The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - April 28, 2026


PREVIEW LIVE： Realpolitik #44 ｜ The Israeli-American-Islamic Alliance

Topics
Moroccan-Israeli defense agreement & tech exchange Morocco-Spain-Israel-US alliance
Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Benjamin Netanyahu Donald Trump Marco Rubio Hormuz Yadiot Ahranot Narendra Modi Michael Rubin Firas Maudad Benny Gantz Barack Ravid Sri Lanka Reconquista Epstein Melilla Patriot Sahel Ynet
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1405 Breakfast With Beau ｜ Wednesday 29th April 2026

Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

127.54

Word count

2,763

Sentence count

103

Harmful content

Hate speech

29

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Firas Maudad talks about the growing strategic partnership between Morocco and the United States in the Middle East and North Africa, and the reasons why this is a good thing for Israel and the US. He also talks about how the Arab world can join forces with Israel in order to counter Iranian influence in the region.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello, welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Maudad, and today we're
00:00:08.620 going to be talking about a bit of change that is happening in global logistics and
00:00:16.620 in global trade and infrastructure, and what that means politically and how things are
00:00:22.500 working out. And the starting point for this, I suppose, is what is happening in Morocco,
00:00:32.260 which is a bit of an interesting detail that not enough people pay attention to.
00:00:37.900 Now, Morocco has become a key partner for Israel and for the United States, and the reason for
00:00:46.400 that is geography. If you just look at where Morocco sits, it is right there at the very edge
00:00:54.840 of the Atlantic, stuck next to Algeria. On the other side, there's the water and then Spain.
00:01:02.160 And it plays a pretty dominant role, actually, in African politics, and people tend to ignore that.
00:01:08.540 Morocco's banks and telecoms companies especially are pretty widely spread out all over the Sahel region.
00:01:18.500 Countries like Mauritania, Mali, Cote d'Ivoire, etc.
00:01:22.340 They all have Moroccan telecoms companies and or Moroccan banks.
00:01:29.080 And if you are looking at the Middle East from an Israeli perspective, what it looks like is something like this.
00:01:37.540 you've got iraq in the hands of iran you've got egypt which we will talk about uh in a second or
00:01:47.700 near the end of this episode which is a borderline hostile state you've got saudi arabia which for
00:01:55.200 religious reasons can't really normalize ties with israel fully and for the most part the rest of
00:02:03.600 the countries are hostile. I mean, there's a peace treaty with Jordan, but actually Israel wants to
00:02:09.360 expel the Palestinians of the West Bank into Jordan, and that will create a massive problem.
00:02:15.560 There's Libya, a basket case. Algeria, an absolutely hostile state. Sudan, there was some 0.97
00:02:22.600 expectation of Sudan normalizing with Israel. That failed. And so the main partners for the
00:02:29.300 Israelis are actually the UAE at the tip of the Gulf and close to the entrance of the Strait of
00:02:36.320 Hormuz and Morocco. And the reasoning behind that is if you can get the countries that are far away 0.89
00:02:44.980 from you to side with you, you can cooperate with them against the countries that are in the middle 0.71
00:02:52.600 and slowly tame the Middle East to your will. And obviously this is in the context of a Greater 0.86
00:02:58.380 Israel project, and this is in the context of Israeli ambitions to force the Muslim world 0.66
00:03:06.720 to stop being hostile, because what's been happening for the Israelis is that every time 0.59
00:03:12.500 they reconcile with one of their neighbors, a new country shows up, like Iran, and starts 0.57
00:03:19.400 supporting the Palestinians and creating problems. Now Turkey is doing the same thing. So what they 0.68
00:03:25.520 want to do is really to try to transform the Middle East. And a key objective behind that 0.99
00:03:31.300 is to secure Israeli trade routes. The siege that the Houthi imposed on Israel was quite
00:03:37.560 consequential, actually. The port city of Eilat here on the Red Sea, which is one of, you know,
00:03:45.000 three major ports that the Israelis have, their port ended up going bankrupt because of...
00:03:51.520 excuse me sorry about that uh the risks of going live uh their port ended up going bankrupt because
00:04:00.160 of the uh houthi siege on uh on israeli shipping and so this has become a problem for israel
00:04:07.840 and they're slowly figuring out ways to build new friendships in the region that would stop
00:04:16.160 the endless hostility towards Israel from everybody in the Middle East.
00:04:21.120 And then if you look at a marine map of the world that's another good starting point and you see
00:04:28.640 instantly that there are a few lines of travel that everybody's stuck with and there are a few
00:04:35.600 choke points that everybody's stuck with. Now one of these major shipping lines obviously goes
00:04:45.200 through the Strait of Gibraltar, the entrance to the Mediterranean. And that is a critical one for
00:04:51.840 Israel. Another one is the Suez and the Red Sea. That's a critical transportation network
00:05:00.720 for the United States, for Israel, and pretty much for the whole world. Then there's Hormuz.
00:05:06.560 That's a pretty big deal. We are seeing all of the disruption that is happening in the world
00:05:11.600 because the Iranians and the Americans have shut down Hormuz.
00:05:16.480 There is the strait next to Sri Lanka, which, again, pretty important.
00:05:24.660 Everything that goes through the Red Sea travels on the way towards Sri Lanka,
00:05:30.700 and then you get Indonesia, and you get the Malacast Strait there,
00:05:36.160 and it is only through that that China or, you know, this is one of the few ways for China
00:05:43.160 to get to Europe by ship. And so you see these shipping networks and you combine them with
00:05:53.540 American needs and Israeli needs and then a bit of a strategy starts to emerge. I'm not going to
00:05:58.660 talk about Panama and South Africa in this episode. That's a conversation for a different time.
00:06:03.920 But I am going to talk about the policy for the wider Muslim world, in which what we're seeing is the beginning of an Indonesian-UAE-Moroccan partnership alongside Israel and the United States that is intended to secure this shipping line here.
00:06:25.620 starting from Gibraltar, going through the Suez, and then the Red Sea, and the Bab el-Mandeb,
00:06:34.540 and then going through the Strait of Malacca. So let's start with Morocco.
00:06:41.220 In 2021, a year almost after the Moroccans entered the Abraham Accord and officially
00:06:48.980 recognized Israel, the Israelis and the Moroccans signed a defense agreement,
00:06:54.240 which is an incredibly unusual thing for an Arab country to do.
00:06:59.780 Most of the time when Arab countries have some kind of relationship with Israel
00:07:04.820 it is hostile at the popular level and this is true of Morocco
00:07:10.400 and at the official level it's a bit of an arm's length relationship
00:07:15.100 because of the unpopularity of any relationship with Israel
00:07:20.160 as far as the peoples in the Muslim countries are involved.
00:07:26.180 And so it was quite an escalation or an uptick, I don't know how to describe it,
00:07:34.300 for the Israelis and the Moroccans to actually officially sign the defense agreement.
00:07:38.480 And this didn't actually happen under Netanyahu.
00:07:42.000 It happened under, I believe, Lapid, who was prime minister.
00:07:46.380 And you saw the defense minister, at the time Benny Gantz, meeting with the Moroccan chief of staff.
00:07:59.440 And, you know, this was something that would upset the Moroccan public.
00:08:05.100 Because even though the Israelis and the Moroccans have a pretty long-standing relationship with Morocco,
00:08:10.980 and I would argue Tunisia, over the course of history, having some of the closer relationships
00:08:18.700 with the Israelis, elevating it to this level was quite unusual. Elevating their relations to the
00:08:26.860 level of a defense agreement was very unusual. And then this year, we saw even deeper cooperation
00:08:34.820 with Israel and Morocco signing a framework to exchange technology and to build industry
00:08:42.440 jointly, and with plans for Morocco to start building drones using Israeli technologies,
00:08:52.280 buying a big amount of military equipment from Israel, and things like that. And from the
00:08:58.200 Moroccan perspective, what this does is that this brings them closer to the United States, 0.50
00:09:02.340 which is a kind of theme that we saw in the Epstein files. If you want to be in the good
00:09:08.980 books of the Donald Trump administration, one of the things that you should do is to try to get in
00:09:14.760 Israel's good books, and that wins you success. And that's why, if you remember, we saw Indian 0.99
00:09:21.240 Prime Minister Narendra Modi going to Israel and dancing with Benjamin Netanyahu as a way of
00:09:27.820 showing the Americans that actually he is on their side.
00:09:31.740 So the deepening of this military cooperation is important.
00:09:37.140 And what it provides Israel is a state that is close to Algeria, which is now the largest,
00:09:46.260 very hostile to Israel, Middle Eastern country operating right now. 0.68
00:09:54.540 It's a huge country with an enormous amount of resources. 0.61
00:09:58.920 The Spanish and the French and the Italians do depend on Algerian gas and on Algerian
00:10:05.880 oil exports.
00:10:07.260 So it's a very important country.
00:10:10.040 It's a kind of socialist dictatorship.
00:10:12.940 Not kind of.
00:10:13.940 It is a socialist dictatorship where the military chooses a president and then when they've
00:10:20.320 chosen one, they try to keep him there for life.
00:10:23.880 And it's a weird combination between the worst of Stalinist and French bureaucracies combined
00:10:32.440 with one another, running a country of 40 million people, which makes Algeria potentially 0.98
00:10:39.440 a significant player if it only wasn't governed by Algerians, really, because the quality 0.98
00:10:46.880 of the government there is absolutely atrocious. 0.99
00:10:50.800 The Algerians themselves describe a phenomenon called the haitists, hait means wall and haitist
00:10:57.360 means somebody who's constantly leaning against the wall because that is largely what Algerian
00:11:02.880 youth do to the extent that they have things like pre-employment contracts where people 0.99
00:11:08.220 are promised government jobs but there aren't any government jobs available so they just
00:11:12.820 get paid in exchange for standing by a wall and leaning on it.
00:11:17.680 Well, Algeria, because it gets so much Russian weaponry and is the third biggest buyer of Russian military equipment, is a militarily important state.
00:11:33.080 And so what the Israelis and the Americans are doing is that they're trying to make sure
00:11:37.840 that there isn't a very hostile Algeria that is able to restrict navigation through Gibraltar. 0.64
00:11:48.060 And what they're doing is that they're strengthening Morocco.
00:11:51.040 And Morocco has become a pretty important player in things like manufacturing parts for French cars
00:11:58.940 and in providing some basic electronic equipment for Europe.
00:12:06.260 And it's developing its industries quite rapidly with a view towards becoming an offshoring destination for European countries
00:12:15.780 that doesn't have the same risk as China, commercially speaking.
00:12:21.660 politically and militarily. It's a much bigger risk given the number of Moroccan migrants and 0.99
00:12:27.680 North African migrants in Europe. But it is trying to become a bulwark acting against Algeria 0.98
00:12:35.600 and therefore Russia behind it in partnership with Israel and the United States.
00:12:42.000 And from the American perspective, having a strong presence on the other side of the Atlantic is
00:12:47.240 important. And so to get the Moroccans to make their relationship with Israel more official,
00:12:55.140 what the Americans did was that they said that this piece of territory here,
00:12:58.900 the Western Sahara, is officially part of Morocco, which is something that the Algerians reject.
00:13:06.840 And so there are gains in this from both an American perspective and an Israeli perspective.
00:13:13.140 You get an ally sitting on the eastern coast of the Atlantic, policing the Strait of Gibraltar, able to check a Russian client state in Algeria and build friendly relations with Israel.
00:13:30.620 And because of the long or the large presence of Moroccan banking and communications in Africa, you get oversight over financial transactions and communications via Morocco. 0.78
00:13:47.540 So that's one step in this project to secure these trade routes and to secure the support or acquiescence of the Muslim world for the presence of the State of Israel. 0.70
00:14:09.700 So that's one country to cover. 0.66
00:14:11.820 Now, the implication of this is really fascinating because now you're seeing Israel openly saying that it is going to work to support Morocco against Spain to reward Morocco for its backing for Israel and to punish Spain for its refusal to back Israel.
00:14:39.300 And this is a very unusual piece that was published in Ynet, which is the English-language version of one of Israel's biggest newspapers, Yadiot Ahranot.
00:14:52.920 And here, this gentleman, I think Moroccan, is openly saying that what Israel is going to be doing now is working with American think tanks in order to push the Trump administration into recognizing two exclaves that the Spanish have on the coast of Morocco.
00:15:21.780 and transfer their sovereignty to the Moroccans.
00:15:25.840 So essentially a reverse of the Reconquista
00:15:28.220 because these were territories that were taken by Spain
00:15:31.780 in the long and brutal wars it has had to fight against Muslims
00:15:36.480 and it stayed in control of them. 0.80
00:15:39.440 And now the Israelis are saying that they want to back the Moroccans
00:15:46.020 to help them recapture this territory. 0.91
00:15:48.940 Now there's a silver lining here which is that
00:15:51.420 these two exclaves are territories from which a lot of illegal migrants break
00:15:57.360 in and then get transferred into Spain. But the logic here is fascinating.
00:16:04.240 And here you see this guy saying that they've been assembling pieces to get
00:16:08.520 this kind of support to transfer American support against Spain for
00:16:16.080 months. And in March, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute wrote for the
00:16:22.940 Middle East Forum, both of these organizations are extremely pro-Israel, called on the Trump
00:16:30.080 administration to formally recognize Quetta and Melilla as occupied Moroccan territory,
00:16:36.320 branding Spain a colonial power running colonies across the Strait of Gibraltar.
00:16:41.760 And then an ally of Marco Rubio comes in and says that these territories are not in the
00:16:54.840 geographic territory of Spain, but rather in Moroccan territory. So they're pressuring Marco
00:17:01.000 Rubio to change policy in order to back the Moroccans further, in order to solidify the
00:17:10.100 Israeli-Moroccan-American alliance and to punish Spain because Spain stood against the United
00:17:17.600 States in the war against Iran. And generally, it has to be said, Spain has a very extreme 0.53
00:17:26.640 left-wing government that went as far as to legalize, you know, maybe up to a million
00:17:32.920 illegal migrants and essentially grant them the permanent right to remain to Spain.
00:17:37.880 So they're trying to exploit this now, and they are saying that this is a coordinated 0.98
00:17:46.320 campaign to punish the Spaniards, which I really find to be incredible. 0.82
00:17:54.860 And they're saying that this is essentially a reward because Israel and Morocco have signed 0.83
00:18:01.200 a joint military agreement and are planning on deepening their defense cooperation.
00:18:07.880 The logic here is stunningly cynical. And that is what they're working on. And you see the Americans actually taking this to heart to a certain extent and saying that because Spain refused to back the United States and allow the United States to use its bases against Iran, what should be done is that Spain should be suspended from NATO,
00:18:35.000 although there is no such mechanism for that and maybe also recognize the falklands
00:18:41.720 in the southern atlantic as part of argentina and you sort of see how this is a sort of
00:18:50.680 coordinated move to reward israel's friends and punish its enemies and you see that carrying
00:18:59.320 over into trade policy because the bigger that morocco becomes in european supply chains
00:19:06.120 the bigger israeli influence over western companies that rely on these supply chains
00:19:14.860 and therefore the bigger israeli influence over european policy making and it's just genuinely
00:19:22.000 brilliant it's genuinely brilliant but it is connected to a strategy that does benefit the
00:19:28.060 United States and that has to be said so it's not clearly it's not just a case
00:19:32.500 of the United States serving Israel it is also serving the American objective
00:19:37.240 in strengthening control over key waterways it's just that the Americans
00:19:42.220 no longer regard the Europeans as reliable allies and are looking for
00:19:46.600 allies in the Muslim world and the litmus test to see that they are reliable
00:19:51.280 allies is whether or not they align with Israel so that's one part of the equation
00:19:58.060 The other part of the equation is obviously the United Arab Emirates, and Barak Ravid of Axios, who is very close to Israeli intelligence circles, who sort of showed up out of the blue with incredible sources in the Trump administration as well.
00:20:13.740 So, he's reporting that the UAE received the Iron Dome missile defense system from Israel in order to help it against Iran, and that this was the result of an agreement between the UAE's prime minister, or the UAE's ruler, and the Israeli prime minister.
00:20:37.760 and this is exceptional because the israelis haven't given the iron dome to anyone
00:20:44.640 they ended up transferring a unit to the united to the uae and it seems that this unit played a
00:20:52.400 big role especially in shooting down uh iranian drones now as a reminder um the
00:21:01.260 The Iron Dome system is mainly designed to deal with smaller and low-flying targets,
00:21:09.300 so it doesn't really work against ballistic missiles.
00:21:11.800 It really works quite well against drones.
00:21:15.540 And rather than spending extremely expensive Patriot and FAD systems
00:21:21.740 and using those to intercept drones,
00:21:24.760 FAD can't be used against Patriot systems,
00:21:27.580 and using those against drones,
00:21:29.200 the Emiratis ended up having access to a much cheaper system.
00:21:34.180 If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the Lotus Eaters,
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