The Palestine Pod

This week Lara and Michael discuss Israel's latest scheme to recruit African asylum seekers to the genocide effort and the frozen death toll in Gaza in the mainstream media despite Israel's continue daily livestreamed massacres. Lara covers a recent piece indicating an economic collapse in Israel based on available data since the genocide began. 

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. Amanda argues that the Jewish community has a fascism problem through its support for Zionism while imploring fellow Jewish folks to do more in support of Palestine and Palestinian freedom and liberation. 

This week Lara and Michael discuss the hysteria surrounding Washington's reception of Benjamin Netanyahu, the genocidaire overseeing Israel's current genocidal campaign in Gaza. Lara discusses the spread of preventable skin diseases in Gaza where Israel's siege continues to forbid 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 more entrenched 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 Territory, 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, providing evidence-based data that the real death toll is likely at least 186,000 Palestinians. These earth-shattering findings are contrasted with the phenomenon of genocide denial and erasure 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 that support Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, 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 Israeli massacres in Jabalia and Jenin. Lara covers how the last two functioning hospitals in Gaza are being besieged by the Israeli occupation forces and have been without clean drinking water for days and in international law developments, how the ICC Prosecutor has applied to the pre-trial judges for arrest warrants of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in relation to possible war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

This week, Lara and Michael play a recorded interview with UCLA students from their student encampment and sit down with Presidential candidate for the Green Party, Dr. Jill Stein. Dr. Stein discusses the role of electoral politics, how it has failed the American people, and how now more than ever, a third party is needed to threaten the two-party duopoly and end the US-Israeli genocide in Palestine. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the Pro-Publica report that internal State Department recommendations advise sanctioning and cutting military funding to Israel, a recommendation that Secretary of State, Antony Blinken has been ignoring since December 2023. Lara and Michael also cover the phenomenon of college campus Gaza solidarity encampments including those at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the details emerging around the massacre at Al Shifa Hospital, predicting that this massacre will be remembered in the same way as the massacres at Deir Yassin and Tantura. Reports indicate that the Israeli occupation forces separated people by color-coded bracelets before detaining some, torturing others, and killing patients, displaced people, and doctors who refused to abandon their patients.     

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.

This week Lara and Michael discuss the Zionists’ genocidal assault on Rafah during the evening of the Super Bowl, targeting at least two mosques containing sheltering families and dozens of Palestinian family houses and tents containing displaced families. During this night, Israel killed Sidra Hassouna, 7 years old. The pressure from the impact of the bomb catapulted her body, which hung by a wire when she was found. We cover the reports concerning Egypt’s construction of a so-called “fortified buffer zone” in the Sinai — a concentration camp presumably intended to hold Palestinians in the event of a mass expulsion of Palestinians by Israel, which remains looming as Israel continues to promise a mass escalation in Rafah, the very area it has spent the last 4 months concentrating the majority of the Palestinian population in Gaza.