For those of us living in the United States, today — what we call Thanksgiving — is a very significant holiday because, for some of us at least, it’s a day to recognize and remember the violent, genocidal, settler-colonial history of the land we live on. Our lives here in North America are predicated on a history and a pattern that is repeating itself as we speak, most notably in occupied Palestine, where we are witnessing what feels like the culmination of a decades-long ethnic cleansing campaign against the Indigenous population of Palestine by the forces of Zionism, the state of Israel, and, by the reigning global hegemon, the United States.
We've already covered some of the history that led us to this point in Part 1 of our ongoing series on Palestine with Sumaya Awad, and on today's show, we're going to be exploring a different angle, outlining the history and context of the formation of the state of Israel, how Palestinians resisted Israeli occupation from before the state was even created, and how they continued to resist throughout the disingenuously named “peace” process that culminated with the Oslo Accords. As we’ll see, this process was never intended to bring a lasting peace to the region, but was intended to cement in the status quo of Israeli supremacy and the ongoing subjugation of Palestinians.
To talk about this we’ve brought on Noura Erakat, Associate Professor at Rutgers University in the department of Africana Studies and the program of Criminal Justice and author of Justice For Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. From the Great Arab Revolt in 1936 to the second Intifada at the start of this century, and up to Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th, in this conversation we explore the history of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, the so-called peace process, the betrayal of the so-called two-state solution, where Israel's ethnic cleansing campaign is headed, and what it’s up against.
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