Article

Palestine’s Great Agrarian South: Journal of

Political Economy

Flood: Part I 13(1) 62–88, 2024

© 2024 The Author(s)

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DOI: 10.1177/22779760241228157
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Max Ajl1

Abstract
This is the first part of a two-part article which considers the US-Israeli
attack on Palestine in general and the Gaza Strip in particular in a
world-historical and regional context. In contrast to a range of theo-
ries which resort to liberal international relations theory, economism,
or methodological nationalism when theorizing accumulation in general
or Arab region accumulation in particular, the article argues that the
Arab-Iranian region is under a regime of US-imposed de-development
which seeks to dismantle strategic obstacles in the region through war
and sanctions. The article argues this process encountered an obstacle
amidst Iranian-linked regional militia and standing armies, and that these
forces need to be understood by revisiting thinking about the role of
political sovereignty in emancipatory transitions.

Keywords
Iran, Palestine, resistance, imperialism

Introduction
The October 7 Hamas-led military operations against Israel were events
of world-historical importance.1 Palestine contains the world’s most active
1
Department of Conflict and Development Studies, University of Ghent, and Observatory
of Food Sovereignty and the Environment, Tunis, Wageningen

Corresponding author:
Max Ajl, Department of Conflict and Development Studies, University of Ghent, and Observa-
tory of Food Sovereignty and the Environment, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, 9000 Gent, Belgium.
E-mail: [email protected]
Ajl 63

armed anti-colonial national movement. Israel is the world’s least con-

solidated settler state, forced into brutal, constant counter-insurgency
to defend settler property rights and imperialist domination of the Arab
working classes. Furthermore, the operation brought into explosive
combination yet larger forces, outside the territory of historic Palestine:
The United States and the US-allied neo-colonial states alongside Israel,
against regional republicanism, mass-mobilizing popular militia, and Iran.
The Palestinian insurgency has brought the national question back to the
table (Moyo & Yeros, 2011). As with other anti-systemic experiments, like
Zimbabwe amidst agrarian reform, and Venezuela under Chavismo, it has
polarized not merely its surrounding state system, where Palestine has been
the compass orienting any resolution to the Arab national question, but the
world system. Indeed, Palestine crystallizes nearly every contradiction
within the current order. Although Zimbabwe and Venezuela confronted the
racial distribution of world power, the Palestinian question spills far beyond
questions of class and nation internal to historical Palestine’s boundaries.
Amongst its myriad complexities: “one section” of the Palestinian people
“exists under a racist, fascist entity,” namely Israel, supported by imperialist
powers, while the latter also turns “feudalist, tribalist, reactionary and puppet
regimes in the Arab world into mediators in the ongoing plunder of the Arab
revolution and the Arab toiling classes.” Thus, “the issue of struggle against
these regimes indirectly becomes a Palestinian front as well” and raises,
beyond the puppets, the nature of struggles to deepen popular democracy
and resistance capacity within those regimes’ enemies (Kanafani, n.d.; PFLP,
1969).
Moreover, the question of Palestine is not merely a question of national
oppression, but poses Israel’s uniqueness: a condensation of Western colo-
nial and imperial power, a world-wide symbol of Western perfidy, a state
which physically cleaves Africa and Asia, a merchant and mercenary of
global counter-insurgency, all melded in a manticore of death and destruc-
tion. Indeed, the harder and stronger Palestinians fight for liberation, the
more, like lightning bolts of ever-increasing luminosity, they bring the
relief of the world system into clearer view: the impotence of the United
Nations; the imperialist contempt for international law; the complicity of
the Arab neo-colonial states with Western capitalism; the fascist racism at
the heart of modern European and US capitalism, as murderers and
maimers operate in Western capitals; the neo-colonial structures of the
Arab and Third World; and the hollowness of Western liberal democracy
and its constellation of civil society institutions.
This two-part article restores self-defense to its proper place at the
center of social reproduction and accumulation. It analyzes the historical
64 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13(1)

and contemporary utility of Israel to US imperialism and dynamics of

resistance to this project, in an era when the violence associated with
US-Israeli practice in the Arab region is presented as “surplus,” or irra-
tional from the perspective of monopoly capital, as in the “Israel lobby”
hypothesis. This first part uses the historical reconstruction of the US-Israeli
Special Relationship to illuminate broader dynamics of accumulation-by-
waste, the imperialist agenda in the Arab region, and those resisting it. It
revisits the theory of national liberation and the national question, recon-
textualizing Fanon and Cabral to understand the uses to which they
intended their theories. It uses the framework of national liberation to
assess Arab-Iranian resistance to the United States, including a survey of
the national projects of the standing Arab-Iranian armies and asymmetrical
resistance forces. It discusses their military logic and interprets their
defense of the deteriorated fabric of regional political sovereignty as
having an anti-systemic character in the face of patterns of accumulation
which feed on the carcasses of waste, de-development, and state collapse.

The Special Relationship

The Israeli and imperialist connivance to balkanize, de-develop, intimi-
date, and occupy the Arab region never cleaved war from “economics,”
rejection of sovereignty from control of the development process, or
either from broader imperial politics. Nor was Arab development ever
shorn from questions of sovereignty and defense by its champions, as
defensive armoring and industrialization were inseparable in the eyes of
planners, rebels, army officers and statesmen whose formative experi-
ence was seeing Palestine fall to settler-colonial avarice, a microcosm of
Arab underdevelopment and subjugation to imperialism.
Israeli implantation in the Arab region was a project sold by its makers
as “a part of the bulwark that protects it [Europe] from Asia. We would
serve as an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism” (Herzl, 2012),
at the high noon of European franchise and settler colonialism, but only
accelerating after the implantation of Europe’s other African-Asian colo-
nies. It attracted considerable British Jewish ruling class investments,
while broader British support for Zionism reflected strategic and economic
interests (Rifai, 2016; Shafir, 1989). The British were central in the milita-
rized evaporation of the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial
revolt of 1936–1939 (Kanafani, 1972; al-Saleh, 2022). By 1948, as Israel
consolidated settler-capitalist property structures through its great war
of primitive accumulation—Al-Nakba, the disaster—the US began to
Ajl 65

reassess the newly-born settler state. As military leadership stated (cited in

Gendzier, 2015, 284), “[f]rom the viewpoint of tactical operations, Israel’s
territory and its indigenous military forces…would be of importance to…
the Western Democracies,” otherwise, if not in the grasp of the NATO alli-
ance, it would risk falling into the red hands of the Soviet Union. After its
war of conquest, Israel’s major ally and armorer was the French state, at
that time fending off guerilla armies across the Maghreb fighting for
national liberation (’Abd Allah, 1976). Hostility to Arab nationalism in
North Africa and Nasserism in Egypt bonded the settler-state to its colonial
patrons. They allied in their failed bid to reverse Egyptian nationalization
of the Sinai through the 1956 Tripartite Aggression. In turn, France gifted
Israel with advanced Mirage fighter-jets, while Israel gifted the world
counter-revolution its assistance with the assassination of Moroccan revo-
lutionary and convener of the Tricontinental, Mehdi Ben Barka (Anon,
2015; Heimann, 2010).
As the political sovereignty regime dawned in the Arab region in the
shadow of Soviet power, global capitalist powers fought wars of move-
ment where necessary and wars of position where possible to dampen
redistribution, divert the surplus to arms, and dilute the drive to agrarian
reform. The “waste” element of accumulation was constrained by the
existence of Communist powers and the role of Communism as world-
wide legitimizing ideology for sending resources to popular reproduc-
tion and social infrastructure (Ajl, 2023b; A. Kadri, 2023).
Meanwhile, in reaction to the Arab military defeat in 1948 and the
loss of Palestine, Arab nationalism mutated beyond its romantic and
elitist origins. It spiraled in mass-mobilizing, republican, and populist
directions, fusing bread at home with guns pointed at the author of the
1948 catastrophe. Varied projects of national renaissance sought sover-
eign industrialization, defensive capacity, socialism, unity, and inde-
pendence, and moved beyond the cultural and economic debility that
marked the ancient regimes. Amidst the regional magnetism of Arab
nationalism, its adherents ruled the state or the street. These swept from
the Syrian Ba’ath fusion of “Marxist-Leninism to Arab nationalism”
(Hinnebusch, 2004, 46) in the palaces to the threat of Nasserism amongst
the publics of Lebanon and Jordan (Aruri, 1972), to the beacon of
Egyptian anti-colonialism and arms flows to millenarian and Marxist
Arab nationalist guerillas in Tunisia and Algeria (Azzouz, 1988; Gruskin,
2021), to the 1958 Revolution in Iraq and its aftershocks (Wolfe-
Hunnicutt, 2021), leading to nationalization of foreign land, infrastruc-
ture, and industrial plant, and taking steps to shatter monopolist agrarian
structures, improving social protection, increasing longevity, building up
66 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13(1)

health and housing, and partially industrializing (Kadri, 2016). The

United States deluged Arab monarchies and republics in developmental
aid to constrain deeper redistribution and confrontation with Israel. Such
soporifics did, in places, help dull the drive to deeper redistribution and
to building more internally articulated industrial fabric (Chaieb & Dahan,
1981; Samir, 1982), but could not induce the needed paralysis.
The Arab Republics were too radical for the imperialists and not radical
enough to resist the imperialist typhoon (Hafiz, 2005). The United States
effectively gave a green light to Israel to slam the Arab frontline states in
1967, through its war of aggression (Stork, 1994). That war, compounding
Saudi-stoked revanchism in North Yemen prompting Egyptian interven-
tion (Abdalla, 1994), destabilized Nasserism (Zabad, 2019) and Ba’athism,
beclouding prospects for combining anti-Israeli warfare and social redis-
tribution from above and alchemizing the states into corporatist class com-
promise and partial confrontation with Israel. Increasingly, this left the
radical option of people’s war to Palestinian guerrillas (Higgins, 2023,
330–420) and radicals radiating region-wide. In Arab states such as Iraq
and Libya (First, 1974; Wolfe-Hunnicutt, 2011), further from the struggle
and less impacted by the violent defeat of Arab republicanism amidst its
prioritization of rigidity and protection from Israel against the plasticity
needed for people’s wars, the defeat catalyzed radicalization. The war also
led to the occupation-to-annexation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,
turning them into fresh frontiers for Israeli colonialism, captive markets
for Israeli goods, and cheap labor reserves for the Israeli petty bourgeoi-
sies, while putting their land at the service of state and capital alike
(Farsakh, 2002; Samara, 1992).
Israel’s success against the frontline states impressed the US political
and military establishments. Following the war, the United States opened
the spigot of military “aid,” with the unique provision that 25% of such
aid could feed the industrial infrastructure of geographical Israel, the
remainder flowing back to the Pentagon system. The United States
viewed Israeli incubation of its own military-industrial sector favorably,
allowing for the state to better balance its accounts and for the United
States to slightly sidestep Arab ire at its arming of Israel. Alongside con-
siderable private investment from the United States, the Israeli defense
industrial system rapidly metastasized from 1967 onwards, becoming a
major sector of the Israeli economy: arms exports totaled 10% of total
exports in 1970 (Lockwood, 1972). Extensive armoring of Israel went
alongside diversions of Arab wealth to weaponry, sometimes through
aid, more often through sales, always with the proviso that Israel
would maintain a “qualitative military edge” (El Nabolsy, 2021). In the
Ajl 67

republics, arms build-ups were defensive. Egypt, Iraq, and Syria spent
between 10% and 17% of gross domestic product (GDP) on arms during
the 1970s and 1980s.2 The oil-rich republics and monarchies spent
smaller proportions of their GDP, but diverted tens of billions of
dollars from potential regional-popular development to weaponry. Such
weapons served equally as buffer from US-Israeli aggression, domestic
counter-insurgency, subsidy for the US industrial base, and as assistance
to play the role of regional Sparta, as with the Iranian Shah’s support for
reactionary counter-insurgency in Dhofar.
Meanwhile, US military interventions, “security assistance,” arms sales,
black operations, and developmental aid—in fact, developmental counter-
insurgency, meant to soften the edge of hunger and want and consolidate a
social base amongst portions of the middle classes or the state bureaucracy
for neo-colonialism—secured US power and neutrality towards Israel
amongst a range of royalties and republics. Petrodollar flows from oil prices
which the US connived in pushing up (Oppenheim, 1976) gushed from US,
European, and Japanese consumers, the primary purchasers of refined petro-
leum, first to the coffers of the Gulf states and then to the Pentagon complex
and US treasuries and securities (Spiro, 1999). Israel was the machine’s
central turbine, forcing defensive and justifying offensive arms purchases,
some of which laid idle in arid warehouses: pure waste.
Furthermore, the cultivation of the Israeli defense plant soon yielded
fruits for worldwide repression. Israel grew as an organic component of
the worldwide capitalist offensive, neo-colonial counter-revolution, and
colonial rearguard. And it operated in theaters where the United States
preferred not to, or could not, tread. Throughout Latin America, Israel
armed and trained genocidal anti-revolutionary counter-insurgency,
from the Contras to Pinochet’s Chile to the sub-fascist junta in Argentina.
It supported Portugal in colonial counter-revolution against popular lib-
eration forces in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau, and trained
and funded the forces of repression in Central African Republic, Somalia,
Togo, and others. It supported the Mobutu regime in then-Zaire and
effectively circumvented UN-imposed sanctions against the former
Rhodesia, feeding it with arms, and did the same in South Africa (Beit-
Hallahmi, 1987; IJAN, 2012). In the Arab region, Israel propped up the
Iranian Shah against Communist activists, worked against the Lebanese
National Movement during the Civil War, assassinated Ghassan
Kanafani, backstopped Jordanian regime repression of the Palestinian
Revolution (Higgins, 2023, 334–433), and grinded away at Egyptian
development under Sadat through war and militarization in the Sinai
(Arab Republic of Egypt, 1978).
68 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13(1)

Reaction and Revolution in the Regional

State System
Arab republicanism was born buffeted by war and the securitization of
politics. It soon saw a descent into authoritarianism and the consolida-
tion of capitalist intermediate classes (Mansour, 1992), amidst the slow
Saudi and US extirpation and de-legitimization of radical republican-
ism, revolution, and Communism. Its allure as developmental alternative
grew tarnished as Arab leaders stabilized their welfare states but ceased
more aggressive redistributions, and lost capacity to confront Israel. A
US-arranged peace treaty, one amongst many, lubricated by military and
economic aid, levered Egypt in 1978 into normalization with Israel. And
the tarnish spread amidst serial US-Israeli military defeats, social regres-
sion, and sanctions (Capasso, 2020). In Libya, US attacks chipped away at
Qadhaffi’s legitimacy, and the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq war, which the United
States stoked on both sides, damaged the Islamic Republic at nearly the
moment of its birth and immolated tremendous surpluses in each state. By
1991, the bell tolled on Arab republicanism. As the Soviet Union fell, there
was a regional surrender of hope in the face of capitalist advance (Fergany,
2000). The dominos started falling: Iraq was militarily defeated, then eco-
nomically besieged, erasing it as a possible regional developmental pole
and a state capable of staving off Palestinian surrender. Egypt assented to
full entrance to the Western camp through forgiving of its debt in exchange
for its support for the war on Iraq. With regional military and economic
powers isolated, weakened, warrened off from influence, Palestine was left
nearly isolated despite its mass-based popular intifada from 1987 to 1991.
The Oslo Accords soon followed.
But isolation was relative, not total. Parallel to the waning of Arab
nationalism was the waxing of a new anti-systemic alternative. The last
major Jacobin-style revolution of the last millennium, the 1978–1979 rev-
olution in Iran, marked a turning point in the history of the region. Mass-
mobilizing the population (Kurzman, 2004), it drew on a mix of Marxism,
dependency theory, liberation theology, and Arab republicanism (Sohrabi,
2018), fusing them into an anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist revolution
(Ahouie, 2017), which moved “to create a full-fledged welfare state,”
(Abrahamian, 2009) while securing space for the market and the private
sector domestically, even while bristling at foreign capitalist activity
within Iran (Pesaran, 2008). Amidst the mass-mobilizing needs of a state
at war and influenced by the legitimating ideology of its revolution, Iran
turned to widespread social welfare investments and nationalization of
private productive forces, creating a large state-owned industrial sector
Ajl 69

(Harris, 2017). Looking outward, it ruptured the Israeli “periphery doc-

trine,” expelling the US Embassy and breaking the petrodollar-weapons
flow which had bound it to US imperialism. Furthermore, it took up the
banner of solidarity with Palestine and opposition to US imperialism
(Orinoco Tribune, 2023). Throughout the 1980s, Iran supported Hezbollah
and Islamic Jihad militarily, politically, and technologically. Syria and Iran
shared anti-Zionist alignments, and although they had friction in Lebanon,
shared opposition to the US war on Iraq in 2003—the second major
regional inflection point, which laid bare to Ansar Allah in Yemen the per-
fidious global role of the United States. By the early 2000s, Iran’s doctrine
of “strategic depth” merged with ideological commitment in layers of the
state to anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, and increasingly it became a
semi-industrialized semi-periphery.
These processes fertilized the embryos of a new regional Cold War. It
arrayed Iran and its allies, which would crystallize into an “axis of resist-
ance,” against the neo-colonial US allies, Israel, and behind them, the United
States. Whereas the previous Cold War pitted republican redistribution and
anti-Zionism, the banners carried by complementary and clashing Arab
nationalisms, against the reactionary US and British-backed monarchies and
satraps, the new Cold War emerged as the US sought to evaporate any inde-
pendent global poles of capital accumulation and dismantle the regional
political sovereignty regime, which was being defended by armed mass-
mobilizing militia. This process was inseparable from, and, indeed, articu-
lated through—as with the previous Arab Cold War—the “Arab-Israeli”
conflict (Kerr, 1971). By the 1990s, Arab normalization, long de facto in
Jordan, became de jure, opening the way for an economic peace alongside
free trade zones. Within Palestine, the Oslo Accords sought to erect a neolib-
eral and hybrid neo-colonial/collaborator class, enmeshed in economic nor-
malization, administration of selected monopolies, buttressed by West Bank
and exile Palestinian capital flows, especially Gulf-linked but also Lebanese,
as with the Cyprus Construction Corporation (Rabie, 2021). This cold peace
was frost-bite for resistance forces: the political face of this dynamic was the
“terror lists,” as remaining Palestinian and Arab rejectionist forces, including
Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and
Islamic Jihad were placed on lists sanctioning any material support for them,
a component of broader post-Soviet encirclement operations against remain-
ing Communist armed guerrillas (Ajl, 2023a). “Terror lists” deprived organi-
zations of material support and created ideological over-compliance, leading
to ideological and political isolation. But sanctions and terror lists forced their
own delinking. As political organizations were “maximally” coerced and
quarantined, they made mutual linkages. Delinking led to a type of regional
70 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13(1)

collective self-reliant security doctrine, architecture, and technological and

military coordination. Imperialism built an inadvertent scaffolding for its
opponents’ ideological and political goals.

National Liberation and Social Reproduction

To understand the anti-systemic character and limits of the axis of resist-
ance we revisit the theory of national liberation, the national question,
and how to interpret each under various stages of imperialism. The
“classical” approach to the national question developed during the age of
monopoly capital and formal colonialism, divvying up the world into loot-
ing grounds for each colonial power based on colonial super-exploitation
and income deflation (Patnaik & Patnaik, 2021). Accordingly, Lenin
took the leap of supporting nationalist movements, even if they had a
non-socialist character, as a move to deepen democracy (Lenin, 1965b,
1965a). National liberation had an anti-imperialist character because
the victory of the national movements attacked the political architecture
of colonial accumulation, which depended on extra-economic colonial
force for its reproduction. Furthermore, almost no such struggle reached
only for purely formal rights. And finally, struggles for formal political
rights mattered since they were potential mechanisms for redistributing
material assets—which required emancipatory movements.
Fanon and Cabral offered the classical criticisms of bourgeoisie
nationalism. Although now their dissections of neo-colonialism, the
national bourgeoisie, and national consciousness are used to attack states
and nationalist movements willy-nilly, their dissents came from within.
They emerged during a shift in the coordinates of imperialism imposed
by the national movements on recalcitrant colonial empires, as monop-
oly capital in the late 1950s and 1960s was shifting to its neo-colonial
stage (Nkrumah, 1974).3 The existence of the Soviet Union and later,
Communist China, forced most bourgeois nationalist states, helmed by a
wavering petty bourgeoisie, to implant some level of social protection
within their development projects, minimally stopping colonial famine
(Davis, 2002). Furthermore, emblazoned on the banners of the national
movements were commitments to the wellbeing of their people. These
were promissory notes that the post-independence leadership had little
choice but to respect and, indeed, often did their very best to honor.
Fanon and, even more so, Cabral situated their critiques in a periodiza-
tion of accumulation, noting that monopoly capital was the source of
imperialism and that post-colonial states were entering neo-colonialism,
Ajl 71

often in linkage with one another. They attacked the nationalist move-
ments for theoretical and organizational weaknesses and for inability to
deliver on the promises of the anti-colonial struggle: redistribution, land,
bread.4 They clarified that the “new” bourgeoisies incubating in newly-
decolonized nations were transmission belts for the reproduction of foreign
monopoly control over the development of the productive forces (Cabral,
1979). For Cabral (1979, 141), the issue was neo-colonial or colonial
“violent usurpation of the freedom of development of national productive
forces.” Although they wished to unmask the barren ideology of the new
leaderships, they were not illusioned. While they argued that the political
forces helming the state ought to radicalize, commit “class suicide,” they
understood that the decision to assimilate to the emerging new interna-
tional order was less deviation than destiny (Fanon, 1963, 99). They knew
the pressures to conform to neo-colonialism were overwhelming.
Yet, the critique had a background assumption: the legitimacy of the
political sovereignty regime which had been broadly achieved, was in
imminent crisis, as the prime target of anti-colonial parties and move-
ments. Fanon defended the intrinsic merit of the struggle for decoloniza-
tion and political sovereignty (1963, pp. 40, 51). But Fanon and Cabral
inadequately theorized sovereignty. This was not without reason: over-
focus on its merits would have been gratuitous. Within the national move-
ments it had become basically universal that political decolonization was
a boon (but see Awan, 2024). Their major works were of their place and
time. They carried a whiff of polemic and entreaty. If they underplayed the
achievements of decolonization and the acquisition of political sover-
eignty, they did not do so to imply that those achievements were nothing
but gewgaws for the new bourgeoisie and state managers. Rather, with
their words Cabral and Fanon were fighting intellectual warfare, arming
the national movements with better tools to help them fill the shell of polit-
ical sovereignty with emancipatory programs for working peoples. Cabral
in particular theorized culture as a weapon for national liberation. And
both drafted communiques to the national movements to organize, build
mass accountable parties, for the intellectuals and statesmen to forego the
fat of administering the apparatus of state for their own interest and instead
to serve the people. It is unimaginable that Fanon and Cabral could not see
that in Tunisia or India suddenly the hungry had fuller bellies, but they also
would have known full well that they still needed land—hence Cabral’s
focus on reacquisition of the productive forces.5
Their critiques were necessary in the sense that monopoly and colo-
nial capital, while still defending a wide range of settler-states in Africa,
was plastic, malleable, morphing. Thus, the critique of neo-colonialism
72 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13(1)

or bourgeois nationalist outcomes was a critique of the form of appear-

ance of the new stage of monopoly capital, marked increasingly by a
widening of the market to enfold sectoral import-substitution or export-
oriented industrialization and more extensive proletarianization in a
nascent and new international division of labor (Dowidar, 1973;
ʻAbdallāh, 1976).
Post-1991, the pattern of accumulation shifted. As the Soviet Union
fell, income deflation globally accelerated (Banerjee, 2020; Patnaik,
2007), registering a decline in per-capita access to foodgrains and abso-
lute rural immiseration, the widening and deepening of global labor
reserves, pervasive semi-proletarianization (Yeros, 2023), and existen-
tial threats to social reproduction on a world scale (Ossome & Naidu,
2021). Global restructuring of commodity chains deepened, enfolding
ever-more of the Third World within the capitalist system, including
a partially re-incorporated China which yet retained massive state
control over the accumulation process (Smith, 2016; Suwandi, 2019).
Homogenization and financialization of food supplies spread. The dollar
became weaponized, hand-in-gauntlet with US assaults on remaining
strategic obstacles to the entry and exit of hot capital flows, pressuring
countries through attacks on their sovereign credit to de-socialize social
reproduction under the threat of financial blackmail or bombs (Gowan,
1999). The escalation of semi-colonization (Yeros & Jha, 2020) and wars
of extermination and encroachment became the norm (Kadri, 2014).
Global labor reserves became so massive as to be redundant from the
perspective of worldwide accumulation. Capital benefited from the
amputation of lives via war, lessening the quantity of use values required
for the reproduction of labor power on a world scale (A. Kadri, 2023).
This logic of accumulation is systemic, with income deflation applied as
policy through sanctions and negative growth in Iran and Venezuela. Yet
it is concentrated in the Arab region, which is historically articulated into
the global law of value through the monopolies of oil and weapons,
finance, the petrodollar and securities purchases, and war. The Arab
region is the world’s most war-prone, reflecting its centrality to global
accumulation yet obscured through discussion of dictatorship and terror-
ism. The Arab world has been an experiment in this mode of accumula-
tion via waste: as Colombian President Gustavo Petro stated, “[w]hy
have large carbon-consuming countries allowed the systematic murder
of thousands of children in Gaza? Because Hitler has already entered
their homes and they are getting ready to defend their high levels of
carbon consumption and reject the exodus it causes” (Fadul, 2023). The
US agenda for the Arab region is an augury for the future. In that region,
Ajl 73

capital as imperialism allows for dependent industrialization and agri-

cultural specialization for export among its closest regional allies and
within stable securitized neo-colonies woven into global production
chains (Morocco, Egypt, and Tunisia; on the latter, see Mullin, 2023).
Within the stabilized monarchies of the Gulf, it allows the development
of real estate, finance, oil and gas, and secondary processing hubs. And
capitalist advance has gone hand-in-hand with advancing normalization
with Israel, as one Arab monarchy after another signed normalization
agreements with Israel.6 But in those nations with a history of republican
coup d’état or existing para-state militia or standing armies, as in Libya,
Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine, the US agenda is immolation, and
reduction of developmental levels. The goal is the weakening or destruc-
tion of the state sponsors and allies of regional militia which challenge
US-Israeli domination.
In Syria, for example, Hamas was able to train its personnel. The
2000s saw Iranian-Syrian strategic cooperation, and Syria was a trans-
portation hub for arms shipments to Hezbollah. It also harbored Imad
Mughniyeh, one of Hezbollah’s major military tacticians until the joint
CIA-Mossad assassination in 2008. Indeed, the origins of the US war—
carried out through subcontractors and effective proxies in the Gulf
states, Turkey, Israel, and the Future Movement in Lebanon—lay in the
US arming, training, and ideologically indoctrinating sectarian militia
through their “redirection” (Hersh, 2007) to shatter state sponsors of
Hezbollah, while overall US and Gulf neoliberalism weakened the state
sufficiently so as to render it vulnerable to its attempted dismantling by
the United States which accelerated in 2011 (Donovan, 2023). Such
incitement and arming operations widened into a war whose substance
was an attack on the Syrian state as even a theoretical container for
popular policies, and as a non-theoretical attack on its role as a structural
support base for regional anti-Zionist militia. By 2011, the attack—spon-
sored by the Gulf monarchies as well as the United States—cozened
Hamas political bureau chief Khalid Meshal to leave to Qatar and, in
2012, for the movement to openly disavow the government, while
Palestinian Islamic Jihad retained relations with the Syrian government
and the armed wing of Hamas, Al-Qassam, maintained friendly relations
with its sponsors (Skare, 2021).
The war set back Syrian developmental levels to the 1950s. It razed
forest cover, decimated popular access to electricity, and reduced GDP by
two-thirds (al-Asadi, 2020; Gaafar, 2021; Hatahet & Shaar, 2021). This
assault has proceed not merely through kinetic attack but sanctions which
amputate and warp the body of state sovereignty itself: by illegalizing
74 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13(1)

political representatives (through the “terror lists”) and by preventing the

state, a central economic actor in all modern societies, from engaging in
the day-to-day operations of capitalist exchange and getting needed goods
on the market (Capasso, 2023; Doutaghi, 2024; Doutaghi & Mullin, 2022).
US sanctions dismantled pharmaceutical and agricultural production
chains (Aita, 2020) and even hemorrhaged into the humanitarian section
due to sanctions over-compliance. Similarly, in Iraq, “Oil for Food”
unbundled the sovereignty of the Iraqi state and remitted it to an
imperialist-sponsored United Nations program (Gordon, 2010), hollowed
out industry and its melding with national defense by prohibiting “dual
use” imports; Iraqi oil proceeds continue to be held in the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York.
Those wars of encroachment rest on negations of, or attacks on, polit-
ical sovereignty. The wars burn up the social surplus, the values crystal-
lized in social infrastructure or defensive militarization, requiring yet
further, or constant, re-composition of defensive industrial bases and the
use of skilled labor-power for industrial militarization and less-skilled
labor power for national armies and guerilla forces. Or they must use
scarce monies to import defensive armaments burned up in war. Countries
must devote national productive labor merely to maintain and protect
rather than add to their capital stock. Thus, the defense against imperial
or colonial wars of encroachment, the hardening of the armistice line
against such wars (Lebanon) or the active “forward defense” against
such wars (Iran) has an anti-systemic character. Furthermore, the mass-
mobilizing popular wars countervail the sense of defeat imperialism
sows in the Arab world. We now turn to an analysis of the political forces
waging these wars in the Arab-Iranian region.

The Resistance Axis

The resistance axis refers to those states and militia antagonistic to the
US-Israeli agenda. The axis’s critical element is post-revolutionary Iran,
which from 1979 has supported a proliferating set of armed movements
and states which have taken up arms or offered material infrastructure
for anti-Israeli resistance: Syria, Hezbollah, Palestinian armed groups,
Yemen (Ansar Allah), and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq. Inter-
nally, since the revolution, Iran has embarked on continuous—if frus-
trated—efforts towards endogenous industrialization, the technological
basis for an increasingly self-reliant military-defense capacity (Czulda,
2020; Hashim, 1992). This, in turn, has been the foundation for regional
Ajl 75

sharing of technology, alongside operational training, dispatch of its elite

forces to assist in the defense or reclamation of state sovereignty within
nearby Arab states, and sharing of technical and logistical expertise. This
defense-and-deterrence strategy emerges out a mélange of ideological
conviction, enmity to Israel and the US, desire to defend the revolu-
tion, and the urgency of avoiding hot wars on Iranian cities. Its existence
should force us to reconsider the concept of “self-defense” as neces-
sary to understand the regional landscape. Yet, this strategy is used to
paint Iran as a regional dybbuk, spreading terrorism, imperialism, and
dominance. At least two narratives are central, and they converge on the
axiom that self-defense is not a valid explanation for Iranian activities.
We survey some of those explanations and their indicators, then put for-
ward a theoretical explanation for Iranian regional policies.
A common narrative within mainstream and heterodox social science
focuses on the resistance axis from an economistic perspective: lacking
a socialist ideology and bound up with bourgeois projects, the axis
expresses imperialist, sub-imperialist, hegemonic, or domestic bour-
geois class projects. These formulations rest on a reductive, formalist,
and Eurocentric analysis of accumulation, considering war epiphenom-
enal to the accumulation process rather than as constituent of it. A sym-
metrical error from International Relations (IR) theory or mainstream
security studies considers the resistance axis reducible to geopolitical
containers struggling against their counterparts in a zero-sum game.
The first set of arguments rely on mis-readings of Ruy Mauro Marini’s
(1969) concept of “sub-imperialism,” echoing its use for the BRICS. He
argued that sub-imperialism was a stage in the development of capitalism
within semi-peripheral countries when economic power concentrates in
monopolies, fusing with finance. Productivity massively increases through
the implantation of imported technology. Yet, super-exploitation constricts
the domestic market, forcing the sub-imperialist power to secure export
markets for realizing the value of products (Higginbottom, 2010).
Furthermore, this occurred amidst “antagonistic cooperation” as an empow-
ered national capitalist sector sometimes battled and sometimes broke
bread with the imperialist capitalist sector (Valencia, 2017, 76–77). In the
case of Iran, although reference is made to its own “imperialism” or “sub-
imperialism” (Collective, 2019), occasionally with vague gestures to the
country’s economic interests in Iraq and Lebanon, trade statistics do not
constitute a political sociology of sub-imperialism. They are empiricist
indicators of capital movements within a capitalist system, including the
resistance axis—a characterization denied by almost no one (Kadri, 2019).
Iranian exports to Lebanon are dwarfed by economic support to Hezbollah.
76 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13(1)

Iran’s exports to Yemen and Palestine are almost non-existent. Exports to

Iraq are significant, but increased only after 2003, with the fraying of Iraqi
productive fabric and US sanctions (Guzansky, 2011, 92–93). Meanwhile,
Iranian support for domestic military actors in Iraq—the Popular
Mobilization Forces—was a direct response to the takeover of a third of the
country by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) (Arif, 2019).
As with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iranian force projection occurs against
colonial, sectarian, and imperialist-backed violence.7 It shatters the concept
of sub-imperialism to equate anti-systemic and pro-systemic power projec-
tion by intermediate states within the world system, or to suggest that Iran
has “antagonistic cooperation” with the US. Furthermore, Marini’s argu-
ment linked domestic super-exploitation with realization of production
abroad. While Iran is capitalist, domestic wage compression has been linked
to the maximum-pressure sanctions regime (Nosratabadi, 2023), and Iran’s
total national capital faces suppression from the US through sanctions.
Stretching “sub-imperialism” to Iran distorts the concept beyond meaning,
vacating it of the historical processes from which it was abstracted and re-
tooling it as essentially a Marxist-sounding pejorative. Meanwhile, IR theory
cannot assess the different class interests within the black-box nation-states
it uses as a unit of analysis. It analytically equates wars of national defense
or liberation, which seek to liberate productive forces from imperialist control
or protect them from destruction, with wars of offense and occupation.
Iranian action needs a better explanation than sub-imperialism, a
resort to liberal or “realist” IR relations theory which sees classless
national blocs battling for hegemony in zero-sum games, or simply
“rival capitalisms” engaged in zero-sum struggles over relative shares of
world accumulation. Accumulation is the piling up of surplus value.
Abstractions can be used to theorize accumulation but accumulation is
not abstract. Still less can it be reduced to expanded reproduction.
Primitive accumulation, or the use of extra-economic force to affect pat-
terns of production within a given social formation (Patnaik, 2017), is
part of historical capitalism. Expanded accumulation is, furthermore, a
historical moment in the evolution of capital, but it is a moment which
does not occur everywhere; neither “backwardness” nor permanent
primitive accumulation are historical stages prior to expanded reproduc-
tion but constitute it in its essence (Moyo et al., 2013; McMichael, 1990).
Violation of state sovereignty through wars of encroachment is constitu-
tive of accumulation via waste. Imperialism as a sociological phenome-
non rests on the concrete practices of arms factories, counter-insurgency,
surveillance, and the physical land bases and attendant stability needed
for those processes (Capasso & Kadri, 2023).
Ajl 77

Wars of national sovereignty against imperialism are pro-working

class. Because the law of value proceeds through encroachment, sanc-
tions, destruction of social infrastructure, burning up lives, and shorten-
ing lifespans, defensive wars partially disrupt its mechanics in the Arab
region. They expand the realm of formal and democratic rights, which
the colonial and neo-colonial powers disrespect. Such wars dismantle
the machinery—the gears, pulleys, and levers—which make the engine
of accumulation run. Weakening Israel weakens imperialism.
Sufficiently armored state frontiers and the evaporation of forces like
Israel, whose logic of militarized and imperialist settler expansion, under-
mine the non-economic processes needed for accumulation. Socialist tran-
sition cannot be reduced to national sovereignty and anti-imperialism, but
nor is it possible without those processes. They are necessary but not suf-
ficient. Furthermore, Iranian arming cannot be compared to the EU-US
arms trade or aid. The latter buttress imperialist accumulation directly
through the commodity circuit, through their deployment to shorten the
lives and kill the working class on a world scale and to reduce the combat-
iveness of labor by inculcating defeat. Iranian weapons and training are
free, representing “the possibility of access to weapons for the poor”
(Moussaoui, 2023, 179). Indeed, their blueprints are often open-access or
freely shared from Iran to its state and sub-state partners, another way in
which they qualitatively differ from US and Israeli arms-dealing: Iran dis-
tributes these types of use values whereas the US and Israel commodify
them. They also extend life by preventing or beating back military assault
against those countries which bear them. And when deployed in practice,
they dissipate the sense of defeat which has been the central achievement
of US-Israeli regional action.
Thus, capacity to resist wars of encroachment and primitive accumu-
lation has a class content on a world-scale, given it is often needed to
secure social reproduction and provide the basis for expanded accumula-
tion. Resistance on multiple geographical scales is the hardened shell
around state capacity. It is not necessarily the warm cradle of working-
class social reproduction, but the latter presupposes state capacity to
operate hospitals, schools, trash collection, the basic institutions of sta-
tistics-gathering and bureaucratic decision-making, and the physical
institutions which organize skilled and unskilled labor in the service of
social well-being—all of which imperialism dismantles as it levels Arab
targets (see Alhaffar & Janos, 2021; Anon, n.d.; Lafta & Al-Nuaimi,
2019). Within any state, sovereignty is central to regulating, democratiz-
ing, and embedding accumulation to provide use values to popular
classes. Diversion of surplus to the military capacity of a nation or its
78 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13(1)

allies cannot be separated from domestic social reproduction. As Farnia

(2023) argues for Iran, this is not reducible to “authoritarianism” but
connected to a domestic welfare state (Harris, 2010) and investment in
research and development linked to aerospace, nuclear utilization, and
pharmaceuticals. Similarly, Syria, in the face of military defeat and Gulf-
channeled re-penetration of capital after the successful Ba’ath nationali-
zation and redistribution policies (Ajl, 2019; Matar, 2016) still retained
critical capacities for endogenous food production and sectoral self-sub-
sistence and comparatively superior health outcomes (Sen, 2019).
Beyond states, the second element of the region-wide resistance
project are the mass-mobilizing popular militia or standing armies in
Yemen and Lebanese Hezbollah. The latter developed from the 1980s
onwards through substantial Iranian assistance, as Syria permitted
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC) to set up training
camps in the Lebanese South in the 1980s. It grew further within the
framework of the Lebanese confessional system and sectarian-capitalist
state apparatus, the child of French colonialism and the US-supported
Ta’if Accords which created cold neoliberal peace after the hot exter-
nally-stoked war (George, 2019; Wakim, 2021). Hezbollah led a guer-
rilla insurgency against the Israeli occupation of the South, harrying the
Zionists into full withdrawal by 2000, sowing great interest amongst
regional occupied and colonized peoples in the military option to con-
front colonialism and imperialism. Domestically, the party built up a
network of social services, a para-state in the South, which especially
targeted working-class Shia constituencies (Cammett, 2015; Love,
2010). By 2006, through logistical, technological, and organizational
upgrades alongside a pronounced up-take of people’s war (Matthews,
2011), Hezbollah was able to confront and defeat an Israeli incursion
into Lebanon, overpowering Zionism and behind it, the United States.
In Yemen, Ansar Allah emerged initially from complaints about “mar-
ginalization” amongst Yemenis belonging to the Zaydi religious group in
underdeveloped Saada, spurring an armed insurgency (Forster &
Kinnear, 2023). Husayn Al-Ḥūthī, their leader, initially focused on polit-
icizing an already-existing cultural revival movement. His sermons
focused on how Israel and the United States were degrading and disem-
powering Muslims. Alongside this largely culturalist response to Zionism
and the United States, the enemy was painted in often religious terms.
Paired to this was an early admiration for Iranian steadfastness and per-
ceived self-reliance in the face of the Western threat, and to Khomeini
himself for sowing rancor against the United States and Israel in all fields
of Iranian society (Albloshi, 2016). The US war of aggression against
Ajl 79

Iraq further radicalized, broadened, and more acutely politicized Ansar

Allah, giving their mobilization a more overtly anti-imperialist hue—in
ways not dissimilar to the politicization induced by the Nakba and
the alchemization of Arab nationalism into a republican and mass-
mobilizing ideology (Al-Hardan, 2015; Al-Kubaisi, 1971).
Ansar Allah started to intermix a populist class analysis and rhetoric
of revolution into its ideology, as the baton passed from Husayn to Abd
el-Malik Al-Ḥūthī after the former’s assassination. State-building sought
a “revolutionary model of republican government,” and he spoke of
“oppression in all its forms whether individual, racial, class, or regional”
and the wider scope of a “liberatory revolutionary project,” whose key-
stone was “total independence in its decision making”—a populist vision
of sovereignty (Cited in Schmitz, 2022, 199). For him, too, Iran was a
beacon: “[a]re not those (the Iranians) who secure life and produce men
and build nations?” Furthermore, he affirmed the Iranian role in taking
up the vanguard of national liberation rooted in “dignity and glory”—a
task previously under the aegis of Arab radical republicanism. From
2014 to 2019, the Houthi social vision solidified through notions of just
taxation, price engineering for basic commodities, and government pro-
tection for social reproduction (Abdulfali & Root, 2020). The 2019
National Vision Document, prefaced by the martyred leader Saleh Ali
al-Sammad, called for a modern, “strong” and “just” state overseeing a
mixed economy, committed to sovereign industrialization through
import-substitution, in situ transformation of national resources, self-
subsistence and ecological transitions in agriculture, and broadening
healthcare provision (Republic of Yemen, 2019).
Militarily, Ansar Allah has developed from a guerilla group to a
national army, merging with elements of the official national armed
forces. They have benefited from technological upgrading through
synergy with Hezbollah and the IGRC, including training in anti-tank
and anti-ship weapons, and endogenous industrialization to strengthen
military capacity, including landmines, missiles, and drones (Moussaoui,
2023, 222). Hezbollah and Iran also offer military training and propa-
ganda crafting (evidenced in the convergence of media strategies in the
2023 war). In relation to anti-colonial and anti-imperial practice and
vision, from 2015 onwards Ansar Allah fought a war of national libera-
tion against what they called the “Saudi-American” attack which sys-
tematically targeted agriculture and other productive sectors in a war of
genocidal counter-insurgency and depopulation (J. Kadri, 2023; Mundy,
2017). The Yemeni armed forces understand themselves as fighting a
mass mobilizing peoples’ war, based on ideological hardening of troops
80 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13(1)

and sophisticated tactics to neutralize technological superiority,

learned during their apprenticeship with Hezbollah (Moussaoui, 2023,
222–226).8 Yemeni armed capacity, buttressed by Iranian logistical and
material investment in the defense of Yemen, forced the Saudis and the
Emiratis to sue for peace in the face of threats to their oil and gas
infrastructure, refining, and shipment points if their aggression contin-
ued—another manifestation of the dialectical relationship between tech-
nological upgrading, defensive industrialization, and armed defensive
capacity to secure the space for expanded reproduction in peripheral or
embattled nation-states.

Conclusion, Part One

This set of regional forces has allied with Palestinian asymmetric militia
in their guerrilla war against Israeli settler-colonialism, and particularly
the siege on the Gaza Strip. We consider their post-October 7 activities, as
well as the Palestinian militia, in more detail in Part II of this article. These
forces have distinct orientations and internal disagreements regarding
models for economic development but converge on the active defense—
or achievement—of political sovereignty as necessary for the well-being
of the region’s peoples. We have argued that the current strategies of US
imperialism make it necessary to re-visit the theory and practice of national
sovereignty and the role of self-defense in socialist construction. Given
that the US is carrying out a policy of state collapse and de-development
in major Arab population centers, which is a testing ground for broader
US methods of income deflation, destabilization, de-development, and de-
statization, forces defending state sovereignty cannot simply be dismissed
as “bourgeois nationalist,” “state-capitalist” or using kindred typologies.
Such descriptions may have elements which are formally correct. But they
block from view the strategic landscape which is contoured by the current
stage of US accumulation, wherein “waste” is an input into accumula-
tion. The systematic attacks on Iranian-Arab state capacity, the policy of
de-development, and the military, political, and legal encirclement ought
to be understood as part of accumulation-through-waste and the attack on
working peoples on a world scale.
Reconsidering contemporary accumulation strategies allows us to under-
stand the conjunctural role of defense of state sovereignty in the current
context, as a positive good in and of itself, and as providing a platform for
planning policies which can lead in the direction of expanded accumulation
Ajl 81

(as with Yemen’s 2019 national document). While the limits of such visions
can and should be explored, any such critique must depart not from fancy
but facts: US-Israeli operations only allow national capitalist development
on certain terms within countries fully integrated into their security and
financial umbrella. In that context, the contemporary axis plays a limited but
real liberatory role in staving off state collapse in the countries near and
around Palestine and shielding populations’ social reproduction and popular
well-being against the reaper of accumulation-through-development.

Acknowledgments
Thanks to Patrick Higgins, Zeyad el Nabolsy, Ali Kadri, Nina Farnia, and Helyeh
Doutaghi for sources and discussion.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author acknowledges the support of FWO grant number 1294523N.

ORCID iD
Max Ajl https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1422-1010

Notes
1. The Ali Abu Mustafa brigades of The Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine (PFLP), the Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigades of Fateh, the Omar
al-Qasim forces of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(DFLP), the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the Mujahideen brigades
also participated in the attack.
2. Calculated from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)
database (www.sipri.org/databases).
3. A revisionist strain of European economic history argues that decolonization
was essentially welcomed by European capitalism; see the following refuta-
tions by Depelchin (1992) and Saul (2016).
4. Consider not merely the content but the tone of Cabral’s critique of Nkrumah
in this context. Thanks to Zeyad el Nabolsy for clarifying this point to me.
5. On internal dissent within the planning schemes in India and the United
States and the difference between “full bellies” and the implementation of
those plans, see Ajl and Sharma (2022).
6. In 2020, normalization agreements were signed by the United Arab Emirates,
Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.
82 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13(1)

7. It is now openly admitted that France, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, whether their
states or their nationals, have backed or financed ISIS. It stretches belief to
argue that the United States has not been aware of those financial flows.
8. See the unmistakable influence of East and Southeast Asian Communist
people’s wars in this military assessment (Matthews, 2011). Thanks to
Patrick Higgins for clarification on this point.

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