Episode Details

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Sabri Jiryis, who for more than half a century has been among the most important Palestinian intellectuals trying to understand Zionism and promote Palestinian freedom. As a young man, he helped found al-Ard, the first Palestinian political movement in Israel, which called for Palestinian national rights and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In 1966, he wrote The Arabs in Israel, his landmark book on the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the Nakba. In 1970, Jiryis was exiled to Lebanon, where he became a close advisor to Yaser Arafat and director of the Palestine Research Center, the research and publication center of the PLO. In 1977, he published the first volume of his seminal Arabic-language book, A History of Zionism, and followed it up with a second volume in 1986. That book has now been translated into English by his daughter Fida. Following the Oslo Accords, Jiryis was one of the few Palestinians allowed to return to Israel and now lives in his native village, in the Galilee. We will discuss his understanding of Zionism, and his extraordinary life, on Friday.

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Cited in Today’s Video

The open letter claiming that accusing Israel of genocide constitutes a “blood libel.”

The letter’s link to one paper published on the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ website accusing Hamas of genocide.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars accuses Israel of genocide.

Scholars estimate that Israel has killed roughly 100,000 people in Gaza.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Daniel May writes about the lessons of Minneapolis’s resistance to ICE.

In 972Mag, Sophia Goodfriend explains how ICE is adapting surveillance practices pioneered by Israel.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I interviewed Adalah’s Myssana Morany and B’Tselem’s Sarit Michaeli about the forced displacement of Palestinians in both the West Bank and the Naqab/Negev.

Appearances

On February 17, I’ll be speaking on a panel for the World Policy Forum about Muslim-Christian-Jewish Coexistence in the Holy Land.

On February 24, I’ll be

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