[TEASER] Palestine Pt. 17: Capital Accumulation at Any Cost w/ Jason Hickel

Upstream

Politics, News, Society & Culture

4.9 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2026

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, part 17 of our ongoing series on Palestine, we're joined again by Jason Hickel for a conversation on Palestine and the role that Palestinian liberation plays in the global fight against imperialism and capitalism. The conversation opens with a discussion on why Palestinian liberation is a threat to capitalism globally—we unpack the role that Palestine plays geopolitically in West Asia and the role that West Asia plays in global capital accumulation. We go on to talk about Israel's role as the US's proxy force and attack dog, not just in West Asia, but throughout the globe as well, from Argentina to Guatemala.

We then talk about Trump's so-called "Board of Peace," and its vision for Gaza before discussing what's taking place in the West Bank and the official death of the Two State Solution. We then broaden the conversation out and situate what's happening in Palestine into the context of the United States' quest for geopolitical hegemony, what this means in terms of the Second Cold War with China, and the implications for Palestine, West Asia, and the world at large.

Jason Hickel is a professor at the The Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the author of the books The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions and Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World.

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Intermission music: "Courage, My Friends!" by Andrew Glencross

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode, thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers
0:05.9	for making upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support
0:11.8	allows us to create bonus content like this and to provide most of our content for free
0:16.6	so we can continue to offer political education media to the public and build our movement.
0:22.7	Thank you, comrades. We hope you enjoy this conversation.
0:27.0	Ah, oh.
0:35.6	Oh.
0:36.9	Oh. It's important to understand that Israel is not like an ally of the U.S.
0:51.3	in the conventional sense of the term.
0:53.3	It's a proxy force, right?
0:56.0	And this is particularly useful to the US because it allows them to have a degree of plausible
1:01.0	deniability for the kinds of crimes that they commit.
1:05.0	So the US can send weapons to Israel and directly coordinate military strategy with Israel,
1:10.0	including genocide,
1:11.6	and then claim that it's not responsible for that violence
1:14.6	and the destruction of the war crimes that Israel perpetrates, right?
1:17.6	And that's exactly what we saw happen with the genocide in Palestine,
1:21.6	this kind of deniability on the part of the U.S. political class.
1:24.6	So my point here is that, is that U. that US support for the Zionist project is not
1:28.6	unique. It's exactly in keeping with US strategy. The US supports Israel for the exact same
1:34.9	reasons that they undertake any imperialist intervention. It's the exact same reason they've imposed
1:39.6	a blockade on Cuba. It's the same reason they destroyed Iraq and Libya and Syria. It's the same reason
	...

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