The Electronic Intifada Podcast 1 October 2025
Several of Israel’s staunch allies announced in late September that they are recognizing Palestinian statehood – including the UK, France, Australia and Canada.
But they are all attempting to dictate that the Palestinian Authority must rule, Hamas can play no role and the resistance to Israel’s ongoing occupation and genocide must disarm.
These colonial-like diktats negate any notion of sovereignty, self-determination, independence and democracy.
Some statements, including Australia’s, make no mention of stopping the genocide. More analysis below.
“I have survived genocide”
On this program, Ahmed Abu Artema speaks about his experience surviving 690 days of genocide and being evacuated to the Netherlands in late August.
Abu Artema is a Palestinian writer, poet, and journalist who helped organize the Great March of Return in 2018 – a weekly nonviolent mass mobilization by Palestinian refugees to march to the Gaza barrier and demand the right to return to their homes.
Israel responded with its habitual violence, murdering hundreds and injuring tens of thousands – and giving the lie to the claim that all Palestinians have to do to achieve their rights is practice nonviolence.
Abu Artema described having to leave behind everything that reminded him of his 13-year-old son Abdullah, who was murdered in an Israeli airstrike on the family home in Rafah weeks into the genocide.
The attack was almost certainly an attempt by Israel to kill Abu Artema himself.
Abu Artema had been carrying around his son’s Quran and comb but was not allowed to take them with him when he – along with about 130 other Palestinians left Gaza in an evacuation organized by European embassies for students with scholarships, family reunifications or individuals with work contracts.Abu Artema was able to leave because the Dutch newspaper De Correspondent decided to hire him and supporters in the Netherlands pressed the government there to get him out.
He has written an account of his journey for the newspaper.
Israel barred Abu Artema from taking anything out of Gaza except his documents, the clothes on his back and his phone.
He said that thinking about the items that were his last physical connection to Abdallah brought him to tears.
”I passed horrible experiences for two years. Then I collapsed now about something maybe simple, for a simple reason,” he said.
”It’s a matter of repressed feelings. In Gaza, we don’t find time even to cry for our beloved people,” Abu Artema concluded.
When leaving Gaza, for the first time Abu Artema passed through historic Palestine and saw an Israeli soldier face to face.
Abu Artema saw Israelis living life normally and wondered how they could do that when a genocide was happening “just a few kilometers away.”
Israelis, he said, started their ethnic cleansing and colonization by dehumanizing Palestinians and that’s how they are able to commit genocide and then return to their families as if nothing is happening.
”You can go home and you can show your kindness with your friends and practice your life normally,” Abu Artema said.
He quoted Yoav Gallant – a fugitive under indictment by the International Criminal Court for his actions as defense minister at the start of the genocide – calling Palestinians “human animals” in October 2023.
Israeli leaders have used dehumanizing language to describe Palestinians for decades.
Relentless massacres
Israel killed at least 357 Palestinians and injured 1,500 between 17 and 24 September, mostly in Gaza City, associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman reported in her news brief at the start of the Livestream.
She shared heart-wrenching videos of people mourning their loved ones in Gaza.
One father scrambled in rubble to find his daughter and son after Israel bombed his home in a refugee camp on the beach.
He cried out to his son, “Didn’t I tell you to take care of your sister?”
And another video shows a boy carrying his dead 4-year-old cousin. “My darling Zain! We used to play together every day!” the boy says through tears.
You can watch a video of the full news roundup or read it in article form.
Barrows-Friedman also delivered a moving tribute to Samira Ali Najjar, a Nakba survivor from the village of Lifta, and the mother of Ali Abunimah. She died in Amman, Jordan, on 14 September.
Robot bombs
Israel is increasingly using robot bombs to devastate Gaza City, contributing editor Jon Elmer reported.
It fills old US-supplied armored vehicles with explosives and guides them remotely into Palestinian neighborhoods to create horrifying destruction.
Israel has bragged about the technology and how it is speeding the ethnic cleansing of Gaza City.
“It’s the most cowardly [tactic] in a war of cowardice,” Elmer said.
Elmer also reviewed operations by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza.The Israel military began its latest invasion of Gaza City on 22 September and immediately suffered its first fatality of the new offensive.
Resistance fighters in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood fired Yassin 105 rocket propelled grenades at an Israeli tank fatally injuring an officer.
There were four resistance operations in Rafah on the morning of 18 September, Elmer reported.In one operation, an improvised explosive device destroyed an Israeli vehicle, killing four soldiers.
“The fighters were able to navigate through the ethnically cleansed, completely destroyed territory of Rafah to get all the way to the south of Rafah and carry out a qualitative operation,” Elmer said.
That operation also happened under the close surveillance of Israeli drones.
According to an investigation by Israel’s Channel 12, Israeli drone footage from 16 September shows an explosive was placed under a blanket to cloak it.
But the Israeli military did not notice. Two days later the soldiers were killed when their vehicle came into contact with it.
Why are Israel’s allies “recognizing” Palestine?
Dozens of countries have in recent years recognized the “State of Palestine” – an entity that exists only on paper.
During the UN General Assembly session in September, several more recognized the Palestinian Authority as the state of Palestine, including the UK, Canada, France and Australia.
“ It’s not anything really new,” said associate editor Asa Winstanley on the Livestream. “ But it was new in the sense of the states that did it.”
The “recognition” was contingent on releasing the Israeli prisoners of war in Gaza – which these governments refer to as “hostages” – Hamas having no role in any future government and the resistance handing over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, which openly collaborates with Israel.
”If [French President] Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia and [UK Prime Minister] Keir Starmer and [Prime Minister] Mark Carney of Canada get to decide who can actually govern the state – then it’s not independent and you’re not recognizing anything,” said Abunimah.
Abunimah examined Australia’s statement on Palestinian statehood in detail while making clear it is similar to the statements from other governments.
It refers to Palestinian “aspirations” for a state but makes no mention of any Palestinian rights – including, fundamentally, the refugees’ right to return.
The only use of the words “rights” is in reference to Australia welcoming that the Palestinian Authority had “restated its recognition of Israel’s right to exist.”
States do not have a right to exist under international law as Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, articulated in a widely circulated November 2024 clip.
As Abunimah pointed out, it is peoples who have the right to self-determination, which can include forming or dissolving a state as they see fit – just as states like East Germany and South Vietnam no longer exist.
As for Australia’s claim to support “democratic elections,” the PA has not held elections in decades.
”And it’s because of the international community that blocked elections because, wait for it, because they were going to lose. Every time,” according to Elmer.
Israel’s American and European backers were shocked and dismayed when Hamas handily won legislative elections in Gaza and the West Bank in 2006 – and the United States sponsored a coup to overturn the result.
No elections have been held since.
Australia asserted that its “recognition of Palestine,” along with other states, “is part of a coordinated international effort to build new momentum for a two-state solution.”
But it hasn’t been accompanied by any action to hold Israel accountable.
Abunimah noted that Australia’s supposed recognition of Palestine as an “independent and sovereign” state is negated by all that follows, calling the “recognition” push a “PR effort.”
”They’re proceeding from the point at which the genocide has been completed,” Abunimah said, noting that the statement talked about “Gaza reconstruction” while ignoring the ongoing genocide.
Abunimah urged everyone not to “fall for this” and compared the effort to the Oslo Accords.
“This is just an attempt to revive that in the middle of a holocaust,” he said.
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.
Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
Add new comment