Israel Crosses the Rubicon – Lessons from South Africa with Patrick Bond
In this wide-ranging conversation, political economist Patrick Bond joins me from Johannesburg to trace the lessons of South Africa’s struggles — from the fight against apartheid and Big Pharma to today’s battles over BRICS, Palestine, climate, and global capital. We dig into the meaning of “sub-imperialism,” the hypocrisies of governments that talk left but walk right, and the urgent question of how to end genocide and ecological collapse in real time. What does internationalism look like after the failure of unipolar power? And can “power to the people” still break the system’s grip?
0:00 – Coming Soon / Intro
5:23 – From Wharton to Mandela’s Office
14:36 – Where are we within capitalism and BRICS?
22:33 – BRICS: Anti-Empire or Just Sub-Empire?
31:06 – Slaying the Neoliberal Dragon
35:14 My Enemy’s Enemy?
39:23 Botha and the Rubicon
43:25 Imperialism and Zionism and the Revolutionary Violence Moment
52:50 The Hypocrisy of BRICS and Israel
57:53 – “Hague-Schmague”: When International Law Collapses
1:05:31 – Gaza and why won’t anyone do anything?
1:15:17 – Western Liberals and “Zionism”?
1:24:32 – After Thoughts and Next Guest
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Patrick Bond
Patrick Bond is a political economist, political ecologist and scholar of social mobilisation. From 2020-21 he was Professor at the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-2019 was a Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance. From 2004 through mid-2016, he was Senior Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Built Environment and Development Studies and was also Director of the Centre for Civil Society. He has held visiting posts at a dozen universities and presented lectures at more than 100 others.
Five years on from George Floyd’s death, Minneapolis residents are pushing back against the city’s contract with Zencity, a tech company founded and headed by veterans of the Israeli spying organization, Unit 8200.
ZenCity has signed a three-year contract with the city of Minneapolis, enabling it to gather information about residents’ attitudes towards the police.
But this contract is only one of many. In fact, Zencity’s services are employed by dozens of municipalities across the United States to surveil ordinary Americans and target protestors.
ZenCity uses AI to collect millions of data points from your emails and posts on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Nextdoor. From these, it gauges security threats and advises local governments on how to act accordingly.
In Kent County, MI, ZenCity analyzed residents’ online footprints and used them to determine what level of security the local government needed to meet the protest movement.
In other words, they were there to insulate the government from the voice of the people and limit our ability to effect change.
Unit 8200 is the centerpiece of the vast Israeli surveillance operation on Palestine. Palestinians’ every movement is tracked by facial recognition cameras. Their calls and messages are recorded, and compromising information is gathered for extortion and blackmail.
If you are cheating on your spouse or need medical attention, that information is used against you to turn you into an informant. One Unit 8200 veteran revealed that they were instructed to learn every Arabic slang word for “gay” in order to listen out for them in conversations.
Even worse, Unit 8200 uses AI to develop kill lists of tens of thousands of Gazans for the IDF to target. And it is widely reported that it was behind the Lebanese pager attack – an act of terrorism that injured thousands of civilians.
Israel treats Gaza and the West Bank as a laboratory, sharpening its tech, before selling it around the world. Now that tech has come to the United States.
Residents in Minneapolis are rising up and demanding that the city drop its contract with Zencity.
Watch the full documentary now for free, and exclusively on MintPress News.
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