For episode 182, Elia, Anna, and Dana are joined by author, scholar, and activist Naomi Klein to discuss her most recent book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, and the myriad connections her analysis of the cultural rise of fascism has to our work at From the Periphery. 

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Recent Articles

• 972Mag: Israel’s renewed war on Lebanon is about more than just Hezbollah (archived)
• Good Law Project: Trump’s illegal war puts all of us at risk (archived)

Recent Interviews

• It Could Happen Here: Israel’s Attack on Lebanon
• Crimethinc: “History Is Repeating Itself”
• The Final Straw podcast: The US-Israeli War with Iran Spreads, Nuclear Weapons, Lebanon and Anti-Imperial Solidarity
• The Dugout podcast: Honoring Political Ghosts
• The Breakup Theory podcast: Episode 31 – Iran and the US-Israeli Death Drive Economy

Highlighted Hauntologies articles

• Israel’s Lebanese Ghosts (March 2026)
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• Iranian protesters don’t owe us an explanation (February 2026)
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• Notes on Assadism, Zionism, Fascism and Hope (August 2025)

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Check out other projects: Politically Depressed⁠ | Syria: The Inconvenient Revolution | From The Periphery Podcast | The Mutual Aid Podcast⁠

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• Naomi Klein has a website, a newsletter, and is on Instagram and Bluesky
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Credits:

Hosts: Elia Ayoub, Anna M, Dana El Kurd | Guest: Naomi Klein | Music: ⁠⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠ | TFTT theme design: Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠ | FTP theme design: Hisham Rifai⁠ | Sound editor: Kaylee | Team profile pics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠ | Episode design: Elia Ayoub | Producer: Aydın Yıldız

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities, employers, or other affiliations the speakers may have.

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

Standing on the side of life, in the context of genocide and ecocide and the normalization of mass death on pretty much every front—I don’t believe that’s moderate. I don’t believe it’s liberal. I believe it’s radical, transformational. There’s a posture of radicalism that actually defends these institutions, defends massive states with massive armies. I don’t want to cede the definition of what is radical to those self-styled “radicals.”

Dana El Kurd: Hello everybody, my name is Dana El Kurd; I am a Palestinian researcher, writer, and professor, and I’m very happy to be here.

Anna: Hi everybody, my name is Anna; I am a cohost of Obscuristan, and a lawyer and Armenian in the United States.

Elia Ayoub: Hi everyone, I’m Elia, I’ve been doing this a few years now; I’m currently a post-doc researcher and I write stuff.

Naomi Klein: I’m Naomi. I’m based in British Columbia, Canada, on unceded shíshálh territory most of the time, and I also write stuff. I also teach stuff.

EA: Thank you a lot for coming on. 

We wanted to have this conversation revolve around Doppelganger—it’s been one of my favorite recent books—but it’s also partly going to be about the broader topics of conspiracy thinking, what it’s like to challenge someone who is “on the other side,” what the implications are of some of the stuff you get into to organizing spaces, and your long history of writing on challenges in activism. 

We have three different positionalities; the hope is that this enriches the wider conversation. The reason I wanted to do an episode on Doppelganger is that I resonated a lot with the themes you get into in the book. The way to think about this “mirror world,” as you call it, is something familiar to the three of us. Although we come from different experiences—whether it be my experience with Syria and Lebanon; Dana with Palestine; Anna with Armenia and Artsakh—we saw similar themes or commonalities that most folks would have missed. 

Personally, the framework of starting to think about the mirror world and conspiracy thinking, understanding them as narrative structures, helped me a lot. Before that, I would be lost a lot of the time: Why is someone believing this? It’s not real! This is absurd! It took me a while to realize what you point out in the book: that the “other side” sees us in similar enough terms, and that can be very unsettling.

For those who haven’t read Doppelganger, give us a bit of an overview of what it’s about. After you do, I’ll share a funny anecdote I’ve never had a reason to share until now.

NK: That’s very intriguing!

The thing about Doppelganger is: unlike every other book I’ve written, it’s hard to summarize. I had such an easy capsule—what is The Shock Doctrine, what is This Changes Everything? It’s important for me to say off the top that I consider Doppelganger a work of creative nonfiction, unlike the other books I’ve written. I always care about the writing, but it’s more experimental in its form, which just makes it hard to say what Doppelganger is about. I’m still trying to figure it out.

It’s one of the things that makes it fun to talk about, because more than anything I’ve else I’ve written, Doppelganger inspires other writers and thinkers to play, to take it places I never could have imagined. With The Shock Doctrine, people would be like, You forgot a chapter! What about Turkey? or apply its framework but in a way that was very recognizable to me. Whereas where people have taken Doppelganger is so cool to me. I’ve learned so much from these conversations, which is why I was really looking forward to this one, because I see so many connections and affinities between what you’ve been doing with this podcast and your various projects and some of what I was trying to get at with Doppelganger.

The short form of it is: it’s an attempt to map the wildness of now, including the way everything seems to be turned upside-down and we don’t know who and what we can trust, including ourselves. I use the literary tool of the fact that I have a doppelganger, somebody who many, many people have confused with me over many years. The term Doppelgänger comes from the German; it translates as “double walker.” In mythology it’s often the experience of somebody walking down the street and seeing themselves. My experience of having a doppelganger isn’t exactly that; it’s other people telling me I have done things I haven’t done—screaming at me about it, thanking me for it—just confusion on a mass scale in a way that only the internet can produce.

I don’t think that’s particularly unique. There’s lots of people who I confuse with other people online. I don’t think our brains are wired to encounter as many names and faces, especially in as small forms as we do on social media; we tend to put people in different baskets, and I got put in the same basket as a writer named Naomi Wolf, who also writes nonfiction books. 

And not only is she a doppelganger of me, but she’s a doppelganger of herself. She’s one of these people who we all know, and who you talk about on the show: people who used to be one way and kind of seemed to change, fell down the rabbit hole, started believing these wild things. One of these people like, What ever happened to that person? She’s a doppelganger of who she used to be, a mainstream liberal feminist, and now she’s hanging out with Steve Bannon and cheering on Donald Trump and the January 6 insurrection, showing off her guns, talking about the “war on the border.” She has conspiracy theories about everything from ISIS beheadings to cloud formation. There’s nothing she doesn’t have a conspiracy theory about. 

So basically I used my own identity confusion to fall down the rabbit hole with her and try to understand this world that she now inhabits. We used to be in a similar political space; now we’re not. But that’s not just true of her and me, that’s true of lots of people. 

That’s why the book is very hard to describe. It ends in Gaza; it came out a month before October 7. Ultimately, it’s a book about fascism, I guess is what I could say. Many literary works have used the figure of the double to get at the uncanniness of fascism, the way a whole society can flip into its evil twin, and that sense of menace, that sense of: Has it happened already? Are we there yet? Can I trust my neighbor? Have they joined the mob? We all have either experienced that ourselves or know people who have had that very direct experience.

We’re in a moment like that, so I used this very mundane thing of being mass-confused with someone else to basically write a book about fascism, but through various back doors, if that makes sense.

EA: Yeah!

The anecdote is that I was Facebook friends with the other Naomi years ago, back a century ago when it was very easy to just add people on Facebook, and people were still using Facebook. I was writing for Global Voices at the time, and it was 2014, so exactly ten years ago, during the last war on Gaza (which of course wasn’t as bad as the current one; it wasn’t technically a genocide but it was still quite bad). I had written an article about an Israeli ex-IDF guy who had turned into a whistleblower and was exposing all these things, and she shared that article on Facebook.

And she did the thing I later recognized—at the time I didn’t really think about it, to be honest—that we would call “baking,” finding different links that aren’t there, connecting dots that aren’t actually there. And she was doing this in a participatory way: she was asking her followers on Facebook to chime in, which I recognized later on as a thing that folks in the conspiracy world do a lot. At the time I hadn’t really encountered it. But that’s my funny way into this. 

When I was reading Doppelganger, I didn’t know about how there were lots of people confusing you with her. But you go through the details—your husbands have the same first name, and other funny commonalities which are very uncanny and uncomfortable. And I realized at some point that this was a person I interacted with ten years ago, and since then things have just gotten weirder.

NK: I do have a little section of the book where the subhead is “When she was right.” It’s about that 2014 moment where she had an awakening, as someone who grew up as a liberal Zionist—I think she spent time living in Israel, and seemed to have had a fairly conventional Jewish upbringing—and all of her illusions fell away at once. She was describing it as a genocide; she got all kinds of blowback.

This was the part of the book where I talk about the thing that bothers me most about being confused with her: that she’s a liberal and I’m a leftist. Yes, she had a critique of patriarchy in her first book The Beauty Myth, but it was always a “Lean In” critique: These beauty standards are unfair to women because they’re keeping us from advancing in the corporate workplace or in politics, because we have all this extra beauty labor. That’s fine, it’s just not my politics. It was always annoying to me.

But I do think it’s important in understanding that there is a particular type of person who gets radicalized over Palestine, and they’re often liberals—it’s so shocking to them; they believed liberal self-flattering myths, and Zionism and Israeli war crimes unmask it so completely that it creates this complete shock. And then you say, This is wrong! and then you get completely kicked out of your community. She had that experience.

I grew up in an actual left family. I’m a third-generation red-diaper baby, so I didn’t get kicked out of my family. I didn’t lose as much as she lost; I didn’t have the illusions she had. But I know other people like that, and they are liberals. They are not leftists. This is what bothers me about horseshoe theory! If you look at her or RFK Jr. or Glenn Greenwald—these are hardcore liberals who really believed in the myth of America, and are very patriotic and all that.

I think we should define it properly, because it’s just not that many Marxists who are prone to become believers in fantastical conspiracies. I’m not saying they never do, but I think a firm hold on the workings of capitalism is your best defense against conspiracy thinking. It’s not fail-safe. But if you have pretty much no analysis of capital, and then you suddenly realize that things are not as they seemed, you’re much more prone to believing these fantastical stories. 

It’s interesting you called it “baking;” now that needs to be distinguished from “cooking.”

A: I wrote down horseshoe theory right before you said it. It strikes me that most often, the poles that are described as most similar are leftists and conspiracy theorists—and you can understand why. In your book you talk about the funhouse mirror that we’re all being filtered through and why these things are held up as similar. But what resonated with me the most in your book was that that path actually does not go through leftism. 

It might touch on some things that leftism touches on; it might ding it a little bit on the way. If you’re critiquing power, you’re going to end up critiquing some of the same stuff eventually. But the path doesn’t actually travel through being a leftist into being in this funhouse mirror world. It’s actually much more direct. That is really valuable, because in the same way Naomi Wolf is a doppelganger of herself, I think some of us can relate to being seen as doppelgangers of ourselves if you move away from liberalism—but they could not be more different mechanisms.

It’s worth drilling into that, because some of the reason that this funhouse mirror is so realistic is because there’s an unwillingness to actually examine its component parts and see that it looks like glass, it’s behaving like glass in some ways, but on a much more granular level, it is not in fact glass. Maybe we can go into this a little bit later in more depth.

NK: I just want to add one thing, Anna. There are some people who are leftists—I’m just saying this because you grapple with this a lot on the show, around people whose guiding worldview is definitely not liberal, but neither are they anticapitalists. It’s mainly anti-imperialists. So it’s definitely leftists; I wouldn’t put them in the Naomi Wolf camp. This is a lot of who you’ve been talking about around Syria, where the animating force in their lives is anti-US-imperialism. And I’m against US imperialism too! But I think that having that as your animating life force without a broader engagement with capitalism also gets you into the mirror world pretty fast.

DK: It’s a shallow anti-imperialism, and oftentimes it can be chauvinist.

A: One of the things we argue on the show is that these struggles draw on each other, and the blind spots that result from not having a pulse on other issues can show up pretty quickly. You’re talking about imperialism and capital, but for me, I most often see it when it comes to imperialism and abolition. When those aren’t in dialogue, I see real issues coming up in how anti-imperialism is manifested.

For me, anti-imperialism was also the thing that animated me away from liberalism. But it was in conjunction with abolition, and I think that played a huge role in how I see the anti-imperial movement. I do see it as a different camp than the more direct pipeline that your doppelganger represents.

NK: For sure. But I think one place where they come together is this question of whether or not you just want your turn in the system. If we think about her critique of patriarchy, it was just like she wanted women to be able to be at the top within these same structures. So yeah, what Dana is referring to as shallow anti-imperialism is similar: some forms of it are just, It’s our turn now. We don’t want to change these fundamental power structures, we just want our turn. 

Then that becomes a replication, it becomes a doppelganger. I think Zionism is a pretty powerful example of that, in its own way—not as anti-imperialist, but as an understanding of what it means to fight antisemitism: Jews get to do what white people have done around the world. It’s an Our turn now! approach to justice. 

DK: And that’s my biggest concern. We don’t have to segue to Israel-Palestine quite so quickly, but that’s my biggest concern with what people are understanding of this moment, when it comes to the Palestinian [cause]. Are we deducing the right implications from what we’ve witnessed, especially in the last year? Have we learned what Palestine actually means?

EA: I have an interesting segue. As you guys were talking I thought of who could be a doppelganger, not necessarily just for me personally but for a lot of people who were in Lebanon or Gaza while the Israelis are bombing—or Syria now, for that matter. And that’s the IDF’s Arabic spokesperson. He’s often referred to by his first name, Avichay [Adraee], and there’s something about him that’s very uncanny because he speaks our language. In theory, he can understand a mother mourning her dead child. He can literally understand what she is saying, whereas Netanyahu doesn’t have to. He can’t, but he doesn’t have to.

And for most people in Lebanon especially—because unlike in Gaza where they would bomb absolutely everything (although they did that in parts of Lebanon as well), they would often release maps to let people know, sometimes with twenty minutes in advance and sometimes with two hours: We’re going to bomb here—those maps became very familiar. And they were always associated with him, because he would be the one releasing them on social media, on his account. So people would literally be talking to each other and saying, Have you seen what Avichay said? Have you seen where they have pointed, the next place to be bombed?

I wrote a piece on my newsletter about him; he’s the face of death in Lebanon. Most people in Lebanon would see him more frequently than the face of Netanyahu, because he would appear every day a dozen different times. For me, I felt this a few times: You speak our language, you surely know. I go through these moments; he’s been doing this since 2006 or something, and yet every time I’m almost tempted to believe, He’s going to come around! It’s not rational, it’s just thoughts that come through.

DK: You know our slogans, you know our slang!

EA: You’re able to talk to us! And he does. On his YouTube channel, he used to have debates with Palestinians. Whereas with Netanyahu, at no point do I have this. He’s just someone I know wants to be in power, and he’s very racist and he wants to take land. It’s more boring—how can I describe a genocide as boring? It’s more predictable. Whereas with Avichay, I always feel like, You’re almost there! But you never are. And that feels very uncomfortable.

DK: That uncanniness—I feel it with a lot of Arab Jewish communities in Israel. There are so many parallels, and we’ve come to very different conclusions about those parallels.

EA: That’s a very good point. [Itamar] Ben-Gvir is of Iraqi-Kurdish origins or something like that.

NK: It’s the chill of the familiar, right? When you can say, This is so Other! it’s horrible, but it’s simple; then you’re able to push it away.

When I see Wolf brandishing her gun and talking about the “war on the border” and making these chilling alliances with people who she herself used to call “the devil,” it has that same chill, that I don’t have when I watch Trump or whatever. There’s no part of me that understands him; he feels like another species. It’s not just because people confuse me with her, but because there’s a weird way I feel related to her.

DK: On some level there’s a similar starting point.

NK: There’s a kinship. That’s what Freud wrote about doppelgangers. Otto Rank wrote about doppelgangers first in a psychoanalytic framework; there were having this debate, Otto Rank was his student, then they fell out. But Freud was speculating that there’s this draw to the doppelganger in the arts because they stand in for the lives we might have led. We all have this sense that the lives we have are the result of partially our own choices—something that we can own—but also decisions that were totally not ours: our parents deciding to emigrate. It’s why when we see people who look like us in huge danger or committing crimes, it just lights up the randomness of the lives that we have.

That uncanniness, I think, is fruitful. It’s more useful for us to be able to identify with people who commit horrible crimes than it is to always be able to push it away and say, That’s them.We’re always reaching for [the moral high ground], because it’s too terrible.

DK: It reminds me of what James Baldwin says about how That could be you. It’s uncomfortable, but for any kind of future-minded politics, we need to be able to have that empathy. Not empathy for people’s crimes, but empathy for some basic starting points, let’s say.

A: I think this is where abolition helps inform a good way to stop yourself from becoming a terrible person, frankly. Because abolition of prisons and police forces you to confront the worst parts of not just your country or the world you live in, but the scariest parts of your community, the scariest things that you might actually see yourself experiencing. That type of exercise in empathy also gives you a pathway to imagining an alternative way of being and of living.

What sometimes is missing in both anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist work is that if you can see yourself being an oppressor in a different context, that is really powerful for how you might structure your movement or our society in order to constrain that corruption of yourself, too. That’s something that abolition and abolition spaces give a pathway toward: how you create justice, accountability, and then really keep in mind what horror you’re trying to prevent, while also always seeing yourself sometimes in the worst ways. 

It’s an exercise that is kind of scary, but is really important. It really does provide a structure for how we can structure our movements for liberation.

DK: Obviously the last year has been catastrophic for Palestine, with the war in Gaza and ongoing genocide. The added layer of catastrophe is the fact that there continues to be a lack of a pathway forward, and that’s been coupled with an authoritarian resurgence here in the United States and in the Global North more broadly. I can speak from the United States: the crackdown on academic freedom, on protest, on people’s demand for accountability in foreign policy, culminating in the election of Trump…

That’s the backdrop which we’ve experienced in the last very exhausting year, but in some ways the questions that led us to the moment of catastrophe remain the same now in this new stage of catastrophe: what future exists for Israel-Palestine? Can we envision a pathway forward that is beyond a zero-sum view of the conflict? We’re recording this on December 17, 2024, in the shadow of genocide.

Obviously I’ve been following your work and your speaking about this, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on some of these issues. First, given where we are now, and that Trump has been elected, we are going to see even more of a state crackdown in an unprecedented way, as well as a Trump foreign policy exemplified by the appointments of people like Elise Stefanik and Mike Huckabee. So I’m wondering: how should the pro-Palestine movement and pro-Palestine activists here in the United States or in the Global North more broadly think about shifting to meet this current moment?

I know it’s a lot.

NK: It’s a lot, but it’s a great question. I would just say: I don’t know when this is going to air, but we are talking in this interregnum; we don’t really know where we are right now. Trump is staffing up; he’s throwing out all kinds of trial balloons—but the truth is, we don’t know what February is going to look like. It’s a very good time to think about what’s going to guide us, who we want to be in what is coming.

I’m not in the United States by choice, I moved back to Canada during the pandemic; luckily that was possible for me. But we’re all impacted, wherever we are in the world, by what happens there—and we have our own far-right party in waiting that will probably be in power by summer.

I was talking to my twelve-year-old this morning. He’s obsessed with this bill, the shorthand of which is the “nonprofit-killer,” which they’ve been trying to get through congress, and they will under Trump. It uses Palestine as a wedge to shut down the whole left nonprofit sector—and civil society, universities, all of it. We’ve seen this before; we saw it after 9/11. But more than that, what we’re seeing very clearly is a lack of fightback—it’s extraordinary. 

You would think that, given the level of threat, there would be some kind of coordinated response from liberal nonprofits, universities, foundations, who are all in the crosshairs. None of them are even working together; they’re all terrified, getting ready to capitulate—if not already doing so. And the capitulation in the face of Palestine that we saw from our universities, from our NGOs, the willingness to just shut up—not everyone! We know who the exceptions are. But huge swathes of liberal society, the arts, museums, whatever—I was involved in the PEN fights—all of this was preparing the ground for the capitulation that we’re already seeing.

Nothing stays where it is. Your question, Dana, around what is next—as somebody who doesn’t live in Israel, I’m not identified with Israel as a project; I feel like my project as a Jewish person is the exodus from Zionism, the viability of diasporism. My values and principles and ethics guide what I think the future of Israel and Palestine should be in the same way that it does pretty much anywhere else. I believe in equality, period.

The future has to be rooted in equality, and justice, and reparation. That’s not special; that’s just what I believe about everywhere. But I do think that we need to be looking—when I say “we,” I mean the left wherever we are. We need to build coalition; we need to build connection across our differences and silos; they need to be guided by legible principles, which is another way of saying what we’ve all been talking about and what you’ve been talking about in your critiques of multipolarity: Towards what end? What are the guiding principles? If we don’t have guiding ethics and principles and worldview, then we’re completely at sea and we’re just choosing teams. 

I am increasingly interested in what the relationship to Israel and Palestine on the right lights up about the Millenarian worldview that is at the core of the project of the right. We can see it in the Christian Zionists who Trump is appointing, but we can also see it in the tech executives he’s appointing, and these fantasies of literally abandoning Earth for Mars, or basically torching this planet by using so much energy to create a literal mirror world—which is what AI is! It’s a fake world based on our world, a mirror of everything we’ve ever produced, except the catch is that it devours so much energy that it lights this world on fire.

What is it about this desire for escape? What is so wrong with this world? Why must we place our hopes for the future in leaving this place, in leaving this world? It brings me to the Jewish history around “hereness” that’s part of the tradition that is the unearthing that our friend Molly Crabapple is involved in, in writing her incredible book that will come out about the Jewish Labor Bund. But that’s just one tradition of hereness, of celebrating the sacredness of this place, of this realm.

I don’t think it’s secular, exactly, because part of it is recognizing the sacredness of creation, of life. That animates the way I encounter the world. I also get attacked for it. I wrote a piece, as you all know, after October 7 that got me massively cancelled online, for a line that said, Stand with the child over the gun. But I believe that those kinds of principles—Stand with the prisoner, not the guard. In the context of Syria, if we had more of those clear principles that we were not afraid…Stand with the worker, not the authoritarian state repressing them! 

We cannot be shy. I think it’s radical—I don’t think it’s “liberal.” I think if we applied any of these principles, it would be revolutionary. I think it’s devouring the left not because most people agree, but because the bullying has been successful, so a lot of people are saving their disagreements for their private chats with friends. I can say that personally; that’s basically what I’ve been doing this year. And I’m not going to do it anymore, because it’s a moral disaster.

I would be curious to hear your perspective on this, because for a lot of the people I know, we did not think it would last this long. It was: We are going to get a ceasefire, this couldn’t go on longer than a month…two months…three months…We got into a habit of silence, because it makes sense that in the middle of a genocide, it does not feel like the right time to air our disagreements. Certainly I can say from a Jewish perspective that it didn’t feel like the time to argue with Palestinian comrades. I’m not saying this was mainly coming from Palestinians; I don’t think it was. A lot of it was coming from the same folks we’ve been talking about, from a campist perspective, who are not Palestinian, who are happy to speak on behalf of the Global South.

But silence becomes a habit. What’s that line? Sooner or later the mask becomes the face. I teach university students, as some of you do, and it puts you in touch with how people talk in a certain way for a year and then that’s the dominant way, that just becomes what the left is. The loudest voices become the left, and if there isn’t a clear alternative, then it’s like, Okay, these are the legible principles that guide us; this is what we believe in, and we are also the left; you could choose to join this tendency. And then people are like, Okay, I guess this is how you oppose genocide! These are the rules.

The time for biting one’s tongue is over. And it is still going to be hard, and it’s still going to hurt to argue in the middle of a genocide, but I will say that some of the people we’re talking about don’t have any qualms about attacking their own side in the middle of a genocide. So this is a unilateral disarmament—enough!

DK: Since I’m an academic and very academically-minded, I think about studies of social movements and how social movements that are particularly successful have both radical and moderate flanks. I kind of want to throw it back to you: do you feel like that division of labor is useful? 

Of course there are challenges to that; what challenges do you see in that? Is that a lens that should frame our movements, that it’s a division of labor?

NK: There are contexts in which I do; I would frame it more as an inside/outside division of labor: pushing from the outside and negotiating on the inside. It’s really important that there be accountability between people on the inside and the people on the outside.

I’m not sure that the distinction between what is “radical” and what is “moderate” resonates with me. I believe that actually standing on the side of life, in the context of genocide and ecocide and the normalization of mass death on pretty much every front—I don’t believe that’s moderate. I don’t believe it’s liberal. I believe it’s radical, transformational. There’s a posture of radicalism that actually defends these institutions, defends massive states with massive armies. I don’t know, I don’t want to cede that, I don’t want to cede the definition of what is radical to the self-styled “radicals.”

DK: Fair point.

I’ve also been thinking about applying some of the lessons we’ve learned on the ground in Israel-Palestine to informing how we might function abroad. To be clear, we do need to function abroad! The Palestinian diaspora community, the American Jewish community, broadly more in the Global North—we are in countries that are obviously directly responsible for these dynamics, so we can’t distance ourselves because we aren’t directly impacted, necessarily.

In Israel-Palestine, anti-apartheid and anti-Zionist Jewish activists talk about the concept of “co-resistance,” that it goes beyond solidarity; it’s about resisting apartheid together. I’m quoting here from some of the organizers at Masafer Yatta who talk about how “the choice to resist together can be perceived as rubbing up against the principle of anti-normalization, which holds that relations with Israel and Israelis should not be conducted ‘normally,’” and that “‘coexistence’ programs normalize the occupation […],” but “our work has responded to this principle by offering a framework of ‘co-resistance’ which […] is predicated on a shared commitment to fighting for Palestinian liberation and an acknowledgment of differentials of power.”

And then there are some, like the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, that talk about co-resistance as a form of joint activism, but it’s a joint nonviolent struggle against apartheid and genocide in Palestine and Israel.

So my questions stem from trying to apply what’s learned about co-resistance in that context. Where do Jewish communities in the Global North fit into this? How do we create co-resistance when largely it seems that the anti-Zionist segment of the Jewish community is so small (but growing)? More broadly there are people who identify as liberal Zionists who have mobilized in this moment as well, but all of that mobilizing around a ceasefire and things like that is running in parallel to, not in connection with, Palestinian diaspora organizing.

Where do we see co-resistance coming into play with these communities? What does co-resistance look like moving forward in the Global North? 

Sorry, that’s a very big question too.

NK: Yeah, it is. Coming back to what I was saying before: if we are anti-Zionist as Jews, we’re trying to disentangle our identity from an ethno-state. At the core of this is the fact that all of these Jewish institutions have systematically entangled Jewish identity, religion, summer camp—everything—with this ethno-state. So a lot of our work is disentangling it and saying there’s another way to be Jewish, and here where we are, we’ve got work to do in stopping the bombs from going and organizing for change, whether it’s finding ways to take on AIPAC and recognizing that they are a foreign agent that is interfering in democracy, [and] connecting that with a broader movement against donor power over politics, over our universities…

The more we can de-exceptionalize this issue—yes, this is money interfering in politics, but money interfering in politics is at the core of basically every crisis that we have, so the more we can de-exceptionalize this and make it part of a broader get-money-out-of-politics, stop-donors-from-running-our-universities [effort], the better off we are. Because we’ll have a stronger movement, we’ll be more protected from accusations of antisemitism—and we have to fight antisemitism here, because the more it is allowed to rise, the stronger the case for Israel is.

And then asserting these core principles around international law and equality that should govern whatever happens there—I’m just speaking as myself; I don’t want to overplay my connection to that place. I think it’s been overplayed by others. I visited a few times; it’s not where I live. And I resent the fact that my identity has been entangled with it; I don’t want to act like it’s mine. I want to reclaim my Judaism from it, and I want to fight for the kids. I want to fight for the next generation, because I think we can build institutions and new traditions and culture.

Arielle Angel, who is the editor of Jewish Currents and is a wonderful person and friend, says if you’re going to ask people to lose their community, if taking on Zionism means losing all of these communities that you grew up in, then you’d better have some other institutions to welcome them into. So I think that’s a lot of our work.

DK: I do sometimes worry that the lessons learned from this are not that Palestine stands in as a struggle for liberation, as representing values against ethno-nationalism, against state power, against all these mechanisms of destruction that have upended our lives and theirs—instead, Palestine is understood as just another national identity project. Of course it’s a Palestinian national movement; I understand what the aspirations of the Palestinian people are and historically have been. But for us to actually face the full breadth of destruction that the Israeli model represents, we need to go beyond that.

And I worry that this hasn’t been absorbed, or that people within our movement can use particular language, and weaponize particular language, and speak the language of leftism, sometimes, the language of these kinds of values and of liberation—but really what they want is something else. What they want is their turn, like you said.

There was an interesting article, an interview with an author at Jewish Currents, Abdaljawad Omar, that Arielle did about how the only thing right now that seems to exist for Palestinians is either absolute collaboration or armed resistance. The fact that these lessons aren’t being learned isn’t an accident; it’s the fact that any other alternative has been wiped out. And then we see in the last poll from the Palestinian Center for Survey and Policy Research that forty-eight percent of Palestinians choose armed struggle as the pathway forward—fifty percent in the West Bank and thirty-six percent in the Gaza Strip.

Again, it’s not an accident that those are the options available to people, that these are the conclusions people are coming to. But it speaks to a lack of imagination. If the underlying premise is that we want an end to mass violence and suffering, and that Palestine will remain a place for both people in some way, then that leads us down a different path than these kinds of conclusions. I don’t know what people’s endgames are sometimes, with the things they say or the things they advocate for, especially in the diaspora.

The question I have is: what do we do with those who don’t share this premise? How can we even talk about co-resistance with the landscape looking like this?

A: I don’t think we can talk about the shrinking space for resistance that isn’t either armed resistance or total collaboration without really understanding that it didn’t shrink on its own. I hate to disagree or push back, because I love all of you tremendously, but I think that the shrinking of that space was by state design—and not only the US state.

DK: It was the Oslo framework.

A: Naomi, you mentioned earlier that your son is obsessed with the NGO-killer bill. That bill exists in a long legacy of laws, frameworks, regulations, and state decisions that shrink the space for resistance. I’m thinking of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, which was a supreme court case that was decided in the United States [in 2010] in the wake of 9/11. What it decided was that with the creation of these foreign terrorist organization lists and the outlawing of all material support to them, that material support was really widely interpreted to include advice and other things.

Human rights groups who had been providing support to the PKK, the Tamil Tigers, various groups engaged in liberation projects with questionable practices argued: The support we provide for them is distinctly nonviolent; in fact we do the opposite. We train these groups on how to access UN reporting, on how to file lawsuits, on how to set up conflict resolution mechanisms that are independent of the state. And we saw that quickly stamped out by the supreme court in the United States, and by the state.

I’m also thinking of Turkey and Russia, and of how in Turkey there is no room for Kurdish resistance that isn’t armed, and that’s partly because of the criminalization of anything that could possibly be connected to the PKK. This is true from state to state. So I think that the reason we find ourselves in this place is because we did not center the state as a creator of violence.

If we take Zionism as a cautionary tale—which I do think it is. As an Armenian, there are many Armenians who look to Zionism as something we should emulate! And it’s a really frustrating, horrifying experience saying that isn’t so. It becomes easier when Zionism’s most violent manifestations show up. It becomes easier when a genocide becomes so undeniable, as it is now in Gaza. But that’s not the right approach; that’s the wrong time to be opposed to emulating Zionism. The right time is before the escalations—there’s always mass death when it comes to Zionism, but before the escalations that we see. 

It’s one of the reasons that I insist, for example, on calling the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh a genocide. Because these things are a process, and that is absolutely a part of the process of genocide. But the reason I push back on the idea that the shrinking space for co-resistance has to do with a lack of imagination is because it has to do with de-centering state violence at the wrong time and reaping the consequences of empowering states to this degree.

We do live in a world where states have a monopoly on violence, and we do live in a world where in order to engage in armed resistance you also have to engage in collaboration with states. That’s just a fact. There is no example of a group that is manufacturing its own weapons and is able to resist their own mass death. In navigating that, I think we’re in an impossible situation and it’s going to require of us impossible choices. But there is a reality that we have to grapple with, which is that people only have space for armed resistance in many places in the world, and that armed resistance is intrinsically tied with collaboration to state violence. 

It might not be right in front of you, but it’s somewhere else.

NK: I don’t disagree, by the way.

DK: Neither do I!

A: No, I think it’s important to bring up, in part also because I think Armenians are a great example of the limitations of statehood as the end goal of a national project—which is something we talk a lot about on Obscuristan and we’re going to talk about more.

Right now we have a liberal collaborationist government in Armenia that considers our achievement of statehood as enough to protect the Armenian people. And I’m from Artsakh; my family roots are there, and it’s very clear to me that that is not enough—but it’s also clear that statehood is not only not enough to protect Armenians, but we don’t even weaponize it when we could have to protect Kurds or Yezidis or other people.

So for me, the question really is: in a world where we are intrinsically connected to states, which means we are violent at every action, we are connected to these violent projects—that makes our movements violent too. I take responsibility for that, because we have to, but in that world, in this framework that we’re in, how can we disentangle ourselves from that violence, piece by piece? I think that’s a very hard question to answer.

I really always try to extend so much grace, because it results in people choosing to entangle with state violence a lot more than I would, and in part I think it’s because we haven’t centered the violence of a state enough to show that it is a cancer at the heart of a liberation movement.

NK: Maybe I’m taking a little bit too much for granted in terms of what we all know, that every form of nonviolent resistance has been shut down—the anti-BDS laws and the rest of it. As somebody who has been supporting BDS since 2008, with the publication of The Shock Doctrine and working with the BDS national committee, I’ve been part of these debates for so long—I knew we were going to have to step up BDS organizing in that moment, as has happened. And the BDS call is until Israel complies with international law.

That doesn’t mean that Palestinians don’t have a right to armed resistance; it does mean that they are bound by international law. And it doesn’t mean we can’t understand why that is violated for an occupied people without precision weapons, without all kinds of options—there’s a difference between understanding that and celebrating it. Which did happen, even though people deny that it did. And there’s a distinction between people celebrating in Gaza and people celebrating in Montreal or wherever. A lot of this gets flattened into very simple binaries. 

Just to be clear, I don’t believe in nonviolence in all situations. I would like to live in a world like that, but that’s not the world that we live in.

EA: One of the things that baffled me after October 7—as Naomi just said, I make a very clear distinction between how people who are on the ground are reacting to something and how people do who are not, and between people who are directly connected and not directly connected. There are different shades of this. If you’re in Gaza and you’re celebrating Iranian rockets, I’m not going to tell you, Don’t. That’s not my place. There were no options left at that point, and they didn’t do much for that matter, but I understand where that would come from—at least I try to. 

But for those who are outside: Motaz [Azaiza], the Palestinian journalist from Gaza, posted a photo of Rafah yesterday, and he said, “Remember #AllEyesOnRafah? This is what it looks like today.” This reminds me that a lot of energy has gone into “awareness-raising,” and I have some issues with that. There is a place for it, but it got to the point where that was most of what was being done.

One thing that struck me is that before October 7 there was no real engagement in our spaces—I’m speaking specifically in diasporas—with refuseniks, Israelis who refuse to join the IDF and go to jail for it. Since October 7, one thing that I find is the elephant in the room (I mentioned this in a conversation with Musa Okwonga on this podcast) is that a lot of the calls for a ceasefire did not intersect enough with calls for the release of the Israeli hostages. That’s kind of odd, because it’s the same demand: to stop the violence and for the hostages to be released—which they cannot be if the violence isn’t stopped. The two are interlinked.

Instead what I found on the streets where I was—Paris, Geneva, Marseille, and now here in the UK (and of course online as well)—was almost a rivalry between “Stop the Genocide” graffitis and photos of the Israeli hostages. I think there’s been a missed opportunity. I read just today in the Guardian: they were speaking to a woman whose relative was a hostage, I think still is, and she became a very vocal opponent of the war; she opposed Netanyahu and also calls for a shared future for Israelis and Palestinians. And I don’t see much engagement with people like her.

Even strategically, let alone morally, objectively I cannot but conclude this hasn’t brought us anything good. It’s not the only thing, or the main thing that matters. But this is something that was at least under our control, that we could at least influence, and it seems, logically, that it could have led to something, rather than becoming: You either support the end of the genocide, or you care about the Israeli hostages. That creates, discursively, a weird position, a weird place to be. Because you’re not actually debating the thing you should be debating; you’re not discussing the things you would want to be discussing: How do we end this right now? What are the steps to end this right now? How do we prioritize this first and foremost, and then figure out the thing that’s step two?

That’s where I was, and honestly still am.

NK: It reminds me of some of what I wrote about in Doppelganger. There’s this line about how once an issue gets touched by “them,” it becomes untouchable by us. In the context of the pandemic, we saw this around questions raised around lockdowns and school closures, and even vaccine verification apps. Once this is an issue on the conspiratorial right, then we just take the opposite position. 

There’s no doubt that all those hostage posters were part of a hasbara operation: they were coming from a place of justifying the genocide, it was a weaponization of grief and loss. And the impulse is to be like, Okay, that’s their issue. It’s tainted and inherently reactionary. But as you say, there was no reason why it couldn’t be a call for a ceasefire and hostage release. I think lots of people did do that, but I do know that after the family members get paraded at the Republican national convention—this goes back to the original debates about October 7: Gabriel Winant wrote a piece basically saying it’s impossible for Israeli lives to be grieved in public, because they are “pre-grieved” and those lost lives are already being turned into bullets.

And then other people, including me, made the point that if we cede this territory, that’s the ultimate gift to those who are weaponizing that grief. Because then anyone who is feeling any grief has nowhere to go. They are getting a cold shoulder from the left, saying, You’re not allowed to grieve! But emotions are unruly, and people are going to grieve, and this pushed some people to the right who might not have [been].

EA: The link to Syria is one of those things that is going broader, slightly. Obviously the Assad regime collapsed, which those in our world never really anticipated, at least not this fast—and there is something weirdly hopeful in that we’re pretty bad at predicting the future, as humans, in general. In terms of what politics is going to look like next year, we can have some kind of educated guesses, but ultimately we’re projecting from what we know today, and a single thing can change that just makes it utterly irrelevant.

To name the obvious: Trump is pretty old and not in good health. That might already change things—maybe for the worse, because his second dude is not exactly good. To go back to your point of not ceding ground: when Netanyahu talks, he speaks like he’s Thanos in The Avengers; like, I am inevitable. He speaks like he is History. He speaks like, We are changing the Middle East. We are going to change the Middle East, and that’s what we started doing (he said this in the context of the Assad regime collapsing). And a lot of people take that and conclude what he wants you to conclude, which is that they have a hand in all of this; they are that omnipresent and powerful.

They had nothing to do with the Assad regime collapsing in Syria, but they can kind of imply, and then the conspiracy baking happens online on its own. But what if he’s just wrong? What if he thinks that something is going to get there, but it won’t, because of A, B,and C? The elephant in the room here is that virtually no one—I did joke that earlier this year I predicted the Assad regime would collapse, but I did not know that this was going to happen and I can’t claim credit. I was guessing, I was hoping. That dynasty, that regime lasted fifty-four years, and it collapsed in ten days.

A day before that happened, a week before that happened, not a single Syrian I know had a single doubt that they were never going back to Syria. That’s never going to happen. They had shelved that idea. Maybe if somebody was forcibly disappeared or something, they were thinking of them very concretely, but the notion that they would go back—it didn’t cross their minds.

DK: And now they’re in Damascus.

EA: And now they’re in Damascus, and I have friends who are planning to go to Aleppo in a month or whatever, and we have friends, including Leila (which is a pseudonym) who is more comfortable speaking in her real name, and other folks in similar fashion. That just changed in ten days!

I think a lot of that Milton Friedman quote about “ideas lying around.” You’ve probably quoted it yourself, Naomi.

NK: I made that one famous in The Shock Doctrine. “Our job is to make the politically impossible politically inevitable, to have the ideas ready when…” Yeah. I used to quote it every day.

EA: There is a genuine lesson there. I used to be very active on Syria, until roughly 2018. I was very active between 2014 and 2018. 2016, the fall of Aleppo, and then more big cities fell after that—some before that, but Aleppo was the big symbolic one for Syrians and those of us who are allied with them. But history didn’t stop in 2018. It just didn’t. There’s something for me that’s kind of hopeful, in the sense that I was just reminded, in the moment, that me personally “giving up” on Syria (I was exhausted, didn’t know what to do, and many around me were as well) made no difference on the ground.

They didn’t give two shits that I personally stopped—and that’s a good thing! That’s actually hopeful for me.

DK: That’s the thing. We know what state policies do, but I am unwilling (and that’s where my questions come from, that’s what I’m centering in this discussion) to cede that we have agency in all of this, that we can pursue different paths and come up with other ideas that we can seize upon in critical junctures.

NK: Yeah. Just building on the Friedman idea of needing to have the ideas “lying around” until such a point as the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable: we can’t predict what the shock will be, but we can prepare. I do think that these discussion around guiding principles, values, what we actually stand for, really making the worldview visible and not implicit, actually being clear about it—that’s part of it. The ideas lying around are not just like, “privatize the water.” That’s a Friedmanite idea.

But one of the things that was really damaging after October 7 was that people were trying to figure out what their worldview was in the teeth of a crisis. They were putting out terrible statements, then rescinding them, taking them back, because they had not figured out the basics within their organization. What is their position on targeting civilians? Are there civilians in Israel? That would be a good thing to figure out not in a state of crisis or emergency, but actually have them figured out ahead of time!

We’re in a rolling crisis now, a staccato crisis, so we’re not going to have the luxury of figuring this stuff out, outside of crisis. But there are lulls. Or else we just have to figure it out on the fly and be ready for the next shock. Because it is an impossibility, really, to figure it out in the teeth of a crisis, which is why we’re all so vulnerable to people who say, I have it figured out, here’s what we believe.

DK: Going back to the division of labor—poli-sci literature talks about moderate versus radical flanks, but I think about division of labor in terms of our positionalities. We can’t expect right now Palestinians under the brunt of Israeli state violence to necessarily be able to articulate some of these values, or come up with other ideas beyond survival, given the scope of everything. But maybe that’s where we have the responsibility to have these discussions, and speak candidly amongst ourselves. 

Yes, we are in a crisis too, and some of us in various levels of our lives. I’m an academic, so that’s in crisis mode (not at the same level, of course). But maybe that’s the division of labor we need to think about: who right now has to triage and survive, and who can think about some of these things moving forward?

NK: This is why I think it really does matter to reread the BDS call, because that was a remarkable collaboration from Palestinian civil society—as far as my understanding, the broadest coalition ever of Palestinian civil society—coming together for an agreed-upon call. And the call is for the application of international humanitarian law. In the teeth of a genocide it is impossible, but there are some agreements that can be held that predate the acceleration of crisis.

EA: One of my concerns now is that when there is going to be a ceasefire—because there will be at some point—not only will the news coverage die (it’s already died down compared to even a few months ago), but a lot of the people who were active on Palestine will be less so.

It’s a different sort of crisis, although very interlinked, because it kind of says that ultimately activism is in reaction to something; that’s an inevitable part of it. But part of the difficulty is how we get into the business of creating something, trying to set the standards. Ultimately we’re reacting to what the Israelis are doing to Palestinians—which we have to, when they’re doing a genocide. But if they stop one day (because everything does stop one day), what happens next?

I saw [reporting] that a vast majority of Palestinian children just expect death. Some, like fifty percent or so, have suicidal ideations. They are there. Those who have not been murdered will be there. What do we do with them? How do we talk to them? How do we help them? All of that stuff is difficult. I do not have the answer, obviously. But it’s not as likely to be something you take to the streets on a weekly basis and have signs that say, What about their mental health? It doesn’t make sense in the same way because it’s not an immediate action. 

I’m concerned because the work that has to be done—I am specifically talking about mental health for children, although it’s part of this wider thing, but most Palestinians in Gaza are underage. Before talking about the wider narratives, the wider cause, all of that, this is part-and-parcel. Because how can we have the cause if the children are suffering from PTSD for the next two, three, four generations? What will the cause be? Just speaking for them, just imagining what the cause looks like? Concretely, this will be one of the more urgent things to do as soon as the ceasefire happens.

That’s just one example among many, but it’s one that concerns me because I’ve already seen—the second Syria was in the news, Palestine was less so. There is an “attention economy,” there is fatigue that all humans have; all of those are jumbled up together, it’s not like one or the other. Then my mind goes in very different directions. What do we do in terms of structural issues related to the media, and our shorter attention spans? What counts as activism online, and is it clicktivism only? Part of this project is to put them all out there, rather than being necessarily prescriptive. But it is part of that problem. 

For me, Palestine has been turned into a metaphor. There’s even a book: Palestine as Metaphor. There is room for that. If you’re a poet, there is that. There is a usefulness to metaphors because they are effectively stories, and you can connect to other stories elsewhere with that, even if you come from different backgrounds. So it’s not useless. But my worry with Palestine—I say this as someone whose grandfather was born in Haifa and passed away four years ago now, never able to go back—is that if it has been turned into mostly a metaphor in a lot of the discourses, in a lot of the spaces, especially in the West (and the Arab world to a different degree, because there’s a different genealogy there), whether that’s good, whether that’s something to be challenged or thought about.

I do come from a Syria-centric perspective here, because Syria is a place where basically the entire population, and their entire lives and their entire history, as far as many people in the Palestine space in the West are concerned, could just be sacrificed. It’s a stepping stone; it’s where the weapons to Hezbollah can go; it becomes geopolitical and abstract and it doesn’t address real people who are living real lives and suffering under unprecedented types of oppression. There is a lot of tension there that some people are better than I am at navigating. But it is there. It is difficult to ignore it.

A: You bring up a good point, of how we’ve become responsive. But the reason that campist and statist politics on the left are so strong is because they’re not responsive: there are infrastructures that are set up that actually mirror a lot of what we’ve seen and been able to trace in the American conservative movement, a movement that was very successful at being able to set up the ideas that are ready for the moment to come. 

We’re living at that moment right now: the ideas that have always been there for everyone to see—their time has come, and now we’re living in the consequences of that. But I also think (keeping with the theme of the project and the podcast) that some of those answers lie not with us here but in the peripheries. The truth is that no matter what we say or do, Palestinian children are going to keep being born, today, tomorrow, in five years, and in ten years. Their parents are going to take care of their mental health, and their parents are going to tell them stories and sing to them and find ways to build that resilience for them. 

And actually, to be honest, something I’m constantly struck with is the ability in Palestinian society specifically (and in the diaspora too) to build these caretaking structures across very real obstacles: checkpoints, prison walls, surveillance. All of these things are real obstacles, and we actually see the ways Palestinians build against them.

As an Armenian, I also see the opposite, which was in many ways a community that chose to hang our hat on statehood, that chose to hang our hat on the idea that preserving statehood is enough to protect us and to move forward—and it very clearly wasn’t. Something people often say (I get into this argument with Armenians all the time) is, Well, we’re in a better position than the Palestinians; we have a country! I deeply disagree. I disagree strongly, because I see that while we have a country, we also have a perfect map of how that country and how these people will cease to exist, and how the people that state project is ostensibly supposed to protect are removed from their land, and in many cases permanently and personally feel a disconnect from that land.

All this is to say that it may not be our job to figure out how to comfort Palestinian children—because the truth is, we just can’t. I can’t pick up a child that’s not my own and ever give him the comfort that his mother or grandmother or even his neighbor could. But what I can do, and what I think it really is our job to do, is see these structures that have formed, and ask ourselves how we can replicate them. There are many different forms of both resistance and caretaking that have been created under these circumstances of oppression, and I think a better question is to find a way to genuinely tie them to each other in a world that actively seeks to disaggregate them. 

Part of that also has to be rejecting philosophies and impulses that seek to separate these issues. As somebody who has studied law, law is a big part of that. Law exists to disaggregate Indigenous rights from a national struggle. These two things are one and the same, but under international law they are treated as two different struggles, which is fascinating and super weird.

It’s super weird to anyone who’s ever been involved in any kind of Indigenous movement. You’re like, This is the same thing, and yet, under national law they are often treated as different movements, different groups—different rights, even. So I think we really have to identify where these obstacles and barriers are coming up, and how we can get around them. And sometimes the answer is We can’t, but at least we have to know where they are.

NK: Or, We can’t right now. 

Coming full circle to where we started, a lot of what I see your project doing is around having clear politics and principles beyond campism. One of the areas where I see this playing out is around freedom of speech, where it’s not clear a lot of times whether the left believes in freedom of speech. We don’t like it when people try to censor us, but we get pretty casual about censoring other people.

With the ferocity of the crackdowns on speech about Palestine, I don’t see how we can fight back without being the people who are for freedom of speech, including speech we disagree with (obviously with some limits). I’m seeing examples of anti-normalization discourse pushing us very far in the opposite direction, and I’m worried about what that is going to mean for our ability to fight back against these ferocious attacks on speech from states, when we look like hypocrites a lot of the time.

A: Naomi, when reading your book I was screaming and jumping up and down when you started talking about the mirror world, because for me, and for a lot of us, we’d been living in the mirror world, or looking at the mirror world, for a long, long time. It predates COVID, it predated this particular kind of conservative politics in the US—because the mirror world is the same thing that Palestinians and Armenians mean when they say, Every accusation is a confession.

We’re living in this maddening universe where you talk about something that is real, that is a real part of your history, and you’re met with something that sounds real and it feels real, and it’s like in My Cousin Vinnie where he says, It’s like a brick, you’re looking at it and it has rectangular sides and straight sides, but no matter what you do it is so fucking hard to turn that brick and show that it’s actually a piece of paper.

I think about this in the context of Armenia and Azerbaijan all the time, because a big part of the Azerbaijani project is rewriting the history, rewriting the entire topographical and real history of this place. For us, we’ve been living in this funhouse mirror universe. But that also means I am able to see ways in which the Palestinian discourse has been very successful at changing a lot of minds in a way that Armenian discourse hasn’t been (even for people who like us!), and that is worth looking at.

I’m grateful to many Palestinian activists for putting free speech back in the place it should be in the left’s arsenal. One interesting thing about talking about free speech before this was that there were people talking about the “Palestine exception” to free speech, and somehow, for some reason, we felt like we were trapped in the funhouse mirror, where you were looking at the groups talking about free speech, but this was the most obvious, big, state-enforced belief system, that you literally have to sign your name to on many occasions, and yet it’s accepted from the “free speech” discourse.

Again, in this area of bringing the periphery to the center—of understanding that the periphery is the center—it feels like the American left, liberals, whoever it was, ignored the screaming periphery showing them where this was going to be headed. And of course that’s where it ended up.

EA: I was on the It Could Happen Here podcast, years ago now, and I mentioned in that interview that for me, as someone from Lebanon who already has seen a number of apocalypses, it has already happened. It’s not that there aren’t lessons to be learned on both sides—but they do this quite well: they’re trying to use their experience of what they’ve learned from other contexts to tell Americans (it is a US-focused podcast): Take these other contexts seriously, because there’s nothing about us that’s special. It’s a very difficult thing to de-center oneself, and one’s imagined community and nation. 

But to go back to Syria again, for me Syria has been a very revealing reality in the context of our region, because it’s also very tied to Palestine and to Lebanon. In Lebanon, the regime was previously a military occupier, but also, because of the wave of Syrian refugees, it became another place where Syrians were oppressed. For Palestine, Palestine has been in many ways relocated; there are many Palestinian Syrians—Yarmouk, the Palestinian refugee camp outside of Damascus, was called “Little Palestine,” and they were able not only to recreate and pass on the traditions and stories and cultures of their parents and grandparents, but to use that to make a direct link and connect with other Syrians in the uprising against the Assad regime (it’s complicated how Palestinian Syrians view themselves; some do see themselves as Syrians as well, some don’t), and to use their Palestinianness in that, because the Assad regime instrumentalized and co-opted the Palestinian cause in the context of Syria.

And now today, after the downfall of the Assad regime—it’s been a couple of weeks now—at celebrations in Syria, most of the flags flown in Aleppo, Damascus, and so on are the “new” Syrian flag (which is technically the “old” Syrian flag)—but also the Palestinian flag. And it’s unprompted. That’s very different compared to before. No one’s forcing them to do so. There’s no Assad regime, obviously. But there are a number of different signs on the streets in Damascus: one of them I really loved was O Gaza, We Haven’t Forgotten You in Our Day of Joy.

There’s something there that I genuinely find not just moving and very powerful, but useful. I want to try and understand how, in such a context, still mid-celebration of the collapse of a dynasty that had ruled over you and your parents and your grandparents for five decades, you still have mental space to think about Gaza. Again, it’s unprompted, and you get nothing out of this. It makes zero difference in the geopolitical sense. But it’s still there. That’s something that’s worth building upon.

Naomi, thanks for coming on. Dana and Anna, thanks for co-hosting this.

NK: Thanks for having me. I really loved meeting all of you.