The LeBoff Public Lecture | Passages of Life and Death in West Asia

To illuminate the centrality of energy politics and settler colonial regimes of power to US hegemony in West Asia, this talk maps corridors and straits through which the United States and its regional clients support the imperial war machine. The struggle for energy hegemony in the region has been central to Israeli settler colonization of Palestine (Meiton 2019; Khalili 2024a). A major plank of the Camp David negotiations of 1979 was a permanent US guarantee to deliver energy to Israel (Telhami 1992; Rubinovitz and Rettig 2018). In practice, this guarantee has translated into the US and its regional clients supplying Israel with petroleum and refined products such as jet fuel (Bahbah 1982; Khalili 2024a; Cohen 2025). 

The Israeli energy dependence on these US guarantees has become particularly salient during its current genocidal assault on Palestine (Oil Change International 2024; Guardian 2024a; 2024b). The defense of Israel and the protection of its Gulf clients have led the US to again and again engage in catastrophic financial and military assaults on countries of the region, culminating in the US/Israel war on Iran in 2025 and 2026. In response, forms of mobilization have used different strategies and tactics to evade, hamper, or resist the war machine. 

In this talk, I will discuss how logistical corridors and straits are utilised by the United States and Israel in West Asia and the resistance to them in the Mediterranean (Somo 2024; Funes 2024; El-Khazen and Rose 2024), crippling them in the Red Sea (Khalili 2024b; Ziadah et al 2025; Kumar 2026, Boyle 2025) and confounding them in the Strait of Hormuz.

Laleh Khalili is a professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter and the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007), Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford 2013), Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020), The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (Mack Books, 2023) and Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy (Profile Books, 2025).