Sept. 30, 2025

Palestinians Under Siege: A Visit to the Occupied West Bank

As the world watches the horror unfolding in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli state, the oppression and displacement of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has intensified.

This episode offers a rare and urgent eyewitness account from the ground. We’re joined by Simone Deckard, a NY-based organizer who works with Palestinian women community organizers in the Northern West Bank. Simone recently returned from towns and refugee camps across the West Bank, including Nablus, Jenin, and Tulkarem. She describes the deepening repression Palestinians face under military rule and settler violence, from daily raids and mass arrests to home demolitions and economic strangulation. We explore how Israel is accelerating its long-standing colonial project of annexing the West Bank with full U.S. backing.

We also examine the collapse of the two-state illusion, the complicity of the Palestinian Authority, and the carceral system that tortures and imprisons thousands of Palestinians, most without charge. As settler militias grow bolder and the Israeli government carries out its goal to rid historic Palestine of its Palestinian inhabitants, this is a vital conversation on the realities of apartheid and the ongoing Nakba.

Welcome to Unwashed and Unruly, where we turn over stones and see what crawls out.

Today we're talking about Israel's war of annihilation against Palestinians, not only in Gaza, but through expulsion and terror in the West Bank.

0:24

I'm your host Lola Michaels, joined by Ezra Saeed.

Hi, Lola.

Hi everyone.

And Cam Cruz.

Hey, guys.

And today we have a special guest, a New York based organizer who works with Palestinian women organizers in the Northern West Bank, Simone Deckard.

0:40

Hi, Simone.

Hi.

You can find all our episodes on our website unwashedun-ruly.com, plus special content.

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1:01

While we watch in horror the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the Nakba has continued and intensified in the occupied West Bank.

Israel's occupation of the West Bank is one of the longest military occupations in the world today.

We'll get an eyewitness account from the ground.

We'll talk about how Israel is tightening its control of Palestinian towns and villages through daily military raids, home demolitions, mass arrests, torture, destruction of crops, constant settler violence and surveillance.

1:30

It all started when the Zionist movement took over 80% of Palestine and forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of native Palestinians in 194748.

The Israeli state completed its takeover by seizing the Golan Heights, Gaza, and the West Bank in 1967, and it continues with the violent repression and dehumanization of millions under Israeli rule.

1:52

We're so deeply honored to have our first guest on the show to share her observations of the West Bank.

Simone.

We'll be talking about the deepening despair under Zionist rule since October 7th, the prison system, settler violence, the myth of the two state solution, and what Palestinians themselves see as a path forward.

2:15

Thank you so much for joining us, Simone.

Thank you so much.

I'm really happy to be here.

So let's just start with some of the fundamentals.

With the backing of the US, the Zionist state is trying to carry out its long standing goal, outright annexation of the West Bank.

The complete colonization of the West Bank and the genocide in Gaza are part of the Zionist program of so-called Greater Israel.

2:37

Their desire is to seize all the land of historic Palestine with as few Palestinians as possible.

OK, so now a couple of specifics on the West Bank.

This is part of historic Palestine, which was militarily seized by Israel in 67.

The major cities like Ramallah, Hebron, Nablis and Janine are where millions of Palestinians live without basic political, civil or human rights under an apartheid system of control that touches every part of daily life.

3:05

It's where you have Jewish only settlements, concentrated and strategic locations to militarily encircle the Palestinians, as well as in the heart of Palestinian areas.

The Israeli army regularly enter cities and refugee camps with indiscriminate terror and deadly force.

3:21

The Palestinian Authority, which has partial civil control, is widely viewed by Palestinians as corrupt and complicit with the occupation.

Because it is.

OK, Simone.

So tell us a little bit about your recent trip and where you went in the West Bank.

Yeah.

So I was in Palestine for about a month this past summer, but middle of the summer, and I mainly spent time in the northern West Bank.

3:46

It's where I do the majority of my work in the communities in Janine, Nablus and Tolketa.

These are kind of the three main cities in the north as well as Tubas is another major city in the north, mainly Nablus, but I did day trips to Bethlehem.

4:05

Ramallah.

Ramallah is really the administrative capital.

A lot of organizations will have an office, main office in Ramallah and the satellite offices in Nablus.

So sometimes you do have to go to Ramallah to do business and E Jerusalem for short periods of time as well.

4:21

So you've been traveling to the West Bank regularly or or enough so that you've been able to notice some of the changes over the last two years, specifically since October 7th.

Can you talk a little bit about those changes or how different it's been?

Yeah.

So things are declining in the West Bank economically, absolutely.

4:42

When October 7th happened, about 250,000 Palestinians were West Bank Palestinians were fired from their jobs in Occupied 48 Palestine or Israel.

And many of these people were low income workers, but this also included nurses, doctors, some professional class people.

5:04

Actually many of the refugee camps, particularly in Janine, they're very close on the border if you look at a map to quote Israel.

And so these communities did rely heavily on particularly low income work in Israel.

And so October 7th happened and you know, you had mass, mass firings.

5:23

And so these communities, particularly the working class communities, which already have very high levels of unemployment, are now two years into many families having no one working other than maybe odd jobs here and there, maybe some assistance from some organizations.

5:41

That's a crisis.

And two years in, people have gone through their savings.

For many families, things are getting quite desperate.

People are struggling to afford food.

People are struggling to afford university fees.

5:56

Because also particularly around university fees, there were programs that wealthier Palestinians in the West Bank would contribute to, for lower income families to cover university tuition.

But these families no longer have that extra income to put towards those.

6:14

So a lot of those kind of really 100% community based initiatives have not really been able to continue post October 7th because you just generally have such a decline in expendable income.

And so economically, definitely things are very bad, very bad in the West Bank.

6:35

And how do you see that playing out in terms of just the general outlook and despair and overall sense combined with what's happening in Gaza?

Something that I think is really important is that people, people in the West Bank, they, they are, they're very aware of Gaza.

6:55

And as much as people talk about how the situation is that in the West Bank, they always say, but Gaza is much worse and we are not Gaza and, and they come first.

And so I think Gaza is also kind of a a warning in a way of what what could happen as well.

7:15

And people are very aware of that.

I think it's not as spoken because that's a really scary thing to say outright, but that's kind of a lot of the underlying feeling.

And this has played out in reality in the refugee camps in the northern West Bank.

So in the refugee camps of Janine Tokatam and Nora Shams, which is a refugee camp in the city of Tokatam.

7:36

And among these three camps, there are currently about 48,000 people who are internally displaced in the West Bank who were violently removed from their homes.

And the refugee camps right now are closed military zones.

7:52

The homes are being burned, they're being demolished.

The army is creating these large kind of boulevards to ease their movements within the camps because the camps, these neighborhoods are very, they're very narrow streets.

So they are difficult for military operations.

8:09

And so you know you see the Gaza level destruction in the West Bank and you see displacement, mass displacement already in the West Bank in these refugee camps.

So, of course it is not to the scale of Gaza, but they are implementing the same strategy currently in the West Bank.

8:32

One of the things I was curious about it, if you had any insight on or gotten a chance to spoke to people about while you were there, is like if you look at the first intifada, which was obviously a product of decades of simmering discontent, the spark at the end was a soldier killing a young man in Gaza and that exploded throughout all of Palestine.

8:54

But Gaza, West Bank, and within Israel itself.

You look at the second intifada again, years and years of mounting discontent.

And then Ariel Sharon goes to the Haram Sharif and it's seen as such an affront.

Today.

It's almost a weekly occurrence.

9:09

But at the time, it was seen as such an affront that it sparks a whole rebellion.

And now you're seeing this genocide happening in Gaza.

But the West Bank, well, I understand that there's been sparks here and there by small militant groups.

9:27

Seems relatively quiescent.

Is it fear?

Is it despair?

Is it the sense that you spoke of the the threat of what Gaza poses to the population of the West Bank?

Do people talk about it?

Is is there a sense of my God, almost half of our nation in or good chunk of our nation is being annihilated and we can't do anything about it?

9:54

I think it's a combination of of all of those things depending on who you're who you're talking to.

I think there is a sentiment among people who, you know, you have people who are more politically aligned with the PA on the Palestinian Authority who will say, look at what are the actions of Hamas has gotten us.

10:15

It's gotten us a genocide, it's gotten us a terrible economy.

Look at what's happened in the refugee camps.

This is what resistance gets us.

So you do hear this from, from people, you know, a lot of people have lost a lot to, to Israel and, and by Israel.

10:32

And there is definitely a lot of anger and a lot of rage.

But unfortunately the the PA is a very powerful mechanism of counterinsurgency and I think it cannot be understated kind of the the Vichy nature of of the Pai personally think of it as a Vichy government essentially because of the the role that they play, particularly in area A or 100% Palestinian controlled areas.

11:06

The PA is just as much of A concern as as the Israelis in many ways.

Because when when people are brought in for questioning in Nablus, most of the time the first round is done by the PA, you know, or they're held in PA prisons before going to a quote, Israeli prison.

11:26

Some context that I think is very important about the northern West Bank.

And I don't know Ezra, if you are familiar with a group called the Lion's Den in Nablus, but they were a popular supported resistance group, I guess technically aligned somewhat with Hamas, but independent brigade in many ways.

11:45

And in in 2022 and into 2023, their leaders were systematically murdered and their families terrorized and imprisoned by the Israelis and the Old City was put under under siege.

12:05

And this was really impactful in terms of, I think, quelling any resistance over the last couple years, particularly in the northern West Bank, because of both how violent the response was, but also how effectively the Israelis murdered every leader of the lion's den.

12:26

And so I think that it's two things.

It's both that there's a lot of oppression, there's a lot of fear of repression and of particularly like economic, like I, I need to support my family so I can't go to prison and I don't want to get caught up in something.

But also the Lion's Den was very, very, very serious, just destruction of a really pretty popular resistance in the northern West Bank.

12:52

Didn't the Lion's Den subsequently also fall to some repression at the hands of the PA as well?

Yes, yes.

And we see this more recently with incidents in Janine, in Janine camp and in Janine City where the PA had snipers who were shooting Palestinians and killing them in Janine in the the winter.

13:13

On behalf of Israel.

Yep, on behalf of Israel.

Exactly.

The Israelis didn't have to lift a finger.

So yes, a good amount of operations are done by the PA against resistance actions.

Etcetera.

And those who denounce Hamas or, or you could say the same thing about the PFLP or others who denounce resistance, look what resistance has gotten us.

13:34

Do they offer something in place of that?

Do they have another leader or someone in mind or?

Yeah.

Are they happy with the rule of the PA?

I have not heard a good alternative from these.

Oh, do they offer any alternative, even if it's a bad alternative?

Not really, because the alternative is continuing to go as is where you can.

13:54

Maybe if you're a small business owner or if you are a lawyer, a doctor, you can continue having your, you know, you have a nice house and you have your little piece that you're trying to protect.

But beyond that, no, they don't really offer another solution.

14:11

Yeah.

One of the things I'm hearing, and please correct me if I'm mistaken, is what the PA has as a base now within Palestinian society.

Is that shrinking professional and middle class?

That feels like it would have something to lose.

If.

Yes, if there's an uprising of some kind.

14:27

Yeah.

I mean, it's not frankly too dissimilar to the liberal political establishment here, right?

It is serving a very specific class of professional and very wealthy people in the United States.

14:43

And so the dynamics are not so dissimilar to what we experience here, where it serves A shrinking few.

And then the actions of poor people who may be more involved in more, quote, extremist parties are seen as kind of a a shame or a moral failing.

15:03

I mean, I would say the one difference is the liberal establishment in the United States at least plays a role in running the United States, whereas the PA doesn't run Palestine.

It's simply is it?

Well, one I was.

Going to say it's the it's the arm of Israel within Palestine.

15:21

Yes, but they employ a lot of.

People.

Oh, I'm sure, because Israel lets them.

Because they and.

The US and the.

US, but I think it's a but but, but it is important to recognize that like the hospitals are socialized, city functions, city cleaning, all of this stuff, that's all the PA.

15:39

So they employ a lot.

They do play a very important role in everyday life because they do employ a lot of people and that does have an impact.

They have not been able to pay people their full salaries even before October 7th, which is a very big issue that comes up a lot.

15:58

I understand, like one of the things that distinguished the first intifada was a civil disobedience campaign.

We're not going to pay our taxes.

We're not going to cooperate with the ruling government in the West Bank.

We're not going to cooperate with the administrations.

16:14

And these were all directly run by Israel at the time.

What to me the PA now represents is they've put a tattered Palestinian flag as a facade on top of the Israeli occupation.

And so if you imagine you're a Palestinian who is basically continuing to suffer these conditions, you now have to take on both Israel and the PA.

16:36

Yeah.

Like Ezra and I were talking about this beforehand and trying to come up with kind of how to describe the Palestinian Authority.

And I thought that your analogy with the capo was, you know, that these are the the traders who are maintaining their position within the ghetto and they have something to gain in maintaining that position.

16:57

Yeah.

I do want to be careful though, because again, it is a difficult situation.

There are not a lot of choices particularly right now economically.

And so I think that PA leadership and people who may be affiliated with the PA who are workers, I do think it is important to make that distinction though generally.

17:23

To me, the capo is not the guy who works at a hospital or the teacher.

I'm talking about the people who run the PA.

I'm talking about the people who order the arrest and repression of Palestinian activists on behalf of the US and Israel.

17:38

There's an understanding to me which is if they don't do that, they're no longer going to have their position of power because the only reason the PA exists is to basically run the West Bank and it used to be a Gaza to run the Palestinian territories for Israel and the US as a handmaiden to them.

17:57

Otherwise there would have been no Oslo Accords or any of that stuff.

It never was about a road to self determination.

It was basically about giving a fig leaf to creating these little Bantu stands and giving these little chieftains A fig leaf to basically Lord it over the Palestinian population and dominate them.

18:20

And that domination can be repression, but it could also be economic.

And I think they kind of looked at the South African model and said, oh, there's some lessons to be drawn here, chopping up the body politic of the Palestinian nation. 100%.

Yeah.

I want to go back Simone, to some of the kind of the the daily existence in the West Bank.

18:40

And one of the things that we talked about is that it's not just when there's a major event or massacre where you can actually see the systemic cruelty of the occupation and how it plays out.

But some of the most horrible things are just the daily regime, the checkpoints, the Jewish only roads, how difficult it is to get from point A to point B.

19:03

Can you talk a little bit about that?

And if you had any specific interactions or observations at these at these checkpoints, if you feel comfortable talking about that Or with settlers even in the West Bank.

Movement within the West Bank, particularly in the last nine months, has gotten dramatically more difficult, more dangerous, more time consuming and more expensive.

19:27

So when I was in Palestine in last November, 1/3 taxi ride from Nablus to Romola, which should take about 45 minutes, cost 18 shekels.

And then when I came back in this past summer, it had gone up to 25 the shekels for the same route.

19:47

That is both.

That's a variety of factors.

Some of it is fuel cost.

Some of it is also just that now it usually takes a lot longer or it has the higher chance of taking sometimes up to four or five hours depending on checkpoint settlers, just traffic, a lot of factors.

20:06

And so just just that cost rise.

My colleague and I, we we went and I had a 50.

Shekel No, in the first time we got on the shared taxi, I put it, I put it forward to the driver and we got nothing back.

And I was like, oh, and someone said, oh, it's 25 now.

20:22

That was definitely a shock for your average Palestinian right now.

It's a very big a big jump.

So just on a price point, things have gotten much more expensive for for transportation on a safety point, it has gotten much more dangerous because in addition to checkpoints, which they have both permanent checkpoints and then what people call flying checkpoints, which is where it can just kind of, you know, you can have there's like a little booth that sometimes is empty, sometimes is there.

20:53

And then you also can sometimes just have soldiers who will make a checkpoint on the road.

In addition to checkpoints, there have been about, I think as of yesterday, about 1000 gates that are these large yellow metal swing open close gates that have been placed literally all over the West Bank in front of most villages, in front of the entrances to major cities such as Bethlehem.

21:24

There was a gate that was placed in the entrance to Bait Sahur and into Bethlehem yesterday.

And I read someone had done some math that now your average Palestinian only has to go about 2.38 kilometers between these gates where it's only about every 2.38 kilometers.

21:45

There's a gate now in the West Bank and so these can be closed, opened at any time.

Many villages, the gates will get closed at 8:00 PM and if you're not back, you're you have to figure out your evening.

So this is just like that level of uncertainty when you leave your village, when you leave your city, you are opening yourself up to death.

22:07

Very much so.

There are drive by shootings you can be run into by a military vehicle.

This happens to shared taxis quite often as well, where a military vehicle will kind of brush by the side, RIP off a door just for terror and then time.

22:24

So we had a, another colleague from the, a remote office was coming to Nabilis.

It took her 45 minutes to come because the roads are clear, thank God.

And then on her way back, it took four hours.

And there's no way to know.

You just.

There's no way to know.

22:39

Beyond the fact that when you're traveling from point A to point B, you could get interrogated, you could get arrested, you could get shot.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And so it really, a lot of people have stopped traveling to different places in the West Bank.

I have friends who haven't left Nablus in nine months because it's just not worth.

22:57

They're just like, it's just not worth it.

It's scary.

You know, you never know how long it's going to take.

And if they don't have to go somewhere like for a visa appointment or something like that, they're not going to be leaving Nablus.

And this has become pretty common.

23:13

And so the freedom of movement has been severely eroded in the West Bank in the last couple of months.

Another piece is that my sister actually went to university in Nablus for a year 10 years ago.

She went to university, which is a major university.

23:32

People come from all over the West Bank and actually also in Israel to come to.

So when my sister was 10 years ago and she and her friends would travel to Ramallah for the day, they would drive back at 1:00 AM, no problems, no questions.

23:47

It wasn't a brave thing to do.

They'd go to an event or a concert in Ramallah and then come back that that same evening.

Now in the West Bank, if you are traveling between cities, you want to be either in your final destination or you are staying overnight somewhere once it's sundown because the roads get very scary at night.

24:10

So it's effectively like a curfew, even if.

It is a it is not a curfew, but in effect it it is a curfew.

This past summer I had an incident where because of other occupation related traffic, I was very late leaving Ramallah and I couldn't leave until the last shared taxi.

24:27

That was about 7:50 PM, so it was late.

My colleague and I were a bit like, we were debating whether to stay in Ramallah and leave the next day or leave.

But we had some stuff early and we were like, OK, we just have to go back to Nablus.

It was sundown and it got dark and it ended up taking about 3 1/2 hours to get back to Nablus.

24:51

And part of why it took so long was because one of the main highways, which is a shared highway between Palestinians and settlers, had been kind of shut down by settlers.

We drove past a crowd of 250 settlers who were throwing quite large rocks onto the roadway.

25:14

And there were about 10 army vehicles that were essentially escorting these settlers and then stopping every Palestinian car and shared taxi and talking to us with guns pointed into the van.

25:30

And that's a bad drive back, but not the worst case scenario, right?

No one, no one was hurt.

No one was killed.

We did get back to Nablus because there was a question of are we going to have to turn around and go back to Ramallah?

Because that's the other thing that can happen when you're traveling is they can just say this road is closed, you have to go back.

25:48

And so you either have to go through the villages and it is very windy and adds a lot of time.

And also you're in more rural areas, which can be a little frightening sometimes at the dark.

And so, yeah, it's become essentially a curve for you.

And what I think like in the US we kind of refer to as like sun downtown that's.

26:05

What I was thinking of as you were describing it, the other thing too is again as you're describing it is but if you have a medical emergency and you need to get to a hospital in another city that you don't live in, and maybe you'll get there and maybe you won't.

And this is a big issue in the villages actually, because particularly women giving birth, the hospital or birthing center won't be in their village.

26:28

You'll have to go to Tubas or Janine or Nablus.

And you know, if the gates closed, the gates closed, or if there's settlers on the road or there have been many deaths from traffic, traffic in general, from checkpoints, But then also just the Israelis not letting people pass through.

26:48

It's someone giving birth, someone having a heart attack.

These are not resistance or anything related injuries.

These are just you.

You know, you have people, you have old people, you have young people, someone falls on a skateboard and breaks their arm.

These are just what you have in a, in a society.

I think something that we should also think about generally is we have the death toll of the occupation.

27:08

But like everyone who dies of a heart attack because they couldn't get to the hospital because of a checkpoint, that's a death from the occupation.

The murder woman who dies giving birth.

Right.

That that is a death from the occupation.

And of course, in the situation of Gaza, that is tenfold because there are people with diabetes, there are people with kidney issues who are dying every day.

27:27

And so I think when we talk about death tolls, we do need to add in quite a few from these daily medical things that are just not able to be taken care of in a timely manner on purpose by the occupation because the goal is extermination.

27:42

I want to talk a little bit about the settlers because you mentioned having this confrontation with them and the increasing settlement growth and settler violence, these fascistic settlers.

And I think that's not an overstatement at all.

There's more than 750,000, right?

28:00

Is that an accurate number?

In both the West Bank and E Jerusalem, they're continuing to expand and they're backed by the Israeli military.

And these are extreme religious nationalists settling the West Bank.

They call it Judea and Samaria.

28:16

And they find that it's they they say that it's their religious duty and necessity to drive out the Palestinians.

And in the history here, we've seen that Israeli governments since the beginning have supported and funded these settlements through infrastructure and subsidies and military protection.

28:34

So I just want to talk a little bit about this.

I've just watched a recent BBC documentary by Louis Theroux called The Settlers and there's a lot of documentaries out there about the West Bank and seeing some of this visually that you talked about Simone, not just no other land that obviously a lot of people are talking about that, but these documentaries that show like the complete terror and the lack of rights and apartheid conditions.

29:00

In the Louis Ro BBC documentary The Settlers, it showed Daniella Weiss, who's considered the godmother of the settlement.

She's this raving lunatic sociopath.

And in the documentary she goes on these numerous ethno nationalist rants about the plan to make this a Jewish only state with more Israeli outpost.

29:19

The thing that was really notable is that you also saw them really wanting to settle Gaza.

And in one scene she goes with these rabbis to the border of Gaza and there's smoke billowing from the extermination and the bombing, and they're doing this prayer and they talk about cleansing the land of camel riders.

29:39

So really gives you a real sense.

There's another part of the documentary where there's a continually armed man from Texas who says, I don't know what you're talking about.

Palestinians, they don't exist.

There's no such thing as Palestinians.

29:56

So yeah, tell me a little bit about what kind of changes you've seen.

Settlers have been around since the beginning, since 6768.

What have you seen in terms of their proliferation and the role they're playing?

Really what we're seeing is just increased settlements generally and more settlers on the roads, the settlers also becoming more violent, especially with Ben Gavir and his kind of encouragement, both in terms of giving weapons to settlers, but also in terms of his rhetoric and how he's been elevated in the government.

30:36

And so I think particularly we've seen the very extreme and alarming examples in Khalil, also known as Hebron or Hebron.

And we saw the mosque.

It's both a Jewish and a Muslim site.

30:51

The Cave of the Patriarchs.

Yes, The Cave of the Patriarchs are the Abraham Mosque.

And so this is a historic Palestinian city.

The majority of the residents that are there are Palestinian.

Recently, the Israeli government decided that the mosque is no longer under the mosque control and leadership and they have completely decided to take over the site, which is a huge provocation.

31:18

And Salil is somewhere where you see settlers rushing into a home and taking it over.

This is a city where you see theft is done not in the kind of usual legalistic area, ABC kind of colonial law way.

31:37

It's done in just the most kind of extrajudicial.

You get 20 guys who just literally run into your house and stay and force you out with guns.

And so I think Khalil or Hebron is somewhere that you've seen the most kind of extreme examples of the urban settlement and then also obviously in East Jerusalem where you have similar types of settler actions for land theft.

32:04

Just in terms of a background, correct me if I get the numbers wrong, but I believe Khalil Hebron is about 280,000 or 250,000 Palestinians and about 1000 settlers.

And for those 1000 settlers, they control about half the city and basically the whole of the center of the city has been decimated of all the old businesses and just become a ghost town.

32:31

It's also very naked there that there are roads that are only to be allowed by Jews and roads that the Palestinians can travel on.

It's sort of Zionism taken to its rawest form before you get to the genocide part.

There's another documentary about that called H2, the Occupation Lab, where it's specifically about the history of Hebron and how it's kind of the symbol of what is to come in the West Bank.

32:55

It's kind of a testing ground.

What they do in Hebron, they try to execute and carry out in the rest of the West Bank.

The earliest settlers came in in 68, and the mosque that you're referring to is where they had the massacre. 94 Baruch Goldstein, an American settler, I believe it was 29 Palestinians, massacred, dozens and dozens wounded as he walked into the mosque during prayer and opened fire with his semi automatic gun, after which he was killed by the surviving parishioners and is now a lionized hero of the settler movement.

33:32

Yeah, and the the effect of that massacre afterwards was a massive crackdown on the Palestinian residents of that town, not on the settlement movement.

Yeah, as you mentioned he was an American settler who lived and worked in a settlement nearby Folio where he was a physician, where he was famous for refusing to do any medical work or help any non Jews.

34:00

As a physician.

His extremism was in all aspects of his life as well.

And I think there are many Baruch Goldsteins in the West Bank and in Israel, frankly, probably more because there's more people in Israel.

So.

They're running the government.

Yeah, so Bruce Budstein and the Kahanas in general have become mainstream.

34:21

Something that has become very common to see on roads in the West Bank are flags that portray the Third Temple.

And I think a couple days ago, settlers also added some fake Rd. signs underneath the signs that pointed to Jerusalem that said essentially the Hebrew term for the Third Temple and had the little symbol.

34:45

Can you describe what the third temple is?

So the Third Temple is what most of these religious Zionist supporters and settlers, and I think also evangelical Christians.

Yes, absolutely.

I'm less of an expert on the evangelicals, but what they dream of creating on top of what is now the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where the Dome of the Rock is and where the AL Aqsa Mosque is as well.

35:14

And so they want to rebuild from the ruins of what they claim, which is a disputed archaeological fact, the ruins of the quote Second Temple, which is what they say Alexa and the Dome of the Rock are built on top of.

35:30

So that is a very extreme provocation in terms of the symbolism of those flags.

And I will say personally, it was extremely distressing to see them on the roads.

It seems like part of the increasing amount of settlements is also that the Zionist regime has a green light to basically take over.

35:54

And that's what they've been aiming for from the beginning, is to create the quote UN quote facts on the ground.

And part of their goal of taking over the West Bank, which was a Zionist aim even before 48 and part of the project.

What do you think about the possibility of these settlements going into Gaza and the likelihood that's going to take place?

36:18

I mean, unfortunately, I think it's fairly likely whether in a official way or in an unofficial capacity, because you have these quote extremist illegal settlers who even a lot of Zionist but more mainstream Israelis will say, well, they're the problem.

36:39

They're the problem because they are going into areas that are technically not allowed, but they still are not removed by the Israeli government.

They are implicitly allowed.

So unfortunately, I think that there will be some settlement whether officially sanctioned or not, but implicitly sanctioned and that this is the spoken and defined goals of the state.

37:02

Yeah, they've said they want to do it.

Whether they can or not, it's a different question.

And the American government has said they want them to do it.

I mean, the American government wants to turn it into Riviera, as they say.

Right.

I would maybe.

I think the environmental and health situation of making settlements in the north of Gaza right now would be definitely a big concern.

37:22

But these settlers don't have a lot of concern for their personal.

But yeah, there's.

Sacrifices to be made to seize the.

Land, Exactly.

Yeah, There are groups of settlers right now who have set up in the in the north, I believe near what is now the Israeli city of Ashkelon.

37:40

You know, they are ready with supplies to literally flood into northern Gaza and set up camps, which is what they do in the West Bank.

They show up with trailers.

They show up with, I mean, some of the conditions, frankly, that some of these settlers are living in the West Bank are, are really the contrast between like how some of the settlers are living and then the village and the cities around them.

38:02

If they're living in like trailers with no indoor plumbing and then around like very normal towns, the contrast is always a bit odd when you see the settlements.

But they are living a frontier fantasy.

They are living in their mind in these Wilds where for Palestinians novelist is one of the oldest cities in the world.

38:22

You know, Jericho, which is on by the Dead Sea is home to the longest inhabited location in the world.

So, you know, it's also just completely a historical, the way that these settlers view the land in and of itself, in terms of even how it has been lived on.

38:40

They also view it as they're willing to make, quote, UN quote, these self-imposed sacrifices so they can seize the land.

And if they grow any bigger than they'll get more tax breaks and more everything from the Israeli government.

Eventually then you get the big settlements that suck up all the water and where you have basically homes that are like villas.

38:57

Oh yeah, some of the settlements, the big ones, I mean, they're like small cities.

I've never been in any of them, but I see them and I mean, it's incredible the luxury some of these people are living in, in these settlements.

A kind of interesting contrast of the settlement, though, is that one of these very big settlements that you pass by on the way to Ramallah, it's a big established one, but they pump their sewage directly into the stream that's below the settlement by the road.

39:26

I think this is to make that area completely inhospitable, generally to Palestinians.

But it's also just they have no care for the land.

It also smells terrible.

So you're driving by and you're like, oh God, it's this olfactory landmark where you can smell the shit in the stream that is just being piped down by the settlement.

39:48

It's so illustrative of how they have no respect or relation to the land.

It is purely for exploitation.

I agree.

I also think they will never miss an opportunity to make the life of the Palestinians as miserable as possible in the hopes that the Palestinians will just go away.

40:09

Even if it affects them because they drive on these roads too.

This is a shared road and it's like you want to drive by the shit stream.

I don't I, I don't it's.

For the greater good to them, it's for the greater good.

Right.

Some of these settlers have Instagram accounts and you'll see them complaining about checkpoint traffic because they want to go have a date night in Jerusalem.

40:27

And it's like, this is all you.

This checkpoint is for you.

You know, it's all part of this slow suffocation and just making it so untenable to to live that people leave.

When you say make it the slow suffocation to make people want to leave, are they, are you seeing that in terms of the people that you've worked with and interacted with and where are they going?

40:54

A lot of people are leaving.

Even I think something like this past summer, people who I never thought would want to leave.

We're talking to me about, oh, I'm trying to find an internship, I'm trying to find a job that maybe I can go to Europe or something like that.

Another thing that I heard a couple times from people was that the violence, they're used to the violence.

41:15

That's not why they want to leave.

They want to leave because they can't have a dignified life economically and they can't provide for their family, and that's not tenable.

So people are wanting to leave.

A lot of young men are leaving particularly.

And you know, you have people going to Jordan, to the United States, to Europe, to the Gulf.

41:36

Are they able to come to the United States or isn't there a ban on Palestinian visas?

Yeah.

So there was that policy change.

I don't know exactly how that policy change has affected people, frankly, because I don't know anyone who's traveled since then.

But the the reality is there are a lot of Palestinians in the United States.

41:52

So a lot of people have extended family in the United States.

It also plays out differently if you can get a Jordanian passport.

Right.

So that's, that's the other thing is a lot of Palestinians do have either a Jordanian passport or a rate to a Jordanian passport, especially Jerusalem Palestinians, because Jerusalem was under Jordanian control for many years.

42:12

There are a lot of different people are in a lot of different documentation situations in Palestine.

Some people have Israeli citizenship and other people are Palestinian Authority ID holders.

It's another way in which Israel slices and divides the Palestinian people through different ID citizenships, different rights, different economic opportunities, different travel opportunities.

42:35

It's a way for them to systematically divide and create tensions between people.

I'm glad you mentioned that because this was one of the things I wanted to ask you about.

I'm going to preface this by referring to a book that came out in 1988 that I read in 2005.

42:51

It's called My Enemy Myself.

I don't know if you've ever heard of it.

It's by an Israeli author who was inspired by the book Black Like Me, where a white journalist dressed as though he were a black man to see the experience of being a black man in the United States in the 1950s.

So this was a an Israeli journalist of Moroccan background, spoke perfect Palestinian Arabic and wanted to see for himself experience the racism and discrimination and oppression that Palestinians faced.

43:20

When I read it in 2005, this came out in 88, came out right as the first intifada was breaking up.

He's laying out the horrors that Palestinians face.

That's the point of his book.

I'm reading in 2005 and I'm thinking, Oh my God, things have gotten so much worse than they were in 88.

43:37

The level of freedom of movement that he had.

So he was pretending to be from Janine and every day he would cross from Janine into Israel where he would do a day labor job and he would go visit people in Gaza and he would cross back into Israel and he would cross back into Jedin and into E Jerusalem and he was basically moving around.

43:59

This is an 87.

When he was doing this before this massive amount of checkpoints went up.

One thing you had to do was be outside of Israel by the end of the night.

And often times he didn't obey that rule.

He made a rule for himself that if he were asked for his ID by border police or something like that, he would show the policeman his Israeli ID.

44:21

He would not pretend to the Israeli official that he was a Palestinian.

And the whole year where he did this experiment, he was asked for an ID twice.

Only twice.

Which is crazy now.

What you're describing is literally impossible now.

44:37

And it was impossible in 2005 when I read the book.

Yeah.

So the reason I'm mentioning all this is one of the things that I think Israel has succeeded in doing, especially in the wake of the Oslo Accords, but it began before that, is dividing up the national body politic of the Palestinian people.

44:57

You have the people in Gaza.

You have the people within Israel itself, you have the people in East Jerusalem who have certain privileges but not others.

You have the people in the West Bank areas, AB and C of the West Bank.

And you yourself mentioned if you are in Nablus for the last nine months, you don't even travel outside of Nablus because can you even get to your destination?

45:20

So you have the West Bank itself chopped up into little bits and pieces.

You have Palestinians all over the Middle East, with the partial exception of Jordan, still not integrated into the various countries that they're in, like Lebanon and Syria.

You have a Palestinian diaspora in the West, in Europe, the United States, and Latin America.

45:38

Let's not forget the massive Palestinian diaspora and Chile and other countries.

This is a nation that's been divvied up.

And each of those groups of people have, in many ways, very little interaction with one another.

They have some.

I'm not saying none, but it's limited and it's kind of at the privilege or mercy of the Israelis or the Americans call out who's in charge here and enjoy different levels of life, different levels of privileges, like the ones in Israel have certain privileges of the ones in the West Bank I don't have.

46:10

And then obviously there's the ones in Gaza who have been living in a concentration camp for decades.

And I'm just wondering if you saw some sense of the effect of that dismemberment of the Palestinians.

And I think just before you answered, I just want to say I think it is credit to the national aspirations of the Palestinians that despite these things, that sense of national identity is still very powerful and strong.

46:34

But I can't believe it's had no impact.

It must have impact on that society.

Yeah.

I mean, to your last point, there is still an understanding of a Palestinian as a Palestinian, no matter whether they're Israeli citizenship Holder, Jerusalem ID Holder or a West Bank Palestinian Authority ID holder.

46:54

I think I'm not the best person to ask about this because I frankly have mainly have interacted and spent time in East Jerusalem and then in the West Bank.

So in terms of Israeli citizen Palestinians, I don't have too much experience in that way, but there is a, they have the freedom of movement to come in and out of the West Bank.

47:18

And there are many Israeli citizenship holding Palestinians who come to, for instance, Annabolis all the time.

They come to restaurants, they come out to eat.

Sometimes they come and get medical care because you can imagine the medical racism that many Palestinians experience in Israel, particularly around fertility.

47:39

And so you do have a lot more back and forth.

And I think a lot of people would think, but there is definitely people go, oh, they're from 48.

Oh, those people over there, they're from 48.

They have they're, you know, seem to have more money and a bit more privilege.

47:57

But you'll be in a restaurant, Annabolis, and they'll be someone leaving a Hebrew WhatsApp voice note.

And everyone's kind of like a little around the little.

There are looks, There are looks that kind of go around.

48:13

And everyone's like, OK, interesting.

But at the end of the day, they're they're still Palestinian.

And, and everyone kind of understands that this is no one's choice, you know?

But they're definitely dynamic in in between those.

Yeah.

The reason I mentioned that book is because the travel between the West Bank and Gaza that the guy was doing as a Palestinian, whereas if you can imagine someone, let's say, born in 2000 in Tokaram, would have probably never set eyes on somebody born in 2000 in Gaza.

48:44

Well, unless they were coming for medical treatment on a permit.

Yeah, but as a norm, as a norm.

Yes, in the street as a oh, I'm coming to see my cousin.

No.

And you have whole families that have been divided up like this for decades.

Yes.

And it's it's devastating because when you think about this is a single nation that's just been carved up like that.

49:03

I mean, Nablus, if you're up on the mountains.

Nablus is between two mountains.

It's famous for its two mountains.

If you're up on one of those mountains, you can you can see the sea.

But never go there.

If you're under a certain age, it's even been a possibility to go to the sea.

49:22

But if you talk to older people, they'll say, when I was a boy, my buddies and I, we'd drive at night to the to the ocean, have a swim and come back to Nablus.

So I think it's also important to remember that the current situation is very recent and that it is much more unnatural than it is made to seem in a lot of media and a lot of the way in which people talk about it.

49:47

Oh, it's incredibly unnatural.

I think it really started with Oslo.

Oslo was that utter disaster and which is why I will never forgive the Palestinian Authority and the PLO for what they did.

That's why to me, they are the capos, or as you put at the Vichy regime, they handed the Palestinians over to Israel so that they can get to wave a flag and control them on behalf of Israel in the US.

50:08

It's incredibly unnatural, but it's frightening in its impact.

To your point about also I think we talked about the kind of ABC area distinction, right?

This is a product of Oslo and its purpose was to quote ease the PA into full governance.

50:29

This has not obviously functioned this way.

They have become essentially official colonial distinctions that the Israelis use to further their annexation and is a permanent state of law now that is used to justify illegal settlement.

50:50

And that's why also I think when we talk about Area ABC, we do need to be a bit critical of it generally because it is a colonial framework.

This is all Palestinian, and these areas have no effect on how Israelis operate within these areas.

And also in area A, even though it's 100% of Palestinian control, there are settlers, there are army incursions all the time.

51:12

Palestinians are just as much danger in those areas as they are in the other ones, and vice versa for the Israelis.

They operate the same way whether they're in area ABC, right?

Maybe they file different paperwork.

I'm not exactly sure how it works on their end, but I think sometimes when I talk with people in the US about the West Bank, sometimes they get very caught up on which area is that.

51:37

And I always find it interesting because it's really giving a lot of credence to this completely colonial framework that I think we need to be very much more of a rejection of because in the reality of it, it has no impact on how the Israelis operate.

51:54

If I can, just for listeners, the dividing up of the areas AB and C Area A, which is like what is a 20% of the West Bank thereabouts, but where most Palestinians live, is supposedly under full PA or Palestinian Authority governance.

But as Simone pointed out, the Israelis can go in there whenever they want.

52:13

Area B is supposedly shared governance between the PA and Israel, which really means Israel runs it.

Area C is officially Israel runs it however they want to.

It is 62% of the West Bank.

So it's the biggest land.

It has the fewest number of Palestinians.

And if you want to talk about expulsions, since Oslo there has been a substantial number of expulsions of Palestinians out of Area C And this is the only thing that's important about this stuff, to be perfectly honest, Israel has use this division to expel Palestinians out of Area C into mainly Area A, so they can basically get the 62% of the land without the people.

52:50

And one last thing, this whole thing that this was supposed to ease the Palestinian Authority into governance, just the very racist and colonial framework of that.

Like, these are the savages who don't know how to rule, and we're going to teach them how to rule.

53:06

At the time, people like Edward Saeed rightly understood this as a betrayal.

And if anything, he understated how much of A betrayal it was.

So we've been talking about Oslo, and I wanted to use that to talk about the two state solution, which is long been dead in practice and I think completely exposed as a farce.

53:27

Last night I was reading Ilan Papaya, Israeli historian, and he has this line about the two state solution being like a corpse taken out of the morgue every now and then, dressed up nicely and presented as a living thing.

This is always been an Israeli invention, a kind of a charade, and there was never any chance that it would be more than a ban to stand.

53:48

But it's also impossible, for so many reasons, that there would ever be a Palestinian state under the current situation.

First of all, Israel's laws define the country As for Jews only.

It would not be contiguous even if it were conditionally autonomous.

It would be 20% of the historic Palestinian homeland.

54:07

So very far from the idea of National Liberation.

You also have, of course, the settler question.

That's the facts on the ground.

So the Israeli settlers are never going to live under Palestinian rule, and Israel will not expel them.

So you're talking about the kind of Swiss cheese scenario that looks like the West Bank right now.

54:26

There's also the right of return, which is a key component of National Liberation for the Palestinians.

There are millions of Palestinian refugees.

This would give up their opportunity to even come back under this supposed 2 state solution.

There would be no proper sovereignty, no means of Palestine protecting itself or sustaining itself independently of Israel.

54:45

Those are just some of the components if you were to take it at face value.

But I think it has been so fully exposed.

So I'm curious, Simone, if this is seen as a farce or anything more than that, what does it look like on the ground?

Yeah, I don't think I've ever actually talked to anyone who's a Pro 2 state solution.

55:04

I'm trying to think.

I don't think I have honestly.

Because what I hear the most is a full Palestine from top to bottom, river to the sea and with right of return.

And frankly, the vast majority of people that I've talked to, they say, and the Jews are welcome to stay.

55:24

They just have to put down their weapons, put down their borders, get rid of the checkpoints and let people return.

And if they're willing to live as Palestinians in a Palestinian society.

And, and that's really like, it sounds kind of simple.

55:41

I've heard this from people who I've been surprised based on their life experience, in terms of the really severe abuse they've had by the hands of the Israelis.

And would it learn more towards than one state with equal rights kind of scenario?

55:58

Honestly, the situation right now and the last two years has been so bad that we haven't.

We don't get that far in the conversation.

It's just like, what?

What?

How do we get to tomorrow?

Yeah.

We're not talking about it.

And also, frankly, political discussion right now.

It happens in people's homes if they really trust you because the level of repression is so high that people will post something that's slightly critical of the PA on Facebook and they'll get a knock on their door.

56:24

Yeah.

I think sometimes people on the left may be surprised that everyone in Palestine isn't having deep political discussions all the time.

People talk about the situation, but in a very like day-to-day way.

But in terms of having conversations about like, would we have equal rights?

What would it look like?

What about Haifa?

56:40

These are not is is not something that I think is.

Yeah, I don't know.

That feels like it speaks a lot to some of the points we were talking about before the suffocation and the dismemberment too, because the idea that there would be any sort of future.

56:55

How do you discuss the future?

There were these discussions in the past and there were resistance movements, and I think if you were doing this trip in 2000, there would still be these kinds of discussions.

I'm sure, yeah.

And that's 100% true.

And I think my point, yeah, is the Israeli oppression is so intense that it is hard for people, especially working class people and who've been displaced from refugee camps, to have these kinds of political discussions.

57:21

That's the same for working class people in this country where people don't have a lot of time to think about politics and what a deal political system they would want either.

And that's part of why the system wants to keep people economically really disadvantaged.

57:38

It it takes up a lot of time to make sure you have food on the table and that becomes your main priority.

One of the things you said that I found interesting about those discussions is this point about in this ideal or idealize one state, Israeli Jews are welcome to stay provided they're willing to live as equals as opposed to it as a privileged population.

58:00

And one of the things that's interesting about that is you look at a lot of pseudo leftist in the West and they'll talk about Israeli Jews as a foreign implant and it can just go back to Europe or wherever it came from.

And I understand it is a settler colonial society, but much like the US, within a generation or two, you've settled and there's a certain recognition what you're describing from what the Palestinians are saying of we're kind of stuck with these people.

58:29

Also, mass displacement.

No one wants to do mass displacement to anyone.

And that's what that would mean, you know what I mean?

And so that's the other thing.

I imagine if something like this were to happen, which it's hard to imagine at the moment, I imagine there will be a certain layer of Israeli Jews that will just leave a. 100% it'll be like Algeria.

58:48

But in the case of Algeria, they all left.

But they were welcome to stay if they wanted to.

If they wanted to be part of the Algerian national project, they could have stayed.

They did not want to.

But I also think in the case of Algeria, they saw themselves as French.

They had a mother country to go to.

I think for a lot of the Israeli Jewish population, except for the more recent people who moved there from Brooklyn or Europe, this is where they're going to be.

59:13

You're kind of stuck with them, for better or worse.

And I think there is a certain recognition of that among the Palestinians, not as something good or bad.

It's just is, it's a reality.

And there's an element here.

You're right.

On the one hand, no one wants to drive out several million people.

59:30

On the other hand, you also can't.

Right, exactly.

I think one of the things that I've noticed in the US is that and ideological sense Israel has has one in terms of depicting any form of Palestinian resistance as motivated by hate for Jews and not as opposition to the colonization of their homeland.

59:51

And that's where you get the accusation of anti-Semitism as a weapon against anyone who sides with the Palestinian people.

I do think that's shifting a little bit.

I'm cautious to say that because obviously it's not nearly enough.

So I don't want that to be portrayed as me saying like that's not the primary narrative.

1:00:12

But I do find that in the US, I'm surprised more and more.

With the conversations I have with people, they, they're just in shock about what's happening.

And they say, you know, I would never, I could never let that happen to my family.

I mean, in the US, we have the right to bear arms.

1:00:30

We have the right to defend ourselves.

We have stand Your Ground states.

But I'm talking about Israel winning in terms of the ruling class, in terms of what it's able to carry out and the dominant narrative.

I do know that there's been a growing number of people who are actually looking at the origins of Israel and the Palestinian question and seeing what it really is and not taking as good coin this idea that Israel's only democracy or whatever, all the shit that they push.

1:01:00

Yeah, it's true on an institutional level.

I mean, disappointment of the decade.

Bernie Sanders, he, you know in his most recent statement that he put out saying it is a genocide, but the first third of it was saying how Hamas is a horrible terrorist organization and started it all.

1:01:19

Yeah, exactly that it it all started on October 7th, Yeah.

And reiterated that Israel has the right to defend itself.

I would put it a little differently though.

I wouldn't put it that Israel is 1 in terms of the establishment.

I thought that the US has one because yes, Israel is one in the sense that that's what Israel wants.

1:01:36

But I think this is what the US wants.

Every time I see American politicians genuflecting before Israel, a lot of people presented as Israel is controlling American politics.

Bunch of bullshit.

No, they're not.

America controls its own politics.

1:01:52

Israel is important to America, and the US is making clear to its population and to the world that it will defend its aircraft carrier in the Middle East.

I heard I heard about this in a podcast.

I think it was our episode 1.

And that is a hill I will die on, that this genocide is America's genocide.

1:02:10

That occupation is America's occupation as much as Israel's, if not more.

And this whole sham of the two state solution, actually, you want to know something?

Israelis haven't been pushing it.

The only people have been talking about it is that Americans.

U.S. politicians, yeah.

The Israelis, Israeli politicians have made it clear they don't want to see a Palestinian state.

1:02:30

There's going to be no Palestinian state of any kind on any piece of.

Land.

Yeah, they haven't.

Yeah, they haven't even like dangled it as a carrier.

The only people who talk about it are American politicians.

And it's a lie.

And you know what?

I'm going to say one other thing, One other thing.

I'm sorry.

The other people who despise the Palestinians almost as much as the Americans and the Israelis are the Arab rulers.

1:02:51

And what a Palestinian state would represent to the Arab rulers is a dumping ground where they can dump all the Palestinian refugees in their lands.

That would be their version of the right of return.

Right.

I think also Biden said it very clearly.

1:03:07

If Israel didn't exist, we would have to create it.

That was a concerning statement on many levels.

But I think it gets to your point about, I mean, he just, he says it right out.

It is a useful tool, a necessary destabilizing force for American imperialist interests in the Middle East, but also just around the.

1:03:28

World They've managed to bring every Middle Eastern country to heel with the exception of Iran, and they're working on that.

Yes.

The Houthis and and the Houthis.

Yeah.

Well, but Yemen, they've yeah, great cost in Yemen.

Yemen has been paying for it since 2015.

1:03:44

Exactly, exactly.

And of course, the United States is very pro to state because we have many two state solutions in the United States with our own indigenous nations.

Reservations.

And we have refugee camps in the United States as well that are not dissimilar from in many ways from the Palestinian refugee camps that exist in Lebanon and in the West Bank and all over many parts of the Levant.

1:04:10

I think I've been doing some thought experiments about to your point, Ezra, about that This is an extension of the United States.

Colonialism is an expansionist ideology.

It needs to expand.

Whether it's Palestinians, Philippines, it doesn't matter.

1:04:26

This is the newest frontier of American colonialism, and we are recreating the same systems that were unfortunately very successful here in North America when it comes to colonialism and domination of indigenous peoples for exploitation and for resource extraction.

1:04:45

It's interesting that you mentioned that because Ezra and I were talking about how this happens where they stand up and they say we are on stolen land.

Does this kind of recognition we are on stolen land.

It's a way for liberals to feel really good about themselves, but they can also do that because it has no political impact or implications whatsoever.

1:05:04

Whereas if an Israeli were to say that we are on stolen land it would be like OK well then get the fuck.

Out, you know or share?

It yeah, we're still here, you know.

Right.

But I would say you could say the same thing though about most of the United States.

Except the difference is, in the US, no one thinks of the Native Americans as a threat anymore.

1:05:23

They have been decimated.

Right, 100%.

But I think whether they're a threat or not, it remains the same.

I think in the United States we are taught that it is such a kind of a impossibility to imagine a shared, even at a very low level, maybe not full sovereignty of California to a variety of indigenous nations, but a more shared society.

1:05:48

I think we're taught as such an impossibility.

But I, I don't know, I think that we should challenge ourselves.

I think all of us on the American left are very quick to criticize the Israeli left, which again, I'm not against by any means.

But I think we in many ways always need to put a lot of those judgments back on ourselves as also people who benefit from and live within a settler colony here.

1:06:15

The thing is that the US ruling class is never going to share the land or anything like that with the survivors of the Native American genocide.

And I think the difference between the US and Israel is the genocide has been so successful here that they feel no threat from and they see no threat from the native population.

1:06:35

So they can get up and wax eloquent about how I stand on land that used to belong to this or that tribe.

And it means absolutely nothing other than to make themselves feel better about themselves.

Whereas if you are in Israel, they do feel a threat.

The very existence of Palestinians are a threat.

1:06:51

If you do get up in Israel and say this, well, the Palestinian can say I'm still right here, bud, you can share the land.

Well, I would say I think in Hawaii there's definitely still, that's why I'm saying I think also we think of this issue in the United States as a monolith, but the relationship, the diplomatic and political relationship between the Mohawk nation and the United States and the Hawaiian monarchy in the United States is very different.

1:07:14

That's my point on this.

It is a more complicated situation even here on this matter because Hawaii wasn't a quote state until 1950.

There are lots of sovereignty issues and land battles that happen every day in Hawaii.

And I reference why because I think it's the most recent but also the clearest analogous example in this situation.

1:07:34

This is something that I'm kind of been thinking very recently about.

I think this is a really central kind of contradiction and issue of the kind of American anti imperialist left.

Like, we do have to deal with this fact of our own existence here regardless of our politics, right?

1:07:53

Like whether we think the good politics or the bad politics, the facts remain about our positionality or how this country exists here.

You know, we're not exempt because we're the good thinkers.

So I wanted to talk a little bit about some on your experience in the West Bank.

1:08:09

And one of the things that I know is really impactful and that you see visually is that any soldier in the IDF can just completely ruin your life with full impunity if you're a Palestinian.

And the fact that we see of this is in the prison situation.

1:08:28

So there was a lot of talk about the Israeli hostages in Gaza.

And meanwhile, you have 10,000 Palestinians that we know of at least or being held hostage by Israel in the Zionist prisons.

And nearly half of them have never been charged with a crime.

1:08:43

There's been a massive uptick in the prison population since October 7th.

And then you have a tremendous amount of evidence about torture.

And this is not something that you have to dig for.

You see evidence of torture, punching and kicking and sticks and batons and explicit forced nudity.

1:09:05

And this has been accounted for by prominent doctors who have been imprisoned as well.

So could you talk a little bit about the prison situation from your observation or how it's affecting some of the families that you work with?

I tell you, the prison situation in Palestine general, the situation inside the Israeli prisons is one of the most underreported crimes of this entire two years.

1:09:30

The prison conditions were always pretty harsh in Israel, in the Israeli prisons, but the last two years they have gotten to death camp levels of abuse, frankly, mainly in the way that this also both for people in prison but also the loved ones of in prison people.

1:09:49

The Israelis have cut off all visitation.

They have cut off almost all communication between prisoners and their families.

And this is particularly hard for people who had loved ones in prisons before October 7th because many families haven't heard from their loved one in almost two years.

1:10:06

Plus, the Red Cross is not able to visit the prisons.

The Red Cross does not seem to be working very hard to try and visit the prisons.

The Red Cross has also stopped communicating with Palestinian family members of prisoners.

1:10:21

And the main way people get information about their loved ones is when people are released from prison, they come out with names and numbers.

I saw your son, I saw your daughter.

This type of information.

There are also methods about getting other written information out with prisoners as well.

1:10:38

But another thing is that there are over 400 and this is the reported.

Again, all of these numbers that we're using is the reported.

And it's under.

Reported.

Yeah, and it's always under reported.

So there's also the situation of children in prison.

There are over 400 children in Israeli prisons and they have similar lack of communication with their families.

1:11:02

And many times also when prisoners are released, half the time they're released directly into hospitals because they are in such poor health.

People come out with missing limbs, people come out with severe brain damage, people come out with severe malnutrition, other signs of obvious torture.

1:11:26

Scabies is a really big problem in the prisons right now.

Skin infections in general, but particularly bugs.

Huge, huge problem in the prisons.

I mean, these are death camps.

We have reports of people coming out of prison who were just taken, disappeared from a checkpoint, who were in a cell with a dozen other guys who were given basically one piece of bread that was so hard they had to soak it in water, not just dip it, soak it in water to be able to eat.

1:12:02

And similarly, we've heard one bowl of rice for 12 guys.

These are the glimpses of what we hear from people being released.

So the prison situation in the West Bank right now is really extreme.

I've had mothers come up to me and say, can you please get me information on my son?

1:12:21

I don't know where he is.

I haven't heard from him.

You're American.

Can you go to the prison and talk to them?

And to be clear, these kids, they can be taken away on mere suspicion.

They can be taken away from having any sort of association, like a family member stepping out of bounds, quote UN quote, can mean basically anything.

1:12:41

A soldier just has to make it up.

We have one family who a family member was taken because his brother was suspected to be involved with some resistance stuff and he had given him a sandwich and they considered that material support Jesus and arrested him.

1:13:00

Another thing to note about these is the arrests are also extremely violent.

Many deaths happen much like in the US arrests can be just as dangerous as being in prison.

We've seen some really horrific situations of people being beaten, basically lifeless as they're being arrested.

1:13:18

There was one case of a young man who's this is I guess trigger warning for like extreme violence, but there was a Israeli army talk dog that bit his hand clean off in the process of arrest.

1:13:34

Also when they arrest in a home that they don't knock on the door nicely and come in and read your rights, they bust open, they'll blindfold everyone, they'll put them in a room, they'll handcuff children, they'll throw a tear ass canister in the room.

These are like some of the most violent arrests I've ever heard of.

1:13:50

So the arrests are also extremely traumatizing to family members, particularly children.

I don't even know what to say.

It does feel so much like Nazi Germany.

So far as to arrest 7 year old boys.

It's a sociopathic society.

1:14:06

One and Israel also believes and practices collective punishment, so an entire family is targeted, and that includes all the children, the grandmother, everyone and just routinely terrorized.

Yeah.

So if some young man carries out an operation against soldiers or civilians or whatever in or out of Israel, not only is he targeted, basically anyone who is a relative of his will be targeted, arrested, detained.

1:14:36

And their favorite practice is to destroy their homes.

Home demolitions.

Yeah, and the other thing is these families also become ostracized, in many cases within their own communities because people are scared.

They don't want to be affiliated.

Right.

They don't want to be targeted as well.

1:14:52

So it also causes issues within communities as well.

Yeah, and that's also a way of quelling resistance too, because it's creating so much fear.

Exactly.

It doesn't have to be an operation against anything.

It can be.

Oh yeah, no, they can just make up shit.

Yeah, I've seen interviews with soldiers who said I was bored that day.

1:15:11

Yeah, Also, it's just because you're from the camp, that's it.

You're from the camp, you're guilty because the goal is extermination.

It's also to try and destroy the identity and concept of the refugee who has the right of return.

So these camps are also targeted because they don't want there to be people to return and you know, people in the camps, these are strong identities.

1:15:36

This is also to try and force people away from their claim and right to return.

You're absolutely right.

This has been a favorite thing of Netanyahu since October 7th, with basically wanting to destroy the designation of refugees and descendants of refugees for Palestinians in both the West Bank and those still surviving Gaza.

1:15:58

Yeah, because that is the real threat to Israel in its current form, those millions of people who have the right of return, who live very close, very close to the places in which they are from.

1:16:14

And hold the keys and the deeds to the lands and homes from which they were expelled.

Exactly.

Just as an illustration for people who may not know, there is no such thing as civilian law in the West Bank.

The West Bank is governed under Israeli military law.

1:16:31

Supposing you actually reach the point where you are accused of a crime, you do not appear before a civilian judge.

You appear before a military judge.

There's no obligation on the part of the state to provide you any legal aid or anything like that.

Frankly, at this point, there's no obligation on the part of the state to feed you or anything.

1:16:49

But there's a story, and this is from 2016 that always struck me.

It's from a magazine.

It's a literary magazine.

This author was just talking about the conditions of life for Palestinians and Palestinian prisoners, and she or Rachel Kushner tells the story.

1:17:06

A child lucky enough to get a lawyer from an NGO Israel provides no legal aid to.

West Bank residents will be mightily pressured to plead guilty.

There is no point in declaring innocence since 99.47% of trials result in a guilty conviction.

1:17:24

An anecdote was supplied to us about a rare scene in which a lawyer actually got an acquittal.

The translator stopped proceedings because he did not know the Arabic word for acquitted.

What?

Non guilty?

1:17:39

I don't know how to say that.

Wow.

Yeah.

I'm glad you brought that up, because I was going to say that the other thing about these military courts is that it's a 99% conviction rate.

I imagine they've rounded up since then, yeah?

Yeah, it's exactly.

It's 100.

It's 100% and also 50% of that 10,000 number are held on what's called administrative detention, which is the essentially pretrial holding of someone in prison.

1:18:08

I would argue now because since COVID, Israel hasn't been reporting the temporary arrests, probably more than half now.

They aren't even going through the motions of these fake trials.

They're just holding people on administrative detention for years and years and years.

And there's also the suspicion that half of these prison releases is just because they run out of room.

1:18:30

Yeah.

And then aren't they released?

And then there's detained again like?

Yeah, the vast majority of people who are released in these prisoner exchange are re arrested within a couple months because the Israelis know that they're just releasing them into a larger prison.

And This is why the Israelis are so actually against doing those kind of like negotiated deportations of prisoners, because if they deport them to Lebanon, if they deport them to Egypt, if they deport them to, I know if someone who is deported to Venezuela because they were half Venezuelan, it is door difficult to rearrest them.

1:19:02

But if they released them back to the West Bank, they could get them tomorrow and no one would care.

I think this is also a really important thing about a lot of those prisoner exchanges as those people, they either rearrest them or they kill them or they just kill them once they're out.

The prison situation and the use of prisons.

1:19:17

Yes, many women are arrested as well, but particularly for men.

This is a this is a real crisis.

And the level of abuse of these prisoners is incredible.

The known number killed since October 7th, 23 is 75 or more who died in prison.

1:19:37

It's probably higher.

I'm sure it's higher, but that's what's known.

There's literally a video of prison guards raping a Palestinian prisoner, followed by videos upon videos of Israelis protesting to defend the rapist.

1:19:53

And in April 2024, a prominent surgeon from Gaza at Nana Borscht, who had been arrested in December, died from wounds sustained in a gang rape.

This is the the, this is what they run as prison.

1:20:09

They're torture chambers and death camps.

As you, just as you.

I think the image of that mob that stormed the prison defending the rape of a Palestinian prisoner and defending the rapist, I think that was a real, I don't know if it was a turning point, but I know that for a while Ezra and I have spent time trying to look for fissures in Israeli society.

1:20:33

Since October 7th, whenever I hear about a protest in Tel Aviv, I kind of look and see what are the main slogans.

And the slogans are almost always centered around bring our boys home.

Not that Palestinians are humans.

The main concern is over anyone who's being held hostage right now in Gaza.

1:20:53

Poll after poll shows upwards of 80% in Israel.

It's probably more than that.

Support the genocide right now.

What is your measure of Israeli society and how it's changed over the last two years, 10 years, 15 years?

It's gotten just more extreme.

1:21:09

It's gotten more extreme, but also the pressure to prove the worth of the project has become much more extreme as well.

What do you mean by that?

To prove that the cost of maintaining Israel is worth it and is necessary has become more difficult to justify.

1:21:30

When that happens, you can realize it's not worth it and you can fight to dismantle it.

Or you can become more extreme and they have chosen to become much more extreme and you have seen record people leaving Israel.

The economy is not doing well at all.

1:21:48

The major port of a lot in the South is essentially non functional anymore because no one's shipping to it.

The port in Haifa in the north had to be shut down for a period of time because Iran strikes were very effective in destroying the major infrastructure.

1:22:07

Economically.

Many people are leaving Israel as well because it is not doing particularly well if we just look at the numbers.

So that is a positive sign.

Again, this is all coming at much too high a cost, but I do think it is still important to note where there are these places that have had impact on the longevity of the colonial project.

1:22:33

In Hebrew, they've had their mask off forever, but in English in the last two years, they've been fully translating themselves into English in the last two years.

It's a really sick, depraved society.

I don't know what you do with that.

I also have very little interaction with Israelis myself actually, so.

1:22:52

Is that because you're a self hating Jew?

Yeah, yeah.

It's also because other than going to East Jerusalem for very short periods of time, I do not spend any time in 48 Palestine and I also do not use the airport.

1:23:08

We only enter Palestine through the only border that Palestinians can enter through, which is the Alan B King Hussein Bridge from Jordan to the Jericho area.

So our interactions with Israelis are essentially soldiers at checkpoints and then settlers that we share the roads with.

1:23:26

Cream of the crop.

Yeah.

Which are often one and the same people, the soldiers and the settlers.

This is a really good point.

The vast majority of soldiers who serve in the West Bank are from the settlements and are usually actually reservists who volunteer to kind of do this as a side hustle, you know, civil service.

1:23:48

Yes.

So most of the sellers that you interact with in the West Bank are from these insane settler communities, which is partially why they are just so dangerous.

One of the reasons I want to raise this question is I think what we're seeing playing out is the logic of Zionism.

1:24:04

If you go back, this sort of thing has always been there.

It's been masked to some extent in one way or another by this facade of liberal Zionism and at times even socialist Zionism and things like that.

1:24:21

But a Colonel has always been there.

There is a genocide, a logic to it, because it's premised on we want the land, we don't want the people.

Well, there's really only a couple of ways of achieving that.

You expel the people, you're you kill the people.

And what has been clear in the last, really, I keep going back to this, but really since Oslo has been this incredible rightward shift of Israeli society to the point that when you look at the founding of the State of Israel, it was Labor Zionists who founded it.

1:24:52

It was the Ben Gurion types, the Labor Zionists.

Today there are more members of the Knesset that are Palestinian than there are members of the Labor Party.

The Labor Zionists have become just unnecessary.

There's no point to them.

There's no point to the facade.

1:25:08

They've become full mask off.

That's where you get in the 1980's the Kahanis movement was illegal in Israel and today it's running Israel.

The other example is it used to be that Israel denied the Nakba.

It didn't happen.

1:25:24

It's a lie.

They left voluntarily.

We didn't do it.

Whereas today what they say is we want a new Nakba, we need to do it better.

Or the problem with the knock bow was that it wasn't complete enough.

We went from a denial, which within that denial is a sense of shame.

1:25:42

There's something we need to deny.

There's something we need to pretend didn't happen even though it happened to.

Now we're going to embrace the crime and say we needed to be worse and bigger and more deadly than it used to be.

An expulsion is not enough.

We need to kill them.

And that has become basically the defining marker of Israeli society to the point where on the occasion that you see, remember a few months ago, an Israeli teacher, all he did was say, you know, we should remember the young children of Gaza who are killed.

1:26:14

He was gone after and fired from his job.

And who went after who started the witch hunt was the kids.

Yeah, the students in his classroom, they like basically drove him out of the classroom.

There's a video.

It's crazy.

So.

That has become Israeli society and I'm trying to think of an analogy and I don't know that this works as an analogy in terms of a genocide will kill them all type of logic.

1:26:35

I'm thinking mid 19th century United States as it's expanding to the West.

You know the only good one is a dead 1.

Manifest Destiny.

If you want an analogy again, you can go back now in the continental United States and say, oh wow, I feel bad about it.

OK, we'll remember it.

1:26:51

We'll have an Indigenous Peoples Day and all that.

I will.

After we've killed 90% of them, sure.

And the remaining that we forced into boarding school and abuse.

Exactly.

Yeah, but at the time when it was happening, the only good one is a dead one.

Well, we're at the only good one is a dead one stage of Israel.

1:27:09

I think also, if you go back to looking at 1948, at the time a lot of the Israeli military and politicians saw it 1948 as a missed opportunity that they should have occupied all of historical Palestine.

1:27:25

And so they've been looking for this opportunity since then.

That's not a secret.

Yeah, I think about this moment often, but we had one mother and Janine tell us once before they were displaced from the camp and she said, you know, they used to come to arrest.

1:27:42

They used to come to the camp to arrest.

They come now to kill.

Yeah.

There didn't used to be a thing called the Gaza Strip.

They created the Gaza Strip as a dumping ground for Palestinian refugee.

Gaza used to be a town and a few villages and another town in the South called Rafa.

1:27:59

It used to be not very densely populated, didn't used to be a strip, it just used to be there, just part of Palestine.

Yeah, 80% of those two millionaire refugees.

Right.

I listened someone the other day and I can't remember who it was because I do listen to a lot of interviews on this question.

1:28:16

But I was talking about Gaza and described it as a Guinea pig.

And I was thinking about that a lot.

This idea that what the brutal rulers and imperialists can get away in Gaza, they can get away with.

And that this kind of moment that we're in also where there is a heightened level of understanding and visibility about the colonial project and what Israel is all about and Palestinian subjugation.

1:28:45

But there's also a sense of it is visible for everyone.

And yet the rulers are more emboldened to carry out this final solution.

So in that context, what is the message that you would send Simone to political activists who really want to take a stand against the genocide in Gaza and against the annexation of the West Bank?

1:29:13

One thing that I think is really important is recognition that there is a big language divide on this issue.

There are conversations that are happening in Arabic and there are conversations that happen in English.

And a lot of times they look a little bit different and they're being had by different people.

And something that I would encourage people who want to get more involved, particularly want to get more involved in material ways in Palestine, in the West Bank, is to get more familiar with Arabic.

1:29:41

Whether it's just learning the alphabet, learning how to read a little bit, having some elementary understanding, I think is actually a really, really important thing because this is an Arabic struggle in many ways.

And also, you know, we, we do have a lot of tools for translation now as well in terms of written stuff and to follow West Bank news sources and Arabic news sources.

1:30:03

And Google Translate is actually pretty good for reading.

I would not use it to speak, but if you're trying to translate a headline or an Instagram caption, it's actually pretty good.

And I think I would just challenge people to challenge themselves to go across that language, divide a little bit more and demolarize themselves with Arabic.

1:30:24

I think that's my one big piece of advice, especially because if you're coming at this from a more Marxist or political kind of ideological position, the working class in Palestine speaks Arabic.

And so if you want to also connect and be more active and aligned in that way, it is a really important piece.

1:30:44

And I don't say this lightly, I am learning Arabic.

I am not fluent in any way, but I have just seen in my own work it is a little bit of a handicap.

And I think if we look also in Israeli policy, Arabic in Israel is essentially be legally not allowed in the schools.

1:31:05

So the nation state law, this is something in Israel that they essentially want to criminalize and erase Arabic from the land.

And so I do think that this is something that is a big thing.

The other piece of advice I have is that if you are visiting Palestine to enter through Alan B, the King Hussein Bridge via Jordan, it is to enter Palestine via Jordan through the land border if you can.

1:31:36

It is, I think, really an important act of solidarity to travel as Palestinians travel and to travel in that same manner.

Because if you are going to the West Bank, the vast majority of people you interact with cannot use the airport.

1:31:53

And also the airport is you are going to have to spend money.

You are going in Israel and in the Israeli airport and in Tel Aviv.

And people ask you, they say, how did you enter?

Did you come through the airport?

People a lot of times are surprised when foreigners come through the land border, but they respect it a lot because it's a really important act of solidarity because, yeah, it is inconvenient.

1:32:15

It takes a lot longer.

Sometimes they close the border at random times and you have to come back the next day.

But a lot of people interact with don't have a choice and so it's important to experience that.

I also think it's a very eye opening experience to go through the Palestinian border solidarity in this moment.

1:32:47

Look like we're all trying to do something.

But I do think you do have a responsibility to not just do anything.

We actually owe Palestinians more than just uncritical solidarity this far into both 77 years but also two years into a genocide.

1:33:06

Just doing your best is not enough anymore.

1:33:30

Thanks for listening to Unwashed and Unruly, and thank you to Simone for joining us and sharing so many important insights and a very critical moment in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Please follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find us and make sure to rate and review and check out our website, unwashedunruly.com.