The Electronic Intifada Podcast 29 August 2024
That was one of the headline topics of The Electronic Intifada Livestream this week, which we discussed with author Steven Salaita.
We also covered Hizballah’s retaliatory strike on Israeli military bases, the ongoing unraveling of Israel’s economy and society and the cataclysmic plans, endorsed by Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, to build a synagogue in the place where Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest shrine, stands.
We featured a reading of excerpts from the genocide diaries of Refaat Alareer, written in October but first published by The Electronic Intifada last week.
The Palestinian poet, professor and beloved mentor was murdered in an Israeli airstrike on 6 December 2023.
You can watch a recording of the whole program, which begins with a news brief from associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman, in the YouTube video above, or listen to the audio at the end of this article.
You’ll also find links to specific topics in the discussion as they are highlighted throughout this article.
“Good faith” and genocide
The Uncommitted Movement is made up of Democratic Party activists who had called on people to withhold their votes from President Joe Biden during primary elections earlier this year, before he withdrew from the race.
Some liberal commentators and activists expressed dismay at the Democrats’ refusal to platform a Palestinian, arguing that this was inappropriate for a party that tries to portray itself as a big tent.
But many Palestinians criticized the Uncommitted Movement’s approach, asserting that putting a Palestinian on stage would be at best an empty gesture – and would only help the Democrats whitewash their image – while the party and its nominee Kamala Harris remain fully committed to arming Israel as it perpetrates genocide.
Those criticisms grew even sharper after the publication of the speech the Uncommitted Movement had wanted Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American state legislator from Georgia, to give.
Romman eventually delivered the speech on the street, outside Chicago’s United Center, the DNC venue.
“I’m disappointed that the speech got made at all,” author and educator Steven Salaita told the livestream.
Salaita is a professor of English and comparative literature at the American University of Cairo and the author of eight books including his just-published first novel Daughter, Son, Assassin.
“It’s an embarrassing speech,” Salaita added, in reaction to the explanations Romman gave for why she unconditionally endorsed Harris, failed to mention Israel’s genocide in Gaza, failed even to say that Israel is committing crimes with American-supplied weapons and failed even to demand an arms embargo that would quickly bring an end to the carnage.
Romman had told MSNBC that omitting these basic demands was meant to show “good faith” to the party leadership.
“I don’t think that we who are concerned with ending this Zionist genocide need to be engaging in what’s called ‘good faith,’” Salaita said. “What does that even mean in this context? ‘Good faith’ means, as [Romman] explained herself, not mentioning the genocide, unconditionally endorsing Kamala Harris.”
“These are not the demands of the great majority in our community,” Salaita said. “It strikes me as a type of unilateral decision-making that’s not representative of majority sentiment in our community.”
That kicked off a broader conversation between Salaita and livestream hosts Nora Barrows-Friedman and this writer over how and if Palestinian Americans and Arab Americans should participate in US electoral politics, whether “progressive” politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar can ever deliver for Palestinian rights and what alternative modes of activism might look like.
And as a new academic year begins, we talked about the harsh crackdown on the campus Palestine solidarity movement.
“There always comes a point in the political process in the United States, where, if things start getting serious and picking up in intensity, that the administrative classes, the managerial classes, the cops, the politicos and so forth, drop all of their pretenses of diversity and inclusion and free speech and just bring the hammer down,” Salaita said. “And we’re seeing that happen now.”
Salaita’s recently published memoir, An Honest Living, reflects on his own experience: In 2014 he was fired from a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for criticizing Israel’s massacre of Palestinians that summer.
A decade later, Salaita reflected on how educators and students can exist within institutions that tolerate little dissent when it comes to Palestine, while maintaining their integrity.
“Figure out what your core principles are, what your red lines are,” Salaita said, “and determine that no matter what they try to do to you, that you’re not going to cross them, and that you’re going to face down and survive whatever they might try to do with you as difficult as it is.”
“Without that sense of steadfastness, you’re going to put yourself in a position where you get the same punishment and you sold out at the same time,” Salaita added.
Hizballah retaliation an “operational success”
Meanwhile, on Sunday, Hizballah carried out a significant drone and missile attack against military and intelligence targets in Israel, in retaliation for Tel Aviv’s assassination last month of Fuad Shukr, a senior commander in the Lebanese resistance organization.
Israel tried to spin the attack as a failure, and claimed that it detected and preempted a much bigger Hizballah attack by launching a series of airstrikes.
In his resistance report, contributing editor Jon Elmer analyzed the Hizballah operation, and cut through Israel’s spin.
It was an “operational success for sure, deeper than ever into Israel,” Elmer said. “More rockets than ever, but far less, I think, than many people expected.”
Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah “has been saying for months that they’re not trying to throw the world into World War III,” Elmer explained. “They’re escalating rungs up the escalation ladder.”
“This is a two-rung climb up the escalation ladder, and it’s possible for a war to start based on climbing the escalation ladder,” Elmer added, noting that Hizballah “wasn’t going to give [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu what he wants, which is just an open war that protects his government and protects his failures.”
Elmer also looked at some of the latest resistance news and videos from southern Gaza and the Netzarim corridor.
Israel is falling apart
In a striking op-ed in the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz this week, Yitzhak Brik, a prominent former general and Israeli military planner, assessed that “Israel is sinking deeper into the Gazan mud, losing more and more soldiers as they get killed or wounded, without any chance of achieving the war’s main goal: bringing down Hamas.”
“The country really is galloping towards the edge of an abyss,” Brik warned fellow Israelis. “If the war of attrition against Hamas and Hizballah continues, Israel will collapse within no more than a year.”
In our discussion we talked about this and other warnings of Israel’s unraveling and possible collapse amid more news that its economy continues to suffer severe blows as a result of its decision to pursue its genocide in Gaza.“It’s very satisfying to see the startup nation becoming a shutdown nation,” associate editor Asa Winstanley said in reaction to the news that many companies in Israel’s much-hyped hi-tech sector have gone bankrupt as local and foreign investment had completely dried up.
Reflecting on Nasrallah’s speech, following Hizballah’s retaliatory strike, this writer observed that the resistance leader was signaling that the resistance cannot strike “one big blow that knocks Israel out, because nobody has the power to do that right now.”
Rather, the resistance appears to assess that its most effective strategy against Israel is attrition. “That’s how you can wear them down, because the resistance has the ability to prevail or to last longer in a war of attrition than Israel does.”
Israeli plans to destroy al-Aqsa mosque
Last week, Israel’s national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir sparked outrage by saying he wants to build a synagogue atop the Haram al-Sharif, the site of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which Jews call the Temple Mount.
Israel’s so-called Temple movement, with support from some governmental authorities, has been making plans to destroy the Muslim holy sites and erect a so-called Third Temple for years.
As we discussed on the livestream, these plans must be taken seriously: Ben-Gvir, a genocidal Kahanist extremist, once represented a fringe. But his ideology now reflects a large part of Israel’s mainstream.
As Israel continues its genocide in Gaza and expands its assault on the West Bank, it will only be emboldened to carry out its most extreme agendas, unless the world finally intervenes to stop it.
The Electronic Intifada’s Tamara Nassar produced and directed the program and Maureen Clare Murphy contributed writing and production. Eli Gerzon contributed post-production assistance.
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