The Electronic Intifada Podcast 17 March 2025
The measure, which was placed on the ballot in 10 towns across Vermont passed in five of them – Plainfield, Thetford, Newfane, Winooski and Brattleboro.
In four other communities where it failed, the measure garnered support from 29 percent to 43 percent of voters.
Local organizer Wafic Faour, of Vermonters for Justice in Palestine and the Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation, said this demonstrated that most people support Palestine if they have a one-on-one conversation that connects the situation there to local issues.
He appeared on the Livestream on 13 March along with Zoe Jannuzi of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the convener of the national Apartheid-Free Communities coalition.
Faour and Jannuzi hope that the victory in Vermont will be a model and inspiration for people organizing for Palestinian rights across the United States.Jannuzi said over 500 organizations around the US and beyond have signed the pledge.
They have adopted different tactics “to end all support to Israel’s apartheid regime, settler colonialism and military occupation,” as the pledge states.
That includes divestment campaigns, lawn signs, teach-ins and donation campaigns.
Faour insisted that polls underestimate how much people support Palestine and oppose Israel – even a recent poll by Gallup showing a 25-year low in Americans’ support for Israel.
He has found that it is not an issue of liberal, conservative, Democrat or Republican. ”It’s right and wrong.” Faour said that the communities where the measure passed included “very conservative towns… liberal and mixed towns.”
Executive director Ali Abunimah noted we’re often “reacting to horrific events” while these communities are “building up grassroots power for the long term.”Yemen resumes naval blockade of Israel, downs US drone
The United States launched dozens of airstrikes across Yemen on Saturday and Sunday, killing dozens of people.
President Donald Trump claimed this was to ensure freedom of navigation for American ships. However it was evidently to punish the Arab state for re-imposing its maritime blockade of Israel.
Ansarullah, the ruling movement in Yemen, restarted its blockade against ships bound for Israel on 12 March and downed a US drone, after Israel failed to heed Yemen’s warning given four days earlier to end the blockade on Gaza.
The Yemeni movement said that this was in response to Israel’s total blockade since 2 March preventing food, fuel and other basic humanitarian supplies from entering Gaza.
Israel’s closure of all crossings has continued for almost two weeks, as associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman reported in this week’s news brief.
Palestinians are reporting severe water and food shortages as Israel uses starvation as “a weapon of genocide,” the human rights group Al-Haq stated.
Speaking on Sunday, Ansarullah leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi, said that supporting the people of Gaza in the face of a deliberate campaign to starve them to death was a moral, legal and religious duty.
He said that Yemen had endured years of US attacks and that the latest raids would not deter the country from continuing on this course.
Al-Houthi warned that US ships would now be included in the blockade, as long as the United States kept up its aggression.
Focusing on Yemen this week, contributing editor Jon Elmer reported on the only power in the region taking direct military action in solidarity with Palestine.
Elmer cited Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a nonprofit monitoring group, which says that Ansarullah – often referred to as the Houthis – carried out 136 operations from 19 October 2023 to 14 March 2025.
Elmer noted that most of those operations consisted of warning shots to turn ships away. And they included assaults on US warships in the Red Sea.
On Sunday, the Yemeni armed forces announced that they carried out a retaliatory attack against the US aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman using ballistic missiles and drones.US officials acknowledged the attack but claimed that the drones were intercepted.
While Yemen’s maritime blockade has solely been aimed at ending Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Trump on Monday used it as a pretext to escalate tensions with and directly threaten Iran.
“Any further attack or retaliation by the ‘Houthis’ will be met with great force, and there is no guarantee that that force will stop there,” Trump posted on his website Truth Social on Monday.
Trump added: “Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!”
In a response to a direct call from Abdul Malik al-Houthi a day earlier, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis rallied in the capital Sanaa in support of the government’s stance.
Worst displacement in West Bank since 1967
Freelance reporter Zena Al Tahhan joined the Livestream to talk about the “largest displacement since 1967” in the West Bank. Israel has forced more than 40,000 people from their homes mostly from Jenin and Tulkarem in the northern West Bank.
Al Tahhan emphasized that the majority of people were forced to leave by the Israeli military, some at gunpoint.The Israeli military plans to stay in the area until the end of the year leaving thousands of people without their homes. They are “paralyzing these massive areas, these cities that are economic capitals.” She calls it a “humanitarian crisis in the making right now.”
Al Tahhan said many Israeli soldiers in the West Bank are “doing whatever they want to do just to get their revenge for 7 October.”
She talked about her recent article for The Electronic Intifada focusing on the Abu Zeina family, who found feces, urine and used condoms in their home after Israeli soldiers forced them to flee.
Abunimah said, these are “ long-standing tactics,” referring to Israeli soldiersdefecating in the offices of the Palestinian Authority during the second intifada, the uprising of the early 2000s.
Chilling free speech after US arrests Mahmoud Khalil
Editors also [discussed(https://www.youtube.com/live/QdFbqAOHk1M?si=v0mobYcnkURxM4uq&t=5768) the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and how the journalism school at Columbia University is encouraging self-censorship.
“Students who are not US citizens should avoid publishing work on Gaza, Ukraine and protests related to their former classmate’s arrest,” Stuart Karle, a First Amendment lawyer and adjunct professor at the Columbia School of Journalism told students, as summarized by The New York Times.
”It’s a journalism school professor telling students not to do journalism!” associate editor Asa Winstanley remarked.
Editors discussed Columbia University’s complicity in the arrest of Khalil, who had been a trusted student leader and negotiator during last summer’s encampment to protest Columbia’s complicity in Israel’s genocide.
On Thursday, hundreds of members of Jewish Voice for Peace occupied Trump Tower in New York City demanding Khalil’s release and holding banners such as, “Fight Nazis, Not Students.” Dozens were arrested.
At the end of the discussion Abunimah underscored the threat posed by the Trump administration’s actions, going far beyond the issue of Palestine.“ If there’s one thing you pick up the phone and call your member of Congress about it should be this,” he said. “Because they are coming after the core of our basic constitutional rights.”
Hamas members “pretty nice guys,” says Trump envoy
This week, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff offered Hamas a deal which includes Hamas releasing Israeli soldiers in exchange for a ceasefire extension.
Elmer said that’s basically “nothing” and he doesn’t see Hamas “changing their fundamental principles” and accepting that deal.
Witkoff was able to effectively impose a ceasefire deal so quickly in January because there was already a complex agreement on the table which both sides had spent months negotiating. Reaching agreement on the next phase could take much longer now, Elmer suggested.
Meanwhile, Adam Boehler, the Trump administration’s hostage envoy, held historic direct talks with Hamas.
Interviewed by Jake Tapper on CNN to defend those talks against attacks from the Israeli government, Boehler said Hamas leaders ”don’t have horns growing out of their heads. They’re actually guys like us. They’re pretty nice guys.”
He also said that the US is not “an agent of Israel,” and added, “We have specific interests at play.”
These statements appeared to stray too far from the pro-Israel consensus in the US and Boehler was quickly sidelined by the administration.And feeling the pressure from Israel, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted the direct talks with Hamas were a “one-off” that “hasn’t borne fruit.”
Abunimah once again observed that often with the Trump administration, “What they say is very different from what they end up doing.” Therefore it remains very difficult to predict what will happen next.
You can watch the program on YouTube, Rumble or Twitter/X, or you can listen to it on your preferred podcast platform.
Tamara Nassar produced and directed the program. Michael F. Brown contributed pre-production assistance and this writer contributed post-production assistance.
Ali Abunimah contributed reporting for this article.
Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada Livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
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