Chapo Trap House - BONUS: Focus on Palestine feat. Mohammad Alsaafin

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

Felix is joined by journalist for AJ+ Mohammad Alsaafin for a wide ranging discussion on Palestinian resistance and the future of Zionism and the Palestinian cause. Sorry for the slightly abrupt outro, we lost the last few seconds of Mohammad’s audio, but please follow him at @malsaafin and check out and share this concise video explainer on Israeli apartheid he produced for AJ+: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MknerYjob0w And follow @ajplus on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

Today, we have a really special guest, you know, we said we were doing an episode specifically about Palestine, about Israel's actions, Israel's war crimes they have been committing, but also the background of Sheikh Jarrah, of these settlements. And today with us, we have a great guest, we have Muhammad al-Safeen from AJ Plus here to talk with us about Palestinian resistance and the future of Zionism and the Palestinian cause. Thanks Felix. Pleasure to be on.

Thanks for having me. No, thank you. Thank you for coming on. I'm ready to just jump right into it. Sure. So let's start with some background on the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood specifically. Can you give a summary of this specific neighborhood significance in Israeli expansionism? Yeah, so to start off, let's talk about what Sheikh Jarrah is and where it is.

It's a Palestinian neighborhood. It's quite small in occupied East Jerusalem. That's Israeli occupied East Jerusalem. And one of the things that Israel has been doing ever since it occupied East Jerusalem is it has a kind of target ratio for demographics. It wants to maintain the number of Palestinians in Jerusalem at 40% to 60% Israeli Jews. And it's, this isn't a secret. This isn't some kind of, you know, hidden reporting or investigative journalism that

had to reveal this. This is clearly stated in the plans for the municipality of Jerusalem as part of Israeli government plans, the idea is always to maintain a stable Jewish dominance in terms of demographics in the city. And to that end, what Israel has been doing since 1967 when it occupied East Jerusalem and then in the 80s when it formally annexed it is building Israeli settlements in and around the Palestinian neighborhoods and villages that make up East Jerusalem. And it set its eyes on Sheikh Jarrah because strategically it's, you know, it's important.

If it takes Sheikh Jarrah, then it becomes ever closer to completely encircling the main Palestinian neighborhoods around the old city of East Jerusalem. And so since the 80s, what it's done is it has allowed settler organizations, including settler organizations that are registered in the United States as nonprofit organizations to take the people who live in Sheikh Jarrah, the Palestinian residents to court, to Israeli court and claim that the land they live on is actually Jewish property. And therefore these settler organizations have a right to live there. And that's kind of the crux of what's happening.

The families that have lived there have lived there since the early 50s. And you know, they've been resisting this forced expulsion. And you know, Sheikh Jarrah has kind of made it into the news a lot over the last month because the Israeli courts announced that in May, early May, it was going to remove two families and then several more later in the year. And these families put up, you know, pretty heroic resistance considering that they have no weapons, they have no protection from the courts, from the Israeli state and the Israeli states actually colluding hand in glove with these settler organizations to remove them

from their homes. And the resistance kind of, you know, sparked a lot of solidarity amongst Palestinians in Jerusalem in the West Bank and Gaza in 1948, what we call the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Palestinians who stayed behind in Israel proper when it was founded. And we can get into that history a little bit as well, because I think it's very constructive. But yeah, you know, the resistance led to a brutal police crackdown. And what was interesting and what was kind of dumb on the Israeli police's part is this crackdown was filmed, it was filmed every day on live coverage from the residents.

They would be, you know, streaming on Instagram live to hundreds of thousands of people in the Arab world, in the diaspora, in the U.S., all over the world, you know, media outlets were starting to cover it. And every day the Israeli police would come in, would crack down on the solidarity protesters who would show up, especially during Ramadan when a lot of Jerusalemites would go to Shekhterah and break their fast, climb in a communal way outside these threatened homes, and then the settlers and the soldiers would attack them day after day on camera. And as you can imagine, that led to kind of like an uptick in anger and tension.

And it was coupled with, the other thing we can't leave out is it was coupled with a lot of Israeli police crackdowns outside Shekhterah, but on the old city of Jerusalem. So during Ramadan, when a lot of people would want to go pray in Al-Aqsa, which is the third holy site in Islam, it's the kind of the national symbol for Palestinians, it's a mosque that's in Jerusalem. The Israeli police put up barricades, they limited who to go in and out, they would violently attack young men. And again, you know, it was kind of like a feedback loop where the more the Israelis

cracked down, the more kind of this rage and anger amongst a lot of Palestinians was spreading and solidarity was spreading as well. And at a certain point, the Palestinian factions in Gaza, particularly Hamas and the armed wing of Hamas, told the Israelis, warned the Israelis, made a statement that, you know, if the Israelis didn't back off of Al-Aqsa and Shekhterah, then there would be consequences. And I think it's key here, we hear a lot about the kind of imbalance of power and it's key to talk about that here. Hamas threatening Israel with, you know, with retribution, if it didn't leave Shekhterah

alone, was important because for the first time, Palestinians in Jerusalem felt like they had someone who would be their defender, right? Hamas is the only, Hamas and you know, slumped Jihad and the factions in Gaza, the only kind of factions amongst the Palestinians that have arms, that have built some kind of resistance capability or military resistance capability. And so at a time when Israel was, you know, kind of rebelling in the fact that the Palestinians have become very disconnected, disunited, there was a lot of, there was a shift on the ground when the factions in Gaza and the resistance in Gaza kind of explicitly linked

that threat to protecting the people in Jerusalem. And then from there, we get to where we are now, which is Israel on its ninth day of completely pounding Gaza after rockets were fired. Can you talk a little bit about, a little further about broad support for Hamas's resistance? Because I feel like in the Western press and a lot of Hasbara efforts, a lot of hay has been made about, you know, how, well, Hamas is wrong too, you know, how do you support Hamas, basically arguing that Palestinians are delegitimizing themselves by supporting Hamas.

Yeah, just talk a little bit about the background of that. And I just have a small question. Did people not feel that Fatah would defend Palestinians in Jerusalem in the same way as Hamas? Yes. So one thing actually that's really interesting, because you were asking about Fatah and Hamas and people in Jerusalem, did they not feel like Fatah would ever protect them? I mean, Fatah, for those who don't know, is the other major Palestinian faction, right?

It's the one that kind of runs the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is the chairman of Fatah. But no, Fatah has no, as a party and as a power, has essentially been destroyed. And it's been destroyed by Mahmoud Abbas because, you know, he, his survival is predicated on the approval of the Israelis and the Americans. Palestinian Authority's sole role now, now that there's no chance for a two-state solution, now that there's no chance for any kind of Palestinian state because Israelis have taken so much of the land.

The only reason he exists is as a security force that helps enforce the occupation. So Palestinian activists in the West Bank, they are under threat of, you know, arrest and torture by the Palestinian Authority as much as by the Israelis. Any time there's any kind of attack by a Palestinian on, say, like an Israeli checkpoint, it's the Palestinian Authority that kind of take the lead in trying to track down who it was and passing on that intelligence to the Israelis. And so Fatah as a force has essentially dissipated, right? And so no, there was no one calling for Fatah to protect them in Sheikh Jarrah because Fatah

has no capacity to do so, like neither politically nor militarily. It's a disarmed political movement that essentially only exists on paper in Mahmoud Abbas's office. Hamas is, you know, a lot of people I think misunderstand Hamas. I like to think of Hamas as almost two organizations. You've got kind of the political side, which is, which is pretty incompetent and like embarrassingly so. You know, they've never been able to provide any kind of vision for Palestinian liberation. They've never been able to kind of unify Palestinians as a whole around any kind of program.

They've never really been able to advocate for Palestinian liberation or Palestinians in any way that's been effective, right? Some of that is due to Israeli pressure and, you know, and campaigns, including assassinations and more. But the other side of Hamas is the military wing. The military wing has, if you look at the trajectory of the growth of the military wing, it's going one way, right? So especially since 2005 when the Israelis pulled out of Gaza and for the first time

Palestinians had a territory that despite being, you know, infiltrated by spies and being surveilled 24 seven, Palestinians had a bit of space to kind of build some kind of military capacity. And that's what the military wing of Hamas has been doing diligently in like the last decade and a half. For the first time, Palestinians are able to fire long distance rockets that reach every area of, you know, historic Palestine. There's a symbolism to that, right?

It's the first time Palestinians have any kind of weaponry that can attack Israelis anywhere. Obviously, a lot of people will say that, you know, in this for a minute, rockets are a war crime, and, you know, I'll defer it to like human rights watch on that. They say it is. But the idea is we're talking about a guerrilla army fighting a battle for what they see that they're fighting a liberation battle, right? There's this tendency to kind of look at Hamas simultaneously, like the most evil, devious

people on the planet, but also like bumbling fools who don't know how to fire a rocket without blowing themselves up. And Palestinians on the ground, especially since 2014, when I think the, you know, the Palestinian resistance in Gaza surprised the Israelis with how tenacious it was. There's been a generation that's grown up and actually looks at them as, you know, the protectors of the cause, protectors of the only people they have in the world who are going to protect them from the Israelis. The disparity in power is so large that effectively they, you know, they can't really be protectors,

but they're the only people who will fight on behalf of the Palestinians. So when Muhammad live, who's the commander of Hamas's military wing, and essentially the commander of all the resistance movements in Gaza, this is a guy who has never been seen in public. There's only one picture of him that exists. He's like the number one on Israel's kill list and has been for 20 years. He never speaks. Any time he does, it's like audio only.

And he's only ever spoken in public three or four times. And usually that would have been during a war. But he came out with a recorded audio message, you know, supporting the families in Sheik Jirah and threatening the Israelis with, with violence if they don't leave the families in Sheik Jirah alone and if they don't stop storming the al-Aqsa Mosque, which is the other provocation that keeps getting missed, right? And he did that and between that and like the first rockets being fired, there was about 10, 12 days.

So you know, the Israelis had time to kind of tone it down and they did it. And one thing that stood out to me was how many protesters, how many people chanting just in Jerusalem and the streets, see them on video, chanting his name, right? A lot of people, they don't look at Mahmoud Abbas as, you know, as the leader of the Palestinians. They don't look at like any of Hamas's political leaders. It's this guy whose face no one has ever seen, right? Who's Israel's number one most wanted man. That's the guy that a lot of people in Palestine are chanting for across the West Bank, inside,

you know, Palestinian towns in Israel, in Jerusalem, as well as Gaza. So there's, there's been kind of a shift in how a lot of Palestinians look at the military resistance in Gaza. But on the, you know, it's fascinating, I know sometimes you've, you know, you've talked about, you know, we look at the, like the military capabilities of resistance movements or liberation movements, the rockets that Hamas are firing, the tunnels that they built, the, the drones that they built, you know, it's incredible what they've been able to achieve under this like crippling blockade.

A lot of people would say, well, they should have spent the money on hospitals and schools. I'm like, yeah, but then the Israelis always bombed those every time there's a, there's a flare up, right? Um, but you know, when the Israelis left Gaza in 2005, a Hamas rocket, a homemade rocket would barely travel two miles, right? Now they're building rockets. Now they have rockets that can reach, you know, 200 miles and hit any part of Israel. So there's a trajectory there of development, military development that I think surprises

the Israelis every time. So it'll be interesting to see how it goes, but Palestinians, especially younger Palestinians, see that trajectory. And I think it's, um, it's a source of hope for a lot of them that Palestinians might eventually be able to build an arsenal that's able to deter Israel, not necessarily defeat Israel, Israel's, you know, backed by the U S empire as a nuclear weapons, but at least to create some kind of deterrence that never was there in military terms. It's the way that, you know, Hezbollah and South Lebanon since the last war in 2006, been

on 15 years, but the Israelis know that if they do attack South Lebanon again or Lebanon again, Hezbollah has the capability to really hurt them and not necessarily defeat them, but at least hurt them in a way where, you know, any kind of war with Lebanon is not worth it. I think that's what a lot of Palestinians are hoping the factions in Gaza are able to get to. Yeah. And that is, that is the thing people miss when they, they go, Oh, I don't get why people

are mad at me. I said that Hamas should stop, stop firing rockets. Yeah. Israel should too. And it's like, well, like, do you, like, do you get the point of like having a deterrent? Yeah. So this doesn't happen again. Like that's why they're doing it.

I mean, there's, there's, there's, you know, when the first rockets were fired, I saw a lot of people, oh, this is so stupid, this is taking a tension away from Sheikh Jarrah. I mean, if you look at it from kind of like that perspective, yeah, but that doesn't reflect reality on the ground. That's the kind of thinking you get when you've been inside a think tank too long, right? But when you're on the ground and you're thinking, why is Gaza firing rockets because of Sheikh Jarrah? Well, like Gaza isn't, doesn't exist in a different continent.

Like Palestinians are in Gaza or Palestinians in Jerusalem. It's one struggle and they see themselves as fighting a struggle for liberation and equal and freedom on both sides. So this idea that, you know, Hamas firing rockets isn't helpful because Israel will just go on a murderous rampage. Well, she tells Israel to stop going on murderous rampages then and stop evicting people from their homes. And is it okay if I give a little bit of background on who the families in Sheikh Jarrah were and

what kind of makes their eviction or their, you know, upcoming expulsion so poignant to Palestinians? Is that okay? Oh yeah, of course. So the Palestinians who live in Sheikh Jarrah haven't lived there for hundreds of years. Those families moved there in the fifties and the early fifties. The reason they moved there is because they were refugees forced out by Israel from their homes near Haifa and the Mediterranean coast.

When Israel was founded, 700,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from the territory that became the state of Israel. That's three quarters of the Palestinian population at the time. They were either forced out at gunpoint or they fled after hearing reports about many massacres that were committed by Zionist paramilitaries prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. And that ethnic cleansing is the only reason and the only way that Israel was able to create a Jewish majority, right?

It was deliberate ethnic engineering to force out the people who were living there who were the majority and create a Jewish ethno state where Jews would be the majority in a state where they were a definite minority until just a few months prior. And so the families that moved into Sheikh Jarrah did so because at the time Israel hadn't yet occupied the West Bank. The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, was under the governance of Jordan and the Jordanian government in coordination with the United Nations had offered this plot of land in Sheikh Jarrah to these families in exchange for them giving up their refugee status, essentially

giving up their claims through return to their homes in near Haifa that the Israelis had taken over. And so what happened is after Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank and took over is that these families who had already been ethnically cleansed from their homes once were facing the exact same thing again. We're talking about generational, like a generational cycle. And that's what makes Sheikh Jarrah so poignant because it's not unique in the sense that Israel has been trying to kick out Palestinians from several neighborhoods in Jerusalem for

the same reason, among them Siluwan, which is just south of the old city. And where a settler organization called Elad, which I believe is also registered in the U.S. as a nonprofit and received $100 million from the Israeli, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich who owns Chelsea Football Club. The Guardian and BuzzFeed revealed last year that he had actually spent $100 million in this organization that explicitly works to ethnically cleanse the village of Siluwan. And kind of their reason or their stated reason for doing it is that there is a archaeological site under this village dating back to the times of King David thousands of years ago.

And so therefore, because King David possibly once lived there, therefore it belongs to Jewish people. Right? Yeah. It's very reminiscent of, there's an anecdote of Netanyahu. He displays some coin in his office that he says the ancient Hebrew translates to Netanyahu, which is a Hungarian name that's existed for like 500 years with echoes of that. And I think actually if I'm not mistaken, the Netanyahu name is actually adopted.

So that wasn't even the original family name, I need to double check that. So yeah, I mean, that's kind of the, so what Elad does in Siluwan is they've created a archaeological park. And so, you know, slowly bit by bit taking over land around the houses, around the homes, in some places, bribing some of these Palestinian families after kind of choking them off, bribing them then with some payment exchange for the houses. The ones who stay behind, you know, they suffer from ebillations, checkpoints, you know, inability to build, to grow, to expand.

And they're building this archaeological park and obviously the main, the main, it's a tourist attraction for American evangelicals, so the main people will go there. Right? That's the main, that's the main audience. So, all these areas, these are, these are like a, these represent a continuation of the Israeli policy in 1948 to remove Palestinians from land that it desires and replace them with Jewish settlers, right? And what's really interesting is, there was a, there was a sign at one of the kind of

the pro-Palestine protests that erupted over the U.S. that stuck with me. Someone hauled up a sign that said, every Israeli town was once Shercharah. And if you think about that, that's essentially the crux of this issue, right? Every Israeli town was once, you know, populated by Palestinians who'd been forced out and replaced with Israeli Jews. And you know, that's why it's, that's why it's, it's, it's hilarious when the Israeli foreign ministry says that what's going on in Shercharah is just a private real estate dispute between two private parties.

It's not, right? It's state-backed. And the, I mean, the other thing is, under international law, Israel should have, Israeli courts should have no jurisdiction over East Jerusalem anyway, because it's considered occupied territory. So there's layers to how much the Palestinian families in Shercharah, you know, there's layers to how much they're forced to endure. And you know, it's not a, it's not a private real estate dispute because the Israeli state

is fully complicit in this, whether through, you know, the forced evictions that are made by Israeli soldiers and police, or it's the court system that refuses to hear the, oh, so I mean, this is, this is the other thing we're talking about the crux of the issue. So the claim by these Israeli settler organizations that the land in Shercharah once belonged to Jews, you know, they're using, they're using kind of like land deeds from the Ottoman Empire to prove this, and, and there's, there's question marks about how valid these land deeds are, some of them may be forgeries, some not. But what's interesting is that they're not saying we have to return this land to the

people who owned it. They're saying that because Jews once lived here, then any Jew could then move in and kick out the Palestinians who live there now. And that's why you get, you know, Jacob from Brooklyn moving in to these families' houses. At the same time, I mentioned that the Shercharah families are originally from, you know, near Haifa, Israeli courts don't allow them to make a claim to return to their houses that are still there. So the Israeli courts will hear any case for any, any Jewish organization that wants to

reclaim the land that, you know, that you might not have lived in for hundreds of thousands of years, but a Palestinian who's still alive and says, you know, I want to go back to the house that, that was mine a few decades ago. The Israeli court system will not hear that argument and will not allow it. And that is kind of a testament to the apartheid system that Israel is running against Palestinians. And I mean, the utility of the settlements is pretty clear, I mean, one part of it is just expansionist settler colonialism. But the other part of it, I mean, the part that it can sort of like bolster, it can bolster

these flare-ups that, you know, like that's certainly what Netanyahu is partly using it for to save its sort of flagging political fortunes. But where does it end? That has been, that has been the thing that no Israeli can really answer. Where does this stop? Does it, yeah, does it stop at the West Bank or where does it go? Yeah. Or will the last settlement be put on?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think kind of the public facing discourse that Israel for decade had pushed out, especially to the West, was that, you know, initially these settlements, you know, they'll eventually be, will negotiate a resolution to them with the Palestinians, right? And that was kind of the basis of the Oslo Accords. So when the Oslo Accords were signed, for listeners who might not know, the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 between the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasser Arafat and the Israeli government, and it was the first time that any Palestinian organization

had come to an agreement with the Israelis. And the idea was that the Oslo Accords would create a temporary Palestinian authority that was to take over the running of kind of the day-to-day running of certain Palestinian population centers in the West Bank and Gaza, while, you know, what was called final status negotiations under the auspices of the United States would then decide a final resolution to the conflict. And the idea was that from 93 to 98, so it was supposed to be a five-year interim period, and then there would be a Palestinian state by 98.

During this period, a guy called Benjamin Netanyahu was rising in the ranks of Israeli politics, and he did, you know, his most to kind of throw a wrench in these plans by kind of, well, actually, let me take a step back. So the idea was that, you know, the Palestinian state would be founded by 1998 on the West Bank and Gaza, and maybe there'd be some land swaps to accommodate the settlements, or maybe they'd be negotiated one way or the other. Since then, the Israeli settler population has actually tripled. So when the Palestinians and Israelis signed the Oslo Accords, there were 200,000 settlers

in the West Bank. There are now 600,000. That's one in 10. One in every 10 Israeli Jews lives in a West Bank settlement, right? So the idea of where did this end, well, for Israelis, I think, if you look at the maps they put out when they talk about Israel, there's no line marking the West Bank separate or the Golan Heights, which is, you know, the Syrian territory that they've also annexed or the East Jerusalem.

And I think what we saw last year with the Trump peace proposal, you know, Krishna's plan to kind of create a bastardized version of a Palestinian state connected by, you know, tunnels and bridges that go under Israeli population centers in the West Bank. I think that's what the Israelis are happy to go for. You know, Netanyahu says that he's happy for the Palestinians to have a state minus. He said they can call it whatever they want. It won't ever be a state. But what's also interesting is if you go back to Yitzhak Rabin, who's lionized as the great

peacemaker who signed the Oslo Accords and then was assassinated by a right wing Israeli Jew who, you know, kind of supported Netanyahu, Rabin himself told the Knesset Israeli parliament that there will never be a Palestinian state. The Palestinians can call it whatever they want, but we, you know, we want them essentially to run their own affairs in their population centers, but we want the land. And that's clear in places like Jerusalem. So Jerusalem, unlike the West Bank, has been officially annexed to Israel. But what's interesting is they annexed the land, but they didn't annex the people living

on it. So you've got 350,000 Palestinians living in Jerusalem who live on a territory that the Israeli state claims as its own, that the Israeli state claims as no different from Tel Aviv. The Israeli state says, you know, it has full jurisdiction over and that's why the courts are involved in things like the Sheikh Jarrah case, but at the same time, the Palestinians who live there don't get any kind of say in Israeli politics, they don't get any citizenship. They're considered temporary permanent residents, they're given a permanent residency card that

can be revoked. It's called a permanent residency, but it's temporary. So essentially if you're a Palestinian and you, you move outside of Jerusalem, the Israelis will say that, you know, your center of life is now no longer inside Jerusalem and they'll take away your right to return there and live there. And I think since 1967, 14,000 Palestinians have lost their residency in Jerusalem through that process. And again, we're talking about an apartheid system that treats people differently based

on their ethnicity. So if you're a Palestinian living in Jerusalem, that's what you, that's what's kind of like the sword that's constantly hanging over your neck, right? If you're an Israeli Jew, you can move from anywhere in the world, live in Jerusalem, and then six months later say you don't like it, leave, and you'll have, you'll be able to return whenever you want. So I know we got away from the question of where the settlement enterprise ends, but I think it's important to look at how the Israelis look at the land, which is that

there's no reason to end the settlements because the Palestinians living on it are Cantonized, they're, they're kind of forced into these little Bantustans population centers and everywhere they're surrounded by Israeli development. So there's 200 settlements in the West Bank right now. The West Bank is a tiny, tiny territory, if you look at it. And these settlements are not built haphazardly. They're not, you know, the places where they're built are very strategic. I lived in the West Bank, I went to the university, to college over there.

And when you're driving through, every mountain top or every hilltop has an Israeli settlement on it. Right. You have the Palestinians kind of on the lower ground and these villages that have been there for hundreds of years. And then these new red roof developments are on every single hilltop. And not only does that give them kind of the strategic, you know, higher ground, but what it does is it breaks up the contiguity of Palestinian land.

So you might hear a lot that according to the UN, there's something like 500 different checkpoints that the Israelis run in the West Bank to control the movement of Palestinians. And these checkpoints are designed for the security and safety of the settlers. And the settlers are living in and amongst, you know, every population center that the Palestinians have in the West Bank. Yeah. And just to circle back a tad, that precedent of every Jew in the world having a right to return to, like, you know, where they say they found like a stone plate from 5,000 years

ago, which, I mean, you can do that for, like, anywhere. It's like the most insane thing I've ever heard. Like, expand that to anyone else, like any, yeah, there are things along the Volga River where ethnic Germans lived. So anyone from Wisconsin can go there and just kick a Russian out. And lay claim to it. Yeah. No, it's, if you extrapolate it to any other group, any other territory, it just, you realize

how insane it is. But it's just, yeah, it is, it's sacrosanct. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, when you look at kind of the tactics and the strategy that Israel employs on the land, it's very much like textbook colonialism, right? So you know, taking the higher ground, dividing the population, dividing them geographically, but also kind of creating different classes of Palestinians. So one thing that a lot of people kind of have a difficult time wrapping their heads around

is we don't have a society of Israelis and Palestinians. We have a society of Israelis who, wherever they are in this land, whether it's inside what we call Israel proper, which is, you know, Israel's 1948 borders or settlements in the West Bank or in Jerusalem or anywhere, they have the same rights and privileges as any other Israeli Jew, right? So if you're an Israeli Jew living in Tel Aviv, you have the same rights and privileges as an Israeli Jew living in Mali Adomine, which is one of the biggest settlements in the West Bank, like deep in the heart of the West Bank, not on the border, deep inside, close to the

Jordan border, actually, right? You are subject to Israeli civil law, so you commit a crime, this Israeli police will come and you'll be taken to court, you'll face a jury of your peers, you vote in the same elections, you have kind of the same entitlements from the Israeli government in terms of health care, in terms of education, et cetera, et cetera. If you're a Palestinian, your rights depend on where you live and the ID that Israel has granted to you. So Israel grants every single Palestinian born in that territory, an ID card and an ID

number, and based on that, your life, the trajectory of your life is determined by certain Israeli laws. So at the bottom of the rung, the bottom rung of the letter, you have Palestinians were born in Gaza, right? So for those who don't know, Gaza is the tiniest territory in this already small piece of land. It's, I think, six miles wide at its widest point, two miles wide at its narrowest point, and just 10, 12 miles long, very, very small territory, right? Smaller than the size of most mid-sized U.S. cities.

Two million people are packed into it, 80% of them are refugees or descendants of refugees, not from far, refugees from towns that are literally walking distance or a 20-minute drive away from Gaza, that, you know, we say, every Israeli town was shacharrah, where they were being kicked out from. So my family is from a town called Fallujah, not the Iraqi Fallujah, but there was a small town called Fallujah that's now known in Hebrew as Kiryat Gat. Kiryat Gat is like a small, mid-sized development town in Israel now. It's 20 minutes from Gaza.

My granddad was forced out of it in 1949, a year after Israel was founded, and was never allowed back, and he died a few years ago, a refugee, in a refugee camp. And this town is literally 20 minutes away from where he died and where he spent his whole life unable to leave. And so Palestinians in Gaza are subjected to kind of like the harshest of Israel's territories. They're not allowed to leave, they're not allowed to travel, they're not allowed to visit even other parts of the Palestinian territory. So even the West Bank, they're not allowed to travel to that.

They are under a 12-year-old siege now, going into, it's, sorry, a 14-year-old siege now, that stops, you know, we've already mentioned people can't travel in and out, but it also blocks things like fuel, food, basic supplies, building supplies, building materials, right? All of this is heavily regulated by Israel. People can't import what they want freely. They can't export what they want. So they can't run in businesses, factories have collapsed. Ever since Israel imposed the blockade in 2007, 90% of Gaza's industrial capacity has

completely collapsed, right? So there's a deliberate and forced impoverization of the people in Gaza. So when you hear about, you know, rockets being fired from Gaza or militants in Gaza, you always have to place that against this context of what Gaza is, who the people there are, and what they've been forced into. So that's Gaza at the bottom-wrong. In the West Bank, you have a military occupation, you have, you know, 600,000 settlers. You're unable to build freely, you're unable to travel freely.

You face a military occupation that discriminates between you and Israeli settlers living in the same territory, right? An Israeli settler commits a crime. They get tried in a civilian court, arrested by the police. Palestinian commits the exact same crime in the exact same place. They get arrested by the Israeli military, taken to a military court with a 99.7% conviction rate. In Jerusalem, we consider them kind of like one-wrong up on the ladder because they're

not under kind of the same strict military rule, but their lands are constantly being, you know, under threat of confiscation for settlements. You know, they can travel more freely, so they can travel into Israel's 1948 borders. They can travel out of Israel's airport, but, you know, they have no political rights. They can't vote. They can't take part in anything in terms of Israel's political process, even though Israel controls their lives. And then at the top, we have what Israelis like to call the Arabs, the Israeli Arabs.

These are the Palestinians and the descendants of Palestinians who stayed behind in 1948 when most Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. And, you know, they have citizenship in Israel. But Israel is interesting because unlike most countries, citizenship doesn't mean what it would mean, you know, here. If you're a citizen of the United States, at least in a legal sense, you have the same rights as any other citizen under the law. In Israel, that's not the case.

In Israel, there's a difference between citizenship and nationality. So a Palestinian can have an Israeli passport and Israeli citizenship. They can vote in Israeli elections, but their nationality as a non-Jew means that they're subject to dozens and dozens of laws that explicitly discriminate against them. And Israelis don't hide this. This isn't something that Israelis only talk about, kind of like, you know, in secret government meetings. This is Israel's basic law.

So you know, two years ago, 2018, three years ago, the Israeli Knesset passed the nation-state law. The nation-state law explicitly says that Israel is the state of the Jewish people and only them, not of its citizens, but of the Jewish people. And there was a famous, I think, Israeli pop star who made a comment on Instagram or posted on Instagram at the time saying, you know, she was ashamed that this was legalized and put into, codified into law. And Netanyahu himself replied to her on Instagram saying, you know, it's the state of the Jews

only, and only the Jews have the right to self-determination in Israel, which is crazy to think about. That's like saying, in America, only white people have the right to self-determination, even if everyone else has citizenship. Their citizenship is a different level, it's a different caste. But this is the country that, you know, you hear US politicians tripping over themselves to line up and say, is our closest ally and our best friend and always has the right to defend itself, blah, blah, blah.

This is the regime that it runs. It's a colonial apartheid regime. And that it really puts into context, I mean, Arab Israelis, that is one of the most often used things by more liberal Zionists, PR campaigns, and a lot of US newsrooms as well. Yeah. As proof that it is not like this very harsh, very explicit ethno-state, it is, they just, their existence is used as a prop for justifying all of this and yeah, completely glossing

over their legal treatment and Israel basically outright declaring that they're not right real Israelis. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, again, this isn't something that Israel does kind of like hush hush through, you know, the bureaucracy of the state. This is something that Israel has codified into law openly and not that long ago either.

This happened three years ago. I mean, the nation-state law didn't add anything new. That's the key point, right? What the nation-state law did was codify policies that Israel has been pursuing explicitly since it was founded, but now it's just like it's part of its basic law, which is the equivalent of the Israeli constitution. Can you go into a little bit, you touched on it briefly, but on sort of expand a bit on what daily life in Gaza is like.

Yeah. Okay. So, Gaza is a tiny territory. If you look at the map, you know, it's, I think it's like six miles wide and it's widest, 10 miles, 12 miles long. It's a territory that on two sides is bordered by Israel to the west, the Mediterranean Sea, and to the south by Egypt. And it's been under a closure policy.

A lot of people don't realize this since the early 90s, right? So there's a blockade that Israel instituted after Hamas kind of took over Gaza in 2007. But between 1991 and 2007, Gaza was already under a closure policy. And what that meant was that if you lived in Gaza, you were unable to leave to travel to any other part of Israel or Palestine without a special permit from the Israeli authorities, which was exceedingly hard to get. And the reason Gaza was put under a closure policy in the early 90s is because that's when the first Palestinian intifada or uprising was happening.

And it was a nonviolent uprising against, you know, Israeli rule and it kind of petered out and died out with the Oslo Accords. But between then and 2007, Israel never reopened Gaza and allowed people to leave and travel freely. Okay. So that's one piece of context to keep in mind. In 2005, Israel removed the settlers that were living there. And there's two reasons why it did that.

The cost of maintaining security for the settlements was getting too high, right? Palestinian factions in Gaza were attacking the settlements. They had crude weapons, but there were continuous attacks and they were growing, especially during the second intifada, which happened in the early 2000s. And I think the Israelis felt that the cost of continuing to protect that very small number of settlers, I think it's like 7,000 total, amongst the sea of what at the time, one and a half million Palestinians was getting too high. And so the Israelis pulled out.

There was another reason why the Israelis pulled out, which is related to demographics. Gaza is the most heavily populated and densely populated area and the entire territory in between the river and the sea. And by pulling out, what the Israelis wanted to do was kind of write off the two million Palestinians who live there, off the books, off the demographic logbook. Because right now, if you count the Palestinians in Gaza, the Palestinians in Jerusalem, the Palestinians in the West Bank, and the Palestinian citizens of Israel, you have 6.8 million people, which is the exact number of Israeli Jews living in that territory, too.

So we have complete parity, right? And that parity is kind of, I think, what's driving more and more people to call out this apartheid system, because the Palestinians are not a small minority, but they are ruled everywhere by the same regime, and they will soon overtake Israeli Jews in terms of numbers. But going back to Gaza, so Gaza is kind of the only territory where the Israelis have no internal presence. But they do control the borders, they control the airspace, they control the electromagnetic spectrum.

It means everything from cell phone towers to internet, radio frequency, etc., all controlled by Israel. The electricity supply, the fuel supply, the water supply, all controlled by Israel. Imports all controlled by Israel. After every kind of devastating assault on Gaza, we have thousands of homes demolished or destroyed by Israeli air strikes and artillery. It's very difficult for Palestinians to rebuild, because they can't even get building materials into Gaza.

Gaza is a very, very kind of dystopian place. On the borders or on the boundaries, you've got remote-controlled machine-gun tower setup that are operated by Israeli army soldiers, you know, young Israeli recruits in bases miles away that just fire machine guns at anyone who gets close to the border. The UN in 2015, I believe, said that by 2020, Gaza would become uninhabitable for human beings. And that was before the latest assault on Gaza. 95% of the water in Gaza is not fit for consumption.

And in every Israeli assault, Israelis target the wells that are operating. Since the blockade began in 2005, people in Gaza receive an average of four hours of electricity per day. Half of Gaza's population is about a million people or children under the age of 15, which means that they were born after the blockade began, which means a million children in Gaza have never known a day with more than a full day of electricity. So try to comprehend that. Try to comprehend what it's like to live in a place where, you know, in the 21st century,

where you only get electricity for four hours a day, four hours a day to cook, to clean, to do your work, to communicate with the outside world, to build, to create, to do anything. And all of this is man-made. Gaza isn't in such dire straits because of some natural disaster that hit it and it needs money to rebuild. It's a deliberate policy by the Israelis to keep Gaza on the brink. And then every few years, they have a policy of what they call mowing the lawn, which is horrific euphemism.

And the idea is that every few years, they have to go into Gaza and carry out like a wide-scale assault to kind of push the Gazans back down and kind of continue keeping Gaza in the state of de-development. And so that's life in Gaza. You've got a captive refugee population that isn't allowed to travel to leave the escape, even during these assaults, where, you know, there's no opportunity for work, for employment, for development. And people are expected to get along quietly.

Yeah. And it is very clear most of that is meant to just torture a captive population. I have heard people theorize that the utility, part of the utility of Gaza for the Israeli government is sort of a weapons demo. That is to say that since 2005, when the Israeli military and a lot of specific Israeli military hardware lost a lot of their aura of invincibility, that it was a way for Israel to sort of make a show for the world in the sickest sense possible. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I mean, Palestinians in Gaza, you know, are very well aware of themselves as being kind of lab rats for the Israeli military industrial complex, you know. And Israel is the world's biggest exporter of arms per capita, right? It exports arms to India, to Myanmar, you know, luminaries of democracy, you know. And Israeli weapons are also kind of the backbone of its normalization with the Gulf Arab states, with the UAE in particular, right? And so, yeah, Gaza is frequently, and people in Gaza know that they are used as lab rats

for this. It's sick. Mm-hmm. To go a little bit towards the Israeli politics side of things, people have mostly said, people who are both sort of like passively liberal Zionists who, you know, let's be honest, this whole thing for them is they want this to be over with, they want Netanyahu gone so they can have a guilt-free Mediterranean vacation. While everything else you mentioned still goes on.

And more actively anti-Zionist people have brought up that this is probably just a way for Netanyahu to avoid prison. Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, you know, the thing is, it's sort of like a self-defeating, if you're a liberal Zionist, a sort of self-defeating argument because it's like, oh, he's, you know, he's just torturing a captive population and doing all this because Israelis love that and will support him if he's doing it.

And that seems to be the case, but what do you think the shelf life of another government he puts together is? Because it seems like this will just keep happening. So, you know, I see it a lot with a lot of people who, you know, I think some of them are mean well, and they see Netanyahu as the bad guy in this, right? And I think, especially in the U.S. amongst liberal Zionists and liberals in general, this idea of Netanyahu being a bad guy was reinforced by how close he was with Trump, right?

They were kind of, Trump is the boogeyman for American liberals, and Netanyahu was kind of like his Israeli alter ego. And so it's easy to kind of link those two together. And there's this fantasy that if Netanyahu is gone, then things will be a lot better. And that's not the case at all. And that's why I'm hesitant. And I, when people say, you know, Netanyahu benefited from ratching up the conflict, ratching up the violence, yeah, he does in a narrow kind of political sense.

But, you know, Netanyahu wasn't the one driving the settler organizations to pick people from Sheikh Jarrah, Netanyahu isn't the one who was forcing the Israeli courts to, you know, put these families on notice that they were going to get kicked out. So failed sons from Brooklyn can move it, right? And Netanyahu's policy towards the Palestinians everywhere is a continuation of Israeli policy since the inception of the state. There's no real difference, right? Netanyahu, the first assault on Gaza wasn't carried out by Netanyahu 2008, 2009 is carried

out by, you know, Israel's centrist government. Yeah. Old mayor who? Yeah. Who then went to prison? Maybe that, yeah, maybe they could, they could occupy a halfway house together. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's interesting how many Israeli prime ministers have gone to jail and presidents. It's like they pick them based on who the most indicted guy in the country is. As long as that indictment isn't for killing Palestinians. Yeah, no, of course. But I mean, you know, even, even kind of labor, the Israeli, you know, the nominal Israeli liberal party, I mean, it was labor that ran the settlement enterprise from the beginning. It wasn't the right wing that supported it and backed it, right?

And so we got to separate this idea of Netanyahu's personal kind of ambitions and politics and his little tactical maneuvers from the overall situation that Palestinians find themselves in. It's very intoxicating for people in the West, especially the US media to talk about periods of calm. There was this awful headline from the New York Times the other day saying, you know, what basically blew up the months of calm? What happened?

And it's like, well, Palestinians are still being killed and blockaded during those months of calm. Palestinians are still being built. Palestinians were still having their land taken away. And whether Netanyahu stays or goes, whether it is another Israeli election or not, whether there's, you know, he becomes king of Israel, which his supporters want him to be, that policy won't change. And so that's why I'm always hesitant to kind of fall into the trap of talking about

an escalation with Gaza, some kind of political gambit by Netanyahu. Yeah, he does benefit politically. But you know, let's look at who the people trying to oust him are, right? Benny Gantz, the guy who ran a coalition with him recently before the last elections. I mean, Benny Gantz started his election campaign with a TV ad that boasted of how he bombed Gaza to the Stone Age because Benny Gantz was the IDF chief of staff during the 2014 war on Gaza. You know, Avigdor Lieberman, who used to be a nightclub bouncer in Moldova before he

moved to Israel and decided that he had more rights there than Palestinians and talked about blowing up the Nasser Dam in Egypt and dropping Palestinian prisoners out of helicopters and cutting off the heads of Palestinian citizens with axes if they didn't, you know, stand up with hand on heart and yell allegiance to the Israeli state. I mean, this is the other guy, right, Naftali Bennett, who made his money in fucking Silicon Valley. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, this is the guy who was famous for openly bragging, you know, in the army, I killed lots of Arabs and there's no problem with that. So these are the people that we're talking about who would replace Netanyahu in any kind if Netanyahu was going to go. There's not it's not like there's going to things are going to get going to get any better for Palestinians in that sense. And these escalations happen not because of any kind of gambit by Netanyahu or whoever's prime minister.

They happen because of the settler colonial, you know, nature of the state. You have your boot on the neck of six and a half million people, seven million people. Eventually they're going to rise up when we're at the other. Yeah. I think there is this very unfortunate tendency for people to look for the most compelling individual story. Yeah. You know, if every story has a protagonist, it has to have an antagonist.

And if there's a singular antagonist, oh, it has to be Netanyahu. It has to be this guy we can replay the Trump script for. And that's exactly it. Right. It's the Trump script. It's easy for a lot of people to think about how bad Trump was and Trump was was bad. Right. He was a bad guy.

And if we're talking about this context, he was awful for Palestinians as well. He basically said to the Israelis here, blank check, do whatever you want, fuck international law. The thing about Trump was what he did was just say the quiet part out loud because decades of U.S. administrations had been saying the exact same thing just quietly. Right. It was as Israel was expanding its settlements, it was, oh, no, we disapprove of this, but we're not going to do anything about it.

As Israel's bombarding Gaza, yes, we're going to sign, you know, Barack Obama signs a record for a $38 billion weapons deal for the Israelis. You know, as ethnic cleansing happening happens, you know, we're not going to put any sanctions on Israel. You know, Trump, you know, the bad guy is gone, but now a good guy, Biden's in. And you know, his, his State Department can't even say the words, you know, killing Palestinian civilians, children is bad. Right.

You saw that, you saw that press conference with Ned Price, the State Department spokesman. Yeah. The CIA guy who quit because Trump made him too sad. Oh, is that what happened? Yeah. He ran an op-ed in, an op-ed in 2017 that was like, I used to love my job, then Trump ruined it. And it's like, where did you work?

Oh, the CIA. Oh, great. Well, maybe he can recruit, or he can go back now, the CIA is recruiting. You saw their intersectional ads. Well, he's, I don't think he's up for his current job. He just always looks like he's about to cry. And there have been a lot of bad State Department spokes, spokesmen. I mean, there were some, the Pompeo State Department had some real fucking, they really

laid some eggs, but like, this guy really sucks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if we're going to keep this, but I actually saw a private email he sent yesterday, he's part of a, he was part of some fellowship, and like they all keep in touch apparently, and he was asked about that, about how he found it so hard to condemn the killing of Palestinian children, and just like wrote this like three page response

about how, well, I didn't know the facts. And, you know, obviously if I could go back, I changed what I said and just bullshit. Yeah. No. Awful. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, you know, going back to what you said, they, it's tempting to think of Netanyahu

as the guy who wants Netanyahu's gone, things will go back to normal. But you know, Rabin, it's like Rabin is lionized amongst liberal Zionists, and amongst a lot of Americans and Westerners is the guy who kind of gave his life for peace, right, because of fanatical right wing Israelis shot him just because he dared to sign an agreement with the Palestinians. I gave them very little, by the way, but Rabin is the guy who during the first Intifada, which was an unarmed Intifada, he was the defense minister and, you know, every Palestinian knows this, he was the one who gave the Israeli army the order to break the bones of the Palestinians.

And they literally took out, you know, carried out those orders. You know, I grew up seeing footage from the, from the eighties and nineties of Palestinian protesters being, you know, arrested by Israeli soldiers who would literally break their bones in the street. You know, you'd have Israeli soldiers hold out the arm or the leg of someone they've arrested while the others would beat them with rocks and batons until they broke their bones. They saw Rabin kind of like the peace, the lion of peace.

So there's a, there's, there's a common thread in Israeli politics where treating the Palestinians like humans doesn't really factor. And now in 2021 where Netanyahu is actually being flanked to the right by the conists, but the open Jewish supremacist movements, you know, there's, there's no empathy for Palestinians or any desire to find a resolution to this. I think it's sort of like triumphal is to just call like that this is a total watershed moment that we're at a new frontier for American awareness of this. But it does feel like something shifted because, you know, having watched this from our side

our entire life, my entire life, it does seem as though more voting aged people are aware of this or aware of the insane relationship between America and Israel. But in the best of worlds, how could that affect things enough to stop this? How could, what would the US have to do specifically to put an end to settlements and to, in the absolute best of worlds, give full civil rights to Palestinians? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, if we're talking about the only solution to this, it's not an end to, to settlements.

It is, like you said, equality, equality and freedom, right? If Palestinians get equality and freedom, and that's the end of the conflict, and you know, equality and freedom means being allowed to return to the home you've been kicked out from, being allowed to participate in politics. It means, you know, having the same rights as anyone else who lives in the land, as you, and that those rights not being predetermined based on what religion you are, what ethnicity you are. These are things that I think most people around the world kind of take to heart is,

yeah, that that's, that's what freedom and equality is. That's not controversial. To get there, Americans need to realize just how complicit the United States isn't this. The United States isn't a supporter of Israel. It's deeply complicit in this from, from, you know, from kind of the way it orients its foreign policy around the wishes of the most hawkish, white-winged Israeli governments to, and by foreign policy, I mean specifically in the Middle East, right? I don't want anyone to tell me that I'm saying Israel runs the U.S.

But, you know, but also the way that the settler organizations that a lot of people when they look at find disgusting, these organizations that are funded in the U.S., these are considered, you know, nonprofit organizations. If you donate to them, you get a tax write-off. And I think people need to look at that and people need to realize so much money flows from the United States into these organizations. But more than that, it's the U.S.'s political cover for what Israel does, right? And if the United States decided that we no longer support apartheid, we no longer support

settler colonialism, we're going to join the 21st century, Israel would find it very, very difficult to maintain the trajectory it's on. I mean, look at the United Nations. The United Nations is, you know, it's hollow, it doesn't mean shit anymore. But you know, at the very least, it's an expression of kind of like globally what most countries want. The U.S. has already refused three statements calling for a ceasefire that every other member of the United States, the United Nations Security Council, has tried to put out this week.

The United States was the only dissenter every single time, right? And we're talking about fucking ceasefire. We're not talking about, you know, giving Palestinians the right to return to their home. It's just end the killing. And the United States is refusing to do that. The $3.8 billion a year that the U.S. sends in weaponry to Israel, you know, that by itself is huge.

There's a bill that Betty McCollum, Congresswoman from Minnesota, the non-Hijabi scary one. You know, it's funny. Betty McCollum is like this little old white lady from Minnesota. And I think her district neighbor is Ilhan Omar's district. And Betty McCollum talks often about kind of the rights of Palestinians and introduces bills supporting Palestinians. Somehow conservatives never go crazy at her. They always go crazy at Ilhan Omar.

And yeah, and McCollum has been doing it for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She's, I mean, she's not exactly like where I would want her exactly to be, but like for a U.S. congressman, like she's, for a while, she was like one of the only voices at all up there. And yeah, no, of course, they're just what, there wasn't shit saying she's like not a

real American, like just insane shit, like every fucking day. Yeah. She should go back. No, no one calling her a Jew hater, Marjorie Taylor Greene isn't tweeting about her. No one's telling her to go back to Scotland. So McCollum, for those who don't know, introduced a bill earlier this year that would put limits on U.S. support for the Israeli military if U.S. weapons are used to attack Palestinian children.

I mean, that's kind of like the bare minimum, right? Yeah. And it only has, I think, a couple dozen cosponsors in Congress. But I mean, things like that, right? I mean, I think based on U.S. law, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think it's the Leahy law, where U.S. government weapons cannot be used in human rights abuses. I mean, it's funny to say it out loud, but there's a law that says that, right? But no one invokes Leahy when it comes to Israel, even though we're seeing on our screens

what Israel is doing and how it's using those weapons. So what can people do? What can the United States do? I mean, it's a slow process, and unfortunately, we are seeing some kind of shift, not only in kind of the narrative, but also in Congress. But it's slow. It's too slow. Yeah.

And sometimes it does feel like triumphant when you're seeing people in Congress and the most popular late night talk show hosts talk about Israeli apartheid and call things by that name. That is huge. But at the same time, it's like, how much more trauma does my family have to go through before Americans realize that we can't keep supporting this, and we actually have to stop being complicit in it? So yeah, it's hard to talk about what America can do.

I mean, America can stop, but it's hard to talk about because it's taking so long, and it's always been so slow. Yeah. And there is an unfortunate impulse among Americans who, even if some are ceasing their support for this, to make this a personal narrative about their redemption, about their how, oh yeah, the most important thing is how I went from going on birthright to thinking this is bad. It's like, I'm sorry, no one gives a shit.

Yeah, no one gives a shit. And also, cool story, put it in a book, release it later, not when bombs are falling. But no. I mean, look, if Americans do have a tendency to be a little self-centered, and if you want to make it about your personal redemption story, then get involved in the things that can make a difference, right? Whether it's working with your local representatives or local organizations to make it clear that no, you won't take Palestinians being thrown under the bus because, for decades, the easiest

thing to do in US politics is throw Palestinians under the bus. Let's put a stop to that. Talk about BDS, right? At the very least, if you don't want to participate in BDS, then at least you should say something about the dozens of BDS, anti-BDS laws that have passed across the United States. I don't know if listeners know this, but in Texas, when Hurricane Harvey hit, people who applied for relief from the state had to sign a contract that said that they would not advocate for the boycott of Israel.

It's like, what the fuck does that have to do with getting relief from Hurricane Harvey? Yeah. The Texas one is particularly wild, and it's amazing that it's, I think it's still on the books, but there are laws like that all over, and they're in Canada, and they're all over the West, yeah, they, I mean, I will, he's kind of annoying, the tweet, the tweet and Senator Brian Chats. From Hawaii. Yeah, he is, you know, one of those like, oh, I'm against BDS guys, but he did say they

are like unconstitutional, and hopefully one tangible thing we could get now is some actual challenges to those laws because they are, they are completely flying the face of the First Amendment. 100%. And you'll be shocked to hear that the usual free speech anti-woke crowd don't really say anything about that. Right. Yeah.

It's not a threat to free speech if it's BDS. I don't know if you saw that, but one of those like, you know, youth Hesbara accounts, like, the posts were five days apart, and one was like, you know, Tel Aviv is the queer, you know, woman with an X instead of an A. Feminist, queer, blah, blah, blah, space is the Middle East. We have to protect it. These values are impenetrable compared to Amaz. And then like five days later, it's like, the woke are trying to take down Israel.

It's like, oh, you're just going to say like, what, you're just going to throw a million things in a wall. Well, I mean, that's kind of, I think part of the reason why there has been a shift recently, right? It's because it's because the usual Hesbara tricks are just not sticking. Yes. You know, it's a combination of the fact that people are seeing things that they can't unsee.

Right. You know, the gatekeepers in the mainstream media are still gatekeeping, but there's a lot more gates, so to speak, that people can get their information from now. Right. So people are getting a better sense. And, but beyond that, it's just like, Israeli Hesbara just doesn't work on several levels anymore. First of all, no one gives a shit about war and terror rhetoric and rhetoric and in 2021.

Right. Like if you, oh, we're fighting terrorists, like, what the fuck does that mean anymore? Right. And we have a whole generation now coming to voting age that weren't alive during 9-11 and kind of like the fear and the panic of that, you know, so war and terror rhetoric that Israel has employed so well for so long in its Palestinians, I don't think is sticking as much as it used to, especially with our younger generation. And then you have kind of like the hilarious woke Zionists who try to kind of, you know,

promote Israel by branding it as like this progressive haven, you know, like, oh, our soldiers can get vegan boots that they then use to step on the necks of Palestinians. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, I think like there was an attempt at that type of Hesbara since 2014, 2014 is I mean, this is unrelated, but it was an important year for the, for media groups trying to figure out how to co-opt things that came from like Tumblr and that era of Twitter.

But, um, where they tried that, where I think that's around that time or a couple of years after the infamous Palestine dead naming post came. Oh, is it, we remember, is it, like, if you call Israel Palestine and you're dead naming it? Yeah. Basically. Yeah. And it was, yeah.

But it's, that stuff seems to have fallen totally flat. Like no one is into that because it's like, yeah, you can like, okay, when they banned porn off Tumblr, it sent like a wave of Tumblr refugees to Twitter and like, yeah, they're like annoying because they're like, you know, ages like 15 through 19. And that just like, that's what it is to be at that age is you're annoying. And like, yeah, you try to, I guess you do like annoying stuff. Like you try to, I don't know, cancel Darkwing Dog or something. Like who gives a shit?

You, you can just as easily like not read it. They should like re-open Tumblr for them. But that's again, neither here nor there. But um, I mean, we can, we can buy it. I think it's worth nothing. No. Yeah.

No, they finally fucking destroy the value. But, uh, you know, like those people, like their main issue is of course, like Steven Universe or like Darkwing Duck, but like they're still like, that still isn't going to work on them. Like they know that Israelis are the part that say, even if you do use those words, like, yeah, you can fool some people to support in some things, but you're not going to get people, those people who like weren't already Zionists to be Zionist off of that, you know, credit through them for that.

And I think, you know, it's easy to kind of, you know, laugh and make fun of the teens, right? But yeah, I mean, to be fair to them, this is a language that a lot of people, you know, do believe in, right? And they take it to heart. And so I think a lot of them do see clearly through kind of like attempts by a militarized ethno-state to co-op their language, right? Yeah.

And also they're using, they're trying to use it on platforms where the Palestinian story is visible more than anywhere else. So you have that contrast, right? You have kind of like, yay, Israel, gay utopia, but also Israel bombing the shit out of Palestinians regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. And you see that on the same feed. And I think people, you know, I like to give more credit to people than most. I think people, they see what's happening and once they see, they can't unsee it.

And I think, yeah, I think the biggest barrier for Americans is not that, I mean, polls are one thing. And I feel like a lot of like public support for Israel, it reminds me of the Bloomberg polls. I feel like it's a lot of hollow support. And I feel like a lot of people just probably don't think about it a lot. A hundred percent. It's just reflexive, right?

Do you support Israel? Yeah, support Israel, because we've always supported Israel. But what does that mean? Right. I think that like the more that people actively think about this and actively consider this, you're not going to be able to really bring them back to the other side. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, there's very little to bring them back to the other side with. Like someone who looks at Israel sees war crimes happening live on TV, right? Learns a little bit more about kind of like the Nakba, which was what Palestinians call the for those who don't know the expulsion of, you know, three quarters of the population 1948. When people hear about like the apartheid system that's run there, the separate laws for Jews versus non-Jews, yeah, there's what are you going to bring them back? Like how are you going to ever convince them that that's okay?

You know, even if you tell them Hamas hates gays, I mean, I guarantee you Israel has killed a lot more gays than Hamas ever has. Yeah. Just by bombing. And like, okay, even if like Tel Aviv is like, you know, they like bought enough advertising in some magazine to name it, like the top gay city, how those awards usually work. But no game it like Israel isn't New York, like gay marriage isn't really legal there at all.

Yeah. They've like blackmailed gay Palestinians into spying for them and just thrown them in prison or killed them if they refuse. It's like, yeah, no, it just does not fly. Yeah. I think the consequence of this because, you know, do people see what's happening with like the attempts at sort of pink watching Zionism? I think the future of it is probably just going to be like the affect becomes more openly

right wing as more representative of what it really is. And I don't know, I think from there, they'll just probably try to make it, you know, just another like right wing, left wing culture war issue. They'll try to do that. I don't know if they'll be entirely successful because, you know, like those culture wars shit, when they try to make like a right wing culture war issue or something, it is stupid, but it like, it usually you can figure it out. Like it's like when someone is like able to get elected because they hate, you know,

paper straws, it's like, yeah, I get it, like paper straws are annoying to use. Or like if they, if they fucking, you know, guns or something like that, something that's like more a tangible thing that people use. I think there are a lot of boomers who are really in Israel, but I think with like even younger, more right wing people, it's not something they can, they feel like is necessarily like part of their way of life. Correct. That's how you generate a culture war issue.

Yeah. They try to do that with free daycare, the conservatives, where like, Was it JD Vance saying that it takes away freedom from families that free daycare or some shit like that? Yeah. Yeah. Like, oh, it's, it's a war against normal people. Oh yeah.

It's like, no, yeah, it's like, no one like, that's just not fine with you're the freak. Yeah. It's like masks or one thing because that's a thing everyone experiences, but like Israel, I don't think they can really do that with. So I think, I think the move, unfortunately, is going to just try to, it'll sort of replicate the American relationship with like Saudi Arabia. Yeah. Like that.

We're just like, just don't think about it. Yeah. It's interesting to see how things go if, you know, if, if the Biden administration's talks with, with Iran payoff, right? Because, you know, I was talking to someone, an analyst who would tell me he thinks the reason Biden is being kind of so, so poor on, on, on Gaza and the ceasefire and all that is because he's trying to bank some credits with Netanyahu for whatever future Iran agreement he comes to, which is fucking stupid and very craven.

But it would be interesting when kind of, you know, if Iran is removed from, you know, the axis of evil in the US and Iran ever have normal relations, then what are the people who, you know, have been telling conservatives in the US that we have to protect Israel because Iran's such a big threat to them? Well, what do they say then when Iran becomes a normal US, you know, partner? So there are other shifts. There's geopolitical shifts happening that I think we still haven't taken into account. But in terms of how it will be in the US, yes, I do think it'll be a cultural.

I think the Israelis, the Israelis know who their, their core audience is in the US and it's not American Jews. It's not American liberals. It's US evangelicals and, you know, former Israeli ambassador was saying the other day that we need to stop reaching it, spending so much effort reaching out to American Jews because they're essentially a lost cause and we have to start focusing more on Christian evangelicals because there are support basin in the US, which is hilarious because everyone knows why Christian evangelicals love Israel so much.

Yeah. Yeah. Because they want to kill the Jews eventually. Yeah. I mean, well, the good news with that is Americans are, this is a good side of Americans broadly getting less religious. Like this isn't the 80s, this isn't the 90s, this isn't the early Bush years. The evangelicals are still very powerful and they hold a lot of power centers in the United

States, but it's definitely not what it once was. There's definitely a counterbalance growing now as well. You'd never had, so, you know, throughout the growth of kind of like the evangelical movement, the 80s and 90s, there wasn't really like an equivalent on the left, right? There wasn't a, there was like, you know, centrism and then they had the far right. So it was very skewed to one way, to one side and, you know, not to say that we have a massive left wing movement in the US right now, but it's definitely bigger than it's ever been in my lifetime.

And it seems to be growing. Yeah. Well, I mean, I feel, I feel this is the most vaguely, but very cautiously optimistic way that we could end this episode, which is rare for us. Is there anything else that you wanted to hit on? Just really, really briefly, today's Tuesday, sorry, Monday, right, Monday, Monday the 18th of May. So for the first time ever, there was a nationwide strike by Palestinians.

And it's really interesting because this isn't a strike in the West Bank or a strike in Gaza only where strikes have happened before against Israeli occupation. This is a strike where Palestinian citizens of Israel have also gone on strike, right? It's fascinating because it's nationwide, it's kind of broken all the borders and boundaries that Israel has built between Palestinians. There's no leader calling for this. It's totally grassroots. And the Israelis, the Israeli, you know, there are a lot of like sectors in the Israeli kind

of that rely on Palestinian labor, the health health sector, for example, is one of them. So this is potentially a big deal. If Palestinians inside, you know, Israel, people of Israeli citizenship continue to protest and rise up the way they have been over the last week, which is completely unprecedented. That I think is a bigger threat to Israel, the Israelis might see that, perceive that as a bigger threat than anything coming out of Gaza. For the first time since 1948, you have towns and cities in open revolt against Israeli rule. And these were the Palestinians that Israeli, you know, political establishment convinced

themselves have been pacified and accepted kind of their status as inferior Israelis. So that's something to keep an eye on as well. It's hard to do so when Israelis are flattening, you know, towers and clinics in Gaza, but it's something definitely keep an eye on. Oh, yeah, I skipped over that. I wanted to talk about, we've seen, we've seen really just horrifying videos of basically crystal knocked happening every night to Arab Israelis, to Palestinians, to people everywhere by Jewish supremacist mobs, nothing else to call them going on.

But we've also seen some resistance to that. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the death to the Arab chance that we were seeing in Jerusalem weeks before, you know, the flare up in Gaza weeks before things got really bad in Al-Aqsa, I mean, this is the mainstream of Israeli society right now. And I don't say that just as a way of kind of dismissing Israeli society, but if you look, just look at kind of the parties in power.

It's a coalition of right wing, extreme right wing and openly fascist parties, right? There's no, there's no, there's no kind of liberal balance to that in Israel anymore. And so, you know, one of the things that really contributed to like the heightened tensions in Jerusalem and the solidarity with Sheikh Jarrah were these mobs that were organized on, you know, social media, just going around stopping Palestinian cars, breaking, smashing their windows, lynching people in the streets, right? And these mobs, a lot of them like Lahava are actually, you know, tied to certain Israeli political parties as well.

So they're almost like they have a, they have a veneer of semi-authority. And Israeli police stands by and watches that happen. And this isn't new. This has been going on for years. And it's an extension of the price tag attacks, the so-called price tag attacks, which is one extremist Jewish settlers in the West Bank will go and attack, you know, like the defenseless villagers in West Bank villages, they'll burn their homes, their mosques, smash their cars, smash windows as a price tag.

Sometimes it's a price tag for, you know, if a Palestinian has attacked an Israeli somewhere, sometimes they do it when the Israeli government talks about, you know, pulling out of a certain area, both going to punish Palestinians. And so what we saw over the last week that's unprecedented is this kind of rising resistance, especially amongst people in Israeli, you know, Palestinian towns in Israel, right? Which have traditionally been kind of the most pacified. You saw the town of Lid, or Lod in Hebrew. I mean, Lid is the site of a famous massacre, an infamous massacre in 1948.

Lid was one of the largest Palestinian towns. I think 40,000 people were ethnically cleansed from it, right? And people who remained behind have been kind of mired in poverty, de-development, lack of funding by the state. And at the same time in Lid, and I'm talking about it because it's a microcosm of how all these so-called mixed towns that a lot of liberal Zionists talk about is like this paragon of coexistence, how they actually operate. So neighborhoods are segregated by ethnicity again.

But more than that, in places like Lid, which is, again, a central town in Israel, it's where the international airport is, the Israelis build walls around the Palestinian neighborhoods. So this isn't just in the West Bank where you have that massive barrier that cuts off Palestinian neighborhoods from other Palestinian neighborhoods or towns from other towns. Even inside Israeli towns where Palestinians live, they're building walls to ghetto-wise them and separate them from the Jewish population. So Lid, for a couple of nights, was the Israeli authorities completely lost control of it. People just rose up, they burned the police stations, they burned the cars, sorry, the

police cars, and that had never happened before. And what the Israeli government did was send the Israeli border police paramilitaries, which are responsible for kind of running the occupation in the West Bank, they sent them to Lid and to several other Palestinian towns inside Israel for the first time. So you have the same forces that occupy Palestinians in the West Bank now occupying Palestinians inside Israel's 1948 borders in Palestinian towns there. Coupled with that, the death to the Arab mobs and the price tag mobs from the West Bank in Jerusalem descended on all these other Palestinian towns inside Israel.

They were carrying out beatings, lynchings, fire-bombing houses, all while the Israeli police stood by, Netanyahu talked about needing to crush them with an iron fist. Not the rioters, not the lynch mobs, but the Palestinian protesters and rioters. So it's unprecedented because it's never happened like this before. It's unprecedented that there's been a general strike across the entire territory by Palestinians everywhere. I think in the United States especially, I think there's this tendency to believe the Israeli right wing that the Palestinian struggle and the Palestinian cause is kind of on the

back burner now, and that Israel can just, you know, Israel can be, you know, the Abraham courts, can be best friends with the Emiratis and the Saudis and the Bahrainis because no one cares about the Palestinians anymore and the Palestinians themselves have given up. And what we're seeing is not, is the opposite of that. So it'll be interesting to see where it goes because, you know, I don't want to sound too triumphalist right now and say that we're seeing a revolution happen, but it'll be, it's interesting because it's never happened to this extent before. Yeah, yeah, and I do think that was with some more right wing American Zionists, the Abraham

Accords were, they were based on this misunderstanding of the Gulf relationships to Palestinians, which is, they had this idea that Palestinians just operated on the back and call of the Saudi government or the UAE, which has just never been the case, and there hasn't really been a Saudi monarch since Faisal, who really made Palestine a priority in any sense. Even he, that was secondary to, you know, getting infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and all his goals for Saudi Arabia specifically. Well, I mean, the truth is no Arab leader ever has. Right.

So, so, so this idea of, of it being an Arab Israeli conflict because the Arabs, their Arab leadership cares about Palestinians. That's not true. Their leadership, I mean, these dictators, what they care about is the fact that their people identify with the Palestinians and support the Palestinian cause. And so, you know, it was kind of a bridge too far to openly embrace Israel in the past when the majority of your population despises what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians. With the Gulf is slightly different because both geographically and materially, they're

pretty removed from liberation movements anywhere in the world. And so, that's why it was easy for people, like at the foundation of the defense of democracies, to convince Americans that actually now that Muhammad bin Zayed wants to be besties with Netanyahu, that means the Palestinians don't count anymore. Yeah. It was completely immaterial to the Palestinian cause and yeah, it's, I mean, I did see something that they interrupted broadcasts on Saudi State TV where they said that they're suspending any transfers of money between citizens of Saudi Arabia and Palestine.

That regular Saudis aren't even allowed to send money there, which is... Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen that myself, but there's definitely been a crackdown on any kind of Palestinian Saudi solidarity since Bonsaw came to power. It's not very well reported, but hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested and locked up since he came. Palestinians who lived in Saudi Arabia arrested and locked up since he came to power. There's been a chilling effect, but beyond that is also like a really strong propaganda push from the Saudis.

So for those who don't know, Saudi media dominates the Arab world. The Saudis, before Bin Salman, they were in Saudi Arabia, they had very strict control over the media as very religious, very conservative, but they also controlled the most liberal news channels and entertainment channels in the Arab world as well. And in the last few years, you saw TV shows that talk about Israel's right to exist or TV shows that talk about the connection between Jewish people and Israel and how we have to respect that, and TV shows, media talking about how much the Palestinians are disastrous for us, i.e., the Gulf Arabs.

So there's been a huge push to demonize the Palestinians as well in Saudi and Emirati media, because it just opens up or decreases popular resistance to the idea of Israel being allies with the Saudis and the Emiratis. It's kind of an aside, but it has been interesting to watch Saudi Arabia since Mohammed Bin Salman's ascendancy, because it seems like they're almost using an Israeli playbook. Their media has become incredibly more liberalized. I remember reading years ago that when they started allowing more outside media onto Saudi airwaves, that people would get heartbroken when they would watch K-dramas they could

watch for the first time, because they portrayed a type of interpersonal drama and soap opera schmaltz that just didn't seem very unattainable from where they lived. And now, if you look at the media that Saudi Arabia produces, it's very interesting, because it looks like Turkish soap operas or K-dramas or NBC dramas, and there's a definite utility in that, because God knows what Saudi TV was for the longest time, and now it's this that has an incredible cultural power. And yeah, if they're sort of like putting these things, sort of normalize Zionism and stuff in there, yeah, there's definitely a utility there.

But their overall media strategy is very reminiscent of stuff they make in Israel, too, and the image that Israel tries to portray as modern. It's particularly weird for a monarchy to do it, and not just a ceremonial one, like an actual monarchy, but yeah, that's what they're going for. Are you saying that MBS might not have thought this out properly? I don't know. I mean, the thing is, people love shows. That's the thing is, I don't know how, I am very interested to see how much it will work,

because MBS has done a lot of things that have been thought out very poorly, and he's been led by the armed by the UAE, and some things have been disastrous for him. But I wish there was, I don't want to say polling, because polling, like, something like... Some way to read the minds of Saudi people. Yeah, or like a media study, because I am very interested in what effect this wall has. Yeah, yeah, no, me too, me too. But I think, you know, since this episode is about Palestine and Palestinians, it's had a kind of an opposite effect in Palestine as well, which is a lot of people have given

up on this, not just given up, but like, you know, completely tossed aside this idea that the Arabs will ever be there for us, or ever going to help us or support us. And it's very interesting because we're getting into the weeds here a bit, but you know, at the height of kind of like the Syrian civil war, there was, there's a lot of anti-Shiar resentment amongst a lot of Palestinians, right? Particularly people who support Hamas, which is really interesting, because Hamas obviously is funded and armed primarily by Iran. And Hamas made that statement in support of, was it the FSA specifically, or was it just

a broad thing? It was a broad thing. It was a broad thing. And I think, and again, we're talking about, you know, the two sides of Hamas, the incompetent military, political side, and the more kind of dedicated military side. That came from the political side, who saw Muhammad Morsi win elections in Egypt and figured that Muslim Brotherhood was going to take over everywhere. And so they were riding that wave.

Oh yeah. Yeah. And it cost them a lot. But it's been interesting because a lot of Saudi propaganda was being utilized in against, you know, against Shi'as during that time amongst Palestinians, which is wild, because we never had that before. Because, you know, Palestinians don't have a Shi'a population, right? So there was never any, that kind of sectarianism never really existed.

But now, you know, everyone sees MBS and MBZ are essentially enemies of the Palestinians and people act accordingly. Yeah. Yeah. No. It is, yeah. It's a lot of shit there. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, one thing I want to say, if that's okay, is, you know, just kind of pulling it back to Gaza and the rockets that are fired and the utility of rockets versus, you know, other forms of resistance is a couple years ago, Palestinians in Gaza decided to organize a march to the fence where Israeli soldiers kind of like their jailers are stationed. And the idea was to kind of break through probably more, you know, it was more hopeful thinking anything else, but it was to break through and march back to their homes just beyond the fence that they were forced out from in 1948.

And you know, in one day, Israeli soldiers killed 65 people in this kind of unarmed march and it's just something to keep in mind when people talk about what acceptable forms of resistance there are for Palestinians. If you support BDS, you're deemed, you know, an anti-Semite who wants to boycott Israel. If you march peacefully to a border, you're shot down and accused of, I think the Washington Post editorial board called the people who marched nominal civilians, right? It's like this weird dehumanizing language that only ever gets applied to Palestinians. If you fight back with weapons and try to develop your own kind of military deterrence,

then you know, you deserve to have moving shit bombed out of you and your family and your friends and everyone around you. So I know there's been a shift in the way people talk about Palestine recently and talk about kind of Israeli apartheid and colonization and war crimes. But I think people also need to take another step and think about Palestinian resistance and what they would do in that situation. Yeah. No, I think for Americans and anyone wondering how do they, what is the next step?

It's to honor the resistance of Palestinians. Yeah. Yeah. You know, necessarily get squeamish about it or to feel as though you have to excuse it. But no, that is resistance. Yeah. Yeah.

You don't have to, you don't have to, both sides, everything, you know. Exactly. Yeah. All right. I'm Mohammed El-Safin, thank you so much, yeah, we'll put that all in the show description.