On May 15, Palestinians around the world commemorated Nakba Day, which marks the imposed partition of historic Palestine and the foundation of the settler-colonial state of Israel in total violation of the will or rights of the Palestinian indigenous people. Israel’s expansionist war of 1948 led to the planned expulsion of at least 750,000 Palestinians by way of massacres and terrorization of the population. The term Nakba marks this catastrophe and its violent ethnic cleansing. But commemoration is probably the wrong word: as the subsequent history of Israeli colonialism has amply shown, the Nakba was not a single event but part of a still ongoing process of dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians from their historic homeland in order to consolidate a Jewish supremacist regime over the whole of the territory. The ongoing genocide in Gaza is the most horrific instance of this continuing Nakba but is nonetheless continuous with Israel’s longstanding aims to clear the Palestinian population: as Netanyahu recently announced to his Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee: “We are destroying more and more homes, and Gazans have nowhere to return to.” Despite euphemisms like “voluntary emigration” or “population transfer”, the completion of the Nakba by devastatingly violent means is Israel’s Final Solution.

This week's Radio Intifada has two segments. In our first segment and live broadcast we discuss the campaign to bring the University of California system to divest from its large portfolio of holdings that directly and indirectly give material support to the ongoing genocide and to supporting and legitimating Israel’s apartheid state. In the second, we will discuss the recent People’s Tribunal for Palestine that took place in Southern California last weekend with one of its organizers. The Tribunal brought forward evidence of UC complicity in investment, donor funds, and research in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and in the machinery of death globally.

Our guest for the first segment is a PhD student at UCLA researching social movements. In October of last year they joined the Unmasking UCLA collective, which has been doing in-depth research on UC’s investment portfolio since the summer following the encampments. You can find their white paper and executive summary at unmaskingucla.org. 

Our guest for the second segment is Jennifer Mogannam, Assistant Professor in the department of Critical Race & Ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz. Professor Mogannam is also a UC-Mellon Humanities Initiative early faculty fellow and affiliate faculty with the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. She is a critical, cross-disciplinary scholar of Palestinian and Arab transnational movements, third world solidarities, gendered power in anti-colonial struggle, violence, refuge, and revolution. She was  a member of the organizing committee for the Tribunal.