It Could Happen Here - The Pro Palestine Movement Two Years After Genocide
Episode Date: November 12, 2025Dana El Kurd speaks with author, activist, and 2025 Foundation for Middle East Peace fellow Ahmed Moor on the pro-Palestine movement in the US, and what we can learn after two years of genocide. Sourc...es: Ahmed Moor & Antony Loewenstein’s book - https://saqibooks.com/books/saqi/after-zionism/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hello, everyone.
This is Dana Al-Kurd for It Could Happen here.
I'm a professor and analyst of Palestinian and air politics.
And today we're joined by Ahmed Moore, who is the 2025 Foundation for Middle East Peace Fellow.
He's also an author, an activist, just very, very involved in the Palestinian space and on the question of Palestinian liberation.
So I've invited Ahmed today to discuss with us what we can understand about pro-Palestine organizing in the past two years in comparison to prior to October 7, 2023, and think kind of analytically about where we can go from here.
We're recording this on November 5th, 2025.
We had a very interesting night last night,
where Zahran Mandani was named the mayor of New York City,
and a lot of think pieces sense about how this means nothing
and actually it means everything.
And the pro-Palestine movement is winning.
It's really not winning enough, et cetera, et cetera.
So, yeah, we're in an interesting moment in American politics.
I think the Palestine question is obviously very, very relevant.
So, yeah, Ahmed, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, Donna.
Huge pleasure to be here.
All right.
So maybe we can start with kind of an introduction to yourself.
You can tell us about your experience as an activist, as an organizer.
Sure, yes.
As a researcher.
Yeah.
So I was born in Gaza, Palestine and Gaza and Rafah.
And my family moved here when I was a kid and became naturalized.
So American citizen when I was 10 years old.
So that was in mid-90s.
And, you know, went to college right after 9-11.
and like lots of people was galvanized around that experience.
I think it was a period.
I was so a journalist both in Beirut and in Cairo,
and often you would meet American journalists roughly of my generation.
And all of them would indicate that, you know,
I became engaged around the Middle East because of 9-11.
I think 9-11 was for our generation,
a big learning opportunity for people.
The global war on terror, the war in Iraq,
galvanized a lot of the left.
And I'm thinking now of move on.org.
And so this is really the environment that I grew up in.
Today, I mostly work with the Guardian, with the nation,
mostly write about Palestine, Israel, and American foreign policy.
And as you mentioned, I'm a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace,
where I host a podcast, Occupied Thoughts,
where we spend a lot of time thinking through policy matters related to Palestine.
I have ideas about how things have changed, but that's just a quick introduction to me and my work.
No, thank you.
We're approximately the same age.
I won't tell you exactly how off.
But yeah, I just am reflecting so much these days on how much the war on terror was a formative moment politically for our generation.
And it's interaction with the Palestinian issue.
I think that's starting to really be understood more why.
widely, I think maybe it was more fringe or like a very select kind of understanding of the
left would have that kind of analysis.
For sure.
I mean, just to put a fine point on it, I mean, that was the, I would say, generational awareness
that we've been lied to.
We've lied to by Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, all of that cohort, those people.
You can see how that's rebounded today in Maine with Graham Platner, somebody who fought two
or three tours.
And then subsequently worked as a mercenary.
with Blackwater was radicalized, I would say, through that experience when he was watching
these happy-go-lucky diplomats swimming in pools in a diplomatic compound when just outside
a savage war was being waged or an insurgency. So I would say that, you know, Palestine is
so deeply interwoven. Palestine is a long history of having been lied to for people here in the
United States domestically. That came to a head around the Iraq War. We relied into that
or. And I think you saw the way that the Biden administration particularly stuck with the playbook
and alienated huge numbers of voters in 2024. Right. So Palestine is kind of indispensable to
understanding how our elites in the United States have been captured by special interests,
by corporatist interests. And we're beginning to see that, I think, rebound in meaningful ways.
and, of course, congratulations to Zaraan Mamdani, done a wonderful job.
He ran an extraordinary campaign.
I question, though, whether the campaign could have been successful without the awakening
that occurred through two years of genocide.
And what I mean by that specifically is so many of the taboos that had been enforced around identity,
around good politics in America, were dispensed with because those taboos were employed
to suppress opposition to genocide.
Yeah, no, I think you're right on the money on that.
I mean, in some ways, the MAGA movement and Donald Trump also capitalized on the lies
of the war on terror to, I mean, despite the incoherence of the MAGA movement, like, that
was part of, you know, a rebuke of the neocons.
But, of course, the left is, especially after two years of unspeakable genocide, I think
it has led to just an articulation of how much the American foreign policy in the Middle East
is, you mentioned boomerang.
It's an imperial boomerang that is impacting American politics.
It's also highlighted how much the elite and public opinion is bifurcated on this.
Palestine has become an issue of democracy.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but that's what I would say.
No, I think that's correct.
I agree with that.
I mean, so Palestine went from being specifically Palestine,
And from being a niche issue when I was in college, post-colonial studies majors knew about Palestine
and could integrate Palestine into an understanding of life in America to being really part of
the American story today. And I think it's apt to describe it that way. The experience of watching
a genocide unfold for two years has been radicalizing for many, but it's also been
enlightening in that the first question was, why is this happening? The second question is, why can't we
stop it. Okay, Israel's an independent country. We can't control them. Fine. Why are we still
supporting this? And then ultimately, you end up going down that rabbit hole and arriving at,
what is this Israel lobby? What is this special interest? And so I think the degree of
complicity, the way in which the Biden administration blew so much smoke, the way in which both
sides of the aisle engaged in genocide and cheered the genocide, really, has caused the
the Palestine issue to become deeply interwoven with the experience of being American today.
And I don't think that's an overstatement. And I think concretely it means that you need an answer
to the question, well, if you can't stand up to genocide, if you can't stand up for
defenseless children in Palestine, and if you're going to lie to me about it, why would I
expect you to stand up for anything meaningful as it relates to my standard of living, say I'm a
working class person? And so it's become this litmus test, at least on the left. And I think
you're seeing a similar dynamic play out on the right, but for totally different reasons.
Right. Right. And it's been extraordinary to behold, because I think so many of us who've
been in this issue for so long, we've been marking our progress in incrementalist terms.
And then suddenly, things have broken wide open and the world has changed very, very quickly.
Yeah. From my vantage point in American academia, I mean, they might have had personal feelings
about Israel, Palestine. They may have had sympathies, but so few people would ever talk
about the erasure of Palestine in the academy or the impact of censorship and attacks on
academic freedom. But now, because the Palestinian issue is being used as this cudgel to attack
higher education, like you're just a normal Joe Schmo like math professor. You're going to have
to care. And you do. And we're seeing this very much with the mobilization of the American
Association of University Professors that is not a Middle East specific.
organization whatsoever, but they are, they recognize the linkages between these issues. So in the
ways that Palestine is interwoven with, but also has impacted so many of our current realities
and the policies that we're facing by the Trump administration and the Biden administration
before them, yeah, I think it's very clear to a lot of people.
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So that actually brings me to one of the main questions.
that I wanted to ask you is, aside from kind of this increased awareness and the taboos that have
been broken around the discussion of Palestine and its integration in American foreign policy
and American domestic policy, what are some other ways that you think since the genocide
began that pro-Palestine organizing has changed?
So the biggest thing I've seen is that an analytical frame has changed.
We used to talk about foreign policy adventurers, wars for oil.
those kinds of things. Now I think the analysis is very correctly focused on empire, the way in
which resources domestically, the real working class effort to build a life in the United States
is subsumed by wars of really imperial overreach. The whole idea of empire for me was an antiquated
one. I didn't think it had a whole lot of relevance today, but I think I and many others who may have
thought in that way missed the point. The realities that empire is intact. I think that awareness
that our efforts domestically are deeply, deeply intertwined with what's happening, what we're
doing elsewhere is important and it's emergent. It's new. When I was in graduate school,
you would hear people talk about how they're engaged with domestic policy or people talk about
their interest in foreign policy. And I was mostly interested in foreign policy. But today,
to try to draw that differentiation is really meaningless.
And again, you see that in the race in New York.
Mom, Donnie did run on affordability.
He ran on a domestic policy program.
But equally 38% I think of voters were heavily motivated by his foreign policy interests
and his foreign policy perspectives, which, again, from a policy point of view, he can't
really impact.
But nonetheless, are supported by this idea that our taxes, what we do domestically,
is having a huge impact everywhere else in the world and that American empires
sprawling and a challenge for people domestically as well.
From a pure activist point of view, you know, I used to have a real belief in
electoral politics.
That was shaken deeply through the DNC, through the grassroots effort to be heard.
Uncommitted, yeah.
The uncommitted movement, precisely.
We'll see where things go.
I mean, the truth is that, you know, the person who is just elected in Jersey is a,
is a typical, I believe, A-PAC Democrat, Mike and Cheryl.
My perspective domestically is that we need to be aggressive.
We need to be forceful in calling for a total reconstitution of Democratic Party.
No half-measures.
And I think Zeranamandani did a good job of illustrating what that could look like.
Yeah, I mean, there's always a tension in this very money-captured system that we have,
that at certain level, it doesn't really matter liberal or Republican.
They are captured.
But I think what the New York City race has demonstrated is like, that can only go so far.
You still need some public support, which is why, of course, they're going after gerrymandering and all of that.
But yeah, it's an uphill battle.
But I think if this democracy is to exist, we are in a better footing than we were, you know, on this discussion.
I also am wondering what you think of this characterization, which is that I think before this genocide, and I don't mean to create this binary,
but it has been a very transformative event.
Before this genocide, I think a lot of Palestinian-American organizing in spaces discussed
the issue of Palestine in a rights-based approach way, so about human rights, about ending apartheid,
about extending rights.
And I think the framing for that has also changed.
It is really a critique of settler colonialism and the legitimacy of these nation states.
First of all, what do you think of that characterization on my end?
But also, what do you think of the tension then that poses for the Palestinian National Liberation Movement that still wants a state?
Yeah, you're right.
Again, the analytic frame has shifted.
We've gone from a contested conversation around 1967, the June war, when Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, Ghausta from Egypt, Jerusalem as well, from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and a small sliver of land from Lebanon, to 1914.
That's what we talk about now, and that's correct.
And I think for many Palestinians or Palestinian Americans, that has always been the starting
point of the conversation.
But now we have the political legitimacy to say, wait a second, this whole state was founded
upon separate and unequal on Jewish supremacy, on a point of view that we reject as Americans
and we should reject everywhere in the world.
And so I think that that's the first meaningful change that I've seen.
when we talk about palace design. And then, of course, settled colonialism is built into that analysis.
Things get a little bit different when you zoom out. Let me just talk about domestic.
I think that when you talk to people on the left, the universalist argument, everybody's
created equal is very, very powerful and resonant, and it's the one that I believe in.
But what's happening on the right as well is an America First argument. And the word protectorate comes
up repeatedly. Why are we investing so much in a protector? Tucker Carlston, powerfully, I think,
for his audience, and this is probably the most influential commentator in the United States today.
But powerfully, you know, said that this country has half the size, half the economy, the state of Connecticut.
Why have we invested so much political capital, so much money, and something which is so immaterial,
especially when it pays a big negative dividend in lots of different ways?
So the nativist argument is meeting the universalist argument, but the core analysis around
settled colonialism around the lack of legitimacy for a supremacist state gives rise to both
of those arguments.
It acts as a substrate, I would say.
Palestinians want to see a Palestinian state and how you're going back to Palestine.
I don't know what that means today.
I've heard perspectives that, you know, availing ourselves of statehood as a legal construct
will mean that you can now access legal frameworks to pursue justice in the courts wherever they may exist.
I hope that's true. Let's see if it works out. I think there are people who are trying to take
Israeli men, dual nationals who participated in the genocide to court in France, I think,
by using some of the laws that exist between recognized states and non-states or maybe the UK.
Let's see if Robert Meets Road there. I support those tactics.
But practically when you're talking about Palestinian liberation, I don't believe that a state which has been colonized out of existence.
And you kind of have to look at a map to see what I mean here.
But the West Bank is thoroughly colonized.
Gaza is still occupied by the Israelis and will likely be slowly ethnically cleansed over time and not rebuilt.
I fail to see how a state, a legal construct, is going to yield real benefits for the people on the ground now in Palestine.
I agree 100%. And I think that the continuation of this framework, the statehood framework that a lot of our kind of political elites in the Palestinian landscape continue to use. And a lot of these, you know, countries in the global north use also to bypass the work that actually needs to be done after a genocide. It's certainly a distraction in my view. But it also speaks to the renewal that needs to happen within Palestinian politics.
and within the PLO.
But that's a bigger matter.
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What up, y'all?
It's your boy, Kevin Stage.
I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Moment,
where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends,
people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures.
What did they mess up on?
What is their heartbreak?
And what did they learn?
from him. I got judged
horribly. The judges were like,
you're trash. I don't know how you got on
the show. Boo. Somebody had tomatoes.
I'm kidding. But if they had tomatoes,
they would have thrown the tomatoes.
Let's be honest. We've all had those moments
we'd rather forget. We bumped our head.
We made a mistake. The deal fell through.
We're embarrassed.
We failed. But this podcast is
about that and how we made it through.
So when they
sat me down, they were kind of like, we got into the
small talk and they were just like, so what do you got?
ideas. And I was like, oh, no. What? Check out Not My Best Moment with me, Kevin on stage,
on the Iheart radio app, Apple podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Robert Smith.
This is Jacob Goldstein. And we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back
making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses
in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history
business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it
at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode,
how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline
business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to
have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons.
And you know what? They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of
famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked,
like Thomas Edison and the electric chair.
Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcast.
All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie.
For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in graves,
County, Kentucky, went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls
came forward with a story.
I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know.
A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen
investigator on national TV.
Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica
Curran.
My name is Maggie Freeling.
I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said.
They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her.
They made me say that I poured gas on her.
From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go
in order to find someone to blame.
America, y'all better work the hell up.
Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed
on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to binge the entire season ad-free,
subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
My next question was going to be on the Palestinian-American diaspora.
In what ways do you think the Palestinian-American diaspora is alike with people in historic Palestine, with other diaspras?
And in what ways do you think that they're unique?
That's a hard question for me to answer.
I think the diaspora and the way that I've interacted,
people is diverse. What people have in common is a common reference point in Nekba.
They have a common understanding around the legitimacy of Israel as an ethno state, which
takes Jewish supremacy as its point of departure. But it's a very diverse diaspora. I mean,
our first Palestinian-American in Congress is Justin Amash, who is on the right.
That's right. I always forget about him.
Yeah. I mean, he had relatives who were murdered in Gaza at a church in northern Ghazir, which dates
back to, I think, the 11th century. So we're a diverse diaspora. I think the Palestinian diaspora
in the United States is integrated. It's educated. That's the passport for lots of Palestinians
around the world. It's how you get out. It's how you build a life. We have a very high literacy
rate in Palestine, exceeds 99.5%. But I think where the diaspora hasn't, at least in the United
States, done as effective a job, and this is kind of the natural trajectory, I think, of
of diaspora communities generally.
I don't know that we're as aggressive and organized as we could be.
And I want to emphasize the word aggressive.
The idea that we can go out and compete at all levels of government,
that we can go out and assert our understanding of history,
backed by facts, we should be doing more of that,
especially when you look kind of across the board
when it comes to people who are doing well in medicine or in business,
you know, where there's been a real career risk for speaking out and for being assertive,
we can do more now. And we should use the leverage gain through two years of genocide,
the most expensive access to leverage, I can imagine, to push much harder politically.
Yeah, that's a very good point. I'm also wondering how well you think the Palestinian organizing
groups and spaces. How well integrated are they into other?
activist issue areas? Yeah, I think this is where when I was in college, I didn't know the word
intersectionality. That wasn't a concept that really was one that people thought about, you know,
you would host an event and you would invite your friends, some of whom would be in the black
students group, some of whom would be in the queer students group, and just regular left
groups. But today, I'd say that activists have a much more complete sense of how you almost
have a social quilt and a compression on one part of it will impact everything else that's related to it.
And we're all interrelated in that way.
I'd say that the most potent discussions around Palestine are coming from left organizing groups,
not exactly Palestinian organizing groups.
I think if I could offer gentle criticism of Palestinian organizers, there's been too much,
and you saw this with uncommitted, too much effort to ingratiate yourselves to the existing power apparatus.
to ask for a seat at the table when it's somebody like Zeran Mamdani, again, who demanded a seat
at the table through an unrelenting focus on the issues, achieved access to a platform
that nobody wanted to seed. And I don't think that following the rules exactly or being friendly
about accessing platforms within the Democratic parties when yield a huge benefit to Palestinian
Americans or people here, I'd say the most principled organizing is the organizing that's going
to win. And today that comes from non-Palestinian groups. And I'm okay with that. I don't really think
it matters if the best argument is coming from somebody whose family comes from South Asia through
Uganda or somebody whose family emerges from, you know, the Balata refugee camp. That doesn't
really matter to me. I think just to focus on the principles is the most important thing.
Yeah, right, right. I think we're definitely seeing.
more of an acceptance of that. I agree with the limitations that you referenced. I also sometimes
do reflect on how matched the discussion is in the United States with the discussion in historic
Palestine and what activists can do to kind of bridge some gaps that might emerge. But of course,
understanding that we do exist in a different political reality and we obviously will develop
different views as a result of that. I agree. And look, I mean, nobody needs to be apologetic
about inhabiting a different reality.
You know, we don't need to defer to a leadership which is divided, divided in Palestine,
and PLO that won't talk to itself.
And there are structural reasons for that, right?
I mean, the Israelis and the Americans have done a very effective job in splintering
Palestinian leadership.
I think we need to think extremely locally.
There are issues that matter to my community in West Philadelphia, bigger issues across
Pennsylvania that impact my life, that impact my life as a father of three little girls.
So I think being a member of a community and focusing, again, relentlessly on the principles and the facts that we've known all along is critical to pushing the conversation on Palestine forward.
And practically today, for me, that means an arms embargo.
It means sanctions.
It means a cultural boycott.
And it means those things unapologetically.
Again, those are principled positions that I can take as an American citizen, a citizen of a country which has underwritten genocide.
has underwritten apartheid for decades.
Yep, I think I agree with that analysis.
As the author, which we didn't mention at the beginning, as the author, one of the co-authors
of After Zionism with Anthony Lewinstein, I'm going to pose a difficult question for you.
Now, I'm just joking.
Not that you have to answer it fully, but where do you think we go from here?
Where do you think the pro-Palestine movement goes from here?
And if you can reflect in your answer on where we've stalled as well.
Yeah.
So I used to believe in one state for everybody with equal rights.
Today, I think the writing is on the wall for the Palestinians in Palestine.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is proceeding.
The fact that the Gaza has been utterly destroyed, utterly destroyed.
There are no universities, no schools, no really functioning hospitals.
The basic infrastructure required for the maintenance of life doesn't exist there anymore.
That's part of why it's a genocide.
We've got to take that reality.
into account. The Palestinians in Gaza, the Palestinians in Palestine generally have the right to pursue
life. They have a right to an education. They have a right to self-actualization. And many of them,
when they can, they're going to leave. That's the ethnic cleansing program. That's the idea
behind the mass destruction of Palestine. The Israelis are succeeded in that regard, I would say.
We need to be mindful of that. We need to be aware of that. So what I think will happen ultimately
is that you'll end up with some rump community of Palestinians and Palestinians.
who were eventually, when in arms embargoes enacted, and I hope it's within our lifetimes,
when the sanctions are enacted, when Israel is forced to become a normal country with equal
rights for all, will continue to exist in that space. I don't know, you know, I can't predict,
nobody can really predict what's certain to what's going to happen, but the kinds of pressure
required to cause Israel to become a de-radicalized normal society will take time to produce.
and in the interim, the writing is on the wall for the Palestinians in Palestine.
And I think that's the saddest, for me, part of all of this.
The continuity of Palestinian life in Palestine is not guaranteed.
You know, the overwhelming force of the state exists in one place, and that's in Israel.
Yeah, that's why when a lot of people talk positively about the developments of the past two years,
Of course, you want to feel hope.
You want to highlight how the discussion has changed here in America,
how politics is moving forward.
You want to have some pathway.
But we never were able to prevent that genocide.
Nothing we did in any avenue.
All of us have different positionalities engaged with different actors.
Like, none of it actually stopped that.
And that is a very hard pill to swallow.
I hope, I've always been hoping,
that at least that will allow us to get to the place of self-reflection
about what radical solutions look like
in the aftermath of this kind of disaster.
And yeah, I hope that that's where we go from here on my end.
Yeah, thank you so much, Ahmed.
This has been a really enriching discussion,
and I think that the listeners will benefit from this overarching view
of propalsine activism and its intersections with everything we're
seeing unfold. So thank you so much again. Thank you, Donna. It's been a huge pleasure.
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