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Revolutionary Spirit: Palestine Round Table Pt. 1
8 Plays1 year ago
Join us for a guest episode and round-table discussion between four Palestinians in the diaspora, Muhamed, Battuul, Firas, Vinny & Michlin. In part one of this two-part conversation, we are given the gift of listening to our guests talk about Palestine, Palestinian resistance, indigeneity, historical memory, cross-movement solidarity and so much more. We are honored to offer these folks a platform to share their voices & stories with us. Stay tuned for Part II, coming soon!
(Recorded December 2023)
Guests:
- Muhamed Abedelhak, Sociology Professor
- Battuul Abdal
- Firas Helall, writer/organizer, writing to Palestinians back home to a liberated Palestine
- Vinny Mansoor, law student, born in exile, raised in heritage and currently on his way back home
- Michlin Mikel, Social Worker
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At the publishing of this episode at least 32,782 people, including more than 13,000 children have been brutally murdered at the hands of the Israeli Occupation Forces in Gaza. More than 8,000 remain missing. In the West Bank, at least 455 people have been killed since October 7th and over 4,750 injured. (Source: Aljazeera)
Learn more & take action here: Call to Action & Resource Checklist
Outro last updated April 2023
FYI: we've recently unpublished older episodes as we are in process of re-editing for a smoother flow & audio experience. they will be available again as we finish.
Thank you for listening to our passion project <3 You can find us on social media here! We're a team of 2 people & have always been ad-free. If you are enjoying, please consider supporting our sustainability on Patreon or by making a one-time contribution via CashApp $unpacktheeerie.
- your grateful hosts
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Palestinian Identity
00:00:00
Speaker
To be Palestinian, I think it's to exist in such a revolutionary way.
00:00:05
Speaker
Definitely believe that to be Palestinian, there's a revolutionary spirit because we actually actively have to assert our existence.
00:00:14
Speaker
And that's something that Edward Said said, it's such a tiresome, laborious task.
00:00:18
Speaker
And we do that often where we have to assert our existence.
00:00:21
Speaker
I sometimes I'll tell people I'm Palestinian before I introduce them my name.
00:00:25
Speaker
Hey, this is Shaina, one of the co-hosts of Unpacking the Eerie, and you're listening to a guest episode and roundtable discussion featuring a dear friend of ours, Micheline, and her friends slash comrades, Batul, Vinny, Mohammed, and Faraz.
00:00:40
Speaker
Here, we have the gift of listening to our guests talk about Palestine and Palestinian resistance, as well as identity, historical memory, indigeneity, cross-movement solidarity, and so much more.
00:00:52
Speaker
These discussions cover a lot of ground and are rooted in a lot of historical context.
00:00:58
Speaker
So if you're feeling like you want to learn more about a thing that is mentioned, we have a collection of resources available to you in the description.
Roundtable Discussion Overview
00:01:09
Speaker
This conversation, which will be published in two parts, was recorded in December of 2023.
00:01:14
Speaker
With that in mind, here is the episode.
00:01:17
Speaker
Thank you so much to our guests for giving us the opportunity to host this.
00:01:24
Speaker
Hi everyone!
00:01:25
Speaker
Hello listeners to Unpacking the Eerie.
00:01:28
Speaker
If I don't sound familiar, it's thanks to Shayana and Akshi for giving us this platform in order to have all of you hear us out.
00:01:36
Speaker
By us, I mean me, Batool, and my fellow friends here that are about to introduce themselves.
00:01:41
Speaker
Hi everybody!
00:01:42
Speaker
My name is Micheline and I'm a social worker and a mental health provider.
00:01:47
Speaker
Hi, my name is Firas.
00:01:49
Speaker
I'm a writer and organizer.
00:01:51
Speaker
Hello, my name is Muhammad and I'm a sociology professor.
00:01:54
Speaker
Hello, my name is Vinny.
00:01:55
Speaker
I'm a musician and a law student.
00:01:57
Speaker
Lovely.
00:01:58
Speaker
Thank you, everyone.
Understanding Resistance and Identity
00:01:59
Speaker
Today, we're going to be talking a little bit about resistance and being Palestinian and being indigenous.
00:02:04
Speaker
To start us off, we're going to be talking about why we are holding this podcast and what we want our listeners to get out of it.
00:02:11
Speaker
I'm hoping that we give everybody the knowledge, our experiences, history, the tools and resources so that everybody feels ready and prepared to put themselves in the way of the genocide.
00:02:26
Speaker
We have a responsibility and a duty towards people in Palestine and everywhere that there is a genocide happening as people living in the imperial core to stop this and to do whatever we can to get in the way.
00:02:38
Speaker
Thank
Colonial Impact on Palestinian Lives
00:02:39
Speaker
you, Firas.
00:02:39
Speaker
I also want to ask all of us here today, what does it mean to be indigenous to Palestine?
00:02:46
Speaker
And with that, we can start with Mohamed.
00:02:48
Speaker
Thank you.
00:02:48
Speaker
So one of the things that I do in the context of my profession and my occupation as an educator sociology professor is often explaining the social construct of things, which I think is critical to understand what it means to be indigenous as a social construct.
00:03:06
Speaker
Because indigeneity is often thought about in the context of who is there first.
00:03:11
Speaker
It's often thought about in genetic or scientific terms.
00:03:14
Speaker
But to be indigenous is nothing really more than a social construct.
00:03:17
Speaker
And once we start to understand that bit of information, a lot of things about Palestine will make sense.
00:03:24
Speaker
So what does it mean when we say that to be indigenous is a social construct?
00:03:28
Speaker
It simply means there was no such thing as indigeneity before colonization.
00:03:34
Speaker
Someone becomes indigenous as a response to colonization.
00:03:39
Speaker
The majority of the world population up until the early European colonization were, in this case, the indigenous people of the world.
00:03:47
Speaker
They were colonized by the minority in numbers, the European colonizers.
00:03:51
Speaker
Even if you think of something like the word passport or the borders that we have today, all of these are social constructs.
00:03:58
Speaker
Passports were not really a thing.
00:04:00
Speaker
Passports as we know them today are a European invention.
00:04:04
Speaker
It's a social construct.
00:04:06
Speaker
If we look, for example, the very first time the word passport emerged, this was in the mid 1500s to early 1600s.
00:04:14
Speaker
And it was something that was really limited generally to wealthy people and powerful people.
00:04:20
Speaker
And this idea of a passport as we knew it today is really very recent phenomenon.
00:04:26
Speaker
So the system that we have today really emerged after World War I.
00:04:29
Speaker
where the victorious countries like England and France, who already had that kind of system, wanted to make that system much wider, much more global.
00:04:39
Speaker
And that's because World War I have created a lot of refugees, a lot of displaced people, and they wanted to limit the entry of the people that they displaced into their countries or into their lands.
00:04:49
Speaker
So this also ties into the idea of borders, because really throughout human history, for the most part, we've had these two systems.
00:04:56
Speaker
We've had empires,
00:04:58
Speaker
And you've had these capitalist economies that emerged after the 1500s.
00:05:02
Speaker
These capitalist economies are now concerned about this idea of borders because it's about resources.
00:05:08
Speaker
And a lot of the borders that we have today, a lot of these nation states are very, very recent human phenomenon, which is a really important thing to understand because as Palestinians, for example,
00:05:18
Speaker
one of the questions that we get is, well, who was the ruler of Palestine?
00:05:23
Speaker
Or what kind of government ruled Palestine?
00:05:26
Speaker
Or who are the people that, you know, were the representatives of Palestinians?
00:05:30
Speaker
And it's important to understand that when we ask a question like that, the problem isn't the question itself.
00:05:35
Speaker
Because if the question is who ruled Palestine, or who was the president of Palestine, if Palestine was a real place,
00:05:41
Speaker
for people that deny the existence of Palestine.
00:05:44
Speaker
That question in itself is colonial.
00:05:45
Speaker
We don't ask that question about the indigenous people of Turtle Island.
00:05:49
Speaker
We don't say who was the president of Turtle Island.
00:05:52
Speaker
We can understand why that question sounds ridiculous because it's not connected to this idea of nation states and capitalist economies that Europeans introduced through colonization.
00:06:01
Speaker
So to be indigenous is a social construct.
00:06:04
Speaker
These passports are social constructs.
00:06:06
Speaker
These borders are social constructs.
00:06:09
Speaker
They're imposed on us.
00:06:10
Speaker
And we start thinking of them as what we would call in sociology social facts, which means ideas that have so much power that those ideas actually take a life on their own, that we start accepting it and normalizing it so much so
00:06:26
Speaker
that when someone, a lot of self-identified progressives or people that many think of them as progressives in the so-called United States will say things like, well, we're not saying we don't want borders, we just want immigration reform as a progressive suggestion.
00:06:40
Speaker
When in reality, it's not, it only affirms the colonial ideas.
00:06:44
Speaker
Yes, a world with no borders is very real, is very possible, is in recent history, and it's not a wild idea, but
00:06:52
Speaker
But we're made to believe that this idea that a world can exist without borders is one that is just unrealistic.
00:07:01
Speaker
It's not.
00:07:02
Speaker
And a lot of times it really clicks in the minds of people that actually transition from one nation state to another a lot of times when they walk across a border, when they see the sudden changes in rules and regulations.
00:07:13
Speaker
Something clicks in our minds that this is all just made up, that this is all just a social phenomenon.
00:07:17
Speaker
But to understand why Palestinians are indigenous is to simply understand that they are colonized.
00:07:23
Speaker
A lot of times the question is unfortunately directed towards who was there first.
00:07:27
Speaker
That question is very problematic, and I think it does a disservice to even engage in that question of who was there first, because one, it's colonization and indigeneity is not about who was there first.
00:07:38
Speaker
It is also not about any genetic markers necessarily, although those can, of course, become part of it just because of geographic information.
00:07:46
Speaker
And spatial differences between people, but that's not necessarily a marker of indigeneity as much as it's the history of colonization.
00:07:55
Speaker
So to understand why Palestinians are indigenous is to understand that Palestinians are colonized more specifically by the British and the Zionist movement leaders.
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah, more to your point, Mohammed, I think like you were saying, the capitalism is a recent phenomenon too, right?
00:08:10
Speaker
Like it's just like 400 years old and that borders are inherently violent.
00:08:16
Speaker
And we see that so clearly in Palestine where like people locally refer to the checkpoints, they call them death points.
00:08:22
Speaker
The other thing I wanted to touch on is just about indigeneity.
00:08:26
Speaker
As indigenous folks, we see it as our opposition towards the power structure and how we relate to each other with our neighbors and how we relate to the land, basically, right?
00:08:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:39
Speaker
That's really interesting as a point of conversation because as Palestinians, even back home, do you think we have a term that kind of brings up in like being indigenous to the land?
00:08:50
Speaker
Because in my perspective, it's usually just Falasini is enough.
00:08:55
Speaker
But like in a Western perspective, you have to prove that, yes, you're Palestinian, but you're also indigenous.
00:09:00
Speaker
And I think that comes from the idea of like when they ask you, where are you from?
00:09:03
Speaker
They don't ask you where you're from from.
00:09:05
Speaker
They ask you where...
00:09:06
Speaker
Like, we're in California.
00:09:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:09
Speaker
So the idea of being indigenous is already in everyone that's already local to Palestine because that's all they know.
00:09:16
Speaker
And that proves exactly why we are indigenous.
00:09:19
Speaker
Like, it just comes with that.
00:09:20
Speaker
I don't know if you guys share the same sentiment or not.
00:09:22
Speaker
Do you want to add to that, Michelle?
00:09:23
Speaker
I mean, yeah, as a Palestinian in the diaspora, like, growing up and being born in Jerusalem, that was a whole...
00:09:30
Speaker
Another different perspective.
00:09:32
Speaker
I remember when I moved to the U.S., people wouldn't know where Palestine is.
00:09:36
Speaker
So I had to prove to them where is Palestine, show them where is Palestine.
00:09:40
Speaker
Sometimes I would have to say, oh, it's next to Jordan.
00:09:42
Speaker
But they still wouldn't even know where Palestine
Diversity and Culture in Palestine
00:09:44
Speaker
is.
00:09:44
Speaker
Until you said Israel.
00:09:45
Speaker
Until I said Israel, I'm like, oh, OK, I know where that is.
00:09:48
Speaker
To be Palestinian, I think it's also...
00:09:52
Speaker
to exist in such a revolutionary way.
00:09:55
Speaker
Being also Christian-Palestinian is something that was very shocking to people because people don't understand that there are different religions in Palestine.
00:10:07
Speaker
It's not one thing.
00:10:08
Speaker
People did not know that Christian-Palestinian existed and they would always be so shocked.
00:10:15
Speaker
They're like, oh, what did they do to you?
00:10:17
Speaker
I'm like, what do you mean what they did to me?
00:10:19
Speaker
Nothing.
00:10:20
Speaker
I lived there.
00:10:21
Speaker
I coexisted.
00:10:22
Speaker
Yeah, it wasn't something so radical.
00:10:24
Speaker
It wasn't something so, you know, mind-blowing to be a Christian Palestinian.
00:10:30
Speaker
But it kind of is because y'all are like the OG Christians, right?
00:10:34
Speaker
The original Christians.
00:10:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:35
Speaker
I mean, my uncle is a priest.
00:10:39
Speaker
He did his priesthood in Bejana in Palestine.
00:10:43
Speaker
He actually got me to meet the Pope.
00:10:46
Speaker
Nice.
00:10:47
Speaker
Not Francis, not the one that is right now.
00:10:50
Speaker
John Paul.
00:10:52
Speaker
Yeah, I met him.
00:10:53
Speaker
I actually got the communion from him.
00:10:56
Speaker
My uncle met like all the other popes.
00:10:58
Speaker
And he's Palestinian too.
00:11:00
Speaker
I mean, he grew up in Jordan, but he's Palestinian.
00:11:02
Speaker
We do exist.
00:11:03
Speaker
We are in Palestine.
00:11:06
Speaker
I do like the revolutionary aspect that you spoke about.
00:11:09
Speaker
I think Vinny, if you'd like, you can add a little bit more on that.
00:11:12
Speaker
Oh yeah, definitely.
00:11:14
Speaker
I would definitely believe that to be Palestinian, there's a revolutionary spirit because we actually actively have to assert our existence.
00:11:24
Speaker
And that's something that Edward Said said, it's such a tiresome, laborious task.
00:11:28
Speaker
And we do that often where we have to assert our existence.
00:11:31
Speaker
Sometimes I'll tell people I'm Palestinian before I introduce them my name.
00:11:34
Speaker
I don't know.
00:11:35
Speaker
Even before I tell them where I'm from, I'm Palestinian.
00:11:38
Speaker
My name is Vinny.
00:11:39
Speaker
It's on all of our shirts right now.
00:11:43
Speaker
It's always part of the conversation.
00:11:45
Speaker
A person on the street will know I'm Palestinian before they know my name because I'm going to make them know because I'm going to take that space.
00:11:53
Speaker
They took that from us, so I'm going to take that space right back.
00:11:55
Speaker
That's how we find each other, right?
00:11:57
Speaker
So it is that revolutionary spirit and that kind of ties into culture and the idea of even hip hop in the United States, it started from a very revolutionary place.
00:12:09
Speaker
It started from, believe it or not, at one point the Bronx in New York looked like Gaza.
00:12:15
Speaker
The buildings were abandoned, torn apart.
00:12:19
Speaker
These kids were creating spaces of culture and community and joy at such a miserable place.
00:12:26
Speaker
And they're using these abandoned buildings to host these DJ parties and host these places where people can share their poetry, share their ideas, groove,
00:12:35
Speaker
have joy.
00:12:36
Speaker
Why not?
00:12:37
Speaker
Can they not have joy in a place so miserable?
00:12:40
Speaker
So I see that.
00:12:41
Speaker
I see that.
00:12:41
Speaker
And when I see the Ghazans, the great march of return, they're literally Dapkeh.
00:12:47
Speaker
They're doing Dapkeh.
00:12:47
Speaker
It's a traditional Palestinian dance in front of sniper fire, actively doing Dapkeh in front of sniper fire.
00:12:54
Speaker
And the traditions and origins of Dapkeh ties into, we could use quote unquote indigeneity, but
00:13:01
Speaker
just aka the people who were there you know so you know and it's it's a it shows how we were there because the death gate was actually a process of of settling on our and building our homes we'd flatten the earth out we'd get in a line and we'd stomp the floor we'd have boards and we'd stomp on the boards to flatten the earth so we can build our homes out of stone on top of that you know just about stone throwing i always think
00:13:24
Speaker
about it like how like we literally take pieces of the ground of the earth and then we weaponize it and like our people like you know use it to throw stones I mean back in the day like or still actually like when there are invasions right like yeah I mean the land is fighting on our side
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah, and that's another thing.
00:13:43
Speaker
You see these children in Palestine who are getting arrested for stone throwing.
00:13:48
Speaker
But those stones, that's the demolished parts of their home.
00:13:52
Speaker
That's their house.
00:13:53
Speaker
That's their property.
00:13:54
Speaker
I can chuck it at you if I want to.
00:13:57
Speaker
That's how I feel about that.
00:13:59
Speaker
Yeah, there's definitely a tie between our poetry and the idea how our folklore, our history of resistance, our steadfastness, it's written, it's carved into our poetry, our language, how we speak with one another.
00:14:14
Speaker
It kind of accounts for all of that history.
00:14:15
Speaker
It accounts for that struggle.
00:14:18
Speaker
Thank you, guys.
00:14:19
Speaker
I really do think this is very touching because we do live in the U.S. And most of my life I was raised in between back home and here.
00:14:27
Speaker
And to just hear how we as Palestinians speak of our land and of our homeland is so different and drastic from the people that we coexist with here in the U.S., right?
00:14:37
Speaker
They're so detached from...
00:14:39
Speaker
a land for us our land is us we defend it like we would defend our like our family because it is our family it is it's it's our it's our it's everything exactly yeah yeah so i think i think that gives a great perspective to all of you guys listening that when we talk about falistin it's like we're talking about someone from our family it's a family member that we're defending it's the the thing that encompasses all
00:15:01
Speaker
So thank you.
00:15:02
Speaker
When it comes in regards to being indigenous, what are we being indigenous from?
00:15:08
Speaker
What instigated that?
00:15:10
Speaker
So who would like to?
00:15:12
Speaker
Go ahead.
00:15:13
Speaker
So like I mentioned earlier, being indigenous is purely a social construct.
00:15:17
Speaker
It's a product of colonization.
00:15:18
Speaker
You don't become indigenous until you're colonized.
00:15:21
Speaker
So with the colonization of Palestine, that, you know, that the
00:15:26
Speaker
The world was colonized at one point by the British and the French and other European powers to the point that the sun did not set on British colonies.
00:15:34
Speaker
They took over the world.
00:15:35
Speaker
They created a lot of indigenous people through that type of colonization.
00:15:41
Speaker
With Palestine, the region known as Palestine, historical Palestine fell under British occupation, the British mandate.
00:15:50
Speaker
Now you can still see the impact of this kind of colonization today.
00:15:56
Speaker
A lot of people, for example, are surprised when I tell them I attended a French Catholic school when I grew up in Jordan.
00:16:03
Speaker
and that I am from a Palestinian family, that I am Palestinian.
00:16:07
Speaker
And then they're even more surprised when they learn that my name is Mohammed, which is a traditionally Muslim name, and I come from a Muslim family, and I am Muslim.
00:16:15
Speaker
And yet, you know, I was attending a French Catholic school.
00:16:18
Speaker
And even in my school, I remember very well
00:16:21
Speaker
you know, even imagery of Jesus in Jordan in these French Catholic schools in which Jesus was basically looking like a Scandinavian sailor.
00:16:30
Speaker
So the impact of colonization today is still very real.
00:16:35
Speaker
We still see it in the region even outside of Palestine.
00:16:39
Speaker
So for example, if you look at some of the geographic regions in North Africa like Al-Jazair, Algeria, Tunisia, Tunis, or Madrid, Morocco, you'll see a lot of people there still speak French as a second language and then some will speak English as a third language.
00:16:56
Speaker
If you go to places like Jordan and Palestine or Egypt, you'll see people are much more likely to be speaking English as a second language.
00:17:03
Speaker
And the real difference here, you'll see the connection is that a lot of parts of North Africa were colonized by the French.
00:17:10
Speaker
Places that were, you know, like Jordan or Egypt or Palestine were colonized by the British.
00:17:18
Speaker
But then a lot of this colonialism was not necessarily in the form of settler colonialism.
00:17:24
Speaker
It was just good old, you know, colonial state and approach where they go in there, steal the land, destroy the land.
00:17:29
Speaker
Exactly.
00:17:29
Speaker
Exactly.
00:17:31
Speaker
But the form of colonialism that we see in Palestine is more of the settler colonialism.
00:17:35
Speaker
And in this case, not necessarily directly by the British, but because the British basically had, let's call them converging interests with the Zionist movement, which emerged also in Europe in the late 1800s.
00:17:50
Speaker
under the leadership and the creation of Theodore Herso, who basically is a very blatant Islamophobe, anti-Palestinian, lots of statements that he made, well documented, written statements that he created that are very Islamophobe, they're into this very racist.
00:18:07
Speaker
He's also an atheist.
00:18:08
Speaker
And he is an atheist.
00:18:09
Speaker
He was a secularist, yeah.
00:18:10
Speaker
Exactly, but he used Judaism.
00:18:12
Speaker
They weaponized it.
00:18:13
Speaker
Exactly.
00:18:14
Speaker
I think it's important to acknowledge that Zionism...
00:18:17
Speaker
Zionism is a secular movement.
00:18:19
Speaker
It's not based on religion.
00:18:21
Speaker
It started on a secular movement.
00:18:23
Speaker
And now it's like on steroids.
00:18:25
Speaker
Yeah, and then they use the religion to weaponize it.
00:18:29
Speaker
Just like Manifest Destiny with the colonization of this land.
00:18:33
Speaker
The relevance of religion in this case, in the colonial project is to the same extent, well, in this case, Judaism is used to the same extent that Manifest Destiny and Christianity was used to rationalize the violence towards the indigenous people.
00:18:46
Speaker
Exactly.
00:18:47
Speaker
So the Zionist project is one that basically collaborated with imperialist powers to create a settler colonial state of the so-called Israel.
00:18:58
Speaker
And in the words of Kwame Ture, who said,
00:19:01
Speaker
once responded to the claim that Zionism is just a liberation movement for Jewish people.
00:19:06
Speaker
He said that liberation movements do not align themselves with imperial powers.
00:19:12
Speaker
Instead, they actually fight imperial powers.
00:19:14
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:19:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, like when we think about like Sykes-Picot, right, and how a French dude and an English guy like took it upon themselves to carve up our part of the world.
00:19:24
Speaker
And the same way like the rest of European nations like carved up in like the scramble for Africa, right?
00:19:30
Speaker
And there's like so many laws that are like just like relics from the era of the British occupation of Palestine, which paved the way for the Zionist colonialism, settler colonialism of Palestine, like the administrative detention, for example, where like even children are held detained indefinitely, no charges, no trial.
00:19:50
Speaker
A person does not even know why are they in jail?
00:19:52
Speaker
When will they get out?
00:19:53
Speaker
And they're just...
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, they're just lost in the system forever, basically.
00:19:58
Speaker
I definitely understand that Palestinian resistance takes a course within every Palestinian family.
00:20:03
Speaker
I don't think any one of us can say that they don't have any family member or someone they know that wasn't in the prisons in Israel or detained under the Israeli government.
00:20:15
Speaker
I know at least my family has had a few people in the past years, even children.
00:20:20
Speaker
We recently had one of my dad's cousins
00:20:22
Speaker
released like last month right before everything in Gaza happened two months ago now again I remember when I was in Palestine when I was younger we would walk all me and my little cousins would stand by the windows when the Israeli soldiers would come in and we'd start shouting I forgot what the word was I don't know if you guys remember what they would shout when they would come in
00:20:39
Speaker
But it's like, boo, boo, yahood, itla'u barra, something like that.
00:20:43
Speaker
But yeah, so the revolution is within everyone in Palestine because it's your reality.
00:20:51
Speaker
Every day you have to fight for your watan.
00:20:52
Speaker
And I know that like a lot of us here probably have had people from our own families in this instance.
00:20:57
Speaker
Yeah, my grandfather, I mean, fought with...
00:21:01
Speaker
and against the British colonialism, basically.
00:21:04
Speaker
It's a necessity.
00:21:07
Speaker
Resistance is existence, basically.
00:21:09
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:21:10
Speaker
And my great-grandfather as well.
00:21:12
Speaker
We're actively fighting for our...
00:21:15
Speaker
Dignity and actively fighting for our self-determination this entire time, you know it quite frankly if the Buddhist had taken over our land We would be actively fighting against those who are taking up the name of the Buddhists So that's the idea it's like we are a people who are fighting to exist on the land that we belong to It's really not that complicated
00:21:37
Speaker
We could get into different things like there was general strikes way before the Zionists came over to weaken the British's economy, to weaken them.
00:21:46
Speaker
Palestinian people have always been actively fighting against colonialist powers, the strongest colonialist powers.
00:21:52
Speaker
So...
00:21:53
Speaker
In reality, after World War II, the British just wanted to put a big bow on the whole situation.
00:21:59
Speaker
And the best way for them to do that was to concede and actually be in concert with the Zionist movement to actually just give them our land.
Religion and Colonization
00:22:10
Speaker
And if you look at the Balfour Declaration, it is for the Jews to have a homeland in Palestine.
00:22:16
Speaker
So that concedes the fact there's a place called Palestine and these people are going to live there.
00:22:24
Speaker
I don't understand why they couldn't live there as Palestinians, why they couldn't just be Palestinian Jews, just like Jesus Christ was a Palestinian Jew thousands of years ago.
00:22:33
Speaker
And my ancestors as a Palestinian Christian, they saw the coming of Christ and they thought that guy had the right ideas and they followed him.
00:22:41
Speaker
And that's why I'm a Palestinian Christian.
00:22:42
Speaker
So I didn't convert to Christianity.
00:22:46
Speaker
I was born into it from a very deep, long line.
00:22:49
Speaker
It's a deep ancestry.
00:22:50
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:22:51
Speaker
So, I mean, that's another thing.
00:22:53
Speaker
Resistance for the Palestinian people is quite literally to exist is to resist.
00:22:57
Speaker
If we weren't, this wouldn't be a conversation.
00:23:00
Speaker
If there was no resistance on October 7th, this would not be a conversation.
00:23:04
Speaker
People would be very uninterested about it.
00:23:06
Speaker
Absolutely, yeah.
00:23:07
Speaker
I think something to add of you spoke about Jesus.
00:23:10
Speaker
I think it's important to say that Jesus was radical.
00:23:12
Speaker
Yeah, he was very radical in all the ways that he he was actively doing different things for different people.
00:23:19
Speaker
And people don't see that people think, you know, like like Mohammed said, he's a.
00:23:24
Speaker
I really appreciate that.
00:23:25
Speaker
He portrayed him like a Scandinavian saint.
00:23:28
Speaker
Yeah, and that's not what he was.
00:23:30
Speaker
I mean, he went against the power of the time.
00:23:32
Speaker
Exactly.
00:23:32
Speaker
He went against the Judaism of the time.
00:23:34
Speaker
Exactly.
00:23:35
Speaker
He became his own entity.
00:23:37
Speaker
Yeah, so he was very radical and...
00:23:39
Speaker
A good example of that is when Jesus Christ walked into the synagogues, a place of worship, a house of God, and he saw that they were exchanging chickens and animals for sacrifices and they're exchanging money and coins.
00:23:53
Speaker
He saw that he got so enraged.
00:23:55
Speaker
Imagine Jesus Christ.
00:23:57
Speaker
Being so enraged to see the sight and he flipped the tables and he said, you dare disrespect my father's house.
00:24:03
Speaker
That's revolutionary.
00:24:05
Speaker
That's at the very core, very revolutionary.
00:24:08
Speaker
And he threatened the powers that be.
00:24:10
Speaker
The system is always trying to defend all of these revolutionary concepts.
00:24:14
Speaker
Because the same thing we witnessed with Islam.
00:24:16
Speaker
People say, the normalizers, they say, oh, Islam is a religion of peace.
00:24:21
Speaker
When in reality, Islam is a religion of justice.
00:24:24
Speaker
Right?
00:24:25
Speaker
No, I totally agree.
00:24:26
Speaker
And I really appreciate mentioning Jesus in such a way because I feel like the movement of Christianity has definitely been a little too westernized recently.
00:24:35
Speaker
It has been colonized.
00:24:36
Speaker
Exactly.
00:24:37
Speaker
So many different ways.
00:24:38
Speaker
Yeah, and commercialized.
00:24:39
Speaker
Commodified.
00:24:41
Speaker
And I feel like we can all move back and think back.
00:24:43
Speaker
Maybe we've heard the stories to the time of Palestine before all these titles and limitations that was put on the Palestinian people.
00:24:51
Speaker
For example, I remember my Seedo used to say, my grandpa used to say, there was a time in Palestine when you could take a taxi from Lebanon to Al-Quds.
00:25:01
Speaker
So you can eat breakfast in Al-Aqsa and then go have some tea or coffee with your friend in Lebanon.
00:25:07
Speaker
So it's very much of a reality.
00:25:09
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:25:10
Speaker
to have open borders prior to colonization, prior to the concept of passports, prior to everything that we kind of exist through and we've normalized today.
00:25:18
Speaker
So I would love to hear from you guys more about what for you, Philistine, prior to all this colonization is.
00:25:26
Speaker
Whoever wants to start.
00:25:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, my parents said exactly, my great-grandparents said exactly the same story, like having breakfast in, you know, and then having lunch in Amman.
00:25:37
Speaker
And then there's like all of these bus lines, right, like from Haifa to Kuwait.
00:25:41
Speaker
to Cairo and to like even the Hijaz railway that went from Turkey to carry the pilgrimage, the pilgrims through to Jerusalem, Al-Quds, and then like to Hijaz, which is like Mecca.
00:25:56
Speaker
And then you have Lidd airport, which like is colonized.
00:25:59
Speaker
And now it's under, you know, under the name of one of the people who ethnically cleansed our people and did so many massacres against our people.
00:26:07
Speaker
And it's important for us to name like, you know, like, no, it's Muttar Lidd.
00:26:10
Speaker
It's
00:26:11
Speaker
Lid Airport.
00:26:12
Speaker
And Lid actually had so many engineers, right?
00:26:15
Speaker
Because that's where the trailways were fabricated, were made, and that's where the airport was.
00:26:21
Speaker
But one thing, also, I wanted to just because you were touching on it, the barter, basically, like, oh, yeah, before...
00:26:26
Speaker
You know, what Vinny was saying earlier, I heard the story about how, you know, the Yaffa oranges were so delicious and so popular around the world that products like cars even were bartered in exchange for boxes of the Yaffa oranges.
00:26:41
Speaker
Our currency was actually the fruits of our labor and the fruits of our land.
00:26:45
Speaker
But now all of that is going towards dispossessing our own people and manufacturing all of these weapons that go and kill our own people, you know, using our fruits of labor and extracting our resources to make guns that are aimed at us.
00:27:00
Speaker
As Palestinians, we're also very, like, rural people.
00:27:04
Speaker
So our land is our identity.
00:27:07
Speaker
I know my parents moved here to Hemet, California.
00:27:10
Speaker
So if any of you guys hearing this know what Hemet is, it's nothing.
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:14
Speaker
There's barely anything in Hamid but empty lands.
00:27:16
Speaker
And my dad took that upon himself.
00:27:18
Speaker
And in his backyard, we have zaytun, so like olive trees.
00:27:21
Speaker
We have anab, so grapevines.
00:27:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:25
Speaker
And we have rubman, pomegranates.
00:27:27
Speaker
And it was his everyday ritual to just wake up.
00:27:31
Speaker
go in the backyard and just take care of his plants and that's just so palestinian like that's the only thing that i remember and our tree for our olives barely had any zaytun on it barely had any olives but my mom still managed to pick them and make a small jar of olive oil and i think that brought her so much just pride in being right yeah
00:27:50
Speaker
But we also have the urbanites, right?
00:27:52
Speaker
Because Palestine was also organically cosmopolitan, again, because of the pilgrims.
00:27:58
Speaker
There are doctors from Chad.
00:28:00
Speaker
We have Afro-Palestinians.
00:28:02
Speaker
We have people who came from Iraq, people who came from Turkmenistan, people who came even from Europe.
00:28:09
Speaker
Right.
00:28:09
Speaker
And yeah, the Druze, so many also religions like the Bahayin that today have the gardens in Hefa, they were actually before the colonization.
00:28:17
Speaker
Of course, like the politics of divide and conquer, which again is a British relic that Zionists exploit today to separate us and to divide us, where they, you know, create a model minority.
00:28:28
Speaker
And I'm sure this sounds familiar to, you know, audiences in the U.S., you know, where they play up all of this respectability.
00:28:34
Speaker
So they play up a model minority that is collaborating and actively aiding and abetting
00:28:38
Speaker
the colonization at the expense of the rest of the indigenous folks.
00:28:42
Speaker
But, you know, like just like the concept of like, we also were an urban society.
00:28:46
Speaker
Of course, we had like the, you know, each town is famous for some kind of produce, a kind of like, you know, where we were able to practice self-sufficiency.
00:28:55
Speaker
But at the same time, we had urbanized where, you know, there was cinemas, there were libraries, there were concerts like Mkalthoum and Fayrouz, you know, Abdul Halim,
00:29:03
Speaker
hour-long concerts yeah exactly absolutely you know like um you know it was the publishing houses there were newspapers as early as 1911 there were like institutes and schools again that fallacy of oh it's just like making the desert bloom or like a land without the people that's how you sell it to you know people in europe so that oh i don't feel guilty about stealing somebody else's home right i absolved myself from the guilt i've
00:29:29
Speaker
Yeah, go ahead.
00:29:29
Speaker
I was going to say our version of that, our side of the coin with that, with the people without a land is like, you know, for us, in Arabic, they say, Yeah.
00:29:39
Speaker
They say, They took it fully furnished.
00:29:43
Speaker
They took the land fully furnished.
00:29:45
Speaker
So what I was just saying, where, quote unquote, so-called Ben-Gurion airport was, lo and behold, there was already an airport there.
00:29:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:52
Speaker
They were very creative people we're talking about.
00:29:56
Speaker
They're like, oh, this looks good.
00:29:58
Speaker
We'll take it.
00:29:59
Speaker
And that's what it was.
00:30:00
Speaker
It was beautiful.
00:30:01
Speaker
I mean, how can anyone believe that a coastal land that has the best climate to produce isn't thriving?
00:30:08
Speaker
Who believes that that was a desert?
00:30:10
Speaker
It's like geographies.
00:30:12
Speaker
Y'all are being scammed.
00:30:13
Speaker
I think it's...
00:30:15
Speaker
I think it's very important to realize that we all have a shared sentiment is that Palestine was thriving.
00:30:21
Speaker
We had the Muslim next to the Christian next to the Yahudi.
00:30:25
Speaker
We all were together.
00:30:26
Speaker
And it wasn't until colonization and it wasn't until imperialism and it wasn't until the British...
00:30:32
Speaker
So many factors that changed us and made the fighters that we had to be.
00:30:37
Speaker
It's not something that we particularly choose to be on one day.
00:30:41
Speaker
It's our survival mode.
00:30:43
Speaker
In order to exist as Palestinians, we had to fight against this occupying power.
00:30:49
Speaker
And I think it's also important to kind of start seeing the parallels with all other colonization that took place, especially settler colonialism that's still ongoing in places like the so-called United States, so-called Australia, Canada, etc.
00:31:05
Speaker
We see the very same patterns.
00:31:06
Speaker
Even if we look at something, for example, like the British colonization of India, you will see that the British, for example, did end up actually recruiting and using Indians to fight against their own people with the British.
00:31:22
Speaker
We kind of see the same patterns here.
00:31:25
Speaker
And we see the same patterns in Palestine, where we see the Palestinian Authority that's basically a tool for the occupation.
00:31:33
Speaker
It's basically people that look like other Palestinian, people that speak like other Palestinian, people that live in Palestine.
00:31:41
Speaker
But the Palestinian Authority has become a way for the colonizer to use the indigenous population to work against their own.
00:31:50
Speaker
So it's important to also understand the role of colonization and
00:31:53
Speaker
creating this kind of psychological internalized colonization of the indigenous people where they start accepting in some instances working against their own people with the occupation.
00:32:05
Speaker
And I think that's something we need to address as well.
00:32:08
Speaker
But going back to another point that Fauras mentioned earlier, relevant to the ease of movement, I know my dad and my grandfather were
00:32:18
Speaker
They lived in Jerusalem, but they had an apparel shop, a business, a small business, a small apparel shop in downtown Amman.
00:32:25
Speaker
So you could literally just commute back and forth.
00:32:28
Speaker
From Al-Quds to Wall Street.
00:32:29
Speaker
From Al-Quds to Amman.
00:32:30
Speaker
And I remember last year when I went to Palestine, I was literally looking at Jordan across the border.
00:32:35
Speaker
I could see Jordan.
00:32:37
Speaker
And I had not seen my nieces in years.
00:32:40
Speaker
And all I could think to myself is how I just could not go see my nieces because now these borders, these colonial borders that didn't exist at one point, not in the distant past, were stopping me from seeing my nieces, even though I could literally see the lights of cities in Jordan.
00:32:58
Speaker
And I knew if there were no borders, I'd be there in about 45 minutes or less.
00:33:03
Speaker
I couldn't.
00:33:03
Speaker
And it stopped me from literally seeing my family because of that.
00:33:06
Speaker
Because I understood the complexity of leaving through El Jisr, which is basically the border crossing that we have right now between.
00:33:14
Speaker
There are multiple ones, but any of them would be at least a day kind of.
00:33:19
Speaker
trip and sometimes you might not be able to make it you'll go there for the whole day you'll wait and they close it and sometimes you'll just wait all day long and then you don't process you and then you just have to go back at a time where literally my dad could just go back and forth in the same day multiple times and
00:33:36
Speaker
These are all just colonial inventions.
00:33:38
Speaker
So what was life like before colonization in Palestine, at least in the context of mobility?
Historical Context of Freedom and Colonization
00:33:43
Speaker
It was fluid because even when we think of pre-colonial history, it doesn't have to be just Palestinian, quote-unquote borders of empires, really more like frontiers, where these structures that were built, for example, were more to protect from invaders, not to protect from people coming in or reduce their mobility around the land.
00:34:04
Speaker
That's very important because I feel like a lot of people when they talk about land pre to what we know now, even with Native Americans, they were called Indians because Christopher Columbus thought he discovered India.
00:34:19
Speaker
And the same concept of already furnished.
00:34:21
Speaker
It was already furnished for them.
00:34:23
Speaker
Thanksgiving just passed by.
00:34:24
Speaker
But the reason why Thanksgiving is celebrated is because the pilgrims came to a land that already was established, a land that had food already set for them, and they claimed it as their own.
00:34:34
Speaker
So I feel like a lot of the struggles that we go through as Palestinians and the support that we get is usually from other indigenous people, other people that know the struggle and know what it means to defend the land.
00:34:45
Speaker
Mm hmm.
00:34:46
Speaker
Speaking of said support from other people, we know about like the Black Panther movement, the Irish, even South Africa.
00:34:54
Speaker
All of these people are or have been the main supporters overall.
00:34:58
Speaker
And I know I think Hamid can speak a little bit more about that.
00:35:01
Speaker
Yeah, so this kind of goes back to the main idea that I mentioned earlier when we started this discussion, which is that indigeneity is a social construct.
00:35:09
Speaker
So someone becomes indigenous because they've been colonized.
00:35:11
Speaker
So if you look at South Africa, for example,
00:35:14
Speaker
we look at the indigenous population here in Turrell Island or in the so-called Australia, you will see that all of these people became indigenous because they were colonized.
00:35:24
Speaker
When we look at the Irish, the same story, the response through the Irish Republican army that were labeled as terrorists or the
00:35:31
Speaker
liberation movements that we saw in South Africa that were also labeled as terrorist organizations or terrorist individuals, people that were labeled as terrorists like Nelson Mandela.
00:35:40
Speaker
This is a very common strategy and very similar patterns that we see across all of these liberation movements.
00:35:46
Speaker
We see the same patterns.
00:35:48
Speaker
Even when you look at the Black Panthers, we see that the FBI infiltrated them.
00:35:51
Speaker
We see that these are the folks that are truly seeking liberation.
00:35:55
Speaker
They're not looking for compromises with their oppressors or with their colonizers.
Liberation Movements and External Influences
00:35:59
Speaker
They're often targeted.
00:36:01
Speaker
They often are infiltrated by government agents that are basically trying to destroy these institutions.
00:36:09
Speaker
And this kind of also goes back to an important point.
00:36:12
Speaker
Which is that whichever indigenous population, whichever oppressed population you look at, you will always find some people within this population working with the oppressor.
00:36:23
Speaker
And I think it's important to point out that these people that work with the oppressors, this is not necessarily to place the blame on the oppressed group.
00:36:30
Speaker
This is to say that there's a psychological component.
00:36:33
Speaker
And that psychological component is an important part of any system of oppression.
00:36:38
Speaker
An easy example of this, although I don't really like using necessarily gender examples in terms of power dynamics and to try to explain it through the lens of oppression when it comes to colonization, because they're different.
00:36:50
Speaker
but power dynamics nonetheless work in a similar way.
00:36:53
Speaker
We do, for example, know that women can support the patriarchy.
00:36:57
Speaker
We've seen that happen.
00:36:58
Speaker
Just like we've also seen folks that identify with the LGBTQ community also can support or make homophobic statements.
00:37:06
Speaker
Exactly, or like white feminism.
00:37:08
Speaker
And homonationalism.
00:37:09
Speaker
All of these are part of that system of oppression.
00:37:13
Speaker
And it's important to understand that if we see someone that is indigenous,
00:37:18
Speaker
And that is working against their liberation and working against the interests of their own people.
00:37:24
Speaker
This is not to say that, oh, the blame is to be placed on the indigenous population or the oppressed population, but to understand that these are much bigger structures and systems.
00:37:33
Speaker
There's, for example, this term called native orientalist or native neo-orientalist in sociology, which
00:37:41
Speaker
which is basically we're seeing today in the context of these brown folks or indigenous folks that show up on TV and basically parrot the same things that their white masters are expecting them to say.
00:37:55
Speaker
This is a form of neo-Orientalism where indigenous subjects are basically the voices of white supremacy.
00:38:03
Speaker
We see that in the UN.
00:38:04
Speaker
We see that in the UN.
00:38:05
Speaker
Every US representative in the UN, it's always somebody from the black community.
00:38:12
Speaker
We see when they vetoed the recent... The UN resolution.
00:38:16
Speaker
The UN resolution for ceasefire.
00:38:18
Speaker
And then, what's his name?
00:38:19
Speaker
Kony.
00:38:19
Speaker
I forgot his name, but almost every UN representative that we had was... Yeah.
00:38:23
Speaker
Kofi Annan.
00:38:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:25
Speaker
All of them, most of them were...
00:38:26
Speaker
People of minority groups, absolutely.
00:38:30
Speaker
They're tokenized.
00:38:31
Speaker
They're definitely tokenized.
00:38:32
Speaker
It's like if a bomb is dropped by someone who's brown, all of a sudden it's fine now.
00:38:37
Speaker
Like right around the elections of Joe Biden, all of a sudden since Kamala Harris was his VP, everyone's like, oh, we need a first woman or first VP.
00:38:46
Speaker
That's just too much.
00:38:49
Speaker
Exactly.
00:38:50
Speaker
It goes into everything in the U.S. Even schools.
00:38:53
Speaker
like the diversity and inclusion centers of schools, they go out of their way to have students of color join these coalitions, join these groups, but then don't even listen to them.
00:39:06
Speaker
They'll have one by person and that person will be taking the narrative, but when it comes to the pictures on campus or pictures of anything, they're taking the pictures of the people of color.
00:39:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:16
Speaker
The respectable ones.
00:39:17
Speaker
Exactly.
00:39:18
Speaker
The ones that fit the narrative.
00:39:19
Speaker
Exactly.
00:39:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:39:20
Speaker
We're meant to shrink ourselves so that we fit into their frame.
00:39:23
Speaker
Precisely.
00:39:24
Speaker
Their claustrophobic little, yeah.
00:39:26
Speaker
Yeah, and I know Mohamed spoke a little bit about Black Panther.
00:39:28
Speaker
Do you want to expand on that, Vinny?
00:39:30
Speaker
Definitely.
00:39:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:31
Speaker
What we saw with the Black Panther movement was actually a rise in the consciousness of internationalism, internationalist thinking, the idea that if you are a struggling person, that you can identify with all struggling people of the world.
00:39:47
Speaker
whether they are in Chicago, whether they're in Palestine, whether they are in South Africa, whether they're in Chile, in all parts of the world, there are struggling people and they're fundamentally fighting the same oppressor.
00:40:00
Speaker
And they are fundamentally all fighting for self-determination.
00:40:03
Speaker
I mean, when you look at the 10 point platform,
00:40:07
Speaker
of the Black Panther Party.
00:40:10
Speaker
We're talking about law students, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, even before that, Kwame Torre or Stokely Carmichael, you know, with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and he ended up being one of the ministers of defense in the Black Panther Party.
00:40:28
Speaker
So, we're speaking of the first point on the Black Panther Party speaks of self-determination.
00:40:33
Speaker
We want the freedom.
00:40:35
Speaker
We want power to determine
00:40:37
Speaker
the destiny of our black and oppressed peoples.
00:40:40
Speaker
And notice how we're villainized.
00:40:42
Speaker
But if you look at their platform, the first six points are all social programs that they want to implement.
00:40:49
Speaker
I mean, you're talking full employment for our people.
00:40:52
Speaker
We want an end of the robbery by capitalism of our oppressed communities.
00:40:56
Speaker
You know, the idea of the wealth and the resources, you know, we talk about brain drain all the time.
00:41:02
Speaker
The idea that they're taking our
00:41:04
Speaker
Oh man, black culture is just hijacked and put on a pedestal and sold and they don't, they're stripped of their actual ownership and that's what they were fighting.
00:41:15
Speaker
Decent housing, decent homes, decent education for our children.
00:41:19
Speaker
That's point five.
00:41:21
Speaker
We want completely free healthcare for all black and oppressed people.
00:41:24
Speaker
Man, but all black and oppressed people.
00:41:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:52
Speaker
It literally says, we want an immediate end to the police brutality, murder of black people, other people of color, all oppressed people inside the United States.
00:42:01
Speaker
So under those pretexts, under that, that is when we are, and they knew the law, they studied the law, their students, they say, okay, we can police the police.
00:42:09
Speaker
We are allowed to stand within 10 feet.
00:42:11
Speaker
They're genius.
00:42:13
Speaker
They combined the Second Amendment right with their ability to observe the police.
00:42:17
Speaker
I could carry my rifle and I could stand 10 feet away from the situation and I could watch what happens.
00:42:21
Speaker
And if I see you beating on my brother, I could act on that.
00:42:24
Speaker
Who knows the oppressor the best?
00:42:27
Speaker
The oppressed.
00:42:28
Speaker
We know our oppressors better than everybody else.
00:42:31
Speaker
So they took that seventh point of the ten-point platform of community organization, of actual social programs, food programs.
00:42:40
Speaker
They had square meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, groceries for the community.
00:42:44
Speaker
That's what was the big thing.
00:42:46
Speaker
It wasn't until they had to use their force, like we're witnessing in the Blad, like we're witnessing back home in Palestine, on when the oppressed people use their force.
00:42:55
Speaker
When we're quiet and we're dying softly...
00:42:57
Speaker
Nobody, it's not a problem.
00:42:59
Speaker
But when we use our force, that's when it becomes an issue for them.
00:43:02
Speaker
And we really witnessed this, the unification between the black African struggle and the Palestinian movement.
00:43:09
Speaker
Huey P. Newton, in his youth, he went to Lebanon.
00:43:12
Speaker
He met with Yasser Arafat, you know.
00:43:14
Speaker
love him or hate him, he met with Palestinian leadership at the time because he as a law student understood that he was a part of a greater struggle, a greater movement and he was connecting with leaders of the Palestinian Liberation Organization Movement.
00:43:27
Speaker
The Palestinian Liberation Organization Movement who fed with actual real arms, with actual real support, fed the African Liberation Movement in South Africa.
00:43:37
Speaker
And this was, I mean, Nelson Mandela was an ardent supporter and defender of Palestine.
00:43:44
Speaker
He knew what they did for him and his movement.
00:43:46
Speaker
So the enemy's tactic, when I say the enemy, their tactic has always been to defy and conquer.
00:43:53
Speaker
So it's so natural that our victory is based on unification and liberation.
00:44:00
Speaker
We unify and we liberate one another.
00:44:03
Speaker
They want to keep us separated and that's the only way they're strong.
00:44:05
Speaker
The only way they're strong is if it's a black movement, it's a Chicano movement, it's a Palestinian movement.
00:44:10
Speaker
But what if it's an international movement, of human movement, of all struggling people?
00:44:15
Speaker
That's different.
00:44:15
Speaker
And I think that applies to like even worldly politics.
00:44:18
Speaker
Like when we talk about what happened in Syria and Iraq and everything, they separated Sunni Shia, they separated this versus that.
00:44:24
Speaker
And my dad would always tell me, Iraq was beautiful before they started meddling in because everyone was just co-existing and now...
00:44:31
Speaker
America and everything Palestinians have always supported liberation movements in Vietnam We we supported the Vietnamese we literally trained them.
00:44:40
Speaker
We they came back with AK-47s and kofiyas There's a reason why Vietnamese wear kofiyas We supported their struggle against the imperialist forces of the US Who's buying the weapons now, you know?
00:44:52
Speaker
Oh man!
00:44:52
Speaker
Vietnamese government is buying a shit ton of weapons from Israel
00:44:57
Speaker
You know, our oppressors command, they're working with each other, right?
00:45:00
Speaker
They know each other.
00:45:01
Speaker
So they're united.
00:45:02
Speaker
They have a united front.
00:45:03
Speaker
So I think an important point that Vinny made earlier was about the Black Panthers believing in armed resistance, which, again, one of the things that we see today is this narrative of so-called gun control, which a lot of self-identified progressives in this country like to promote and support this idea of gun control.
00:45:24
Speaker
I think what a lot of people don't realize is that this is really just part of the liberal politics that we have in this country, because the reality of it is that it's not about gun control.
00:45:33
Speaker
It's about gun control for black and brown people.
00:45:35
Speaker
The controlled access is largely towards people that have a record that are formerly incarcerated, people that might live in poor neighborhoods.
00:45:43
Speaker
When you even just take for the example of
00:45:47
Speaker
people that have a record of formerly incarcerated and limit their access to guns.
00:45:51
Speaker
For a lot of people, this might seem like, oh, this sounds like a great idea, we should do that.
00:45:55
Speaker
But then again, this is part of the liberal politics because any gun control regulations that impacts those that are formerly incarcerated,
00:46:04
Speaker
is going to disproportionately limit access to guns, which is again a constitutional right, but really limiting the access to brown and black people.
00:46:13
Speaker
So this narrative of gun control and liberal politics is really at the core of a lot of the dangers that we run into in any settler colony, because these liberal politics are really intended to come across as progressive, to try to recruit brown and black and indigenous people, when in reality, as Malcolm X described it best,
00:46:34
Speaker
that liberals are like foxes and the people on the right, Republicans, are more like wolves, where wolves are going to show you their teeth and they're going to tell you they're out here to eat you.
00:46:48
Speaker
Foxes are...
00:46:50
Speaker
going to pretend to be your friend.
00:46:52
Speaker
And then they're still going to have their meal.
00:46:54
Speaker
So the foxes are going to be a lot more successful in getting their meal than the wolf because at least, you know, the wolf is there, you know, with the intent of eating you, of harming you.
00:47:06
Speaker
And you know it, exactly.
00:47:07
Speaker
But the fox is going to trick you, going to pretend to be your friend, and they're going to have their meal.
00:47:13
Speaker
And that's exactly what liberals do.
00:47:15
Speaker
Sure.
00:47:15
Speaker
And that's why liberalism is extremely dangerous because it hides itself and it does it very effectively.
00:47:21
Speaker
Malcolm was one of those people who he would just cut through the rhetoric, you know, he would just slice through it like butter.
00:47:29
Speaker
He knew where he stood on things.
00:47:31
Speaker
They tried to call him.
00:47:32
Speaker
They would say, oh, tell us more about your cult or whatever.
00:47:35
Speaker
They would pose that question to him and he would come to them.
00:47:39
Speaker
with poise, with direct analysis, and that was a threat.
00:47:42
Speaker
He exposed liberals and what liberal ideology does.
00:47:47
Speaker
Like Batu said, he cut through the bullshit.
00:47:49
Speaker
And that's why it's important that people start detecting this liberal nonsense when they hear it.
00:47:53
Speaker
Because this narrative of gun control is harmful.
00:47:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:56
Speaker
And it is anti every liberation movement, meaningful liberation movement we've seen.
00:48:01
Speaker
It's anti the liberation movements we've seen in Ireland, anti liberation movements that we've seen in South Africa, anti every indigenous liberation movement.
00:48:10
Speaker
Because what's been taken by violence and force can only be taken back through violence and force.
00:48:17
Speaker
Well, they want to monopolize power, right?
00:48:19
Speaker
The state wants to have a monopoly on power.
00:48:22
Speaker
I think the worst form of offense is usually stemming from microaggressions, if anything, because it will be the people that think they're doing, like, God's work.
00:48:31
Speaker
They're, like, smiling at you with the biggest smile.
00:48:34
Speaker
They're like, where are you from?
00:48:35
Speaker
I'm like, California.
00:48:37
Speaker
Like, no, no, from, from.
00:48:38
Speaker
So, like, I can ask that question to any brown person.
00:48:40
Speaker
That's fine.
00:48:41
Speaker
Brown people, we can say that.
00:48:42
Speaker
Oh, yeah, 100%.
00:48:44
Speaker
A little more privileged, they come up to you, they see you as more exotic, and see you as more that.
00:48:48
Speaker
They become micro-aggressing you, that's exactly how I feel liberalism is.
00:48:54
Speaker
They try to use us in order to do their cause.
00:48:57
Speaker
When you do tell them where you're from, and you say, oh, I'm Palestinian, and they're like,
00:49:04
Speaker
How is your family out there?
00:49:07
Speaker
Are they good?
00:49:08
Speaker
Are they in Gaza?
00:49:09
Speaker
Are they in Gaza?
00:49:11
Speaker
Are your family in Gaza?
00:49:12
Speaker
It's absolutely important.
00:49:14
Speaker
Palestine is Yafaa also, Haifa,
00:49:19
Speaker
And that pains me.
00:49:20
Speaker
I just wish that's not our history.
00:49:22
Speaker
That's not our legacy.
00:49:23
Speaker
That's not our dignity They forced us into that.
00:49:26
Speaker
We're farmers.
00:49:27
Speaker
We're entrepreneurs They forced us to pick up a rifle and defend all that.
00:49:31
Speaker
We didn't want that.
00:49:32
Speaker
And speaking of not wanting that our land was always something that we took pride in and annexation of it.
00:49:39
Speaker
I remember till this day we have
00:49:41
Speaker
People who wear the keys to their houses, the keys to their homes around their neck because they know they're going to return.
00:49:46
Speaker
They know if they're not going to be the ones returning, their grandchildren, their kids are going to be the ones.
00:49:50
Speaker
Liberation is inevitable.
00:49:51
Speaker
And I think a lot of us here probably can speak upon the annexation of the land and conditions in West Bank and Gaza.
00:49:58
Speaker
Like if anyone wants to...
00:50:00
Speaker
Like Oslo in 1993 happened.
00:50:02
Speaker
That's when they tried to liquidate the PLO and liquidate the cause.
00:50:06
Speaker
And by they, I mean, you know, Zionists and the Palestinian Comprador, the anti-Palestinian authority.
00:50:13
Speaker
Right.
00:50:13
Speaker
Like, but what you're seeing today...
Gaza's Struggles with Self-Governance
00:50:16
Speaker
is effectively Israel, you know, it's past annexation.
00:50:22
Speaker
It's literally occupying all of Palestine, all of it.
00:50:26
Speaker
Even Gaza, that is self-governed.
00:50:29
Speaker
Israel controls how many calories people are allowed to consume, controls electricity, controls the water.
00:50:35
Speaker
Controls the civil civic records for people.
00:50:38
Speaker
That's how it bombs it uses genocide basically to practice ethnic cleansing to dispossess Palestinians to make the Nakba ongoing basically the Nakba is never ending and that's why our people carry resistance right to to as a modes of survival literally surviving against this war machine all of empire conspiring against you know a tiny
00:51:04
Speaker
lot of land with like, you know, seven million people.
00:51:08
Speaker
Resilient people.
00:51:09
Speaker
Sah?
00:51:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:10
Speaker
But that's how, I mean, effectively today, you know, all of the West Bank is area C, right?
00:51:17
Speaker
I mean, how they took Masafir Yatta, how they're dispossessing Silwan, you know, just to build a fucking cable car, Telefreak.
00:51:26
Speaker
You know, to do the freeways the same way that the U.S. government, you know, confiscated black land, split neighborhoods entirely just to construct freeways.
00:51:37
Speaker
I mean...
00:51:38
Speaker
I mean, when we talked about the separation or the separation wall, or when we talk about how they, you know, divide and conquer, you know, they make people think that Gaza, it's its own country, different than West Bank.
00:51:51
Speaker
And the West Bank and Gaza are in Palestine.
00:51:53
Speaker
They're both part of Palestine.
00:51:55
Speaker
It's all Palestine.
00:51:56
Speaker
And then, you know, they separated people from their lands with the separation wall.
00:52:02
Speaker
They tried to divide and conquer, and then they keep...
00:52:06
Speaker
inching and taking in more of our land.
00:52:08
Speaker
They keep annexing it.
00:52:11
Speaker
Yeah, my experience when returning to the West Bank in both 2011 and 2019, to give everyone just a very grounding idea.
00:52:22
Speaker
Have you ever been to, you know, a wilderness wildlife park or you go out camping and as you're hiking or whatever, you actually see a sign that says, beware mountain lions, your life may be in danger.
00:52:37
Speaker
You will see the same sign driving by different parts.
00:52:42
Speaker
Faraz was mentioning Area C. It will say, Area C, this area is forbidden for Israeli citizens.
00:52:51
Speaker
Your life is in danger.
00:52:54
Speaker
Like we're dogs go beyond the wall did the same thing with with with some areas over here and Turtle Island in the so-called United States where you were about to go into an indigenous land or you're about to go into a predominantly black neighborhood They would actually put signs claiming that those are dangerous signs.
00:53:12
Speaker
And do you know what I saw while driving by this dangerous territory?
00:53:17
Speaker
I saw children walking back from school.
00:53:20
Speaker
I saw auto mechanics working on cars.
00:53:22
Speaker
I saw people working in the streets and having a civil life, beautiful life.
00:53:28
Speaker
I saw these children walking down the streets.
00:53:31
Speaker
They're walking home.
00:53:33
Speaker
It's a safe place for the kids to walk home by themselves.
00:53:37
Speaker
So, I mean, that type of characterization, that villainization, you'll see a red sign.
00:53:42
Speaker
Like, it's beware of mountain lion.
00:53:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:45
Speaker
Like, we're literally animals to them.
00:53:46
Speaker
But it's more the thing, Vinny, is that we were talking about divide and conquer.
00:53:50
Speaker
They don't want their own Zionists, their own settlers.
00:53:53
Speaker
Sing the truth.
00:53:54
Speaker
To see what's happening behind the walls, right?
00:53:57
Speaker
And I challenge the Zionist left, you call yourselves Israeli left, I challenge you to fucking like see what's happening beyond the wall and preferably to leave Palestine, you know?
00:54:07
Speaker
A lot of them know, by the way, Farah.
00:54:09
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure they do.
00:54:10
Speaker
They sneak to Ramallah because that's where the culture is.
00:54:12
Speaker
Exactly.
00:54:13
Speaker
That's where the culture exists.
00:54:15
Speaker
100% you're right.
00:54:15
Speaker
It's in the Palestini side.
00:54:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:17
Speaker
Whether music is... Like, what are you doing on our land if you're truly a left, if you're truly for, like, you call yourself a leftist, right?
00:54:25
Speaker
What does it mean to be part of a left if you're not for liberation, right?
00:54:30
Speaker
If you're not for land back, if you're not for reparations, what does that talk about your politics?
00:54:36
Speaker
You know, they did a document recently, the renewal of the left, trying to sneak in all of like this co-opted language.
00:54:42
Speaker
Not once did they say the word Palestine.
00:54:44
Speaker
Not once did they say Palestinians.
00:54:46
Speaker
Not once did they acknowledge that there's a genocide, that their government is, that their own privileges are based upon.
00:54:52
Speaker
Not once did they say any of this.
00:54:54
Speaker
How come?
00:54:55
Speaker
Leave.
00:54:55
Speaker
When are you going to leave?
00:54:56
Speaker
When are you going to denounce your citizenship?
00:54:58
Speaker
When are you going to leave our homeland so we can return?
00:55:01
Speaker
That's the right of return is ours.
00:55:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:05
Speaker
We see also a lot of these performative politics here in the so-called United States as well.
00:55:11
Speaker
So you'll see, for example, a lot of people that will say that, you know, that they are leftists, but then they're still going out there and telling people to go out there and vote.
00:55:21
Speaker
And that's the thing with settler colonialism, because it's a very it's a unique type of colonialism in which the goal is to remove the indigenous population, to ethnically cleanse them through multiple tools.
00:55:31
Speaker
One of those many tools is genocide and to replace them with the settler population.
00:55:35
Speaker
Hence why it's called settler colonialism.
00:55:37
Speaker
It's expansionist.
00:55:38
Speaker
It's elimination of the native.
00:55:39
Speaker
And then you'll have people over here telling other folks to go ahead and vote.
00:55:43
Speaker
I think as Palestinians here, we can easily understand why it would be considered normalization, why it would be considered very problematic to go tell a Palestinian to go become part of the Knesset.
00:55:55
Speaker
or to go vote in the elections of the so-called Israel, you know, a settler colony.
00:56:00
Speaker
Because by engaging with this government, by engaging with their politics, that is literally normalization.
00:56:08
Speaker
So when we also as Palestinians, we have often a tendency to compare our struggle and our history of experiencing settler colonialism to connect it to the indigenous population and their experiences here.
00:56:22
Speaker
Now, if I'm being completely honest, I think sometimes we fail the indigenous population here because we can't compare our struggle with the indigenous population here and say, look, we've gone through the same thing through the land theft, the genocide, the ethnic cleansing, and then tell people go out there and vote.
00:56:38
Speaker
I think we're betraying the indigenous population.
00:56:41
Speaker
our indigenous brothers and sisters on this land.
00:56:43
Speaker
We're betraying the indigenous liberation movement on this land when we vote, when we tell people to vote, because we are engaging exactly in a system that is even being legitimized further.
00:56:56
Speaker
Yes.
00:56:57
Speaker
When we know it's a secular colony.
00:56:59
Speaker
That's how it goes, right?
00:57:01
Speaker
That's how imperialism ties into occupation, right?
00:57:04
Speaker
Do all of these wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Sudan, in Congo, in Palestine, and then in Haiti, and then get all of these people, force them out of their homes, get them all to quote-unquote migrate...
00:57:19
Speaker
to Turtle Island, settle more land, and then they use us to, like, you know, as labor, use us to build all of their institutes, they use that to tokenize us so that we vote on the resolutions that harm us, that create more war, and then that cycle keeps continuing, right?
00:57:33
Speaker
And more and more people come out here, and we're the ones who are upholding this dying colonialism.
00:57:39
Speaker
Like, let's be honest, you know?
00:57:41
Speaker
And I think it's really important to see which groups and which resistant groups are labeled as the terrorists.
00:57:48
Speaker
These are always the groups that delegitimize these states that we're talking about.
00:57:52
Speaker
For example, like Hamas.
00:57:55
Speaker
They are not taking the Israeli government as anything.
00:58:00
Speaker
They don't care.
00:58:01
Speaker
Because to them, we have the right to this land and it's not seen at all.
00:58:05
Speaker
So they're not going to care.
00:58:06
Speaker
They're not going to compromise.
00:58:07
Speaker
And that scares the U.S. That scares Israel.
00:58:10
Speaker
That...
00:58:11
Speaker
scares everyone and every big power absolutely you know what terrifies them the most i feel two things one is that the compass is within the compass they send like they have no other thing that's guiding them like for here in the u.s it's money yeah yeah money money takes and goes it takes you like anywhere but with with them it's a cause that they're really trying to do absolutely and the other thing is sacrifice right like that concept is just
00:58:35
Speaker
The West is like oblivious to what it means to sacrifice.
Martyrdom vs. Terrorism Perspectives
00:58:39
Speaker
Or martyrdom.
00:58:39
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:58:41
Speaker
You don't ever hear anyone refer to anyone here in the U.S. as a martyr.
00:58:46
Speaker
Because that's always a terrorist in their eyes.
00:58:48
Speaker
Anyone who dies for a cause.
00:58:49
Speaker
You'll never hear anyone back home refer to anyone as dead.
00:58:54
Speaker
They're not dead.
00:58:54
Speaker
They're martyrs.
00:58:56
Speaker
The reports, our news reports say, oh, a hundred have been martyred.
00:59:00
Speaker
Not killed.
00:59:01
Speaker
They've been martyred.
00:59:02
Speaker
Because they died for something.
00:59:04
Speaker
Exactly.
00:59:04
Speaker
Each and every one.
00:59:05
Speaker
100%.
00:59:05
Speaker
Yep.
00:59:05
Speaker
And I think that scares people.
00:59:08
Speaker
I remember even being in high school here in the U.S., I had to explain to people why we use the term martyr.
00:59:13
Speaker
Well, they want to police our language.
00:59:15
Speaker
That's what I was thinking about.
00:59:16
Speaker
Like how they're trying to police like, explain what river to the sea means.
00:59:20
Speaker
Explain what, constantly explaining ourselves.
00:59:23
Speaker
Rita, you go look it up.
00:59:25
Speaker
Go find out for yourself, bitch.
00:59:26
Speaker
Why do I have to constantly explain my cause, my existence, my history?
00:59:32
Speaker
Go learn.
00:59:33
Speaker
Go learn.
00:59:34
Speaker
Educate yourself.
00:59:35
Speaker
But not even that.
00:59:35
Speaker
We have to constantly police ourselves.
00:59:37
Speaker
But even on Twitter, the fucking US president last year, or like fucking Trump, he would fucking tweet things and we're like, oh, that's normal.
00:59:46
Speaker
But now a Palestinian tweets one thing about anything, literally.
00:59:49
Speaker
They could say, free Palestine.
00:59:51
Speaker
Or long live their resistance.
00:59:52
Speaker
Exactly.
00:59:52
Speaker
And then they could be fired and like...
00:59:55
Speaker
Twitter account revoked, everything.
00:59:57
Speaker
But you have the fucking president of the U.S. saying random ass shit on Twitter.
01:00:02
Speaker
Why are they bombing Gaza now, like, 75 days in of the, like, you know, recording this?
01:00:08
Speaker
75 days and counting into the genocide.
01:00:11
Speaker
Just to make an example of people who dared to jump over the wall, right, on October 7th.
01:00:17
Speaker
That's literally what happened.
01:00:19
Speaker
You know, tear down the wall, bulldoze it down, right?
01:00:22
Speaker
Right.
01:00:23
Speaker
And that really inspired, everybody saw themselves in us.
01:00:26
Speaker
They broke the siege.
01:00:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's really important to note that after October 7th, if anything, we've had the general public's vote.
01:00:34
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:34
Speaker
So like, Philistinia, for the first time in a long, long time, we've seen resistant talk normalize.
01:00:41
Speaker
The only reason they're still reporting about it negatively, every report that you'll see, like sometimes I'll be clicking on the reports on news, it'll be like, after the atrocities of October 7th, it's like the first paragraph where they killed 12,000 and then like, and now there's protests.
01:00:56
Speaker
But they want to punish us for it.
01:00:58
Speaker
They still have to demonize us.
01:01:01
Speaker
On October 7th, the war was won.
01:01:03
Speaker
Well, not even a war.
01:01:05
Speaker
Whatever you want to call it.
01:01:06
Speaker
That battle was won.
01:01:08
Speaker
They broke the siege, they gained hostages, they shifted the power dynamic.
01:01:15
Speaker
They won.
01:01:16
Speaker
And I don't see why that's fucking wrong.
01:01:17
Speaker
Like, the US can fucking imperialize and take over a whole fucking continent here, and that's fine.
01:01:23
Speaker
And say it's their right.
01:01:24
Speaker
Exactly, it's their right.
01:01:25
Speaker
Land and God and glory, whatever the fuck it is, manifest destiny shit.
01:01:29
Speaker
But when people, indigenous to a land, try to defend themselves, all of a sudden, how dare they?
01:01:35
Speaker
And here we are now, we have brothers and sisters who are opening up their platform for us and people are willing to listen.
01:01:40
Speaker
It shows the people want to know.
01:01:42
Speaker
That right there is a victory.
01:01:44
Speaker
The conversation is not... We've been talking about Palestine for the last two months.
01:01:47
Speaker
Gaza has been abandoned for 18 years under siege.
01:01:52
Speaker
So this is amazing.
01:01:54
Speaker
This is a crazy time to be alive.
01:01:56
Speaker
The brainwashing is very real.
01:01:58
Speaker
As someone that teaches, that works in higher education, a lot of my students...
01:02:02
Speaker
who are young folks, you know, a lot of them are in their early, mid-20s.
01:02:07
Speaker
A lot of them, first of all, know very little to nothing about Palestine.
01:02:10
Speaker
And I know this because, you know, early on when I start talking about Palestine in my classes, I ask very basic questions to try to get a feel for what everyone kind of knows about Palestine.
01:02:20
Speaker
And it's
01:02:20
Speaker
Very rudimentary knowledge that they have, if any at all, sometimes.
01:02:24
Speaker
And I think a lot of it's because that's a liberal institution.
01:02:27
Speaker
Higher education is a liberal institution.
01:02:29
Speaker
And because of that, there's this liberal ideology that just normalizes this idea that the United States is this country that's humanitarian, that is about justice.
01:02:40
Speaker
The savior.
01:02:40
Speaker
The savior.
01:02:41
Speaker
Right.
01:02:42
Speaker
In reality, when you really look at the facts, you look at the history, forget about opinions.
01:02:47
Speaker
Forget about opinions for a second.
01:02:48
Speaker
And just look at the history.
01:02:50
Speaker
Factual, real history.
01:02:52
Speaker
A settler colony.
01:02:53
Speaker
That's a fact.
01:02:54
Speaker
The so-called United States is a settler colony.
01:02:56
Speaker
This is stolen land.
01:02:58
Speaker
Unceded stolen land.
01:03:00
Speaker
This is not an opinion.
01:03:01
Speaker
This is a historical fact and a present fact.
01:03:05
Speaker
This is...
01:03:06
Speaker
This is a settler colony that committed genocide and ethnic cleansing.
01:03:10
Speaker
By the early 1900s, you had less than 250,000 indigenous people on this land from what used to be tens of millions when Christopher Columbus first arrived and colonized this land.
01:03:22
Speaker
And this is a massive scale of genocide.
01:03:25
Speaker
This is a settler colony that enslaved black people for hundreds of years, that later put them under apartheid conditions, that committed atrocities in Vietnam between 65 to 75.
01:03:35
Speaker
They enslaved.
01:03:38
Speaker
Inspired the Nazis.
01:03:39
Speaker
Inspired the Nazis.
01:03:40
Speaker
And a lot of it came out of ideas and universities from California.
01:03:44
Speaker
The so-called progressive state.
01:03:46
Speaker
This is a country that put Japanese Americans in internment camps.
01:03:50
Speaker
This, among so many atrocities, killed over a million forced labor of Chinese folks, killed over a million Iraqis in the last 20 years.
01:03:58
Speaker
This is not, if there's a terrorist, it's
01:04:01
Speaker
The so-called United States.
01:04:03
Speaker
That's the real terrorist.
01:04:04
Speaker
That's the real terrorist.
01:04:05
Speaker
They have a monopoly on violence, which, that's the thing.
01:04:08
Speaker
If they have the monopoly on violence, it's not terrorism for them to exercise.
01:04:12
Speaker
It's only when the minorities exercise that same violence, then it becomes an issue.
01:04:16
Speaker
Well, they use technology.
01:04:17
Speaker
They use technology for their war.
01:04:20
Speaker
So it legitimizes it.
01:04:22
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
01:04:23
Speaker
They do press releases.
01:04:24
Speaker
That's the difference, right?
01:04:25
Speaker
They have a spokesperson who goes on TV and talks to the press and lies about it.
01:04:29
Speaker
So just because we're wearing suits,
01:04:31
Speaker
It's more... They actually say that we're going to have an operation and bomb Syria today.
01:04:36
Speaker
They announce their mission and then they go out and do it.
01:04:38
Speaker
They make it like a video game.
01:04:39
Speaker
I am.
01:04:40
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
01:04:42
Speaker
Thank you, thank you guys.
01:04:43
Speaker
Just because you use fighter jets to carpet bomb a population does not make it less of a crime.
01:04:50
Speaker
I just really wonder if people in the world know
01:04:52
Speaker
that on October 5th, few days just before, even a week before October 7th, Israel bombed like four different countries.
01:04:59
Speaker
They bombed Syria.
01:05:02
Speaker
They bombed a Syrian graduation ceremony of military sciences.
01:05:07
Speaker
So yes, it's a military academy.
01:05:09
Speaker
But what we're talking about is the best and brightest Syria has to offer.
01:05:13
Speaker
We're talking about scientists, engineers.
01:05:15
Speaker
They're not combat.
01:05:16
Speaker
They don't want us to prosper.
01:05:17
Speaker
They don't want us to reach any level of intellect.
01:05:20
Speaker
It was 15.
01:05:20
Speaker
It was a graduating class with their families and they set a drone at that.
01:05:24
Speaker
They knew where everyone was going to be.
01:05:27
Speaker
The destruction of schools, hospitals, none of this is right.
01:05:29
Speaker
It's intentional.
01:05:30
Speaker
It's definitely intentional.
01:05:32
Speaker
All of it is intentional.
01:05:33
Speaker
Israel can bomb four countries before October 7th, but the moment any one of those countries strikes back,
01:05:39
Speaker
Now that's terrorism.
01:05:40
Speaker
We were talking before about the brain drain, Vinny, weren't you?
01:05:43
Speaker
Like, you know, it's the same thing.
01:05:44
Speaker
They thrive upon stealing all our intelligence, all our brains, our brightest, our most loved.
01:05:51
Speaker
If they can't steal it, they'll destroy it.
01:05:53
Speaker
Exactly.
01:05:53
Speaker
If they can't steal it, they'll destroy it.
01:05:55
Speaker
There you go.
01:05:55
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:19
Speaker
You really carry these ideas when you're killing with them.
01:06:22
Speaker
And not just California, Michigan, Florida.
01:06:23
Speaker
Like, we're all over the place.
01:06:24
Speaker
Texas, wherever.
01:06:25
Speaker
We're literally everywhere.
01:06:27
Speaker
And it blows my mind that a lot of people don't even know about Layla Khaled and don't know about any women resistors or any, like, sort of resistance that comes from being a woman.
01:06:35
Speaker
And they don't see that as anything that's used within our own countries because that's a true power.
01:06:40
Speaker
And Layla Khaled is, isn't she labeled as a terrorist?
01:06:43
Speaker
Yeah, she is.
01:06:44
Speaker
Yeah, she's been exiled.
01:06:45
Speaker
I remember I think... She never killed anybody though, right?
01:06:48
Speaker
No, she didn't.
01:06:49
Speaker
I remember a few, a couple years ago, I think she had a talk on YouTube, like live, and the Zionists canceled it because they were like, oh, she's a terrorist.
01:06:58
Speaker
She's a terrorist.
01:06:59
Speaker
It's from UC San Francisco, I think.
01:07:01
Speaker
I think so, yeah.
01:07:01
Speaker
Yeah, Cal State San Francisco or something.
01:07:03
Speaker
And they shut it down, like within like 10, 15 minutes, they just shut down.
01:07:07
Speaker
Even right now in the current movement, the, you know, young women are leading the movement.
01:07:11
Speaker
I mean, you see who are the ones who are speaking at the rallies and the protests?
01:07:15
Speaker
They're the ones who are speaking.
01:07:16
Speaker
They're the ones using their voice.
01:07:19
Speaker
My mother is the one who, Palestinian women are the reason why I'm alive today.
01:07:24
Speaker
You know?
01:07:25
Speaker
Palestinian women are the reason... Our rooms are resistant.
01:07:27
Speaker
Exactly.
01:07:28
Speaker
Are the reason why, who I am today, who made me, they're Palestinian women.
01:07:32
Speaker
That fighter, that spirit, they're the ones who nurtured them.
01:07:35
Speaker
Palestinian women, my family, my friends.
01:07:38
Speaker
They preserve our culture.
01:07:39
Speaker
And I always say it every time.
01:07:41
Speaker
I can't create more Palestinians.
01:07:43
Speaker
They create Palestinians.
01:07:45
Speaker
And they create our culture.
01:07:47
Speaker
They teach our children our language.
01:07:48
Speaker
Within our food, within our culture, within everything.
01:07:50
Speaker
The reason... I mean, people are like, oh, you're so kind.
01:07:54
Speaker
That's my mom.
01:07:55
Speaker
That's my dad.
01:07:56
Speaker
We call it ahtiram.
01:07:57
Speaker
We call it a khla.
01:07:58
Speaker
We have respect, integrity, dignity.
01:08:01
Speaker
They give life.
01:08:03
Speaker
We're raised by a village.
01:08:04
Speaker
I think I remember...
01:08:08
Speaker
bringing back the fallah spirit yeah i always said that i have a mom and dad but i have more than a mom and dad because my aunt is my mom my uncle my uncle is my dad my cousins are my siblings we're a communal being that's why i want to live in ghazza that's why because ghazza has the tightest community in the world you see i mean i know what elsewhere wherever there's hardship and war the same thing like in yaman i'm sure it's the same dynamics you
01:08:31
Speaker
What I see the most clearly is my own... You'll see on the news, they'll say, They killed my family.
01:08:39
Speaker
They're martyrs.
01:08:41
Speaker
Where are your family?
01:08:41
Speaker
Where are your family, Habibi?
01:08:43
Speaker
Where are your family?
01:08:44
Speaker
Immediately.
01:08:44
Speaker
You have doctors who are pulling children from the rubble.
01:08:47
Speaker
Their families are gone.
01:08:49
Speaker
They are adopting those children.
01:08:51
Speaker
They are their children now.
01:08:52
Speaker
It's one family.
01:08:53
Speaker
Yeah, me and me.
01:08:54
Speaker
I think it's important to speak more about women too when it comes to everything going on.
01:08:58
Speaker
There has been a lot of videos recently of all the reporters and all the journalists that are just walking around and all the women cooking and baking bread and they're trying to feed the journalists.
01:09:07
Speaker
They're like, here you go, take this.
01:09:09
Speaker
And they're very like hospital, even though they have nothing.
01:09:14
Speaker
It's just the hot tub.
01:09:15
Speaker
It's just the fire with the bread.
01:09:17
Speaker
Nobody goes hungry.
01:09:18
Speaker
Exactly.
01:09:18
Speaker
And now they're, you know, starving people as a weapon, right?
01:09:22
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:23
Speaker
And going back to Layla Khaled, I recently saw a video of her and it was an interview recently that she had taken.
01:09:29
Speaker
And what she was saying, she was like, when we moved to the Lebanon, I think that's where they went.
01:09:33
Speaker
She was exiled.
01:09:34
Speaker
She was like, when we moved to Lebanon, my mom saw me and my sisters picking up.
01:09:38
Speaker
Oranges from the tree.
01:09:39
Speaker
And she told me, don't eat from this tree.
01:09:42
Speaker
Wait until you go back to wait until you go back to And she was like, after she mentioned that, she was like, my mom is my greatest inspiration.
01:09:54
Speaker
Right when I was flying out above Palestine, I was seeing, she was like, it was a crazy feeling to see all of my land.
01:10:00
Speaker
And that truly gave me goosebumps.
01:10:02
Speaker
Like when I watched it, I remember like, I was like, wow, this is, this is true resistance right here.
01:10:06
Speaker
Like these people, yeah.
01:10:08
Speaker
But I just want to say something, Batul, just because you brought it up, like, you know, hating the hatred of women.
Western Influence on Arab Identity
01:10:13
Speaker
Like when I first got here, that's what I felt.
01:10:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:16
Speaker
This is a culture that hates women.
01:10:17
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:10:18
Speaker
You know, and we have to remember that with colonizers, when we were talking about colonizers, every accusation is a confession, basically.
01:10:25
Speaker
And they want to project all of the things that they don't want to deal with, that they don't want to see in themselves.
01:10:30
Speaker
They want to project it onto us, right?
01:10:33
Speaker
There's so much Orientalism that is wrapped up in the occupation of Palestine, right?
01:10:37
Speaker
Yeah, so when we speak of Orientalism, we really are talking about the Western perspective of us and their use of that Western perspective and their justification by that in order to do what they're doing right now, like bombing our countries and justifying the killing of our men.
01:10:52
Speaker
And what I really love about what's coming out of Gaza right now is basically normalizing
01:10:57
Speaker
Arab men, and as radical as that sounds, but Arab men were seen as this evil being that suppresses and oppresses these women and oppresses a whole, they can't say anything.
01:11:09
Speaker
And now we're just seeing these really soft men that are pulling their kids out of the rubble, crying on top of their dead bodies, and it's normal now.
01:11:19
Speaker
I have not seen a true man in this country compared to all of these men that we see.
01:11:23
Speaker
These are true men.
01:11:26
Speaker
And these are the ones that are being vilified by the Western perspective of Orientalism.
01:11:32
Speaker
And I think it's important to point out that Orientalism isn't just a phenomenon that's just absorbed by Westerners.
01:11:39
Speaker
So...
01:11:40
Speaker
Even Edward Said talks about this, about how the Orientalist narrative can be internalized among our own people, where our own people start believing the Orientalist nonsense about our own people.
01:11:51
Speaker
Where, for example, there are many Orientalist narratives, but one of them, going back to the one that Batuu and Machine were talking about, about the role of women.
01:11:59
Speaker
and how a lot of people were surprised to see women that were reporting, and they were at the center of their story, and they were the protagonist, and they were independent in so many ways, that even I've heard some Arabs and Palestinians in the diaspora, they themselves were surprised by this.
01:12:16
Speaker
And that's a symptom of that internalized Orientalism.
01:12:20
Speaker
This is, again, a symptom of the liberal ideology that we see in the West.
01:12:24
Speaker
And also, there's a danger that a lot of Western powers...
01:12:28
Speaker
And liberals are trying to co-opt these people to try to take these people and again, create more native New Orientalist, the indigenous people that speak basically the white supremacist messages.
01:12:43
Speaker
but they're speaking it with the body and the voice and the look of a brown individual, of an indigenous individual.
01:12:50
Speaker
And that's because within liberal ideology, it's all about identity politics.
01:12:53
Speaker
You see a brown or a person or a Palestinian person or indigenous person parroting white supremacist ideas, colonial ideas.
01:13:00
Speaker
And then a lot of,
01:13:01
Speaker
folks are eager to accept these ideas because they're coming from an indigenous voice.
01:13:07
Speaker
We see this in a lot of spaces.
01:13:08
Speaker
We see this even with Malala Yusufzani, or whatever her last name is.
01:13:11
Speaker
I forgot her last name.
01:13:12
Speaker
Malala.
01:13:13
Speaker
Malala, who was basically co-opted by the West and by the United Nations.
01:13:17
Speaker
And, you know, they used her as a tool to basically argue, look at these evil brown men.
01:13:23
Speaker
Now we're going to bomb the crap out of them, right?
01:13:26
Speaker
And in the process of doing so, bombing the crap out of...
01:13:30
Speaker
you know, these brown men and brown women and brown children.
01:13:33
Speaker
I think it's crazy because I remember even myself when I was younger, when I first moved here, I had like a little bit of an oopsie phase.
01:13:42
Speaker
That's what I'm going to call it right now.
01:13:44
Speaker
But I remember making a post on Facebook after my dad pissed me off and I was like, oh my God, I hate being Arab.
01:13:50
Speaker
This is being raw as hell.
01:13:51
Speaker
But I remember my uncle, he just passed away recently.
01:13:56
Speaker
He texted me and my uncle left back home when he was 14, you guys.
01:14:00
Speaker
So he was really young, but he texted me after he saw that message.
01:14:03
Speaker
He's like, Batul, what are you saying?
01:14:06
Speaker
This man has been here for more than half all of his life, only 14 years out of here.
01:14:11
Speaker
And he was in his 40s.
01:14:12
Speaker
He's like, Batul, what are you saying?
01:14:13
Speaker
He's like, why are you not proud to be?
01:14:15
Speaker
He's like, you've been in this country for a year and they've already convinced you that you're not.
01:14:20
Speaker
Yeah, he's like, it's not the Arab.
01:14:21
Speaker
It's the confliction of the culture.
01:14:23
Speaker
And I guess that's when it really hit me.
01:14:25
Speaker
I was like...
01:14:26
Speaker
This is very radical.
01:14:28
Speaker
I'm really being taught something great right now.
01:14:33
Speaker
How beautiful our elders are.
01:14:37
Speaker
Our elders gave us so much and our ancestors, they left us with a beautiful inheritance called the Tawabet that I love talking about just because I feel...
01:14:48
Speaker
Like, you know, they were, it's almost like they had the foresight.
01:14:50
Speaker
Like, they saw all this coming.
01:14:52
Speaker
They saw, like, oh, there's going to be some dark days for our children.
01:14:55
Speaker
And I want to protect them.
01:14:56
Speaker
And I want to protect this land.
01:14:58
Speaker
And I want, you know, to protect our right of return.
01:15:01
Speaker
And they came up with these, you know, points that we must uphold, you know, that we must, like, you know, protect and defend ourselves.
01:15:13
Speaker
That is the blueprint to our... We don't have to reinvent the wheel, right?
01:15:16
Speaker
And I feel like when we were a bit younger, or at least me, I used to think of it as something funny.
01:15:21
Speaker
I used to be like, oh my God, Baba, you're doing the most right now.
01:15:24
Speaker
Yeah, I was the same.
01:15:26
Speaker
When I moved to the U.S., it didn't take, I don't know, maybe in high school.
01:15:30
Speaker
I moved here when I was in mid-seventh grade, and then probably when I was a freshman, I remember saying the same stuff, because I would get in fights with my dad, because he wouldn't let me go out, or...
01:15:43
Speaker
hang out with somebody or even spend the night or sleep over.
01:15:47
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, now I understand.
01:15:49
Speaker
I would never like allow any like our kids to sleep over at somebody else's house.
01:15:55
Speaker
Not in this country, no.
01:15:58
Speaker
As I got older, I really understood where my parents were coming from.
01:16:02
Speaker
Yeah, the context.
01:16:03
Speaker
Context matters.
01:16:03
Speaker
And I had to unlearn what I learned when I moved to the U.S. And that's why Zionists say the elders will die and then the young will forget.
01:16:14
Speaker
And it's not true.
01:16:16
Speaker
Exactly.
01:16:16
Speaker
It's not true.
01:16:17
Speaker
They won't.
01:16:21
Speaker
The videos out of Gaza right now are all children.
01:16:23
Speaker
Like the children are the ones keeping me up at night and holding me.
01:16:27
Speaker
They're the ones giving me comfort from afar.
01:16:30
Speaker
They're the ones saying, we're not going to leave our land.
01:16:32
Speaker
We're the ones staying.
01:16:33
Speaker
This is our land.
01:16:35
Speaker
Exactly.
01:16:36
Speaker
That's why they're killing so many of them, right?
01:16:38
Speaker
I know.
01:16:38
Speaker
That's why they're murdering our children.
01:16:41
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
01:16:43
Speaker
I mean, another just to comment on the internalization of, you know, anti-Arab, whatever you want, like Orientalism.
01:16:52
Speaker
I like that.
01:16:53
Speaker
Xenophobia.
01:16:54
Speaker
So I was at the beaches of Haifa in Palestine.
01:17:01
Speaker
My hands, hair is standing up already.
01:17:03
Speaker
It's the most beautiful place.
01:17:05
Speaker
It is the most beautiful sight you will ever witness.
01:17:08
Speaker
Just standing at the shores of Haifa.
01:17:11
Speaker
I can smell it.
01:17:11
Speaker
Staring into the Mediterranean Sea.
01:17:14
Speaker
I had a deep sadness in me to think that this is ours and this is so beautiful.
01:17:21
Speaker
And one of my cousins commented something that really just got to me.
01:17:24
Speaker
They said, oh, but you know, if the Arab were in charge of ruling this, there would be dirt.
01:17:33
Speaker
I've heard that.
01:17:34
Speaker
It would be trash everywhere.
01:17:36
Speaker
You don't think exactly.
01:17:38
Speaker
Everyone's outraged.
01:17:39
Speaker
For those back home, everyone's outraged here in this room.
01:17:42
Speaker
You can hear it because...
01:17:44
Speaker
We don't have the brain cells to put a basket and have a recycling basket like they do.
01:17:50
Speaker
We can't take care of ourselves.
01:17:52
Speaker
We're going to love our occupiers so much.
01:17:55
Speaker
We have a resistance that dug tunnels underneath them.
01:17:59
Speaker
You don't think we can do recycling?
01:18:01
Speaker
We can't clean our beaches.
01:18:02
Speaker
Yeah, my family back home have said that to me so many times.
01:18:06
Speaker
And I'm just like, what do you mean?
01:18:08
Speaker
Of course we're going to take care of this.
01:18:12
Speaker
I think survival is the first suit right now.
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:18:15
Speaker
Even when you look at the beaches of Ghesa right now, they're beautiful.
01:18:19
Speaker
We're just taught to love our colonizers as part of this oppressive system.
01:18:24
Speaker
And that's, again, important to remember because
01:18:27
Speaker
We internalize these ideas.
01:18:29
Speaker
Colonization happens where first?
01:18:31
Speaker
In the mind, right?
01:18:32
Speaker
Exactly.
01:18:32
Speaker
Where does liberation happen?
01:18:34
Speaker
Where's the first place?
01:18:35
Speaker
Where's the first site for liberation?
01:18:36
Speaker
In our bodies?
01:18:37
Speaker
It's ourselves.
01:18:38
Speaker
Yeah.
01:18:39
Speaker
We have to start with ourselves more than before anything else.
01:18:43
Speaker
Okay, hi, this is Shana again.
01:18:46
Speaker
Thanks so much for listening to part one of this two-part roundtable discussion.
01:18:50
Speaker
The next episode will be learning more about the conditions and the history of the West Bank.
01:18:56
Speaker
You'll be hearing more about the brutality of Israel's occupation, but also the spotlight will be on the people's movements to resist it.
01:19:06
Speaker
Stay tuned for part two, dropping next week.
01:19:11
Speaker
Thanks for listening and for supporting us.
01:19:13
Speaker
You can find us on Instagram and Facebook at Unpacking the Eerie, on Twitter at Unpack the Eerie, and on our website at www.unpackingtheerie.com.
01:19:26
Speaker
Yes, and special thanks to all of you who subscribe to our Patreon.
01:19:31
Speaker
As we've mentioned before, we do all the research for this, we edit, and we don't have any sponsorships or ads.
01:19:40
Speaker
So Patreon support is super helpful in just keeping this project sustainable, keeping the Buzzsprout subscription going, paying for the website, all the stuff.
01:19:50
Speaker
So thank you so much.
01:19:52
Speaker
Sari, Liz, Clifton.
01:19:55
Speaker
Jill, Victoria, and Lindsay.
01:19:57
Speaker
Lauren, Vivian, Valerie.
01:19:59
Speaker
Micheline, Montana, Katrina.
01:20:01
Speaker
Raina, Allie, Jake.
01:20:03
Speaker
Drithi, Daphne, and Katie.
01:20:05
Speaker
Vern, Meredith, H, and Vince.
01:20:09
Speaker
To April, Aaron, and Ellen.
01:20:11
Speaker
And to Brittany, Alyssa, and Meredith R. Yay, thank you so much.
01:20:16
Speaker
Thank you.