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 one of our conversation with Rasha. Find Part Two 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

Welcome to the Death Panel. To support the show and get access to our second weekly bonus episode and entire back catalogue of bonus episodes, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. We are entirely supported by listeners like you. And patrons, as always, thank you, we could not do any of this without you. And to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, hold listening or discussion groups, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_.

Today I am joined by returning guest and friend of the panel, Rasha Abdulhadi. And we have a lot to get into today, so this will be part one of what is going to be a two part conversation. Part two will be out in the public feed next week alongside a transcript. Rasha is a queer Palestinian Southerner, a cultural organizer, editor and poet. They were on the show back in October, basically exactly six months ago to the day, in an episode called Refusing Genocide. And I'm really glad to have them joining me again today.

Rasha, welcome back to the Death Panel. Deeply appreciate you coming on.

Rasha Abdulhadi 2:16

I am grateful to be returning to our conversation. Thank you.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:21

Now the last time that we spoke was back in October. That was about a week after Al-Aqsa Flood, and the escalation of genocidal violence against Palestinians. It's been over 190 days since then.

And when this started, many were quick to point out exactly what Israel was doing, exactly what has come to pass. Six months ago, just a week into this wave of escalated settler-colonial eliminationist violence, it was already clear that we were seeing some of the worst and most obvious violence in decades.

Now, with half a year behind us, that has sadly proven to be quite accurate beyond a doubt. And that wasn't the only thing that was accurate about our previous conversation. Much about our previous conversation, unfortunately, remains quite relevant today. And many aspects of that discussion have held very true over the last six months. And yet it happened so early that there was still so much more to say and so much has happened since.

So today, we're going to revisit some of those points, touch on topics that we didn't get to before. This will allow us to reflect on things that have happened since October that we could only sort of touch on the shadows of back then, but definitely could see coming. And so we'll have a lot to get through today.

And last time, we started with a reading of one of your poems, and today, we're gonna end on one, and I'm really looking forward to that. But first before we get into anything else, Rasha, how are you?

Rasha Abdulhadi 3:43

Hmm. (Pause) -- I'm a different person than when we talked in October. And I think it is valuable for all of us to pay attention to the ways in which experiencing, witnessing, living through, trying to fight or resist or stop a genocide is changing all of us. I think we should pay attention to that. I think these questions are important to ask, and the question of how are you is not a simple question of coping, or a question of personal feeling. I think it is an existential question. It is a historical question. And it is a political question.

I was saying to you earlier as we were getting ready for this conversation that March until now, through all of Ramadan, has been harder, even at this distance. And it is -- I know I'm not alone. I know that other Palestinians all around the world, including Palestinians in Palestine and Gaza have been clear that in many ways, this recent time, the past four to six weeks have felt like October again, in terms of the intensity and the escalation and the brutality, the extremity of violence.

As someone disabled by Long COVID, I have been too sick to fast, but I was also not really able to eat. The intensity of the siege, the bombardments, the ground massacres, the starvation of our people, the flour massacres, the daily airdrops of aid like bombs, the two week long massacre of Al Shifa Hospital, I cannot say that I was well.

And so much has happened, Bea, since the last time we talked. I never in my life thought I would have to hold a compartment inside of me with this level of violence and grief. And I know that when I touch it sometimes, I just lose language. And I feel a depth of care for Palestinians in Palestine, because they have told us they lose the ability to speak, and that Palestinians that they are with who have survived, being pulled from the rubble, who have survived massacres and seiges, often are not able to talk about it.

Rafaat's assassination changed me. And I -- I feel his presence, even though I did not know him as well as many others did, even knowing him briefly. And I think it is important for us to say that he was assassinated. He wasn't killed, he wasn't just murdered. He was murdered for his words.

He was assassinated because his sharpness, his love, his insistence was considered too dangerous. And they've tried to kill him again, several times and ways over, in the ways that this genocidal, colonizing, settler, apartheid ethno-state tries to kill so many Palestinians.

They will kill the body, but that's not enough for them. They want to kill the reputation after they've killed the person. And we've watched them kill graves. And all of that and more is inside of me, every time I speak, and everywhere I go. And I had no idea I could hold this much inside of me and live. And I feel a stubborn and loving and spiteful responsibility to live. So that's how I'm doing.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 8:02

I hope there are many people who heard you say "I'm a different person now" who feel the same way. Because I think that the last six months have forced people, I think, to reckon with any number of kind of comforting half truths around sort of exactly what point constitutes the edge of the depravity of colonial empire, right? You know, there are people who've written lots of essays and done lots of chin scratching, saying, in a way, this is -- you know, “Israel's better than this,” right? Or that there's some line in the sand where there's going to be X amount of violence, at which point it becomes not okay, right.

And I think as time has continued to progress as the way it does, and those ideas about what would get, for example, the US to stop doing this genocide, because this is not something that really would happen the same way without the US supplying funds and weapons and cover, justification, you know, a legal regime that for 80 years has been favorable to Israel. And I think over and over people have been sort of dealing with the falseness of their surprise and the kind of ways that when you sort of move past these points, I think many people are being reminded that -- that there really kind of isn't much more to surprise than a mystification of essentially this kind of machine of empire, right?

Last time you were on, we talked about it in terms of you said, throwing sand in the gears. And I think people thought many times over the last six months that whatever had happened must be the thing that would stop those gears, that the machine would stop moving forward, that the machine would not crush people beneath it, after, you know, X, Y, Z. And as that hasn't happened over and over, I think we've seen -- and I know this is something that folks in the Death Panel listener community have been talking about a lot, you know, this has been a point of cleavage in a lot of people's lives, even in some of the apologists. And I feel like before we sort of get into any specifics, you know, I wanted to just like leave it open for a second, to just reflect on sort of the passage of time, and mark that passage.

Often, when you're talking about events of mass death that are tied up into the "politics of international relations," things that are called war or conflict, right, you see things marked in terms of money spent on arms, by whom, to whom, or in terms of numbers of dead or in terms of movement of troops, and what I feel like will sort of probably characterize the historicizing of what we have just observed and lived through, I think for many people will be marked by these moments of disillusionment, where they realize that there is no limit to Empire, that the importance of throwing anything you can into the gears is because the machine doesn't stop until the gears fall off, until the machine breaks down, until there's sort of nothing left to continue to reproduce the political and economic means of essentially a nation state building and rebuilding and constantly creating itself through the sustained elimination of a group of people.

And I know that many people listening must also feel like they won't ever be the same. But there have been so many things that have happened and there are so many ways to mark the time. So I wanted to just before we get into specifics, or rehashing last time, I just want to sit with like the kind of enormity of more than 190 days of this, right, when we talk about presidential administrations in the United States, like all the pundits, and all the beltway talking heads, all the morning show people, the writers of Politico, you know, it's -- everyone talks about the first 100 days, that the only things that ever happen during a US presidential administration, the big important things happen in the first 100 days. Well, what does it mean that we're in day 200 of this, right, and that we think about politics in such a way that the Biden administration, for example, can continue to exist at this point.

I mean, the kind of refusal that's going on within the limits of the democratic system that's happening in the apparatuses of voting, the demonstrations, the polling, you know, all of the metrics that people think will do it, right, the metrics that will make them think twice, none of that has seemingly sort of changed course. And I think for a lot of people, that those more than anything else, and partially because of the way information has been controlled. But I think that those kind of moments of disillusionment, and of the translation of sort of surprise into recognizing that this is the mythology of settler colonialism, ultimately, it's about sustaining Empire.

Rasha Abdulhadi 13:56

I think it is important to think about time, and to think about time not just as an accumulation of days, or death tolls, or injuries, or number of massacres, although those numbers are important to pay attention to.

And if I'm going to give folks a specific resource or action, I would recommend following and paying attention to the reporting by Euro-Med Monitor, which is a human rights organization based in Europe, but with a lot of staff, Palestinian staff in Palestine, some outside of Palestine, who have been providing more accurate, closer to accurate, weekly reporting on death toll, injury, destruction. There may be at least a dozen different things they are reporting on every week from Gaza. Their numbers are higher than what you'll see in the news and we know that numbers are higher still because the ability to count has been intentionally decimated, disrupted and destroyed by the genocidal settler colonial state.

As we hold time, I think it's important for us to realize there are things about what has already happened that we don't yet know. So few people have really paid attention to what we now know about what happened on October 7. And the passage of time seems less important than an attention to what we can know about what has happened over that time. I think about the two weeks in which I knew, and anyone paying attention knew, Palestinians in Gaza knew, even outside of Al-Shifa, where definitely they knew, that a massacre was happening the likes of which would exceed every horror movie that could be imagined.

And yet, it was far from the news. And even people who follow me and engage with content that I post on social media, I could tell people didn't understand what was happening. Because in the middle of a massacre happening, there isn't always a live stream reality TV show that, particularly, residents of this settler colony, and also the rest of the Anglophone settler colonial imperial world, solidarity network [laughs], there is an expectation in the Anglophone settler colonial imperial solidarity network, that news of violence in other places is normal. It's just a part of the entertainment cycle. It is necessary grist for the mill of the lives that people lead in the so-called West. And I think this duration and sustained intensity of violence has exfoliated some of those easy expectations about violence in Southwest Asia and North Africa as being naturalized. I don't think it has fixed anything.

But I think the -- I observe the illusion is harder for more people to maintain. It is more distressing. It requires more cognitive processing to maintain a sense of normalcy, given the intensity of the violence we are witnessing, even for those who aren't trying to look very hard. So I think the revisiting of October 7 is an important part of thinking about time, and paying attention to the cycles of settled propaganda, in every sense of that word settled, to really revisit events that we might think we know about just because they're in the past. Just because they're not "news" doesn't mean there is not new information, or information that has been intentionally suppressed, or not distributed. Let me not be coy. If listeners to this podcast have not been following the increasingly reported news about October 7, that the settler colonial apartheid military in fact itself used tank and helicopter incendiary missiles to massacre their own people in an attempt to both kill Palestinians escaping from Gaza and to reduce the possibility that any settlers could be taken hostage and kept alive for prisoner exchanges.

If people have not followed the news that has been reported now in Electronic Intifada, in Quds News Network out of Palestine, and that has been picked up increasingly by other larger publications. Al Jazeera did a whole video explainer on it. There are now and have been since November, December, suits being pursued by settlers against their own government, for the implementation of Hannibal directives to kill their own people as a military strategy to avoid the disadvantage of having to negotiate for hostages.

People should pay attention to the past which is not past and not accept the repetitive talking points that obscure real events. And what we have learned or can understand about events, which may not be possible to understand immediately after they've happened. And I think that might be relevant for some of the other very recent events that we will talk about today, I think there are some things that we'll be able to say, and that I can offer, as focus and attention for what we can look for, without having to pretend that we know everything right now about what has happened, much less what will happen or could happen.

So that's a long answer about time. But I really encourage people to be curious about the recent past and not assume that just because they lived through it, that they know everything about what happened. That's my answer.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 21:22

Very well put. I think one of the things that you have me thinking about in particular is that in our initial discussion, part of what we were really delving into, is the role of language, both how language is playing a role in terms of perpetuating genocide, but is also a necessary part of stopping it. And, you know, it's been interesting to see, for example, some of the parallels to questions that I think are large, unanswered questions around the normalization of COVID. And the idea of, well, why won't people understand that there's been updated information, you know, the discourses that happen around various degrees of attention that different groups of people are paying to COVID.

And I find it interesting that sort of, in a lot of these discussions, what I think everyone is ultimately sort of dealing with is a discomfort with uncertainty. And part of where that sort of comes from is that I think in these moments where we're so used to thinking about things in terms of the kind of statistical aggregate analysis that is the language of the state, right, through days, through accounting, through deaths, through numbers, through timeliness and what's newsworthy and what's not, right, the repetition of US media and the concentration of US media, all of these different factors are ultimately part of the kind of mirage that we've solved uncertainty, that uncertainty doesn't exist.

I mean, when we've talked about this on the show before, I think I've called it like a fantasy of competency, right, a fantasy that the United States sort of is in this like CSI-level control, right, that it's the kind of hyper-competent understanding of the military apparatus, such that everything is coordinated and planned and specific and precise, right. And these kinds of mythologies, and the kinds of ways that language and specificity and repetition came up in our last discussion I feel like are very relevant to the kind of understanding that I'm hoping we're going to be able to get at today.

And you know, when we talked about slippery words that run cover for genocide last time, among what we were talking about, we highlighted the kind of susceptibility to manipulation and cooptation by the state that various demands face. Particularly we focused on what could happen to the demand for a ceasefire. And we discussed how the demand for a ceasefire, while obviously, that's essential, it can also be distorted in practice, potentially leading to a situation where what is labeled a ceasefire merely paves the way for a sort of quieter but persistent continuation of Palestinian suffering. And our aim wasn't to criticize, it's merely to highlight the danger of something that gets called a ceasefire that could be used to usher in essentially just an era of less spectacular annihilation, as you put it.

This point about ceasefire has been one of those sort of enduring points that has remained really relevant and helpful in the time that has passed since we had that conversation. And we've brought this into the show a couple times since then. So if possible, I'd love for us to sort of start here, by revisiting your concern that even in the face of obvious genocide, that Biden would be resistant to calls for a ceasefire, and at which point that his administration might finally seem to take up that demand, that it would be crucial to hold them to the truth of the actual demand and not let them stretch and bend the meaning of ceasefire to be merely a quieter, milder, less visible genocide. So for some context, you know, back in October, we got statements from the administration through, for example, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who in early October was calling Congress members who have called for a ceasefire "disgraceful and repugnant."

That was October 10, at a press briefing, so that was from before we recorded. But then later in October, Jean-Pierre again then compared pro Palestine demonstrations to white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.

That was October 30. But then jump to now, you know, mid April, the Biden Administration's position, let's say, is illustrated by White House comments to the press summarizing calls between Biden and Netanyahu, where Biden's team says to the press that he basically gave Netanyahu a hard talk - "Biden underscored that an immediate ceasefire is essential to stabilize and improve the humanitarian situation and protect innocent civilians. And he urged the Prime Minister to empower his negotiators to conclude a deal without delay to bring the hostages home."

So that's a lot of drift in a short amount of time, and not to play into the comfort of feeling like uncertainty is being pushed away, but this sort of played out exactly as you called it. And I think we're sort of approaching this crucial moment of really needing to sort of step up the contention with the slippery language of the genocide. So can you run through what your point was back in October, Rasha, for folks who may not have heard that first conversation, and then can you speak to the drift that we've really seen, from silence to humanitarian pause to the cooptation of ceasefire that's happening right now?

Rasha Abdulhadi 27:08

Yeah. So the call for ceasefire in October, when we were discussing it, I reminded folks, I pointed out then, that many of the campaigns here in this settler colony, which is arming and funding every bomb and bullet used against Palestinians, whether in the Gaza, or the West Bank, or elsewhere in Palestine, that people organizing in this settler colony, who were organizing for ceasefire, there were a lot of Palestinians, and still are a lot of Palestinian organizers who were pushing for that. And at the time that they were pushing, they were answering a call from Palestinians in Gaza, who were very clear that what they wanted immediately was a ceasefire.

And that was in the context of saying, don't try to get us aid while there are still bombs being dropped on us. And in both cases, Palestinians in Gaza and Palestinian organizers here in this settler colony, if you look even at the graphics that were used for the organizing for ceasefire calls at the time, in bigger font, in those graphics, is the phrase "stop genocide."

So I emphasized at the time that the clarity of Palestinians was entirely consistent, and that, for Palestinians, the call for ceasefire was a matter of an order of operations, that absolutely bombing must cease, that the military assault and siege on Palestinians in Gaza had to stop in order for any other action to be meaningful. There could be no humanitarian response, there could be no further political negotiation that would be meaningful without an immediate ceasing of brutal military violence against Palestinians in Gaza.

So in that sense, I was very clear that I did not want to criticize myself or encourage other people to criticize Palestinians who were calling for ceasefire. However, I will say, then and now, I do criticize a lot of non Palestinians who are very comfortable with calling for ceasefire, but cannot talk about decolonization. People who might be very comfortable calling for ceasefire and at the same time want to talk about a "two state solution," which has always been a fiction, it has always been another one of those slippery cover terms that allows for the expansionist process of slow or fast genocide and displacement in the hopes that Palestinians will simply go away or disappear or magically forget that they were ever Palestinian and stop being such a problem for the settler-colonial apartheid project.

And that pattern continues. And in this moment in particular, this moment in which we are watching the settler colonial state respond to even the slightest retaliation from another state, whose consulate they bombed, as we watch this state respond and attempt to reframe itself, this ethno-supremacist state reframe itself as a victim even as it continues to carry out unceasing genocide in Gaza, it has not stopped. There is nothing that happened yesterday on April 13, or that has happened now that has paused for even a moment, the bombing, the shooting, the drone attacks, the starvation, the complete and total siege of Palestinians in Gaza, including a UN resolution for immediate ceasefire that the US settler colony did not support, but abstained from vetoing.

And this is the kind of drift that you and I talked about, that was almost laughable if it were not so grim, to watch people reply to Palestinians online and say, well, you know, they voted for a ceasefire and Genocide Joe, Butcher Biden, Biden the Despicable, has, uh, you know, thoroughly chided his best buddy, so definitely now that'll -- that'll show 'em, you know? They killed some non-Palestinians, so certainly now, you know, settlers all over the world will finally care.

And I said then, as other Palestinians have said, and I'll say it again, I don't base my understanding of what's happening in Palestine on what politicians performing on a settler colonial, imperial global stage have to say in their press conferences, in the halls of the Useless Nations. I wait for news from Palestinians in Palestine, because they are the ones experiencing the results, and nothing has changed. So yes, we have seen many iterations, whether it was various politicians refusing to even say the word ceasefire in October, November, or December. Justin Trudeau had a hilarious moment where he corrected himself, he started to say cease pause, and then he stopped and said humanitarian pause.

I've been thinking a lot about the word “peace-fire” lately. That word feels resonant to me. I think that it might poetically describe a long strategy of using nice words to describe continued genocide.

And I've written about this in my poetry, the way that peace is used as a quelling term. It's a killing peace, the peace of the mass grave, and that is the kind of peace that has been on offer to Palestinians since before 1948. That is the only peace that Palestinians have ever been offered by the US settler colony or the apartheid settler colony currently carrying out a genocide with full US funding.

The other part that is worth noting is just a very clear contradiction between, or incredibly consistent political play, if we're being honest about it, between politicians in the US settler colony, you know, making declarations of outrage.

Oh, how could you kill these aid workers who were deputized subcontractors for the genocide, who were a part of giving cover for creating this military installation of a pier that is -- in Gaza that is built with [pauses] the rubble and the bodies of Palestinians, literally, excavated from Gaza, to make their pier for "humanitarian purposes."

As a poet, I could not imagine metaphors, I could not invent speculative fiction, that would be a more pointed satire, or critique of empire than the reality is, to build a humanitarian pier with the corpses of Palestinians, and the rubble of their homes that they were murdered in.

This is the only kind of humanitarian relief that has been offered to Palestinians. This is the only kind of peace that has been offered. And at no point during the alleged last two weeks of Ramadan, when after the UN's declaration, that they really thought it would be a good idea, maybe finally, to try a little bit of ceasefire. At no point did any violence let up.

The only thing that caused the withdrawal of the genocidal settler military in parts of Gaza were Palestinian resistance forcing them to leave. And we won't hear about that in the news, which is another thing we talked about last time when I encouraged folks to pay attention to when Palestinians are resisting, because that will be the part that won't be published in the news.

You will see other events being spoken about related to Palestine. So we'll see the -- you know, the news will be obsessed with the very limited missile strike in the settler colony, but won't pay attention to Palestinians who were tearing down parts of the wall, the apartheid wall in the West Bank. And if they pay attention to Al-Shifa at all, the massacre at the hospital there, they won't pay attention to how Palestinian resistance protected as many people as they could and forced the genocidal military to withdraw.

If Palestine is liberated, and I know that it will be and must be, it will be because it must be. Palestine will be free because we must be free. And because we will not stop existing or insisting on being free. It will be because Palestinians have liberated Palestine. And because no other route will be liberation.

Only Palestinians liberating Palestine will be liberation. It can't come from an external source. Though certainly, there are many ways for people all over the world, and people frankly I have more belief in than nation states, any nation states, no matter what maneuvers they make in diplomacy or material response.

Although the material blockade of ships by Yemen is notable [laughs]. There are ways that people outside of Palestine can support and give assistance to Palestinians, they can be part of refusing and resisting, creating friction, grinding down the gears, slowing the gears of the machine, but it is Palestinians who will liberate Palestine.

And in thinking about the drift in political discourse related to ceasefire, related to genocide, we now have even a few politicians here in the US settler colony who have decided to experiment with saying the word genocide, even as they were part of enabling and calling for a violent and brutal genocidal military response to Palestinians engaging in a jailbreak of Gaza on October 7, politicians like, you know, Ocasio-Cortez.

These are all attempts to absorb and recapture energy from a political base, a public, a voting base, that no politician of any party in the settler colony has any intention of engaging with materially. And I'm thinking also of the conversation you had with Dean Spade about collapse. And I think about it in organizing spaces that I'm in, because there is an urgency for our own survival in this settler colony, in all of our communities who are threatened by continued legacies of genocidal, eugenic, racist, supremacist violence, gendered violence.

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. And I find myself being very careful when I talk with people, because it comes back to this uncertainty you mentioned, that -- and I'm glad you brought it up, because I've encountered it, frankly since certainly the beginning of the still ongoing pandemic, and it shows up again in a lot of places, particularly in organizing responses to resist and refuse and stop genocide, in Palestine and elsewhere, including here.

Many people feel a lot of uncertainty about their own ability to affect reality, whether in their daily lives or at any scale larger than their personal lives. And that is always a central challenge of organizing. And it is one of the most electric parts of gathering people and practicing taking action together.

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. And it can be exhilarating, and it can certainly be frightening. I really encourage everyone to think beyond a normal notion of time, or expectations about how things go just because that's how they've gone in the past.

None of us predicted October 7. And I think anyone who presents themselves as someone who can predict what's going to happen now is lying to themselves and to you, either because they're grasping for a kind of certainty that just isn't available to any of us, some game of pretend that they can imagine what will happen on a geopolitical level, or a socio-cultural level, or they're selling something.

I mean, and often, they're just selling something. They're selling their own careers. They're selling the continuation of a settler colonial ordering of the world. They're selling what their corporate sponsors want sold, even though they don't truly understand what it is or why, and don't much care.

I'm thinking about the moment where the Republican Party, the red flavor fascist politicians here in this settler colony, were pushing for a more draconian border policy. And the blue raspberry flavored fascist party here in the settler colony felt like they were doing some real big brain maneuvers by proposing an even more authoritarian, violent, racist policy to call the bluff, you know, fascists calling other fascists' bluff is still fascism. Still fascism. And I remember at the time, before the blue flavor fascism proposal came out, there was some chatter about oh, we're going to have a civil war, again, in this colony.

And, you know, I think that there's part of that instinct towards heightened stakes that is appropriate. However, I think people misplaced the analogy. There's no indication that the blue fascists will fight the red fascists on anything. They seem very determined to out-fascism them in order to retain whatever kind of corporate sponsorship or political position they can.

I think a better analog is either to be found in the further back colonial history and expansionism of this settler colony, or recognizing that we are in a moment of escalating and consolidating fascist power globally, that could look much more like the 1930s than the 1860s.

And I think it's worth people taking that seriously, and not just locating it in one particularly odious politician, or two or 10, or one party, but recognizing that it is a societal structural arc. And then I think it's very important for us to ask ourselves what we will do, if that is what we understand is happening. And I think focusing on that might clarify all of the political sideshows and the ways in which language is twisted to its breaking point, is made brittle, and sharp, and murderous, to speak of only giving weapons to the genocidal settler colony to be used for self defense, when we know that they consider genocide to be self defense, because they are correct that without genocide, their settler colonial project cannot exist.

So, yeah, if they need to defend a genocidal project, they'll have to do genocide. It's true. But people should not be confused about what self defense means in that context. People should not be confused that no Palestinians are considered civilians under settler colonial apartheid, including the Palestinians who hold citizenship, like Walid Daqqa, who was denied medical treatment, a Palestinian prisoner who died just this past week, after being denied cancer treatment for years and years. More than a decade ago, he was diagnosed. And he was a citizen of the apartheid state. He did not live in the West Bank or Gaza. This fiction of a genocidal democracy is so ludicrous that it exceeds any satire I could make.

So yeah, I hope that if we feel uncertainty, we pay attention to the past and what we can learn from it, both the recent past and the longer past, that we pay attention to resistance, rather than the actions of states. And we pay attention to people who are working to keep each other alive, and that we focus more on what we are willing to do to keep each other alive than we do on our fantasies about some sort of rescue from the powerful that is never coming.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 47:41

So well put, and just brought so many things to mind while you were speaking. I really appreciate your analysis, Rasha, because I think what you're pointing to here, in some ways, is that sort of anticipating lip service or anticipating cooptation, right, that's a strategy, not a prediction of the future, right.

And often, I think, in some ways, the kind of reckoning around uncertainty or maybe the hope that we've reached a turning point, and the US will stop sending money and weapons and playing around with domestic and international law to, you know, put a thumb on the scale in major favor of the settler colonial regime. and I think that in some ways, there's evidence of grief there, if that makes sense. Perhaps it's grief at the realization that the state is not benevolent, or is not what you thought it was, or whatever.

But I think, more often, that in some ways is a kind of -- one, it's definitely naive in some cases. I'm not trying to, you know, make an excuse for that, but there is a kind of like, I think, aspirational sort of narrative around the idea of peace being a goal, for example. You know, growing up in the 90s, there were extended negotiations over years around the two state solution. Listeners who are younger might not be as aware of this, but -- and maybe it's worth getting into kind of how that -- you know, where your rejection is sort of oriented from, because you mentioned that at the top of what you're saying, but maybe it's worth getting into a little detail around the two state solution framing because, in many ways, the kind of point that you were trying to really highlight, I felt, back in October was not so much the outcome, but the technique, right, you were calling for people to respond, to meet the circumstances, and trying to offer your insight into what techniques and strategies we were going to encounter in many ways.

And I think in some ways people can sort of see that and maybe recognize it as a prediction, right? And so it appears as if there is someone somewhere who can access certainty, right, and who can predict the future [Rasha giggling], and that might be comforting. But in some ways, that's also limiting, because then that creates a political horizon where we're just waiting for the person with the right answer to show up. And that kind of framework, just waiting for the person with the right answer to show up, when you mentioned that in the same sentence as Palestine, I immediately go back to those years and years and years of circling the kind of cul de sac of the debate around the two state solution, which once that narrative was no longer useful, poof, it disappeared quite quickly, right. And it comes back when it's useful.

But this is -- this is kind of like an inflection point that I think is a kind of important history. So I know it's a big ask in some ways to be like, by the way, off the cuff, do you want to address this, but I think it might offer some listeners additional sort of background here that may be tactically useful.

Rasha Abdulhadi 51:33

I'll drop a few keywords, I won't go into a full explanation of it.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 51:37

No, that would take hours.

Rasha Abdulhadi 51:38

Yeah. Folks should look up the Oslo Accords and the Oslo process. It was a "peace process" negotiated during the Clinton era with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, as the two representatives of the respective sides, so to speak, and very worthwhile to notice that they received Peace Prizes for those negotiations that signed away the right of return for Palestinians, who had been forced out in 1948 and in 1967, which now is maybe estimated at 8 million plus Palestinians outside of Palestine, who are descendent of Palestinians who were forced to emigrate, were displaced or left.

A very worthwhile noting that Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a settler, because even his strategic capture of Palestinian -- what became the Palestinian Authority as the subcontractor for the genocidal apartheid state, and his -- Rabin's strategic attempt to enmesh and mire Palestinians in a endless, never attainable statehood wasn't extreme enough to satisfy settler appetites in the genocidal apartheid state. So he was murdered by his own people. There's plenty of intrigue to look up there, too. If people think the JFK theories are interesting, oh, wait till you get to this one. Have fun, kids. There's a lot of documentaries. There's a lot of articles. There are many, many books. Many careers have been off of that process, and the writings about it.

And genocide continues. I think sometimes Palestinians look like we have the gift of prophecy, just because the present has not been any different from the past. We're just still in the same time. So it sounds like we're predicting the future. But it's really just us saying, look, the same thing is happening, like nothing has changed.

I'm not predicting the future just as much as pointing out, nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. The same thing is still happening. So until it stops happening, it's going to look like Palestinians are predicting the future.

But it's just because people are looking at the drapery that's being changed out on the windows. And they're not looking at the scene that they can see through the windows. If I had more time, I might come up with a metaphor that was less based on just one sense, but I don't think that's inaccurate.

Yeah. There are great documentaries about why the two state -- the two state "solution" is a distraction that was just a cover for the continued expansionism of the settler colonial state, and the fact that there still is no Palestinian state of any kind, whether in the limited carve outs of the West Bank that are increasingly encroached on by "illegal settlements," which is a great invention to pretend as if the entirety of the colonial occupation of Palestine is not one unified, incredibly illegal, totally immoral even if it were not illegal.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 52:01

Well, I mean, that's why if in calling and in naming illegal settlements, right, there's the implicit command --

Rasha Abdulhadi 55:28

There are some legal ones.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 55:30

That there are legal ones. And this was the trick of -- this was the whole thing Artie and I were pointing to in naming “health communism” and “health capitalism” as sort of oppositional forces, which is that the political economy of health has no name and goes unquestioned, and therefore has no alternative. And so we took that kind of doubling that always occurs with -- you see it constantly in the kind of world of disability and of abolition, of the sort of pitting of one group against another.

The ways that in implying that there are people who deserve to be incarcerated, and people who don't, right, for whatever medical reason, you're sort of perpetuating the incarceration of both, right. And this is a similar situation where there are all these language games that are played in the settler debate. And you highlighted exactly sort of what I was hoping you'd bring in around the two state solution, which is that it's not predicting the future to know that Israel does violence, displaces people, and then as a condition of it ceasing that behavior at the intensity that was such that it drew attention and outrage, it negotiates additional legal, political and economic control over the territory regardless, right.

And this is sort of where the critique of this and the sort of highlighting of the cooptation and the slipperiness of language came from in October. That's part of why I really felt like it was important to focus on, because we know these tactics, right. And we know that we're dealing with uncertainty and propaganda, explicit propaganda, you know, that there are legal arrangements, there are political alliances, right? This is incredibly important to sort of understand that, actually, it's very good to realize that no one can predict the future, right? Because that opens up the horizon of possibility beyond the legal versus illegal settlement.

Rasha Abdulhadi 57:54

Oh, definitely. I think this is really important to pay attention to. And this is something that has been on my mind to talk about today. I have spoken before, I mentioned it a little bit in our conversation in October, in terms of the feels bad industrial complex of settler feelings that will be offered to us by people like Naomi Klein and Judith Butler, who have continued to flog their own work, and platform themselves to talk about Palestine, and neither of them has taken responsibility for the role that their own words, articles and affective whipping of emotion for settlers everywhere, played in manufacturing consent, and uncertainty and the hands-wringing feelings about the tragic necessity of committing disciplinary eliminatory violence against Palestinians in Gaza, and I do not take them seriously. And neither should you if you care about keeping Palestinians alive.

They do not have anything to offer to you in explaining what is happening in Palestine, much less what should happen. And I think they are examples of people who are very comfortable saying ceasefire now, but are very uncomfortable with Palestinians resisting wholesale liquidation. And they're just a couple of examples of the kinds of settler substitutes that are going to be offered, have been offered on the news, on podcasts, including people who think of themselves as supporting Palestine or Palestinians, including people who think of themselves as calling for a ceasefire, calling for an end to genocide, even calling for decolonization. Because the depth -- oh, I cannot emphasize enough, the depth of supremacist ideology that drives every bit of analysis and reporting about Palestine.

If you -- this is such a clear line that I cannot believe how many times I have to scream it. If you are not hearing from a Palestinian about Palestine, what you are hearing is propaganda. I'm going to say it again, because I don't think people believe me. It is 100% true. Anytime you hear someone who is not Palestinian talking about Palestine, you are going to hear propaganda. And it is not even a matter of their heart or their desire. They may be people who wish for the aliveness of Palestinians. But most people who are not Palestinian are unqualified to navigate the 100 plus years of discourse and propaganda that has been woven around the settler colonial project in Palestine. And even fewer of them have clarity about their own investments in settler colonialism where they live, whether it's here in this US colony or other settler colonies.

We are going to see more settlers substitutes be offered to us, whether that's Antony Loewenstein is going to describe Palestine as a laboratory, in line with the way that a publication like +972, state magazine, as I like to call them, operates as captive opposition within the settler colonial continuum. Their critique/hype cycle of speaking about settler military capacity, whether its weapons being marketed globally after being used to murder Palestinians, or conveniently as we saw both in December, and in March, with +972 magazine, releasing stories about these alleged AI technologies being used by the genocidal settler military as a way of displacing news about the massacres, about the effects on Palestinians. So the recent article in March by +972 mag was used to displace coverage of the aftermath of the massacre at Al-Shifa Hospital. And I've had people ask me for interviews to talk about that. And I've refused because the point of that story is to get people to talk about and focus on the alleged, now debunked, thoroughly disproven, mythical invincibility of the settler apartheid military. October 7 proved, that jailbreak proved that the settler colony was not invincible.

The events of April 13, including the tearing down of even just a piece of the apartheid separation wall in the West Bank, is another kind of jailbreak. And to me very powerful, because it's done by Palestinians, for Palestinians. And the whole settler imperial world order, supremacist world order would love for us to focus on anything except those moments of Palestinian resistance and Palestinians overcoming this paper tiger. Palestinians describe the military occupation of all of Palestine, the settler project, as fragile as a spider web.

And I think we have some moments where we can pay attention to that. And they connect to moments here in the settler colony, too. I think about the movement to Stop Cop City and the amazing range of strategies that have been used to delay, slow, stop, force a reorganization of even just the raw construction of the space. I have said this before in other contexts and online, but it is worth paying attention to the low threshold of tolerance for violence that the powerful have. They're willing to enact endless violence upon us. They have no limit there.

We should not kid ourselves about that. But a small amount of property damage is enough to make them squeamish. And all it took for a construction company to pull out and cancel their contract to build Cop City in Atlanta was the destruction of six concrete mixing trucks. What an extraordinarily low price, but that was too high for them. And if we are listening to analysts who are settler substitutes for Palestinians resisting in Palestine, for people subject to settler colonial violence, state violence in this settler colony, around the world, if we pay attention to their resistance, instead of these official, authoritative interpreters, interlocutors who are given to us, I think that we begin to understand something much more valuable to our lives.

If we look at the actions that people are taking, versus all of these explanations about the future, that really are, let's be honest, they're an attempt to control the future. These predictions are often an attempt to like -- I mean, let me not get too analytical. In a very Foucauldian way, by naming what is real, trying to make it real, trying to foreclose the possibility of an otherwise, trying to trap us in their interpretation of what's possible, because they hope that we'll obey, they hope that we'll conform to their predictions. And I -- yeah, so I'll name a couple of other people who I think of as settler substitutes that I hope folks are encouraged away from. You know, a lot of them are trotted out as being in support of the Palestinian cause, as like co-signatories to the Palestinian cause.

But Palestinians don't need co-signers, who often if you scratch them just a little, you'll find that they're into the two state solution dance or the one democratic state solution dance that isn't really about decolonization, but it will effectively continue to be apartheid and they don't really explain how it won't be if a decolonization process doesn't happen. And those people, like, you know, Gabor Maté, Norm Finkelstein, Peter Beinart, people like Jose Andres, the celebrity chef from World Central Kitchen, who maybe folks make the mistake because he doesn't have an Anglophone name, they don't think of him as being aligned with settler interests.

But as I mentioned before, his whole project for providing aid was so gruesomely limited, such a small, meager amount and distributed via this pier built of Palestinian bodies and the rubble of Palestinian homes. And he supported the brutal military response of the settler state after the jailbreak of October 7. And I don't think any of us should be fooled by his crocodile tears now, just because settler colonialism didn't protect him while he was serving its interests. And this is a man, by the way, from a DC context, who has fought the mandatory increase in minimum wage for all workers, including tipped workers, for years and years.

And as recently as last year, last couple of years, was not yet recognizing unionizing at his own restaurant. So this is not a man who should be anyone's hero or role model. He certainly should not be anyone that people look to to explain Palestine. The co-signatories, these settler substitutes, will always co-sign and consign us to continued colonization, whether that's a one or two state solution. All of these people, academics whose careers depend on being interpreters, who sometimes position themselves as ambiguously ethnically situated within relationship to Palestine, people like an Anne Irfan, who was contracted to write a "short history of Gaza" -- so grotesque, don't you dare buy that. Don't you dare go to anything that Anne Irfan presents in. Her settler affinities, her settler partner who served in the military of the apartheid genocidal settler state, these people do not deserve to be taken seriously about Palestine. Zach Foster, who is running some kind of Palestine newsletter, who wants to teach people about Palestine but also says that he was running from rockets in the settler apartheid capital on October 7.

These people have settler affinities, they have settler loyalties and allegiances. They are seeking to keep by any means necessary their access to settler privileges. And if that means that they are going to position themselves as authorities on Palestine, they'll do anything they need to do to prevent people from listening to Palestinians. Because if we did, if we really listened to Palestinians, we would recognize that for Palestinians to be free, we would have to dismantle settler colonial orders worldwide.

And that is why so many nations are invested in what happens in Palestine. I was talking to you before, as we were getting ready for this conversation about settler substitutes. So I have a gluten intolerance. And one of the things that became very clear to me, once I could no longer eat things that had wheat, was just how many different kinds of foods are presented as different kinds of foods, but they're just all wheat. It's just wheat in another form. It's cookies, it's bread, it's pasta, it's breaded things, it's croutons, it's couscous, it's any number of things that people would think of as something different. It's cereal, it's, you know, all of this is just wheat. And once you can't eat it, once it would make you sick to eat it, you realize all of these things that are just one thing. And that's what it looks like to me with all of these non Palestinians talking about Palestine. It's all just the same thing that makes me sick [laughing].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:11:28

I think that there's a kind of dismissal when this type of violence, which is violence, it's cultural violence, right, that's happening, this is normalization. I think that there's a kind of almost reaction like, oh well, these kind of takes that are very both sides-y, right, it's not hurting anyone. And even in that assertion, there's dehumanization implied, right? Like the kind of anointing of the specified and approved speakers is in and of itself part of the process of cultural violence and dehumanization. You can't separate someone's speech from the impact that it has, once it's out in the world, and the context that it's published in, you know, who it's edited by. This is how cultural violence happens. This is how normalization happens in the actual meat of things, right? This is how the sausage gets made.

Rasha Abdulhadi 1:12:24

Mhm. I mean, I -- this comes back for me too to these like notions of, you know, you mentioned earlier, like, oh, the settler state is better than this, or we were talking about, you know, you mentioned people feeling grief, in recognizing that the powerful are not going to save us, that there's no limit on the violence they're willing to do to maintain power, access, wealth. Yeah.

I think that there are a lot of folks who are still holding on to a notion of a more perfect union. And it breaks my heart because there are people in this settler colony whose peoples have been decimated by settler colonialism. And I find myself sometimes just really imploring them, like, you don't have to settle either for this settler colonial aftermath, this apocalyptic settler colonial aftermath. I understand the negotiations people make for survival. And I understand why some of those negotiations have been tempting to Palestinians and are still tempting to people trying to survive violent, interlocking systems of global state apparatus, corporate aparatus.

But I think my interest is not in saving the souls of settlers or saving the fantasy of a more perfect union with settler colonialism. Like I long for better. I really insist on better for us. I don't think we can get better by accepting the terms of continued violent extraction and expansionism that are being offered to us worldwide, not just to Palestinians, but to people here in this settler colony, in the still ongoing pandemic and the sort of extractive abandonment that you all have talked about so clearly, repeatedly, effectively, at great detail from every aspect, on this podcast, which is part of why it feels meaningful for me to be in conversation with the body of work at the Death Panel. I think the --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:14:50

Wow. Thank you, Rasha. That means a lot to hear.

Rasha Abdulhadi 1:14:52

Yeah. I mean, the connections are important for my words to speak in the context of the archive of your conversations about extractive abandonment, about eugenics within this settler colony, about -- I think of Jules talking about the colonial roots of trans misogynistic violence, eliminationist trans misogynistic violence, and how much that explains about the United Kingdom, and how much that explains about why certain reproductive justice organizations can't talk about genocide in Palestine or won't, because of some colonial commitments they have to funders, or maybe even in their gender analysis, some limitations around who they are ready to consider as people and who they're ready to serve.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:15:51

I'm just gonna pause this here, because this is going to bring us to the end of part one. Part two is going to pick up right where we left off, and that will be out this time next week in the public feed on April 25. To support the show, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. Patrons get access to the extra weekly bonus episode that comes out every Monday in the patron feed, as well as the entire back catalogue of bonus episodes. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, hold listening and discussion groups, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_. Patrons, we'll catch you Monday in the patron feed. For everyone else, we will catch you later next week. As always, Medicare for All now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.

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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)