Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Decolonizing Palestine: Toward National Liberation in the Levant

Episode Date: May 3, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Nov 2, 2023 Alyson and Breht discuss the ongoing national liberation struggle in Palestine. Together, they discuss the incredible shift in public opinion on Israel and Palestine, the internal and external contradictions culminating in unison for Israel, the discussion about whether or not what Israel is doing is technically a genocide (it absolutely is), international law, Frantz Fanon on the psychology of national liberation, the prospects of a broader regional war, the possibilities of Turkish or Iranian engagement, the history and core elements of Zionism, the analytical importance of the settler colonial and decolonization frameworks, the disgusting role that Biden and the Democratic Party are playing in manufacturing consent for Israel's civilian mass murder campaign, the "lesser of two genocider" arguments being trotted out by liberals, how Hamas is basically an orphan army of men who have had their families killed by Israel in previous assaults, why we should reject the "terrorist" framing of the western ruling elites, what the palestinian resistance has managed to accomplish, and what might emerge from the Ruins of Gaza when all is said and done... ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE  

Hello, you are listening to Red Minnis. My name is Allison, and I am here with Brett, and it has been a little bit since we have done an episode. We've had pretty busy schedules in both of our lives that have taken us away from the show for a little bit. But we are back today. to discuss a very important issue that I think is, you know, an obligation for communists to speak out about at the moment and to be pushing, you know, where these discussions are going. So today we are going to dive into what is happening in Palestine and the conflicts that we are seeing there as Palestinian resistance is fighting back against Israeli occupation and genocide. And we are seeing a big flare up happening in this context. One of the reasons that I think, you know, it's important for us to talk about this is really, one of the things that I'm most proud of Red Menace for is that we have been very vocal about decolonization, both as a historical reality and as a theoretical position. We have episodes throughout the past of our show, looking into the work of Phenon, looking into how decolonization was explored in the Battle of Algiers as a film, and looking into how to understand the entire genocide that is happening within Palestine through the lens of settler colonialism and decolonial struggle. And one thing, thing that I think is very important that we always come back to as communists is to tie our views into the necessity for decolonization, for decolonial struggle and what that means. And at this moment, this is particularly key. We are seeing a intensification of resistance that has struck a very sizable blow to Israel that has also, you know, led to intense backlash from the Israeli occupying forces with a brutal and devastating and absolutely genocidal bombing campaign happening

within Gaza as well as now a ground invasion which is taking place. It is hard to tell the scope of that at the exact moment. But in this moment, we think that it's really important and key to discuss these issues because as communists, we need to be finding these struggles that are at the forefront of the struggle against imperialism and capitalism. And the struggle against Israeli occupation in Palestine is definitely one of these. Israel as a client state of the United States serving imperialist hegemony within the region is important for us to understand, and we have to be able to stand in solidarity with the national liberation struggle taking place now to reclaim that land from settlers who are occupying it. So I think

it's incredibly important to discuss this. We have a bunch of points that we'll get into, but that is kind of what we will be diving into here today. Brett, do you have anything? Yeah, definitely. Just has some opening thoughts. We're recording this just so everybody knows on October 30th, so the day before Halloween. I say that because this is a very, you know, evolving situation and it's going to continue to evolve. You know, we're at a precipice of, I mean, the ground invasion more or less started officially in the last 24 to 48 hours. We have countries like Turkey and Iran talking about their red lines, which are seemingly

being crossed as we speak. We'll touch on that a little bit further into the episode as well. But yeah, so it's a very evolving situation. So, of course, we want to come and present stuff in real time as this situation develops. Now, Rev. Left listeners will know I put out two episodes called Palestine. on fire where I did sort of monologue-style episodes breaking down the conflict in the first week or two. And then also on guerilla history, we've done a bunch of interviews. They're still going to be coming out. And on Rev. Left, I released a lot of the old episodes, Allison and I did

on Red Menace, for people to help them orient themselves to decolonial theory. We re-released all the France Fanon episodes. We re-released our wonderful two-hour episode explaining settler colonialism in Israel and the United States. I think I even put up Alice. Allison's wonderful Jewish anti-Zionism, the history of Jewish anti-Zionism, which was interesting. We also have that A. M.A. Cesar episode that I forgot about as well. And probably another one I'm forgetting about. But we've tried to provide people with the theoretical, you know, underpinnings and analysis that is essential to understand a situation like this. And we hope that long-time listeners of Red Menace, when this situation pops off, you immediately have learned some stuff that you

apply that helps you understand and break down the situation to use the correct language right because one thing that is very apparent is the pro-Zionist side they want to talk about terrorism they don't want to mention words like settler colonialism you know you really i listen to a two-hour debate with like four different people all different stripes of zionist and i didn't i didn't hear the word settler colonial once that's just one example but it's these words matter it's important to understand and to label things with what's actually going on you know Is this an act of terrorism or is this a national liberation struggle? Once you have the analysis that hopefully Allison and I have helped people learn, it becomes very clear this is a national liberation struggle.

And as Marxists, we have to support it. So yeah, we're going to touch on, I think we might even start with some U.S. domestic issues, but we're going to get into the internal dynamics of Israel, ground invasion, a bunch of other stuff that has not been covered on the previous Rev. Left Palestine on fire episodes and has not really been covered to the extent that we're going to cover on anything we've done on GH. So I grill a history. So I really hope that this can be a useful, a useful sort of intervention in an evolving situation. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, the start. us off, I figured I wanted to talk about something that I think is a hopeful opening potentially that we can use to dive into this issue and, you know, to position ourselves in relation to this. Because obviously both you and I, Brett, are in the United States, right? We are in the Imperial Corps. We are in the country whose funding makes this genocide possible. And so from within this country, we have a, you know, specific position where it is especially important to be in opposition to Zionism, to be in opposition to the U.S. funding of the Zionism. project. And one of the things that I think is really hopeful in that, I don't know if you've seen this where you are. Obviously, I am in a West Coast city, which probably leans more left-wing

in some ways. But I've seen just for the first time in a long time, just the discourse on this issue finally starting to shift a little bit, I think. There has been a slow, steady tide of increased solidarity with Palestine in the West. The BDS movement has had gains in terms of the size of its support. That's part of the reason they've tried to criminalize it throughout parts of the United States. But I have never seen people in the streets at the scale that we have seen the last two weekends in Los Angeles here standing in solidarity with Palestine. It is incredible to see. I've talked about this before, but like I grew up in like conservative religious community of Christian Zionists. And I'm seeing people I grew up with who were like deeply indoctrinated in

this with me talking about how this is a genocide, right? And how. We need to be thinking about this as an issue of fighting against colonialism. And that's fucking insane to me, honestly, because these are people who are incredibly indoctrinated into the American Zionist kind of thought project, who have seen through that, who are coming around and who in this moment really can't deny what is happening right in front of their own eyes, what they're seeing on the internet in these films, that that is a genocide. And I think it's really important. And one of the reasons I think that this episode matters is that I want to encourage everyone to be fucking loud about this issue, right?

Because there is a turning point happening. Discussing this actually matters. Discussing this unapologetically matters because it emboldens more people to be willing to stand up on this issue. Zionism requires the idea that it is the default position, right? And that a rejection of it is somehow anti-Semitic or monstrous. But real normal people pushing back and being able to call the Zionist project, what it is, shows the lie that that really is. It shows that there isn't an actual consensus around this and that good people disagree and are willing to call a spade a spade and stand in opposition to what is blatant ethnic cleansing. And I think it's really important that as many people choose to be unapologetically vocal about this as possible,

because part of the reality is that there is a real attempt to silent dissent on this issue. We've seen this here in the United States with the Harvard students who had their faces put on an electronic billboard, calling them Harvard's top anti-Semites driven around the neighborhood. That same group, then put their faces on billboards that they put outside their fucking houses, right? So there is real attempts to get people fired, to get people having their careers ruined over this. And the fact that they want to silence this so badly tells you how important is to be vocal, but it also tells you that they're scared, right? They know there isn't actual consensus about this. They have to force people to believe this. They have to force

people not to speak out. And so the more people that speak out, the more that there is an actual turning point here, the less those kind of social punishments become viable and the more we are able to push back against Zionist and imperialist propaganda. So one of the reasons that I think, you know, this matters and there's a real reason for hope is, yeah, I think we're at a turning point. I think people are starting to be vocal and I hope we can encourage and inspire other people to do the same thing because it's really crucial in this moment that solidarity actually exists. however we can contribute to that. I hope this episode is a small part of that. Absolutely. Yeah, I've never ever seen Zionism so on its back foot in the West in particular.

Their attempt to clamp down on all dissent, you know, these riot police in every major metropole in the West, beating protesters who come out with the Palestinian flag, trying to pass legislation to silence people to make a chance like from the river to the sea, which is a chant about decolonizing. civilization into some sort of hateful, anti-Semitic genocidal, you know, statement. And that's another thing that's very fascinating is the projection on the part of Zionists, right? They're accusing their enemies of what they do. So they'll say something like, oh, look at these pro-Palestinian protesters saying from the river to the sea, they want to genocide us. They want to ethnically cleanse us as they're engaging in genocidal ethnic cleansing, right? And you can go down the list and see this manifest in a bunch of different ways. And so I think they're incredibly insecure. I think when

they are insecure, what do they turn to? They turn to fascistic tactics. The fact that the fact that you could have somebody like, I don't know if anybody's been keeping up with the freaks on the American right, but Nikki Haley, you know, just absolutely acting as if she's Bibi Netanyahu, talking about

she wants to run for president so she can help Israel eliminate them all and no amount of money is enough to protect Israel and do what they was, as if she's running for the presidency of Israel instead of the United States. Now, of course, Nikki Haley will never, ever win in a million years, but it's just fascinating how insecure they are. And it's fascinating also, and this is to our advantage, this enormous never-before-seen split

between the Western government ruling classes and the Western population centers, right? This is a fascinating divide that speaks to some deep internal divisions in Western countries themselves that go beyond just this conflict, right? this sort of inability for the actual interests and desires of the populations to get through the ruling class and be instantiated into policy is the democratic facade has really fallen off completely and Allison was mentioning this this and we're talking about it right now you know this unprecedented support for Palestine of course it's always been present in the global west it's definitely always been present in Arab states in the in West Asia but to see it in the West is fascinating and I would argue that that there's many, many reasons for this shift. One of them, I think, in the U.S. in particular, is, and I make this argument quite a bit, we've been through a lot, right? If you're a millennial or a Gen Z person, right? Like, we started with 9-11. We watched the war on terror, so we saw how a traumatic event was

weaponized by the worst people, for illegal criminal behavior. That was a very big lesson for us. And I also think, you know, we can think of Standing Rock, 2015, 2016, 2014, I can't really remember. That was huge. We blew past it. A lot of other events happened. We had Trump and BLM. But if you remember at that time, Standing Rock was a big thing. And what that does is it educates people. So when Standing Rock was all over everybody's Facebook feeds back then when we used to have Facebook pages, you know, it was it was another notch in the belt of political education, a young generation coming up like, you know, this is disgusting. This pipeline is disgusting. These indigenous people have every right to stand up. And then we had Black Lives Matter in 2020.

A lot of the same themes, right, an internal nation that is oppressed, the racial dynamics, the primitive accumulation dynamics, the colonial dynamics, right? That was very educational for people. And if you remember, Allison and I did our two-hour episode on settler colonialism in Israel in the United States in 2021 when the last big conflict happened. Now, it's been overshadowed by this latest 2023, basically war, medieval siege on Gaza. But in 2021, a a big flare-up did occur, and right after Black Lives Matter when people were really primed to see the dynamics of oppressor versus oppression, right, the oppressed versus oppressor. And so I think what we've seen is, especially in the U.S. in particular, but of course, this is all global, given the Internet, is a slow and steady building up of experiences, material realities that younger people have had to face that have educated them in such a way that when they look at this conflict, they can no longer be tricked, hoodwinked, convinced Israel. are the good guys. And that's not even bringing up the delegitimization of institutions in the U.S., the fact that people don't even get their news from these corporate mouthpieces, that you come do a show like us, you know, or on the internet or go on YouTube to find a broad swath of perspectives. All of these things and more, I think, are contributing to this process. But I really wanted to emphasize stuff like Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter as educational processes

within themselves that help set people up intellectually and morally and analytically for them to make sense of a situation like this. I think those truly did help. Yeah, no, I think that's really important. And I think this is a connection that I think we've always tried to draw, right? Which is that the situation that is happening in occupied Palestine is not unique and the sort of thing that has never happened elsewhere in history, right? Settler colonialism exists in many contexts, including here in the United States, right?

So you're totally correct that the contradictions that we've seen bubble up in the United States, that our generation and the younger generation have encountered and have mobilized around our colonial contradictions as well. Right. And understanding the way that colonialism operates globally in different contexts, I think really has done a lot. And, you know, talking about like just the normalization of terms, the amount of people using the term settler colonialism now to talk about what is happening is more than I've ever seen. This is becoming an increasingly mainstream concept. Decolonization is becoming an increasingly mainstream concept to the point that the Atlantic had to run like a scarepiece about it today, about the danger of decolonization as an idea and what it poses. And, you know, that is incredible that we are seeing these breakthroughs this way, that people are starting to make these connections. And yeah, I think it's worth just highlighting that up top because it is a point of hope for the possibility of global solidarity in opposition to imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. And we should point out those. openings where we see them, I think, and really, you know, emphasize how important that is. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So while we're talking about domestically what this means and here in the United States, I think another thing that it's really important for us to, you know, give some attention to is how this is affecting domestic politics as we are going to be going into an election year soon. And one of the big things that I am seeing intense frustration about, and I'm glad to see intense frustration about is that there is not a candidate going into this next

election who is opposed to Zionism, who's even fucking critical of it, you know what I mean, like to set the bar as low as possible. Even the supposedly sort of outsider candidates like RFK, who we add, were huge supporters of Zionism and the Zionist project. And there's a lot of frustration here. And as we are going into this, obviously, you know, I'm speaking a little too broadly, I will say Cornell West was at the rally in Los Angeles this weekend speaking out against this genocide, so not no candidate, but no mainstream candidate, certainly. And I think that as this is happening, we are seeing the liberal democratic establishment starting to panic about what this means, because it is clear to them that for many, many young people, this is an important issue

where they are not in line with the Democratic Party's position on this. But at the same time, The Democratic Party and Joe Biden, who for some fucking reason is going to be their candidate, will not budge on this issue. And we've seen this to the extent where it's not just that they're not giving into pressure from outside the political establishment from the public, but people within the State Department. And the people in the State Department, these are like fucking ladder climbing like liberal political elites essentially are quitting over the inability to budge Biden and the Democrats on this issue. And so really, the Democratic Party is locking. down its position as willing to fund the Zionist project through its most horrific acts of violence that we have seen. And part of what they're having to do in order to get away with this is the thing that liberals and Democrats love to do more than anything, which is to just try to shame you into fucking voting for them, even though they're opposed to every value that you have and thing that you believe in. And so one of the things that we've started to see is really this discussion of, well, you know, even if Biden is a Zionist and supports genocide, he's still

the lesser of two evils, et cetera, et cetera. And I think this position is just obviously fucking absurd for a number of reasons. One of the arguments for this, right, is that Trump essentially emboldened Netanyahu in some way and the right within Israel. And even if there were a level of truth to that, guess what? Trump is out now and we're still fucking funding them, right? Biden is still emboldening the right in Israel and Netanyahu. So there has not been a reduction in aid to Israel in any way that could be meaningful. And then, addition to this, I think it's important to point out that Biden in particular and the Democratic partly broadly have Zionism baked into their history, right? Biden has spoken out throughout his time

as a politician about how important Zionism is to him, how he says he is a Zionist in his heart. And when someone like that is who the candidate is, we should reject the idea that they are the lesser of two evil, someone who is so blatantly committed to this genocidal project. And despite all the shaming that is going on, I think it is really important for us to say that among the two candidates, it's going to be fucking Biden and Trump. Neither of them is a choice that any progressive can stand behind because both of them are involved in this genocidal project. And I just think it's important to say, don't let these fuckers shame you, right? Don't let these cynics manipulate you into voting for them. Punish them for fucking supporting genocide and don't let them win. And, you know, kind of my thoughts there, at least. Yeah, if Biden wins, if for some reason Biden can still pull this out, what will they take that as as just like, okay, we can do whatever the fuck we want? There's no price to pay for anything. We can literally help and fund and assist and, you know, a genocide.

We can be a, we can be a genocide denier. We can disgustingly cast doubt on the number of innocent fucking human beings being slaughtered and pulled out of the rubble. Like, what are you talking about? Where is your floor? If that is not enough, if that's not your red line as a voter, what the fuck do you even believe in? What is the fucking point of any of this shit? I mean, we're literally going from, I saw a tweet the other day that got a fair amount of traction and apparent agreement, which is they admitted up front. Yes, Biden is doing a genocide, but we should still vote for them.

So we've now, we've now following their path of politics, we've gone from the lesser of two evils to the lesser of two genociders. My genocider is better than your genocider. That's the fucking low point in American politics right now that Democratic fucking weasily liberals are trying to tell us to choose their genocider over the other one. No, what is happening is we are in a global crisis period and an American crisis period happening simultaneously, right? Unipolarity is ending. The American Empire is now on its back foot in ways it's never been before. And at home, it is under increasingly intense pressure because all of the institutions are being utterly delegitimized.

The gap between what the American people right, left and center want, or maybe not center, first what the American ruling elite is doing is getting bigger and bigger. Young people in particular, because of their material reality, not because of the romantic, you know, wide-eyed, bushy-tailed nature of being young, but that's idealist, but because of the material reality of young people are disgusted with all of this shit. And the thing is, the American crisis that we're living through right now will continue no matter who is president. There is no anti-fascist vote between Biden and Trump. There's no way to get out. There's no ballot box that you can check off that will get us out of this crisis. The crisis is in full downward spiral. It is past the event horizon.

You know, the crisis has to play out. And no amount of voting for Biden or Trump or any of these two parties, as they currently are constituted, will do anything to prevent that. Like, in a sense, whether you want to be or not, we're all accelerationists in the sense that the crisis has now its own momentum. It must go down. The status quo is simply untenable. And if you still think that picking the D versus the R is going to make any real impact on your life, on global policy, on. on climate change, on anything that matters, you're deluding yourself. You're deluding yourself.

So I have morals. Instead of choosing between that genocider and this genocider, I'm actually against genocide, actually. I'm against it. And I'm not going to support anybody that engages in it. And we will get to this later. This is a bit of taking us off course. But I'm going to talk later, and I have it circled on my notes, about genocide. And I'm going to address full-throatedly this idea that you see from some Zionist and

some liberals, that is not actually a genocide. So we will get to that. And I will defend wholeheartedly that this is a genocide. But for now, I just wanted to make that point. No matter who's president, this crisis has to play out, will continue to play out. And that's what we are seeing. And the Biden quote, I thought you were going to say this one, there's plenty of Biden quotes to go around. There's that old clip of him saying, if there were no Israel, America would have to invent an Israel. Because it's not merely that Biden and his inner circle just agree with Netanyahu or just like Israel a lot. It's a material reality that Israel serves the U.S. Empire's economic and geopolitical interest in the region. It is a huge, well-funded, and America makes sure of that, military base in

West Asia for America to carry out its operations. Just like there's an Afrocom, right? I just did a whole episode on Rev Left about the African command. Every continent has their own sort of command where the U.S. imperial empire has a sort of command just for that continent, just to do imperialism in that area. And you can see Israel as sort of a really big glorified version of just that. And so there's a deep material interest in the military industrial complex of which both parties are completely wedded to maintain Israel at any costs. And that's what they're going to do. Yeah. No, I think that's super important to say. And I'll expand on that a little bit because I think this can be a transition to discussing Zionism broadly. But I think one thing to get at, right, that you're really, you know, correctly emphasizing here is that Zionism as an ideology in the United States, right? So as an ideology of American politics, isn't really even fucking about Jewish self-determination at all, right? Like, those claims are just fundamentally incorrect. If you really look at it, Zionism in the context of the United States. States is exactly like you said, it's about essentially having a military base within the region.

It is about power projection. It is about having a client state that is loyal to us in an area where the United States has had a lot of political and warfare-based conflict. And then on top of that, ideologically, within the United States, some of the largest Zionist organizations in the U.S. are Christian right-wing organizations, right? And these organizations don't give a shit about the Jewish people. They are made up of people whose politics is actually fairly anti-Semitic. anyways, and by and large, are part of kind of the, like, billionarian evangelical death cult that believes that in order for the end times to occur, an Israeli state has to exist on the entire historical land of Israel. And so much of the support among the American right for

Zionism is about wanting the world to end, basically, and about this weird in times prophecy bullshit in which they believe Jews will be wiped out or converted to Christianity. So, Zionism in the United States is not even strictly speaking really ideologically a Jewish national project. It is this weird hybrid Christian imperialist sort of power fantasy that exists there. I think that's important to point out. And I think this is crucial to say, right, Zionism ideologically in the U.S. cannot be disentangled from imperialism, cannot be disentangled from American nationalism and its attempt to project itself globally whatsoever. And we need to to make sure that that relationship is understood correctly, and we need to make sure to understand

that Israel really is a tool of the United States internationally, and that gives us a really useful framing moving forward, I think. Absolutely. Yeah, the point about Christian Zionism being insane and also deeply anti-Semitic is really, really important. Now, that form of Zionism tends to proliferate on the American right, of course, but they find themselves in bed with certain liberal, well-off, ruling class types who have interest in Israel for the more materialist reasons, not the crazy biblical ones. So this is weird sort of cohesion, which makes the Democratic Party and the Republican Party both have huge bases of sort of support for this, not huge numerically, but huge in their influence. And that's not even bringing in APEC, right,

the actual lobby for Israel that is incredibly powerful in its own right. and is one of the most powerful lobbies in the United States and has been for a very, very long time. And of course, Zionists abroad in Israel, in the U.S., everywhere, know that this lobby they have, and they've built over decades, is really crucial. It's not about one party or the other. It's about this lobby making sure both parties will do Israel's bidding, even if you have to articulate it slightly differently for the Republicans versus the Democrats, right? Your Zionism will be articulated a little differently, but it gets to. the same end. And so this lobby knows that and it operates in that way. And the other thing I wanted to mention, two things. One, of course, Zionism is a Euro-colonial project. And it can't be

made more clear other than the fact that it was the colonial Brits in 1948 that helped go and partition Palestine to launch this entire Zionist project in the first place. You know, literally British colonialism, the British Empire holding the hand of European Zionists. to go and steal the land from the Palestinians and do the first Nakhaba. And I really do think that what we're seeing right now is the second Nakhba. I think it is in the, it's the explicit goal internally. Israel won't be super outward about this, but it is their goal to displace as many people as possible. Killing is one thing.

It's nice to make them disappear. But ultimately, they're not going to be able to slaughter all 2 million, 2.2 million of them. They want to push them out into the fucking Sinai Desert and then lock off the Rafah crossing and turn all of Gaza into greater Israel. That really is the fucking goal. And we can't lose sight of that. The last thing I will mention on this front, self-determination. The idea that Zionism is self-determination for anybody is like saying the French in Algeria,

you have to oppose the Algerian National Liberation movement because it steps on French self-determination. Right. It is crazy. It's a complete wacko upside-down world version of that. No, self-determination means that the people of Palestine who are indigenous, to Palestine have the right to self-determine and not live in an occupied apartheid ethno state or not live in an open-air concentration camp, which interestingly, I think, is more appropriate than saying an open-air prison. I heard an interesting critique, and this is just

linguistics, but the idea of a prison is like, well, somebody was convicted for something, right? The prison might be terrible and disgusting, but these are fundamentally guilty people in some way, and I know that's not what people mean when they say that. But I think the use of the word concentration camp is more evocative, and it's, also is actually more correct. It's a concentration of the leftovers from the Nakaba, pushed into this little sliver of land, the size of

fucking Philadelphia, packed to the brim, almost as dense as Tokyo, and bordered off, and actually Israel is even, over the years, as it's sort of sealed off Gaza, put a full fence around it, and now with automated technology, they have, like, automatic surveillance

and drone activity, sort of surveilling and policing the border. So it's kind of like this insane sort of mixture of 21st century technology and like 18th century colonialism coming together. It's pretty fucking sick. But yeah, I think calling it a concentration camp is a little more on the nose and yeah, spells it out quite well. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So building on a little of what we discussed about, I'm going to take us to another point that I want us to touch on. I think it's at our discussion just now of like what Zionism is ideologically and how it's a colonial project.

One of the things that I want to talk about that I've seen over the last few weeks from liberals and kind of liberal progressives domestically, internationally, is this kind of idea that they're putting forward of, okay, it's fine to be opposed to Netanyahu, right? It's fine to be opposed to illegal settlements. It's fine to be opposed to the current government of Israel. But the thing that is fundamentally wrong is being opposed to Zionism, right? That's a step too far. And this is kind of this language that you've seen with people. people like Brianna Wu saying, like, hey, I think that the left is actually really anti-Semitic because they're talking about whether Israel should exist instead of criticizing the Israeli government. And, you know, you'll notice throughout this episode, Brett and I are very directly talking about opposition to Zionism, right? Not to Netanyahu, not to the current existing government, the current coalition, but to Zionism itself. And there's so much to impact about what Zionism is and its history. We have an episode on that, that episode on the history of settler colonialism,

in Israel and the United States, where we go back to Theodore Herzl, we look at where Zionism comes from. And I highly recommend that you check that out. But one of the important things that I really want us to emphasize is that for any progressives and for communists especially, no, it is Zionism that we need to be opposed to. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One of the other kind of talking points that I've seen bubble up is like, oh, like the international left stands with Palestine and like ignores the Israeli left, right? Like the opposition parties within Israel. But one of the things that I think we can start off by saying and or understand why Zionism is the problem is that the Israeli left is complicit in the genocide as well, right? It was under the early more socialist and liberal-leaning Israeli political parties than the first Nakhpa took place. Right. There is not an opposition within Israel, which is actually opposed to this genocidal process of land theft. And that is because built into the idea of Zionism is the idea that the Jewish people have a soul. and singular and exclusive claim to this land, and that any state which ought to be an

ethnic state that reinforces that claim, right? This is central to the Zionist idea and central to the Zionist project. Again, go listen to our history of that. And unless you are the kind of person who's down with fucking reactionary ethno-nationalism, you should be opposed to that, right? That is a fundamentally absurd idea that a state should exist that grants a fundamental right to the land to a specific ethnic group is absolutely fucking fascist to begin with. And so one of the things that I think is very important to point out and that we have to insist and that my God, if you read the Palestinian resistance documents, they've pointed this out too, is that to reject Zionism isn't to reject the idea that there's a place for Jewish people in the region. It's to

reject the idea that there ought to be an ethno state that's an explicitly Jewish state with a sole claim to the region, right? That's what we're fucking rejecting, and we have to explicitly reject that. That is an ideology built on a settler colonial political system that can only end in genocide. There's no other place that that idea can take you. That is an ideology meant to justify a settler colonial project modeled after the settler colonial projects in the United States, modeled after settler colonial projects throughout the world. And that needs to be fought against. And so if you're scared to call yourself an anti-Zionist, if you're scared to say, no, I'm not opposed to Netanyahu. I'm opposed to Israel. Then I want to walk you

through why you have to get past that. Because I think like many people in the world, if you asked me, what do I want to see in this region? My answer would be, well, what I would love is a multinational state with equal rights for the Jewish people and the Palestinian people, right? That is what would be beautiful to see. And okay, here's what I'm going to tell you, and this is hard to swallow. If that is what you want, you want something that is fundamentally incompatible with Zionism and fundamentally incompatible with Israel as an existing reality, because built into Israel as a Zionist state is the denial of the possibility of that multinational, multi-ethnic state with equal rights. So if that's what you want, if you want a world where

equality under the law can exist in the region, you have to be an anti-Zionist. You have to be opposed to Israel. It's not a matter of criticizing that in Yahoo. It's not a matter of criticizing the current government or criticizing the settlements. It's a matter of criticizing, the entire project and relationship to the material reality of land that has produced those problems in the first place. Beautifully said, absolutely. What we want, ideally, and I've said this many times in many places, I'll say it again, a singular, multi-ethnic, democratic state with equal constitutional, human, and civil

rights for Jews, Muslims, Christians, and the secular alike. That would require full decolonization and the toppling of any artifact of colonialism, but it would actually, actually be the prerequisite for peace in the Middle East, right, for actually addressing the problem at its root. And I think that is so essential to understand because what will happen, and this is very anti-dialectical, but it's very obvious that this is what happens all the time, is they'll present this to the average person. They're just like they presented this one. They presented all the past ones as here's the, here's the series of events. Here's the dominoes falling.

Hamas does a terrorist attack Israel responds and has a right to defend itself And then everything follows from that point But that is but that And you know Hamas has said this Everybody with the fucking brain has said this The inauguration of violence Comes with the occupation

It comes with settler colonialism It comes during the Nakhaba It comes the moment you go from Europe Come to another people's land And start violently slaughtering them Or displacing them Everything that happens after that Every fucking ounce of blood that is shed after that point is inaugurated by that colonial violence,

by the putting of one person's boot on the throat of another human being. And if you really want peace in the Middle East, it's not about Israel has a right to defend itself or Israel has a right to exist. You strike at the root of the problem, which is occupation, which is apartheid, which is ethnic cleansing, which is an ethno-state, which is Zionism. now what you'll often hear from the liberals and what you're going to hear a lot in the coming weeks, months, possibly years, from people like Biden and from people all over the West in the ruling class, as this situation gets more and more intense, you hear and you've often heard calls for a two-state solution. Now, I want to make it clear. Two-state solution would be an improvement over the current situation. I'm sure the people in Gaza would say, God damn, if we have to choose between fucking this living in a concentration camp, Or actually having a state, even if it is weaker and geographically intermeshed with Israel, we'll take the political power, please. So I'm not trying to say this in a vacuum or that I wouldn't take one step forward because I only want five steps forward. No, I'll take that. But what that fundamentally does, and you have to understand this ideologically.

The reason why somebody like fucking Biden wants a two-state solution has actually said so in the last couple of weeks, he's come out and said that the ultimate solution to this would be to a return to the two-state solution, which for a very long time has been dead in the fucking one. water because Israel doesn't want a two-state solution first and foremost, right? But what will that do? Well, the fact that the U.S. wants it should make you cock and eyebrow, right? Because what it would do would allow Israel to remain. So even if you had a weaker Palestinian state, you know, Gaza and the West Bank, whatever, you'd still have Israel, so it would still serve the material interest in the region for the United States. And then what they would do is just do their normal imperialism. So you would be,

the Palestinian people would be promoted from colonialism to imperialism. The moment there was a Palestinian state, the U.S. and Israel would be behind the scenes, funding new media outlets, funding new political parties, trying to cause internal strife, making sure the economy is strangled, making sure they never get nukes or even powerful military weapons, trying to box them in and keep them enclosed, keep them weak, keep the threat subdued. So it actually doesn't solve the problem. It just shifts the problem a little bit. It is a better shift because at least they'd have a military, at least ideally they would have a government, they could have relations, they could form alliances with other nations around them. But the fact that America wants it should really make you be suspicious, and I really truly think it is merely not solving the problem, not creating peace in the region, but is merely an upgrade from colonialism, which is so last century, to imperialism, which is so in. and i don't think that's a win ultimately for palestinian people though again it would be an improvement on the horrific unholy disgusting conditions that they're forced to live in not just

in gaza but in the west bank and alison mentioned earlier the problem of settlements this is undertaken by the most far right or ultra orthodox freaks on the planet this is what people that are hardcore zionists in the u.s will fly americans will fly right um if they have a i think it's like if you one of your grandparents were jewish israel will allow you to have citizenship there they'll fly there and they'll start going being a settler immediately for the ideological reasons that they may have which are of course a diverse but in the west bank you basically have these settlers filling the function we always talk about the ideology of settler colonialism must be fascism these are the black shirts and brown shirts of our

time. They harass Palestinians. They beat them. They brutalize them. The IDF is there with guns to back them up. They steal their homes. They take their plants out of the grounds. They take trees out of the ground, olive trees, ruining the Palestinians' material opportunity for income, for finance. They smash windows of Palestinian-owned stores. These mobs of young Israelis will like go through the neighborhoods and just like jump people, these are fascist motherfuckers. You know, they are not innocent civilians. They are violent arms of the state. And they're backed up by the official arms of the state. And I think it is disgusting. And so anything that would end, that would definitely be, again, an improvement on the situation. But we got to think deeply about what a two-state

solution means, whose interest is served. But even that, even that tepid step is too much for Israel to accept, even if Biden accepts it, even if both the Democrat and the Republican Party start asking for it. Israel and the Israeli ruling class will do everything they fucking can to make that not possible. And what they're doing right now, if this is a second Nakaba, if they're trying, you know, the settlements are a way of picking apart the West Bank, turning it to Swiss cheese. So there's no contiguous territory there to be turned into a state. And if they get their way in Gaza, they're going to take this chunk of concentrated Palestinians and they're going to disperse them into the Sinai Desert so that even Gaza can no longer be formed into a fucking state.

So while Biden sits here or what the Democrats or the ruling elite of the Western fucking countries for 10 years are talking about the possibilities just around the corner of a two-state solution, the Israeli elites are doing everything they can to eradicate the very possibility of exactly that. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other thing to say on the two-state solution as a concept is part of the reason that that is a palatable thing for the Democrats and the United States to kind of push for is that built into that two-state solution, right, is an

affirmation of Zionism inherently, because the idea is that the land that they already fucking got is theirs, right? The land that's already been stolen was rightfully taken. And they have a right to it, and now it gets to be a legitimate state. So there is this still kind of continued ideological justification for land theft that would make continued settlement in what would now be a Palestinian state inevitable, right? Because the reality is it's been affirmed by the political reality of the existence of an Israeli state in the first place and of a Zionist state in the first place. So I think that is the other reason that we need to understand why it is that the liberal establishment can grab onto this as

something acceptable is because built into it is the premise that Zionism is correct and that land theft is justified at the end of the day. Exactly. And that original British partition of Palestine, the opening bid, right, is 80-20. Israel gets 80% of your land. you get 20% If some asshole came into your house some group of squatters And they said hey 80% of this house is now ours

But you get 20% We'll let you have that What would you do Fuck you You don't get 80% of this shit Fuck off Right And that's what we say

To anybody's saying A two state solution Or any of that bullshit So yeah It's really important That we think through that Because that is going to be something that you continue to hear

Especially as the bloodshed increases Western countries Want the sort of moral and diplomatic facade of trying to be solution oriented so they're going to continue to trot out this two-state solution but just know that is doing everything it can behind the scenes to undermine it and i really truly think that in a lot of these ruling class elites that are that are pushing this line

they know that what they're basically doing is they're holding the line a little longer allowing israel a little more time to do what israel needs to do and then by the time it gets around to like okay let's do the two-state solution be like oh gauze is already gone and the west bank is is beyond swish cheese there's no there's no even there's no possibility for a two state solution what are you talking about right i think that's kind of a long game that's the long game yeah i agree all right well um so i'll shift into do you have anything else to say on that front no i think that covers the stuff i had so i just want to shift quickly into an interesting kind of discussion of the internal dynamics of israel um that some people might not know

and if you're a veteran of this issue if you've studied it very deeply if you have a good grasp. None of this would be particularly earth shattering or brand new to you, but I assume a lot of people don't know the intricacies of a lot of this. So for the past 10 months plus, there has been incredible internal division within Israel. They have the furthest right government they've ever had in their entire history. There has been 10 months of really aggressive protests by the more secular, let's say liberal elements of Israeli society and the Netanyahu government, which is far right, fascist, has lots of ultra-Orthodox within it, et cetera. So that's just, that's like the background sort of internal division going on. And so when Hamas is planning this attack,

I don't know all the things that went into their planning, but surely just ripping a page out of Sun Tzu's The Art of War, you know that the best time to launch an attack on your enemy is when they're at their weakest point internally. And Israel, I think it's fair to say, the last 10 months over the last year, has been at its weakest point in its entire history, making this attack much more impactful and also creating big divisions. So while there is a sort of a rally around the flag, not rally around Netanyahu, but a rally around the flag effect after the events, that quickly dissipates. And the underlying internal divisions will continue to stack up, not least because. One of the things driving this divide between more traditional or, you know, more moderate, secular Israelis and the ultra-Orthodox is military conscription. So if you are ultra-Orthodox, which is about 13 to 15 percent of the Israeli population, the far, far-right, religious, you know, sort of inclined sorts of people, they get a military exemption.

So everybody else in Israel, when you turn 18, you got to go serve in the IDF, in one faction, in one facet or another. But the ultra-Orthodox, this relatively small community of 13 to 15, but growing community, gets complete military exemption. So that's that cause a lot of heat already. So because of this ultra-Orthodox run government, the conscripted secular Israelis are going to have to go into Gaza and get fucking slaughtered, while the ultra-Orthodox children get the military exemption and won't have to see fighting. So when the IDF body starts stacking up, this contradiction, I think, is going to become more and more and more of an issue.

On top of that, the ultra-Orthodox also have a carve-out where their men just have to study the Torah and not go to work. So they get full state welfare program. So not only do they not have to join the military at 18, they don't have to have a job. And the Israeli state, i.e. the Israeli taxpayers, fund their lives. And on top of that, they have an incredible. birth rate. So the average ultra-Orthodox woman averages about seven babies, right? While secular Israelis, I think, are like 2.1, 2.3 babies, more in line with like, you know, other parts of the world, Europe, America, other parts, Japan, etc. Although I think those are even a little smaller. I mean,

over two is pretty good even, you know, for the secular Israelis. So you have now this new dynamic where a small population relatively 13 to 15% is having babies at an incredible rate such that their numbers by 2050 by 2060 are projected to be a third of all of Israel. So then you have this ultra-Orthodox far-right element within Israeli society that secular Israelis in particular

and more moderate Israelis in general have a lot of problems with. They're taking over the government, right, with the Netanyahu government and they give all these exemptions from shit that other people have to do and they're producing children at such a rate that they're going to become

even more sizable, right? Which means that Israel, an insanely fascist state is going to become more fascist if that's even fucking possible at this point. So those internal dynamics, I think, are really interesting and they're going to play a role.

It's not going to be in the headlines, right? As this conflict continues to unfold, you're not going to read a lot, lot of headlines about it. It's not going to be the topic of a lot of talk shows, but I think it is an underlying very important thing that people like you and I should sort of keep our eye on if we want to make sense of the full scope of how Israel is going to conduct this war, how it's going to carry out, and what the underlying contradictions just within Israeli society are

before the external pressures of war even begin to kick in. And I think Israel is at an incredibly, incredibly fragile and weak moment for those reasons and so much. And so much, anymore. And it's really worth keeping our eyes on. Yeah, I think it's important to think about those internal contradictions. Definitely tensions about mandatory conscription, not applying to heredity communities, right, have been huge. And then, yeah, the subsidization of full-time yeshiva students, right? So studying Torah and Talmud full-time instead of working is obviously a huge point of contention. Yeah, looking at the numbers, some half of Herdi men within Israel do not work, but instead study full-time. So those tensions,

obviously are large and creating issues. And I also think we see internal contradictions just between different kind of factions within Israeli politics generally happening right now that shows how much this all occurred at a time when things were already really unstable. Two that I think are kind of worth pointing out is the extent to which fucking Netanyahu and the families of hostages are just at odds with each other now. Very much we have seen the families of hostages wanting to prioritize the return of hostages. And the position of Netanyahu and the current government being, fuck that, we really don't care if they die in the crossfire, right? And that already shows us some of those tensions which are showing up, even to the point where, you know, families expressing the need to get hostages back and criticizing Netanyahu were interrupted by basically paid thugs for Netanyahu's party, right? And we can see these political contradictions coming up there. And the other thing, too, that I think is really interesting here, you know, if we think about this on the military level, is that these kind of military contradictions that are coming up now, where Netanyahu, who is this

kind of hardliner, has kind of talked shit about parts of the Israeli military for letting this attack happen. And there's this buck passing game that's being played right now that he's actually kind of losing. He just tweeted like an apology out, basically, being like I shouldn't have criticized the rest of the military for this and said it was their fault. But this shows you that these contradictions exist. There's been this very long-term battle over changes to the court structure within Israel and to the judicial system where Netanyahu's based opposition. And again, I think it's important not to overemphasize what these contradictions mean. Even the opposition parties on the more liberal side are still fully on board with

the genocidal project of Zionism. But it does show you that these contradictions create instability that allow these kind of situations to happen. And certainly, you know, it is interesting to wonder, like to what extent the calculation happening within the Palestinian resistance is taking into account these kind of contradictions that are happening domestically. But they are happening. And it's extremely important for us to pay attention to it because if we want to understand what's happening, we need to recognize that internal and external contradictions both exist. And both are at play in the movement of history that we're seeing right now, essentially. Exactly. And while the external contradictions are being emphasized right now because of the conflict,

I just thought it's worthwhile to think also about the internal ones. And you're right. And this kind of is a nice segue into the ground invasion aspect of this because you know what do they have 200 230 hostages they believe so far now israel has for all intents and purposes been indiscriminately bombing northern gaza i mean all of the gaza strip but particularly um the northern half of the strip um almost certainly i've heard different stuff coming out i know it's fog of war i haven't been able to follow up on every single claim but it's almost certain at this point that Israel has killed some of these hostages themselves, and one of the big hesitations on part of the Israeli populace, especially those, you know, Israel is a small country.

Everybody knows there's a one or two degrees separated from somebody who, you know, was impacted on October 7th, was killed or knows somebody that has hostages. So this is not just like a tiny little part of the population that can be totally ignored. It's an important part. And so their fear is if the IDF goes in, this ground invasion, which looks like they're doing, doing and giving how they don't give a fuck about civilians or anything else that you very well could lose the opportunity to get those hostages back because Israel themselves would put them in harm's way and possibly slaughter them directly. And so that's a huge concern and I think

that is going to continue to be an issue. People want their loved ones back more than anything else, right? If you lost the person that you love more than ever, you don't care about what Netanyahu's government wants to do to Hamas. You want your fucking loved one back. And that's going to continue to create tensions. Another thing with the ground invasion in particular, the IDF, you know, I mean, to be a little flipping here, they're used to beating up on kids and old people, right? They're not really ready for what's coming. On top of that, because of the nature of conscription, you know, you're having a bunch of reservists.

People who served their time in the Israeli army like they were supposed to, but almost certainly never saw any real conflict again maybe you're backing up settlers in the west bank maybe you're breaking a kid's arm here and there um but you're not necessarily taking on a fighting force like hamas you're certainly not taking on something like hesbalah right and so you have a lot of reservists who have very little experience right who might be inspired in the short short term to protect their country or whatever but don't have the sort of the grit the experience the the the bad assery to go in there and do a brutal urban warfare in the rebels of Gaza fight with Hamas and other factions, of course, as well, in Gaza, who are battle tested just from having to be Palestinians growing up

in Gaza, who are battle tested from just being a part of Hamas, whose every day is a fight for survival and who are fighting for their liberation or annihilation. So these are people with everything to fight for, with a hard, hard, hard life. They're not relaxing on the beaches of Tel Aviv and then get called up to go fucking fight a war. They're in the trenches of fucking Gaza. They were there from 2021. They were there in 2014. They've been through this shit.

A lot of the Hamas fighters, which everybody in the Western world wants to dehumanize as less than animals, where do the people from Hamas come from? They come from the Palestinians. And what do you think happens to a little boy in 2008 who gets his mom and dad fucking killed by an Israeli bomb when he grows? up, what is he going to do? He's going to put on that motherfucking bandana and pick up that gun. And I, personally, refuse to dehumanize that person. I refuse to dehumanize or

condemn Hamas. I refuse to separate them from the rest of the Palestinian populace civilians, right? Because that's kind of the liberal, social democratic, progressive thing to do is to say, listen, Hamas is fucking disgusting. Cut their heads off, shoot them into the fucking space. I don't care.

But just be careful about the civilians. Those civilians are the mothers and fathers and uncles and best friends and children of the people who are fighting for Hamas right so there is it that Hamas is not fundamentally alienated from the masses and the people who join Hamas are doing what I think almost any person in their position given their life experiences would do which is either you accept your miserable fate where the people you love are constantly brutalized slaughtered killed pendant at will and just accept that your life is going to never go outside of Gaza, all your opportunities and life horizons are just right

there in the street in front of you, you have no opportunity, 50, 60, 75% unemployment rate, hardcore poverty. In that situation, what would almost anybody do? You would find meaning, you would regain your sense of control over your own life and your sense of dignity by picking up the gun and fighting back. And that is what Hamas and these other fighting factions in Gaza and as part of the broader Palestinian resistance are doing. And I refuse to dehumanize them. And I truly think that the IDF is going to have a hell of a time going into fucking Gaza and conducting urban warfare with a guerrilla army that is as sort of seasoned as Hamas is.

It's not going to be a good time for those guys. And that's also going to be implicated in a broader regional war. But before I get into that part, Allison, do you have anything else to say about the ground invasion, Anything like that? Yeah, a couple important things I think to touch on. So one of the things that you were saying about the conditions that have produced this resistance in the first place, right? This is one of the things that Hamas said recently is that 85% of their fighters are orphans, right? Who were orphaned by violence coming from Israel. And again, if you think about the reality of that, if that is what your fucking childhood is, what else can you do to a certain degree, right? We have to understand the conditions that produce this. And I think to tie it back to Fanon, this is this kind of reality that Fanon gets at over and over again, which is that the lashing out against colonization sometimes is the only thing that the colonized have left in whatever form it'll take, right? That is something that is produced by the conditions of colonialism, though. It's not produced by some hatred that begins within the human heart out of nowhere on its own. It's not produced out of just pure malice. It is produced by conditions which dehumanized in ways that are unthinkable to so many. people within the Western world who have never had to face them. So I do think that that is just such a crucial framing to understand where this is coming from. And again, to say, if you want an into all of this, the only end to that is the end to colonialism. And the end to colonialism in the region

is the end to Zionism. There is no way out of this cycle other than that because it is the conditions of colonialism which produce the situation in the first place. I think that's so necessary to say. And I think the other thing that you got at that is true is that, yeah, I think there's a level of military resistance that they are seeing and not being able to overcome, that is relevant to consider, right? One of the things that we've seen is that Israel very early on started talking about a ground invasion, and they put it off and they put it off. And one of the reasons for that may be external pressure happening from the U.S. or whatever, you know, there's a bunch of possible possibilities. But another is the reality of the fact that, yeah,

a lot of reservists do not have the high level combat training. That actually, you know, they often brag themselves having in that a ground invasion is going to be costly and a mistake. We had talked about their expanded invasion happening now, and we've already seen arbored vehicles, including several tanks taken out by Palestinian resistance, which indicates that there is a real fight that is happening here that perhaps is more than Israel thought it was getting and chewing off when it made those threats now that it's actually implementing them. And the other thing that I think is relevant to point out here when we think about the military level of this. And again, I want to return to Phenon here, right? Is that in Phenon's framing of colonialism, one of the really, you know, important things that happens is that dehumanization almost goes two ways, right? The colonized are dehumanized in as much as they are reduced to subhuman. But the colonizers almost come to be seen as non-human themselves. They boast about almost godlike powers over the colonized. And one of the things that Phenon tells us is when the decolonial violence,

comes into play when we see the clash of decolonization, there's this mutual humanness that exists. One, because the colonized are able to assert their humanity through rising up, but two, because the colonized are proved to be just human as well, right? To be not the mythologized, unfitable, undefeatable thing that they have claimed to be, but to be fellow humans who die in combat as well. And I think that is a big part of what we're seeing here as well, is that the idea that resistance is a useless thing that can go nowhere because colonial states like Israel are impossible to overcome, that they will exist for all of history, that they are beyond the ability to defeat. It's being called into question through struggle. It was called

into question in South Africa when we saw a resistance movement that took place against apartheid there. It has been called into question in Algeria in every place where there were fights against the colonial powers that proved that colonialism is not something that's destined to exist. Colonialism is enforced by humans as well and that it can be fought against and successes can happen. So I think when we talk about what's happening militarily here and the extent to which Israel is, you know, not necessarily winning in the way militarily they claim they would, it really does kind of concretely demonstrate that humanization in a very horrific sense, perhaps, that we see coming from Fanon's theory on this. So I do want to tie it in a little

bit into some of the texts we've talked about because I think it's a very clear example of that. It's actually quite beautiful. It's scary, right? Horific, almost like the Kantian sublime, both terrifying and gorgeous, act of nature almost. But yeah, this reclamation of your humanity and your point about it actually humanizes both sides of the ledger. Obviously, the colonized or reclaiming their humanity by fighting back and asserting their humanity by standing up to their oppressor. But then, yeah, it brings down the sort of, you know, the sort of bloviating, overwrought, gargantuan sense of self that the colonizer has sort of internalized, programmed within themselves, that they are a superior human being to the colonized. And they truly believe it. They truly believe it. And that fascist, supremacist ideology not only leads to colonialism, but settler colonialism incubates and nourishes that sort of psychopathy, that fascist psychopathy. such that to be a settler colonial and to be truly devoted to the settler colonial project

makes you into a monster. And you know, to dehumanize somebody else, you dehumanize yourself in the process because humans are humans. We're fundamentally equal. And when you have to go out and make somebody else lesser than you, when you have to bring them low, make them less worthy than an animal, you also at the exact same time, whether you know it or not, do that to yourself. Your own humanity leaves when you dehumanize a fellow human being. And that is what we're seeing. And it is fascinating to read Fanon and then to look at

a situation like this, to go listen to chance death to Arabs, Israelis screaming, or listen to the Abby Martin interviews on the street with random, totally normal looking people who say the most fucking psychotic things you've ever heard in your life like they're asking what time it is.

The casualness with which they say it. It's horrifying. It's horrifying actually to see that ugly face come to the fore it is it is it is yeah it's disturbing for sure um i do want to get into the regional war here i will just say yeah talking about um the the the the ground invasion you know humas has some bangers when when they put out their little their little um you know memos or whatever they say shit like you know idf soldiers are welcome gaza will be your grave and you will meet various forms of death that await you i don't know it's

almost poetic. It's pretty cool, whoever they're literary forces. But one thing is for sure the IDF is not going to be able to tick-tock dance their way to victory here. It's going to be fucking brutal. And that raises this other prospect, the prospect of regional war. And I think the real prospect, which ebbs and flows as far as whether it's on the top of people's minds, but this breaking out even beyond the region into something like a de facto world war, even if it's not called that at the time. So right now you have a situation, and many of you will be vaguely familiar with this, but you have a situation in which Hezbollah and southern Lebanon is right on the border,

already exchanging fire with Israel and has been for the last several weeks. We have Iran saying that their red line is more or less a ground invasion. Israel, if you do this ground invasion, you are forcing us to come into it. Turkey, Erdogan over in Turkey, no friend of the left, no friend of the left. humanity to be sure, but runs a very big, you know, Muslim majority country, has been sort of saber-rattling in very interesting ways going up to, if not outwardly saying, that Turkey might get involved if Israel continues the bloodshed. And then there's Syria right there. There is, of course, a little less of a threat, Jordan and Egypt. They're more integrated into

the sort of global system at the moment. But their populations, their populations, though, especially in Jordan, I mean, what happened during the first Nakaba? The dispossession and the scattering of Palestinians to the surrounding Arab states, including Jordan. So you have a lot of ethnic Palestinians in Jordan in the population, who even though their government is sort of in bed in various ways with the West and with the U.S., they still have immense pressure from below to stand up for the Palestinians, to stand up for Muslims being slaughtered, et cetera. So what we could see is, and I think it's almost guaranteed at this point, insofar as Israel is doing a ground invasion, that this is going to almost certainly become a regional war. And what happens if, I mean, if Turkey gets involved, all bets are off the table. This is a fucking NATO country. Like, who knows what happens at that point?

But Iran could get involved either explicitly, although more likely through its proxies by giving the green light to Hezbollah. And at that point, the U.S. is getting involved. I mean, the U.S. already has boots on the ground. The U.S. has two carrier ships off the coast of the Mediterranean, basically acting as a bodyguard for Israel while it kills fucking babies. And I heard that there's a special, 2,000 man special forces team. I heard earlier today, you know, you're just going through the ephemera of Twitter. You're not sure what sticks and what doesn't. Right.

But that there's a force coming in. American boots on the ground is more of a special force. We'll see what happens. But, you know, I think the U.S. is really trying to keep this confined. I think the U.S. knows that this could get out of control very quickly. The Europe and the U.S., of course, has been funding Ukraine for the last year or two, throwing all their surplus equipment and everything like that at Ukraine. Now you can see the possibility of this other war opening up.

It's a big concern right now for the U.S. And I think a lot of behind-the-scenes diplomacy is the U.S. trying to be like, hey, hey, hey, we're trying to let we're trying to talk to israel so they'll let some humanitarian aid or whatever trying to keep this the lid on this fucking thing don't get involved literally just straight up telling iran don't don't you dare because if you do we'll do it you know and so that's a very interesting point because you know iran also has its internal divisions as does the u.s all these countries do what what will they do does iran really want a full-long confrontation with the u.s military proper if it uses its proxies, is that really going to protect it from a U.S. direct conflict or is the U.S. just going to fight its proxies? That's not certain. It's like the most intense high stakes game of chess imaginable right now. And so I'm not really sure where things are going to go. I'm definitely not going to make any predictions. But it seems like things have been moving and are continuing to move in the direction of this becoming a regional war, at least. What are your thoughts on that, Alison?

Yeah. I think to summarize my thoughts broadly, this is the closest to a flashpoint for a larger conventional war that I think we've seen in a very long time. The amount of things that could spill this over into a regional war and possibly into a larger global war are just huge, right? I think you got at them. But also I think in terms of the U.S. military in the area, the U.S. is sending ships, the U.S. is sending military into the area. And the U.S. military is being fucking attacked right now. Right? They were. attacked in Iraq and Syria over 20 times within the month. Like, we are seeing the U.S. mobilizing and we are seeing that being met by military resistance from various groups in the area. And all of that increases the likelihood of a flashpoint occurring. The U.S. just engaged in what they called defensive air strikes in Syria, right? So we are seeing these tensions boil up in a way that is very intense and very cute and we're thinking about. I don't fucking know how to predict it, right? Because I think you're right. You know, at the end of the day, states like Iran also have to make real politic, you know, considerations

about their continued existence and what that would mean if they were to get involved in the conflict. But I do think, fucking hell, for a NATO state to be talking the way that Turkey is talking does tell you how much of a crisis of imperialism this is at the moment and how much we are seeing kind of the imperialist order not know how to respond to and handle the situation whatsoever. And yeah, it's hard to say. I do think. though, that I struggled to think of a time within the last five years or so where we have seen such a possibility of spill over into something broader. Nothing in Ukraine had the risk on this level. And the fact that the U.S. has now stretched than in a proxy war in Ukraine

and mobilizing in this region just indicates all the potential for some sort of miscalculation to happen even higher. And that's all the more reason why we have to stand in opposition to the, you know, material situation of settler colonialism, which is producing this. Because settler colonial states don't just enact genocide domestically. They also destabilize the world around them because of their projects, because people around the world are fucking humans who can see the evil that is taking place and who want to fight back against it. And we've seen this wherever settler colonial states have happened, that there has been externalized violence as well. And it's important for us to say, like, we have to oppose these

settler colonial systems because they enact violence on a global level because of the destabilizations they create because of the violence that they enact. And we're seeing that here. And that's all the more reason why Palestinian liberation is necessary. Right. All the more reason why whoever you are, you have a vested interest in this issue and standing in solidarity with national liberation. Absolutely. And you know, I think Zelensky is playing the role of the jilted lover. Zelensky is over in Ukraine like, oh shit. I'm not getting my shit in. my he's like please don't forget about me baby please I'm out here um so I think like you know that's just in the background so no matter what happens with this war if it pops off to a regional

war something bigger the Russia Ukraine European for hugging war is already happening right now and so that's going to feed into anything that that happens of course Russia and Iran and Syria have have alliances they have that you know they have each other's backs to some extent now is Russia going to be able to get involved in this when it's getting involved with Ukraine already no but is Ukraine on the ropes I generally genuinely feel that they are and if u.s gets dragged into this war in west asia you know the the support for ukraine is going to continue to dwindle and they're already fighting a losing battle like you just eventually run out of ukrainian men and that's you know that's that's that's sad to say but

that's literally the sort of situation that ukraine is looking at right now they don't have enough to keep going and of course america is willing to fight to the last ukrainian but is ukraine i'm not so sure and so we're going to see how that that situation um plays out now i don't think this is going to happen, but it would be very funny, just in a vacuum, if we're dispassionately talking about amusing things, if China just takes Taiwan right now. Sure, right. Can you imagine what the U.S. deep state would fucking be the meetings that would be going on? Right.

That would just be wild. But the other thing that I wanted to mention more seriously is this fucking insane thing that happens where America has bases all over the world, and then when one of their bases get attacked, they treat it as if the homeland has been attacked and then they talk about our assets are being targeted like you're in every place everywhere like why are you in Syria right now why do you have a base they're getting bombed at all fucking go home and you won't have assets being struck you know so but they're going to use that they're going to use that if they have to go to war they're going to frame it such as we were trying to stay out of this we were trying to de-escalate

but enter country here attacked our military base and enter country here and now we have to go in right now they've already have been attacking these bases and of course it's sort of it's escalating etc but the u.s if they have to will present it to the american population as they might as well have attacked a town in main or a town in florida because this is just as much america but america's everywhere so that it's like it's just it's crazy making to hear them talk about it's like we're being attacked we're defenseless innocent people and our bases everywhere are being attacked it's like no to get the get the fuck out of there um but I do want to move as we're getting sort of towards the end of this conversation to some to some buzzwords right we talked earlier that words matter and I said I was going to return to the question of genocide now what is a genocide when when somebody comes across on Twitter or whatever and they say this is this is this is bad but it's definitely not genocide these little liberals that when people are being slaughtered these these little dorks want to go to the dictionary and say well actually the definition is what is genocide really? it's a process. It's a process with many aspects, many elements. It is not a one-off event. And we can think about this in terms of the genocide of the indigenous people of North America. Nobody has a problem talking about that was a genocide. What happened to the Native Americans was a genocide. And it's an ongoing genocide, but it's been so successful that the numbers are so reduced. And, you know, it's not like 50-50 like it is in Palestine right now. But that genocide was not a one-off. event. That was a centuries-long process. And that process had many different aspects to it. It had broken treaties. It had outright slaughtering of civilians. It had ethnic cleansing. It had the pushing of the frontier further and further into indigenous land. And then using the

indigenous attacks that inevitably followed from that as a pretense to then launch more genocidal attacks. It had the trail of tears. Right. It had all these events over hundreds and hundreds of years, and that culminates in what we look back on and call a genocide. So for some little, you know, worm to come here today and say, hey, it's only 10,000 gossens that have been killed so far. Is that really? There's two million of them. Is it really a genocide? It's not just the immediate one-off acute event in which everybody is slaughtered. That's like some kindergarten-ass level understanding of genocide. Genocide is dispossession. It's displacement. it's the destroying of cultural sites it is the slaughter of human beings it's the pushing of people

into new areas out of their homelands it takes on all of these different forms it's occupation it's apartheid it's ethnic cleansing and even if they only ethnically cleanse northern gaza right let's say ultimately what israel does is just take out northern gaza um you know shift the gaza strip to an even smaller chunk of land maybe push some people in the sinai desert but then just incorporate the northern third of Gaza into greater Israel, that is still part of a genocidal process. And if we think about it in terms of processes and not in terms of one-off events, it makes a lot more sense. And you could easily say, this is a genocide. It's 75 years into a genocidal process.

And all of these different aspects of it are a genocide. Now, what you'll immediately be hit with is, well, you know, Israel is so strong. If they really wanted to, they could really do a genocide. They could just kill everybody. They could do it. No, they can't. Because that would just set off the entire world. There are still limitations, right?

The Arab states would never accept it. I think at some point, even the West would be like, okay, we got to fucking, if you literally tried to kill every Palestinian, right, you would lose all support. So Israel has to play politics. Now, as I've said this before, if fucking Netanyahu or any of these Yahoo's in his inner circle could snap their finger and the Palestinians would be gone with no global blowback, nobody else in the world noticed, they would do it yesterday. The thing that's holding them back is that they have to exist in this international system.

They have to take into consideration, you know, the opinions and the uprisings and the blowback and the responses from their neighboring states and public opinion worldwide. They can't just slaughter everybody, okay, or they would if they could get away with they would do that. So understanding genocide as a process and as the genocide of the Palestinians as a 75 year process that certainly involves killing, but is not limited merely to killing, I think is an important note to remember and internalize and hopefully give people ammunition to continue to use the phrase genocide because that is what's happening and to be able to defend that claim when somebody, when some sniveling little weasel wants to come up and point to the

dictionary and say, well, actually, 10,000 people out of 2 million isn't a genocide. You can hit them with a much more mature analysis of what genocide is. What are your thoughts? Yeah, so a couple thoughts on that. Well, actually, more than a couple. I've spent a lot of time thinking about genocide as a concept, both legally and kind of philosophically. I previously was working on a very long essay for Cosmonaut that I never published with them about the history of the genocide convention. So I spent a good bit of time looking. at the legal side of the definition of genocide and international law. And I think there are a couple of things that we can point out. So on the one hand, I want to make a quick case that under the Genocide Convention, this is genocide. And then I want to make a second case where even if it's not under the Genocide Convention, the Genocide Convention's not great. It's not the best way to define genocide. But broadly, the Genocide Convention looks at a bunch of different factors for

determining whether or not genocide has been committed. And it's a convention that obviously is regulated through the context of international law. And it thus has this complicated sort of burden of proof to prove genocide. Because in international law, we're not just trying individuals. We're trying individuals for their roles within organizations. And so you have to kind of prove how an individual and an organization functioned. But broadly, the genocide Convention defines genocide as a list of acts of which several must have been committed where they are part of an intent to destroy either in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such. So real quick, a couple important things to

point out there. Intent to destroy. The destruction doesn't even actually have to occur, right? The intent to destroy is enough. The genocide convention talks about conspiracy to commit genocide as a crime in the case where only intent exists. And then it does not have to be the entirety of a population in whole or in part meets the definition of the genocide convention. And specifically, it has to be a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such on the basis of them being that group. And then there are a couple acts which would fall under genocide according to the convention. There is killing of members of the group. That's probably the most straightforward one. Causing serious, bodily, or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately

inflicting on the group. Conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Let's just go through a couple of these real quick, because I think it's straightforward. Killing members of the group. Yep, we are seeing that. We are seeing the killing of Palestinians, not just Palestinians who are part of militarized organizations, but Palestinians broadly on the basis of their nationality and their ethnicity, because the reason they're in fucking Gaza is on the basis of their nationality and their ethnicity, because they cannot reside within Israel. They cannot reside within the land that was taken in the Nakhba because they are not Jewish.

Ergo, we see a clear violation of the first clause. The second, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group also is very straightforward and obvious. Even those who are not dying or having serious mental harm and ongoing enacted trauma being inflicted upon them because of the campaign that we are seeing right now. And then I think most importantly, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction of wholly or in part, the deprival of water, not just during this crisis, but throughout the history of the occupation of Gaza, the deprival of electricity needed to keep people alive in hospital. All of these things clearly violate just the text of the convention. And it doesn't have to be the entire group that was killed, and it doesn't even have to have succeeded the intent to kill part on the basis of nationality and ethnicity. is enough. And blatantly, this is genocide under that definition. There's just no getting around it. But even if you're not buying it, even if you want to get into the minutia of the genocide convention, the other thing I would say is the genocide convention is not the best way to determine whether or not something is genocide. Because the genocide convention came apart because of conversations that happened to the UN where a lot of it's more useful and radical aspects that focus on systemic harm to a group were gutted by the United States. Right. So the definition within the genocide convention is already loaded. We actually here again can connect the struggle, the Palestinian people for national liberation, to struggles within the United States. The thing that a lot of people don't know is that Paul Robeson, W.B. Du Bois and others presented a treaty to the UN in 1951, claiming that a genocide against black people in the United States had taken place under the definitions of the genocide convention. And this was thrown out. because the Genocide Convention isn't meant to be able to go after imperialist countries, right? It's meant to be able to go after other countries. So even if, you know, you want to get into the minutia of the laws of the Convention, I would argue that that is not what the most useful thing is. Genocide as an attempt to eliminate a group, aside from the sort of international law definition of it, just on a moral level, is taking place here, obviously. So I think you can prove it under the Convention. I also think you can just prove it morally outside of the Convention. This is the

the correct word to use for what is taking place here. Very well done. Yeah, I did not know a lot of that. So that's absolutely fascinating. Great breakdown. Another word, this is a lesser issue, but sometimes it does get brought up. I just want to touch on it quickly and we can move towards wrapping up, which is occupation. So then some people will make this really pedantic and deeply disingenuous argument that,

hold on, hold on. You're saying this is an occupation. Well, you know, Israel left Gaza in like what, 2006, 2008. they haven't been in there so they're not occupying Gaza okay when we say occupation we mean fucking Israel is occupying Palestine okay it's not it's not about literal Israeli soldiers walking the streets of Gaza that equals occupation when we're saying this is an occupation we're saying it is a it is a European settler colonial occupation of Palestine it is a taking over of their land and a squatting on it and then you get the genocide the ethnic cleansing

the apartheid etc that's what we mean by occupied so when some somebody says, well, they left Gaza and such and such. They have to be being disingenuous. They cannot be serious. This is absurd. So, yes, it's an occupation. Yes, it's a genocide. Yes, it's an apartheid regime. Yes, there's ethnic cleansing. And then the last word that you hear is ethno state. This one is maybe a little blurrier, but I'm wondering, Alison, if you have any thoughts on the use of the term ethno state. Yeah. So real quick, I want to touch on the occupation thing real quick before I move over to that. So I actually think, you know, occupation, you're correct. There's multiple sentences in which we mean it. Settler colonialism is inherently an occupation, right?

But also, again, if we want to get into kind of the legal international law side of things, the withdrawal of Israel and the settlements in 2005 just does not mean the occupation ended. And here I'm actually just going to directly quote the United Nations Office for Coordination of Human Affairs because I think this is very useful. And they say, quote, Israel has, been occupying the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza, which collectively constitute the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967. Contrary to what the Israeli government claims, Israel's withdrawal of ground forces from Gaza in 2005 did not end the occupation of Gaza. That is because ever since, Israel has maintained effective control over Gaza, including its

territorial waters and airspace, the movement of peoples and goods except at Gaza's border with Egypt, and the infrastructure upon which Gaza relies rendering the strip and open-air prison. end quote. So this is not coming from Palestinian resistance groups. This is coming for the fucking United Nations. Literally, the withdrawal of troops is not the same thing legally, internationally as the end of occupation. So I think that's important to point out. Again, even under fucking bourgeois international norms, this shit is still blatantly an occupation and blatantly genocide. But on the question of ethno-states, I think, you know, ethno-state is a complicated term. I use it in this episode myself to refer to what I think the project of Zionism is.

And I think it is fair to say that the Zionist project is an ethno-nationalist project, right, which is what that term is getting at, because, again, of the idea that there is a specific ethnic group with a sole and unique claim to this particular land. And, you know, ethno-state gets thrown at the various Palestinian groups as well to try to argue that they're Arab nationalist in some way and want to set up an ethno state. And when it gets thrown that way, I would just say that's completely inaccurate. The various resistance groups, including Hamas, as of their 2017 charter, want to set up an ethnically nationalist state, right? They have talked about a state that is multi-ethnic in its reality. And so when that term gets applied the other way to the resistance

groups, I think it is not accurate to their self-reported politics, right? And that I think is very necessary to point out. But I do think the term is fair to discuss in the context of describing what Zionism is and what a Zionist state would be. Very well said. Yeah, like I said, every accusation is an admission and what you just said a couple seconds ago is exactly that and also I think it's kind of funny that I'm just like this fucking shit talker coming up with arguments and Allison is like this fucking lawyer pointing

to international lines. That's why we make such a good team. Thank God for you. All right. Well, I think we're wrapping this up. I just wanted to end this with a couple of thoughts on what has been accomplished so far. So if we do see this as a national liberation struggle, what has this historic

rebellion by Hamas accomplished so far. Maybe some of these things were intended. Maybe some of them weren't. And here's just a list I came up with at the top of my head. Allison, feel free to add anything to this. They brought the issue of Palestine back into the forefront, not just of regional politics, but of global politics. Every person on every corner of the earth that's at all tapped into what's happening in the world around them is thinking right now about this conflict. So they've managed to do that. They have sabotaged. the attempt to move past them, to put their issues on the back burner, specifically in the form of the Saudi normalization campaign with Israel. They were just about to sort of, you know, try to normalize relations and sort of

put this whole issue behind them and let Israel move forward as a respected state in the region. And having normalization with Saudi Arabia is one of those major steps. They ended that. They revealed the hypocrisy of the West. All the arguments we've heard about Ukraine, self-determination, This is a country being invaded People have every right to fight for their freedom Everybody should have democracy and human rights All of that goes out the window when it comes to Israel Now they have to reverse the arguments

Right actually none of those things matter at all Israel has a right to exist and defend itself end of discussion So that's the revealing of the hypocrisy of the West They're pushing the conflict to a peak They are not letting it die down They're not letting it go out with the whimper They are forcing some sort of resolution Israel, you're going to have to

fucking kill us all or you're going to have to do something. But the status quo is unacceptable. It's unbearable. We can't live like this anymore. And they've successfully pushed this to a sort of culminating event. And we'll see what happens. The war is going to

determine what that resolution ultimately is or if we get to a full resolution or a partial resolution. But in any case, the conflict is no longer on the back burner. Now, another thing they've accomplished is they have and you know

I want to be thoughtful about this because you know while I don't think that settlers are civilians and I certainly don't shed any tears over the IDF you know a kid born in Israel is an innocent person

you know somebody who's just born in a kibbutz and is raised in a kibbutz and they don't know anything else they don't have a citizenship in any other country you know that sucks that's brutal I ultimately laid the blame at the feet of Israel

they started this conflict you know it's like my announcement is that of a slave and a slave master. If the slaves revolt and they burn down the master's house and his family dies, do we not care that the little baby died? No, we care. A baby died.

That's terrible. A baby's fundamentally, by definition, innocent. But the parents brought that baby into a slave master dynamic. They put them in harm's way. And that is disgusting. But it doesn't mean that we shouldn't feel empathy and have some spiritual and moral consistency that we care about truly, truly innocent people, and we can talk about what that means. But my main point here is what they did do is they scattered the settlers. So if you're a

settler that wants to immigrate, right, to Israel, because they give you dual citizenship, if you have one grandparent who is Jewish, you know, these people that are born in America that fly over and become settlers, those people are going to think twice three times before they come back. And so they have fundamentally scattered settlers and made settlers feel not at home because it's not their home. And the last thing that I can think of, and I'm sure there's many more, is that they have successfully lured Israel into overplaying its hand. They have lured Israel into this insane, psychopathic, fascistic response that maybe people around the world had some sympathy on October 8th, but by October 9th, you're having to watch baby after baby. be pulled out of the fucking rubble and you lose and and that now takes over your moral universe and people are disgusted by that because they have functioning fucking hearts and they should

be disgusted by that but the thing is when it's just every day when it's just 15 Palestinian kids killed it doesn't even make the headlines right and that's a disgusting disgusting tragic fact about this Palestinians are dying the entire time every day you know you You could go a year without hearing about Israel and Palestine in the conflict. Babies are still dying. Innocent families are still being slaughtered. People are still being brutalized. How many Palestinians are rotting away in Israeli jails?

Those are political prisoners as far as I'm concerned, right? And so what they've done is they've highlighted all of that. They refuse to let the low-level annihilation and genocide continue. If you're going to kill us, you're going to have to fucking show the whole world that you're killing us. Because you're going to kill us anyway. Whether the world is looking or not, you're going to fucking kill us. so we might as well make the motherfucking world look at what you're doing and then they'll their hearts have to determine what side they're on and so these are what the the uprising has accomplished and it's hard to talk about accomplishments in such a tragic disgusting violent conflict my heart fucking aches i've wept every fucking day since this conflict has started but it's bringing it into the foreground and not allowing Palestinians

to be slaughtered and suffocated in silence. And that in and of itself is something like an accomplishment. So things are happening. Things are moving. And the Palestinian resistance, you know, they have, they've done something. They are fighting back and they're making the world look. And that's something. And we're going to see what happens from here on out.

But I think that is worthy of being called something like an accomplishment. And I'm wondering, Alison, if you have any other thoughts. Yeah, I think that's a very comprehensive list that you've got. Dave, you know, on the seventh kind of when everything kicked off, my first question was kind of like, what is the thought process here, right? What is motivating this? What caused this to happen now on this day at this scale? Right. And we still totally know that. There have been interviews with the political leadership of Hamas and the other resistance groups where they've given some explanation. But again, the context around it remains murky and will remain murky for quite some time probably. And one of the things that I came back to on the seventh when I was trying to understand, why is this happening now is to a certain degree, like this has to just be a what other option is there kind of thing, right? That has to be a part of what's at play. And I think that that very much has been what we've seen play out. And I think you're correct that when you're in that situation of desperation, where everything has failed, where you've tried to go through the

International Accords, where you've tried to go through the Oslo Accords, where you've tried to go through so many different attempts to reach a solution and none of them have worked, you fall back on what is available to you. And I think you're correct to say that in this context, in the wake of all of this, the issue has been pushed globally, right? Everyone has to see this now. Everyone has to watch this happen. It has to confront the immoral evil of settler colonialism and of occupation and of genocide. And we'll never know intent at the end of the day. We will never know the decisions and the individual people who made individual military strategies leading into this. But what we do know is that we have reached a point where in L.A. there were 50,000 people in the street marching against colonialism, marching against Zionism, marching against occupation and apartheid and genocide. And that is meaningful and that is important. And if nothing else, you know, in the wake of this, we can, we spend all time trying to speculate. But what we know we need to do is be vocal in our condemnation of the system of Zionism that produced all of this violence in the first place. So I don't really have

more to add to your list of accomplishments, but I want to underline that, you know, the issue has been forced and that's the most important thing of all. And now it is time for everyone to respond. Absolutely. All right. Well, I think we're going to end it there. Alison, do you have any other things to say? Are you good? I'm good. Okay. Yeah, we're going to end it there. We're going to see how things play out. Again, this is an evolving situation. We're recording on October 30th. Things are going to change in the next day, two days, three days. But Allison and I are continue to monitor events and we're going to continue to try to put out episodes like this helping people understand what's going on as it goes on and as it escalates and as it evolves.

So with that said, we're going to wrap this episode up. Thank you to everybody who listens to the show, who supports the show. We deeply appreciate it. And as always, free Palestine. We're going to be able to be.