Radio Intifada by SWANA (South and West Asia and North Africa) Region Radio

On this week’s webcast of Radio Initfada, Rana Sharif and David Lloyd devote the full hour to a discussion of Israel’s practice of scholasticide in Gaza and its history across historic Palestine. We turn to a report recently published by the UK’s Friends of Palestinian Universities, entitled Scholasticide in Gaza. In Gaza, Israel has deliberately destroyed all 19 recognized institutions of higher education since October 2023. What does it mean to target and destroy Gaza’s intellectual and cultural institutions?Scholasticide is the systematic and targeted destruction of schooling that is intrinsic to the aims of genocide and its destruction of the intellectual and cultural life of a people. The destruction of Gaza’s schools and universities is so complete, and so deliberate, that it has spawned this neologism, scholasticide. To help us understand the practice and impact of scholasticide, we spoke with Professors Abdel Razzaq Takriti of Rice University and Chandni Desai, of the University of Toronto, who were among the co-editors of the report. Professors Takriti and Desai have jointly worked on developing the concept of scholasticide, as part of a broader collective effort to mobilize the international scholarly community in solidarity with Palestinian universities. They co-authored the widely disseminated Scholasticide Toolkit as well as key academic studies detailing the comprehensive assault on, and the resilient continuity of, the Palestinian higher education sector. Chandni Desai is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. She is an expert on emancipatory Palestinian and global anticolonial education and pedagogy and is currently completing a major book on the subject. She is a longtime organizer in the Palestine solidarity movement, and is one of the co-authors and co-editors of the International Scholasticide Report. Abdel Razzaq Takriti is a Palestinian historian and organizer. He is Associate Professor of History and Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair in Arab Studies at Rice University. He conceptualized and co-founded ISNAD https://www.taawon.org/en/isnad, the official program launched by Gaza's nonprofit universities through Palestine's largest NGO, Taawon. This $16 million initiative constitutes the largest collective effort to support the continuation of higher education in Gaza. He also serves on the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza, the main structure established by Gaza’s non-profit universities for the purpose of representing them internationally. Most recently, he has co-authored and co-edited the international scholasticide report. The open letter by Gazan academics, expressing their determination to preserve the ongoing and surviving Gazan academic sector, can be found here: May 2024 Gaza Academic Open Letter https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2024/5/29/open-letter-by-gaza-academics-and-university-administrators-to-the-worldThe official Tawoon-US ISNAD program link for your donations can be found here (it is strongly advised to support Gazan institutions through Tawoon-US to avoid scams and also to support the colelctive work of Gazan academics and their students):https://taawonus.org/our-programs/isnad-education/

David Lloyd speaks with Professor Robin Kelley about the case of UCI Professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard who has been placed by UCI Chancellor Howard Gilman under draconian sanction for having intervened to protect students from the aggressive actions of armed police during the break-up of the encampments against the genocide in Gaza. They discuss the extraordinarily punitive nature of the sanctions and the wider climate of repression in the University of California and beyond. And since here on Radio Intifada we like not only to analyze the forces of repression against freedom of speech and protest, but also to bring our listeners news of those who, like Professor Willoughby-Herard, are speaking out and taking action for justice, we turn then to David’s interview with Miriam Arghandiwal of Entertainment Labor for Palestine to discuss the action being taken to confront Zionism and the support of Israel and its genocide within the entertainment industry that is so prominent a part of the economy of Los Angeles where this station is located. What can entertainment workers do to honor the Palestinian call for the boycott of Israeli cultural institutions? How, in an industry traditionally so Zionist in its orientation, can workers stand for justice and Palestinian liberation?Robin D.G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Freedom Scholar Award. His books include the prize-winning Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002, new ed. 2022); and his forthcoming book is Making a Killing: Cops, Capitalism, and the War on Black Life (Henry Holt, 2026). He is a longstanding and eloquent advocate of the Palestinian struggle for liberation.Listeners who wish to aid Dr. Tiffany Willoughby Herard in this difficult moment can:Sign the petition on her behalf: https://sites.google.com/view/withdraw-all-charges/Email UC Irvine Chancellor Howard Gillman directly at [email protected] here to her financial support: https://chuffed.org/project/156203-mutual-legal-aid-for-tiffanyMiriam Arghandiwal is a war reporter turned filmmaker. She organizes with Entertainment Labor for Palestine and the Boycott Home Depot Coalition.Further information about Entertainment Labor for Palestine can be found on their Instagram page: @entertainmentlabor4palestine

In this show, United Auto Workers delegates voted to prohibit the union from investing in Israel Bonds. What is the significance of this victory for pro-Palestinian activists within the labor movement? We speak with three members of UAW.But first, as the war between Iran and the United States continues and Israel bombs Lebanon, Radio Intifada co-host Ankine Antaram speaks with our commentator, SWANA Collective's Hamoud Salhi about developments in the SWANA Region.

Join us for our conversation with Nisreen Jaradat of the No Azure for Apartheid Campaign that seeks to end Microsoft’s complicity with Israeli genocide and apartheid.In what is dubbed the world’s first AI-assisted, algorithmic genocide, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)—or, more accurately, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF)—have been using AI systems such as the Gospel and Lavender to accelerate their genocide. The use of these programs against Palestinians in Gaza follows a pattern of Israeli use of AI and Cloud technologies to advance and accelerate oppression against the Palestinian people and to control their demographic and spatial existence. Israel’s regime of domination and oppression against the Palestinian people for over 76 years has been identified by multiple human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even Israel’s own B’Tselem as an apartheid regime according to international human rights law. US-based corporation Microsoft has not only remained silent about the application of AI and other digital technologies in warfare and genocide, but is actively complicit in the ongoing Nakba against Palestinians, supporting and enabling an apartheid state, by continuing to sell cloud and AI services to the IOF. This is in direct contravention of Microsoft’s own Corporate Social Responsibility commitments including a commitment to “protect fundamental rights”: in the corporation’s own words, “respecting human rights is a core value of Microsoft.”Microsoft is, of course, not the only corporation engaged in supplying Israel with the means to sustain its regime of genocide and apartheid, but on Nakba Day, May 15 2024, Microsoft workers began a campaign, No Azure for Apartheid, in the words of their very substantial petition, from which we have drawn extensively in our introduction, to demand several remedies, including: –to end Microsoft’s complicity in Israeli genocide and apartheid by terminating all Azure contracts and partnerships with the Israeli military and government; –to make all its ties to the Israeli military publicly known, including weapons manufacturers and contractors.–to conduct a transparent and independent audit of Microsoft’s technology contracts, services, and investments, and ensure Microsoft products and services are not being used to violate the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the Geneva Convention, and Microsoft’s own Human Rights Statement, in Palestine or elsewhere.Since this campaign started, Microsoft has fired or otherwise sanctioned numerous of its workers who have spoken out for this campaign, and used arrests and violent methods to suppress protests by current and former workers and concerned community activists. These measures have not silenced the protests and many Microsoft employees have publicly resigned as part of this campaign which goes under the slogan “We will not be cogs in the Israeli genocidal machine.”Today we speak with one of those workers, Nisreen Jaradat about the campaign, Microsoft’s response, and the role of technology in both the Israeli and the US war machine.Nisreen Jaradat is a Palestinian organizer with No Azure for Apartheid, a movement of current and former Microsoft workers demanding that Microsoft cut all ties with the Israeli government and military. Nisreen was fired by Microsoft in August of 2025 following protests at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, where she took part in setting up encampments and establishing the Liberated Zone on the Martyred Palestinian Children's Plaza and the Mai Ubeid Building.

In this episode, we're joined by Aishah Masood from Defence of Human Rights, an organization that advocates for victims of enforced disappearances in Pakistan, to discuss enforced disappearances and the conditions experienced by people detained in prisons in Pakistan. Defence of Human Rights and Public Service trust, or DHR Pakistan for short, is an independent non-governmental, non-profit organization that was born out of personal experience of the deprivation of human rights of the victims of enforced disappearance. Defence of Human Rights offers legal aid, psycho-social accompaniment, economic support, campaign, and lobbying for policy recommendations regarding the issue of enforced disappearances in Pakistan to victims of torture, through active engagement with the stakeholders.

Over the past 26 months of Israel’s still ongoing genocide in Gaza, we have covered the exceptional degree of repression on universities directed at Palestine solidarity activists. National media attention has largely focused on the violent actions taken by campus security forces against student protest encampments and on high profile cases like the arrest and detention of US green-card holder and Columbia student activist Mahmoud Khalil, still under threat of deportation by the Trump regime. We want to focus on the less widely publicized campaigns of repression directed at faculty which have ramped up over the past few years to a degree that threatens the very structure and mission of the postwar “liberal” university. Universities have long been the target of Zionist efforts to control the discourse on Palestine. For decades, the question of Palestine was rarely taught on US campuses and very few Palestinian faculty were hired nationally. Palestine was the “third rail” of academia as of the media. The work of Edward Said began to make inroads only thirty years after the Nakba and was immediately met with virulent antagonism as it illuminated the colonial nature of the Israeli state. Gradually, both the persistence of scholars and activists on US campuses and the increasingly evident violence of the Israeli settler-colonial regime made Palestine a critical site of study and activism, and students now have a complex and detailed understanding of the workings of Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism and genocide and a language that informs their activism.Faced with the fact that every debate now forces them to justify the unjustifiable facts of the Israeli supremacist regime, Zionist organizations no longer demand debate, but seek to repress and punish speech about Palestine in schools and universities. California’s “democratic” governor Gavin Newsom recently signed off on Assembly Bill 715 that effectively bans the teaching of Palestinian perspectives in California schools after years of Zionist lobbying. Numerous faculty have been targeted for their speech on Palestine, both on private social media accounts and in the classroom, or for their protection and support of student activists at encampments. They have been targeted by external actors, from right-wing MAGA activists to their Zionist allies such as Silicon Valley Chapter Hillel (as in the case we discuss today) or the ADL, and by their own university administrations. Even Harvard, that is making media capital for its legal defiance of the Trumpian demands, fired an assistant dean in the Divinity School merely for the crime of hosting a program on Christian Zionism.In California, the UC and CSU system’s administrations are behaving in a no less draconian manner, from demanding oversight of syllabi on Palestine and the “Middle East” to undermining longstanding faculty disciplinary proceedings, and from prosecuting or expelling students to sanctioning and even firing faculty. Today we speak with two CSU professors, Ahlam Muhtaseb and Sang Heal Kil, who have been subject to many years of Zionist and administrative harassment, culminating in the firing of one of them, tenured San Jose State University professor Sang Hea Kil. We discuss with them their first hand experience of the collaboration of university administrations and Zionist lobby groups, the overall picture of regression in academia, and Sang’s case in particular. How are faculty and students resisting this new repressive regime? What does it mean for the future of universities that are also threatened from many other quarters, from the advent of AI to the right-wing efforts to control university research and teaching in line with their own agendas? Is Palestine once again the cutting edge of violent reactionary efforts to curtail learning and democracy in the United States?

In this episode, we host Pakistani filmmaker Jawad Sharif to discuss his most recent film, Moklani. Winner of the 2025 Jackson Wild Global Voices prize, the documentary follows the lives of the Mohanas, an Indigenous community that has lived off of Manchar Lake in Sindh, Pakistan for generations. Through the swiftly changing lives of the Mohanas, Sharif explores the deep sense of loss that comes with the ecological destruction of Manchar Lake. This week’s show is hosted by Misha Choudhry and David Lloyd.Jawad Sharif is an award-winning filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer based in Pakistan. Exploring the themes of social change and human rights, his projects focus on reviving the suppressed cultural and indigenous identities of Pakistan. In the past 15 years, Jawad has pushed the boundaries of visual storytelling by documenting stories about the rights of folk musicians, high-altitude porters, climate migrants, and marginalized communities. Some of his films include The Losing Side, The Color of Smog, Natari, and Indus Blues. You can find more information about him and his work at: https://jawadshariffilms.com/