The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 2735 - Paramount Settlement Sparks Outrage; The Forensics Of Israel's Genocide w/ Eyal Weizman

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

G'mar Chatimah Tovah It's Fun Day Monday on The Majority Report On today's program: California Attorney General Rob Bonta caves and reaches a settlement to allow the Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Brothers. Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and founder and Director of Forensic Architecture joins for a discussion about his book, "Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide". In the Fun Half: At an event in the Oval Office, Trump brags about banning certain press outlets from the White House, falls asleep, then wakes up to talk about his wife's ass and to spread disinformation about vaccines. Lauren Boebert has a very weak rebuttal to journalists reporting on her reported multiple affairs. Houston Texans star linebacker, Azeez Al-Shaair speaks to the media about why he chose to wear Hind Rajab's name on his eye black. Football analyst Chris Simms perfectly articulates how Ted Cruz and the Republicans are attacking college athletes as the country crumbles. Bill Maher gives another one of his typical soup-brain take on the Macklemore - Ed Sheeran controversy. Morning Joe panel discusses how it could be possible that polling is showing a tight race in the Senate race in Florida. all that and more. Please consider helping the Aldaghma family, they are the family behind Gaza Bakery, which provides bread and meals to displaced families, and Future Flowers Kindergarten, which gives children a place to learn, play, and experience moments of normalcy whenever conditions allow. On Sunday, October 4, Emma will be in Los Angeles doing a Bitchuation Room Live with Francesca Fiorentini at the Lodge Room. Get tickets here. To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AM Quickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: COZY EARTH: Go to cozyearth.com/MAJORITYREPORT for an exclusive 20% off home and sleepwear. SUNSET LAKE CBD: Head to SunsetLakeCBD.com and use coupon code 'Left Is Best' to save 20% your entire order. Follow the crew on X @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's YouTube channel: https://ww.youtube.com/Th3Discourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here: https:/www.youtube.com/@avaraiza

It is Monday. September 21st, 2026. My name is Emma Vigland, in for Sam Cedar, and this is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, A.L. Weitzman, founder and director of forensic architecture

and author of The New Book Ungrounding, the architecture of genocide. Also on the program, breaking news, California's Attorney General caves on the Paramount Warner Brothers merger, securing no structural remedies and handing the oligarchs a win. More on that in just a second.

After Trump banned Politico, MS now, and CNN from the White House grounds, Those three organizations are suing the administration for access and TMZ reports that the human printer Natalie Harp was the one who convinced Trump to do it this time. My muse. Other major TV networks suspend their pool coverage in solidarity. Ice shoots a man in Austin, this time a Venezuelan immigrant,

driving for DoorDash. And his lawyer says his wife has been blocked from seeing him in the hospital. A 37-year-old Costa Rican man dies in ICE custody in Louisiana, the 25th ice-related death this year. Republicans squirm as two recent polls show Angie Nixon closing in on Ashley Moody in Florida. Great news, the FAA is testing new AI air traffic control tools at D.C.'s regional airport. starting today. That's...

After it just about got us to a war with China over fake information about them moving things to Iran. Yes. You got that right, buddy. The top crypto super pack is unveiling a $30 million campaign against Sherry Brown in Ohio.

The Trump administration will impose more sanctions on the international criminal court. In Germany, the far-right A-L-LAR WIFD wins once again in a state election. It's second this month. A new scientific report concludes that climate change was a core contributing factor

in the flash floods in Nepal that killed over 1,400 people. And lastly, former Kamala Harris aides tell Axios that they think now she's not going to run for president. I mean, she just like seemingly is a procrastinator. It's the same thing with the governor's race. Like, all right, just lay low. Retire. Have a ball. All this and more on today's majority report.

Welcome to the show, everybody. It is Fonday, Monday. Sam is not in today because he is celebrating the holidays. So happy Yom Kippur to our friends who are listening, who celebrate. Gamartova, I think you're supposed to say. Look, I'm one of the good ones. I'm one of the good ones. folks. You can trust me.

Hello, Matt. Hello, Brian. We've got a great show for you today. Let's start here. So, over the weekend, news started to trickle out that the California Attorney General Rob Bonta was looking to settle the antitrust litigation that California and 11 or 12 other states brought forward against Paramount Skydance because they were trying to and acquire Warner Brothers for around $111 billion. Now, the political wins appear to be at their back. This is not a popular merger, and specifically in California, it really screws over the

workforce in the state. Well, Banta has caved, it appears. And some of the other states' attorneys general are not happy about it. But let's just go back in time for a second, because this all started. right around the election in 2024. CBS did an interview with Kamala Harris where they edited out certain laughter and coughing, I believe. And Trump said this is so misleading and so biased

that I'm going to sue CBS for $20 billion. And he did that right before the election and everybody knew it was BS. Doesn't matter though. When you have the resources, this is how actual lawfare operates. It's not going after. people that stormed the capital on January 6th. It's people with immense financial resources

that can tie you up in litigation over bullshit. Trump did that right before the election. He, of course, won, installed Brendan Carr as the head of the FCC. And then within weeks of Trump's new administration, they opened up an investigation into Paramount, which at the time, you know, owned CBS. Now it's merged with Skydance, the Ellison's production company.

The Ellison's, as people know, are Zionist mega donors. Larry Ellison at the time in 2017 was the single largest donor in terms of one singular donation to the IDF in the history of the IDF. Ellison's company, Oracle, has extensive military and technological tech contracts with the Israeli government. And Oracle itself, people may not know, was found. and it's largely understood there's been some reporting about this I saw from the San Francisco Gate I was reading this morning amongst others that it's basically a CIA cut out it was in the 70s there was a CIA project called Oracle from around the time the CIA was Oracle's first customer coincidentally and they provided them with database technology and it made Larry Ellison

one of the three wealthiest people on the planet and then his son got this production company that he's been playing with as one of his toys. And Skydance is, is that production company. So they merged with Paramount after this, oh, by the way, we should say, after a settlement that ended up just being a bribe, a $16 million bribe settling that BS case about Kamala Harris, settled with Trump. And then within weeks, the Trump administration approved Skydance's acquisition of Paramount. They installed Barry Weiss at the head. After Ellison overpays an insane amount, $150 million for her blog that no one reads

the free press, puts her at the head of CBS News, she purges the staff and makes the editorial choices a lot more right-wing and a lot more pro-Israel, let alone the Ellison's involvement in the TikTok takeover. So they're attempting to consolidate as much as possible and as quickly as possible. Here is from over the weekend, Brian Stelter reporting that the settlement was nearing. Now, I'm told this weekend that some of those 12 states in this 12th state coalition are ready to settle. California AG Rob Bonta has been leading the coalition, and he is pushing to get the deal done. But there are several states that are holding out or resisting.

Those states include New York and Connecticut that apparently want additional concessions from Paramount before they sign off. Fred, the Wall Street Journal was first to report on these advanced talks, and now we're adding new details, reporting that Letitia James in New York and William Tong in Connecticut are both trying to get more out of Paramount, and I'm told at least two other states also have reservations about any settlement deal right now. Unfortunately for those states, their reservations remained, and they held out, and seemingly were leaking to the press in order to try to stop this from happening because California is the is the lynchpin in this lawsuit because of the nature of standing and the fact that this is involving you know production in Hollywood and so if California goes the feeling from the New York and

Connecticut and according to Bloomberg the four states that wanted to hold out Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut and Minnesota, the feeling from those attorneys general was essentially that they didn't have the muscle without California at the helm. Bloomberg reported this morning, the states that held out longer did succeed over the past week in securing independent editorial boards for CBS and CNN as a part of the deal, the person said. The terms are said to also include a financial penalty

if the company fails to make good on a promise to distribute 30 films per year in theaters. Discussions included Paramount having to pay $30 million for each film that falls short of that goal, Bloomberg reported. It could also be forced to sell its sake in Miramax, the studio behind movies such as Pulp Fiction, if it fails to meet the target. If, do you see how much wiggle room is given in the initial reporting about the deal here?

So, this basically has zero structural remedies in it. As Lena Kahn pointed out, also last night, before this was finalized, trying to ring the alarm bells. Lena Kahn, former FTC chair, says, the Paramount Warner Brothers merger seems facially illegal, and the state AG lawsuit challenging it is very strong. It is troubling to hear that the states may now settle for behavioral remedies,

allowing the deal to go through subject to various promises from the firms. Behavioral remedies routinely fail, and the stakes here are particularly high, given the strong democracy requires open markets for sound journalism and creative expression. The states were right to step up and I hope they keep fighting to protect the market, its workers, and the millions of Americans who value a free press and a vibrant film industry. Well, unfortunately, this morning, that is not what happened. So when she talks about the lack of structural remedies,

all that is included here in the initial reporting at the very least are behavioral remedies, basically saying, you have to act this way under the letter of the law. here are the different ways that you have to act differently. We're going to appoint this supposedly independent editorial board to see if CNN and CBS are down the right path, which is a little concerning to me as well. How will that be structured? This 30 film promise that they had already thrown out there,

which I think is even less than this year that they had produced. And there's no forced divestiture or anything like that, which would be more of a structural remedy. structural remedies and antitrust force sales. That is a concrete change. Behavioral remedies do, as I say. They provide incentives. They tell them how they can operate,

but they don't actually force financial sales. That's where it hurts them. All of this gives them so much wiggle room. They just have to get in the door. And what they're counting on is that behavioral remedies, as opposed to structural remedies where sales are very concrete and can be monitored, behavioral remedies require enforcement.

Is the Trump administration going to prioritize enforcement on this to make sure that they're following through? And do our anti-trust infrastructure even have the capacity to enforce some of these things because it's been so hollowed out? And what makes us even more insane is that Bonta had previously, in his position said that structural remedies were what would be necessary for any settlement to

occur. This is from August 11th. A.G. Rob Bontas says that he is willing to negotiate a settlement with Paramount, but they need to come with structural remedies. If they do, we will listen, he said at the Politico event. Well, they didn't, and it turns out that he caved anyway. And this is immensely concerning for free speech, as CNN, which would be a part of this sale, is currently being banned from the White House for some capricious reason by our Mad King president. But additionally, even like in, for our art, right, like this is going to result in job losses all across Hollywood. There's a reason that the actors and other artists in Hollywood, like Mark Ruffalo, we're speaking out against this and then we're being smeared as anti-Semitic for calling out

the Ellison's deep ties to Israel, which is laughable. But this means that further consolidation means that there's going to be more debt. So layoffs, they're going to cut costs, and that means labor first. And there's already this mass exodus from L.A. of writers and other artists moving to say like Atlanta because they do all their filming down there because of tax breaks. So they were threatening to leave, but this might just still result in them destroying jobs, even if they stay in Hollywood, because they're going to have to go into debt for this acquisition and they're going to have to cut costs, as I say. So this is going to be a real problem. This is going to result in job losses.

And it's just incredibly undemocratic, once again, to have the. Ellison's at the helm of another piece of major media property that includes news outlets and all of these like, you know, channels and art and stuff that will now be under their control. So, you know, it's just, this is Rob Bonta and the California Democrats, and let's include Gavin Newsom and Bacera in this, who are aiding in the oligarch takeover of our media. and our art. That's what's happening. Capture and kill the entire industry.

Like they did with 60 minutes. Oh, yeah. Not respected anymore. Like, there are certain things that I think should be monopolies and then the government should massively regulate them, their natural monopolies. I don't think things like Hollywood should be. And that we let one person,

particularly like a rabid Zionist, be in charge of all these media institutions, is an assault on democracy. It is like, or a complete Halloween out of democracy. It's really disgusting. Yeah, I think that now it's just basically four companies that control all of production in Hollywood. We actually talked about four companies having complete control of an industry within the context of meatpacking. And we're seeing the results there.

So it's just, whichever Democrat, if there is another Democrat that gets elected in this country, must return our antitrust enforcement to its stated priorities and actually use it and make sure that we build off of what Lena Kahn and Jonathan Cantor and others in the Biden administration built, but you have to pair it with a real legislative push to tax the billionaires and break them up from that end as well. It can't just be administrative enforcement.

The legislature has to get on board with this, and the president needs to twist arms in the future on that behalf, because it's really existential, as we're seeing right now, for our democracy. In a moment, I'm very excited that we're going to be speaking to A.L. Weitzman about his latest book, Ungrounding, the Architecture of Genocide. But first, a word from one of our sponsors here, Cozy Earth. Cozy Earth is got definitely one of our favorite sponsors, one of mine at the very least,

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Cozy Earth stands behind everything they make, and there's a return and exchange window if the fit isn't right. head to cozyearth.com and use our code majority report for up to 20% off home and sleepwear. That's code majority report, one word, for 20% off on home and sleepware. And you see a post-purch survey, please be sure to mention that you heard about Cozy Earth right here. Again, that's CozyEarth.com slash Majority Report for an exclusive 20% off home and sleepwear. I'll put a link down below in the video and episode descriptions and at majority. FM. Quick break, and when we come back, we'll be joined by A.L. We are back, and we are joined now by A.L.

Weitzman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and founder and director of forensic architecture. His latest book is entitled Ungrounding, the Architecture of Genocide. A.L., welcome to the show. Yeah, great to be here, Emma. Great to talk to you. So your book is really a very exhaustive. look at the systemic destruction of Gaza all the way back to the NACBA of 1948, but prior to that. And I want to start, though, from an overall thematic viewpoint, because you argue that Gaza isn't just a demolition zone, but a construction site. What do you mean by that? I mean that the way in which the genocide was conducted was what we all are familiar with are images of total destruction.

80% of buildings in Gaza either destroyed or damaged. Entire areas have been turned into a desert in a sense that we cannot even see that the neighborhood was there. But what is very important to understand is that military presence, military occupation rely on architecture. It relies on the construction of roads. sometimes these are carved right through Palestinian built fabric where it exists. It relies on the construction of military bases, of detention facilities, and other bits of infrastructure. And all that is being built, quote, unquote, through and with the rubble that Israel is produced through the destruction. So imagine a neighborhood like the G-Camp, like Jabalia,

has been turned into rubble, then condo bulldozers and would pile that into artificial topographies that create barriers that enclose military bases. And sometimes those are permanent bits of infrastructure. We have over 20 permanent military bases made out of the rubelled. rubble of neighborhoods of Gaza, and sometimes they are temporary, and therefore you have that kind of shifting dunes made out of rubble that is arranged and rearranged. What is important to understand that currently within the Israeli-occupied part of the

Gaza Strip, that is where Israel is currently, the military currently controls about 70% of Gaza, That area is continuously being demolished and reshaped, even if there is no active combat taking place. We need to also remember that there are about 12,000 Palestinians missing, unaccounted for, in addition to, you know, over 70,000 people that have been murdered during that genocide. And those bodies are generally. under the rubble or in deep craters within the earth, so that all those earthworks are not only shuffling rubble, but actually shuffling and destroying Palestinian bodies that need to be returned to their families

and honored in a proper burial. 12,000 is a little bit smaller of a number than I'd heard from some other estimates. How do you come to that figure? Because, you know, you have Lancet from last year estimating that at minimum, you know, we're looking at like 180,000 dead, I believe, if I'm thinking at the top of my head. Yeah, you're right. I mean, the estimates that we have both for people killed during the genocide and also people missing are or the ones that I use is the very conservative estimates. of the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

These are actually numbered, identified bodies with names and ID numbers that are collected in that way. When statisticians are actually looking at excess mortality, meaning people that could have been alive without the genocide, but they're dead now, the numbers become much higher because many patients have actually, that could have survived in any other situation,

actually could not survive due to the total and utter destruction of the health system in Gaza. And those numbers would be closer to... Yeah, this is not something that we in forensic architecture have made direct analysis of. So, yeah, I mean, when you look at the... other numbers that have, that other researchers have, there are closer to what you were saying in the well over 100,000. Yes, forgive me. It's just, we're so desperate for any concrete information about this.

It is going to be, it seems to me, quite a long while until there's any kind of official accounting, which is by design and so much of your book explores that, you. you know, kind of almost industrial destruction and the how, how deliberate it is. But I want to back up a little bit because your book is divided into three parts. Soil, subsoil, and ungrounding. Ungrounding largely explores the post-October 7th reality in Gaza. But I want to talk about the beginnings here. How the Gaza Strip came to be.

Zionists like to portray Palestine as underdeveloped and primitive, but your book looks at how irrigation and agricultural systems were created to benefit Zionist settlers, and that had a very, you know, tangible impact on how Gaza is even constructed. So when a genocide occurs, when you claim as we do with the South Africa legal team at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, that the justice is that the genocide is undertaken, is unfolding right now. The question is when did the genocide begin? Where the intent, the genocidal intent to destroy people begin.

And therefore, one needs to draw a much bigger historical framework of Zionist settler colonialism and an Israeli settler colonialism in the southwestern coast of Palestine in order to show that, you know, the genocide exists within a pattern of, ongoing ethnic cleansing, territorial control and killing that have been going on for a very long period of time. And for that to be understood, a great task, one of the most important task of the book is to tell us what was Gaza like before settler colonialism? And indeed, the area around Gaza is one of the richest agricultural zones in Palestine, an area that was considered a breadbasket of Palestine, where the majority of wheat and barley that was feeding the entire country was actually grown by farmers, mainly Bedouin, Palestinian farmers in the Wadi Gaza area, but also north of it by Falahian farmers all the way to Jaffa. And Israeli settlers coveted that breadbasket. It was absolutely essential for them that if they are to produce a state,

that they need to take that agriculturally productive area and use it for their own population. And therefore, although the expulsion from east of Gaza occurred relatively late, during the Nakbah, it was made with the intent to actually free those lands, grab those lands, and expel all Palestinians into the Sinai Desert. The area of Gaza is very unique environmental zone in that it is always articulated in relation to that desert threshold. But Zionists have weaponized the desert as a destination for the expulsion of Palestinians,

And they were attempted to do it in 1948. A ceasefire that was imposed on Israel by the U.S. and Britain at the end of 1948 stopped the Israeli army from fulfilling its goal for complete ethnic cleansing of the area. And along the coastline, so by the beginning of 1949, along the coastline, remain about 200,000. and 80,000 Palestinian, 200,000 of them refugees from hundreds of agricultural villages in the vicinity of the area. Those were, in fact, incarcerated initially by strings of settlements, of Kibbutz settlements. It wasn't a fence around Gaza initially. There was a ditch that was carved into the ground by a plow.

this is how the book begins really. And it was those settlements, those Kibbutzim, that incarcerated and held the refugees in place that were attacked later on October 7, 2020. So we need to understand how the landscape was designed because everything that happened after happened on an environment that was fabricated for, you know, the expulsion of Palestine and holding them,

in the Gaza Strip forcefully. Any Palestinian that would step and try to return to the land would have been shot by settlers and the Israeli army after 1948, yeah. The Kippozyme plays such a central role in settling, you know, in the way that was often framed as Marxist or leftist, even though, you know, it's exclusionary to Palestinians in this like egalitarian way, we're going to live off the land, we're going to, you know, till the soil and we'll settle here. Your book shows how those, you know, so-called egalitarian and settlements basically acted as a human

shield border human wall for the Gaza Strip to encase Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The imagery of that is. is so vibrant and it's so symbolic that it almost sounds made up, but that's exactly what happened. Yeah. I mean, it's incredible to understand that the Kibbutzim, who are egalitarian internally, amongst the settlers, are actually colonial means of this possession. It was at the end of the first part of the Nakabar, the end of the 1948 war, the Israeli army was stretched very thin, and it knew it had to rely on settlers in order to police the borders.

And this is why it has actually placed cores of relatively young, militarized settlers along the entire borders of the state. Those settlements were armed, were trained. They were spaced apart in the distance of mortar fire. everything about the design of them from the distribution of homes, the layout of homes, to the road network between them was meant to create a kind of a matrix of fortification. And architects, some of them Bauhaus graduates, the Bauhaus is a very famous school of the modern movement in Europe. Many of its students were left-wing, but some of them were Jewish. and went to Palestine and used the kind of the language of modern movement,

modern architecture to create that matrix of fortification and dispossession around Gaza. It was only in the 1970s that Israel has actually constructed the first fence around Gaza, and since then it's only thicken and thicken the system of fortification. That could be an excellent way to move to part two subsoil, beginning with the 1967 occupation, and analyzing the emergence of tunnels, the tunnels that we've heard so much about, that were, you know, there to assist in Gaza just having some semblance of an economy for a while, but after October 7th, of course, they were merely terrorist networks that Israel knew about the entire. time, but yeah, I guess let's start with 1967, and then we can talk about both the construction of the Gaza border fence in conjunction with the construction of these tunnels. Yeah, when you isolate a place, when you incarcerate it, when you build walls around it, you can pass those walls in two ways above or below the surface.

and Palestinians were actually because of the agricultural nature of the area around Gaza, many of the refugees, many of the 200,000 Palestinian refugees that ended up in Gaza were farmers. And farmers have a form of knowledge, indigenous knowledge, if you like, of inhabiting the subsoil by digging tunnels, sorry, by digging wells and channels of water, etc. So dispossessed Palestinian farmers, dispossessed of the land, thrown onto the sand dunes of Gaza, still had that knowledge of how to work through and move through the subsoil, which is something that is quite complicated from an engineering perspective.

Think about it, the wells around Gaza, amongst the deepest in Palestine, some of them are 100 meters deep. It's very difficult to dig. It's very difficult to reinforce. But they knew how to do it. And plus, a lot of the relatives of the Palestinian refugees in Gaza were on Sinai across the border in Egypt. And the trading route, the traditional trading routes in this zone come from, you know, the area of the Nile and what's called the Via Maris, the coastal route. into Palestine.

And Palestinian refugees in Gaza connected to clan or tribal and family members on the other side of the border in Egypt through the tunnels. The tunnels were began like something like a social network. Now we think about social network in a digital sense. But actually digging through the subsoil, you want to emerge in a basement off

or in a property or near the property of somebody that you know and that you trust and bypass those that you think might be informers or that you don't trust. So obviously the shape of the network was like a social network. Of course, the armed Palestinian armed resistance against Israeli colonization and occupation needed to resort to the subsoil because it was the only part of Palestine left unoccupied. about it, the entire surface of Palestine is controlled by the Israeli militaries. The air above it is controlled by the Israeli Air Force. The one part of Palestine left unoccupied is the subsoil, and within it, using the indigenous knowledge and using the metrics that initially was conceived

in order to bypass the siege and supply Gaza with the food and medicine and commodities that it needed, to live was turned into a strategic matrix that some part of the matrix was obviously used in resistance to Israeli colonization. Now, Israel, because you cannot really show and fully know where the tunnels are, Israel has criminalized the entire subsoil under Gaza and somehow treated the surface of the earth where people live, the cities and schools and buildings and mosques, as if it is a horizontal human shield

separating the air force that is in the air from the subsoil where the tunnels were. And it used it as a blanket justification to destroy the entirety of Gaza. And whatever you confront Israelis and say, look at what you've done. You have destroyed, you know, not only killed, I mean,

the numbers that we spoke about before, but destroyed completely every condition of life. All hospitals, schools, neighborhoods, buildings, you know, everything that was on the surface, they say, well, there were tunnels underneath it without being able to show whether they were or whether they weren't, et cetera, and simply used it as a blanket kind of justification for the genocide that they've been perpetrated there. And so how did the response to the tunnels and the adaptation from the Israeli occupation

construct the current architecture that, or construct the architecture that paved the way for, like the industrial scale genocide of 2023 on. You know, what about, how did they respond to Palestinians trying to adapt in a way that kind of fortified Israeli control over the strip, which I would say directly leads to their ability to shoot fish in a barrel to a degree in Gaza since, since October 7th? Well, I, in my analysis and looking at the direction of bombing an Israeli military movement starting in the fall and winter of 2023 and 24, it seems

clear that the Israeli military was wanting to create a new demographic reality in guess, to kill Palestinians in part in large enough numbers to force the displacement of the entire Palestinian survivor, whoever would survive that assault into Egypt, right? So you could see very clearly, if they wanted, as they said, to rescue hostages or prisoners taken by Palestinian resistance fighters in there, they would have surrounded it. But they left the border to Egypt open. They left it all the way until the spring of 2024. And the military effort was an enormously massive bombardment,

like a wall of fire that was washing Gaza from the north to the south, together with evacuation order, ordering everybody going to the south. And they failed to do that. They failed because Palestinians, some did, but many Palestinians held on to their ground knowing what happened in 1948. And if you'd leave Palestine, you'd never return to it again. So they stayed in the bombed out cities. They lived amongst the ruins. They lived under condition of starvation and remained in place, picking up whatever was growing in and amongst the ruins that could have been.

edible at the time and it failed because Egypt kept the border closed. So effectively, yeah, so it is the kind of the construction of that spatial reality that exists turned from expulsion of everybody to, from the north of the south, to the later part of the genocide when Israel is starting to squeeze in Palestinians closer and closer tighter and tighter along the coast in areas where life is, cannot be lived, no, where no conditions of life exist, hoping that some geopolitical event would occur, that would allow them to push Palestinians out all of a sudden, or that Palestinians would, the willful migration that the Israeli government is talking about,

which is effectively starving people in place, making life unlivable so people are forced to live to leave the area and and and in in that in the plans of displacing of destroying Palestinian life there also the reconstruction ghosts there's no reconstruction plans they're kind of like ghost images of reconstruction like trumps deranged kind of like what is called the the the Riviera plan and other plans that are there that are only meant to fence up entire areas expel Palestinians from them

so that they could move out of the country. And this part where you analyze the genocide after October 7th on, this part of your book is called ungrounding and this is

where this term comes from. Can you explain that to our audience about what ungrounding means in the context of Israel's genocide and what makes it unique? So in most cases, so I'm running a human rights agency called forensic architecture, we look at the urban and architectural effect of state violence overall, and we have looked at many other places that experience aerial warfare in Syria, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, frontier with

the American drone strike campaign, etc. Many other places. Always you can see a city under attack. You see where a building used to be. Maybe there's a pile of ruin or a destroyed building, but you see where the road was, what the building was. Potentially, at the end of the conflict, the building could be extruded from its footprint. In Gaza, we are seeing a form of destruction that we haven't seen anywhere else except in the context of settler-colonial genocide, meaning it's a destruction of a city or urban areas, and it's a destruction of the traces of destruction. So that when you come back to place,

you cannot even see that there was a city there. You have no reference point. And basically the way it is produced by, you know, depth bomb exploding sometimes 20 meters under the city, creating huge craters into which the part of the, the city collapsed and then bulldozers finishing it off by stabbing the front loader into the ground and flipping everything from field to orchards to neighborhoods, etc. Creating a total desertification.

So it's a destruction of the city and it's a destruction of the traces of destruction. And this is what Israel has done in areas it's occupied since 1948. is very much a process like that. Palestinians that were expelled from, you know, the hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns that were depopulated during 1948, wanted to return. And Israel has realized that if there is a cemetery left in place, a tree left in place, a house left in place, Palestinians would return there. Therefore, they destroy the traces of their own destruction.

It created a completely alien landscape that in the 50s was produced by plows. You stab the plow teeth, the plows into the ground, and you flip the ground. And the plow is a mechanism of erasure. I mean, think how a cemetery looks like after you plow it over. You don't see the grave, the grave site. You don't see any traces of that. There is no place to return. So when we think about evidence today, of course.

you know that we are working with the South Africa legal team in the historical genocide case they brought in a hay. But there also traces for return to traces that would allow Palestinians to actually hold on to something and claim their areas. And I think that this is Israel, when you turn Palestine into Israel, the act of turning. Palestine into Israel is the act of erasing whatever existed there, erasing the society, but erasing also all the traces that it has left behind. We have a question from one of our longtime viewers, Kowalski from Nebraska. Could you ask your guest if he believes the water table under Gaza has been compromised,

to the point that is beginning to leach into the surrounding environment? For instance, I know that high pollutants can cause desalination plants to essentially not be able, not be effective. So I'm just curious if the plants around Tel Aviv were experiencing issues from the poison this runoff from the bombs. Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. And I'd start from what goes into the ground and into the water. So when a city is destroyed, buildings are solid, toxic waste. They contain so many chemicals. The minute that they are destroyed or pulverize, they become this poison dust that with the rain goes into, and pollute the aquifers.

When an aquifer is polluted or salinated, and we know also that this has had an experimental program during the genocide of pumping seawater into the tunnels, supposedly to flush out anyone that is there, it is actually salinated the deep water and the water table. We are seeing now along the coast of Palestine, very new and strange ecological phenomena. There is algae blossom to an extent that never existed before.

There is an enormous amount of jellyfish coming into the coast, clogging Israel power stations, coastal power stations in it. Israel is starting to pay the price of the ecologically, of the destruction of Palestine. They can build a wall in the... the West Bank, through the West Bank, they get built a wall around Gaza, but the ecology, water, soil, air, all those things are moving across borders and create a single large ecology that is becoming now much less livable for everybody in this place.

And lastly, I'm curious about with the settlement of Gaza and a takeover being, you know, obviously the goal here, how does the yellow line and Israel's moving of it within Gaza play into this attempt? It seems to me that it is still prioritizing the more historically fertile parts of the strip and pushing the Palestinians west towards the coast would be in line with your analysis. Yeah, absolutely. So Gaza has two types of soil. There is about half of it is sand dunes. That's the western part. And the eastern part of Gaza is an extremely fertile ground. This is the sliver of what was left from what I spoke about before is the breadbasket of Palestine in this part. But in the eastern strip of, in the eastern part of Gaza, everything that

was cultivated in Gaza was cultivated there. Israel systematically destroyed all agriculture there so that it control every calorie that comes in from the outside and then could restrict it or attack the aid as it was coming in or as it is doing now kind of like opening and closing the tap in order to have a leverage and control Palestinians over there. The yellow line should be thought of as less as a static border and more as a principle as a kind of a slow, strangulation. The yellow line has moved kilometers from where it was originally placed from about 50% of Gaza that was in the ceasefire agreement of October 2025, given to ground control by Israel, to about 70% right now. Israel is squeezing further and further Palestinians into the coastal area, making sure there is. There's no detergents. There's no chemicals to control the enormous amount of rodents and other carriers of disease, vermin, that are there, making life unlivable. So that is really the aim to create an unlivable death zone, if you like, that Palestinians' only way out would be you either die or you live.

leave the country. A.L. Weitzman, professor of spatial and visual cultures at Goldsmith's University of London, founder and director of forensic architecture. As A.L. mentions their work is being used by South Africa's ICJ case against Israel for its genocide. And the book is called ungrounding, his latest, Ungrounding, the Architecture of Genocide. We'll put a link to that down below, wherever people are listening to or watching this. A.L., thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

Great talking to you. You as well. With that said, we're going to just wrap up the first hour of this program. I could have talked to AOL for a lot longer, but a busy guy. Yeah, that was great. Incredible work. And there's so many visuals in the book that we were unable to show in the interview just for time reasons. But if people do pick up this book, it's helpful.

And if you have a more scientific mind about this kind of thing. And perhaps you know somebody that is more inclined in that. way and hasn't necessarily thought about Israel's genocide in in that way it can be another you know piece of information for them to get them on board activism on this incredibly important I mean one thing that's been incredibly obvious is that people have a really poor understanding of what genocide is despite it being fairly prominent in our culture for the last like a few decades and making life unbearable for the inhabitants is a whole hallmark of that

included and a lot of these other sorts of things that just short of just, you know, bombing people or what have you. Or, I mean, he lays out the case for how Israel has been creating conditions for the ethnic cleansing and

active genocide for decades and shows that in evidentiary with evidence. So it undercuts the entire false premise. of the military campaign in what it was actually responding to. This show relies on your support.

Join the majority report.com. If you can, become a member. Helps us survive and thrive. You get access to the fun half, commercial-free podcast episodes, and you get to IM the show, and you might get your IM-red in an interview like Kowalski's was, or in the fun half or at another time.

Who knows? So join the Majority Report. dot com. Also, I think we're nearly sold out, but it's like two weeks, less than two weeks away, October 4th in L.A., join myself in Francesca Furentini at the Lodge Room at 1 p.m. We'll put a link down below. If people want to get those tickets, we're nearly sold out, I think. So get them while they're good. Matt, what's happening on Left Reckoning? Oh yeah, we know a Sunday show for our Left Reckoning patrons, patreon.com slash Left Reckoning. Also on Friday, we did another lad show just David and I talking about the news, which people really like, even though I think it's

probably more nutritious to get experts in and talk to them on interviews. But anyway, we did talk about what I know it's strategic by the media to like try to entrap us on into this stuff, but I also think it's a mental breakdown of a failing industry that is only going to get worse. So yeah, check that out over at the Jacob and Meg. YouTube channel. All right, folks. See you in the fun half. Okay, Emma, please. Well, I just, I feel that my voice is sorely lacking in the majority report. Wait, whoa. Look, Sam is unpopular. I do deserve a vacation at Disney World. So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome Emma to the show. It is Thursday.

Yeah, I think you need to take over Sam. That's good. I'm going to pause you right there. Wait, what? You can't encourage Emma to live like this. And I'll tell you why. So it's offered a twerk. Sushi and poker. Sushi and poker. Ah, that's what we call it bids.

I just think that what you did to Tim Poole was mean. Free speech. That's not what we're about here. Look at how sad he's become now. You shouldn't even talk about it because I think you're responsible. I probably am in a certain way, but let's get to the meltdown here. Sushi. I'm sorry, I'm losing my fucking mind.

So it's offered a twerk? Yeah. Sushi and poker with the boys. Logic. Twerp. Sushi and poker. I think I'm like a little kid. Little kid.

People just don't understand. So I'm not trying to be a dick right now, but like, I absolutely think the U.S. should be providing me with a wife and kids. That's not what we're talking about. It's not a fun job. Twerk. That's a really weird. That's a real thing. And has like the way of the world on the shoulders.

Hoggers. Sam doesn't want to do this show anymore. It's so much easier. One of the majority report was just you. You were happy. Let's change the subject. Now, shut up. Don't want people saying reckless things on your program.

That's one of the most difficult parts about this show. This is a pro-killing podcast. I'm thinking maybe it's kind of buried the hatchet. Left is best. Violet twerk. That's a way that's all possible. Incredible theme song. Eye bumbler.

Emma Viglin. Absolutely one of my favorite people. Actually, not just in the game. Like, period.