The Palestine Pod

This week Lara and Michael discuss Israel's expansion of its Nakba and ongoing genocide into Lebanon, with a word on the pager terrorist attacks, and the history of Hezbollah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah. Turning back to Gaza, Lara reminds that by now 902 Palestinian families have been wiped off the civil registry and will no longer be a part of a Palestinian future. With over 1000 Palestinians...

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a hand surgeon and recent humanitarian volunteer in Gaza during the genocide. He describes seeing a number of children with multiple sniper shots to the heads and hearts, indicating there is no way such wounds are "accidental" as Israel often claims. He speaks of why he was inspired to go to Gaza and why he cannot wait to go back. 

This week Lara and Michael discuss Israel's latest scheme to recruit African asylum seekers to the genocide effort and the frozen death toll in Gaza in the mainstream media despite Israel's continue daily livestreamed massacres. Lara covers a recent piece indicating an economic collapse in Israel based on available data since the genocide began. 

This week on the Palestine Pod, Lara and Michael cover the ongoing genocide in Palestine with updates from on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank including Israel’s bombing of the Al-Ahly Baptist Hospital (again) on August 31, 2024 and the invasion of multiple cities and refugee camps in the West Bank including Jenin where Israeli occupation forces besieged the city, destroyed 70% of the city’s r...

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Jewish anti-Zionist activist and writer Amanda Gelender. Amanda argues that the Jewish community has a fascism problem through its support for Zionism while imploring fellow Jewish folks to do more in support of Palestine and Palestinian freedom and liberation. 

This week Lara and Michael discuss the hysteria surrounding Washington's reception of Benjamin Netanyahu, the genocidaire overseeing Israel's current genocidal campaign in Gaza. Lara discusses the spread of preventable skin diseases in Gaza where Israel's siege continues to forbid the entry of even the most basic medical supplies. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Associate Professor of Law at Queens University, Dr. Ardi Imseis. Dr. Imseis is the author of the UN and the Question of Palestine, a study into what historically went wrong in the UN’s treatment of the Question of Palestine since its inception. Dr. Imseis exposes how at various critical moments in the last century, the prevailing international law of the t...

This week Lara and Michael discuss two recent reports challenging the stagnant death toll in Gaza: a recent article by Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa in the Electronic Intifada, concluding the Israel has most likely killed, in 9 months, 194,768-511,824 people in Gaza. Such findings were corroborated weeks later by an article published in The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal, pro...

This week Lara and Michael sit down with the former President of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), Jwan Haddadd. We talk about the successful organizing effort to pass a resolution divesting from companies that support Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the coalition of organizations, students, and faculty who made it happen. UCSB becomes...

This week Lara and Michael cover Israeli massacres in Jabalia and Jenin. Lara covers how the last two functioning hospitals in Gaza are being besieged by the Israeli occupation forces and have been without clean drinking water for days and in international law developments, how the ICC Prosecutor has applied to the pre-trial judges for arrest warrants of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in rela...

This week, Lara and Michael play a recorded interview with UCLA students from their student encampment and sit down with Presidential candidate for the Green Party, Dr. Jill Stein. Dr. Stein discusses the role of electoral politics, how it has failed the American people, and how now more than ever, a third party is needed to threaten the two-party duopoly and end the US-Israeli genocide in Palesti...

This week Lara and Michael cover the Pro-Publica report that internal State Department recommendations advise sanctioning and cutting military funding to Israel, a recommendation that Secretary of State, Antony Blinken has been ignoring since December 2023. Lara and Michael also cover the phenomenon of college campus Gaza solidarity encampments including those at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the details emerging around the massacre at Al Shifa Hospital, predicting that this massacre will be remembered in the same way as the massacres at Deir Yassin and Tantura. Reports indicate that the Israeli occupation forces separated people by color-coded bracelets before detaining some, torturing others, and killing patients, displaced people, and doctors who ref...

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Palestinian-American ER physician, Dr. Mohammad Subeh. Dr. Subeh came to the US as a Palestinian refugee during the Gulf War after his grandparents were expelled from Palestine during the Nakba. He speaks to the Palestine Pod about his recent experience providing medical care for five weeks in Gaza a field hospital with the International Medical Core in Raf...

This week Lara and Michael cover the ongoing deliberate starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza by the Zionist regime in violation of international law. The Palestine Pod also covers a recent Al-Jazeera report entitled "Not just the UNRWA report: Countless accounts of Israeli torture in Gaza" compiling accounts of Palestinians from Gaza who have been kidnapped by Israeli occupation forces and...

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Hala Hanina a Palestinian dentist, PhD researcher in sociology, and 4th-generation Palestinian refugee from Gaza, Palestine. She is a former volunteer in hospitals during previous Israeli aggressions. We hear from Hana about how five generations of her family suffered under Zionism (from her great-grandfather experiencing the 1948 Nakba, all the way up unti...

This week Lara and Michael discuss the Zionists’ genocidal assault on Rafah during the evening of the Super Bowl, targeting at least two mosques containing sheltering families and dozens of Palestinian family houses and tents containing displaced families. During this night, Israel killed Sidra Hassouna, 7 years old. The pressure from the impact of the bomb catapulted her body, which hung by a wir...

This week Lara and Michael cover the story of the missing 6-year-old child by the name of Hind whose terrified phone calls circulated worldwide and the tragic disappearance of two civil defense workers who went looking for her. After recording, it was confirmed that Hind and the defense workers were killed by Israeli occupation soldiers. Lara covers stories of Israeli settlers blocking the entranc...

This week Lara and Michael (mostly Lara) break down the significance of the ICJ ruling in the Genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel from the perspective of a Palestinian lawyer with an emphasis on international law. While this decision will not in and of itself compel Israel to stop bombing and starving Gaza, it gives us a useful tool to be used in furtherance of the freedom struggl...

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Plestia Alaqad, one of the leading voices from the ground in Gaza. She’s a primary source who survived and documented the ongoing genocide in Palestine in real time. Plestia shares reflections on the notion of believing you will have more time, survivor’s guilt, Gaza’s culture and close knit community and the fiction of choice when it comes to being a victi...

This week Lara and Michael sit down with the President of the Amazon Labor Union, Chris Smalls. We read the ALU statement of solidarity with Palestine, talk about the history of unions both good and bad when it comes to the Zionist colonization of Palestine and resistance against it and the importance of organizing your workplace to get us closer to a place where we can call for a general strike.

This week Lara and Michael sit down with rapper activist and revolutionary, Immortal Technique. We discuss his path to learning about the Palestinian struggle for freedom and his lyrics critical of mainstream media and western democracy which helped to educate generations of liberators. We also provide updates from the ground of the ongoing genocide in Palestine committed by the zionist regime and...

This week Lara and Michael cover the calls from occupied Bethlehem to cancel Christmas celebrations because of the genocide happening to the Palestinian people at the hands of the zionist regime in Gaza. We talk about how oppressed people are reliable narrators of their oppression and we should not wait for the colonizers or their allies in the mainstream media to confirm the lived experience of t...

This week Lara and Michael cover the US blocking the UN Security Council vote on a permanent immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Lara reads through just one day's worth of death and destruction updates from Telegram. We also cover the assassination of beloved poet and academic Refaat Alareer and his sister's family in a targeted airstrike on his sister’s home in Gaza.

This week Lara and Michael cover the death march in Gaza whereby hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes in the northern part of Gaza to the south on Salah Aldin road amidst sniper attacks, arbitrary searches, interrogations and more. We comment on the difference between the conditions of released hostages and gruesome accounts from the ground about the prema...