Kalam Edgar Mannheimer

What if all the Palestinians would disappear? Not in a figurative sense, or even through ethnic cleansing or genocide. What if they simply vanished out of thin air? What would that do to israeli society? This is the premise of the Palestinian author Ibtisam Azem’s Book of Disappearance, first published in Arabic in 2014. 
It’s a truly fascinating read, and Ibtisam Azem, who grew up as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, masterfully portrays the hard truths and complexities of Israeli society.
This episode can be seen as a sequel to Episode 1 with Suad Amiry, as her novel talks about the very real disappearance of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba.
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It's been six months since the October 7 attack. Since then, over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israel's bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza, nearly 14,000 of whom are children.
The renowned Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha joins Edgar today for a discussion about what it means to grow up in what Masha Gessen likens to a Nazi concentration camp.
We would like to dedicate this episode to all the murdered poets of Gaza.
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The Second Intifada (~2000-2008) came out of the failure of the Oslo Accords, the failure of the PLO to create a Palestinian state, the crippling of the Palestinian economy through Israeli restrictions and Israel’s increasingly aggressive and violent settler expansion and colonial oppression.
In contrast to the First Intifada, the Second Intifada was marked by a series of bloody terrorist bombings against Israeli civilians. The renowned Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi laments this dark development in his book “The 100 Years’ War on Palestine”, describing how different Palestinian armed factions from Hamas to Fatah expressed their rivalry through a kind of competition in suicide bombings. Part of it was desperation, part of it was blind revenge against the Israeli population for the Israeli Occupation Forces’ heavy handed response to Palestinian protests - where thousands of Palestinians throwing rocks were gunned down down by Israeli soldiers.
It was always the case however, and still is, that far more Palestinians were killed than Israelis. During this uprising, Khalidi estimates that 4,916 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis were killed.
Episode 5 of the Kalam podcast explores this difficult period, with the General Director of the Palestinian prisoner support organisation, Addameeer, Sahar Francis.
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In Late 1987 Palestine erupted. The Israeli occupation was closing in on 20 years and getting comfortable. But seemingly out of nowhere, a mass movement of protests, strikes and boycotts shook Israel and the world. For the first time, the West gained sympathy for Palestine, as images of heavily armed Israeli soldiers brutalising Palestinian women and children were broadcast on TV screens around the world.
Today, Associate Professor Islah Jad joins Edgar for a conversation about the First Intifada. Islah has written the book, Palestinian Women’s Activism: Nationalism, Secularism, Islamism and was an active participant in the First Intifada.
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In June of 1967 Israel launched an attack against its immediate neighbours, the combined Arab armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. In a flash it managed to dismantle Egypt's entire air force, and defeated the Arab forces in just six days. This led to the occupation of Egypt's Sinai peninsula, Syria's Golan Heights and the occupation of all Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. This is where the occupation of Palestine begins.
The seminal historian Dr Khaled Fahmy, Edward Keller Professor of North Africa and the Middle East at Tufts University, joins Edgar in a discussion about the war, focusing on the popular culture at the time. How is it that the Israeli and Arab public believed the Arab forces were superior while the military elite on both sides knew the opposite was true?
Towering figures like Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez played their part in egging on the war. Equally, they played a huge part in trying to understand the defeat.
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In the previous episode of the Kalam Podcast, Suad Amiry walked us through the horrors of the 1948 Nakba. In this episode we try to answer the question of who those early Zionists who carried out the Nakba were, and they were motivated by. And what exactly Israelis celebrate when they commemorate the Nakba as their Independence Day.
The Israeli journalist and political dissident Gideon Levy joins Edgar to try to explain these phenomena.
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