All Our Liberation is Linked

In this episode, Lara and Michael cover the latest assertions of the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and the UN Gilad Erdan who, following a trip to the "American south," said he was touched by learning about segregation and the Jim Crow era calling it an "incredibly moving trip." The Times of Israel reports that the ambassador compared slave plantations in the US to concentration camps but said there was "no comparison" between Israel's treatment of Palestinians and struggles for racial justice in the US. Lara and Michael play a quick round of “Sounds like Jim Crow or Not” to test the ambassador’s unsupported assertions on the reality of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians which according to Michael “fold like a house of cards after Kevin Spacey got accused.” Lara and Michael reject the ambassador’s attempts to exploit the Black struggle in the US and erase a deep history of Black-Palestinian solidarity going back to the 1960s and existing until today. Citing the book Black Power and Palestine, Lara and Michael cover the positions of leading Black activists throughout the ages including Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, and Angela Davis, and describe the anti-imperial, anti-colonial, and anti-racist connections that undeniably form the foundation of the solidarity between Black liberation and Palestinian liberation activists. Lara and Michael coin the term “crocodile sympathy” to refer attempts by Pro-Israel apologists to posture themselves as compassionate supporters of equality in situations not involving Palestinian rights, meanwhile hypocritically participating in the system that deprives Palestinians of the very rights they purport to support elsewhere.