All right ladies and gentlemen, rather than one of our usual goofy intros, we're just going to play an excerpt from the interview that you're about to hear that we just did with Akram Sahab.

The aim is a second mass expulsion of Palestinians and the turning of the remainder of the Palestinians who stay here into a tiny minority living permanent subjugation.

And so given that reality, expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people is really important in limiting the violence that Israel is able to and does enforce on Palestinians.

And I think that anywhere you look in your life in the West, there's places you can take action, make statements, think about different arenas in which you can organize, try and mainstream Palestine.

There's lots of different ways that you can work intelligently and with others to have an impact on what's happening there.

Hello, everyone. My name is Liz.

My name is brace and we are, of course, joined by producer extraordinary young Chomsky in the podcast is it's true and on hello, hello, just that he's just saying hello, like five times and then right after the name of the podcast, people like to be greeted.

I think it's a nice thing to like when you hit them with the hello. Hello, no, we're not doing that.

We're not doing Adele. Oh, I was doing Lionel Ritchie actually, but interesting right there, little little gender swap.

I think you were doing Adele, but little Lionel Ritchie. Okay, well, maybe a kind of different swap, but all right, with the hellos out of the way, we're going to get straight into the meat of it.

We have today an interview with Akram Salahab Palestinian organizer based in Jerusalem coming up.

Yeah, and during this, something that Akram said really stuck with me that maybe we can kind of frame this for our listeners, which he says that Gaza is an object lesson in what happens and I'm paraphrasing you're going to hear him say it not me, but he says Gaza is an object lesson in what happens when you resist Western hegemonic power and what we're seeing unfold and what has been unfolding for for quite some time in Gaza, you know, is a direct result of that.

So maybe we can get into and he can give us and our listeners some really important historical context for what's going on.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show we have with us today, Akram Salahab Palestinian organizer based in Jerusalem joining us. Thank you very much for coming on the show. How you doing?

I'm good thanks, Grace. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us. So I think maybe before we get into some like get into some of the larger context about that's kind of shaping what's transpiring.

Maybe we can just start with some some basics. I mean, we were talking yesterday and I think that, you know, for a lot of our audience in the West, they see a lot of.

I guess I would say contextless images of Gaza, but I think what would be helpful is if we could kind of talk about, I mean, what is Gaza and what does Gaza mean to the Palestinian people?

Well, yeah, I think, you know, the morning that I woke up on 8th of October, I was reading a book by a Palestinian poet called Main Obsessor, which is about the about Gaza in the 1940s, rather than 1950s and the 60s, and how it really became the center of Palestinian identity formation, it was a site of considerable struggle.

Not least because 80% of people who live in Gaza are refugees. So in 1948, there was what Palestinians know as the Nakhba or the catastrophe, which was an ethnic cleansing of 522 Palestinian villages, towns and cities, and over 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes.

They were forced out in two main ways, either they would, the Israeli or Zionist militias would conquer a village, they would round up the people in that village and march towards nearest border, or they would attack a village from three sides, leaving one side open towards the nearest border in order to induce flight in that direction.

And if you look out of a map of Palestine in 1948, the place where the many massacres took place appeared to be kind of strategically dotted around in different localities, in order to spread fear among the people in that area, to herd stories of murder, rape, and various other atrocities.

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