AD’s All New Top Ten Podcast Countdown: #4 Palestine and a new awakening

Today we continue our all new top ten podcasts countdown. Sitting at #4 is Amal Ghandour’s Palestine and a new awakening first broadcast 18 September 2024.

Amal is a writer, analyst and commentator and the author of the memoir This Arab Life: a Generation’s Journey into Silence published by Bold Story Press. You can find her blog ‘This Arab Life’ an ongoing commentary here.

When we launched the podcast five years ago we had no idea what sort of reception to expect. Now more than nearly 300 podcasts later we are proud they have been listened to a quarter of a million times by people right around the world. That response is a measure of the outstanding quality of our contributors. We are fortunate and very grateful to have them.

In today’s newsletter we publish a short excerpt from Amal’s podcast. You can listen to the full podcast here.

When we had you on the podcast last time (6 January 2023,) it was to talk about ‘This Arab Life’. You spoke very powerfully then about sacrifice and here’s what you said:

“We know that radical, systemic change does not come without sacrifice. I think that goes to the heart of the matter of my generation and generations that followed me, were we really willing to sacrifice (to achieve) this kind of systemic radical change? Did we have enough belief in us, enough conviction that this kind of sacrifice will deliver the radical change the region very much needed? And I think in many ways, the answer was no.”

Hearing those lines again made me think of the terrible sacrifices the Palestinian people are making. Last time we spoke it was before the war began. The war is now nearly a year on. What are your thoughts about what many are describing as a campaign of genocide being waged by Israel against Palestine?

Well, it’s interesting the juxtaposition you suggest between the matter of sacrifice for my generation and now the Palestinians. In the final analysis for us sacrifice however difficult was a choice. It wasn’t and isn’t a choice for the Palestinians. It is a destiny. You, as a Palestinian, are born to sacrifice. In 1948 the 750,000 Palestinians who were expelled from Palestine sacrificed; they were born and lived to sacrifice. Those who ended up as refugees, caged refugees in Gaza, were born and lived to sacrifice. Those refugees who ended up in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which came under Jordanian control in 1950, were born and lived to sacrifice in the aftermath of Israel’s conquest of the territories. So for the Palestinians, sacrifice is destiny. You could be now, today, as a Palestinian in the territories, sitting, doing nothing, absolutely nothing, just minding your own business and you would be sacrificing everything precious we hold as human beings, tangible, material or intangible. The Palestinians have to sacrifice identity, land, property, and today – as we witness genocide and ethnic cleansing unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank – it seems that the Palestinians are being called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice. And I think it just does break the heart, of course, but it presents some very difficult, profound questions for all of us really. Now what this might translate into I don’t think any of us can really answer at this stage, at this early hour. It’s been a year now and I think radical change is upon us, of course, but radical solutions, I’m not really so sure. At least not in the immediate term. In the medium and long term inevitably but in the immediate term I’m not sure we have that level of clarity yet.

So radical solutions are a long way off. But what about where we are right now in the midst of radical change? 

In terms of radical change October 7 is a kind of catharsis, isn’t it? One year into this genocide we have before us now an Israel that has been declared a genocidal state and an apartheid regime. Now to what extent Israel is going to be able to survive its pariah state I think is fundamental to the radical change that you are asking about and I don’t have an answer for that yet.

You suggest that at some point down the road perhaps there will be a radical solution. Is the two state solution that sort of a solution and do you see it happening?

You know, the two state solution is just… it continues to be really quite a depressing story. What two state solution? The premise of a two state solution is that, in fact, there is a temporary Israeli occupation of the 22% of Palestine that remains for the Palestinians, formally, so to speak. But in point of fact, what Israel has managed to achieve between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is one state. There is no Israeli occupation. There is Israeli colonisation. There are 750,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem living on 150 settlements and another 196 illegal outposts that you and I know will soon, very soon, become legal. You have Halevi, the Chief of the General Staff in Israel as a religious settler. You have two of the Supreme Court judges as settlers. You have several cabinet ministers as settlers. Today you have Israeli settlers in the West Bank already emptying Palestinian villages from their residences in a form of ethnic cleansing. You have the Israeli army carrying out a campaign against the city of Jenin that has reduced 70% of the infrastructure of that city to rubble and they have also forced the displacement of many residents of the Jenin camp as they carry out this campaign. So what kind of two state solution does the West have in mind when they’re talking about a two state solution? Even in 1967 before Israel had begun settling the West Bank – and we need to remember that they really began settling the West Bank mere months after the conquest – the Israelis, of course, argued that they had won the war and therefore the peace has to be a victor’s peace. But if you were thinking about a truly just and fair solution, 22% of Palestine did not even come close. Now, I think it’s become very clear that (two state) is a fiction the West and others are trying to flog into some kind of existence. You know, there are fundamental facts on the ground that, I think, dictate any future solution and we are at a true impasse because Israel is not going to accept one single democratic bi–national state. And it doesn’t want a two state solution. In fact, the Knesset passed a resolution just last month rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state as a mortal threat to Israel. By the way it passed with an overwhelming majority of its members. So it doesn’t want a two state solution, that two state solution about which you ask. It doesn’t want, of course, a single democratic state. So what’s left? What’s left is what you and I are witnessing today: ethnic cleansing and genocide. You have two people in this piece of land between the river and the sea, two people at parity, with demographic trends already favouring Palestinians. 7.5 million Israeli Jews, 7.5 million Palestinians: 14 million people, 5.5 million of whom today are suffering from genocide and ethnic cleansing. So what two state solution?

We finished our last conversation with you talking about hope and the youth generation and here’s what you said:

“Look, I’m really quite sensitive to the new generation’s need for hope. And I do think this region is really full of very small stories, individual stories of success and hope. And it is really quite open to some kind of a rewrite. I can’t really tell you what. I mean I have enough modesty and humility in me not to dare predict but I think there’s much space for an imaginative leap. I don’t think my generation is capable of it. I do think that we have enough influence to play some kind of a role but I don’t think we are really going to be the initiators or the leaders. I think this is entirely now the challenge for the new generations. So I’m not entirely pessimistic.” 

So Amal, to conclude, despite the horrors of the Gaza war, the challenges that the Levant and indeed the wider Middle East face do you still hold to that hope and to the idea that the Middle East remains open to a rewrite?

More than ever, more than ever. What I described in the book has become only more entrenched now that unpredictability, uncertainty, the fragmentation, the pain and again the impossibility of Israel-Palestine. It’s become only a much more pronounced feature of the region today, of the immediate region, our region the Levant. So I think it’s wide open to rewrite. Wide, wide open. And I have to tell you something, one of the more interesting revelations of October 7 and its aftermath is the degree to which the younger Arab generations began to have a sense of belonging and a sense of self and a sense of identification with Palestine and with their Arab roots. You have a new Arab generation that’s much keener on the conflict, much more eager to partake, much more organised. And they have to a large degree inspired many of us in the older generation to begin moving in that direction. So you’re seeing quite a bit of organisation, really, quite serious and game–changing, both inside Palestine and in the surrounding regions and I’m not necessarily talking about organised politics per se, that traditional term, but I think organised effort on all levels, legal, humanitarian, human rights. You see it everywhere. You don’t only see it in the region. You see it in Europe and you see it in the United States. And I think in many ways what has been transpiring in the United States, the developments that we have been observing there within, for example, the American Jewish community and other progressive groups in the United States and Europe, I think, to a certain degree, reflects those trends that we also are witnessing here in the Arab world. It’s a very interesting moment. So I think it’s wide open to a rewrite. And if you were to ask me for a good guess, I would say that it should all be extremely worrying to Israel. Extremely worrying.