Antisemitism, European Union, Germany, Israel, Palestine, Protest, Transcribed, United States, war, zine

Elia J. Ayoub on the War in Palestine

Joey Ayoub on the War in Palestine

Elia J. Ayoub

We’re joined again by podcaster, writer and activist Elia J. Ayoub, who is a Lebanese Palestinian living in Europe, co-hosts a podcast called The Fire These Times which is soon to be a part of the From The Periphery podcast network. For the hour we speak about the Israeli war on Palestinians, US policies in the SWANA region and the possibilities of war expanding to neighboring states, conspiracy thinking in the early days of these massacres, European state approaches to massacres in the Occupied Territories and other subjects.

Announcements

Fundraiser for Daryle Lamont Jenkins

Supporters of antifascist and anarchist activist Daryle Lamont Jenkins are raising funds for DLJ after a recent visit to the hospital. You can learn more and kick in some funds at GoFund.Me/e40da8b8 or check the link in our show notes.

New Episode of B(A)D News

The latest episode of the monthly podcast from the A-Radio Network is available, featuring stories from:

  • Kilavo Seme about Quilombos and struggles in Brazil;
  • A-Radio Berlin on the trials concerning the 2017 G20 protests in Hamburg
  • Flora Radio in so-called Valparaiso, Chile, on recent repression against Mapuche people claiming their lands

Hunger Strike At Red Onion Expands

The hunger strike that began on December 26th at the infamous Red Onion State Prison in Virginia has doubled in size as of a few days ago with participation of 7 more imprisoned resisters protesting abuse by isolation despite Virginia policy and international human rights law. There is a rundown of the hunger strike and conditions at Red Onion available at RashidMod.Com and supporters are requesting that people call or email VDOC officials to end this cruel and unlawful use of segregation.

Newly joined the strike:

  • Nguyen Tuan – #1098070
  • Demetrius Walllace – #1705834
  • Gregory Binns – #1157265
  • P. Williams – #2103207
  • DeQuan Saunders – #1458253
  • J. Hilliard – #1988319
  • Ray Galloway – #1407902
  • Gregory Azeez – #1421616

Who To Contact:

VADOC~ Central Administration; USPS—
P.O. Box 26963
Richmond, VA 23261

Virginia DOC ~ Director, Chadwick S Dotson,

VADOC ~Central Administration

Rose L. Durbin, Phone~804-887-7921
Email: Rose.Durbin@vadoc.virgina.gov

Beth Cabell, Division of Institutions
beth.cabell@vadoc.virginia.gov
(804)834-9967

Gov. Glenn Youngkin
(804)786-2211
glenn.youngkin@governor.virginia.gov

. … . ..

Featured Track:

  • Splash Waterfalls (remix) (instrumental) by Ludacris feat. Raphael Saadiq

. … . ..

Transcription

TFSR: So we’re joined again by Elia J. Ayoub, one of the hosts of The Fire of These Times Podcast among many other things. Congratulations on scaling up the podcast there’s been some very interesting discussions recently. J’s been kind enough to return to the show to speak about the ongoing war in Palestine. Thanks also for being willing to talk about this really tough subject. Do you want to introduce yourself further?

EJA: Thanks for having me again actually. My name is Elia J. Ayoub. I’m originally from Lebanon, that is where I grew up. I am myself of Palestinian descent. I’ve been covering the region of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria for a decade now, in various capacities. Most recently, given what’s been happening since October 2023, I’ve been focusing on Palestine obviously due to what’s happening, which of course we will be talking about. As you mentioned I am the founder and one of the hosts of The Fire of These Times. Which is now expanding and is going to be a part of a wide umbrella of podcasts and other media projects under the name, From the Periphery, with a website and everything that is still in the works. It’s going to include podcasts that focus on the Caucasus, on Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine, the Mediterranean and the Global South more broadly. The term “The Periphery” is going to be the one that we focus on. So the places that perhipheral from centers of power, whether this means ghettos outside of a city or the banlieues in Paris, whether this means North Africa in comparison to Southern Europe. We’ll be trying to explore them from as many different angles as we can. The hope is that we are able to find commonalities between experiences that are usually not connected. If that makes sense. Yeah thanks for having me.

TFSR: This is obviously not a disconnection from the work that you’ve already been doing with the podcast between the guests and the new co-host that you’ve brought on. I really suggest folks go back and listen to some of the coverage and discussions around the war in Palestine, Anti-Zionist Jewish reactions, the one on Azerbaijan was really interesting. There’s been voices of really thoughtful folks who have excellent english from Sudan or of Sudanese background. In the last few months it’s just been a lot and really inspiring, really good conversations.

I wanted to start this off by saying this is not a news show so although we will sometimes interview folks that are on the ground or engaged in anti repression work or folks that are in prison talking about the struggle that they’re going through, this is not exactly going to be one of those conversations. Partially because of the scope of the war of the last three months, it will probably be about three months by the time this comes out, maybe to the day. But also because there’s so much going on, so much tragedy that we couldn’t really cover it in a responsible manner. We’re just going to talk around and through the issues going on and bring a little international scope to the conversation.

During the conversation that we had in October, we had a nice little side conversation. Part of it where I asked you to speak a little more in depth about the ways that, and this is before the attacks by Hamas occurred, you were mentioning the way that people outside of Palestine and maybe outside of Palestinian communities talk or talked about the struggle in Palestine. Particularly talking about college campuses in the west and bringing up antisemitism as one of the weird framings that well meaning people outside of the struggle take towards looking at the issue, the complications, and the people that are involved in it. Right after we released that conversation, it was interesting to look back on that as things started escalating and violence started occurring at a higher rate. I’d appreciate hearing your perspectives on where you feel the anti-authoritarian left is right now, if you can even make that generalization, and talking about the issues going on right now with the war in Gaza and the war in the West Bank and the hostage situation of Israelis taken by Hamas. Is that an interesting starting point? We can start somewhere else if not.

JA: Yeah, I think it is. Maybe if we can center on the scale of the violence imposed by the Israelis on Gaza. It’s something that is quite difficult to comprehend in many ways but it should at least be acknowledged.

Since the Hamas attacks, obviously referring to the massacre on October 7th, the kidnapping of hostages, many of whom are still in Gaza, the Israeli response has been both to some extent predictable and also even if you are one of many who would have predicted a violent reaction because that’s what Israel does and that’s what Israel has been doing for quite some time now. I think the scale probably surprised many. The scale of the violence. The totality of it all. We are now nearly three months in, maybe three months by the time people listen to this. Outright calls for genocide and ethnic cleansing have become so routine in Israeli media and politics and talking about high ranking members of the Netanyahu cabinet, including minsters, foreign minsters, ambassadors left and right, virtually ever major Israeli channel features at least one high profile person, personality and so on, talking almost casually about what needs to be done to Palestinians.

To be quite honest with you, I think we need to call it for what it is. Its not too dis-similar from conversations that not too long ago were referred to the Jewish question in Europe. There was a way of approaching the very existence of Palestinians in Israel-Palestine, in historic Palestine throughout the territory. Although right now it is concentrated in Gaza obviously. But it’s not that far off from how they talk about the West Bank, for example East Jerusalem and to some extent as well how they would talk about Palestinian citizens of Israel proper. It always starts from the premise that their very Palestinian-ness, their existence as Palestinians on this land is a problem. If that’s the assumption that they start from, you can only go through different answers, all of which compete with one another which is more extreme.

So it’s either this “just ethnic cleansing”. Like what Azerbaijan did in Nagorno-Karabakh for that matter. Which is of course a form of genocide. Or it’s a combination of that plus mass murder. We are seeing the mass murder right now, as of the time of recording I think the latest death toll in Gaza is something over twenty-two thousand people killed. The vast majority of whom are civilians and a good percentage of them are children because roughly half the population of the Gaza strip are under eighteen years old. And who knows how many more thousands are still buried under the rubble and haven’t been officially counted yet. But the actual death toll by the time this is over, whenever that is, is likely to be much, much, much higher. At the same time, again recording this in early January of 2024, we’re seeing what is usually referred to, a bit euphemistically I think, as ‘spill overs’ elsewhere. So we are seeing Israeli strikes in Southern Lebanon, we saw a drone attack on a top Hamas official in Dahieh, in the suburbs of Beirut just last day. And yesterday we saw two explosions in Iran, struck I believe as well with a drone (the details, folks can look them up because as you mentioned this is not a news podcast but all of the details are accurate…) a base in Iraq.

So it’s already expanding in many ways, and I think we may have, I don’t want to make predictions per se, although I unfortunately don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that we may have already reached a certain point of no return. Which doesn’t mean we can’t stop it. We, the collective world community or whatever, doesn’t mean we can’t stop it from getting worse and escalating. But war has a tendency of having its own momentum in many ways and I think we are seeing that now.

I think if we want to focus, especially on the US role in this, I am very rarely and don’t often say, “I have agreed right now with Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, because he and I are not on the same side of things,” to put it mildly. But yesterday he made this speech and said that at the end of the day this remains the fault of the United States. And honestly, objectively, I cannot disagree with that statement. The Biden administration has done everything humanly possible to make sure that the Israelis have whatever they need to continue this genocide. They have made it very explicit, from the very first day when that IDF General, I think the leading general, I don’t remember his name, went on TV and said that these are human animals and we are going to cut off everything. Water, energy, electricity, food, etc. From the very first day. After the Hamas attack, after the Hamas massacre the declarations by the Israelis have been nothing short of genocidal. The Americans obviously know this, and they have even more access to intelligence than someone like me does, and at this point it does not require too much intelligence to realize what is happening because they are telling us what they want to do. So we can take this in very different directions of course. I’m happy to focus on any one of them in many ways. But I figured this is as good as a general intro as any.

TFSR: I wonder, not to deflect from the guilt of the US in this, when we are talking about what this conversation might look like, one of the things you mentioned was, from the people that you have talked to and from what you’ve witnessed, what have you seen of a reaction from within Israel. Obviously when a tragedy, even in the context of ongoing tragedies of the occupation of Palestine and all the violence associated with that, when people experience something such as the massacres on the 7th of October, I remember this from growing up in the United States and being somewhat politically active when 9/11 happened of looking around and being like, “Yeah that sucks but what about what’s going on over here? Those are US bombs,” or whatever. And everybody, or at least all the white people just like rallying around the sense that we have to bring a reaction to this. The visceral floodgates of emotions opening among those people and rage coming out. There were people that spoke otherwise and tried to do some things to stop it. There were large anti-war marches at various points that didn’t stop the war, the war in Afghanistan continued for twenty years. Because you’ve had anti-Zionist Jewish guests on the show, some of whom I assume are living in Israel, could you talk about what your sense of the resistance to the invasion to this point within Israel? Is that something that has a grip? Is that something that beyond the already existing distrust of Netanyahu whose administration and the fact that those attacks happened on his watch. I’m seeing recordings of refuseres making public demonstrations about refusing to join the military, but that seems like it’s just a grain of sand in the desert.

EJA: Yeah I actually think that the last metaphor is basically the situation. I can relate to what those guests on The Fire of These Times have said because obviously their experiences are even more direct than mine is. They have made it pretty clear that basically any anti-war voices in any meaningful way, including by survivors of the massacre and relatives of those who were killed during the massacre, are rarely tolerated right now in Israel. There are exceptions here and there but for the most part, they’re either pretty violently clamped down upon or ignored. They’re not given a platform or taken seriously. The only acceptable debates right now in the mainstream of Israeli politics is how hard should we go on Gaza. The very concept that maybe we shouldn’t, maybe this is cruel and horrible and inhumane and barbaric is not part of the conversation. If it does occur in Israeli circles for the most part it’s very small circles of already experienced anti-occupation activists in Israel proper or it’s in the diasporas. Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t matter, I’m part of a diaspora so I would never say a diaspora doesn’t matter, but of course the impacts that we might have on the national government, let alone its policies and let alone its directives it sends to the IDF or to the Mossad or whatnot is of course very limited. Unfortunately there’s no other way of putting it. It’s very bleak. In terms of how many sober voices within Israeli society there are today. They exist but they are barely making a dent in the national narrative. After October 7th I don’t think it would be unreasonable to understand why many people would say we actually need to do something about this. They just murdered I believe between 800-1200 people. That’s a huge number of people to murder. The vast majority were civilians from what I understand. That is clearly a crime. So a response to a crime is not something that would blow anyone’s mind to be honest. The question of course is what kind of response and this is where it gets more difficult and I think people that are not what James Baldwin would call morally brave, morally courageous, what they don’t want to ask is “Why did this happen?”

It’s easy to go for the straightforward and simplest answer. I’m not saying the simplest answer, ie. Hamas is full of hate is completely wrong, because yes, Hamas is full of hate. But why did it happen now? And why did it happen the way it did? And what has caused the situation in Gaza to be so desperate that many men, and often pretty young men, would be willing to do something like that? That’s a more difficult question, because that requires looking in the mirror. It’s a pretty universal experience, I would argue that people usually don’t want to do that. The difference, of course, is that if I don’t want to look in the mirror, I’m just some random Lebanese guy in Switzerland and it doesn’t make much of a difference to the world. But if high ranking members of the IDF and the Netanyahu cabinet and a lot of the supporters and personalities on Israeli television, as I mentioned before, every single day calling for genocide in one way or another, them not looking in the mirror has very different consequences. Because Israel is one of the most powerful militaries in the world. Therefore, any reaction by the Israelis is on a different scale than any reaction that someone like me can have. Or frankly, then the vast majority of Palestinians, October 7, notwithstanding. Because that is very much the exception to do it. There’s never been anything like it. They heard this multiple times, as the single worst day for Jews since the Holocaust in terms of deaths, that says a lot because the Holocaust was almost eight decades ago. Whereas on the Palestinian side, it’s just not the case, as I mentioned 22,000 in the past three months alone. This does not include everyone else that is going to die from lack of access to water or not being able to get cancer medication. Those are not part of the casualty numbers that we see. What we see are those that die directly from the bombs, or immediately due to the bombs from injuries and whatnot. It doesn’t include everyone else. So the real number is very likely to be multiple times that. Maybe hundreds of thousands, if not more. There are 2 million people in Gaza today.

So all of this to say that I am never of the opinion that things are inevitable. I never believe that. And I don’t think anyone can really argue that rationally this was bound to happen. This was the result of a political decision made by Hamas, of course, since they are the ones that planned October 7, we know that. But it’s also a political decision, more importantly, I would argue, political decisions made by the Netanyahu administration, especially, and I would say the wider Israeli state apparatus for decades. It’s a bit difficult to just look at what’s happening now and not conclude that the most urgent thing that needs to be done is simply ceasefire. It says a lot that this has been a huge demand as far as the Americans are concerned, they have seen this as almost an extreme demand to make. I think we should be concerned as to what that means honestly, even regardless of what happens in Israel and Palestine. Because at the end of the day, we’re talking about an imperialist power with a lot of resources, the United States. With the upcoming elections and so many different things that could happen this year between also the Indian elections, which I’m not even going to get into, but so many different authoritarian tendencies becoming more and more normalized, in some extents, venturing into straight up fascism, as is the case of India for that matter. What is happening in Israel and Palestine, in many ways, is symbolic of what could happen elsewhere as well. Not just in terms of deaths and mass murder, but in terms of normalization. Why the normalization of profoundly authoritarian tendencies and worldviews?

TFSR: Yeah, thank you for that. I think this might be a good time to sort of talk a little more about those repercussions. It is strange that the main purveyor and provider of military weapons and collaborator in the training processes and all these things that, as you say, the most radical demand that seems to carry any sort of air in the US is a ceasefire. I guess because of the deep implications of the US in the long standing crimes, if we were to talk about anything deeper than that, like decolonization or something like that, then we would have to talk about how the next step may be a proposal of a two state solution has been dead in the water for a very long time, and not really an option. What you say about the upcoming elections too, the fact that Biden doesn’t have a great acceptance in the US system at this point and doesn’t have a lot of support from the general population, for a number of reasons, a lot of which are probably partially related to the fact that he’s just continuing Trump policies around things like the border, obviously, things like Israel.

The prospect for me, while as an anarchist I don’t really believe in the electoral system….I mean, I believe it has impacts, but I don’t believe that my participation in it will bring about any fundamental changes. I see it as a kind of swapping between popular parties that generally have a similar sentiment and get a lot of the same things done. And then there’s the deeper state institutions that exist underneath it. Sort of like in Israel that have been pushing a lot of the same policies, despite what administration happens to be in office. It’s the same border regime in the US that’s been in power and that’s been working things in this direction since at least the mid ‘80s. A lot of this audience is in the US, a lot of us will see the comparisons to be made between what was happening under the Obama administration and what happened under Trump and then what has been happening policy-wise under the Biden administration and not see much of a difference. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, from the periphery? Maybe push a little bit back against that if you want to?

EJA: Yeah, of course. So, in those elections, whatnot, I’m agnostic about it, if you want to put it that way. I’ve only ever voted personally in the Lebanese elections twice as a member of the diaspora. It’s made no difference. And that’s largely due to the structural issues in Lebanon. But anyway, I’m kind of agnostic on it all to be honest with you.

There are concrete differences between the Biden administration and the Trump administration, in that the Trump administration in that the Trump administration tends to do what the Biden administration does, but more openly and often more violently. So for me, it’s actually a calculation of what you call harm reduction. And I realize what that even means, because it’s harm reduction, not harm abolition because the Biden administration is also profoundly violent, profoundly racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and so on. I just think the Trump administration would be even worse. And that’s kind of like an old Soviet joke, I don’t know, I’ve seen it passed around in different contexts and apparently not just in the Soviet Union, but it’s like, “We thought we hit rock bottom and then we heard the knock from below.”

Unfortunately, in the same way that part of me has this endless sense of optimism, there’s nothing really that prevents things from also just getting worse. And the thing about things getting worse is that if we apply the same logic of shifting baseline syndrome. And for those who don’t know, I’ll explain it briefly, the best example that one gives to explain shifting baseline syndrome is that if you go fishing today, and you pick up five fish, you might think that’s amazing, but if you compare it to what your grandfather used to fish, it’s like nothing. That’s because the new average has shifted, and you weren’t around to see what the previous average used to be, like the previous normal. I think that applies to pretty much anything, usually like I said in the context of things like biodiversity and whatnot. But honestly, as a human tendency, it’s very common. It’s been a normal thing. I mean I don’t want to get into it as much. Maybe we can but I wanted to introduce that concept, because I think that if, for example, Trump gets into office by the end of this year, or early 2025, the new reality could be so bad that he wouldn’t even need to do that much to make things much worse. But if he does make things much worse, whoever comes after would then be dealing with a new baseline reality. Even if the person who comes after Trump is like the most amazing and well meaning person, there will be so many different things that would have taken a kind of life on their own or taken at a new momentum of their own, that attacking them becomes more and more difficult.

My worry right now is that the risks of spillover into a regional war is many times scarier than what is currently happening and what is currently happening is terrifying, and is obviously most terrifying for people in Gaza, of course, but if it expands beyond that, and obviously as I said, I want it to stop completely within Gaza as well. But if it doesn’t, and as of now, it doesn’t seem like it will, because as I said the new administration has been given the green light by the Biden administration to basically do whatever they want, as long as they’re not too obvious about it. That seems to be the only limitation that the Biden administration is imposing on Netanyahu: just don’t make it too obvious in your rhetoric. That’s when you hear the Americans being quite vocally angry. A friend joked about it, like, “you can genocide, just like stop talking about it.”

TFSR: In the US we talk about not saying the quiet part out loud.

EJA: Yeah, that’s basically it. If it expands to include Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran to various extent, I worry… and I still genuinely believe that to this day, most people don’t understand that Hezbollah is a different beast than Hamas. They don’t operate on the same scale. Hezbollah has much more experience and has access to weaponry that is virtually unlimited, because Lebanon is not blockaded and cannot be blockaded because there is a border with Syria, and therefore with Iraq and therefore with Iran.

The Israelis can bomb and the Americans can bomb and that is what they’ve been doing for years and years now, and Hezbollah still managed to be much stronger today than it’s ever been before. That’s something that the Israelis themselves have recognized multiple times. It’s kind of wild that we’re at the stage now, where I’m basically hoping that there are enough sober minds within the IDF itself that recognize that they cannot deal with both Hamas and Hezbollah at the same time. Because this is quite important and one of those details that gets lost in coverage: one of the reasons why the Israelis targeted the high ranking Hamas members in Beirut is because they haven’t been able to really get any of the highest ranking members of Hamas in Gaza itself. That’s been kind of humiliating for them. The best comparison I can give you is, Putin in the beginning of the full scale invasion, saying that they will take over Kiev in two days and that basically the intention was to either kidnap or kill Zelensky, and failing at that miserably, proceeded to bomb the shit out of Ukraine. Right?

That’s sort of what’s happening now, because targeting Hamas operatives in Beirut is relatively easy for the Israelis. Lebanon is not advanced economically, or militaristically, or whatnot. You have Hezbollah, that’s a powerful force. But the rest of the country is not that different than, for example, targeting a Hamas member in Turkey or in Qatar. And clearly different than targeting Hamas members in Gaza itself, high ranking officials, Sinwar especially, who supposedly was a leader or the mastermind of the October 7 massacre. They failed at doing that and it’s been three months.

I think this should tell you different things, or at least a few things that are very important. One, whatever is said at the highest functions of government, like whatever is said by Netanyahu himself. That’s aspirational, if you want, like he says we are going to destroy Hamas. Every single Hamas member is a dead man walking. Obviously easier said than done. And obviously, this is going to come at a cost. Now the cost that is imposed on the Palestinian people, we can see that it’s pretty straightforward. It’s mass murder, and that’s by bombing kindergartens, hospitals, nurseries, churches and mosques. Pretty much everything is a target in Gaza, as far as Israelis are concerned. But what about the consequence on Israel itself? What about the consequences on the Israelis, because that’s something that the people who usually do the bombing don’t like to think about, until they’re forced to, and even then I think they don’t want to think about it. But we know that Netanyahu is unpopular with the latest poll being something like 15% of Israelis want him in power after the war. And so he knows very well that as soon as the war ends he’s done for and there’s the trial happening, all of that stuff, he can be in trouble, again, parallels to Trump here are not that difficult to make. Except that Netanyahu is a prime minister who is actually in power, whereas Trump wants to be again. And so it is in his best incentive to prolong it for as long as possible until the new reality can be formed. until maybe he completely overturns the judiciary until maybe everyone else, like his opponents agree not to pursue charges or whatever it may be whatever the details are happening behind closed doors here. But isn’t it in his best interest to make sure that this war continues?

If we agree with that assessment, which I don’t think it’s that far out. I think it’s pretty straightforward. What is he not taking into consideration? Because if his only goal is to expand and continue the war, that means at some point, expanding your list of targets. There’s only so much you can do in Gaza itself before questions start being raised within the Israeli population, which we’ve already been seeing from the very beginning, the first month of this war. Questioning your capacity to get rid of terrorists, as they would say, destroy the enemy or whatever. They’ve been failing at doing that. They’ve been very good at murdering babies. That’s something that they are good at, but in terms of targeting and killing high ranking members of Hamas within Gaza, it has been quite frankly humiliating for them and they see it that way. And they talk about it that way. It’s in the media, including in English, Israeli media.

So my fear right now is that because there is this very clear incentive, and at the same time the green light has been given by the Americans who could have stopped this from basically the first few days after it started. That’s something I’m 100% convinced of. But because we have these two things, I’m worried that his goal is a very short term one, or at least in the way he’s thinking is very short term. He wants to maintain power and stops at that. He doesn’t have a grander vision of things. And the proof of that is that other members of his cabinet, some of his closest advisors and ministers, who say things like we need to occupy southern Lebanon again.

Putting aside the ethics of it all, which obviously would be horrific at a horrific cost. It’s not feasible. It’s not that easy to do. It was very difficult to do in the 80s and that took a toll on the Israelis as well in terms of military losses, and this was in the 80s, Hezbollah didn’t even exist then, it was at least in its infancy at the time. We are in a different time now, things are much more sophisticated now. You can do so much more damage with small drones compared to before. There’s a qualitative difference in how war is done now compared to before. I think Netanyahu doesn’t seem to entirely understand that. Again, that, plus the fact that the Biden administration has given him the green light to do this, leads me to think that, and again, unless something changes by the time folks are listening to this, we’re going to see an escalation that resembles more and more of a point of no return. And as of now, Hezbollah is already engaged in the war. They’ve opened up in the northern front at the northern border, as they would say, but they’re not ‘in’ in yet. They haven’t fully declared war in that sense. If they do, that would mean there is also a green light coming from Iran, which would mean Iran is involved. At some point, we’re going to be dealing with a new reality in the Middle East, for lack of a better term, is that Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, maybe broader than that, including Yemen, given what the Houthis have been doing and that might also mean the Saudis in one way or another etc, etc. I really worry about what this could mean. Because I think the potential for mass destruction is sort of there, it doesn’t require that much to trigger. Right now we’re getting to that point faster and faster. I’m not saying it cannot be stopped, it can. But as of now, literally right now, I don’t see it happening.

TFSR: And we’ve also gotten two of the wider participants in this struggle are slightly unhinged nuclear powers. That being the US and Israel. It seems kind of unlikely that Israel would use anything in the region, because it would poison their own well, by doing that, but also if some of the goal is displacement in order to occupy, using anything short of like a bunker busters doesn’t seem like a feasible approach. But also there are a lot of things on October 7, October 8 that I didn’t think would happen. Such as the scale of more than 22,000 people being killed over three months and the war being said to go on for months beyond this by the Israeli military. Do you think that they’re gonna use nuclear weapons in this?

EJA: I mean I still think maybe Putin might as well, you know, but the fact that nuclear weapons exist in the first place means the exercise it’s an option. And with the Israelis, for the reasons you mentioned, I don’t see it happening near their borders. Whether they try something related to Iran. I don’t know. But many things can happen without me thinking that they might, there are lots of extremists. Like of the religious kind within the Israeli cabinet. One of my worries of Trump coming back in power in the US is that then you would have a very similar environment within the US as well, given the prominence of Christian Zionists and the evangelical movement and the Messianic movement and all of that stuff. Kind of waiting for the end of the world. And always apparently Israel/Palestine is related to that end of the world as far as the way they see it. It’s always a possibility. It’s also a possibility that a mistake is made because the more this continues, the more mistakes will happen: ie. unintended destruction from one side or the other. Here I’m imagining a broader regional conflict, not only Hamas, Israel. Because with Hamas, Israel I see less likelihood of surprises, but more like what the Israelis are doing now. More of that until someone stops them. As for regional powers, there are so many other bombs these days that the nuclear weapon is not even the best one as far as they’re concerned. Because of poisoning your own well kind of thing and I forgot what you call it. The bombs you mentioned.

TFSR: Bunker busters, which are targeted lower yield nuclear bombs?

EJA: Yeah, exactly. A lot has been said now that something like that does not even seem that crazy in comparison to what’s been said already of what they want to do. Whether it’s towards Gaza itself, as I said, and they may go for that, they may decide that Sinwar, the apparent architect, or the presumed architect of the October 7 massacre, they may decide that he is there at a specific location on the map. And then they would maybe conclude that the way to take him out is to use that. Because he’s clearly in the bunker, clearly several meters below the ground, we know he’s not using phones or anything like that, because he is hiding. So they may say, “Well, this is the only way to destroy him.” And if they do destroy him at the cost of thousands of deaths, the Americans might back them. Because the Americans will say, “Well, this was the only way.” And then the Americans might impose some kind of peace processes, because the Israelis would have gotten at least a symbolic victory.

As I said, the reason why they killed that guy in Beirut is not that important, to be honest with you. But they did so because they needed a win. They’re not getting the win that they want. They don’t have the Bin Laden moment or we killed al-Baghdadi moment or whatever, which, especially Americans, I think really love seeing in their media and their politics. But to be honest, with Israelis as well, which is why they had tried to kill Arafat many times in the past. Anyway, all of this to say that the likelihood of things getting worse, always increases. The longer this continues, it takes on different dimensions. The more the different actors that are included in this war, the less and less predictable it becomes to know what any one of them would do. And now we know that on October 7, we actually know for a fact, for example, Hezbollah was not aware of the October 7 massacre. There are even reports that Hamas leadership in Qatar was not aware of at least the extent to which this was going to happen. Because this was almost exclusively planned by a pretty small group of people within Gaza that obviously were utilizing the highest security measures. There was this big report in The New York Times that interviewed a bunch of Hamas officials, that seems to confirm that theory. But now they are now Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and therefore the Iranians are actually talking to one another quite a lot. If it gets to the point where they are coordinating attacks together, then yes, we have reached a different stage of things. Something that as of now can be prevented. But once it crosses a certain threshold, not to repeat myself too much, it becomes more and more difficult to prevent it, or to stop it.

TFSR: As activists who want to be informed about how the world operates and what’s going on, and how to ethically engage with it and how to support people who are suffering from tragedies, and attacks, how do we not get so caught up in the news cycle that we get spun in the wrong direction. It was clear when that IDF video from the basement of the hospital came out and people were able to read the Arabic on the walls while watching it on social media and be like, “That’s just a calendar dude. That’s not an attack plan,” like, you probably don’t know that yourself. But you’re really assuming a lot of stupid people in the audience by showing the text from this. I’m sure that there are a lot of moments where, whether it was meant or not, people who wanted to be on top of the situation and understand it to be able to mobilize and move to stop war to help undermine the occupation, got caught up in misinformation. Can you talk a little bit about that approach?

EJA: I can answer in two different ways that are interrelated. The first is that I think by now it’s become clear to many, if not most people that misinformation and disinformation is not just something that occurs in the idea space, in the sense that you just have wrong information, let me correct this for you. It’s actually a much deeper and much more integral part of warfare. In many ways, this has always been the case, propaganda has always been part of war. We know that. I would say that maybe qualitatively, that hasn’t changed that much from 100 years ago, but what has changed is the frequency and the quantity. This actually means something, this does actually affect the scale of things as well. So let me try and explain what I mean by this. In the early days, from October 7 and onwards, I also saw a lot of confusing reports coming out. I think a lot of people in the online space, broadly speaking on the left, whether anti authoritarian or not, I think they got stuck in a few different stories that maybe felt better. I don’t know. There are a lot of folks who don’t even believe that Hamas did this on October 7, or that it has been exaggerated or whatever it may be. This was kind of enforced by reports that there seems to have been accidental killings from the Israeli side, covertly, while responding to what’s happening, shooting down the wrong people. Stuff like that.

If you’re not conspiracy minded, this isn’t new information that in the fog of war, you will have friendly fire, basically. You will have people that you are not targeting actually being killed, and so on, and so forth. If you are conspiracy minded, or you have that tendency, you’re looking for patterns, you’re looking for different things that can help you make sense of what is happening, and therefore can help you make sense of the world. And that’s a very normal thing. It’s literally called the patterning instinct. We seek patterns as humans, but it doesn’t mean that the patterns we find are correct. That’s how conspiracy thinking usually works. If you think of conspiracy theories along the lines of, “There is a cabal of globalists doing this or that,” or whatever it may be the QAnon stuff, they always have to rely on some kernel of truth of reality, that they then cover with all of these stories that are ridiculous and false.

There are unaccountable elites around the world. This is not rocket science. We are run by unaccountable politicians and rich billionaires and bankers and petro-dictatorships and whatever. But that’s a much messier story than believing like in popular TV series going in literature going back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and stuff like that, that there’s just like a secret group of people, often like Jewish people hiding and meeting behind closed doors and deciding what to do next. That’s a much simpler story. The reason I mentioned that kind of obvious one is that I don’t think it’s that different. It’s different, in terms of the details of the story, but the tendency is often the same, and looking for easier stories to tell yourselves that in your mind fits the broader story better.

So let me make it more concrete. The broader story of Israel Palestine, from the perspective of Palestinians usually starts with the Nakba in ‘48. In some cases, with the Arab revolt in the 30s. But the Nakba is usually the date, our story or the current story, that the current timeline really begins. In that story, we are a people resisting occupation, colonialism, mass murder, and so on and so forth. That story is correct. This is actually what happened from ‘48 onwards, but it doesn’t mean that within our camp, everyone thinks the same. That’s a difficult reality to hold. When something as emotionally charged as a massacre like October 7, and the subsequent massacres in Gaza proper. It’s difficult to hold that reality in you. I think it’s even emotionally difficult because you would have to recognize that “our side” is not just people like me, or like us that share the same values. There are people who have different values that may be reacting to a profound injustice, which in this case is the blockade and the occupation, but don’t necessarily have emancipatory, let alone progressive, let alone liberatory visions of the world. You kind of have to contend with that reality.

When it comes to Hezbollah, I think I’ve been right about them for some time now, at a great personal cost in terms of losing friends and contacts and connections and whatnot, because Hezbollah as far as Israel is concerned, it’s an easy story, they are resisting a brutal, quasi-imperialist power. A Zionist colonial power. If you include Syria in that story, then the picture gets a bit more complicated, because in Syria, Hezbollah actually are the occupiers. So how can the same group be occupying in a different country and at the same time resisting occupation in Lebanon? As they did before, until the liberation of southern Lebanon in 2000, this is the reputation that they had. So how can the same group be doing both at the same time?

I think for a lot of people that’s a difficult kind of tension, if you want to maintain or to hold. So it’s simpler to adopt explanations that simplify that story. And to kind of finish on that, understanding a situation has been complicated does not actually mean that you’re weakening your outrage and opposition to the greater of the injustices happening, which in this case, is the Israeli bombings of Gaza. Nothing else that I’m talking about here compares to the concrete problem that we’re seeing, which is the genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza. Understanding the extremism of Hamas and how they are ultra conservative reactionaries and whatnot does not mean that you don’t understand why there are people in Gaza who would prefer supporting Hamas over being bombed to death, because as far as I’m concerned, it’s not rocket science. You go with whatever game is in town, whatever cards you’re dealt with are the cards you’re going to play. There are no alternatives, realistically speaking in Gaza today. The Americans want to impose an alternative by way of making sure that Hamas doesn’t exist anymore, however that’s going to happen, and having the PA or Gaza not asking what the Palestinians want in any of this, of course. But the reality is always more complicated is what I’m trying to say.

Let me know if this makes sense. I think conspiracy thinking has always been part of the left, I don’t think this is a new thing. I think it’s kind of the socialism of fools kind of thing. But in many different manifestations today then let’s say 100 years ago, when that quote was made by Rosa Luxemberg. If I’m not mistaken, I don’t think this tendency has gone away. I think it’s probably symptomatic of a much wider problem in society that goes beyond the left. Because you see versions of that on the right, and the liberal and the center and whatnot, it just takes different actors in that worldview, if you want compared to the worldview of the left. I would argue as someone of the left of the anti-authoritarian left, who does think that there is some value in maintaining an organized left, conspiracy thinking is the vast majority of the time as far as I can tell, a hinder in that wider project, it actually makes things much more difficult, because you end up spending so much energy, looking at patterns or trying to put patterns together that are not actually there. And by doing so, actually missing the ones that are there that you may, in theory, be able to act upon. So if anything it’s just a colossal waste of energy. Personally, I don’t engage with that anymore. But that’s why I think it’s such a problem. But I’m happy to go into it in more detail, because I think the way I’ve explained it here has been very broad.

TFSR: I feel like I have a pretty good understanding. We could keep talking about that if you want to, but there are two things that I recall you mentioning before, wanting to specifically touch on. One was I think the weaponization or the whitewashing of European history by European powers, in terms of how they’re engaging with what’s going on or have been engaging. That’s large scale, like high up policy wonk stuff. Also, I think digging down because the majority of the audience is in the US. And I think that this cannot be repeated enough. Like, going into more detail about why a ceasefire cannot be the only answer to the situation or demand that people are making of the ruling governments wherever they’re living. I think that’s the thing that is worth digging into and reiterating. Maybe we can talk about both in the next half an hour. I don’t know if you have a preference of where to start?

EJA: I would love to talk about the European side of things. I recently published a very small blog post on my own website, and kind of the argument I was making is that you can really argue by now that specifically Germany, because a lot of what’s been happening in Europe has been sort of led by Germany. France has sort of done similar things, but has taken different turns as well. And then focusing on the two most powerful countries within the EU at least.

I think you can argue that Germany is once again, which is very ironic given its history, giving itself the right to decide who is a Jew. Germany has actually actively sought to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. This is one of those details that when you read about them it baffles you, the vast majority of the people who are actually tasked by the German government to report on antisemitism in Germany are not Jewish. Often you actually find situations where you have a non Jewish German person, deciding that an action by a Jewish person is antisemitic. And I think you can only understand the absurdity of this, if you understand Germany’s not just history, the obvious one, World War Two, but the post war one as well. And I think the way the German state, and by German state I don’t just mean the central one, I also mean the various states within Germany. It’s relatively decentralized, compared to France, I guess. You have one of the states, I forgot which one, for example, that is not putting it as part of its citizenship requirements to become German to recognize the right of the Israeli state to exist. That’s kind of wild, if you really think about it, that a state requires you to recognize another state’s existence, in order for you to become a citizen of the state. It’s the reason that as they would say, the reason for being of the German state, is how high ranking German politicians, including the chancellor, have put it: ie defending Israel’s right to exist and protecting Israel at whatever cost.

Israel’s right to exist is not in any meaningful way actually being threatened. Like there’s no comparable regional power, as we know. Hamas for all it’s done cannot compare to Israel, in terms of its actual militaristic capacity. Obviously, the vast majority of Palestinians, civilians, even if they decide everyone wants to do violence, cannot do what the Israelis can do in a single day, that only a single hour for that matter. So that’s not actually under threat. But there’s something that happens when you say it is. A kind of a form of politics that gets activated, not that dissimilar from the post-911 US world or US dominated world in many ways, where you basically say that this is a war on terror, right? We’ve been here before, in some sense, what’s kind of very specific about the German case is the fact that they seem to be struggling a lot to actually understand that you can be Jewish and not pro-Israel. And be like, this actually is a fundamental part of your identity. If you’re an anti zionist or German Jewish person. One of the protests the Berlin police banned was called something along the lines of, “Jewish Berliners against the violence in the Middle East ceasefire,” something very mellow, in that sense, something very humane, if you want. And they banned that. One of the reasons cited is risks of antisemitism. Again, the German Berlin police, the vast majority of whom are of course not Jewish, decide that a bunch of Jewish Berliners organizing a protest that is basically saying, “Hey, Palestinians are humans” risks causing antisemitism? Because for them, the legal definition of antisemitism, besides the obvious hatred of Jews, which again, as far as they’re concerned, does not include anti-Zionist Jews is just the state of Israel it’s the same thing in their rule book.

I think this has wide ranging consequences. Germany is supposedly the state, as this is the story that they like to tell themselves, that has dealt with its past. They are the ones that teach the Holocaust in school and have all of those memorials everywhere and all of that. I would actually argue, I’m not the only one to do so I should say, there’s very good long essay on Granta which I can send you titled, “Once Again, Germany Defines Who is a Jew” It’s by three folks, I think one of them is Eyal Weizman. And I think all three of them are Jewish. If I remember correctly.

It’s kind of mind boggling if you really sit down and think about it, that after the Holocaust, eight decades after the Holocaust after what the Germans did to the Jewish peoples of Europe, they are still the ones that give themselves the right to define who is a Jewish person, there’s something quite astonishing about that realization once you really sit down with it, because in many ways they were actually rewarded for their Nazi past. Because that’s what the Nazis tried to do as well, of course, they wanted to be the ones to define who gets to be a Jew in the first place, with the purpose, of course, of murdering them.

Why am I mentioning this? I’m mentioning this because I think a lot of the responses that we’ve been seeing in Europe are kind of shades of that. Germany is mostly, or at least it’s the most obvious one, because of its past. Because it’s so transparently obvious, there is almost a compensation mechanism, that they don’t want to deal with the reality of their ongoing guilt and what’s happening, that they actually prefer to project on the Israelis and decide that they want to just defend the Israelis at all cost, regardless of what it means to Palestinians. Then of course, instead of dealing with that discomfort, they double down and triple down and quadruple down and start saying things along the lines of “Germans of Arab descent need to condemn antisemitism,” or another one saying something along the lines of, we have to limit immigration from the Arab world or from Palestine, I don’t even know where he specified, because we have enough antisemitism in Germany today. I can guarantee you that neither of those are referring to the vast majority of antisemitic attacks in Germany today, which is by the Neo Nazis in the far right, the overwhelming majority of it is something like 85, or 90%, according to the latest statistics I saw. They can’t comprehend that. It’s almost like it’s an ideological blindness, for lack of a better term, apologies for using an ableist term. They can because otherwise, they will have to recognize that 90% of antisemitic attacks are their fault. It’s something that they have to tackle something that they have to actually deal with, it’s much easier to say well actually, those are the 2% or 3%, or whatnot. As those foreigners, those immigrants, those Muslims, Palestinians, those Arabs, Turks, maybe I don’t know, it’s so much easier. It’s such an easy story.

This is what I’m trying to really understand. This tendency of looking for absolutely everything humanly possible, any explanation possible to avoid dealing with your own responsibility, whether as a people, as a nation, as a community, as an individual, whatever it may be, because right now Germany has expanded its militaristic reach, and is actually selling more and more weapons to Israel, and is therefore they actually complicit in the ongoing genocide. You see what I mean? Like there’s something profoundly messed up, disconnected, for sure. Given the premise of what they themselves say.

Their work on memory is supposed to be about sharing. I think this will have, again, wide ranging consequences on Europe itself. This is the whole boomerang effect. With the upcoming EU elections this year. But yeah, this is something I’m also trying to focus on a bit, because I think antisemitism as a phenomenon has been part and parcel of European life for the past, give or take thousand years, and has obviously taken a very specific dimension in the past couple of centuries, with the advent of the nation state, and the goal that the Jewish person as this, you know, the wandering Jew as the antisemitic, the rootless cosmopolitan, all of that stuff is still very much with us today. Sometimes, it’s not even about Jewish people. This could be about the Romans, for example, depending on the countries and stuff like that. But that tendency is very much still with us in Europe today. It’s something that genuinely profoundly concerns me. At the same time, the more profoundly it concerns me the more the more it baffles me how little it’s talked about at the mainstream level in Europe.

TFSR: Yeah, I think that there’s something really fundamental and because I’m “Amero-centric,” I guess I’ll bring it back to the examples that I’m more familiar with. But I mean, the same thing has been happening in the United States for at least a decade in response to to the BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] struggle, and before that too, but when you’ve got people in the US calling for a change in the situation in the occupation of Palestine, or whatever solution they’re proposing, getting push-back mostly from conservative forces, some of them are the Christian Zionists that you mentioned before.

I think a lot of it also falls into the way that neoliberalism and identity can intertwine with each other in this strange way. I think that maybe neoliberalism is not the term that I should be using, but liberalism, and the idea of identities and representation. I feel like in the United States, when there is conflict around institutionalized racism or societal racism, the elements of the US government at a local, state or federal level can go ahead and bring out people that they claim a representative, or the media, like in the US sphere, we can have conservative or centrist or whatever, members of the Black community come up and talk in response to the killing of a young Black person in one of the communities around the country. That person that is brought before the media or brought as a government representative is supposed to shift the way that everyone feels. Everyone puts their emotions and their thoughts into this person that claims to be representative of the experience of all these masses of people that are suffering under police violence. Do you see what I mean? That sort of representation doesn’t make any logical sense that this person could speak on behalf of all of these wide communities that you’re lumping into this one racialized category, totally dispensing with class with regional differences of experience with the person’s life who was killed by the police. I don’t know if there’s a way that, that was transposed through the US occupation of Germany after World War II, and the way that Germany was restructured and the creation of Antideutsche, that gets a little murky for me, I think that if you look at the Antideutsche response, my experience of it, it feels very much like it is not with Jewish people, it is about Jewish people without Jewish people is the perspective of that political movement. But the philosophy is supposed to be in line with the interests of Jewish people.

EJA: It made me think of that book. The author, his name escapes me, but the book title is something along the lines of “Racism Without Racists”. Fundamentally, there are logics of power that don’t necessarily have to include individuals that are of the dominant racial group oppressing members of the minority group. That is usually the case, statistically, it remains the main story if you want. But then if you don’t understand that this can happen, regardless of who is on top and who is at the bottom, so to speak, in terms of individuals, then all you need really is basically what you described. What you need is like a few members of the minority calling themselves conservatives, and then conservative saying, clearly we cannot be racist, because we have, you know, X amount of Latinos or Black folks or whatever. That’s in the US context.

In Europe, it’s a bit different, because racial politics doesn’t kind of translate in the same way. In the UK to some extent, and it’s kind of like an anglophone thing. But in places like Switzerland, or France, or Germany, the ones I kind of focus on the most here in Italy, to some extent as well, it doesn’t quite translate in the same way. In many ways, I would argue that white supremacy here is taken even more for granted than it is today in the US, which might be a baffling statement, but I do generally believe that it’s “more normalized to not be white in an American context than in a European context.” You know these are obviously broad strokes here. The Antideutsche movement is a very good example. I think, indeed, these folks cannot just be speaking on defending Jews, don’t have any Jews among them. But they can even be antisemitic while saying that they are defending, or they are opposing antisemitism, in the same way that you can have Neo Nazis calling themselves anti Zionist. It doesn’t have to make direct logical sense is what I’m trying to say. As long as it sort of has this rough internal coherence within the various communities that is within the various narratives. And I think Europe itself, Europe specifically, given that it is Europe that has committed the Holocaust and Europe is the one where the spark that led to World War II was initially launched by the invasion of Poland and whatnot, has a very specific responsibility when it comes to antisemitism.

Now I think that this hasn’t quite been the case in the sense that in the post war era, Europe has, for the most part, washed its hands from antisemitism. If you think about it, the reason why they were able to do so is because of the Holocaust. Is because the Nazis murdered so many Jews, that the remaining Jews that stayed in Europe that were not in the USSR, or the US at the time, and then later on, of course, then those that migrated to Israel and so on, they were able to sort of speak on behalf of Jews, speak as if they were remembering and commemorating Jewish histories in their towns and neighborhoods without having any actual Jewish person in that neighborhood or community or whatever, it’s something I’ve seen, especially in Italy. It’s very common to go to various towns in Italy, where the term ghetto comes from, you go to the Roman ghetto, for example, and there are virtually no actual Jewish people living there anymore. If there are, there are very few in numbers. And that is part of how they’ve allowed themselves, the Europeans as I’m kind of generalizing here, to speak of Jewish history without including any Jewish peoples.

There’s something very unique about that that’s very uniquely European that I think in the US is actually a bit different, because of the diversity of the Jewish American population that tends to be liberal-center, even to the left compared to the Israeli Jewish population that tends to be towards the right. There are various historic reasons for this happening, which I don’t think we have too much time to get into. But it makes it a bit different, but I think it can be easier depending on your resources and your exposure levels and whatnot for you like as an American to understand that one can be Jewish and anti-Zionist. Whereas in Europe, I think on average, it’s more difficult because the average European doesn’t know any Jewish person in their neighborhood and their communities as part of their lives, right as just part of their just culture. France, to some extent, is an exception to this, but Germany isn’t. And that’s kind of the irony of it all. This book, I forgot who’s the author [Dara Horn -ed], but the title is like, “People Love Dead Jews.” And that’s something that is a fundamental phenomenon to understand. I don’t want to be too generalistic here, even though I have to be in the way I talk just because of time and constraint, and whatever and the fact that this is a podcast at the end of the day, but they’re able to fundamentally disconnect themselves from reality, and talk entirely in terms of narratives, in terms of stories about who they are as a people who they are as Germans, who they are as French, who they are as Italians, who they are as whatever, without having to actually deal with the reality of Israel Palestine, not just what the reality of Palestine, that’s what I’m trying to get at, but also what the reality of Israel. Their relationship with Israel with Zionism, with Israel Palestine, to some extent the entire region, but especially for focus on Israel Palestine, it’s almost entirely to do with their own personal history, and how they view themselves. It doesn’t have much to do with the realities on the ground and the facts on the ground in Israel Palestine. I think that has been profoundly dangerous, with horrific consequences that now we’re basically seeing out in the open, but which I think have always been there in one way or another.

TFSR: Where do you want to go from here?

EJA: Yeah, I recognize that once you start talking about this, it’s quite difficult to narrow it down or at least to wind it down towards somewhat of a conclusion for this episode. But I am worried. I’m worried about things to come. The reason why I do what I do, to the extent that even useful, is I try and present things the way I think they are, which of course I can get some things wrong, and I am always trying to learn and whatnot, because I genuinely believe that this is part of how we can tackle things. It’s kind of like a naive understanding of the world to some extent, and I think I would agree with that assessment. I still think understanding what the facts are, including how people view themselves and kind of not taking the way they view themselves for granted. As if that’s the only way to view reality. Like not taking German nationalism for granted and actually opposing German nationalism for reasons I think should be very obvious. The reason why I think it’s important to do so is because I think we need to understand that we reached a point and again, maybe we’ve always been there, but we’ve definitely reached a point today where stories and the way we tell stories about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and the way we think of others, and the way we talk about others to ourselves, the way we talk about Israelis and Palestinians to ourselves as Germans, or as Swiss as whatever, has fundamentally destructive consequences, on the ground, usually elsewhere. There is this export of violence from the centers to the periphery. Whereas the mistakes and the moral cowardice, to paraphrase Baldwin again, that occurs in the centers, they tend to not pay the price for it, at least not in the immediate term. Instead, it’s the people in the peripheries that tend to pay the price for it.

If I can finish on that note, there was a protest, I believe it was two or three years ago now, in Germany, by Palestinians holding signs with statements along the lines of, “Dear Germany, you’re guilty past, you cannot erase your guilty past on our bodies,” or whatever it may be, something along those lines. I think that remains fundamentally true today. I think, going a bit more into psychoanalytic theory, which I’m not necessarily qualified to do, but I think that subconsciously, elements of the German population, and especially I think those who are most vocally anti-Palestinian today, either know this or part of the message knows this, which is why they’re doubling down. There’s something very fundamental and so nakedly hypocritical about the way the Germans have reacted to the Israeli assault on Gaza that I think says so much more about Germany today than it does anything about Palestinians or Israelis for that matter. And I think there’s something worth sitting with, in my opinion, and I’ll stop on that.

TFSR: Your point is well taken. I mean, I personally think that, you know, to have the people that are affected by the problem speak about the problems is a really important step towards getting on the same page, and finding solutions to the problems that we’ve made, that are actually focused on the needs of the people that are suffering the consequences, particularly for those of us that live in the imperial core, or live at the center of white supremacy, or patriarchy, or whatever those systems of power happened to be. So I guess on that note, thank you very much for this conversation and for putting in all the work to have the conversation. And I wonder if you’d remind folks, at least for the moment where they can find your podcast and your writings, and where they can find the upcoming Podcast Network, as best you know, right now.

EJA: Yeah, thanks. So the podcast is called The Fire of These Times, it’s available on any podcast app, and you can go on thefirethesetimes.com to find it there, the wider network is going to be called From The Periphery. So at some point, maybe by the time this is out, I’m not sure, I’m hoping this month I manage to finish it. It’ll be available at fromtheperiphery.com. and my writings are all archived. I also have, it’s more of a newsletter on joeyayoub.com. So it’s just my first name and last name dot com. I’m hoping to motivate myself to write more. In a way of a newsletter as a blog, basically, on my website, and people can subscribe to it. I think there’s like 80 people or something, which is nice, and can subscribe to it if they want directly there. You just put your email and you get a post whenever I post stuff, just that, thanks for having me.

TFSR: Of course, and the Patreon that supports the work that you do.

JA: Oh, yeah, thanks, you’re, you’re better than I am. So there is patreon.com/firethesetimes. I don’t know if this is gonna change when it is From The Periphery when that’s officially launched. So I don’t think that will change things anyway, you will always be able to write patreon.com/firthesetimes and you will be redirected to the correct Patreon regardless of whether we changed the name or not. In addition to getting early access to everything you can also have access to the monthly hangout, which we have on the first Saturday of every month. Watch parties, currently there is one on the Nakba, watching a documentary on the Nakba, which is going to start soon, as well as eventually, different book clubs and exclusive episodes, you know, that sort of thing. The more we’re able to make, obviously as a team, the more we’ll be able to set aside time to do so more regularly.

TFSR: Alright, thanks again, J for the time and for all the work that you’re putting in. I really appreciate it. I get a lot from listening to y’alls material and I’m excited for the expanded voices. Thank you.

EJA: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me.