A Focus on Palestinians with Dr. Maha Nassar

American Muslim Project

Dr. Maha Nassar, a Palestinian American professor and expert on Arab cultural and intellectual history, shares her insights on Palestinians.

Naturally, we ask her to address the horrific situation in Israel and the Gaza Strip over the past few weeks. She enlightens us on several key points, including how the conflict is truly an anti-colonialist struggle, how the youngest Palestinians in Israel identify themselves, and how Palestinians have been covered by major U.S. news outlets the last several decades. [Spoiler alert: Very few articles written about Palestinians are actually by a Palestinian.] Find out why bias in major news outlets may matter less now.

Maha shares the impetus behind her award-winning book, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World, as well as details from her 2007 trip to Palestine that turned “really icky.” After learning of the de facto segregation in neighborhoods and schools in Israel, we dive into a fascinating if not disturbing comparison to Jim Crow laws. You may also be surprised to hear about Black Lives Matter leaders studying structural suppression and institutional violence in Palestine, and American police forces attending trainings in Israel. How murals of George Floyd can be found across Palestine, where they too hope to translate the present online momentum into real change. Naturally, we finish with Maha’s predictions on how this all ends.

Follow Maha on Twitter @mtnassar and read her unsettling article documenting how opinion pieces about Palestinians in the US mainstream media are overwhelmingly written by non-Palestinians. Check out her first book, Brothers Apart, and upcoming book, The Palestinians: A Global History, on the construction of Palestinian identity under statelessness and transnational dispersal.

American Muslim Project is a production of Rifelion, LLC.

Writer and Researcher: Lindsy Gamble

Show Edited by Mark Annotto and Asad Butt

Music by Simon Hutchinson

Hosted by Asad Butt

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