Radio Intifada by SWANA (South and West Asia and North Africa) Region Radio

In this episode, we turn to Egypt and to its ongoing violations of human rights in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring and the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt that brought the downfall of President Mubarak and the eventual rise to power of the current President Abd el Fatah Sisi, once dubbed by the US President Trump as his favorite dictator. In the wake of Sisi’s seizure of po...

In this episode, collective members host Professor Ather Zia in conversation about the decades-long struggle for Kashmiri self-determination and sovereignty. In Indian-occupied Kashmir, Modi's time in power has been marked by increasingly aggressive settler-colonialism, intended to weaken the struggle for Kashmiri sovereignty. This has included an aggressive tourism industry that treats Kashmi...

On May 15, Palestinians around the world commemorated Nakba Day, which marks the imposed partition of historic Palestine and the foundation of the settler-colonial state of Israel in total violation of the will or rights of the Palestinian indigenous people. Israel’s expansionist war of 1948 led to the planned expulsion of at least 750,000 Palestinians by way of massacres and terrorization of the...

As regular listeners will know, the last few months have seen a drastic intensification of efforts by organizations and pressure groups that support Israel in its continuing genocidal war on the Palestinian people, especially in Gaza. As we have reported in past shows, this campaign of repression of speech and activism has included collaboration with the increasingly fascistic Trump administration...

In this episode, we host Sean Malloy in conversation with a SWANA Collective member to discuss the intensifying repression of Palestine solidarity on US university campuses. Over the past ten days or so we have witnessed the alarming spectacle of the arrest and detention with a view to deportation of Palestine solidarity activists who are in the United States legally and are accused of no crime. T...

In this episode, host Dr. Kali Rubaii to discuss her recent article, co-authored with Dr. Mark Griffiths, titled, "Deferral and dispersal: The military violence of post-war clean-up," recently published in Human Organization. We discuss the logistics behind post-war clean up activities, the capitalist industries that crop up around them, and the ordinary people who perform this clean-up...

Join us for a discussion with Dr. Jess Ghannam of President Trump’s preposterous proposal for the depopulation of Gaza and the draconian repression aimed at Palestine solidarity activists in the United States.  In the two weeks since his inauguration, President Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders and launched a plethora of proposals, from the imposition of tariffs on allies and rivals al...

We discuss the genocide in Sudan with Dr. Khalid Mustafa Medani . Dr. Medani is Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies and Chair of the African Studies Program and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Islamic Studies Institute at McGill University. He is the author of the book Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa.

On this Sunday after the so-called Thanksgiving holiday, which celebrates the nineteenth-century myth of Native American generosity towards the Pilgrim settlers in the 17th-century, and is immediately followed by gluttonous consumerism on the aptly named Black Friday, we are hosting a conversation about the meaning and political force of the notion of Indigeneity in the United States and the SWANA...

Given the International Criminal Court’s issuing of warrants this week for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes, international law is back in the news. Radio Intifada has therefore decided to rebroadcast an interview we did some time ago with Noura Erakat, a legal scholar and author of the book  Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Pales...

In this live call-in show, we review the parliamentary elections in Sri Lanka. We also discuss recent updates in Lebanon.

In this episode, we think about new ways of understanding genocide as a long-standing event, and the history of starvation as a weapon, from Armenia and Palestine. We host Dr. Elyse Semerdjian to discuss her recent article, titled “ Gazafication and Genocide by Attrition in Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh and the Occupied Palestinian Territories ,” published in July 2024 in the Journal of Genocide Resear...

This podcast is a discussion of the one-year anniversary of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and its aftermath, 12 months of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the West Bank, and now Lebanon. One year ago, Hamas’s Qassam Brigades and other Gaza-based armed resistance forces broke through the securitized fence that has imprisoned 2.3 million Palestinians since 2006 and launched a strike against Israeli mili...

Collective members discuss the geopolitical context behind the war and famine in Sudan. Dr. Elamin is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently writing a book, tentatively titled: Stratified Enclosures: Land, Capital and Empire-making in central Sudan which focuses on Saudi and Emirati land grabs and community resistance to land dispo...

This episode airs our interview with Dr. Yasser Abu-Jamei , Director General of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, about the psychological impact on Gazans of Israel's continuous assault and on mental health practitioners seeking to intervene under the horrific conditions that they and their clients must face. Anyone who has been paying attention to Israel’s conduct of its war and its...

Collective members host V. V. Ganeshananthan to discuss her 2023 novel, Brotherless Night, (winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and an NPR Book of the Year). With the novel as our guide, we ask this author about her inspirations for Brotherless Night and its characters and stories, and about the responsibility that co...

We host Dalal Mawad to discuss her 2023 non-fiction book, All She Lost: The Explosion in Lebanon, the Collapse of a Nation and the Women who Survive . Mawad was in Lebanon on August 4, 2020, when twin blasts eviscerated the port city of Beirut in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. According to a Human Rights Watch report , the blasts killed 218 people, including nationals of Leb...

We discuss recent political developments and the multiple man-made crises in Yemen with our guests, Dr. Hamoud Salhi and Dr. Aisha Jumaan.  Hamoud Salhi is Associate Dean of International Education at California State University Dominguez Hills and a professor in the Political Science Department. He specializes in international and comparative politics with an emphasis on the Middle East and North...

Nearly three years ago now, the recently elected US President Joe Biden brought the United States’s 20-year occupation of Afghanistan to an abrupt and in most views chaotic end, leaving the Taliban to culminate its long guerrilla war with a complete take-over of the country. US forces were withdrawn to the background of frantic scenes at Kabul’s airport, where many who had worked for the United St...

This broadcast is an edited version of a talk delivered by a SWANA Region Collective member at the California State University Long Beach in February. We would like to thank Professor Jake Wilson of CSULB for organizing and recording this talk. The talk met with intense opposition from organizations and individuals who bombarded the CSULB administration with over 2000 letters demanding that it be...

Today we are covering the People’s Conference for Palestine , a historic convention set to take place in Detroit, Michigan, from May 24-26th. The conference is a three-day convening of organizations, collectives, movement leaders, community members, students and intellectuals, artists and cultural workers, and activists. Their goal is to collectively reflect, exchange, and strengthen ourselves in...

Last month, lawyers for the California-based Center for Truth and Justice , or CFTJ, opened a formal investigation into Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and other top leaders for genocide. The Center has submitted an Article 15 communication to the International Criminal Court, urging the court’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan to look into alleged atrocities committed by Azerbaijan’s forces against...

For this year’s show honoring genocide commemoration month, we hosts Dr. Elyse Semerdjian to discuss her latest article, “ A World Without Civilians ,” published in the Journal of Genocide Research . We discuss Dr. Semerdjian’s insights about how modern warfare both foreshadows “a posthuman future in which entire populations are no longer categorized civilian” and “essentially nukes populations wi...

In the wake of Operation Al Aqsa Flood on October 7, Israel’s violent operations not only on the refugee camps in Gaza, from Khan Younis to Jabalia, but also on camps like Jenin and Tulkarm on the West Bank, have become regular if perfunctory items on the mainstream news. In the long history of Israel’s settler-colonial project the camp has had a central role, both as the institution into which et...

Within the first 100 days, the Israeli regime has destroyed every single university in the Gaza Strip. Killing 100 university deans and professors, including several university presidents, nearly 4,300 students, and more than 230 teachers, professors, and administrators. This context is particularly important for us today as we pan out momentarily to discuss the targeting of academics and academic...