Breaking the Siege on Gaza with Huwaida Arraf

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Huwaida Arraf, Palestinian activist, and lawyer who co-founded the International Solidarity Movement. We discuss her previous trips to sail into Gaza with humanitarian aid and journalists to break the Israeli siege on Gaza. We chat about the time they successfully docked in Gaza without zionist permission. We also cover the other attempts where Israel either commandeered their boats or murdered the humanitarian aid volunteers like with the Mavi Marmara. We also talk about her most recent effort to set sail from Turkey but how the government of Turkey will not let the ship sail. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with the one and only Amanda Seales. Amanda shares her path to learning about and speaking up for Palestine as an artist, explaining that it takes about seven minutes to figure out what is going on, especially if one is armed with knowledge and understanding of white supremacy and colonialism. She invites listeners to check out her latest project, “What would the ancestors say” which explores Black-Palestinian solidarity amongst other social justice issues through a comedic and artistic intellectual lens. Amanda understandably reminds us of George Bernard Shaw’s saying that “if you’re going to tell people the truth, make them laugh them or else they’ll kill you”.  Lara teaches Amanda Arabic. Michael wonders why Amanda still moves her own boxes. 

This week Lara and Michael discuss the occupations' expansion of the Nakba into Lebanon. We cover the zionist pager terrorist attacks, give a brief overview of the history of Hezbollah, and discuss the impact of the martyred leader Hassan Nasrallah. We cover how 902 Palestinian families have been wiped off the civil registry. Many Palestinians are the only surviving member of their families, which as Michael points out, is the Batman origin story. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a hand surgeon and recent humanitarian volunteer in Gaza during the genocide. He describes seeing a number of children with multiple sniper shots to the heads and hearts, indicating there is no way such wounds are "accidental" as Israel often claims. He speaks of why he was inspired to go to Gaza and why he cannot wait to go back. 

This week Lara and Michael talk about the occupation's latest scheme to recruit African asylum seekers to the genocide effort. We discuss how many people have repeated a frozen death toll despite daily massacres. We cover how the stats around settler migration from the colony are incorrect because the statistician himself has left and so much more! 

This week on the Palestine Pod, Lara and Michael cover the ongoing genocide in Palestine with updates from on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank including Israel’s bombing of the Al-Ahly Baptist Hospital (again) on August 31, 2024 and the invasion of multiple cities and refugee camps in the West Bank including Jenin where Israeli occupation forces besieged the city, destroyed 70% of the city’s roads in a manner of days and, at the time of recording of this episode, killed 22 Palestinians. Lara reminds us this is all part of the plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine which has been ongoing since Day 1 over 76 years ago noting that Israeli officials are even calling for the “temporary” displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank, a tactic which has historically never proven to be temporary and has only ever been used as a means by Israel to steal more Palestinian land. Lara and Michael also critique a recent move by NYU to propose that “Zionist” be considered a protected class under the school’s code of conduct, a move which comes on the heels of social media giant Meta announcing that content targeting Zionism or Zionists could be removed under the company’s hate speech policy. Finally, the Palestine Pod recalls the brutal killing of the brilliant Palestinian content creator Medo Halimy and the legal case for the mainstream media’s role in perpetuating the genocide of the Palestinian people.

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Jewish anti-zionist activist and writer Amanda Gelender. We discuss how the Jewish community has a major fascism problem in Zionism; and how to best bring it to an end. Amanda speaks frankly that Jewish ally-ship is not more important than any other, and implores fellow Jews to do more in support of Palestine and Palestinian liberation. 

This week Lara and Michael discuss the grotesque hysteria around Washington's reception to a heinous war criminal. We cover the spread of preventable skin diseases in Gaza where Israel forbids the entry of even the most basic medical supplies. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Associate Professor of Law at Queens University, Dr. Ardi Imseis. Dr. Imseis is the author of the UN and the Question of Palestine, a study into what historically went wrong in the UN’s treatment of the question of Palestine since its inception. Dr. Imseis exposes how at various critical moments in the last century, the prevailing international law of the time was flouted by the UN in favor of policy that violated Palestinian rights and democratic principles. The work reminds us how the law can be used as one of many tools, but certainly has its limits. Laws can be oppressive (like the Nuremberg laws, South African Apartheid laws) and the choice to respect them or not is inherently political. We discuss how a lack of accountability for Israel’s violations has only caused the Zionist occupation to become worse and worse over time, what public international law principles require of Israel in terms of reparation for its international wrongs against the Palestinian people, and the handful of current legal efforts brought by Palestinians and their allies to use the law for emancipatory aims including the ICJ case in relation to the illegality of Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinians territories, a case where Dr. Imseis acted as part of the legal team.

This week Lara and Michael discuss two recent reports challenging the stagnant death toll in Gaza: a recent article by Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa in the Electronic Intifada, concluding the Israel has most likely killed, in 9 months, 194,768-511,824 people in Gaza. Such findings were corroborated weeks later by an article published in The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal, finding that the real death toll is likely at least 186,000 Palestinians. These earth-shattering findings are contrasted with the phenomenon of genocide denial in the US political landscape and the urgent need to stop the annihilation of the Palestinian people.