Rev Left Radio - From Palestine: Suffering, Dignity, & Resistance

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

In this episode, Breht speaks with Mohanad Alsayed about his memoir Scars and Medals (Iskra Books), a powerful and deeply human account of growing up Palestinian under occupation, carrying exile across continents, and trying to make sense of memory, loss, family, and resistance. Through the story of his grandmother Jamila, his missing uncle Ghazi, and his own journey from Palestine to the United States, Alsayed offers an intimate portrait of how dispossession enters not only history and politics, but childhood, identity, and the inner life. The conversation explores occupation as a lived and psychological reality, the tension between assimilation and memory, the many meanings of resistance, and the current situation across West Asia - including how Palestinians view Iran. At once personal and collective, Scars and Medals opens onto the wider Palestinian experience with honesty, dignity, and emotional force.   Buy or get a FREE pdf of Scars and Medals here: https://www.iskrabooks.org/books/p/scars-and-medals   ----------------------------------------- Check out a great new resource for revolutionary education, Unlearning Capitalism: https://unlearn.capital/ Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio   Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have on the show, Palestinian author Mohanad al-Sayed, to talk about his book from Iskra, entitled Scars and Medals. This is a historical memoir about his childhood growing up in Palestine, the relationship with his grandmother who was alive during the Nakba, his uncle who chose the path of armed resistance, him working illegally under a pseudonym in Israel and getting a sort of first-person perspective on Israeli society and their sort of propaganda regime, their ideological conditioning, their widespread disdain and dehumanization of the Palestinian people. And then he eventually was able to come over to the United States and chart out his own path here. So coming over to the United States, particularly in the American South and trying to be an advocate for his. people also gave rise to a bunch of fascinating experiences. So throughout this episode, we used

the lens of his personal life to elaborate on Palestinian history, Palestinian humanity, Palestinian resistance, the current situation in historic Palestine, the Greater Israel Project, the Epstein class, the Iran War, the compromise nature of the American ruling class with regards to this issue, the increasing divergence of the American populations of perspective of Israel with the ruling class in both parties, what that contradiction might ultimately lead to, the Comprador regimes throughout West Asia, and so much more. I mean, this is outside of an intellectual sort of history, this is a deeply emotional book and interview, an interview where both of us at various times can't help but get emotional

when we're talking about, you know, the tragedy and violence and injustice imposed on the beautiful, courageous, and persistent. Palestinian people and the implication of what happens if Israel and the United States succeeds and the realization that the Palestinian liberation fight is on the forefront of the fight for humanity, the fight for a more human future. It's not just the fight about the fate of West Asia. It truly has implications for the entire world. And these two rogue terrorist states, the United States and Israel, they're increasing in their desperate. aspiration lashing out, trying to censor people, starting a regional and perhaps world war,

and all of it to preserve this insane European colonialist project that we call Israel, and the insane imperialist project of global domination that we call the American Empire. So, fascinating discussion, deeply moving discussion, and I think anybody listening will get a lot out of it. And of course, this book is put out by the one and only Iskra book, who is also published. I'm under contract for two books. With them, we're in the editing process of my first one. So a huge love and shout out to Iskra books.

And 100% of the profits for Scars and Metals goes to the people in Gaza. So there's also a free version of the book. So if you don't have the money, you can go read Scars and Meadows on Iskra's website for free. Something Iskra often does, which is so cool of them, to offer their books for free. But if you are so inclined, you want to buy a physical copy, absolutely do so, knowing that your money is going not only to support Iskra books, but going to support the people in Palestine. And then using that book, spreading it around, asking your local library to get it,

reading it in a context of an organizing chapter. These are all wonderful things that you can do and kind of take this book and this memoir and this history and this family really and expand its influence. That would be a wonderful thing to do. And I also wanted to shout out our friends over at a new website, really. It's a new resource for revolutionary education called Unlearning Capitalism. And it features Rev.F, but that's not the reason I'm promoting it. It's because it features so many wonderful and very searchable outlets for revolutionary education,

whether you're interested in anti-imperialism, you're interested in the Global South, you're interested in philosophy, you're interested in Marxism, whatever it may be, that you're interested in in the realm of revolutionary education. Unlearning capitalism is this fascinating website just produced and put up that allows you to navigate huge and I believe growing swaths of revolutionary literature, media, etc. So people can search up what you want to learn about and have something presented. So, you know, if you go on the search tab and you put in philosophy and Marxism, Rev Left is the first thing that pops up.

It's kind of our little niche in the broad. revolutionary and Marxist ecosystem, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial ecosystem, is that we do have this, you know, philosophically inflected approach to this stuff. And other people are more historically grounded or, you know, whatever. Everybody has a different thing to contribute. This growing ecosystem of radical revolutionary independent media, articles, books, etc. So go check out on Learning Capitalism. I'll put it in the show notes of this episode and all episodes going forward

because I just think it is a really cool, you know, grassroots. educational tool that is easy to navigate and is one of those things that we can learn from ourselves, help spread to our comrades and even people in our lives who aren't convinced but might be searching for more understanding. It's a great resource for that. And as always, if you'd like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support the show at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. In exchange for that, you get bonus monthly episodes. We have a meditation group. We do, you know, situation rooms when big global politics pops off. I'm going to do this sort of free raffle thing where I'm going to ask patrons to pick a number between one and 10,000

every month and whoever comes closest to the number that I picked will get one of the books off my bookshelf. We'll get a bunch of really cool unique designed RevLev stickers that my friend over at Coffee Stain Comics drew the art for printed off and sent me a bunch of. So I have like a hundred of these really cool design stickers, unique designs from an artist. and we're going to put those in the book. So I'll take a book off my bookshelf. I'll write a nice little message to our supporter.

I'll throw in a few of these really cool stickers and I'll ship it free of cost to you to whatever address. You give me P.O. Box, whatever you feel comfortable giving. And I'll do that going forward as just a cool little give back to patrons. We also do NFL and NBA fantasy leagues. We actually have buy-ins too. So people that won, we did two NBA fantasy leagues that did. just wrapped up and they got, you know,

$170 bucks, $180, something like that. Each for winning that league, it's just a fun little thing that we do. So I really try to make the Patreon a place not only where people can come and support the show, but that they get back more, hopefully, than $5 worth of content a month. And I really make it a point to support and give back as much as I can to our Patreon supporters in particular because without them, we wouldn't exist at all. So without further ado, here is my fascinating, wide-ranging, deeply moving, emotional conversation with Mohanad al-Said, the author of Scars and

Metals put out by Iskra Books. Enjoy. Hello, this is Mohanad al-Said. I wrote a memoir called Scars and Metals, and it talks about me and my life in Palestine, growing up under apartheid and illegal occupation. and it explains how it affects different aspects of everybody's life. And this memoir goes in depth into the details of life under illegal occupation. And in it, I explain a lot of the details of the daily life and how it is affected by taking away every aspect of normal life

that people in the West would usually experience. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's an honor genuinely to have you on the show and to discuss your book. Again, you mentioned it. The title is Scars and Metals. I would say it's something like a memoir, but you're using your own personal experiences as kind of a lens through which to examine not only the Palestinian issue in Palestinian history, even through figures in your life like your grandmother, which we'll get into in a second, but also the subjectivity of somebody who is Palestinian, but who worked illegally in Israel as we'll get to, move to the U.S. as we'll get to. So I think it's a really unique way to come into this subject.

People can write histories, people can write political manifestos about Palestine. We can highlight the origins of certain resistance forces, all of that. But I think this really takes a unique path into the issue. So before we get into more questions, can you kind of just let us know a little bit more about your own personal life, like when, you know, your time in Palestine, when you moved out, just to help listeners orient to your kind of story before we get into the details. Yes, absolutely. So I was born in Palestine in a small town called Tulkarim, and it is a border town like 15 minutes away from the city of Natania. So we were about

20 minutes away from the Mediterranean shores, though I grew up until I was. was probably 20, 22 years of age before I saw the sea. I was not even allowed to see it. I grew up in that little town, but it was always segregated. There was an apartheid wall that I didn't understand its existence or the purpose of its existence. I had refugee camps surrounding my house, and I didn't understand the origin. of the people that lived in these refugee camps. So there was a lot of things happening around me that sit the stage for me to start asking questions as a child.

And then as I grew older, I started understanding what was happening around me that I was born into an occupation, that we were under military colonial displacement occupation. its sole purpose was to basically end the presence of the Palestinians in their ancestry land. After I grew up, I started working into the historical Palestine, 1948 Palestine, what is known right now as Israel. And then at age 24, I moved out to the United States on the purpose of finding freedom,

and finding normal sea and also on the premise of fighting back for my people and exposing the truth and telling their stories and hopefully I can make some difference and shed some light on their stories because the truth definitely was not known not as much as today, especially back when I moved to the U.S. around the year 2000. So that gives the timeline of how things that evolved. Wonderful. Yeah. And I do think this is a genuine contribution to that, you know, truth-telling mission that you mentioned before. So I commend you for that. You know, one of the things that just hearing you talk and it just kind of always

destroys me and I think increasingly people around the world is, you know, the child's perspective of what it must be like, not only during your childhood growing up in apartheid, brutal oppression, but for those growing up in the last two years in particular, facing an acute phase of an ongoing genocide, I think is the best way to say it. And it's shook in the world awake in a way that I've never seen in my life. And I was wondering if, like, how do you comprehend the shift in opinion across the world on Palestine? There's always been advocates of Palestine around the world.

Growing up in the U.S., the pro-Palestine cause was almost exclusively a part of the far, far left. Not the Democratic liberal left, but the socialist, anti-imperialist left, really cared about Palestine and the rest of the political spectrum. Was either indifferent or explicitly pro-Israel. How has that shift in public perception around the world been interpreted by you? When I came to start writing the memoir, I started before the dial-up of the genocide. So the genocide in Gaza, because for me, I don't think that the genocide in Gaza was the first genocide for the Palestinian people. 80 years ago, 1948, is the beginning of the genocide. It was sometimes dialed up, sometimes dialed down, but it never stopped.

And the shift of the perception happened this time due to social media and free platforms like yours and others that shed the light persistently for many, many years. But this time around, there is social media, there is smartphones, there is people who actually gave live feed of how a population could get exterminated. and genocided, and people saw it in 4K. So it had a profound impact on the population of the world, because the world was not ready for this, because of exactly what you just explained. The world did not have a pretext to what was going on in Palestine. So it was shocked.

I think had the word known more about the truth, they would not have gone as shunken as you described. But because the truth was always shunned away, it was always hidden, it was always worked against with the persistent Hasbara and its brutal machine that hid the truth. It had this impact. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with you that, you know, social media, the ability to communicate instantly across the world, all the videos we've seen, that has really kind of broken down this firewall. that Israel, the U.S., the West in general, was able to set up for so many years and kind of, you know, titrate the information that got in, manipulate the information. Growing up here in the U.S., you only heard, you know, Israeli voices, Zionist voices. I cannot remember ever seeing a Palestinian person on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News.

So in addition to social media and the communicative technologies, we also get, you know, figures like yourself, people, Palestinians themselves, able to, you know, turn. on their phones, release videos, release messages, go on other independent media outlets and give their perspective. And that's really helped as well. But you mentioned the Nakaba, and I think that's obviously where this history, in particular, the history of Zionism and occupation officially begins. And that connects well with your grandmother, Jamila, who I think is the moral and emotional center of your book in so many ways.

Can you kind of talk about who she was, kind of what she experienced and what she taught you about Palestine, survival, dignity, etc. Yes, and I believe Jamila is a great way to start the memoir. Because to me, she transcends time and she predated Israel itself. So she dealt with the Palestinian currency, the Palestinian Lera and Jenei. And she used to travel to Jordan and to other places without having to go through checkpoints. and she used to farm her land, Oceanside, in the city of Yaffa,

and she had an orange orchard that used to export oranges to the rest of the world. And on every piece, it used to be wrapped up with white paper and with a stamp that says Palestine. So she saw Palestine. She used to send mail with stamps that said Palestine. So she knew everything prior to Nakhba, prior to 1948, when the terrorist organizations like Haganah and Stern attacked her town and the house fell down almost on top of her and my late grandfather

who took off taking nothing with them, but her newborn across her arm and her three-year-old. old daughter, my aunt, and they fled to the West Bank. So the stories that she used to tell us predated Israel, this is the only memory for me as a child who predated internet to learn about what existed besides the occupation. So she instilled in us the hope that one day Palestine will be free and the house and the orchard and the freedom and this seashore will be restored back to the people who originally owned it. And the amount of injustice that she had been exposed to and how she had to rebel again.

But even in 1967, she lost her older son, never to see him again because he joined resistance and he was chased off. And he probably has a major chapter in my memoir due to the story that I had. gotten involved in. But as to my grandmother, he was a son that she lost. Also, her older daughter, my aunt. She was in Jordan in 1967, so she was never permitted to be coming back to see her mother. So my grandmother most likely saw her less than 10 times in her life past 1967. Every time my grandmother had to travel to Jordan and through checkpoints, numerous checkpoints, to be able to go to Jordan and see her daughter

who was never allowed to return back. So my grandmother sacrificed so much and she lost her inherited wealth so many times and she had to re-belt. So she represented that little window on what normal life used to be like, but she also represented resilient. and the will to survive and the will to give so much, but still cling to the will of life and the will to rebel

and the will to have some kind of normalcy around all of these abnormal situations that she was always put in. I can't remember this from your book, but is she still with us? Is Jamila still with us? No, she passed away. She passed away, and I talk in the book about the last time I saw her is when she asked me to go look for my uncle. That's right. That's right.

Yeah, well, may she rest in peace. And I think this book, you know, does her memory incredible justice. And I applaud you for doing that. And I highly encourage people to get out the book, to read the book, not just for the amazing, you know, amount of. of humanity within it, but also to continue to preserve and perpetuate Jamila's memory. So you mentioned, and I'm going to skip around this outline a little bit, but you mentioned your uncle and the search for your uncle, Ghazi, gives the book a kind of like narrative spine, if you will, because it's kind of something that is a reoccurring theme throughout

the text. But he also seems to stand for something larger than just one missing relative. Can you kind of talk about that part of the book and what Ghazi came to represent for you over the course of writing it? Yes. So when you live under this brutal machine of occupation that really wants to end your life, that really wants to kick you out at best, you have to resist by many different ways. But my uncle's story represented the violent resistance, you know, picking up arms, you know, making sure that you stand up to the aggressor, not by the soft ways, because there are so many soft ways of resistance, including, you know, joining demonstrations, just living life, just sending your kids to school.

And these are a means of resistance that we can talk about more. But when it comes to my uncle, he took it up on himself to do the selfless act of sacrifice in himself and his livelihood and the opportunity of having a normal life to resist the occupation. And for me, that was big deal to have such a figure in the family that we always looked up to him. And we didn't know a lot of the details of his stories. But when I got to meet him, I went on a journey myself in his search. until I was able to locate him, and then I went on another journey of trying to have him to open up to me

and speak to me because I had never met him before, and I was sure that he was skeptical. I was looking for a man that left at age of 18 before I was born, never to return, never to have a phone call with his relatives, and my grandmother, Jamila, or my mom herself. So I was an ambiguous person to him, Now that he's a senior and I didn't know his state of mind or whether he was ready to take in strangers. So I explained in the memoir very abnormal events that I had to go through in order for him to open up for me and receive me.

And then we sat down, we embraced and we talked. And he explained to me a lot of what happened to him back in Palestine when he was resisting and how he, the group to resist, simple group of like high school graduates who had not even like pistols or anything. They just wanted to resist the occupation. Still, they were chased off. They were chased off to Jordan and then to other parts of the Middle East and he ended up in Europe. And he explained to me all of the missions that he took when he was in Europe. A lot of those are things that I didn't even mention in the book because there were things that I had to keep for myself. But I explained some parts of his heroic actions that he took.

So my uncle definitely represents another aspect of how you resist brutal, illegal occupation. If you want to drive off the occupiers, sometimes you have to be doing. doing what he did. Yes. Absolutely. And I've long argued that the, you know, like for example, the members of Hamas who are presented to us in the West as the super scary, violent, psychopathic, terrorist organization, I always remind people, I'm not just here to humanize the Palestinian victims.

I'm trying to also humanize the Palestinian freedom fighters. And the people that are picking up guns today who Israel and the United States government, government and Western governments want us to, you know, to hate and disdain as terrorists and to not value their lives, right? Like when a Palestinian, innocent, obviously innocent Palestinian civilian gets slaughtered by Israel or the U.S., there's some amount of, okay, you can be sympathetic to that. There's a human being there. But when somebody fighting, you know, somebody that they can label as Hamas gets killed, there's this sense of like, well, that's literally a terrorist, so that's okay that they died.

But no, the terrorist, quote unquote, are the little boys of 20 years ago. They were the people that grew up under brutal conditions of occupation and oppression and apartheid who watched Israel humiliate in prison, beat, and in many cases murder and slaughter, their family, their friends. And they decided over the course of their lives,

much like your uncle, to engage not only in peaceful protesting, but in armed resistance, which I think is more, and according to international law, legally justifiable in every sense of the term. And so I see these figures, as I think most of my listeners do, as straight up heroes, as freedom fighters, as those willing to sacrifice their lives in defense of their homeland and of their people. And that turns the entire narrative that Israel and the U.S. would like to sustain. It really

turns that completely on its head. So I'm wondering what is the perspective of Palestinians insofar as you can tell, or maybe, you know, your first, first 24 years living in Palestine, what was the popular perspective of not just Hamas, maybe not just the PFLP, but of armed resistance in general. How did regular people kind of relate to the idea that some people in their family and their communities would pick up guns and would fight back that way? Yes, absolutely. My childhood predated Internet. So everything, we were in a bubble and we were surrounded by the apartheid walls and we were surrounded. surrounded by the barbed wires.

So to us, we were engaged. So anybody who would try to break the siege, break the cage, break free, was looked at as a hero. That's definitely the way my people looked at those who protested, those who picked up the arms, those who decided to stay awake at night while the rest of us slept to guard us. and to protect us and to tend off the occupation military. I was the child who slept under the bed, more than on the bed, because of the clashes that used to happen

between the fighters. We used to call them Shabab, which means, you know, the young men, our youth, back when I was a child, and they would clash with the occupation. And, you know, I know the West painted, the first intifada, which happened when I was a school kid, as this peaceful demonstration. And it picked up good esteem because of that.

But I want to assure you that the Palestinians were ready to pick up arms, but we had none. Like imagine a population of 7 million Palestinians did not have a single pistol to resist with. That's why they picked up stones and they started throwing them. And it's even more heroic to pick up stones when you're fighting off a nuclear power. A nuclear hegemon, major regional power that wants to basically finish up completely your existence in the land. So this is how we looked at the people who resist it.

But this is also how we looked at the child who went to school in defiance of the occupants of the occupations. the occupation. We had to walk through the brigades of the military occupations to get to school and back to home. And we knew we would get harassed regularly. And we still aggravated them, even when we were little children. We used to get beaten up. And I mentioned one or two of those incidents. And I lost a classmate who was shut off. I couldn't even explain the details of how he was killed because it was so gross, it was so graphic. I just couldn't mention the whole story in my memoir. So this is how people looked at them.

And you know for the label of terrorists, I know your listeners are very smart, but I can put this out there during two years of a genocide. The Palestinian people, half of them are trapped inside Palestine and the other half is dispersed all across the West. If any other population that is violent in nature was under a genocide, the rest of them out there would just strap bombs and start going suicidal. Two years passed in a brutal genocide.

You haven't seen one violent act from the Palestinians. We only did what the countries that we lived in allowed us to do peacefully, to demonstrate to go out there with our bare, bodies to show the people what is going on just to raise awareness. And that shows that we are life-loving and peace-loving population that was just crushed for 80-plus years. Absolutely. Powerfully said, and that's actually a great point. For the whole diaspora of Palestinians around the world, there's not been any so-called terrorist attack where somebody lashes out and hurts innocent people. It's always a concerted fight against the machinery of occupation and

settlement and it is and it is a it's actually a deep respect for life and the people who hate life the people who destroy life from human life to animal life to the olive trees themselves is the Israeli occupation death machine in the U.S. Empire that backs it, funds it, and arms

it to the teeth. Those are the rogue terrorist states in the world. Those are the people that are preventing freedom and democracy and peace from being able to exist. Violence is not present in the Palestinian people. Inher, it is a result of the violence brought to them by the Nakhba and the ongoing occupation and

continuing genocide of their peoples. And still they resist against all odds. Again, you said there's times in the first Intifada, there wasn't a single pistol, right, to be used. People had to pick up rocks and they're going not only against this insane, rogue, rabid Israeli state, but also backed up by the biggest, strongest, most well-funded military empire and human history, the United States. And it's, you know, it's profound when you see how asymmetrical that is. And yet Palestine and the Palestinians persevere. So I kind of want to talk a little bit more about the occupation, but not just as a political system, right, but as something that enters daily life, that infuses psychology and memory and even the human nervous system, right? It's like,

it's a different way of being to live under that sort of brutal occupation that most people listening will have never experienced to any degree. So can you kind of talk about how, can just talk about maybe the psychological impact of growing up under occupation, what it did to people? Yes, your grandmother persevered and she stands in for like Palestinian history and perseverance. Your uncle fought back. Many people fled and, you know, filled. the diaspora, but for people living under occupation, what are some other ways that the occupation manifests in people's psychology? The short description is that it messes you up because it is very brutal. And let me elaborate. There are now, you know, being the grown

up that I am and having studied many different occupations, the Israeli occupation is unique it shares a lot of the attributes of other occupations, but it is unique in many other ways. Because unlike apartheid South Africa, where they needed the black Africans as cheap labor, as subservants, this one does not want us. They just want us kicked out. They want us to perish.

So it's more brutal, but it's not only at the times when they dialed, up the genocide where they're killing people, where they're dropping bombs, where they're just destroying life. And we saw Gaza, after two years of a genocide, we went back to status quo that is, Gaza is destroyed, flattened, but there is 2.2 million people live in, nobody hears about what's going on with them. Nobody's allowed in.

No journalism is allowed in. no international service barely gets there, no aid to get in. Calories back calculating, we kind of like back prior to the genocide on Gaza plus total destruction where there is no facilities. People imagine living for two years under a genocide in a tent that whitefish forest is raining on you and 2,000 pound bombs are raining on you. and you don't even have the simplest means of life. You don't have a restroom or a bedroom when it's too hot,

when there are winds blowing, when it's raining. This is the psychological effect of this occupation. It wants you to get to the breaking point where you will be like, you know, it's not worth it to stay. Let me try to survive with these two little nine-year-olds that are already deeply scarred. Let me see if I can't find normal sea elsewhere. They want the Palestinian population.

Five million Palestinians, five to seven million Palestinians live in Palestine, whether they are in Ghazda, in the West Bank, or even within 1948, Israel. They want us to get to that breaking point. So whoever is left would rather to pick up their kids and leave, go live elsewhere. so they would ethnically cleanse the place.

But the problem they're facing with this project is that we won't budge. And we showed it in Gaza how we would rather perish than leave. And fucking to my family in the West Bank. And if anything happens, God forbid, to the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank will be next. They're like, well, we're already under constant terror because maybe the light isn't shed on the West Bank as much. especially in the past three years because of the ongoing genocide,

but the settlers became under bin Gvira and Smotris, they became armed to the teeth, they became with total impunity so they can burn a Palestinian child alive and film him while doing the act and still not suffer any consequences. And it happened to a Palestinian child alive. Palestinian child and it happened to a Palestinian kids who would get tied up and they would get sexually violated and it would get filmed and they will still, these settlers will still have

full impunity. Even when those footage is will get to the West, this is the level of impunity that this apartheid regime has. But if you want me to talk about what happened, I was a child, I can tell you that for a naive child like myself, before I went to school up to five years of age, I did not know what was happening around me, probably because my parents, being the good parents, they wanted to shield me from it. My older brothers knew what was going on, but myself, I didn't know up until I went to school. So I explained in the memoir my first exposure to the occupation, to the violence that they present. And how it traumatized me as a child, this event.

And the following events kept traumatizing me, but then the little child, myself and the rest of the children included, we'd learn how to deal with these traumas that are happening back to back. because we were harassed going to school, harassed going back from school. We were harassed at our homes. There were a curfew times where the whole family would be trapped in our homes

for like weeks on end, would like two hours to refuel of allowance, to go out and buy some supplies. But then is there enough supplies in the town? They don't care. Did people have enough money to purchase supplies? They didn't care. So during the first intifada, we saw a lot of traumatizing events,

little subtle things that happened, like being stopped at a checkpoint, being with your parents in a car, and then getting stopped at a checkpoint, seeing how they would humiliate your parents, how they would frisk them or strip-searched them, or even sometimes beat them up, While you're a little child grabbing the clothes of your mom or your dad's foot,

trying to make sure that you have a little bit of safety as a child. I saw this happen to a lot of the little children. These children, they're like recorders. They take these things in, but as long as the trauma is still happening, they don't know how to deal with it. They don't know what to do with it. They just bottle it in. And I did that as a child as well.

Every time we were beaten up by the Israelis, we went home, we didn't even tell our parents. They had to know if they saw like Torab clothes or some blood on our elbows. Other than that, we would never tell them. We just bottled things in. So it traumatizes you. You didn't know because you're in survival mode. That's all you know.

Just survive day by day. Probably that's why post-traumatic events are called post-traumatic. You have to get past the trauma for you to realize. how much these scars have accumulated inside you and how to deal with them. And I'm talking about this, not about myself. You're talking about 7 million Palestinians, not a single one of them.

Hadn't had been either beaten or harassed or arrested or prevented from traveling or something happened to them, breaking into homes in the middle of the night, terrorizing little ones and their parents, destroying the houses, we've seen it all. And it accumulates into you. Only when I moved to the U.S.

and I started seeing some kind of normalcy is when you start recalling these events and you realize how much traumatizing it is. But imagine everything that I explained to you about my childhood and everything that I mentioned in the memoir about my childhood is really, really soft compared to what the children and Ghazza have seen in the past two years,

living amongst the destruction and living amongst the genocide that was ongoing around them, destroying their livelihood. Right now, fitching water is a task where we just, you know, turned the spigot and we got water. They didn't even have the simplest means of survival,

and they're still there, and they're still saying, we're not leaving. So psychologically, it's a warfare. And I think because the occupational machine backed up by the empire have all the means and the resources and the research, they knew exactly how to traumatize the Palestinians. But what they didn't understand is that our faith in God and our faith in the goodness of the humanity collectively that at the end, we will survive and we will prevail. They didn't understand this.

They didn't understand it. They didn't understand how we would rather die than leave the land because we knew those who left in 1948 never were allowed back. So we knew leaving is not an option. Either stay or you kill me. These are the two options that we had. And it wasn't a slogan.

We lived it. It happened. I have to kind of get myself together after listening to that because I'm a human being. And hearing that, seeing that, thinking about the images that we've seen over the past two years, over the past seven plus decades, it's beyond heartbreaking. I'm crying, listening to you speak. I've wept, as so many in my audience certainly have countless times. I've played out fantasies in my mind where I'm something like an all-powerful deity and can come over and take all the people to Palestine and, you know, and give them safety and love and comfort for the rest of their lives and punish the people who abuse and torture and harass them.

I'm a father of three children myself and I just, it's obvious the emotion, the incapacity that children have emotionally to process. I mean, adults don't have. the emotional machinery to process such inhuman behavior and such brutal trauma and such abject unfairness, injustice that plagues every single aspect of their lives and seemingly impossible, although it's not, but sometimes it must feel utterly impossible, utterly hopeless. And that's hard on the most emotionally robust adult you can imagine. and when it comes to children, it's unthinkable. And we're seeing what I truly believe is the Nazis of our time.

The Zionist, and I'm going to ask you about your time in Israel next, my opinion is that Israel represents, and the U.S. too, because they are completely culpable in all of this, the Fourth Reich, right? The Nazis of our time. In the first instance, the world more or less came together to stop the, the Nazi menace and the actual truth of the Holocaust didn't get out to most people until kind of at the end and then much, much later after the war, did people finally come to terms with, oh, that was happening under the surface of this war. We don't have that excuse today. We're seeing it in real time.

We know exactly what's happening. And yet still there's this feeling that I know people across the planet feel of like hopeless or helplessness, the inability. like we all in the depths of our beings want to do whatever we can to stop it and yet we can't and and as an american my government takes a huge chunk of my labor the time that i spend working to support my family they take that and they turn that into weapons and money and give it to israel to inflict that brutality on the Palestinian people of whom i see myself and i don't see myself in my own government i don't see myself certainly in the Israeli government or and any Zionist. I see myself in the Palestinian father searching through the rubble, you know,

for his children. And, yeah, and I apologize for getting a little emotional there, but I can't help and I know I speak for millions of people around the world and just thinking about children being victimized in that way. Adults, too, you know, we talk about women and children. We talk about grandmothers. That's all true. But also the men, also the fathers and the uncles and the brothers. And, you know, they are there just as human and they are just as worthy. of our love and care. But having said that, I do kind of want to talk about the Israeli side of it, because before you left for the U.S., which we'll get to in a bit, you did spend years working illegally on the Israeli side of the border, telling your employer that you were an American named Joe

and kind of inventing this fictional identity just to survive economically. But I'm really interested, and not only you can talk about what that double life kind of felt like, holding those two identities, kind of having to lie about who you are more or less to get by. But ultimately, I'm interested in what that experience taught you about Israelis, about the psychology of settlers insofar as you came across them, or just regular Israelis with regards to their views about Palestine. Did you ever come across Israelis who, you know, honored the humanity of the Palestinians in any way? Certainly they have to possibly exist somewhere out there,

although we don't really see many of them. I'm just really interested in what you learned about Israel and your time working there. Yes, and this is a period of time that when I look back at it, I don't know what to think and how to feel about it. Because it was the most unreal, the most fake period of my life because it had to fake my existence like you suggested just for my safety because I knew I was getting into the hornet nest. So I had to protect myself somehow. But I want to push back, I want to pull back a little bit and explain to you why I felt that way and why I invented the American Joe. Because as a child, back in Palestine, houses are structured a little bit differently because it doesn't know much in Palestine. We don't have the tiled roofs.

The house roofs over there are more like how people here utilize balconies and patios. So they're flat and there's usually stairs up to the roof of the houses. So my grandma, every time her and I were on the roof of her house, she would look to the west towards the ocean and she would point, excuse me. She would point where her house used to be in the city of Yaffa, a place she was kicked out of never to be allowed to regard to. So my perception of everything beyond the apartheid wall was being the enemies

and being the land that we were kicked out of. So I had very mixed up feelings about it, and it took me a while to even... fathom the fact that I was about to go into these areas. I wasn't a big fan of it. I didn't want to do it, but I had. So, and I explained in the memoir how the moment I got in there and I saw an Israeli, because to me, Israelis always wearing uniform, I-O-F harassing us.

So it was an Israeli, he was dressed up as a civilian, but the fact that I was an inferior person who's coming to offer cheap labor and then get dropped off after finishing that. While I was working in my grandma's area that she was kicked out up, I just couldn't, it didn't set well with me. So I had to invent something where at least I will be seen as an equal human being. And that was when I came up with this crazy idea because I was working on getting to the U.S. and getting the visa and I had

neighbors who were studying in the U.S. and I had an American that I interacted with who lived in our area. He was working on his PhD and I explained his story as well in the memoir. So I was getting really good at English, probably not as good as an American, but I probably was speaking better English than most of the Israelis because unless they were Americans who moved back or moved out from America into

Palestine, the Israelis usually, if they're Russian or Romanian, they don't speak English. And to them, it's a difficult language. So I had superior English to most of them. And I got by and I worked and I lived there and honestly it baffled me how they looked normal. And I'm like, you cross this apartheid wall and you're a killing machine. You're a psychopath maniac who's willing to just shoot at children. Children were moving targets to you. And now you're living normal life. You have a girlfriend.

You have a coffee shop that you work in and you drive cars and you hang out with people. How can you live this double life? It felt schizophrenic and borderline psychopathy. And I was like, how could they do this? And after living there for a few years going back and forth between the West Bank and historic Palestine, I can't realize they were indoctrinated from childhood, A, that were not humans, the Palestinians are not humans,

So they could do whatever they want once they cross the border lines. It's like how people here sometimes have hunting ducks for sports. You can go and kill a Palestinian child for sports. And there's a lot of leaked videos that you can see in the Internet. If you search well through the filtering machines that they have, that they would be discussing with each other. Can you shoot that little child wearing the white shirt, in the head? Do you have a clear shot?

These are snipers sitting on, you know, like posts on the apartheid walls overlooking Gaza. And he would shoot him and the child would drop dead. And his colleague would be high-fiving him and laughing. Not understanding that on the other side of the wall, they created a catastrophe. They killed a child. His mom is going to weep him for the rest of her life. But they can do this and go back and live a normal life

because they don't think of us as humans. So this fact that the whole society is like that, they're okay. They just think it's normal for them to do that. It is probably two things. Firstly, this indoctrination, thinking that the guillaim are not worthy of life, are not human, they're subhuman,

they're created to look as human just not to hurt your feeling, while they're serving you, but they're not really humans. You can treat them like dogs. This is literally what they get thought as children. The problem is the West doesn't understand this. If they understand it, it will really scare them because if they finish off the Palestinians, a white guy from Minnesota is a goy to the Israeli who got indoctrinated into this. So the Israeli is not going to stop after killing the Palestinians.

Palestinians, there's nothing that will prevent them from shooting people in the West. White people to them are guine. White Europeans are guillem. And they actually have a grudge against white Europeans. So they need to understand that the Palestinians are the front line protecting the West right now from this beast that was created on a large scale. Seven million Israeli settlers are indoctrinated like this from childhood. The second thing that lets them do that is the impunity, the levels of impunity that they have is unmatched. You will never find a collective population that can inflict this kind of injustice to another collective population and get away with it.

Only the Israelis can do it because they can't pull the victim card and play the victim and play the self-defense card. How do you self-defend yourself when you're in the heart of the West Bank, shooting children? But they can do it. That's the psyche that they have. It took me a minute to understand and it really baffled me at first. Because I saw a regular society inside and I'm like, how can you live with yourselves? I've seen you across the border. And it's not like you've sent your bad ones to us.

Every single Israeli has to serve in the IOS. graduate in high school. They will serve at least for two years. So every single one of them came to the West Bank and did what they did. So was there good ones? I think there probably are like those who work at Salem and such. But if you're an Israeli and you have humanity in you and you feel like this is wrong, A, you have to speak up.

B, if you can't speak up, pick up and leave if you feel like you're living on a stolen land. So there is no exemption unless you're actively helping the Palestinians by existing there. Like you see some of the activists who get into the West Bank and try to get between the Palestinians and those crazy settlers that are arsons that are, you know, destroying all of fields that are burning and setting houses on fire. Unless you're doing that, you have no excuse living on a Stalin land. Yeah. That's my analysis of that society. Absolutely. And I think that analysis is spot on and everything that comes out of that society on social media. You see regular people online talking. Abbey Martin, many, many years ago did this investigative on the ground thing where she would just go up to average Israelis walking around in the street in Tel Aviv and just kind of ask them, you know, what are your thoughts on Palestinians or, you know, just very simple questions. and then you would just see time after time, no matter who the person was, a 17-year-old high school girl,

you know, a 32-year-old father, they would just spout the most psychotic, anti-human things you can imagine. And they would do so casually, genocidal wishes of violence and the eradication of an entire people. And they would talk about it as if they were talking about their favorite sports team. It was just a casual, calm conversation. and they would just just like casually, you know, say these horrific things that in any other context, I'd be like, I am dealing with a possible serial killer here, but it's just a normal Israeli, because the ideological superstructure of settler colonialism is fascism. And fascism depends on the dehumanization of the other.

And one thing that is always defined fascist movements, especially of the last 100-so years, is that they also. always play the victim while they aggress. And I think Zionists have perfected that, have taken that to new heights of absurdity. But the Nazis of last century also had this idea that they were downtrod in and preyed upon and facing an unjust

Europe. And, you know, because people don't want to tell themselves that they are psychotic serial killers that have been dehumanized by their dehumanization of others. They have to create a story where somehow some way, even as they slaughter innocent people, that they're the good people. and that that ideological superstructure the rest of the world sees it for exactly what it is but they're still lost in it and you see Israelis go you know we see these videos of Israelis going to the Philippines or Thailand or visiting the rest of the world and they carry with them their entitlement and their disdain of all other people all of their cultures it's like this world is theirs and we're just living in it and I've even said like you know America likes to tell us that Israel's are great are great

greatest ally. If Israel, if Netanyahu, if the Israeli people had to obliterate every single living American right now to fulfill their greater Israel project and fully magically, instantaneously, ethnically cleanse, historic Palestine and the surrounding regions, they would do so in a heartbeat because you're right. They literally do not see other people around the world as equally human as them. Even, you know, like, and this is this disgusting distortion of Judaism, This is not what Judaism is, but the idea of God's chosen people, you'll have atheists who don't even believe in God, atheists who don't even believe in God, still retain the sense of being superior to other non-Jewish people, but even more than that, non-Zionists. You know, and it's really sickening to see. And, okay, you can understand that when it comes to people born and bred and ideologically conditioned inside of Israel.

What is also fascinating to see, specifically from an American perspective, is Americans who grew up in fucking New York or New Jersey or Pennsylvania or whatever the hell, going over to Israel, becoming settlers and immediately adopting that sort of outlook. So you can't even say, as somebody who might have grown up and spent their first 20, 30 years in America, also a settler colonial state and a far right state in a lot of ways, but perhaps not as sick and as such a widespread. way as Israel. You see them go over there and immediately embrace that, that psychology, and it's, it's, it's, it's, it's incredibly disturbing. But you're fascinating inversion that, you know, we always hear that Israel is fighting for Western values. And they're on the front lines of Western civilization. Perhaps they are, but in the exact opposite way that the people that say that mean that. Because, you know, the West and even Israel itself is a product of colonialism, of this brutality, of strangling the global south

while pretending to be these brave defenders of freedom and democracy. So, yeah, maybe Israel is fighting for Western values, but it's not the positive Western values that advocates like to pretend it is. It's this negative, disgusting, colonial history of the West that Israel is giving acute and extreme expression of right now. But you saying that Palestinians are actually on the front lines fighting for the West I think is true and a fascinating inversion of that ideological narrative. Do you have anything to say before I move on?

Yes. I wanted to elaborate on something that you talked about. The difference between Israelis and Jews, I've met some of the greatest Jews, and I talk about them in the book. But Israelis, I think the society is just disturbed. It's a disturbing society. And I think for those who come usually from the West to fight with the Israelis, they're also indoctrinated in their segregated areas.

But for open-minded Jews, they understand, they know well on that this is not the mission that God has for them. And whether they're religious or secular, it doesn't matter if they have the, right view of the world of and of themselves, they understand that this isn't what they were chosen for because when you're chosen, you're chosen to do something, you're not chosen, period. Because when the interpretation of the Torah says, because this is one of the interpretations, I know it's not the soul one that says chosen ones, and then they stop. when you do that, you're really saying that your chosen period, you're superior to others.

And this is exactly what I was explaining to you when I was telling you that they were indoctrinated. But when you come to the bottom line, nobody gets chosen but to serve something. And it was obvious they were chosen for monotheism. They were chosen for spreading goodness and some values where people around them were, know, sacrificing children and so on in the past. So they were chosen to give humanity some civilization. They weren't chosen, period.

So this is a distortion of the religion and it's manipulation of the religion for them to create this kind of Sikh society. So I definitely tell apart the difference between the good Jews that stood beside us in New York, in Sydney, in London, everywhere. were in the world because they knew they have something, they have stakes in this because it's their name that it was used so they have to

clear their name as well. And in my memoir, my foreword is written by Nora Barrow's prominent Jew who is pro-Palestinian. My blurb is written by Katie Halper. So these are prominent Jews, but they understand what the right side of history

is and they definitely stand on it. I just had to distinguish between the to and make it clear that I understood this full on back from my childhood. Because as soon as I was exposed to the American Jew that I explained in the book that I spent extended periods of times with, and he helped me speak English. And I taught him some Arabic. We used to have long conversations, and I met other people as well. I came to this realization early on.

But prior to that, when we were children, the only Jew we saw was the Israelis coming in to brutalize us. So we had that distorted image. But as you get into the other side of the apartheid wall, you brought in your view and you understand and then traveling to the West and coming to meet people and speaking with them, I definitely understand the difference, and I totally agree with you making this distinction. Yeah, I mean, beautifully said, but I don't condemn anybody living in Palestine or in the surrounding region that might, you know, connect the two because the whole point of Israeli propaganda is to connect the two. They put the damn star of David on their flag so that they are trying to constantly conflate Judaism with Zionism

and conflate criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism, while at the same time, you know, spreading anti-Semitism because it serves their interest. Netanyahu loves nothing more than for Jews around the world to buy into the idea that they are being hunted and persecuted and that the only safe place in the world for them is Israel. That anti-Semitism literally serve Zionists' interests. They don't want to eradicate it. They want to perpetuate it, and they do. But some of my best friends, literally my best friends, my co-host on Red Men's,

who also is on Rev. Left all the time, they're Jewish. And one of my other friends, close friends, is the leader of the chapter Jewish Voices for Peace here in Nebraska. And they're all pro-Palestine to the core. And they're pro-Palestine and they're anti-Zionists precisely because they do not, well, first of all, they're human. But secondly, as Jewish people, they are disgusted by the way that Israel presents itself as having anything to do with the deep liberatory history of the Jewish people in the same way that in America, hardcore right-wing Christian nationalists completely invert and destroy the message of Christ Christ while pretending to represent it. And there's a very similar thing happening between the two. You know, Christian nationalist here in the U.S. and, you know, Zionists pretending to represent

Judaism over there and here. So I really appreciate you making that point. And you mentioned now going to the United States, and I think I want to move in that direction because a major thread in the book is not only your life in the United States, but this tension between assimilation and memory, kind of similar to how a little bit similar to when you were working in Israel, coming from a Palestinian perspective, being immersed in Israeli society is surreal and kind of traumatizing in its own way. But coming to the U.S., I'm really, really interested in what that did to your identity, how you experienced America coming from Palestine and just kind of your experiences and whatever you want to say about what it's like to come into American society after having all those experiences you had for the first quarter century of your life.

Yes. So definitely it had some similarity to going into the Israeli society, but it was different in a sense that when I went to the Israeli society, when I crossed the apartheid wall, I was scared for my life. And I felt that I was going into a very dangerous place. I didn't feel like that here coming to the U.S. I actually to the contrary, I was seeking safety. I was seeking freedom. And I felt like because of the slogans that rang in my ear as a child with America and the Statue of Liberty and give me your tired and your poor and your huddled ones, all of these things, they stuck with me as a child. And I was always thinking, the U.S. will help us. I didn't understand back then that the U.S. was an empire itself.

It was only looked at as the mediator, the policemen of the world. And for us in the Middle East, we used to hear about the back and forth of, you know, Secretary of States being sent by the President of the U.S., be George Schultz of Reagan or any other Secretary of State coming to bring peace to the Middle East. And I remember as a child, my father would be listening during the prolonged curfews. periods to the news on the transistor radio trying to figure out when is the next visit, maybe he will lift some of these sanctions, maybe we will have some normalcy, maybe we will have the Palestinian state. Poor him and poor me as a child, they didn't know that this is

an empire and it's serving Israel more than it's serving us and it's not a just mediator, it's biased towards Israel. We didn't know any of that. Now I come to understand it. we understand that for the U.S. to become a just mediator, you have to fight the core of the empire. And you have to actually make sure that it is a real democracy. And this is probably something that we will have to test with the upcoming elections. because if the governing body is not reflecting the will of the people, one of two things will happen. Either the people will change this body with different people who will represent it,

or it will go more towards tyranny and dictatorship. Hopefully it will be the first rather than the latter. That's why I have good hopes with fruitful change coming up in these elections. I think it will be detrimental. But back to how I looked. Did I want to assimilate? This time, I didn't. But I wanted to blend in.

I wanted to fit in. I wanted to relax a little bit. I was very tired. Dude, the occupation is very tiring. It drains your energy. So I wanted to wind down, but also I knew I had a message. I knew I needed to explain to the West what's happening. I knew, hey, I wanted this mediator to understand our point.

point of view at some point and make the right decisions and give us the justice that we've been seeking. We've been paying sweat and blood for it. And we haven't seen it, you know, materialize yet. So that was the mindset that I had when I came here. I had personal goals. I'm an ambitious person. But at the same time, I was tired. I wanted to wind down. But I also had this big mission that I was tasked with by my own people. They didn't have to one by one tell me about it. I knew it. I was fortunate enough to leave, so I knew I had some kind of responsibility.

This is where this book comes. This is where me taking part in protests and demonstrations early on when it was very few of us at an intersection's corner, most limited Easterns raising the Palestinian flag every Earth Day or every date of return demonstration time.

Where we used to get flipped the bird, we used to be cursed and spat on and cars passing by, the drivers will lower the window and give us the finger. It was different. It was very, very different back then. So now protests our

and you will have a whole lot of people who sympathize with you and who will protect you, or at least will get, you know, crushed along with you. So you're not left alone. But back then, this is the motive that I had. So I knew that I wanted to do something, but also I was shocked of the amount of misinformation and disinformation that the people had about us, the Palestinians. And I first landed in the Christian Beltway. So I was in Memphis, Tennessee for years on end.

So I knew I got to learn a thing or two about the church and the role it plays in Zionism, in Christian Zionism, evangelicals in particular. And I had friends who I would have long, long conversations with. And I had to go the extra mile to explain to them that we are human. I had to put faces back to the Palestinian people. I had to put names. I had to put lives and aspirations. We were totally dehumanized by the Hasbara machine.

I had a glimpse of the Hasbara machine because when I crossed to the apartheid wall, back when I was in Palestine, I landed that job in the place that used to bring in these groups from the West and then indoctrinate them. So I knew Israel did that, but I didn't know its impact on the West, especially on America, because it was the decision maker and it was the sugar daddy, and it was the funder of the occupation machine. So it was fate that had me there, so I understood the society. And then I saw firsthand how they actually do the Hasbara. back then. So to me, when I see right now, most of the Congress bought and paid for by APAC or by

Israel, I'm like, I knew that a long time ago. You could have asked me 15 years ago, I'll tell you exactly how they do it. They invite them on paid for trips. And then over there, these lavish parties happen and they think they're in a different zip code or a different continent, let alone different zip code so they can do whatever they want. At the end, they end up in rooms and party halls that have cameras and they will have dirt on people that either are important back in their countries or they're about to take positions of power in their countries. So between building relationships and collecting dirt on them, they have the carrot and the stick. So if this person ends up becoming an important person, they will know how to leverage this relationship.

So I knew this was happening, but I didn't know the effect of it because Israel is little. All of historical Palestine is so little for it to have that impact on America, which is almost a continent. It was beyond me. And I had to live here for a few years to wrap my head around the impact that they had and the control that they had. But every time I talked about, and then people would laugh at me. You're like, you don't understand how politics work. There's no way that little country that we feel for and help out of our goodness can't have control over us.

But I'm like, you guys have it all the way around. You have it backwards. This isn't how it is. Had you known what I know, had you lived through what I lived through, you would have known. So I had to have these very long conversation, but taking it on one person at a time was very tiring. So I realized I needed to do something of an impact.

So initially I thought of a movie. So I wanted to write the script of a movie. My life and the people around me, I wasn't going to invent something. I knew it was going to be a real story. But when I realized how Hollywood is in bed with the Zionists, I give up on that. And I turned it into the memoir because I was like, okay, it has to be a memoir because I wanted to put facts. I wanted to give a set of eyes and ears for the people looking into the life of a family that lived in Palestine.

And that's where living in the West is different from living in Palestine and crossing the apartheid wall into working in Israeli areas. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. the defining characteristic of your memoir is just the raw humanity of it and filtering that historical experience into the specific individual persons experience and subjectivity and their family. I think it really is a humanizing thing. And it's frustrating that you have to humanize yourself and your family to people for them to start caring about the fact that your people are being slaughtered and ethnically cleansed and

genocided. Not only facing all the trauma that Palestinians have had to face, but then having to go out in the world and try to prove your human, prove your humanity to some of the most brainwashed human beings on this planet. And by that, I mean Israelis and the way we've already discussed and Americans who fancy themselves as freedom-loving, critical thinkers, independent thinkers, mavericks, but who are subordinated ideologically by their governing apparatus. And even now, when our government is so distant from the will of the people, right, on almost every issue, including Israel, including the Iran War. I mean, Trump has the lowest favorability ratings of any president in American history. Every single person I talk to right, left, or center

hates the government, hates the people running this country, hates Congress, understands that we need something like a second American revolution if we ever hope to reinstill democracy, whether that revolution happens peacefully or through armed resistance. I don't think the American people, you know, are going to pick up guns anytime soon. But certainly the sentiment in the United States is drastically different than it has been in the past. And I think democracy has already failed. I mean, I think we live in a corporate dictatorship masquerading as a democracy. And something has to give because this is unsustainable.

But to your point about Israel, you know, having undue influence on the United States, it's undoubtedly true. And there's a mutual relationship here, right? because the U.S., well, first of all, Israel, Zionism comes out of European colonialism. It was backed by the U.S. and the U.K. when it first began with the Nakhaba. So it has its roots in that history, but also the U.S. as the, at first going against the Soviet Union in a split world, but then after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unipolar hegemon, it has always relied on Israel as being its major foothold, in the region, right? It's, it's helped develop it economically. It's supplied it and defended it militarily. It's helped build out its Iron Dome defense capacities. It's always been locked in

with Israel because it benefits the United States in so many ways to have that brutal, unscrupulous presence in that region to do its bidding. But, and this is where I think it's important and the two interests diverge, the United States could obviously exist with Israel, right? If Israel snapped our fingers and it didn't exist anymore, the United States as a country could obviously continue on. And so, you know, the bonds are, they're needed. Obviously, the ruling class supports it. It's not existential. For Israel, support of the United, the support of the United States is existential. If the U.S. becomes neutral or, God forbid, hostile to Israel, if it pulls its funds, if it pulls its military support, Israel, at the very least,

have to radically alter its behavior, radically toned down, have to treat the people in the region and the governments in the region as equals, have to negotiate on equal terms, and at most wouldn't survive very long at all. And so for Israel, they have to control the political system of the United States. They have to have billionaire Zionists who are also Americans shut down speech that is pro-Palestinian. They have to take over the major media and social media. works from CBS to TikTok and try to strengthen their grip on the narrative. They have to buy politicians from the Democratic and the Republican side. They have to bring over the Christian evangelical support and kind of further indoctrinate them using their own religion.

Because for Israel, American support is existential. And I think that describes the difference there. But now they're seeing for the first time that American support among the regular people is obliterated. future of pro-Israel sentiment on the American left of center is dead. Even though some of the politicians and Gavin Newsom and all these creeps, they'll continue to be Zionist in various ways, the base is completely done with Israel. Their last hope was the American right. And now young people on the conservative right in the United States have turned against

Israel. And so only real support for Israel today is over 50 Republicans, often from a Protestant, evangelical background who support Israel. And that's unsustainable. So I think Israel is flipping out. I think their overt attempts to control the narrative in the U.S. is a product of their weakness. I think it will ultimately fail, but it will fail only after Israel and the American

ruling class have exhausted every possible option to strengthen and defend that connection, despite the American people increasingly turning a huge. against it. And that will, it's already in the form of brutal censorship, the attempts to denaturalize people, brutalizing pro-Palestinian protesters, people like Bill Akman, making sure that if you've ever said a pro-Palestinian thing in your life, you'll never have a job with him or his friends. That is not a product of strength. That's a product of desperation. While it may work in the short term, I think in the long term it's doomed. And I just want to hear your opinion on all of that and whether you think I'm right or if you have a diverging

opinion on that. No, I think you're spot on and they understand that the colonial project, the expansionist colonial project, especially greater Israel, is on the line and they probably have their very last chance at it right now. And that's why they're going beyond whether it is the measures that they took here in the West in order to sustain this relationship that is becoming shaky and spotty, or the extra violent behavior for the state of Israel with everybody around it in the region because it feels the heat. It feels like this is their last chance. They're not becoming popular anymore, and it will take them a long time, if ever,

to regain people's hearts and minds, which is probably never going to have And so they will understand for them they have one chance, and I hope and I know it will not happen, but they have one chance at greater Israel, which is like a self-sustaining regional Hajiman. That's what they're after, because if they really expand the Israeli idea into greater Israel, they will have enough.

Oil sources, they will have enough. Land, they will have enough. resources of everything to be able to sustain themselves as a power independent of that umbilical cord that they've been connected to with the West in particular with the USA. So they're taking a long shot at it. I'm hoping and I know they will fail at it and that will be the end of Zionism. I hope it will have them retreat. I hate violence so I hope it will happen peacefully just like.

like apartheid South Africa got dismantled and broken down into pieces in a peaceful way, although they had nuclear weapons, although they were a hegemon in the African continent. I'm hoping this will happen this way because otherwise all of this violence that they've generated with everybody, a friend and a foul around them in the region, it only shows that come the time when the U.S. lifts a finger and says, you know what, I am not going to support you. We hear the frontrunner for a governor of Florida what he's saying. He's saying, I'm not sending you any money. We hear what McDoni is saying.

We hear what everybody that is running for Congress right now is a person who went into pro-Palestine protests and got beaten up or lost their job over, comment on Twitter, who was already political and had an opinion and is fed up with it. We see then Brazilian doing the same thing. Why? Because these individuals feel like I can't go for another four years or eight years seeing this injustice and seeing the repression here in the U.S. and accept it.

So they're taking it up on themselves to put a foot down and put a step up onto this ridiculous behavior of the government. And I think this is why a lot hinges on. this midterm election, maybe preserving and restoring democracy as it should function. If not, I think the U.S. will have to resort into more juristic correction measures. But I am still hopeful because for democracy to work, it has to be the will of the people. And I think the overall perception of who the evil one is and who the victim is has finally started emerging. Definitely more obvious with people that are knowledgeable, people that are critical thinkers,

people that are politically aware and ask questions versus the people that just take in what their preacher told them in the church. or just take in what Fox News told them or Sean Hannity did, because these are distorted images. That's why I thought like, okay, I need to do more than just speaking to individuals, I needed to have that movie or I needed to have that memoir. That's why I feel like hopefully this contribution will shed a light. If somebody grabbed this book and saw the message in it, the fact that it's place, it's finally between two hairs, this is the Palestinians in their stance, and these are the Israelis

in their stance. And he feels like, wow, this explains really in a very black and white manner who really the victim is and who really the aggressor is. And if Israelis are doing this there, and now we know their influence on our government here, because I touch up on their influence in the West a lot in my memoir because of the fact that I lived in Palestine and I came here and I saw the influence and I talked about it a lot. So it's a major component of the memoir. Maybe this person will be like, okay, I'll grab a copy and give it to my boomer father who still believes the preacher in church and so on.

So this is me contributing to the awareness that needs to happen for what you're hoping for to happen globally to take place. So I totally agree with your point of view on what is happening. And I'm definitely hoping that the change is coming. And hopefully very, very soon, I'm very optimistic with the outcome. Yeah. I mean, yeah, well, we'll see. The Democratic constituency is going to have to drag the Democratic leadership kicking and screaming. And we'll see ultimately who the Democratic Party is more aligned with. And it's, going to be interesting to see. I know that they did an autopsy of the 2024 election loss and the whole Democratic Party, hundreds and hundreds of pages on the ground investigations,

trying to figure out why they lost to Trump. And then they never revealed it to the public because you know the reason. It's over the genocide. You know, everybody I know that refused to vote Democrat did so more or less because of the genocide, first of all, and then just the malaise of the Biden years in general. But the fact that the Democratic Party establishment refuses to release the report, they spent, you know, months and months and months writing up and accumulating evidence for, I think is really indicative of where it's at. And you see all of these wannabe presidential candidates like Gavin Newsom, like Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, whatever, they're now having to figure out how are they going to navigate this. And they're still being too

mealy-mouthed about it. I think it's actually going to hurt them. significantly in 2028. I think the midterms are going to be just a hardcore Democrats everywhere winning because the sentiment is so low with regards to Trump and the Republicans. But I still think that this contradiction is going to play out in American politics over the next several years in fascinating ways. And I just wanted to also mention your argument about greater Israel, spot on. I've often called it a death drive accelerationism where Israel, knows that this might be their last real shot at fulfilling their project, whether that is the greater Israel project, the destruction of Iran, or the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, or the expansion

of settlements, whatever, all those things and more, they see that the time is running out, and so they have to push the pedal to the medal and go full out. And then Netanyahu himself has all these personal, political, and legal reasons why he needs to stay engaged in this war. And he also has this ego that cares about his legacy for Israel and wants his legacy to be the expansion, if not the full obtainment of the greater Israel project. But the one thing that stands in the way is not only the Palestinians themselves, refusing to bend, not only Hezbollah in Lebanon, refusing to cede control of their territories to Israel and always fighting back Ansar Allah in Yemen. but the big final boss, as it were, for Israeli hegemony in the region, and thus the ability to do the Greater Israel Project is Iran. And right now we're in an ostensible lull, a somewhat tentative ceasefire,

although it's not a ceasefire in southern Lebanon. Israel never respects ceasefires, as we know. But it seems to me that Trump kind of wants to get out on so many levels, not ideologically, but just because of the economic, pain that is being inflicted on the global economy, on American allies, and now on American people with regards to gas prices. So much of that is locked in. It's going to increase inflation. It's going to devastate Republicans' chances at the midterms, all these petty political reasons. But also, there's no way, there's no really way to win here. If they want to end the conflict,

is going to have to come with unprecedented concessions to Iran one way or another, or it's going to have to escalate into a ground invasion. and possibly who knows the use of nuclear weapons at some point. So it's a really terrible or horrific and sort of uncertain situation. But from Israel's perspective, we know that the dismemberment of Iran is absolutely necessary for the fulfillment of the Greater Israel Project. They know that. And if this is the last time that they really have full American support in the way that they do,

it makes sense that they do not want a ceasefire with Iran. They want America fully committed. They want America tomorrow to announce we're sending 200,000 troops into Iran, right? That's what Israel wants. And Israel is working behind the scenes tirelessly to make sure that happen. So my question for you is about your perspective on that, on Iran in particular. And perhaps I'm interested as well in like the Palestinian perspective on the role Iran plays in the region and the role that Iran plays with regards to, you know, the Palestinian resistance movement in all.

the forms that it takes. Yeah, well, you're definitely spot on here again because as of right now, for greater Israel to happen, they have to make sure that Iran is taking care of because it is a threat to them. Also, it means that they really want to become bordering neighbors. This is how far they expansion they want for Israel to be. That's why they want to make sure that if they become that close to Iran, it's not going to pause any threat to them. So with that said, they are worried about Iran and they will definitely do the impossible to make sure that the U.S. will do their betting and will go back to war, will not negotiate a peace treaty with Iran. As to how the Palestinians look at Iran,

Look, we were lit down by numerous Arab countries. So for us to see Iran stand up against Israel, they're looked at as heroes. They're praised. People, I know they gather on the rooftops of their houses and watched the rockets reign on Israel in a scene that they didn't even imagine was possible. So this is definitely definitely something that they're looking at it and they're happy and they're praising Iran for doing the one thing, the one move that nobody had dared to do.

And I mentioned in my book how my uncle told me that a lot of these so-called wars against Israel, that it always ended up expanding afterwards. because it won them were staged. So a lot of the Arabic countries around Palestine were created past World War II and the families that were appointed to rule these countries were picked after they have signed to agree to given Palestine to the Zionist movement. So they gathered up troops to go fight Israel because the collective population was so emotional about losing Palestine because Palestine was always the heart and the soul of the Middle East, the Islamic world, the Arabic world, so to speak.

So the people were not okay. It did not sit well with them losing Palestine. So these appointees who in secret were okay with Israel taking Palestine for them to gain these thrones over these countries that were newly formed and protected by the West, by Colonial West, because past World War II, blatant colonialism was not accepted. So for colonial West to still protect its own interests, it had to have a window dressed,

form of colonialism. It was, you know, finding families that are pro-West that are okay with splitting the wealth of these regions with the colonizer to serve and further their interest in the places versus the interest of its own people. And that's what happened. So for us to see Iran fighting off Israel in the real war, we know Iran did not be in the need. Iran did not become complicit into this narrative. But the rest of the countries, that's why they will fight off the Iranian rockets that are going to hit Tel Aviv. Why would a country like Jordan or like Saudi Arabia or others do that if they were really as invested emotionally and politically in secret as they are in public? But they're not.

They're not. They hide the secret deals that have long leaked. Now we know with the Epstein files and this and that, we understand how the West manipulated locally, the governments in the West, but also abroad overseas. They had played a role. And I have to say this. The Epstein thing has Israel's masad fingerprints all over it. Like, I don't know how people can spin it into a Russian cell. This is the most ridiculous thing. And I dug deep because I was like, how can you have all of these indications and the fingers pointed out Israel and then say Russia? Because Jeffrey Epstein appeared in one picture wearing a hat, a red hat that had, I think,

the Russian symbol. That's it. That's all they saw with all the other indications, all these Israeli ties and furthering Israeli interests and making corporate America serve Israel. Because look, to sustain a colonial settler entity in the Middle East is not a cheap thing. It's costly.

And it takes tons of the American taxpayer money, but it also takes a lot of the corporation income. So all of these corporations for them to become national or even international, they have to also promise to have headquarters in Tel Aviv and promise to give Israel heads up on their research, on their manufacturing process, on their R&D process. It helped Israel become the technologically advanced release. But this is also not by nature, not natural. Nature is just genocidal, but all of the other stuff was manufactured.

And all of that got exposed. Now we understand exactly how this entity is sustained. And definitely when the people collectively work against it, they will take it down, whether be it by divestment and boycotts or by electing the people that are clean and they don't take bribes and they don't have dirt on them. So they can serve locally the people. We don't want them to be pro-Palestan. We just want them not to be pro-genocide. And that's fair enough. just playing the field and make it, you know, a plain field for us and them.

And you saw, because Sam Brigades, I think, can take care of business when it comes to the violent resistance. But at least don't have that leg up, don't have the upper hand, don't have the biggest and the most influential economy in the world, seeding into this little tiny spot in the Middle East. That's why it has that upper hand. It's not great minds. It's not the fact that they

try to make the oasis of democracy in the Middle East or be it, you know, living in a rough neighborhood. I always said to my friends who told me, oh, Israel lives in a rough neighborhood. Well, Israel is the roughest thing in that neighborhood, by the way.

So I totally agree with you. And Will said and I think my worry is that the U.S. will bend the need to Merriam Edelson and the rest of the APAC influence and will resume the war.

Although they're out of critical ammunition, they will still resume the war and go down to critical levels that will expose the empire elsewhere just to fulfill the all of this influence on all of this pressure that they're putting on the president and the cabinet that he has. So I will not be surprised if sometimes this week or in the following weeks, we will see a resume of the war against Iran.

I totally agree with everything you said there. And I do think a relaunching of explicit aggression is imminent, whether it happens today in a week, whenever I think it's almost unavoidable, whether that is a product of Trump being ideologically committed to Israel, being corrupted and bought out by Miriam Adelson and so many others money and campaign donations, or being compromised with compromise from the Epstein files. I mean, Trump and Epstein were best friends for 15 years. If Trump did anything illegal, anything unsavory with Jeffrey Epstein over 15 years, the Mossad and Israel absolutely have evidence of that.

And you would have to be a fool to think that over 15 years of Trump and Epstein being best friends, that they wouldn't have, that Trump lives some morally upright life, of course not. We know for a fact, whoever has it, whether it exists and documented proof or not, that Trump with Epstein had almost certainly committed horrific, unimaginable crimes. And it would be, it would be wild to think that, one, Israel doesn't have evidence of that. and two, that they're not in some way leveraging that to get what they want. Does that mean that Trump is not culpable? Absolutely not. I think Trump with Kushner and all these other figures, I mean, that's his son-in-law. I think he's a boomer, Fox News boomer.

He is ideologically pro-Israel. I believe that. I also believe the money he takes from Miriam Aedleson and figures like that. He likes that money. He likes that support. He's totally down to do their bidding in exchange for that. He's an openly corrupt president. but I also think that there is a compromise material on him.

And we know for a fact historically, Israel had compromising evidence against Bill Clinton with regards to his affairs, specifically with Monica Lewinsky, before that story broke. And they explicitly leveraged that against him. And that information has come out. And if you think about the Epstein network, who were the main echelons of society that Epstein was interested in engaging with? with the top political leaders, the top corporate leaders, as you said, and the top academic leaders, you know, figures in science and academia, because politics obviously represents politics, corporations represent economic power, and academia represents the ideological superstructure,

right, the maintenance of ideology and the perpetuation of ideas with an academic sheen. So it would serve, deeply serve Israeli interests to have connections. and Compromot on figures in the upper echelons of politics, economics, and academia. And I think it's almost certain that eventually it will all come out, that that's the case. They're trying their best to prevent that from coming out. There's been bipartisan efforts with Tom Massey from the Republicans and Rokane from the Democrats to try to get more information on the Epstein files out. And I think if there is a blue wave in the midterms, the Democrats, if,

they wish to pursue it will have unprecedented leverage to do exactly that, not only to investigate the Epstein files or perhaps release more of them, but also to investigate the open and flagrant corruption and self-serving and nepotism and using tariffs as a power play to make deals with countries, it's just open corruption. And if the Democrats are so inclined, they can pursue that legally as well. But yes, I totally agree with you. Epstein almost certainly will definitely have deep ties to the Israeli state, Ahud Barat, Mossad, possibly with the CIA itself, but was almost certainly serving the interests of Israel.

And, you know, you spoke earlier about this disdain of non-Jewish people that many Zionists have. And in the emails themselves, we see Jeffrey Epstein discussing things with other Zionists and explicitly expressing that disdain for non-Jewish people in general. And it's, you know, it's very clear. And of course, we also seen Epstein wearing IDF shirt. So if wearing one Russian hat one time is indicative of having ties to Russia, what does wearing an IDF shirt and being best friends with Ehud Barak say about Epstein? So I think regular Americans know this.

And I think the elite know this, but they're trying their best to prevent that knowledge from having hardcore proof, which is almost certainly in the file somewhere. Probably in some of those three million files, the government has still refused to release. And then I also take your point as well about the Comprador regimes in West Asia and the Middle East that have this weird contradiction where the governments themselves are neo-colonial puppets serving Israeli and American interests. But the populations in those countries are pro-Palestine and they have to basically work with that contradiction, not let the populist anger boil over, sometimes pretend to be on the side of Palestine, but ultimately. ultimately serving to serve U.S. and Israeli interest in the region for their own benefit, the benefits of the regimes themselves, not the people living in those countries. And we saw what Israel and the U.S. did to Libya.

We saw what Israel and the U.S. did to Syria, right? Assad was one of those figures, love them or hate him, that was part of the axis of resistance and would not submit wholeheartedly to Israel and U.S. interest. And they toppled them and replaced them with an al-Qaeda terrorist. Jolani who does exactly that and the first thing that happens after they they implement their new government in Syria is that Israel takes a big chunk of Syria and says this is ours now and nobody says the thing and Jalani nods and approval of it so yes they want to turn Iran into the next Libya into the next Syria if they can but certainly into the next Libya they'll settle for

that and that's why I think the Iran war will start up again and it will have to it'll have to be it'll have to be sort of solved on the battlefield one way or the other and it's it's It's hard to say where that will go. Absolutely. I agree with you. And where we at right now, maybe somebody will get lost in the landscape of the political playing field. But honestly, if somebody gets mixed up with all these names from the Middle East and the countries and the governors and this and that,

we can dumb it down to one very simple thing. Palestine is under a brutal occupation that is directly tied to the empire. So for us to clear out the corruption locally in the U.S., you have to see a free Palestine because they are one and the same. They are tied by the same Zionists that are corrupting the government here. They're having their influence on the corporations and the way they influence all of the, of these decisions that are corrupting the water, the air, the plants, the food, everything here that people are up in arms, you know, not happy with how things have gotten, the gas prices. The good life is being taken away a little by a little.

I don't want to see the same thing happen to this good country, how it happened to us in Palestine. But they're connected, the same Zionists are working definitely on doing this. So if you want a crystal ball on how things are going here, take a look at Palestine. You don't want to wait until there's a drone that's about to shoot your kids coming out of school just because the government here has gone full on crazy. I don't want to see that happen here. I already saw it there.

So the best thing to do, if you want to know that you've rooted out corruption from America, you need to see a free Palestine. So we're tied in this. We're in this together. And I think once we realize this, we will be pushing and puddling in the same direction. And the will of the people will definitely be stronger and will be dominant over the will of the few corrupt people, the few corporate beneficiaries. So hopefully we would see that day sooner rather than later because there is this exploits. of awareness. I think Gaza genocide have waken up a lot of people, had made them criticize everything, not take anything with face value the way, the naive way that people had already thought before. They thought, okay, I'm driving my car and I have a simple job and I have a good life. I don't care what happens outside Continent USA. Although this good life may have come as a result of exploiting numerous.

countries in Africa, numerous countries in Asia, and so on and so forth. So people now understand the world has become a village that my simple iPhone, for it to be in my hand, for me to make a phone call or watch a video, a child somewhere in Congo had to dig with his bare hands for for cobalt or for something else that goes into these devices. So decisions we make here locally are affecting the global stage. And it's all interconnected. If you see a free Palestine, you will know that you've rooted out all of these corrupt politicians

and corporate beneficiaries here in the U.S. I see this connection and I see that people have started seeing this connection. and if we tie it like this, this is the best indicator. We will have a compass that will point at the result, the outcome that people would want to see here. Once you see a free Palestine, you will know that you have freed up the people and they're well in this good country as well.

Amen, my friend. And I think that is the perfect place to wrap up this conversation. We're almost at two hours. I want to be respectful of your time. We have more questions on the outline, and perhaps I could have you back at some point in the future to have more discussions because I really appreciate your voice, your knowledge, your experiences, this book itself, and I really encourage people to go check it out, support you, support your work,

support the Palestinian people, because I think what you just said about the liberation of Palestine having implications for the entire planet, I think is more true than most people, even those who are sympathetic to Palestine, fully realize. And I could not have said it better myself. Before I let you go, can you just let listeners know? Any final words you might have for listeners, but also where they can find this book online and anything else you want to say as a closing statement? Yes.

As to the book, it is available on Barnes & Noble online. Just type in Scars and medals. It will come up. I can share with you the link to the book. It's available on Escara Books website as well. For those who don't want to buy it, they can have a free. PDF file to download from Eskra Books website as well. I can share the link to that as well. The mere knowledge is more important than the monetary return, which I have vowed to have all

the proceeds to help the people in Gaza with the humanitarian aid, whether it be in food and and anything that helps them maneuver through these difficult times. And as to a closing statement, I wanted when I wrote this memoir to give the Palestinian people the humanity that they deserve because it pained me on a personal level to know that the Hasbara machine had worked for 80 years, maybe 60 to 80 years, just to do one thing, to dehumanize us to the point where if any news media comes out and mentions 113 Palestinians were murdered today or died because of a blast.

It will be an occasional news that nobody will pay much attention to. Had you known the suffering and the plight that the Palestinians have to go through, had you known some of the Palestinian families, their names and faces, and aspirations and hopes and dreams, you would have stopped at that news and you would have dug deep to figure out who did that to them and why did it happen? How did we not stop it?

How are we involved in it? It will change the perspective on things. So that was my contribution. Having one family, I went very personal, I went very emotional in it, and I invested deeply in the personal level. I wanted to include so many details of normal Palestinian family's life because of that reason. And I hope that I managed to reach it across to the West.

I invested everything I learned about the West in order to have a simple Palestinians family be relatable to a simple Western family that lives here in America and the West. That's a beautiful project. and I think you absolutely succeeded, my friend, and I think people after listening to two hours of you talk will walk away knowing that this is a beautiful human being with a very specific life path who is contributing everything he can to his people and to the betterment of the world. And I truly salute you for that. Iskra Books is also publishing my upcoming book.

I can't give them enough love. I will link to Scars and Medals from Iskra Books in the show notes. the fact that all profit is going to go to the people of God's is just another reason to buy the book to support not only the author of it, who we've just had a two-hour discussion with, but also Iskra Books, who is a small publisher putting out really important stuff like this. So again, I'll link to all that in the show notes. I encourage people to go check it out. And yeah, thank you so much, my friend.

The book, again, is scars and medals. This has been a fascinating conversation, and I would love to have you back on to have another one at some point. I would love to do one more round with you. I'm at your service anytime.