Society & Culture

Articles

Microbe Magic

Fermented foods — very nutritious, very magic. The GPM speaks with a microbe magician. Taking stock of biological diversity, using DNA barcodes. The GPM speaks with several DNA barcoders. And, a frightening vision of a warming planet: Hothouse Earth. A conversation with Earth systems pioneer, Will Steffen.


Jewish Anti-Zionism

Israel wants to eradicate the Palestinian people, and the UN agency that supports them. The GPM speaks with Chris Gunness about Israel’s persecution of UNRWA — the UN Relief & Works Agency. And, a Canadian Jewish group declares itself anti-Zionist. The GPM speaks with Sid Shniad, founding member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada.


Wages of Impunity

A conversation about Palestine-Israel with Dutch-Palestinian commentator Mouin Rabbani. The GPM met up with Rabbani in The Hague for an extended discussion about Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the Palestinian people’s depleted, divided and leaderless ‘national liberation movement’, the much-touted ‘Axis of Resistance’, and about what the future holds – for the Palestinian people, Israel and the wider Middle East.


Staatsräson

Almost a million uncommitted US voters want Kamala Harris to stand up for an arms embargo on Israel, and an end to the Gaza genocide. The GPM speaks about this, and more, with CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin. And, why does Germany criminalize pro-Palestine discourse? It’s not about Auschwitz, it’s about NATO. The GPM speaks with Wieland Hoban, Chairman of Germany’s Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East — Jüdische Stimme.


Base Nation

Israel’s 57-year military occupation of Palestine is unlawful, the World Court rules, and must come to end. Will Israel abide by the ruling? Will countries like Canada enforce it? Washington certainly won’t. The GPM speaks about Canada’s response with Ottawa commentator Peter Larson. And, perpetual occupation of other people’s lands is an activity the US supports, defends and engages in, all around the world. The GPM speaks with United States of War author David Vine.


Mobile Petri Dishes

Mobile phones — smart, incredibly useful. Life support systems. They’re also mobile Petri dishes! The GPM speaks with a microbiologist who knows. And the roots of the US anti-abortion movement; misogyny, racism, hatred toward immigrants. A conversation with American academic Lauren MacIvor Thompson.


Genetic Gold Mine

The wheat genome — much larger than the human genome, and packed with lost alleles for resilient wheat in a warming world. Plant researchers in the UK and China united to sequence the source code of long lost wheat varieties. And, at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Israel’s never-ending occupation of Palestine has been declared illegal. The GPM speaks about the ruling with former UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk.


Killing the Future

Killing the future in Gaza. Reducing it to rubble. Forcibly transferring its people into filthy tent camps, or onto the street. Starving them. Hunger and disease go hand in hand. The GPM speaks with Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and authority on human-engineered food crises, and with Margaret Harris, global spokesperson for the World Health Organization.


Gaza, the West Bank & Belgium

Navi Pillay, chair of the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, reports to the Human Rights Council in Geneva about high Israeli and Hamas crimes — crimes one Palestinian and a good Israeli friend know too well. Atta Jaber and Jeff Halper describe settler land theft and violence in occupied Hebron. And, ugly crimes recalled, a century later, in German-occupied Belgium.



Scholasticide

Scholasticide. Bombing schools, libraries and cultural centers. Killing students and teachers. Sound like genocide? It is. The GPM speaks about Israeli scholasticide in Gaza with the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education, and with a Palestinian academic doing top-drawer scientific research in the West Bank — against all odds. And, we play back voices at the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, talking about Israel’s attempt to pulverize the foundation of Palestinian society — its learning institutions and its children.


Wheels of Justice

Some thought it would never happen. This past week it did: criminal charges against Israeli leaders at the International Criminal Court, in The Hague. Israeli leaders can kiss their overseas travel plans goodbye. Days earlier, the International Court of Justice ordered it to halt its assault on the southern Gaza city, Rafah — an order Israel is now defying, with US and British backing. Which does international law serve – power or justice? What difference does it make? The GPM speaks with three international law and human rights scholars — Toby Cadman, William Schabas and Michael Lynk.


Scoundrel Time Revisited

European governments try to stop a Palestinian surgeon from talking about Israeli ultra-violence – and fail. No one seeks to stamp out free speech more zealously than the Germans. How to explain the passionate attachment Western powers have for the State of Israel? It’s not what you’d think, says an Anglo-German Jewish activist.


Gowns and Goons

Dutch students and staff stand up for Gaza at a university gathering, and get a hearing. Free speech in the Netherlands? Just for show, protesters say. Weeks later, peaceful campus encampments are broken up by riot police, called in by university officials. Protesters persevere, the university relents – so it seems. Democracy in the Netherlands? Maybe. The GPM covers pro-Palestine protest at Utrecht University.


Beautiful Resistance

For those who’ve never visited a Palestinian refugee camp, these are not dense tent or tin shacks encampments. They’re more like barrios; densely packed, tightly knit, fully functioning communities. On a very recent trip, the GPM visited one of Palestine’s largest refugee camps – Aida – in the southern West Bank town of Bethlehem.


Genocide by Home Demolition

In the seven months since Hamas’ daring incursion into southern Israel, the Israeli military has demolished over 300,000 Gazan homes — almost three-quarters of Gaza’s housing stock — killing an estimated 35,000, most of them women and children. Countless thousands of Gazans remain buried under the rubble of their humble homes. Armed with US bombs and missiles, Israel demolishes Palestinian homes in an instant. Palestinian suffering and trauma will endure for generations. What’s its aim? Ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the consolidation of the settler-colonial regime it established in 1948, says Israeli author and activist Jeff Halper. Halper is a founding member of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He’s also the author of a host of books, including An Israeli in Palestine (2010), War Against the People (2015), and Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism and the Case for One Democratic State (2021).


Land & People

Clinging to the walls of a fertile valley beneath the city of Bethlehem, a half dozen kilometers south of Jerusalem, alienated from the holiest of Palestinian towns by walls, barbed wire and a string of mega-colonial settlements, boxed in by settler-only roads and militarized checkpoints, Mazin and Jessie Qumsiyeh and their friends are planting native Palestinian seeds, growing fruits and vegetables, raising chickens, rabbits and fish, and offering up habitat for birds, insects and other wildlife. Rescuing their beloved landscape cruelly scarred by land thieves without true roots.


Dear Mr. Trudeau

Starvation and famine in Gaza. A UN expert speaks out. And, a group of Canadian lawyers demand that the Trudeau government stop supporting Israeli genocide.


Intellectual Author

Consider all the injustice, death and destruction gone down in Palestine over the past 50, 75, hundred years. No one more responsible for all this misery than the British. The GPM speaks with British scholar Victor Kattan. Then, looming famine and genocide. Will the UK, US, Canada and other Western Powers act, or will they help Israel out? The GPM speaks with former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness.


Day of Two Suns

The Day of Two Suns: 70 years ago, the Pentagon conducted its biggest-ever atmospheric H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, in the central Pacific. The 15-megaton Bravo shot spewed radioactive fallout on thousands of Marshallese, and long-lived radioisotopes all around the planet. Nearby Rongelap Atoll suffered the worst. Seventy years later, the people of Rongelap and Bikini have yet to go home.