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The Chris Hedges Report
How Palestinian History Is Systemically Forgotten (w/ Micaela Sahhar) | The Chris Hedges Report
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- [00:11]
A
Palestinians in Gaza, like millions of Palestinians in the Diaspora, will soon battle to preserve memory, to defy an indifferent world that stood by as they were slaughtered. They will doggedly seek to preserve scraps of their existence. They will write memoirs, histories and poems, draw maps of villages, refugee camps and cities that have been obliterated, set down painful stories of butchery, carnage and loss. They will name and condemn their killers, lament the extermination of families, including thousands of children, and struggle to preserve a vanished world. But time is a cruel master, intellectual and emotional life for those who are cast out of their homeland and is defined by the crucible of exile. What the Palestinian scholar Edward Said told me is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place. Said's book out of Place, is a record of his lost world. Michaela Sahar, whose Palestinian family was driven from Jerusalem during the 1948 Nakba or Catastrophe, asks in her book Find Me at the Jaffa Gate, what the daughter of a Nakba survivor inherits. It is not property or tangible heirlooms, nor the streets and neighborhoods of a father's childhood or the deep roots of a family who have lived in one place, Jerusalem, for generation upon generation. Michaela Sahar, as the older generations and her family who are raised in Palestine die off, seeks with a sense of urgency to capture the world that formed them. She struggles with the gaps and blank spaces that cannot be recovered, piecing together the fragments and shards of memory to prevent this lost world from being erased. Joining me to discuss her book, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is Mikhaila Sahar. Your book is non linear. I'm just curious as to why you decided to write in that format. It bounces back and forth in place and time.
- [02:18]
B
Thank you, Chris. Thank you for that introduction.
- [02:22]
I suppose the non linearity of the book really reflects the process of writing the book and in a. And I was keen to foreground that process for people when I started the project. It was my sense actually that the Diaspora is really cut off from a broader Palestinian polity. And of course, I live in Australia, so it's really quite far indeed.
- [02:48]
And so there was this idea that in writing this narrative, which is not an epic narrative, it's a narrative, it's an intergenerational narrative. It's a polyphonic narrative of different people's experiences that I could capture.
- [03:03]
The experience and the way that we are connected to the past and the way that a present is connected to the future. And I do a lot of work actually, with first nations and Maori writers here in Australia. And I learned a proverb, a Maori proverb recently, which is.
- [03:24]
I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past. And I think in some ways that captures quite well how a non chronological narrative is able to capture these sort of experiences of displacement of, I guess, settler colonial, settler coloniality rather than post coloniality.
- [03:47]
And how also.
- [03:50]
We can understand the experience of now. I mean, I didn't start writing this book during the genocide, but I was editing it during the genocide. How do we understand now if we don't understand 1948 or 1917 or all the things that happened during the British Mandate? And I think the answer is we can't. So this importance of connecting the past to the present as something that isn't in the past, as something that actually informs in a very urgent way the present.
- [04:21]
A
And yet these stories, I mean, you have an experience of school, you can explain, but. But in many ways these stories, these narratives, these realities, these histories are not acknowledged by the dominant narrative and the dominant society.
- [04:37]
B
No, that's absolutely correct. And I suppose the non linearity in some ways also allows for a particular way of positioning authority, archival authority, state authority, next to family members, the memories of family members, the ephemeral documentation that my family has, that other families have. I'm thinking actually about who is the authority in these sort of situations where you don't have obviously a national repository of narrative in the situation of diasporic experience. So. But you know, there's a huge. And I come from a very interdisciplinary background. I'm trained actually as a lawyer and an historian as well as a creative writer. But there's been a real explosion in a scholarly sense of the archives of resistance in the Palestinian context. And this does deal with ephemera, photographs, tickets, guidebooks. Guidebooks, exactly.
- [05:42]
A
I mean, that's part of your book. You can talk about it. I mean, and then the guidebook, actually the guidebook leads to the, to the cafe, Right, you can explain that.
- [05:53]
B
Yeah, that's right. I was doing some work actually on guidebooks for a completely separate project I'd found online. And I think this is this desire of the displaced Palestinian person who grows up, on the one hand, a very Palestinian family, but within a mainstream culture where your own reality is, there's no space for it. And so in a sense, you grow up with a. A strange sort of superpower that you understand there are other realities and other ways to be apart from a mainstream culture. But I was doing work on these guidebooks and as I was doing so, I came across a number of articles in the Palestine Post, which is today the Jerusalem Post, and it was in its inception, a Zionist magazine, referring to a particular restaurant project, actually, which I mentioned to my then living great aunt. And she said, oh, that was my father's restaurant.
- [06:50]
And so being able to locate my family in a very precise way, suddenly, not just for my grandfather's generation, but for my great grandfather's generation in the operations of the Mandate through, to be honest, this ephemeral but Zionist repository of materials was one way into the story. And so right at the start of the story, and you're right, I talk about the Palestine restaurants, and I do it quite quickly. It's a way of locating myself and my family in this disappeared landscape that, on the one hand is physically still there. I mean, my family are from the Greek colony, which at the time was called the New Jerusalem and today is called West Jerusalem, in this sort of colonial partitioning of space.
- [07:44]
And many of those buildings are still there, including our family's home. But there's a rift in the possibilities of what that space is for Palestinian people today.
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A
And so many Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, your own family, they carry, they still carry the keys and the deeds.
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B
That's right. I mean.
- [08:11]
There'S a sense that what you have, that your key and your, your titles will one day assist you in prosecuting the case for a turn.
- [08:22]
And so these are really vital and nourishing and sustaining aspects, I think, of Palestinian identity. And then, of course, there's all the UN registries. I mean, there's a. There's a wonderful book that Salim Tamari edited called Jerusalem 1948, and it's got a partial registry in it. I think it was in an article by Dr. Salman Abu Sita, who has thought about what the right of return would look like and how you would, in a practical and tangible sense, repatriate people to their ancestral homes. And my grandfather's property is in that. We have documentation, we have maps, we have.
- [09:04]
You know, the proof, if you like, of our history in a place that we're told we. We never existed. And I think.
- [09:14]
This is so often on display. And you would, you would know this, Chris. But.
- [09:19]
The assault on Palestinian memory and Palestinian documentation has a long history. We saw it in Sabra and Shatila, where the, where the office, the PLO were ransacked, you know, by the IDF and what seized. It's archival documents. It's the maps, it's the deeds, it's the memories. And ever since Then. And, you know, a lot of my work has been on contemporary military assaults of Israeli forces on Palestinian territories. But the assault is also and always on education, on history, on archives. And so you have the seizure and ransacking of, you know, the Ministry of culture in 2002. You have the obliteration of universities in Gaza every time it's bombarded and with shocking finality in the recent genocide.
- [10:09]
A
Just explain what happened. Your own family, its own history, what happened in 48 and to what extent. As a child, you obviously were cognizant of that, that pain, that loss. But how cognizant were you of what actually happened? But let's begin with just your own family and their history up to 48. And then after 48.
- [10:38]
B
Sure. So my family were a middle class, Greek Orthodox Jerusalemite family. My grandfather was involved in the tourism trade and also they had a, a furniture shop and he had.
- [10:53]
Brothers and they, and they worked across these enterprises together.
- [10:58]
And at a certain point, he bought a property from the Greek Patriarchate, who was selling off land in the, in the new Jerusalem, and built a house out of Jerusalem stone, you know, in the 1920s and early 30s, as was.
- [11:15]
Common or typical to the era.
- [11:19]
It's interesting, Chris, thinking actually, about what happens to my family in 1948 and actually in part as a result of this book. It is, of course, not 1948 per se. It's. It's a series of events that lead up to, you know, an exile or a departure and create an impossibility. And I think it's often forgotten, actually, that the British, while suppressing Palestinian political organization, turned a blind eye, really, and actively enabled in some cases, the development of sort of Zionist paramilitary groups in Palestine. And certainly in urban areas in Jerusalem and throughout the 1940s, those terrorist activities increase. And a really impactful moment in that is the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946.
- [12:10]
To this day, I believe it's the most significant terrorist event that the British experience in terms of the casualty numbers.
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A
Right. And that was what, how many people? 61. I can't remember the number killed over.
- [12:22]
B
90, 96, although reports vary, but 50% of those approximately are Palestinian people. But, you know.
- [12:31]
And so I write about it in the book, but my aunt and uncle are walking home from school on the day of the bombing at the King David Hotel, and they walk past the, the destruction of it.
- [12:44]
And actually there's a little boy playing marbles who doesn't go to school. And my uncle remembers seeing him before school. And then afterwards he's one of the casualties. He's not documented anywhere, but there are a number of people from Jerusalem who know this story.
- [13:00]
And you know, and he's, he's been blown apart and the marbles are rolling around in his, in his exposed skull. And for my aunt and to think then about the sort of traumatic events, when my uncle said this and he died some years ago, she said, yeah, I must have seen that, but now I don't remember. And about 10 years later when I was writing the book and I was asking her, she said, no, no, I wasn't there. I was at home sitting on my balcony and I could see the smoke in the sky and I was eating grapes. And she was most insistent about the grapes. And eventually I wrote it into my book and my cousin who's a psychiatrist said, well, but obviously the grapes are the marbles.
- [13:42]
And so I suppose there's this buildup of fear, of anxiety, of terror. And apparently after the bombing of the King David Hotel, there are just funerals for days because there's over 40 Palestinian casualties. And although that's an horrific foreshadowing of what Palestinian people have experienced since then, none more so than the people of Gaza, it's, it's quite an unprecedented experience in the 1940s to have just funerals for weeks and weeks and weeks. And also the society in Jerusalem is fairly small and quite coherent. And so everyone's affected. Everyone knows someone who's been lost, someone's cousin, someone's sister, someone's friend, someone's colleague, everyone knows someone who's killed in that bombing. So the effect of that is, I think, underestimated in terms of the experience for the Palestinian Jerusalemites in the 1940s. But then in a very specific sense, the reason why my family ultimately exiled is as a result of another bombing that happens not very long after the announcement of the 1947 partition plan in November 1947, after which, of course, as Joseph Massad says, you know, the Palestinians don't accept it and they think it's terribly unfair.
- [15:00]
And riots break out.
- [15:03]
Amongst both the Zionist militias and sort of Palestinian liberation groups. But in early January there's a bombing of another hotel, of a Christian Arab owned hotel, the Semiramis Hotel in Kadamon. Late at night, it gives everyone a shock. And my, you know, family lives in a neighborhood that's quite nearby. And when I first asked my aunt about it, which was actually while I was writing the book, I suddenly connected the date because it happened on the 4th of January, and my father was born 10 days later. And I said to her, you know, do you remember this bombing? And she said, yes, I do. She said, we thought the roof was going to fall in. We got out of bed, we crawled around on the floor, and we didn't know what to do. And then my father.
- [15:51]
Realized that all the hospitals were full because of the casualties. And, you know, this is a bombing that kills two dozen people and leads to real chaos. This is early 1948 at this point. And so in order to access medical care, my family go to Amman, to the Italian hospital in Amman, where my grandmother gives birth to my father 10 days later. And during which time they're debarred from ever returning to their home. So their intention when they leave is not to leave. Their intention when they leave is to seek medical care, medical treatment. And certainly, I know, you know, Palestinian friends in Gaza have been put in similar situations as well, where urgent medical care, if they're lucky enough to be able to access evacuation on medical grounds.
- [16:40]
A
You have thousands of them in Egypt.
- [16:42]
B
Yeah, that's right, that's right.
- [16:46]
A
And then talk about what happened after. So they can't go back. And then what happens?
- [16:51]
B
So they can't go back. So they spend several years in Amman, you know, in a.
- [16:58]
You know, in makeshift sort of accommodation, which is typical of the era.
- [17:04]
And Amman is, of course, flooded with Palestinian people. And, you know, this is the beginning of the refugee crisis. And this, of course, is why the United nations establishes unrwa, the Relief and Works Agency, which is specifically designated for Palestinian people. And.
- [17:23]
At some point, my grandfather makes the decision to apply for citizenship wherever, wherever he can find it. And he has a brother who's in Australia. So this, of course, obviates or fast tracks his capacity to come here.
- [17:40]
And so that's what they do. They. They do try and go back to Jerusalem. They get stuck, as one of my aunts recalls, on. On the sort of east side of the cyclone fence that gets put up down the center of Jerusalem in the 1950s. They can't access their, you know, their home, their property, their business, etc.
- [18:03]
My grandfather is quite a versatile.
- [18:07]
Worker, I suppose, and turns his hand to a number of different jobs, but ultimately they come out to Australia in 1952, and of course, it's this very final separation in many ways. My grandmother doesn't see.
- [18:24]
Her eight other siblings more than. More than once again in her life. So it's this, you know, very.
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Very substantial fracturing of the fabric of Palestinian relationality.
- [18:42]
Life, family, culture, and in. And in Some ways, you know, this book is about a reassembly of those things, to allow. To allow some sort of, if only, literary resolution and reunification or something like this.
- [19:02]
A
Well, you deal with fragments, but you also acknowledge the holes. I mean, you have to speculate in a way. You have to guess. You have to.
- [19:14]
B
Yeah, I think this was an important.
- [19:18]
An important part of thinking about people who are in some ways so vital. But the people left to talk about them were children, you know, and the memories of children are.
- [19:31]
Some things that loom very large, but there's not. There's not a lot of connective fabric, if you like, between those sort of reflections and the.
- [19:41]
And the people.
- [19:48]
You know, the people who are otherwise lost to us, I suppose, you know, there's the impression of a favorite aunt. There's the impression of a missing aunt. There's memories that are provoked, perhaps by photos, and there's also the fallibility of memory and the lack of documentation. And, you know, some people are harder to follow in a. In a research sense than others because there's. There's less materials. Perhaps they didn't have children. Perhaps they, you know, this sort of thing.
- [20:19]
And. And my. You know, I'm quite young in my family as well, so.
- [20:25]
I missed out on. On. On the storytellers, on some of the storytellers that might have been able to fill in these blanks. But I actually, I felt this was an important thing to foreground. I think in an Anglospheric context, there's a real reification of nuclear families, you know, and actually, originally, when I was trying to publish the book, a publisher said to me, well, you know, it's very well written, but there's just too much family in here. And actually, the point was to. Was to think about the closeness of some of these family members, their centrality, their.
- [21:00]
The, you know, the way that they.
- [21:04]
Created a community, and how central this is, I suppose, to the Palestinian.
- [21:12]
Social fabric. Yeah.
- [21:14]
A
Can you talk about, in your own childhood, the shadow of exile, how it expressed itself? There was that moment at school, I think, where you tell a teacher that you're from Palestine, and the teacher answers, well, that can't be because Palestine doesn't exist. But just talk about to what extent it was more what you intuited emotionally as a kid growing up and in a family of exile.
- [21:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, I. Perhaps this is true of eldest daughters and their fathers, but I was very close to my. To my dad and very close to Dad's family. I think Dad's family had a kind of cultural resilience about them. So visiting my grandparents was like visiting a sort of a portable Palestine. To be transported into their home was to be transported into another reality, you know, in which there was Arabic language. There were, you know, various items, although in some ways scant items, but many things recalling who they were, certainly in terms of the, you know, practices of food.
- [22:29]
You know, this was quite important. So there was always a sense, I don't think there was ever not a sense for me, of Palestinianness. I think it was the confrontation with the school system that found that to be very confronting. Of course, I went to school in the year of the first Intifada, and so there's a particular transformation in the imagination perhaps, of that preparatory school music teacher of what a Palestinian kid is. But I encountered this later on as well. And so, you know, later on in the book, I talk about studying Brian Friel's Freedom of the City, which is a place at. In Derry, and. And this teacher wanting to discuss conflict situations and asking me, or asking the class to discuss, you know, places that have been, I suppose, contested. And this is the 90s, and people don't have a vocabulary for things like settler colonialism or certainly not in school schools.
- [23:30]
And so there's this complete lack of understanding of the Palestinian experience in this country. And, you know, this comes back to a whole history of Australian support, actually, for the project of Israel, and comes back also to the suppression, as I know, as I know you would know, Chris, the suppression of Nakba, the fact that, you know, the journalists, the journalists of 1948 who want to cover the Nakba can't publish the work that they're producing. You know, there's a Australian journalist, journalist, historian Peter Manning, who writes about the fact that the Sydney Morning Herald in this country, completely missed the Nakba, reported on what was going on. But as a. As a collective picture, it never understood that what was going on was as significant as what was going on, and so it was missed entirely.
- [24:23]
A
Well, that was true in the entire world press when you had reporters go to Jaffa, which was primarily an Arab city, a Palestinian city, and almost completely ethnically cleansed. It was targeted by the Zionists because they wanted it. And they, you know, they can describe the empty houses, but they don't. The Nakba was just almost universally not covered. That's right, it was. I mean, you had the physical evidence of it, and sometimes the physical evidence was described, but what actually happened is not transmitted.
- [25:03]
B
That's right. And in some ways, you know, I think, moving about A world in which what's happened to you hasn't been conceptualized is a very difficult thing to live with for Palestinian people and for Palestinian people in exile. I don't know that I knew the Nakba as a young person. I think I learned it, you know, around the time that I was 10 or 11. My grandfather was a great storyteller, and this, for me, was another way in which Palestine became a reality. But he died when I was quite young. And so in writing this book, I've developed a sort of adult relationship to him in a way that I couldn't really imagine having done without having written this. But, you know, there are a few tapes, there's a few things he wrote, and what. There are a lot of absolutely glorious photos of him as a young man and as a tour guide in Palestine and in Jerusalem.
- [25:56]
And I suppose he, as a also somewhat ephemeral presence on the edge of my life, has left a very big impression on it.
- [26:05]
A
What did you learn from this, from writing the book, that you didn't know before?
- [26:15]
B
There's a line in a memoir by the daughter of Khalil Sakakini, Hala Sakakini, Jerusalem and I. And she talks about the bombing of the Semiramis Hotel and about trying to stop Palestinian people from leaving the neighborhoods that they lived in at that time. And she says that she would say to people, you should feel ashamed to leave. And I think.
- [26:45]
I think what I learned. A number of things I learned, actually, but, you know, they're small and large. I think they're the small family histories that also describe, in some ways, a national history. I think my father had carried the guilt with him all his life, of his family leaving Jerusalem. And it was only through me writing the story and grappling with both the events leading up to his birth, which I don't think anyone had ever discussed with him, and finally had a conversation with his sister about it. And.
- [27:17]
It'S extraordinary to me that a baby for 77 years had carried the weight of his family's exile in his body and on his shoulders. So I think, you know, maybe it's a little bit beyond me, but I think for my father, that was a really important discovery. And for me also, I understand that what happened to my family was. Was circumstantial and that this sort of.
- [27:45]
This idea of.
- [27:48]
Shame.
- [27:51]
In the Palestinians who departed is really something that has to be put to one side.
- [27:56]
I hope I made a space, to be honest, for Palestinian people who are in the Diaspora and who quite often disappeared at both ends of their diaspora. They're disappeared by the state of Israel and quite often disappeared in the societies they go into. Certainly in a place like Australia, where the demographic dream is to, you know, flatten everyone out into the same sort of product. And I hope this created. Creates a space for people who read it to be Palestinian people, not people of Palestinian descent, because that's what colonialism sort of wants to do, right? To eradicate the indigeneity or the Palestinian ness of.
- [28:39]
Of people. And I think it helped me to understand considerably more. And actually, I'm in the middle of writing a paper about it at the moment, but to understand.
- [28:51]
The degree to which terrorism was used as a tactic in the urban spaces of Jerusalem, you know, during the. The. The 1940s in particular.
- [29:04]
And since the book's been published, a lot of people, you know, people have contacted me from the Palestinian diaspora to tell me it's the first time they've read themselves in writing. Because although there's a lot of work on Palestine, Palestinian epics by.
- [29:22]
Various authors, and there's beautiful poetry, but I do think that the Palestinian diaspora has seen itself as somewhat lesser up until really the unity intifada in 2021, which was an important moment that shifted some of that.
- [29:37]
Relationality between the outside and the inside. But for me, I think there was a real need for this book and.
- [29:47]
The feedback I've had from various people who've managed to track me down, that for the first time they've seen themselves written somewhere. Both the. The wispiness of the stories, but the. But the reality and the vitalness of that in their life has been an important lesson.
- [30:04]
A
You go back. You go back to Palestine and you visit these places your family is from. Can you talk about that?
- [30:15]
B
Yeah. I mean.
- [30:18]
I'm a person who's quite geographically challenged in ordinary circumstances, but going back to Jerusalem, I have spent years studying pre1948 maps and looking at images and piecing things together. And at one level, I had a kind of. I felt a little bit like a, you know.
- [30:41]
A pigeon, you know, who understood where they were going, who understood the terrain and the geography, or a migratory bird who knows where they're going without necessarily having been taught.
- [30:54]
And my approach to Jerusalem, you know, initially was.
- [31:01]
Through the west bank, and a friend's brother had driven me down to the border and he just said to me, you know, and then you'll see the wall and you'll understand how pathetic they are.
- [31:14]
And so there was this sense as I drove through the west bank and sort of. I don't think anything quite prepares you for the reality.
- [31:25]
Of the way in which our.
- [31:28]
Country has been divided, you know, by Israeli settlement and.
- [31:34]
Terrorism really.
- [31:39]
But when I arrived to Jerusalem I felt in a very. And when I first, you know, saw my grandparents house, I suppose, but also, you know, walk the streets, which in a sense are ordinary streets. I think people really reified Jerusalem and it's part of the, you know, problem for the Palestinian people is the reification of this, of this city and this place. But to try and experience it as neighborhoods in the way that I experienced the neighborhoods of my father's childhood.
- [32:11]
Was incredibly powerful.
- [32:15]
And I, and I tried to walk out. I suppose the walks that my, that my grandparents and my aunts and my uncles had done with mixed success because of the way in which things are divided, the way in which things have been redeveloped.
- [32:34]
And I also understood in the materiality of the place and the physicality of the place, things that I could not have understood had I not been able to, to go both the kind of the awe and the beauty and the in some ways devastation.
- [32:55]
Of my grandparents life. You know, my grandfather, like nearly any Palestinian you speak to, wanted to be buried at home. And of course it wasn't, it wasn't to be and it wasn't possible. But the other, the other really special thing that happened for me going to Jerusalem and to Palestine was reconnecting with family who remained and learning all kinds of fascinating and interesting things about that, hearing memories sort of refracted through other branches of the family that, you know, have now come to me, having stories offered.
- [33:35]
Actually after I published the book, a tour guide contacted me and told me a story about the relationship between my brother and one of the, Sorry, my grandfather and one of his brothers and that in their house they used to wheel a phone between their two apartments. I mean, it's a tiny little detail, but to someone whose trade is really in stories, you know, and I think the inheritance for Palestinian people is in, is often in story and in memory.
- [34:03]
To have this little image is just beautiful. I mean, I had a chat on the phone to a very elderly lady who was employed by my grandfather, which again, had I not gone wouldn't have been possible. And she could describe the furniture showroom that he had and you know, another gentleman who described to me how beautiful the display in that shop had been. And that area, which is the Mimilla Mall area, the name exists today, but.
- [34:33]
It was all moved through some sort of Israeli architectural project. And so that, that's certainly not the.
- [34:42]
Topography of the time that I'm writing about or trying to access. Yeah.
- [34:48]
A
And how do you watch Gaza? I mean, it is unlike anything we've seen in the history of Palestine, even the Nakba.
- [35:04]
And of course, so much of what, what's happening in Gaza, as you mentioned, is about erasure. Complete, not just physical erasure, cultural erasure. They've targeted their poets, their professors, their doctors, the entire educated elite. And targeted is the right word because the drones hit specifically their apartment or the journalists who as soon as they finish their stand up or they're in their media tent or murdered.
- [35:39]
What has Gaza evoked for you.
- [35:46]
B
As a writer? I mean, there are no words, there are no words strong enough to evoke what Gaza has been. I think to describe it as the nadir of human experience is.
- [36:00]
Apt, but also hardly touches the sides of what we've been watching. I do think there is no way to understand Gaza without understanding an entire history of erasure, deflection, destruction from first the Zionists and then from the Israeli state. So in a sense, to understand 1948.
- [36:27]
Is also to understand 2025 and to think about, you know, we've been talking, Chris, about the fact that the Nakba was missed entirely. People went and reported it and they missed it. In a sense, the genocide has been missed too. I mean, you had an experience during your Australian trip which was, you know, to be interviewed by someone who refused to connect any of the dots. People have the facts in front of them and they refuse to understand the bigger meaning. And I think that's.
- [37:00]
In some ways Palestinian people are perhaps well equipped. You know, I spoke about this at the start, this idea that to grow up, or diaspora Palestinian, to grow up as a diaspora Palestinian is to be equipped with a particular kind of superpower which is to understand the enormous rift between a dominant culture and what you know to be true from the people you sort of love and trust. Has it availed us of much in this period? I mean, I think, I think over a number of years, over a number of decades, advocacy for Palestine has become stronger. We've developed better allies. I mean, you know, I'm wearing a much loved T shirt of mine, which is a blackfella Palestine Solidarity T shirt. And just after the genocide began.
- [37:47]
Coincided with a moment here in Australia where there had been a referendum to just changed the constitution to offer a voice to parliament for first nations people. And it was not.
- [37:57]
It was not carried. And so at a rally a couple of weeks into the genocide, First nations you know, allies and friends included us into their day of mourning and called it.
- [38:14]
From, from our invasion to your Nakba and then created these T shirts of solidarity. And I think those solidarities have been so vital in this time. You know, we saw it with the red nation in the States who immediately called.
- [38:31]
The genocide a genocide. They didn't wait around for two years, unlike, you know, some states that have managed to call it a genocide.
- [38:41]
You know, and here in Australia too, there's been the absolutely appalling time wasting, draining distraction of the fights around what is and isn't anti Semitism. And a lot of those arguments are conducted in very bad faith. We see it with the IHRA definition of anti Semitism, you know, which has been shot down in certain spaces but reared its head again here and has really, along with a number of other movements, cost so much time and energy. The idea that from the river to the Sea is an anti Semitic or even genocidal lion. I think it's been quite extraordinary. I think this was a moment where we probably thought that at last the narrative could not be denied. And amazingly, there have been, you know, other distractions, other deflections.
- [39:33]
Maybe not so, maybe not surprisingly, but certainly amazingly. And I think if you don't understand what happened to Palestinian people across the 20th century, you can't make sense of the way that a Western international hegemonic consensus has tried to disappear a genocide now.
- [39:55]
A
Great, thanks, Mikayla. And I want to thank Diego, Thomas, Max and Sophia who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
- [40:12]
Sa.