Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
A Year of Ongoing Genocide in Gaza with Tareq Baconi
617 Plays1 month ago
Al-Shabaka Board President Tareq Baconi and Co-Director Yara Hawari reflect on one year since the start of Israel's genocide in Gaza. Together, they discuss its ramifications on the Palestinian liberation movement, the region, and beyond.
Recommended
Transcript
Reviving Revolutionary Legacy
00:00:00
Speaker
The question for me today is how do we think about this moment of genocide as a way of re-resuscitating our revolutionary legacy, of going back into our roots and bringing out a political project, a decolonial project that's not about going back
00:00:17
Speaker
to the past because there's no going back. But it's rather about how do we think about decolonization and revolutionary politics today in this day and age, thinking about all of these global challenges. And I think that's our most urgent task to date. From Ashabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, I am Yara Hawari, and this is Rethinking Palestine.
00:00:47
Speaker
Over the last year, Palestine has been irrevocably changed in ways that for many of us were once inconceivable. Since the beginning of the genocide, the Israeli regime has killed over 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza, an estimate provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health that includes over 6,000 unidentified bodies in the ministry's possession. An additional 10,000 assumed to be still buried under the rebel.
Impact of Conflict on Palestinian Lives
00:01:12
Speaker
Devastatingly, some will never be retrieved. Meanwhile, a July 2024 article in the Lancet Medical Journal on the importance of accounting for Gaza's fatalities argued that conservative estimate of total deaths in conflict scenarios equated to four indirect deaths per one direct death.
00:01:29
Speaker
By this calculation, Israel's genocide has likely resulted in the loss of over 250,000 Palestinian lives since October 2023. In addition, Gaza is now home to more than 42 million tonnes of rubble. These ruins include many people's destroyed homes, businesses and essential public infrastructure.
00:01:49
Speaker
Relentless Israeli bombing has also released hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic dust into the air, with long-lasting and deadly consequences. 80% of schools and universities have been damaged or destroyed, and for the first time since the Nakaba Palestinian children in Gaza did not begin school this year.
00:02:07
Speaker
Concurrently, the Israeli regime in its settler community stole a record amount of land across the West Bank over the past 12 months. This theft has been accompanied by increasing violence against Palestinian bodies. Over 700 have been killed, 5,000 injured and thousands more arrested, bringing the number of Palestinian political prisoners to nearly 10,000.
00:02:28
Speaker
For the north in Lebanon, the Israeli regime has expanded its assault and displaced over 1 million people in the space of days and killed over 1,800, including Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.
00:02:41
Speaker
Israeli bombardments have continued to target neighborhoods and Palestinian refugee camps from the sky, while colonial forces began a ground invasion in early October 2024.
Tarek Makhloni on Gaza's Genocide
00:02:52
Speaker
Joining me on this episode is Tarek Makhloni, board president of Ashabaka. We will be discussing one year on from the start of the genocide in Gaza and the acceleration of the Israeli settler colonial project in the rest of Palestine and beyond. Tarek, thank you for joining me on this episode of Rethinking Palestine.
00:03:11
Speaker
Thank you for having me. In this introduction, I took stock of the devastating material consequences on the ground and I said that Palestine has been irrevocably changed. What does that mean for you?
00:03:26
Speaker
Thank you for this question, Yara. I mean, look, for Palestinians, it's impossible to go back to October 6. The genocide is the bloodiest year for Palestinians. We haven't had this number of Palestinians murdered, including in the Nakba. The devastation that you just outlined at the beginning of the episode is one that will inform everything today. It will inform our politics, our thinking. It will inform how we wage the struggle. It will inform
00:03:56
Speaker
how we relate to our brothers and sisters in the Gaza Strip and where we go from here. There's no way for us today to think about what Palestinian liberation is without taking stock of the genocide that is still ongoing. And in many ways, that thinking
00:04:11
Speaker
is already taking place and is already evolving, but it will really have to shape our struggle once the ceasefire is achieved and after the killing stops, we're still very much in the act of vocalizing this genocide and attempting to stop it. So in that way, the reality of the past here has irrevocably changed us as Palestinians and as humans.
Palestinian Struggle and International Order
00:04:35
Speaker
and that will impact our struggle. But there's another bigger way in which this past year is unprecedented in the way that it's shaped us or changed us. And that's in ways that are not only relevant to Palestine, it's changed the globe in the sense of showing the limitations of the post-World War II international order.
00:04:57
Speaker
And in terms of demonstrating the hypocrisies and the racism of Western liberal democracies, or so-called democracies, and it's completely shattered the illusion that we're living in a world of multilateral governance. It's highlighted how important it is for us as Palestinians and as allies, as people who are hoping for a more equitable world order, to really engage with some of the issues that have surfaced over the past year, the fact that we can
00:05:26
Speaker
witness a genocide on our phones and not only allow it to happen but also face the narratives that it is self-defense or important or view Western liberal democracies sort of abetted and armed. I think it really brings up global questions to the fore and I don't think there's a way for us to go back to October 6th, either in a Palestinian context or in a global one.
00:05:50
Speaker
I fully agree and I want to unpack some of that further but as you were speaking you said this has been the bloodiest year for Palestinians including the year of the Nakba and every day it does seem that things are more and more horrific than the day before and a lot of people are asking how on earth is that possible?
00:06:11
Speaker
How is it possible for Israeli soldiers to bomb time and time again hospitals, to force doctors and medical workers at gunpoint to leave their patients, to shoot children in the head, to bomb schools, to destroy every aspect of life in Gaza? And something that I've been thinking about a lot is this idea or this notion that Israel is unstoppable.
00:06:37
Speaker
And I think on the side for us, it does sometimes feel that way. It feels that way in the face of this brutality, this cruelty. You know, we have this rogue state violating international law, left, right and center, breathing havoc across the region. But I think that statement is untrue and it obscures the responsibility of others because in the reality, it can actually be stopped.
00:07:05
Speaker
There are countries that hold a significant amount of leverage over the Israeli regime. The US and Germany, just to name two, they could literally stop this, or at least
00:07:19
Speaker
disrupt it. And that's why I think it's really important that we don't fall into that narrative trap, because it also dismisses how we got here. It dismisses and disregards the decades long impunity that Israel has managed to achieve for itself and has managed to cultivate. And it also dismisses there are very real mechanisms of accountability that can be used.
00:07:46
Speaker
I think that's absolutely right.
Zionism and Dehumanization of Palestinians
00:07:47
Speaker
And I want to say several points in response to this. I mean, on the first point around the insanity of witnessing this level of killing and of, you know, the disbelief or suspended in disbelief, you know, how and indignation, how could they kill at this rate in this way without stopping?
00:08:06
Speaker
And I think it's really important for us to sort of also take Zionism out of its exceptional mold. I think that genocidal regimes in the past have murdered and have killed in ways that are horrifying and brutal. And what we're seeing today is a particularly egregious example of that because of the fact that we're witnessing it light on our screens and that
00:08:28
Speaker
sense of time in which the immediacy of it is happening in front of us, that cracks the illusion that we might have sat in before October 7th, that had we known about these other genocides, maybe the world would have acted to stop it, and now we know that the world wouldn't have acted to stop them. The reason I'm saying this is because this disbelief that we're in
00:08:49
Speaker
is also something that we need to set in and we need to understand how Israel is able to do what it's doing. I think the level of dehumanization has been so pervasive that I don't think they may think that they're killing humans in Gaza. I don't think they regard Palestinians as human and I think that is what enables them to continue
00:09:09
Speaker
this level of of statistic violence, there's no other way really to sort of think about some of the images that we've seen coming out of Gaza just this week. You know, the bombing of refugee camps, people being burnt alive, there's a sadism there that I think is driven by a complete internalization
00:09:28
Speaker
of the belief that Palestinians are not humans. Now, the reason I'm sort of bringing this up is because it relates to your point about whether Israel is stoppable or not. Israel is absolutely stoppable. I mean, if there's anything that came out of October 7th of Hamas's attack, it is to sort of shatter this idea that Israel is invincible.
00:09:48
Speaker
that as a military power, that it can't be dismantled. As an apartheid regime, it can't be challenged. I think we've seen not only through Hamas's attack, but from the reality that Israel would not have been able to wage this genocide without the U.S., that Israel absolutely is a state, is a center colony that has always been and continues to be dependent on empire, dependent on
00:10:14
Speaker
the foreign metropols that allow it to do what it is doing. And therefore, in that sense, it is stoppable. There are levers of power that can be used to arrest that kind of atrocities that Israel has been carrying for a century, not Zionism for a century, Israel since 1948, not just since October 7th, but
00:10:36
Speaker
The reason why it hasn't been stopped is because this dehumanization of Palestinians isn't limited to Israel. This is a Western dehumanization. Palestinians are not featuring, and I have to say, not just Palestinians. Arabs do not feature in the thinking of liberal, so-called liberal Western states, right? They believe that Israel is the banner of a civilizational project. They're fighting against barbarism.
00:11:04
Speaker
This has always been the underlying assumption or belief of Zionism, and it continues to be one that also informs America's engagement in the region and America's engagement specifically with Israel. So this dehumanization is not limited to Israel. It extends far beyond that. And so when we're thinking about, you know, is Israel stoppable? The answer is, of course, it's stoppable, but there's no will to stop it because as far as
00:11:32
Speaker
countries like the U.S. are concerning, Israel is serving both their ideological and their strategic purposes. Now, I think that that's completely misplaced, and I do think there's a divergence of interest, but I don't think the American administration have opened up to that.
00:11:51
Speaker
I don't think you're completely right. The Zionist project and the Israeli regime has completely dehumanized Palestinians. There's no way that they could be doing what they're doing on such a massive scale and with such support from the Israeli public. I think some polling showed that over 95% of the Israeli public supports the genocidal actions in Gaza.
00:12:16
Speaker
And I think the only way they could be doing this is with such mass dehumanization, which, as you rightly pointed out, extends beyond the Zionist regime. It's been decades and decades of dehumanization of Palestinians and Arabs by the West and beyond. And as you were speaking, I was thinking in particular
00:12:38
Speaker
because this is something that I have written on. In particular, the Western media's role in this genocide. And really, what we're seeing and what's being highlighted over this year is that the groundwork and the foundations for this genocide were laid long ago through this consistent dehumanization. And the Western media, mainstream media, has a lot to answer for in this regard. We've seen it by the way that the Western media reports on
00:13:06
Speaker
the killing of Palestinians, how they consistently unchild Palestinian children, how they completely dismiss and delegitimize Palestinian voices. So I think there is a lot to be reckoned with there.
International Law and Bias
00:13:22
Speaker
And something else that I want to unpack, which you mentioned briefly, is the role of international law and its place in the Palestinian liberation struggle.
00:13:33
Speaker
In the last two decades, significant segments of Palestinians, civil society, and the wider solidarity movement have placed international law at the center of their work. And in part because this is a system which claims to uphold certain values, many values which Palestinians also hold dear, but also because of a process of endurization following Oslo,
00:14:01
Speaker
Palestinian civil society was in many ways forced to break ties with a more revolutionary politics, a more revolutionary discourse and adapt international law as the framework for their modus operandi. And I think for myself included, the ongoing genocide in Gaza has had a profound impact on how the international legal regime is perceived.
00:14:26
Speaker
The Israeli regime has systematically violated the provisions of the Geneva Commensions related to warfare and occupation. The International Court of Justice, the ICJ, one of the highest courts in the land, found the Israeli regime to be committing plausible acts of genocide. And still, not only have the US and UK and others played down
00:14:51
Speaker
these international rulings, they've completely disregarded the violations and they've also blocked attempts to hold the Israeli regime accountable through the various legal channels. And I think that many people are inevitably making the comparison of the international response to Ukraine amid Russia's invasion and been comparing it to how the international response has been to the literal genocide in Palestine. So I think it's not only about
00:15:19
Speaker
a lack of implementation and political will but also the hegemonic bias which holds certain lives more valuable than others within the international legal regime and I think it speaks to the very foundations of that regime and who it was set up for
00:15:41
Speaker
If you're enjoying this podcast, please visit our website, al-shabaka.org, where you will find more Palestinian policy analysis and where you can join our mailing list and donate to support our work. Yes, I mean, look, we started this episode talking about the fact that after October 7, there's no going back, that we've been irrevocably changed. And they agree with that. We're living in a moment of rupture, a moment of
00:16:11
Speaker
paradigmatic rupture where the paradigm we thought we were living in has been fundamentally
00:16:16
Speaker
changed. However, there are continuities. What you're talking about in terms of the limitations of international law, it's something that we have been aware of as Palestinians for many years now, if not decades, that this system of international law and its DNA has excused colonialism and has not dealt with indigenous rights or with reparations.
00:16:42
Speaker
or has not protected the rights of minorities, that it is fundamentally, this rule-based order, fundamentally, colonialist still. And that we needed to engage with it, and this is Nudarikat's work, we need to engage with it politically. We need to be able to deal with international law not as this terrain that is just.
00:17:07
Speaker
that is going to give us well-deserved rights, but as something that we will have to struggle for politically. And the thinking always was that we engage with international law opportunistically, strategically, in an instrumentalized way. However,
00:17:24
Speaker
After October 7th, and as you see even before October 7th, after Ukraine, we now understand that this is far more challenging than we might have hoped before. But also, in some ways, we now are living in a world where the mask is off. The emperor has no clothes. There's no way for Western powers now to talk
00:17:46
Speaker
about legality or rights or justice without many members of the so-called global south laughing in their face. And this is not only October 7th. This is also Ukraine. This is also the Iraq War. This is also Kosovo. This has a long history of the West co-opting international legal norms and using them in the service of their own hegemonic power. Now,
00:18:15
Speaker
I think in Israel's case specifically, we also have to be aware that Israel systematically created legal precedent over the years in order to be able to do what it is doing today. You know, extrajudicial executions of Palestinians are illegal under international law. Now, the media and
00:18:34
Speaker
most people think of them as targeted assassinations. That paved the way for the Obama administration to carry out extrajudicial executions of Afghanis at a rate that was unprecedented. And so the kind of erosion of international norms that has been allowed to happen by Israel and by the West is leading the way for us to live in a world where
00:18:59
Speaker
Bombing pagers and phones in civilian areas indiscriminately is something that's celebrated as a security operation. This doesn't come out of a vacuum. This is the premeditated systematic erosion of rights and of legality and of the international norms
00:19:19
Speaker
that govern the world. Now in Israel's case specifically, Israel today is a rogue state. It's a pariah state that's carrying out the genocide actively, it's documenting the genocide, it's being proud about it, and it's spilling it to other countries, to Lebanon and elsewhere in the region. Now can you explain to me
00:19:40
Speaker
what international governance will look like after this genocide? What is to stop other rogue states from doing the same? What are the measures that we have to protect vulnerable populations and people against genocide or against this kind of impunity, this kind of sustainability in apartheid regimes? So I think this is something that is really pressing and urgent for us to grapple with, again, not only for Palestine, but on a global stage. And I think in this sense, Palestine becomes the
00:20:10
Speaker
the path through which we need to think about decolonizing international law and revising this rules-based order that has only served the powerful.
Global South's Legal and Political Actions
00:20:21
Speaker
So you mentioned indigenous rights and sovereignty, and I think this is a really good example or lens in which to critically examine international law and its bias, not only towards nation states, but also colonial ones. In 2007, the UN adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, the UN DRIP, UNDRIP.
00:20:48
Speaker
unfortunate name but there we have it. And some people celebrated this but importantly it faced huge criticism from Indigenous communities themselves who felt that it was not only limited, it had a very limited description of Indigenous people but also because it didn't make space for Indigenous sovereignty. The Declaration
00:21:13
Speaker
stated that nothing in the Declaration could be interpreted as encouraging any action that would dismember or impair the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent states. So reading that, you can see how this is actually actively against the idea of decolonization and indigenous sovereignty. So I think that's just one example which shows the
00:21:44
Speaker
the inherent flaws in international law, the inherent biases towards
00:21:50
Speaker
settler colonial entities and nation states. And I think you also mentioned something really important in that intervention, and that's the sort of the reorientation towards the global south and the sort of, I'm apprehensive to call it the rise of the global south, I think that's essentialist, but we all know that South Africa brought a genocide case against the Israeli regime,
00:22:16
Speaker
at the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, and perhaps lesser known as the fact that Namibia extended the legal battle and brought legal action against Germany for facilitating the genocide. And even with the aforementioned skepticism on the international law front, you know, I do think that these moves were symbolically at least significant. I think it did
00:22:43
Speaker
signal a challenge to Western hegemony and reinforce the notion of global south solidarity. I think it's something we have to think about and take action on in a very intentional and serious way whilst also maintaining that healthy dose of skepticism.
00:23:02
Speaker
And I think it does require a shifting of energies and efforts. I think it requires moving away from prioritizing solidarity efforts with people in positions of supremacist power and moving instead towards collective power building with other colonized and marginalized communities. So all of this is to say that there are significant, at least symbolically significant moves
00:23:32
Speaker
being done within these spaces that are inherently problematic and some might even argue inherently set up to limit people of the global south and people who are under settler colonial domination. But there are also other avenues with these actors that we can pursue and perhaps other avenues in which we should spend more time and energy.
00:23:59
Speaker
I agree with that. I mean, when we think about the global South, we mustn't think of it as a monolith because obviously there's, there's, we're not in the, in the time when arguably even back then in
00:24:10
Speaker
the time of the Non-Aligned Movement. There were huge divergences and diversity within that movement. And the Global South today is not a monolith. And I think engagement with it has to be thoughtful and strategic. The way that South Africa is dealing with Palestine looks very different than the way India is dealing with Palestine. And it's very different with how Brazil is dealing with Palestine. And each of these states obviously come with their own baggage and their own strategic
00:24:38
Speaker
priorities and their decision making. So I think that the way we engage with countries in the Global South has to be thoughtful. At the same time, there is somewhat of a shared agenda in the sense that I think not only members of the Global South, but globally, we are interested in having a world order that is able to deal with the global crisis we're facing, for example, climate justice and climate change, right?
00:25:07
Speaker
So we need to be able to engage in real conversations around what does it mean for us to move beyond the idea of Western hegemony, beyond the idea of American unipolarity, and towards multilateral governance.
00:25:23
Speaker
And those questions are questions that are at the forefront of most global South powers, even if they are not necessarily aligned with the question of Palestine. But this global question is one that we should all be actively engaged in. And I think what's happening is that Western powers don't quite understand that this realignment is taking place. And they don't quite understand that America's role is no longer the world's policeman.
00:25:50
Speaker
Arguably, it never was. Obviously, it was an empire that was destructive. But this sort of self-understanding of America's rule as the world sort of policeman, we're not in that world anymore. And I think the West hasn't quite understood not only what you call the sort of the rise of the global South, but also that their own empire and their own sort of
00:26:12
Speaker
America's desire for Western hegemony and unipolarity is the source of destabilization and destruction in many parts of the world. And I think we're sort of in the midst of that the alignment. And as I said, Palestine is central to that. But to your point about, you know, how do we engage in these
00:26:29
Speaker
in these questions, in international law, is there value? I think fundamentally the biggest challenge that Palestinians are facing today is that we are not yet at a place where we're able to engage with all of these questions strategically and politically. I think the Palestinian movement is immense today. It's bigger than it has been for a long time. And I think we now have global support and grassroots power
00:26:58
Speaker
and allies and solidarities in ways that would have been unimaginable this time last year. At the same time, I think that we need to be more strategic in terms of how we push this popular power forward. How do we develop political power? How are we able to engage with questions of international law, with foreign policy towards global South actors, with questions around global governance? These are strategic questions.
00:27:27
Speaker
not coincidentally, by design, our leadership, our revolutionary leadership of the past of the 60s and 70s has been co-opted and emptied of content and imprisoned and exiled and executed. And we need to rebuild that. We're coming out of three, four decades of the narrowing out of our revolutionary potential.
00:27:50
Speaker
as Palestinians, our institutional power to sort of carry out the colonial agenda. And we need to rebuild that. And it's urgent that we rebuild that because of the absence of that. I think foreign interests and certainly Western hegemony will try to reassert a paradigm that certainly does not center Palestinians or Palestinian rights. So the question for me today is how do we think about this moment
00:28:14
Speaker
post October 7th, this moment of genocide, how do we think about it as a way of re-resuscitating our revolutionary legacy, of going back into our roots and bringing out a political project, a decolonial project that's not about going back
00:28:33
Speaker
to the past because there's no going back but it's rather about how do we think about decolonization and revolutionary politics today in this day and age thinking about all of these global challenges and I think that's our our most urgent task today.
Grassroots Mobilization for Palestinian Liberation
00:28:49
Speaker
I agree with you that I think thinking and unpacking what decolonisation means for Palestinians is perhaps our most urgent task. I want to take us back a bit to what you were saying about grassroots mobilisation and I want to bring us a bit closer to home, to our region, the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, whatever you want to call it, where we have seen
00:29:14
Speaker
massive mobilization and support for the Palestinian liberation struggle, in particular in Jordan and Bahrain. But in Jordan, we've seen consistent demonstrations over the last year that have brought thousands and thousands out. And of course, Jordan has a very sizable Palestinian refugee population, I think,
00:29:37
Speaker
over half of the the population of Jordan is of Palestinian origin and then you know also in Bahrain we've seen very large protests take place in support of Palestinians amidst the genocide and at the same time these protests have been met with
00:29:53
Speaker
brutal crackdowns and oppression in Bahrain, perhaps more so than in Jordan. We've seen in other countries where arguably the authoritarianism is much more oppressive, like Egypt, we have seen small protests as well there. And all of this sort of stands in direct contrast to the Arab regimes themselves, which of course not all of them, but by and large have been complicit in the genocide.
00:30:23
Speaker
through normalisation, through active diplomatic and trade ties, even militarily coordinating. And I think what has spoken to me amidst all of this is yet again how Palestine
00:30:38
Speaker
is serving that role as the linchpin of regional liberation, as it were. How the mobilization around Palestine inevitably always leads to critique and to rejection of domestic status quo's
00:31:00
Speaker
So in Bahrain, for example, someone said that the government is so fearful of its own people's just demands that it can't even stomach children protesting for other people's freedom, let alone their own. And this comes after a huge wave of arrests in Bahrain, including of children. And it brings me to thinking about the writing and the work of Allah Abd al-Fattah,
00:31:26
Speaker
a prominent writer and political prisoner of Egypt, who once wrote that the roots of the Egyptian revolution lie in the solidarity demonstrations with the southern intifada. And I think what's clear or becoming even more clear amidst massive regional normalization is that the Palestinian liberation struggle is not just about Palestine, it's actually about the liberation of the entire
00:31:56
Speaker
region. And perhaps that links quite nicely with this question about decolonization and the urgent need for conversations around that. And I think those conversations certainly have to happen in the Palestinian context, in Palestinian spaces, but they also have to happen beyond, not just in the region, but in particular in the region, considering the massive complicity of Arab regimes. But what does decolonization of Palestine mean?
00:32:26
Speaker
for the neighbouring countries? Can decolonisation of Palestine, can the liberation of Palestine happen whilst those regimes are still in place? I've always thought of Palestinian liberation as being inextricably linked with the region and with its Arab depth.
00:32:49
Speaker
for various reasons. And I understand, you know, when you talk about these regimes, when you talk about their complicity in genocide, I think of most of these regimes as being part of the postcolonial order in the sense that they are authoritarian after independence was declared. They're sort of authoritarian powers that rise and that are
00:33:12
Speaker
ingratiated into the Western sphere and that are not necessarily serving their people, right? They are regimes that are oppressing their people. They're anti-democratic. You know, put Palestine aside thinking about all of the basic measures of humanity, of good human life, are severely lacking across the Middle East. That's the reason why in 2010, 2011, the revolutions erupted in various countries throughout.
00:33:38
Speaker
That post-colonial order, which is post-colonial in the sense that independence had been gained, but neo-colonial in the sense that these regimes are neither legitimate nor chosen by the people and are absolutely backed by foreign powers,
00:33:53
Speaker
Those regimes are not representative of Arab street and they are and have in the past co-opted the question of Palestine to further their own interests. And so that kind of dialectic I think where Palestine is instrumentalized or used in order to further oppression in these
00:34:10
Speaker
various countries is still one that we see today. Even if we look at countries like Jordan or Egypt, they're dealing with Palestine in as far as they have to address their existential worries about what might happen if Israel expels Palestinians, ethnically cleanses Palestinians out of
00:34:28
Speaker
historic Palestine, but it's not in any way acting more than that in terms of pushing solidarity or actively trying to engage in the quest for Palestinian liberation. They each have their own domestic concerns. Some of them are existential. And so the order that we're in is an order whereby both Palestinians and Arabs and non-Arabs, just the inhabitants of that region, are living under settler colonialism and under authoritarianism. And both of these things are
00:34:58
Speaker
linked and reinforcing and mutually constitutive. Now, if we think about this moment in time where Israel is expanding its genocide and starting to attack countries throughout the region, but systematically carrying out attacks across Lebanon in a way that I fear might destabilize the country and push us towards sectarian violence and the civil war in Lebanon,
00:35:22
Speaker
What what Israel is doing, and this is openly happening and being debated now back to your point about the media's complicity, as Israel remaking the Middle East, what's this what's this idea that they have? This idea is that there would be regime change in Iran, you know,
00:35:37
Speaker
decapitating the head of the octopus, changing Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt in a way that furthers the Israeli agenda and strengthens the kind of relations that we saw in the Abram Accords between the UAE and Saudi
00:35:57
Speaker
And Israel, this is a region where Israel is with the support of the U.S., obviously financial and military and diplomatic, rising as a regional power with countries that are essentially doing its bidding in terms of stabilizing the region and maintaining anti-democratic norms. So it's reshaping the Middle East in its favor. Now, this is a fantasy.
00:36:17
Speaker
This will never happen. We understand what regime change operations do. We understand that the arrogance and the idiocy of that kind of top-down efforts to reshape and the racism, to reshape regions, certainly in this case, is to sort of meet Western demands. But this is the reality we're in. So this is what colonialism in the form of Zionism is doing in the region. This is the vision for what the New Middle East is.
00:36:43
Speaker
And so when we're thinking back to the point about decolonization, yes, thinking about decolonization in Palestine is part and parcel of thinking about decolonization in the region. It's thinking about how do these governments serve their people, not foreign interests. What does it mean to have a life of dignity and of good employment and good health and good education in the region today, not
00:37:07
Speaker
in a way that's sort of giving up also political aspirations or right to sovereignty and right to sort of having a political project that's one's own. And I think we haven't figured out what that looks like in the region yet, because the forces against us are very powerful. And to take us back to Abd al-Fattah's point,
00:37:29
Speaker
In his book, one of the quotes that I love is he says, you know, someone asks him, what can we do in order to sort of show solidarity or support the struggle in Egypt? And he said, fight for democracy in your own country. And I think that's right. And I think, you know, the struggles in the Arab world are reinforcing the struggle in Palestine and vice versa. And I think that's how we should be thinking about decolonization in the region.
00:37:54
Speaker
Got it. I think we'll leave it there. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Rethinking Palestine. Thank you for having.
00:38:05
Speaker
Rethinking Palestine is brought to you by Ashabaka, the Palestinian policy network. Ashabaka is the only global independent Palestinian think tank whose mission is to produce critical policy analysis and collectively imagine a new policymaking paradigm for Palestine and Palestinians worldwide. For more information or to donate to support our work, visit al-ashabaka.org. And importantly, don't forget to subscribe to Rethinking Palestine, wherever you listen to podcasts.