Dear Friends–
Happy Martin Luther King Day! I hope it finds you well.
This week, on Friday, Just World Ed will be launching our new podcast series, “The World From Palestine”. In each episode of this ten-week series the Palestinian scholar Yousef Aljamal and I will explore different aspects of the intersection between Palestine’s liberation struggle and other anti-imperialist struggles — throughout history, and until today.
The new podcast series will be available globally on Just World Podcasts and will also be available for streaming or download on Apple, Spotify, and all other major audio-streaming platforms.
I am particularly excited to work on this podcast with Yousef, given his wide experience of settler colonialisms in many parts of the world including Hawai’i, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Ireland, Algeria, in Palestine (of course!)… and here on Turtle Island.
In 2014 and 2019, he undertook speaking tours of the United States, speaking to super audiences and connecting with Palestinian-rights leaders and activists nationwide. In 2019, he also held good meetings with key members of the U.S. Congress and numerous congressional staffers.
Learn a little more about our new podcast project below…
In the meantime, I also want to tell you about another cutting-edge project that Code Pink is organizing and that Just World Ed is co-sponsoring. This is a webinar, “A Closer Look at China in Africa”, that will be held tomorrow, Tuesday, at 1pm ET.
It will feature two intriguing speakers:
- Mikaela “Mika” Nhondo Erskog,an educator and researcher working at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, a member of the organizing committee at No Cold War, and a member of the media and research collective Dongsheng News.
- Kambale Musavuli, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who is a human rights advocate, the Student Coordinator and National Spokesperson for the Friends of the Congo, and an analyst with the Center for Research on the Congo/Kinshasa.
Register for this webinar that we’re co-sponsoring here.
So now, back to our podcast series… I want to tell you that I’ve really found that my decades-long, in-depth study of the Palestine Question has given me powerful tools for the exploration I’ve been engaged in over the past year, into how it was that a handful of tiny countries perched on the Atlantic coast of Europe came, over the centuries, to exercise a dominant role over the entirety of humankind.
In a sense, the Western settler-colonial project in Palestine– which is ongoing, as we speak– can serve as a microcosm for that whole earlier period of Western empire building.
By having our public conversations on “The World From Palestine” podcast, Yousef and I hope to cast useful new light both on the Palestinian struggle and on the history of settler colonialism itself… And of course, we hope to strengthen the ties of solidarity between Palestinians and anti-imperialist strugglers all around the world!
I’ll let you know the moment the first episode gets released, this Friday!
You might also be interested to see what I’ve been writing thus far this month? In my ongoing “Project 500 Years”, I’ve been exploring the role that successive generations of Quakers played in initiating and pushing forward the English settler-colonial project here in Turtle Island. (The top four articles there all deal with that topic. You can also read them here.)
Did you know that there were Quakers in the Chesapeake a quarter century before the English monarch “gave” William Penn a huge chunk of land along the Delaware River? Read all about that here.
(The map at the right shows who was living along the Delaware before Penn took over and started putting “White” settlers there in their place…)
So now, we are moving into an era in which– I hope!– there will be considerably more equality between all the world’s peoples…
Over the next ten weeks, Yousef Aljamal and I will be exploring some aspects of the quest to make this happen. Please support Just World Educational in our podcast project and the other projects we’ll be undertaking this year. If you’re able to make a donation to support our work, that would be great.
Here’s to building a much more equitable, safer, and better world, going forward!
My warmest good wishes–
Helena.
In this episode of Occupied Thoughts, FMEP's Sarah Anne Minkin speaks with activist and author Ali Awad about the threats of dispossession and state-backed settler violence facing Palestinians in the Masafer Yatta area of the South Hebron Hills. 
