, there’s several major Jewish organizations in the US that have been the first to call this a genocide. They’ve been very vocal in the defense of Palestinian liberation and their condemnation of the Zionist regime.

In fact, they’ve really opened up space, actually, for this to occur. So I think this easy discourse that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic – this has fallen apart. And that’s a major shift that has occurred.

That’s good. It creates room for a conversation to emerge. So that’s one thing. And I guess, in terms of other false discourses, right,

like the claim that Israel has the most moral army in the world. I mean, this has just clearly been revealed as an absolutely extraordinary lie.

The idea that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, this is also crumbled, right? This is really, I mean, to me, leaving aside the fact that Israel is increasingly outing itself as, effectively, a fascist regime internally, right?

But I think it’s really important that people have now learned that Israel is fundamentally an apartheid state. It exercises total control over the West Bank and Gaza. Those territories have zero sovereignty.

The 5 million people living in those territories do not have a right to vote over the government that determines, virtually, everything about their lives. Their basic human rights under international law are unenforced and regularly violated by the Israeli regime.

On top of that, there’s another 6 million Palestinians who’ve been forcibly expelled from Palestine, who exist as stateless refugees with no rights within the territory whatsoever, right?

So, yeah, effectively 11 million people who are excluded from voting, excluded from rights within the territory over the entity that exercises sovereignty over the territory. There’s just no way in the world you can consider this to be democratic, right? It’s, in fact, one of the most anti-democratic countries in the world.

And I think it’s important to recognize the fact that Israel was founded in 1948, right? It was the very same year that the apartheid regime was established in South Africa.

And it consciously followed the apartheid playbook – literally, chapter and verse. Like, in South Africa, one of their key strategies was to forcibly remove the majority of the African population and dump them into tiny chunks of territory called bantustans, right?

And this, basically, allowed the white population to deny rights to most of the black population by claiming they, basically, had their own countries, right? But, of course, the countries were fake. They had no economic sovereignty, they had no independent militaries, et cetera, et cetera.

The apartheid regime controlled their borders and their trade and blah, blah. Israel did the exact same thing with Gaza and the West Bank, right?

So it’s, literally, the grand apartheid strategy that the South African regime implemented, and they did it consciously. And I think also, the idea that the US and Israel support democracy in the Middle East is, also, absurd, right?

And this is something that Sameer Amin himself pointed out in 2004, right? He said that the US and Israel, very clearly, actively reject genuine democracies in the region because they know that democratic Arab countries would be pro-Palestinian liberation, right?

Like the people of Jordan, the people of Lebanon, the people of Iraq, the people of Syria. These people, overwhelmingly, are supportive of Palestinian liberation. And if there was democracy in these regions, then that’s what they would be calling for and agitating for, right? The US can’t handle that.

So in the case of Jordan and Egypt, for example, they’ve effectively installed these, kind of, proxy clients. These kinds of regimes that bend the knee to the US, right, and prevent their populations from rising up against the genocide and the occupation, and so on. So, yeah, I think in all sorts of ways these ideologies have crumbled before us. And I think that’s quite interesting to see.

This is why I think that something is going to change. I don’t know how it’ll play out, but that seems to be the case. Now, in terms of the question you asked, I got a bit sidetracked. I’m sorry.

Steve Grumbine

00:38:23.101 – 00:38:24.501

It was great, though.

Jason Hickel

00:38:24.693 – 00:38:28.085

You also asked about BRICS, or about, kind of, resistance in NATO, et cetera, yeah.

Steve Grumbine

00:38:28.125 – 00:38:31.253

NATO and BRICS.

Jason Hickel

00:38:31.269 – 00:41:27.375

Yeah, I think it’s interesting because while all this has been going on, BRICS had a conference in Russia just a couple of weeks ago; recently.

And it’s interesting because I’ve been watching BRICS for a long time and I’ve always felt like there’s some potential there, but I’m not really seeing a lot of movements. I think that’s beginning to change. Like what happened in this last meeting.

There were several decisions that were taken that, I think, are actually, quite potentially, transformative. So one is that they added a bunch of new members. They also established a partner country system.

And so this allows a lot of countries that are not actually, formally, a part of BRICS, like formerly members, to, kind of, join the BRICS bloc, as it were, right? So, and this opens the door to a lot of Global South countries.

And then what they did is that for this broader partner country system, they established a BRICS clearing system.

Now, this may sound boring to some listeners, but it’s crucially important. Because what this clearing system means is that international trade between countries within this bloc can now be settled, or I guess if this goes through, be able to be settled in national currencies. Which means that you can have trade within the BRICS bloc without people needing to obtain the dollar or the euro, right? Without needing to obtain imperial currencies.

And this means that it frees them to have much less reliance on debts from Western creditors which come with structural adjustment conditions and limit economic sovereignty. It means they are not under pressure to obtain those currencies by exporting a bunch of their stuff on unequal terms.

And so it means they’re less exposed to unequal exchange and drained through unequal exchange. It builds up the possibility of South-South solidarities on beneficial terms, right? I think this is an incredible development.

And then the final piece of it is they, also, established a BRICS trade insurance system. Which is important because, in order to have international trade, you have to have an insurance system. And right now, like, the Western insurance companies are the only game in town.

So this, basically, allows you to have trade outside of Western control, which is governed entirely by Global South countries. This is extraordinary. So I mean, again, who knows how this is going to play out?

Of course, within the BRICS bloc there’s a wide range of different kinds of political systems. There’s, like, some very progressive ones and some, you know, decidedly less progressive ones, like [India’s Narendra] Modi’s India as part of this, et cetera, et cetera.

But it’s very clear that there is a general consensus around the fact that the existing institutions of the world economic system are not serving us. It’s time for us to establish our own alternatives.

I think this is part and parcel of everything we’ve been seeing more broadly over this past year, as the global majority looks in disgust at what the West is doing. Like, the mask has fully slipped.

The idea that the West is a champion of human rights and international law and the rules-based order, et cetera, et cetera – all of that clearly collapsed. And I think there’s a real recognition of, why would we submit our futures and our fortunes to this decrepit system?

We’re going to establish something more inclusive, more democratic. And I think that’s what they’re building now. Again, it can go in various directions.

This is no guarantee that it will go in the direction that we might want to see. But something is shifting, and I think that’s quite powerful to see.

Steve Grumbine

00:41:27.675 – 00:43:46.885

This is a bit of a sidebar, but you going on all the way to Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh had a real, kind of, like, love fest for the US. He really saw stars in his eyes.

And when he realized what a sham it was, and what disgusting place . . . the disgusting, you know, geopolitical angles that the US took . . . You know, it’s almost sad to think of him hero-worshiping the US and then, simultaneously, having his hopes and dreams smashed. I’m sure he’s not the first and only revolutionary to look at the US and go, wow, there they are. You know, look at, look at this.

But how many people’s illusions of the shining light on the hill, and let liberty ring – how many people are just, literally, losing their minds as they realize – pretty much everything they thought, was a lie? That’s the stuff that causes me to lose sleep, is because, you know? Look, I’m a human being, I’m propagandized. I . . . there’s a lot of things I still got to learn. I’m nowhere near a finished product and I don’t think I ever will be.

But I, literally, every time I learn something new about how bad it is, it’s a gut punch. It’s just trying to crawl up out of bed, even. Because, what do you do?

And I think the big thing that I’m watching right now – You know, I go back to the first State of the Union with Biden, and I was appalled to hear him isolating China; to attack China. Starting to call them, like, the enemy. And then the continued Russophobia. The Red scare kind of stuff coming back, again. Demonizing Russia. Now, Russia’s no saint here. Let me not paint them out to be a saint.

But this whole concept of US hegemony having to demonize these folks so that they have distant forward ability to attack. Because they’ve been priming the pump, getting the American people ready, getting them thinking of these people as enemies. I mean, Iran has been a – largely – a saint here.

The restraint that they’ve had for not just going ballistic like Israel has gone . . . it’s just . . . You know, you read the newspaper and it’s like, what am I reading here? It’s not real. Nothing I’m reading is real.

The press. You see all these folks being killed. People that you one day are reading their tweets, and the next day you find out they’ve been slaughtered. They were buried in a pile of rubble.

Jason Hickel

00:43:47.005 – 00:43:48.265

Oh, it’s devastating.

Steve Grumbine

00:43:49.045 – 00:43:50.945

Talk about the press a little bit.

Jason Hickel

00:43:51.245 – 00:45:37.697

Yeah. I mean. I mean, look, to me, it’s wild how it’s, it’s just so clear that that Israeli forces have intentionally targeted Palestinian journalists.

This was very clear from the beginning of the genocide that they were doing this, right? Look, I think we have to be clear about what’s going on here, right?

If you want to be able to conduct a genocide in an era of mass media, like one of them tried to eliminate . . . like tried to eliminate journalists. They debarred Western journalists from independently accessing Gaza. I mean, think wild, right?

And so . . . and so it’s only down to Palestinian journalists who were able to tell stories from there. And then they systematically went after Palestinian journalists. I think we have to understand that what we know about what has happened there is only a fraction of what actually has happened.

And we could have known a lot more had we actually had a proper journalistic presence there. The other thing that is very clear is they went after hospitals.

And of course, to justify it was, oh, these are Hamas command and control centers, et cetera, et cetera. That all turned out to be lies. But why would they do this?

You know, by dismantling health systems and also, by the way, in the process, also, of effectively starving a population and moving them around from place to place over and over again – people are malnourished – massively, their immune systems are massively weakened. They’re getting diseases they would otherwise not have got. And now there’s no health system to treat them.

And what that means is that you’re going to see death rates – mortality rates – increasing from conditions that otherwise would have been preventable or treatable, right? This is very clearly calculated.

Like, look, if you’re in a situation where the US is only effectively allowing you to massacre a few hundred people a day, then it would create media outrage, right? And so, if you want to conduct a genocide, then you’re going to have to find alternative methods for doing that.

And I think that dismantling health care system is very obviously one of those, because you know, this is going to result in excess deaths. We don’t know what the final excess death figure is going to look like. But if you ask me, and if you look at existing medical reports, it’s going to be over 100, over 200,000 people.

Steve Grumbine

00:45:37.881 – 00:45:53.571

The erasure of the people themselves, I mean the birth records, all the health records, all the records of their existence has been blown to bits. I mean, this is a systematic erasure of them. This isn’t just slaughter, it’s as if they never existed.

Jason Hickel

00:45:53.643 – 00:45:54.707

Yeah, correct. Yeah.

Steve Grumbine

00:45:54.811 – 00:46:01.135

And, and I think that is tragic. Tragic on a level that is just beyond my ability to think through.

Jason Hickel

00:46:01.875 – 00:48:38.239

Yeah. But, but again, I got distracted and, and you’re asking about the discourse on China, etc. Look, I think this is exactly part . . . the discourse on China, etc. Look, I think this is exactly part of the same thing that we’ve been discussing here, right? Like, and it’s wild.

The US is gearing up now to massively demonize China because they want to build up a consensus for a war against China at some point, right? This is striking because, I mean, this only really started emerging about 10 years ago. About 10 years ago.

Like, up until recently then, the US was all about China because China is manufacturing a tremendous amount of cheap goods that are, basically, propping up the US economy and enabling, like, huge amounts of growth and consumption in the US as a result, right? So what’s happening now is that China is now in the condition of having increasing wages.

Like, they’re achieving sovereign development. Their wages are going up. They’re producing and consuming more for themselves. What does this mean? It means that their resources and their labor are now less cheaply available for appropriation by capital in the Core.

And what does capital want to do in response? It wants to do what it always wants to do. It wants to suppress those prices back again. It wants to crush wages. It wants to crush resource prices.

It wants to resubordinate industrial capacity in China to the imperative of accumulation in the Core. This is the very reason that it has also supported Israel’s actions in the Middle East.

It’s the very reason that it also sought to destabilize Iraq and Libya, et cetera, et cetera. It’s the same story over and over again.

I mean, just incredible amounts of violence on a world scale and getting the population to buy into the idea that all of this is somehow justified.

It’s just amazing to me how US citizens can be so quickly convinced to hate people who are some of the poorest people on the planet, on the other side of the world. They often don’t even know where these countries actually are, right? I mean, to hate people who pose zero threat to them.

China has one foreign military base in the world, in Djibouti, right? China has not engaged in cross border military action for over 40 years.

The US has hundreds of military bases around the world; is constantly engaged in cross border military action, right? China does not pose a threat to the United States. It has no intention of posing such a threat. It shows no signs of posing such a threat.

The only thing that is at all a threat is that China is developing itself and, therefore, cutting off access for profitability to US firms.

And so I think that, ultimately, we have to face up to the fact here, which is that if we want to put an end to this extreme wild pattern of imperialist violence, then we need to achieve a post capitalist transformation in the Core economies, right? So what does that mean for political organizing in the West? It, certainly, means that we cannot put our faith in the Democratic Party.

Steve Grumbine

00:48:38.327 – 00:48:38.863

Amen.

Jason Hickel

00:48:38.959 – 00:49:45.109

We have to understand that that is a complete dead end.

And I think what needs to be done is, we have to build an alternative political machine that can build up grassroots power and alliances sufficient to win elections and establish a post-capitalist order. That’s the future we have to take. Because, crucially, a regular economy does not require imperialism.

A regular economy can function – can provide for its citizens – can organize production around human needs and well-being and achieving ecological objectives, et cetera, et cetera. A capitalist economy is what requires an imperialist arrangement.

A capitalist economy requires constant imperialist wars because it has to constantly suppress prices and wages and reorganize production in the Global South around accumulation in the Core. That is, ultimately, the system that we have to overcome.

And I think that the clarifying moment about all of this – what’s happening in Gaza, the discourse around Iran and China – is that if we want this nightmare to end, if we want to stop, like, living in this extremely dark period, then we have to overcome the ultimate problem which is the imperatives of capital accumulation in the world system. And that’s what we have to set our sights on.

Steve Grumbine

00:49:45.277 – 00:50:00.345

Amen. Jason, you’ve been wonderful today. I want to give you a chance to put a bow on this.

If you had one thing that we didn’t cover that we should have covered, or one point you want to leave the audience with as we close out – take the floor. What would it be?

Jason Hickel

00:50:00.925 – 00:50:39.353

Oh, gosh, I’m not sure if I have anything in mind, immediately. But let me say this:

I think that if listeners are interested in pursuing some of these ideas more, then the person that I think is the best go-to resource is a guy called Ali Kadri. He is a scholar from the Middle East region. He wrote a brilliant book called Arab Development Denied, which links all of these issues together.

I would also recommend the book Capital and Imperialism by two Indian economists, Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik. It’s, also, brilliant.

It’s a little bit technical to read, but if you have any training in economic history or economics or a general interest in, kind of, world affairs, it’s an extremely important and powerful read.

Steve Grumbine

00:50:39.489 – 00:51:55.185

Thank you very much. I’m going to have to chase after them and see if I can get them out here.

All right. Well, with that, Jason, thank you, once again, for always being generous with your time. Thank you for being bold in this space here because a lot of people are silent and I’m not going to lie, I judge them for their silence.

I can’t help it. I just want everybody to be loud and proud and get this thing done. I appreciate you taking risks.

I know it’s a risk to be a vocal critic of this scenario. With that, folks, my name is Steve Grumbine. I am the host of Macro N Cheese. We are a 501c3 nonprofit. Our work continues with your donations.

We appreciate anything you can give us. With that, I want to thank my guest Jason Hickel and, on my own part, remind you all that we love you.

This is all about learning. All together solidarity. And on that, Macro N Cheese. We are out of here.

Production transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras and show notes from Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor, please go to patreon.com.

Books:

Kadri, Ali, Arab Development Denied

Patnaik, Utsa, and Patnaik, Prabhat, Capital and Imperialism