Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - Bad Hasbara 88: Psychopolitical Science, with Gazan Girl

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Matt and Daniel welcome Palestinian-American international lawyer and activist Lara E., also known as @gazangirl. They discuss ChatGPT’s diagnosis of zionism, probe the professed morality of the IDFs leaflet airdrops, and examine the false choice between Biden and Trump’s policies in the region.Matt and Francesca will be at the Sacramento Punch Line on March 16th! Buy tickets now! livemu.sc/4jS1qKfCome see Matt Lieb and Francesca Fiorentini do stand up at Cobbs Comedy Club in San Francisco on May 7th. Tickets here: https://www.livenation.com/event/G5vYZb0MwzkkR/francesca-fiorentini-and-matt-liebPlease donate to Islamic Relief USA: irusa.orgGet The Palestine Pod at https://www.palestinepod.com/Join their Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/palestinepodSubscribe to Lara’s Substack: https://gazangirl.substack.com/Subscribe to the Patreon https://www.patreon.com/badhasbaraSubscribe/listen to Bad Hasbara wherever you get your podcasts.Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/5RDvo87OzNLA78UH82MI55Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-hasbara-the-worlds-most-moral-podcast/id1721813926Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Moshwam ha bitch, a rib and poker toast. We invented the terry tomato and weighs USB drives and behind all. Israeli salad, oozy, stents, and javas orange crows. Micro chips is us. iPhone cameras us. Taco salads us. Pothalas us.

All of garden us. Life costs for us. Zabrahamas. As far as us. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Bad Hasbara. The world's most moral podcast, bar none. That's right. My name is Matt Lebe. I am your most moral co-host. Daniel Mate here. Other guy. Other most moral co-host.

Turned down the brightness a little bit, trying to match our darkness. you've got some nice like a blue lighting going on you look like a jazz guy it's just the natural life streaming in through these here windows here in Brooklyn it's that Brooklyn jazz lighting that you guys are known for I think probably

what's up welcome back everyone to another wonderful episode of the world's most moral podcast we are here talking about Israel and stuff so excited to have you all here please give us Israel in air quotes yeah yeah sorry israel is not real is not real um crumbling settler colonial entity jizrael whatever you want to call it um you know

just don't call it late for suffer you know what i mean uh please give us five stars in a review on whatever podcast app you are currently listening to this on uh or if you're watching it please subscribe to the channel why not you're watching it why wouldn't you just subscribe what's your problem it's just one more click yeah just click it and then you find out when we're doing all sorts of other things like episodes and you probably clicked your volume button up or down several times all right it's just just just click yeah the thing that's just move the mouse over just down a little bit you just click yes and you don't you don't you won't even remember you did it and that's good for everyone um also come to sacramento on march 16th please do

that. I'm going to be at the Sacramento Punchline with my wife, Francesca Fiorentini. We're going to be co-headlining on a Sunday, so you know we're big time, big time co-headliners. You know, when one of you can't put butts in seats,

maybe both of you can. That's how it works. No, I'm kidding. My wife is successful. But please see us together. Ticket link in bio. Sponsor! Today's episode, is brought to you by Islamic Relief USA.

Islamic Relief USA works with local partners in the region to provide immediate emergency assistance, including access to food aid, hygiene kits, medicine slash medical supplies, and so much more for families throughout Palestine. And if you have any money and you feel like donating some, please do it at irrusa.org. That's irrusa.org. Please donate.

and if you have any more money after that go to patreon.com slash bad hasbara join it join us join us line up at the pay pig piggy trough and lap up the slop because we make it hot and ready get yourself get yourself some more more slot for the for the brain that's right it'll help your brain it'll make you smarter it'll make your life just that much easier this is the bad as bar of promise we're like uh you know we're like those supplements that people hawk on joe rogan except for it's just other content that's us i want to play that tom wait's song step right up you know that where he's hawk i don't all kinds of crazy products i feel like uh every tom wait song sounds like he's going to say step right up yeah he's got kind of a carnival

barker energy to him yeah is he from san diego i'm not sure where he's from. I think he's from L.A. guy. Yeah, which is like, shouldn't he be from New Orleans? I'm just saying he's, is it an affectation or is he from like the New Orleans part of San Diego? That's the question I have. You know, is, or he's like from Fresno or something where a guy shouldn't be like, hey, we're going to eat some alligator. They're going to get baseball. Bob Dylan is from Hibbing, Minnesota. So, oh, man. All these guys, just making up their accents. Just make up their accents.

Shout out to producer Adam Levin, who's loving this Patreon promo. Daniel, what's the spin? Well, because we have our guest today, Gosen Girl, I went looking for songs that could go with that, you know, basically the genre of girl from location. Oh, okay. I feel like we're going to get some Gets Gilberto action going on. I don't have that one because I didn't, I only, the format is blah, blah, blah, girl.

So not girl from such and such. Got it. So starting with Michael Jackson, Liberian girl. Okay. A real deep cut. That's a real, yeah. I didn't even know he had a, like, song about a lot. This is not a good album, actually bad.

I mean, it's actually bad. It's got some good songs on it, but it doesn't, to me, it doesn't hang together. Yeah. He didn't really know what he was doing production wise. I mean, he's, he says it. in the title. It's true. He's like, this album's bad. It's bad. Don't let it's much. American Girl by Tom Petty. Okay.

The Heartbreakers. Yeah. Brownsville Girl by Bob Dylan off his greatest hits volume two. Co-written with, who did you write this with? Sam Shepard, I think. Okay. He wrote it with some playwright. And then I've got Around the Way Girl by Al Cool J. and a song especially for you Matt because I know that you can take any song

in the world and turn it into this song Uptown girl Uptown girl That's one of your party tricks right Yes it is You want to try it right now? Yeah just name a song Ferrell happy

Okay let's see Because I'm happy If you feel like a room with a roof Because I'm happy cap along If you feel with an uptown girl She's been living in her uptown world Give me another song I didn't even know you knew this about me

But yeah You did it once on the show before Have I done this? Yeah I'm a fucking idiot Was it Were you in any way disappointed That I knew that much

That many lyrics from Happy by Farrell Or do you No no no No good All right that's good So that's the spin That is what is spinning Before we get to our guest

I think we need to shout out some fan art that came to our, to our doorsteps. Some 3D fan art. Yes. And functional fan art. Do you have the name of the person who did it or I don't know? Okay. Yes.

His name is Eric Pagan or Pagan. It's spelled Pagan. Pagan. So I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to call him a pagan if he's not a pagan. Yeah, yeah. But his last name is P.A.G.A.N. His Instagram is, I think, Head Planter, B.C. Mm-hmm.

That sounds right. Colombia, my home province. Yeah. And he makes planters out of people's likenesses, out of people's heads. Sure does. He sure does. And so he sent us planters of ourselves. However, he did not send me myself and you, yourself.

He sent me you and you, me. That's correct. I didn't know until after I read the card. So when I got it, I was like, why did someone send me Daniel Mate's head? I was wondering the same thing. I was like, I started feeling like maybe this was, you know, he was just like, I'm a really big fan of the podcast and it's one host, Daniel Mate. but now I see mine and I got to say great job isn't it great it looks like this looks like you dog look at this looks like you and this has detachable glasses man yeah mine didn't come

with glasses you know this is this comes from you not wearing your glasses sometimes I guess so I think you you're smarter you put a succulent in there I just put um what is it like a carnation I put a carnation in there so you just look like you did your hair real good I like it. But thank you for this planter. I'm going to actually put some soil in it and put a plant in it. And, you know, and hey, if anyone else wants to send us likenesses of our heads, feel free. Baddha's bar at gmail.com.

Maybe just take a picture of it. But, no, this was really, really nice. So thank you for your head planter. I now forever have Daniel Mante's head. in my studio. Yeah, and I've got Matt Meadlebe on my window cell. Hell yeah, that's where I belong, baby.

Okay, today we have an amazing guest. I'm very excited. This next guest is a Palestinian, American, international lawyer, and activist. You may know her from social media at Gossengirl. I know her as the co-host of the Palestine pod, a podcast that has been doing it

far longer than we have in fact so long that the country is named after the podcast that's crazy i didn't know that you learned where they got the name palestine from you learn what's our favorite podcast that's right well we're just naming nations after podcast yeah oh i can't wait to live in comtown um ladies and gentlemen and everyone else please welcome laura to the podcast hi hi thanks for having me thank you for coming on how are you doing laura um surviving hey you know it's always weird to answer that question yeah yeah i never said i was good at interviewing i don't know how to open any conversation with that how's it going yeah did good um i think a lot of us have been um going through the motions

Especially Palestinians in forced exile. Yeah. Because we're witnessing everything. Our families are, for many of us, still in Palestine. And we have been forced to try to wrestle with this genocide life balance, genocide work balance. Yeah. For the last 15, 16 months. And yeah, so it's always awkward to answer the how are you doing?

in question. Maybe a more zoomed-in version of that. Has there been a palpable, I mean, not that things are not awful, but has the awfulness, has there been a qualitative shift at all since this very tenuous and completely incomplete ceasefire started? What is the, if you're comfortable speaking about the sort of emotional climate, like, as a result of a shift like that what's it what what what have you been experiencing this particular period and and and where are you at the moment with it um i i liken it to a moment of respite but like sort of

not completely and fully um as you mentioned it's not really a ceasefire because israel has not ceased firing yeah that's kind of like the number one thing that makes something a ceasefire exactly you got to stop fire and I mean I think since the ceasefire I'm doing quotes

but you can't see them has gone into effect it was a month ago that it went into effect and Israel's killed over 130 Palestinians just in that time period just in Gaza or are we

including the West Bank no that's just in Gaza because the West they've been going haywire in the West Bank exactly not taking into it account the escalation of the aggression that is taking place in the occupied West Bank, where Israel has destroyed the Janine refugee camp, has destroyed other refugee camps

and cities in the occupied West Bank. And Netanyahu himself has come out saying that he has ordered a new military operation to take place in the West Bank. And in fact, a lot of what we're seeing, too, is that when the hostages are being exchanged, Palestinian hostages will be released by Israel in accordance with the agreement only for Israel to go and round up and kidnap other Palestinians in the very same day sometimes. We saw that, for example, with the first exchange where 90 Palestinians were released and then they kidnapped 60 more later that day.

That's just the occupation trying to maintain homeostasis, Laura. Right, exactly. They felt out of balance not having Palestinian hostages of their own. it seems like this i mean it it really does seem like the uh you know you're joking about the homeostasis but it does seem like they almost have like these quotas to fill where they are rounding up people um as they're releasing people in order to like make sure that you know it's like a when a school truancy officer goes around goes like hey we need you guys to be in school or else we're not going to get the funding.

You know, it's like, hey, we need to keep you guys in prison or else, you know, yeah, I'm not sure what the actual, like, rules are around it, but it does seem like they do it, half out of cruelty, but also half out of bureaucratic cruelty. I don't know. Well, I mean, no, I think you're, I think you're onto something there. I mean, it's no secret that Israel refers to Palestinians as a demographic threat. That's their terminology. That's how they refer to us.

And the reason for that is because they are concerned with maintaining a Jewish majority from the river to the sea in a land, which was not primarily Jewish when they founded their state. And they've only been able to engineer that Jewish majority artificially through force. And it's maintained through force as well. And I think that's also contributing to what we're seeing in this moment, you know, proposals for forced displacement of two million Palestinians from Gaza, it's part of that goal to artificially engineer a Jewish demographic majority so that you don't have a situation of a minority ruling over a majority in the most classic, you know, discriminatory, you know, model, you can, you can sort of justify it as, well, we're the majority, you know.

Right, yeah. It's the number one reason why they claim not to be an apartheid state is because they're like, no, we, you know, apartheid was a small minority ruling over a large majority. In our case, we're the majority because we've put everyone who's not Jewish behind walls. So technically, whether it's like walls, you know, literal apartheid walls in the West Bank and in Gaza, or it's They'll sell walls. It seems to be how they've been able to maintain this illusion that they are somehow the majority in the region, or at least within their own borders, which is never been true. Or yeah, yeah, or by keeping Palestinian refugees, Nekba survivors from returning to their homes and their land, which is their right under international law. Right. The only purpose that serves is to maintain the artificial Jewish majority in the land. If Palestinians were allowed to go back to their homes and their lands, then the Jewish majority would no longer exist. And so Israel justifies its perpetual violation of international law by this goal of engineering, you know, of establishing a state that must have this demographic, you know, makeup.

But that doesn't work. you can't justify violating international law because you have a goal that is illegal. Right. You know, like your goal is not, you know, to engineer a Jewish majority in a land by force is not legal. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seems, it would seem ridiculous on its face for anyone who in, you know, any way purports to be a supporter of international law to, in any way engage in good faith with Israel's claims about any of this

but no there seems to be an exception. It's like the Nixon Frost interview. It's like I'm saying when Israel does it, that means it's not illegal. So that's what it feels like what's happening. You guys have to see Frost

Nixon is a great movie and that was a quote from it. But yeah, it is so I mean I want to talk about you a little bit in terms of the Palestine pot. You've been doing that podcast for how many years now? We started in 2020, I think, or 2021. Yeah. How did you and Michael meet? We met on Instagram, actually. I saw some of his videos and I was like, hell yeah. You know, I was really, it was really

refreshing to see an anti-Zionist Jewish comedian who was just so unapologetic and and speaking truth and really rooted in, you know, Jewish principles and saying this has nothing to do with our faith and these people have co-opted our faith and they are, you know, cosplaying as us and they're telling everyone that this is what Judaism is and it's not and it's on us to do something about it and so I was I found that um you know really compelling and I followed him and uh kept watching his videos and I said you know what let's make a podcast I just sent him a message like that thinking you know like I don't know maybe we'll make an episode or two and let's see what happens there was no like there was no thinking behind it it was very much a spur of the moment

thing and then here we are five years later five years later and the palisine pot is still going strong um you guys it's a great podcast i i uh listen i listened to it before um you know uh october seventh uh because i knew michael from uh from stand up uh and uh it was it was one of those things where i uh at one point in my life i thought um you know this uh i should do podcast about this issue um but then i when i saw the palestine pot i was like all right someone's already doing it so i'll just i'll just talk about i'll talk about sopranos we need more we need more everybody everyone has a role to play and i think honestly the more people talking about it the better if there's a hundred more podcasts even better because the truth is is that there's strength and numbers

and the more people you have speaking truth to power the more powerful we are as a collective and just the the weaker the propaganda is. And I think that's really important because there has been so much propaganda. Yeah. It's endless. I mean, as anyone who watches the show knows. Well, has it helped to collaborate with someone from the world of comedy? Like, I don't know, Daniel, you tell me. Right. I mean, I mean, I am kind of asking for based on my own experience although I'm not a comedian but I'm also not like an international human rights lawyer

like your world and Michael's world seems so completely different you would expect that you'd be like the dry fact one and he'd be yucking it up but actually the two of you are doing this together because you actually vibe well together independent of your you know your professional vocations but like what's that been like has it

have it has it helped what has it done for you to be in a collaboration with someone who comes from that world well i think comedy is really powerful um for a couple of reasons one because you can say anything right it's comedy you know there's a creative license to make analogies and and to create and to think about things in a different way for the purpose of comedy and i think as a human civilization like we've all accepted that um i remember in one of our first episodes michael made a joke that was like you know he was pretending to be netanyahu and he was like if the international criminal court looks at a zionist you know that's anti-semitism and i was like michael we can't say that because he didn't say that and so technically it's like defamation

and like i'm always trying to like minimize the legal risk of our episodes right and he's he's he's is always like, you know, off the cuff or whatever. But, you know, and eventually, like, we, we let it stay in because we were like, it's comedy, right? It's comedy. It's just comedy. It's a joke. And the funny thing is, is that now, several years later, that the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Galant, he actually said something very similar. So it actually manifested and became real life, right? Yeah. Yeah. Think of the most ridiculous. possible thing you could

imagine an Israeli politician would say and wait six months and they will end up saying it it was yeah if you jokingly said you know something like shy davidai is Hamas

just wait six months and you'll find people saying that exact thing if you want prophecy probably stand-up comics are the ones who are likely to predict the future And if you want sober analysis of what's already happened, that's where technical expertise comes in. I want to say one other thing, which is to answer your question, there's also like the reality that Palestinians love to laugh.

Like we are a very funny people. Oh, yeah. We love to laugh. We love to make jokes. We love to, you know, lighten the mood whenever we can. And that's just part of our nature. So I personally, you know, appreciate that. And I also think it's therapeutic.

It's therapeutic to look at some of, you know, in terms of helping process what we're seeing to have moments of just laughing at the absurdity, you know, because it is absurd. And if you don't laugh, you know, you need some sort of a release. And so I think Bad Hasbro has also been really helpful. And I see that in the comments, you know, you guys have people saying, like, I would blow my brains out if it wasn't for your podcast you know because I can't process this I need I need a space where sane people are talking about how insane this is right yeah yeah no I mean I definitely think it's like it's a useful coping mechanism you know it's it's useful to process it's like

the one time where parissocial podcast engagement I think serves a really positive purpose in society, usually it's negative as shit. Usually it's just people yelling at you for betraying them. But in this case, because of this sort of mass hysteria that's been happening for the last like 16 months, you know, in the United States, and particularly in the American Jewish community, and also, you know, like the media and obviously our government as well, just the way in which people are pretending that we live in this opposite land in which the eternal victims of everything is Israel and the Israeli people and the eternal oppressors of them are and have always been the Palestinians. This is the one

time where it feels like very positive that people have a place to go in which to like kind to process these things together with people who they may not necessarily, you know, know personally, but they feel like they're having a, they're in on a conversation where people are, you know, assuring them that, yeah, no, you're not, you're not crazy. The world has just gone briefly insane for 70 something years. But yeah, I found, you know, the same to be true with your podcast. You guys, you guys were kind of, I consider you the OG. in terms of, like, you know, being in this space and talking about it because, you know, we came into it, you know, late in the game, right?

And it's a great podcast. We had Michael on early, early on, and we're all very excited to have you on as well, Laura. So I'm glad you could be here. I wanted to talk about some content. First, I want to talk about some leaflets. that were dropped over Gaza. Now, the leaflets thing, in terms of Hasbara, has always been what Zionists will fall back on

to prove the morality of Israel and the IDF. If you don't know, Israel always claims whenever there's any kind of military action, we dropped leaflets all over the neighborhood before we leveled it therefore we are very moral and good people. I'm surprised they don't call it a literacy drive or something or like cross-cultural like Yeah, yeah, it's cross-cultural exchange. Like here's a little bit of Hebrew and a little bit of Arabic and you can read it together.

And once you learn it, it tells you that we're going to destroy the home you've lived in for the past 70 years. Never mind the fact that Gaza is a much more literate society, probably than Israel is, but never mind. Yes. And I just want to, first I want to play a video of what it sounds like. This is the thing about scientists. I don't think they know what they sound like sometimes. I think they think the rest of the world is in their exact sort of delusional headspace. So when they make these arguments, they think they are, you know, they think the general public is as convinced of this bullshit as they are. And so it is, it's always creepy to watch.

And I have a video of someone talking about the leaflets. I'm going to play that for you guys right here. So the first thing image we see here, this is a stitch, is we see some Palestinians who are, you know, recording on their phone and a bomb goes off or, you know, a missile hit something. Oh my gosh. How on earth was he able to set up a camera literally facing exactly where this bomb was going to fall? And the people were far enough away to not get hurt at all. And no one was actually where the bomb fell. I mean, how did that even happen? Oh, right. Israel sends

leaflets to avoid civilian casualty. Is she had a child's birthday party? Yes, she is. Yes, she is. She's taking a break from her niece's, you know. Yeah, from her niece's two years old party in order to make a video trying to justify the bombing of civilians in Gaza. In a community center. Yes.

Auntie Leigh, can I have my cake? No, shut up. I'm making a video. Not now. Now, I'm making Hasbara. The world needs to know. Yeah, in the video, I've zoomed in very slowly on a happy birthday balloon while she is talking. Oh my gosh.

Was that the point of the video? Because we saw it. We, with eyeballs and brains, saw it. Unfortunately, not everybody has eyeballs and brains, so not everyone sees that. But it's... You added the music, yeah. Oh, of course, I added the happy birthday music. Like, it's just like there's a level of, I don't know what you call it when you see.

Delusion. It's delusion. It's psychosis. Yeah, it's psychosis. That's what in the eyes. For me, it's a mass psychosis event that has lasted 76 years. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, if you, you just look at the way she was conveying her message, her teeth were clenched, her eyes were open really wide. There is something psychologically not stable here. Yeah, yes. It was like you could see in her face and like in her eyes specifically this, I don't know. It's like a psychosis. Like deeply troubling. I mean, you know, sane people do not justify the need to. level apartment buildings where families live.

Yes. And I think that's the elephant in the room. You know, they use the leaflets to justify the destruction of civilian homes and the killing of Palestinian families. They use the leaflets to order Palestinians to leave their homes so that then they can say the ones who didn't leave are terrorists. And then we can just kill them because we tell them. because we told them to leave, right?

So leaving aside the international legal aspect of this, because this is all illegal, there's no way that this complies with any international norms. And I'm not going to bore your listeners with getting into the reasons why, but if you're interested, Francesca Albanese has talked about this a lot. But it's just not something sane people do. And I think that's the elephant in the room that nobody's really addressing. when they, you know, they always start the discussion,

but we send leaflets when we do it. And it's like, why are you doing it in the first place? Well, if we could just detour from the leaflets themselves just for a second because this brings up something that friend of the show, girlfriend of the show, Hadar Cohen, yeah. Put into chat GPT recently is Zionism a psychosis? Please read that.

So I actually just sent it to Matt if we could get these on screen. it's uh yeah there's several pages if you flip to the the very beginning yeah so the first yeah the the prompt was is zionism a psychosis uh she asked the the bot and the bot said if you're asking whether zionism functions like a psychosis that would depend on the framework you're using psychosis involves a break from reality and some argue that zionist ideology contains elements of ideological delusion such as the denial of Palestinian existence the rewriting of history or the belief in eternal victimhood while exercising power over others.

Damn chap, JPD. Oh, no. Others, however, see Zionism as irrational. More bots are turning. It's happening. Yeah. They're becoming sentient. Others, however, see Zionism is irrational,

albeit deeply flawed response to historical Jewish persecution. Well, that's nuance. Would you like to explore a psychoanalytic critique of Zionism and you bet she said yes? Absolutely. A psychoanalytic critique of Zionism could explore the movement

through concepts like trauma, projection, and collective identity formation. So number one would be trauma and repetition, compulsion. So Zionism emerged in response to Jewish historical traumas, but instead of breaking free from these cycles, it arguably reenacts them by displacing its trauma onto Palestinians. The state of Israel built as a supposed refuge, perpetuates its own form of ethnic displacement and violence, mirroring the very oppression it sought to escape.

I mean, I wonder what academics and scholars, chat GPT is pulling from to come together with this quite brilliant and co-gender analysis. Projection and externalized fear. Freud and later psychoanalyst described projection

as a defense mechanism where individuals or groups displace their own unwanted qualities onto others. Zionism often externalizes Jewish historical victimhood framing Palestinians as existential threats. This allows Zionist ideology

to sustain a sense of Jewish moral purity while justifying preemptive violence. Palestinians rather than being recognized as victims of Zionism are instead portrayed as the aggressors. Wow. This is kind of amazing.

Keep going. Keep going. Yeah. Paranoia and the persecutory fantasy. Freud and later theorists like Jocla Khan exploit paranoia as a psychological condition rooted in deep-seated insecurity. Zionism fosters a hypervigilant,

the world is against us mentality even when Israel holds significant military, political, and economic power. The belief that Israel is in perpetual danger, despite being a nuclear state with U.S. backing, suggests a persecutory delusion. It certainly does. Yes, it does.

Where the fear of annihilation justifies ongoing occupation and military aggression. And number four, narcissism and national identity. Freudian and post-Froidian thought, especially in the work of Heinz Kohut, examined how nations, like individuals, construct narcissistic self-images. Zionism often portrays Israel as an exceptional moral, and it turns. righteous state incapable of wrongdoing,

this narcissistic self-concept makes it difficult for Zayna's discourse to acknowledge Palestinian suffering without experiencing

it as a personal attack. My God. And defile and the denial of Palestinian subjectivity. Psychoanalysis,

mainly, particularly in Lakanian theory, discusses disavowal, a mechanism where one simultaneously knows and does not

know an uncomfortable truth. That's very important, I think. Yeah. I think there's often a

false binary between do Israelis know, do they not know? And it's both at the same time. Zionists all over the world fall into this category too. Zionism requires the disavowal of Palestinian existence. Israel was founded on land where Palestinians lived, yet its dominant narratives insist it was a land without a people. The Nakaba is both known and systematically denied in Israeli consciousness, creating a form of collective repression. Wait, before you move on to supremacy, that is exactly why. you saw in the aftermath of October 7th, Israeli leaders saying that they were going to commit the 2023 Nekba and why when they went into Gaza, soldiers were putting graffiti up in

Palestinian homes that said Nekba 2023. And also why just two days ago I saw an interview with Smotrich, of all people, who was speaking about Palestinians in Gaza saying, you know, you know where they're they should they should leave gaza those aren't their actual homes anyway you know where their homes are their homes are in haifa and and yaffa and nakka and nazareth and all of this and it's like exactly you know and it's like so you've just admitted to the nekba and the denial of the right to return and you've just admitted it wasn't a land without people and that you established a state for jews on land that was not jewish whose whose inhabitants were Palestinian Arabs who are Muslim and Christian primarily like you have just affirmed

everything we have been saying. And you said it in passing as means to justify the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza because you thought it was like a hot take. And it wasn't. It was just an admission that you live in this collective denial and erasure of Palestinians. But at the same time, like, you know the truth. And this is like the thing that one day Israel is going to have to confront. They're going to have to confront what they did to us and what they keep doing to us and they keep pretending like we don't exist we weren't there they didn't do it to us if they did it even as they admit that they did it and they'll do it again that's the thing I think that's the hardest to get around Israeli husbarah like you know American imperialism has

its own brute stupidity and and most Americans don't know what the fuck America's done all over the world right and don't care but the specific kind of intimate knowing and not knowing at the same time admitting and denying at the in the same breath yes i'm i'm not a historical expert i can't make sweeping there's never been a society like this uh in history i don't know but there is something very specific yeah about this and it does feel like what it feels like to be dealing with a very um deranged yes person on a collective level it i think what drives people crazy it's that it's not just that it's gaslighting, it's that it's ham-fisted. It's like that is a...

We just isn't even kosher. Right. That's not even kosher. It's crazy to like, to gaslight people in general is obviously, you know, abusive. But what's crazy about it for, you know, in these cases, is they will, in the same sentence, affirm they know about the atrocities they've committed and then deny that they committed them. And I think this is actually why Israel and Israeli society has no choice but to, you know, just steamroll all the way to right-wing fascism. It's why they've at, you know, such an alarming rate have become these right-wing fascists is because they are gotten to the point where the caring about optics that the liberal Zionists have. you know, is just, um, it's too heavy of a burden. It's too much to keep in your head. So eventually

you just, uh, you know, you say, fuck it. Yes. We want to do ethnic cleansing. We want to do another NACPA. The NACPA was good. You have to embrace this right wing fascistic ideology or else you're forever, um, you know, in this place where you're holding all these different lies together to try to That's what Jabotinsky said back in the day. Yes. That's what Jabotisky said, you fucking so-called liberal Zionists. What are you doing? Stop pretending.

Stop pretending we're not a settler movement. Of course we are. If you don't want to be involved in settler colonialism, the fuck off. Yeah. Don't do it. Like then don't do it. Yeah. And actually, you know, I respect that, actually.

There's an honesty to that, right? I know. I mean, all these years of trying to keep together this most moral humanitarian image. Or the thing that liberal Zionists did for a very long time, which was to put a separation between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, as if it wasn't all Palestine. As if there weren't Palestinians where Israel is, and there are still Palestinians where Israel has established itself. And as if 20% of the population, right? And as if by the same token, Israel doesn't control all, like it's all Palestine and it's all Israel in a sense. Like functionally,

yes, exactly. There is no occupied territory separate from the regime that controls it. Right. Yeah. 100%. Israel controls Palestinian life from the river to the sea. And depending on where you are geographically, you are subject to different forms of colonial violence, which vary in intensity with Gaza being the most extreme manifestation because it has reached the level. of an ongoing live stream genocide for 16 months now. So yes, you're absolutely correct. And if you go back to number four, number four is extremely important because what we saw as we were responding to Israel's destruction of Gaza

and its killing of Palestinian families on a daily basis for 16 months, within about a week it became very clear that Israel was going to commit a genocide in Gaza and that it had already started to do so. And the analyses started pouring in not only from Palestinians on the ground, but in parallel in real time from the scholars of state crime and genocide. And what is so interesting about the response from Zionists was, what do you mean? A genocide? Israel can't commit a genocide because it's Israel. That was the response as if that means anything. That doesn't mean anything. You're a state like any other state and states can commit crimes, including the crime of all crimes, which is genocide. And so there's

nothing about your intrinsic characteristics that prevents you from committing this crime, which in fact, not only are you committing, but you're literally doing it televised and everybody is waking up every day and watching it play out on their phones. I literally didn't sleep for the first six or eight six to eight months of the genocide. I was just up all night watching the genocide unfold. Yeah. And so it's this, it's this gaslighting that you're watching it play out and they're telling you that it's not happening.

They're telling you don't trust your eyes. For Palestinians in Gaza, they're telling them, you know, don't believe what you're experiencing, right? Yeah. And then you've got the spectacle of, this is the other unique factor here, I think, or at least semi, it must be semi unique. You got this worldwide cheering section for it who are affiliated. ethno nationally

being like, no, we're the real victims and I think this was like number two or three, right? Would you hide me and all this shit? This was happening in the first couple of weeks of it. And I'm noticing it right now with the release of the, you know, the corpses of the Bibas kids, right? The sense of collective Jewish victimhood

that when it gets to this fever pitch of they're the victims, it they're after us, this is an attack on us, you know some ugly, ugly shit is being about to be unleashed. But I can't even imagine what it is to be Palestinian. And not only to be asked to believe that the country that's doing this to your people is, quote, unquote, the most moral, but that somehow your natural human, anguish and upset and rage at what's being done to your people constitutes a thing.

threat to the feelings and lives of like Jews all over the world. Yeah. I don't, my brain breaks. Yeah. When I try to imagine what that must be like, if I have family in Gaza, if I have family in the occupied West Bank. Yeah. I think it's why I end up filled with rage and resentment over anyone in the United States who I know who is constantly spouting off about their fear of being a Jewish person, you know, at this time. Because it's part of this chorus of delusion that you see within our community of people

who would truly would put them their own feelings. over the material conditions, dead Palestinians on the ground. They truly would focus on hypothetical fears that they have over the realities. And it just makes you, you know, I think it makes a lot of people go completely insane because a lot of these people once were, you know, seemingly allies of good things, you know. I think also when you look at the discourse on, you know, you know, the empty allegations of anti-Semitism to, right? This notion that, like, Palestinians are driven by blind hate, right?

That their actions, their resistance against colonial violence is driven by the identity or the claimed identity of the people carrying out the violence and not by the violence itself. It's a very racist analysis, right, that we would be okay with it, for example, if they were just a different, you know, they claimed they prayed to a different God or they had a different identity or whatever. Of course not. The problem is what they did to us. It doesn't matter who they prayed to. It doesn't matter if they believe or they don't believe. It doesn't matter what their religion or their background is. The problem is what they did to us. The problem is

the Nekba, which is ongoing. It has never ended. It began in 1948 even before, and it has been ongoing every single day since then. And the genocide is merely the latest chapter, the latest manifestation of the ongoing Nekba, the sole purpose of which is to, to eliminate Palestinians from Palestine. And you do that through killing, you do that through destruction, you do that through starving them, you do that through forced displacement,

and eventually to take that land for Jewish settlement, which is how the state was born in and of itself and how it's seeking to expand now. I mean, whether or not they'll be able to accomplish this goal in Gaza, which they are trying, they say they're trying to do, is going to depend on a number of factors, but I think they have all,

like all colonizers do, underestimated the will of the Palestinian people to remain on their land. They will not go down without a fight, and they have every right to resist force displacement. That's right. And yet somehow they managed to keep clear in their heads what you just said. It's not about the identity of the people doing it to them. It's about who they're resisting. It's about what they're resisting. I don't know if either of you guys have seen no other land. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it. Just saw it the other night. Quite a lovely film and nominated for an Oscar, and I hope it wins, bringing more attention to what's happening in Masafriata

in the South Abraham Hills. But, you know, there's a scene where the Israeli activist, who's the sort of one of the two protagonists of the film, Yuval, comes on one of his visits to Basel Adra's village. And it's not like everyone welcomes them. Oh, our Jewish savior, welcome, brother. Like, there is some distrust, but it's very, understandable and it's expressed in a way that's not like get out of here Jew right it's like

yeah you're from you live over there on the other side of the you know you're free we're not you have rights we don't we don't like prove yourself to us trust like like earn our trust which is a human thing yeah there's nothing about like and they yes they he they do ask him if he's yahood but that's just how they say Israeli Jew Right. Right. They're not, they're not, there's, there's no, like, anti-Jewish edge to it whatsoever. And in fact, it's rather, there's a lot of camaraderie and, uh, it's very human.

If you actually watch what happened, I'm going off on a tangent, on a tangent, on a tangent. We were going to talk about the leaflets. We haven't even gotten to the leaflets. No, I know. Okay. So number six, supremacy has a defense against guilt. Franz Phenon, drawing from psychoanalysis, described how colonial societies rationalized their violence through racial hierarchies.

Zionism justifies Jewish supremacy in Israel-Palestine as a necessary defense against historical oppression, suppressing guilt through moral rationalizations. When Palestinians resist, it triggers deeper feelings

of insecurity and aggression, reinforcing cycles of violence. And I would add, and then they project onto the Palestinians, the kind of racial animus that they themselves have to bring to the project in order to justify it in the first place.

It originates from over here and then they perceive it over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. Someone write a thesis on this. Maybe that's where they took this from. I don't know. Maybe someone has. I assume that that's someone...

Someone read a thesis and the only source you cite is just chat GPT. Conclusion, Zionism is a psychopolitical structure. I like this a lot. Psychopolitical formation. Yes, yes. Rather than being a psychosis in the clinical sense, Zionism can be understood as a psychopolitical formation driven by unresolved historical trauma, persecutory anxiety,

and the defensive mechanisms of projection, denial, and supremacy. Its contradictions, claiming to seek safety while perpetuating insecurity, asserting moral purity, while committing atrocities, suggest a structure of psychic fragmentation that requires ongoing violence to sustain itself. Wow. And this is why the project will fail because there are limits to what military power can achieve. and it's it's just unless you're going to nuke the entire world right you know which is the samson option and they haven't excluded it um you may have talked about that already but yeah um no yeah you're right unless you're going to do that there are limits there are limits and at some point

you're going to have to reckon with the fact that there are seven million Palestinians living between the river and the sea and there's seven million more Palestinians enforced exile who have the right to return to their homes and lands because they're either Nekba survivors are the descendants of Nekba survivors and you're going to have to wrestle with the Nekba. You're going to have to wrestle with the foundational myth that you are a state that was for a people without, you know, a state, a land without a people for a people without land. That's a lie. There were people there. People like my family and millions of other Palestinians. And the proof is just in the fact, if you even just look at the map, it's like there's Gaza, there's Palestinians there's Israel.

there's Palestinians there. There's the West Bank. There's Palestinians there. There's Palestinians in all of historic Palestine. And ask any Palestinian that you meet today where they're from, they're going to give you a city that existed prior to 1948 and may or may not still exist today. And that's where their family was from. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's, it's interesting. We talk about the you know unless they are willing to you know

push the Samson button you know do the option this is the only thing that keeps me I think with any semblance

of optimism when it comes to any of this is the fact that there is no there is no road other than wiping out a large portion

of the world world that doesn't include Palestine eventually being free. And for me, I look at it as like the founding myths of it make it inevitable. The founding myths of Israel. Like, you know, we were driven into exile and we are back to take our land. They are. The epilogue is written into the prologue. Yes, it is. And so they are forever, forever going to be living in the state of insecurity because even if they were to drive out ethnically cleanse the entire land of the Palestinian people, they would forever be afraid because they base their right on this land on the, you know, on the idea that because from, you know, 3,000 years ago we were driven out,

yada, yada, yada, their foundational myths are going to be the thing that destroys them in the end because they are going to, you know, have to reckon with these realities at the same time of people's right to return. And there's, I just don't see, I don't see yet, despite the batars of the world and the right wing, the Kahanis and the Jabotinskiists and all these like psychopaths and Lakud and all the Jewish power party and Jewish home, I don't see a unified, let's do a holocaust. I see infighting. I see them understanding that they want to be of the world and not a separate entity.

And for every crazy Zionist out there who says, fuck the world, we don't need them, we only need us. There's two more who are just like, I just want to be normal. And there is no normality in apartheid. There's no normality in being a fascist. Nazi state. And the hope lies in some principle that psychosis can only last so long. Yeah, but not just for them, but for the world, for the world, you know.

Yeah, and I think, I mean, look, I think we need everything all the time in terms of resistance, whether from the inside or the outside, drawing attention to the atrocities, educating people, et cetera. I think, you know, something, even Anthony Blinken, said it. It was one of the last things he said before the Biden administration said goodbye and we welcomed, you know, Trump. He said, oh, as it turns out, there are the same if not more number of Hamas fighters in Gaza now today as there were when Israel began. Yeah, a real ringing endorsement of your policy. So if, you know, if the stated public

aim of Israel's military campaign, its genocide, was to eliminate Hamas. And now there are more Hamas members than when Israel began. Then Israel has spectacularly failed. And the reason it has spectacularly failed is because you cannot bomb resistance out of existence. That is illogical. Resistance exists because there are certain conditions on the ground, which a lot of, allow it to come into existence. It is a response to an injustice. Demandate it coming into existence. Demand it coming into existence.

Exactly. And whether it's called Hamas or something else or by another name, it doesn't matter. There will be a different group. It'll have a different name. Then the U.S. will designate them as terrorists. And it'll keep going, right? But at some point, you're going to have to reckon with the fact that you

cannot bomb a way a people's will to be free. It just doesn't work. And so, you know, the ANC were designated terrorists as well. And then, you know, Nelson Mandela now has his name on children's libraries. And he is a revered hero. And, you know, we all love him. And, you know, he said, our freedom is not complete without the freedom of the Palestinians. There's a reason why all the major anti-apartheid leaders in South Africa were very devoted and, you know, close allies with the Palestinian people and their liberation struggle because they saw themselves in one

another. Yes. Yes. Yeah. They mean, they're the first to recognize it. It's always you know, been something that has earned them the ire of the U.S. State Department, the fact that like, come on, we

you guys got rid of apartheid and now you're out here trying to get rid of other apartheids. Fuck you. Just let us make movies about you and let us claim that your victory is our victory without trying to cozy up to the people that we are fighting our allies. Yeah, it's great. Well, I want to talk about leaflets, but we do have to take a little break. Can I just give the little post script to the whole

Oh, please, please, please. The chat GPT post. Yeah. So Hadar posts this on Instagram, right? What do you think the loudest and most frequent complaint about that post was? That chat GPT is anti-Semitic? No, it was that it was ablest to ask, is Zionism. a psychosis. Oh, my God. That if we talk about Zionism as a mental illness, now we are impugning people with mental illnesses. And I just want to say, as someone who's been diagnosed with various things over the course

of his life, fuck off with that shit. Fuck off. Please. Please fuck off with it. Because I can't think of a better, more incisive. I mean, I get the impulse, I guess, but it's just hypersensitivity taken to such an extreme that it shuts down the ability to just speak plainly about what's in front of our face.

Yeah, yeah. If you can come up with a better, and in fact, more well-roundedly, like, trenchant and yet compassionate and yet uncompromising at the same time formulation, then psycho-political formation to describe Zionism, I'd like to hear it. Yeah, please do. Because it actually does capture the human tragedy of it. It captures the universality of it because there is something going on in the collective psyche, right?

It doesn't exceptionalize Jews. It doesn't say it's some kind of Jewish conspiracy. It doesn't put it in impenetrable, you know, leftist, revolutionary jargon. Yeah. Yeah. It actually, it gets at the emotions underneath the core of this thing. Yeah. And the whole thing is driven by emotions.

Yes. Quite clearly. So I just found that. I just had to roll my eyes at that. I mean, yeah, that kind of, that kind of discourse is completely unhelpful. But for the record, just because you may also suffer. from some sort of psychosis. We're not saying that that makes you a Zionist.

Correct. All right. You've got a whole different level of your own individual psychosis and you know what we respect that. Just not everything is an attack. Just because one thing is an example of another thing. It doesn't mean the other thing equals all the first thing.

Exactly. Let's try and keep our discourse healthy all right um but uh let's speaking of healthy let's try to keep our capitalism healthy what enjoy these products ad break ad break i will be right back we need a psychotic break we're going to get an ad we're going to take a psychotic break in order to have an ad break enjoy Moral Podcasts. I am here. We are here with at Gosengar, Lara. Thank you so much for being here with us. We promised leaflets and we will deliver them. These are, this is, this came out a few days ago. It was reported by only like lefty outlets and like pro-Palestine outlets. It's like one of

those things that really pisses me off is the ignoring of things by the mainstream media that point out the general genocidal nature of the Israeli state. But as far as I know, these do appear to be genuine. So Israel dropped leaflets over Gaza threatening to displace all two million residents. These are what the leaflets look like right here. And I will read this for you so that you can know what was dropped to the honorable people of Gaza. That's so respectful. Yeah, it's a good start. After the events that have taken place, the temporary ceasefire and before the implementation of Trump's mandatory plan, which will impose forced displacement upon you, whether you accept it or not,

we have decided to make one final appeal to those who wish to receive aid in exchange for cooperating with us. We will not hesitate for a moment to provide assistance. Reconsider your position. The world map will not change if all the people of Gaza cease to exist. No one will feel for you, and no one will ask about you. You have been left alone to face your inevitable fate. Iran cannot even protect itself, let alone protect you. And you have seen with your own eyes what has happened.

Neither America nor Europe care about Gaza in any way. Even your Arab countries, which are now our allies, provide us with money and weapons, while sending you only shrouds. there is a little time left the game is almost over whoever wishes to save themselves before it's too late we are here remaining until the end of time wherever you go whatever you do we will be right i mean jesus christ oh my god it's a fucking slow jam genocidal so come on can you put it back up for a second yes please yes okay so after the events that have taken place.

Genocide. You know, it's not an event which has taken place. It's not like, you know. Yeah, no. It's not a fucking carnival ride or so. You know, it's like, exactly. It's genocide. Okay.

Then Trump's mandatory plan, forced displacement will be imposed upon you whether you accept it or not. That is a declaration of a mass atrocity that they are intending to carry out. Yes. Literally a war crime being. admitted to on paper. It's more. It's a crime against humanity. And in fact, they make it sound like it's just Trump's idea. Like it came from Trump. Yeah. This has been part and parcel of the ideology of the state since inception. The early Zionists used to talk about what are they going

to do with all the people there. And you know, you know, the, I mean, there's so many quotes, but one of my favorite ones is, is I think a Herzl quote when he says that we will find jobs for the penniless population. That's how he referred to. Palestinians. You call them the penniless population. You can look it up. Oh, we can convince them to leave if we just get them jobs abroad or something. Okay. And then if that doesn't work, we'll have to transfer them, but quietly, quiet transfer. You know, not in an outward, an obvious way. And then it's this notion that their proposal to expel Palestinians is some sort of a humanitarian gesture, right? This idea that we're giving it, we're giving it. We're giving it. We're giving

you another chance if you want to cooperate and take advantage of our humanity and then if not then definitely we'll genocide all of you at that point which is you know no problem but and you will have consented to it by not having accepted our mass

atrocity proposal right our proposal for mass atrocity so there's so many shoot yourself in the head twice it's like the shittiest Columbia record club in the world if you do not if you do wish to be genocided do nothing

Yeah, right, exactly. And then it's just like, just how evil the wording is, you know. Yes. American, the U.S. don't care about you. Nobody will remember you. No one will remember you, yeah. It's no sane person or entity speaks in this way. It's incredibly threatening.

That's what an evil villain in a Bond movie says. Everything in here is just what Jigsaw says before he puts you in a, fucking thing that ripped your head off like this is this is nothing but villain speak you can't read it any other way than as a ransom note essentially i mean it is i'm surprised it wasn't cut out from little bits of magazine this shit is essentially saying sorry now i'm breathing into this sorry i'm laughing it's like it's you are essentially saying you know surrender dorothy in fucking, you know, like on a broomstick. Like, this shit is nothing but evil speak.

And it isn't just like, it's not a real plea for collaborators, for people to like break and start cooperating with the Israelis. It's not. That is not what they're doing. Oh, I actually think it is. Oh, you think so? Oh, I do. I do think so.

I do think they're dead. I think they're dead serious. I think they're dead serious. And I think, I think, you know, we saw them use, how else, one of the ways we saw them use the leaflets throughout this genocide was they cut up Gaza into little tiny squares. And then they gave each square a tiny number. And then they told people like, now we're going to bomb square one and two and three and four hundred and twelve. And if you're here, now we're going to bomb 311.

And if you're here, go here. And it's like all of it was wrong. Everywhere was being bombed all the time in any event. Zaza was offline so much of the time, couldn't even access where this information was. The information itself was wrong. It was used to, like, inspire fear and terror and all of this stuff. But at the end of the day, they still bombed everywhere in any event.

And so I think that they, of course, they want to carry this out. Whether they're going to be able to do it or not is a different question. But I think this is very serious. No, no, I agree with that. I guess what I'm saying is that there's a caveat in there, like, should you, collaborate with us we will send you aid and support we will not hesitate uh you know to help you what oh right yeah yeah yeah that shit to me uh is the um that's them being the uh trademark most moral like that's that's them saying we gave you a chance but that is it's not a we really

shouldn't be doing we really shouldn't be doing this yes yeah yeah yeah but we just we just couldn't live with ourselves if we didn't try to cut you on this once in a lifetime deal yeah uh my manager doesn't know i'm extending this offer to you yes no i i think that that is uh oh yeah that part i i agree with i mean they don't expect anyone to like take that they expect people to uh they expect this to cause fear confusion depression this is for them to gloat about their uh upcoming uh knockba attempt you know this is this is them saying fuck you

we're going to displace you whether you like it or not get ready to go and you won't be able to say we didn't warn you and you won't be able to say we didn't warn you look how moral we are for telling you before we crush you and it's and I think what pisses me off about

you know all of this beyond the like depraved nature of it is again I'm searching the internet for coverage about this leaflet. And I see people like Skahill talking about it, DropSight talking about it. I see it covered in the New Arab. Dropsides become a really crucial resource.

Yes. You know, New Arab, I think Monda Weiss. It was a democracy now. It was in democracy now. And yet, radio silence from anyone in mainstream media. And you need to do nothing else but look and read the letter to understand that the Israelis are the bad guys. There's nothing more clear than that. And because of the fact that they're making it that clear, it's like, you know, the mainstream media doesn't want to touch it because they can't make it that obvious.

They can't go against their own narrative. Their narrative that this is complicated, that there's many different facts. assets to this. That there's nuance, that you need a PhD to understand, that you can't begin to understand if you don't have certain, yeah, you know,

there's a lot of, one of the ways that I analyze this issue, a lot of the times is from the perspective of how the historical record will tell the story of the Gaza genocide and of the ongoing neck by against the Palestinian people. And one of the realizations that I had, as I was watching Palestinian bodies,

be placed into massacry, in Gaza, you know, entire families. There was over 900 families that were wiped off the civil registry altogether and thousands of families for whom only one or two individuals remain in the entire family, okay? That they're the lone survivors and in many cases their children, which is why in Gaza physicians coined the term wounded child, no surviving family because they didn't have an acronym for this phenomenon before because Israel created the phenomenon in Gaza, okay? but as I'm thinking about all these things

and I'm watching these mass graves of Palestinians of people who had hopes and dreams and lives and deserve to live and deserve to be free I'm sitting here thinking to myself the good guys don't put people in mass graves that's right you know like the historical record doesn't tell the story

in a way where it's like and then they put people in mass graves but it was totally fine it had to happen it was inevitable you know so much of the discourse in this current moment in terms of justifying the genocide has been to paint it as this inevitable reality that just has to happen. It just has to happen. Just let it happen. It's got to happen. And that we can't stop it from happening. No, no, we have to prevent this from happening. We have an obligation to prevent genocide. And their justification has been, no, no, it's inevitable. It's, you know, it's going to happen. But yeah, good guys don't put people on mass grade.

Good guys don't arrest and torture pediatricians, you know, Dr. Hussam Abusufia. That's right. They just, they don't do that. Good guys don't fire 500 bullets into a car with a five-year-old girl named Hind Rajab, who's on the phone with the Palestinian civil defense screaming for someone to come save her. You know, there's so many more of these. You can, you know, I could go on for hours. Yeah.

And leaflets like this are why, no matter, I'm just speaking. for myself now. No matter what Israel and its apologists want to trot out as evidence of Hamas depravity, whether it's, you know, the pageantry of the way hostages are released or this or that, I'm just completely at this point unmoved because I've looked into the face of evil and the face of evil is a powerful regime that drops a leaflet like that. Whatever happens in the territory that that entity, that that regime occupies, controls, brutalizes, and genocides, as a result, whatever crops up in the form of resistance,

whether it's, and whatever chaotic scenes might erupt, whatever expressions of rage or revenge, I might hear individual Palestinians utter at different times. I'm just, I've seen the source of it. I've seen, I'm, I have a, my moral compass says, who has the power, who holds the cards, who has been blocking the just and legal and moral ways out of this since forever, who planned this, who benefits from this, and no matter what you show me in terms of

evidence that there are malign elements running that place or whatever. I'm like, okay, cool. And yours is the Bond villain regime that oversees all of this and drops a leaflet like that. I do want to ask you, Lara, about Trump's quote-unquote mandatory plan. Because I've heard different Palestinian voices speaking about it differently. And I don't want to put you in like as a Palestinian place, but just as you. I've heard some people, for instance Ali Abunima of electronic intifada

express a certain kind of like okay well how call us you know they're saying it out loud at least this has been the plan since forever I'm not particularly perturbed I'm not overly perturbed by hearing Trump come out and say it that the most offensive thing about it is who he's

sitting next to when he says it as if the as if the architect of the quote unquote parking lot that Gaza now is or the mass grave that isn't sitting right next to him What was your, what is your experience of this quote unquote mandatory plan? How seriously do you take it? What are your, what are your thoughts as, because as this quote unquote, we started asking you

about the ceasefire, but one of the things that's come with that ceasefire is this new cockamamie fake humanitarian ethnic cleansing plan being spoken out loud. What's your take on that? As a lawyer, as a Palestinian, as a person, as anything. well i i tend to agree with ali on this in the sense that you know it's not new israel has always sought since its establishment to remove Palestinians from Palestinian land and it has been obsessed with in particular expelling Palestinians from Gaza for a very long time and so i'm not particularly fussed uh you know given now that trump has said it because well now

Trump has said it, so it must mean something different. It just reveals what has been the plan all along and the intention all along. And I think sometimes it's helpful to have that level of clarity when it comes to understanding what we're dealing with. I would I have preferred a situation where Joe Biden stood there for the next four years and told us that that's not what was really happening when in fact that is what was really happening? As the bombs keep falling.

Yeah, and as Palestinians are continued to be deprived of food and water and medicine and Gaza is made more and more unlivable and they're pushed out, like would I have preferred to be, you know, someone to gaslight me and to tell me that we weren't being forcibly displaced while we were? No. And I think, you know, Joe Biden gaslit us for, you know, for the last 15 months to tell us that what Israel was doing was that they were engaged in some form of legitimate self-defense. When in fact, what they did was they destroyed all of Gaza. Like 93% of all the housing in Gaza has been destroyed by Israel in the last 15 months. 93%. That's almost 100%. Like what part of that, you know, that just screams genocide. That screams intent to destroy a people in whole or in part. That's just about the housing. That's not about the water, the sewage, the electricity, you know, all of the other requirements, elements, building blocks of life. right which have all been completely decimated um and so for me you know i see that scene and i'm like the elephant in the room is that the architect of the genocide is sitting right next to you

grinning like the most evil you know um evil cartoon book you know character um he might as be twizzling his mustache like the dude is just he's smirking as the person as next to him is describing the sudden, you know, random incineration of Gaza. Evil Steve Urkel, did I do that? Yeah, did I? Yes. As if Gaza is just like a naturally dangerous place that we've got to rescue the Palestinians from because it's just like this, you know, by definition, by nature, it's a dangerous

place, you know? It spontaneously combusts every once in a while. As if it's a volcano. know, like, that's, so it's that, that break from reality that makes it particularly disturbing to watch. But I, I am happy that the intention has been stated clearly for the world to understand, because we've always known that that was the intention. But Palestinians will not let this happen. In fact, every single response that I have seen of Palestinians in Gaza, responding to the plan has been to laugh in their face, has been to tell them they'll never

leave. They'd rather die in dignity on their land than accept a proposal for help to be forcibly displaced, you know, into the Sinai or into Jordan or, you know, elsewhere in the world. Are you happy with Saudi Arabia's response? Reminded me of what that was. Yeah, what was it? It was a fairly robust statement saying the Palestinians have the right to be on their land. We completely reject any plan to, I thought I saw. I mean, it's the bare minimum. You know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, you know, applaud the bare minimum at this point. But I think, you know, it's really important for the world to understand that for 76 years, Israel has offered the Palestinians a choice of being victim to an ongoing Nekba or watching it take place from forced exile. There

are no other options for us. There is not anywhere for us as Palestinians to be free in Palestine. like there are no Palestinians on earth that are free right now on their land okay so the solution is freedom the solution is freedom is the restoration of people's rights which they would which they were deprived from the right to return the right to citizenship on their land the right to self-determination to determine their own futures as a people which is the most sacred right of all peoples under international law and you don't get that with apartheid, genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, they're just not compatible with one another. So so long as Israel wants to organize itself in this way where it seeks to maintain a certain

demographic majority through force, and it will always be incompatible with our rights to exist and live and thrive on our land and that is this that is the issue here and you're not going to get a resolution to this unless you confront that head on and Palestinians will not go down without a fight and as nobody else would because what would you do in that scenario you know how many times I've had people told me Palestinians have been so patient they have gone through so much they've been so patient, people don't understand, because the thing is, is that people expect Palestinians to react in a way that they themselves would not react. You know, Mohammed al-Kurd made a brilliant analysis recently, speaking about stand-your-ground

laws in America and how you can, someone comes onto your property. Like, you have rights as a property owner, but our rights as Palestinians, as property owners of our land, were not just ignored in an individual case, but ignored in terms of our entire society. The majority of our society was expelled from our land at the beginning of the Nekba, the majority. Right? So that's not something that goes away. And that trauma remains with us, the effects of that trickle down generation after generation. And every Palestinian today knows the story of the Nekba, and they will, you know, for many of us, we'll dedicate our lives to justice for the Nekba and the possibility that we will one day live in a post-Nakba Palestine.

Well, and this is the thing, I think, Zionist Jews, I think one of us, maybe it was said today, but Zionist Jews know this and Zionists know this on a certain level, because Zionism itself is predicated on the notion of the tenacity of historical memory. And that's memory for things that may or may not have happened a long time ago, thousands of years ago. Right. And, you know, cumulative history gathered through Jewish wandering and dispersal throughout the entire globe over many, many centuries. A few thousand years of lore. A few thousand years of lore, right?

How much more potent and indelible and unkillable is the memory of something that happened very quickly? I mean, not overnight, but in a concentrated period of time, that's heavily documented, that's recounted in the oral history of living families, within some people's living memory or a couple of generations. It's still happening. And it's continuing ongoing. There's at least 20,000 orphans from the Gaza genocide. Their whole life, they're going to know that Israel took everything away from them.

That doesn't, by the way, if I were to say that in the presence of a Zionist, they would say that that's an excuse to kill those children because they will be terrorists tomorrow, right? But it's, you know, this idea that demanding accountability is equivalent to terrorism. What? Accountability is the only thing that renders legitimate the entire international legal framework. If there's no accountability, there's no international law. It doesn't exist.

It's just words on paper in a book in a desk drawer or somewhere. If you don't have accountability, the system doesn't function. Now, people can argue about whether the system was even intended to function in the first place or not, and there's a lot of critics of international law, which I fully share and agree with. But what I'm saying now is if it's to mean anything from this point forward, there needs to be accountability. Absolutely. Great words to end on. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And we will see what the choice is. We'll see. We always try to end on a positive note. But sometimes it's hard. I don't know. We'll see what happens, man.

I mean, you know, whether or not we choose upholding the idea, the morals behind international law, or if we decide that for the sake of an apartheid state, we tear it all down so that we can allow genocide to be legal in this case. We'll see. And I hope to see you again, Laura. That was amazing. Thank you so much for coming on Bad Hasbar and talking with us. Where can people find your work? Oh, wow. Lots of places. First and foremost, the Palestine pod. We are free, no ads, everywhere where podcasts can be found on YouTube and Spotify, Apple, all that good stuff. Please give us a five-star rating. We'd much appreciate it and subscribe. You can also find us on Patreon, where we have an additional podcast, a little bit more personal. We talk Palestine politics, pop culture, a lot of P-words. Join our Patreon. And I'm also on Substack, where occasionally I will

put my musings into writing. And you can also follow my substack, gauze and girl. It's a great substack. It's a great podcast. And you're a great person. Thank you once again, Laura, for coming on. Thank you so much. My pleasure.

And thank you all for being out there talking with us, listening with us, emailing us, Bad Hasbara at gmail.com. And subscribing to us, patreon.com slash badhasbara. And thank you all for listening. And until next time,

from the river to the sea. We're so grateful for Lara E. Yes. And also Palestine will be free. And Palestine will be free. This is our little stick at the end. We do a little alternate rhymes. And also I have Daniel and Daniel has me.

Jumping jacks was us. Push-ups was us. Godmaga us. All karate us. Taking Molly us. Michael Jackson us. Yamaha keyboards. Us

Georgia makes on us Andor was us Keith ledger Joker us Endless Fred success Happy meals was us McDonald's was us Being happy us Bequam yoga us

Eating food us Breeding air us Drinking water us We invented all that shit Thank you.