THIS Should Worry Zionists: The Resistance Is Winning | Laith Marouf

## Introduction and Free Palestine TV A new narrative has been displacing old certainties across West Asia: what looked for decades like an unassailable settler-colonial project is encountering limits it cannot easily overcome. The conversation recorded with Laith Marouf and his colleagues crystallizes that intuition into argument — the Zionist project, propped up by external power and force, now finds itself confronting a resilient, region-wide resistance that has returned historical geography and popular memory to the center of politics. The significance of that shift is not merely military; it is sociopolitical and epistemic. Media efforts like Free Palestine TV are part of the same unfolding phenomenon, documenting both the violence and the communal refusal that counters it. Free Palestine TV, as described in the exchange, emerged from a pragmatic combination of journalistic craft and political commitment. Laith Marouf, whose personal ties to the region and background in broadcasting inform the project, launched the platform to cover spaces and stories that mainstream outlets miss or marginalize. The program’s aim is twofold: on the one hand, to bring viewers into devastated streets and besieged communities through field reporting; on the other, to amplify voices from the Levant, the diaspora, and allied movements who rarely find English-language platforms. In the current media ecology, where access to conflict zones is uneven and funding for local reporters sparse, this kind of grassroots capacity-building becomes itself a form of resistance — an insistence that the facts on the ground, and the human perspectives behind them, be neither erased nor commodified. The practical constraints the project faces are revealing. Reporters in the West Bank and Gaza have been arrested, banks shuttered, and payment channels obstructed — all of which forced Free Palestine TV to shift much of its coverage to Lebanon and to diasporic networks. That pattern, where the producers and carriers of truth are actively targeted, underscores a larger strategic dynamic: control of narrative is an integral component of control of territory. By foregrounding on-the-ground witnesses and making their testimony accessible in English, the platform situates itself as both journalistic actor and political actor within a contested communicative field. ## Empire and collaboration in the region What the conversation makes plain is that contemporary conflicts in the Levant cannot be understood without reference to imperial structures that predate the state system imposed in the twentieth century. The artificial partitioning of Bilad al-Sham — the Levantine space that historically encompassed modern Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and parts of Jordan — is the product of foreign drawing rooms and colonial compulsions. Those lines were not neutral; they were mechanisms for extraction and control. Understanding resistance, then, requires grasping how these borders fragmented societies whose economic, familial, and cultural life had always flowed across the landscape. The imperial order that came to dominate after World War II — with the United States taking on the mantle of global protector — operates through local intermediaries. The conversation describes this system in stark terms: the region’s monarchs, presidents, and political elites are often less sovereign actors than viceroys or provincial managers for a distant power. Within that framework, Israel functions as a provincial instrument of American strategy in the Middle East, not as an independent pole removed from great-power politics. That structural reality explains why “collaborationist” regimes emerge: they are the byproduct of empires seeking local allies to stabilize their reach. Such arrangements are historically recurrent, not exceptional; the comparison to Vichy-era collaborators or medieval protectorates highlights how collaboration has long been a feature of imperial governance. Yet the resilience of local cultures and forms of social organization complicates imperial designs. Geography matters here: the Levant is not merely a strategic crossroads for transcontinental empires; it is a living civilizational zone whose social practices and collective memories resist totalizing control. Every imperial surge has encountered this absorptive, syncretic quality, and the current upsurge of resistance springs from those same rooted continuities. If empires need compliant local arms, resistance is nurtured in the dense social fabrics that those empires seek to disarticulate. ## Iran and the region’s shared history One of the most consequential threads in the conversation concerns how Iran is read within the broader regional tapestry. Rather than an isolated actor, Iran is presented as part of an interconnected historical geography that stretches from the Taurus and Zagros mountains to the Mediterranean littoral. That longue durée perspective matters: it reframes contemporary alignments not as simply ideological contests but as the reassertion of older civilizational networks fragmented by colonial interventions. Iran’s role, in this account, is not reducible to a state-centric rivalry with Israel or to Western security narratives. Instead, it links to regional memories of empire, trade, and cultural exchange that long preceded modern borders. This shared history buttresses solidarities that are strategic as well as cultural: alliances with Iran are at times the product of geopolitics, but they also rest on shared experiences of resisting colonial predation and seeking alternative regional orders. To understand resistance movements in the Levant partially aligned with Tehran is to see them as nodes in a broader anti-imperial constellation, not merely as proxies of a single state. That perspective challenges Western framings that cast Iran primarily as a destabilizing externality. It also forces a reconsideration of cause and effect: are regional actors “aligned” with Iran because Tehran projects power, or is Iran influential because the regional currents of anti-colonialism and social solidarity resonate with its posture? The conversation leans toward the latter: the resonance between Iranian policy and regional anti-imperial aspirations explains much of the perceived alignment. ## Anti-Zionism and Jewish dissent The discussion complicates monolithic portrayals of Jewish identity and politics by carving space for Jewish dissent against Zionism. Anti-Zionism, as articulated in the conversation, is framed not as an antisemitic posture but as a political position held by many Jews who oppose the ideological and territorial premises of the settler-colonial project. This distinction is critical: collapsing anti-Zionist critique into bigotry obscures the diversity of Jewish political thought and neutralizes potential allies within diasporic communities. Moreover, the narrative challenges the notion that the Israeli state represents an immutable or moral monopoly over Jewish life. Instead, it is a political formation with particular historical origins — a force-based project that consolidated territory and power, often at the expense of indigenous Palestinian life. Recognizing Jewish dissent exposes the contingency of Zionist hegemony and opens strategic possibilities for multiethnic alliances grounded in shared commitments to human rights, anti-colonialism, and egalitarian politics. The contribution of Jewish critics and activists to anti-colonial discourse is an important tactical and ethical resource for the resistance. Their participation helps undercut simplified binaries and provides a basis for solidarity beyond identity categories. In short, the political struggle is not zero-sum between Jewish and Palestinian claims; it is a contest over the legitimacy of violent dispossession itself. ## Where to follow Leith Marouf The final portion of the conversation turns to practicalities: how to follow the reporting and ana

THIS Should Worry Zionists: The Resistance Is Winning | Laith Marouf Desperation is setting in: the Zionists now know that they can't win. Not against Iran, not against Libanon, not against Palestine. After 80 years, the Zionist project is hitting a very hard wall. One that not even Genocide can break through. Today I speak with Leith Marouf of Free Palestine TV about Palestine as part of a wider region shaped by colonial borders, the role of empire and Israel, the link between history, geography, and resistance, the place of Iran in the region, and the limits of Western politics. The talk also covers anti-Zionism, armed struggle, media work, and paths toward liberation. Links: Free Palestine TV Website: https://www.freepalestine.video Free Palestine TV on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@tvfreepalestine Free Palestine TV on Substack: https://substack.com/@freepalestinetv Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack. com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s /academic) Merch: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Donation: https://neutralitystudies. com/donate Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction and Free Palestine TV 00:07:17 Palestine and colonial borders 00:15:00 Empire and collaboration in the region 00:19:35 Colonial history and Western power 00:27:28 Iran and the region’s shared history 00:33:58 Israel as a force-based project 00:40:52 Anti-Zionism and Jewish dissent 00:54:12 Resistance strategy and Western limits 01:07:00 Where to follow Leith Marouf #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies. My name is Pascal Lottaz, and today I have the extraordinary pleasure of being joined by Leith Marouf from Free Palestine TV. Leith, welcome. #Laith Marouf Great to be with you, Pascal. Thank you. #Pascal Leith, you're doing a fantastic job. You are the host and the brain behind this one here, Free Palestine TV. You've been uploading over 1.4 thousand videos already, documenting a lot of the crimes against humanity that are currently happening in Palestine, in the different parts of Palestine that are all disjointed and kept apart. You are currently, as far as I know, in Lebanon, and you are documenting the crimes there. Your last videos are actually you walking through these places and documenting all of the warfare that's going on. Can we start a little bit with you? How come you are where you are now? What's your journey? -- 1 of 17 -- #Laith Marouf Yeah, well, I am half Palestinian, half Syrian—if you can be half anything, right? And I lived all around the region here, as well as in Canada for 25 years. I've been working in print, radio, and television throughout my career, as well as in broadcasting laws and policies. When I moved to Lebanon in 2018, I decided to bring my expertise and try to figure out how we can help bring out the stories from the region and build capacity within the communities here. So Free Palestine TV was launched days after the beginning of Al-Aqsa Flood, October 7th, 2023. We've been covering the developments on the ground in regions that the mainstream media wasn't covering or the independent media wasn't able to reach, mainly the West Bank and Lebanon. There was a lot of coverage of what was happening in Gaza, and we thought it's important to concentrate on what's missing. The content that we're producing is mainly field reporting, as well as interviews with personalities, thinkers, artists, whatever, from the region here—voices that people don't hear. And it's all in English, so it's accessible to the vast majority of humans. And I think this mix of, on the one hand, doing the field reporting, bringing the audience with us to the ground to see the details of what's happening, as well as bringing those voices from the region that usually don't get airspace in the media, has delivered a unique service to both the communities here and everybody that wants to watch. #Pascal No, they do. They do. They absolutely do. I must emphasize that everybody who's interested in actually knowing what's going on on the ground—I mean, on Free Palestine TV—you actually also get interviews like your colleague Dimitri Lascaris, a Canadian lawyer who was actually in Iran, traveling through Iran and covering interviews there. And you are then walking through these devastated streets, actually, and damaged places, which just gives a very intimate view of what this war actually means. And of course, you cannot go to—or did you manage to go to—Gaza, actually, to the place where the genocide is being implemented in full force? #Laith Marouf Unfortunately, no. The coverage from inside Palestine was the hardest to sustain. On the one hand, our people that we worked with in the West Bank were immediately targeted by the Israeli military and the collaborationist Palestinian Authority. So four of our journalists who were working in the West Bank were detained and questioned, and at the same time we were trying to get money to pay these workers, these journalists. We didn't want anyone to work for free. We're trying to make sure all these amazing journalists and producers who are working on this content are paid a salary that is worth the risk of their lives. And there are a lot of international agencies that are hiring these Palestinian and Lebanese journalists and paying them barely anything. And as we know, journalists in the region here have -- 2 of 17 -- suffered some of the worst crimes against them. The number of journalists killed in the West Bank, Gaza, Palestine as a whole, or in Lebanon and Iran and Yemen over the last two and a half years is the largest cohort of journalists killed in any war or battle since recorded history began on those issues, like recording how many journalists are killed and such. So we had to, at one point, because even getting the money to the journalists in the West Bank was a great risk. Partners that we worked with, their banks were being shut down. So at one point we had to stop the production in the West Bank because of the risk to life and our inability to bring the money into the West Bank. So, you know, over the last year, it's been mainly covering the situation here in Lebanon. We also traveled to Iran. We've traveled to Italy and Greece and documented in those countries the history of revolutionary anti-imperialist work and the current situation of support for the liberation of Palestine. So we're trying to do anything that we can from unique perspectives, bringing stories, even if it's not from inside Palestine, that are related to human liberation that can, you know, help people look into the past of their nations for inspiration to liberate themselves and help liberate Palestine. #Pascal So let's talk a bit about how you make sense of what is happening and going on. I mean, maybe first of all, like your concept of Palestine, because, you know, the entire West Asia was carved up and defined basically by the colonial imperial powers. That includes Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and of course what Israel became. Today it's just a work of brute force, nothing organic in the sense of how communities develop. What to you belongs to Palestine, the way you understand it? #Laith Marouf Yeah, so Palestine is part of a natural geographic region called, in Arabic, Bilad al-Sham, the countries of Sham. Or, you know, we can call it the Levant in French or the Fertile Crescent. It's a, you know, natural open region with defined natural borders: the Zagros Mountains in Iran, the Taurus Mountains in Turkey, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Arabian Peninsula. So it's an open space. Culture travels through it normally. Before there were even cars, it was easy to move in this space. This is how we can, you know, think about how cultures develop, or subcultures even. It's about natural borders. And so the people that are in Lebanon and Syria and Palestine and Iraq are intermarried. They're the same tribes, the same families. They have the same cuisine. There's maybe a few regional dishes. They use the same instruments for music. And, of course, they speak the same language and have the same 6,000 years of history. So when we look at Palestine as it is today, even this border between Palestine and Lebanon, it even cuts through subcultures within this region. The Galilee, for instance, half of it is in what is now called South Lebanon, and half of it is what is North Palestine. And so you can imagine how even on a smaller scale, the -- 3 of 17 -- subcultures are broken up this way. So this is why the first resistance to French and British occupation and the Sykes-Picot came from the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, the party that was pushing for the unification of this Greater Syria or Bilad al-Sham. And they were, of course, oppressed and murdered and killed by the French and the British. And then comes the wave of Arab nationalism or Arab unificationists that came in the 40s and 50s after the defeat of the Syrian unificationists, basically. And that got defeated. And then you had the movement of the communists in the 70s. Now that got defeated. Then you had the liberals, the PLO and stuff, that got defeated. And now we've got an Islamist or Islamic liberationist version, all trying to find ways to liberate us from these colonial borders and the imperialist hold over the region. #Pascal So is it to you the imperial hold and the strangulation of the region by these colonial forces—clearly colonial and with their brutal repression—is that the key to understanding what is happening in this entire area that you just described and the artificial divisions among them? #Laith Marouf Yeah, I mean, look, of course, the region here is almost cursed by geography, right? If we can think about how the Arab peoples and even their theological record, history of monotheism and all of these, and we kind of, you know, put that on the same record to see how the development of time and trade and so forth comes. And you look at this region being the most important knot in communication, in transportation between the old continents. You can understand how this region has, you know, developed its culture, but also you can understand how the peripheral civilizations in Europe, in the Far East, in South Asia, in Africa, anyone that needed to become an empire had to hold this region. So the curse of geography, you know, on the one hand means that over the last 6,000 years there's been constant invasion from the East and the West of the greater Syria region. On the other, it also shows you how the culture, because of that, developed into this monotheistic religion, birth, and so on. If everybody's coming and telling you, "My god is this, my god is that, you've got to be converted to it," then you come and say, "There's only one god, okay?" And in a way, this cultural development in the region made it into a culture that cannot be conquered. In fact, every colonizer that came to the region came out of it converted by the region. So when we think about the Europeans, even all the way back to the Greeks coming here, instead of forcing any language or so on, they take the alphabet of the Canaanites and it becomes the Greek alphabet. They take the pantheon of the Canaanites and, you know, probably it becomes the pantheon of the Greeks. Similarly with the Romans, they become Jewish and then they become Christian. All of that is coming from here. The Mongols come, they become Muslim. So this region, because of this geography and how the culture is shaped—and this is something that everybody -- 4 of 17 -- should read with Ibn Khaldun, the most important philosopher of the Muslim Renaissance—you know, geography made this culture into a culture that absorbs those who invaded instead of one being absorbed by those who invaded. #Pascal Very, very, very good observation. I mean, at the end of the day, the Greek gods left, the Roman gods left, the monotheistic God is here. The Catholics and