The Electronic Intifada Podcast 26 April 2023
Elia analyzes the historical and present-day struggle against Zionism while keeping a focus on how Israel’s militarism and settler-colonialism deliberately affects women.
For example, she says, after the 1967 military occupation began, Israel stopped issuing licenses to Palestinian midwives, effectively banning Palestinians from giving birth at home and forcing women to give birth only at hospitals – which have been intentionally under-resourced and only accessible through Israeli checkpoints.
“When a soldier stops a woman from reaching the hospital, that’s not an accident,” she explains.
Palestinians, she adds, are “the ‘demographic threat.’ How do we stop the demographic threat? We make it illegal to give birth at home. … We don’t upgrade the hospitals. And we make it difficult, dangerous and sometimes fatal to get to the hospital. That’s one example of how settler-colonialism is gendered and impacts women.”
We also discuss mainstream progressive politics in relation to Palestine, and how Israel attempts to brand itself as a beacon of feminist and LGBTQ+ liberation while engaging in colonial violence.
Articles we discussed
- “A feminist vision for liberation,” Nada Elia, Mondoweiss
- “How Palestine is a critical feminist issue,” Nada Elia, Middle East Eye
- “Ending Zionism is a feminist issue,” Nada Elia
Video production by Tamara Nassar
Theme music by Sharif Zakout
Subscribe to The Electronic Intifada Podcast on Apple Podcasts (search for The Electronic Intifada) and on Spotify. Support our podcast by rating us, sharing and leaving a review, and you can also donate to fund our work.
Full transcript
Lightly edited for clarity.
Nora Barrows-Friedman: Welcome back to The Electronic Intifada Podcast, I’m Nora Barrows-Friedman. Today, we’re delighted to be joined by author, professor and organizer Nada Elia, to talk about her brand-new book, Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine.
In the book, Nada Elia unpacks Zionism, from its hyper-militarism to incarceration, to its environmental devastation and gendered violence. She insists that Palestine’s fate is linked through bonds of solidarity to other communities crossing racial and gender lines, weaving an intersectional feminist understanding of Israeli apartheid throughout her analysis. And she also looks deeper into the interconnectedness of Palestine with Black, migrant, and queer movements, and with other indigenous struggles against settler-colonialism.
Nada has been a contributor to The Electronic Intifada for many years, and is a core member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective. She is also a professor at Western Washington University. Nada, thank you so much for being with us again on The Electronic Intifada Podcast.
Nada Elia: Good to be in conversation again.
Nora Barrows-Friedman: Yes. Let’s start off by talking about your book, kind of situating it in the time that we’re in right now. You begin by looking at what many called the Global Intifada, you write about liberation struggles all over the world resisting Western imperialism, settler-colonialism and capitalism, who are coming together. Situate us in this context and how Palestine is at the forefront here.
Nada Elia: So yes, I do speak – In fact, for the longest time, my title for my book was not “Greater Than the Sum of our Parts,” but “Notes from the Global Intifada.” So I mean, you pick up on obviously, what is at the very core of my book, a global intifada. And, you know, if we look back just a couple of years ago, May 2021, the unity intifada, the Unity intifada was like, held around the world, as you know, like Palestinians coming together from the West Bank, Gaza, Naqab, ‘48 Palestine, coming together despite the fragmentation, and that was a moment like that we really, really, really need because it was overcoming the fragmentation, the imposed fragmentation of the Palestinian people.
And that unity intifada for me it was like, also a very important moment in that while it brought Palestine together, the homeland, it still was not addressing diaspora Palestinians. So for me, the global intifada is the intifada of Palestinians everywhere. But as soon as you speak of Palestinians in the diaspora, Palestinians in the diaspora are very much part of the other struggles, right? So we are, you know, speaking of myself, I am an immigrant. I am a woman of color. I am criminalized and racialized. I’m sexualized. And I think of myself as part of the very large community, I’m an abolitionist, and obviously the book is also abolitionist. And I think like, okay, when, when someone like if the police are coming, am I going to be assaulted or protected? I’m in the community of the people who would be assaulted and threatened and endangered by the police, and that’s a very large community, and we are coming together.
For me, that’s where the global intifada is. It’s not the unity intifada within the homeland, which I absolutely like, I mean, all of us celebrated that, of course, but the fragmentation is beyond the homeland. The fragmentation is global, we are a diasporic people. At least 50 percent of the Palestinians are displaced Palestinians, are in the diaspora. And so I was looking at what that means – the global unity, if you want and the global unity and intifada because those, as I said, marginalized, disenfranchised, dispossessed, colonized, unsettled, criminalized, racialized, sexualized communities are are coming together, you know, and, and it’s also like, it’s not a very like – recently, we’ve been appreciating and analyzing and looking at these coalitions that are coming together, but they’re not necessarily coalitions that started in 2020.
They also go back a long time, you know, Black-Palestinian solidarity is not a recent phenomenon. It’s back from the anti-colonial days, you know, in Africa, and the Black Panthers knowing what the African struggle for decolonization was. And knowing that struggle was very much in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. So we have that. We have, you know, a history of understanding amongst the indigenous people that was not maybe as articulated as it is now – that this is settler-colonialism. So that’s what my – part of what my book is about.
Nora Barrows-Friedman: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And of course, you talk about how Zionism, Israel’s political ideology, is a project modeled on the United States’ history of expulsion, genocide and replacement. But you also describe the quote, “masculinist violence of Zionism,” and how ultimately, this is also baked in into the pies of all settler-colonial projects. Can you talk about that?
Nada Elia: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, settler-colonialism is gendered. History is gendered. And for me, like, you know, what is now being denounced a lot is what’s called the two stage liberation theory – that first liberate the nation, then we liberate the nation’s women. Like, excuse me, I mean, you know, how – and historically we know, we know, this is just like, it doesn’t make sense. You can’t liberate a nation without liberating its women, there is no such thing as a two stage liberation theory. If you start prioritizing liberation, then you’re not liberating. If you want to truly liberate, then you liberate the most vulnerable communities, gender non-conforming, women, queer, and then you are truly liberating the nation. So by now there’s an understanding that the concept of the two stage liberation is corrupt – is just like, doesn’t work, right?
There’s also an understanding that history is always gendered, that colonialism is always gendered, that violence is always gendered, especially militaristic violence. But even though the understanding is there, I found that the analysis wasn’t. And so for me, it’s like, I mean, I’m super grateful for the fact that writing about Palestine, discussing Palestine, covering Palestine has finally broken through the censorship. There are books about Palestine, there are books about – but even the books are fragmented.
We have books about the West Bank, we have writings about Gaza, we have writings more recently about ‘48 Palestine. So the writing is fragmented. But also, the writing somehow follows this flawed logic of the two stage liberation, where it’s like now we’re going to talk about apartheid, without discussing how apartheid is gendered. Now we’re going to talk about settler-colonialism without discussing – it’s like, but settler-colonialism is always already gendered, you can’t talk about it without looking at that. And, and so what I did is I actually, I wove in, I didn’t have to do anything, I just had to uncover it, you know, like women have been impacted by settler-colonialism from day one, women have been impacted by militarism from day one. It’s just a matter of actually putting it in print.
And so, so my analysis actually looks – like I mean, as I said, the understanding was there, the analysis wasn’t. So I tried to look very much at what does it mean when we say militarism is masculinist? How does that translate on the ground into the experiences of women? And as I started looking at that, I mean, there’s more than ample documentation. But again, it’s like there was this – I think of, and that’s probably why I ended up with “Greater Than the Sum of our Parts” rather than Global Intifada.” It’s like, I was bringing together all these fragmented pieces of analysis. And so I brought in all of that that was present you know, that we have records from the Khalidi books to the to the Benny Morris books about the fact that rape was a weapon of war. It was. It wasn’t an afterthought. It wasn’t, you know ‘and also some soldiers raped some women.’ It was like part and parcel of the conquest, the Zionist conquest. Well, why can’t we then, as we write how the Nakba was taking place, also inscribe that experience? Yeah. So that’s what I was trying to do.
Nora Barrows-Friedman: Yeah, yeah, it’s really important. Can you give us a couple more examples of how apartheid and settler-colonialism continues to be gendered today, especially when we look at Palestine?
Nada Elia: Oh, just a couple of examples – I want to talk for example, about again, one thing that, the knowledge is there, the analysis is not. And I wrote about it in my book is, you know, we know about women giving birth at the checkpoints, right? There’s documented, United Nations has documented it, many Palestinian NGOs, many even Israeli journalists have documented it, that women, Palestinian women give birth at the checkpoints. But the analysis that I bring in is why is that and why is that a tool of, a part of settler-colonialism? Right? Settler-colonialism wants to erase the Palestinian population.
So I talked about how, for example, in 1967, meaning the, when Israel occupied the West Bank, one of the first things that it did is it stopped issuing licenses for the daya – for the traditional midwives, right? For the Palestinian midwives, traditional midwives, it started, it stopped issuing licenses, so that delivering at home became illegal. Right? So you know, I mean, you know, Palestinian existence, as far as Israel is concerned, is illegal, but delivering, I mean, like, the most feminine thing at all, delivering at home with a midwife became illegal. So midwives were either practicing illegally with the risk of being arrested and jailed. Or, and, as they aged out, new ones could not be licensed. What, what that led to is more women needing to deliver in the hospitals. Right? So Israel stops issuing licenses for the daya, and therefore, Palestinian women have to give birth in hospitals. But, A), the infrastructure of the hospital was not in any way improved to accommodate women giving birth in hospitals, and B), the hospitals were only in urban areas. And women in villages had to plan on going to the hospitals, and between your village and the hospital is probably a dozen checkpoints.
And that was intentional. You know? We’ve got brains thinking about that. And they’re like, Okay, we’re going to stop issuing the licenses. Women have to deliver at – I mean, you know, a pregnant woman, that’s visible, right? A woman who’s nine months pregnant who is about to give birth, that’s visible. When a soldier stops a woman from reaching the hospital, that’s not an accident. So that’s one example of how settler-colonialism – Because of course, we are the demographic threat. Right? You know, I mean, again, the knowledge is there.
What about the analysis? So we are the demographic threat. How do we stop the demographic threat? We make it illegal to give birth at home. And we make it difficult, sometimes, literally – I mean, deathly, women and newborns have died at the checkpoints to deliver in the hospital. We don’t upgrade the hospitals for that. And we make it difficult, dangerous and sometimes fatal to get to the hospital. That’s one example of how settler-colonialism is gendered and impacts women.
Nora Barrows-Friedman: Yeah, yeah. We’re speaking with Nada Elia. She is the author of Greater Than the Sum of our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism and Palestine. Nada. Today we’re seeing an acceleration in not only Israel’s settler colonial violence and its project in Palestine, but in the unmasking really of what Zionism is at its core – and so-called liberal Zionists in North America and in Europe are saying they’re outraged at the new government, that you know, they’re they’re really terrified of figures like Itamar Ben Gvir, as though he and other newly elected ministers are just aberrations, and Israel has some sort of moral center that is losing.
And there are protests in Tel Aviv where thousands of Jewish Israelis are marching to demand that the Israeli high court, you know, remain independent, again, completely ignoring the fact that the entire state project is built on ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Can you talk about how you see the current situation right now in Palestine, and what it says about really what Zionism is and what it’s always been?
Nada Elia: I mean, I think what you’ve just said in your question, and your statement to me is, like, summarizes what the current situation is, it is not an aberration. Israel was created not as a democracy, but as a Jewish supremacist nation. Privileging, I mean, in its very ideology, and its very vision, there’s a privileging of one ethno-religious community over another. And that in a country that was populated, because of course, the whole myth of Palestine is “a land without a people for a people without a land” has been more than denounced and exposed. I mean, you know, there wouldn’t be 7 million Palestinians today if we didn’t exist less than 100 years ago, right? So Zionism was the creation of a state through the genocide of a people, of an indigenous people, and through the dispossession and disenfranchisement of the survivors. That was already the ideology, the idea, I mean, look at the very early Zionist writings, and that was the ideology and the vision. It did not succeed in completely erasing every single Palestinian. Therefore, it has to continue doing what it’s doing.
And so what we are seeing today is the absolute, total, logical consequence – there is no, I mean, it’s not. Maybe it’s just like maybe more obvious, I don’t know that it’s even more obvious. I mean, for me, it’s not more obvious, because the land dispossession has been going on, the violence, the control of reproductive justice, as I, as I said, you know, in 1960 – from 1948 to 1967, we had apartheid within Israel itself, with Jewish citizens subjected to civil law, and Palestinian citizens subjected to military law. So apartheid was there from the very beginning. The creation of Israel was accompanied by apartheid, the creation of Israel was accompanied by massacres, by genocide, and literally look at the definition of genocide. It was genocide. You know, I remember back in the days when I once wrote an article where I used genocide, and the editors wanted to change that to ethnic cleansing, and we argued at great length about whether ethnic cleansing qualifies as genocide.
And of course, there is the fact that the UN requires that if there is an acknowledged case of genocide, then other countries have to come and stop it. But I mean, that’s, besides the point. Israel was founded on genocide and apartheid from 1948, not from 2015 or 20, or whatever, you know, all the reports that we’re now getting, apartheid existed within Israel itself in 1948. Right? So – and dispossession is like, you know, Palestinians have been losing land since 1948. Massacres have happened since 1947. And they’re still happening. So for anyone to think this is an aberration, that rather than simply a continuation, that person must have been intentionally intentionally living under a rock, you know, because, I mean, I know that within Israel, there are so many Israelis who don’t know. I mean, that apartheid wall actually does block them, blocks out Palestine, blocks out what’s going on there.
But it’s like, okay, so if you see a wall do not wonder why it’s there? So while I do understand that, not quite understand, but know, that Israelis are not necessarily aware or have not been necessarily aware for the past decades of what’s going on, of what is being done in their name, I would say ignorance in their case is a choice, not an excuse. It’s like how we go on with our lives is we ignore. And you know, but that – I think maybe now the outrage of the Israelis is that they can’t ignore what’s going on anymore. But it’s not that it’s happening now and it wasn’t happening ten years ago. It’s just that it’s a little hard to ignore now.
Nora Barrows-Friedman: Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, it’s disturbing their daily lives, right. You also talk about in your book, hegemonic white feminism, you know, the feminist except for Palestine crowd and how it absolves and covers for Israel and its crimes. Can you expand on this, and talk about how anti-Zionism is a real feminist principle?
Nada Elia: Feminism is not only about, you know, caring about some women, I mean, obviously, feminism is a gendered, focused, analytic lens, but it is a lens that looks at justice. And so, you know, justice cannot be selective, justice cannot be – I’ll care for just it’s like, it’s like progressive except for Palestine. I mean, you actually are not progressive if you are progressive except for Palestine. Just like, you know, there’s the PEP and the POOP. You’re also not progressive if you’re progressive only for Palestine. Progressive Only On Palestine, I used to call it PEP and POP. But apparently, the more common expression is PEP and POOP, progressive only on Palestine. Anyway, so. I mean, you’re, you’re not – you’re, I mean, there are people whose cause is only Palestine and in my mind, those are not progressive. They’re nationalist and nationalism is not my idea of progressive.
But, you know, just as you can’t be progressive only for Palestine, I mean, progressive except for Palestine, because progressive means anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-militarist, anti-supremacist, well, isn’t feminism also supposed to be all of that, with more focus gendered analysis? So how can you claim to be feminist and support a state that is militaristic? That is a settler-colonial state, that has engaged and continues to engage in genocide and ethnic cleansing in massacres in the name of the state? Right? How can you? I mean, where, what kind of – what kind of apartheid walls are you building around yourselves so that ignorance becomes your choice? So, I mean, yeah, I do write about it. But for me, it’s just even more than progressive except for Palestine, because it’s like, Wait, feminism comes from a deep analysis, right? And how does that analysis then exclude Palestine?
And it is even more surprising when we look at well, actually, no, not surprising, you know, because of Islamophobia, it was like, you know, white hegemonic feminism that absolutely totally supports, for example, many of the Muslim women who are rising up against authoritarian Islamic fundamentalism, right? And absolutely, absolutely, yes. Malala Yousafzai, okay. Masa Amini, the Iranian Revolution, all of that. And it’s interesting that there’s support for Muslim women rising up against state violence, state-sanctioned, fundamentalist religious violence, except for Israel. When we have again, ample, ample documentation of how Israel is a religiously fundamentalist, oppressive state that oppresses not only Palestinian women, but also Jewish women, but more so with all of the added layers of oppression of settler-colonialism and dispossession against Palestinian women. Yet when Palestinian women rise up against that state-sanctioned gendered violence, they become violent and terrorist?
Nora Barrows-Friedman: Right, so – and and you know, and in children’s books, in high school history classes here in the US, you know, we I remember seeing, you know, Golda Meir held up as like a great feminist icon of the 20th century. Just as like, Hillary Clinton is held up as a great feminist icon. I mean, how you know, and then on the flip side of that, you also – or maybe not, it’s the two sides of the same coin, but you also talk about how there’s this like, sexualized, militarized way in which Jewish Israeli women are also viewed, you know, like the, you talked about Maxim Magazine’s you know, Hottest Women of the Israeli military, the, you know, this like, full, full spread. Can you talk a little bit about that? How like, you know, Israeli women, especially Israeli soldiers who are women, are also held up as like the pinnacle of feminism and beauty. And, you know, just in this, like, completely deranged analysis, how does this happen?
Nada Elia: I mean, I think the glorification of the military is so uncritical that anyone associated with the military becomes glorified. And I think that Israel does, of course, you and I are aware of Israel using absolutely any possible aspect of propaganda in order to, you know, improve its tarnished image, and one of them was women in the military. Right? And but you know, that – that’s funny. I mean, we have to actually come up with a term for that, we know about greenwashing, red washing, and all of that, what would be the weapons washing about women in the military? I’m going to have to come up with that term, or you can. I mean, the glorification, but it’s also the uncritical glorification of the military, right? Because if you do not uncritically glorify the military, then you would not think that women in the military are some – are an accomplishment of feminism, you know, like, how could they be? How could they be?
But there’s such a glorification of the military, uncritical, unquestioning, here and in Israel, that – basically that anyone entering the military automatically becomes heroic. And these women become heroic by entering a killer machine, a killer institution, the institution that actually is upholding to this day genocide and apartheid, but entering that glorified institution becomes unquestioning. I mean, speaking of the Israeli military, also, I mean, “the most moral army.” Right? Okay. Right. So I do write about, about greenwashing, and how, like, you know, and pinkwashing in the military, I mean, the military, the Israeli military, it’s just like this institution, as I said, that upholds apartheid and genocide, and yet is viewed as moral.
So, you know, like, there’s the idea that, because before, before, when the US still had Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, or you could be gay in the military, but, you know, don’t ask, don’t tell, please don’t be out with your sexuality. In Israel, actually, you could, you could tell. Right? So, there were, you know, like, openly gay soldiers in the Israeli army. And that meant that the Israeli army is more open-minded. But it’s like, you know, does a gay soldier not kill? I mean, but also the greenwashing. I mean, for me, it’s even more mind boggling that Israel also prides itself on accommodating vegan soldiers.
Nora Barrows-Friedman: Right. Right. They had a whole thing about that. Yeah, they get vegan combat boots, right.
Nada Elia: Yes. Not leather, and not woolen berets and not leather. They have hemp belts, you know, but they’re still soldiers in the Israeli military. Right. And so yes, and also women in the military, does that change the the military? It does not. It makes it more effective, and effective as far as the army goes, is killer. So whether you’re gay, or vegan, or a woman, or a gay woman vegan soldier, you’re still part of a killer machine. But, again, I mean, the uncritical mind that views someone like Hillary Clinton as a feminist, someone like Golda Meir, as a feminist would also see these women in the military as feminist.
Nora Barrows-Friedman: Right. Right. How do we, how do we resist that? I mean, what are the mechanisms for, you know, changing a definition of what feminism should be and what it has become under imperialism, and settler-colonialism and apartheid and capitalism? I mean, it’s all very ingrained in how the system operates. How do we even begin to change that?
Nada Elia: I always quote Winona LaDuke’s statement, “we don’t want a bigger piece of the pie. We want a different pie altogether.” We want different ingredients in the pie, where some kind of feminism that simply wants a bigger piece of a pie that is toxic, where every ingredient is unhealthy, but I’ll take a bigger piece. Right?
Nora Barrows-Friedman: Right. Representation, right?
Nada Elia: Versus, No, this pie is not good. Can we bake something healthier? So the switch that you’re talking about is basically, you know, I mean, Hillary Clinton wants a bigger piece of that pie. Golda Meir got a bigger piece of that pie. Is that the pie we want? Because we know what that pie is. That’s all, you know, whatever your analysis, your anti-oppression analysis comes from, whether it’s anti-capitalism, anti-militarism, anti sexual violence, anti-colonialism and whatever, then you look at that pie and you go, that pie is corrupt, that pie is toxic. That pie is unhealthy. I don’t want a bigger piece of that pie. Versus, Okay, well, then what? And so I think that, you know, how do we make that switch? I think a lot of us have already made that switch. You know, the switch has been made, the switch – for many of us, we didn’t have to make the switch. We didn’t have to.
I mean, I’ve never been a Hillary Clinton wannabe or a Golda Meir wannabe. You know, I didn’t have to make the switch. And I think an understanding of different circumstances for many of us, when it’s our lived experience, we don’t have to make the switch. But there are women whose lived experience allows them to be a Hillary Clinton wannabe. And they’re, they’re the ones who have to make the switch. And they are making the switch. I mean, you know, I want to look at, I do look at the ugly reality. I’m also looking at what is happening just underneath the ugly reality. And that’s which is absolutely taking place. It’s like, it’s like, you know, we’re almost in spring, probably in California, it’s already spring, here it’s almost spring. Under the soil, there’s so much going on.
You know, and so I see, you know, that’s, again, the global intifada, greater than the sum of our parts, all of the coalitions happening. And they do include a lot of people, yes, it’s primarily the lived experience of disenfranchised communities, disenfranchised by any number of systemic oppressions. But also it’s, it’s like, people are coming together. So some of us have never had to make the switch. Some of us have always known that the police were never meant to protect us. I mean, who does this police serve and protect? They do serve and protect some people. Not me. Right. So for some of us, we’ve never had to make the switch. But there are some people who are making the switch like okay, yes, the police, hmm, alright, let me reconsider. And I think that we’re getting that even – so I no longer speak of white feminism, I speak of hegemonic feminism. Because there are white feminists who are on board.
So, hegemonic feminism – and hegemonic feminism does include, unfortunately, some women of color, right, because I mean, that’s the assimilation – that’s the dominant discourse. What do we aspire to? We aspire to be President of the United States, right, if we’re uncritical, right, rather than understanding that President of the United States is president of the most imperialistic superpower in the world, you know. Is that what anyone wants to be, who’s a feminist?
Nora Barrows-Friedman: Right. You touched upon this, but I kind of want to bring it back. You know, when when you’re speaking to your students, for example, who are growing up in a different world than it was, you know, 20 years ago, where there is, I feel like there’s more discussion, there’s more understanding of the interconnectedness of all of these struggles from, you know, the global, you know, climate crisis struggle, to LGBTQ rights to, you know, to Palestine to, you know, de-colonial movements across the world. How do you talk about what inspires you and what pulls you from the despair when you look at all of these struggles on so many fronts? How do you talk to your students and this young generation about keeping these fights going? And, and, and not, you know, giving in to just the weight of how massive these fights really are?
Nada Elia: I mean, I tend to bring in then a historical background at that, you know, one thing I do tell my students is, it wouldn’t be called a struggle if it was easy. I mean, we’re in the struggle, part of being in the struggle means we’re struggling, right? Yeah, it would be called a struggle if it was easy. And then I give them examples of some struggles that have taken a very long time, you know, ending slavery in this country – even though from day one, every enslaved African knew that it was wrong. Every enslaved African, you know, but it took centuries, literally centuries. What if they had given up? But was it even an option, right? And so I give examples of that, of like, how struggles have not been easy, you know, countries that were colonized for centuries, think of India, think of Algeria, for decades or centuries. It wouldn’t be called a struggle if it was easy. And it does take decades or centuries.
What is the alternative? Right. So I think that’s how I present it. Like, you know, we absolutely, yes, we’re in the struggle. That’s how we define struggles. Struggle is not easy. But is the alternative like really more police? Funding the police is the alternative? Bigger jails are the alternative? I mean, like – we have to create the alternative. And I, you know, I’m always saying like, okay, so I may not have all the answers. Nobody has all the answers. But is it not better to look for answers than to settle for what we have? And I don’t claim to have all the answers. And I think no abolitionist of anything, of the police, the military, Zionism, colonialism, has all the answers, but we’re looking at a reality that is unsustainable.
And so we’re also – we’re working on the solution, as we also work on – we’re looking at the answers as we look at the solution. You know, again, it’s not a two stage theory. There is no such thing as two stage liberation. Liberation has to happen. And all of these conversations are taking place because yes, Palestine will be free, and when Palestine is free, it’s not going to be the PA that’s free.
Nora Barrows-Friedman: Nada Elia, thank you so much, again, that the book is called Greater Than the Sum of our Parts Feminism, Inter/Nationalism and Palestine. Where can people go to get this wonderful book and learn more about your work?
Nada Elia: I think it’s available everywhere. I mean you can – it’s available through the unnameable website, through Pluto Press, my publisher, but also I do want to plug Palestine online store, Palestine online store is a Palestinian-owned small business, activist small business and they carry my book. So Palestine online store, if you don’t want to go through the unnameable big website.
Nora Barrows-Friedman: And also independent bookstores, of course, yes, yes. Nada Elia, thank you so much for all that you do and for being with us today on The Electronic Intifada Podcast.
Nada Elia: Thank you for having me.
