Podcast Ep 20: Joseph Massad on annexation

On episode 20 of The Electronic Intifada Podcast, Nora and Asa are joined by leading Palestinian intellectual Joseph Massad, professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.

We discuss Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and the current Trump-Netanyahu annexation plan.

Added to previous annexations, Massad argues that the plan could mean about 70 percent of the West Bank is declared as under Israeli “sovereignty” – far higher than the 30 percent usually discussed by the media.

The plan is being presented as a major break with history and the so-called peace process.

But in reality this is just Israel’s latest phase in the ongoing process of violent settler-colonialism, Palestinian expulsion and apartheid.

European governments have said they condemn the plan, and more than 1,000 European parliamentarians have signed a letter calling it “fatal to the prospects of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

Massad argues that Zionists who claim to support a two-state solution “would be the equivalent of white South Africans who would call on the South African apartheid government to withdraw from occupied Namibia and grant Namibia independence while maintaining white supremacy in South Africa.”

“Left wing” Israelis and their supporters around the world “want Israel to leave the occupied territories, while maintaining its right to be a Jewish supremacist racist state in its 1948 territories,” Massad explains.

“It would be laughable if white South Africans” made such a proposal and claimed to be on the left.

South Africa’s apartheid regime occupied neighboring Namibia and imposed racial segregation there until the resistance in that country won independence in 1990 after a decades long struggle for self-determination.

Apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994.

Relevant articles

Image: Palestinians in Gaza City demonstrate against Israel’s annexation plans, 1 July 2020. (Ashraf Amra/APA Images)

Theme music and production assistance by Sharif Zakout

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Nora Barrows-Friedman

Nora Barrows-Friedman's picture

Nora Barrows-Friedman is a staff writer and associate editor at The Electronic Intifada, and is the author of In Our Power: US Students Organize for Justice in Palestine (Just World Books, 2014).