True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 326: Palestine
Aired: 2023-10-16
Duration: 01:02:43


=== Akram Salhab On Gaza (04:25) ===

[00:00:00]  All right, ladies and gentlemen, rather than one of our usual goofy intros, we're just going to play an excerpt from the interview that you were about to hear that we just did with Akram Salhab.
[00:00:10]  The aim is a second nakbah, a second mass expulsion of Palestinians and the turning of the remainder of the Palestinians who stay here into a tiny minority that live in permanent subjugation.
[00:00:21]  And so, given that reality, expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people is really important in limiting the violence that Israel is able to and does enforce on Palestinians.
[00:00:33]  And I think that anywhere you look in your life in the West, there's places you can take action, make statements, think about different arenas in which you can organize, try and mainstream Palestine.
[00:00:45]  There's lots of different ways that you can work intelligently and with others to have an impact on what's happening there.
[00:01:08]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:15]  My name is Liz.
[00:01:17]  My name is Brace, and we are, of course, joined by producer extraordinaire Young Chomsky.
[00:01:23]  And the podcast is it's true, Anon.
[00:01:26]  Hello.
[00:01:26]  Hello.
[00:01:27]  Just gotten used to saying hello like five times in the interview.
[00:01:31]  True.
[00:01:31]  And then right after the name of the podcast.
[00:01:35]  People like to be greeted.
[00:01:36]  Hello.
[00:01:39]  I think it's a nice thing.
[00:01:40]  People like it when you hit them with a hello.
[00:01:42]  Hello.
[00:01:43]  No, we're not doing that.
[00:01:45]  We're not doing Adele.
[00:01:46]  Oh, I was doing Lionel Ritchie, actually.
[00:01:49]  No, interesting.
[00:01:51]  We were doing Adele.
[00:01:52]  Right there.
[00:01:52]  Little gender swap.
[00:01:54]  I think you were doing Adele.
[00:01:56]  A little Lionel Ritchie.
[00:01:58]  Okay, well, it'd be a kind of different swap.
[00:02:00]  But all right, with the hellos out of the way, we're going to get straight into the meat of it.
[00:02:04]  We have today an interview with Akram Salhab, a Palestinian organizer based in Jerusalem coming up.
[00:02:12]  Yeah, and during this, something that Akram said really stuck with me that maybe we can kind of frame this for our listeners.
[00:02:19]  He says that Gaza is an object lesson in what happens.
[00:02:23]  And I'm paraphrasing, you're going to hear him say it, not me.
[00:02:25]  But he says, Gaza is an object lesson in what happens when you resist Western hegemonic power.
[00:02:31]  And what we're seeing unfold and what has been unfolding for quite some time in Gaza, you know, is a direct result of that.
[00:02:41]  So maybe we can get into, and he can give us and our listeners some really important historical context for what's going on.
[00:03:05]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show.
[00:03:08]  We have with us today, Akram Salhab, a Palestinian organizer based in Jerusalem, joining us.
[00:03:16]  Thank you very much for coming on the show.
[00:03:17]  How are you doing?
[00:03:18]  I'm good.
[00:03:18]  Thanks, Bryce.
[00:03:19]  Thanks for having me.
[00:03:20]  Thank you so much for joining us.
[00:03:23]  So I think maybe before we get into some, like get into some of the larger context about that's kind of shaping what's transpiring, maybe we can just start with some basics.
[00:03:38]  I mean, we were talking yesterday and I think that, you know, for a lot of our audience in the West, they see a lot of, I guess I would say, contextless images of Gaza.
[00:03:51]  But I think what would be helpful is if we could kind of talk about, I mean, what is Gaza and what does Gaza mean to the Palestinian people?
[00:04:00]  Well, yeah, I think, you know, the morning that I woke up on the 8th of October, I was reading a book by a Palestinian poet called Maine Besa, which is about Gaza in the 1940s, Gaza in the 1950s and 60s, and how it really became the center of Palestinian identity formation.

=== Gaza Becomes Occupied Crossroads (15:45) ===

[00:04:26]  It was a site of considerable struggle, not least because 80% of people who live in Gaza are refugees.
[00:04:33]  So in 1948, there was what Palestinians know as the Nakba or the catastrophe, which is an ethnic cleansing of 522 Palestinian villages, towns and cities.
[00:04:47]  And over 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes.
[00:04:51]  They were forced out in two main ways.
[00:04:53]  Either they would, the Israeli or Zionist militias would conquer a village.
[00:04:58]  They would round up the people in that village and march them towards the nearest border.
[00:05:04]  Or they would attack a village from three sides, leaving one side open towards the nearest border in order to induce flight in that direction.
[00:05:14]  And if you look out of a map of Palestine in 1948, the place where the many massacres took place appear to be kind of strategically dotted around in different localities in order to spread fear amongst people in that area who heard stories of murder, rape, and various other atrocities.
[00:05:39]  The idea was, and this was written in Zionist policy at the time, was to induce flight towards the nearest border.
[00:05:45]  So that took place throughout, obviously, historic Palestine.
[00:05:48]  And then a lot of those people in the area around Gaza ended up in Gaza from the neighboring villages.
[00:05:57]  So Gaza became a place and is today a place where 80% of those people living there are refugees from villages and towns just the other side of the Gaza border.
[00:06:09]  And I mean, reading Mohin Ibseso's autobiography, which is available, actually has been translated into English, but other works that he's written, as well as many others, you'll see that the conditions in those camps and indeed in all Palestinian refugee camps were atrocious.
[00:06:30]  They had the second highest malnutrition rate in the world at the time.
[00:06:35]  There were freezing winters, scorching hot summers, living in tents that eventually became transformed into kind of more permanent structures with corrugated iron roofs.
[00:06:48]  And they describe a hellish existence, living in refugee camps, waiting in queues for food from the United Nations Relief Work Agency and being turned into a dependent and oppressed population.
[00:07:02]  But Gaza became well known in the Palestinian psyche understanding as a real center of resistance from the 19 kind of early 1950s onwards, and it was occupied in the course of the tripartite British, French, and Israeli war.
[00:07:21]  After the President Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, these three countries attacked.
[00:07:31]  And in the course of that, Israel occupied Gaza for I think a period of three months.
[00:07:38]  And many Palestinian writers talk about this, but they say that that period was very formative in creating a Palestinian sense that not that we're separate from the broader Arab nation, because most Palestinians understand that they're Arabs linguistically, culturally, and in ties of family and kinship and solidarity that are very profound, but rather that Palestinians had a particular, I mean,
[00:08:06]  and various writers speak about this, Palestinians had a specific role in the vanguard of the struggle to liberate Palestine and the struggle most keenly of the refugees to return to their homes they could see just over the border.
[00:08:21]  And so Gaza in the 1950s had a very active communist movement.
[00:08:27]  Mohin Ib Saysa, the poet I mentioned, was in fact a member of the Communist Party.
[00:08:33]  Many of what then what would later become the leadership of Fateh, the leading Palestinian revolutionary movement in the revolutionary period, much of the leadership, yes, Arafat, Abu Jihad, Abu Iyad, perhaps the three main leaders were all based in Gaza at one time or another.
[00:08:56]  And so Gaza became associated not just with resistance to kind of Israeli occupation, but also resistance to all of these international schemes that were trying to resettle and resolve the Palestinian question in ways that maintained the unjust status quo.
[00:09:24]  So we're now hearing about during these massacres taking place in Gaza about the death and destruction and the death and destruction is being visited on Palestinians under bombardment today.
[00:09:40]  We're now hearing about an attempt to expel Palestinians to the Sinai.
[00:09:44]  This isn't new.
[00:09:45]  This was a scheme that also existed in the 50s and that Palestinians resisted.
[00:09:50]  After the Israeli withdrawal, there was a UN peacekeeping force that ruled Gaza for a short period of time, but there was huge protests by Palestinians in Gaza refusing this turning up and pulling down the UN flag.
[00:10:05]  And a boy was martyred, pulling down the UN flag and raising the Palestinian Egyptian flag in its place.
[00:10:12]  So Gaza became this hub not just of resistance, but of a separate past, an understanding of the Palestinian-specific role, because it was the first time the Palestinians had lived under occupation and had seen in the day-to-day their enemy up close.
[00:10:28]  Yeah, yeah, something you mentioned is that 80% of the people who live in Gaza are refugees.
[00:10:34]  And the issue of refugees with the Palestinian question has been a huge one.
[00:10:39]  And obviously, both the Palestinian side, as Palestinians have been, you know, expelled to Jordan, to Lebanon, to Egypt, and then in sort of these internal, I guess, Bantistans, as you could call them, but these little enclaves of either occupied territory or basically all occupied territory.
[00:11:01]  And something that's, I think, really striking about the situation in Gaza is that, like you mentioned, a lot of these people, their sort of ancestral villages or homes are within a very short distance from Gaza, but movement and the ability to visit those villages is completely non-existent.
[00:11:23]  And I think that people generally have some idea that like the Gaza Strip is this like area of land kind of in the tucked away in the corner of the country between, you know, basically on the border with Egypt and the sea.
[00:11:42]  But it's also been called essentially the world's biggest open-air prison.
[00:11:46]  I mean, people can't leave there.
[00:11:49]  I know that there's been some issuance of work permits and things like that in recent years.
[00:11:53]  But like for the most part, people in Gaza, I think the majority have never left Gaza, right?
[00:11:58]  Yeah, I think there obviously there is some coming and going.
[00:12:03]  More recently, as you said, that there's some work permits that have been issued.
[00:12:09]  And there are some Palestinians who come and we as Palestinians living in Jerusalem meet them in Jerusalem coming to get health care if they need specialist treatment.
[00:12:19]  And there's some students that come and go through the border with Egypt.
[00:12:25]  And, you know, I have a number of friends who have family who would, and, you know, the Scottish First Minister, his wife's parents who are actually are in Gaza now.
[00:12:35]  One of them is Scottish and her father is Palestinian from Gaza.
[00:12:42]  So there is some coming and going, but I think the vast majority will never have had the opportunity to leave.
[00:12:48]  And they will have been brought up in this situation, which, yeah, as you say, it's the largest open-air prison in the world.
[00:12:56]  Some people describe it as a concentration camp.
[00:13:00]  Really, it's the level of depravity of the Israeli regime and what it's what it's attempted to do to the Palestinians in Gaza is will go down in history as one of the most shocking and appalling crimes in history.
[00:13:20]  And I think, you know, part of it is we're hearing now about the explosion of a conflict in the Middle East, to use the euphemisms that are often employed in Western media.
[00:13:33]  But when I speak to people in Gaza or I hear from my friends, the things I find just as shocking are the day-to-day reality of living in a situation like that.
[00:13:44]  Like the pottable water in Gaza is undrinkable.
[00:13:49]  I remember many years ago, the UN did a report.
[00:13:52]  They said that by 2020, Gaza would be unlivable.
[00:13:55]  Well, that came and went.
[00:13:58]  The sewage is being pumped into the sea.
[00:14:02]  Because of the march of return, thousands of people were mutilated.
[00:14:05]  So people are everywhere missing a limb walking around without legs and arms and God knows what else.
[00:14:10]  Cancer races through the roof because of the collapsing infrastructure and the contaminated water and food.
[00:14:16]  So I think the reality of life there before this latest horrific escalation and bombardment and what's being now described as a genocide by legal scholars is something that, you know, is the context on which this latest round of fighting has taken place.
[00:14:40]  But to really imagine what that's like is something that is very difficult, even for Palestinians who are not in Gaza because you don't quite comprehend the profundity and the ways in which it, you know, I get a sense, for example, when I see three young people who've come for cancer treatment from Gaza and they have all these rare kinds of cancers that just don't appear in normal situations.
[00:15:09]  The level of mental health, suicide rates, and unwellness is all very high as well.
[00:15:19]  You mentioned the March of Return.
[00:15:22]  I'm wondering if for our listeners who aren't familiar with that event, if you can explain what happened and what transpired during that.
[00:15:31]  Yes, after the expulsion of 1948, the main concern for Palestinians who had been made refugees was to return to their lands.
[00:15:43]  Most Palestinians left expecting to return within a period of time and they took with them some belonging just so they could escape the fighting, including famously their front door keys.
[00:15:55]  And the key in Palestinian culture has become a symbol of the right of return because it's the key to your door and you expect they expect it to go back within a matter of days, weeks, at most months.
[00:16:08]  And when you read all the literature about the post-1948 period, it's this really painful realization amongst Palestinians that this wasn't going to happen by requesting support from the international community.
[00:16:24]  It wasn't going to happen just by relying on other countries to stand in for them.
[00:16:29]  It was something that they were going to have to take up themselves.
[00:16:34]  But even before Palestinians were able to form into a coherent national liberation movement in the 1960s, the most basic impulse was that Palestinians wanted to return home.
[00:16:45]  And they attempted to do so many times.
[00:16:49]  Either on an individual basis, sometimes Palestinians would cross just to harvest their crops and then come back with them.
[00:16:56]  Other times they would try and return to their villages and they would be prevented from doing so.
[00:17:01]  And of course there's a very large number of what they call Palestinian citizens of Israel who literally can go to their villages, but they're not allowed to go back to them.
[00:17:10]  And there's three villages in the north on the border with Lebanon that were very cruelly destroyed in the 1950s in front of the villages, in front of the villagers who had who repeatedly tried to return to them.
[00:17:25]  And in Eilabun and some of these other places, they go back and have weddings there, they have summer camps and they try and reassert their right to return to these villages.
[00:17:39]  So when a Palestinian would be caught returning to his home, they would either be shot on the border, 5,000 Palestinians were shot attempting to do so, shot and killed in the first years post-1948, or they would be rounded up and bussed back to the border.
[00:17:57]  So there's a tradition within more recent Palestinian history of organized marches of return, attempts to cross the border en masse.
[00:18:06]  And there was a famous attempt in 2020, in 2011, when many people came from the Golan Heights.
[00:18:19]  And there's a video of this kind of mass of people walking down the border, walking to cross the border.
[00:18:26]  And there's all these minefields.
[00:18:28]  And all the Syrians in occupied Golan Heights say to them, there's mines, there's mines, you need to be careful.
[00:18:34]  And they cross nonetheless, because they see Palestine and they just want to be there.
[00:18:38]  And so they try and cross, and the mines don't go often miraculously.
[00:18:43]  And one of them gets on a bus and goes to Tel Aviv and then does an interview with Israeli TV in the middle of Tel Aviv.
[00:18:51]  And he says, yeah, I'm coming back home.
[00:18:54]  And one of the guys trying to cross was carrying his grandmother, who was very old and frail and wanted to return to her village.
[00:19:03]  So these attempts to return, marches of return, have a tradition within our political practice.
[00:19:10]  And there was one that was organized in 2018 from Gaza, and Palestinians would gather every week.
[00:19:19]  I can't remember how long it went for, but I think it was six months and sometimes tens of thousands of people and attempt to walk to the border.
[00:19:28]  And Israeli snipers were positioned on the border and were instructed to shoot in order to shoot off people's limbs, arms, legs.
[00:19:43]  And a few hundred Palestinians died, but many, many thousand more were lost limbs and lost legs and arms and so forth.
[00:19:56]  So this was an example of Palestinians having been long instructed by the West to do so, engaging in non-violent resistance, but the response was brutal suppression.

=== Palestinian Dehumanization (14:52) ===

[00:20:11]  Yeah, I think the issue of return has such a sort of a, that's what's always sort of struck me as like one of the most kind of like perverse and ugly ironies of the entire situation because, you know, as someone who's Jewish, but I've absolutely, you know, I have no connection to Israel.
[00:20:31]  No one from my family lives there.
[00:20:32]  No one from my family is from that region, you know, lived in America for a very long time from Europe before that.
[00:20:39]  But I could get on a plane tomorrow and, you know, essentially apply for Israeli citizenship and likely get it.
[00:20:48]  But somebody whose family has been there for, you know, generations on generations on generations on generations is essentially unable to leave whatever little area that they've been relocated to.
[00:20:59]  And something that Israel has really been engaged in, you know, you mentioned the UN Relief and Works Agency.
[00:21:08]  And, you know, I believe the UNRWA supplies, I think, I don't know if it's a majority, but they, I mean, the unemployment rates in Gaza in particular are super high.
[00:21:20]  The economy has been totally squeezed because of the blockade and the siege.
[00:21:26]  And I believe they supply most of the food there and a lot of the aid there and them and other agencies.
[00:21:33]  But one thing in particular that Israel has really been pushing for on the international level is to essentially redefine a refugee in a very strict context as somebody who was directly themselves in 19, you know, in the 1940s, 1948, kicked out of their village, rather than somebody who was maybe born any date later than that, which is just really absurd to me.
[00:21:56]  But it's been one of the kind of big political projects of Israel, especially at the UN.
[00:22:02]  Yeah, so I think that's a really useful point to bring up because we need to understand the nature of the international system to which Palestinians have been subjected.
[00:22:14]  So after 1948, two agencies were set up to support Palestinians.
[00:22:20]  And this is before the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, which established the UNHCR and the agency to dealt with refugees.
[00:22:32]  But sometimes it's possible to set up specialist agencies.
[00:22:37]  So for the Palestinians, there was UNRWA, the United Nations Relief Works Agency, and there was a UNCCP, the UN Conciliation Commission on Palestine.
[00:22:49]  And UNRWA's role was to provide aid, and the UNCCP was to provide access to what they call international law access to durable solutions.
[00:22:58]  And a durable solution in international law for a refugee is that they have a voluntary choice.
[00:23:03]  They are allowed to choose whether to return, be resettled in a third country or rehabilitated where they are.
[00:23:11]  And in all those cases, they're entitled to compensation for lost property and even lost property if they've fled and their house has been destroyed and so forth.
[00:23:22]  So, I mean, without going into too much detail, there are specific mechanisms within international law for dealing with cases of refugees and internally displaced persons.
[00:23:34]  Now, what Israel has constantly tried to do is, as you say, say that Palestinians, unless they're directly forcibly expelled themselves, do not constitute refugees.
[00:23:46]  And they've tried to draw a precedent in that in international law, which is not the case.
[00:23:50]  All international internally displaced persons are considered internally displaced persons across generations.
[00:23:57]  And in many other cases in the world, that status remains until they have access to a durable solution, until they, as an individual, have a voluntary choice and can make a voluntary choice about where they want to go and what they want.
[00:24:12]  And in the case of Palestinians, the choice of return has been completely denied to them.
[00:24:20]  And that's why that's what they've been struggling for for that return.
[00:24:24]  And lots of the struggles that took place amongst Palestinian refugees, I was talking about the one in Sinai as an example, but many others was about resisting the attempt to forcibly resettle them.
[00:24:34]  There's nothing per se wrong with being resettled somewhere if people agree to it.
[00:24:39]  They say, you know what, there's a solution which we might, we all agree to voluntarily without coercion.
[00:24:46]  But the forcible resettlement and many of the refugee campaigns and organizing was around preventing that permanent resettlement because people wanted to return to their homes.
[00:24:55]  And, you know, as an anecdote, I met a friend of mine who's from a village, as you can probably tell from my accent, I've spent a lot of time in England.
[00:25:06]  My mum's English.
[00:25:08]  And while I was living there, I met a friend whose grandmother was expelled from her village in Norfolk when they set up a British army base there during the Second World War.
[00:25:18]  And they surrounded the village, they forced all the villagers out, and they allowed them to go back at Christmas and use the church or at weddings and so forth.
[00:25:26]  So it's obviously a very different situation.
[00:25:28]  It's not settler colonial.
[00:25:30]  It's not with the same level of violence or anything like that.
[00:25:33]  But what I found surprising was she just described how her grandmother felt about her village.
[00:25:38]  She just said that her grandmother, this place meant everything to her and she felt very attached to it too.
[00:25:44]  So I think what's really of the many ways in which Palestinians are dehumanized, this very normal human instinct to want to return to your home is treated like some bizarre anomalous thing.
[00:25:58]  You know there's these books written about the right of return as a war against uh, the Israeli state or something that has been forced upon Palestinians, and you know there's so much rhetoric and um fake news around it and pressure that's been exerted over many years, but despite all of that, Palestinian young people still know.
[00:26:18]  The first thing you ask them is, what village are you from, what town are you from?
[00:26:23]  They know.
[00:26:23]  They know the local accents the, what people wear.
[00:26:27]  You know so much has been passed down generation to generation because people refuse to forget, and that's really central, I think, to understanding um, everything about the Palestinian struggle for the past three decades.
[00:26:39]  Yeah, I think the point you bring up um about just the sheer amount of kind of noise or it's almost like completely inverted logic that has been used uh, especially in the western press obviously, to normalize the occupation.
[00:26:57]  Um, and the the kind of case that you bring up at the UN is just one of the ways in which the Israeli state has attempted to do that in a sort of like jurisprudence arena.
[00:27:07]  But I think like for our listeners in the West, the sheer amount of propaganda that has been unleashed, I guess, has had such an effect of just sort of like turning these completely natural instincts for people everywhere to want to return home.
[00:27:25]  Or to have these connections to their home place, to their people, kind of back on the Palestinians as if it was some sort of bizarre.
[00:27:37]  or foreign or like um even like yeah backwards, wrong thing, like backwards human instinct kind of.
[00:27:47]  And I think that's just one of the ways in which um the the occupation has been normalized.
[00:27:51]  But i'm wondering if you can speak to some of the other ways that that that has been um kind of furthered, and especially in the western media.
[00:27:59]  Yeah, I think, I mean, kind of just maybe I'm belaboring the point, but I think one really interesting example which came to my mind the other day because of how extreme the situation in Palestine is becoming is one of Wad al-Hawarith,
[00:28:18]  which was a place in the north of Palestine that in 1933 was subject to a mass expulsion of the peasants living there and largely Bedouin.
[00:28:30]  a Bedouin tribe.
[00:28:31]  And they were expelled and went into surrounding cities and towns.
[00:28:36]  And lots of Palestinians, seeing them kind of with nowhere to go, began to accelerate the understanding that what we were being subjected to and would be subjected to was a slow but then accelerating and eventually a flood by 1948 expulsion from our land.
[00:28:53]  And if you read the story of Wa'd al-Hawarith, you see that they were offered land somewhere else in Palestine, but they refused to go there because they were used to living where they were living in Waid al-Hawarith and they're used to growing what they were growing.
[00:29:13]  So I'm just trying to emphasize that the attachment to the land also came from the fact that they were peasants with an intimate understanding of what they grew and how they grew it and how they lived there and how they inhabited that space, which really strengthened that attachment to very specific places rather than just any old bits of land in Palestine.
[00:29:34]  Anyway, maybe that's kind of not really answering your question.
[00:29:36]  But I think the overall way you describe it is correct.
[00:29:42]  There is an attempt to turn natural human instincts into some anomalous, bizarre desires.
[00:29:50]  You know, Palestinians speak about what we want for ourselves in terms of liberation.
[00:29:55]  And when the revolution began and grew in the 1960s, the slogan was liberation and return.
[00:30:02]  And there was a rich debate about what that liberation was.
[00:30:05]  There was a rich debate about the specificities of how we were to live together in this land, one state, a secular democratic state, a binational state.
[00:30:15]  If you look through that history, you see a really incredible array of ideas about which dealt seriously with how we could come to a just resolution to the situation here.
[00:30:27]  And none of that was, and all of that was rejected.
[00:30:34]  And through all of that, we were told that those proposals were inciting to genocide or the desire to live a life of safety and be able to protect yourself, including with weapons, was violent resistance that went, that represented some bloodlust that went to the heart of some, you know, some Orientalist analysis of our psyche.
[00:31:03]  So I think that in the media terms, as someone who watches the Western media, but also lives in Palestine and sees how people discuss and talks about things, the difference is stark.
[00:31:18]  But the way people inhabit the world, what they think about it, what they talk about, what we hope for is completely misconstrued and misrepresented on every level.
[00:31:28]  And obviously, that's in some ways a particular focus, particularly there's particular kind of projects, propaganda projects, the Israeli state, their allies abroad.
[00:31:45]  You know, there's ways in which this is sort of particular to Palestinians, but there's lots of ways which is not particular to Palestinians.
[00:31:55]  You know, the image of the terrorist, the genocidal language they're now using about, you know, I saw an image today of Palestinians being a cockroach being crushed by an Israeli boot.
[00:32:09]  The human animals comment by the defense minister.
[00:32:14]  So yeah, I think all of this together just are all part of the same colonial and now increasingly genocidal language that's used in order to unleash unbridled violence against Palestinians.
[00:32:32]  And they need to turn us into something which is less than human in order to do that.
[00:32:37]  Yeah, you know, I think that's a point worth sticking with too, particularly the one about violence.
[00:32:44]  You know, during the 1960s and 1970s, the Palestinian movement was sort of at the heart of the ongoing Arab revolution throughout the Arab states, which was fought against by the U.S., but also by a lot of the reactionary regimes in the region and, of course, Israel.
[00:33:02]  You know, most of the leaders of the sort of Palestinian national movement were assassinated or eventually, you know, with the endless peace talks that were mostly mediated by the U.S., but of course in Israel's favor, turned into the situation that we have today.
[00:33:21]  And something that you hear a lot from people who don't know a lot about the situation, and I'll just tell an anecdote from here, is that like there is this sort of flattening of the Arab, whereas people say like, well, you know, there actually is no Palestinians, they're just Arabs.
[00:33:36]  So why can't they live in Egypt?
[00:33:38]  Why can't they live in Lebanon?
[00:33:40]  Why can't they live in Jordan?
[00:33:42]  I feel like you've sort of answered that already, even though it's, I feel like, a fairly should be an obvious point to anyone who thinks about it, but people's actual connections with the real physical land.
[00:33:56]  But yeah, I mean, the situation that we have today, I mean, it really did not come out of a vacuum.
[00:34:02]  And it seems like something that I've noticed just through every sort of cycle of violence that the Israeli state engages in, there's sort of this amnesia where the press and A lot of sort of the commenters on it will basically just act like the history of the region is the Palestinians acting up in one way or the other and the Israelis having to reluctantly put down this violent child is sort of the way they portray it.
[00:34:31]  But the situation that has been erupting over the last week is not coming out of a vacuum.
[00:34:38]  And I'd like to ask about what were some of the incidents that essentially led up to what's happening this week.
[00:34:47]  You mentioned the march of return, but there's also been, I know, an increasingly, increasing settler, not only settlements, but settler violence against Palestinians and attacks on holy sites throughout Palestine.

=== Defining Feature of Palestinian Oppression (04:59) ===

[00:35:03]  Could you tell us a little bit about that?
[00:35:05]  Yeah, I think what I would say is that the defining feature of the political oppression that Palestinians suffer is this question of fragmentation.
[00:35:18]  When people were expelled from their homes in 1948 and in 1967 and in virtually every single day since then, what Palestinians refer to as the ongoing Nakba, one of the effects that had was not only to expel people from their homes, was to fragment us geographically from one another, you know, on all the borders and in refugee camps on the border states with Palestine or expelled further afield,
[00:35:44]  and also to fragment us politically and to divide us up into lots of separate peoples.
[00:35:50]  And what the revolution was able to do for a period of time was bring us together in a single national movement that was able to wage this struggle for liberation.
[00:36:01]  But that fragmentation is really at the heart of so much of the way that the Israeli regime focuses on Palestinians.
[00:36:12]  It allots different sets of rights to different people.
[00:36:15]  If you're a Palestinian citizen of Israel in 1948, Palestine, you have a passport, but you still get land confiscated, but you're denied many other rights.
[00:36:27]  If you're in the West Bank, you have a different ID card.
[00:36:30]  If you're a Gaza, you have a different ID card.
[00:36:34]  But also, you're subjected to different forms of violence.
[00:36:38]  They operate within the same aim, the maximum amount of land, but the minimum number of Palestinians on that land, but they operate in slightly different ways.
[00:36:47]  And I think what Gaza has intended to be since 2007, when Hamas took power after it was elected in elections, in parliamentary elections in 2006,
[00:37:03]  Gaza has intended to be an object lesson of what happens when you refuse The dominant hegemonic Western-imposed pacification project in Palestine.
[00:37:18]  So, you know, surrounding it, placing it under siege and subjecting it to unbridled violence with no limit is a way of demonstrating to other Palestinians that this could be your fate.
[00:37:32]  And I think what's been happening over, and so Gaza has been in that situation really since 2007.
[00:37:41]  And I've described some of the attempts that Palestinians there have made in order to break out of the prison that they've been placed in.
[00:37:49]  But elsewhere in Palestine, you've seen lots of laws that have been passed, the nation-state law, which has been intended to say only the Jewish people can self-determine in this land, Palestinians, Arabs, anyone else cannot.
[00:38:03]  You've seen a confiscation of land, which has been accelerating, forcing people into ever smaller parts of the West Bank.
[00:38:13]  Jewish settlers have more or less ethnically cleansed all of the Jordan Valley as of the end of August.
[00:38:22]  Near to where a few friends of mine live, there's the other day under the cover of the fighting that took place, an entire village was ethnically cleansed, and near my friend's house, those ethnically cleansed villages appeared on the hill and set up a tent, which we're now living in.
[00:38:39]  So you begin to see the space physically shrinking around you.
[00:38:43]  And also as you pass between places, between towns and villages, there's settlers who gather.
[00:38:50]  So for example, if you go on certain roads, you know settlers might be there and may try and stop you.
[00:38:58]  That happened the other day in the north of the West Bank.
[00:39:02]  Settlers dressed as soldiers stopped a woman and her husband and their small child.
[00:39:07]  And when the car slowed down, they shot her dead and injured the child and they managed to drive away, but her life could not be saved.
[00:39:15]  So this increase in settler violence all over Palestine and with growing impunity.
[00:39:21]  And all of this reflected in the fact that the niceties, the pretense of being a liberal democracy has completely been shorn.
[00:39:32]  And that's what we see in the disagreements between the different parties in Israel, which is really a difference between kind of the transferrs who believe that there should be a second Nakbah immediately.
[00:39:46]  And that argument is growing in strength, especially after recent events, and the apartheidists who believe that they can continue with this sort of apartheid regime and warehousing of Palestinians into different areas, but they don't have to bring about this transfer straight away.

=== Increasingly Genocidal Rhetoric (06:23) ===

[00:40:02]  that that's the that's the background context i guess you mentioned the increasingly genocidal rhetoric um coming from i mean i don't know the i guess the furthest right It's hard to kind of describe how right-wing the Israeli government is.
[00:40:29]  And I mean, it's all sort of right-wing, even the non-right, technically right-wing parts are very right-wing.
[00:40:36]  But I mean, there was one Israeli, I think it was the defense minister, or I can't remember which official came out and said, you know, that we are going to pursue a Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba 48.
[00:40:48]  And it seems as if a lot of monsters were sort of unleashed, at least rhetorically.
[00:40:58]  There seems to be a lot more space for the Israeli leadership to kind of just come out and say things that before they had to at least sort of dress up in some of the kind of typical cloaks of liberal internationalism and kind of liberal humanitarianism or faux humanitarianism, however you want to characterize it.
[00:41:20]  But that seems to be completely gone.
[00:41:22]  Is that a fair assessment, you think?
[00:41:24]  Well, it's ironic, of course, because they claimed that the NAKBA never took place.
[00:41:29]  Right.
[00:41:30]  So, I mean, and I find this remarkable as a student of history, the extent to which the very well-evidenced, easily, easy-to-verify reality of what took place against Palestinians in 1948 was completely denied and ignored and marginalized.
[00:41:51]  And it was only at a certain later point that it broke into the mainstream of kind of Western academia, but it was denied point blank.
[00:42:01]  Or it was said that the Palestinians left of their own accord and so forth.
[00:42:06]  So I think that the fact that they've moved from denying it to saying, we're going to give you a second one, is of course an escalation.
[00:42:15]  And, you know, I've not been following this debate in great detail, but it seems like one of the thresholds for talking about genocide is genocidal language.
[00:42:24]  You need to demonstrate intent.
[00:42:26]  And in terms of intent, that has been amply demonstrated this past week.
[00:42:31]  But of course, there is a long, there's a long history of Palestinians being spoken about in dehumanizing terms.
[00:42:37]  Monkeys, pigs, and all kind of manner of other animals.
[00:42:47]  Even in general terms, I think Ehud Barak said, we are an island in a jungle.
[00:42:53]  Our culture, our history, everything desecrated and denigrated.
[00:42:58]  So I think what's perhaps significant about this latest round is that it's taking place in the context of this horrific massacre and genocidal intent in Gaza at the moment.
[00:43:12]  You know, as someone who's heard this language used about Palestinians for many years, I guess I've not been so worried about being called a dog or a pig or a monkey or being told that my culture and my history is that of savages, so much as we've been concerned with the fact that Israel has been undertaking actions of ethnic cleansing throughout all of that period of time.
[00:43:42]  So in many ways, the rhetoric part of it was the least of our worries.
[00:43:48]  But now I think why that rhetoric becomes so important is because they're saying it in a way that they didn't do on the side only in the Hebrew media so that they spoke to an internal audience, but they weren't actually happy that the West knew it.
[00:44:08]  They seem to say it very openly in English to a Western audience.
[00:44:14]  And for me, that represents not only the quote-unquote rightward shift of the Israeli government, but it also reflects the extent to which the apartheid regime feels that it can get away with that.
[00:44:30]  And if you look at the support that the West is giving, I mean, you know, they've just sent a second, the US has just sent a second aircraft carrier and the British Navy has sent two destroyers.
[00:44:44]  The extent and in public rhetoric, not popularly, but at least in the media and amongst politicians, there's complete closing of ranks in support of Israel's massacres that are taking place now.
[00:44:59]  And so I think they're able to say all this stuff because they're saying it and nobody's responding to it.
[00:45:05]  And it's that complicity of Western states that enables them to be so brazen.
[00:45:12]  And so it's more, I think it's more useful as a measure of what they think they can get away with and how far the rot has sunk in, you know, these colonial and imperial states in their kind of lack of any desire to conceal their colonial crimes.
[00:45:32]  Yeah, I mean, you know, sort of back to the subject of, I guess, protest that we were kind of talking about a little bit with the March of Return.
[00:45:43]  You know, one thing you hear a lot from a lot of Western leaders is that like, you know, Palestinians, they need to engage in this sort of Gandhian nonviolence, which I've heard, I've seen the word Gandhian written, I think, more times this week than I think I ever have in my entire life combined.
[00:46:02]  But one of the things that like, it really gets dropped in that is that there is essentially, I mean, from my outside view at least, like, I'm not really sure what people could do because I mean, in, well, now as a result of this past week, they're actually criminalizing protests in other countries, you know, in France and England.

=== Immediate Pressure Matters (15:05) ===

[00:46:26]  They're talking about criminalizing, even flying the Palestinian flag.
[00:46:30]  But within Palestine itself, it's almost impossible because you'll be treated essentially the same as somebody who takes up arms as somebody who maybe marches or has a nonviolent protest or something like that.
[00:46:46]  But it's really like, I think what strikes me as just so mind-blowingly fucked up is that like there's almost this lie that there's like still a two-state solution that's going to happen if only the Palestinians would behave themselves.
[00:47:02]  But the Israeli government has acted in the exact opposite direction for, well, for the entirety of its history, but really for especially in the past few decades with the issue of settlements.
[00:47:16]  You know, there's this whole thing about, you know, or it used to be at least land for peace, that the Israelis would give up land in order to achieve peace with the Palestinians.
[00:47:26]  But the exact opposite has taken place.
[00:47:29]  And really with the financial and political support of a lot of very big players in the West as well.
[00:47:37]  You know, you live in East Jerusalem.
[00:47:40]  How does this just look on the street there?
[00:47:42]  Like, how is this for the average person living there?
[00:47:44]  How does this affect them?
[00:47:46]  I mean, I think, you know, it's always useful when talking about Palestine to think of other examples and instances, either contemporary or historical, where similar processes have taken place and similar responses have been elicited from those who are under colonization.
[00:48:02]  So, you know, I'm a bit of a history geek, so that's why I keep trying to bring that in every juncture.
[00:48:10]  So I hope your listeners forgive me for that.
[00:48:13]  But, you know, this is something that's happened.
[00:48:17]  And I remember when I was reading about the Haitian Revolution and there was a French commissioner who came and when he was sent back to France against his will, the last thing he told the slaves was anyone who comes to take your weapons from you, they mean to take away your freedom.
[00:48:31]  Because them self-determining and being able to defend themselves and protect themselves was the guarantor of their freedom.
[00:48:40]  And this is replicated over and over and over again in lots of national liberation movements that then established the right for colonized peoples to take up arms to defend themselves within international law in the bodies of the UN.
[00:48:56]  So I could, for example, talk about how Palestinians have exhausted every single other option available to them, which they have, but it doesn't even have to begin from that point of discussion.
[00:49:09]  Palestinians have the right under international law to defend themselves and they have the right to resist through means of arms the colonial occupation of their country.
[00:49:19]  The other issue in relation to violence when it comes to Palestine is just how profoundly embedded it is in everyday life for Palestinians.
[00:49:29]  So as a Palestinian who lives in Jerusalem, for example, I would get up in the morning, I would get on a tram to the old city.
[00:49:39]  On the tram, there would be security guards who routinely beat up young Palestinians just for being Palestinian on the trams.
[00:49:46]  And if you see videos of that, it's really extremely violent.
[00:49:50]  I've seen it in front of me many times.
[00:49:52]  There are lots of soldiers with big machine guns on the trams.
[00:49:56]  Sometimes young women who look like they're teenagers with huge machine guns that seem too heavy for them to even carry.
[00:50:04]  You get off the tram in the old city, you go to Damascus Gate where there are watchtowers everywhere surrounded by cameras.
[00:50:10]  You see soldiers sometimes harassing salespeople, old women who are selling fruit and vegetables by the door of Damascus Gate.
[00:50:21]  Sometimes you walk along, you get to Shara al-Wad, which is within the old city, and then there are policemen with body cams who stop and search you.
[00:50:31]  Or you witness that happening in front of you, pushing people up against walls, frisking them, taking their documents, leaving them to wait next to them for hours on end for no reason.
[00:50:41]  There are cameras everywhere in the old city watching your every move.
[00:50:46]  Then you might go to the barber's shop like I did today, where I heard about a settler attack and the discussion is about what roads to avoid and where we should or where we shouldn't go.
[00:50:57]  Then you leave the barber's shop and you see some settlers who would be spitting on a Christian delegation or ripping down Christian posters.
[00:51:08]  One group of young settlers attacked a cafe which we were having dinner in a few months ago.
[00:51:16]  And then you go and open your phone and you see on social media a video of soldiers shooting somebody randomly or a child being pulled from under the rubble in Gaza.
[00:51:24]  And then you hear about later in that same day, you hear about a friend that has been arrested and is being held in Israeli prisons without charges.
[00:51:32]  So when people talk about the question of violence, you can't understand it unless you understand the Palestinian life is so completely saturated with it.
[00:51:41]  And not only with the reality of being physically attacked, but also of witnessing that and the constant awareness that such violence could happen virtually at any moment and nobody could do anything about it.
[00:51:52]  And, you know, I think I mentioned earlier, Angela Davis has a whole thing about this when they ask her that same question.
[00:51:58]  And she just says that anyone asking the question about whether or not a colonized person agrees with violence, they can only ask that question from a position of not knowing anything about the reality of that person's life.
[00:52:12]  And I think that's why when we approach this question, it has to be understood that it's not that Palestinians are living in a normal situation.
[00:52:25]  They're living in this extremely abnormal situation in which violence is inherent alongside this broader question of the use of violence in anti-colonial struggle.
[00:52:37]  I definitely think that we've seen that flattening in action this past week in Western media.
[00:52:58]  And it's obviously provided a lot of cover for what has been the Israeli response.
[00:53:06]  Where we're at now, I mean, you know, we don't do a daily news show and that's not the purpose of this, you know, of this program or whatever.
[00:53:13]  But as we're looking towards the next week, the next couple of weeks, I mean, how does the situation look to be unfolding?
[00:53:21]  I mean, that's such a broad and kind of terrible question to ask.
[00:53:25]  But what is your sense of how the next coming weeks are going to look?
[00:53:29]  Yeah, I think what will determine the outcome of the next few weeks is really something that depends on how people can stand in solidarity with Palestine and how much we can mobilize to place pressure on the Israeli regime.
[00:53:47]  And, you know, there's lots of kind of we ask like political analysts how they see things unfolding and there's lots of guesses about what will happen.
[00:53:57]  It looks like there will be a ground invasion to northern part of Gaza.
[00:54:01]  It looks like there's an attempt to expel Palestinians from the entirety of Gaza into Sinai.
[00:54:08]  Most Palestinians do not want to go because they understand that when you flee Israeli violence, that your refugee, your status as a refugee is not temporary.
[00:54:19]  It will just be forced further and further away from Palestine in even worse conditions in the Sinai desert.
[00:54:25]  And there's a question, of course, about whether a northern front will open and what kind of engagement there will be from other potential parties to the conflict.
[00:54:36]  But the other factor, and at moments like this, it becomes very crucial, is that Israel in undertaking these crimes is constantly measuring how much they can get away with.
[00:54:47]  So there was in a news item on Channel 12 of Israeli Channel 12, where they were showing the demonstrations happening all around the world and seeing that public opinion in the West and elsewhere was turning against them.
[00:55:01]  And that was something that they began to say, okay, well, there's going to be a kickback and there's going to be pressure, so we need to try and get as much murdering done as quickly as we can.
[00:55:09]  And if you remember in 2008 and 2009, that's precisely what they did before Obama, before Obama came into office.
[00:55:18]  They bombed Gaza right up until his inauguration as a way of saying, see, we can do whatever we like, but like, we're in control by letting you have your inauguration without the bombing unfolding in the background.
[00:55:32]  So there's constantly this measuring of how much they can get away with and where the solidarity and pressure is on them is at.
[00:55:42]  And I think that's where your listeners and anyone can be doing something about it.
[00:55:48]  And the reality is that Israel is a creation of the West, that it exists because of Western material, military support.
[00:56:00]  And that penetrates into lots of different elements of everyday life that people in workplaces will experience.
[00:56:07]  And, you know, one of the calls that has come out from Palestinian trade unions, for example, is saying that we need to stop manufacturing arms and delivering arms.
[00:56:18]  We need to make sure that if a ban won't be brought in on a government level, which seems very unlikely somewhere like the US, which provides Israel with, I think, more than 80% of its weapons, then that can be brought in popularly and people can take action on all kinds of different levels, particularly in trade union, to say that we're not going to give you the means by which to commit your massacres.
[00:56:40]  So that's all to say that it really depends on what is done in the next few weeks will be measured minute by minute by the Israeli regime.
[00:56:52]  Yeah, I think that it's important for us to kind of just reiterate what you just said or hone in on that.
[00:56:58]  I think after, I mean, I'll just speak for a lot of people in America, I think, and especially in the left in America, there's a sort of disillusionment in terms of protest or calls to action or how to kind of,
[00:57:16]  you know, where and how to best show support or, you know, line up in solidarity, particularly with, you know, international causes and in the sense that the Palestinian cause.
[00:57:29]  And I think that the sort of window that you're speaking to that we're that we're sort of all working in is really key for people to understand because there really is a kind of short window of opportunity here in which the West can make it so basically a PR nightmare for Israel to act with further impunity, the stronger and stronger the response out of the West is.
[00:58:00]  And so I think kind of people can understand the sort of urgent moment that we're kind of working in in that sense.
[00:58:07]  Do you think that's fair to say?
[00:58:09]  Yeah, I think anyone watching on their television screens can see the reality of what's already happened and they can see the reality of what's going to happen, which is the deaths of thousands and thousands more people, the continuing bombardment of hospitals, the continuing bombardment of schools and mosques, the war crimes and crimes against humanity that are being committed on a daily basis, and the complete destruction and leveling of Gaza.
[00:58:37]  And at the same time, the politicians in Israel have been talking for a very long period of time about a second nakba.
[00:58:46]  And that's been evidenced in the fact that they're distributing, they say, up to 10,000 rifles to settlers.
[00:58:54]  I thought they were already armed, but apparently not enough.
[00:58:59]  Closing of roads between Palestinian towns and villages.
[00:59:03]  They've ethnically cleansed two villages since the fighting began last week.
[00:59:07]  50 Palestinians have been killed in violence in the West Bank.
[00:59:10]  So I think what's happening in Gaza will also be reflected as a wider Israeli policy directed now at Gaza and slowly and increasingly at other areas if they achieve their diabolic objectives there.
[00:59:27]  The aim is a second nakbah, a second mass expulsion of Palestinians and the turning of the remainder of the Palestinians who stay here into a tiny derasinated oppressed minority that live in permanent subjugation.
[00:59:41]  And so given that reality, expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people is really important in limiting the violence that Israel is able to and does enforce on Palestinians.
[00:59:54]  I think that anywhere you look in your life in the West, there's places you can take action, make statements, think about different arenas in which you can organize, try and mainstream Palestine.
[01:00:06]  You know, there's often this attempt, as we've been talking about, to dehumanize and push it to one side.
[01:00:10]  There's ways to talk about it, to bring it within anti-colonial history, within familiar understandings of the struggles for freedom and for justice.
[01:00:19]  But also, you know, I was talking before about trade unionists.
[01:00:22]  I was talking about academics and I could talk about academics and the role that academic institutions have.
[01:00:28]  There's lots of different ways that you can work intelligently and with others to have an impact on what's happening there.
[01:00:33]  And, you know, there have been lots of attempts and lots of work done in the past.
[01:00:41]  And it's possible to build on that.
[01:00:43]  And everything people do has an immediate, can be translated immediately in terms of lives and in terms of putting the brakes on this immediate violence.
[01:00:55]  So I think that if there's one message anyone should take away today, it's that given where you are in the world, it's particularly important that people in the U.S. think about how they can contribute to Palestinian liberation.
[01:01:07]  Well, Akram, we really appreciate you joining us here today and stay safe.
[01:01:13]  Thank you very much.

=== The Most Fucking Insane Thing (01:10) ===

[01:01:32]  You know, I sort of mentioned this during the interview to him, but something that whenever talking to anyone in Palestine or from Palestine, it does just always strike me as the most fucking insane thing in the world that like, I mean.
[01:01:46]  like in Akram's case, for instance, like I could, I could go to Israel tomorrow and in a very short period of time, basically be able to legally shoot a ton of people that live there or to dispossess them of their house or anything like that.
[01:02:04]  And like have full, complete rights to vote or to work or anything like that.
[01:02:11]  And, you know, I can't read a fucking, I can't read a sentence in Hebrew or anything like that.
[01:02:15]  It's just, it's astounding to me.
[01:02:17]  Yeah.
[01:02:18]  I don't know where I'm going with that.
[01:02:19]  I'm just thinking about it.
[01:02:21]  Yeah.
[01:02:23]  Well, ladies and gentlemen, I guess we should end the episode.
[01:02:29]  My name's Liz.
[01:02:30]  My name, of course, as always, forever, Brace Belden.
[01:02:33]  We have with us today, as always, forever, Young Chomsky.
[01:02:38]  And the podcast is called.
[01:02:41]  Trinan.
[01:02:42]  We'll see you next time.