The Palestine Pod

This week Lara and Michael discuss two recent reports challenging the stagnant death toll in Gaza: a recent article by Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa in the Electronic Intifada, concluding the Israel has most likely killed, in 9 months, 194,768-511,824 people in Gaza. Such findings were corroborated weeks later by an article published in The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal, providing evidence-based data that the real death toll is likely at least 186,000 Palestinians. These earth-shattering findings are contrasted with the phenomenon of genocide denial and erasure in the US political landscape and the urgent need to stop the annihilation of the Palestinian people. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with the former President of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), Jwan Haddadd. We talk about the successful organizing effort to pass a resolution divesting from companies that support Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the coalition of organizations, students, and faculty who made it happen. UCSB becomes the sixth university to institutionalize a boycott within the UC system. 

This week Lara and Michael discuss Israeli massacres in Jabalia and Jenin, the besieged hospitals in Gaza, and the ICC Prosecutor's application for arrest warrants of Netanyahu and Gallant. They explore the challenges faced by ICC in addressing crimes in Palestine, government hypocrisy in genocide discourse, and the urgent need for humanitarian action in Gaza.

This week, Lara and Michael play a recorded interview with UCLA students from their student encampment and sit down with Presidential candidate for the Green Party, Dr. Jill Stein. Dr. Stein discusses the role of electoral politics, how it has failed the American people, and how now more than ever, a third party is needed to threaten the two-party duopoly and end the US-Israeli genocide in Palestine. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the Pro-Publica report that internal State Department recommendations advise sanctioning and cutting military funding to Israel, a recommendation that Secretary of State, Antony Blinken has been ignoring since December 2023. Lara and Michael also cover the phenomenon of college campus Gaza solidarity encampments including those at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. 

This podcast covers the tragic events at Al Shifa Hospital, including the execution of doctors and aid workers by Israeli forces. It discusses the racist coverage of the assassinated aid workers and emphasizes the importance of valuing Palestinian lives equally. The episode delves into the dire circumstances of families trapped underground and explores the complicity of countries in supplying arms to oppressive regimes. It also advocates for sanctions against apartheid Israel and addresses the ongoing arms transfers impacting the Palestinian population in Gaza.

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Palestinian-American ER physician, Dr. Mohammad Subeh. Dr. Subeh came to the US as a Palestinian refugee during the Gulf War after his grandparents were expelled from Palestine during the Nakba. He speaks to the Palestine Pod about his recent experience providing medical care for five weeks in Gaza a field hospital with the International Medical Core in Rafah during Israel's ongoing genocidal assault. In addition to detailing the realities of Israel's attacks against civilians in Gaza as well as Israel's decimation of the Palestinian healthcare system, Dr. Subeh paints a picture of a people committed to "ihsan", the concept of seeking to achieve excellence in all aspects of life while facing annihilation. Lara reminds that the Palestinian people refuse to disappear in the face of the zionist settler colonial project which requires extermination of the indigenous people. Instead, the Palestinian people currently undergoing genocide continue to insist on life with excellence. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the ongoing deliberate starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza by the Zionist regime in violation of international law. The Palestine Pod also covers a recent Al-Jazeera report entitled "Not just the UNRWA report: Countless accounts of Israeli torture in Gaza" compiling accounts of Palestinians from Gaza who have been kidnapped by Israeli occupation forces and subjected to brutal torture in violation of international law as a part of this current genocide. These accounts illuminate the treatment Palestinians in Israeli captivity have been subjected to for over 75 years of settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Hala Hanina a Palestinian dentist, PhD researcher in sociology, and 4th-generation Palestinian refugee from Gaza, Palestine. She is a former volunteer in hospitals during previous Israeli aggressions. We hear from Hana about how five generations of her family suffered under Zionism (from her great-grandfather experiencing the 1948 Nakba, all the way up until her family home was destroyed in the 2023/24 Nakba and genocide) as well as her reflections on this current moment.

This week Lara and Michael discuss the Zionists’ genocidal assault on Rafah during the evening of the Super Bowl, targeting at least two mosques containing sheltering families and dozens of Palestinian family houses and tents containing displaced families. During this night, Israel killed Sidra Hassouna, 7 years old. The pressure from the impact of the bomb catapulted her body, which hung by a wire when she was found. We cover the reports concerning Egypt’s construction of a so-called “fortified buffer zone” in the Sinai — a concentration camp presumably intended to hold Palestinians in the event of a mass expulsion of Palestinians by Israel, which remains looming as Israel continues to promise a mass escalation in Rafah, the very area it has spent the last 4 months concentrating the majority of the Palestinian population in Gaza.