After the October 7th attacks by Hamas, Israel launched massive bombardment campaigns of the Gaza strip that, at the time of this writing, has killed 7000 people. This is a genocide. In the West Bank, settler violence and army raids have also killed dozens of Palestinians, and Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as leftist Israelis have been arrested for speaking out.
While the world is currently transfixed by what’s happening in Israel-Palestine, this story did not begin on October 7th. Daniel Voskoboynik, Dana El Kurd and Elia Ayoub are joined by Orly Noy and Yair Wallach to think through this moment, process our grief together, and articulate alternative visions for both peoples. We focused on three themes: a) Grief, b) Thinking Through This Moment, c) What can be done?
This will be the first of many episodes on post-October 7th Israel-Palestine.
Dana El-Kurd is a researcher in political science, and an assistant professor at the University of Richmond. Works on state-society relations in the Arab world with topics like authoritarianism and international intervention. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and she is also the author of “Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine.” A regular guest of TFTT, Dana has recently co-written an essay with Leila Al-Shami, Elia Ayoub and Romeo Kokriatski for the South/South Movement entitled “A view of anti-imperialism from the periphery.”
Orly Noy is an editor at Local Call, a Hebrew-language news site committed to democracy, peace, equality, social justice, transparency, freedom of information and resisting the occupation. She is also a political activist with the Balad political party, and a translator of Farsi poetry and prose. She is the chair of B’Tselem’s executive board. Her writing deals with the lines that intersect and define her identity as Mizrahi, a female leftist, a woman, a temporary migrant living inside a perpetual immigrant, and the constant dialogue between them. She recently published a piece for 972Mag and Local Call entitled “Enough with the warlords. There is another way.“
Yair Wallach is a social and cultural historian of modern Palestine/Israel at SOAS, University of London, studying the entangled and relational histories of Jews and Palestinians. He is also the author of the 2020 book “A City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem” and has most recently published in The New Statesman a piece entitled: “The deadly logic of the existential war: Warnings that the escalating Israel-Hamas conflict is heading towards genocide should be heeded.“
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Credits:
Host: Daniel & Elia
Producer: A.M.
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: A.M.
Episode design: Elia Ayoub
Support human rights workers in Palestine-Israel and the diaspora
Medical Aid for Palestinians | Adalah | Al-Shabaka | Gisha | Hamleh | Hamoked | The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel | Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre (JLAC) | MIFTAH: The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy | Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) | Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P) | Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) | Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC)
Recommendations
- The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History: Edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg
- Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, by Tareq Baconi
- Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929 by Hillel Cohen
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
It’s an incredible amount of grief, sadness, worry, and chaos—and I’m almost completely alone with it.
Elia Ayoub: Hey everyone, I’m recording a separate introduction because the episode you’re about to hear is a rather special one—and also a difficult one. It was difficult to record, it was difficult to prepare, and it’s even been difficult in post, in the sense that the team has been wondering and asking ourselves whether this is the right time for this. Maybe we should wait some more? People may not have the capacity to think more long-term, because they’re dealing with what’s happening now. I wanted to start by saying that these are very valid critiques. I don’t want to downplay them.
At the same time, the team and I have been trying to do something different with The Fire These Times. Not that I think it’s special, not that I think I have a “unique responsibility,” not that I think no one else can do this. It’s nothing like that. I have just given myself a certain period of time—initially I told myself it would be five years, maybe it will be ten now, I have no idea. It may end up becoming too much by next year. But I’ve given myself this task after years of trying to approach this problematic from various angles. My stake in this is pretty clear, for everyone who knows me. I’m Lebanese. I’m Palestinian. I have family and friends especially in Lebanon, but I have a lot of acquaintances and friends and colleagues in Israel-Palestine as well.
What has been happening in Gaza since October 7, when Hamas fighters breached the militarized fence separating Gaza from Israeli communities in the south, killing some fourteen hundred people and taking over two hundred hostages, committing one of the most brutal massacres—obviously the response by the Israelis was predictable, because the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli government specifically have tended to treat the entirety of Gaza as a hostile space, ignoring the civilians on the ground, treating them as demographic threats or potential terrorists or “human animals” (literally a quote by a high-ranking IDF guy, the day after the massacre by Hamas).
This response, while not unpredictable, has still been very difficult to take in, and has been honestly terrifying. At the time of recording this intro, October 27, over seven thousand Palestinians have been killed. These include some two thousand children, a large number that my mind is incapable of comprehending. At the same time in the West Bank, settler violence and army raids have also killed dozens of Palestinians. In Israel proper, Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as leftist Israelis have been arrested for speaking out. Many fear for their lives. Some have had their lives threatened already by Netanyahu’s backers, including Israeli Jews—leftists and anti-occupation activists who have dealt with risks in the past (of course they themselves usually avoid comparisons with the risks Palestinian citizens of Israel, let alone Palestinians under military occupation, have to deal with). Even by those criteria, the threats that they have been facing in recent weeks have been severe.
At the same time, Western governments, allies of Israel, have been cracking down on free speech by both Palestinians and Jews in the West who dare to criticize the Israeli state and its violence. We see this in Germany especially, where there has been a crackdown unprecedented in Germany’s recent history (I don’t need to tell anyone what Germany’s less recent history is like). But beyond Germany, from France to the UK to the US: we have the president of the US making things up, literally lying on camera and saying things that either he has been told are true (in which case we have to worry about his sources) or he is just fine with lying. At the same time, just yesterday the US announced that it was stopping funding for six Palestinian and five Israeli NGOs who work on anti-occupation issues, Palestinian human rights, minority rights, and so on.
This is what we’re dealing with. I want folks listening to this to understand and make space for this if you are able to—if you’re not, that’s completely fine. Just listen to something else. But why am I even recording this? I don’t usually do this. I’ve only done it a few times when I feel the need to explain in advance what you’re about to listen to. I want you to keep this in mind: The Fire These Times is not a news podcast. We don’t have the capacity, we don’t have the finances for it to be a news podcast, and frankly I don’t think I’d be good at it. What I have learned through trial and error, as someone who used to be a journalist, worked as an editor, and now sees myself as mostly a writer and researcher focusing on Lebanon, Syria, and Israel-Palestine, I have felt the need for more folks who are “on our side” to be having conversations like the one you’re about to hear.
To be clear, I’m not saying you have to agree with everything you hear. I’m not saying if you disagree you’re a bad person. I’m just saying there’s a certain level of discomfort in having such conversations which, as long as they don’t actively hurt anyone of course, should be held, dealt with, reckoned with. That’s what I hope we’ve managed to do with this conversation. Maybe we failed, I don’t know. But the fact of the matter is, the team and I decided to record something that is more evergreen, more long term than what the situation on the ground right now demands. The reason for that is simple: capacity.
In order to compensate for that, we’ve included a whole bunch of links: all of the NGOs and associations and individuals who are reporting on what’s happening on the ground, who are defending human rights, who are challenging the horrifying repression and violence against Palestinians in Israel-Palestine, and to a lesser but significant extent many Israelis who are willing to stand up against occupation, who are willing to oppose this supremacist worldview that the Netanyahu government and its far-right allies have been trying to push for years. This is what this episode is. If you want to listen to more “newsy” episode to learn about what’s happening on the ground as it’s happening, we are including other podcasts, media outlets, op-eds, commentaries, and so on in the show notes.
The last thing, and the most important thing before you listen to this: we need to recognize that what is happening in Gaza right now is effectively a genocidal campaign. The statements by the Israeli state and its allies have been pretty clear. At best they are looking at a massive depopulation of Gaza. At best. They want to “destroy” or “eradicate” Hamas, and they have decided that the way to do so, the way to defeat this enemy of theirs, is to carpet bomb the entire place and level entire buildings and murder journalists and destroy schools and kindergartens and hospitals—and to do so live on air.
If you feel this is too much, please listen to something else. If you are willing to go through this episode I am genuinely grateful. Feel free to take your time doing so. We go through some difficult things. There were some minor disagreements here and there. But all in all we were on the same page. We’re all genuinely concerned for our friends and loved ones back home. We all genuinely believe that a better tomorrow is possible—although as you will see, some of us were more optimistic than others, some were more pessimistic. That’s perfectly normal, and this is the sort of discomfort that I feel is necessary.
The four of us, facilitated by Daniel in this conversation, come from a place of grief, come from a place of trauma, of sadness, of anxiety, of despair. Changing those emotions, or at least channeling them towards something more positive is something that I would like to do. Whether I manage to do it or not, I genuinely have no idea. I’m trying. I hope that folks listening to this have enough kindness in your hearts to recognize at least that. There are genuine attempts being made here. A lot of work is being put into this. Not just this episode but this project in general. And I hope that counts for something.
We divided this episode into three parts: Grief; Thinking Through This Moment; and What Can Be Done. It’s straightforward: reflections about how we feel is how we started (Daniel’s brilliant idea—it helped remind us that we are fallible and we are capable of contradictory emotions and thoughts). Thinking Through This Moment is reflecting on what is happening now. Obviously it’s linked to the first bit, and it’s also linked to the last bit. I apologize for the very long intro at the beginning—it’s unusual as you know, but I thought it was important to do. I would be genuinely interested in hearing what you think about this episode. If you disagree, please explain to me why. What is it that you thought we could have done better?
We will not be responding to insults and bad faith arguments. There is no time for that anymore. The times we are living in are too critical. I don’t feel we can afford this. Thanks for listening as always, and take care.
Daniel Voskoboynik: Welcome to The Fire These Times. On this episode we’re hosting a Palestine-Israel roundtable with esteemed guests who we’ll introduce in a second. My name is Daniel Voskoboynik, I’ll be a co-chair of this conversation. I’m a Barcelona-based journalist, poet, and researcher working at the intersection of human rights, climate justice, and historical memory. I recently joined The Fire These Times as a co-host and I’ll be facilitating this conversation alongside Elia.
I’d like to introduce the first participant of the circle, and that’s Dana El Kurd, a researcher in political science and assistant professor at the University of Richmond. Dana works on state-society relations in the Arab world, with topics like authoritarianism and international intervention. She is published in peer-reviewed journals such as PS: Political Science and Politics, Journal of Global Security Studies, Middle East Law and Governance, Siyasat Arabiya, an Arabic peer-reviewed journal, Contemporary Arab Affairs, Parameters, and more. She is also the author of Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine. A regular guest of The Fire These Times, Dana has recently co-written an essay with Leila Al-Shami, and Romeo Kokriatski for the South/South Movement entitled “A view of anti-imperialism from the periphery.” She is also going to be a more regular member of The Fire These Times.
And I’ll hand it over to you, Dana.
Dana El Kurd: Thank you, Daniel. I’ll go ahead and introduce the other participants. Yair Wallach is a social and cultural historian of modern Palestine and Israel at SOAS, the University of London, studying the entangled and relational histories of Jews and Palestinians. His work has focused primarily on visual and material culture, and on the urban fabric as sites and vehicles of contestation and transformation in late Ottoman and British-mandate Palestine. He is also author of the 2020 book A City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem and has most recently published in The New Statesman a piece entitled “The deadly logic of the existential war: Warnings that the escalating Israel-Hamas conflict is heading towards genocide should be heeded.”
Orly Noy is an editor at Local Call, a Hebrew-language news site committed to democracy, peace, equality, social justice, transparency, freedom of information, and resisting the occupation. She is also a political activist with the Balad political party, and a translator of Farsi poetry and prose. She is the chair of B’Tselem’s executive board. Her writing deals with the lines that intersect and define her identity as Mizrahi, a female leftist, a woman, a temporary migrant living inside a perpetual immigrant, and the constant dialogue between them. She recently published a piece for +972Mag and Local Call entitled “Enough with the warlords. There is another way.”
Thank you both for joining us.
EA: Because this is a very difficult topic, and at the same time this is not a news podcast, I will put all the newsy-related stuff in the description with links and everything for folks listening to this to follow and read there. Daniel has very kindly organized this conversation, which we will follow to some extent—but this is informal. This is a roundtable, so we can take as many liberties as we need in three different themes that are interrelated. Daniel, if you don’t mind, I can ask you to introduce those.
DV: Thank you, Elia. Today we’re going to be moving back and forth in time. We’ll be opening a space for grief in this moment right now—it’s impossible to start without the grief that many of us are wading through and living through. Then we’re going to move towards a deeper past perspective, and think about what this moment means looking both towards the future and looking towards the past; in what ways are we facing the unprecedented, and in what ways are we facing the old, and in what ways are we facing the new? In the end we’ll turn towards bridges: what are the possibilities, what is the hope that we can build from this moment?
To get to that bridge, we might have to start with the space of grief. The last seventeen days, and much more, have been tremendous—words are incredibly insufficient to encapsulate anything that a lot of us are going to want to talk about. I’d like to invite all of us into the space to start with grief, for us to share a little bit on how we’re meeting this moment and what these seventeen-eighteen days have been like, felt like, and meant to us.
EA: Dana, I could ask you to start if you want—I don’t want to put you on the spot.
DK: I’m not living in Palestine, so I feel like I would monopolize space if I speak first. I can’t possibly be dealing with more grief than the people who are living there. Maybe Orly can go first.
I: Grief
Orly Noy: There is enough grief to go around for everybody, Dana. I find it very hard, too, because I haven’t been able to process, because one catastrophe is chasing the other. What happened on October 7—for us Israeli Jews it was an unbelievable earthquake, something out of the ordinary, unbelievable. There was a lot of chaos because nobody gave any reliable information, and the numbers—we couldn’t figure out what was going on.
Then the first thing was a sense of fear that I have never felt before. By the end of the day, on that Saturday, my older daughter—she’s twenty-four, a veteran activist against the apartheid and occupation; she’s been arrested several times—she couldn’t fall asleep from the fear that maybe not all of the Hamas militants were caught, and maybe they were making their way to Jerusalem where we live. We needed to actually go physically to the shelters in the neighborhood, showing her that there are safe spaces nearby.
Then the fear was replaced by a whole different sort of fear. For anybody who knows anything about Israel, it was very clear that all hell is going to break loose now. We have three field researchers in Gaza from B’Tselem. What we are doing is checking up on one another and checking to see if they are alive on a daily basis.
Right now I think my deepest emotion is a very deep sense of solitude. One of the things that also happened is the complete shattering of what I believed to be my political camp, which was very much needed at times like these. We found out that it was almost completely gone, that what I understood as all the moral principles, the political analysis that made some sense for me, all my tools to make sense of the world—all of the sudden I keep seeing all of my friends from my political camp completely deserting those principles and those analyses, and just going back to the tribe, to the Jewish tribe: joining the taken-for-granted approach that yes, Gaza should be erased and yes, it’s unfortunate but we have no other way.
It’s like in my head now I’m left almost alone with an incredible amount of grief, of sadness, of worry, and chaos—and I’m almost completely alone with it.
I’m sorry, it’s not very coherent, but that’s where I am right now.
DK: That makes perfect sense to me. I think it resonates with all of us.
I live in the United States; I don’t have immediate family in Gaza. I have some extended family I’ve never met. So it’s not as immediate. But I agree about feeling alone in this space. Arielle Angel of Jewish Currents wrote a wonderful piece where she talked about how it is a failure of our movements that we haven’t prepared for this moment, for this kind of moment. I think that’s right. I do see myself as on the periphery of a lot of these movements anyway. Maybe I’m more used to the alone-ness. But things broke down so quickly, in terms of our political orientations and how we understand what’s happened, how to make sense of it and where to go forward.
To be really honest, what’s happening in Gaza is the worst we’ve ever seen. So I feel almost ashamed to bring up the things that the Palestinian diaspora has dealt with, because I know it’s not comparable. But at the same time this is something that has been weighing on my mind: we are being so suffocated, the Palestinian diaspora. For Palestinians it depends on where you live. But the American context has been so vicious, so fascistic. Every gain we have made to be able to be openly Palestinian and to talk about Palestine has gone into retreat, essentially. This has compounded that alone-ness. Because I’m constantly paranoid about who around me is actually an ally, and who around me will stand up for me, keep me safe when times get tough.
I wrote something on social media: I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know anything, I don’t recognize anyone anymore. It feels like a collapse. Also not very pithy, but yeah, we’ve just been dealing with different layers of grief.
Yair Wallach: I’ll say a few things. The first thing was watching all this unfold on social media, which was a very strange and horrible and mesmerizing experience. Starting from the day of 7 October, it’s people I’m following begging for help for their relatives or for themselves. You don’t know if they’re going to be alive in a couple of hours. Then later on, the same in Gaza: people I know online talking about their families and their loved ones—and again, they don’t know if they’re alive and they don’t know if they will be. And you can’t do anything. It’s very tough.
None of the people I know, in the first circle of family or friends, was hurt. But a lot of people I know had family and friends hurt, killed, taken hostage, bombed, and so forth. That obviously makes it different. It’s obvious for Jewish Israelis in the case of other Jewish Israelis. But for me, gradually over the last twenty years, knowing more and more Palestinians, including people from Gaza—these images start to have a meaning that they didn’t have before. It always feels like you’re being hit in the stomach.
The moment I found myself breaking down was the moment where Palestinian colleagues and friends reached out to ask if I’m okay, to say something. That’s the moment where I was weeping, because first to be allowed that sense of grief in a way that you feel held for a minute, but also the tragedy that you know it doesn’t have to be this way, and none of us want it this way, and still we watch this happen and we kind of knew it was coming in some shape or form. That was the moment when I couldn’t hold it together anymore.
I wrote in my New Statesman piece that especially for Jews, descriptions from 7 October inevitably sounded like early twentieth century pogroms: images of kids hiding while their parents are killed. This is something that touches a button—it doesn’t matter that you know this is not the same. You know that this is not Jews in Europe facing antisemitism. No, it is a very different situation. You know the context, but inevitably it’s going to touch a button of insecurity. It’s no surprise that people are kind of going berserk. Everyone is going berserk. People I follow are extremely cynical about Zionism or whatever have suddenly become hasbara agents. It’s tough to see.
DK: May I add one more thing?I also forgot to mention how angry I was. I talked about the grief, but I was so angry. I’m not even as seasoned a person in this space as the others, but I feel like we’ve been screaming for so long, for years, that—exactly as you mentioned Yair—something like this was going to happen. The status quo is unsustainable. I was so angry—I was angry at the international actors that led us to that point. I’m livid at the Americans. I’m not angry at the surprise—the scope of it was surprising. But what were people thinking? We’ve been saying this.
Hamas experts have been saying this, and if it’s not Hamas it’s going to be something else. It’s coming. So I just wanted to say also anger defines a lot of how I’ve been feeling.
EA: I was also going to focus in on the anger. On a personal note, my wife gave birth about eight days ago now, and the baby is a micro-preemie. As difficult as that is to hold and comprehend, we have been managing relatively well on that front because as it happens the hospital that is not too far from where we live is one of the best in the world for this specific type of care. Knowing I could leave my daughter in this incubator for months and know for a fact that she is going to be safe—my wife said that contrast is what broke her. Both of us had to take a real break from checking anything. Our priority had to be putting as much positive energy as humanly possible towards our daughter Sofia.
It’s a dilemma in some sense—I feel grateful that I am not there; I feel grateful that she is not there, specifically. The “there” is where this gets messy. I grew up in Lebanon, not Israel-Palestine. My grandfather who passed away a couple years ago was from Haifa. When the news filtered in, I was grateful that he isn’t with us. I’m grateful that he doesn’t need to see this right now.
Then the anger came in. I’ve been on anger mode for like two weeks now. Mixed with grief and sadness. But the others are very paralyzing, so I’m able to compartmentalize them as much as I can (out of experience, for what it’s worth). But the recklessness of the day—like Dana said, I wasn’t surprised that something was going to happen. I was horrified at the line that was crossed in how Hamas acted specifically. This is me being extremely naive, in retrospect. I expected (as I do with Hezbollah for different reasons) a certain “logic” to certain acts and actions, and this felt beyond that.
Of course, knowing how Israel would respond as soon as the IDF got its shit together (because they were clearly caught off-guard), knowing that a line was crossed and knowing from some of the research I have done—my masters was on Jewish history, I focused on the politics of Yiddish and Hebrew, and read a lot of texts that allowed me to understand that there’s going to be a very emotional response for understandable (obviously not justifiable) reasons.
But the recklessness of the so-called international community, and Biden’s speeches making things up that he clearly has not seen, and Rishi Sunak—we are cursed to have people like him right now in power at this specific time. Then there’s the German response, which has gone into full anti-Palestinian hysteria. It’s so many things at the same time, and me being in this space right now where I’m in the international city of Geneva where nothing ever happens, and we complain about (but are grateful for) how boring it is—and then going to Lebanon. As I said, I grew up in Beirut. My family and most of my friends are in Beirut. I know that Lebanon is always one or two degrees’ separation from anything that is happening if it gets to a certain scale.
Dana and I are in this group where we’re texting live as things are happening, and sharing responses and reactions. I was terrified everyone doesn’t understand that as horrifying as this is right now, it can actually get worse. Hezbollah hasn’t really entered the game yet, and I’m hoping they don’t, but they haven’t. I’m partly in exile due to them; I’ve dealt with them; I lived in the same neighborhoods for some time and I’ve been following what they’ve been doing in Syria, most importantly. Without sounding too extreme about it, Hamas is a joke in comparison to Hezbollah, in terms of their capacity. I was terrified that the response of the Americans is to send some boats and aircraft carriers in the sea. And that’s going to be enough of a deterrent? As far as they’re concerned, Hamas has shown that they can do stuff, and Hezbollah knows that they are stronger than Hamas, so they can do stuff too.
I haven’t been sleeping well, clearly, for both my personal family reasons and also what’s happening back home. But in addition to all this it’s a mix of helplessness and deep cynicism on “our side,” and here I’m focusing specifically on the Lebanese side. It’s been difficult to watch. Friends of mine who aren’t necessarily super active are now very active online, because everyone feels the need to say something, to yell something, to do something. And because they may not know of the Syrian context, for example, they are sharing Assadists and Hezbollah supporters and all of that. Most of them responded calmly when I pointed out who the people are that they are sharing and why this can be damaging. But not all. Some of them were like, Fuck everything, it doesn’t matter. They are not fans of Hezbollah but they are like, Who else is going to do anything?
DK: If we think about who benefits from this type of dynamic—it’s the worst actors. The antisemites, the Islamophobes, the tankies. They are being vindicated. Whatever ‘we’ there is outside these hateful groups, we have failed to articulate something better. We do articulate it of course, people are working very hard. But you know what I mean.
EA: There is a failure there that we have to recognize and critique as much as we can. Now all the worst actors imaginable from all possible sides have the perfect story. The Germans suddenly are teaching us about antisemitism—which I will never get over. I’m still losing my mind over this. Everyone has something they can now use. If they want to be anti-immigrant, they have it. If they want to be Islamophobic, they have it.
On the Hezbollah side, there are muftis and sheikhs and supporters and allies saying the most genocidal thing you can imagine, and even throwing queer people under the bus because why not? Stuff like that is why I’m really worried there’s a powder keg around us. If the temperature is not lowered by any means necessary at this point, it’s just going to continue. War and these things have a way (as the Lebanese civil war proved time and time again) of taking on a logic of their own. Whatever the initial spark, phase two or three or four or five or six will take on a different life of its own. That’s what really worries me.
ON: As you were speaking I also thought about the extent of the emotions that Hamas attack raised. It’s needless to say that it was a heinous crime. At the same time I think about the white world’s conception of the aesthetic of death, and of killing, and of violence. This is something that became so vivid in the past couple of weeks: your violence, no matter how extreme, no matter how lethal and without distinction against civilians, as long as it has the aesthetics provided by the very sophisticated technology of the white world, then you’re on the right side of things. But if your violence, because you don’t have the same advanced technology, is not as aesthetic, then it’s very easy to push you and everything that can be related to you out of the definition of humanity. This is a privilege that the white world is taking right now. It’s also the basis of the situation, of our entire reality.
DV: I’d like to come back to the stakes of this moment that everyone is referring to. There’s a simultaneous intensity of grief and anger right now, and also I’m hearing a lot of fear about what could come. I’m noticing as well that Israel-Palestine (and especially what’s been happening these days) ignites conversations and transformations in movements across the world, unlike many other conflicts. I think, though, there is still an underestimation of what’s at stake in this particular moment.
In the interest of popular education, I’d like to invite you all to reflect—we have a beautiful assembly of historians, activists, scholars. I’ve heard you, Yair, talk about how historians get into history to know that things can be different. Things can be done differently, there can always be different contingencies. I’m curious to ask you all what the stakes of this moment are. What are we facing, from your perspective? And why is it so important to name it? I think we need to name those stakes before we get to the “bridges” and how we can deal with them appropriately. What are facing right now, and why is it so important to name it and its scale?
II: Thinking Through This Moment
YW: I can start. I think the biggest risk at the moment is an original escalation that would allow or lead to a significant expulsion of Palestinians from different parts of Palestine, quite potentially accompanied by the killing of tens of thousands. That’s a completely possible scenario, and that is the first thing that needs to be prevented. I’ve been saying this for a few years now, sometimes ridiculed by people. But I hope that people see this as a real possibility that has to be prevented. We know that things can happen in a month that later you cannot change, forever. We need, as much as we can, to be aware of that and therefore prioritize accordingly.
In the longer term, if we manage to avoid that (which is possible—I’m a bit more optimistic now than I was a week ago), then there are potentials. I can see also there are positive scenarios and transformations. The stability of Israel’s model of domination has been clearly proven wrong. This is clear. That creates an opening. I would say that there are moments of light.
Many of us have seen the images of one of the hostages released, Yocheved Lifshitz, turning around very consciously, very assertively, looking the Hamas guy in the eyes and shaking his hand and saying “shalom” (at first he was surprised but then reciprocated). That’s a moment of taking things into your hand and showing that this is not the only way. Yes, horrible things happened, but you can see a way beyond that. I think that potential exists. I don’t know exactly in what form.
I would say that in the medium and long term, it’s very clear to me that it either will be a future of mutual recognition and recognition of humanity and rights of all people living between the river and the sea, or it will be some kind of scenario of ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. Failing to put forward commitments to humanity and to the humanity of all will result in ethnic cleansing.
The power lays with Israel. Israel is considerably more powerful than any other actor, even if the IDF’s weaknesses were on display on that day. Don’t mistake that with actual profound weakness, or get the idea that it can somehow be overcome militarily. It would be extremely stupid to overestimate the weakness of the IDF even if it failed on that day.
Why am I saying all this? The onus is on the Israelis to recognize the basic rights of Palestinians to be there as they are and as full human beings with full human rights. That is the first. But this is the more difficult part: there also needs to be recognition from Palestinians to imagine the full legitimacy of Jewish Israelis in the land. There hasn’t been an urgency for Palestinians to deal with that—and why should you have to deal with this when you are the victim and you are so vulnerable? But if you don’t have that vision, especially after what happened three weeks ago, it’s much easier to sell to the Israeli public that it’s either us or them, there is no other way, it is existential, somebody has to be destroyed, and therefore it has to be them. If you’re unable to show that this is not the way, I don’t see a way to counter it.
DK: Can I ask a question? You’re much more aware of Israeli public opinion—I hear snippets here and there but it’s not my area of focus at all. Everything you’re saying makes complete sense to me, that there is a weakness, and that this model is unsustainable. There is some discussion, a Ha’aretz editorial here and there, but I don’t know—I’m genuinely asking how much this is being discussed. How much is the sustainability of the model being discussed? It seems like at the level of decisionmaking, on the Israeli side and on the American side, there is no serious discussion about what October 7 says about the sustainability of this model. In fact they’re doubling down.
For me—I’m a generally depressed person also, maybe this is just a character weakness of mine. I don’t see—I hope we can put forward that kind of vision so that we do avoid making it more existential than it already is, but realistically, how much are people talking about this?
YW: Orly is better positioned to answer this than me, but I would say a couple things: first, the demand for revenge is deafening. This is the first and often the only thing you hear at the moment. There are quite a lot of people warning against that; analysts and commentators and so forth. They’re usually not in the TV studios on the programs that everyone watches, but there are a lot of people, including Orly and also including quite centrist people saying No, stop this, this is not going anywhere. There are various voices.
I don’t know—the only thing I can say is that Israeli society is quite dynamic. Things can shift very quickly, for the worse but also for the better. I think it would be wrong to say that the potential isn’t there. On the one hand there is a backlash against the Palestinian citizens of Israel. This is really worrying. But there is also a recognition of a shared fate in some ways, so it hasn’t escalated to the riots that we saw in 2021. That at least leaves some room for some tentative not-full-pessimism.
ON: I completely agree with Yair, but I would define the attitude right now among many Israelis towards the use of violence in Gaza as the way that an addicted person would treat heroin. He knows as he uses it that it’s incredibly bad for him, that it can lead to his ultimate death eventually, but as he uses it he needs it and there is always a sense that one more dose will fix me, and then I will give it up. I think the incredible sense of revenge is shared by almost everyone right now. What is also worrying is that there is no foreseeable picture of victory, something that Israelis would need in order to say, Okay, we achieved that, so we can retreat with some dignity. And what would it be, even?
I find some sense of optimism which will come a long time after the dust settles: there is—this is what I am seeing very clearly—not only a tremendous amount of anger towards Netanyahu personally, but also towards the settlement project. A big part of it is because the military troops that were supposed to be in the south protecting the southern border on October 7 were instead relocated to protect settlers while they were pogroming the Palestinians in the West Bank. I think in that sense the Israeli public has had enough. Right now the sentiment is: We are united now, we are doing what the government is not doing. There is no state right now in Israel, there’s just simply no state. It’s completely paralyzed, and the citizens are taking care of everything by themselves.
The sentiment that I keep hearing more and more is, We will deal with Netanyahu, let us get over that crisis, but then you will get the hell out of our lives, and take your crazy settler fascists with you. If I find any shred of optimism it’s in that sentiment right now.
EA: It just emphasizes how important turning down the temperature is right now. Part of what worries me is that I can imagine Netanyahu’s brain right now maybe understanding this, or at least his allies understand this, so it’s actually an incentive not to turn down the heat, but actually doing the opposite. I don’t expect anything out of Netanyahu other than what we already see, because we’ve known him for some time now. But it’s the powers that do have some influence, that do have some say in what happens—not that they control Israel or anything like that, but they are not neutral actors.
Macron, as we’re recording this, is meeting with Netanyahu and says that we need to build a coalition against Hamas. And Biden is basically saying No ceasefire until all hostages are freed and having this maximalist position. This tells me that they don’t understand the stakes at hand—and that’s what worries me when I talk about the other fronts, about Hezbollah entering the scene, but also the hubris and the recklessness. If you don’t care about Palestinian lives—which I am used to, because that’s what I expect from these leaders—how are you also not caring about Israeli lives at this point?
There’s something very reckless about everything that’s happening. In addition to the sheer intensity of the moment and how difficult it is—I’m not saying if they were sober-minded then a perfect solution is easily at hand. But that sure as hell doesn’t look like what’s happening right now and how they are acting right now. That’s where a lot of my personal frustration is going.
DK: This has been somewhat illuminating. In terms of stakes, going back to the question—obviously the human cost is the biggest stake. That’s my biggest concern: lessening the thousands who will die. Another stake that we should think about is that given the kind of dynamic you just described, Elia, and the dehumanization of Palestinians that has been ongoing but is at a fever pitch right now, we have to think, on the Palestinian side, how the severity of what’s happening in Gaza and the images coming out of Gaza—talking about making this existential, on the Palestinian side there was already such a narrow space, after all these years of brutalization, to talk about a shared future…we are closing that space, if we have not already closed it.
How do you go to a Palestinian at this point and talk about shared humanity and shared future? You can make the logical strategic argument that we’re all making, that we’re trying to avoid an existential disaster. But to them it’s already happened, it’s already that bad. So I just worry, because the voices who care about the humanity of both sides, and the voices who have that kind of radical empathy—there is no space for them, and no traction for them at this point. And the worse it gets in Gaza (and there are also raids in the West Bank), the more and more existential it becomes on the Palestinian side.
I don’t have an answer to this, but we need to think about realistic expectations, and think about the power differentials, and think about who has responsibility to put forward that kind of vision right now. My position is: I am away. I have the luxury to have this discussion. It becomes my responsibility, then, to state these things. I think about it that way, because the Palestinian side is so incredibly brutalized at this point I don’t even know how to have a discussion about this.
I also wanted to mention the Arab side. We’re talking about it in terms of other actors becoming involved in a regional conflict. But every time I think about the Arab side, I’m thinking about Arab citizens in a lot of these places who are also reacting to these images, who are also reacting to their own governments’ complicity. Another stake we have is what this will spark, which is what Palestine in the past has sparked: anti-regime sentiment and anti-regime mobilization. This on its face is a good thing, because all these regimes are terrible. But also we have to think about the human cost and the instability and who comes to fill the vacuums when regimes are threatened.
That has been missing from the analysis as well. People discount Arab lives so much that when they see thousands across the region, even in places like Oman, even in places like Qatar, they think, It’s just Arabs being Arabs, doesn’t matter, they’re out in the street again! But this has been such a generator of dissent in the past, and it will be in the future. I just wanted to bring that up as well.
ON: If we are not terrified enough by this conversation already, I would just add that the extreme right in Israel is working very hard to use this moment in order to accelerate the fulfillment of their agenda in the West Bank, and it’s a full ethnic cleansing in massive numbers which are really frightening. They are now talking about transferring all of Gaza’s population to the Sinai, to empty the Gaza strip. In Jerusalem, in the last few days they have repeatedly called for mass Jewish presence in the Temple Mount, the Al-Aqsa mosque, deliberately trying to ignite a full religious war against the Muslim world.
Combined together, I’ve never been more scared. Honestly, I’ve never been more scared in my life. It feels like an apocalypse. It’s really scary.
EA: That’s the other aspect of the recklessness. Dana and I and others have been thinking about this nonstop for some time obviously, and even I did not have the mental capacity to factor in this doing shit around Aqsa and seeing what happens kind of thing. The recklessness of it all is still something that baffles me. Dana, you mentioned the reactions on the “Arab street”—there’s already a lot of discontent. Even Sisi seems to have understood that he can’t completely stop protests. There’s this concept of tanfis that we’ve talked about on this podcast a few times, that some Arab regimes allow this “letting off of steam.” Arab regimes have done this in the past; Bashar al-Assad has done this in the past. But the key thing about tanfis that is often overlooked is that it sometimes gets out of hand. They can’t always control the reaction. They say, clearly we cannot tell them not to take to the streets, maybe we can try and control them—cordon off a certain road, only let them go there, try and manage it. But at some point you can’t contain it in the same way.
For different reasons and different political contexts here, there is a shared animosity towards various regimes. Extremely mildly put, there is a shared dissatisfaction with the status quo. Egypt for me is one of those wild cards right now that I’m trying to pay attention to. Even on the Saudi side—there are so many different things that depending on what counts as a red line…I shudder to think, if they do something to Al Aqsa mosque, there will have to be something, in terms of the pressure building up. Not to sound apocalyptic—I try in my mind to turn down the temperature because otherwise it goes different places. Not necessarily productive ones, at least not for the purposes of this conversation.
DV: Hearing you all, the first thing I think is to sit with the immensity of the grief and the pain and the fear and the terror—Orly you were talking about having never been more afraid.
This is a very minor thing in the whole comparison, but it is also a window towards a possible future: just this week in Barcelona, the police arrested a cross-national neo-Nazi network that was planning immediate attacks on both the Muslim and Jewish communities here. There are all these other emergent—
EA: Because we need to add Nazis to the mix!
DV: One hundred percent. And there are loads of other un-discussed actors as well that see this as an incredible opportunity as well to achieve a lot. But to me, at least working as an organizer here, this is also the biggest opportunity. We have a joint opportunity to confront this threat together, from one position.
I’m really curious: we hosted a conversation over a year ago, at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, which was called Our Wounds Can Be Bridges. It was a conversation between Ukrainian and Syrian activists, trying to share common experiences and common possibilities and common windows in the struggle against Russian imperialism. But the metaphor is what I want to get at, that our wounds can be bridges.
We spoke a little bit about different kinds of “openings,” possibilities for transformation in Israel right now, the possibility of that deep anger at the Netanyahu government but also at the settler project as potentially being something that can be used to harness progressive change in the future. I’m curious, all of you—and also want to bring into the room the listeners that we have: there are few projects like this one that have such a diverse group of listeners. We’re talking to organizers and activists in many cities and countries around the world who are all internationalists at heart working to understand that we are not alone in what we do, and that every wound touches each other in some way.
From that space of the audience, I’m curious how you would address activists and organizers around the world from very different positions in terms of thinking through what possibilities we have in this moment, what we can prioritize in our different contexts and different struggles, specifically relating to Israel-Palestine right now, and what would be constructive for people to do. This is an open question that some of you have hinted at but I wanted to name it more specifically.
III. What Can Be Done?
EA: I don’t know who wants to go first. This is going to be an indirect response, and I’m also saying this in order to get the ball rolling. The panel that Daniel mentioned between Ukrainians and Syrian—I’m the one who hosted it. There was an opportunity there but it was also easier to organize because Russian imperialism is very straightforward. If you are Ukrainian or if you are Syrian, it’s pretty black and white.
Speaking broadly, when it comes to the intersections between Jewish experiences in past decades around the world, and Palestinian experiences in past decades, obviously with Israel-Palestine being an axis in that story, but taking different dimensions in the US context that are very specific to the US, like having Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, Jewish Current—these things are a very good sign. Not that long ago, they would not have been as vocal as they are now. Blocking entrances to the White House, as we saw a few days ago—that’s not nothing. And we’re still in the beginning of seeing where that happens.
So without over-quoting Gramsci, at times it feels like an interregnum right now, maybe that’s the optimistic side. Biden’s generation is set in a certain framework—not that I’m saying everyone who’s younger is necessarily better; there is the dynamic within Israeli Jewish society for that matter. There are different factors in all of this. But to the extent that we can build on something that’s already there, like +972, Local Call, JVP, Jewish Currents (just focusing on more Jewish-oriented things), or on the “other side,” this project that we’re doing is part of it obviously, trying to build something that doesn’t quite exist but can exist: it’s not that impossible to have these things. To be frank, a lot of people I know have these conversations anyway—they just don’t do it publicly. And they don’t do it publicly because of the fear of retribution. If they’re a Palestinian in Germany right now, for example.
Or maybe they are already in precarious conditions, like they are a Syrian refugee in Germany who is also very attentive to what’s happening in Palestine, but they are worried that because they are a refugee their visa status can be ruined. At the same time there are statements from conservative Germans like the leader of the conservative party basically saying, We won’t accept any Palestinians from Gaza because we have enough antisemitic young men. And I’m sure he did not mean Nazis when he said that. He meant people who look like me.
In France, the interior minister said something that sounds ridiculous if you’re not familiar with the context, and it is ridiculous: antisemitism is not that different from hating cops. I’m not going to get into France now or I won’t shut up. But all of those different places, some of which might be more difficult than others—I think in the US and UK and other places, there are different openings that aren’t nothing. Those states are very influential—the US being the obvious one here, but not just the US.
The wife of the first minister of Scotland has to deal with this reality as well because she’s from Gaza, and apparently that this makes no difference whatsoever in the calculation of a Macron or a Sunak speaks a lot to how devalued Palestinians’ lives are, and to a wider extent Muslim and Arab lives. There is an opportunity here to build on existing movements, from Black Lives Matter to what JVP does, that I don’t think is nothing. There is actually potential there. Maybe we can say that we’re so desperate that we have to find a way forward. But I do think that there is a way forward.
I kind of have to believe that, because otherwise what’s the point of doing this?
ON: Three things come to mind, concrete ways of action. I’m thinking as a person, as an activist, as a publicist, and as a member of a broader camp. One is to put things in context. This is incredibly important, because the Israeli tendency to immediately treat October 7 as something out of context—that if you even dare to speak about context then you’re justifying it somehow. But this is not an expression of your astonishment or grief! It’s more than anything an expression of the dehumanization of Palestinians. This doesn’t have a context, it didn’t happen within a certain history, within a certain relation. It’s just something that Palestinians do. So the first thing is to insist on the context. Speaking about context is not justifying, it’s understanding. If we want to go to a different place, we need to understand what happened here.
The second thing is solidarity with our Palestinian fellow citizens in Israel. It is unbelievable, the persecution right now against Palestinian citizens. It is really strange for me how so many Israelis whose hearts are in the right place are completely oblivious to the fact that they do not hear their Palestinian friends in the public sphere because they are afraid to speak up—and with good reason. I get messages from Palestinian friends asking me to publish their words anonymously because they are afraid. It’s the most humanistic messages—but that’s the level of fear. Without a Palestinian-Jewish partnership inside ’48, nothing is possible. Nothing. This is where it all begins, and without establishing a solid basis for shared citizenship that is based on equality, we will not be able to do anything.
The third thing is to propose an articulated, clear political alternative. This is something that the Israeli left is very shy of doing. It’s like, it’s not the proper time. No, it is. It is the proper time for saying explicitly, bluntly, what the alternative is that we are suggesting. We cannot continue just focusing on what not to do. Of course—genocide is a horrifying thing. That’s the easy way out, just asking them not to commit a full genocide in Gaza! We should be able to articulate, step-by-step, a pragmatic suggestion to what should be done now. Unfortunately we do not see it right now.
EA: The question of If Not Now, When? is something I’ve been reflecting upon a lot in recent days and weeks, but even before then to be honest. It’s a question that’s often taken a bit for granted, like, Yes we need to act, clearly we need to act. But it’s also a difficult place to be in—mentally, in your communities, online, what have you. The outcome, the answer is clearly Now, we can’t wait until tomorrow or whatever, but it also means a certain amount of risk that is inevitable. And there’s a hierarchy there. There’s a different level of risk depending on your gender, your race, civil status, legal rights, depending on where you are. This is certainly not a judgment. I have to take certain precautions; these are things we have to do—if not for us, then sometimes for family back home. That obviously makes the entire space of possibility, the thing we’re trying to imagine, much more difficult to create.
But crucially, a lot of the time the paralysis ends up speaking for itself. It ends up becoming an end in itself. I see in a lot of friends that I know for a fact, knowing them and working with them in the past, that they are capable of doing certain things that would be risky, but not that much riskier than what they are currently doing, which is posting online mostly—yelling into the void. Letting off steam, once again. But I also know that a number of them can—even anonymously, taking certain precautions—I don’t know if they are fully cognizant of how much they can do, because it feels overwhelming. It feels like too much.
This conversation, however many people listen to it, hopefully allows things to be nudged in a certain direction, instead of towards paralysis. Because paralysis—I certainly feel it a lot, and I definitely understand it; I was until very recently a very depressive person as well, and I don’t think that ghost of the past is completely gone either. But I’ve found that recognizing that some of the privileges that I have (again, I’m in Switzerland) together with the tools that I have and tools that I can learn or have someone teach me (and this is where community building matters) can actually lead to situations where I have random people in random places tell me—and maybe not publicly because they are afraid, similar to what you mentioned Orly, and Yair you said you had Palestinian friends check up on you…for me, the difficulty is: how do we make things like that visible? How do we make that more public?
In certain circles, I can say all of the things, Fuck Hezbollah, Fuck Hamas, Fuck the IDF, Fuck all of them, and it wouldn’t sound weird—it’s understood what I mean by that. But if you say this online it can be very difficult. That’s why I feel like projects like this one, in a very small way, can help nudge things in a certain direction. As I said, the two options that I see are either paralysis—which comes with fear, paranoia, depression, helplessness—versus some aspect of that (it’s never completely gone) but also doing something about it, channeling that energy towards something that I feel other people in the moment need to hear or need to read. Then they might do something completely different with it that I have no control over; I can’t even picture what it is. But that’s part of the philosophy of this project.
YW: A major difficulty here is the demise of the Palestinian national liberation movement in its secular form, which leaves just Hamas as the main vehicle of challenge to Israel. That makes is very difficult. A one-state struggle, for example, is not possible without significant political and social Palestinian mobilization. It can’t come from Israelis—the very few Israelis who would be in favor of that. It’s very difficult: Palestinians are fragmented as a result of all the historical developments that we know. How does this come about to create an alternative to the Palestinian Authority and also Hamas? That’s one issue that is part of the current paralysis.
The only constituency that has some level of room to maneuver, and agency, but also sufficient stake in Israeli society and awareness of Israeli society, is Palestinians. It is only the Palestinian constituency which has the ability (because they are not under military occupation or under siege or far away in the diaspora), and where I see interesting ideas and approaches coming out. It’s also unfair to put this onus on them. But if I have some optimism it’s from that constituency.
As for the US and so forth, I am not optimistic. I’ve seen people say that they think 7 October took us back a generation in terms of American Jewish public opinion and the ability of the left inside the American Jewish public to mobilize. I don’t know if that’s true, but it is true (this is very visible) that among the left, even people who are unambiguously not Zionists experience a real crisis when you talk about Jewish American leftists. I’m talking about the fact that so many of the statements on what happened either seemed to accept it as the logic of decolonization—that’s the outlier—but most of them just didn’t mention 7 October, even though the hostages are still in Gaza and so forth.
In some cases we’re talking about activists who have family and friends in Israel—they cannot ignore that, and cannot expect other people to ignore that.
Even if they are perfectly aware of the bigger context, and they are perfectly aware of where the root causes are—whether the Nakba or the Israeli occupation. That is a real crisis that will have to be overcome in one way or another if effective mobilization is to happen.
DK: We’re all speaking from kind of different positions—some people are more embedded than others. Just to be clear, I’m not leading movements—I’m a person who teaches and writes. That’s the extent of what I do. But I’ve been thinking about what individually is in my capacity to do, and what I think Palestinians in more privileged positions can do in this moment: when we see the collapse of solidarity in places like the United States…Elia, you mentioned some good and powerful examples of Jewish Voice for Peace or If Not Now also leading protests along with Palestinians, and that’s all good. We also have seen a lot of that collapse as people have retreated and as people have been hurt by reactions.
What’s important for someone like me or in my position to do is to look for the opportunities to build. Look for the people who have had a nuanced, empathetic reaction to what has happened since October 7. These are the people that we ally with, and these are the people that we can continue to talk with. For people who used to be part of this ‘camp,’ who saw a shared future for Israeli Jews and Palestinians but have since fallen off or have retreated, it’s a useful expenditure of our time to address those people, and to find some common ground again.
I’m thinking of particular activists I don’t want to name, but people who have expressed hurt and despair in the aftermath of October 7 and have retreated but had been active until that point—those aren’t people we just dismiss. Those are people we have that conversation with. For me, that’s all I can do. Because there is no theory of change, with the octogenarian elite that is in power in the United States—there is no theory of change that includes the institutions at this point. I’m not sure that these is. I mean the formal political institutions. Biden is not going to save us. Most congresspeople are ignorant.
It is important to note that an alternative to Hamas on the ground doesn’t exist, in terms of resisting Israel. Not because Palestinians lack the ability to articulate that, but because the alternatives have been directly targeted by the Israeli state and by the international community. That’s another thing someone in my position, in the United States or in the Global North, also has to address. You’re unhappy with Hamas being the bulwark of resistance, claiming that for themselves? Then why did you imprison activists, and dismantle the PLO? It’s not even holding anybody accountable, addressing that in order to be able to have the correct context in the discussion…
Everything I’m saying is so absurdly privileged, because I am not there. I’m not facing that fear for my direct safety. It’s not great, but instead of not addressing that privilege, maybe we use it, maybe we weaponize it.
DV: Thank you so much, everyone. There’s so much that we brought to the table. I’m starting to think of ways to close. But I think actually the traditional question used to close this podcast is useful. Dana, you said that you “just teach,” and I think that’s a massive understatement—teaching is everything. What we often ask people at the end of every podcast is what’s a book recommendation or what’s a recommendation you’d make for people to learn more? Especially for folks in the most privileged contexts, where the doomscroll is often the most common method of “learning,” could each of you individually, in a short sentence—it could be music, it could be a book, it could be anything—what would you recommend to listeners as something that’s given you context or inspiration or hope or whatever you feel is important? What would be one recommendation you would make?
YW: I recommend Hillel Cohen’s book 1929, which deals with another moment of violence. It’s wonderfully written, and also a challenging book to everyone who reads it. It’s trying to make sense of how and why violence happens and how different people understand it. It’s on a very specific moment, but it opens up questions which are relevant to the entire century of colonization and conflict and violence. It’s a book that gives me hope—1929 is a book about people killing each other but it is also about people saving each other. Arabs saving Jews, Jews saving Arabs. And the book is dedicated to the people who saved other people. That’s where I see the hope.
DK: I don’t know if this is something that gives hope, but for understanding context, Tareq Baconi’s interview with the New Yorker was really useful. It was quick and accessible. His book is good and more in-depth as well: Hamas Contained.
But I’ve been thinking a lot about Yassin al-Haj Saleh and this concept of Syrianization, and the political proletariat in the world. I think it’s useful to embed Palestine, and what’s happening in Palestine and Israel, in a global context—and not to zoom out too far, but there are precedents set in this space that have horrible ramifications that we don’t always think about and that are super dangerous. It’s important to think about our rights and our right to live in human dignity in Israel-Palestine and how that relates to other similar struggles, whether it’s in Syria or Ukraine or other places that have these unmet sovereignty claims.
ON: Putting on my Iranian hat, I would recommend The Colonel—it has been translated into English—by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, who is the most prominent Iranian author. It’s a brilliant book about how very justified revolutions end up turning against their own people and tearing them apart in so many different ways. It has a lot to say to us in our region.
EA: Thanks for that. I’ll add a couple things: we did an episode on Hamas last year on Tareq’s book. Another thing is Yassin is one of those people who we’ve mentioned so many times on this podcast and he hasn’t been a guest yet, but he will be soon. And Dana and I are actually working on having a written conversation with him that we’ll publish on the website at some point.
As for a book, I’m never good at recommending just one, but there is a book called The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trama and History edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, with a forward by Elias Khoury, the Lebanese writer. I haven’t read all of it, but I think it’s an interesting experiment. Comparisons are not good, and I would never compare the Holocaust and the Nakba—it doesn’t even make much sense to do so. But what does it mean to speak about those two in the sentence? What does that mean and what does it look like? This book takes different angles to this, and tries to answer that question. It’s worthy for those of us who have the privilege of resources and time to engage in this matter.
I also want to echo what Daniel said. Dana said, “I only teach,” but the essay we wrote together for the South/South Movement—I’ve had folks from parts of Ukraine who are actively in conflict (Russia is bombing them) mention this to me as a breath of fresh air. The dilemma of what I feel the five of us do to various extents is that it’s difficult to see the result immediately. It’s almost like it goes into the ether and we don’t know where it goes. But I’ve had enough interactions with people reacting positively, in contexts that I didn’t expect, that when I’m able to remind myself of that it’s what keeps me going.
DV: Thank you everyone for making the time to be here. It’s a joy to connect and to speak and share our grief, share our histories, and share our fragments of hope. Bless everyone listening to this conversation, and may we continue to meet each other despite everything.
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