Palestine Will Be Free

Jeremy: Hey everyone, this is Jeremy speaking from the editing booth. We wanted to let you know that once this episode is over, that you should stick around after the outro, because we are going to include a section from our bonus episode we call The Secret Speech. It's going to cover a list of organizations which our guests feel like Ought to be supported materially, financially, as well as organizations which ought to be resisted materially. So if you or the organization you are with are looking for the best way to support the Palestinian people, that information will be contained in that section following the outro. And if you or your organization are looking for ways to materially resist the Zionist entity in more than just ways that raise awareness, we also have that information contained in that clip as well. But without further ado, let's get to the main feed episode.

Rae: Welcome to Palestine.

Jeremy: Hello, and welcome to ProlesPod, your biweekly dose of history, politics, and culture without the liberalism. You can find and follow us on most social media platforms @prolespod. And on TikTok @proles.pod. If you want to help us reach more people, leaving 5-star reviews on any of the various podcast catchers is the best way to do that. If you want to help us with our vision, you can subscribe to our Patreon over at patreon.com/prolespod. There's a lot of great stuff there, such as early access to main feed episodes, bonus episodes, Theory beats, study guides, raffles, surprise drops, and more, with more on the way. This episode is brought to you by BlackRock. Today we're going to be talking about Palestine. We're going to be doing a little bit of a different style of episode. It'll be based more on questions and answers, uh, but it'll be focused around the topic of Palestine, its history, What's happening today, and so on. But first, it's a small crew of the proles today. It's just me and Ray, and our subject matter experts—

Rae: Hello.

Jeremy: Hello, Ray. And our subject matter experts are Cody and Ameed from the Good Shepherd Collective. So I guess, fellas, where would you like to begin with, I guess, introducing yourselves or telling us a little bit about your your work and what you do?

Cody O'Rourke: Sure. I guess I can start. My name's Cody O'Rourke. I've been working here in Palestine for about 20 years now, actually. And it's been a long journey coming from Michigan to here and trying to understand what's happening and more importantly, what we can do about it. Over the years, myself and others, I guess in response to the international organizing spaces, particularly the NGO system, which kind of controls a big section of the narrative in terms of understanding the history of Palestine, Palestinian liberation, justice, and tactics and strategy. So we got together and tried to put together this structure of the Good Shepherd Collective as a means to kind of create a space for other activists here in Palestine and outside of Palestine, I guess, to kind of address the liberalism, you know, with inside of the movement.

Ameed Faleh: Great.

Cody O'Rourke: So that's kind of the Good Shepherd Collective and myself, just in a few sentences.

Ameed Faleh: Yeah, thank you, Cody. My name is Ameed Faleh. I live in the West Bank. I'm a 4th-year BA student at Al-Quds University. I study political science and economy, and thank God, not the traditional economy, the more political economy type, because there's a lot of things that can't be said about the traditional way that we view economics. I joined the Good Shepherd Collective relatively recently, and the reason that I joined the Good Shepherd Collective is that you look at the stuff the Good Shepherd Collective does, and they very much differ from any organization in the West Bank. They differ from— their discourse is different.

Rae: Right.

Ameed Faleh: The way they tackle things is decolonial. It's not tied to a donor. It's not tied to appeasing a certain constituency. They're very much honest and to the point. And as a Palestinian, I grew up in the post-Second Intifada era where lots of these NGOs popped up that catered to sensibilities that do not cater to actual liberation. It's a breath of fresh air to just see the Good Shepherd Collective, and I'm honored and proud to be part of it. And, uh, yeah, I'm happy to be here.

Jeremy: Very good. Love it. Yeah, we're glad to have you. Uh, thank you for agreeing to do this. And I guess, uh, Rae is gonna take it away with some of these questions. I guess, where would you like to begin, Rae?

Rae: Hey, so first, it's worth it to say that the questions that are going to appear in the main feed episode as well as in our bonus episode are an aggregation of questions both from myself and from us, the Pearls, as well as from our patrons. So Just a simple reminder, if you want to ask the next question on the next interview episode, you should head over to patreon.com/pulsepod so that you can do that. Okay. I want to acknowledge that a key part of the Good Shepherd Collective is collecting and sharing and analyzing data. And I guess the first question that I have for you is, what story does the data tell? And how is the data manipulated or obfuscated by the Zionist entity? And furthermore, we as watchers, listeners, readers, how can we sharpen our vision? How can we clarify our skills so that we know what to look for and how to engage in the story that is being told and where we can be suspicious, where we can poke holes in it? Obviously, everybody listening to this is fairly well-practiced in some degree of media literacy, but I think that there are some special challenges that are unique to Palestine and the Palestinian cause. And so that's where I wanted to start.

Ameed Faleh: So for me, at least, there are 3 things that the Zionist entity does that can tell you a lot about, you know, how they use media, how they use numbers, how they manipulate numbers, and how they manipulate statistics. So the first tactic Israel uses is that it discredits data from Palestinians, from Arabs, through like the question of labels. So for example, they say, when we say, you know, more than 40,000 Gaza Palestinians die during this war, were martyred. They say, oh, the numbers are incorrect because they run, you know, it's a Hamas-run Ministry of Health numbers. And when you look at it at face value, yeah, it is Hamas-run. But when you delve deeper into it, the question of institutions in Gaza is totally separate from Hamas as a political entity. They are run by technocrats and the numbers are accurate. And in fact, you know, The numbers they put out are short of the actual martyr toll because they do not have the necessary equipment. They do not have the necessary personnel. Lots of them, unfortunately, were assassinated by Israel. They do not have the personnel or the equipment to excavate buildings, excavate rubbles, and put together an even larger martyr count. We know about 125,000 to 200,000. And even when talking to a professor of mine that that specializes in statistics, and he said the number is probably even higher because, you know, when it's published in a journal, it takes months. So in this month, these like 3 to 6 to 7 to 8 month time span, how many more Gazans were martyred is the question. So no number captures the martyr toll in Gaza. They are still discovering martyrs in Lebanon as we speak, and it's been 40 to 50 days since the ceasefire in Lebanon. So we will not know the actual martyr toll in a long time. So this is the first thing, that Israel discredits data to secure its image, to secure its own facts. And it's an effective tactic for those that don't have media literacy, that don't have that in-depth look at the things that happen in Palestine. And there has been a shift in the narrative. You know, when you look at like 10 years ago, nobody would believe anything that comes from a Palestinian's mouth. But now the tide is shifting. And part of the fact that the tide is shifting is through, you know, you can't carpet bomb an entire coastal enclave and get away with it. You can't.

Jeremy: Right.

Ameed Faleh: There's no tactic you can do that can convince millions of people that you're on the right path somehow. So this is the first tactic. The second tactic they have is they try to, especially, you know, when we talk about the armed resistance in Palestine, They try legitimizing themselves and legitimizing their numbers through appearing technocratic. So in the sense that 2 of our soldiers were killed in northern Gaza during clashes with Hamas militants. And when you look at what Al-Qassam issues, and I believe them more because they're actually on the ground and they have no media censor, they have nothing, they publish stuff as is, and they say 10 soldiers were killed. And this has been a long theme of Israel. So when we're talking about the PLO's armed struggle phase, this also happened. Israel minimized their casualty numbers in order to also uphold a settler optimism and mentality while trying to delegitimize the resistance as being ineffective. The third one is, and I think we see it, I think we see it a lot, is that they manipulate numbers. I mean, the most golden example of this is For example, when they say there is no genocide and they give you a population growth number that conveniently starts from 1948, after 1948, like 1949 or 1950, as if like the Nakba didn't happen. And this sort of manipulation of data can fool a lot of people and can fool a lot of people in the sense that, one, they manipulate the data, two, they give a definition that doesn't exist of genocide. Genocide Your population number can go up, but you can be still under genocide. Israel, as a genocidal entity, as a bastion, quote unquote, of Western interests, as even like when you look at Zionist thought, it all rests upon the elimination of the Arabs. And in that sense, it is inherently genocidal as an entity. But they use the manipulation of numbers, the manipulation of dates, giving false definitions. to imbue a sense of that we're lying, that we're actually living in paradise as Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza or in '48 or as refugees, when that's not the case at all.

Cody O'Rourke: Thanks, Ameed. No, those are all really important points. I think so much of how Israel is able to control the narrative is just how integrated it is into the mainstream media, into the large newspaper outlets like the New York Times or the Guardian or et cetera, et cetera. I think that a lot of it is really just bait. Based on racism and classism, I'm going to say, is that you have so many foreign correspondents here. They won't go into Palestinian neighborhoods for any real amount of time to get to understand the community or see what's happening on a day-to-day basis. They stay in spaces that are really comfortable, such as Tel Aviv, because of the quote-unquote Western lifestyle that it provides. So, so much of the Western discourse is really constructed by This whole ecosystem of people not really wanting to engage with Palestinians or taking Palestinians seriously. So we see that. And then in return, a lot of times, you know, the data isn't understood or read through a paradigm of capitalism, of imperialism. You know, it's read through an understanding of this liberal understanding of conflict. You know, it's a Palestinian-Israeli conflict, what Ameed was alluding to, only starting from like 1948. Right. If they start at 1948 at all. So then in return, when we don't talk about settler colonialism and colonialism, that erases people's kind of understanding. We're not able to kind of contextualize what a settlement is and isn't. Because there's a lot of people that when you talk about Israeli settlements, what they will talk about is the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. They'll talk about Kiryat Arba or Efrat or some of these other spaces, but they won't talk About Tel Aviv as being a settlement, or Holan as being a settlement, or Beit HaTikva as being a settlement. Jewish communities inside of quote unquote you know Israel. And so that really obfuscates the larger system of what's happening when the data is just completely detached from theory and practice. That's not even necessarily something that Israel does, but something that we do as a movement. That I think that kind of also. Degrades our understanding and our analysis, because I think that there's another part of reading the data that's interesting in the sense that I was just looking over the home demolition data in the West Bank and East Jerusalem for the last several years. And every year since 2017, so the last 7, 8 years, home demolition has risen. From 2017, it was at 427 home demolitions. And this year, just in the East Jerusalem and West Bank alone, it was almost 1,800. And so what we see in a lot of ways is that while all the numbers show that there's a clear escalation of colonization, ethnic cleansing, which has really culminated in a year-and-a-half-long genocide, that the movement in itself isn't moving to meet the needs of the Palestinian people to which they purport to be in solidarity with. And I think that that was really evident in this past election, whereas you had large swaths of the NGOs like Jewish Voice for Peace, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, the Adalah Justice Project, particularly in the United States, that they wouldn't articulate a program of community organizing which was specifically geared to hold those who are in political office accountable for the roles that they've played in animating this genocide. So, what I want to say is, is that even though we can share an analysis that shows that things are escalating, that doesn't always necessarily translate into tangible resistance at the international level from those who purport to be in allyship with the people here.

Ameed Faleh: I just want to add to Cody's point that the notions of allyship and how we understand allyship, it's away from data. It's away from the question of data, but it's also not away, paradoxically. How we understand allyship is that we understand it as something symbolic and not moving through the material allyship. We can make all sorts of connections between Palestine and any other place in the world. Palestine, for us, exemplifies every other issue in the world. It's a central node to understand the entire world. I won't understand any struggle in the world as a Palestinian without centering Palestine in it.

Cody O'Rourke: Hmm.

Ameed Faleh: And in that sense, the notion of allyship, especially in the West, is rooted in the fact that we can do all these symbolic things. We can wear a kufiya. We can, you know, go to a protest. We can protest for 1 hour. We can do X, Y, Z. And those are all things that, as a Palestinian, I appreciate deeply. You know, people taking time off their day to do this type of stuff. But with the scale of everything happening, with the scale of the genocide, ever-increasing colonialism in the West Bank, the erasure of our existence from '48, there needs to be more material, concrete things. In that sense, the movement in the West, The left needs not to appeal to petit bourgeois sensibilities. You might be branded as, quote unquote, extremist. You might be branded as whatever, and you shouldn't care. You will have enemies. You need to define your friends and enemies. And I think, I think this central question of who are our friends, who are our enemies, if answered by the movement in the West, will move them from the symbolic to the concrete.

Jeremy: Sure.

Rae: Thank you guys so much for that. That was like really rich and really thoughtful. And if I can pull on a few threads, you know, something that really stood out to me, Cody, just in response to something that you said, was this call for us to stop flattening, if I'm understanding what you said correctly and the implications of it, for those of us, especially in the imperial core, to stop flattening our own understanding of the complexities of class as they exist abroad. I think that it's very easy for us to see differentials in class in the countries that we live. But as you when we're engaging with foreign media, we have to be just as discerning and just as willing to see every other culture, every other group of people on the planet as people with their own class interests and people with their own class complexities that might be sort of illegible to us in the West. And we have to continue to try. Otherwise, Ameed, to something that you said, we end up sort of catering to a petit bourgeois sensibility without even realizing it. Something else that I was thinking about, Cody, as you were speaking, is the way in which Israel and the conceptualization of settlements functions to sort of like, I'm not sure how to say it, but like psychically or psychologically protect the Western imaginary, the Western mind, to give us the sort of will to believe that there can be a fair or a just colonial project and that maybe colonization was really bad. before, but now modern colonization is somehow not bad. And I think that there are ways in which that which they may call Israel is a sort of manifestation of that. And then finally, Ameed, something that you said early in your response, and I wrote it down, it all rests upon the elimination of the Arabs. And this sort of brings me to the next question because there's something unique or less common about the Israeli settler colonial project, which is Finding a way not to need the labor of the oppressed, right? If we look at other colonial projects throughout history, whether it's for agricultural knowledge or whether it's for other reasons, for labor, for slavery, whatever it is, the settlers usually find a way to need the labor of those who they oppress. And in this case, the labor of the Palestinians is mostly rendered obsolete. And so the genocidal project can therefore escalate. And so I guess my question is, in this case, this sort of changes what the subject of the settler is. And I want to know more about what role do settler organizations and then the physical, like the human beings, the settlers themselves play in the perpetuation of imperialism and the genocide?

Ameed Faleh: I'm just touching upon from what I see how the settler question is articulated by lots of Western leftists is that There is somehow a Jewish Israeli proletariat, and that we as the Palestinian proletariat must align with. And this notion of Israeli Jewish proletariat, as a Palestinian, I go through multiple checkpoints to my university. The Jewish Israeli proletariat is the one that's holding me at a checkpoint. It's not some Israeli businessman. The soldiers that are in Gaza, they are in the West Bank, are the Jewish Israeli proletariat. And I think the notion of some sort of idealized vision of the Jewish Israeli proletariat, you know, it emanates from the '50s and until 1967, you know, there was lots of talk about some sort of a socialist Israel. It's impossible for a settler colonial project to be socialist. It's impossible for it to be emancipatory. It's impossible for it to be historically progressive. There is no way. And revamping these old theses about a potential alliance between the Palestinian and Israeli proletariat. It misses the heart of the question of Palestine, which is how every settler is complicit by virtue of the fact that their physical existence rests upon Palestinian erasure and land. And it also erases the history of Palestinians, Palestinian communists who were in the Palestine Communist Party. They were with Israeli settlers before they were called Israeli settlers. And when the Soviet Union told the Palestine Communist Party to Arabize. Most people who opposed the Arabization project of the Palestine Communist Party were the settlers, because they feared their own position in the party and their own privileges. And they all had these racist theses about assumptions about how Arabs are like one social step behind. We're feudal in nature, and we love the Bashas and the Mukhtar, and we're not historically progressive to be intellectually communist. So these things have been tried before. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. There is no need to talk about a mythical alliance that won't exist because every settler is complicit.

Jeremy: Well, and this is— if you want to draw a parallel, there are many people who believe that there were atrocities committed on both sides of the US or Canadian or, you know, other settler colonial projects. And, you know, this is factually true, but the atrocities committed by the settlers themselves were in service of displacing Displacing people from their homes, and the atrocities committed by the indigenous people here were in defense of their traditionally held lands. And so it always makes the settler the aggressor and guilty of theft at the very least, if not murder and other you know violent actions in service of of the settler. So these are not equivalent, you know what I mean? Like, even if they were the same acts committed in the same way against the same sorts of populations, the settler is always the aggressor and the indigenous people are always on the defense.

Ameed Faleh: Exactly. And it touches at the heart of the point that within the history of Palestinian struggle, and you could look way back, way, way back to the PLO days, We never treated them as they would treat us. And it's not— we're not morally obligated to be kind to them. They're settlers.

Jeremy: Sure.

Ameed Faleh: So, for example, and this is back in the PLO days, in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, the Fatah, the main faction in the PLO, took like 6 Israelis or 8, I don't remember, as prisoners. And when I look through the archives and I look through, because I'm also doing my BA thesis on this history, when I look through the archives and what these Israeli prisoners had to say about the entire period that they were held. They had nothing bad to say about their time in prison. They were treated very well. We see parallels between this and how Hamas also treats settler prisoners, when in reality, they're the ones who took the land. They're the ones who are aggressors and like went into Lebanon to invade it, and they killed innocent people for fun. You could look at settler soldier testimonies from that period. It's insane. And we had no reason to be kind to them. But we were. So the colonized, even in their Western perception of them being quote unquote barbaric, they're very much kind. And I don't understand how, you know, when you're a fighter and you have a settler in your head that you're kind to them. But we were. And we are. The resistance is kind to these settlers.

Cody O'Rourke: Yeah, thanks, Ameed. I think that a lot of good things have been bubbling up, you know, especially I think one of the things that you folks do really well on Proles is Who really kind of tease out how theory really kind of materializes in the material world. You know, Patrick Wolfe and other decolonial scholars have made the argument, what we've been saying here in this conversation, is that the settler existence is really premised on the erasure of the indigenous people. And surely we can see that across the United States, of Canada, of South Africa, of New Zealand, of Australia, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that a lot of times we're The left, I think, kind of falls short is not kind of getting into theory of settler colonialism in the sense that there's a lot of people who can't really understand the difference between an immigrant and a settler. You know, I think this is particularly true in the United States, whereas, you know, there's a sense that immigrants coming to the United States that are fleeing war-torn countries that the United States has, you know, been fomenting intentionally, that they should be welcomed into the United States and taken care of. That's certainly a sentiment in different spaces within the side of the left. So when they go, when they turn around and look at the horrors of the Holocaust and antisemitism across Europe, they are quick to see the parallels of immigration. And it's very easy to understand Zionism as being a story of immigration. And so I think it's important to as difficult as it can be, is to point out that the main difference between being an immigrant and being a settler is settlers move with the express purpose of colonization. You know, they're connected to institutions. You know, the World Zionist Organization, for example, is an official part of the Israeli state. You know, the Jewish National Fund is a part of the Israeli state. You know, in the very same way that, I don't know, the Department of Treasury is a part of the United States. Well, it's an official part of the Israeli government. You know, that's a key difference, is that, you know, people that are fleeing from Latin America to the United States, they're not integrated into these political structures that are set up for the express purpose of colonizing the United States. And so I think that there's that real importance for us to make a distinction between what is an immigrant and what is a settler. But I think it's also important for us to make, not necessarily make value judgments on the people. You know, we're not necessarily saying, when we say settler, I think that there's this derogatory connotation that goes with that. I think, you know, rightfully so. But I think it's important to understand is that this is more like an analytical definition. You know, we're not saying like this settler is a bad person or they're a good person. That's not what we're saying. Because I think, again, for a lot of especially people that are in this You know, they know Israelis, you know, and they see them as good people. You know, they see what they do, you know, back home in Michigan or in New York or in Florida or wherever they happen to be at, you know, that a lot of times they're involved with, you know, different progressive, you know, movements in the United States. So it's not about— for us, it's not about talking about whether a settler is a good person or a bad person. Well, it's about talking about the impact that they have on, you know, the Palestinian infrastructure here.

Rae: Right.

Cody O'Rourke: That in real ways, that because of the structure that they belong to, their existence is contingent on the erasure of the local population here. And in order for them to be here in a way that is conducive to society, you know, there has to be a process of decolonization. Whereas the political structures, you know, the economic structures are decoupled from these, from this larger system of capitalism. And restored to the indigenous people here. You see very few Israelis that are actually involved in that process. You know, they're still involved in this understanding of, let's negotiate Israelis and Palestinians within this model of conflict resolution. So one of the ways that that narrative continues to stay alive is really through these settler organizations, organizations here that are registered with the Israeli government. They're official nonprofits, but they're also able to build upon the nonprofit philanthropic structures in Canada and the United States and the UK. So you have these other organizations in Israel like Regavim, for example. Regavim is this organization that has really worked hard with a side of the Knesset to kind of push forward much more extremist, accelerated vision of Zionism. They've been the ones that have been advancing the turnover from administration of the West Bank from the military to actually the Knesset, for example. They were the ones that proposed the nation-state bill that effectively undermined Palestinian-Israeli rights. They were the home of Bezalel Smotrich, kind of the far-right National security. Yeah. You know, he's been calling to turn, you know, Jenin into, you know, into Little Gaza. You know, he's also been calling for the ethnic cleansing. So it's important to understand that these NGOs are really leveraging the nonprofit structures in the United States, you know, to finance the ethnic cleansing here. So organizations like Regavim raise millions of dollars from the United States in order to finance what's happening here. And so, you know, most recently in the United States, in different leftist spaces, people have been ringing the alarm bells that, you know, Donald Trump wants to shut down these Palestinian NGOs. I can't remember the name of the bill. And one of the reasons why is that we haven't really seen that being really that important, because when we look at the philanthropic structures Historically, those have been structures that have been used to create violence, and not just in Israel or in Palestine, but the churches, the churches and their historical nonprofit understanding across Europe were leveraged to colonize all of Africa. So when we think about these organizational structures, It's like, for us, it's not only just the settler organizations in Israel that are able to leverage these financial instruments to create propaganda campaigns, to push more violent policies inside the Knesset, but it's also looking at the ways that the NGO structure inside of the United States has also kind of damped down understandings of Palestinian liberation and Resistance there. I think it's also just important to understand is that you know when we for us as the Good Shepherd Collective, you know when we're talking about similar organizations, you know we're not just talking about the far right organizations like Regabim or the New Israel Fund or some of these some of these other other ones. You know we're talking also about the liberal groups as well, like Betlem. Who's often a widely cited organization. We're also talking about ACRI. We're talking about the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. We're talking about Combatants for Peace. We're talking about these different Israeli NGOs that also kind of work to obfuscate the impact that Israeli settlers, not just in the West Bank, but Israeli settlers in Tel Aviv and in West Jerusalem, have on the impact of Palestinians here. Because for them, it's like, oh, if we can show a good Israeli, then that kind of legitimizes their presence and being here, and then therefore we just have to work together for a solution. There's this weird way that they've been able to kind of secure an ongoing settler existence inside of our imagination. By having these kind of campaigns of like, oh, well, we just want human rights for everyone. We just want equal rights for everyone. Well, it's like, you can't secure the rights of settlers without those coming at the expense of Palestinians. It's kind of like this equal rights for all is kind of like a new version of All Lives Matter.

Rae: Yeah.

Cody O'Rourke: And so this, all of this can't take place without having these structures of NGOs and nonprofit laws and that charitable giving. And so one of the things that the Good Shepherd Collective has tried to point out is that we need to challenge the nonprofit system as a whole and kind of rethink it.

Rae: And now a word from our sponsor. When you look around, seeing ongoing genocides, climate catastrophe, and ever-increasing precarity, do you ever think, hey, should we maybe profit off of this? Well, someone does, and they're our sponsor for this episode. BlackRock is a something-something investment, something-something fiduciary, something-something future. As an asset manager, they found a way to extract every possible cent off of every possible man, woman, child, genderqueer person, animal, vegetable, and mineral. They now have Black and brown people in their stock photos, so you know they're legit. And they've gifted us with this special one-time offer for you, the listener. If you just willingly give up your soul to BlackRock, they will still kill you, but kill you a little bit later. Hey, that's a steal. I'm a Black woman. Thank you, BlackRock, from all of us at Proles, because our sense of humor is a direct result of the trauma of the polycrisis. And without you, we might have clean air and an end to extraction, but we would also be less funny. And now back to the show. So as you guys are speaking, I'm hearing language like immigration, socialism, migration, proletariat, and that Brings me sort of to my next question, which is, what role does language play? I think that on the left, we walk a sort of fine line between policing other people's language or demanding that everybody has the correct sort of narrative, and also the acknowledgement that words mean things. And so what role does language play in terms of framing people's perceptions? What questions remain outside of the collective imaginary? What questions go unasked when our language is limited? What words get to mean what? Words like genocide, Zionism, ceasefire, right? Because there are plenty of liberals calling for a ceasefire, but I don't think that they mean what I mean when I say it. Words like resistance, words like fascism, who gets to decide? And if you guys could talk about what impact those decisions have.

Ameed Faleh: Yeah, definitely. And it's been a question that's been on my mind for a long time, you know, how language creates a reality and the back and forth relationship between language and reality. And I think the past year, I saw lots of people getting mired up in the question of language. Is Palestine, for example, and this is a very famous question locally, is Palestine a human cause or an Islamic cause? And I think Palestine in that sense encapsulates both the human and the Islamic. And the socialists, because you can find every contradiction within the paradigm of Palestine. So when people debate stuff like, is Palestine an Islamic cause? Yes, it is, because it holds a value for Muslims. And it's also— Israel is the most intensive form of capital and capital accumulation that history has ever seen. So it is a human cause. It is an Islamic cause. Sometimes language can create unnecessary barriers that need to be cut short, especially in how we conceptualize, you know, the struggle in Palestine. With regards to how language can be effective, like, for me, language creates these networks of solidarity. It creates, you know, a common ground on which, you know, both people— if I'm speaking to someone, we can agree on a base analysis that that we can talk about. It is important in the sense that we need to have a base so we can talk about Palestine. And I see this with lots of people. The question of, for example, the genocide in Gaza and the emphasis on the fact that it is a genocide also strips away native agency. Is that— I was coordinating an event past October, and it was titled One Year of Genocide. And I'm like, yes, it is one year of genocide, but it's also one year of resistance also. Gazans are not laying down to the floor just dying. They're also resisting.

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Ameed Faleh: Some of them with arms, some of them by taking care of their families while living in hellish conditions. Some of them help entire neighborhoods. They have these communal kitchens. Some of them, you know, go participate in civil defense activities. They put their lives on the line. So in that sense, the question of genocide, the question of a ceasefire, of resistance, and sometimes resistance, like the framing of how we view resistance, can also be counterproductive in as far as when people talk about Palestinian resistance, especially in the West, I want to say an overinflation of the capabilities of the resistance. So we're talking about people with locally made guns, locally made weapons, with training, yes, but the Gaza Strip is small. It's a miracle that the resistance in Gaza right now is ongoing a year and a half during a genocide. But we must contend with the fact that lots of capabilities of the resistance were destroyed. Lots of good leaders in the resistance were assassinated. And How we put this fine line of, or how Westerners put the fine line of victimizing Palestinians, because we are victims. We haven't seen justice for a century. And how we're resisting is a crucial question. I think language plays a huge role in it. So in that event, I put, I suggested one year of genocide and resistance. This way, we're not passive, but we're not also, you know, overly inflated in our capabilities as Palestinians because we're just a people. There are lots of shades of Palestinians. There are lots of stuff happening in Palestine that on the daily that they undermine our steadfastness as Palestinians. And I think in Gaza, in the West Bank, in '48. And I think when you focus too much on the military side of things, you know, the armed resistance, you miss these crucial aspects. You know, there's a genocide going on. And I've seen a lot of people expressing sympathy, expressing, you know, the fact that there is a genocide happening. But you see through the minute focus on the military side of things that, in a sense, it downplays the atrocities that are being committed in a way. I'm not saying it's a conscious thing. It's not a conscious thing. It's a subconscious thing. And I think it stems from a good place of heart. But we also must be careful in how we put these questions. Is it resistance? Is it genocide just without resistance? The question of also Zionism. Different people have different definitions of Zionism. And in definitional questions of— in language, we must go back to the source. And when you read the writings and the findings of the original Zionists who came, they were pretty explicit. We need to erase the Arabs. The remaining Arabs, we need to put an iron wall, a military iron wall, to the fact that they know they can't beat us, so they will just surrender. We need to expropriate their labor for the time being. Once we become more powerful, we don't need their labor and we can kick them out. The question of, you know, what is fascistic and what's not fascistic? You know, I've seen some people call Hamas fascistic. I don't know how. It is a very contentious thing because you see people that call Israel fascistic and Hamas being a liberation movement, which it is. And you see the other side of the coin, which is like Israel is socially liberal and an oasis of democracy, and Hamas is fascistic. In the sense of what is fascism and how is Hamas fascist? We must ask these questions. How is Israel fascist?

Cody O'Rourke: Yeah.

Ameed Faleh: Is Hamas really fascist? Is fighting for the land fascist? Is it an inherently fascist thing to fight for land, for emancipation? And I think when I say Western leftist, it's an umbrella term for lots of people. So, you know, those social democrat types that love saying that Hamas is fascist because it has an Islamic epistemology to it, they miss a very crucial point that in Palestine, it doesn't matter what ideology you have. If the long-term strategy is emancipation. You know, after liberation, we can debate these things. I have no problem debating them. But in the question of people nitpicking and preferring the PFLP over Hamas, or preferring this faction over the other, it's, I think, childish.

Jeremy: Well, it's not materialist either, because—

Ameed Faleh: It's not materialist at all.

Jeremy: Yeah, the PLFP is not in the position to have the strength that Hamas does.

Cody O'Rourke: Exactly.

Jeremy: So it is irrelevant whether you prefer them. They, they don't have the power to, to do what, what needs to be done in terms of resistance. And, you know, it's not just Social Democrats. I know you singled them out, but it's also, you know, ultras who believe that any argument in favor of a, of a state or some sort of like state entity as a form of liberation or resistance is inherently capitalist or statist or fascist or whatever they want to call it, and therefore not to be defended, you know, which is, again, not materialist and not serious by my estimation.

Ameed Faleh: I think if you tell this to the average Palestinian on the streets, they would just laugh at you, because we're not in a position to pick and choose. Hamas is part of us. It's part of our society. It's an inherent organic part of Palestinian society. It's not something imported. And I think when you call them fascists, you miss a very crucial point that they're the only significant force that is fighting Zionism in Palestine and trying to liberate Palestine. When you exclude and try kicking out Hamas from this equation, what are we left with? We're not left with much to speak about, and the cause is diluted to cater to a specific audience and a constituency when Palestine needs a mass support base. It needs a national front in Palestine and abroad, and it needs real unity. And within that, the question of language is just irrelevant to the, to the entire conversation at hand in Palestine. So yeah, language can be beneficial, It can be very harmful, can get us mired up in semantics that are not productive. And yeah, it plays a dual role. So language creates reality, but we also must know what this reality is and what we want reality to be.

Rae: I was just going to say also, for me, it's sort of very simple. I think that even if— which is, to be clear, this is not the case, nor is it my opinion that this is the case— but even if all of the If all of the worst things that we said about Palestinian people or Hamas specifically or whatever were true, and all of the best things that people said about Israel and Israelis were true, colonization is wrong. Right. And genocide is not a response to any of those, like, societal shortcomings.

Ameed Faleh: Yeah, exactly. You know, I think the question of us being socially backward and that somehow justifies That we can get killed en masse by some, I don't know, European or some, I don't know, some American flying an F-16 fighter jet. It's, it's, it's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. And I don't get it, but maybe because I'm at, I'm at like the receiving end of the bomb. I don't know.

Jeremy: Right. And, and I think people want— because they're used to consuming Fictional media to educate themselves about how the world works. This is not a new phenomenon. This is something that's, you know, been recorded and claimed for decades, that, that particularly the West is informed by fiction more than it is by facts. They want a perfect victim and they want a perfect sort of hero.

Rae: Mm-hmm.

Jeremy: And That is not the case anywhere. Do I wish that everywhere in the world all national liberation movements were socialist or communist or whatever? Yeah, absolutely. But are they? No. Does that make them indefensible? Obviously fucking not. So it doesn't really matter what the character, social character is of these resistance movements. They are resisting Settler colonialism and therefore should be supported and defended.

Ameed Faleh: Exactly. And within this very— it's a trend in every colonial setting that the colonized social shortcomings are amplified there. It's not a real term, but like it's barbaricized in a way that it becomes any societal shortcoming that we have, any real conversation about it, it's diluted into a camp where just because we have them, we deserve to be killed en masse, or people denying the real work we need to have as a colonized society. And we're not a perfect people. We don't need to be a perfect people to say, hey, we need to have a bit of justice for ourselves. We need to have people stop colonizing us. Stop carpet bombing us. We don't need to be perfect. We don't have to be perfect because no society is ever perfect.

Rae: And also, no societal imperfection justifies genocide. Like, we need to normalize the reality that genocide is always the wrong move. Like, what the fuck?

Jeremy: Exactly.

Ameed Faleh: Exactly. Genocide is not even a reaction to these quote unquote societal imperfections. It is an inherent trait of Israel. And it's going to do it whether we're branded as progressive or not by the West.

Cody O'Rourke: Right.

Ameed Faleh: It's going to do it.

Cody O'Rourke: One of the things that, you know, we're really confronted with is, I think, like we've all kind of, you know, alluded to, is that, you know, on the one hand, we recognize that the language is important and that it shapes and crafts our understanding of the world around us. But, you know, you also don't necessarily want to get so hung up on the semantics that We can't find points of unity. And I think that one of the things that we've tried to do as a collective is really kind of make that distinction between, are we critiquing individuals or are we critiquing institutions? And I think that that's also kind of an important thing to think about when we're trying to advance And kind of bring people into a fuller understanding of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism. Because when we critique individuals, that's completely different than critiquing institutions and movements, and certainly different online personalities who make their own brand off of being like professionals, for example. Yeah. So it's like, you know, when we see an email coming out from an NGO, it's important to understand when we're making that critique, it's also with the understanding that that email, that that language was chosen as a matter of policy, you know, that it had went through multiple drafts, that it had been through reviews and breakout sessions, and it's very intentional, you know, whereas If someone is using this kind of messy understanding of international law and human rights, might just be in their first or second year of college and they're just getting introduced to the Palestinian question of liberation, clearly those people deserve and need a different sort of engagement than institutions who are doing this as a matter of strategy and policy.

Rae: Right.

Cody O'Rourke: And I think that one of the things that we routinely are also confronted with is that there's a large part of organizing that is social. We get into these spaces because we're fighting for a common good. We're with friends and people that we share our vision. And we don't want to get into these spaces and then be critiqued But then also get kicked out of these spaces for being the rabble-rouser, being too radical. And so I think that there's a real issue of going, these movements that we're a part of, that yes, it's important that they're social, that they're engaging, that we're finding fulfillment out of it, that they don't end up becoming an end in themselves.

Rae: Right.

Cody O'Rourke: But it has to be a reminder that the Palestinian people are the reason that we reside in these formations. Because time and time again, we've said, hey, look, these are issues that we see that's happening. For example, there was this group that was doing some organizing here on the ground. The organization was called the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. Right. And one of their directors is a Zionist. You know, he wrote— Daniel Roth wrote an article in Jewish Currents talking about, you know, how he is a part of the Zionist movement. And so, you know, this was a group of people that were and are connected with Jewish Voice for Peace. Yeah, and had like members of several of the board members of Jewish Voice for Peace were actually founding members of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. So when we talked with Jewish Voice for Peace, it was like, hey, look at like the head of this organization that your board members are a part of wrote this long article about being a Zionist, that they're having like dinners with the World Zionist Organization inside of these Palestinian communities, like, this isn't right. You know, like, you can't call yourself an anti-Zionist organization, but then, like, having your people also under the banner of Jewish Voice for Peace, like, engaged in this Zionist propaganda. And it's hard, I think, for people to be willing to confront, I think, these spaces Because of the backlash that it could have for yourself as an individual, for your organizing agenda. So I think that you have to understand that there's certainly value in it. There's risk in it. And ultimately, understanding when to challenge language in the production really comes down to reminding yourself that, you know, you're doing this because it's inherently wrapped up with— Yeah.

Rae: As we start to close this Main Feed episode, I guess the final question that I think is worth speaking to is, could you describe a little bit about Palestine's economy, both in the last several years and now recently?

Ameed Faleh: That's a great question. And when we talk about Palestine's economy, we must go back To the 1900s, and we're going to tackle. I guess it's going to be a long answer. We're going to tackle two portions: the Zionist economy and the Palestinian economy. And starting with the Zionist economy is crucial also to understanding the Palestinian economy. For Palestinians, like you know, for the longest time, just like any other place in the world, we did sustenance farming as a part of a larger trend. The Arab region was open to European markets, so. Our own modes of production were geared towards not sustenance farming, but cash crop farming. And it is crucial to understand Zionism within that shift from sustenance to cash crop. When people think of the Zionist movement, they think of this movement that was destined to succeed for some reason. And I think through the process of just relaying this history, we would see that the Zionist movement had as much of a chance of failure as it did of success. And it's only through the institutions that supported them that they succeeded. So it ran through 6 primary phases in its own economy and its own labor relations with Palestinians. It ran the first phase, 1882. Jews came in from primarily Eastern Europe. They came in wanting a European lifestyle, and they came in as like curious settlers that wanted to settle this land. Like, they were genuinely curious about, you know, what Palestine is. So they bought land, they had farms, they cooperated with Palestinians, and they sort of copied their agricultural style. So they conducted, you know, dry crop farming. Our methods of dry crop farming and the crops we grew and our own climate didn't meet the standard of living that they were accustomed to as first Europeans, second urbanites. It's hard to convince an urbanite to adopt a rural lifestyle, especially in the Arab region. And within that, lots of Jews left. The second phase started around the 1890s to the 1900s, it was marked by the first institutional sort of support for Zionism, the first real support for it. And it's through the intervention of Baron de Edmund Rothschild. And he rescued this, the issue of labor that those European urbanite settlers can't farm and they don't want to farm. And he funded ethnic plantations. Ethnic plantation colonies all around the place. So Palestinians would work on these plantations, they would get a wage, and yeah. And it relied on very minimal Jewish labor. And, you know, it was completely sort of afloat by Palestinian wage labor. And eventually it sort of transformed to the third phase where Those ethnic plantations were not making a profit despite paying Palestinians a meager amount of money for the cash crops. So support for it by Baron de Edmund Rothschild was dropped basically. And lots of settlers during that period that came, they left again. And for its part, what's the role of the World Zionist Organization in this? They actually refused to help the settlers in Palestine. They did not want to purchase land before receiving political guarantees from the imperial powers, Britain, France, Germany, or the Ottoman Empire for the continuation of the Zionist project. So they said the Zionist project is unsustainable in this condition because we have no political guarantee that the Ottoman Empire or anyone else will support our endeavor financially and politically. So in that phase, it was the Zionist project seemed to have stopped kind of. And we're talking about the 1900s. The 4th phase was in the 1900s to 1905. And it was marked by those remaining settlers embracing the quote-unquote Arab wages in the fledgling plantations that were no longer supported by anyone. And they lived a quote-unquote Arab lifestyle. So they were slowly getting accustomed to the conditions of Palestine in a sense. But again, these attempts were abandoned and the labor question was put in both until like 1905 to 1909, where the concept of the Hebrew conquest of labor was sort of cemented in Zionist political thought, whereby the modality of settlement changed from being on an ethnic plantation to a pure settlement, pure Jewish Israeli settlement. Through Jewish hands. And they vehemently rejected Arab labor. But in a sense, and this is very sort of weird and paradoxical, they also embraced Arab labor because the Yemeni Jews who came to Palestine, they were regarded as Arab, but also Jewish. So for the European urbanite Jew, that came to Palestine and didn't want to get his hands dirty in the dirt, I guess, and didn't want to farm, they employed the Yemeni Jews because the climate in this region is sort of similar. You know, the Yemeni Jews can get accustomed to the Palestinian lifestyle much better than any European can. And in this sense, it also had the limited success. It didn't convince plantation owners to transform their plantation to a pure settlement despite employing Yemeni labor in that period. And when we talk about Yemeni labor, it's not like thousands of laborers, hundreds, small amount. They were in small numbers still. They were still more expensive than Palestinian labor. You know, the plantation, the Jewish plantation owners were like, no, we're not going to because they're expensive. This endeavor failed until the 6th phase where the World Zionist Organization, 1909 to 1920, lots of stuff happened during this period. They got their political guarantee, the Balfour Declaration, the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, British occupation of Palestine. And the World Zionist Organization actually emulated a sort of a model of settlement from Prussia, which is the Prussian Junker model of settlement, where it put a certain landed elite in control of the micromanaging of labor, but also making the World Zionist Organization buy the land, give them the land, and tell them, you know, that you need to only employ Jews in this. This last endeavor sort of rested on 3 pillars: internal colonization, land nationalization, and cooperatives. So they established cooperatives, which were mistakenly thought by Marxists of the period for them to be socialist. And this also, you know, gave them political leeway in the world stage. And within that, Palestinian labor was rendered a surplus. Therefore, we were ripe for genocide. 1948 happened. And within that, one can see the through lines in Gaza. Ever since 2005, when Gaza was liberated, when Israel withdrew from Gaza, the question of Gazan labor was denied by Israelis. So Gazans used to go to '48, And work, but within 2005 it was closed off. No one was was allowed in in 48, and you know Gazans were rendered a surplus. And within that, you know, everyone saw the the horrific scenes of you know the 2008-2009 war aggression. They saw the 2014 aggression. They're seeing a genocide right now happening. And when you're talking about the West Bank, Israel is still unable to solve the labor question in the West Bank. This is why the West Bank is not being under genocide in the same intensity that Gaza is, because they're still reliant on West Bank labor despite the closures, the post-October 7th closures. They're still reliant on it. The working hands of Palestinians are crucial for the Zionist economy, and they can't abandon this for the time being. They tried importing, you know, foreign labor from East Asia, from parts of Africa, but it was more expensive. It was inefficient for them. So they're still reliant on Palestinian labor because it's a commuting labor. So Palestinians go in, they work, and they go back home. But within, you know, importing migrant labor, there is a lot of stuff that's complex about it. You know, finding a place for them, being legally registered, etc., etc. It costs both the Israeli business owner and the state, the entity, a lot. And through this, we can explain how the Palestinian economy is, which is not an economy. It's multiple economies. Even in the West Bank, it's multiple economies. We have the north of the West Bank, the south of the West Bank, we have '48, we have Gaza. So, and in one article by a Palestinian economist named Rashid Khalidi, he derided the notion of a Palestinian economy. He's saying basically, no, there's no such thing as a unified Palestinian economy. Because when you look at the economy of the West Bank, it's radically different from Gaza. It's radically different from '48. The labor question in the West Bank is different from Gaza. It's different from '48. But through everything, I think there's a through line in those economies is that there is a sense of de-development. They undermine native institutions. They undermine any capacity for autonomy for the native, you know, agriculture, industries. Most famously, you know, the Oslo Accords also put a dent in any meaningful agricultural or industrial prospects of the West Bank because the Paris Protocols were ratified. It puts us in an internationally recognized status quo that isn't so different from the status quo we were in under military occupation, which is like a customs union between the PA and the Palestinian Authority and Israel, as set a VAT tax rate that the PA simply agreed to. It's a fixed VAT rate from the '90s. It put dents into the creation of a national currency. It put dents into lots of stuff that were under military occupation. And it's now internationally recognized as a ratified agreement, which is scary. It puts us in a very vulnerable position because the PLO agreed to this, and the PLO is supposed to represent the Palestinian people. And yeah, we're trapped between a rock and a hard place in that sense. But also the question of Oslo designating areas as A, B, and C. A being under full Palestinian security and administrative control, B being under Palestinian administrative control, but Israeli military control, and C, fully under Israeli administrative and military control. It also puts a dent to any agricultural prospects of the West Bank. The West Bank is a mountainous place, but it's also a very fertile place. Traditionally, it's a very fertile area. It feeds into the larger ecosystem of the Levant. And, you know, I heard one story by a researcher that loves agroecology that, you know, the sesame that was grown in Jenin found its way to Europe. And apparently some French king, like, was eating, was using sesame grown in Palestine. And in that sense, Palestine is part of a larger worldwide, previously mercantile but now capitalist economy. And the laws of neoliberalism and how it's enforced through violence and force, very much prevalent in Palestine. And within that, As I said before, Palestine encapsulates every struggle in the world. We're a testing ground for neoliberalism. We're a testing ground for everything that is under the sun, short of a nuke.

Rae: Thank you so much for sharing all of that and for helping to sort of concretize something that we were talking about earlier of the tensions in the inherent contradictions of these Zionist project, as well as the ways in which rendering the labor and participation of Palestinian people in different regions correlates with the escalation of genocidal violence. I think it's really devastating to hear and also very helpful for listeners to sort of contextualize that relationship and this sort of like parasitic nature of the Zionist entity and the devastating and ongoing and terrible Truly terrible impact that this has and will continue to have on Palestinians, Palestinian people, and Palestinian land for as long as this project is allowed to continue. As we come into closing, I guess the obvious question that so many listeners had in the Patreon and through our social media is like, how can people continue to help? What role does our own attachment to our comfort play in Our inability to escalate our support? And then I guess the last piece of that is, are there actions that people are taking or have taken, and you've both alluded to this during this conversation, with the intention to support that are harmful or counterproductive?

Cody O'Rourke: Yes. So the question of what can folks do to help out Palestinian revolution? Yeah, I mean, I think certainly committing yourself to studying, as you put it, And I think that that can sound kind of fluffy in a way, but the reality of it is, is that there's a lot of folks that are trying to help out Palestinians, but their actions aren't rooted in decolonial praxis. It's not anti-capitalist. It's certainly not anti-imperialist. And so in various ways, if you don't engage with Educating yourself about the real nature of what's happening, you can disrupt a lot of what Palestinians are trying to do in terms of sharing their narrative, sharing their analysis. So I think the first step is really to engage in what's really happening. And I know that can sound kind of cliché, but I think it's important to To study the folks like Fanon, like Lenin, like Marx, et cetera, et cetera, to get a basic understanding of what's happening, because there's a lot of folks that don't. And of course, it is difficult, I think, at times to ask Palestinians, what should we do next? Because I think a lot of Palestinians, Yeah. You know, certainly here are frustrated, because what people don't realize is that, you know, the people in Gaza, people in the West Bank, people in East Jerusalem, they have social media. You know, they're watching what, you know, people are saying, what actions they're taking, you know? So when people are having poetry reading contests, you know, and people in Gaza are starving to death and you're not sharing their GoFundMe campaigns, it's like, well, what is that about? Well, you say that you're wanting to help out, but what material ways are you helping out? Because so much of the activism outside of us is about how can we be Palestinian in public, or how can we be So it's about being visible in spaces in the United States. How can Palestinians be visible in the university? Whereas Palestinians here need a disruption of the material ways that finances flow. And one of the things that the Good Shepherd Collective has been pushing forward is trying to get some of these nonprofits that finance the work here to have their 501 status dissolved in the United States and their charitable status revoked in Canada. We've been working with some folks in Canada for several years, and we've made headway, you know, where several of the organizations in Canada that enjoyed nonprofit status, you know, had their charitable status revoked. So it's really about, like, understanding, like, how do we disrupt the structures Rather than doing things symbolically, and you know, and that's not to say that there's not value in you know these these cultural actions around Palestinian heritage and culture. But you know, that can't be the base of your organizing. It really has to be. Move towards how do we get Palestinian communities material assistance, financial assistance? How can our actions actually disrupt the legal structures that facilitate imperialism? How do we change policy even with inside of the smaller institutions that we're a part of that are complacent in this? And I think a lot of this has to do with a lot of our self-reflection because, you know, it is hard for— because there's such a power dynamic, such a power imbalance. You know, I've, over the years, I've watched so many, so many internationals come here and go, what do we need to do differently? And it's really kind of a loaded question because on the one hand, you know, the Palestinian speaker will always say like, If I tell the truth, if I tell the truth, then this group might not come back. If I'm honest, if I'm blunt, I might not get invited into the next space. What can we do can be such a loaded question. What we can do is really about studying and understanding those dynamics. We also have to take responsibility for ourselves.

Ameed Faleh: Just like, um, adding on to Cody's comments about that, like Palestinians, people on the ground, you know, I don't call myself a person on the ground, even though I live in Palestine, because it also puts a certain heroism into this. And I don't like this attitude of Palestinians being looked upon as either heroes or victims, you know, or just normal people. I think that's a very important point. I think no Palestinian has a ready-made recipe for what people should do. People should do what feels right, what feels that brings material change, what is actually beneficial. And as Cody said, like, if Palestinians are blunt, they're gonna say stuff that people will not like or will take issue with. And in such devastating genocide. Palestinians living in Palestine are as clueless about what to do as anyone else. And I think that should be realized through everything, is that the average Palestinian on the street is as clueless about the future, the present, as anyone else, especially in the West Bank. I guess the point I want to get across is that do what feels material. We appreciate the symbolic. We appreciate The poetry classes we appreciate. I saw some event that people like recreated Ghassan Kanafani's office. I appreciate it, but we need to move beyond the symbolic because the intensity of the genocide, the intensity of the logic of elimination by Zionist colonialism necessitates that there needs to be real material action on the ground. One notable example of this is Palestine Action. They're moving beyond the symbolic.

Rae: Oh, thank you so much for that. And to close out, a final question from a listener. What is your favorite Palestinian food?

Cody O'Rourke: Wow, it's hard to narrow it down just to one. You know what I really like is watahineb. It's basically like grape leaves that's wrapped around rice, and sometimes it has meat in it. I don't know what it is, but it's like, if I can get a plate of those, I'll I'll eat them all.

Ameed Faleh: For me, it sounds weird in English, but it's called ouzi. And ouzi sounds disgusting, but it's actually a really good dish. It's basically spiced rice with minced meat, lots of vegetables. And yeah, it's an amazing, amazing, amazing dish. Definitely my top first. Like, I can never get tired. Just eat ouzi all day.

Cody O'Rourke: For me.

Rae: Thank you, guys. And for those of you who are able, please join our Patreon and stick around for the bonus episode.

Jeremy: That about does it for this episode. Thank you so much to Ameed and Cody for giving us all that good information and some sense of, I guess, direction on where to go now. Also, to our listeners and Patreon subscribers, Some of you may have noticed that your names are not being read in spite of the fact that you have signed up for our Patreon, and that is because we have gotten so many, uh, in to the tune of hundreds.

Rae: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Jeremy: Yes, thank you so much that we feel like it would be somewhat tedious to read them all at once. So we are trying to do them in, uh, chunks. The, the influx has slowed down to some degree, so eventually we will catch up. So I apologize if you signed up expecting to hear your name on the next episode. We will certainly get to you. But the newest ones in terms of what we have selected are Sergei, Russell, Frida, Matt, Jon, Bilbo Swaggins 43, Benji Schoendorf. Thank you. Rex, Jason P., Chris Nix, Welfare State, Anthony Le Revolutionnaire Ordinaire, Sarah, Dan, D., Brandon, FTW All Day, Melancholic, Michael IFT, Jorge. Sarah, Thomas, John, Gabriel, and Nolan. And we want to give a very special shout out to our Vanguard patrons: The Winking Cossack, Talking Socks, Carlos Marx, and Comrade Chihuahua. Once again, if you'd like to subscribe, you can do so at patreon.com/prolespod for free. If you have questions, comments, or episode ideas, please email us at prolespod@outlook.com. Please follow, review, like, all that algorithm stuff, and we will see you in 2 weeks. May the specter haunt your streets, and solidarity forever.

Rae: Death to America and to Israel.

Cody O'Rourke: They envision the entire world Sovietized. Communist style.

Rae: Communist style. Communist style. Communist style. Communist style.

Cody O'Rourke: Stalin.

Rae: Soviet retro, communist style. Communist style. Soviet retro, communist style. Communist style. Soviet retro. Soviet retro. Communist style. Communist style. Soviet retro. Communist style. Communist style. Soviet retro. Communist style. Communist style. Soviet retro. Communist style.

Cody O'Rourke: Popular star.

Rae: We will bring back Stalin. Stalin. Stalin. We will bring back Stalin.

Jeremy: So we kind of talked about this a bit or hinted at it during the main feed episode, but what organizations do you two feel like are worth supporting, backing materially, financially, you know, in whatever ways can be done by our listeners? And then also, what organizations which support the Zionist entity should we be targeting for direct action sort of in the inverse? So I suppose if people are in the local area where these organizations are based, they can kind of focus their attention on those?

Cody O'Rourke: Sure. Well, I mean, I can start with that. I, you know, one of the things that we've been trying to do is we've really been trying to uplift these, just these individual Gaza campaigns. And there's a couple of organizations, Gaza Funds and Workshops for Gaza. They're 2 organizations that, you know, work to actually vet some of these GoFundMes. Because right now, I mean, just ensuring these families have food, you know, is so much more important than any sort of, like, organizational building right now, you know?

Rae: I think that people outside don't understand the ways in which, like, every fundraising effort, like, Palestinians are extorted at absolutely every level. Everyone is taking a cut. Inflation is so crazy that a statistic that a person in Gaza that I know communicated to me was that their small family of just 4 people, 2 adults and 2 children, were requiring about $500 per week just to survive.

Cody O'Rourke: Yeah, no, for sure. And in some cases, it's even more depending on which neighborhood you're at in Gaza. And I think that It's just so important at so many different levels to give to families in Gaza right now. There's the practical one of, like you said, like just ensuring families can eat. But there's also that ideological thing of going like, no, we're not going to keep investing in these liberal NGO structures, you know?

Rae: Yes.

Cody O'Rourke: So like not giving to them, it also creates this culture of let's build a culture that's outside of these state regulations, you know, to the best we can. And of course, GoFundMe and these other, these other things, you know, they're still regulated by the state. And there's been several Gaza campaigns that have been deplatformed. And even us as an organization, we've been deplatformed.

Rae: Also, the irony of so many people saying, well, I feel nervous because I don't know which of these GoFundMes are legitimate. I don't know which of these families are real. And I'm like, well, you know that all these NGOs are not.

Cody O'Rourke: So, right. Yeah. And I think that that's the other piece of it is, is that, you know, just donating to these, it also fights against, like, you know, racism in a way of like, why can't a Palestinian that's in Gaza just start up a GoFundMe page? Like, why do they need validation in so many different ways as opposed to people in the United States? Oh, you know, like this person has cancer. We don't go through the same vetting process.

Rae: Right.

Cody O'Rourke: that Palestinians are subjected to. There's also that part of it of just donating to these campaigns also kind of disrupts that part of it as well.

Rae: And kind of feeds into what we were talking about before, the narrative of the perfect victim, right? You hear stories of people, or I have experienced stories of people that say, oh, well, this person that I was donating to, they said that they had 8 children, but they have 6. It's like, who the fuck cares? Are you fucking serious right now?

Cody O'Rourke: Yeah.

Rae: Like, you are looking to discredit people on any— first of all, people who are largely using Google Translate to communicate to people, like, why do I care?

Ameed Faleh: Plus, and I'm speaking about Palestinian culture, I think the GoFundMe culture that's prevalent in America is not prevalent in Palestine. Like, even between relatives, if someone is struggling financially, they won't ask for help. We have this sort of view that if you ask for monetary help, you're begging. So in that sense, when somebody sets up a GoFundMe, they must have gone through a lot of shit to finally actually set up the GoFundMe. We come from that culture. It's not easy for us to ask for money. Money is a very sensitive issue. And when people say, well, I don't know what's fake and what's not, As Cody said, you wouldn't ask that of a European, you wouldn't ask that of an American. It's the notion that we are somehow, even if implicitly, beggars, and we're not. Money in Palestine for Palestinians is a very sensitive issue, and lots of people who set up GoFundMes and lots of people that I talked to went through hell before setting up the GoFundMe. Now, which is real, which is fake? I don't know which American GoFundMe is real and which one is fake.

Rae: Right.

Ameed Faleh: Maybe that needs to be answered first.

Rae: And again, all of the organizations that we've spoken about before that Westerners sort of implicitly trust are, to some degree, I don't want to say fraudulent in that the organizations themselves don't exist, but like launder money for the Zionist entity. And so like those organizations are fake. Those organizations and the NGO industrial complex in aggregate exist to perpetuate their own existence. Not to perpetuate liberation. So you already know that that's fake. I would put my trust in somebody who's asking me directly for their family than I would in this large organization that I already know does not exist for a liberatory purpose. This is my personal opinion.

Cody O'Rourke: No, absolutely. Yeah.

Ameed Faleh: And like, aside from GoFundMes, Palestine Action does a lot of stuff on the ground. They set up a fund. You can, anyone can chip into it. To contribute to any lawyer expenses they might incur, anything they might incur in their advocacy missions, I want to say, because they are, for all intents and purposes, missions. And lots of people put their entire life and careers on the line for this type of stuff, and I think it's important to aid them and help them. It's a very noble cause. It challenges state hegemony. It challenges the military-industrial complex that Israel has built in the West and with the West. And I think it's a very, very noble cause. So Palestine Action, GoFundMes. There are also lots of accounts on Twitter, on Instagram. One that comes to mind is called Ahl Ghazi. It basically distributes food to the people of Gaza. It's a very reputable grassroots organization, and they do a lot of good stuff on the ground. Definitely.

Jeremy: We just have the other side of it, like the organizations that we should be resisting, I suppose.

Rae: Sure.

Cody O'Rourke: Yeah. So one of the main organizations actually in the United States, it's called the Central Fund of Israel. It's registered in New York. It has a 501 status. And they kind of act as, in the nonprofit world, as what they call a physical sponsor. They raise money for all of these other kind of like non-registered organizations in Israel. So, you know, for those people who are in New York, like that's clearly a good target, but it can't just be a protest. Like people have to submit complaints to the Attorney General to actually have them lose their status because it does make a difference, you know, to think about what are the laws and the policies that we can change. There's others as well that are registered in the United States that I think people should also focus on. One is called the Hebron Fund, and again, it's also registered in New York as a 501, and the Attorney General can actually revoke the status of those The Hebron Fund is an organization that raises money for the settler community in Hebron, which is one of the more radical type of settler communities. It's home to, of, oh, Ameed, who's the, who's the, who's that settler from Hebron? Itamar. Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Ameed Faleh: Itamar Ben-Gvir. There are a lot of well-known settler names, so I was confused.

Cody O'Rourke: Yeah. So this is an organization that really that also brings in millions and millions of dollars to the settler community in Hebron, which of course, like, has these violent campaigns against the people there in the Old City of Hebron, which I lived there for, like, several years. Ater Hakohanim, this is an organization that tries to buy Palestinian lands in East Jerusalem, files legal injunctions against Palestinian homeowners to try to take over their homes. And then another one is the Ir David Foundation, which is another organization that works explicitly in the Palestinian area of East Jerusalem in a community called Silwan. They also raise in millions of dollars to try to push Palestinians out of their homes. And these are all, again, all organizations that are completely legal and enjoying all the benefits that comes with being a nonprofit entity in the United States and in Canada and in probably the UK as well. And you can find a lot of that information on defundracism.org.