Ep 25: Palestine. With Ghassan Hage (English).

De Verbranders

Our guest today is Ghassan Hage, a professor of anthropology at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Today, we talk with Ghassan, not about Europe’s borders, but about Palestine, and the intensification of the destruction of life in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli state and the powers that support it. We recorded our conversation a few weeks ago, in January 2024. As I record this introduction, I am struck by how difficult it is to find words that speak to the moment we are in. We are witnessing military attacks of unimaginable brutality, with countless bodies still to be found under the rubble. Alongside this obliteration of Palestinian life, we see the destruction of the conditions of possibility for life, with the bombing of water wells, tanks, greenhouses, food depots, ports, fishing boats, hospitals, schools, and bakeries. At the same time, as Ghassan points out, this violence is not new, but an intensification of the structural, settler colonial violence inflicted upon the Palestinians for the past 76 years and more. We must pause and reflect on the histories that made it possible for Gaza to become the place it is today, a place where Israel can cut off the supply of water, food and electricity to Gaza, turning hunger and thirst into weapons of war. As Ghassan points out, violence is inherent in the very existence of Gaza. Where does the legitimacy of such violence come from? How do we accept living in a world where it is normalized? Ghassan identifies the root of the problem as the virtual absence of the very thought of negotiating one’s existence with others, creating the fantasy in Israel that supremacy over everyone is possible. This fantasy is fueled by a frightening racism that makes it such that Palestinians can be treated as if their death is meaningless. In the episode, Ghassan describes Israel as an ethno-racial state and as a meta-colony, a colonialism of all colonial powers. This means responsibility lies not only with the Israeli government but also with the meta-colonial powers that make this destruction possible, in the form of massive military aid and diplomatic support. And we must dig deeper, and think about the global infrastructures in place that provide the materials and cover necessary to sustain this onslaught and find ways to challenge it. We close the episode with a reflection on the future. Israel as an ethno-racial state, Ghassan asserts, is going to come to an end. The question is what kind of an end. Tragically, with massacres and counter-massacres? Or through a negotiated mode of existence where everyone can live together? Let us work towards the latter. In the episode, we play a clip of Refaat Alareer, the writer, poet, professor, and activist, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on the 6th of December 2023, along with several members of his family. Refaat was a professor at the Islamic University of Gaza. He also co-founded the We Are Not Numbers project, which provided writing workshops for young Palestinians. We close the episode with a recital of one of Refaat’s poems, titled, ‘If I must die, let it become a tale’. It became widely shared and recited at protests all over the world after he was killed. The recital we use is read by Peter Griffin and can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0zYDME9oaw