This week, Lara and Michael sit down with acclaimed Lebanese-American journalist, Rania Khalek. Reporting from Beirut, Rania comments on Israel’s use of a 2000-pound bunker-buster bomb on a residential building filled with families in Central Beirut on the evening of November 22, 2024. Noting that killing sleeping families was a policy first rolled out in the Gaza Genocide through the use of the Israeli AI “Where’s Daddy”, Lara asks Rania to elaborate on the similarities and differences between Israel’s assaults on Gaza and Lebanon. Rania comments on the ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. Michael provides an update on the Israeli occupation's military losses in Lebanon. Lara reminds listeners of the essential truth that Palestinians are struggling for their freedom against colonialism, which is the gravest affront to a people’s right to self-determination.

This week Lara and Michael cover the formal announcement by Apartheid Israel of the plan to not allow for the return of Palestinians to the Northern part of Gaza while it continues to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from there towards the center and southern part of Gaza. Michael comments on the recent fiasco in Amsterdam where Israeli hooligans chanted genocidal songs celebrating that there were no schools in Gaza because there were no children left, while committing acts of violence and destruction of property. Predictably, the Global North's politicians and media painted the incident, whereby genocide apologists were confronted by locals for their anti-Palestinian threats as "anti-semitic" and a "pogrom". Michael explains his theory as to why it happened, namely to strike fear into Jewish communities in Europe for the purpose of recruiting more people to settle in Israel and the OPT. Lara references Professor Avi Schlaim's findings that Iraqi Jews left their homelands after Mossad orchestrated terrorist attacks in Baghdad in the 1950s. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Huwaida Arraf, Palestinian activist, and lawyer who co-founded the International Solidarity Movement. We discuss her previous trips to sail into Gaza with humanitarian aid and journalists to break the Israeli siege on Gaza. We chat about the time they successfully docked in Gaza without zionist permission. We also cover the other attempts where Israel either commandeered their boats or murdered the humanitarian aid volunteers like with the Mavi Marmara. We also talk about her most recent effort to set sail from Turkey but how the government of Turkey will not let the ship sail. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with the one and only Amanda Seales. Amanda shares her path to learning about and speaking up for Palestine as an artist, explaining that it takes about seven minutes to figure out what is going on, especially if one is armed with knowledge and understanding of white supremacy and colonialism. She invites listeners to check out her latest project, “What would the ancestors say” which explores Black-Palestinian solidarity amongst other social justice issues through a comedic and artistic intellectual lens. Amanda understandably reminds us of George Bernard Shaw’s saying that “if you’re going to tell people the truth, make them laugh them or else they’ll kill you”.  Lara teaches Amanda Arabic. Michael wonders why Amanda still moves her own boxes. 

This week Lara and Michael discuss the occupations' expansion of the Nakba into Lebanon. We cover the zionist pager terrorist attacks, give a brief overview of the history of Hezbollah, and discuss the impact of the martyred leader Hassan Nasrallah. We cover how 902 Palestinian families have been wiped off the civil registry. Many Palestinians are the only surviving member of their families, which as Michael points out, is the Batman origin story. 

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 talk about the occupation's latest scheme to recruit African asylum seekers to the genocide effort. We discuss how many people have repeated a frozen death toll despite daily massacres. We cover how the stats around settler migration from the colony are incorrect because the statistician himself has left and so much more! 

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 roads in a manner of days and, at the time of recording of this episode, killed 22 Palestinians. Lara reminds us this is all part of the plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine which has been ongoing since Day 1 over 76 years ago noting that Israeli officials are even calling for the “temporary” displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank, a tactic which has historically never proven to be temporary and has only ever been used as a means by Israel to steal more Palestinian land. Lara and Michael also critique a recent move by NYU to propose that “Zionist” be considered a protected class under the school’s code of conduct, a move which comes on the heels of social media giant Meta announcing that content targeting Zionism or Zionists could be removed under the company’s hate speech policy. Finally, the Palestine Pod recalls the brutal killing of the brilliant Palestinian content creator Medo Halimy and the legal case for the mainstream media’s role in perpetuating the genocide of the Palestinian people.

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Jewish anti-zionist activist and writer Amanda Gelender. We discuss how the Jewish community has a major fascism problem in Zionism; and how to best bring it to an end. Amanda speaks frankly that Jewish ally-ship is not more important than any other, and implores fellow Jews to do more in support of Palestine and Palestinian liberation. 

This week Lara and Michael discuss the grotesque hysteria around Washington's reception to a heinous war criminal. We cover the spread of preventable skin diseases in Gaza where Israel forbids 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 time was flouted by the UN in favor of policy that violated Palestinian rights and democratic principles. The work reminds us how the law can be used as one of many tools, but certainly has its limits. Laws can be oppressive (like the Nuremberg laws, South African Apartheid laws) and the choice to respect them or not is inherently political. We discuss how a lack of accountability for Israel’s violations has only caused the Zionist occupation to become worse and worse over time, what public international law principles require of Israel in terms of reparation for its international wrongs against the Palestinian people, and the handful of current legal efforts brought by Palestinians and their allies to use the law for emancipatory aims including the ICJ case in relation to the illegality of Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinians territories, a case where Dr. Imseis acted as part of the legal team.

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, finding that the real death toll is likely at least 186,000 Palestinians. These earth-shattering findings are contrasted with the phenomenon of genocide denial in the US political landscape and the urgent need to stop the annihilation of the Palestinian people. 

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 who support genocide, and the coalition of organizations, students, and faculty who made it happen. UCSB becomes the sixth University to institutionalize a boycott within the UC system. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the Israeli massacres in Jabalia and Jenin. We discuss the premature infants forced out of their incubators by zionist bombs. The last two functioning hospitals in Gaza are besieged by the IOF and have been without clean drinking water for days. We also cover the ICC Prosecutor's application to the pre-trial judges for the arrest warrants of Netanyahu and Gallant. 

This week, Lara and Michael play a recorded interview with UCLA students in the encampment and sit down with Presidential candidate for the Green Party, Dr. Jill Stein. We discuss the role of electoral politics, how it has failed us, and how now more than ever we need a third party to threaten the two-party duopoly. Dr. Jill Stein has centered her campaign around being the only option on the ballot across the country to call for an end to the genocide in Palestine, and she promises to dismantle the US empire. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the Pro-Publica report that internal state department recommendations advise sanctioning and cutting the supply of weapons to the the occupation. A recommendation Anthony Blinken has been suppressing and lying about since December of 2023. We also discuss the phenomena of college campus student solidarity encampments starting with Columbia and then leading to others at Harvard and Yale. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the details emerging around the massacre at Al Shifa. This massacre will be remembered in the same way as Deir Yassin and Tantura. Doctors who refused to leave their patients were executed. IOF terrorists separated people by color-coded bracelets. We cover the wildly racist coverage of the assassinated aid workers, and how the lives of foreign nationals are not more important than Palestinian lives.  

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 Rafah during Israel's ongoing genocidal assault. In addition to detailing the realities of Israel's attacks against civilians in Gaza as well as Israel's decimation of the Palestinian healthcare system, Dr. Subeh paints a picture of a people committed to "ihsan", the concept of seeking to achieve excellence in all aspects of life while facing annihilation. Lara reminds that the Palestinian people refuse to disappear in the face of the zionist settler colonial project which requires extermination of the indigenous people. Instead, the Palestinian people currently undergoing genocide continue to insist on life with excellence. 

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 subjected to brutal torture in violation of international law as a part of this current genocide. These accounts illuminate the treatment Palestinians in Israeli captivity have been subjected to for over 75 years of settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid. 

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 until her family home was destroyed in the 2023/24 Nakba and genocide) as well as her reflections on this current moment.

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 wire when she was found. We cover the reports concerning Egypt’s construction of a so-called “fortified buffer zone” in the Sinai — a concentration camp presumably to hold Palestinians in the event of a mass expulsion of Palestinians by Israel, which remains looming as Israel continues to promise a mass escalation in Rafah, the very area it has spent the last 4 months concentrating the majority of the Palestinian population in Gaza.

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. We just received an update today (after recording the pod) that Hind and the defense workers were murdered by the zionist entity. We also cover the zionist settlers blocking the entrance of aid into Gaza in violation of the ICJ order while Palestinian children die of starvation in Gaza. We report on the discovery of a mass grave of 30 bound numbered bodies in a school in Northern Gaza and comment on the long-term impact on the freedom struggle of the public narrative shifting to discuss the genocidal intent of the Zionist ideology.

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 struggle. As Nkosi Mandela said when he appeared on the Palestine Pod in May 2021, all forms of resistance must be applied at once to cause the disruption necessary to bring about the collapse of the settler colonial apartheid Zionist entity.

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 victim of Nakba.

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 its fanatic genocide supporters and enablers.

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 the colonized.

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 premature babies left to die because of the Israeli occupation siege on Al-Nasr hospital in the northern part of Gaza.

This week Lara and Michael cover the extreme censorship by streaming and social media companies. Episodes 1-5 of @thepalestinepod have disappeared, and numerous accounts were disappeared or disrupted on the ground and in the diaspora like organizing acct @wolpalestine Lara provides accounts and updates from the ground. We talk about the occupation forces storming Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, occupation forces making life unlivable for everyone in Gaza, and impossible for medical staff to save people. Lack of medicine food fuel and water is causing disease in a planned genocide on the people and infrastructure of Palestine.

This week Lara and Michael cover the genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinian people by the Israelis. Lara shares gruesome updates from her family on the ground. We bring you the news the corporate media won't. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with student and activist Soha Khatib, a senior at UIC and board member at Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at her University. We discuss the events that led up to her and her classmates teaming up with Palestine Legal to file a civil rights lawsuit against the University for their disparate treatment of Palestinian students. She explains how she and other members of SJP were barred from entering an informational Zoom setting pertaining to a study abroad program inside 48. While flyering she explains the university staff called the cops and one police officer grabbed a female student by her hijab. She also tells us about subsequent meetings she's had with study-abroad personnel and the climate for Palestinian activists on campus at UIC. The episode speaks to the overall connections between oppressive state forces like the police, zionist think tanks, and higher education institutions in the United States. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the egregious story about Zionist female soldiers who forced Palestinian women to strip at the threat of attack dogs and automatic weapons. We discuss Netanyahu's proposal to deport "all African migrants" after flare-ups in the Eritrean communities inside 48. Lara breaks down the reality of navigating a maze of 21st-century settler colonialism in which all the most physical locations for your life are interrupted by checkpoints, violent settlers, and a literal apartheid wall. Also, we talk about online censorship as The Palestine Pod was recently demonetized on Instagram for no other reason than our reporting. 

This week Lara and Michael discuss Mayor Eric Adams of NYC visiting the occupation, legitimizing land theft, and generally being a bad person. We discuss the upcoming film Golda and how it normalizes the oppression of Palestinians by framing a war criminal as the movie's hero. We also cover the story of the Russian-Israeli citizen who is likely a Mossad spy and was captured by a Shia militia in Iraq while claiming to be doing field research for Princeton. Spoiler alert: Princeton does not claim this woman. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the atrocious story of a Palestinian man branded with the Star of David on his face by Israeli police we discuss how the entire society lives in cognitive dissonance, including the protests against the government. We cover the trial proceedings of a zionist settler who murdered Qusai Mutan. The zionist courts have released him to house arrest in a stolen home.

This week Lara and Michael sit down with acclaimed Rabbi, author, and rabbinical scholar, Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro to discuss what it actually means to be Jewish. He dives deep into Jewish history and shows how the Zionist movement belonged to Christians before Theodore Herzl came around. He explains how the founders of Zionism hijacked the religion while holding a lot of the same beliefs as the antisemites of their day. He defines what it means to practice Judaism and how the future of Jewish identity hinges on defeating Zionism

This week Lara and Michael discuss the occupation’s failed invasion of Jenin including making thousands of individuals new refugees for the second time in their family’s history (most inhabitants of Jenin were refugees from Haifa in 1948 during the Nakba). We also cover the occupation’s killing of 12 Palestinians and wounding over one hundred. The media ran with zionist propaganda that dehumanizes Palestinians and promotes the false notion that the invasion of occupied Jenin was Israeli “self-defense” but spoiler alert Israel, as an occupying power, has no right to invade Palestinian cities nor does it have a right to “self-defense” from the people it occupies but Palestinians have the right to defend themselves against illegal and permanent occupation. We also cover the story of French police reaching out to Zionist occupation forces for tips on how to better oppress after riots have shaken many French cities in the wake of the police murder of 17-year-old French-Algerian boy, Nael.

This week Lara and Michael sit down to talk about the recent zionist pogroms in Turumusaya, a town in the occupied West Bank. We share accounts of some of the victims of the pogrom, some of them Palestinian-Americans visiting home for the first time in twenty years. Lara recaps her family reunion and gives a fiery speech. Finally, Lara and Michael cover the recent Haaretz article “Zionist Militia’s Efforts to Recruit Nazis in Fight Against the British Are Revealed” further to release to the public of documents last month by the Israeli State Archives proving the coordination between Zionists and Nazi Germany. Michael reads excerpts from a book called, The Secret Contacts, which elaborates on this sinister relationship.

Lara and Michael cover the upsetting pattern whereby Palestinians on the ground document in real time their lived experiences as victims of Israeli apartheid and colonialism but are dismissed. On the other hand, time and again mainstream media investigations confirm the veracity of Israeli crimes months after the fact and validate what Palestinians have been saying all along. The latest example are the settler attacks on occupied Huwara which were thoroughly documented by the Palestinians who lived them only to have CNN now carry out an investigation confirming what we already know. Lara and Michael continue with an update on Israeli impunity and critique the occupation’s habit of exonerating itself from its crimes. This week, the IOF declared that nobody would be reprimanded in the killings of 2 year old Muhammed Tamimi who was shot in the head sitting in his car with his father in their driveway by an Israeli sniper and the elderly Palestinian American man, Omar Assad, who was murdered by the occupation after being left bound and gagged on the ground in a street in his village last year. Meanwhile, a Ryan Air pilot was reprimanded for saying “Welcome to Palestine”.

This week Lara and Michael covered the child martyr Mohammed Tamimi murdered by the occupation. We also discuss the case of CUNY Law graduate Fatima Mohammed who gave a commencement speech in support of Palestinian liberation and was viciously attacked with racist slurs by media and local politicians. Finally, we discuss Lara's trip to the EU to advocate in the halls of government with Adnan Barq and other Palestinians from on the ground.   

This week Lara and Michael sit down to talk about the zionists' recent calls for genocide in an op-ed, the New York-based charities that are getting tax write-offs for supporting war crimes while members of the Holy Land 5 Foundation are still imprisoned for charity, and the story of the IOF officer who was reprimanded for visiting the firing range naked + much more!     

This week The Palestine Pod covered the colonial entity’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, we spoke about the ongoing Nakba, settlers celebrating 75 years of murder and forced expulsion, and the damn near total silence from the world when entire families are massacred in Palestine.

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Janaya Future Khan, a Black liberation trans activist, model, and comedian to talk about the long-standing connection between Black and Palestinian liberation, BLM's decision to adopt a resolution supporting Palestine, and how Future uses comedy as a tool to influence culture. We discuss Future's trip to Palestine, and the importance of seeing where the conversation will be, not just where it is now. 

This week Lara and Michael reflect on the rise in hate crimes perpetrated by zionist settlers against Palestinian Christians, and Muslims at their places of worship. Whether it's a church or a mosque, zionist settlers are determined to make life a living hell for Palestinians living on their land trying to celebrate their holy holidays. We cover Israeli top officials lamenting the bad PR image of beating worshippers during Ramadan and another zionist commander's admission that there's no difference between the army and the settlements. 

This week (technically last week) Lara and Michael sit down with Ru'a Rimawi, a doctor in Palestine and sister of two Palestinian martyrs, Jawad and Thafer Rimawi. Both brothers were murdered by the Israeli occupation on the same day in November 2022. We sit down with Ru'a and talk about Jawad and Thafer's lives, their hopes, their dreams, the impact they had on their community, and the gaping hole left after their martyrdom. We discuss Ru'a's campaign to seek justice and the plight of so many Palestinians who have had family members stolen from them by the illegally occupying zionist entity. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with anti-zionist Israeli dissident, Ronnie Barkan who is currently facing trial in Bristol for smashing up an Elbit weapons factory. The factory was supplying weapons to the occupation to be used to murder innocent Palestinians. Ronnie talks about how Zionism is a cult, and we relive his journey to antizionism, how Israeli society is heavily brainwashed, fascist, and militarized society conditioned to accept and be complicit in committing crimes against humanity, with the exception of a handful of dissidents. We talk about how these waves of protests are not real allyship, and how zionists can only sense the vibes are off when the occupation starts to impact their daily life. 

This week Lara and Michael discussed the various BDS victories which include boycotts on Netanyahu and other government officials, Saudi Arabia's refusal to grant travel documents to Israeli officials, and the former head of Mossad saying the apartheid state is "on the verge of collapse." Fingers crossed. We discuss Ahmad Manasra and the absurdity of protesting to save a judicial system that has stolen his childhood and tortured him and countless other children. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with the Michael Ratner Justice Fellow at Palestine Legal, Amal Thabateh. We talk about the growing support for Palestine on college campuses that intersects with other anti-racist struggles. We cover how this support is increasingly being censored and chilled by lobbyists, think tanks, and apartheid apologist groups in a way that harkens back to McCarthyism in the 1950s. We chat about the environment at CUNY that is producing some of the best Palestinian legal minds in the country, and finally, Amal assures us that most of the people who get involved with this work come out whole despite the difficult odds we face.