It Could Happen Here - Palestine’s Stolen Future

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an iHeart Podcast. I'm Robert Evans and on my show Behind the Bastards this week, we have one of our worst subjects ever, David Byrd, founder of the Children of God cult, who we'll be talking about with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century is a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. But that's the beauty of cults.

Starting point is 00:00:35 Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol podcasts. with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to better offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated.

Starting point is 00:01:28 I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebene and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Starting point is 00:02:11 Hello everyone and welcome to It Can Happen Here. My name is Dana Al-Kurd. I'm a writer, analyst, and researcher of Palestinian and Arab politics. I'm an associate professor of political science and a senior non-resident fellow at the Arab Center of Washington. You may have heard me on It Could Happen Here Before or Behind the Bastards.

Starting point is 00:02:36 I've been following Cool Zone media projects for a while. I was happy when Robert and Sophie reached out and said, hey, come talk to our listeners on a more regular basis. Today, I wanna talk to you about something that doesn't get almost any attention in Western media. Internal Palestinian politics. Something I've argued for a while and continues to be the focus of my work is that Palestinian politics are important and the Palestinian issue is important.

Starting point is 00:03:04 I remember once being on stage for one of these DC events with none other than General Stanley McChrystal and he turns to me and says, essentially, the Palestinian issue is an issue of the past. Other Arabs want to move on. And it took everything in me to not respond, what planet are you living on? A genocide has been unfolding for the past almost two years, and crackdown on pro-Palestine activists is in the American media every other day. Maybe now we recognize that this is an important issue to understand.

Starting point is 00:03:36 Maybe one can hope. But you would not believe how many people in DC, in the American government, and by extension, lots of people in power, convinced themselves for years that the Palestinian issue and internal Palestinian politics were not worth addressing. For today's episode, I want to start to tackle a sort of big question of what is going on with Palestinian politics. And I'll give you the takeaways for this episode right away.

Starting point is 00:04:01 Number one, the Palestinian people are totally unrepresented by their leadership right away. Number one, the Palestinian people are totally unrepresented by their leadership right now. The Palestinian people haven't had a say in a very long time and that's a big problem because if we want to resolve any part of this conflict sustainably, we'll need people to go along. And the conflict got to where it is now because international actors thought that they could ignore the Palestinian people. That's literally as simple as it gets. Number two, no one internationally or stateside seems to have learned this lesson. In the US we've had bipartisan support for ignoring Palestinians and internationally the response has been

Starting point is 00:04:37 okay let's go back and try to do the same things we've always done and maybe this time it'll work out for us. I'll explain more what I mean as I go along, stay with me. Let's start first with the present, what's on everyone's minds and screens. The war in Gaza. The genocide that's unfolding there. I use that term because it's been credibly identified as a genocide by scholars of genocide and Holocaust studies such as Raz Sigal, Omer Bartov, and Amos Goldberg.

Starting point is 00:05:09 But I don't really care about the semantics here. Even if it was just mass violence and war crimes, that's still pretty bad too. But this genocide and this war has been relentless for over 600 days now. So what's everyone's endgame here? When this latest iteration of violence started under the Biden administration, with Hamas's October 7th attack that killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostages, the president and his team took every step to support Israel in its war. As Khadid al-Gindy, author and political analyst, wrote for Foreign Policy last year,

Starting point is 00:05:45 Biden's embrace of Netanyahu was rooted in the belief that only positive inducements and constant reassurances, both militarily and diplomatically, could restrain Israel's actions in Gaza." The Israelis were pretty vocal and clear about what they thought they needed to do in Gaza. Their goals were to eliminate Hamas as a political actor entirely, and some vocal members of the cabinet, such as finance minister Bezalos Motrich, as well as members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, like Nassim Vetturi, the deputy Knesset speaker, were talking straight up about annihilation and population transfer, settlement in Gaza. Perhaps we all remember what happened here, but even as time went on, none of this was enough

Starting point is 00:06:29 for the Biden administration to change course on the type of support it was extending for this war. But let's also remember that the Biden administration had little interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before the October 7th attack. Or indeed any interest in the Middle East. The State Department under Biden had wound down its Middle East engagement. They didn't undo any of Trump's major policy changes vis-à-vis the Middle East during his first administration. In fact, they doubled down. They agreed.

Starting point is 00:06:57 For example, Trump during his first term officially recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Even though this is contested, and UN resolution 147 says it should be an international city, internationally administered, so that Palestinians could also have access and claim to it. But Trump says the US doesn't care, accepts Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem. Trump also during his first term tried to sideline the issue of Palestine entirely

Starting point is 00:07:22 by engineering these quote unquote peace deals between Arab governments and Israel. Now, most Arab governments have had the position since the Arab peace initiative of 2002 that they would not have diplomatic relations with Israel and not recognize it officially until the implementation of a two-state solution. That Palestinians would need to get some sort of state and only then would Arab governments normalize relations with Israel. For a variety of reasons I can't get into here during this episode, but might be good to touch on in the future, some of these Arab governments and the Trump administration decide to undo that precedent, sign these agreements with Israel, and basically

Starting point is 00:07:59 make the claim that the Palestinian issue doesn't need to be solved. We can all move on. the claim that the Palestinian issue doesn't need to be solved. We can all move on. When the Biden administration comes in, they support this line of policy too. They seem to agree that the world can move on while the Palestinians experience worse and worse violence and have zero freedom of movement and are born and die without any sort of political rights or autonomy. They thought that that status quo looked pretty sustainable. Two years into the Biden administration, my colleagues at the Arab center wrote a report titled the Biden administration and the Middle East in 2023, where they try to trace any shifts in his foreign policy towards the Middle East.

Starting point is 00:08:41 There are six different analysts. They basically agree across a variety of issue areas, including Palestine, that the Biden administration is pursuing business as usual. Of course, we know now that this comes to an abrupt end with the October 7th attacks and the subsequent war and genocide. Then Trump wins in 2024. He's back. And Trump and his team, well, they largely see the Middle East as a business

Starting point is 00:09:06 opportunity. Like everything, it's a place for moneymaking and grift. It's where Qatar can give the president a Boeing 747 and where the president's companies can build hotels. The uncertainty around war spilling over from Gaza is putting a damper on all of that. The Trump team has people on it like Mike Huckabee, who doesn't even believe Palestinians exist as a people. He has repeatedly said that the occupied territories are not occupied, often uses their biblical names, Judea and Samaria. When he was one of the candidates running for president in 2008, he said that the Palestinian identity was quote, a political tool to try and force land

Starting point is 00:09:48 away from Israel, end quote. This is an argument on the far right and some liberals too, who think that the Palestinian identity is not a national identity, but it's some sort of anti Semitic ideology. He has also since, as the ambassador to Israel currently, talked about establishing a Palestinian state in another Muslim country. Despite these types of people, the Trump administration is weirdly more willing to take steps without Israel's approval to try and get a ceasefire in Gaza and resolve the war that's cramping

Starting point is 00:10:23 everyone's hopes and dreams for Gaza Riviera, maybe complete with bearded belly dancers. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, I really envy you. So Trump's team, Steve Witkoff, US Special Envoy to the Middle East, and Adam Bowler, US hostage envoy, actually have direct talks with Hamas. The Trump team is talking deals with Saudi Arabia without trying to pressure them to make a deal with Israel anymore. Bowler says the U.S.

Starting point is 00:10:49 isn't an agent of Israel. It has to have its own policy. Honestly, the Biden administration could never. Now, to be clear, the Trump administration is still talking about population transfer. They don't care about stopping Israel's worst excesses, like targeting schools and aid organizations. They, in fact, go along with this idea of creating aid distribution points under a new organization they call the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which all the other aid groups

Starting point is 00:11:16 are screaming warnings about. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, their Commissioner General, Philippe Lazzarini, has described this distribution sites as quote a death trap with quote scores of injured and killed among starving civilians. Doctors Without Borders as an organization put out a statement affirming that this proposed aid organization is quote conditional on forced displacement and vetting of the population. So this humanitarian foundation is really just a way to politicize aid. And indeed, the Israelis promptly use them to make arrests at aid sites and use them to sequester Palestinians into smaller, contained areas.

Starting point is 00:11:58 You'd think in the Gaza Strip that wouldn't even be possible, but they are finding a way. The first executive director of this foundation, Jake Woods, literally resigns in a matter of weeks because he can't do his work while respecting humanitarian law. He said specifically it was, quote, not possible to implement a new Israeli-backed aid system in the enclave while remaining neutral and independent. So we're talking that bad. So, we're talking that bad. I'm Robert Evans and on my podcast Behind the Bastards, we talk about the worst people in all of history. We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of

Starting point is 00:12:37 the very worst we'll ever talk about. David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God. We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest, Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid century.

Starting point is 00:12:59 He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. Right. But that's the beauty of get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. Right. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:13:14 Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebene and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the strength to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer.

Starting point is 00:13:51 Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network.

Starting point is 00:14:12 Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why open AI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer.

Starting point is 00:14:42 Listen to Better Offline on the iHotRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Starting point is 00:15:11 Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's the end game here?

Starting point is 00:16:06 For the Israelis, like I said, it's been pretty clear they want population transfer. For the US, we shall see to what extent the Trump administration will go along with that. For Arab leaders, for international powers outside the US, they're all scrambling to go back to a two-state solution framework. They want to press reset on this war, go back 30 years to 1993 when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Peace Accords, and they want to restart these promised negotiations. The Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Faisal bin Farhan bin Abdullah, has repeatedly

Starting point is 00:16:41 emphasized the Saudi Kingdom's commitment to the two-state solution, both at the Arab and Islamic summit last year and in internal ministerial meetings. French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman even recently co-chaired what they called, quote, a high-level international conference for the peaceful settlement of the Palestinian question and the implementation of the two-state solution. Quite a mouthful. This meeting is held at the UN and Qatari Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman Al Thani also expressed support for the conference and its mission. A lot of regional actors would love to put an end to all the war that's destabilizing

Starting point is 00:17:20 Palestine, the region, and the domestic politics in many countries. And that would sound like a good idea if we didn't know how the first attempt at the two-state solution ended up. Let's break this down more. What is the two-state solution that they are desperately trying to go back to? And what were the Oslo Peace Accords? The Oslo Peace Accords was a framework agreed upon by the Palestine Liberation Organization and the State of Israel to start the discussion about a two-state solution. As part of that, it established the creation of a Palestinian Authority, a government that

Starting point is 00:17:54 was supposed to start building up the parts of an eventual Palestinian state and the occupied territories. Now, where those lines eventually would be, what the word state actually meant for Palestinians, who would get to have sovereignty in Jerusalem, what would happen to refugees, all of this was put on the table for continued negotiations. But the Osso Accords were significant and have shaped the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict because not only was it the first time Israelis and Palestinians were directly negotiating with American oversight and control, of course,

Starting point is 00:18:26 but also because it creates this Palestinian authority apparatus. The biggest problem is the Oslo Peace Accords didn't work. We don't have a Palestinian state today. Palestinians, in fact, have become more repressed, more restricted in their political rights and freedom of movement, more fragmented physically and politically after the Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accords create a system of separating different parts of the occupied territories into Area A, B, and C. Eventually, Gaza and the West Bank are no longer governed together, and Palestinians in the occupied territories no longer can access Jerusalem or inside the Green Line in Israel.

Starting point is 00:19:01 And all of these changes happen because of the Oslo Accords. Not to mention, of course, the fact that the Palestinians continue to deal with changes happened because of the Oslo Accords. Not to mention of course the fact that the Palestinians continued to deal with the repression of the occupation as well as the Palestinian Authority. The Prime Minister of Israel who signed the Oslo Accords, Yitzhak Rabin, literally said in his last speech to the Israeli Parliament, quote, we will give them something less than a state. And then after he's assassinated by a right-wing Israeli, we get successive Israeli governments that don't care about these negotiations at all,

Starting point is 00:19:31 that continue to take more and more land in the occupied territories, build new Israeli settlements, and restrict Palestinian life. The Palestinian people have not had a real say in any of this. And the Oslo Accords fundamentally shifted internal Palestinian politics in such a way that disempowered the Palestinian people even more.

Starting point is 00:19:52 Keep this in mind, it's a very important point. Before the Oslo Accords, Palestinian politics was defined by the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO is an umbrella organization with a number of political factions. It includes the diaspora. It includes Palestinians in refugee camps. Palestinians as a people, basically, wherever they are. Of course, the Palestinians are killed wherever they are. Of course, within the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem and within the Palestinian

Starting point is 00:20:23 communities in Israel. They're repressed in a variety of ways. So just to be clear that it wasn't great before the Oslo Accords by any means. And there are divisions within the PLO between the different factions. There are also divisions between those within the occupied territories and those in the PLO outside the occupied territories. And then during the first Palestinian uprising in the 1980s, we also have the emergence of militant Islamist groups

Starting point is 00:20:49 like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who are not part of the PLO and represent a sort of opposition to them. But the PLO is the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people. It's a national liberation movement by its own definition, it's not a state, and it's not a government. The Palestinian Authority, a governing body, is supposed to be subordinate to the PLO. In actuality, it really became the key player,

Starting point is 00:21:16 and the PLO becomes a zombie organization. Some parts of the PLO haven't seen meetings since the 1990s. The PLO today is not representative, it's not very active. The PLO National Council, the main legislative body, is supposed to meet every year, but has only met twice in the past three decades. And then certain bodies within the PLO like the Executive Committee or the Central Council, really only meet to rubber stamp the Palestinian Authority leaders decisions. Why is this relevant? Well it means the issue of Palestine became the issue of negotiating over what this quote less than a state governing body called the Palestinian Authority gets to do in the bits of the occupied territories where it's allowed to operate. This framework doesn't include Palestinians outside those bits of the occupied territories where it's allowed to operate. This framework doesn't include Palestinians outside those bits of the occupied territories.

Starting point is 00:22:08 And the issue of Palestine is no longer about the right of refugees to return, for Palestinians to have actual sovereignty, to have a say in their own future. The PA doesn't defend the Palestinians it's supposedly governing. In fact, it coordinates with Israel to maintain Israeli security. And there's no institutional way for Palestinians to impact their political leadership that might actually negotiate away their rights because the PLO is no longer functioning and the PA itself is undemocratic. The US and its allies consistently make sure it stays that way. They elevate the current leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and back his essentially uncontested election in 2004 to the presidency. They push Abbas to hold parliamentary elections in 2006, and then when Hamas wins a plurality, help

Starting point is 00:22:56 him overturn those elections. Within the political party that Abbas is also a leader of, Fateh, the emergence of new leaders is often blocked, sometimes by Israel simply not allowing party members to travel and attend the conferences. Palestinian scholar, Tarek Danna, has some really interesting research on that front if people are interested, in a chapter titled, Lost in Transition,

Starting point is 00:23:17 the Palestinian National Movement after Oslo. Suffice to say, everyone ignores demands by Palestinians in the occupied territories to have new leadership or to hold elections. And the Palestinian people's regular everyday life is such that they face more restrictions, more violence, more of an inability to live. When Hamas takes control in Gaza, Palestinians in Gaza also have to face a brutal blockade. Everyone in Palestine faces layers of authoritarian control.

Starting point is 00:23:46 Not just occupation, but the Palestinian Authority itself. And everyone with power around the world basically expects them to just accept this reality. Well, they won't. Not because they're crazy, but because this is existential. I'm Robert Evans and on my podcast Behind the Bastards we talk about the worst people in all of history. We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about. David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God.

Starting point is 00:24:21 We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't make sense. Right. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebene and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you.

Starting point is 00:25:08 On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the strength to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal.

Starting point is 00:25:34 He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley.

Starting point is 00:26:04 And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why open AI along with other AI companies are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your

Starting point is 00:26:33 gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened

Starting point is 00:26:57 when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes

Starting point is 00:27:25 one, two, and three on May 21st, and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. There are more uprisings, some very violent. The second Palestinian uprising that starts in 2000 is more fragmented and much more violent than the first, based on both death toll and tactics. Wendy Perlman's book, Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement has an excellent analysis of how and why this happened. There are also nonviolent campaigns. There is the call by Palestinian civil society in 2005

Starting point is 00:28:05 To boycott divest from and sanction Israel the BDS movement. There are nonviolent protest campaigns Especially in village areas where the new segregation wall is going up People really lean on getting the attention of the international community and pursuing nonviolent tactics as a form of legitimacy There are village campaigns in places like Bel-En and Nile'in and Budros, lots of books, documentaries and press coverage. They get attention, but they don't stop the occupation. Things for Palestinians keep getting worse. With no political options, the appeal of violent tactics goes up.

Starting point is 00:28:40 With increased threats and attacks by Israeli settlers alongside occupation forces, the appeal of violent tactics goes up. The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, in a poll from September 2023 across the occupied territories, so this is right before the last war, found support for armed struggle is much higher than support for negotiations as the most effective means of ending the Israeli occupation. 53% of respondents support armed struggle, and 20% support negotiations. I remember being interviewed by the Ukrainian outlet Commons,

Starting point is 00:29:13 and I'm not the first to say this, nor was I the last, but I remember talking to them in August 2023, and saying, it really seems like mass violence is coming, because all of this is unsustainable. On the Israeli side, with every election, their government was becoming more extreme, more vocal about population transfer and ethnic cleansing. So now that you know the backstory, it puts a new light on the discussion of a two-state framework today. Even if that two-state framework remained feasible, and that's a big if, how do international

Starting point is 00:29:46 actors imagine this is going to work out if Palestinians still don't get a say in their own leadership? How are you going to get Palestinians to go along with a peace process they had no hand in shaping? And Palestinians are critical of their entire political establishment, both the PA and Hamas. In Gaza, people were protesting Hamas before the October 7th attacks. There were protests in July 2023 against governance and living conditions. And there were protests after the October 7th attack, in March of this year, also critical

Starting point is 00:30:18 of Hamas and its conduct. In May 2025, that same center, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, had a poll which showed that only 15% of respondents from across the occupied territories thought that the Palestinian Authority's conduct had been satisfactory. 42% support its dissolution. So given that this is how the public views things, plans for Gaza that rely on the return of a previous status quo, something like Hamas in Gaza or the PA in the West Bank, or returning PA control to Gaza altogether,

Starting point is 00:30:50 will not be popular in any shape or form. And yet, there haven't been any clear proposals for anything but such a scenario. In fact, it seems Israel is banking on the idea of sequestering Palestinians into smaller camps. The US doesn't seem to have a problem with that. The Arabs and EU actors are still talking about supporting the Palestinian Authority. Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia in December 2024 put out a statement affirming that, continue to support the Palestinian Authority, noting its capacity, despite all challenges, to manage the situation in the West Bank and Gaza."

Starting point is 00:31:29 And because they're worried about where the PA will go from here, given how old the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is, he's 89, Arab governments have also pressured him to figure out a succession plan. A few weeks ago, May 2025, he did indeed convene the PLO Central Council, despite objections and despite the fact that most factions within the PLO boycotted the proceedings. Those present changed the bylaws to make a new vice president position, understood to be Abbas's successor. Abbas then appoints a man named Hsein al-Sheikh, a businessman,

Starting point is 00:32:06 a security coordination guy, who polls at 2%. I mean, this just won't be acceptable to the Palestinian public, but this is their best plan. Because of these shenanigans, there are Palestinian initiatives with political leaders and civil society actors calling to revitalize the PLO to make it more representative. For example, there is the Palestinian National Conference Initiative, which has been pretty consistently attacked by the PA. This national conference attempts to involve a wider diaspora and include input from all the political factions, and it's called on PA leaders to revive the PLO meaningfully and allow for more input. There are also initiatives such as Land for All, which includes Israelis and Palestinians

Starting point is 00:32:51 that talk about a new type of two-state solution, and they want to move beyond the current kind of political impasse on both sides. But no one is really paying attention to these calls from outside initiatives or from civil society. So as of now, the only plan being taken seriously is the Israeli US plan of repressing Gaza into oblivion. There's even reporting by Mohammad Shada at Zateo that the Israeli forces have activated and supported gangs in Gaza, some of them with affiliations to ISIS, to advance their political aims. What's clear is that we do need to go back to the drawing board,

Starting point is 00:33:28 and we need to understand that unless Palestinians have a say in their internal politics, no solutions will be meaningful. But I don't see any indication that anyone with any power talking about solutions for Gaza and the war has absorbed this fact. That's all I have for you today. I'll be back to talk more about developments in Palestinian politics, as well as deep dives on topics like Arab-Israeli negotiations, protest movements, and more.

Starting point is 00:33:58 Thanks for listening. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I'm Robert Evans, and on my show Behind the Bastards this week, we have one of our worst subjects ever, David Byrd, founder of the Children of God cult, who we'll be talking

Starting point is 00:34:31 about with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity Pentecostal preaching in the mid century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you

Starting point is 00:34:56 get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm and powerful at ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or

Starting point is 00:35:55 wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebene and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Starting point is 00:36:28 This is an iHeart Podcast.

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It Could Happen Here - Palestine’s Stolen Future

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