LISTEN TO SAVE PALESTINIAN LIVES w/ Our Friend Dr. Thaer Ahmad

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Hi, everybody.

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

Today is

maybe the most important episode we've ever done.

Before we get started with Dr.

Thayer Ahmad, who is a Palestinian American, I want to let you know two things.

First of all, every penny that this episode makes will go to the Palestinian American Medical Association.

It's the 501c3 tax-exempt tax-exempt nonprofit organization that provides Dr.

Ahmad and his brave colleagues the supplies they need to keep healing and saving Palestinian lives.

I also want you to know that if you have, pod squad, if you have any dollars to spare, after you listen to this episode or now, please give directly to this life-saving fund, all of which will go to

the doctors, the healers on the ground who have been working so bravely and so tirelessly to heal their people.

Give directly at the link in the show notes

or the link in my bio.

It's like, it's called Lincoln Bio, I guess, on Instagram.

Okay, so you go to Instagram.

There's a thing called Lincoln Bio.

The link will be there to give.

Every penny that goes into there from you will go to the Palestinian American Medical Association.

Also,

more than what you give will go because I, in addition to all the profit from this episode going, I am personally going to be matching every single dollar dollar that you give up to $100,000.

We are going to get

these heroes

the supplies that they need to continue their life's work, which is to save Palestinian lives.

They do not have the support nor the supplies that they desperately need.

Please, please let us be the ones who say with our voices and our money, we see you.

You are not alone.

We will share with you what we have so you can continue to heal your people because you are our people.

We belong to each other.

I love you all so much.

Secondly, the way that this episode came about is this:

one of the ways that I am

staying

sane and awake during this extremely difficult time in this country is by attending protests, by going out in the world and putting my body with other people who care.

And I'm doing that because protest works, but also because it's personally what's saving me.

And so recently I was at a pro-Palestine anti-genocide protest in Los Angeles, and a man was speaking and he was so beautiful and so eloquent and so moving.

He was a Palestinian American, a father.

And I posted part of his speech at that protest.

And what ended up happening is that this woman who many people know, her name is Leslie Priscilla.

She's a writer, she's a thinker, she's incredible, but she has an Instagram account called Latinx Parenting.

She saw my post of that man's speech and she knew him.

So she DM'd him and said, What are you doing on Glennon Doyle's feet?

And he was like, Who the fuck is Glennon Doyle?

And

he ended up DMing me.

His name is Omar.

We asked Omar, who should we have on the pod?

What Palestinian voice would you want on the pod right away?

And he is the one who introduced us to the incredible man you're about to meet, Dr.

Thayer Ahmad.

So there's the background.

And here we go.

Dr.

Thayer Ahmed is a Palestinian American born in Chicago, home of the greatest concentration of the Palestinian diaspora in the United States.

He is a board-certified emergency medicine physician and global health leader who has provided medical relief in some of the world's most devastated conflict zones, including Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon.

A voice for Palestinian dignity, Dr.

Ahmad has conducted multiple medical missions to Gaza, most recently entering in January 2024 in the midst of Israel's relentless bombardment.

He has since been denied entry multiple times by Israeli authorities due to his Palestinian heritage.

He delivered a powerful first-hand account during a private briefing with President Biden in 2024 and walked out in protest after the administration rebuffed calls for an immediate ceasefire.

Dr.

Ahmad, we would like to start

by acknowledging and honoring and dignifying the grief and sorrow that you hold for your family and your people due to the terror of the last years and the suffocation of decades prior to that.

You have seen the targeting and capture and torture of your medical colleagues, captivity of your family members, genocide of your people, and silence and complicity of the world.

And in the last days, we have also witnessed Israel's targeting and assassination of Anas al-Sharif, the beloved heroic journalist and his colleagues in an attempt to silence truth and kill hope.

And

we just want to meet you in that moment now.

And

I don't know how you're here.

I don't know how you continue to do what you do.

But before we get into experts and facts and what is actually happening, it's just

how is your humanness in this moment?

Yeah, I mean, I really appreciate you kind of bringing that up.

I think for us,

it's really, really tough right now.

Um, it's just tough because we feel like I think when you're watching it from so far away and you're seeing everything sort of unfold, it can get very, very easy to get lost in the numbers

and forget about the human beings that are actually suffering and the amount of suffering that they're doing.

I think when you mentioned Ennes,

Ennes was really backbreaking.

I mean, it was really tough.

He's somebody that we were watching every day show up on the screen.

He's covering the news and you saw him.

And

what really hurts me about what happened with Ennas, and I think all of us are reeling, is his last few weeks on this earth were

so troubling.

He is somebody who we watched about a week and a half ago covering the hunger and the starvation that was happening in Gaza.

And you saw it affect him.

You saw him seeing people collapse in the street.

We're heading to the hospital.

We're searching for food.

And it just,

it

was weighing so heavy that at one point during the live broadcast, as the journalist in Qatar was asking him to describe the scenes that he was seeing, he sort of

breaks down and he's got his, you know, his hands in his face.

And you can hear somebody in the background walking telling Ennas,

you know, he's telling him,

he's saying, you know, keep going, Ennas.

You're our voice.

Just keep going.

You know, and this is just this faceless person in the background.

That's how all of us sort of felt about Ennas.

And,

you know, I'm sorry.

I just,

I think it's still tough to think about him.

So, you know, and he's in that moment.

And I remember later on Instagram seeing his wife post about him and saying, you know, she had seen him sort of break down because he had been separated from his family at this point when he's covering the news and he has to be in these areas that are being so violently leveled.

He's not going to stay with his family.

He's going to stay in a tent.

And, you know, when he was killed, he was in a tent right outside of the hospital in Gaza City.

And that's where he would be covering from.

And his wife said, you know, she saw that moment where he, again, is breaking down and she didn't see it as a moment of

weakness.

She said she saw that as just one of his more powerful moments, just the strength that he had, that even though he was witnessing what was happening to his people, that he was standing up and he was standing tall.

And that, yes, you know, the emotion that he was showing is, you know, not by any means a sign of weakness, but just sort of this.

this hero that had this press vest on.

And

he called

on the world to sort of respond to the threats that were being leveled against him.

The fact that he was specifically being somehow legitimized as some target.

It was going to be normal if something happened to Ennis.

And he asked everybody, every organization, human rights organization, every single media agency, every single

press committee, like the Committee to Protect Journalists.

He asked everyone to do something to stop the threats that were being levied against him, to ask Israel to abide by international humanitarian law.

And he'd said this in the last month that he was alive.

And it's like as if he knew something was going to happen.

And when it happened, I remember getting the text message.

I was getting ready for work and I couldn't believe it.

I just could not believe that Enas and his colleagues, his five colleagues, were the ones who were targeted in this strike.

You know, when people say all of Al Jazeera's Gaza City team was eliminated, and to me, it's just, again, it's it's just much more than that.

It's just this other sort of red line that was crossed.

It was a deliberate attempt to absolutely crush our souls, to just devastate sort of the

will of the Palestinian people.

You know, it's just hard to see him, you know, watch his funeral take place, to see what had happened, to think about his daughter, Shem, and his son, Salah, and his mom.

And we got to see some really intimate moments from Ennes' life and so many of the other journalists' lives that were killed a couple of days ago.

We got to see when his mom was being interviewed by another journalist who was Ennes' close friend, who had been killed last year.

And I had posted just in memory of Ismail, another journalist a year ago who had been killed.

And so, you know, you saw a video surface of Ismail.

interviewing Ennes' mom and her saying how Ennes was stubborn and

was such a troublemaker and that as long as Ennis was refusing to leave Gaza, that his mom was going to refuse to leave Gaza.

And

this is,

I think for us, it's just, you know, who else are we going to lose?

It's been

now close to over 22 months.

Who else are we going to lose?

Somebody that we've become intimately familiar with.

I never met Ennis.

I've never spoken to him.

I've never sent him a text message, but he was a part of my life.

Just like I've never met Hind, the six-year-old that was in the car that called the Palestinian Red Crescent operator and was asking for somebody to come and save her as an Israeli tank was nearby and had unloaded 300 or some bullets into the car that she was in.

I never met Hind, but I felt like I got to intimately see this child's last moments and it's something that still haunts me.

I never met her mother who was screaming for the world to help somebody who needs to save her daughter.

I never met Soul of My Soul, the grandfather who we got to watch carry the body of his granddaughter.

And the only thing that he could take with him was

the earring that she had on.

And then a year later, watch him be killed in an airstrike.

I mean, it's just so absurd what's happening in this moment.

It just feels surreal.

Like, what timeline are we living in?

What is this?

What kind of world do we exist in?

Where it's like you get to meet some of these people through screens, or you hear about them, or you see them in the hospitals.

And then you watch as

time after time after time, it's like people who seem to have the most precious souls or are the definition of what it means to be like an innocent person.

You just watch them get targeted, and their killing has become normalized.

So, I mean, it's a very long-winded answer to say, it just you start to wonder, you start to look out and wonder, what is it about being Palestinian, or what is it that kind of suddenly makes it okay for for them to be killed, or maimed, or wounded, or, you know, forced to flee their homes and be herded around like sheep?

It's, it's tough.

I mean, it's tough.

And I've got two daughters.

So,

you know, they're one is four, Maryam is four, and Batud is a year and a half.

And I just wonder, I don't know how to explain to them when they grow up about this time period.

I think about that all the time.

What am I going to say to them when they grow up about this period that we're living through?

Doctor, can you tell us about your your family, your family that is there, and how you ended up here?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, my family is originally from the Gaza Strip and they had moved around in Palestine over time.

And right now, they're mostly based in suburbs of Jerusalem.

And in the 80s, my father, in an effort to complete his education as an electrical engineer, decided to come to the United States.

And he decided to come to Chicago because he had a cousin who was here.

And that's really, that's generally how a lot of Palestinians end up in different parts of the states.

It's like you got a cousin who's in Cleveland, Ohio, and he says, you know, it's not bad out here.

You can come and make a better life for yourself or you can earn a decent wage out here.

And so we had a cousin who was in Chicago from the, from the 70s.

But Palestinians were sort of laying some roots down in the United States, in Chicago from the 50s and 60s.

And so you'll see the diaspora is kind of segregated in the United States based on the village or the city that they're from.

And we've all got our like, you know, we've got our different kinds of competitions between cities and villages.

And, you know, everybody thinks that their village is the best or that they've got, you know, they make the best food.

And so my father came in the 80s and then my mom followed him shortly after.

She came in the late 80s.

And I ended up being born in Cook County Hospital on the south side of Chicago.

So

that's really how we ended up.

We've got a decent amount of family who came over here, came to the United States, but still the majority of them are still in Palestine.

And most of them are in Jerusalem in the West Bank.

In fact, my wife and two daughters, as well as my mom, they're there in the West Bank right now.

And my wife and two daughters were just in Hebron.

And my mom is in Ramallah right now.

But yeah, that's kind of what my childhood looked like was most summers, most of the time it was going back.

And I remember the very first time I visited Palestine, my uncle, I went with my uncle's family.

I was probably four and I was turning five.

And it was during the first intifada.

And the first intifada is, this is like, you hear the word intifada used a lot right now, especially against Zoran in New York.

It's like, you keep saying intifada.

But growing up, I remembered it as one of those moments where, you know, it directly translates into the word uprising.

But the way I understood what Intifada was, was Palestinians across all different parts of Palestine, Gaza, West Bank, were basically rising up and asking for the right of self-determination to really have a chance to determine what their futures looked like.

And I'll give you an example of a moment that deeply sort of affected my family, but every family has a story from the first Intifada in the late 80s and 90s.

My cousin, Esam, was 17 years old, and his father was in Israeli prison.

And he joined a demonstration, nonviolent demonstration, to ask for better rights in prisons, conditions for his father.

I mean, he wanted to be able to visit his father more.

He wanted his father to be able to have better access to health care while he was in prison.

And he was shot at one of these demonstrations.

And I was there at the time that he was shot.

And I remember he had gone to the hospital, and it was clear that he was in really critical condition.

And he ended up dying.

And I just remember that moment distinctly because his father, who was in prison,

was allowed to leave prison for one day to bury his only son, his 17-year-old son, and then had to go right back to prison.

I remember seeing my uncle as a five-year-old sort of coming out and seeing so many people are gathered around and, you know, not really understanding the gravity of the situation, but understanding something serious was happening.

And one thing I mentioned from that moment that, again, it's like this sort of discrepancy between how the, and I don't know what better word to use, but let's say the West views Palestinians and versus how I understood and got to understand what it means to be Palestinian is Assam's mom, who's no longer with us and was my aunt, I remember that he

had loved orange juice.

And at some point during his hospital stay, when he was recovering, I guess he had a moment where he was awake and was lucid and he asked her for a glass of orange juice.

But by the time she had gotten it for him, that, you know, he had already sort of slipped back into this unconsciousness.

And I remember like the rest of her life, she couldn't, you know, hear somebody offer her juice and never drank orange juice again.

And it's like you just knew like, you know, that's how much she loved Isam is like she couldn't even hear the word or somebody couldn't offer her orange juice.

Like that's how deep the love was.

But then you like flip now, and I heard, like, you know, this viral clip is circulating of like Megan Kelly talking about how Palestinian mothers are willingly starving their children.

You're like, you have never met a Palestinian before.

You've never met a Palestinian dad or mom.

You don't get how deep and intense that love is, you know, how passionate sort of they feel about their children.

It's the same thing with Netanyahu.

He went on this Nelka Boys podcast.

And the way he was referring to Palestinian women, in Gaza, too, specifically, he said, oh,

you know, Palestinian women,

they're property.

That's what they are.

They're property.

You know, they are nothing and they have no rights.

And you're like, dude, you have never met a Palestinian woman.

You never met my mom.

You've never met my wife, my grandma.

You don't know.

anything.

You don't know what you're talking about.

And it's like Gaza is one of the only places in the world, by the way, that there are more women who are studying and graduating with computer science degrees than men.

So you don't know anything about us.

You have no idea just how intelligent Palestinians are, but specifically Palestinian women.

Like you just don't.

And I just hate hearing it.

You know, I think about all of the people that I grew up with who helped raise me, who helped make me who I am.

And instead, you've got these people who are trying to make these caricatures or two-dimensional characters of them.

So it's,

sorry, I mean, I know you just kind of asked about my family, but it's like, I feel like they're so, like, there are these amazing characters and stories behind them.

And, you know, you just kind of want to acknowledge them a little bit.

Yeah.

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I have so many questions, but all of your answers seem to go back to this idea that there's some

what must have been over a very long period of time,

very intentional dehumanization and otherification

of Palestinian people.

We don't get to this point in witnessing firsthand an absolute intentional genocide as an international community if there isn't this pre-existing condition where we have somehow agreed

that this is okay

or everything Israel says is correct.

Like,

when

and how did that happen to us?

How did we lose touch

with humanity and life so specifically with your people?

Yeah, I think it's, there's been this dehumanization campaign for obviously my entire life, but it's been going on for a very long time.

And it goes back to even some of the leaders of Israel.

It goes far back as, you know, Golda Maiyer.

There's this sort of famous quote attributed to this, the first female prime minister of Israel.

And she's this sort of figurehead that, you know, was a sort of a titan in American politics, even the way she would influence different parts of foreign policy in America.

In fact, they say that President Biden was really affected by kind of her, how she spoke about things, and she influenced a lot of his disposition towards the Middle East and Palestinians.

But she had a quote, and she had said once that there will be peace when Palestinians love their children more than they hate us.

And you can see sort of these are the roots that are being planted when you're talking about Palestinians, when you're talking about really making them sort of these as close to animals as possible.

I mean, you can, you see it.

It's riddled, not just in Israeli media, but you see it everywhere.

And there's this really, really incredible former New York Times journalist.

Her name is Muna Shalevi.

And she talked about just the words that are being used when you talk about Palestinians and even kind of referring to the incidents that may happen, instead of saying somebody was killed, like Enas was assassinated, Enas was killed, you'll say, you know, Enos died.

And then they'll also mention some ridiculous, you know, claim against these people, right?

You somehow legitimize what the Israelis are saying, right?

The Israelis are denying that they're targeting women or children, or that, you know, the Israelis say that these aid workers also doubled as terrorists.

And you can just so quickly then suddenly make this

death death complicated, this killing complicated.

It's incredibly tragic in nature.

And somehow they've created that avenue to make you think like, so maybe this person was dubious somehow.

And that's been going on for a very, very long time.

And

I think it gets at the heart of how you do what you do and how the world sort of sits idly by.

If you can dehumanize these people to a point where suddenly you say, we're better than they are.

And the way that they they think about things is wrong.

Then you can rationalize in your mind how fighter jets can just absolutely level an entire area, regardless of who's in that area.

And to me, I think, again, I bring up Hind Rajab so much because it was so devastating to watch this six-year-old girl get in a car with her family.

and head towards the south because the Israeli military said, your home is going to be bombed.

So go south.

If you want to be safe go south and as she's heading south in this car a tank fires on that car and you have to hear sort of her cousin Layen who's 15 at the time and Hend is six they call 911 and you hear this you hear that voice recording and you hear this young girl 15 years old saying you know we've been shot and we've been attacked and everybody in the car is dead except me and my youngest cousin and then you hear bullets fire into a car you hear the yelling of these girls and then a a moment later, you hear the voice of a six-year-old saying, Leanne, who initially called, she's dead, and now I'm here.

And that audio was so hard to listen to because,

you know, she's this young six-year-old who is terrified.

And she's separated from her mom, who was in a different car.

She was with her uncle and their family.

And you hear her tell the operator, she says, I'm scared.

Please come get me.

Come get me right now.

Please, where are you?

And then she's piecing together the scenes for you, a six-year-old describing that there is a tank nearby.

And we hear this call for three hours.

She's on the phone for three hours with the operator.

And

there's a moment where the operator says, Let's pray together, just so you can kind of get through this.

Let's pray together.

And she's saying, you know, oh, God, keep me safe.

Oh, God, you know, protect me.

Oh, God, allow me to reach safety.

And

towards the end of the call, you know, Hind starts to talk less and less.

And it's clear that she's bleeding to death.

And the operator says, she goes, Hind,

why are you not talking as much?

Keep talking to me.

And she said, every time I talk, blood comes out of my mouth.

And I don't want to get my clothes dirty.

My mom doesn't want me to get my clothes dirty.

And that was it.

That was the last thing that you hear.

And there was this, again, this heroic crew named Ahmed and Yusuf, these two paramedics who find out that there's a girl in Gaza City that's entrapped in a car, family members are dead around her, and they hop into their ambulance, they get clearance from Israel, permission to go and reach Hind.

And when they were less than 50 meters away from Hind, their car gets hit with a missile by the Israeli military and both of them die.

And to me, We never get a chance to find out their names or who they were.

You know, you don't get to hear about who Ahmed din Yusuf is in the New York Times or the Washington Post.

You know, of course, not on Fox or any of these other programs that are trying to report on what's happening there.

Nobody hears the audio.

You don't need to speak Arabic to hear Hin's voice and to know that this little girl doesn't deserve to be in this situation, doesn't deserve what's happening to her.

But the reason I mentioned her story, because one of the moments in this conflict, in the genocide that was sort of being carried out that really pissed me off.

I mean, like,

was, there was just so much rage is when they were referring to what happened to Hind, some

newscaster on some program, I don't even remember, you know, who, you can kind of look this clip up, but she refers to her as a, you know, the Palestinian woman.

Who refers to a six-year-old as a Palestinian woman?

Like, there's something almost intentional about referring to Hind, a six-year-old.

Like, that's a baby.

You know, that's a little kid.

That's how you should be describing that person.

And you can find these moments all across anytime there's a reference to Palestinians.

I see Jake Tapper before, before October 7th, before anything, I remember him talking, you know, when he's talking about Palestinian, he's making sure the word terrorist is closely followed afterwards.

You talk about

the way that Palestinians think about Israel.

Anytime they talk about Palestinians, it's always some sort of violent attitude towards Israel.

And at some point, you know, even throughout this, I just felt like, hey, we exist without Israel.

Like, you don't have to mention Israel when you're talking about Palestinians.

We've got this rich culture, this amazing history.

You would, you know, I would love, love, for example, for you guys to come to Palestine and me to take you around, just to show you around.

I would love to show you Hebron, Ramallah, Jerusalem, and show you like all of our little mom and pop shops that you guys could try.

Like, I don't even have to mention, you know, Israel or the occupation or apartheid.

You know, like we exist independently of that, but somehow it ties us to it always.

Anytime we're mentioned, and it ties us as somehow we are the aggressors or somehow we, and I, that's something that just kind of, especially at this point, it's just so frustrating for me.

Yeah.

I'm shocked

by how many Americans who certainly have a responsibility to understand what is happening because of our absolute support and complicity in this genocide.

Americans must must

understand

more.

And I am so surprised by how many people still say, well, this started on October 7th.

It's unbelievable.

Can you tell us

how this started?

Yeah, of course.

And I think that's such an important point because it's so clear how major of a role the United States plays in what's happening.

And I think if, you know, there's a organization too when I was growing up, it was called like If Americans Knew, because the thought is if we, if Americans really understood what the context was, they probably, they wouldn't be comfortable with what's happening.

They wouldn't be comfortable with essentially subsidizing an occupation, an apartheid, and now a genocide,

especially given some of the things that we could be focusing on here.

But I mean, I think it's important for people to understand that, and I don't want to kind of make it a history lesson, but just to understand like from a personal perspective,

you know, 1948, there is this sort of, or I should say 1947, post-World War II, you know, it's clear that the way things that were done before World War II and what led to World War II can't happen anymore.

And you have this sort of all of these horrific events that take place.

You have this, they have the Holocaust and you have sort of carpet bombing and the dropping of atomic bombs.

I mean, humans were really terrible to each other in World War II.

And as a result of that, there's sort of this moment where things need to change.

And as a part of that, it was sort of this idea that Jewish people needed a homeland of their own, a state of their own, especially given the sort of what anti-Semitism in Europe facilitated.

I mean, it facilitated the extermination of an entire people.

And I think there was a movement that had already existed prior to World War II that saw an opportunity to have that homeland in Palestine.

And I think it all starts, I think the injustice and unfairness all starts with one of the first acts of the United Nations.

They want to do a partition of Palestine.

And I would just ask anybody to look at what that partition looked like.

There is an Arab majority that was existing and living on that land that was told by the UN that you would be getting close to 46 to 48 percent of the land that you were living on and that there would be 50 some percent of it that would be used to create the state of Israel.

And from that moment, I think, is really why you see where we're at today.

Of course, there were farmers and Palestinians and people in Jerusalem who were

seeing this plan and saying, this is absurd.

There's no way we could accept it.

And then every moment from then on was just sort of riddled with dispossession of land and this moment in our history that we refer to as the Nakbah or aka the catastrophe.

I mean, that's how we refer to it.

It's translated as the catastrophe.

And everybody has a story from the nakbah.

And in fact, we have our, we have in Chicago, we have Little Palestine.

I hope you guys get to come to Little Palestine too.

Honestly, I'd love to host you guys.

So that's an open invitation.

But you see all of these, you know, I mentioned kind of the villages and the competition.

There are villages that no longer exist.

And there's still people who are descendants from those villages, villages like Deir Yassin.

And they,

you'll see them here in Chicago, and they still refer to those moments.

You see people who had actually lived in 1948 when the Nakba took place.

And they tell you kind of how, you know, how things unfolded.

And it was from that moment that we sort of get to arrive at the point that we get.

You know, 1948 is a very pivotal moment.

But then in 1967, for example, my mom was living in Jerusalem at the time in 1967.

And there was this, you know, six-day war that took place.

And essentially, the Israelis, as they were growing, as this young national is growing and becoming more supported by the U.S.

and their military is getting stronger and they're becoming more of a power, they are also acquiring more land.

But what does that mean?

Like, what does it mean when this country gets, you know, more powerful?

I'll tell you from my family's perspective.

1967, my mom is living in Silwan, which is a suburb of Jerusalem.

And suddenly the Israeli military is outside of her home, giving her family 15 minutes to grab any belongings that they have.

And she tells me, she was a young girl at the time.

She was five years old.

She says she remembers holding on to sort of her teddy bear and watching the house get demolished and crying and her family having to find somewhere else to live.

And that's kind of, this is kind of how things have gone for so many families, losing their homes, having to move, family members losing their lives in the process of this.

military growing stronger and really occupying more land and land.

And that's, I think, once you understand that's the history of the last 75 years, then you can, I think, really understand how things have unfolded and the presence of, you know, what the Israeli military means for Palestinians.

I mean,

I grew up thinking it was normal to be going through these military checkpoints as you're moving from city to city in Palestine.

as you're sort of going from Ramallah to Bethlehem or Hebron or any of these really historic cities, just having to stop at a checkpoint, a bunch of soldiers there checking documents, and then you've got to move through it.

And some days it's shut down.

Some days there's raids that are taking place.

I thought that that was really normal until I was old enough to travel to Europe and go to other areas and realize, oh, I mean, like, that's what it means when they say occupation.

It's like your movements are controlled.

You know,

everything that you do has to take into consideration this military entity.

And that's dictating kind of what happens, whether it's going to school, work, or whatever it is.

And so, you know, October 7th took place.

And yes, that's a very like important moment in this juncture that we're at.

But before October 7th, you know, especially in the West Bank, 2023 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in, you know, in about 10 or 15 years.

I mean, there was really this massive assault happening in Jenin refugee camps and across the West Bank.

The settlers were expanding and just being able to take as much land as they need.

And I think that's another component of this is this idea of Israeli settler.

And, you know, it's actually, if you see this, if you see just how they interact with Palestinians and this sort of entitlement that Israeli settlers have, it's bizarre.

I mean, they are showing up, you know, really just essentially taking land from Palestinians, really saying, this is mine.

I want this now.

So I'm going to take it.

I mean, that's the attitude that you're dealing with.

And you feel it.

And I mean,

recently there was the famous documentary last year that won the Oscar, No Other Land, but one of their, sort of one of the crew, one of the cameramen on that show, he recorded himself getting shot and being killed.

You can see it now.

I mean,

it's been released and it's in the public, but he got shot by an Israeli settler.

And this Israeli settler was just wanting to move Palestinians away and grab more land in Hebron.

And so that's the context that Palestinians have been living in for the last 75 years.

It's sort of like dispossession of your land, you know, the wide-scale assault on civilians that are there, the way that you're essentially given a different system, and it's all under

some sort of military rule.

And then it's just this abject violence that everybody's dealt with, that everybody has experienced and has a story about.

And so, you know, for anybody to really kind of, especially even here in the United States, it's so, it's so disingenuous, especially if somebody's a politician or an elected official, somebody that's dealing with our foreign policy, for you to just pretend like, hey, this has all just been taking place over the last 22 months.

I mean, you're not only missing the entire story, but you're purposely framing it in a way that you suddenly create villains and bad guys on the Palestinian side.

Yes.

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Okay, so 1948, there's one way to say it is partition

that's loaded as well.

But

from that moment on,

there are an Israel and a Palestine, but an Israel that has complete control over Palestine.

I mean, what comes in, what and who goes out, what kind of supplies, who travels where, who goes to school, who is incarcerated, and for whatever arbitrary means, that occupation has been in effect since that point in time.

No, so in 1948, what I would say is from 1948 to 1967 is the ethnic cleansing phase of this, like the most devastating ethnic cleansing phase, which hasn't stopped, it's still going, but that's the moment where 750,000 Palestinians are dispossessed from their homes.

And then the other Palestinians that are in what is now the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, West Bank, they are basically rejecting.

this UN partition plan.

However, the Israelis, before they had become the Israelis, but they fully embraced this idea and they're all about this and they want to move forward with it.

So what happens in 1948 is they announced an independent state of Palestine.

You have different gangs that are going city to city, violently either erasing cities.

I mean, there's a lot of really horrifying documentation about just mass slaughter in cities and the ethnic cleansing portion of this.

And there were these sort of brand new post-World War II Arab states nearby, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan.

and they decide that they are going to sort of come in there and save the Palestinians from this ethnic cleansing.

And they just get absolutely decimated.

The Israelis handedly defeat them, of course, because they are supported at this time by the United Kingdom, the British, and the US.

And so they absolutely sort of solidify, hey, we're a military presence that exists here, and we are this new nation state that's not just going to be defeated by these disorganized Arab armies that don't know, you know, really, don't even know what they are in terms of identity.

Then, as this sort of moves forward, you have very different moments in history that are actually pretty fascinating to see how the U.S.

played a role.

But that's 48.

Right away in the 50s, there's this massive crisis between Israel and Egypt and the Suez Canal.

And Eisenhower is the president at this time, and he had just suffered this heart attack and was sort of like, you know,

struggling to actually lead this country.

But he's he's very frustrated with the Israelis because they have suddenly taken on this role of like this expansionist kind of, you know, entity.

They really want to continue to move.

They want to, you know,

be a very dominant presence.

And so you see that take place while Egypt is sort of governing the Gaza Strip, Jordan is governing the West Bank, and Jerusalem is supposed to be this sort of independent international city, but the Israelis sort of control it.

And then 67 happens where the Israelis decide like they don't like this status quo.

And from that moment, from 67, 6, they were, again, another really hand, like devastating defeat to, you know, Egypt and Jordan, as well as Syria.

They basically, that's when the occupation starts of the West Bank, of the Gaza Strip, of the Golan Heights.

And so, you know, you see that's from 48 to 67.

Then in, you know, 1973, there's this very surprise war that happens.

It's called the Yom Kippur War because the Egyptians and the Syrians decide that they want to get their land back and they're going to do this surprise attack.

And initially, the Israelis are pretty surprised by this, and the Egyptians make some gains.

But again,

their military strength has continued to increase, and they've got some decent support here.

And they were able to sort of

get to a point where the gains that were initially made by the Egyptians and the Syrians were quickly erased.

And then there was this sort of deal that took place and eventually led to peace between the Israelis and Egyptians with the Egyptians getting Sinai back, but the Israelis still sort of maintaining occupation of Gaza Strip.

And then with the Syrians, they're still occupying the Golan Heights.

And then you kind of will move through what we call a phase where these other Adab states that Israel for so long has claimed are these like, you know, there's like this sort of, I guess, I don't know how else to phrase this other than propaganda that's being, you know, spilled.

But they always say, we're a tiny country.

We're the only democracy in the Middle East.

And everybody, all of our neighbors want to attack us.

Well, in 1979, they normalize and make peace with Egypt.

So basically their neighbor, especially along the Sinai and Gaza.

Then in the early 90s, they make peace and normalize with the Jordanians.

And so now suddenly all of the people that they border with have normalized relations with Israel and have peace with them and in fact help secure their borders.

And they have all of these relations.

And we've seen that trend continue until now.

So the occupation is maintained.

They become a superpower in the Middle East, one of, you know, a nuclear power that we've seen over the last 22 months.

They can unleash really hell anytime they want.

And they are also at the same time maintaining this occupation while expanding.

with settlements and acquiring land.

Even now in Syria, they've gotten to the point where they've been able to occupy more land.

And so that's really, again, I mean, again, it's like this is a nation that sort of now has also had this imperial arm, this arm that's able to occupy, and that is very well funded, advanced military, very sophisticated nuclear power that can really unleash hell on people that are nearer.

And so, is that what you see?

Because

just in the last few days, we have seen, even though Israel's military has advised against this advancement and plan, because Israel's military has said our military objectives are complete, there is no remaining military objective.

And yet,

Netanyahu's regime has said that they are going to

go and control

all of Gaza.

They are going to annex the West Bank.

is

all of this about

acquiring

through some kind of pretext the land that was always desired?

Yeah, it's, I mean, that's spot on, especially when it comes to the West Bank.

The Gaza Strip has its own sort of significance, but the West Bank has this religious significance as well.

And that's what you're seeing at play here.

You're watching the proliferation of settlements and you're watching the expansion of the military presence in the West Bank.

And the idea is that it's Judea and Samaria and that that actually belongs to the nation state of Israel.

And that the Palestinians that are present there are on borrowed time.

And even while Gaza was being absolutely flattened and erased, you see the borders of the West Bank.

You see the different camps and cities that were being leveled and the people being displaced.

There was a couple couple of weeks where the Jenin refugee camp, there were these evacuation orders, which should be referred to as displacement orders, but 40,000 people had to leave their homes forever.

And then their homes were all leveled and demolished by the Israeli military.

And the idea is it's clear what the plan is, what the intention is.

So that's the West Bank for sure.

In fact, the New York Times

in 2012, I think, maybe 2011, had this article about that plan that's at play in the West Bank.

What you do is you put settlements around all of the major city centers, and suddenly what Palestinian state are you talking about?

You can't go from my city to a city that's five minutes away without it being interrupted by a settlement and having to go around that settlement.

And so now you've got city-states all over the West Bank.

uh that are not connected to each other there's no contiguous land yeah so what do you you know there is no two-state solution and then with respect to gaza again you i mean you said it perfectly too.

Military objectives for a while now have been complete.

And one thing that really bothers me, again, because we can talk, you can look at it from a political perspective.

It's clear, Netanyahu has no intention of ending the Gaza war because that would mean it's the end of his term or it's the end of his time as prime minister.

No one is going to forgive him for the security failure of October 7th.

No one is going to forget the fact that he is a very corrupt politician who is under trial and keeps prolonging it.

No one is going to forget that.

And I think he knows that for him, as long as there's this active war in Gaza, then he's going to kind of under the guise of, hey, we're in the middle of a war.

We're not going to, you know, it's not time for elections or it's not time for me to go.

But yeah, it's definitely a political calculation what's happening in Gaza.

And the idea in Gaza is, you know, they, one of the moments that the Israeli government always refers to is like some of this failure of the disengagement.

They always talk about the disengagement from Gaza.

And this was under the prime minister Ariel Sharon,

another war criminal, who decided that 8,000 Israeli settlers in Gaza would be removed from Gaza and go to the perimeter of Gaza, or what they call the enclave of Gaza.

And then they would institute the blockade that we've seen since 2007, the siege that Gaza's been under.

You know, that's like another thing that people don't realize about the people in Gaza is they've been under this military blockade since 2007, where the air, land, sea, and electromagnetic space is under Israeli control.

So most of the people in Gaza have never left Gaza.

Most of the people in Gaza have been confined to this space.

And it's been, you know, the conditions before October 7th weren't great.

You know, they were, it was precarious from a humanitarian perspective.

It's electricity is on and then off.

Water is on and then off.

Your supplies, maybe you get them, maybe you don't.

All of that under control.

Okay.

100%.

Yeah.

I mean, even the ability to be self-sufficient, it was under attack long before October 7th.

So the electricity comes from Israel and Gazans are trying to have power plants, but it's only enough to do 10% because 10% of what Gaza needs in terms of electricity needs.

Otherwise, they're depending on that electricity to come from Israel and to be able to keep the lights on.

Same thing with the water.

Three major water pipelines come from Israel.

The ability to have a desalination plant in Gaza.

yeah, they have a couple of those, but it's not enough for the 2 million people that are there.

And so all of it is under control.

In fact, your fishermen in Gaza, which,

you know, before October 7th, you'd always see these guys early in the morning.

They're on these like surfboards and they're swimming out and they're casting their nets and they're bringing the fish back.

Well, they are only allowed to go three nautical miles from the sea.

That's an Israeli instituted limitation for Gaza's fishermen.

If you go past that, Israeli warships, which are always stationed in the Mediterranean, fire on you and you die.

I mean, it's that, that's that's the reality that exists.

And now it's much more, now there is no such thing as three nautical majors or fishermen going out, otherwise, um, you know, the starvation wouldn't be as bad.

But even that, that was under control before October 7th.

And so, yep, the, I mean, that's that's kind of what the plan has been in Palestine.

And the reason Netanyahu, who even was able to rise to power and has been, he's a really, really sort of

effective politician on the global stage and domestically.

I mean, the guy knows how to, you know, he's, for example, Trump says something, this guy jumps on it and he'll, he'll manipulate it in a way that, you know, Trump doesn't want to backtrack because he cares about how he looks and his ego and all of this.

But now Netanyahu's taking it in all these different directions.

This is someone who always survives and he thinks about how to manipulate things.

And one of the reasons that he's been able to maintain power is he's taken these far-right extremist elements and said, I promise you, I will never allow a Palestinian state to exist.

And the way that I'll do it is I'll allow Hamas to be in Gaza and have their own little, you know, control over this area.

And I'll have the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

And from time to time, we'll do what we need to do to just make that reality just a total dream,

the reality of a Palestinian state impossible.

It'll always be a dream.

And he's been very effective at that.

I think this is really important for

Americans to understand because the normalization of this

will be

the worst case scenario.

Because what you're describing, and I'm going to try to think of a way to describe it to like the American experience, but what you're describing is like, for example, with apartheid South Africa, where they set up the Bantu stands and they were like, look, we're not an apartheid state because they have their own places to live.

Or in America, it's the equivalent of

we will

remove the threat of Native people, we will kill the vast majority of them, then we will set aside inhospitable, undesirable, small enclaves of land, and then we will call that their state.

So, it would be the equivalent of saying in the contiguous United States, there are two states.

One is America, and one is

the nation of the Native Americans.

Like, and then, but normalize that internationally so that people are like, that seems fair.

And then America gets to control every single thing that comes in or out and occupies the Native American state.

Yeah.

And that's why America doesn't want us to look hard at this, because this is how America has built itself is through genocide.

So it's the unraveling of everything if we actually look hard.

What is it, Doctor, when you say

in the very beginning of this, you said, what is it about Palestine that makes people

not

rise up, that makes people say, well, it's okay that it happens to them.

When you're having your honest conversations with your friends, what is it?

And what is it about Israel that makes the rest of us allow Israel over and over again to violate every single

UN mandate, every single,

why is there never any consequences?

And the language around it.

How do we decolonize our language?

So we stop.

Anyway, what is it about Palestine that allows everybody to allow this?

And what is it about Israel that allows everybody to allow them?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, you were, you were just, you were cooking right there.

So that was, that was, you know, like amazing to kind of see the connections that you guys made.

And it's exactly kind of what so many of Palestinian thinkers have really pointed out is really look at the history and the inception of the United States, look at with respect to Israel, their close ties to apartheid South Africa, and just how things have played out on the ground.

And I think there's a couple of different things that are at play here.

First, I think about sort of again, that World War II context that sort of, you know, was in this post

World War II era.

There's also all of these different colonizing entities that exist within Africa and the Middle East as well as Asia, right?

I mean,

people forget that so many European nations had colonized so much of Africa and the Middle East, right?

France and the UK had such a major role.

And so it makes sense that first, sort of this colonial power rises in the midst of that.

And people don't like to use that word as much anymore, but that's sort of, I think it's an important term, especially when you understand the definition and understanding that

there were these,

whether you want to say,

I guess that there are like these colonial settlers that came to Palestine, came to this land, regardless of

really the plight and the persecution that they came from.

That's at the end of the day, what happened is this land is being colonized and that there are hundreds of thousands of settlers pouring into it.

And I think

there's sort of that context.

Yes, in the shadow of the Holocaust and the failures of the international community, you get these leaders that come from that.

And somebody like President Biden is the best example.

This is a guy that was born during that timeframe.

And the idea was you failed the European Jews.

You stood by as they were huddled into gas chambers and exterminated and killed by a fascist government.

And that is on everybody, right?

The Vatican Church, the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Everybody that's supposed to have stood up and defended the vulnerable populations that were being slaughtered by Hitler and the Nazis and Stalin.

Nobody did anything.

Nobody stood up.

Nobody said, you know, this is morally reprehensible.

And so there's that reaction that you have from these leaders who are saying, we have to, no matter what, support this project in Palestine.

We have to support it, whether that's with military weapons or whatever it is.

And guess what?

The Palestinians that are there, they just have to bite that.

They have to eat that loss because of what happened here.

So there's part of that.

I think the other part is sort of this incredibly effective lobby group that's international.

It's not just in the United States.

I mean, you see it in the UK, you see it in Europe, you see it all in South Africa.

You see this lobby group that has also devoted an incredible amount of resources to say that when it comes to the international community and politics and diplomatic cover, we have to be in a powerful position.

And they accomplished that.

I mean, they kind of did this really effective job of making sure that Democrat, Republican, Labor Party, Tories, wherever it is in Germany now, Italy, that regardless of whoever gets elected, right or left, there's going to be a tremendous amount of support for Israel and what is now referred to as like the exceptionalism of Israel and sort of their ability to not have to be held to the standards or the international humanitarian law.

And all of that is taking place, you know, and it's working together against the Palestinians that are there.

And so when we, you know, whenever we get together, it's always been like

any family, any cookout or barbecue, even before October 7th, it's always been sort of

this, it does not matter what happens.

It's not going to matter what red line is crossed.

It's not going to matter what story gets sort of any attention.

It won't change.

well, you know, the

facts on the ground because there will always be that sort of protection that's in place here.

And then now, you know, if you look at it now in 2025 and you start to see people are calling for boycotts and divestment and sanctions it really uncovers one thing it uncovers also

how

the israelis position themselves to have such important economic ties with so many countries not the us as much but for example ireland or the united kingdom or germany just like the economic relationship that exists that made it so that you cannot take sort of that principled approach without it being a heavy cost.

And I mean, it's a very strategic approach to things.

So there's this political effort.

There's this also

painting it as a moral and just way to support Israel as a Jewish state.

And then ultimately, there's that economic sort of tie-in, right?

Like if you hear people talk about Israel, oh, it's a tech hub and there's all of these security software and all of these different relationships that are these deep economic roots.

And I think that's made this sort of weird position that so many people find themselves in, where you're like, wait, why are they not saying anything about what's happening here?

For example, we talk about Ennas, the journalist that was killed, but two years ago, Shireen Abu Akle, who's an American Palestinian, was covering the Jenin camp, was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier.

And, you know, she, again, was another famous Palestinian journalist.

I mean, we grew up with Shireen covering the story.

And, you know, we would all mimic how she would sign off.

Everybody, every Palestinian was mimicking how Shireen would sign off

on her broadcasts, you know.

But she was hit by an Israeli sniper in Jenin refugee camp as she was covering what was happening there.

That was two years ago, a Palestinian-American.

And there has been no accountability as a result of that.

You know, you can, you can, all the condemnation statements can come as a result of that, but even the Americans, if you happen to be Palestinian,

you're not afforded the same sort of protections or advocacy by your government and elected officials, which is, again, I hope people can just at least think about that for a second and be like, and just ask why.

You know, I think that's, for me, that's at least what we talk about is we want people to ask why.

We don't want to evangelize.

I don't want to convince anybody of anything.

I don't want you to feel bad for me.

I just want you to critically think about what's happening here and ask those questions.

You spent three weeks at Al-Nassar Hospital, and you were working when I believe it came under siege.

There were bombings all around you.

You were also there well before in keeping with our conversation that you were

working on missions in Gaza for medically, even back in 2009, well before all of this period where we believe things began.

What do you want people to know about what you saw?

What do you want people to know about the thousand,

literally thousand doctors and nurses and medical workers who have been targeted and killed in the last couple of years, the 500 medical workers who have been abducted.

What do you want folks to know about what's happening in there?

I mean, I think what was really clear over a year ago is that this was an assault on life in Gaza.

And every aspect of life had been interrupted, had been attacked, had been targeted.

as early as when I was entering.

I mean, I remember going through Rafah, which is the border town between Egypt and Gaza and Palestine, and not recognizing it.

I'd been there multiple times before and just being absolutely floored at the fact that there were tents everywhere.

Rafah is a rural, you know, kind of like a pretty rural city.

And now it had over a million people there when I was there, had over a million people who were in tents.

And the second the sun set, it was totally pitch dark and black.

And you would see all of the schools that we were passing by were filled with people who had been displaced and had been converted into these shelters.

And this is within the first couple of hours of entering Gaza.

And I remember heading to the hospital.

This is the second largest hospital in Gaza.

Nasser is the second largest hospital.

And at the time that I was there, it was the largest because Shifa, which is where I would mostly work and is like the academic hub, it's like the university hospital.

It's where everybody would go, had already been raided and rendered defunct.

And I remember kind of walking through Nasser.

And if you've been through, you know, these hallways of hospitals here in the United States, Nasser is similar, except it was full of people who were displaced or injured.

I mean, families had been living in the hospital hallway for months at that time.

And there were patients who had been there, had been injured in an airstrike, who were on the floor.

And they would have all these tubes and lines in them, you know, stuff that

here we're watching, wanting to make sure that there's no infection developing, that super clean environment, that we're monitoring them, that it's clear that that's not possible because of just the overwhelming

magnitude of patients that are coming through NASA, as well as the displaced people.

And to me, I was like, this is not the Gaza that I know.

I mean, it's just so, it's completely different.

And there are so many moments from the first seconds that I was at the hospital.

And I had to sleep at the hospital because World Health Organization was organizing these medical teams from entering.

And essentially, they said, we have to limit movement as much as possible.

Otherwise, we can't guarantee any sort of safety.

So they're like, go to the hospital, be prepared to sleep in the hospital, live in the hospital, eat in the hospital.

And so I went there.

Remember, looking outside of the window of the room that I would be staying in, and it was basically like a dorm room with like six beds because all of the doctors would stay there.

And just seeing all of these tents and seeing all of the different people that were just living there trying to figure out when this horror would be over.

And looking down, you see an ambulance that had been destroyed.

You're hearing the bombing in the background.

I remember I was trying to send my wife a WhatsApp voice note because she was telling me my daughter had had a fever.

And I was trying to tell her, oh yeah, I would give Tylenol in this situation, just trying to give her, to tell her what I would do.

And I couldn't get 10 seconds in the voice note without a bomb going off in the background.

And I had to lie lie to my family about where I was going.

I mean, I told them I would be at the border and it was going to be safe, not telling them that I was going to be deployed on the inside, but it was absolutely just devastating.

And so I haven't even talked about any patients that I have seen yet.

It was just that, just this, this atmosphere that was there, the fact that all these people had lost their homes.

All these people were living out of these tents.

The kids were not in school.

They were all just roaming in the hallways of the hospital, some of them playing ring around the rosie.

Like, I mean, these are the scenes out of this hospital.

And every day in Chen Yunes, which was supposed to be, you know, in the south where people could go for safety, you're hearing the military just level neighborhood by neighborhood.

And at the hospital, it's getting closer every single day.

First, they're 11 blocks away, then they're 10 blocks away.

And ultimately, it culminates in them surrounding the hospital while we were there.

I mean, I have never, you know, I never served in the military.

I've been to many different conflict areas.

Nothing was like Gaza.

I mean, you could look out the window of the hospital and you see the tanks rolling and surrounding the hospital.

I stood outside of the emergency department.

You're hearing gunfire and you see one of the bullets, stray bullets hit the top of the hospital building.

I mean, that's sort of what you're feeling.

It's like you're in the middle of a war zone, but it's just this really tight area that's very urban and densely populated.

I mean, you know, you can walk Gaza in one day, all all from north to south.

It's less than the length of a marathon.

And, you know, just kind of seeing that space that was already so small shrink every day,

you were feeling it.

You were feeling the panic amongst the people.

You were seeing the food shortages already.

People were losing weight.

Kids were malnourished.

And you just were being overwhelmed with how many people are rolling through.

I work in the south side of Chicago at a trauma center.

We are one of the busiest trauma centers in the country.

And we are, you know, we get a tremendous amount of patients.

We would not be able to keep our doors open with the volume that Nasser was seeing in Gaza here in Chicago.

We'd not be able to handle it.

We would have to go on something called bypass, literally tell the state and the government, don't bring any more patients here.

We're at capacity.

I mean, that's what would happen if we had one day in Gaza at Nasser Hospital.

But you can't do that in Gaza.

And the doctors and the nurses there wouldn't allow that to happen.

They will keep receiving the patients and treating the patients, even if it's on the floor, even if it's with when they've lost any sort of gloves or alcohol swabs to clean areas.

And

I watched this group of people, these doctors and these nurses, these local Palestinians who were experiencing all of the same things that the rest of the population were experiencing.

Their kids were not able to go to school.

The bombs were dropping.

The families were living out of tents.

The elderly relatives had to walk 10, 15 minutes just to use the bathroom to find an outhouse.

And they were showing up every day,

not getting paid because, you know, everything is going to hell in Gaza, not getting paid at all, and working 24-hour shifts.

They would show up because, again, you can't move back and forth as easily.

They'd show up for 24 hours, be off for 24 hours, come back for 24 hours.

And there was this relentless attack on their communities, on their neighborhoods.

And they were showing up and they were doing everything that they could.

And you watched as not only were they being targeted, like you mentioned, so many of them were dying.

In fact, one of the first days I was there, I pulled one of the doctors who I knew from before us

and we went through my pictures of Gaza.

And it's a bizarre thing we were doing.

I was just asking, how is this person?

Is he still alive?

Is he okay?

What happened to this person?

What happened to this person?

What happened to this person?

They are being specifically targeted.

Even back when I was there, they were saying,

if you were wearing a white coat or you were a first responder or something, that you were more likely to to be killed and these guys were showing up every day on the back of donkey carts because there's no fuel that's entering and they can't you know put gas in their car to show up they're walking two miles early in the morning to show up for the 24-hour shift they're hungry and they're still showing up and they're still treating their patients and they're being handcuffed in every which way literally and figuratively you know they're not getting the medicine that they need they're not getting the supplies that they want they're not getting the money that they need to be able to support their families while they're working here.

And And then almost every one of the hospitals, one by one, surrounded by the Israeli military, raided, and many of these healthcare workers abducted or left for dead.

And, you know, I just think that they don't get, again, you talk about dehumanization.

What do you hear about any of these doctors, especially, for example, Dr.

Hossam Abu Safiyya, a pediatrician from the north?

He's a Hamas operative.

He's a militant, something.

And you're like, this, I mean, how does this, how does anybody let this stuff fly?

This guy wrote two op-eds in the New York Times.

This guy is a dual citizen.

He has a citizenship from Kazakhstan and he has, and he's a Palestinian.

He could have left at any moment, but instead he's sitting in the hospital, begging the world to allow the pediatric hospital that he's running to stay open.

He gets injured.

within a bombing, a shrapnel hits him in the leg.

He loses his oldest son, Ibrahim, during the siege on his hospital.

His 17-year-old son killed by an Israeli drone.

He buries him in the compound of the hospital, prays over his body.

And in the last moments, before he gets abducted and he's still in an Israeli prison right now, you watch this pediatrician in his white coat walk up to a tank.

And the tank door opens and it's these three soldiers basically

shaking his hand and kind of trying to laugh with him.

And then they abduct him.

No charges, nothing.

I mean, that's he's, you know, one thing we always talk about is in the north of Gaza, every single director of a hospital has either been killed or has been arrested and is still in Israeli prison for all these northern hospitals.

I mean, are all of these doctors who spent 10 years getting educated, somehow they're all, we were supposed to believe that they're all military people?

I mean, as somebody who's been there multiple times and met multiple people of them, I will put my neck on the line and say, it's all garbage.

It's all nonsense.

But the fact that we've gotten to that point where it's like, hey, this pediatrician that you saw every day coming from the hospital asking for the babies who who are in the incubators to be protected, you know, oh, he's not a terrorist.

I just hate that we even have to have that conversation.

It's such a distraction.

Even with Ennes, the journalist, it's like, the guy was covering every single day.

Every day he's on the mic.

Every day he's showing you what's going on.

He's going to areas that were bombed.

This is the guy that you're telling me is the necessary military target?

Like, no, you know, and that's one thing I wish I could just tell you all of their, all of the stories of who these people were.

You know, like to me, Enna, I'm not going to respond to you calling him whatever it is.

No, he's a father of two.

He's a loyal son.

He's a loving husband.

He's a guy that's in his late 20s who was so well-spoken, so eloquent, just knew, had his way with words.

That's who he was.

Not whatever the hell the Israeli military is trying to say about him.

Dr.

Hassan, just one of the most...

incredibly talented physicians that you could see, just relentless.

A bomb hits the hospital.

I text him and ask how he's doing and is everything okay?

And he responds and he tells me, I think in two days I'll have things back up again and we'll be able to have the lights on.

Like that's his mindset.

Like, there's no way I'm going to let this hospital go down.

There's no way I'm going to let these kids down that are over here.

You know, and I mean, there's just so many of these different folks who are just incredible people.

I just, you know, you just have so much love for them.

It's like, no, instead we're dealing with these accusations.

Like, that's what I have to respond.

I can't tell you about, you know, Thabat Salim, this young newborn nursery doctor.

She's brilliant, one of so many doctors, international doctors got to work with her.

And they would just talk about like, you know, you, as doctors, sometimes you talk about like the clinical skills.

And they're just like, the way she did it, I mean, just incredible.

She's in her 20s, you know, she's a brand new doctor.

And you're watching some of these experienced neonatal doctors just watching this young Palestinian just show up every day and just amazing with the kids, amazing with these newborn babies, these sick kids, doing the right thing, giving them a chance at surviving.

And then you find out that she goes home to her tent and gets hit and gets killed in the process of this.

And it's like, no one is mentioning Thibet.

No one is mentioning any of these other workers that, you know, we just lost.

And it's not just a Palestinian loss.

I always,

having worked literally with these people and seeing how brilliant and just innovative they are, it's like it's a loss for humanity.

And nobody gets it.

Nobody wants to say that out loud because instead you're dealing with some propagandist who's trying to divert and distract.

And one last thing I'll say about that, about my experience and the experience of everybody that's sort of come back to is,

there's not, it's very clear what was taking place in Gaza, like just clear cut.

Like, it doesn't matter whether you are a hospital, a school, a house, an apartment building, a restaurant.

It was going to be attacked.

It was going to be demolished.

It was going to be destroyed.

And, you know, your ability to sort of exist in Gaza was being attacked.

But there's something especially cruel and evil about going after the healers.

It's like, you definitely want to make sure that if you survive something, that you suffer intensely and then you die.

Like, there's a period of suffering that's going to be inflicted on you because we're going to kill the doctors and the nurses.

We're going to destroy the ambulances.

We're going to abduct them.

And we're going to make sure the hospitals don't have what they need.

And that's why this malnutrition starvation thing was so devastating, especially with these premature babies.

It's like you're watching these kids suffer because the hospital and the doctor is not able to do their job.

And the reason they're not able to do their job is because there's some general.

or the prime minister, the defense minister has decided that they're going to keep the things that you need to save this person's life.

And to me, you know, that sort of,

lack of any sort of concern for human life,

that sacredness of human life, that preciousness, that being disregarded to accomplish whatever it is that you want to accomplish.

I mean, to me, that's what I struggle with as a physician, and I was only there for a short period of time.

I can't imagine.

the people that are putting up with this every single day, like the moral injury that you suffer as a result of that.

You said that

there is no red line.

When you are talking to your friends, you all understand that it doesn't seem to matter what happens,

that there is no line where everyone will say, that is enough, and rally.

What are we working towards then?

What is the hope?

What is the vision?

Is there one?

And what do you need?

or hope for from Americans who are slowly becoming unpropagandized and starting to understand for real what's going on and don't want to stand for it.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's such an important question because I think at this stage, I'll just be honest, I mean, I feel so broken and beaten down, you know, and I ask myself that all the time, like, what are we doing here?

I've met with over

200 congressional offices.

Obviously, I've met with multiple members of the Biden administration, multiple EU and United Nations leaders.

And you feel like you're speaking into this void, you're yelling into this void.

And I've changed my approach to now wanting to be able to share the stories and the voices because I don't want them to be numbers.

I don't want them to just sort of be these casualties of war when they're actually victims of genocide.

And it's like, I want to just honor them by saying who they were, talking about them, sharing their stories.

And I feel like that's a role that many Americans can play and will lead to more justice.

I hope at least, you know, just being able to say who these people were, where they came from, how they are so similar to you as a person and the things that you want in your life and the things that you want for your family members, there's no difference there.

And these are who they were.

They're artists, they're musicians, they're doctors, they're nurses, they're engineers.

And I really want to tackle that dehumanization piece that we kind of talked about.

To me, like that is, that needs to be the center of the fight here.

But we've got, I think, this movement that's growing that's wondering here in the United States specifically.

It's like, wait, what is the purpose of this relationship right now?

Like, what are we actually doing here?

We have so many problems, obviously, at home.

And so.

I think just starting to ask the question of like, why are we paying so much money for fighter jets and 1,000 and 2,000-pound bombs and these tank shells and the artillery and the ammunition?

Why are we paying so much money for this?

Why are we sending it overseas to this country when we've got this homeless epidemic here in the United States when we don't even have health care for all?

You know, you know, Israel has universal health care.

It's like, what are we doing here?

And do we really also want to be dragged in by

this maniac, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and israel cats and all of the people of members of his cabinet we really want to make american soldiers be dragged into another middle east war like what was going to be the case with iran so like if we can ask those questions i think it leads you also to wondering who palestinians are just being critical and wondering how is everything in this country

like bipartisan like i mean everything in this country is very partisan i should say there's all of these polarizing issues that we talk about everything is the democrats feel this way Republicans feel this.

Why is this one issue?

You know, why is it so universally accepted by both parties, the majority of both parties?

Why are we signing off on these limitless checks?

It seems like everything in this country is not going so great right now, but instead, the steadfastness of supporting you know the Israeli military and the Israeli policies.

And why is that the case?

Why is that happening?

And so that's what I think it starts there.

I think it starts with asking your representative, why did you vote this way?

Why did you vote for $30 billion?

Why did you vote and say that um for example that one of the votes that came in i know it's symbolic but it still it tells you something why did we vote to rename the west bank jude and samaria that was actually something that was introduced into congress why is ambassador huckabee the U.S.

ambassador to Israel, why does he sound like the Israeli ambassador to the world?

Yes.

You should see how this guy talks.

I mean, it's insane.

The way he's talking about Palestinians and starvation.

I mean, he is

on X the other day, he's picking a fight with the British prime minister on Israel's behalf.

Like, what are you doing?

Aren't you supposed to be this diplomat, this ambassador, the top diplomat in Israel?

And instead, you're fighting Kir Starmer and making fun of him and telling him that he's stupid?

Like, I mean, why is that?

I think Americans should be asking, like, what's going on here?

Why is that the case?

And also, I mean, at the end of the day, ask ourselves, like, our country, especially if you're like a patriot, if you're like, I love the United States, red, white, and blue.

Like, think about what this country is doing and how we're, what that means for this country's sort of position in the world, authority in the world.

This is something that I think is affecting America's standing in the world, separate from

the moral ramifications of supporting a genocide.

Like, you're never going to recover from that.

But you're standing in the world.

I mean, you are leaving a void for other nefarious or bad actors to fill that void.

And to me, that world for our children or that world for future generations is going to look a lot worse if we continue this path as Americans, as the United States.

So I think that's the steps that I really think most Americans should consider.

I mean, you have every right to ask your representative why they're voting the way that they're voting or why they're making the statements.

They work for you.

They don't work for the Israeli lobby.

So ask them.

They owe you those answers.

They should be taking your meetings, especially these reps in Congress and your senators.

I mean, I obviously ask them that.

But it also gets even more hyper-local than that.

I mean, I'll tell you in Illinois, I found out pretty recently that we're a huge purchaser of Israeli bonds.

And after October 7th, to support the Israeli economy, we bought millions of more Israeli bonds.

Why is that the case when you're telling me that the city of Chicago may not be able to fulfill its pensions for people that have worked for the city for 30 or 40 years?

Why is that the case when there's a budget crisis in Illinois?

I mean, that's that's, I don't think people understand, and this is on purpose, they're purposely being left in the dark.

I don't think they understand how deep it gets here in the United States and how hyper-local it can get, especially when you talk about a powerful entity like APEC.

They don't play games, they're not just showing up for the presidential election, they're there for your local elections, for your mayors, and then all the way up for your state senate and your state reps, all the way until they are ready to be in Congress and Senate.

And then they show up and say, hey, remember us?

We made you.

Now we own you.

Like, I mean, that's, you know,

I think think most Americans are not interested in that.

And you're starting to see it.

You're starting to see some really surprising voices, right?

Like, I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene calling it a genocide, saying America first, saying no lobby groups.

I mean, I give her credit for that.

And I'm also a little upset or annoyed with, I think, the progressive, like, I guess there's, what's the word?

I forgot what the title is, but like progressive except for Israel.

Like, I'm a progressive.

Here are the values that I espouse, except when it comes to Israel.

I'm not an aggressive.

I'm actually a conservative or I'm a neocon or I'm a war hawk.

But like these voices are fascinating to me.

And I don't think that as, if you're on the left, I don't think that we should be just sitting there and say, well, Marjorie Taylor Greene, she

believes in certain fascist policies or has these racist opinions.

We should be asking ourselves, why did she take this position?

Why did she say that?

That's very random why somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, or Theo Vaughan, or

this like on the right group of people.

Why are they taking this position?

Is there something that's there?

And why are people like Pete Buddhajej, who is so eloquent, so well spoken on everything else when it comes to this issue, suddenly is not able to give you a clear answer?

Corey Booker.

Oh my God, Corey Booker.

I mean, like all of these people who want to like wave the flag of

liberty

forever.

I mean, it does tell you.

But why?

Like, why are you doing this?

Because Because like I try to explain to the kids, don't be like Gen X.

Don't be like me and go through your whole life and think the government represents the people.

No, we understand capitalism.

We know when a celebrity starts speaking about American Eagle forever, we know it's because they're being paid by a company.

And that's why they are suddenly obsessed with this thing.

Okay.

The politicians are just like celebrities who get sponsored by a company.

That's right.

They are not representing us.

That's the terror.

It's like, oh, it doesn't matter what the majority of Americans are for or against anymore because they don't care.

They

are bought and paid for by APAC.

And so that's it.

For me, it's like complete campaign reform or we're fucked forever.

We had it.

We had a chance at campaign finance reform, right?

And then Citizens United, our Supreme Court, decided that corporations were people.

This is something that happened and is exactly why we're in the position that we're in.

It's exactly why Obama had to instead go for the marketplace instead of universal health care.

It's exactly why you have the most recent, what was it?

I forgot how many, but close to a billion dollars was raised for this last election for each presidential candidate.

I mean, that's an insane amount of money that you're spending on elections.

I mean, it's insane to me.

What could you do with that money?

The campaign finance reform has to happen.

And I remember being at the DNC in July.

And, you know, Biden had announced, I'm not going to run again.

And there were a lot of people who were really upset with this policy in Palestine and saying we're never going to vote for Biden and saw Kamala and said, give us something to rally behind you.

I remember I was there.

I mean, there's this uncommitted vote in Michigan, which is a huge, obviously, it's a swing state.

And you have this group that represents over 100,000 Michigan people that are ready, looking for anything to get behind Kamala.

They don't want to support the other guy.

And I just remember that you are showing up.

It's in Chicago.

The United Center is where all the events are happening.

And you just look up at the suites and all of these suites were being sold to the highest bidder, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, whether it was, you know,

Wall Street or it was pharmaceutical companies or it was whatever special interests you can think about.

And then her refusing.

to platform a Palestinian on that stage.

I don't know what Kamala thinks about Palestinians, but I know who she's answering to and making sure that they're not on that stage at that point.

Like it's clear these are the groups that are dictating what's happening, you know, to the Democratic Party, to the Republican Party.

It's why you're, our speaker, Mike Johnson, was in Israel a few days ago.

He's sitting there and he's at the wall and he's talking about why the West Bank is not the West Bank anymore.

You know, he's saying these things and you're like, why?

This guy is, it's very random.

You're the speaker of the house.

Like, shouldn't you be in the United States, you know, talking to constituents, figuring out what Americans need, but instead you're like sitting there lobbying for this foreign country.

So again, I think you're 100% right.

I think you've got to get the money out of politics.

You've got, and I see some changes.

I mean, like the Zoran Mamdani campaign in New York City is huge.

It shows you that there is still power in the people.

And it's really about if we organize well as a collective and we say these are the demands that we have as your constituents, that matters.

You know, I mean, all the DoorDash money couldn't get Andrew Cuomo near, you know, Mamdani in the polls.

You know, all of of the billionaires that were threatening to leave New York City, it did not make a difference when people showed up to vote.

It was about rent affordability, it was about the fact that you weren't gonna, uh, Gaza was a big, it was a big portion of that in New York City.

And

I, I mean, that's I do see like that's like the light at the end of the tunnel for me.

Wow, I cannot tell you how grateful we are to you for this time.

And I can tell you that

we are

committed,

We are with you.

Amanda and I are fifth generation Irish Americans, so we know what occupation looks like.

We know what manufactured famine looks like.

We know what all this horseshit looks like.

And we are with you, and we're gonna keep going.

Do you have any ideas for people who have just listened to this and would like to continue to learn and hear from Palestinian voices?

Are there books that you would recommend?

Does anyone come to mind right away that would be a next step to continue resisting the dehumanization?

Because also,

I was also at the DNC.

That was my breaking point with the Democratic Party.

Like, that was the platforming of that beautiful Israeli family who spoke so beautifully about, and

then the refusal to put a Palestinian up on stage and everyone saying, well, the Israeli family talked about Palestinians.

I mean, of course, because that made them feel even more human to the world.

And the reason why we don't put a Palestinian up there is because the last thing we need is for people to start seeing Palestinians as human beings, because then the questions will come.

So great strategy of just continuing the beautiful stories.

Where do people go next?

I have really two very strong recommendations about this.

First, if you're like kind of a history buff, Rashid Khalidi has a book called 100 Years War.

It's a phenomenal book.

He's a Columbia professor.

He was at the University of Chicago.

His family actually, he has an uncle, great uncle who was the mayor of Jerusalem at the times that we were talking about in 48 and so on.

And he even has letters from his uncle to Theodore Herzl, who's kind of like the father of Zionism.

There's like letters back and forth.

It's a phenomenal book.

Strongly, strongly recommend that.

And then there is a documentary that was released and distributed by Watermelon Pictures, and it's called From Ground Zero.

And the reason I love this, this documentary, it's taking place during the current war, but it's 21 different stories of Palestinians.

They themselves are the ones filming it.

They're talking about it.

And

they're talking to you about who they are.

And it's all these different stories.

I mean, one of them, it's like one was a five-minute story of a guy who was engaged to the love of his life, and she was killed in this.

And you just see this young, 20-something-year-old just agonizing over the loss of the love of his life.

And then there's another story about a band that's sticking together in Gaza, even through the displacement, even through them being forced into other areas, and they're still practicing together.

I mean, it's beautiful, beautiful.

And it really captures just how diverse we are as a people.

You know, and I think those two things absolutely, totally, totally recommend.

And then the other thing is, I mean, I think I have to say, I really am so deeply, deeply appreciative that you guys gave me an opportunity to come on and speak to you.

I mean, I can't tell you how much that means.

And if other people are able to do something similar, it's just, it's amazing to be with people who see you.

I mean, you just, I feel like as Palestinians, you guys see us, like you guys were able to, you know, at least see us for who we are, for good and for worse.

I mean, that to me means so much.

So I really can't thank you all enough.

I mean, that it's just so.

so meaningful.

And, you know, you talk about platforming and stuff like that.

And anytime, even if somebody's very sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, it's very rarely you hear the Palestinian voice or perspective.

Even it's like on, you know, Abby Phillips on CNN.

She has like that roundtable.

And you've got all the different points of view.

But it's like they talk about this issue a lot because it's important.

But I've never seen a Palestinian on there be able to respond and give you analysis.

I promise they're pretty good.

I mean, they can, you know, so

you just, that's why I just, it means a lot.

what you know and i i understand just how sensitive the topic is and i also understand how much heat and pressure and criticism you guys can receive as a result of this.

So from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

I mean, just thank you for allowing me to say their names.

Thank you for allowing me to be able to share some of their stories.

It's just, you don't get to see that very often.

And so very much appreciated.

So then based on that, I'm going to guess you're serious about.

We can visit you.

Can you take us to Little Palestine?

And Promongo.

I would like to just seal that deal right now.

No, absolutely.

I mean, mean, honestly, you absolutely have to come through at any point.

And I would love to show you around.

I'd love to show you all of the different folks that are out here.

It's a different experience.

And so you at any time, and you can absolutely stay at my place.

So you have a place to stay.

And I would love to, I would love, love, love for you guys to come out here.

And eventually it can be the precursor to maybe a visit to Palestine.

It would be, I'd love to show you kind of, you know, our family's village and everything.

It'd be awesome.

It'd be great.

I'm delighted by this.

I will also be using the strategy you use, which I will tell my family after we get back.

Oh, yeah, just heading to this place.

I'll be back soon enough.

Don't worry about it.

Don't worry about where I'm at.

All right.

We're in.

We're going to be in close touch.

Just completely.

I'm blown away by you.

I'm so grateful for you.

We are with you.

And I hope we're just beginning.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Oh,

how beautiful was that?

How brutal was that?

What an incredible human being.

Don't forget that every penny of profit from this episode is going to the Palestinian American Medical Association, which is the 501 tax-exempt nonprofit that provides Dr.

Ahmad and his incredibly brave colleagues the supplies they need to keep healing and saving Palestinian lives.

Also, please don't forget that if you have any extra dollars to spare personally,

please go

to the link in the show notes or go to my Lincoln bio on Instagram.

You go to my Instagram page.

You find at the very top, it says Lincoln Bio, and then you click on it.

That is the link.

Every penny you give there will go directly to the Palestinian American Medical Association.

Also, I will be personally matching every single dollar you give up to $100,000.

Let's please get Dr.

Ahmed and his incredible colleagues who are saving lives on the ground in Palestine the support and the supplies that they need

and the love and the just attention and solidarity that these people need.

They must know that they're not alone so that they can keep going.

I'm really grateful to all of you.

Let's do this.

We belong to each other.

If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things.

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We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wombach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey.

Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman, and this show is produced by Lauren Lograsso, Allison Schott, and Bill Schultz.