Today I talk with Omar Zahzah about his new book, Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. This is an immensely informative study, which details the convergence of Zionism, Silicon Valley Big Tech, and the US political and governmental elites in what Zahzah calls the hegemonic form of Zionism. He shows how capitalist profit motives and Zionist settler colonialism and  ethnic cleansing go hand in hand with attempts to censor, silence, and erase Palestinian voices and the voices of those who act in solidarity with Palestine.  Nevertheless, and crucially, Omar fills his book with accounts of how Palestinians have found ways to appropriate, repurpose, and deploy technology in ingenious, creative, and subversive ways that keep the movement alive and growing globally.

Omar Zahzah is a poet, writer, independent journalist, and Assistant Professor of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University.

Today I am extremely grateful to Ardi Imseis and Chris Gunness for joining me for an urgent discussion of Israel’s accelerated genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank.  These eminent international human rights scholars discuss Israel’s longstanding violations of international law and the complicity of the US. We also discuss at length the responsibility of states to immediately halt their direct and indirect support for the genocide. Our conversation includes an in-depth discussion of the UN, and both the usefulness and shortcomings of international law. We end with a call to international civil society to use the information, rules, and judgments of law to do what too many states fail to do—protect the rights and lives of Palestinians and bring forth justice.

Dr. Ardi Imseis is Associate Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, Queen’s University. He is author of The United Nations and the Question of Palestine: Rule by Law and the Structure of International Legal Subalternity (Cambridge University Press 2023). In 2019 he was named by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to serve as a Member of the UN commission of inquiry into the civil war in Yemen. He has served as legal counsel before the International Court of Justice, including the Court’s groundbreaking 2024 opinion on Legal Consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. Between 2002 and 2014, he served in senior legal and policy capacities in the Middle East with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). He has provided expert testimony in his personal capacity before various high-level bodies, including the UN Security Council, the UN Human Rights Council, and the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Professor Imseis’s scholarship has appeared in a wide array of international journals, and he is former Editor-in-Chief of the Palestine Yearbook of International Law (Brill; 2008-2019) and Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and Human Rights Fellow, Columbia Law School. Professor Imseis holds a Ph.D. (Cambridge), an LL.M. (Columbia), LL.B. (Dalhousie), and B.A. (Hons.) (Toronto). He appears today in his personal capacity.

Chris Gunness covered the 1988 democracy uprising for the BBC in what was then Burma. After a 23-year career at the BBC, he joined the United Nations as Director of Strategic Communications and Advocacy in the Middle East. In 2019 he left the UN and returned to London. He founded the Myanmar Accountability Project (MAP) in 2021.

The academic year has just ended, but student activists for Palestinian liberation are already making plans for next year. On today’s show I talk with organizers from the University of Oregon (Cole Herman), from CUNY Graduate Center (Flora deTournay), and from Stanford (Iman Deriche) about this past year’s hunger strike campaigns—we learn of concerted efforts to change the narrative and raise support for those resisting Israel’s genocide. We speak of the need to engage the diverse but broad base of support for Palestine, to build strength, and to creatively bypass administrative indifference and repression. Full of useful information that inspires, this episode is important listening for the summer.  Please also check for our upcoming blog on this episode, where we will share resources and ideas.

Today I speak with Nasser Abourahme about his new book, The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony. Drawing on a wealth of diverse materials including, but not limited to, state documents, political philosophy, literature, and historical archives, The Time Beneath the Concrete focuses on the “struggle over historical time itself.” This is a struggle that is predicated on a constitutional inertia or “stuckness” of the colonial project.  We end by talking about the notion of “inhabitation,” which Abourahme describes as “the life-making practice of the dispossessed everywhere.”  He suggests this as a way to imagine a life that can be lived in a different set of temporal coordinates that recognize a different set of human possibilities.

Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher, and is currently Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College. He’s the author of The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025).

Today on Speaking Out of Place, we talk with Maya Wind about her book, Towers of Ivory and Steel, How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, published by Verso.  Through meticulous research into the archives of Israeli universities and hundreds of other documents, Wind furnishes proof of just how deeply and completely Israeli universities are essential actors in Israel’s efforts to suppress Palestinian freedom.

We originally taped this show in June 2023, as Maya came off a long book tour in Europe.  We decided to wait into the beginning of this new academic year to release this episode.  Since then, of course, we have seen that US universities have spent the summer creating new draconian measures to curtail and make illegal protests against Israel’s war on Palestine, which has now increased in violence and volume not only in the West Bank, but now also spread into Lebanon, killing civilians with impunity.  Whereas the United Nations General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to censure Israel, the US remains committed to feeding the Israeli war machine no matter what. This makes today’s show even more urgent.

Shining a bright light on Israeli universities complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of its Palestinian population, the book is an indispensable resource in the fight to boycott Israeli universities and divest from firms doing business with Israel.

Today we speak with Rebecca Vilkomerson and Rabbi Alissa Wise about their foundational work in starting and growing Jewish Voice for Peace. It’s a story captured in their new book, Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing. We learn about the different phases in the organization’s life—its growing pains, its key transitions and expansions, and the lessons it has learned on the way about organizing and activism for Palestine. As the title indicates, the book is fundamentally about discovering and growing an expansive notion of solidarity, and the love necessary to sustain a movement.

Rebecca Vilkomerson was the Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace from 2009-2019. She is now Co-Director of Funding Freedom, organizing within philanthropy.

Rabbi Alissa Wise is a community organizer, educator, organizational consultant, and ritual leader with over two decades of movement-building experience. Rabbi Wise co-founded the JVP Rabbinical Council in 2010, and was a staff leader at JVP from 2011-2021. She is currently the Lead Organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, which she founded in October 2023.