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In this remastered release, Elia Ayoub is joined by Sumaya Awad and Shireen Akram-Boshar. Awad is a co-editor of the book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, and Akram-Boshar is a contributor to the same book. Originally released on May 20th 2021, this episode has been remastered and re-released. Many of the topics discussed – including the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the growing solidarity movements around the globe, the Palestinian struggle for liberation – all resonate in today’s context. This episode serves as a reminder that the recent escalation in Palestine has origins well before Oct 7 and that calls to end Israel’s genocide are growing louder and louder.

The Fire These Times is a proud member of ⁠From The Periphery (FTP) Media Collective⁠. Check out other projects in our media ecosystem: the Mutual Aid Podcast, Politically Depressed, Obscuristan, and Antidote Zine.

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Recommendations

Shireen:

• Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement Paperback by Angela Davis
• The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
• Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire by Deepa Kumar
• A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution by Samar Yazbeck

Sumaya:

• The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
• Smiley’s People by John le Carré

Movies:

• Qafr Kassem by Borhan Alaouié
• The Feeling of Being Watched by Assia Boundaoui

Contact

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• You can follow Elia on: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Mastodon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
• You can follow Sumaya on: ⁠Twitter

Episode Credits

Host: Elia Ayoub
Producer: Ayman Makarem
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: Ayman Makarem
Episode design: Elia Ayoub

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

There’s a major break with Zionism that’s unfolding in the United States, and growing. That’s massive, because right away what that does is undercut the argument that standing in solidarity with Palestinians, supporting Palestinian rights, demanding an end to occupation and settler-colonialism, means you’re antisemitic. It destroys that argument completely.

Intro to the remaster (2 December 2023):

Ayman Makarem: Hello, and welcome to The Fire These Times. My name is Ayman Makarem, and I’m the editor of the remastered episode you’re about to listen to. It was initially released on May 20, 2021, entitled “Palestine and Global Solidarity,” with Sumaya Awad and Shireen Akram-Boshar. I want to take a minute to contextualize the episode you’re about to hear, but also to briefly mention why we at The Fire These Times decided to re-release this episode now in today’s context.

During May 2021, the ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians had reached a new tipping point, most notably with the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem, the consequent uprisings across the West Bank and Israel (or ’48 Palestine) and the military confrontation between Hamas and Israel. This political moment is described in the episode as a “unity Intifada,” a re-coalescing of Palestinian national identity, which has for decades has been intentionally separated by the Israeli state.

The Israeli bombardment of Gaza that followed resulted in what the guests describe as the worst bombing campaign ever. The two guests also talked at length about the movement growing across the world, with particular emphasis on the US, in solidarity with Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation. The recording ends with news that a ceasefire had just been reached between Hamas and Israel.

So upon hearing this, it may be easy to understand why we decided to re-release this episode. Everything sounds so familiar, if you’re following what’s happening in Palestine-Israel today. Except it’s all incredibly accelerated. The devastation is much greater. The Israeli war machine is in full steam, and the horrors of genocide are on full display. We wanted to re-release this episode to show that all of this did not start on October 7, that these conversations, discussions, and movements have been ongoing for decades.

That said, it is undeniable that we have entered a new phase. So while we navigate this new terrain, it’s still vital to understand the context, root causes, and historical factors that have led us to this horrific moment. I hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you.

Sumaya Awad: My name is Sumaya Awad, and I am a Palestinian—I was actually born and raised in Jordan. My grandfather is from Jerusalem, and in 1948 he and his family were forced out. They went to Beirut because he had an uncle there. They left thinking they would return, as many if not most Palestinians did. But he never was able to return—he passed away in 2019—although his family home is still in Jerusalem. It’s in the old city. So I grew up with Palestine being very central to who I am and my upbringing; my grandfather was very political.

Right now I’m based in New York City; I’m co-editor of a book that was released in December 2020, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, and I am director of strategy at the Adalah Justice Project, which is a US-based advocacy organization.

Shireen Akram-Boshar: My name is Shireen Akram-Boshar. I’m a Boston-based activist and socialist, and a long time Palestine solidarity activist. While I’m not Palestinian, I also grew up in a very pro-Palestine and anti-imperialist household. My parents were very active on Palestine, although they are Lebanese-American and Pakistani. So I actually spent time in Palestine as a child: in east Jerusalem for a summer when I was about five, and then for a year when I was in first grade. Living there as a child completely shaped my politics going forward.

I remember at five years old seeing people get shot in al-Khalil / Hebron. And checkpoints: I had to go through a checkpoint every day to go to school in first grade, which was very stressful for me as a child. I remember my dad, who is Lebanese-American—when he tried to visit us one time, he was interrogated for seven hours when he was trying to get through Israel. At the same time I was completely embraced by the Palestinian community around us and that we lived with at the time.

Elia Ayoub: I wanted to ask you about you relationships to Palestine. Given that we’re recording this specifically on May 20, 2021, and things are still very much developing on the ground, what are some of your thoughts on what’s been happening, especially recently?

SA: What triggered what we’ve seen unfold in the last few weeks, and what is still unfolding, was the protests in Sheikh Jarrah. Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, this very small neighborhood in occupied Jerusalem, have been protesting the ethnic cleansing campaign of Israel’s armed forces and settler organizations (many of them who actually have headquarters here in the United States, some in New York where I am right now) trying to force Palestinian families out and to give their homes to these settlers.

There have been so many videos circulating of the violence and the dehumanization that these settlers represent—and so many of them have American accents. They’re very new to this land. And yet they are taking over the homes of Palestinians who have been there for centuries. So in Sheikh Jarrah, the protests against the Judaization of Jerusalem ended up triggering much larger protests in Jerusalem, at Al-Aqsa. This is all happening in the last ten days of Ramadan, which is already a very important. In years past also there have always been protests in those last ten days, because Israeli forces prevent Palestinians from going to Al-Aqsa to pray and to worship.

The Sheikh Jarrah protests made international news partly because of the brutality of the Israeli police against these unarmed Palestinians in their neighborhood, at their homes. We saw photos and videos of settlers forcing themselves into these homes, throwing grenades, having AR-15s strapped to their backs just walking around in these streets harassing and assaulting Palestinians. There is definitely a connection between seeing that and the police brutality in Sheikh Jarrah, and connecting it to the police brutality and the protests we saw here just last summer.

Then that spread into the Al-Aqsa protests, and Israel forces forced themselves into Al-Aqsa mosque while people were praying, at night, opened fire on them—live ammunition was used, grenades—and all of this sparked a much larger awakening in Palestine. And importantly not just in Jerusalem, and not just in the West Bank. Palestinians living in ’48 rose up as well and are protesting in solidarity and against what they’ve been facing: police brutality and the occupation of their land, and of course the connection to Gaza.

That’s when Hamas intervened, and this was resistance from the river to the sea, as we’ve always chanted for decades, actually happening right before our eyes. Palestinians from Gaza, from ’48, from the West Bank, from Jerusalem, were all rising together against the colonization of their lands and with one common goal: end this occupation, end this settler-colonial project.

Another important thing to point out is how that spilled over to the diaspora: to Jordan, to Lebanon, to Syria, and beyond that. Jordanians first protested at the Israeli embassy—this isn’t new, it happens almost every Ramadan when Israeli forces attack Al-Aqsa. But what was different is that hundreds if not thousands of Jordanians went to the border with Palestine, the infamous Allenby Bridge border, and protested there, and were chanting Open the borders, open the borders! to these rows of armed Jordanian military officers. And some of them managed to push their way through, though they were very quickly forced back. In Lebanon as well—although there, one of the protesters was shot and killed.

These are protests of return. All of these are Palestinians—Jordan’s population is majority Palestinian, Palestinians who were forced out in 1948 or earlier or after—wanting to return home and to defend their land. Many have pointed out on Twitter and elsewhere that the last time there was show of unity was in 1947, when there were Palestinians across the board, together, as a unified whole, fighting to get their land back.

SAB: Thanks, Sumaya, you’ve really laid everything out there. It’s such a different moment right now, because we’re seeing the massive violence of the colonizer completely unleashed, where the Israeli police and government and military and armed settlers are all working together to escalate the ethnic cleansing project. They’re carrying out lynchings of Palestinians in cities like Haifa and Lydd; they’re carrying out the worst bombardment of Gaza that’s ever been seen before. So on the one hand it’s a horrifying and absolutely terrifying moment. Not only did Israel bomb the press building in Gaza that had housed Al-Jazeera and the Associated Press and others, they also bombed Gaza’s largest bookstore. They bombed the homes of three of Gaza’s most prominent doctors and the road to Gaza’s main hospital. Obviously we can’t forget that this is during the COVID pandemic, which has exacerbated preexisting medical apartheid.

In east Jerusalem, weeks before this, the Israeli state, along with settlers, was ramping up their ethnic cleansing project to expel families from Sheikh Jarrah, and at the same time Jewish-Israeli mobs were searching for Palestinians in east Jerusalem to attack and lynch them. That’s escalated to the point where in cities across Israel, Palestinian stores have been attacked, and Palestinian homes have been broken into, to the point where Palestinians in these areas are trying to create self-defense committees.

On the other hand, we’re seeing unprecedented resistance by Palestinians across the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and inside ’48, in a way that’s much more united, and it’s breaking through Israel’s fragmentation of the Palestinian people. Inside Israel, or ’48, the best example might be the city of Lydd, which still has a large Palestinian population. The uprising there reached a level of insurrection where the military came in to crush what they saw as a Palestinian takeover of the city. When Israel started incessantly bombing Gaza, people were protesting at three in the morning in cities across the West Bank, which was very moving to watch.

Then there was the call for the general strike this past Tuesday, which seemed like it was extremely successful: Palestinian laborers in Israel, whether they’re migrant workers from the West Bank or citizens of Israel, in very large part didn’t show up to work. That especially affected certain sectors like construction, which is fifty percent Palestinian workers.

As Sumaya said, overall this is a level of unity across fragmented Palestine that we haven’t seen in decades—some people are saying not since the 1936-39 greater Arab revolt, but certainly not since the Second and First Intifadas of the late eighties and nineties. I’ve been studying the First Intifada a bit, and the demand has actually changed now, from my vantage point at least. Even though the First Intifada was a momentous uprising and together with the ’36-’39 revolt was perhaps the peak of Palestinian struggle, at the same time its main drawback was the mini-state concession. The PLO really had conceded from the start that there would be a two-state solution. And back then the demand was really an end to the occupation, and now I don’t see that as the main demand. Instead it’s a demand to end the entire ethnic cleansing project, end colonization, and for full liberation. I think that’s why the addition of folks in ’48 / Israel is so much more powerful. You can’t just call for the end of the occupation, it’s so much more than that.

Can I comment on what Sumaya was saying about the border protests? It was particularly moving for me and many others to see the mass protests in Jordan that broke through and crossed the border into Palestine—on Nakba Day, which was almost a week ago, on the fifteenth of May. Tens of protesters did the same in Lebanon. As Sumaya said, this symbolizes the desire to return and the right of return for Palestinian refugees across the region and globally. But it also symbolizes that an uprising is happening and people are moved by the prospects of decolonization and liberation.

I think it’s important to note that the last time this happened was ten years ago, also on Nakba Day, and it was during the start of the Arab Spring or MENA revolutions as they’re called. It was a moment of regional uprising when there was the potential for regional decolonization and liberation. Just from that—the fact that this hasn’t happened in ten years, these border-crossing protests—you know we’re witnessing something historic and it is, in fact, an uprising. It’s also a reminder of how closely tied Palestine is to the region as a whole, and how the impulse for Palestinian liberation is tied to broader struggles and the broader desire for freedom from tyranny and oppression and imperialism.

We can talk more about that. I think it’s important to note that while there were protests in countries across the region and the world, there actually weren’t protests in Egypt—in Cairo, for example, or inside Syria’s regime-controlled territory. That’s not because the people there don’t have an affinity towards Palestine, but it’s because protests in solidarity with Palestine present such a threat to those counterrevolutionary regimes.

EA: In Bahrain also—that’s another place where there would be protests otherwise. Yesterday protesters in Haifa were chanting the Hela Hela Ho song that Lebanese people chanted about a year and a half ago, which was really funny for me to see. It shows that there are these cross-border or even anti-border exchanges that are happening at that level.

Sumaya, you mentioned the Judaization project—I wanted to emphasize that this is not just a term that we are using. This is a term that the actual NGOs that we’re referencing have themselves used, which surprises a lot of people. They are in the description of their own websites—that’s a term that they use themselves, which really shows how comfortable they’ve been in thinking that there will be total immunity for this kind of settler-colonial project, even the most brazen version of it.

Both of you mentioned this, so I think we can get into it a bit more, this more intersectional approach that I think the three of us would adopt—and many people are adopting it: on the American side, for example, linking up to Black Lives Matter, to decolonization efforts by a lot of Indigenous folks. And Shireen, you also mentioned how in the Middle East and North Africa, the entire region is linked in the struggles that have for the most part been crushed in the last decade, and what that actually means.

Can we get a bit more into that?

SAB: It can’t be ignored that last summer a Black Lives Matter uprising took hold of the US and also took on global dimensions, and changed the conversation globally about the connections between colonialism and racial oppression today. There was the taking down of statues in the UK and in the US, and now we’re seeing mass movements globally in support of Palestine, and a changed conversation in the US about Palestine. There’s a new way of looking at colonialism and oppression that’s becoming more widespread and agreed upon.

SA: I want to take us back to the strike for a second, because it’s reported that millions participated in it—which is historic, and that’s an understatement. Millions across all occupied Palestine! More than that, it was called by youth. It wasn’t called by any particular faction or political party. It was actually called from the ground, and that’s who led it across the board. There was a very conscious understanding that this is not linked to any of the so-called Palestinian leaders and the parties that they represent.

Even in Sheikh Jarrah, two weeks ago when things were starting to hit the international news, a represent of the PA was going to come visit, and the Sheikh Jarrah community released a statement saying, We don’t want anyone that works with and collaborates with Israeli security to represent us, to come here. That is so important, because right away it ensures that any attempt at “negotiations” will not be taken seriously. Because who are you going to negotiate with? It’s with the Palestinian people on the ground or no one is the message that sends. Also, all of this was unfolding in the leadup to the Nakba.

Shireen mentioned Nakba Day—that’s so important. Because it means it’s been seventy years of Israel trying to erase Palestinians. That is the project: erase Palestinians. Not integrate them and assimilate them—erase them. In fact they’re insisting that we’re all Palestinians from the river to the sea and in the diaspora—and the strike manifesto that was put out really emphasized that the Palestinians in the diaspora are just as Palestinian as Palestinians inside Palestine, which I think is really important.

EA: In 2014 of course there were the Ferguson protests that were happening at the same time as the war in Gaza, and that definitely led a lot of Palestinians and African-American activists and allies all around to link these things up in more concrete ways. Mariam Barghouti, a good friend of mine, was sharing tactics of what to do on the streets, and others were doing the same thing. There’s a book I contributed to called Social Justice and Israel/Palestine, and one of the chapters was specifically on the link between Black Lives Matter and the Palestinian protests from a few years ago. We’ve seen Black Lives Matter releasing statements, of course Angela Davis as well, and a number of other people, and it became more of a conscious thing during the Black Lives Matter uprisings last summer; links are being made more organically.

SAB: I was thinking the same thing recently, seeing people on Facebook, like Shaun King, who has a massive following, posting about Palestine, and saying Israel is committing genocide. I thought this was indicative of the changing conversation, but also I remembered Shaun King speaking at Boston University around 2015, to a packed panel on Black Lives Matter and Palestine, and the connections between Black and Palestinian liberation. Efforts like this made a huge difference in where we are today in the conversation in the US. There were trips that brought Black activists to Palestine, and I know of Palestinian students and activists who were brought to Ferguson during its rebellion in 2014 and 2015.

You’ve mentioned Syria solidarity activists thinking about how the Palestine solidarity movement has made such momentum, and I think other movements should look to this decades-long effort by Palestinians and other activists in the US who have finally brought us to this point. Since I have done some Syria solidarity work in depth as well, I have sometimes come across a sort of impatience—which of course is justified. When it comes to Syria there’s been a massive catastrophe and genocide largely ignored. But there is an impatience in terms of activism in the US—why aren’t folks on board? But as we’ve seen from the Palestinian effort, it takes years of making these connections, and there’s really no alternative to that. We’re pushing back on so many dominant narratives, whether it’s Islamophobia, racism, bad ideas about imperialism, isolation and lack of historical knowledge, and a lot of bad ideas on the left. Even when it comes to Palestine, there are a lot of bad ideas on the left that we have to fight through.

It sometimes feels like We have no time! There are these catastrophes happening now, and we need to act, but at the same time the struggle for liberation is going to take a long time and building those connections and building the movements is what’s going to eventually bring about liberation. There are no shortcuts, basically.

SA: You both mentioned the connections to Black Lives Matter, and Ferguson, which I think is very powerful. The statement that the Movement for Black Lives released at the end of 2016, where it called Israel’s project a genocide, was big breaking point. It was a whole platform that they released; Palestine was just one small part of it. And yet that one small part made front page news across the board.

They just released another statement in solidarity with Palestine, and drawing on the connections is very important and powerful because the direct relationship—the fact that police in this country are trained there, especially in the big metropolises like New York City and Los Angeles and Chicago, and they use the same kinds of weapons and military tactics. But more than that, when you see the images coming out of Sheikh Jarrah, when you see the way soldiers and police were beating up Palestinians—young, old, men, women, doesn’t matter—in the street, you can’t not think of Ferguson. You can’t not think of Minneapolis. Standing Rock. And the list goes on. That was really important.

The fact of COVID in the last year, coupled with the last decade of austerity in the US and elsewhere, has made people really fed up with the government, and really untrusting of what they say and the same lines that they keep repeating to just quell people and squash dissent. It makes people think more like, Okay, I see this happening. The justifications that are constantly given to me no longer really hold water. The idea that Palestinians are the aggressors and instigators; the terrorism charge—even with Hamas right now, when people are like, What about Hamas? I think that’s losing water too. If this had happened three years ago, there wouldn’t be as much of an outcry when Hamas started shooting rockets. Yesterday in the US congress, in the House, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Mark Pocan introduced a resolution to stop this latest arms sale to Israel: $735 million. That happened right after the assault on Gaza. That’s really important, and that’s indicative of a much larger shift.

The way this government has dealt with COVID, and the disaster that has unfolded in the last year in the US and that is unfolding elsewhere in the world is another reason why people are instinctually siding with Palestinians, and choosing to uplift that. Maybe this is different, but I think all of this is part of the shift that we’re seeing in the US—elsewhere as well, but in the US in particular, where often the Zionist narrative is strongest and is so powerful on a number of levels.

EA: I wanted to ask a question about the shift of narratives, and we’ll focus on the US since you’re both based there. In Europe it’s been much slower. We’re seeing some stuff in the UK, we’re seeing some stuff in France, but it’s kind of a mixed bag. I will briefly say, though, on the matter of the exchange: governments are learning from one another as well. You mentioned the example of American and Israeli cops exchanging information and training one another and that sort of thing, but there are also many other things that aren’t talked about as much. The UAE uses Israeli intelligence software to spy on its citizens. Ahmed Monsoor was a famous case a couple of years ago, and he’s still in prison now. Russia uses Israeli drones in Syria. The Chinese government has used Israeli police tactics in their “fight against terrorism,” using Israel’s lessons in how to repress Palestinians to do the same with the Uighurs. There are other things I’m sure I’m forgetting. There’s more obvious stuff like France, or Egypt or Turkey for that matter, swapping weapons with the Israeli government.

Part of what I’m trying to do is just point this out more consciously, especially when these governments are trying to use Palestine to whitewash what they do within their own territories—or even abroad, as in the case of Russia. It has led to this bitterness in activist circles—Shireen, you mentioned this—that we need to be conscious of and careful with, because it ends up being a…

SAB: It’s holding us back.

EA: It’s definitely holding us back. It’s comparing sufferings. That’s something I really think should be avoided, and we need to be very conscious that people will end up doing this if we’re not careful. That’s something that I focus on, at least.

To go back to the shift of narratives—it’s valuable to dwell on this a bit more. A bit of context: I wrote my dissertation in 2016, which was on the politics of Yiddish and Hebrew within Zionist discourse, as well as anti-Zionist discourse in some cases. At that time of course the elections were happening in the US, and it just so happened that pretty much the only major Jewish candidate, Bernie Sanders, was also the only one who didn’t go to AIPAC, and I remember it being this massive thing at the time, something everyone was talking about. There were lots of critiques towards Bernie as well, but this was definitely significant.

Since then, Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now and other groups I’m definitely forgetting made this conscious rejection of the Israeli state’s attempt to say that it is the state of all Jews, and this intersected at the same time with the Ferguson protests first, and then with Black Lives Matter more broadly, and how this ended up being like—I’m hearing lots of statements by Jewish Americans referencing Black Lives Matter in condemning the Israeli government’s actions. I think that’s really powerful.

Can we dwell on this a bit more? What can you tell us from your side?

SA: One of the things, which you alluded to, is this major break with Zionism. There’s a major break with Zionism that’s unfolding in the United States, and growing. That’s massive, because right away what that does is undercut the argument that standing in solidarity with Palestinians, supporting Palestinian rights, demanding an end to occupation and settler-colonialism means you’re antisemitic. It destroys that argument completely.

More and more groups have adopted anti-Zionism. Jewish Voice for Peace officially adopted it in 2017. Other large groups are right now in conversation about coming out publicly against Zionism. That’s really important, because it also means when elected officials, and celebrities, and other political figures with a lot of following want to speak out in solidarity, they know that they can fall back on the fact that not all Jewish people are Zionist. Actually many are saying they are anti-Zionist, that Israel doesn’t get to speak on behalf of all Jewish people.

That’s one of the biggest shifts in the US, in the Jewish community. Another is the ability to draw these organic connections between Palestine and a number of other social justice struggles that have been going, from immigration to antiwar to Black Lives Matter, the list goes on—climate justice work, for that matter, has also made Palestine increasingly in the mainstream and less of a fringe issue, because it’s tied with all of these. Of course this has everything to do with decades and decades of Palestinian activists insisting on this work, despite facing deportation, losing their jobs, and so forth.

Another shift, and we’re seeing the results of this, is happening in congress. These are the places where Palestinians are heard least, if at all. And yet what we saw last Thursday was multiple members of congress on the floor—meaning everything they say is put into the congressional record—speaking up for Palestine. And not hollow slogans about Palestinian rights. Much further than that. Rashida Tlaib talked about her family under occupation. Ayanna Presley asked, What are our values if we’re funding this? Sure, some of it has the same liberal rhetoric that we’re used to. But the fact that it’s happening now, the messaging that’s being used is really different.

We’re using words like ethnic cleansing and apartheid. We’re not just talking about occupation or rights, but really naming exactly what is happening. To be honest, one of the most powerful speeches from the floor of congress was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s. It directly connected what’s happening in Palestine to US imperialism. That’s one of the arguments we have been trying to push in the Palestine rights movement. Can I read an excerpt of it? Again this is not to say we don’t have criticisms of all these people. In this context, the power of these words is really important.

“My family comes from the island of Puerto Rico, and I grew up visiting my family on the island, where the United States bombs its own territories, and I would go to sleep, as a little girl, to the sound of US bombs detonating. “Practice” is what it was called at the time. Practice. When I saw those airstrikes [in Gaza], which are supported with US funds, I could not help but wonder if our communities were practice for this. This is our business, because we are playing a role in it.“

It’s powerful because it connects to US imperialism directly, including what the US is doing in Puerto Rico, and is still doing in Puerto Rico: this practice for what is happening in Gaza. And secondly, it responds to all of the arguments of Why should we care what’s happening in Palestine? Oftentimes that’s what we hear. Why don’t we care about what’s happening in the US? No, this is our business because we are funding it. We are allowing it to happen with our material support.

The whole material support argument I also think is important. For decades, the US has used this idea of “material support for terrorism” to imprison and surveil and deport so many Muslims and Arabs in the United States. The Holy Land Five are a good example: five people who were raising money for backpacks and school supplies for people in Gaza were thrown in jail and are serving sixty-five years. They are still in prison. Meanwhile the US gives Israel $3.8 billion a year that we know goes to buying weapons and the bombs that are falling now on Palestinians in Gaza and killing them. There’s no talk about how that’s material support for the settler-colonial regime.

There’s definitely a shift. The resolution that was introduced, and that Bernie Sanders just signed onto as well and is bringing to the senate floor today, calls for halting this latest sale and shipment of weapons. Congress has ten business days to vote on this. The next ten days are really critical in figuring out how to pressure the senate not to let this deal go through. Not because our liberation is bound up with what the senate does. It’s a lot more than that. But if this doesn’t go through it’s a major signal to Israel that it can’t act with impunity. That there are consequences. We are at a moment when we can hold Israel accountable; the potential for that right now is huge. It’s just a matter of how we seize this opportunity and continue to build momentum, and not let it die down.

SAB: This goes well into what the role of the left is in the current moment. Last week Biden called Netanyahu and said that he’s in total support of Israel, and this week he called Israel and said, Hey, maybe tone it down a little. I’m paraphrasing there. But what’s going on in congress is a reflection of our movements on the street, and what we need to do to pressure them is keep the hundreds of thousands—there were 250,000 people marching in Detroit a few days ago. Our job is to keep the pressure going in the streets. But I have several things to say about the role of the left.

The changing conversation on Palestine might actually be able to push much larger segments of the population to the left in the US, in terms of the relationship to Biden. Biden was seen as this alternative to Trump, almost our “saving grace” in a certain sense—but now we’ve seen there were a thousand people protesting against him in Michigan because of him trying to make a $735 million arms sale to Israel while they’re bombing Gaza. This is a chance to push back against him, which is huge and necessary.

In terms of what you were saying earlier about the interconnection, whether it’s the police—there’s also G4S, Hewlett Packard, these corporations who profit off the prison system in the US and Israel, or the shared technology on the US-Mexico border. All of that points to what Sumaya was talking about, the connection between Israel and imperialism and the role of Israel globally, what my chapter in the book was about: Israel as the watchdog for US imperialism. It has been that way since its inception, pretty much. When the US couldn’t openly sell weapons to reactionary regimes in Latin America, or globally really, they had Israel do that.

One of the big roles for socialists right now is making that connection to imperialism. And the call for BDS is already being put forward. Bernie has already said, Reassess US aid to Israel, but we need to demand a total end to it.

EA: You mean not even conditional, but just cut it off.

SAB: Yes. But I also think we have to put forward as socialists that we need mass movements here to end this US-Israel relationship. What AOC is doing is unprecedented, it is the first time this is happening. And that might stop the sale of $735 million worth of weapons, but that’s not enough to end the US-Israel relationship, which is steeped in imperialism. A change to that requires a change to the US also as an imperial superpower, which would need a mass uprising here, if not an end to the Democratic Party and the two-party system as a whole.

That might sound far-fetched, but we see that it’s not entirely impossible. We had a mass uprising across the US last summer, and if it continues, this is a movement that is taking shape right now. In addition to that, in terms of what we’re pushing for on the left or as Palestine solidarity activists, we have to push for a revival of BDS in many ways, and a revival of our movements. They really took a hit during the Trump presidency. For example, a lot of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapters sort of went underground because of the level of repression, and there were anti-BDS laws being put forward. But it’s possible to put forward BDS right now, in the current moment, while the conversation is changing.

For example, in Boston we have an organization called BDS Boston, and for three years the group fought for Cambridge city council to put forward a resolution to cut ties with Hewlett Packard because they provide technology for the Israeli military, and that came under horrific backlash in around 2018 or 2019. But in the past week, a DSA councilperson brought the resolution back—it’s back on the table because of Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza, and because of the conversation changing right now and the attention on Israel’s crimes.

We’ll have to see what happens with this particular resolution, but it shows there’s an opening for actual on-the-ground efforts to put BDS into practice. But you might be surprised to know that BDS Boston is one of the only campaigns or chapters in the entire US. There’s massive support for it, but conversation alone is not enough. The BDS movement in the US is actually much weaker than in Europe or in other parts of the world, in terms of actual divestment and cutting ties.

I could say more. The argument we make in the book Sumaya co-edited and I contributed to is the understanding of Palestinian liberation as tied to regional liberation, tied to an understanding of imperialism as not just US imperialism but the current stage of imperialism globally. I don’t know if you want to talk more about the left. It’s interesting being at protests right now, because being in the DSA—for example in Boston we’re managing to bring more and more DSA folks out to these protests.

EA: And the DSA is the Democratic Socialists of America for those who don’t know.

SAB: Yes. And it’s an effort to re-orient DSA. Because DSA can often be focused on the electoral aspect or getting socialists into office, but now we’re saying we need people on the street to show that we support Palestine, and to be part of this movement. That’s an argument we’re making. And at the same time there are other socialist groups like—I was very frustrated seeing groups like Socialist Alternative, who have an analysis that we push back against in the book, in the chapter about the Israeli working class: they still think Israel’s working class is a potentially progressive force (which completely overlooks what’s happening on the ground), and because of this they are against BDS.

There’s a lot of work. We see overall the left being so in support of Palestine, but there is a lot of work to be done still, of course. There are other groups like PSL, which sees US imperialism as the major imperialist force, and is against the Syrian revolution. Again, we need socialists who are saying actually we need an end to the regimes across the Middle East that are colluding with Israel in one way or another or preventing their people from rising up in solidarity with Palestine. That needs to be part of the analysis.

SA: I’ll pick up where Shireen left off. We need to connect Palestine to all of these other anti-imperialist struggles in the region and beyond, and when speaking to the media connecting Palestine to Syria, to Western Sahara, to Yemen, to Afghanistan. This is key, because it also forces all of those not in Palestine to reckon with the fact that this is what Palestinians are saying, they are making those connections, they’re saying, It’s not just us. They’re de-exceptionalizing what’s happening. There’s nothing new about what Israel is doing. It’s something that’s been done again and again.

Jehad Abusalim, who is a Palestinian from Gaza currently based in the US, also pointed out to me that during the protests at Al-Aqsa last week, there were Syrian revolution flags flying. People are making connections between Palestine and Syria. So this is not new, this is not something being imposed, this is something organic that people are calling for.

Before talking about what we need to do, I want to preface it by saying that in the US, the attacks on the Palestine movement, on Palestine solidarity, are very vicious. More than in other places. Not only on the ground, on campuses and within organizations and communities, but they happen on the federal level. There are over two hundred laws right now attempting to criminalize Palestine advocacy. Twenty-two percent of them have passed. There are new laws expected to be introduced this year that in some states would make any criticism of Israel and Zionism be considered not just hate speech but potentially a hate crime. That’s a federal offense. A simple statement like Israel is an apartheid state could be considered a hate crime.

There’s no reason to think these are just going to disappear because the movement is growing. Sure, the movement is growing; there are more people, more celebrities and elected officials are speaking out publicly—but US policy remains the same. It hasn’t wavered yet. If this resolution to stop the arms sale goes through, that might be one of the first times that we’re actually able to influence policy in that way.

And of course there’s social media censorship—I’m sure everyone’s heard about this already, this has been happening for years, but in the last three weeks alone, the amount of censorship on Facebook and on Instagram has felt unprecedented. I don’t have the data to back up that it is unprecedented, but it felt that way. Palestinians on the ground in Sheikh Jarrah or in Haifa or in Gaza could not do Instagram livestreams, could not post videos, had their accounts taken down; they were shadow-banned, which just means you can’t access their stories. A lot of these were just videos showing police brutality, showing exactly what’s happening. So social media censorship is a really big part of one of the ways of clamping down on the growing Palestine movement, and just in general on growing solidarity.

Especially as we’ve seen so many people who have never spoken out, come out in support of Palestine—and not in a hollow way, but actually using words like ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Of course, three weeks ago Human Rights Watch released their 213-page report formally accusing Israel of apartheid and persecution, and more than that, also talking about the corruption in the PLO, and most importantly, calling for sanctions—recommending to the United Nations that sanctions should be applied on Israel.

This is huge—not because it’s new. We’ve been saying it for decades. Every Palestinian you ask will say, We’ve been saying this for seventy-three years. But it gives us more to fall back on, more evidence. The more we say this, the more people are saying this from different directions, the more likely we are to be able to hold Israel accountable.

As to the left in the US: there is so much opportunity and potential right now. There is an actual left in the United States right now, which there hadn’t been for many decades. It’s still small, but it exists and it’s growing. I think Democratic Socialists of America is a big part of that. It’s around ninety thousand members right now and still growing, and a majority of those members joined in the last two to three years. What that means is we need to organize in our unions to divest from Israel, from Israeli bonds. Many of the largest unions in the US are still invested in Israeli bonds. We need to call for sanctions. We need to pressure the US to call for sanctions on Israel. Five years ago I would have considered this a lofty dream that would happen decades down the line. But right now it seems very possible, very real, both because of the movements on the ground that are unified and that are calling for this, and because of the very rapid growth of the Palestine solidarity movement globally, and particularly in the US.

In the US it’s different from all the other countries, because the influence of the US-Israel relationship. The US basically paid for the Iron Dome, first of all. It’s Israel’s single largest arms supplier. And it’s constantly diverting any attempt to hold Israel accountable in the UN or any other body. In the US we have a very particular role to play.

Another thing is BDS—the B and the D part, the boycotts and divestments, on campuses and in workplaces, is really key. All of this plays into how we influence policy directly. At the end of the day it does make a difference when there is something like AOC or Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar in congress. It makes a difference when those people are saying what we want them to say. And they don’t say it overnight. They say it after a lot of conversations and pressure and people organizing on the ground. But it makes a very big difference. The photo that came out of Rashida Tlaid confronting Joe Biden on the tarmac in Michigan—this is a US member of congress confronting the president in public, saying, Stop supplying the arms that are killing my family. This is historic on so many levels. It’s important to point that out and think about how to grow that and make the most out of that.

The other thing in the US in particular is really growing the anti-Zionist movement, and thinking about how we use that terminology to build what Palestinians are calling for. It’s not just apartheid. It’s ethnic cleansing. It’s not just apartheid, it’s settler-colonialism. We need to call for full decolonization, not just part, and really cut back against the fragmentation, the abstract and geographic fragmentation that Israel is using to control Palestinians and entrench its project.

There’s a lot of potential for the left, but it’s a question of how quickly we can organize to use this moment, because we’re not going to happen for very much longer. Usually when a ceasefire is called, things die down and go back to the status quo, which for Palestinians is the everyday brutality of occupation. So how do we use this right now to really call for sanctions, for BDS.

EA: You mentioned the climate movement. I was happily surprised to see the Fridays for Future coalition has put out a statement essentially saying they support Palestine against ethnic cleansing. They actually problematized it themselves, asking the question, Why is a climate group talking about Palestine? and they attempted to answer. I think that’s a very important conversation to have, especially in the context of Israel’s myth of “greening the desert” and all of that.

On the apartheid question, the Human Rights Watch report is of course very important. B’Tselem said that a few years ago, and other groups across the world have said this before, but Human Rights Watch saying it has its impact. Last Sunday I spoke with a friend of mine on this podcast who is South African and she’s also Jewish. And she managed to elaborate in very specific ways how the comparison to apartheid has limitations. Yes, it is apartheid, but as you also said Sumaya, it is also more than that. No comparison is ever perfect, of course. It is useful inasmuch as there is the crime of apartheid and persecution, which is a very specific legal crime, and that is something that can be campaigned on, which is very important. But there are also the next steps to be taken, which I think Palestinians are very well tuned to.

We’re winding down a bit, but I would like a few more thoughts on your side if there’s anything I may have missed, if there’s anything you wanted to tackle or expand upon a bit more.

SA: Every time I have one of these conversations, I always think there are a million things I forgot to say. I think it’s the richness of how Palestinians resist, the myriad ways that they do, and also the brutality of what Israel is doing and the myriad methods they come up with of oppressing Palestinians.

I wanted to share that a seventeen-year-old Palestinian was shot on the day of the strike, on Tuesday, and he succumbed to his wounds yesterday. His name is Mohammad Mahameed Kiwan. Palestinians in ’48 organized a very large demonstration and march for his funeral, which was today. And there were thousands of people at his funeral, and they all chanted in unison—I want to read the chant. It’s in Arabic, so I’ll translate it: We were not born to live in degradation. We were born to live in freedom.

That is really emblematic of everything that Palestinians, from the river to the sea, from Gaza to the West Bank to Jerusalem and ’48, and in the diaspora—that is the root of our struggle. We want to live free. We just want to live. We don’t want to live everyday just trying to survive to the next. We want to actually live in freedom. That’s the call that people all over the world are demanding, as they suffer from COVID, as they suffer from austerity, and from settler-colonialism in a number of different places.

I also want to share that just a little over a decade ago, you couldn’t really say Palestine or Palestinian on the mainstream news. It would be edited out, or it would have to come with some sort of qualification. Now we have Palestinians saying what they want to say in their own words, in the mainstream. And I think that is really indicative of the shift that is happening. I also want to say that as exciting and inspiring as all of this is, at the same time we are nowhere near where we need to be. There is so much that needs to be done. It’s not going to be as simple as in a year there’s a chance Palestine will be free. We are in a new chapter, as the strike manifesto says. This is a new chapter that we’re writing, and it’s an important one, but it necessitates that everyone understand the urgency of this moment—the urgency of this potential not just for Palestinian freedom but for liberation across the region, in the Middle East and North Africa, and here in the United States.

What would it mean to fully cut ties between Israel and the US? To uncover all of these arms deals, these surveillance deals and technology deals—that has huge ramifications on a number of struggles in the United States as well. The US remains the most powerful imperial country in the world, so anything that happens here will have ripple effects around the world.

EA: It wasn’t that long ago that Netanyahu went to congress and got more standing ovations than even Obama did. It is pretty significant that we’re seeing people like Noura [Erakat], and Mariam [Barghouti], and other people on these media outlets. Noura herself mentioned that she would actually be allowed to talk, and they would be sympathetic—our expectations have gotten so low that even this is amazing. Not that it isn’t significant, but there is a bit of a bittersweet aspect to it as well.

SA: News is breaking that a ceasefire has been agreed to for tomorrow morning between Hamas and Israel. It’s important to say that the resolution that was introduced by these members of congress and Bernie had the effect of applying pressure on Israel. Because if something like this passes and gains traction, it sets a precedent for other arms deals not to go through, and other actions. I’m sure you all heard about the ship in Italy, and the one in the Bay Area, where workers were organizing not to unload or load ships with arms going to Israel.

The hope is that, despite this ceasefire (which of course is good), momentum doesn’t die down, and the urgency of what is happening in Palestine continues, and that people don’t only care when Gaza is being carpet bombed, but they also care when Gaza is under siege, when Palestinians are forced out of their homes, and when the ethnic cleansing project continues in all the other ways.

EA: And given that it’s tomorrow morning, tonight might also be very terrifying. People should not forget that.

SAB: I really agreed with what you said—to reach liberation we still have so much work to do. What we’re seeing right now, just to reiterate: the colonizer is getting more and more violent. It’s the most brutal bombardment of Gaza, more brutal than 2009, 2012, 2014. It’s hard to imagine but the brutality keeps getting more intense. And it’s horrific, but we can expect more of that. On the one hand, the colonizer is getting more violent, and on the other hand, our side is just starting to cohere, but with a higher expectations for what liberation is going to be.

We saw a youth-led effort in Sheikh Jarrah, and across cities inside ’48 it has largely been youth-led. That is rejecting the concessions that the political parties have made, whether in the First Intifada as I mentioned, or in many other instances, and saying, Our vision of liberation is so much bigger than that. But still, there’s so much work to be done just to cohere, and this is not just in Palestine. This is also here. It’s also across the Middle East. What is our side going to look like? How are we going to build towards power?

We’re just starting to see a left in the US, in the DSA, and we’re just starting to figure it out. The DSA has been invaluable—but we’re still figuring out what our best route is to actual changes on the ground and to actual power. We have to keep building our movement and make it sustain, as you said Sumaya. And our job as socialists, again, is just to keep these connections going.

I wanted to mention there weren’t protests inside regime Syria, but there were protests in Idlib, which is what they call “rebel-held,” or non-regime Syria. There were protests in solidarity. So paying attention to the regional aspect—which, again, is in a period of despair. We can’t romanticize that. We need to be in a much stronger position in the US, in Palestine, and globally, to actually get to that liberation that we want to see.

EA: In Beirut as well there were protests today for Palestine, and they meet extreme pressure. The numbers are definitely smaller than they would be otherwise. A few days ago there were attempts to get to the border, which was stopped because it’s a UN zone, and the army stops people—non-Lebanese people specifically, I should say.

Just to emphasize that the state of Lebanon is definitely in a state of war with Israel, and one would think—people who don’t know the context will assume that the political class is more sympathetic, but they are actually not. They are just using it for their purposes. I won’t get into the Hezbollah stuff right now; I rant about them elsewhere. But it’s something that Palestinians in Lebanon definitely have to deal with significantly more.

SA: One thing that I’ve really noticed—this is back to the shift. I’m new to Twitter. I joined Twitter in December, and I suddenly feel like it’s a whole world I’ve been missing out on. For good or for bad, I don’t know. It’s increasingly become clear, at least in the US, in the last month in particular, is that there’s no longer a middle ground. You either support Palestinians’ demands for freedom, or you justify what Israel is doing. The excuse of ignorance really falls flat. Palestine has been pushed to the mainstream over the last few weeks in the United States. You’ve heard about it one way or another, even if you don’t know any of the details. Your choice to be silent is either because you agree with what Israel is doing, or you don’t care about Palestinians dying in the hundreds, or it’s out of fear. If it’s the latter, hopefully people will overcome that slowly because of how fast the movement is growing and how robust it is and how unapologetic it is in its demands.

That’s where we are in the US. You’re with the oppressor or you’re with the oppressed. There’s no middle ground to navigate.

SAB: Mohammed El Kurd, one of the leaders in Sheikh Jarrah, has said it very bluntly: you’re either an unapologetic racist or you’re with Palestinians. That’s the reason Palestine is at the center of my politics, and that’s why it’s a guide to other struggles that we need to see as so connected. You’re either with the oppressed, or with the oppressor. It’s that simple. It’s that simple when it comes to Syria, too. That’s the framework that we need to use.

EA: That’s a good note to end on. Thanks a lot for this, this has been really informative.