In this episode, we host Pakistani filmmaker Jawad Sharif to discuss his most recent film, Moklani. Winner of the 2025 Jackson Wild Global Voices prize, the documentary follows the lives of the Mohanas, an Indigenous community that has lived off of Manchar Lake in Sindh, Pakistan for generations. Through the swiftly changing lives of the Mohanas, Sharif explores the deep sense of loss that comes with the ecological destruction of Manchar Lake. This week’s show is hosted by Misha Choudhry and David Lloyd.

Jawad Sharif is an award-winning filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer based in Pakistan. Exploring the themes of social change and human rights, his projects focus on reviving the suppressed cultural and indigenous identities of Pakistan. In the past 15 years, Jawad has pushed the boundaries of visual storytelling by documenting stories about the rights of folk musicians, high-altitude porters, climate migrants, and marginalized communities. Some of his films include The Losing Side, The Color of Smog, Natari, and Indus Blues. You can find more information about him and his work at: https://jawadshariffilms.com/

We preview the upcoming Second Annual People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit next weekend, August 29-31, with two of the conference organizers, Tara Alami & Rama Ali Kased.  

But first, two important articles have appeared, in Counterpunch and Current Afairs respectively, which have addressed the dismal question as to the actual death toll to date of Israel’s continuing & unchecked genocide in Gaza. For almost two years the mainstream or, rather, the state-sanctioned media has maintained the obscene charade of questioning the death toll released by the Gaza Ministry of Health, either by using the moniker “Hamas” to taint its numbers, though they are widely accepted by international organizations and even Israeli intelligence, or by reiterating the mantra that the ministry does not distinguish between combatants or non-combatants. This distasteful and unchanging caveat contributes to the pretense  that the number of deaths in Gaza is hard to establish. But as Adam Rzepka writes in Counterpunch, “we do have a very clear idea of the minimum. … And that minimum number is indeed much higher than the Ministry’s count.” 

Rzepka’s figures for the toll Israel’s genocide has taken–and these are the most  conservative possible figures–are indeed horrifying: "That minimum scientifically plausible number of traumatic deaths only—immediate deaths from bullets, bombs, and demolished buildings—in the Gaza genocide is currently more than 115,000. The minimum scientifically plausible number of deaths attributable to the genocide overall is more than 460,000." 

We encourage our listeners to check out these articles that cast the western media’s complicity with genocide into sharp relief. The horror that they document can lead us to feel numb and the refusal of the governments of the United States and its allies to intervene to prevent it–as is their duty under international law and the Genocide Convention–may make us feel helpless. We devote this episode to an upcoming event that not only gives hope in this darkness but also the opportunity to consolidate Palestine solidarity work in the United States and beyond and to imagine new paths forward to contest the genocide and to shape a liberated Palestine. 

Next weekend, August 29-31, the Second Annual People’s Conference for Palestine will take place in Detroit, Michigan. Sponsored by an array of organizations familiar to regular listeners, including the Palestinian Youth Movement, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, National Students for Justice in Palestine, and many others, the conference is designed to address the current political moment and to bring together critical voices in the struggle. Given the ongoing genocide that Israel is committing, Gaza will be the focus of the conference. As the organizer’s announcement states:  

Gaza is the compass! This is our guiding principle for the Second Annual People’s Conference for Palestine. Gaza keeps our path true: it reminds us of our direction in the struggle and the sacrifices that have been made by the Palestinian people; it exposes the forces that we have to contend with on the path to liberation. For this reason, Zionism and imperialism are waging a continuous genocide on Gaza, and we, the people of the world, will fight at every turn to reject it. 

Today we speak with two of the organizers of the conference, Tara Alami and Rama Ali Kased, about the conference and its goals and where listeners can find further information about it. 

Tara Alami is a Palestinian writer and organiser from occupied Jerusalem and occupied Yaffa, and a member of Palestinian Feminist Collective. Her writing can be found at The New Arab, Mondoweiss and The Maple among other publications. 

Rama Ali Kased is Professor of Race and Resistance Studies at SF State University, and long-time organizer currently organizing with US Palestinian Community Network and also a member of the Palestine Feminist Collective.  

In this episode, we have a conversation about Christian Zionism and its impact on Zionism, Israel, and the support of Western powers for the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the annexation of historic Palestine to the apartheid state.

Over the past month Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has continued to intensify even as it drops from the headlines of most of the mainstream or state-sanctioned media. Lately, the criminal state’s foreign minister Israel Katz openly declared its intent to create a concentration camp for over half a million Palestinians in Rafah, on the Egyptian border. Since October 7 2023, the current Israeli government has made no secret of its intent to empty Gaza of its Palestinian population and to declare Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. But we should be under no illusion that this plan is of recent date: Zionism has always promulgated the supremacy of the Jewish state and its settler population over the indigenous Palestinians, building an apartheid regime as a prelude to further expulsions under the euphemism of “transfer”, voluntary or involuntary. The ongoing genocide is the brutal extension of that logic, intrinsic to Zionism’s racial formation and political ideology, and only the latest if most vicious iteration of Palestine’s eighty-year long Nakba.

What does continue to cause perplexity is the ongoing resistance of the Western powers, who have long touted the international legal order and humanitarian and civil rights as the pretext for their maintenance of global economic and political hegemony, to taking any steps to end the genocide or effectively cut the zionist’s state’s ability to kill, disposses, and destroy. On the contrary, Zionism has become the pretext for exceptional degrees of repression of dissent, from the assault on the universities in the United States to the criminalization of non-violent protest in Europe. In the face of Israel’s bare-faced criminality, what explains this unbending materials and ideological support for Israel and the willingness of states to sacrifice the rights of their own populations to defend and resupply the means to go on committing genocide?

Christian Zionism, according to the ecumenical organization Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA), “is a political and theological ideology that misuses Christian texts to support the modern nation-state of Israel out of the belief that Israel has a cosmic purpose in bringing about the ‘End Times’ which will culminate in the second coming of Jesus and the end of the world”. But it has a long history that predates its current manifestations and even laid the groundwork for the political Zionism’s emergence in the late nineteenth-century. In this show, we discuss with our guest, Professor Atalia Omer, both the history and the influence of Christian Zionism on right-wing support for Israel.

Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Professor Omer is the author of Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Professor Omer's article, In the Ruins of the Modern, mentioned in the show, can be found here: https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/theorizing-modernities/in-the-ruins-of-the-modern/

In this episode, collective members host Professor Ather Zia in conversation about the decades-long struggle for Kashmiri self-determination and sovereignty. In Indian-occupied Kashmir, Modi's time in power has been marked by increasingly aggressive settler-colonialism, intended to weaken the struggle for Kashmiri sovereignty. This has included an aggressive tourism industry that treats Kashmir like a playground for the Indian elite.

On April 22nd, things came to a blow when a Kashmiri separatist group attacked tourists in the resort town of Pahalgam, killing 26 people and sparking outrage from Modi's government, which quickly blamed Pakistan for aiding the attack. While the subsequent exchange of missiles between India and Pakistan has ended, Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control continue to live with the consequences of escalating militarization.

Ather Zia, Ph.D., is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Gender Studies programat the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (June 2019) which won the 2020 Gloria Anzaldua Honorable Mention award, 2021 Public Anthropologist Award, and Advocate of the Year Award 2021. She has been featured in the Femilist 2021, a list of 100 women from the Global South working on critical issues. She is the co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak (Women Unlimited 2020), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (Upenn 2018) and A Desolation called Peace (Harper Collins, May 2019). She has published a poetry collection, “The Frame” and another collection is forthcoming titled In Kashmir:Writing Under Occupation (Agitate Collective). Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region. Ather is also a co-editor of Cultural Anthropology.

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.

As regular listeners will know, the last few months have seen a drastic intensification of efforts by organizations and pressure groups that support Israel in its continuing genocidal war on the Palestinian people, especially in Gaza. As we have reported in past shows, this campaign of repression of speech and activism has included collaboration with the increasingly fascistic Trump administration to detain and deport Palestine solidarity activists, the systematic assault on institutions of higher education, many of which have failed to offer any concerted resistance to this gross intrusion on academic freedom and the First Amendment, and the widespread surveillance of social media and electronic devices in search of pretexts to repress. Instrumental in this broad campaign of repression has been the weaponization of charges of antisemitism and in particular the deliberate conflation of antiZionism with antisemitism. Key here has been the tendentious definition of antisemitism promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, which includes criticism of Israel and of the political philosophy of Zionism among other forms of antisemitism.

Given the long history of Jewish organizations and communities that have opposed Zionism as a political philosophy, both on grounds of its contradiction of fundamental tenets or interpretations of Judaism and on account of the violent settler-colonial and apartheid regime that the realization of its Jewish supremacist has instituted, the conflation of antisemitism and antiZionism is self-evidently absurd and in fact harmful. Its absurdity has not prevented the instrumentalization of false charges of antisemitism from sustaining an unprecedented wave of repression in the United States and it is already clear that Zionist repression of free speech around Palestine is opening the doors to attacks on other social movement organizing as well as on the right of university scholars and students to academic freedom and to determine the content of their teaching and research.

In this show we speak with Professor Emmaia Gelman, Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, to discuss the traditions of antiZionism, Jewish and non-Jewish, the weaponization of antisemitism, and the work of the institute in furnishing and disseminating factual information about the history and ideology of Zionism.

Emmaia Gelman is a professor of Social Sciences at Sarah Lawrence College and the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), which examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions beyond their direct advocacy for Israel. Her research and writing investigate the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as political levers in the realm of hate crimes policy, surveillance, anti-terror measures, and war. She is at work on a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League (1913-1990) as a Cold War neoconservative institution, as well as an edited volume of social justice movement writings and academic research on resistance to the ADL. She is the co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism.

Full disclosure: co-host David Lloyd is an Advisory Board member of the ICSZ.

For further discussion of the relation between the Movement for Black Lives and Palestine solidarity, mentioned in the course of this interview, see: https://nakbafiles.org/2016/11/01/blacklivesmatter-and-the-question-of-genocide-in-palestine/

In this episode, we host Sean Malloy in conversation with a SWANA Collective member to discuss the intensifying repression of Palestine solidarity on US university campuses. Over the past ten days or so we have witnessed the alarming spectacle of the arrest and detention with a view to deportation of Palestine solidarity activists who are in the United States legally and are accused of no crime. These include Columbia students Mahmoud Khalil and now Leqaa Korda, both Palestinians, though they may only be the ones we are aware of right now. Their arrest, and Donald Trump’s proclamation that more will follow, comes in the wake of a year of violent crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protesters since the encampments on US campuses last Spring. Other students and faculty, from Columbia and NYU to UCLA and UCI have been arrested by armed police actions, suspended from their universities, jailed and prosecuted, all for the crime of protesting Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Others, like legal scholar Katherine Franke at Columbia and international legal scholar Helyeh Doutaghi at Yale, have been summarily fired in the last few months.While we should not be surprised at such actions that bear all the hallmarks of secrecy and violation of due process characteristic of any police state from Trump’s avowedly fascistic regime or, indeed from the previous Biden regime with its fanatical and weirdly disturbed commitment to Zionist slaughter, more troubling is the complicity and eager participation of US universities in a wave of repression unprecedented even during the revolutionary 1960s. Almost without exception, our universities, including the University of California, have joined in the repression of student, staff and faculty activists, often prior to any pressure from DHS or other law enforcement. They have embraced spurious Zionist talking points and implemented tendentious definitions of anti Semitism, introduced unprecedented restrictions on speech and protest, fired faculty and staff, canceled classes, and more. What explains this extraordinary amping up of repression? How far is this ardent support for Zionism opening the door to repression in other areas of the university? What is the cost to universities and to our wider intellectual life of succumbing to and even embracing the censorship of research and teaching for political reasons? We discuss these and other questions today with Professor Sean Malloy.

Sean Malloy is Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. His research interests include issues of colonialism, war, white supremacy, and the critical study of Zionism. His early work focused on nuclear history as a way of examining the intersection between science, ethics, and decision making. More recently he has explored the radical internationalism of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and its relationship to the Third World, the Cold War, and neoliberal globalization. He is the author of Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War (2017) and Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (2008). His current book project, tentatively entitled "The Iron Wall and the Ivory Tower: The Zionist War on Higher Education," is a critical analysis of the countermobilization against Palestinian solidarity on US college campuses. He is a founding member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and of the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council.

In this episode, host Dr. Kali Rubaii to discuss her recent article, co-authored with Dr. Mark Griffiths, titled, "Deferral and dispersal: The military violence of post-war clean-up," recently published in Human Organization. We discuss the logistics behind post-war clean up activities, the capitalist industries that crop up around them, and the ordinary people who perform this clean-up and as a result have a continued encounter with toxified air, soils, and water. Based on their fieldwork in Iraq, Dr. Rubaii illustrates the critical need for rethinking how we think about people's bodies in war, the materials that make up war, and the way we understand the time and space of war.

Join us for a discussion with Dr. Jess Ghannam of President Trump’s preposterous proposal for the depopulation of Gaza and the draconian repression aimed at Palestine solidarity activists in the United States. 

In the two weeks since his inauguration, President Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders and launched a plethora of proposals, from the imposition of tariffs on allies and rivals alike to the take-over of the territory of allies, from Greenland to Panama. In this week’s show, however, we will focus on two of Trump’s recent pronouncements and orders. The first is his statement this week, alongside accused war criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States would take over Gaza, “own it”, and that he would expel the whole Palestinian population of Gaza–that is, 2.3 million people, from their homeland into neighboring states such as Jordan and Egypt that have forthrightly declined to participate in this  criminal violation of human rights. His dream, as he put it, was to make a Mediterranean Riviera of the territory, a real estate magnate’s vision of what to do of this sector of the Palestinian historic homeland. The second is Trump’s executive order, signed last week, calling for aggressive action to fight antisemitism on college campuses and promising to prosecute offenders and revoke visas for international students found to be what he called “Hamas sympathizers.”

Already the DoE has announced that it is following up with indecorous speed on that executive order: "Pursuant to President Trump’s Executive Order, Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism, the U.S. Department of Education today announced investigations into five institutions of higher education where widespread antisemitic harassment has been reported. The investigations are in response to the explosion of antisemitism on American campuses following the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023."  The schools in question are: 

• Columbia University 

• Northwestern University 

• Portland State University 

• The University of California, Berkeley 

• The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities 

Today we speak with Professor Jess Ghannam of UC San Francisco about both these developments and what they mean both for Palestinians and for those who have undertaken solidarity with Palestine and protested a genocide that Israel has yet to end.

Dr. Jess Ghannam is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine at UCSF. His research areas include evaluating the long-term health consequences of war on displaced communities and the psychological and psychiatric effects of armed conflict on children. Dr. Ghannam also does research in the area of Global Health and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and has developed community health clinics in the Middle East that focus on developing community-based treatment programs for families in crisis. Past president of the Arab Cultural and Community Center and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in San Francisco, Dr. Ghannam is also a consultant with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve and other international NGO's that work with torture survivors. He has been a frequent visitor to Gaza over the past several decades.

We discuss the genocide in Sudan withDr. Khalid Mustafa Medani. Dr. Medani is Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies and Chair of the African Studies Program and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Islamic Studies Institute at McGill University. He is the author of the bookBlack Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa.