Today on Speaking Out of Place we are joined by Shourideh Molavi, who talks about the ways in which Israel has waged a protracted war on both the people and environment of Gaza. Linking this war to its colonial precedents, Molavi explains who she, as a researcher for the Forensic Architecture project, combines technologies like satellite imaging with on-the-ground stories from Palestinian farmers to produce a powerful form witnessing, and testimony to Israel’s war. She connects the trauma felt by the environment and the trauma felt by the people. She also tells of the new and powerful forms of resistance and resilience that take place at the nexus of nature, landscape, and the Palestinian people.
Today we are joined by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins and Jess Ghannam, who comment on a devastating new report authored by Stamatopoulou-Robbins. This report, “Costs of War,” reviews data gathered in Palestine since October 7, 2023. In that year alone, the report finds that the US has spent at least $22.76 billion on military aid to Israel and related US operations in the region. The number of direct deaths, but also so-called “indirect deaths” (and such a term forces us to project such deaths well into the future due to Israel’s massive destruction of the infrastructure and environment necessary to sustain even the barest forms of life), leads this report to claim that “the scale and rapidity of Gaza’s destruction … is unprecedented, not only in Palestinian history, but in recent global history.” Today we review but a small portion of the information that supports this terrible claim.#freepalestine
Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with scholar-activists Naomi Paik and Ashley Dawson about the close connection between abolition and environmental activism from below. How are the twin projects raising profound questions about borders, carcerality, enclosures, and the separation of humans from each other and all other forms of life, including supposedly “inanimate” objects? How can we create “sanctuary for all” in a radical rethinking of notions like “the commons”? #abolition #environmentalism
Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with scholar-activists Naomi Paik and Ashley Dawson about the close connection between abolition and environmental activism from below. How are the twin projects raising profound questions about borders, carcerality, enclosures, and the separation of humans from each other and all other forms of life, including supposedly “inanimate” objects? How can we create “sanctuary for all” in a radical rethinking of notions like “the commons”?
Today on Speaking Out of Place we are honored to speak with three international volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement. They are all involved in the effort to save the Masafer Yatta region in the Occupied West Bank.
While it has been a common practice of psychological warfare for the IOF to place military firing ranges near villages, neighborhoods, outside Palestinian hospitals, and prisons as a persistent reminder of its power and the possibility of lethal force in every space, the case of Masafer Yatta is exceptional–people’s actual homes are bulldozed, land confiscated, livestock stolen, and people often driven to live in caves. Palestinians face physical attacks, including indiscriminate shootings, from Israeli settlers, military police, and the Israeli Occupation Force, who each act in collusion with each other, and enjoy near immunity.
ISM volunteers work under Palestinians to do what is required of them, and have suffered increasing violence, and even murder during peaceful demonstrations. Our guests explain what has led them to leave their home countries and live and stand in solidarity in Palestine. Their eye-witness accounts of various aspects of Palestinian life under Occupation are both devastating and inspiring.
Please check out the blog for this episode, which contains important resources.#freepalestine
Today, Sunday morning, October 20, former general Prabowo Subianto is being sworn in as Indonesia’s new president. We release a conversation we had earlier this month with Intan Paramaditha and Michael Vann about the road leading up to this inauguration, beginning in the 1960s with the Suharto regime. Prabowo is a strong-arm authoritarian figure with a bloody record of human rights violations, yet he has remade his image as a cuddly, elder populist figure. We spend some time talking about how his regime is likely to continue, if not accelerate, aggressive and brutal economic development policies that have wrecked the environment and displaced Indigenous peoples. We talk a lot about how both the Indonesian media and some of its art world has been enlisted to promote this regime, and how decolonial feminists and others have taken on the task to both resist and present, and embody, other ways of being through listening to and engaging with voices from outside Jakarta and the liberal elites.#Indonesia #feminism
Today on Speaking Out of Place we are joined by three members of the University of California faculty who are part of groups that have filed a landmark compliant against the UC system.
This September, faculty associations from seven University of California campuses along with the systemwide Council of UC Faculty Associations filed an unfair labor practice, or ULP charge against their employer, the University of California. A nearly 600-page complaint was presented to the California Public Employment Relations Board.
What is especially noteworthy about this complaint is that it claims UC’s repression of faculty and student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza cuts to the heart of the educational process, and denies faculty, staff, and students the ability to carry on their work of learning and teaching about critical issues in the world today.
Most notably, perhaps, is the fact that the faculty groups say that the university system’s restrictions on activism for Palestine amount to violations of the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act (HEEERA), which protects employees from retaliation around advocating for changes in the workplace. This raises the issue of just how far universities can go, and the methods they employ, to maintain their complicity with genocide and ethnic cleansing. #freepalestine #bds #lebanon
Today, on Speaking Out of Place, we are honored to talk with Munira Khayyat, a Lebanese anthropologist whose book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon examines what she calls “resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare.” Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a place of death and destruction, but also necessarily, as an environment of living.
We appreciate greatly that she was able to join us now, during the massive and deadly new war Israel is waging on Lebanon. Munira shows how this devastation is a continuation of wars Israel has waged against Lebanon for decades, but also how both the Lebanese people and the Lebanese landscape are resisting death and persisting in life. This episode is especially useful to those wanting to know more about Lebanon, as Professor Khayyat gives us an informative account of the intertwined histories of #Lebanon, #Palestine, and the State of Israel.
We originally taped this show in June 2023, as Maya came off a long book tour in Europe. We decided to wait into the beginning of this new academic year to release this episode. Since then, of course, we have seen that US universities have spent the summer creating new draconian measures to curtail and make illegal protests against Israel’s war on Palestine, which has now increased in violence and volume not only in the West Bank, but now also spread into Lebanon, killing civilians with impunity. Whereas the United Nations General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to censure Israel, the US remains committed to feeding the Israeli war machine no matter what. This makes today’s show even more urgent.
Shining a bright light on Israeli universities complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of its Palestinian population, the book is an indispensable resource in the fight to boycott Israeli universities and divest from firms doing business with Israel #bds #freepalestine
