Where are the Decision Makers?

In this episode, I host a conversation with Walaa Katoue of the Watermelon Foundation, Wesam Khalid of Justice for Palestine, and Beau Shaw of Independent Jewish Voices, activists advocating for Palestinian rights. They discuss the ongoing occupation of Palestine, the impact of colonialism, and the importance of global solidarity. The guests highlight the severe conditions in Gaza and the West Bank, drawing parallels to indigenous struggles in Canada. They emphasize the need for an arms embargo and sanctions against Israel, and call for a reevaluation of global structures that perpetuate oppression. The conversation underscores the power of grassroots movements and the critical role of individual actions in driving change. Join us as we explore the complexities of resistance, the importance of truth and reconciliation, and the collective effort needed to create a just world.

Welcome to Wesam, Walaa, and Beau

Jenny:

Welcome to The Gravity Well where you break down heavy ideas into small buckets you can handle. Your mission is simple. Help us work through your dilemmas and conversation and process. Together, you and your community will face your dilemmas and make the world a better place for all. In the spirit of truth, I acknowledge I’m a settler on stolen Blackfoot Treaty seven territory in Metis districts five and six lands. I take ReconciliACTION by seeking the wisdom of elders and individuals who aim to restore water, air, land, life or community. A healthy living relationship with the earth and each other is our guide.

I’m thrilled to have a couple guests here that have been leading the rallies for Palestine in Calgary. Please introduce yourself and your organization and a little bit about your background. Thank you.

Wesam:

Sure, my name is Wesam Cooley. In my activist work I go by the name Wesam Khalid. I am a member of Justice for Palestinians Calgary, which is a group that was formed in 2009 here, a community-based activist group to support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against the Israeli Apartheid government, and to support the Palestinian liberation struggle as a whole. I’ve been involved in Palestine activism for about 15 years, since my undergrad days. I know Walaa from way back. Being an activist around Palestine for that long, you witness a lot of horrors, but I have to say these last eight, or nine months have been the most horrifying that we’ve seen, certainly in my lifetime. We’ve been quite active over the recent period especially.

Jenny:

It’s incredible. The amount of energy it must take to do this every week, especially like you said, with how hard the information is to take it is tremendous. I am grateful to you both. Please take the time and introduce yourself, Walaa.

Walaa:

Thanks for having me. My name is Walaa Katoue. Like Wesam said, we go way back to our bright-eyed and bushy tailed university days. We thought the world was our oyster and we could conquer it all. It’s rather strange to be cognizant of how much time has passed since those days and how entrenched this all still is. My background is in psychology and I have been advocating for Palestine for as long as I know.

I’m not Palestinian myself, but my children are. I did it before them, for the Palestinians, and now I do it with that extra little bit of…I want them to know their home, their heritage, and their land.

This year, or the past year, since October, we co-founded the Watermelon Foundation for Justice. It’s a organization in Calgary, but we do have members from coast to coast, and it’s about advocating for Palestine, advocating for the rights of Palestinians here, and abroad, promoting their culture, the language, everything that is Palestine that they’re trying to erase. We want to keep it and make it known. So thanks for having me.

Jenny:

Yeah, incredible. Wow. Thank you so much. I haven’t heard your story before, it is wonderful. Thank you. I’m going to offer a little bit about how I came to you guys just to help frame my background for you and for others. I was in the oil and gas industry and I was a Geophysicist. I worked on the front end of the business and created “a bunch of opportunities” if you will. The way the industry is set up is you hand those off. You have a group of people that are part of development, but asset retirement is separate and you don’t look at it. It’s always been separate.

During Covid, I got offered this opportunity to look at it very closely, and I had already been connected to [liability] because I was at a startup company when oil prices came out and started to think about this mess that we were leaving for the future and how it was becoming bigger in my mind.

Jenny:

I was following it, and got this opportunity and started to realize how many problems we were creating that I wasn’t fully aware of what I was contributing to. I took a course and it asked me to “define the problem”, and I realized that it wasn’t just an industry problem, it included the regulator, and it included the government, and, oh my god, it includes stakeholders. That means this includes everybody. Holy smokes. Then I started to realize that this isn’t just an energy transition, this is a social transition. This is, wow. For me, 2022 is when I came into full understanding. I was chatting with one of my coworkers, it was a person that I had known for quite some time. He went to school with a friend of mine. We were talking about the looming or impending Ukrainian war, and I’m of Ukrainian background and people were saying, “Oh yeah, it’s going to happen.”

And I said, “Yeah, I hope not.” And [his] answer was, “Well, it will help oil prices.” At the time when I heard it, it’s something that we’ve said. I’ll be honest with you, it’s something that I heard a lot in the industry that this conflict is going to help. We are safe, our jobs are safe. And then it sunk in for me because I’m of Ukrainian background. It was one of those moments where I couldn’t just think “whatever”, it was, “What? We can’t be wishing for this.” Then when the war started people started saying, “Why is this is not in Ukraine, but it’s okay in the Middle East? And I thought, “Oh man.” This is how I came to understand. When this war broke out, right away, it was a David and Goliath situation. Same thing as Ukraine.

This is an army that Isreal boasts about having, [against] an innocent group of people that is trying to resist something atrocious. I’m speaking from a place of ignorance. I hope you hear that I am doing my best to understand, and I’m grateful for your rallies. I know Ronnie from Independent Jewish Voices. I met her at a climate rally just leading up to that. When she was saying she was attending this, I felt safe that I knew somebody that also understood this in the same way I did, especially of Jewish background. It really helped me understand that this isn’t a racist thing, as we’re told it is.

I think that’s enough from me. I would like to ask some questions. I’ve offered segment for us where we can talk about these statements that are made and these are in no particular order. Some of the things, I’ll start with the first one. When people say something like, this is a 6,000 year old story…

The Myth of the Palestine-Israel Conflict is Ancient

Wesam:

This isn’t some ancient thing, ancient hatred of peoples or anything like that, I do think it gets painted in that way by people who want to push a certain narrative around what’s happening in Palestine. I’ll tell you the way that Palestinians look at it, and I think for most of us who stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, this is roughly a 75-year-old conflict. This goes back to basically the settler colonial project that Imperial countries, predominantly Britain, imposed upon Palestine. There’s a lot of history there, that isn’t really this ancient race hatred thing. It’s actually not between Arabs and Jews, at least. I would say there is more of an old race hatred that plays into this story, which is European antisemitism and European hatred against Jews. Much of the Zionist movement, which is… Zionism, is basically that ideology political program of trying to establish a Jewish majority state in the land of Palestine.

That largely emerges, that’s a European phenomenon actually. It emerges as a response to European antisemitism and racism against Jews, which was extreme for hundreds of years. That is an actual ancient race hatred that plays in here. But also Zionism adopted many of the assumptions of colonial ideology and came to the conclusion that it was okay to displace the Palestinian people in order to establish that Jewish majority state because, of course, how else do you establish a Jewish majority state in a land that’s already occupied predominantly by non-Jews, indigenous Palestinians? There’s only one way really, and that’s to displace them. And frankly, that issue that comes with trying to displace Palestinians and maintain this settler colonial racist state that benefits its Jewish citizens to the detriment of its indigenous Palestinians, that is actually the heart of the entire Israeli Palestinian issue in my view.

And the Palestinian’s resistance to it as well. It’s a thorn in the side of Zionism and their refusal to lay down and die or to leave and forget about their rights to their land. That’s really more what this is about. It’s a very modern conflict actually rooted in these ancient racist hatreds of Zionism’s sort of historical trauma of European antisemitism coupled with European colonial mentalities that see Arabs and everyone who’s not European as disposable and less than human.

Jenny:

Yeah, it is hard not to see it that way when, an example I’ve heard you use recently in the rallies is, the story of the beheaded child on October seventh and it was a unbelievable outrage for the world, the media and everything. And yet, we’ve witnessed, in the last month, an actual image of a Palestinian child, and it barely hit the news. That difference is pretty shocking. Thank you very much. Did you have anything to add?

Walaa:

Wesam hit the nail on the head with the conflict being about a century old. I’d say, read Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Amazing book on the history. If someone’s looking for just a cover to cover step-by-step of how this happened, but I think all of it is just smoke screens smoke and mirrors that it’s ancient and it predates and it’s, what do they call it? The intractable conflict of the Middle East. There’s no solution, no one’s ever going to solve it. In reality, it is actually extremely simple once you pair it down to the bare bones of it, it’s Colonialism and Imperialism. This is what is the fire that fuels what’s happening in Palestine.

You mentioned the beheaded babies, I will never forget when the war in Ukraine happened, if you guys remember that news reporter who said, these are not people in the Middle East and Africa. There are people like us. It always circles my mind that there is that very clear distinction in people’s minds that these are the areas of the world where conflict happens, and these are the areas where there’s safety and peace and prosperity. I always question, “Okay, well who set that?” “Who decided that they have the authority to say that this is the status quo?” When in reality they’re creating these conflicts to benefit themselves.

Jenny:

Thank you. I could not agree more. My point of view, from the oil and gas industry, is this thought of at arm’s length again. If it’s happening in Africa, “Well, that’s their government deciding how their people are being treated in this effort.” There’s no thought about the fact that we’re imposing this and, actually, yeah, leaders are making bad decisions, not for the benefit of their people. What I find fascinating as somebody who understands the liability here in this province. There is no other jurisdiction in the world that has as many holes in the ground and as much damage to the environment as Alberta. There is 400,000 hectares between oil sands and well and facility sites in this province. I think Texas would be the next matching [jurisdiction]. They have 300,000 holes in the ground, not 500,000.

Jenny:

We look past that and we criticize what’s happening on the other half of the world. And what our government and regulator tell people is that we have the best environmental regulations in the world and we can’t take oil from the Middle East. They don’t treat women well. And yet here our rights are being stripped. It’s happening in the states, it’s happening right around us. To your point, this ability to at some point be able to say that’s what’s happening there and not what’s happening here, that’s gone away. It’s happening all over. And like you said, you can see it’s from this structure we live in, which is this colonialism and the 99-1% structure that we all have to overcome, which is how I understand that what happens in Palestine could happen to my kids. And like you said, somebody can get on a screen and say, “That’s happening in Ukraine, that’s not happening here in Canada.” Whatever that [tell themselves to avoid facing this].

Addressing the Rhetoric Around Antisemitism

Jenny:

How about the comments around protestors or antisemitic protests or Hamas? For myself, I can say I’ve been there, I don’t know, at least a dozen times, and I’ve never heard any anti, excuse me, antisemitism being said, I feel in community when I’m there. I feel that it’s just a very supportive understanding group that wants to, that understands this is a movement of peace. So I feel uplifted in some weird way when I attend these things because it’s horrifying. But also, anyway, so I’ll stop there. What would you say to those comments around antisemitism and Pro-Hamas? I feel like you’ve already answered this a bit, but I think there’s more on this, if you don’t mind.

Walaa:

This one’s eerily similar to the idea that this conflict is ancient and religious based. It is false. It’s set there in place to kind of cloud what is actually happening. And we can see this in the rhetoric, for example, that surrounds the campus protests in the states. It’s freedom of speech versus antisemitism, completely ignoring the fact that what’s underneath it is, “No, actually these universities are heavily invested and complicit in arming a country that’s committing crimes against humanity.”

I personally believe that such a huge injustice. I know when Beau comes on, he and I have talked about this, about antisemitism being real, but the working definition, it is oppressive for everybody. It’s oppressive when it’s being used to silence people’s rights and their voices, and it’s oppressive to people who are facing antisemitism. And the reality of it’s being used as a cover to shield a country to shield Israel from criticism, right?

Jonathan Greenblatt, is that his name? The ADL spokesperson is the prime example of weaponizing antisemitism for his own good and for the good of Israel. If you remove all of that… I’m glad you say that about the rallies, how I feel. I feel like in all of this chaos and destruction and grief, there is this sense of people coming together for what’s right, for what’s humane and decent and good. In an environment like that, there’s no room for any sort of hatred or discrimination against anyone because the second we start to do that, we play that game. We’re reinforcing the systems that are oppressing us. The same system that looks at me as a Muslim woman or an Arab is the same system that looks at people for being Jewish and stereotypes and is bigoted. So yeah, I wish we could work to reclaim that, to reclaim these ideas back that this is not an antisemitic to speak about rights and justice, and it’s really unjust to suggest otherwise.

Beau of Independent Jewish Voices Joins and Continues the Discussion Around Antisemitism Not Being Antizionism

Jenny:

Beautifully said. And I see Beau is in the wings here, so I’m going to bring him in and then once I do, if you wouldn’t mind adding onto that and then we can catch him up. Hi Beau, welcome to the room. We are live. Really appreciate you joining us. We were in the middle of answering a question around the comments of these protests being antisemitic or that this is pro Hamas. WLA just offered some great thoughts, which is it’s a group that is in solidarity standing up for what is right, and there’s no room for hate in any of that. It is all about understanding that this is oppression.

Beau:

Yeah, of course. And thank you for having me, Jenny.

Jenny:

Yeah, thank you. I’m so glad you’re here. I really appreciate you joining. Actually, before he goes on, if you don’t mind just offering everyone you’re from, sorry, Independent Jewish Voices, correct?

Beau:

Yeah. I work with Independent Jewish Voices as well as Queer Citizens United, and I volunteer with Justice for Palestinians. I’m the sound guy every week, I know these folks very well.

Jenny:

Thank you so much. And I’ve had the opportunity to see you many times now, thanks. Okay. If you wouldn’t mind going and then we’ll let Beau catch up on where we’re at. Thanks.

Wesam:

Sure. I’ll keep it brief. I’m sure Beau has a lot more to say about this than I do. On the point about the sort of characterization of protests as antisemitic. I think if you use a definition of antisemitism, which says any criticism of Israel or any questioning of even the Zionist project, any questioning of the settler colonial system that exists in Palestine, if your definition of antisemitism is that that kind of criticism is antisemitic, then you’re going to find lots of examples of that, especially at this moment where people are protesting all around the world, criticizing Israel very heavily saying that these genocidal acts we’re seeing are not just acts of violence in the moment, but are actually a reflection of the intrinsically racist character of this settler colonial state. If those kinds of criticisms are being defined as antisemitic, then people will find lots of examples of that.

That’s a definition that I would contest, and I think this comes back to what we were talking about earlier, this ancient race hatred. I think this is a reflection of the fact that a lot of people, and particularly Israel supporters, really want to cast Palestinians as inherently antisemitic. That is the source of conflict here, is that Palestinians are just absolutely deranged Jew haters. That narrative is extremely prevalent across certainly the western media, and it’s completely out of touch with the reality of what Palestinians are. It feels gross to even have to say this, to have to say, “Actually, Palestinians are normal human beings and not barbarians.” This is the level of discourse right now that you actually have to come out and say this. Palestinians, when you speak to them, they are all extremely proud of the history that they had before Zionism came.

They will say, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together in peace in Palestine and for hundreds of years before the coming of Zionism. That’s something that was lost by this settler colonial state being imposed on that land. That’s really important because people argue the attacks on October 7th and other attacks that we see from Palestinians in Israel, they’ll say, well, this is just because Palestinians are blood thirsty, antisemites. They just really like killing Jews, and that’s why they do this. As opposed to seeing this as part of a long history of oppression that the Palestinian people have endured. Whether you agree with the tactics or not, there’s a big discussion to be had about what forms of resistance you use, whether violence is appropriate, whether you target civilians in that violence, although that debate should also be applied equally to Israel.

It never seems to be at a time when Israel is murdered 35,000 Palestinians, the western media still treats it as if October 7th dwarfs that crime when it’s literally like 30 times less people were killed. Alright? If you want to apply that discussion, then you have to apply it equally, but the fact of the matter is they’re human beings on both sides.

Palestinians are not blood thirsty, antisemites, nor do I argue that. I wouldn’t say that Israelis are sort of blood thirsty, anti-human, either say, the issue comes from this ideology of Zionism and settler colonialism. Just like in this country, where good people who love their families and who had their own dreams and aspirations and found themselves here in a land that was inhabited by indigenous people and wiped them out as part of a racist ideology, I’d say, “Yeah, human beings are capable of that, and that’s really what Israelis are doing”. Palestinians are fighting for a future where they can return to that sort of peace between everyone who was living there that persisted before.

Beau:

Yeah, I think it’s really interesting that folks who are vehemently in support of Israel deny or perhaps ignore the fact that many of Israel supporters, especially in the United States, are evangelical Christians. And as Jewish folks should know and ought to know, Christians are the ones who actually originated antisemitism, in fact, Evangelical Christians and such, like the Heritage Foundation in the United States who make pro-Israel bills possible in the United States in many, many, many cases outside the Israel lobby, you have the Heritage Foundation and many other evangelical groups advocating in support of Israel for reasons that are inherently antisemitic. And you never ever hear Israeli officials talking about that. The evangelical belief is such that in order for the second coming of Christ to come in their belief, okay, in their faith is that all the Jews must reside in Israel. Two thirds of them shall be eliminated, the nicest way, I’ll say it, and the other third will convert to Christianity and amend for their sin of believing in anything other than Christ.

It started with the Christ killer myth. Where Jews were blamed for the killing of Christ. And we all know that’s just simply not true. When we look at science versus actual history versus biblical history, it’s completely incoherent, right? And what you hear is again, as it relates to Palestinians, is that they’re this inherently violent, inherently antisemitic group of people, which is simply not true. You can’t characterize a whole group of people as being antisemitic. It is just the same as characterizing, for example, all white people as being inherently racist. Some of the folks that I know that are willing to put their life on the line and actually go through litigative processes as it relates to anti-racist work. Where a lot of folks are just not simply unable to do so, they use their privilege in such a way as to negate racism. I do believe, and I’ve worked with many Palestinian people who are not antisemitic.

They’ll attend Shabbat, they’ll attend Yom Kippur service, and they love it. They really enjoy taking in the culture of other people. I simply cannot believe that a blanket statement such as that would apply to all Palestinians or all Muslims or all Arabs, or all of any people like race, essentialism and essentialism in general, is simply to serve a propagandistic purpose. I don’t believe that all Christians are antisemitic. I do believe evangelical Christians are antisemitic because their beliefs are antisemitic. And similarly, when Zionists, for example, and I don’t want to paint all Zionists with this brush, right? Within the Jewish community, a lot of people are really attached to the identity of Zionism. They’re attached to the inclination that Jews need a safe space.

And as a queer person who has heard many, many times, even in my own circles, “What if we just got our own island away from all the straight people or this and that and the other, and we wouldn’t have to face homophobia, wouldn’t have to face this or that, we wouldn’t have to face housing, discrimination, employment discrimination”, and so on.

And Jews have faced those things, right? And Canada, until 1956, when Jews were first allowed back into Turtle Island, there were no dogs, no Jews, signs in public parks. We were still facing antisemitism in Canada, in the United States and so on and so forth. Some of the first boats of refugees coming from Germany were denied. They were denied. They were sent back and most of them were killed. So if we’re going to talk about reparations for the Jewish people… Well, honestly, in the case of queer people, and in the case of Jewish people, I feel the same way. We don’t need a piece of land to be safe. We need to be able to commune with others to be safe. And if we can’t commune with others to be safe, then the world has failed us fundamentally.

What Does the Israeli Occupation of Palestine Look Like?

Jenny:

Beautifully said, Beau. A hundred percent. The other thing that I feel we should talk about the occupation itself. This is a group of people [Palestinians], and now I’m getting into my ignorance here. I’m going to just tee up what I’m asking, and you guys can speak about it. But from what I understand, this is a fenced off area, the largest open air prison in the world. What else can I say? There are gatekeepers. If you leave, you have to go through a gate and somebody can deny you entry, and you have to go around, am I wrong in this or can I have some others offer? What does occupation look like? Can people understand this?

And I appreciate that this is happening presently here in Canada today. In my view, in oil and gas development, that’s how it plays out here. Although it’s happened with agriculture, the Blood Tribe has a fraction of what they actually can farm, but it’s development mostly in Indigenous areas that are critical habitats, and this is why they’ve been fighting. It all comes around for me now, but can you please speak about the occupation, what it looks like so people understand why there would potentially be some anger towards Israel and what is happening to the Palestinian people?

Walaa:

I don’t think people fully comprehend what exactly the largest open air prison means. And even in the West Bank, trying to understand that when you speak to people who come from Gaza or people who live in the West Bank, my sister-in-Law, it’s a very, very different reality there. The rhetoric is sometimes that withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and left all these beautiful greenhouses for people to cultivate the land, and they could have made it into the next Hawaii or some exotic resort. The reality is, you’re absolutely right. There are concrete walls that run, I think if I’m not mistaken, like six to 12 feet underground that are topped with barbed wire all the way around. The fishing is limited. They have limits in how far they can fish, and now it’s over fished. And they’re airport was destroyed when Hamas won the elections. The land, sea, water, calorie deficits, some of the lists, if you look at what’s allowed in to one year, I read jam was not allowed in.

Not sure why, what purpose jam could serve other than with peanut butter. But jam was prohibited. It was on the denied list. And that’s not even mentioning the doctrines that the Israeli military adopts “mowing the grass”. I always forget which one, but, it’s funny. I remember probably six months before October, I looked at my husband and, “They didn’t bomb Gaza yet? He said,, “What?” I said, “I mean, it’s been a minute since the operation…” Because every year or two, without fail, there is a bombardment shooting people at the knees trying to cripple a generation and kill the resistance.

In that context, as Wesam said, there are discussions to be had about resistance. What does resistance look like? What should it look like? But I believe those conversations have to come from a place of knowledge of what does it currently look like? During the second Intifada, during the great march of return, it was peaceful, before 1.3 million live rounds were shot at peaceful protestors. In the West Bank, there’s no freedom of speech or freedom of assembly. With those things in mind, it becomes clear, what does occupation look like as an occupation of every aspect of these people’s lives, including whether they get to live or travel or what they get to eat. It is not a desert that could have bloomed with the right kind of care.

Wesam:

I think you have to [consider] the frustration that people in Gaza feel when you’re living under occupation. I’ve visited the West Bank, I haven’t visited Gaza. It’s very difficult to get there. And the West Bank is sort of the less bad occupied territory, but it’s horrendous there. It is still unbelievable. When I was there, everyone you meet has a story that strikes you. It should be like a global headline. Somebody was raped in prison when they were a kid. This is just like people casually tell these stories. Sorry for the language here, but somebody was abused at a protest. I remember one man telling us that his sister was in her home one day, saw an Israeli bulldozer on the horizon, didn’t know where it was going. It was coming to her house. She had less than an hour to pack up all of her things, and that was her home demolished.

Israel does that routinely to make room for Israeli settlements, illegal settlements. It’s illegal under international law to displace people in occupied land and build settlements there. This is everyday stuff. And that’s before October 7th. In the year 2023, up to October 7th, Israel killed around 250 Palestinians, including over 30 children. No headlines, no discussion, no context. This doesn’t for the rest of the world. They don’t care for people who now are so outraged about what happened on October 7th. Where was the outrage at over 30 Palestinian kids being killed just that year? The bombings… I mean, I don’t know if people are aware, and I say this because we’ve been doing this for a long time. I remember 2008, I remember Cast Lead. I remember being out in protests, sitting there watching Israel use white phosphorus, dropping white phosphorus in civilian areas.

White phosphorus is banned under international law. It’s a weapon that’s banned because it attaches itself to human skin and burns. It’s a weapon that targets human skin. And this was dropped in civilian areas in Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas on earth, and I’ll come back to that. But that was just 2008. There were around 1400 Palestinians killed in that, including over 750 civilians and over 300 children. Yeah, that’s one year. This was in the course of a few weeks. And of course, the western governments did nothing. Did they impose an arms embargo or sanctions? I mean, look at all the sanctions that are imposed on Russia. Okay, fine. Russia invaded a country, it’s committing war crimes. But Israel, where are the sanctions from Canada and the United States? They’re arming this country. They arm [Israel].

They’re weapons companies that operate in Calgary who are sending weapons to Israel, that it’s using an acts of genocide. It’s shocking. And that’s 2008. There’s other ones I could mention. 2014 was another really bad one. Over 2000 Palestinians killed again in the course of a few weeks, including over 500 children. Gaza hasn’t even been rebuilt from that. Now they’re attacking Gaza, the UN says it’s going to take over 80 years to rebuild Gaza. That’s assuming the fighting ends now. But they didn’t even rebuild since 2014. They’re talking about destruction. That’s over a decade old, right? I mean, this is the reality. And on top of that, I mean, let’s go back to the historical aspect. I said Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth. Here’s a statistic that a lot of people don’t talk about that I think needs to be talked about.

Over two thirds of the population of Gaza are themselves refugees who were expelled from the land that is now the Israeli state. This is why you have all these refugee camps across Gaza. Obviously, there’s a lot more now because almost the entire population of Gaza has been displaced, most of them multiple times. But there were refugee camps before. How is it that you have a land that is a part of a Palestinian state? This is the Palestinian territory that will be a part of this great Palestinian state that Israel promised in these negotiations, which is just the carved out piece of land.

Palestinians aren’t even allowed to travel between the West Bank and Gaza. Over two thirds of the population are refugees whose actual homes are inside, inside. What’s now Israel? It just doesn’t register with people. This injustice runs deep and like, my God, frustration of living under occupation and then the Palestinians resistant. I mean, are you surprised? Are you surprised that Palestinians react with violence? Does this shock? Anyone shouldn’t?

Jenny:

No, when you have no choice, right. Go ahead, please.

Walaa:

I just wanted to add to what Wesam was saying. If we’re talking about the media and the truth, it’s this idea that you’re absolutely right. No one talks about the refugee camps. They’re called neighbourhoods. Now, according to the New York Times internal memo, don’t refer to them as refugee camps, and they’re Gaza and West Bank, and don’t refer to Palestine as a whole state or Palestinians unless absolutely necessary this attempt to erase history. That area is mostly comprised of people who were displaced and ethnically cleansed. This is generations and generations of people who can never return and are subject to all the conditions that Wesam mentioned.

The Gaslighting of the Palestinian Abuses

Jenny:

The word I can only [think of] right now is the gaslighting in it, right? Because it’s not only do you have to feel wrong in terms of fighting, but the reason why you’re there to begin with. It’s just so compounding and it’s heart wrenching to think about how far gone this had to go before people like myself woke up to this. And quite frankly, why I’m having this conversation is so that we can help others come into this, too. We are going to move into some lighter stuff. Beau, I want to let you obviously offer some thoughts on that too. And, and if anything else that we haven’t covered in terms of rhetoric, that’s the bucket of conversation we’re in right now, just so you know as we’re trying to address any of the rhetoric. So if there’s anything you want to add on in there, please do.

Beau:

As it relates to occupation. Palestinians are blamed for their own occupation. Palestinians are told that, “Oh, well, the Palestinian authority” “Oh, well, Hamas” and “Oh, well, this, that they govern you.” “They govern you.” What power do they have to govern anything? Their water is controlled, their electricity is controlled, their trade is controlled, their fisheries are controlled, their movement is controlled. What state do you have then to govern? What does a state do? Because they don’t have a state. They’re a stateless people as it is now, and they’re treated as such. But that doesn’t mean that they’re inherent and inalienable. Human rights ought to be trounced on. Freedom of movement is the key one that I can think of that Palestinians are denied on a daily basis, whether it be the West Bank or it’s the most basic thing.

Even a stateless person of any other denomination, they can claim refugee status in any other country. They can go anywhere else. You can’t even leave Gaza if you wanted to, unless Israel approves it. I don’t even know where to begin with the level of cognitive dissonance. When people are talking about antisemitism and human rights and this and that and the other. Okay, when I speak to more mainstream Jewish organizations, they always want to talk about, “Oh, well, they always want to talk about rhetoric as it pertains to denying Palestinians human rights.” Oh, well, all these queer people who are advocating for Palestinian rights, if they went to Gaza, if they went to West Bank, okay, they’d be killed. They’d be this, that, and the other. They’d be maimed. They’d be treated with homophobia. Okay? Meanwhile, Israelis are denied the right to marry if their same-sex relationship, they’re denied employment rights, they’re denied housing rights.

Beau:

And the only difference between the only difference between the United States, which is very low as it relates to queer rights, and Israel is that a few less people die every year from homophobic violence. When we’re talking about a group of people who are denied their inalienable human rights on a daily basis, of course. Of course you’d be upset if you were told, Jenny, that you couldn’t leave your house without the approval of someone else. You couldn’t go to work without the approval of someone else. And even if you were approved to go to work, you had to wait six hours in your car to be able to go to work. What kind of life is that? Wouldn’t you be upset? Wouldn’t anyone be upset at that?

A Duty to Resist and a Right to Exist

Jenny:

Yeah, I heard somebody say, you have a duty to resist. You have a duty to resist. You think of, I’m a parent. The thought of not standing up for your kids in that way of living, and especially that it keeps getting worse, have

Beau:

To not only a duty, a right. You have a guaranteed right to resist.

Jenny:

Yes, that’s right.

Beau:

You have a guaranteed right to exist under international law.

Jenny:

You all have pointed to the hypocrisy of all of this and the expectation that somehow, I’ll use an example of the social media aspect, TikTok is bad because it’s Chinese. No, there is bad use on each platform. You guys have talked about Meta filtering out support for Palestine. It’s the idea that everybody in a country is good, and everybody in another country is bad. Come on. We know that that is not true. It’s just the way we’re supposed to just in one area, this is true, and in this area it’s not. It’s becoming just so impossible to get behind.

You helped me remember Beau, Ronnie Lee presented a couple of weeks ago, talked about this, and you can probably expand on this more, but Wesam passed this on to me. There’s a group of Israeli and Palestinian women that made a statement recently.

The group said, “We cannot close our eyes to the shocking number of men, women, and children who are victims of occupation and the war in Gaza, while the Israeli public knows the names and faces of the murdered, the killed and the dead, and the kidnapped on the Israeli side, inconceivably, tens of thousands of murdered and dead, a million and a half displaced persons in Gaza, and the Israeli starvation policy did not reach public discourse. Many Israelis believe that there are no innocent people in Gaza. We, women of the feminist space, Palestinian and Jewish women living in Israel seek to awaken the Israeli public to the destruction that is taking place in our name. So there’s more, and I’ll share this as I share this conversation, but did you want to add anything to that Beau around this? I think there was a big gathering, as well, please.

Beau:

I think that a lot of people really fail to realize, okay, Israelis have the luxury, and I never thought I would ever say this in my life. The luxury of a Shiva, the luxury of a funeral, the luxury of being able to mourn your dead, not one single Palestinian since October 7th has been able to mourn their dead. I’ll leave it at that. There’s thousands of babies and women, and let’s just talk about the fact that the numbers are given these folks, and even though we’ve lost the capacity to count how many people have been killed, okay? It is still such the fact that I see commentators on either side of the aisle, moderate as they may be, that I will leave that to interpretation, but the numbers are questioned such that, oh, we don’t know how many of those were militants. Okay, well, two thirds of them, three quarters of them, okay, are women and children.

75% of them are women and children. How many of those women and babies are taking up arms? Let’s just be real. Okay? If you knew a single goddamn thing, you’d know that it’s highly unlikely, statistically unlikely. In fact, against a lot of people’s religious practices, if your whole shtick is about being against Muslims for women and babies to take up arms, so these innocent civilians, even if it was 25,000 instead of 37,000, okay? I don’t care if you’re just not going to count the men in that equation, okay, fine. Not a single innocent man exists as a transgender man. I think I am sympathetic to the fact that that is entirely ridiculous, but here

Jenny:

We are. Yeah, that’s something new that’s coming to my view too, is why do we always put it that way, that it’s women and children, and please, I obviously, I’m a woman and I have children, but what about the men that are being,

Beau:

Because it’s easier to refute.

Walaa:

It’s the demonization of Arab and Muslim men, and I think Israel is riding the wave of Islamophobia following 9-11 really, really hard right now. That’s why the men, as a daughter, and a sister of four brothers, and a wife, and a mother to sons, I’m so glad you brought that up, Beau and Jenny, because it’s not talked about. These men are good, decent, honourable men who want to provide for their families and love them and watch them grow. Yet they’re written off as the militant part of it. And also their stories. For example, I’m sure you guys heard about the detention center in, I don’t know how to pronounce it, Sde Teiman. Where they were taking the men and the boys of Gaza to interrogate them. And if I tell you Abu Ghraib all over again this dehumanization and demonization of brown men, it is such a huge injustice that’s not talked about enough that militant. What is the term you just used there? Sorry. A, yeah. Oh, it’s the prison in Iraq in 2004. Abu Gharaib.

Beau:

Anglo folks would know it as Abu Grave.

Colonization is the Problem, Not a Race of People

Walaa:

Okay, thanks, Beau. I appreciate that. I think they just finished the trials for those soldiers that were there and what they did was horrific, was absolutely, and this dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims, this is where it stems from. When you have people on Israeli TV, if you ever tune in and they say, “I will not live across the border from 30,000 rapists.” What? We’re just broadly putting it out there. Going back to antisemitism, actually, if you don’t mind, I wanted to bring one point up. This is not contingent upon Zionism colonizing Palestine or them being Jewish. Any colonizer would be the problem, right? This is not, there’s no religious roots here to make it antisemitic. And I was sharing this recently with somebody. I grew up here, and I remember in school when we’d talk about Palestine and the Holocaust in Israel, I’d get this uncomfortable feeling like people looking at me, is this real?

Is this, there’s actually something here. And then when I had the opportunity to live in Syria to see how peacefully everybody coexisted the Jewish neighbourhoods and the Christian neighbourhoods and the church bells and the AAN going off, and it’s like, oh, I actually believed some of that garbage myself, that somehow there’s something inherently there between us. So it was just an awakening, I’d say. And I think Beau touched on the propaganda, and I think that’s where a lot of people are awakening from so many of these myths, like Israel wants peace, but there’s no partner to be had. This is ancient, this is antisemitic, and so on and so forth. All of these claims really just boil down to this cover to continue the occupation, continue evicting Palestinians off their land in the West Bank and continue Israeli settlement.

Beau:

Yeah, I just wanted to add to that, Walaa. When I say that I don’t want to condemn all people who identify as Zionists, although I categorically and philosophically disagree with Zionism, is that a lot of people are taught to clinging, cling, cling, clinging to this identity rather than evaluate the facts on the ground, evaluate the fact that you’re taking away someone else’s human right in order to bolster this idea and bolster this political philosophy and this ideology, rather than look for a world and work towards a world where everyone has the same rights and everyone can coexist. And if you want to bring it to a Jewish perspective, why are you doing God’s work for him? In many religions, that’s something that we would call blasphemy.

Jenny:

Right? That’s the interesting thing. It even goes against any religion, like “Love thy neighbour”, these principles that we could supposedly can rely on in any religion, those common threads that are somehow just non-existent when it comes to these…

Beau:

There are so many excerpts from Torah scrolls that I could give you, and many of which actually pertain to not destroying trees. When you’re occupying an area, there’s actually passages against the ecocide that’s happening in Israel-Palestine, there’s just so many things that just are completely against religious tenant that have nothing to do with the state. But there’s so many other things that you should know very well that when you get that final test, you’re going to fail.

Jenny:

To me, the story is yet to be written. Unless there’s more rhetoric stuff to talk about, and I’m happy to do that. And I also see it’s eight o’clock. I hope you guys don’t have a hard stop, but I did want to talk about the positive. We now have an opportunity being that… I’m going to tee it up and you guys can say it better than me, which is we have countries like Ireland and Spain, and obviously South Africa and Columbia that have said Palestine has the right to exist. And Wesam, you have said, and I can see the parallels, we’ve talked about the parallels to the indigenous people here in Canada. This is a massive opportunity. Back to your point, Beau, about us, a world of equity, we get to write this future.

I was saying to Wesam before we started, you guys are the leaders of this. It’s become very apparent to me that whoever is, what’s the expression, who feels that they want to change the world, are the ones that do change the world. And that’s quite frankly what’s happening in this, right? Is that you guys are having the conversation. I’m going to stop talking, but can you please talk about the conversations that you’re having around “What does truth and reconciliation look like from a Palestinian perspective?”

What Does Truth and Reconciliation Look Like from a Palestinian Perspective?

Wesam:

I’ll say it’s very difficult to talk about positives in the context of what’s going on. I think right now, top priority is everyone who can, needs to do everything within their power, at least for people in Canada, to compel the Canadian government to stop supporting this genocide. There need to be certainly bare minimum an arms embargo on Israel from Canada. The fact that Canadian made weapons systems and technologies could be being used in those massacres we’re seeing that are leaving headless babies and leaving mass graves in front of hospitals and carpet bombing refugee camps. That needs to be stopped and people need to get involved in that. I’d say it needs to go a lot further. It needs to be sanctions as well, full sanctions from the Canadian government until Israel complies with international law and stops its occupation and apartheid against the Palestini