The Palestine Pod

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. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with the former President of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), Jwan Haddadd. We talk about the successful organizing effort to pass a resolution divesting from companies who support genocide, and the coalition of organizations, students, and faculty who made it happen. UCSB becomes the sixth University to institutionalize a boycott within the UC system. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the Israeli massacres in Jabalia and Jenin. We discuss the premature infants forced out of their incubators by zionist bombs. The last two functioning hospitals in Gaza are besieged by the IOF and have been without clean drinking water for days. We also cover the ICC Prosecutor's application to the pre-trial judges for the arrest warrants of Netanyahu and Gallant. 

This week, Lara and Michael play a recorded interview with UCLA students in the encampment and sit down with Presidential candidate for the Green Party, Dr. Jill Stein. We discuss the role of electoral politics, how it has failed us, and how now more than ever we need a third party to threaten the two-party duopoly. Dr. Jill Stein has centered her campaign around being the only option on the ballot across the country to call for an end to the genocide in Palestine, and she promises to dismantle the US empire. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the Pro-Publica report that internal state department recommendations advise sanctioning and cutting the supply of weapons to the the occupation. A recommendation Anthony Blinken has been suppressing and lying about since December of 2023. We also discuss the phenomena of college campus student solidarity encampments starting with Columbia and then leading to others at Harvard and Yale. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the details emerging around the massacre at Al Shifa. This massacre will be remembered in the same way as Deir Yassin and Tantura. Doctors who refused to leave their patients were executed. IOF terrorists separated people by color-coded bracelets. We cover the wildly racist coverage of the assassinated aid workers, and how the lives of foreign nationals are not more important than Palestinian lives.  

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Palestinian-American ER physician, Dr. Mohammad Subeh. Dr. Subeh came to the US as a Palestinian refugee during the Gulf War after his grandparents were expelled from Palestine during the Nakba. He speaks to the Palestine Pod about his recent experience providing medical care for five weeks in Gaza a field hospital with the International Medical Core in Rafah during Israel's ongoing genocidal assault. In addition to detailing the realities of Israel's attacks against civilians in Gaza as well as Israel's decimation of the Palestinian healthcare system, Dr. Subeh paints a picture of a people committed to "ihsan", the concept of seeking to achieve excellence in all aspects of life while facing annihilation. Lara reminds that the Palestinian people refuse to disappear in the face of the zionist settler colonial project which requires extermination of the indigenous people. Instead, the Palestinian people currently undergoing genocide continue to insist on life with excellence. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the ongoing deliberate starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza by the Zionist regime in violation of international law. The Palestine Pod also covers a recent Al-Jazeera report entitled "Not just the UNRWA report: Countless accounts of Israeli torture in Gaza" compiling accounts of Palestinians from Gaza who have been kidnapped by Israeli occupation forces and subjected to brutal torture in violation of international law as a part of this current genocide. These accounts illuminate the treatment Palestinians in Israeli captivity have been subjected to for over 75 years of settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Hala Hanina a Palestinian dentist, PhD researcher in sociology, and 4th-generation Palestinian refugee from Gaza, Palestine. She is a former volunteer in hospitals during previous Israeli aggressions. We hear from Hana about how five generations of her family suffered under Zionism (from her great-grandfather experiencing the 1948 Nakba, all the way up until her family home was destroyed in the 2023/24 Nakba and genocide) as well as her reflections on this current moment.