Right now there is a violent occupation going on in the West Bank and Gaza. At the time when we were recording this episode, the ceasefire between Hamas and the Israeli military forces had been going on for about 20 minutes.

We sit down with activist and organizer Sean Emery to talk about why this issue is so difficult to talk about in America in 2021. He leads the Philadelphia Free Palestine Coalition (PFPC) and is also a member of Socialist Alternative (SA). He talks about how he sees class and socialism as a fundamental part of the solution to the current ethnic cleansing going on in Jerusalem, specifically around Sheikh Jarrah and al-Aqsa mosque.

This is one issue where looking at the modern media, it really is hard to get down to something that feels like an objective truth. Just as with the George Floyd murder, despite there being a huge amount of footage of the crisis being posted to social media in real time, you'll find many people who support more "traditional" leftist positions, like Black Lives Matter or gun control, denying that the Palestinians are under a brutal colonial occupation or who say that both Israelis and Palestinians are suffering equally.

In the United States, because we are such a young country and far away from most other countries, it can feel sometimes like we are insulated from longstanding historical conflict by both time (most millennials only heard about the Iraq War through the news) and space (we only share borders with 2 other countries). So it can be tempting to write off what's going on in Palestine as an age-old religious conflict that is simply unsolvable. But as you'll find in this episode, many of these dynamics are less than a century old (Israel was established in 1948), many of the original Zionists were actually socialist, and class dynamics and capitalism play a bigger role in the current crisis than you might think.

Links: 

Philadelphia Free Palestine Coalition: https://www.instagram.com/freepalestinephilly/?hl=en

Socialist Alternative: https://www.socialistalternative.org/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

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