The Death of the Two Party System

Welcome to our UK local election special with the acclaimed authors and journalists Oliver Eagleton and Paul Holden.

Oliver Eagleton is Managing Editor of Phenomenal World and author of The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right (2022).

Paul Holden is an investigative journalist and author with 15 years experience investigating corruption. He is the author of The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Labour Together and the Crisis of British Democracy (2025).

Ahmed Alnaouq and Hala Hanina go beyond the headlines and hysteria, examining the widespread attacks on Zack Polanksi and the Green Party by the media and political establishment, Starmer’s latest assault on Palestine solidarity in Britain and whether these local elections spell the beginning of the end for his party.

As always, the realities on the ground in Palestine remain central to our discussion, we’ll be hearing from our contributors in Gaza, Huda and Ali Skaik, to tell us what the situation is under continued siege and genocide.

Thumbnail Image credit: HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
This is going to be an election like we've never seen in the UK
in terms of the result, but the Labour Party loses such a huge
number of seats it's going to bepotentially even on the best
case scenario of the current polling, It'll be the most seats
I think the Labour Party's ever lost in in a local election
campaign while they're in power.It is the total end of a two

(00:21):
party. System.
I think it's entirely possible that Andy Burnham may well be
the kind of unifying figure who can do a deal with the right and
bring the soft left and the leftof the Labour Party on side as
well. And there's been talk just this
past week of him keeping Starmeron as Foreign secretary.
So anyone who thinks that there's going to be a break in

(00:43):
Labour's position on international affairs when
there's an inevitable change of leadership is, is really
delusional. I think Polanski right now needs
to acknowledge this reality and try to maintain the very
effective insurgent oppositionalenergy that the Greens under his

(01:04):
leadership have generated. Particularly on those
international questions, which far from being sort of distant
ones that people don't care about, that don't affect
people's everyday lives, have actually been one of the main
galvanizing forces in undermining, and I think you're
right, fatally destroying this right wing labour project.

(01:25):
Effectively, the neoliberal settlement is collapsing, Yeah.
And and the sort of the imperial, but least in
settlement is collapsing as well.
And in this we have this moment of opportunity and change.
We're also going to see some of the most aggressive forms of of
sort of what's the word you'd use for sort of counter

(01:47):
revolution almost that you'll start seeing like aggressive
calls for curtailing of civil liberties of of weaponizing
language of of declaring pro Palestinian solidarity as a form
of racism. In that moment, what the
progressive left needs to understand is the people who
make those arguments can't be satisfied.
You cannot, generally speaking, you cannot satisfy somebody who

(02:10):
doesn't recognize that the stateof Israel oppresses
Palestinians. You cannot reconcile with a
political movement that thinks that it's appropriate the way
that Israel's responded in Gaza.You cannot reconcile with a
political movement that runs an apartheid state and think that's
fine. You cannot reconcile with an
apartheid state that steals landin the West Bank from people.

(02:32):
You can't reconcile with a political movement that starts
illegal wars all over the place because you're effectively a
rogue regime. There is no settlement with that
political project. There's no triangulating with
it. There's only opposition to.
That's only the more position that can be taken.
Welcome back to Palestine Deep Dive for our UK local election
special on this, the world's first Palestinian chacho.

(02:56):
We're here with acclaimed authors and journalists Oliver
Eagleton and Paul Holden to go beyond the headlines and
hysteria and pick apart what's really going on in British
politics this week. We will be.
Examining the White Sabrit attacks on Zach Polanski and the
Green Party by the media and political establishment,
Starmer's latest assault on Palestinian solidarity in

(03:18):
Britain and within these local elections spelled the beginning
of the end for his party. As always, the realities on the
ground in Palestine remains central to our discussion.
We'll be hearing from our contributors in Gaza, Hoda and
Alaska to tell us what the situation is under continued
siege and genocide. Stay tuned for all of this and

(03:40):
more. Paul and Oliver, thank you very
much for joining us today. It's it's a privilege to have
you both here. You're the experts on these
topics we're going to discuss today, namely Sama.
Basically. Sama, Labour are all of it and
we want to talk about all of it.But allow me first to ask you

(04:00):
the same question, both of you actually.
Is history now repeating itself?We have seen many years ago when
there was a war waged against a Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn
and now we can see the same war waged against Zach Polanski and
the Green Party for the same excuses.
Is this history repeating itself?

(04:22):
I think it most certainly seems that way.
It's certainly history repeatingitself in the sense that
Britain's establishment media, even after years of genocide,
even after everything we've seenin Palestine, will not relent
from its extreme Zionist position and will try to

(04:42):
demonize anyone in mainstream politics who dissents from that
position. I think we've seen that very
clearly over the past few weeks with the mounting assaults on
Zach Polanski. Is history repeating itself in
the sense that these smears are going to have the same
destructive effect on the Green Party that they had on Corbyn's

(05:02):
Labour? I think that remains to be seen.
One of the main reasons why the smears against Corbyn were so
effective was that they came from the outside.
They came from outside the Labour Party, from the Israel
lobby, from the establishment media.
But they were then amplified from within the Labour Party by
Corbyn's sectarian opponents on the Labour right.

(05:24):
And we're just now seeing this week the beginning of a similar
dynamic within the Green Party. Caroline Lucas, the old guard of
the Green Party, the sort of more liberal wing of the Green
of the Green Party, making a a statement about, you know, the
urgency of dealing with the so-called anti-Semitism crisis
within the party. Whether or not that block

(05:46):
becomes as as destructive as intent on wrecking the hopeful
project that Polanski has built as their predecessors in the
Labour Party were, I think will will determine, you know, the,
the, the extent of the, the damage that's wrought by these
smears and, and the extent to which the new Greens, you know,

(06:09):
the left of the Green Party can push back against it.
I think will will be really decisive.
I think it's interesting to me. It's it's, it's history
repeating itself quite literallyin the sense that it, it is the
same, literally the same actors who are behind the stuff.
So one of the things that I talked about in my book and then
sort of exposed in the book is this what I called the Labour

(06:32):
Together project. Now those people who don't know
what it is, Labour Together was this very boring seeming think
tank that was affiliated with the Labour Party.
And I was run by a guy called Morgan McSweeney who became
Kirstamer's chief of staff, was effectively Kirstamer's
political brain for the better part of a decade and had to
resign over the Peter Mandelson affair.
And and for two years between 2017 and and 2020, McSweeney

(06:55):
basically used Labour together as the vehicle through which he
could undermine a left wing politics with Jeremy Corbyn,
which he despised and he despised from multiple
perspective, socialist, but alsobecause anti imperialist in
particular is anti war. And we now know that Morgan
McSweeney and a couple of close political allies, including a
guy called Steve Reed, who is now cabinet minister, were

(07:18):
between 2017 and 2020 secretly and covertly in flaming the
anti-Semitism crisis, working with the media to tell alarmist
stories about the extent of anti-Semitism.
The Labour Party, you know, running stories, front page
stories where they were described as whistleblowers.
And actually they were whistleblowers, their internal
political actors of the Labour Party.
And in this sequence of events has been happening around Zach

(07:40):
Polanski, the person who is leading the attacks for Labour
Party is Steve Reed. It's exactly the same person who
back in 2018 was doing so, but secretly, covertly behind the
scenes. He's now doing it overtly as
their attack dog of the Labour Party and using almost precisely
the same methodology, which I think is quite interesting.
So today, for example, the, the,you know, which I think is very

(08:02):
revealing the day before there'sthe local election campaign,
Labour Party has released this Greens exposed dossier, right?
Which is exactly how these people function.
Exactly same taxes, which is to basically say to, to smear an
entire movement on the basis of the actions of a tiny fraction
of people. But then if you actually look at
the underlying evidence, it's incredibly weak.
So there might be two or three examples of like really

(08:24):
unacceptable conduct. But then what mixed within that,
there's like people saying I support the high Court's
decision to strike down the prescription of Palestine action
and that's presented as extremist or people saying we
think the Israeli Defence Force is a terror, is a terrorist
organization. I'm like, well, that's alleged
in the public opinion, right? That's not, you know, speak to
Palestinians and see if they disagree with that view, right?

(08:46):
How many people agree with that?Yeah, exactly.
Most people in Britain wouldn't disagree with that, right?
That's not actually an extremistview, that's a pretty commonly
held view. So in the sense it is exactly
the same playbook, it's exactly the same techniques.
The difference is this has been,you know, the stuff on Jeremy
Corbyn happened over a much longer period of time, started

(09:06):
2015 and it drew in a much bigger, larger hinterland of
material. This has really been run in a
very almost as like an emergencyduring a local election
campaign, two to three weeks, sort of constructing an
anti-Semitism crisis on the fly.And as a result, I'm not quite
sure how effective it'll be, notleast because I think the end,

(09:28):
the end result is like electionsis going to be Labour Party is
going to be absolutely annihilated and to focus on this
elsewhere, I think. OK, that's good to hear.
So, so you know about the organization, everything that
the Labour and others are doing.I think in the last week we've
seen what happens in golden Screen and how the media has

(09:49):
been like reporting it and how they've used it, but also how
Kirsten and the Labour Party have weaponized it.
So what do you think about that?I mean, obviously, I think the
first thing you have to say is that, you know, obviously as a
horrific attack and you know, it's a terrible thing to to have
happen in a city like London. I think what's disturbing about

(10:11):
that sort of attack is, is that we never seem to learn from
these these moments of of like high emotion that actually
generally speaking, we need to wait for the full facts to
emerge of the case because almost immediately as the
attacks happened as presented asa terrorist attack.
Other thing has been quite interesting and obviously they
were horrific attacks, but the. CPS.

(10:32):
The CPS hasn't charged, that's the prosecution service hasn't
charged it as a terrorist defence.
So I was actually emailing and, and speaking to the police and
saying like what's happening here?
What's happening with this case?Who's being charged, why they're
being charged, what murders they're being charged for.
And the CPS has decided not to charge it as a terrorist
offence, right? What does that mean practically?
It means that this might be a hate crime.

(10:54):
I think it probably is likely tobe a hate crime, but it wasn't
conducted with the intention of like advancing a particular
political 'cause this idea that it was an attack that was
designed to advance the Palestinian struggle for
liberation, for example, which is precisely by calling it a
terrorist attack, what the mainstream media has tried to
imply that this guy was actuallya radical purpose is pro

(11:16):
Palestine and activist and an aggrieved supporter of Hamas
creating terror on British soil.And then if you make that
narrative, then you can say, well, in response to it, we need
to stop pro Palestinian protests.
We need to ban globalized intifada.
And it doesn't seem, you know, we've come from, you know, an
isolated horrible attack, which doesn't seem to have a political
motive to suddenly having a discussion about how we need to

(11:39):
be banning protest. And and that's like a very
damaging problematic conflation.And of course, one of the things
that's very disturbing is the extent to which the media, the
media coverage is a raised the the attacks on a Muslim man.
Exactly, Yeah. And and it.
Happened before. Disturbed by that?
Yeah, the same day and they justcovered it.

(12:00):
Absolutely. And that tells you everything
you need to know about the gap between the attack itself, which
we all agree was a horrific act,and the political narrative
that's being spun out of it, which is that this attack
emerged from some kind of atmosphere of pervasive
anti-Semitism which has been created by the Palestine

(12:23):
movement. That is the narrative that
Starmer immediately went on the news to promote and dispatched
his ministers to promote as wellin order to have an excuse have
a justification for clamping down even further on the
solidarity movement. The police already have just
been given new extended powers to ban protests because of their

(12:48):
cumulative effect. And that is a measure that's
targeted specifically at the Palestine protests because of
their endurance and persistence in the face of the genocide.
And now, as if that weren't enough, they're contemplating
new measures still to, you know,turn marches into static

(13:08):
demonstrations or to ban them all together.
So you see this escalation of the kind of repressive project
that's characterized the Stormerleadership, the Stormer
government from the beginning, and the weaponization of this
Golders Green attack in the service of that project, which
of course, is extremely dangerous because it also relies

(13:31):
on the conflation of the Jewish community and the the supporters
of Israel. And those are obviously we must,
in response, insist on the distinction between those two
things. And we must also insist that,
you know, the Palestine movementhas not created the conditions

(13:52):
of of sort of widespread fear, widespread terror in the way
that the media would like us to believe.
Yeah, I'm really annoyed with the media and how they how they
dealt with this incident. As we all agree, we don't even
need to say that again and againthat this was a horrific attack.
No one should be attacked whether they were Jewish,

(14:13):
whether they were Muslims, whether they were Arabs or
whatever their nationality or ethnicity.
It is. But I'm annoyed with the media
because they only focus on the fact that two Jewish were were
attacked and they forgot the fact that a Muslim man was
attacked. This morning, a mosque was
attacked. Previously it was synagogue, but
the media forgot to mention or deliberately did not mention

(14:36):
that it is now a mosque and now they focus only on the Jewish
side of it. I think this is really
problematic. I think we need to live in in,
in a community, in in a world where the Jews and the Muslims
and the Christians and everyone should be treated equally.
But now not only that, but we have, we have media figures who

(14:58):
even now differentiate not only between the the Jews and the
Muslims, but between Jews themselves.
We have this video of Trevor Phillips.
Can we show this video please? So, so you would reject the the
McPherson inquiry, Stephen Lawrence inquiry definition of a
hate crime as a crime a an incident where either the victim

(15:25):
or anybody else who happens to be there perceives it to be
crime motivated by hatred. Because there are thousands and
thousands of Jews in this city, London, who think that those
marches that you're saying you don't feel intimidated by, they
think these are hate marches. So you're saying that the

(15:45):
McPherson inquiry, the McPhersondefinition, which is what the
government stands behind in which police operate today,
that's wrong. Well, as I repeat, as a Jewish
person, I March with many Jewishpeople on those marches.
Now there are already laws to deal but.
You're not all Jews. I'm just saying that currently
the policy is, but. Why is my Jewish identity being
erased from this conversation? I'm not.

(16:07):
I'm not erasing. So many people on those.
Don't try that one on me. Try that one on me.
I mean, there is a lot of thingswe need to discuss about this
one. Yeah, First, the fact that the
fact before we talk about why his Jewish identity was erased.
Why is it in the media that whenwe talk about the marches, the

(16:29):
the, the marches that started inthe UK to demand an end to the
of the UK complicity in the genocide and in rejection to the
Israeli war crimes in Palestine.Now they talk about these
marches, but they never invite aPalestinian to talk about these
marches, Palestinian British to talk about these marches and why

(16:49):
they March. But also I want to ask the same
question that Zach asked. Why is his Jewish identity
erased from the discussion? If he was a brew Israel Jew, of
course his Jewish identity will be encouraged and it will be
listened to. But when he is a critical of

(17:10):
Israel, it's not why and. I think there's there's so many
things to say about that interview, which I found
incredibly disturbing. And one of the things that, you
know, I posted this to Twitter, what X when, when it happened,
first of all, you got to see thecontext of the sensitive, which
is it's Trevor Phillips did in this interview.
So what has been missed in this conversation with this interview

(17:31):
is that is that Trevor Phillips was suspended from the Labour
Party for Islamophobia, right? Like there was a a very detailed
dossier of evidence put apart and you know, they were
submitted to the Labour Party onwhich basis the Labour Party
decided to suspend and investigate him.
Now that investigation was effectively hamstrung,
undermined for political considerations because he was
basically cleared the week before he was given his position

(17:56):
at Sky News, which is, you know,I've, I write about this in, in
quite a detailed way. My book clearly violated the
basic principles of how the disciplinary process is supposed
to happen, which is a reflectionsort of internally of the extent
to which the Labour Party operates at a very plain
hierarchy of racism here. Which is that you would never in
a million years have a high profile figure on the left who's

(18:18):
accused of anti-Semitism, whose case is resolved in such a
despicable way. But you can for a case of
Islamophobia. And effectively he's been, you
know, cleared by a, by Fiat, by a, by the Labour Party
bureaucracy that's been installed by Keir Starmer and
Morgan Mcsweeney's people. Let him free.
I mean this, this, this, this, this, this is an inevitable

(18:40):
consequence. The stuff that you've seen with
Zach Polanski is it's just that what we're not having is this
happened internally in the Labour Party previously where
effectively you had the Labour Party anti-Semitism crisis was
resolved in the public mind whenthe Labour Party took a sign in
an inter community dispute. That's the key thing here that
effectively in the Jewish community in the UK you have a

(19:02):
substantial portion of people who are Zionist, but you also
have a substantial minority of people who are anti Zionist and
non Zionist. So Institute for Jewish Public
Policy Research put out a, you know, every year they do a
survey of British, of Jewish opinions in Britain.
Percent of British Jewish peopleare anti Zionist, want to see
the destruction of the Israeli state.
Another 20 to 25% of them are non Zionist, as in they have no

(19:25):
particular affiliation with the state of Israel.
Right. But this is a problem if you're
going to run a, you know, these are problematic people for a
Zionist narrative. Because at the heart of a
Zionist narrative like is tryingto be presented in this case
here or press ready narrative, is this idea that is that
Israel's is at the centre of people's Jewishness and that to

(19:45):
attack Israel is to attack Jewishness.
Which is precisely why they can say it's a hate March.
Because if you conflate Jewishness with Zionism, then
you can say, well, people opposing Zionism are opposed,
actually opposing Jewishness. But that's a real, you can't
sustain that argument if you have a substantial minority of
Jewish people saying, I don't like Israel, I have no affinity
with it. Actually, I want to hear the
state of Israel being destroyed.And in that moment what happens

(20:08):
is that, and I've seen him with my colleague Andrew Feinstein,
you know, who is the son of a Holocaust survivor, who is the
first person to lecture on genocide prevention.
He's elected on genocide prevention at Ashford's first
person in this African Parliament to bring up the
Holocaust ever to memorialise the Holocaust in parliament.
And he's treated repeatedly as if his opinion doesn't matter,
as if he's a bad Jew, he's the wrong sort of Jew, as if he

(20:28):
actually isn't a Jew at all. Right.
The number of times that the people that the people on social
media and other places have called Andrea Capo, which is a
really deeply offensive term, isastonishing.
And this is precisely what we'veseen with Zach Polanski as he
represents actually quite a substantial minority Jewish
opinion about a relationship to Israel.
And that's problematic for a proIsrael narrative.

(20:50):
So he has, he has to have his Jewishness questioned or raised
or made to seem like a fringe opinion or not a real opinion.
And suddenly his Jewishness ceases to exist.
And I think it's either Yesterday we had Steve Reed on
Twitter on X strongly implying that Zach Polanski is himself
anti-Semitic. This is mad stuff.

(21:10):
This is crazy. Getting out of control.
I mean, how can people, how can people believe them anymore?
How can people take them seriously anymore, These people?
It's insane and it's very telling.
Like to see the video itself. It's just about seeing how
exactly the establishment and the Zionists are using this and
organizing this anti semitismic claim.
It's not actual thing that they believe in because if they

(21:33):
believe they wouldn't have. It is the identity of Zach
Polanski and Andrew and others. It's just so scary how they can
opinionize other people's fear and pain for their own benefits.
It's a political game for them. Yeah, and I think I think that's
the thing that really strikes meabout this stuff.
It's the thing that I've that I write about a lot in the book,
because obviously the anti-Semitism crisis is a big
parts of what I write about in the book.

(21:54):
And, and I always think actuallyabout there's this brilliant
article that's written by Professor David Graber,
obviously Jewish anthropologist and a brilliant, brilliant,
brilliant academic. And he wrote this article back
in 2019. And he said for the first time
in my life in Britain, I'm scared to be Jewish.
And what he said was, and there was such a devastating article
because what he says is that this anti-Semitism crisis.

(22:14):
You know, there's, there's the far right people on the streets
in America, there's proud boys marching.
There are people who have who are throwing Nazi salutes even
at now we now see protests was that Polanski is that he's
getting Nazi salutes thrown ahead, right.
And instead we have a crisis built around a very small number
in the Green Party. Now it's four people who've been
accused of anti-Semitism. We're supposed to make it seem

(22:37):
like it's a national crisis, right?
And and the way it's presented does actually create genuine
fear and alarm in the Jewish community, which is not
justified. I find that despicable,
genuinely despicable, that you have somebody like Steve Reed
who, as a political gambit for his political advantage to save
this dying project, is deciding to make Jewish people scared

(22:58):
where they don't need to be. I think that's appalling.
I think that should be called out.
You know, it's not just that it's a flaming community
tension. It's not just that it's creating
a hierarchy of racism. It is actively making Jewish
people scared, and they shouldn't be.
And I think that is appalling. It's true, and I mean, it's also
targeted at a block of voters, some of whom may be Jewish, but

(23:19):
many of whom are not. I mean the way in which
Corbynism began to build a kind of coalition that could have
plausibly got a left wing Labourgovernment elected was by
bringing together ethnic minority communities who are
under attack from the state. Downwardly mobile graduates

(23:40):
whose life prospects have been destroyed by 40 years of
privatization and neoliberalism.And then a kind of block of more
middle class swing voters whose politics are ranged between sort
of liberal and left, for whom the the anti-Semitism smear in

(24:01):
concert with the the Brexit controversy, which was also
deliberately inflamed by the Labour right.
That constituted a kind of moraldelegitimization of the Corbin
project. And what they wanted.
The reason why that group of people was specifically
attracted to the Corbin project in the early days was because it
was a kind of moral antidote to the rot and the corruption of

(24:24):
the Tory government. And it was prevented from being
that by this establishment campaign, which convinced a
significant enough amount of those people that in fact, this
promise of of a kind of, you know, moral rejuvenation of
British public life was actuallya hollow one because this was in
fact a project of anti Semites and Eurosceptics and, you know,

(24:47):
all these other labels that werethrown at them.
And so that was very effective back in the 2018 to 2019 period.
And you're now seeing again, if we go back to the question of
whether history is repeating itself, you're now seeing
something very similar because the Greens are starting to
assemble a very similar coalition to the one that Corbin
did. 235,000 members of the Greens composed largely, I would

(25:11):
think of those 3 constituencies and the one that's easiest for
the establishment to peel off and to turn against the Greens
is that sort of more amorphous middle class block in the
middle. So anti-Semitism becomes a, a, a
weapon for for doing that and a grossly irresponsible 1 as Paul

(25:32):
was saying, because it creates conditions that do genuinely
endanger Jewish communities as well as of course Muslim ones
and other and Palestinians. Yeah, Palestinians as we see
like the anti Palestinian racismvery clearly and it's not dealt
at all with media or politicians.
And one of the examples of the weaponization and conflation of
anti-Semitism and anti Zionism as the Starmer speech a few days

(25:57):
ago on the globalizing of Intifada and that they might be
stopping marches for Palestine in the future while the genocide
is still ongoing. So let's watch this video
together on what Starmer speaking about it.
If you stand alongside people who say globalize the intifada,
you are calling for terrorism against Jews, and people who use

(26:23):
that phrase should be prosecuted.
It is racism, extreme racism, and it has left a minority
community in this country scared, intimidating, wondering
if they belong. It's very, it's very shocking

(26:45):
how entitled they feel using, you know, our abusing or
defaming an Arabic word, an Arabic word that was created in
a context of settler colonialism, of occupation.
And it's literally like Intifadacomes from the the Arabic origin
of. Nafada.

(27:05):
Nafada, nafada, which means it'sa reaction.
So if something came to you, youjust shake it or shiver it or
something. So it goes up or it comes from
to rise up or uprising, which isthe translation used in the
western world. So it's it's intifada for the
Palestinians, for the Arabs. It's something that you do
because you have faced oppression.

(27:27):
It's not your hostile yourself. So to have this war that comes
from the context of Palestinian struggle comes from the context
of people experiences. So how would Palestinians
express their own experience andthe late 90s, how, how would
they say what happened to them without even using the word?
So that this, this conflation between anti Zionism and

(27:49):
anti-Semitism is very dangerous for the Palestinians.
It is dangerous for the Jews, asyou have described already,
because they will be like, you know, face more oppression
because of what Israel is doing if this conflation continues to
happen. But it's very dangerous for the
Palestinians. It's very dangerous for their
identity, for their experiences and for their ability to speak

(28:10):
about what they've been through,but also very dangerous for the
pro Palestinians and anti Zionists.
Why people don't have the right of freedom of speech?
Isn't this They will care. So what do you think about that
watching this video? But also I want to say
something, these people speak about what Intifada means.
And as someone who lived in Gazaand who lived during the

(28:33):
intifada, Intifada is a huge part of of my identity as a
Palestinian because when I was in first grade, I lived in the
intifada. I've seen the intifada and every
time I heard the word intifada, it never comes to my mind that
we are there. That intifada is about attacking
the Jews or killing even the Israelis.
It is what comes to my mind is the peaceful protests we were

(28:55):
doing in Gaza. Every day when I was going to
school, every day I would see the peaceful protests that we
were doing, the general strikes.That is what the intifada means.
It's like an uprising. It's not a violent uprising.
Yes, there was like some Palestinians who would throw
rocks at the tanks, but that is.A Tanks.
That is not violence against theJews.

(29:16):
It is like a symbol of, of resisting the occupation.
But the fact that our Prime Minister is using a word that
that is very, it's part of the Palestinian history and make it
like similar to saying a terrorist word is, is deeply
alarming. Now we say globalized intifada

(29:38):
is bad. Well, what will he do tomorrow?
He will say. I mean, where are we hitting?
Where are we hitting? So you'll ever go on?
Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess it's
suggestive of a very hollow formof identity politics, which I
think is very common among liberals, but also among the far

(29:58):
right. And there's an interesting,
interesting convergence between those two political forces in
this kind of discourse of elevating some voices, saying in
a very earnest way, you must absolutely listen to the voices
of these people, these communities.
And then of course, silencing others, silencing others within
those same communities, and of course silencing Palestinians,

(30:20):
erasing the very meaning of the word intifada and so on.
And I think that's, you know, when we're talking about a
hierarchy of racism, it's important to ask why that
hierarchy exists. It's not just about people's
unconscious racial bias or they,you know, privilege some groups
over others. It actually serves a very
specific political purpose, which is that both liberals and

(30:45):
the far right, in order to pursue their projects, need to
pretend to be defending an embattled minority group.
That gives their projects, whichhave very little to offer the
majority of people, some sense of credibility that they are
standing in defence of a group who often are, you know, sort of
representatives in one way or another of Western civilization,

(31:09):
whether it's, you know, Jewish communities, whether it's the
gay community. You've seen similar things of
the far right elsewhere in the world presenting themselves very
cynically as defenders of LGBT people against their enemies,
you know, in radical Islam and so on.
So there's always this discourseof, of not just attacking the

(31:32):
the Muslim invaders, not just attacking the immigrants, but
also defending a more privilegedgroup of people back at home.
And I think that's, you know, a reading of Starmer's speech
that's quite important that he'splaying into this trope, which
will ultimately work to the benefit of Reform because Reform

(31:53):
is much more dogged in it's, youknow, offensive against the
immigrants, which is at once presented as a, a defence of of
the Jewish community or or whichever other community he
wants to cynically claim for forhis project.
And now I will say just the first of all, I think it's, I

(32:14):
think it's interesting to hear aPalestinian perspective because
you don't hear a Palestinian perspective anywhere else,
right? And, and I think it's quite
clear that you guys given a passion and defence of why into
fighters in important word, what, how forms part of like a
vernacular resistance that has like noble intentions.
And I can absolutely guarantee you that Starmer has not
consulted a single person who's told them those things.

(32:37):
It's not a single person who's saying to actually, you know
what, this is slightly more complicated than you're
presenting it to be. There's a reason why there's a
contest over this, because actually this is a, this is a
litmus test. And it's a frontline of broader
ratio of the Palestinian experience.
Palestinian like there's constantly an attempt to, to, to
basically tone police the language of resistance, which

(32:59):
is, you know, really in the context of, of what we can all
see, which is basically being a televised genocide, an ongoing
genocide, ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.
The fact that the Prime Ministerthinks that it's the primary
goal of his fading last days of his despicable, largely despised

(33:20):
period in government is to basically launch an attack on,
on like expressions of Palestinian solidarity.
It's very problematic. I think it's also entirely
predictable because this is, youknow, there really is so little
of substance to this particular political project, really very
little at its heart. I mean, I think it's so

(33:40):
interesting that we are the day before general day before a
local election, which is going to be transformative potentially
for British politics, right, where the Labour Party is going
to lose thousands of thousands of seats.
They cannot provide to the public any evidence of why
anybody should vote for them, why they should vote for the

(34:00):
Labour Party, what they're. Except the crackdown and the
Palestinians. Exactly.
All they have in this moment, all, all they've always really
had is various forms of authoritarianism and various
forms of censorship and crackdown.
And this is a deeply authoritarian political project.
It really is. That has a a deep and and
profound disdain for basic civilliberties in the UK.

(34:22):
And we see that across the board, right?
It's not just about Palestiniansthey want to erase jury trials
for, but the most serious events.
That's 800 years of British civil tradition.
We've had the, the, the recent trial of, of the, the, the
Palestine action 24 where the juries were not allowed to hear
a basic civil right, which is that they weren't allowed to be
told by the defendants lawyers that juries have a total right

(34:48):
to free people depending on their conscience.
The judges instructed them not to be able to say that in court,
right. You have a massive broadening
of, of, of crackdown on, on whatsort of protests can happen.
New laws about, about cumulativedisruption, which is plainly
going to be used only and exclusively against protests

(35:08):
that aim to disrupt a national security status quo.
And Palestinian solidarity is absolutely no way in a million
years this Labour government, asterrified as a reform will ever
use these these these powers wasto actually stop.
Far right protest or anti immigrant protest is never going
to happen. No, they arrested a few students
for saying intifada on their protests and it's continuing.

(35:30):
It's it's just insane. They're just weaponizing it for
the purpose of weaponizing it. But if they are, like if
Palestine is now very important to the UK, so why attacking it
is the only thing that the Labour is offering?
What are they trying to get? Because it happened and they won
when they cracked down on the Palestinians, when they
destroyed Jeremy Corbyn, they won.

(35:51):
So maybe Keir Starman now says, OK, if I want to win tomorrow,
then I will have to be more aggressive on the Palestinians.
Oh my. God, it is the genocide I.
Don't think it's that. I think it's, you know, I was
describing it to my partner Jess, we're talking about this.
I think it's like, you know, when this is a slightly
grotesque metaphor. So I apologise in advance, but
you know when when a body is dying, right?

(36:13):
It'll start shaking and it's gotlike the last is death rows.
It's got like that's a. Little muscle memory, right?
These last things a body does. This is a dying political
project that has nothing to offer anybody and this is
basically it's muscle memory, This is all that it actually
knows how to do. It's a project that started with
irresponsible interventions and dodgy dossiers in the Labour

(36:34):
Party, anti-Semitism price. That's where it really wielded
its power and generated its power.
And now as it's coming to its logical conclusion, as the
public comes to hate it, this isall they have left.
And you know, I think it's such a telling, such a telling
obituary to this political project that in this, this
moment, as it's fading away, it's last dying act is to once

(36:56):
again inflamed ethnic tensions in this country because it
really is. That's all they've done for the
last six or seven years. They've made this country a more
unsafe, more unhappy place. And Oliver, I think I, I, I
agree with Paul, I think this isthe end of the year Labour
political party. I mean, I don't understand how
can people vote for it anymore? But now, as we see how the

(37:17):
Labour government is falling because of the stupid politics
of Keira Salmer and his cabinet,what can Zach Polanski and the
and the Green Party learn from the mistakes of the Labour
Party? Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I mean, it's interesting how Palestine is so salient to
the current political situation in both the Labour Party and the

(37:39):
Green Party. I think it's entirely possible
that because Wes Streeting is set to lose his seat to a pro
Palestine independent candidate,Leanne Muhammad in Ilford, N,
it's possible that the Labour right will decide he's not a
safe candidate. He was previously going to be

(38:00):
their representative and now that seems in question.
In which case I think it's entirely possible that Andy
Burnham may well be the kind of unifying figure who can do a
deal with the right and bring the soft left and the left of
the Labour Party on side as well.
And that's a turn of events which if it happens, Palestine

(38:21):
will have played a major role inin that.
Then similarly on with the the Greens on the other side of the
Ledger. I think if there is a a Burnham
government, the Greens are goingto have to think very hard about
how they respond to it. And particularly on the question
of Britain's role overseas, on the question of it's it's active

(38:43):
participation in the genocide. Because of course, Andy Burnham
is not going to break with the Labour consensus on that
question. He, in the immediate aftermath
of October 7th, came out and very stridently said that Israel
has the right to defend itself. He made very tentative steps

(39:03):
towards supporting A ceasefire before Starmer did, as a kind of
political power play to undermine Starmer.
But his position on this issue is pretty much in line with his
previous support for the Iraq war, and there's been talk just
this past week of him keeping Starmer on as foreign secretary.

(39:24):
So anyone who thinks that there's going to be a break in
Labour's position on international affairs when
there's an inevitable change of leadership is, is really
delusional, I think. And Polanski right now needs to
acknowledge this reality and tryto maintain the very effective

(39:46):
insurgent oppositional energy that the Greens under his
leadership have generated, particularly on those
international questions, which far from being sort of distant
ones that people don't care about, that don't affect
people's everyday lives, have actually been one of the main
galvanizing forces. In undermining, and I think

(40:07):
you're right, fatally destroyingthis right wing Labour project.
So Polanski I think should not give Burnham or any other Labour
leader a blank cheque. He should not form a sort of
Popular Front with the next Labour leader against reform
because what that will do is just assimilate the Greens into

(40:28):
the Labour run establishment, Coopt them into this sub imperial
project of British foreign policy and deprive them of the
thing that makes them popular right now, which is their anti
establishment credentials. And it will even more
dangerously cede those anti establishment credentials to
reform, who will then present themselves as the only party

(40:50):
standing against the Tories, Labour, the Greens, the Lib
Dems, all as one block. The one block that's been, you
know, ruining the lives of British people for so long,
that's been responsible for all the decline and deterioration in
this country. And they will present themselves
as the the only force that can sort of shake up the system and

(41:11):
undermine it. So I think this is a a pivotal
moment. And how Polanski responds,
particularly on that question ofPalestine, is going to be very
important. That's very good.
Also people say that like the defence position and also people
Zach Wolanski and the Green Party standing on their position
is not enough because it happened with Keir Starmer and

(41:32):
they stood to their position butwasn't enough to to stand
against those attacks of anti-Semitism and by the
establishment and the media and all of that.
So some people as Phillip Rudfoot speak about more, you
know, established position and stronger position.
So here Philip says if we learned anything from 2017, 2019

(41:57):
is that Zach Polanski is going to need to sue quite a few
people very quickly or else thisdefamation won't ever stop.
What do you think about the comment?
Is a more proactive position to the Green Party something that
you also advise and think is suitable at this time?
Yeah. I think the one thing that and

(42:17):
there's, there's so many different lessons from from the
Colburn experience. Yeah, one of which is that there
was this I think we've got to understand part of of what the
anti-Semitism crisis did to the to the COVID movement was that,
you know, it wasn't actually thething that was that was
electorally significant because I think there was electorally

(42:38):
significant was Brexit. What the anti-Semitism crisis
did do was to demoralize disorient a a particular
political movement. And the one thing that is very
clear is that, you know, there was this message that kept on
being repeated that why can't Jeremy Corbyn get a grip, get a
grip on anti-Semitism, not Connie controller and a fed into

(43:00):
a generalized narrative that he was a weak leader because he
couldn't get a grip on something.
I mean, I think in that instance, what we now know from
behind the scenes, we actually know what's happening now that
we've been able to investigate this Labour Together project.
So there's no intention for thiscrisis to be resolved in any
sort of meaningful way. Because the only way that the

(43:21):
anti-Semitism crisis was resolved in the public
imagination and the media was for effectively for the Labour
Party to take a position, a pretty despicable position in an
intra community struggle around Zionism.
Right? And to effectively totally erase
a propality in voices. But also left wing non
conformist Jews who are now explicitly not welcome in the

(43:42):
Labour Party. So, for example, you know, I
write about this in the book in in 2023, Labour friends of
Israel posted up a post on Twitter saying that there is no
room in the Labour tradition that includes the union movement
for anti Zionism of 11% of Jewish people in Britain are
anti Zionists. You're saying that 11% of all
Jewish people aren't welcome in unions in the Labour Party.

(44:03):
This is not a reliable and and consistent outcome.
And so in in taking the strugglefurther, I think certain things
have to be borne in mind with Zach Polanski.
So there's no winning a strugglewith the mainstream media on
this issue. There's no ending it.
There's nothing you can do if you're a progressive left wing,
anti imperialist position, who is who is going to be solid on

(44:24):
issues of Palestine? You never going to stop the
mainstream media attacking you in that way.
You can't resolve it the way youhave to resolve it to the
satisfaction of the mainstream media is not acceptable because
the way you resolve it to the satisfaction of the mainstream
media is to give up in Palestine.
Exactly. Right.
So this is something that, and Ithink that also what we need to
bear in mind, Sorry, I'm not going on but long, but I don't

(44:45):
think outside of Westminster, the Westminster me speaking to
journalists, you know, doing this book and Speaking of
journalists, Westminster doesn'tunderstand, just doesn't
understand how fundamental Gaza has been to the politicisation
of huge numbers of people in this country.
For a vast number of people who I know anecdotally, but

(45:06):
throughout society, they have witnessed the genocide in Gaza
and they've been utterly horrified by it in ways that
have radicalized them in a sensethat have made them embed a
politics and a political experience way more in their
life than they ever have before.And there is, you know,
generally speaking, I think thatthere's an enormous number of

(45:27):
people in this country who actually they're a silent
majority in the mainstream mediabecause they never get, they
never get foregrounded. But there are 1,000,000 upon
millions upon millions of peoplewho've seen the genocide in
Gaza, know what has happened andwill respect the politician who
will stand by the Palestinian people and who will stand up for
all anti imperialist struggles. And we'll see that that's an

(45:48):
authentic moral position to hold.
And if he sticks, if he basically sticks with an
authentic anti imperialist position like Zoram Amdani has
done in the states, he'll be rewarded for that.
The voters will see an authenticpolitician who actually
represents A morality that people can get behind.
OK, so we actually maybe see change of history tomorrow.

(46:14):
I think we will. I mean, I think in very deep
fundamental sense we will, because this is going to be
this, this is going to be an election like we've never seen
in the UK in terms of the result, with the Labour Party
loses such a huge number of seats.
It's going to be potentially even on the best case scenario
of the the current polling, it'll be the most seats I think

(46:34):
the Labour Party's ever lost in in a local election campaign
while they're in power. It is the total end of a two
party system right now that within it produces all sorts of
weird, bizarre, hopeful opportunities, but also chaotic
and ugly opportunities. Because this is a moment where

(46:54):
effectively the neoliberal settlement is collapsing and and
the sort of the imperial, but least in settlement is
collapsing as well. And in this we have this moment
of opportunity and change. We also going to see some of the
most aggressive forms of of sortof what's the word you'd use for

(47:15):
sort of counter revolution almost that you'll start seeing
like aggressive calls for containing a civil liberties of,
of weaponizing language of of declaring propalities and
solidarity as a form of racism. And I think in that moment, what
the progressive left needs to understand is the people who
make those arguments can't be satisfied.

(47:37):
You cannot, generally speaking, you cannot satisfy somebody who
doesn't recognize that the stateof Israel oppresses
Palestinians. You cannot reconcile with a
political movement that thinks that it's appropriate the way
that Israel has responded in Gaza.
You cannot reconcile with a political movement that runs an
apartheid state and think that'sfine.

(47:58):
You cannot reconcile with an apartheid state that steals land
in the West Bank from people. You can't reconcile with the
political movement that starts illegal wars all over the place
because you're effectively a rogue regime.
There is no settlement with thatpolitical project.
There's no triangulating with it.
There's only opposition to. That's only the mark position
that can be taken. Wow.

(48:18):
And I think yes, people are aware of that right now.
And that's why we have seen thatGaza, it changed politics in the
West. I mean, Mamdani was elected
because of his position, becauseI believe, I mean, the Democrat
lost because they supported the genocide.
People voted for Trump. He thought that he will end wars
outside America. Of course that was naive of
them. But it's changing a lot.

(48:41):
I think Labour is losing massively now.
It's because their position in Palestine, because they failed
their their, their people. They failed the the 80% of the
Labour members who are pro Palestine.
But tomorrow I believe the war is going to be between Reform

(49:01):
and Green. And God help us if Reform wins
tomorrow. If they win more seats tomorrow,
God help us if the next government is going to be led by
by reform. But can I ask you Oliver, is
Reform UKA fascist party or not?Well, I think there are

(49:24):
certainly fascists in it. I think it depends on your
definition of fascism and whether you think that you need
a sort of highly organized rightwing civil society in the way
that the fascism of the 20th century had.
Or whether now what we're seeingis the emergence of a new form
of fascism that's much more nimble, much more digital,

(49:47):
exists largely online rather than in the old institutions of
the radical right of the 20th century.
I think that's a a debate which in some ways is a, a kind of
scholastic one. But I think there's no doubt
that reform represents the most dangerous, most virulent strain
of reaction that this country has seen for many decades.

(50:12):
And I think that the unfortunatefact is that while I agree with
Paul that tomorrow we're probably going to see the
collapse of the two party system, that collapse is going
to be very uneven and is probably going to benefit reform
more than it benefits the Greens.
There's actually an interesting dynamic where since 1997 the

(50:32):
Tories have been in more or lesssecular decline in terms of the
number of council seats that they control throughout the
country. It's declined from around 40% to
around 20% and it's going to decline further continuing on
that trajectory tomorrow as theylose many, many seats to reform.
About 80% of reforms voters in 2024 came directly from the

(50:54):
Tories. So there's a sort of one way St.
as the old Tory Britain dies, asits voters die out, as there's a
a younger and more radicalized generation on the right, those
votes go directly to reform. With Labour, the dynamic is
slightly different. Labour won around 47% of council
seats in 1997 and since then hasdeclined to 30%, but has stayed

(51:19):
over the last few decades more or less around that benchmark of
30%. Which is interesting.
Despite all the all the credibility that the Labour
Party has squandered, despite the complete cartelization of
the party under New Labour, it'sstill managed to retain this
foothold in local government, commanding about 1/3 of the

(51:40):
seats nationally. And what we're going to see now
with the Labour Party is not, aswith the Tories, the
continuation of a secular trend.We're going to see it fall off a
Cliff edge and it's votes won't then go to one other party
that's benefiting from this collapse.
They're going to be dispersed invarious directions, some going

(52:03):
to the Lib Dems, some going to Reform and some going to the
Greens. So the Greens don't stand to
benefit from the collapse of thetwo party system as much as
reform stands to benefit. And of course, we're facing the
terrifying prospect of a radicalized Tory party then
striking a deal with reform in the way that we've seen in other
European countries, say with Voxand the Partido popular in in

(52:26):
local government in Spain. And that representing then a
formidable right wing bloc. Those two parties converging as
they've already largely converged on policy terms.
But actually formalizing that alliance, while I think it's
much harder to and and potentially very unwise to
formalize any equivalent alliance between Labour and the

(52:49):
Greens. So the outcome could well be,
yes, this kind of very scary radicalization on the right that
you're talking about. OK, I don't want to imagine this
future. I, I hope not.
But anyway, we will move to Palestine right now because
there were a lot of other topicsI want to talk about, but we're

(53:12):
running out of time. We'll go to Palestine.
But before we do a message to our audience, if you are
enjoying this show, please don'tforget to hit the like button
and subscribe on YouTube. And if you want to support our
work, we warmly welcome you to become a paid subscriber from as
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independent Palestinian LED media in a world which never

(53:35):
needed it more. Find the link in the description
below. And now we will go to Palestine
with our contributors, Huda and Alice Cake, who are recorded to
us a video message from Gaza, I think last night.
Let's watch it together if that's OK.
It's really so weird how the sounds of the drones are buzzing

(53:59):
noisily and loudly this night. This is how our night looks like
in Gaza tonight. Hello everyone I am Alice Cake.
And I am Hudders Cake and we areboth writers from Gaza.
Imagine surviving more than 30 months of relentless bombardment
only to end up being eaten alivewhile you sleep.

(54:20):
Well, this isn't a horror movie.This is what the midnight looks
like right now in the tents of Gaza.
Every morning when I wake up andgo to prayer al Fazadi, prayer
in the mosque, I see these creatures.
I see this literal military of giant rats and whistles swarming

(54:42):
the trash bags in the corners ofthe streets.
They are. They are forcing their way into
our houses and the turn flaps ofour tents.
They are looking for flesh and they are going after the ones
who cannot fight back. Those ones are mainly our kids

(55:04):
and our elderly. We are hearing horrifying
rewards. Infants waking up screaming
their ears, their fingers are bitten by rats.
Also, the elderly are in constant danger.
For example, our neighbor who isa diabetic man told me that he

(55:26):
could lose his limb from a single bite.
Or even worse, people don't really feel the bite while the
rat is biting them. According to the World Health
Organization, over 17,000 infections have already been

(55:46):
reported since 2026. But the number, these numbers
are not really show that the real horror that people are
facing here in Gaza every night.And here is the part that really
breaks us. When it comes to the doctors,
they are helpless. When a mother, when a mother

(56:07):
rushes her breathing child into a clinic, the doctors have
nothing to offer because simply there is no specialized ointment
and there is no vaccine for for rat bite fever.
And the honorable has declared that they are overwhelmed
because around half of the people they see every day,

(56:32):
around half of them are coming in with with a skin infection.
And even with this so-called ceasefire, there is a blockade
on medicine and all the doctor, all the doctors can do is
washing these ones with salt water and praying the ones
doesn't spread. Even survival is backfiring.

(56:55):
Families store flour to avoid famine, but it draws rats into
their mattresses. It feels like a biological war,
and summer will make it even worse.
More mosquitoes, more disease. The world must act now, with
medicine, with food, with real infrastructure.

(57:16):
Because before it's too late. Thank you so much guys for
listening to our stories in a time that the world tries not to
listen to at them. Bye bye.
Thank you. Well, yeah, that was so telling
of Ali saying the world stopped listening to Kazo.
The war thing that there is a ceasefire in Kazo, 800

(57:39):
Palestinians were killed after this ceasefire was announced and
the killing continues. But also the diseases continues.
The rats grow more and they get more vicious because of lack of
food. So they go after our children
and they eat them alive. What How do you what, what is

(58:04):
your take on this? I don't know what what to say.
I First of all, I just want to say I hope your colleagues are
safe and I hope they can survivethis at the horrific moment in
time. I mean, it is dystopian to see
that sort of stuff. I mean, it's sort of the the

(58:25):
sort of thing you'd imagine in like the the worst sort of
sci-fi horror movie of like hyper advanced sophisticated
drone technology surveilling people at the same time, people
effectively being forced to livein at a squalor.
And This is why I think it's, you know, people like Francesca
Albanese and pretty much every human rights organization in the
world have made it very clear that this is not some sort of

(58:49):
conflict that's been resolved. I've been effectively, this has
been a process of destroying every aspect of Palestinian
society. So it's not, you know, the most
notable aspect of a genocide was, and that's sort of the most
combustible was when they were just dropping bombs on
everything and flattening everything.

(59:09):
But it's not like anything's been rebuilt.
This is, this is a process to destroy the capacity of
Palestinian and the Palestinian state to persist as a people
and, and as a state. And it's just, it's a horrifying
situation. I mean, there was a there was a
terrifying report and drop side that came out yesterday as well

(59:31):
reporting on the extent to whichthere's just almost an entire
lack of clean water. Currently, the average amount of
water that's being delivered to Palestinians and Gaza is between
3:00 and 5:00 liters a day because there's no functioning
water infrastructure anymore. It's.
Literally. And it's not a clean water.
And not a clean water and there's hundreds of thousands of
people getting diarrhea children.
This is this is an ongoing slow motion squeezing killing of

(59:59):
Palestinian people. And it's it's horrifying to see
how it happens. It's horrifying to know that
it's still happening. And effectively, at this moment
in time, it's being ignored, it's being erased, that this is

(01:00:19):
the genuine crisis of our time, and through a combination of
fatigue and distraction. We're not expressing the same
horror and anger as we should be, but it seems to be very
obvious in this point that, you know, the world's totally failed
to restrain Israel as it's conducted as genocide in Gaza

(01:00:40):
and is still failing to restrainIsrael.
It's in fact now I think almost be more active in support of the
capacity of the Israeli state tofunction.
And it's and it's military to function certainly around the
way it's conducted its war in Iran as well.
And you know, I think from the UK side and from a political
side and bring it back to our discussion, there's never been a

(01:01:03):
more sort of urgent requirement of progressive forces in this
country to unite, to set aside to not to be distracted by
ridiculous gambits like Steve Ree putting out a dodgy dossier
on Twitter to distract people from like the real struggle,
which is the people are dying. Yes, yeah.
And people are dying not becauseof the consequences of the

(01:01:24):
genocide, only it's, it's it's like intentional thing.
So Israel determinedly within the genocide, have you created
this space fear of genocide thatother schoolers are speaking
about and doctors have been speaking about this exact
reality. Even within the genocide.
They knew it that Israel was making everything on the

(01:01:45):
infrastructure to reach to this point.
They damaged the infrastructure of housing more than 80% of
them. They damaged the health
infrastructure and they are putting people in like Geeto
areas where they are pushed to live in very overcrowded without
sanitary places. But at the same time, it did not
stop by the, the fast violence and the thing that people were

(01:02:09):
more keen to see and, and, and bear witness to, but also with
Israeli continuation of their policies of siege.
So when we're, when we're looking at Ali and Hoda talking
about the experiences, it's not just the, the problem is not
just people are being beaten or bite by, by rats or something.

(01:02:30):
And then they go to the hospital.
So they don't find medication. It starts from way before that.
Israel is not allowing the removal of the rebel.
Israel is not allowing the rebuilding of the houses.
Israel is not allowing the medications or the, the material
that could be used so the rats could be fought.
They are not allowing even that.So all of this altogether is

(01:02:52):
creating this infestation of, ofGaza, which some media that you
were talking about yesterday is describing Gaza as infested
place, as infested. Yeah, rat infested area as if
Gaza itself like that, not that Israel have created this
atmosphere, have created the biosphere of of genocide and
destruction and death. And at the same time then there

(01:03:13):
is the creation of that right problem.
At the same time, people get by,then people get sick, there is
no antibiotic, there is no treatment and people can do
nothing to survive this. So the continuation of all of
that, the continuation of of sadness, the continuation of
horror that the Palestinians aregoing through is something we
can see in this program that we can see other in other places.

(01:03:37):
So what do you think about that,Oliver?
What do you think about their experiences?
Absolutely. I mean, I think there's a huge
amount of pure sadism and malevolence and racism that's
motivating this abominable treatment of the Palestinians,
which is still being ignored by most of the world's media.
And I also think that on top of that, there is a political

(01:04:00):
purpose that the Israelis have for escalating the the genocide
at this current moment. The international stabilization
force that was put in to try andestablish effectively a kind of
multinational dictatorship over Gaza, obviously unelected by the
Gazan people, was an abject failure, as it was always going

(01:04:24):
to be. It had no legitimacy as a force
to rule over Gaza and in its absence now the US is trying to
effectively pressure what remains of the armed groups
within Gaza to disarm, to lay down their weapons.
And only then, it says, will it allow a sliver of aid to get

(01:04:46):
through. So this current phase of the
genocide is about breaking whatever resistance still exists
in Gaza and using the populationas collateral damage, inflicting
great suffering on the population, trying to divide
them against the resistance and thereby trying to leave Gaza
entirely unprotected, entirely at the whims of the Israeli

(01:05:09):
occupiers. And while all this is going on,
because of course, the the armedgroups are refusing to accept
this absurd and ridiculous demand, while all this is going
on and there's a sort of state of limbo around the the ongoing
truce, or, you know, the what's falsely described as the truce.
Israel continues to expand the part of Gaza that it occupies

(01:05:32):
such that I think it's now in direct control of around 60% of
the territory. So there are these, you know,
political moves being made behind the scenes while all this
suffering and objection is happening.
And they are really some of the most the most sinister things.
So I think it's also important not to lose sight of that.
Yeah, Yeah, that's true. So basically Israel now has an

(01:05:55):
ex more than 60% of Gaza and forsure there's Gaza Strip is yeah.
And expanding is other than occupation.
That's why we're suffering. But if you have realized in the
in the video of Hadan Ali, therewas a voice, bustling voice.
And that's the voice of what we call the Nana.
And the Nana is the drone. So the voice that you hear in

(01:06:17):
the video is not like a background voice.
It's, it's a reality in Gaza. I lived in Gaza most of my life.
I lived a few days before the genocide I started.
And also Ahmed lived most of hislife in Gaza.
And the drone voice is somethingthat you live with all over your
life. It comes like sometimes it comes
down, so it's very annoying thatyou can't even sleep even if you
had pillows over your head, evenif you had your headphones over

(01:06:39):
your head, you can't sleep from the noise.
It makes you like insane, but atthe same time it goes into your
dreams. So I always have the Nana or a
drone voice in my in my dreams, specifically when I was in Raza.
They live there there all the time.
They just exist all the time around us.
You. Used to write letters to the
drones. So they stop if you.
Go yeah to we have Tummer's website that it was part of our

(01:07:01):
life. There's a drone like sometimes
we feel like we talk to them, they talk to us, we see them in
our dream we have. Jokes about them all the time.
Yeah, we have even jokes about the the drones, and I'm talking
about before the genocide that the drone can see your dreams.
Even they can see what what you eat at your home.
They can't see what. Yeah, they literally live with

(01:07:22):
us in every single expected moment.
But on that note, it's importantto remember that in two days, so
in the 9th of May is the third year passing after the Israeli
aggression of May 2023 on Gaza. So many people think that this,
all of this have started by the 7th of October.

(01:07:44):
But if you just went five monthsbefore, I, I wouldn't be talking
about every other hostility and aggression Israel have been
commencing in Gaza, West Bank and other places.
But if you just went five monthsbefore, there was a huge
escalation by Israel and Gaza. I remember at that time, I was,
I just finished my work. I went to see my husband.
We brought something and we weregoing home, heading to home and

(01:08:08):
we saw like we, we heard the bombardment and we saw this the
smoke coming coming out from thefrom the ground.
So immediately he told me, hello, we need to go and pack
and to see where to go. So, and we were like supposed to
go to his family were invited todinner.
Yeah, at that time. So we packed our bags.
This is like the emergency bag. You have the, the main, the

(01:08:29):
laptop, the the phone and power bank and you have the most
important essentials of documentation and the money.
This is what you have in this and then you take it wherever
you go. And we have these bags, the blue
one is mine, he has one is the black one.
And we went to his family house and you can see in the
background this is his family house where we stayed there for

(01:08:50):
five days. When Israel have bombed around
us when Jabalia camp and they were bombing a lot and they
killed more than 30 people at that time, many were children.
And we had like our neighbors killed and another neighbor and
friend was severely injured. And it was very difficult time.
But people don't know about it. We will only know that some

(01:09:11):
stuff started by the 7th of October and nothing started
before. And even in the image with the
with the bag, my bag is now under the rebel in Jabalia camp
and the house itself is all unfortunately turn into rebel
so. In every Palestinian house there
is, each person has a bag like this, where we bought all of our

(01:09:32):
essentials, our documents, our laptop, our money, just in case.
That's not during wars, that's all the time.
These bags should always. Always be ready whenever you
hear it. The bombing, You just ran away.
Yeah. Because we all know that at any
moment there would be a war. Let me let me quickly go to a
video of a birthday party. Let's see the birthday party.

(01:09:57):
So if you can see, this is Bing Veer, This is the security
minister, Israel security, security minister.
And that's his 50th birthday. And because his wife loves him
so much, she gave him a cake with the nose on it.
The thing that he loves the most?
Hanging up Palestinians. That is a minister, a senior

(01:10:20):
official in the Israeli government, and that is his
birthday. And that is the government that
Kerry Starmer is dying to appease to.
And and please, what do you say about it?
It's harsh and it's just you almost can't make it up.
How absolutely deranged it is. It is mad.

(01:10:45):
There's a totally insane thing to witness.
They're sick people. I think they're sick.
I I don't think there is a normal human being who would do
that. This is Zionism in image.
I mean, it really is like, you know, the the ICJ had to rule
on, you know, when when had to rule on on whether was a
genocide those plausible genocide in Gaza.

(01:11:05):
All of the legal analysis said the real problem is going to be
this kind of confront the South African delegation which bought
the the claim was about proving intent.
You could show the yesterday is this mass destruction, but
actually it's quite hard to prove in a court of law somebody
intended to conduct a genocide. This is not just basically
effectively bragging about, thisis about bragging about

(01:11:28):
introducing a apartheid system of execution, which is only
going to apply to Palestinians, which has been decried across
the world as the most obvious violation of every principle of
natural justice you could possibly imagine.
And this is what I say like the,you know, to bring it back to

(01:11:50):
our discussion when I'm saying there are certain forces and
political actors and political trends that as moral, decent
human beings who care about every life on the planet, you
cannot reconcile with. This is something that nobody
should reconcile. Nobody can reconcile with

(01:12:11):
somebody in the 50th birthday being presented the picture of a
noose celebrating the execution of one particular ethnic group.
Yeah, the definality. This is insane.
Absolutely. And also, I mean, that this is
the image of, you know, the death of the idea of Israel as
the only democracy in the MiddleEast, Israel as a liberal
democracy looking outwards to the Western world, identifying

(01:12:36):
with its civil liberties, its idea of equality before the law.
That Israel, you know, imploded sort of in a way before the
genocide, when Netanyahu passed the judicial reforms to keep
himself out of prison. And the last gasp of that
illusory image of Israel was thepeople who flooded the streets

(01:12:59):
to protest against those reforms, who were so invested in
preserving this idea that Israelwas a functioning liberal state,
when of course it it never was. This was always the true face of
Israel. And the struggle between those
who were invested in the the fantasy liberal image and those
who show Israel's true colors asan ethno state has now finally

(01:13:20):
been won by the overt defenders of this violent racialized
apartheid system. So, so you know that when we're
looking at this image, which is taken for the news cameras,
taken in the awareness that it'sgoing to circulate in Western
media, we're seeing this, you know, the the triumph of that

(01:13:42):
faction of the Israeli right whono longer care about the
pretence of upholding any international norms.
And the really astounding thing is that despite the triumph of
the Israeli hard right, our own government here in Britain
remains invested in the fantasy that they have given up on.

(01:14:03):
We remain invested in the fantasy that Israel is a
functioning democratic society, which therefore we support
against the, you know, the the degenerated Palestinian society
as people like Kirst Armor see it.
And, and I think now what we're seeing in Israel is, is this
fantasy being, you know, stretched to its outermost
limits being undermined by the very people who are who are

(01:14:26):
running the state and who are perpetrating this genocide.
Yeah, but in the way it's very important to for the world to
see all of this because for all of our lives.
Service when they do. This exactly.
We've always knew that they've always dealt with us in that
way, but the world did not see it.
Yeah. So now they're doing us a
favour, as you've said, by themselves and showing the

(01:14:47):
reality of how how they are likeI.
Can see there are guns as well there.
Are guns that the map? The map of.
The map of Israel. All historical Palestine is
there under their guns. I mean it's.
I think fear is up. Guns on on a cake?

(01:15:07):
On a birthday cake. Why?
There is a tendency amongst thatparticular political actors here
to try and suggest that this particular attitude in this
particular sort of quite like gleeful masochism, this like
celebration of violence, is likea marginal position in Israel.
But he's a minister. I mean, he's an incredibly

(01:15:29):
powerful person who has direct control over the disposition of
Palestinian lives effectively under colonial control.
It's not like it's not marginal.This is this is a very
significant political current inIsrael that in I think
throughout the world, most people are actually horrified
by, you know, effectively what we have in a broader sense,

(01:15:52):
which is what we see again tomorrow in these elections, is
a total fracturing of what ordinary people around the world
can see and what our establishment will.
Permit exactly and this type of,you know, mentality, there's
really mentality of murder and torture is now affecting also
pro Palestinians and people who are only they're the heroes who

(01:16:14):
went in flotilla and global smooth flotilla to provide
people with with with aid, some aid and and just give them a
sense of solidarity. As we know, Israel have already
attacked the 22 ships sailing toGaza at the international water
and they have abducted 175 civilians on those ships at the

(01:16:38):
gunpoint. And at the same time they have
kidnapped both of Diego and and CF and taken them both to the
Israeli detention camps where both of them are tortured.
And the Tiago himself has under the torture has has like fainted
twice. And today we know that

(01:16:59):
unfortunately Tiago's mother hashas died waiting for his her son
to be released from the Israeli hostility and from the Israeli
oppression, the same as so many other Palestinian mothers had to
say goodbye and lose their children within the Israeli
captivity. And in that remark, Tiago has

(01:17:22):
like sent a letter to his daughter, little daughter.
And I read it now. So here's saying, and I'm
quoting I'm sorry for not being home with you right now.
Unfortunately, your father, yourmother, and so many people
around the world understood the historic task that we have the
responsibility to fulfill. Today.

(01:17:43):
Over a million children are suffering A genocide, being
starved to death, being amputated without anesthesia,
and suffering from horrific, hateful ideas despite not
knowing what Zionism and imperialism is.
I'm sure you miss me too too much.
And all the mothers and fathers of Palestinian children also
miss them so much and would giveanything to live a life of love,

(01:18:08):
happiness and joy that every human being deserves
independently of race, religion,ethnicity or any other
characteristic. Your world will be safer because
many parents decided to give everything to build this bitter
world for you. I hope someday you understand
that because I love you so much,there was nothing more dangerous

(01:18:31):
for you and the other children than living in a world that
accepts A genocide. Please remember your father as a
person that would sing to you and play the guitar for you to
sleep. And when you grow up, your mom
will also tell you that your father was a revolutionary and
that even when facing the most horrific people alive, Donald

(01:18:53):
Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and it's my big fear, he stood firm
to the belief of building a bitter world.
Please do not forget Palestine with all my love.
Tiago Avella. That was.
Very powerful. It is very powerful to.
Break in at the same time. So what do you think about it

(01:19:16):
when you when you see it's not just only Palestinians, it's
also anyone standing with them? Now Thiago and SEF are with
Israeli it's and illegally it should be like a war crime to
kidnap them from international waters.
What do you think about it? I guess the thing that comes to
my mind just listening to that amazing letter is the

(01:19:37):
unbreakable spirit of the Palestinians and, and the calls
that they've inspired around theworld.
And as conditions darken and theprospects of, you know, a more
emancipated future seem more andmore remote, I think there's a
reason why people around the world look to Palestine as a

(01:20:00):
symbol of the kind of. Resistance and the kind of
undaunted spirit that all of us on the left in movements that
are fighting for a better world needs to display.
And the fact that that's a letter to his daughter also
shows that that spirit is something that you know can be
passed down, that once it exists, it's actually very, very

(01:20:22):
hard to extinguish. And that's of course the thing
that that the Israelis, despite their overwhelming military,
technological, diplomatic superiority, don't have.
Is that sort of unvanquishable will to resist and to keep
fighting? Yeah.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Oliver and

(01:20:42):
thank you very much, Paul. I really enjoyed the discussion.
I I did not enjoy. It was very fruitful.
Yeah, it was insightful. Thank you so much for such
insightful conversation. Yeah.
So thank you very much, I reallyappreciate it.
We have to have you again very soon inshallah.
Talk about the change of historytomorrow.
We'll see. We will see.

(01:21:03):
I'm very excited to see the results for tomorrow.
And our audience. Thank you very much for joining
us. Thank you very much for watching
us. If you watched all of the
episode, that would be amazing. And also watch our previous
previous episodes and stay tunedfor our next episodes every
Wednesday at 7:00 PM.