Makdisi Street
A podcast co-hosted by Saree Makdisi, Ussama Makdisi, and Karim Makdisi.
Episodes
***Producer's note: This is a preview of the latest bonus episode. Sign up on Patreon for as little as $5 a month to access this and other great bonus content.***
The brothers get together for a spirited debate on the age-old question: Is Israel a proxy of the US?
Date of recording: Sept 9, 2025.
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The brothers welcome the prominent violinist, classical musician and Professor at the Barenboim-Said Akademie Michael Barenboim to have a heart-felt discussion about the relationship between classic music and dissent, his regret at not speaking out earlier in his life about Palestine, his horror at the ongoing Gaza genocide, and the implications of anti-Palestinian racism and repressive climate in Germany despite Berlin having the ...
The brothers welcome back to the show Michael Fakhri (@michaelfakhri), United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, to discuss the open war of starvation on Gaza, how international institutions have abjectly failed their moral and legal duties, the role of the media, and what individuals can do to hold the responsible actors to account.
Check his episode from April 2024, "Famine is never a natural occurrence"
Date of rec...
The brothers welcome to the show the Palestinian theologian and pastor Munther Isaac to discuss Palestinian Christianity in the context of the depravity of the Gaza genocide, the theology of empire, the anti-Palestinian distortions in both so-called Christian Zionism and liberal Western Chrisian churches, the urgent need for rethinking the meaning of witness and the need for global intervention because of the horrors of the Gaza ge...
We welcome two brave California educators, Dr. Theresa Montano of Cal State Northridge and Dr. Christine Hong of UC Santa Cruz, who have been at the forefront of developing and advocating for a California Ethnic Studies Curriculum grounded in liberation and social justice rather than identity politics. We discuss how Ethnic Studies went from an insurgent field of knowledge in the 1960s to one adopted in 2017 by Califo...
The brothers welcome historian and headline fixer Assal Rad to discuss the mainstream media’s role in manufacturing consent and perpetuating Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, how it enables the Gaza genocide, how it accepts Israeli state propaganda as fact while rendering suspect Palestinian eyewitness accounts, and the differences between the coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza from its war on Iran.
Date of recording: J...
The brothers welcome back historian Ilan Pappé to the show to discuss whether he still believes that the Gaza genocide marks "the beginning of the end of the Zionist project", his understanding of the nature of Israel's decline, the attacks on institutions of higher learning, and how Palestine has become the keystone for liberatory projects.
Date of recording: July 8, 2025.
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**Producer's Note: This is a preview of the latest bonus episode. You can listen to the entire episode by becoming a member of the Makdisi Street patreon, where you can also find all our other bonus content, including the latest Q&A**
The brothers hosted a special live episode as part of the Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago.
Date of recording: July 4, 2025.
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The brothers welcome the writer and podcaster Alon Mizrahi (@alon_mizrahi) to discuss the Israeli state’s institutionalized and systematic dehumanization of Arabs and Palestinians, the racial hierarchy structuring and defining Israeli society, and the psychopathologies of colonial violence in such a racialized environment.
Alon is the host of The Mizrahi Perspective on YouTube and can also be found on Substack
Date of recording: Ju...
**Producer's note: This was recorded before the US attack on Iranian nuclear facilities**
The brothers welcome returning guest Trita Parsi to discuss the unprovoked and illegal attack on Iran, the potential role of the US in joining the Israeli regime's war, and what, if any, possibilities remain for negotiation or de-escalation.
Date of recording: June 19, 2025.
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Ahead of the most important football match in the history of Palestine’s national team, on the cusp of potential qualification for the 2026 World Cup, the brothers discuss with Bassil Mikdadi, Palestinian journalist and creator of footballpalestine.com, the impact of the ongoing Gaza genocide as well as the deeper context of Palestine national team’s rich journey over many decades, its ...
**Producer's note: The brothers are hosting their first livestream this coming TUESDAY (O6/03) at 10 am EST! It will be a Patreon-exclusive Q&A so only supporters of the show can submit questions or watch live. Sign up for as little as $5 a month and access all the great bonus content as well**
The brothers explore the latest Gaza ceasefire negotiations, the abject failure of the corporate media to cover the crude and explicit expr...
**Producer's note: The brothers are hosting their first livestream! It will be a Patreon-exclusive Q&A so only supporters of the show can submit questions or watch live. Sign up for as little as $5 a month and access all the great bonus content**
The brothers welcome legal scholar Noura Erekat to the show to discuss how the Gaza genocide has threatened to end the "rules-based international order;” the failure of international legal...
The brothers discuss the extent to which Trump represents a possible shift in US policy in the Middle East, contrasting the possibility of new deal-making in the Gulf region and elsewhere (Iran, Syria) with the retrograde pull of Zionist pressure to extend the genocide in Gaza and derail the drive towards profit-driven capitalist stabilization in the region.
Watch the video edition on our YouTube channel
Date of recording: May 15,...
The brothers welcome preeminent British Israeli historian Avi Shlaim to the show to discuss the richness of Arab Jewish identity, and how the ideology of Zionism is based on the negation and denial of this identity and coexistence, his own family's migration from Iraq to newly-created Israeli state, the reception they received there, and the wider story of Jewish minorities in Iraq and other Arab countries. Shlaim dis...
The brothers welcome Sarah Leah Whitson, the Executive Director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) and former director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch, to discuss the role of human rights advocacy amidst the ongoing genocide, the initiative to hold Blinken, Biden, and Lloyd Austin legally accountable, the failure of the ICC, and how Gaza has proven to be the "graveyard" of the "rules-ba...
The brothers welcome Daniel Levy, president of the US Middle East Project (USMEP) and former negotiator, to discuss how Israelis employ negotiations to pursue their political goals of expansionism, the role of the US as a supposed third-party guarantor, and the growing internal political chaos threatening the Israeli political status quo.
Watch the video edition on our YouTube channel
Date of recording: April 7, 2025.
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The brothers welcome Palestinian analyst and researcher Abdaljawad Omar (@hhamayel2) to the show to discuss the nature of the Palestinian Authority's collaborative dealings with the Israeli occupation, how it compares against other examples of collaboration historically, how supporters of the PA regime view their role through the prism of national liberation, and why Palestinians in the West Bank are not able to do more to fight co...
The brothers welcome artist and activist Wael Tarbieh from the occupied Golan Heights to discuss the Israeli colonization of the region since 1967, the mixed ethnic and confessional makeup of the Indigenous population, and their decades-long steadfastness in retaining their political and legal identity.
For more information on the ethnic cleansing of the Golan, check out Al Marsad
https://golan-marsad.org/category/map-en/
The brothers welcome Palestinian anthropologist (and former chemical engineer) Hadeel Assali. They discuss the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil, the history of tunnels and the ecology of Gaza, the ontological relationship of the Palestinians to their indigenous environment that the US-backed Zionist colonizers seek to destroy, the different forms of resistance to incessant colonial surveillance, the story of a secret Israeli population...
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