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On the Nose - What Ta-Nehisi Coates Saw
What Now? with Trevor Noah - Have We Missed The Message? with Ta-Nehisi Coates

Two Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews on his book The Message: One with Peter Beinart, and one with Trevor Noah. One more focused on Israel as a political site of struggle in the USA, the other more on Blackness. The discussion on the exchange between Africans and African-Americans on Black identity is particularly interesting, esp. with these two guys having the conversation. It's such a pleasure listening to Coates and hear his thoughts pop in your head. If you just want to listen to one interview, listen to the Trevor Noah one, but there is little overlap.

I've posted a two-hour-long podcast interview with Tareq Baconi a few weeks ago, describing the history of Hamas and how it came to its current political posture. I've also listened to Baconi being interviewed on a few other podcasts and TV shows, but always from a friendly perspective. This week, Baconi was interviewed by the New York Times' Ezra Klein from what I would call the liberal Zionist perspective, possibly the most insidious of all. Here Baconi shines even more. Here's a salient excerpt.

Ezra Klein:

When I try to think about what negotiations between Israel and Hamas would look like, this kind of sits at the center of it for me. Israel’s view is that Hamas will not accept the existence of a state that is majority Jewish, right, a state that is built on that line. And it sounds a little bit to me like you’re saying that however you describe that, that is also Hamas’s view. And so there is a kind of ineluctable conflict here.

And I think sometimes about what this might look like 100 years in the future, if you imagine in an optimistic world that something happened and there was a negotiated settlement, and you had two states living alongside each other and those states had lived in peace for some time, and you could imagine immigration opening up between them and so on. But that’s not where we are.

We are in a place where there has been mass butchery of Israeli civilians by Hamas, mass bombing and killing of Palestinian civilians by Israel. There have been decades-long history of suicide bombings of Israeli children and buses and elders, decades-long bulldozing and sniping and shooting of Palestinian lives.

These are not peoples who feel safe next to each other. So the idea that there’s going to be free movement between them, it doesn’t feel realistic. I mean, people want to live in security first.

And if you’re going to accept that Israel is not going to do anything that it feels compromises its security, and Hamas has given it every reason to believe that its security would be compromised by Hamas having more permeability into its borders, I guess I don’t understand how you get from there to, well, we can dismantle the Jewish state, and people will live alongside each other. I don’t understand, then, how tactics and ends match up here, because you’d have to first convince people that security is possible, and I see almost everything here as having been doing the opposite.


Tareq Baconi:

I think that’s a really important question, and it’s one that I think about often. And there’s a few things to say here. The first is that the notion of security has been limited to Israelis, that there is only an interest in Israeli security. And this has been an underpinning demand of the peace process and all forms of diplomatic negotiations.

Nowhere is the idea of Palestinian security mentioned, even though we are talking about a nuclear power and an advanced military that’s occupying a people with no state and without a military.

And when we’re talking about security, we’re only talking about Israeli security. I appreciate that’s not how you framed it. I’m saying that this is how it’s framed in the peace process and in negotiations. So that’s part of the problem, that here, we only talk about security for one set of people.

The other is that, again, the fear that the colonized people will do to the colonizer what the colonizer has done to them is not limited to Israeli fears. Whites, white Afrikaners, feared what the Black South Africans would do to them if apartheid was dismantled. And white Americans feared what would happen to them if Jim Crow was dismantled.

Yet, we had to dismantle those systems. And the idea that security could only be provided by maintaining those systems has been disproven. And if there’s anything that we can learn from Oct. 7 is that the idea that Israeli Jews can be safe while apartheid persists is shattered now. It was shattered in the most horrific and bloody way, but it was shattered.

So the idea that security can be produced by maintaining this oppressive rule over Palestinians, we can’t go back to that thinking now. And so everything you outlined is exactly the line of questioning we should be asking.

Now that we understand not only historically and in other contexts, but specifically in Palestine Israel, that there can be no security while apartheid persists, what are the alternatives? And I don’t think we’ve even begun asking those questions.

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Seriously, the whole interview is like this. Ezra Klein shooting hellfire missiles from the Zionist liberal F-16 and Baconi glancing it all off like it was mere sand thrown his way, using the power of the throw against itself, like the most accomplished judoka do. I think I'll have to listen to this interview 5 times to fully absorb its brilliance. (There's a whole transcript at the linked page, if audio is not your thing.) Go to Pod.link to find your favourite podcast player's link to this episode

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#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy.

The Electronic Intifada - Day 17 roundtable on Israel's attacks on Gaza
The Electronic Intifada - Day 20 roundtable on Israel's attacks on Gaza

I'm getting more and more fascinated by Jon Elmer's description of Hamas' tunnel network. The length and the depth of these things seems phenomenal, along with the claimed complexity of infrastructure. At some point I'm wondering, is he fabulating? But even if half of what he mentions is true, this is going to be worse than fighting in the jungle. The flipside is that crimes committee by Israel in there could also stray buried in there.

There's also the flipside to this, that all this infrstructure has been built at civilians' expense, as expressed in this Xhitter thread.

Otherwise the EI livestreams are a phenomenal source to get a sense of what people are living on the ground and getting some Palestinian analysis. Ali Abunimah can be a bit much sometimes but in these current circumstances, I can't think of a way he could be too much. The situation is critical.

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The second bonus episode is a hilarious tale of Kristaps and Ukraine w/o Hype's Anthony Bartaway getting threatened at gunpoint by a drunk Ukrainian in his skivvies at the Transnistria border. (Well, hilarious because nothing bad happened, of course...)

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Finally, a really sucky thing. Learning that Sacha Baron Cohen, Taika Waititi and Jordan Peele have shittier politics than you would imagine, in light of their previous commitments. How many of them (the overall list of signatories) don't grok that this letter is supporting genocide? I don't know. But this sure ain't a call for a cease-fire.