A Killing Peace w/ Rasha Abdulhadi (Part Two) (04/25/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Rasha Abdulhadi about the last six months in the escalation of genocidal violence against the people of Palestine, what has and hasn’t changed since the last time Rasha spoke with us on October 13th, and why appeals to “peace” are not the same as calls for liberation.
This is Part Two of our conversation with Rasha. Find Part One here.
As always, support Death Panel at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod
Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
Rasha Abdulhadi 0:01
There is an urgency for us to unlearn a fascination with and dependency on the actions of the powerful with an expectation that their response or their words are what matter to our future or our survival. Because once you begin to realize that you don't have to wait and in fact should not wait for someone else to fix things, to save you, to save other people, just an endless field of possibilities opens up.
[ Intro music ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:07
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Today is Part Two of our conversation with Rasha Abdulhadi. If you haven't heard part one, make sure to go back and listen to that first, as today we'll be picking up right where we left off last week. You can find part one in the public feed as well as a full transcript for parts one and two, at deathpanel.net. There's a link in the description. With that, here's the rest of our conversation.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:02
What I feel like this points to in some ways is actually the power of storytelling. I think a lot of people are searching for the question of like, what is -- what is it that perpetuates genocide, right? Is it the money that flows through it? Is it the the intent? Is it the repetition, right? Is it the narrative? And obviously the answer is all of these things, but often the narrative, and the power of the story that's being told, is downplayed and treated as if it's not really important.
And one of the things that this brings to mind is, you know, that -- I'd be curious if you're interested in speaking on this kind of the -- we talked about it a little bit the last time, the kind of translation of genocide into humanitarian crisis. And that's been something that has been very common, right. And ties into sort of the discussion we've been having, again, about designated speakers, right, on crisis and how those frameworks, as they're put out from those contexts and standpoints, do things in the world, right, and influence other positions that are repeated. These are how ideas spread, right. This is social reproduction. And there, I think has been real just sort of ubiquity to the language of humanitarian crisis and humanitarian, we need humanitarian relief.
And I just wonder if you could sort of speak on that aspect of normalization, ultimately, because it sort of takes it out of -- you know, I think last time we talked about it relative to natural disasters and sort of taking it out of the context of direct violence, portraying it as indirect. But I think there is an aspect of it that speaks more towards like a self soothing mechanism of settler comfort, if that makes sense, because it's also a lessening of US complicity, or British complicity, or Canadian complicity, to actually call this a humanitarian crisis too.
So it's -- you know, we always think about it in terms of like, well, how is it making Israel look, but I think that move isn't just about making Israel look better and covering for the genocide, I think it also has this kind of mirror where it reflects back on the settler imperial core and lessens those sharp edges a little bit in the process.
Rasha Abdulhadi 4:48
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. If you're listening to this podcast in English, the chances are very high that your taxes are paying for the bombs and the bullets that are murdering Palestinians and leveling Gaza, that are part of pogroms escalating again, in the West Bank, decimating villages, whole families, including increased siege in the capital of Ramallah. Yeah, so settlers everywhere are implicated. Every one of us - me too. We are recording this on April 14. Tomorrow is tax filing deadline in the US settler colony.
And that money -- I think every person -- I would really like every one of us, I include myself, Palestinians do not exempt ourselves from this, please do not think we exempt you. Our money pays for genocide. Every bomb dropped on Gaza is handcrafted in the United States. The planes that drop those bombs could not run without parts from the UK and Germany. Every other settler colony - Canada, Australia are implicated, either directly in terms of material pieces that run the literal death machines, or their money pays for those parts and munitions.
Something I meant to mention earlier - if the United States, the US settler colony, stopped sending billions of dollars of weapons and money to the genocidal project murdering Palestinians every month, if they stopped sending billions every month, genocide would stop. The world is running out of bombs and bullets. That's how much munition has been emptied into the buildings and bodies of Palestine and Palestinians in the Gaza. The settler apartheid state was at one point using leftover munitions from US settler surplus from the Korean War in the 1950s, because they had run out of other munitions.
If we speak about the layers of Imperial War, right, and how deeply implicated the settler colony is. US troops are there. They've been sighted there since November. UK troops are there. The UK won't deny it. They won't confirm it, but they won't deny it. And Palestinians have reported seeing both since early November. So yes, these nice words about who counts as human, I'll be honest, the language almost doesn't affect me anymore.
At one point, one of the representatives of Genocide Joe's regime was speaking at a press briefing at that whitest of houses, used the phrase "final solution" in reference to policies and strategies in Gaza and Palestine.
And everyone was like really up in arms online about it like, oh, she said the thing, it's super Nazi time, that's the genocide language.
Look, they could call it a final solution. They could call it peace on earth. Genocide has been happening for 100 plus years, whatever language settlers use for it.
And it's -- I find the outrage over those terms as equally exhausting as the blithe, easily comforted optimism of people who respond to ceasefire, because it -- to me, it is -- it's still an indication of this -- of where people's focus is, like the institutions can capture you, not just via your consent, and your enthusiastic participation, they can capture all of us via our commitment, our obsession, and our impulse to keep fighting with them, and to keep paying attention to them, either correctively, or to fix them. And I think this is a mistake.
I'm not saying we shouldn't pay attention at all or know what's happening, but I don't think it's a worthy use of our energy. They are offering it sometimes intentionally as heat sinks for our energy. They'll offer individuals or particular news items as a way to allow for a discharge of emotion. And this is where I think paying attention to art and affect and performance can be very instructive. I think a lot about things I've learned from like Augusto Boal or Paulo Freire about theater of the oppressed, strategies that work against catharsis.
And I really -- maybe this is too existential for some folks, but let's go there. I would love to invite everyone to start training themselves away from catharsis, because it's a great way of discharging the energy that could otherwise be used for action, or for relationship building. I'm not saying don't find relief.
But there are a lot of invitations that we're going to be given, that we have been given, to engage in settler feelings, in -- I was writing to a younger Iraqi technologist who was like -- had a lot of feelings and thoughts about people's responses to the targeted assassination of the World Central Kitchen aid workers and the other aid workers, you know, and this kind of question about like, oh, maybe this will be this turning moment. And oh, people will care, it seems like maybe they'll care, or I hope they'll care or -- that moment of intensity of response to the murder of the aid workers, including the aid workers from World Central Kitchen, that froth of non-Palestinian emotion -- and I say that because if people were paying attention to what Palestinians were saying, they would have noticed a different tone and a different perspective.
And again, that is what I encourage people to look at, in these moments, get less busy with your own opinions than you do with paying attention to what Palestinians are doing and saying. But I described it to this person I was talking to as an exhalation of settler emotion that we were witnessing, and that that cathartic release of emotion, finally, here were some people who were grievable [laughs] is not something that we should mistake for some kind of watershed transformative moment. It's just an exhalation of settler feelings.
Similarly, we can look at the intracommunal settler conflicts within the genocidal colonial state occupying Palestine, and look at certain even more radical or conservative religious settlers who have been "protesting" because they don't want to be drafted. They've previously been exempt from military draft. They don't want to be drafted to implement the genocide that maintains their settler apartheid existence, their genocidal utopia. They want to keep their subsidies from the settler state. That's what's at stake for them. But they don't want to serve in the military to do the dirty work of the genocide to maintain the state that they so long for.
And those confrontations have gotten pretty intense. People have been -- protesters have been run over with cars. It is a very familiar scene to protests here in this settler colony. But we should not mistake that. We who care about Palestinian survival, Palestinian liberation, should not confuse that for any disagreement among settlers, about their fundamental commitments to the settler colonial project.
I feel like we could do a word analysis of me talking on this episode, and it's just going to be 60% me saying settler colonialism [Beatrice laughing]. And I know that there's a whole like category of people who are so resistant to even un-knowing settler colonial worlds, that it'll just flow off of them like water, they won't be able to really process it.
But I really -- it's essential. We must unlearn settler colonialism if we want to keep each other alive, not just in Palestine. I think that the settler colonial project here has proven it is incapable of creating a more perfect union that will keep even settlers alive, much less Native peoples who were colonized, displaced, have survived mass eliminationist, mass -- multiple campaigns of eliminationist violence and displacement, and still exist and still fight and still insist on land back and liberation. The abandonment of any project of life-making worldwide must be addressed. And I do not know how to say it any more simply than that.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 14:49
You know, interestingly enough, there's a researcher in the field of peace studies, as it's called, who's known as the father of peace studies, Johan Galtung. And he's one of the original sort of theorists of structural violence, but he also has these two framings of peace. He spends a lot of time in his work talking about what peace is, and whether -- and what violence is and whether accurate descriptions matter. And he talks about “positive” and “negative peace” being these two sort of very separate things that are often conflated. And negative peace is the absence of violence, it's that something has been taken away, a ceasefire has been enacted, right?
Rasha Abdulhadi 15:38
Allegedly [laughing].
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 15:39
Allegedly, right. You know, it's -- it's like, it's negative, because something undesirable or violent has stopped happening, right? That's negative peace. Positive peace, though, is about the restoration of relationships. It's about creating social systems and meeting people's needs. And so ultimately, what is actually kind of funny about invocations of needing peace in the Middle East, right, which is such a sort of banner slogan of the 90s -- and we're still in the hangover of that framework, right -- you know, what there only ever sort of has been on the table is negative peace. And I think what you're pointing to is that the destruction of the settler colonial mode is obviously crucial and important, and part of it right, but also, there's a lot of sort of building involved that needs to happen. And there's no guarantee you don't repeat the same mistakes without sitting in the contradictions and friction. And I think these sort of moments that you've been pointing out, are really important. This shouldn't make -- I hope this doesn't make anyone feel like their actions don't matter, if that makes sense. I think you put it as like people should be running towards the friction and running towards Gaza. And I think that's kind of what you were getting at around the point around catharsis, you know, you're saying don't -- don't be satisfied that XYZ has happened, and that will be the line in the sand. Don't slow your momentum, right?
Rasha Abdulhadi 17:22
Yeah. Can I offer a reflection? So I studied sociology and international politics at the University of Chicago. So I could pull out a citation too. I don't think negative piece exists. I just don't. I understand the rhetorical framework of it. But in implementation, I don't think it exists. I think of something like Norbert Elias' Civilizing Process, which is a text that has been deployed for many uses. But something that was really valuable to me about engaging with that text as a young person studying politics and social movements beyond the nation state was the -- anything that might be called a negative peace, the absence of certain kinds of violence, exists within this evacuated zone that requires violence to push a margin outward, that the civilizing process involves creating some sort of core in which a more perfect union, a utopia, you know, a good life can be created that could be called civilized. And but that existence is always dependent upon the boundary of what gets called civilized. And at that boundary, there is always tremendous violence to maintain that border. And so negative peace never exists, I don't think. I have not seen where it exists without the creation of a boundary. It exists as the location and not a state of being.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 19:08
Oh, for sure. Yeah. Because it's about the cessation of a concrete -- you know, like his definition of peace is like the absence of violence.
Rasha Abdulhadi 19:16
Right. I think the central question for me though, is the violence ceases for whom? And, yeah, I think the work of liberation is to make a positive peace. I think that this is a project that abolitionists, among many others, are often engaged in imagining, people who imagine social orders beyond ethno nationalism, are imagining these worlds and in many cases, practicing them.
I want to read a quote, actually, that feels like it feels relevant to this question of like action and time and hope and uncertainty. This is from an essay by Palestinian writer, Fargo Tbakhi. It was published in Protean Magazine in December, early December. It is an essay on craft. And so really thinking about writing in a time of genocide, but also about action and liberation. And this is a quote that is with me a lot, as I think about what is possible, and how we orient our actions towards liberation and how we orient our understanding of liberation in time and space. And so, Fargo says,
We might be nearer to the end of revolution than the beginning, we might be nearer liberation than defeat, but our experience and our actions exist within the frame, we can see, the frame of the long middle. Liberation is the end, but it is a geographical end rather than a temporal one, a soil and not an hour. We move towards it, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but always. It is the location by which we orient our movement. We know it because it gets closer, not necessarily because it comes sooner.
And there are two other Palestinians I want to quote, that feel in conversation with this, that really just ring inside of me, as I try to orient myself to what is possible, and what to pay attention to, and to stay grounded to act. And one of them is Abdaljawad Omar, who's written amazing articles, including one dismantling Judith Butler's “Compass of Mourning.” But Abdaljawad is based in the West Bank and has observed that in this particular kind of informal resistance engagement with a settler colonial state, all Palestinian resistance has to do is not lose and not give up in order to win. And we continue to see that happening. And that happens independent of our actions, even though there are things that we can do to ease and support Palestinian resistance and liberation, in terms of making genocide more difficult to implement. But that, to me, is a very helpful grounding in moments where maybe it feels like I don't know what to do, or I don't know what the most important thing to do is, or I am not certain if I'm doing enough, or whether what I'm doing will accomplish enough.
And the other part is Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, who is a plastic surgeon who worked in Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza for many weeks, at the early part of the escalated genocide. After October, he went from London to Gaza, as he had done many times before, during times of escalated genocide.
He spoke after coming back with Diana Buttu, who is also Palestinian, on the Al-Shabaka podcast. And he was speaking about the tremendous bravery of his colleagues, and what it meant to lose them at the hands of a murderous, genocidal state, in the midst of their bravery and commitment to keeping other Palestinians alive, and their refusal to abandon other Palestinians.
Then he got very quiet, and unprompted, he wasn't directly answering a question from Diana, he said, "I feel we are closer than ever."
And they were both quiet for a moment. And that sits so deeply inside of me.
And I think about that in relationship to Fargo's quote, about liberation being a geographical end, something that we could be right next door to, but we're -- just haven't crossed that threshold yet.
So maybe that's all very existential and contemplative, but I offer it in case it is useful grounding for people who are trying everything. I hope that we all continue trying everything.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 24:19
I think there's just so much hesitance to place trust in belief. In some ways, the kind of lie of public relations and marketing and advertising is, you say it enough, it'll become true, like magic, you know? These insights are based on observations of organized religion or cults usually. And it's very -- that kind of stuff has been very influential in terms of shaping approaches to management technique and sort of corporate norm maintenance, things like that. But well, it might sound from one perspective a kind of one weird trick thing to say, you know, that you don't need to know what the right thing to do is right now, you don't need to know that your actions are going to add up to whatever, you need to do it anyways, you need to move towards Gaza anyways, you need to, you know, embrace this friction, and learn from it and keep doing whatever you can, again, to throw anything into the gears of that machine. I think it's -- it is a very sort of freeing notion to hear, though, because I think there is a lot of distrust in relying on that belief that merely doing the thing could possibly add up in the aggregate.
Rasha Abdulhadi 25:47
Yeah. I think it's also that numerative metaphor is maybe also helpful for us to pay attention to the impulse towards it, that it's an equation that we could solve, if we just sat and thought about it for a while, or if we just did enough reading, or listened to enough talking heads, definitely some settler substitutes, probably some military analysts, like they have some kind of magic eight ball that works, right.
I think that that numerative impulse is also one we should resist, that I think about the practice of choosing liberation as an exercise, and not just a physical exercise, but an impulse, a sort of training of impulse and taste and attention, so that it is a change of habit.
And the -- I want to give credit to Mohammed el-Kurd, because those are his words, in terms of running towards Gaza. And he spoke them in response to multiple aid organizations declaring after the assassination of the World Central Kitchen team and other aid workers, that they would be ceasing aid. And these included even some organizations that were primarily based in Palestine.
And I agree with him that it's a mistake to do that, that the times of heightened risk for people threatened with eliminatory violence are not the times that we should turn away from them, those are the times we should run towards them. Those are the times when it is most essential that we refuse to comply, that we refuse to be disciplined and cowed by the overwhelming violence of states.
I do not wish for any of us to throw our lives away, or to pretend that us putting ourselves in the way of bulldozers, as Rachel Corrie did, would matter to states. But I do think something like the Freedom Flotilla, which is sailing again for the first time in a decade, should get more media coverage. More people should go join. More people should go if they have money to Cairo, to Egypt and support Palestinians. People should send money to the people who are there to support Palestinians who have evacuated into a space of no support.
The Egyptian government has implemented extractive bribery policies at the border for Palestinians and Sudanese people seeking refuge, seeking evacuation. They have deported people back to Sudan. In some cases, the -- there are all of these ways in which, at many material levels, people could run toward Gaza, could run towards Palestine and Palestinians.
And this training of ourselves to be disobedient, to refuse compliance most at the moment when it costs us the most to refuse. That's when it matters the most, to refuse.
And I can look at writers who are refusing to receive awards from PEN America, the soft power Cold War era, State Department project run by a former -- former? former? former? -- maybe still current? -- State Department official, who was also part of actively suppressing the Goldstone report commissioned by the UN that verified what Palestinians had been saying for a long time, that there was violent, brutal apartheid in the colonial occupation of Palestine. Suzanne Nossel, currently CEO of PEN America was part of Hillary Clinton's State Department team that actively pressured the Judge, Richard Goldstone, to recant and retract his reporting. He later went on to work for one or another of the various settler propaganda organizations. Really an astonishing chapter. People should look up the Goldstone report if you haven't already.
But I think that the other important part of recognizing that our resistance is not about just an accumulation of all of the sand we individually throw into the gears of genocide, but to practice for ourselves what it would mean to resist settler colonial orders in this colony, for ourselves, and unmaking settler colonial power in this colony is a contribution to Palestinian liberation and to the liberation of many peoples worldwide. And that is never wasted.
I -- you know, okay, let me be a little bit of an old head organizer here and give a little metaphorical tale. So I think farming metaphors are more interesting here, in terms of cultivating a space over time, and recognizing that it becomes easier to work over time, that if your practices are engaged in cultivating fertility and nutrients and a complex ecology in the space that you're working in, the work gets easier over time.
And you might even receive greater harvests over time. And I had an experience of working in urban agriculture projects on the south side of Chicago. And it was so hard, and we were just like pulling all kinds of debris out of soil, and like trying to build beds and manage for contamination from all kinds of sources. And then there's also the land politics of the city and, you know, negotiations to sell certain parts of land for development or gentrification.
And we were threatened to lose the spot that we're on, we fought, we didn't get to continue the garden project that I was a part of. But it was infuriating, it was heartbreaking. There was betrayal, there were people who had been involved in the project who were well-positioned academics at the University of Chicago who had recently moved into a property whose value they wanted to increase by supporting development around the area. Very nice settlers, very nice people. So their betrayal was very painful and infuriating and instructive. It's very clarifying.
But the land deal actually didn't end up going through. And years later, I came back to that spot, and other organizers that I had worked with at the time that I was a student organizer at the University of Chicago, had been part of another community group that was able to use the space for an even more lush garden, that was -- had community plots, there were more people involved, it was connected to tenant organizing, it was even more deeply embedded in serving Black folks on the south side of Chicago, who had been in that community for a while.
And it was a really good lesson for me to learn, that what can feel like failure in a moment can later be the thing that can be picked up and continued because the potential for it was set earlier, the precedent for it was set earlier. And I've seen it happen in other spaces too. And in other projects I've worked on and it has really changed my measure of how I understand impact over time, and has given me a capacity to act, yeah, with a certain amount of freedom.
And I also want to give credit to Kelly Hayes, who's talked about that we do not know what happens, what will happen, and that we do not know what it will take to achieve freedom and liberation, can be very freeing for us. If we don't know, it means that anything we try could be the thing.
Any number of things could be the thing. Any combination of things could be the thing. We have then a permission to do anything that is part of this practice of refusal to be complicit, of resistance to implementation of genocidal policies, putting ourselves in the way, and of creating friction, of slowing it down, of challenging people in conversations, of challenging institutions, to commit to boycott, divestment and sanctions, to commit to a cultural boycott, of implementing boycotts for ourselves personally. Yeah.
I mean, major corporations like McDonald's have been forced to admit that the boycotts have affected them. Starbucks has had to admit that boycotts affected them. I think we should pay attention to these things, and I -- so I offer the farming metaphor, I offer the habit forming framework to think about how we practice liberation, rather than treat it as an equation we have to solve for.
It is a craft that is full of infinite elaborations, infinite refinements, in terms of creating a livable world together, and we can practice it now. We don't have to wait for the end of empire. We can it now in everything we do: in the care and kindness we offer to each other, in the mutual aid we practice, in using COVID safety practices when we gather for small meetings or major actions, in recognizing that protests, mobilizations, and actions do not have to be big to be effective, that sometimes very small actions can be incredibly disruptive, and can be powerfully moving, and that being public about our refusals, and our resistance is so important.
Don't do it in private. If you refuse empire and settler colonialism, if you refuse genocide, be loud about it, tell everyone. Don't worry that you're bragging.
What you are doing is modeling for other people a permission to be brave, and a permission to be disobedient, and to not have to comply at that moment, when it costs you the most. And I have seen how powerful that is.
It's very scary to try to do something different than what already is. And that is a big part of what we're up against, not just for Palestinian liberation, but for all of our survivals, on every front of struggle you could name. It is hard work and scary work to be free. And it is so worth doing. And it's so satisfying. And I hope we do it.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 37:41
I think when Kelly and Mariame were on the show to talk about Let This Radicalize You, when we talked about this, I think Kelly put it in terms of sort of having to reckon with trusting each other in some capacity. And we were talking about, I think, in the context of feelings of sort of like pandemic precaution oriented despair and betrayal, so it's obviously a totally different context, but as you're saying, like the idea, right, that everyone together adds up to being XYZ, whatever, also implies that there's like an appropriate and correct order to approach these things. And I think that holds a lot of people up.
And I appreciate how I've heard from many listeners that our conversation in October, that your encouragement to sort of take up some more difficult frictions, and do things anyways, and try whatever you can has been helpful. I mean, I think inspiration and being able to sustain that can be incredibly difficult. And I wonder if we could just sort of to close out, you know, talk a little bit more, or maybe in more detail about modes, or ways or points of refusal. But before we do that, I want to make sure that there isn't anything big that we've left out.
Rasha Abdulhadi 39:10
There is one part and this feels related to the question of humanitarian response, particularly common among healthcare workers. And there are health care workers who are organizing for Palestine and even taking up more substantial positions of refusal and opposition than just calling for a ceasefire or humanitarian response.
So there are Healthcare Workers for Palestine and some other formations that I think are worth attending to and who have spoken more clearly about opposing genocide and supporting liberation, and maybe even some of them are ready to support decolonization on those terms, but I would especially encourage people who are concerned about a humanitarian crisis and the need for responding to what they can understand as a humanitarian crisis in Gaza and Palestine, I would encourage them to pay attention to the intentional, methodical, orgiastic unleashing of violence to decimate the healthcare system of Gaza as a whole, not just Al Shifa, although that would be a devastating entry point for healthcare workers, epidemiologists, health researchers, some of whom have even appeared on the show, to reexamine their idealistic notions about what peace is, and really attend to the peace of the mass grave that the genocidal settler colony continues to attempt to make of Gaza.
There's a thread and a report by Within Our Lifetime, an organization that I want to add to the show notes, but it documents the sort of last three months of the complicity of multiple institutions, including in healthcare, in supporting the genocidal devastation of the healthcare system in Gaza, as a part of the strategy of genocide as a whole. I'm using it in a slightly different context, but the phrase "deaths pulled from the future" just rings in my ear, because in the same way that I held my breath knowing how much death we were going to see at Al Shifa, we are being constantly reminded about how much death and disabling is already built in.
Not only are we going to find out there are more people buried under the rubble than have been reported now, more people that families have buried on their own without reporting or being able to report, who may themselves later have been massacred before they could tell anyone that they had buried their families in the dozens, it is reasonable to expect that the death toll will be in the hundreds of thousands.
At least 100,000 feels [sighs] grimly conservative.
And we know because of poisoning from white phosphorus, from hepatitis, from COVID, from any number of other diseases, the aftermath of unhealed injuries, the inability of people to heal because they're starving, they are being starved systematically on purpose, with great malice and intent, with great precision.
Wounds can't heal if you're starving, even if you had all the medicine in the world, and Palestinians in Gaza do not.
We will learn of more people who are dead than we know now, and more Palestinians alive today, even if we had an immediate ceasing of the siege of Gaza, even if the blockade were lifted, even if every kind of aid could get in, we may see even double the death toll, and in the years to come from shortened lifespan from disease, disability, injury.
There are Palestinians alive today who will not be alive soon. And anyone who wishes to comfort themselves with the humanitarian response to such intentional decimation of a people should not be treated like a serious person, should not be and has not earned the right to be treated politely. It doesn't matter what people's personal definition of peace is. In the context of Palestine, peace has meant murder. Peace has meant genocide and a continuation of genocide. No one who cares for Palestinian life should use the word peace.
If Palestinians use it, again, they will mean something different. No one should impose that word from the outside, because every time someone does, it means murder.
So especially in the context of the Death Panel, and the audience here, I want to make sure that people working in any part of the healthcare sector, as practitioners, as researchers, as advocates, as humanitarian response workers, understand that unless you oppose genocide, unless you speak clearly for liberation and decolonization, you are just as much a subcontractor for the genocide as the aid workers from the World Central Kitchen, who landed their boat and rolled all their pallets of aid over a pier built on Palestinian bodies and wrecked Palestinian buildings.
And you do not deserve to feel good about what you do. We should be honest with ourselves. It is too late, in many long genocides, I do not have the energy not to be honest anymore.
As both a disabled person and a Palestinian person, I feel very aware of mortality. And that I have become friendly in my relationship with it. I find it does make it harder for people to use it against me to discipline me.
I know that's not an easy invitation to make to other people to spend some time getting to know your own mortality. But it is something I appreciate about Palestinians, whether they identify as disabled or not, and disabled organizers, and Disability Justice organizers. I think there is a boldness that we can access, if we recognize that the hardships we are experiencing, the threats to our survival, or freedom, possible joy, possible goodness, and love are not just unique personal problems, but really implicate us in, and bind us to other people, to huge historical and political and economic questions, environmental questions.
I don't think we have reckoned with the fact that as a species, we are having a species wide encounter with a novel virus that is still changing us. And as someone living with Long COVID, who encounters people all the time, and when I talk to them about my, I have found -- you mentioned narrative, I have found that the most effective way to talk to people about Long COVID is to just share stories of my own life, and how I realized I had it and what my experiences are with it, and getting treatment and what did and didn't work and what is still a limit or how I manage it.
And I'll have conversations with people and they'll -- you know, people who do not identify themselves as having Long COVID, may not have even described themselves as having a particularly bad experience of COVID when they had it in the acute phase, who will, you know, tell me about wild symptoms and experiences they have had, losing not just smell but like losing eyesight, either in sort of a flare pattern, or in terms of like a longer term post acute recovery. And no one has permission to even talk about it.
And I find that the biggest thing that I have offered to people is just giving them the permission to talk about it. And I think about that a lot in organizing too, in terms of saying Palestine when you're in a room. Maybe it sounds corny for me to say that that's powerful.
But until you have tried it, I don't think you know, how much can change if you just insist, or how uncomfortable some people will be, how much will become clear to you about what kind of space you're in, and who you're with, once you say Palestine, and once you say it consistently, and once you don't back down. You know, say COVID. If you have Long COVID, talk about it, to whatever degree you feel able and -- and I -- yeah.
Some of the cultural organizing lineage work that I do comes from Story Circles and the history of the Free Southern Theater, John O'Neal and a number of other storytellers, Black artists, Black cultural organizers, going back to the time of street theater in the civil rights movement and the power of witnessing storytelling. A lot of being able to recognize ourselves in relationships to other people for organizing is connected to seeing our stories as connected, or of even understanding what our story is.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 49:27
I mean, I think one of the things I really appreciate about you, Rasha, is from the moment we first spoke over DMs, it was immediately clear that you didn't have the time or interest in being anything but incredibly honest and upfront. And I've really appreciated just the tremendous amount -- I mean, this is a long recording. These are difficult conversations to have, and I just want to acknowledge the fact that showing up and doing this is a lot of capacity to give over to people. And I appreciate so much the generosity with which you've approached your analysis of language, the conversation that we had today. I mean, I -- in some ways, I don't know [pauses] --
Rasha Abdulhadi 50:19
We can take a moment and breathe.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 50:21
I guess I'm just -- part of me is really disappointed right now, because I know that there are people who think that these struggles aren't interconnected, or they say that they are, but they'll avoid conversations like this, right. And there is nothing more inspiring to me in terms of how to keep going, than, you know, when it comes to the kind of situation politically and economically, with regard to COVID, and the state, and the complications of wanting people to be safe, right, as someone who has deep mistrust in the state and deep critiques of statist models of organizing, you know, the Medicaid unwinding is part of the backdrop, right. And you can't talk about COVID without talking about the Medicaid unwinding. And frankly, you can't talk about COVID without talking about Palestine, in my opinion.
Rasha Abdulhadi 51:24
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I am a Palestinian who developed Long COVID over a period of organizing here to respond to pandemic abandonment. And my Long COVID became most severe in May and June of 2021, when I had to quit a job that would not say Free Palestine, and a job that continued to extract from me, even when I was increasingly ill. And for all of these studies that I could be accepted into, like the NIH RECOVER program, or to -- that shares information with the Department of Defense.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 52:09
Of course.
Rasha Abdulhadi 52:09
Or some of these other experimental drug trial programs that are either using research from the genocidal apartheid state killing Palestinians, how could I possibly, as a Palestinian with Long COVID, trust that I'm going to be cared for in those multiple interlocking settler violences and that my research won't just be used to keep soldiers fighting through sickness to kill Palestinians. And all of the people who are hoping for cures or treatments for Long COVID, so many of them are dependent on institutions that are run by or based in the settler colonial apartheid state. They are dependent on genocidal science for an internalized ableist hope of no longer having to be categorized with the dysgenic population, which includes Palestinians.
I enjoy spending time with you, Bea, and I've been glad to get to know you some through our conversations. And I appreciate you acknowledging the effort that it takes to have this conversation both in the preparation and just in the stamina to do it. As someone with Long COVID, an energy limiting disability, which I have learned to manage, but I do not hold out hope for a cure, and I am not interested in aligning myself politically with people who are only interested in curing one disease. I have questions about who will be able to access such a cure, and to what ends -- so that we can go be good cogs in the death machine? No thanks. But I am not generous. I don't do this to be generous. I owe this and so much more, more than I could ever give, I owe this to Palestinians. I owe this to our elders who survived or did not survive, the Nakba, the Naksa. All of the ongoing genocidal violence sustained for more than 100 years. I owe everything I am for the rest of my life to Palestinians in Gaza. And so in that sense, this is an easy offering, at the least. And I hope that it will be useful, I hope people will use it.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 55:04
I hope so too.
Rasha Abdulhadi 55:08
I do want to remind people about some actions I've talked about before, about actions that we have witnessed other people take, about actions you may not think about as actions that are valuable and meaningful.
So as a Palestinian with Long COVID, who isn't able to be in the streets, or in physical spaces of organizing in the ways that I'm used to, I'm doing a lot of relational work. And that work is very important. I'm also doing counter propaganda work.
And I encourage other disabled folks, other folks who are organizing around COVID, to really attend to the value of the counter propaganda of the sick bed, both in the sense of the counter propaganda that can be produced by people who are disabled, house bound, bed bound sometimes even, and also the counter propaganda of just being disabled, and refusing and being unable to participate in the death making of the economy, wherever possible, and to really embrace that refusal as something powerful.
And of course, people continue to organize and go to protests and know that they matter. And they matter not just because a protest leads to a particular specific outcome, but because we are practicing being together, and we are practicing disobeying. And that is good. And there are other skills that we might build and other relationships we might build that might make other things possible. So keep doing those things and practice COVID safety together when you do them.
Practice masking and testing and sharing resources and teach and share and distribute paper bags with masks so that people can learn how to do rotations, and not have to use a new mask every time. Turn towards the friction in your life where people don't want to talk about Palestine.
That's where it matters to talk about Palestine. When you're in a room and no one has said Palestine. When you're in a room and no one has talked about the still ongoing pandemic. Those are two things I am often the first person to bring up in a room and that they are both unmentioned feels so telling to me, so clarifying. Be the person to mention both of them.
When I think about who deserves critique, I also think about practicing redistributing discomfort upwards, like trying not to wear out the people who I want to be in struggle with and be in community with, but really aiming my critique and my troublesome behavior towards people who are in decision making positions or positions of power, in which they might feel isolated from the consequences of being complicit in genocide, either by their calculated silence or by their active support.
And you can refuse, you could quit a job in this genocidal administration, instead of writing all those anonymous memos. Just quit, leave, go, get out. Abandon your post. Desert.
Any choice of refusal would be better than participating. Your participation does not slow the death machine. You are not moderating it. Do not lie to yourself.
Do not think that you're going to release these anonymous memos as your collateral character testimony in The Hague, that this is going to save you from your active participation and your enabling of genocide.
If you are serving in this current genocidal administration, what is in your heart does not matter. Get out. Leave, leave, leave. Unless you are literally throwing gravel into the gears, or pouring sugar into the gas tanks, then get out.
You know, there have been some folks organizing around renunciation of citizenship in the settler colonial state and after recent bombardments of the settler colony, there have been increased flights exiting the colony. Don't you dare take anyone seriously who describes themselves as being in support of Palestinians but still uses the name of the settler colony to describe their own identity or affiliations.
They have not unlearned settler colonialism or ethno supremacy yet. Tell them to renounce that citizenship and leave behind, shed like a cicada their identity as a settler.
Blockades still really matter. Wow. Pay attention to the blockade work of ports and the ZIM ships being done around the world, but especially In Australia, the so-called Australian colony, really powerful, multi-community, indigenous, Palestinian and other folks blockading, and those are not necessarily big actions.
Those are not multi thousand people marches. They could be, but it doesn't have to be that big to be a blockade. If you've never posted a sticker in a public place, or like posted a poem in a public place, or like distributed some zines in a public space, try something like that.
I'm going to share a list of writing prompts and action prompts that I wrote at the invitation of the Radius of Arab American Writers for this month, which is Poetry Month, National Poetry Month. Some poets are celebrating it as Nationalist Poetry Month, but we don't have to be those people. We can think about ways to bring our words into relationship and into public.
Try wheat pasting, try stickering, try cultural jamming, engage in mutual aid, whether that's donating to mutual aid funds for Palestinians staying in Gaza to feed each other, to keep each other alive, whether it's for evacuation funds, especially for children to reunite with family, for people who have medical needs and need treatment outside of Gaza. Those are valuable.
Don't get too hung up on whether you're getting scammed, like morally, is that what matters to you right now, like in all the risks you could take in the world, if you are someone with a home who can afford to feed yourself and have whatever medication or healthcare is a baseline for you, then -- and I know that that's actually such a huge bar to clear that not very many of us do. I don't. I still give.
Give money, give it freely, give it without worrying, in the same way that you should give money to people when you see them in your neighborhood. Just give them money to stay alive. You don't have to know what happens. You don't have to run the equation to figure out whether that's the most impact. Those are some ideas about actions. Certainly, boycott, divest, sanction.
People who are in artistic and cultural organizations, in scholarly and academic situations, you can work to push for the divestment of endowments and budgets. Those are long fights. You should study other people who are in those fights. I've written some about that online.
Don't fool yourself that moral argument is enough, that the material argument is important. It should be costly for people in institutions to be complicit in genocide, or to profit from it passively. I don't think we should expect that a moral appeal will be enough, but we should make it impossible for them to do.
There's another thing that I want to add in the links for the show notes that's an option to think beyond the cultural boycott, which I think is a great training wheels for some people who have never thought about saying no to collaborating with settlers.
So that's a good practice to just develop a habit to not automatically say yes to settlers. So PACBI, the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of the settler colony is worth engaging with as a sub -- as a floor, not a ceiling, as maybe a sub basement floor.
But The Public Source, which is based in Lebanon, Lebanon, created a commitment in July of 2023 that for them was about rejecting Creative Commons, and really embracing orienting more towards a duty of care towards Palestinian lives. And I've been talking with folks about looking at that statement, which is really thoughtful, as a way of thinking about going beyond PACBI, of going beyond the sub basement floor of a cultural boycott of the most heinous military affiliated cultural institutions and individuals, but really embracing what we might call a positive peace of a more community care perspective, of focusing on what it would take to actually keep Palestinians alive, rather than just checking off some sort of papal indulgence to get out of feeling guilty for being complicit in genocide. We are all complicit.
If we are not in Palestine, we are all complicit, and we have a responsibility to fight it.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:04:47
I actually feel like this is a kind of wonderful way to sort of put an end bracket on our conversation, to just sort of re-affirm and re-centralize. I'm sure folks by this point in the episode have a lot on their mind. And I hope that if you're listening right now, you just got some ideas while Rasha was talking about all of these many ways that you can engage in refusal, layer that engagement, right? As we've been talking about this is -- I mean, this has been a wonderful conversation, despite the fact that I really wish we weren't having it, which is frustrating. But this might be a good moment for reading the poem, I guess is kind of what I'm saying. I feel like that's such a nice sort of end point, in a way.
Rasha Abdulhadi 1:05:39
We've talked about so much, I completely forgot that I wrote a poem. We're recording this on Sunday, this poem is going to be on the Oregon tele poems, poem hotline on Monday, but only Monday. So it'll be nice that this poem will exist here, past that time. This poem doesn't -- isn't printed anywhere online, although it'll be in the transcript for this episode. It's published in an anthology called Snaring New Suns by Bamboo Ridge Press based in Hawai'i. And though the press is not exclusively native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander indigenous folks, there are a number of folks in the anthology who are indigenous Pacific folks, and indigenous folks from other geographies. And I'm grateful for this work to be archived in that context and to speak in that context. I wrote this poem after the police murder, the brutal police murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and after the uprising in the community in response. So this is:
Clarity Rests
for Freddie Gray, from Palestine to Baltimore to the Pacific
All hope is bound to that clarity
to the ashen precipitate that falls and covers all alike
in the afterbirth of a moment we will never transcend.
How can you transcend a boat, a ship, the vessel you arrive in
one that carries, ferries you, all of us, me too
across the river of this rupture.
We arrived riding on the backs of a wave that chose us
something that happened seemed suddenly
that it had always been happening
And we could not be happened to anymore.
This is the event we rode in on: the heat of having been ridden
for so long, so roughly, that we bucked back
kicked back, made the rough riders get back, till
it was them who were bidden by our audacity.
Even now we know we won't transcend
we'll try to extend our arms and get our fingertips
to touch each other around the edges of all we're holding.
With these snapping, popping, straining, burning tendons
we'll shut it down. We'll hold it together, for today at least.
We'll hope that the sediment of our deeds will feed some future,
and all the clarity we hold rests on that hope.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:08:51
Rasha, thank you. That is the perfect place to leave it. I know I say that often, but I really mean it right now. Really, really deeply appreciate everything we've gotten a chance to get into today. Thank you so much for coming back on the show, Rasha.
Rasha Abdulhadi 1:09:09
Thank you for your sustained attention and commitment. I listen to the podcast. I was a listener before I was a guest, and your commitment, Artie's commitment to saying Palestine, often, across many episodes, across many topics, and of referring back to our conversations, conversations with Danya Qato, to conversations with other Palestinians who are part of the Death Panel discord, part of the Death Panel Extended Universe, it means a lot. It is important work. It is an important vigilance.
And anyone speaking for Palestine, who takes a risk for Palestine, who insists on saying Palestine -- I want you to know that you will never be forgotten. Your commitment and insistence on Palestine, whenever people do it, is legendary to Palestinians. It is cherished. It is noticed. And it is never forgotten. And it is never wasted. Thank you.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:10:23
Oh, that's the least we can do, to quote you back to yourself, to be honest. Rasha, thank you so much. Deeply, deeply appreciate it. So I think we'll leave it there for today.
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