Rev Left Radio - Decolonizing Palestine: Toward National Liberation in the Levant

Episode Date: November 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...   (recorded Oct. 30th 2023)   Support Rev Left Radio : https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio  

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 Fanon, looking into how decolonization was explored in the Battle of Alger's 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 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. 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 Girl of 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 Phenon episodes. We re-released our wonderful two-hour episode explaining settler colonel. colonialism in Israel and the United States. I think I even put up 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 underpinnings and analysis that is essential to understand a situation like this. And we hope that longtime 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 hear the word settler colonial once. That's just one example, but 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 G.H. So I really hope that this can be a useful, a useful sort of intervention in an evolving situation.

Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, to 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 Zionist 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 have 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

are 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. And, you know, 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 decolonization into some sort of hateful, anti-Semitic, genocidal, you know, statement. And that's another thing that's very fascinating is the, 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 BB 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 is really fallen off completely. And Allison was mentioning 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 West, in West Asia. But to see it in the West is fascinating. And I would argue 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 a 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 edge. educational for people. And if you remember, Allison and I did our two-hour episode on settler colonialism and 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 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 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 de-legitimization 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 had, 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 think 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 that in Yahoo. So there has not been a reduction in, you know, aid to Israel in any way that could be meaningful. And in 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 evils, 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. 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 we can be a we can be a genocide denier we 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 if if that is not enough if that 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 him. 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, 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 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 Zionists 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 whose president, this crisis has to play out, will continue to play out. And that's what 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 in 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 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 are organizations don't give a shit about the Jewish people. They are made up of people whose politics is actually fairly anti-Semitic in many ways. And by and large are part of kind of the like millenarian 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 end. 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 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, you know, they find themselves in bed with certain liberal, well-off, ruling class types who have an 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. 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 also is actually more correct. It's a concentration of the leftovers from the Nakhba, 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 automated 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 it's pretty fucking sick but yeah i think um calling it a concentration camp is a little more on the nose and and absolutely yeah spells it out quite well yeah absolutely yeah so so building on a little of what we discussed about me take us to another point that I want us to touch on that I think gets 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 like Briano 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

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 Naqba 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 sole and singular and exclusive claim to this land and that any state there 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.

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 Antioch, 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 follow. 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 Netanyahu. 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. it for peace in the Middle East, right? For a 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 domino's falling. Hamas does a terrorist attack. Israel responds and has a right to defend itself. And then everything follows. those 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 as 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. 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 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 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. Now, 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 Allison mentioned earlier the problem of settlements. This is undertaken by the most far-right ultra-Orthodox freaks on the planet. This is what people that are hardcore Zionists

in the U.S. will fly. Americans will fly, right? If they have a, I think it's like if 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, 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. 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 improved.

on the situation, but we got to think deeply about what a two-state solution means, whose interest to serve. 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 the 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 why 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 in 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. logical 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, you know, 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 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 Israel is doing everything that can behind the scenes to undermine it. And I really truly think that in a lot of these ruling class elites that are pushing this line, they know that what they're basically doing is their

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, Gaz is already gone and the West Bank is, is beyond Swiss 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, to shift quickly into an interesting kind of discussion of the internal dynamics of Israel that

some people might not know. Now, 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 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 causes 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 in 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, et cetera, 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 elements 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 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 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 headline Right? As this conflict continues to unfold, you're not going to read a 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 incredible. incredibly, incredibly fragile and weak moment for those reasons and so many more. 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 hereti communities, right, have been huge. And then, yeah, the subsidization of full-time yeshiva students, right? So studying Torah and Talwood full-time instead of working is obviously a huge point of contention. Yeah, looking at the numbers, some half of her own.

Reddymen 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 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 over-emphasize 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 real. 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 the northern half of the strip.

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's 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 it's an important part

and so their fear is if the IDF goes in this ground invasion looks like they're 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 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've 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 flippin here, they're used to beating up on kids and old people, right? They're going to, they're not really ready for what's coming. On top of that, because of the, 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 hesbala 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 badassery to go in there and do a brutal urban warfare in the rubbles 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? 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 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, penned in 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 percent unemployment rate, hardcore poverty. In that situation, what would almost anybody do? You would find meaning, you would regain your sense of control. all 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, Alison, do you have anything else to say about the ground invasion, Hamas, 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 it, 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 Phon, this is this kind of reality that Phenon 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 will 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 analysis. 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 end to 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 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 Harvard 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.

fightable, 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. For struggle, it was called into question in South Africa when we saw, you know, 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 claimed 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? Horrific, 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 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 the sort of yeah 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, you know, screaming, or listen to the,

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, right? The casualness with which they say it. It's horrifying, actually, to see that ugly face come to the fore. It is, it is, yeah, it's disturbing for sure. I do want to get into the regional war here. I will just say, talking about the ground invasion, you know, Hamas has some bangers.

When they put out their little, their little, 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 TikTok 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 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. 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 talk to Israel so they'll let some humanitarian aid or whatever, trying to keep 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 This is a very interesting point because, you know, Iran also has its internal divisions, as does the U.S. All these countries do. What will they do? Does Iran really want a full-on 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 large, 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. 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 airstrikes 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 struggle 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 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 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, am I? He's like, please don't forget about me, baby, please, I'm out here. 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, fucking war is already happening right now.

And so that's going to feed into anything that happens. Of course, Russia and Iran and Syria have have alliances. they have, 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 genuinely feel that they are. And if U.S. gets dragged into this war in West Asia, you know, 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 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's willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, but is Ukraine? I'm not so sure. And so we're going to see how that situation 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. Um, but the other thing that I wanted to mention more seriously is this, 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 there 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. 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, et cetera. 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 Maine or a town in Florida because this is just as much America. But America's everywhere. So that is like, it's just, It's just, it's crazy making to hear them talk about it. 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 fuck out of there. But I do want to move as we're getting sort of towards the end of this conversation 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 somebody comes across on Twitter or whatever and they say, this is bad, but it's definitely, not genocide, these little liberals that when people are being slaughtered, 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 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 for some little you know worm to come here today and say hey it's only 10,000 gaza and 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, 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 and and all of these different aspects of it are a genocide now what you'll what you'll immediately be hit with is well you know Israel's 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 it, 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 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. Erego, 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 It's physical destruction of whole air and park, 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 gutting 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 country. 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 correct word to use for what is taking place here. very well done yeah i did i did not know a lot of that so that's 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 um 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 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 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 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 senses 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 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.

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, and I think it is. 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, do not 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, 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 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 in 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 invading. 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're they're not letting it die down they're not letting it go out with the whimper they are forcing some sort of resolution israel you got to have you're going to have the 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, they don't have any citizenship in any other country. You know, that sucks. That's, that's brutal. I ultimately laid the blame at the feet of Israel. They started this conflict. You know, it's like, my analogy is that of a slave and a slave man. 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 is 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 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 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 riding 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 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. 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, 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 gave. But, 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 don't 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. 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 courts, 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 and has to confront the immoral evil of settler colonialism and of occupation and of genocide. And, you know, 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 LA 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. Allison, 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 going to 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. This is for Palestine. The capital Jerusalem, unarmed people marching to the war when they're shooting them, Suppression is a question. Resistance is the answer. Long live Palestine, long live Gaza. Palestine or Quds, the capital of Jerusalem, unarmed people watching to the women and they're shooting them.

Suppression is a question. Resistance is the answer. Long live Palestine, long live Gaza. All you see is war every time you turn your head and nightmare. Bloodshed on the floor. Mother cries who cries for her this nightmare. Truth between these wars. See the lies between the lines they hide

Where the bullet coming from From the tyrant dressed in our disguise I'm a ride till the end Even if I got a pushback for all my friends Because you know that I'm a fighter Let me see a lighter And we not gonna stop the Palestine is free But still you know that I'm a ride up till the end

Even if I got a push back for all my friends Because you know that I'm a fighter Let me see a lighter And we not got stop the Palestine is free Lord are to not love though to be blind Talk to not care Tell me what's free

Border lines military despair How to exist If there's no rights To be human in fear And if you take away your home Where's the heart supposed to live Torture not love Talk to be blind

To not care Tell me what's free Border lines military despair How to exist If there's no rights to be human And if you take away your home Where's the heart's supposed to live Me

My people Long and butterflies Prime Never let you go. Sing it with me now. Free, free, free Palestine, free Palestine, free Palestine, free Palestine, free Palestine, free Palestine, free Palestine, free Palestine. If the Bahrain Abuthoraya could resist without a wheelchair, 10 year challenge, tell Reg if we are still here. And tell that killer Netanyahu he should feel fear the old live through us and guarantee the children will care.

Criminal, not invincible and you know it, so I'm doing, some of doing. Still sitting in their stoic May not feel us with you when you listen to our poems You inspire humanity, your resistance is heroic Regardless of talk Here's time we answer the call Through your strength of spirit You provide example for all

How to live, how to love when a tack from the clouds above Loud and clear the songs you sung Can't be drowned by the sound of guns Won't just watch your tragic times Do a satellite dish The least that we can give you is an anthem like this They panic tried to analyse and sanitise this But we love you more than ever still

Palestine live Free my people long and Palestine We will never let you know Free free Palestine Free, Free Palestine Free Palestine Free Palestine Free Palestine

Free Palestine change this state, no change, no, run away away, all they hate to face, no. Time to change this state, no change, no. Continuing oppression of the Palestinians, encircling of the people of Gaza, killing of civilians, the burning of homes, the daily oppression, the theft of land, the apartheid system in the West Bank where there are two road systems, and I've been, and I'm sure you have, and you see the Israeli road, you see like a spanking new highway with just the settler cars going backwards and forth, then you see the old Palestinian roads. And it's clearly it's people living under two sets of laws.

It's an apartheid system. So all this is being uncovered. And the boycotts and divestment and sanctions campaign, which I support, I'm sure many other people do, as a peaceful protest against the Israeli oppression. Support groups have got to keep proclaiming the rights of the Palestinians are the right to return, the right to their homeland, really. And the theft of land is Israel is breaking international law. It is breaking the Geneva Convention.