The siege in Gaza and Israel’s end game, with Amjad Iraqi

This week, we’re joined by Amjad Iraqi, a senior editor at +972 Magazine and a policy analyst at the think tank Al-Shabaka. Since Hamas’s brutal attack and Israel’s declaration of war, thousands of people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel have been killed. More than a million people have been ordered to leave the northern Gaza Strip; more than two million Gazans are being denied food, water, electricity, and fuel. [3:10] Amjad, a Palestinian citizen of Israel based in London, explains what’s different about this moment for both Palestinians and Israeli Jews. [32:30] He also untangles the international context in which Hamas operates, both in relation to its Arab neighbors and global powers like the United States—the only country, he believes, with the power to stop Israel from committing genocide. [47:20] Finally, Amjad highlights the need to reject colonial and statist frameworks in fighting for Palestinian liberation. 

In this episode, we ask: 

How was Israel able to manufacture a forgetting of occupied Palestinians by Israeli Jews?

How has the politics in Israel shifted following Hamas’s attack? 

How should we understand this latest wave of violence, given the violence required to maintain Israel’s “status quo”? 

What are the freedom dreams of Palestinian people?

For more, see: 

* Amjad’s writing in the wake of Hamas’s attack in southern Israel—‘Get out of there now’—and an older piece he wrote about “the worn-out aphorism of a ‘cycle of violence’” in Israel-Palestine

* A useful conversation with Tareq Baconi, Amjad’s colleague at Al-Shabaka

* Our previous TTSG conversations on Israel-Palestine: 

* Embracing U.F.O.s and rejecting Zionism, with Arielle Angel (August 2023)

* Loving Palestine, with Esmat Elhalaby (May 2021)   

* Sheikh Jarrah and What Feels Different This Time about Israel/Palestine, with Josh Leifer (May 2021) 

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