On October 7th, Hamas fighters breached the militarized fence separating the occupied Gaza strip from Israeli communities in the south, killing 1400 people and taking 200 hostages. Israel immediately retaliated with severe bombardment of the Gaza strip that, at the time of this writing, has killed 7000 people. In the West Bank, settler violence and army raids have also killed dozens of Palestinians, and Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as leftist Israelis have been arrested for speaking out.
While the world is currently transfixed by what’s happening in Israel-Palestine, this story did not begin on October 7th. Joey Ayoub and Daniel Voskoboynik are joined by Dana El Kurd, Orly Noy, and Yair Wallach to think through this moment, process our grief together, and articulate alternative visions for both peoples. We focused on three themes: a) Grief, b) Thinking Through This Moment, c) What can be done?
This will be the first of many episodes on post-October 7th Israel-Palestine.
Dana El-Kurd is a researcher in political science, and an assistant professor at the University of Richmond. Works on state-society relations in the Arab world with topics like authoritarianism and international intervention. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and she is also the author of "Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine." A regular guest of TFTT, Dana has recently co-written an essay with Leila Al-Shami, Joey Ayoub and Romeo Kokriatski for the South/South Movement entitled "A view of anti-imperialism from the periphery."
Orly Noy is an editor at Local Call, a Hebrew-language news site committed to democracy, peace, equality, social justice, transparency, freedom of information and resisting the occupation. She is also a political activist with the Balad political party, and a translator of Farsi poetry and prose. She is the chair of B’Tselem’s executive board. Her writing deals with the lines that intersect and define her identity as Mizrahi, a female leftist, a woman, a temporary migrant living inside a perpetual immigrant, and the constant dialogue between them. She recently published a piece for 972Mag and Local Call entitled "Enough with the warlords. There is another way."
Yair Wallach is a social and cultural historian of modern Palestine/Israel at SOAS, University of London, studying the entangled and relational histories of Jews and Palestinians. He is also the author of the 2020 book "A City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem" and has most recently published in The New Statesman a piece entitled: "The deadly logic of the existential war: Warnings that the escalating Israel-Hamas conflict is heading towards genocide should be heeded."
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Credits:
Host: Daniel & Joey
Producer: A.M.
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: A.M.
Episode design: Joey Ayoub
The Fire These Times