The Electronic Intifada Podcast 1 January 2025
They questioned him over a tweet he had posted saying he supports “Hamas against the Israeli army.” He was arrested and released on restrictive bail conditions, including a prohibition on posting anything on social media related to Hamas.
A few weeks ago, British prosecutors charged Greenstein, 71, under the notoriously repressive and anti-democratic Terrorism Act 2000, accusing him of expressing “an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization.”
They also accuse him of “inviting support” for Hamas. These serious charges could result in a prison sentence of up to 14 years.
“Well, I don’t think with a first offense I’ll get 14 [years], but I think it’s highly likely, being as I’m under a suspended sentence for a Palestine Action outing a year ago, that I will get a prison sentence,” the veteran Palestine campaigner Greenstein told The Electronic Intifada Livestream this week.
The program also featured interviews with emergency room physician Dr. Mimi Syed in Gaza, our regular contributor in Gaza Abubaker Abed and a discussion of how US media are whitewashing events in Syria, along with the news and the resistance report.
“Obviously I will be appealing to the jury to acquit, because the main argument will be that this is not about terrorism. This is about freedom of speech, the right to speak out on Palestine, the right to speak out about a genocide that’s happening in real time,” Greenstein added.
Greenstein’s trial is scheduled for 31 January, and he’s calling for as much public support as possible for him and other activists, journalists and academics facing persecution or prosecution by British authorities for their support for Palestine.
A socialist and a Jewish anti-Zionist, anti-racist campaigner, Greenstein is author of Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponization of Memory in the Service of State and Nation – which he spoke to The Electronic Intifada Podcast about when the book was published in 2022.
Greenstein’s interview on the Livestream came just after this week’s news briefing from Nora Barrows-Friedman, which focused on Israel’s destruction of Kamal Adwan hospital, the last major functioning health center in northern Gaza.
Israel abducted more than 240 people, including patients, medics and the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who is now reportedly being detained in Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman concentration camp where Palestinians, including medical personnel, have been tortured, raped and murdered.
“This is what the Nazis did at Auschwitz,” Greenstein observed, commenting on the eyewitness accounts that Israeli soldiers wrote numbers on the bodies of the Palestinians they detained at the hospital.“For the Zionists now to be imitating what the Nazis did says really everything about their campaign in Gaza,” Greenstein added.
Murdered while his wife was in labor
We spoke with Dr. Mimi Syed at Gaza’s al-Aqsa hospital, where the board certified emergency physician from the United States is on a four-week medical mission.
The interview with associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman was pre-recorded on 26 December, the day that Syed’s friend, the journalist Ayman al-Jedi was murdered along with four colleagues, when Israel attacked their broadcast van outside al-Awda hospital in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
Inside that hospital, al-Jedi’s wife was about to give birth.
Syed had spoken to al-Jedi just a day earlier. “He actually met with me yesterday and came to tell me he’s going to meet with me on Saturday. He wanted to know the situation in the hospital, and he was just so pleasant,” Syed said. “But he was so happy because his wife was in labor.”
According to Syed, Ayman al-Jedi’s wife did give birth hours after her husband’s funeral.
Syed also spoke about the dire situation in Gaza, where in recent days several babies have died from the cold winter weather in a situation where most of the population is displaced, living in the open, or in tents without heat.“It’s very difficult to even describe how much is lacking here in Gaza,” Syed said. “It’s freezing cold, especially for a newborn who requires more heat to maintain their temperature. It’s just so unnecessary and preventable. It’s just such a crime to see these things happening and that’s just like just the tip of the iceberg.”
Trying to survive bitter cold
Across Gaza, people continue to face “extraordinarily difficult circumstances,” regular contributor Abubaker Abed told the Livestream live from Gaza.
In recent days, Abed has been reporting on families trying to survive the bitter cold, including speaking to the father of one newborn who succumbed to hypothermia. That baby’s twin sibling is reportedly fighting for life.
Resistance fights on
In his report this week, contributing editor Jon Elmer analyzed the latest videos released by the resistance in Gaza, including the northern part of the territory that remains under the most intense Israeli siege and attack.
The videos demonstrate that despite Israeli claims of success, the fighters in Gaza continue to inflict heavy losses on the invaders.
Israel has not achieved any of its stated goals, which include returning captives, destroying the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, and destroying the Hamas government.“So Netanyahu is not going to agree to ceasefire talks when he cannot claim victory in this war,” Elmer assessed. “The only thing he can claim is the total destruction of Gaza.”
Elmer also looked at the situation in the West Bank and discussed some of the latest actions from Yemen, as part of its intervention to try to stop the Israeli genocide.
US media whitewashes Syria
Meanwhile, the tumultuous events in Syria have attracted a great deal of attention since the toppling of the government of President Bashar al-Assad in early December by armed militias backed by the United States and Turkey.
This writer discussed the furor around an interview given to the US radio network NPR by Maher Marwan, the man named as governor of Damascus by Abu Muhammad al-Julani (aka Ahmad al-Shara), the head of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militia which seized power in Damascus.In the interview, Marwan declared that the new rulers in Syria had no hostility towards Israel and justified and excused Israel’s massive air bombardment of the country as well as Israel’s occupation of more Syrian land.
“We want peace, and we cannot be an opponent to Israel or an opponent to anyone,” Marwan told NPR.
The interview caused such a backlash in the region that Marwan attempted to walk his comments back.
Meanwhile, Israeli occupation forces are tightening their grip on newly occupied Syrian territories.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 Eli Gerzon contributed post-production assistance.
Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada Livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
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