Water for Gaza (05/20/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Abby Cartus discuss how the ongoing water crisis in Palestine is a tool of genocide, how to understand the centrality of water and sanitation systems to all of the infrastructure needed to support life, and what Death Panel listeners and contacts in Gaza tell us we can do to help.
Support Gaza Municipality here:
https://bit.ly/MuniWater
Support Afnan’s fundraiser here:
https://bit.ly/HelpAfnan
More spotlight campaigns o the Gaza Funds website here:
https://gazafunds.com/
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)
[ Intro music ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:32
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I'm Beatrice Adler-Bolton, and I'm here today with my co-host, Abby Cartus.
Abby Cartus 1:12
Hello.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:12
And it's just me and Abby today. And we wanted to talk about something that is very top of mind for many of the people that we have been speaking to in Gaza, which is the situation with water in Gaza. A situation that, as we're about to get into, is pretty dire, and is a very important and much less visible tool of genocide, as horrific as any of the bombs that have been dropped.
Obviously, today's a patron episode, so for listeners, to go behind the scenes a little bit inside the production of the show for a second, there are a couple of people that we've been talking to about coming on to the show who have much more direct intimate knowledge of this than we do. Hopefully, we'll have those coming up for you soon.
But because the situation is extremely pressing and urgent, and because it also touches on so many of the things that we've talked about for years now regarding the intersections of Gaza and public health, the conditions of public health, infectious diseases, and so on, as conditions and tools of settler colonial genocide and violence.
Because of that, we wanted to take today to just talk through some of it, share some of the things from people that we've been talking to on the ground, and also share a few things that our contacts in Gaza have asked us to highlight in terms of support that we here in the imperial core can materially give to folks in Palestine right now. So there are people that we hope you'll be hearing from in the coming weeks when they have time, that will hopefully be an expansion on this conversation that Abby and I are gonna have today.
We're currently working on scheduling, which can be really difficult because things move quickly and are changing. And a lot of people are engaged in things that are much more important and urgent in their day to day lives than like a media appearance.
So Abby and I are gonna run our mouths today and get the conversation started about water in Gaza, and then we can build on that going forward. So as I said, you know, the reason we wanted to talk about this sooner rather than later, is because the water crisis in Gaza is really, really bad.
The last 200 plus days of bombardment have decimated a system that was already at its breaking point as part of the ongoing settler colonial blockade of Gaza, that has been going now in its current iteration steadily since 2007. And things are really bad. And this is also something that we can help. Again, we can really help from afar by directing material resources.
And we've been asked to help fundraise for Gaza Municipality, who is trying to raise $1M, with only 26 days left to go in their campaign.
So everything you're about to hear us talk about today is because of this request that we've gotten from people that we're in touch with, because the situation with water in Palestine has gotten so bad that, for example, out of 150 stations that are servicing -- essentially like processing water for use, there are maybe only three or four that are working. Wells, there's no fuel to run the pumps, there's no fuel to clean the water, there's no sewage being collected in the way that it's supposed to be collected.
This is a system that has been deprived of the materials and resources that are needed to repair and maintain it now for decades as part of the settler colonial project. And now you have not only constant bombardment for 200 days, tanks rolling over it, you know, you have the intentional targeting and destruction of public health infrastructure, water mains, etc.
So, this is not just -- to say this is bad or this is a water crisis is a gross understatement.
Abby Cartus 4:41
Understatement.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 4:42
Yeah. And the reason we're talking about this specifically is that when we're talking to people in Gaza, this is really top of mind. As I said, this is primary, it is something you are dealing with all day long. It is from the perspective of folks who are working in public health, like for example, if you remember the conversation that we had on the show with Danya Qato, there's a question from one of our listeners in Gaza who brought up hepatitis C. Now that was in January.
And it is now May. And this is, as our listeners in Gaza predicted, now a really major problem, specifically because of the lack of clean water, the lack of ability to clean the water, the targeting of the water system, etc. So this is a crowdfunding effort for a municipality, which this is not an aid org or a charity, basically, like kind of the city government, like the trash, street cleaning.
These municipal agencies that are tasked with providing vital services such as water supply, waste management, sewage treatment.
And with this funding, basically, they can make repairs, try and enhance water provisions, manage the collection and disposal of waste, address sewage overflow, which is a huge problem right now, within the umbrella of just general sanitation issues. They're going to try and repair and reopen key roads to try and facilitate emergency vehicle access to clear debris and provide aid.
So the economic blockade of Gaza is so extreme that they are crowdfunding to raise these basic funds for services that most of us in the imperial core just really take for granted.
And so that is really the key ask and call to action that we're coming with you today, which is to help crowd fund. Donate. Yes, absolutely. We need you to donate.
But we need you to do more than donate. We need you to help pitch in and share this too and take on some of this crowdfunding load with us. Because $1 million in 26 days is a much more manageable goal if many of us can uplift this call to action altogether.
Abby Cartus 6:41
Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 6:41
And so just to say right now, you know, just from the top, the link to their donation page, it's in the episode description. I'm just gonna say it out here, there's a shortened link. You can go to bit.ly/MuniWater. That is with a capital M and a capital W.
Now some people might have heard of this fundraiser or heard of this account because Refaat Alareer, who was murdered in December, who a lot of people have shared his poem If I Die, he was running the Gaza Muni account for a while before he died, helping them run this fundraiser.
So they really need people to help take this up right now and carry out Refaat's wishes. Refaat wanted this funded. He's not here. We need to step in, and we need to lend our effort and skills here to help carry them through to their goal.
So yeah, basically, today, we are talking about the lack of clean water in Gaza. We're going to talk about the ramifications, why it's important to direct material support to Gaza in these various strategic ways.
This is also just a really illustrative example of talking about the use of public health conditions as a tool of genocide and the importance and consequences of the way that infrastructural operations are done. And in this case, you know, what we're really talking about is not just what damage has been done to the city, but what about the broader colonial occupation of Palestine that is decades and decades long?
What about the relationship between the "Palestinian state," the "Palestinian Authority," and the "settler state," what about that political relationship influences this chokehold of resources in Gaza, that not just means that there is a water system right now that has been damaged by bombardment, but there is a pre-existing, long standing crisis, where for a long time now water in Gaza has been used as a weapon of war. And this is, again, this is preceeding October.
And what's really important to know is that some of the best ways to sort of enter in this topic is to think about how quickly, by October 9th, 95% of water access in the Gaza Strip had been reduced, right? If there is a kind of capacity to meter and shut off and shut down infrastructure so quickly, that you can not just like have water access, but essentially slow it to a drip, right, like that -- that really tells you something about the precarity of the municipal system that existed long before October.
Abby Cartus 9:16
Yeah. I feel like I had kind of a dissonant experience as I was preparing for this episode, and reading into the kind of history of the water politics of the Israeli state, which in a lot of ways mirror the water politics of the United States. There's like a really interesting book called Cadillac Desert from the 1980s.
And it's about sort of like water policy in the western United States, and how water policy was kind of a tool of national cohesion, of constructing like a national subjectivity, of carrying out this like manifest destiny of expansion and cultivation of the American West and the attendant displacement and destruction of Indigenous peoples and ways of life. And so, as I was preparing for all of this, I was thinking about parallels to the settler colonialist violence and expansion of the United States.
And it was interesting, because a lot of the things that I was reading about Gaza, even -- even reporting that was very, very sympathetic, and treating this crisis, I think, with the gravity, that it really deserves, a lot of this reporting and analysis seemed to come from this -- almost like an international humanitarian law type of framework, which is very -- it effects almost this bifurcation of the political, you know, and it's like the background sort of discursive frame is, well, you know, there's this "conflict" that is happening. And it's important to ensure that civilians can still access clean water, like amid the "conflict," you know?
I just -- that framework kind of completely glosses over how so much of the violence of this situation is abstract violence, that is enacted through these very, very long histories of how water infrastructure is set up, and how it's undermined over a very long period of time, just as you were saying, about how things like infrastructure, things like food and water, are constitutive of the violence itself, and not just sort of like separate.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 11:38
I mean, I think, in some ways, when I think about the really dire circumstances that I hear from folks who are waiting in line, they get up first thing in the morning, it's fucking hot, or it's still cold, they go and they're walking to the water distribution point. This is particularly -- I'm thinking of like folks that I'm speaking to who are -- who have been forced down and are displaced in and around Rafah, where, okay, you'll get up in the morning, you've been sleeping in a tent, there have been bombings and it's not -- it's not a quiet, peaceful sleep. You get up and you have to walk to a water distribution point with all of the containers that you have to fill and try -- and then wait in line, sometimes for hours, to try and get the water for you and yours for the day.
And some of the folks that I'm talking to, right, they're listeners of this show, they're public health people, they're like, you know, Bea, I'm getting 1/8th of the WHO minimum standard of water a day, and I don't even know it's clean. There are things that happen.
Like, for example, you know, immediately October 9th, there is a sort of truncating of water access, that happens as a deliberate tool of the beginning of this ongoing escalation that has now lasted for over 200 days. And what happened is simultaneously, right, targeting power infrastructure, targeting desalination plants, and then shutting off these three pipelines of water, drinking water, that come from the settler state into Palestine. So you basically have the ability to sort of do this immediate chokehold.
And very early on in this escalation, we saw the politics and conditions of water access in Gaza be something that was sort of talked about, right? We saw -- saw the UN and the kind of humanitarian aid machine, Oxfam, you know, get involved, make statements about water as early as the 16th, the 20th of October, right.
So in November, I got a text. This was one of the first conversations that I had with one of our listeners in Gaza. I got a text from one of them through Signal and they're like, oh my god, some water aid just got in through the blockage, because essentially, they shut off the water, and then they stopped allowing aid in.
And there were trucks coming in with water every day, in addition to the 150 desalination plants and these two pipes, right. So already, the infrastructure that is existing isn't enough. And the aid that came in was bottled water. And it was basically enough for like 22,000 people for one day, if you're going by the WHO minimum, right?
And this is something where in response, you saw press releases go out -- oh, they got aid in, oh, thank goodness, right? But on the ground, they're like, well, what the fuck are we supposed to do, right? This is not -- this is -- this is an insult upon the injury of the conditions of occupation that we -- that were pre-existing, right?
Abby Cartus 14:45
Exactly. Exactly.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 14:46
And the public health framework, right, of water access is very cut and dry. If you think about the history of public health, right, this is the Broad Street pump, sanitation, water access --
Abby Cartus 14:52
It's very important.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 14:54
Cities, crowding, population, right? Like, in many ways, this is the core and foundation of why public health exists for the provisioning of clean water. And ultimately, what we're seeing is this -- it's not just a weaponization of the abandonment, right, but there's also these dehumanizing self-fulfilling prophecies, right, that are created through essentially not just controlling the resources, but then also destroying the infrastructure and again, preventing water from coming in, right, which is that when you don't have water that's clean, when you don't have regular access to water, you can't do the things that you need to do to make sure that you're eating clean food, to clean yourself, right. So you start to have this kind of compounding problem of the deprivation of water, obviously, the more dangerous and severe it is in an immediate sense regarding dehydration, but there's the secondary --
Abby Cartus 16:01
It's a force multiplier in a lot of ways. Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 16:04
Right, I mean, could you sort of talk, Abby, from the public health perspective, as an epidemiologist, you know, kind of what are the core concepts that we're really even talking about here in terms of how important the kind of management of waste and water is towards conceptualizing even just like how we think of managing infectious diseases or keeping like any population that lives close together, especially in a city, but in this case, who are displaced and forced into an area that is not set up with the services needed to support even a quarter of the people who are now forced to be in that area under terrible conditions, you know, the conditions of stress, malnutrition, but also now you have months and months of really no access to clean water, creating this incredible compounding public health crisis that I mean, you know, if you look at some of these -- the language that's used by even these like international aid organizations, right, Oxfam, "Epidemic risk rising in Rafah, lethal cocktail of overcrowding, sewage, and hunger," you know, it's talked about as a "ticking time bomb," as an "epidemic crisis at the boiling point."
And this is, I think, really important to just drill down on for a second is, yeah, we can say all these words to I guess imply that it's really serious, but I think it's important to really talk about what is really sort of going on when you have water infrastructure decimated in this way, weaponized in this way?
Abby Cartus 17:41
Yeah. I mean, it's so -- it's just so big. And I mean, this kind of -- this kind of connects back to what I was just saying a moment ago, even everything that you've just kind of laid out I think really speaks to the inadequacy of US Public Health, which for all intents and purposes, is kind of global public health.
This focus on the kind of single intervention that like makes everything okay, you know? And so I feel like, yes, there's this imminent water crisis. And yes, public health people know, abstractly, that it's bad to be in a situation with a severe lack of water infrastructure and a lack of water. But I feel, and maybe -- maybe I'm projecting this a little bit on to my colleagues in public health, but I feel like the way that this gets talked about is like, oh okay, well, you know, it's a political -- it's just like a political problem.
And if you solve the political problem and deliver enough units of bottled water, then this will be fine. And I think that that -- that's kind of a tendency of US Public Health in general, is to create this idea that it is possible to have sort of like water justice, or ecological justice, or health justice, that these things can coexist with the conditions of occupation. And I really don't think that's true.
And I don't think that public health -- public health interventions are necessarily broad enough in scope or are able to kind of hold all of this context within them. In terms of the public health implications of lack of water, and not just lack of water itself, but lack of water infrastructure, maybe we should take them one by one. Lack of water itself is very dangerous for the body. As you were mentioning, the person that you've been in contact with, they're living on less than 1/8th of what the WHO, or is it the UN is saying is the minimum?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 19:47
Yeah, there's a -- there's like a UN emergency standard minimum that's 15 liters. Mhm.
Abby Cartus 19:51
Yeah, it's like 15 liters a day, yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 19:53
And then the WHO minimum, the sufficient minimum for life for meeting basic needs from the WHO is between 50 and 100 liters of water per person, which is between 13 and 27 gallons. So much more than the UN emergency standard of 15 liters.
Abby Cartus 20:14
Yeah, of 15. Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 20:15
And noting, by the way, that in the UN report where they're quoting this emergency standard of 15 liters, they're saying that in Gaza -- this is from December, in Gaza, that their estimate is that folks are living on three liters of water a day, and the UN was calling to raise it up to 15 liters.
And then, you know, sort of touting, for example, the UNICEF donation of 44,000 bottles of drinking water on a 20 truck long convoy that, again, was one day's supply of water for 22,000 people, and was coming in after an escalation of the blockade at the border, deliberately shutting off these pipelines, and the settler state targeting desalination water drinking facilities and municipal infrastructure with bombardment, to the point that within two days, they had cut off 95% of the water flow to the Gaza strip itself. Please continue.
Abby Cartus 21:12
No, that's good. I think we had read the same thing. And it is from, if I recall correctly, it is from at least a few months ago. So you know, the situation I think has changed even since then. In terms of lack of water, even prior to October of 2023, about 25% of all diseases in Gaza were related to water, like they were gastrointestinal or diarrheal diseases related to water. I think that that has skyrocketed. I think since October, I read that there has been a 2,000% increase in diarrheal disease among children under five. And that is very -- I mean, that's very bad. Diarrheal diseases are intensely dehydrating.
So it's almost like a vicious sort of feedback, that the lack of water that is forcing people to drink water that they don't know if it's clean, it's probably not, it's brackish, it's maybe contaminated with sewage.
This can lead to a whole host of diarrheal diseases. The diseases that I think I and health authorities sort of worry the most about are typhoid and cholera, both of which spread through contaminated water. And the situation around Rafah that you're describing, I mean, it's a tinderbox for something like a cholera outbreak, which, again, cholera is a diarrheal disease, it's rapidly dehydrating. It can kill very, very quickly.
And the effects of cholera are compounded in a population that is malnourished and starving, which we know is also the case. So, it's -- it's not just -- you know, not having enough water to drink leads to dehydration, to kidney and liver problems, kidney stones, it can lead to cognitive problems, all of these things.
But then, beyond the effects of dehydration on the individual body, of lack of water, there's all these other things that lack of water means. And it means, you know, lack of wastewater treatment, which it's -- it's so -- it's hard to talk about these things in kind of a linear way, because it -- everything feeds back onto itself. You know, it's like a self -- it's like a self feeding fire, you know, like a self feeding crisis really.
So, with inability to treat wastewater, this means that wastewater is just getting sort of dumped everywhere. I think millions of gallons of untreated sewage are getting dumped into the Mediterranean every day. I think most of the water in Gaza comes from like a single aquifer, which is pretty compromised to begin with. And just sort of lack of wastewater, of sewage treatment means that this like untreated wastewater -- I mean, it's running through the streets, where people can sort of be exposed to it that way.
And it's filtering through the ground into whatever groundwater is available. So there's a massive sort of contamination threat because of the lack of water treatment facilities that again, you know, just sort of exponentially compounds these risks of disease spread through contaminated water, because there's -- there's no clean water and there's no way to clean wastewater and sewage. Sorry, I'm getting like upset and I need to like --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 24:44
No, it's okay. I mean, I think it's worth saying maybe for -- and stopping for a moment, to say this is really upsetting and really hard to talk about because as you're saying, Abby, this is kind of like pulling out a load bearing beam from a building, and the whole building collapses onto you. This is a -- this is a really difficult conversation that we're having today. But it is so, so important to not look away from this, right? Like the -- and this is why I -- you know, it's why I'm emphasizing that there is direct material asks that are coming from folks in Gaza about this. Again, this is why we're trying to help Gaza Muni raise this money, we're trying to encourage folks to take that up as well. But what we're talking about here is almost like the magic trick that is the whole mythology of public health, right?
Abby Cartus 25:41
Yeah, completely.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 25:43
I think about this relative to -- you talked about, Abby, the kind of myth that there's one weird trick that public health has to fix everything. And there's a kind of similar parallel within psychiatry and the search for biomarkers, right, and a kind of blood test for madness, right? Where they figured out that there was a biological connection around syphilis, right, where syphilis was causing X amount of cases of madness. And this was a huge moment of growth for psychiatry as a profession, right? This is very important.
And so interestingly enough, psychiatrists, after that point, spend decades and decades, and are still looking for the next syphilis, right, for the next bio-linked answer that's going to one weird trick a huge population of Mad people into a state of cure, right?
There's a similar thing in public health around the power of access to clean water, right, like, that is so key. And as you're saying, there's like a really important sort of cyclical, inextricable fucking mess of shit that happens when you take out one of these pieces, let alone a ton at once.
Abby Cartus 27:03
Yeah. And I mean, to bring it into the clinical space, I mean, it is impossible -- I know that like the medical infrastructure in Gaza has been almost completely destroyed. And one of the ways that that has happened is lack of clean water. Like you can't -- you can't have functioning health care, in any sense of the word that we understand that, without clean water.
There are -- there are terrible knock-on effects from this. People are coming into clinical hospital settings with very, very contaminated wounds. They're maybe having to like lie on the floor.
There's no water to sterilize instruments, you know, like, there are sort of chemical ways to do it. But the totality and the brutality of the blockade severely restricts the kinds of care for traumatic injuries that can be provided. And this has -- I mean, talk about like ecology, you know, in ecological consequences, this has terrifying consequences for antimicrobial resistance, the implications and the contours of which I don't even fully understand, but like this is a situation where there are thousands and thousands of people with traumatic injuries that they just have to get -- you know, there's no clean water, the wounds possibly can't be treated in sort of a sterile way.
And then whatever antibiotics are available, you've got to give them to people. I mean, it just kind of creates like a perfect -- a perfect storm for not only these waterborne illnesses, but now, antimicrobial resistance and infections -- they could be skin infections, blood infections that are drug resistant, and I mean, that is terrifying.
And that -- that is terrifying for everyone. Like it's -- it's [sighs], this -- okay, this is going to maybe sound really silly, and if it does, we can just cut it out. But I feel, all of the-- all of this untreated sewage that's getting dumped into the Mediterranean, all of the contaminants that are filtering into the groundwater, not just from untreated sewage, but from things like mass graves.
These are -- I've been thinking a lot about Fanon, about how violence -- violence has a cost to everyone, and I just -- I look at this water situation, and truly like the ecological nature of it, like the tangle of how connected all of these disparate problems are to the problem of water and water access, and I just -- it's hard for me to see it in any other way than just being this wage of violence, this like price of violence that truly -- I mean, it's -- it's a matter of concern for the whole planet, you know, like the whole ecosystem, the human species, certainly.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:12
Well, I think, you know, to make a blind joke for a second, it just highlights the short-sightedness of settler colonialism.
Abby Cartus 30:20
Right. Exactly.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:21
You know, it's -- to understand, I think, really what we're looking at, I just want to build up a picture of sort of where the water is coming from. As Abby said, most of the water in the Gaza Strip comes from an aquifer. There are three pipes that come from the settler state into Gaza, that provide drinking water, and then there are 150 desalination plants that process water from this aquifer. Essentially what you have going on is fourfold.
One, for many, many decades, this system has been under deprivation, assault, right, deprived of the kinds of things that are needed to repair it, machinery needed to repair it. It's been also deliberately targeted in bombardments. It has faced damage from bulldozers, construction equipment, tanks, and not just aerial bombardment, but ground rockets. So you have that aspect, right?
The second is that you need a lot of power to do the process needed in desalination. So what these 150 desalination plants do is they're reverse osmosis processes. So essentially, they force contaminated water through a membrane at incredibly high pressure. So it's a very power and resource intensive process of cleaning water. It's very effective, but it's intensive, resource intensive, right?
Abby Cartus 31:55
Yeah, you need a lot of electricity to push water at that pressure.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 31:59
Exactly. So you have again, now, right, you have a process that's very resource intensive, and power is being shut off, off and on and by the settler state. You have fuel being withheld, right? You have the targeting of solar panels, right? Two, again, is this contamination of the groundwater to begin with, which is downstream of this larger abandonment of the sewage infrastructure. That's kind of the point one, right? So this is, again, like demonstrating the inseparability of all this, that Abby, you know, you've been talking about. So from point four, right, you have the really important and kind of unaccounted for, or maybe I just don't think that there has been a lot of digesting of like what this really means for people, for those of us who are living in the imperial core, is that the displacement that is going on is in and of itself, a huge aspect of the "water crisis," right?
Abby Cartus 33:08
Yep. Mhm, yes.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 33:10
When we think of like access to water, we've been talking about like water mains, water treatment, sewage systems, waste management, but like where do we all access water every day, 24/7? In our homes, right? And that's the part that I feel like keeps getting disconnected from the discussion of water crisis. And it makes sense, because I guess as you were saying earlier, Abby, there's so much of the reporting on this and the media discourse, right, focuses on these perspectives from like UN, these kinds of international NGO lenses, which are not going to look at the destruction of someone's home and incorporate that into an analysis of water deprivation.
Abby Cartus 33:56
Yeah. Well, I feel like a lot of those humanitarian narratives really presuppose the destruction of someone's home.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 34:03
Yes.
Abby Cartus 34:05
And that presupposition, I think, creates some constraints on the analysis. But please continue, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 34:11
No, I mean, this is -- that's really kind of what I'm trying to paint the picture of here, which is, when we're talking about infrastructure, we're also talking about shelter and dwellings and where we access water 24/7. I mean, part of the -- I went into some of the WHO documents about a month ago, after texting back and forth with our listener, who was displaced to Rafah, and we were talking about the specific locale of where they were displaced. And I want us to get into that for a second.
But, you know, when he was telling me, oh, we're living on this fraction of the WHO standard minimum, I went into these WHO documents because I had not heard of there being a WHO minimum amount of water, but I thought, of course there is, right, it's the WHO.
And you know, the thing that I think is really difficult, right, is that you have folks who are living in tents, these tents are under bombardment, there is no water delivery infrastructure, you're dealing with containers, right? There's not the water needed for medical care, there's not the water needed to cook, there's not the water needed to clean yourself, there's not the water needed to go to the bathroom.
And you have to get it from a jug, right, you have to carry it, you have to move it. I mean, the loss of place, of home and shelter, where you have a tap that you turn on and off, right, the loss of where a home's plumbing connects into municipal plumbing is fucking devastating to start to think about, and to start to realize also, under the conditions of kind of point one, where you have deliberate resource deprivation, deliberate sabotage of the capacity to repair this damage, the damage that's being done to the literal place, can't even begin to reckon with like the erasure forever of all these moments where plumbing become society, if that makes sense, like, because there is no society without fucking plumbing, as any investigation into the history of the Industrial Revolution, industrialization in general, or the history of public health can really tell you, like there is no fucking society without plumbing.
And this is a brutal, fucking horrific tool that is not even that much slower at killing you than a fucking bomb.
Abby Cartus 36:50
No. Well, and this is interesting. I mean, your mention of the kind of history of public health and this idea of the WHO minimum, is really kind of like calling back to some conversations that we've had before on the podcast and I'm thinking specifically about our conversation with Jim Downs and his book called, is it called Maladies of Empire?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 37:17
Maladies -- yes. Yes.
Abby Cartus 37:19
There's like -- there's another book called The Emperor of All Maladies that's like a pop science book about cancer that I always confuse the titles. Maladies of Empire is is Jim Downs' book and it's kind of a chronicle of the ghoulish sort of underside of public health and how public health as sort of an adjunct of the British Empire at first and empire and imperial projects more generally, this is how we know, you know what I mean, like what the minimum amount of water that a human body needs to survive is, is these imperial projects of the past, and public health investigations as part of that.
And I'm just kind of thinking about it, like this sort of -- I feel like there's kind of a sinister sort of epistemic innovation that takes place at the coalface of empire, like the coalface of settler colonialism. And, yeah, I don't know, all of this talk about like how -- you know, the minimum, the WHO minimum amount of water is just kind of making me dwell in that, and it's very -- it's very uncomfortable.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:37
It is, yeah.
Abby Cartus 38:38
You know, I don't -- I don't like it. And I -- you know, I consider myself like one of the good ones as far as like public health is concerned [laughing] but, you know, it's really, really, really uncomfortable. And I think that these -- like the humanitarian frameworks and kind of the benevolent public health, humanitarian frameworks, and you know, I'm not someone who knows a lot about humanitarian stuff, like I think somebody like Adia Benton would probably have much smarter things to say about this.
But I feel -- yeah, this like humanitarian/public health kind of framework coming from the United States really hides the ball of what is going on. And I think that this makes the knowledge that is being produced by Palestinians, you know, by people in Palestine at this time, so valuable.
And I think that it's maybe also part of why knowledge production infrastructure has also been targeted very deliberately, because in the United States, like in these highly sort of technocratic disciplines that interface with this kind of humanitarian impulse,, I feel like we are constructing kind of like an epistemic silo for ourselves, that again, you know, makes it seem like the water crisis is sort of disaggregable from the larger genocide, that it's sort of resolvable with a humanitarian intervention in a paradigm, of course, that we would decide on, you know, as the US experts and things like that.
And I -- that is, obviously, it's not even like a tertiary or a quaternary concern in this context, but I do think it does matter, and I do think that the experiences and the formal academic knowledge that is being produced out of this situation is so -- in some ways, it's kind of like the inverse of the canon of epidemiologic knowledge.
It's born out of these same conditions of colonization and genocide and ecocide, but I don't know. I feel like there is an epistemology of it that is so much richer and more explanatory and more valuable than the epistemic -- like the humanitarian epistemic framework that we're working with in public health.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 41:07
It's so much more fucking urgent than that, you know, and I jus -- while you were saying that and laying that out just there, I was thinking about these conversations that I've been having with a 23 year old nursing student, who is now working above her training in the orthopedic department at Al Shifa in central Gaza. And her name is Afnan Abu Hasaballah. She's wonderful.
She's crowdfunding right now also as well. So if you want to go to bit.ly/HelpAfnan, we'll also link that in the episode description. She needs help finding safety, completing her education so that she can really do what she needs to do in orthopedics, what she has been forced to learn how to do before she was ready, as she was just getting ready to start graduate school.
She graduated nursing school in fucking August of 2023. And, you know, she was displaced, her university destroyed and the conditions that she and I've been talking about about -- like ortho is a major part of the trauma care that's needed right now, right. And it's -- these are fucking hellish conditions. You know, she's telling me like, okay, so these are terrible injuries to treat, right?
These are horrific traumas that are happening to people's bodies, right, like very deep tissue trauma, broken bones, major surgeries, you know, you've got pins and armatures to keep things in place, amputations. This is like really, really traumatic injuries, but they're not just in a vacuum, right. These are not just injuries that walks through the door. T
here are people, there are people who, for months, have only been drinking polluted salty water, you know, there are people who may have had hepatitis or may have hepatitis right now. She's saying like there's so many kids with hepatitis, there are so many kids who are malnourished.
She said to me, healthy food is not available at all. Everyone is so thin, everyone is so hungry, everyone is so thirsty. And we've been talking about the way that this is making care even harder, right? Like, we've talked about sterilization, we've talked about supplies.
But these, again, are the ways that medicine and medicalization in a lens are really like important to question, because it can reduce and atomize this really complex thing down into something that feels like all these little parts, right? And all those little parts are like a fucking person who's hungry, who needs help. And the person who's helping them doesn't have what they need, and they're hungry, and they need help, too.
And this is -- this is so incredibly dire. And Afnan has lost 28 members of her family were martyred. It's her and her nine year old cousin now. It's -- [pauses] the cases that they're treating in Al Shifa too are so much worse. I mean, I know that there are a lot of listeners of the show who are healthcare workers.
I'm sure many of you listening who are healthcare workers have spent some time in and around critical care, emergency care, right, at some point in your training or career, regardless of where you work in health care, right. A lot of people have had experiences in this setting. Imagine your worst day at work. And then under these conditions. It's -- it's not reducible, right? You can't. And --
Abby Cartus 44:57
Yeah, it's a totality on the experiential level, that becomes a series of disaggregable, solvable problems on kind of like the analytic level, where these very rational decisions get made. And I think that kind of framework is inadequate to a situation like this.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 45:19
Yeah, I mean, you know, this is what -- this is the US is sending billions of dollars, you know, as Rasha talked about when we had them on the show again recently, you know, the world is running out of bullets because so much artillery has been pumped into the bodies and the land of Palestine. Afnan and I have been talking, you know, she just graduated nursing school, we've been talking about what happens to the body without water, clean water.
You know, red blood cells start changing immediately, like the moment you start to feel -- she told me like the moment you start to feel your mouth is dry, your blood cells are changing. Water is super essential for the blood to deliver oxygen to the brain and other organs.
So pretty much immediately, organs in the brain start to get less oxygen. And when they don't have the oxygen they need to function, things can go bad quickly, especially in the liver and kidneys, it can drop your blood volume, causing less blood to circulate throughout the body, because the blood cells are literally shrinking because they're getting dehydrated.
Abby Cartus 46:26
As a tweet that I saw many years ago said, I'm going to paraphrase it, the human body is basically flavored water, like [laughing] the human body is mostly water,
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 46:36
It is, yeah. And even just the blood volume drop, where your blood cells are shrinking and you have a blood volume drop, that severe drop in blood pressure in and of itself can be fatal.
You can pass out and hit your head, or in and of itself, that blood drop can kill you, right. And without water, all of the cells in your body start to shrink as the water leaves them. Hydration is essential for life. Like we do not have working bodies without it.
“Bodies are flavored water,” as you just paraphrased. White blood cells start to change. You know, Afnan and I were talking about water and the immune system, you know, if you're not as hydrated, you're gonna have a harder time fighting off infections.
So it's not just that people are exposed to wastewater and dehydrated, it's that this in and of itself is not as simple as just numbers on a spreadsheet, right, or just symptoms being plugged into a calculator of some kind, right?
Like these are compounding, co-occurring, random factors that are not so random at all. But in fact, the deliberate and calculated outcome of a campaign of genocide that is not just genocide, but is medicalized ecocide on top of it, you know?
Like it might sound like, oh, here's your daily reminder to drink water, like kind of woo woo. But like, if you are dehydrated, your body is fucking struggling. It's not gonna -- you're not going to have an efficient immune system.
That's why it's really -- you know, it changes your digestion, right? Like, you can't digest food the same way, your body can't regulate waste the same way.
You need saliva to breathe, and that begins to become dehydrated, like the pH of your blood changes, your body stops making certain hormones, like the body is unable to function.
And this is key to the entire balance of the body, right? So without water in the body, right, water is key to regulating temperature. Sweating, right? This is, this is so fucking key. And you can go from like totally fine to organ damage really quickly, right, like --
Abby Cartus 46:36
In days, yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 48:54
Three days, you know? You can survive about a month or so without food. Our bodies don't function without access to water. And now, that is clean water, something which Gaza has not had for many years anyways.
Again, not by accident, not randomly, but as the deliberate and calculated outcome of an ongoing genocide that was happening long before October 7th, right, which has only escalated to such a spectacular annihilation that is yes, happening in terms of a direct killing, right, a targeted killing, but this is where the real toll is going to be taken out, right?
This is where the big totals come from, right? This is just as deliberate a tool of murder as a bomb with a happy face and American flag on it.
Abby Cartus 49:52
It's just as direct, visceral violence as bombing and bullets, as you've just laid out, I mean, beautifully and horrifically, and I'm glad that you brought the conversation around to this point, because I don't know, I think a lot about -- I think it was -- maybe it was Rasha's first appearance on the show, I can't -- I can't keep a chronology straight in my head.
But I think a lot about what Rasha said about the words that you use really matter. And like, when you are saying kind of like slogans around this, you kind of have a responsibility to -- to know what they mean.
This is just making me think -- I mean, obviously, I'm in favor of a ceasefire, you know, in the parlance of kind of the discourse of the resistance in the United States right now. But, you know, as we were chatting about a little bit before we started, I think that this is so critical, because this really, really shows how the conversation, certainly the situation, and the challenge is so much bigger, and so much more totalizing than a cessation of the sort of direct violence of bombing and bullets, which is absolutely necessary.
But there is this whole underpinning, you know what I mean, underpinning the spectacular violence that we have all borne witness to, underpinning all of that is a -- is an infrastructure of violence, you know, almost like a bureaucratic and a very abstracted infrastructure of killing and annihilation.
And I feel like the directness, the viscerality can kind of get hidden in the complexity and sort of the anonymity and the abstractness of this structural violence. There is a book by Mike Davis called Late Victorian Holocausts. As the title suggests, it's about the British Empire, and the astounding, astounding death tolls that the British Empire oversaw, particularly in India and China.
And, you know, kind of what you were saying about like this is where the big numbers come from. The estimates for the number of people that died in India and China in the late 1800s, the confidence intervals are wide, because nobody was really counting very precisely, but, I mean, they're staggering. It's like 30 to 60 million people.
And the vast majority of those people died because of famine, like politically created, like anthropogenic famine and diseases of overcrowding and lack of sanitation. And, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is like both of these types of violence are just spectacular and very, very visceral. And I feel like we shouldn't lose sight of the viscerality and the immediateness of the violence of the loss of access to basically all water, and all electricity.
We shouldn't lose sight of that, I guess, just because it is conducted without weapons, if that makes sense.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 53:33
Absolutely. I mean, what this brings to mind is actually this really wonderful moment where one of our listeners, G, who many may remember from our episode with Danya Qato, Letters From Gaza, G, who was sort of running a one man mask bloc in central Gaza, was displaced twice - first to Khan Yunis, then to a little area just outside of Rafah where many people are displaced called Al-Mawasi, which is not residential.
It's kind of -- he told me it's basically right in between Khan Yunis, the Egyptian border and Rafah, and it's sort of this very sandy no man's land. It's primarily agricultural. He said it was like sort of open land. And this area where so many people have been forced to from the north, in much of the north, a lot of the infrastructure is completely destroyed. Down in Rafah, there is a running desalination plant.
It's run by the Eta Water Company, that I was reading some press releases from the water company, which were wild. You know, this plant used to at most serve 300,000 people. Now they're serving one and a half million people with constant fuel shortages. And again, they're running a reverse osmosis system that requires incredible amounts of energy using generators. So this is like an incredibly sort of dire brink of a balancing act, right.
And so that's where there is access to running water. However, there are a lot of people, 400,000 people in Al-Mawasi right now, which again, is not residential. There are a lot of tents, people are living in tents. It's an area that basically lacks all infrastructure. And this is where G has been for a while.
We haven't -- we haven't heard back from G in a couple of weeks, and I hope that he's okay. But this area has so little infrastructure that out of all the places that he's been displaced to, he's had like the worst access to internet or telecom.
So I am trying to stay really hopeful. But, you know, he described it again as open land. There's no infrastructure, there's no sewage pipes or networks, there's no water treatment substations, no water pipes, no electricity, no internet access, because, you know, this is an area that was mostly used for greenhouses and kind of these like self sufficient-ish greenhouse systems where you have these sort of points of water collection, but it's not like we -- you know, it's not set up for 400,000 people to live there.
And, you know, they told me that this area, right, which is kind of sandwiched in between Rafah, Khan Yunis, and the Egyptian border, this area was actually an area of kind of recent historical significance relative to the blockade of Gaza that started in 2007. And it was a really interesting and humbling moment, I learned so much from G and just saying, wait, can you explain this comment, because he said, oh my gosh, I'm fucking in Al-Mawasi.
This is -- this is fucking more insult upon injury, upon genocide, upon stolen land, and I can't fucking take it. And I said, wait, what do you mean, you know? And he said, well, this area was occupied by settlers in the early 2000s, and the settler state used it as this major agricultural hub, right, where they produce something like 15% of the total agricultural export of the settler state. They exported tons and tons of organic produce to Europe: tomatoes, vegetables, gardenias, right.
Like these are high volume organic produce operations that are going on in this area. And many of these greenhouses were destroyed by settlers when they left in 2005, which was part of a plan by the settler Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, that he called the "unilateral separation plan" at first [laughing].
I'm laughing because this next part is so ironic. He later changes the name to the "unilateral disengagement plan" because as he said in his own memoir, separation needed to go because separation "sounded bad, particularly in English, because it evoked apartheid." So anyway, as G told me, this area was occupied for many years, from the Six Day War through to the 2000s, used as this huge agricultural block. The settler state uses this as part of building relationships with Europe, right, export, etc.
And as part of this "disengagement," separation from Gaza, which, again, is sort of part of the initiation of the 2007 blockade that I mentioned, the settler state sort of separates, and then retreats from the Gaza Strip in 2005. This area with all the greenhouses, some of them are taken down and destroyed by settlers, but each of those settlers is given like a huge payment by Bill Gates.
Abby Cartus 59:01
What? Wait, what the fuck?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 59:02
Because as part of -- this is -- okay. I know, it sounds so weird, right?
Abby Cartus 59:06
Not Bill Gates, what the fuck?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 59:09
He is one of the kind of people -- I mean, Bill Gates, you know, international philanthropist.
Abby Cartus 59:16
I did not think that's what you were about to say, I'm sorry. I'm just like, what the fuck?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 59:19
Yeah, like Bill Gates and some other people basically get together and basically buy off the remaining destroyed greenhouses from settlers. So some settlers just wreck shit, and everybody gets paid out when they retreat. It's fucking sickening, right? And these greenhouses get given back, and that is this area of land, right?
This is Al-Mawasi. This is the area of land that was used to boost the settler state reputation by exporting all these fucking fancy organic vegetables back.
This is like a sort of key piece of land in the sort of development of the discourse of the blockade in 2007 moving forward. And so as G was saying, it's fucking frustrating and highly ironic that this is the area where they have all been pushed to, because as he said, the settler state knows exactly how few people this piece of land is engineered to support, which is 9,000.
And 400,000 plus people are living in this land now. So not only is it dangerously unequipped to support that many people, but as G said, to be displaced there is just more insult upon injury, upon genocide, upon stolen land. And I appreciated that he explained that to me, and I thought that you all would appreciate hearing that too, because it is incredibly frustrating.
And I have not -- no one else has sort of drawn my attention to that sort of specific historical overlap in the way that G did. I think in a lot of ways, right, it can feel -- I feel like I only think of water nowadays.
Conversations with people, with our connections in Gaza, they're only thinking of water. So I've only been thinking of water. It has changed the way that I think of how I'm engaging with the built environment around me in a way that is difficult, but is also useful in that it really constantly focuses your attention on Gaza.
Because I swear, if you're listening to this right now, every single time you turn the tap on, you're gonna think about Gaza. When you step in a fucking puddle, or you flush the toilet, run the dishwasher, run the washing machine, see a water main, or a fire hydrant with the cap off flowing into the street, in so many ways, right, like it can feel really difficult to kind of, hold up, okay, now give to this GoFundMe, right? But nevertheless, this is specifically what they are asking for.
Abby Cartus 1:00:05
This is the one, yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:02:04
This is what folks in Gaza need from you and are asking from you as their collaborators and comrades in the imperial core, right? This is kind of the strangeness and the interesting aspect of a municipality crowdfunding, right, to be able to repair the water mains. I mean, when we sort of look at what has to be fixed here, in Rafah alone, they're estimating like $40M USD worth of damage, right? Like the Gaza Muni campaign, this is just for like one area, right? There are 25 municipal or local governments or governing bodies in the Gaza Strip. This is an important way to begin materially engaging with direct asks from folks who are so thirsty right now.
Abby Cartus 1:03:07
Yeah. And additionally, perhaps on a more abstract level, but in some way, on a concrete level too, it's something that we here in the United States can actually do that is -- this is gonna sound so cheesy, but it's life affirming, and not life destroying. And like we can be -- it's like a little bit weird, it's a GoFundMe for a municipality.
And, you know, it can -- even something like this, with a goal of $1M, it feels like a drop in the bucket compared to -- god, not to use like a water metaphor, but it feels like a drop in the bucket compared to maybe the scale of the destruction and the scale of the need, but it is something that is life affirming rather than -- certainly rather than like death dealing.
But I don't know, that feels very powerful to me, is like there's no life without water. And, yeah, it's just a way to affirm the importance, the value, the lives, the existence of Palestinian people, and to symbolically and concretely resist this narrative of inevitability, which, I do think that some of these conversations about how complex these problems are, can lead people to a space of, well, this is just inevitable, like there's nothing -- there's nothing to be done.
But it's not inevitable, you know, and there there are ways that you can affirm the importance and the preciousness of life right now.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:04:59
Absolutely. And it's so important because what we are up against is that we are -- many of us who are listening to this right now are living in states that are materially supporting all of this death and destruction that we've been talking about, all this fucking suffering. And a lot of the conversation has been around divestment and boycotting, which is absolutely also incredibly important. But this is another way, right?
This is one other way that we can use our resources from where we are. The settler state is not just pushing Gaza to the brink of a deadly epidemic outbreak, the settler state is inducing and using infectious disease and dehydration as a targeted weapon of annihilation and genocide.
And whether it's crowding, no water, no sanitation, stress, dehydration, chronically for more than six months, artificially scarce resources, no rest for months, particulate exposure from damaged buildings, exposure to chemical and other toxins as a result of bombardment, rising temperatures, little to no health care.
I mean, as our comrade in Gaza, G said to me the last time that we spoke,
Even if you survive the bombings and escape to the tent city without being murdered on the death march to Rafah by gleeful settler scum, you are still at risk in the evacuated zone. It might not be as spectacular and obvious as a bomb. But those silent killers we've easily conquered with the most basic public health tools are just as deadly when you chronically DO NOT HAVE THE TOOLS.
We haven't heard from G, as I said, since the similar state stepped up its assault on Rafah, bombing, what G called in that message, the forced evacuated zone, where he was saying in that moment that he was safe on its face, but dangerously up against a suite of silent killers. And now it's both.
And we don't know if G is alive, but G, if you are listening to this, comrade, we hope that you're safe. We know that you're not, because it is impossible to be safe in Gaza, but we are with you. And we send you our love and solidarity. And listeners, I really hope that if you can, please donate. Donate to help folks, like Afnan, other people that are fundraising.
There's a really great resource called GazaFunds.com. There's also social media accounts that are for this website, right? This is people who have gotten together, put together a site that basically you go to this URL and a featured fundraiser for someone in Gaza will pop up. And they're particularly featuring fundraisers that are not getting a lot of attention or traction. And every time you refresh the page, a new one pops up.
So you might see the Gaza Muni one pop up there, so fundraise for Gaza Muni, go to GazaFunds.com, find a fundraiser that needs attention, and start boosting, right? Many of us sickos, many chronically ill and disabled people, we have spent years refining this tool, and discussing the fucking insulting and absolutely just dehumanizing ways that we are forced to absolutely just completely lose so much privacy, give up so much of our dignity to crowdfund, right? Like we understand how fucking painful it can be to set these things up.
And we have skills and tools and networks that we can exploit to help our comrades, and we have to do that. We have to constantly push the fundraisers. We have to do what we can to not just divest and boycott, but also materially redirect resources that we have, as meager as they may be, even if it's only attention and time or skills. If you're an artist, you can make a slideshow, you can make a drawing, you can make a fucking poster, you can email people. If you're organizing, tell all your comrades that you're organizing with.
There are so many more ways that you can contribute to trying to help uplift these fundraisers and redirect things materially to folks in Gaza, or towards where they're specifically asking, that never require you to engage with the fucking NGO charity industrial complex, right? Like we can -- we can directly respond to material asks that are coming from people on the ground.
Those people are real people. You can talk to them and build relationships with them.
And there is a lot of life affirming hope that you can give people materially and actually, whether you can financially contribute to their campaign or not. And that is incredibly important to remember.
Because especially if you're not going to be able to forget Gaza every time you fucking see a molecule of moisture, hopefully for as long as you live, because none of us should ever be the fucking same after this, then at least this is something you can do towards that, right? Like I know this is really hard to grapple with.
But again, I just want to emphasize that this is something that it's important to do what you can with the time that you have. And so yeah, in the immediate short term, help us support Gaza Muni, right? They have 26 days left on their campaign. They're trying to raise a million dollars. Bit.ly/MuniWater, capital M, capital W. We will put the link again for that in the episode description.
But you know, beyond that, in a larger sense, everything that we've just talked about today, right, the settler state's control of water as a tool of genocide, the sort of foundational reduction of the lens of public health or medicalization and how that is a tool of empire. It's so important for us to be clear, again and again, that even if we had a permanent ceasefire tomorrow, this kind of control, this choking of resources, this water crisis, this public health crisis, this genocide will not fully end. The settler state exerts enormous control over Palestine, and that control that they exert is the reason that they could cut waterflow down by 95% in two days. They were ready to do it, right?
Abby Cartus 1:12:08
Yeah. And they can, they have the power to. That's the -- that's the problem.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:12:12
And they've been doing it, for 76 fucking years, and even more within the broader colonial history of the region. The British Empire did this right before. So, you know, there's nothing about this history, right, that we can't also delve into further. There are so many other more important mechanisms of control and violence and genocide, that begin to construct the kind of total picture of what kind of state mechanisms the legitimate monopoly on violence actually encompasses, right?
Like, the blockade that's been going, right, this blockade, the insult upon injury, upon genocide, upon stolen land that G's talking about in Al-Mawasi, like, the planning and coordination of space, forced exile, displacement, these are all some of the tools, right, these are the tactics. And as genocide continues to play out in front of us, right, not only is it important to sort of understand what we're looking at, but to also be really clear about where the kind of cracks are, what the truth of the situation is. And, you know, as Rasha Abdulhadi said, in our first conversation, which was October 13th, this is an escalation of the settler state's genocidal project, an escalation, not a new one out of whole cloth.
And it is important to see that clearly, and to have that inform everything that we do, and to be in community with and supporting Palestinians, and what they are asking of us. And that's why what we should demand from within the imperial core is far more than a ceasefire.
We should demand a free Palestine, land back, everything that we've just talked about today, the conditions of the settler state, the conditions of ecocide, of genocide, that doesn't end when the bombs stopped dropping, that doesn't end when the IOF isn't actively carrying out a ground invasion, right. Even before October, the settler state was using the same tactics, the same restrictions, the same poisoning of the land, the control of water, the removal of resources to control waste, right?
These are all things that when we talked to Danya Qato in August of 2022, about public health in Palestine, we talked about this. We talked about the way that the restrictions on what gets through into the strip shifts the landscape of what's in the landfill, and when prescription drugs are brought in so close to their expiration date that they have to be trashed before they can be used. This changes the composition of what is decomposing in the landfill and effectively means that parts of Palestine have become dumping grounds for the rest of the world's fucking expired pharmaceuticals. The way that stops is a free Palestine.
Abby Cartus 1:15:28
Yep.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:15:29
And so that's what we want. But Palestinians are not waiting. If anything, the Gaza Muni fundraiser is a great example of that, of not waiting, of acting in self determination, regardless of what any state has to say. So while it's only an immediate short term action, I think it's really important that we support however we can, any and all asks for material support for folks coming out of Gaza, whether that's the Gaza Muni fundraiser, or finding and connecting with individuals who are fundraising for themselves and their families and their friends, and doing what you can to help them here, with whatever you can, because what else are comrades for, right? We have to have each other's backs, I think.
Abby Cartus 1:16:16
Yeah, well said.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:16:18
I thought I would feel better after this conversation, but to tell you the truth, I don't know if I feel better at all, but I do feel more determined.
Abby Cartus 1:16:28
Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:16:29
And that feels good. Even though I came into this quite determined to begin with [laughing].
Abby Cartus 1:16:36
I feel the same. I feel determined, and I feel heavy. It doesn't feel good in my body, you know, but that's okay. Like, it's not fucking supposed to. It's supposed to feel intolerable. And it's supposed to feel motivating. The last thing I'll say is just my own thank you to listener G, I feel like I have learned so much from him just in this conversation that we've been having. And that's really, really invaluable. And solidarity forever.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:17:15
Absolutely. Thank you so much G and Afnan. And again, please, if you can, Afnan is also raising money. So we'll put both of those links for the Gaza Muni, and we'll put Afnan's fundraiser link, and then we'll put a link to the Gaza Funds site as well, all in the episode description. So listeners, you know what to do.
And patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. We could not do any of this without you. To support the show and get access to the second weekly bonus episode, as well as the entire back catalogue of bonus episodes, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. 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 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_.
And of course, please go fucking hard for these fundraisers, man. Let's do this.
Abby Cartus 1:18:12
Hell yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:18:14
And as always, Medicare for All now. Solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.
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