Popular Cradle

What does it look like to forge a national identity and re-constitute a liberation movement when a people is in exile? What does it mean to organize a revolution of refugees? For our Nakba 78 episode, we discuss the unique context of Nakba to the cause of national liberation--family histories, the relationship of class, displacement, and dispossession to revolution, and the inevitability of contin...

As Palestinian political prisoners face escalations in abuse and torture in Zionist prisons, we speak to a former prisoner, Hadeel Shattara, in the second installment of our series on Palestinian prisoners. Hadeel talks to us about the conditions prisoners are currently facing, the experience of imprisonment, the achievements of the Palestinian prisoners' movement, and how prisoners lead and...

While starvation and bombardment continue during a time of supposed ceasefire, Palestinian political prisoners are facing an aggressive escalation in abuse tactics during detention. Milena Ansari, a Palestinian attorney based in Jerusalem and an expert on Israeli prison conditions and policies applied to Palestinian prisoners, joins Popular Cradle to discuss the parallel genocide on Palestinians h...

*This episode was originally published on the "5-4" podcast in November 2025.* Rhiannon interviews two of the lawyers who represent Leqaa Kordia, the Palestinian woman who is "the last of the Columbia protesters in ICE detention." They discuss the legal procedural tricks ICE has used to keep Leqaa in custody, and what Leqaa's case means for all of us. Leqaa Kordia has now...

Trump's Board of Peace governance plan for Gaza is anything but. We discuss the ins and outs, from the $1 billion entry fee for individual Board membership, to the plan's complete lack of meaningful Palestinian participation in their own governance. Pay attention, because U.S.-led plans for Gaza are a preview for the billionaire class' vision of the future: a world full of privatize...

Yara and Rhiannon are joined by two organizers from the AIPAC Out of U.S. Politics campaign to discuss the billionaire-funded, propaganda-pushing Israel lobby in the United States, and how the "America First" vs. "Israel First" discourse doesn't accurately capture the role AIPAC and its network play in kneecapping democracy, war-making and profiteering, and advancing both...

From Egypt to Iraq to Palestine and beyond, the U.S. war machine is the vehicle through which America de-develops, subjugates, and extracts from the global south. In this episode, Yara and Rhiannon are joined by Miriam and Taher from the PYM to discuss "America's Forever Wars in the Middle East," the four-part course they recently taught about how the United States established and m...

On the 38th anniversary of the First Intifada, a re-release of our episode on that revolutionary time period that transformed Palestinian society through both spontaneous revolt and the mass organization of a sustained uprising.

The Case Against Israel's Genocidal Soldiers In this episode, Rhiannon interviews Jake Romm of the Hind Rajab Foundation to talk about the work HRF is doing to pursue accountability for the perpetrators of genocide in Gaza. They discuss what justice looks like after genocide, how international law can be used to isolate and disempower war criminals, and how legal accountability is one necessa...

With Israel's bombardment of Lebanon ongoing, we analyze the history and successes of the Lebanese resistance--the first Arab resistance formation to liberate their land from the Zionist entity--and discuss the interconnectedness of the Lebanese and Palestinian struggles against Zionism. Popular Cradle is made in partnership with the Palestinian Youth Movement. Our editor is Soraya Shockley....

We traveled to the People's Conference for Palestine in Detroit to take part in one of the largest convenings of the Palestine movement ever in North America. In this first episode of a series recorded at the PCFP, join us to hear Mahmoud Khalil's keynote remarks and a one-on-one interview with Rhiannon, in which they discuss Mahmoud's time in ICE detention, what it means to be a po...

We know the story of billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein--yachts and private islands, sex trafficking and sexual abuse, close celebrity ties, and his mysterious death in a New York jail cell in 2019. But the Jeffrey Epstein scandal reveals more than just the criminal sexual exploits of the richest men in the world. Epstein's story shows us the true nature of the ruling class--the group of b...

As the mass starvation of Gaza by Israel and the United States continues, the mask is off of Zionism's genocidal and fascistic nature. We discuss the history of Zionist propaganda and how it interconnected Israel and Judaism in order to justify the settler colonial and genocidal project, and the responsibility of our movement to oppose and confront this ugly propaganda machine.

Mahmoud Khalil is a political prisoner, but not the first or only one. As we watch students being abducted by ICE and deportations of migrants to prison camps in foreign countries, we reflect on the history that got us here. Mohammed and Rhiannon talk about the repression landscape we find ourselves in--attacks on immigrants, attacks on free speech, and what it all means for how we show up in our...

Rhiannon is joined by two organizers from the Palestinian Youth Movement to talk about the Mask off Maersk campaign which targets logistics giant: Maersk.  Maersk has delivered millions of pounds of military cargo to Israel over the course of the genocide. We talk about Maersk’s bloody history, the reporting that exposed Maersk’s role in genocide and the disruption that caused in the supply chain,...

After Phase 1 of the ceasefire agreement got underway January 19, we got together to discuss what we know about the ceasefire, how we're thinking about this moment, and what all of this means for the movement for Palestinian liberation here in the far diaspora.

Yara and Mohammed are joined by Patrick Higgins, a historian of U.S. imperialism in West Asia, to discuss the relationship between the United States and Israel, Palestinian revolutionary conceptions of that relationship, and how a recognition of the genocide in Gaza as a function of imperialism helps us better understand American "foreign and domestic" politics and our own role in confro...

It wasn't just a movement. It wasn't just a demonstration. It was an uprising. The First Intifada was a six-year "shaking off" of the conditions of occupation--a revolutionary period in which the homeland was transformed into the primary front for confronting Zionism, and every Palestinian was transformed into a resistor of occupation. Popular Cradle is made in partnership with...

PRISONERS ARE THE COMPASS OF OUR STRUGGLE. In the third episode of Popular Cradle, Yara, Rhiannon, and Mohammed delve into the history of the Palestinian prisoners' movement, and how Palestinian prisoners made the occupation prison a site of revolutionary struggle. From the tactics used by prisoners to resist the repression and cruelty imposed on them, to the prisoner exchanges negotiated out...

"DISCLOSE, DIVEST, WE WILL NOT STOP, WE WILL NOT REST." On the second episode of Popular Cradle, Mohammed, Yara, and Rhiannon discuss the student intifada that swept North America this past spring. We talk about how the campus encampment movement started, how the encampments are part of a long history of student organizing in service of revolutionary struggle, and how the student movemen...

In our first episode of Popular Cradle, organizers Mohammed, Yara, and Rhiannon talk about the history of Palestinian resistance to Zionism, and why that history doesn't start with the Nakba.