Hello dear Radio Reversers,
This week we're bringing you a very special double episode of the Radio Reversal podcast, featuring not one but TWO of our wonderful producer Nat's recent radio programs which showcase content from the recent Palestine Calling: Roads to Justice forum hosted by Geographers for Palestine at the University of Tasmania in lutruwita. You'll be hearing in this episode from Dr. Adel Youssef, a Palestinian academic and researcher based in lutruwita, alongside dear friend and comrade of Radio Reversal, Remah Naji. Dr Youssef begins by setting out the linkages between settler colonialism in so-called israel and here in so-called australia, and why the struggle for Palestinian liberation demands a real reckoning with settler colonialism everywhere. He reminds us that we cannot afford to look away from the violence that is required to maintain colonial occupations - nor from the discourses and justifications that are used to normalise, erase, or justify that violence.
We then hear from Remah, who talks a bit about the history of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, skeching out an understanding of this theory of change and how it emerged from the specific conditions of colonial occupation in Palestine. Remah helps to situate BDS as a set of tactics that emerged as a resistance to the fragmentation of Palestinians from their homelands, offering strategies that could help disrupt and challenge Israel’s occupation from beyond its borders.
We've been thinking a lot over the past few weeks about this strategy of fragmentation, and how the regulation, control, policing, imagining, and re-making of space is used as a tool of repression and subjugation. Dear friend of Radio Reversal, Palestinian scholar activist Dr. Jamal Nabulsi has written extensively about the way that the state of Israel seeks to fragment Palestinian identity through the construction of literally segregated spaces of Palestinian life - Gaza, the West Bank, '48 Palestine, and the massive Palestinian diaspora in Jordan, Lebanon, and across the globe.
Here in Queensland, we know that there's a similar history of spatial segregation being used as a mode of colonial control - from the Boundary Streets that controlled access to the inner "settled" city by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, to the displacement of Aboriginal people from their homelands to "open-air prisons" on missions and reserves.
More recently, we've seen how the Crisafulli LNP state government has aimed to control and repress the use of public space: from the criminalisation and eviction of people sleeping rough in parks, to the repressive "Adult Crime, Adult Time" legislation that targets and criminalises young people in public spaces, and most recently, new laws which prohibit particular political expressions and the use of particular political symbols (e.g. the recently amended Queensland Criminal Code s52DA Recital, distribution, publication or display of prohibited expressions).
In the weeks since these laws were passed, we've seen police using their expanded search powers far beyond their scope: including a recent search and seizure of all of the electronic devices of a person who had displayed a banner with a prohibited expression outside their home. We’ve seen Jewish activists arrested during a peaceful protest action for uttering one of the prohibited phrases - "from the river to the sea" - while directly quoting the Israeli Prime Minister. We’ve heard reports that an artist who used the words "river to the sea" in a mural featuring an image of John Farnhem and the now-ubiquitous watermelon was given a formal warning by police and encouraged to remove the words, despite the fact that the mural did not contain the prohibited expression in full.
In earlier episodes of this podcast, we've tried to get our heads around what's going on with this legislation here in queensland. But this week on the podcast we're digging a bit deeper by looking at the underlying relationship between settler colonialism in so-called australia and israel. We're considering how the regulation, policing, imagining, representing and controlling of space (and how people use it) operates as a key tactic of colonisation. We're learning about the long history of Indigenous struggle against colonial spatial violence, and how Indigenous peoples across the globe have refused to "disappear". And we're situating some of the contemporary strategies of Palestinian resistance (in particular, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement) within the context of an ongoing and steadfast refusal to be disappeared (as Dr. Amy McQuire puts it).
All in all - a huge episode of the podcast and one we hope you find useful. As always, head to radioreversal.org to subscribe to our newsletter for more details about the show and for first look at future series, including our forthcoming investigative series Challenging Colonial Copaganda. You can also join us as a paid subscriber to help us keep doing what we do: if you jump on board in the next few weeks, we’ll send you a special pack of RR goodies to thank you for your support, including some stickers, posters, and zines from the Radio Reversal archive.
Yours in solidarity,
Anna for the Radio Reversal collective
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