Vegans for Palestine Podcast - Episode 21 - Art of Defiance to protest for Palestine

In this episode Dalal talks to SA Bachman about her book Art of defiance: Protest Graphics and Poetry for Palestine or in Arabic فن المقاومة، رسومات احتجاجية وشعر لفلسطين Dalal and SA Bachman explore defiant art and activism, particularly through bilingual protest graphics and poetry that challenge power structures and promote Palestinian self-determination. SA highlights various examples of activist artists and their collaborative projects, including public performances, soil remediation efforts, and community art initiatives, while emphasizing the importance of long-term artistic collaborations in social justice work. SA examines the intersectionality between veganism and Palestinian liberation, addressing how cultural production serves as resistance infrastructure and exploring the challenges of engaging with silent or unresponsive audiences on these important issues.

Follow S.A Bachman here. 

You can purchase a hard copy or e-book copy of the book Art of defiance: Protest Graphics and Poetry for Palestine  here. All proceeds go directly to Gaza.

The work of Juliano Mer-Khamis is discussed in this episode. Click here to watch an interview with Juliano. Here is a summary of the life of Juliano Mer-Khamis. Click here for information on the Freedom Theatre in Jenin. 

This episode is captioned for Deaf and Hard of Hearing viewers here. 

The music in this episode features 2 remixes of 'Sheel Sheel' by the Gaza song birds produced by Nahed Elrayes and Alia Sharrief. 

 Nahed Elrayes is a Palestinian musician, composer, and pianist known for blending Arabic musical traditions with contemporary composition. He has created acclaimed works such as the Darwish-inspired piece A Lover from Palestine, performed internationally and featured across global collaborations, and his solo piano compositions continue to be premiered in venues like London’s St John’s Waterloo. 

Alia Sharrief is a Black American Muslim hip-hop artist and activist whose work reflects her identity as a Black Muslim woman and challenges stereotypes through conscious lyricism and community empowerment. She also founded The Hijabi Chronicles to amplify the voices of Muslim women in music and the arts.

Please support these talented musicians. 

The Vegans for Palestine Podcast team would like to thank S.A. Bachman for joining us and we wish that you could join us in a free, liberated Palestine.

Transcript

[MUSIC]

RAYAN: It’s Ryan from Palestine and this is episode 21 of the Vegans for Palestine podcast. SA Bachmann is an interdisciplinary justice-driven artist whose work spans photo montage, public installations, and mobile billboards addressing issues such as gendered violence, immigrant rights, LGBTQ plus equality, prison abolition, animal exploitation, and Palestinian liberation. In this episode, Dalal speaks with S.A Bachman about her book Art of Defiance: Protest Graphics and Poetry for Palestine or the title in Arabic فن المقاومة، رسومات احتجاجية وشعر لفلسطين  Their conversation explores define art and activism with a focus on bilingual protest graphics and poetry that challenge power structures and advocate for Palestinian self-determination. Essay also reflects on collaborative and community-based art practices, including public performances, soil remediation projects, and other collective initiatives, highlighting the importance of long-term artistic relationships in sustaining social justice work. Their discussion further examines the intersections between veganism and Palestinian liberation, the role of cultural production as resistance infrastructure, and the difficulties of engaging audiences who remain silent and unresponsive in the face of ongoing injustice and genocide. I've just finished editing this episode and I highly recommend you all listen to it. Please check out the links in the episode description which will guide you on how you can purchase either a hard copy or an online copy of this amazing book. Enjoy. 

S.A BACHMAN: Well, the book I view it both as an artistic intervention and a record of resistance in the struggle for Palestinian self-determination. and I've tried to highlight occupation, militarization, resource theft among many other related issues. I wanted to showcase work from Gaza-based poets. There are some poets from the diaspora as well as a handful of allied artists from around the world to try to emphasize certain connections that exist in different struggles. But it's a book that tries to remember. It tries to testify. And it's about art that refuses to disappear. The book is also a fundraiser. 100% of the proceeds are going to support families of poets and the poets themselves and organizations that are doing vital work on the ground. In terms of defiant art and how I view what defiant art is, I feel that it emerges when artists refuse the narratives that power tries to impose. That's the most simple way I can say it. And what unites defiant art is its capacity to obstruct the empire's preferred storyline. So it becomes defiant to name a genocide while governments avoid the word. It becomes defiant to depict joy and cultural abundance in communities the world is told to view only through a lens of tragedy. So when artists keep creating amid displacement and siege and censorship and grief, the act of creation that itself becomes a kind of refusal. So, Defiant Art or activist art projects, they span a really wide range from artist run community centres that support immigrants to documentary films to gallery exhibitions where visitors share a meal. They often include collaboration. That's a big part of my work, collaborating both with artists and non-arts. But despite all these various aims and various methods, they share a common ethos and that's a commitment to social impact. And more often than not, they share a desire for tangible outcomes. So they often reject the market, the market's terms. They often challenge scarcity, exclusivity, and ownership. Instead, activist art practices emphasize things like circulation, translation, reuse, so that art moves through the streets, classrooms, refugee camps, and digital networks rather than remaining confined to white cubes, and elite collections. In my case, I value getting the work into the hands of those people that are working day in and day out in the trenches. So, for three decades, with rare exception, all of my work is donated. And artists frequently navigate art world bureaucracy or activist artists I should say frequently navigate art world bureaucracy to try to redirect institutional resources toward community needs. And I do believe that activist art sustains movement. There's never been a social movement that hasn't had art as an integral part of it. And so activist art can sustain movements by serving as political education, mutual aid, in our case, transnational communication. So it can function as both a message and a logistical tactic when communities such as the Palestinian community face cultural eraser through occupation and policing and censorship and displacement. I feel as though creative practice becomes a survival strategy and it can restore ritual, it can restore memory, it can restore connection. So ultimately activist art interrupts the stories that empire tells about itself and it says that art is not a luxury in a liberation movement. It's a tactic. It's a language and it's a lifeline. 

DALAL: And art is activism on its own. And I think that is the main message or one of the messages that you shared in the in the book between poetry and graphics poster graphics. In the context of art of defiance, protest graphics and poetry for Palestine, where do you see the work that you do playing in the role of art activism and advancing social justice? because these names they all contributed in in different ways speaking on different topics and causes through their work and your work is unique in that it's by bilingual in both Arabic and English. So tell me more about the book as how you see it working on that aspect of social justice and liberation for Palestine. 

S.A BACHMAN: Well, in my little microcosm of Los Angeles, I started to become known as the poster woman. And so, as I mentioned, for a long, long, long time now, all my work has been given out for free. And I might add that I'm not a trust fund kid. So, it's not like I have a million dollars sitting in the bank. And I always like to point that out, particularly to young artists, because if you're resourceful, there's a way to make it happen. There was a time very early on when I was collaborating with my friend David Atia where we were invited to a panel discussion at Harvard and at the time everyone else on the panel had a budget between $25,000 and $250,000 and at the time we were each putting $125 a month into a savings account. So I always feel that's important so that young people feel that there's a way to make this happen. I guess in some ways my work in terms of protest graphics is most closely aligned with someone like Emory Douglas who saw himself as a strategist for the Black Panther Party or Grand Fury in terms of their graphics were very in-your-face and I really admire that and as you can see from the book I don't shy away from that. So for me, there's a way that I see my work as both responding to the moment and trying to articulate things that others are saying as well as document the moment. But I also have this very pragmatic side that wants to just put the work in the hands of people. So, for instance, during the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, David and I did a website called Protest Graphics, and that was a download, click, and print site. But what we also did was send out these packets to individuals and organizations that were doing activist work at the time that gave them the tools and the instructions of how to take these posters and blow them up really large for protests so that they could become banners and things. So on one level, as I said, the book documents the history of this genocide and my work. On the other hand, I'm literally out in the streets at protests handing these posters out to people so that we can put those words and ideas in the streets and get them out in the world. And then there's also, if you look at the cover of the book and the end pages of the book, those are all taken from posts that I put on Instagram that I kind of refer to as my daily outrage. But many of those posts were turned into stickers and those were also placed out in the world. My favourite place to post stickers is on parking meters. I'm thinking really of art of defiance in the practices or the practices of art of defiance in what Juliano Kamiss meant by a cultural intifada. 

DALAL: And I recall from an earlier conversation we had together before in preparation for this episode. You mentioned that one of the quotes for Juliano Meramese who is the co-founder of the freedom theatre in Janine in occupied West Bank in occupied Palestine. He said something about the third intifada will be a cultural one. Where do you see the inspiration for your work in this quote? because those words really stay with you in the activism in in the art in the work that you produce. And we know that art of defiance is both an artifact of resistance and also an engine for it. And in a culture of resistance, art isn't decorative. It's the infrastructure. 
S.A BACHMAN: That's very well said. I'm gonna have to steal that line from you.

DALAL: You go for it. 

S.A BACHMAN: Um, I think I remember this correctly, but I believe that early on in the genocide, I think I first heard that quote from Mosa Babu Toha in an interview. I can't be 100% certain, but I think that's where I first heard it and it really stuck with me. I think that one of the things that is difficult in doing this work and one of the things that I'm every time I lecture you know someone asks do you think it's effective how can you keep doing this work when over decades you know certain things never change I mean I'm old enough that I cannot believe that for instance in the United States I feel like when I was a teenager I was demonstrating for women's right to choose to have an abortion and now I'm a senior citizen technically and I'm still fighting for that. So there's just this kind of lifelong awareness of how liberation is fought both on land as well as in the realm of the imagination. And I feel as though a cultural intifada to me it's a refusal to let the colonizer write our stories and it's a refusal to let the colonizer define our vocabulary or even determine whose lives are grieve-able. So that quote really stuck and then it became a solution to this issue of not wanting to just centre myself in the book. And so for me, culture is not ornamental, it's infrastructure. And so when songs or theatre, posters, poetry and storytelling are suppressed, I feel as though people lose the ability to articulate themselves and to imagine new possibilities. So when cultural production thrives, resistance also thrives and so does the political imagination. So in some ways, a cultural intifada is very simple. It can be as simple as children who are painting keys and watermelons. Poets who are writing on the walls of rubble, street theatre, the wonderful musician who's been having the students improvise songs to the sound of drones. There's billboard interventions. And so I feel like solidarity in and of itself is also a kind of creative practice. But that quote really it allowed me to find a way to anchor my work and more importantly to give voice to people who are there on the land experiencing things as opposed to someone who is a white person in the United States outside the community trying to articulate for them.

[music]

S.A BACHMAN: I feel like there's a really strong parallel in the vegan movement with the women's movement in the United States. and its kind of evolution and the kind of for lack of a more eloquent way of putting it the worst of the vegan movement parallels what I refer to as now feminism which was very overdetermined by whiteness and by white women of a certain class and not a feminism that was very intersectional at all. And over decades, thankfully, that has shifted. And that's simply because I feel like the kind of now feminism has other voices that are just as strong as it is. It's not as though that form of feminism has gone away. But the vegan movement, again, I can speak most articulately in the United States, but here the whole vegan movement tends to be associated with PETA, who while in their early days certainly did some things that are to be respected, really suffers from a lack of intersectional politics and awareness. And I use that word very carefully because it's so overused. But in this case, it it's really apt and I feel as though people are not in tune yet with the wider voices of veganism. And I feel as though for instance like there's a difference between the people who kind of come to veganism with what's referred to as a critical animal studies scholarship approach. Those are people, for instance, who have long identified Israel's vegan washing campaigns, and they've identified them as a state strategy that instrumentalizes animal ethics and is using animal ethics, so to speak, to obscure settler colonial violence, and it's using it to obscure military occupation and apartheid. No one in the animal rights movement, the conventional animal rights movement, has been addressing those things. So from this perspective in Israel, they're celebrating vegan soldiers and celebrating plant-based army meals or Tel Aviv's culture that functions, it's functioning as a branding exercise and it's designed to kind of protect this kind of so-called progressive white mask, and instead it is ignoring the daily realities of dispossession and blockade and rationalized state terror. So I feel like the critical animals studies perspective that critique points out that ethical consumption narratives especially when mobilized by a militarized state. They collapse entirely when the same institutions that are promoting animal welfare are simultaneously enforcing systems that render entire populations killable. So in that analysis, something like vegan washing is not a quirky contradiction, but it's a deliberate propaganda technique. It reframes Israel as compassionate while diverting global attention from its structural violence. So we need a perspective that insists that no claim to animal ethics can be credible when it's deployed in the service of empire and that a genuine liberation needs to confront all forms of domination including the settler colonial state itself. And I'm reminded in terms of those daily posts that I mentioned before again this parallel with the history of feminism. I'm going to misquote myself, but there's a post that talks about if you've been waiting for white feminists to speak up about the genocide, essentially you're going to be waiting a long time. And interestingly, you will recognize this having seen the book. That is certainly in the scheme of the kinds of things that I've written and stated in posters, a fairly benign comment. And yet it's one of the ones that got the most flak. The feminists just don't want to look in the mirror. And so I feel that that's very true of this branch of veganism. And unfortunately that's the brand of veganism that most people are most familiar with. I will mention too just before I lose the thought there are some exceptions. Christopher Sebastian has been very vocal. Mothers Against Dairy has been fantastic. Again, I'm sadly focused more in the United States than out, but there's a scholar Alexandra Isvahani Hammond who's done a lot of great work. So, there are exceptions, but far too few. And some of the voices that I would have expected to speak out that have not have been really both shocking and disappointing. 

DALAL: And when these voices that we expect them to speak of disappoint us, what do we do? Where do we go? Where do we and how do we learn about what we can do to make a difference even within our local communities, you know, within the tiny group around us. 

S.A BACHMAN: I think one of the things that's become clearer to me through the genocide and this is not due to my own thinking. It's due to others that have talked about this, but that there came a point, I would guess for me, maybe 8 months into the genocide, where it just became clear that trying to changed the minds of people like that was a waste of time and that energy had to be put in different places. And that didn't mean that I would ignore those people or that if I had the opportunity, I wouldn't talk about it with them, but that that was not the place to put the energy. And I think that one of the things that I don't know if you've experienced or if this is true in your life, but that there is sort of this double exception rule, which is all these people that we know or I'll say that I know who consider themselves to be to the left in terms of their political perspective. everyone is to the left except when it comes to veganism and Palestinian liberation. Those just consistently are the two exceptions. And so I don't know what we do about that. I will say on the bright side, I cannot begin to express my shock at how much support there has been for the Palestinian cause in the United States. the difference is absolutely beyond my wildest, wildest, wildest imagination. And that, you know, it's sort of the equivalent of that throughout most of my life, if you had a protest in the street that was dedicated to ending the occupation, if you got 50 people there, that would be an incredible success. and now you're getting  50,000 people there. So there is a definite shift in awareness, but unfortunately that has not translated into any kind of meaningful change for people in Palestine. And in terms of the vegan movement, I don't really anticipate seeing much change there. I feel as though at this point if people that we had hoped would speak up or organizations that we had hoped would speak up have not, they're not going to. And one of the things that sadly becomes true in any meeting that I've attended virtually since the beginning of the genocide or this genocide I should say is every one of us talks about people in our lives that either have moved away from us or that we've moved away from because you know they aren't willing to address these ideas or more importantly take action to end the brutality inflicted on non-human animals every minute and the brutality inflicted on Palestinians every minute. 

DALAL: The silence is real. It's ghastly and it's disappointing and yeah, as you really said it and expressed it, it's it shows up when we see those animal organizations and the activists, those speakers on who want sees an opportunity to speak on the topics they're passionate about. They simply avoid speaking on anything close to or related to justice issues. If it's Palestine, if it's indigenous land back, if it's police, prison abolition, if it's Labor rights, disability justice, you name it. They simply want to protect the donors or stay on brand or they also would claim that it's there are so many constraints. or they fear the fun backlash or a platform policing quote unquote. And what is even disappointing is that they brand their veganism as oh this is my personal lifestyle. This is not a political stance. And in retweets are not endorsements. those kinds of things that we see on social media and I'm sure you've seen that as well on different platforms like earlier today I came across this headline online that read something about Germany welcoming donkeys from Gaza but again but Germany won't help injured Palestinian children definitely it reads like a dark joke as the headline writes but it's it is not it's a fact and it gets me thinking a lot of really how media is really complicit and that complicity it's not really changing and also when we want to look at sources where people may get some education on different topics related to veganism you will you will often come across vegans who will tell you oh I became vegan because I watched X and Y documentaries and I have a lot to here. But in short, I will say that I did watch many of those mainstream vegan documentaries that you're also in America and you're American and they are American based and American centred and this US- centric view, it really treats American food lots as universal and it ignores the indigenous small holder context and for the global supply chains from Brazilian soy to West African fisheries. And they also when they frame those issues that would hopefully get people to understand how it's important to go vegan, they really lack context and they lack diversity. Or I should say that it's those documentaries in in a way they sideline certain voices but again they failed to bring that slaughterhouse worker the indigenous food sovereignty advocate the Palestinians facing food apartheid the global south communities and instead of these voices you will only hear the celebrity doctors or the northern activists or a specific set of categories that only fit a certain white activist and it completely ignores, you know, how veganism is really an a philosophy on like entirely. It's not only focused on the animal farming in XY communities in the US, a lot of people go vegan because of these documentaries. And it's not about certain titles, but this is really a common concept there that I find with within those documentaries that simply they're really powerful, but they're very limited in their outlook and in in how they really the way they frame aspects of veganism as a diet or a personal choice because of health or because of the animals and disconnects veganism from its intersectionality and its, you know, the entirety of it as it is connected to different aspects of our lives. 

S.A BACHMAN: It's very interesting to hear you speak about that. We view it very similarly, but it's so helpful for me to hear you speak about it as someone who's on the opposite side of the globe and viewing all this from a very different perspective. I've watched many of those and I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, they often illuminate I'll give them credit for illuminating the environmental and the public health consequences of industrial animal agriculture. I mean, they can effectively underscore that the exploitation of non-human animals isn't reducible to an individual dietary choice, but that it is embedded within a globalized system that is implicated in climate collapse and labour  precarity and the political economy of food production. Um, the best of them, I think, do that. But as you already articulated, these films tend to marginalize the horrific violence of the system itself and the routinized suffering endured by billions and billions of animals in factory farms and industrial fisheries and agribusiness bsupply chains. They fail to adequately address the violence sustained by speciesism and shielded by corporate and state infrastructures. I mean, this has a profound impact on the environment, not to mention the effect it has on our souls. So for me, a more rigorous analytic framework, a framework needs to attend to the relationship of state violence and animal violence. For instance, Israel's marketing itself as the most vegan army amid systemic brutality toward both Palestinians and non-human animals. And a more analytic framework needs to stress that non-human animals are sentient subjects with their own agency and interiority rather than presenting them as mere ecological metrics. And also colonial and neoc colonial resource extraction needs to be addressed because that organizes industrial fishing, deforestation, land dispossession and the expansion of you know confined animal freeding oper feeding operations as they call them in the United States kayos cfo. So all those things they don't address things like militarized borders and sanctions and those things that can dramatically undermine indigenous food histories and erode multiecies life paths, lifeways. And so I mean, as you're aware, like a generally emancipatory vegan politics, it cannot be grounded solely in consumer discourse. It must be entangled with the logics of speciesism and imperialism and racism and capitalism and all the other isms because if not it risks becoming a sanitized form of ethical branding that leaves the foundational structures of violence intact. So I feel like a critical framework makes clear that any movement for liberation needs to reject the fantasy that violence can be neatly partitioned. Harm against non-human animals cannot be meaningfully opposed while white settler colonialism, militarized borders, and racialized dispossession are ignored or excused. And people need to understand that these systems co-roduce and legitimize one another and that the same logics that render animals killable also render certain human communities disposable like the Palestinians. And so when veganism refuses to name these links, it becomes a depoliticized lifestyle easily co-opted by state power and by corporate actors and nationalist projects. and they all leverage this kind of ethical consumption to obscure ongoing atrocities. One of the many reasons that people, you know, don't take veganism seriously is this presentation of it as this depoliticized lifestyle. So for me, a liberation ethic worth claiming must insist on solidarity across species and across geographies and across struggles. And it must recognize that dismantling these hierarchies of domination requires confronting the full architecture of oppression, not compartmentalizing it. And I guess lastly, you know, with regard to vegan washing, which critical animal studies scholars have long identified long before I even knew of the term vegan washing, but Israel's vegan washing campaigns, you know, have been identified as a straight as a state strategy that instrumentalizes animal ethics and it does so to obscure settler colonial violence and military occupation and a apartheid.  So like from this perspective, Israel's celebration of vegan soldiers and plant-based meals or Tel Aviv's cafe culture, it functions as a branding exercise, and it's designed to project this kind of progressive modernity while masking the daily realities of dispossession and blockade and racialized state terror. So I think critical animal studies scholars have pointed out that again these ethical consumption narratives especially when they're mobilized by a militarized state like Israel they collapse entirely when the same institutions promoting animal welfare are simultaneously you know as I said before enforcing systems that you know render an entire human and animal population killable. though, you know, vegan washing is not a quirky contradiction. It's a deliberate propaganda technique and it reframes Israel as compassionate while diverting global attention from the structural violence. So we have to insist that no claim to animal ethics can be credible when it's deployed in the service of empire and general liberation needs to confront all forms of domination you know including obviously the settler colonial state itself. 

[Verse 1: Alia Sharrief]
We in a the streets in the rubble
Still gotta hustle
Say they really love you but the world just watch the struggle
Power to the people we got God we the muscle
Still reporting live from this concrete jungle
Hey kids (hey kids)
What’s that flying in the air?
A drone? A missle?
Nooooooooo it’s a nightmare
Community guidelines so they won’t share
Don't talk about that
Got the whole world scared
What you mean you ain’t tryna pick sides?
What you mean we just better keep quite
What u mean better open up your eyes
Free Congo, free Sudan, free Palestine

[Pre-Chorus]
From the river to the sea
Go and let my ppl free
Go and let my ppl free
From the river to the sea
It's no eye in we
Little babies gotta eat
And we all gotta speak

[Chorus: Ahmed “Muin” Abu Amsha, Gaza Birds Singing (GBS)]
شيل شيل عالجمال شيل يا حوطك بالله

دم الشهيد معطر بالهيل ليل يا ليلو

ويل ويل عالظالم ويله ويله من الله

لسهر على نجوم الليل انا داويله

شيل شيل عالجمال شيل يا حوطك بالله

دم الشهيد معطر بالهيل ليل يا ليلو

ويل ويل عالظالم ويله ويله من الله

لسهر على نجوم الليل انا داويله

[Verse 2: Alia Sharrief]
Say her name, say her name
Sister gotta watch her back
Ain't that a shame
Brothers where you at
Where you at
It’s insane
Seen some fruits hanging and they looking really strange
(Don't be weird bro)
The least respected
The most neglected
And all you wanna do is see us naked
Don’t need ya diamonds
We need protection
We need you ridin
Do not reject this
It’s up to us to make a change
Misplaced hate
In every single race
Such a disgrace
They playin in our face
We gotta make a way
We gotta make some changes

[Chorus: Ahmed “Muin” Abu Amsha, Gaza Birds Singing (GBS)]
شيل شيل عالجمال شيل يا حوطك بالله

دم الشهيد معطر بالهيل ليل يا ليلو

ويل ويل عالظالم ويله ويله من الله

لسهر على نجوم الليل انا داويله

[Outro: Alia Sharrief]
We are the change that we wanna see
It's up to us
To save the world

DALAL: You said how many people are just feeling this double alienation between being vegan and pro Palestine. And I'm quoting you here, but correct me if I'm misquing you. And and you said something about how, you know, walking with this this combination of being vegan and pro Palestine, it's it's like walking with two black marks against you. Do you really walk with two black marks against you yourself? 

S.A BACHMAN: I hope I walk with a few more than two. 

DALAL: All right. (LAUGHS) Okay.

S.A BACHMAN: Um yes. I mean it's actually just it's very pronounced and I do feel those two black marks very strongly and even in my own little microcosm have tried you know simple things I did some work a couple of years ago and it was about only buying cruelty-free products and it was shocking to me how many very smart people had no idea that products are still tested on non-human animals. And I thought, okay, you know, this is something for the people who aren't going to embrace veganism, can can I at least get them to buy cruelty-free? And I would venture to guess n out of 10 of the people that I know and love never did a thing about that. And the same is true for all the people that keep saying,"Well, what can I possibly do to help in Palestine? What can I possibly do?" Well, boycotting is something everyone can do. And it is something that can concretely help both of those causes. But ultimately, you know, those two black marks again, what one finds is that everyone is very supportive of all these kinds of ideas until they in fact have to give up something or be inconvenienced. It's really just that simple. And so I agree with you. I mean, I think boycott and general strikes are far and away the strongest tools we have to disrupt and to ultimately dismantle the systems that dispossess and destroy. So, you know, when states fail to protect life or they fail to uphold international law, then it becomes our job to turn on the economic pressure. And so, boycotting, you know, is a strategy of withdrawal. But it's also a strategy of connection. It links consumers and artists and unions and students and cultural workers into a kind of shared refusal. And so if we boycott, we're disrupting the profit motive behind occupation and resource extraction. We're making complicity expensive. That's something I like to really stress, that we make complicity expensive. I might steal that from you. Absolutely. And you know, boycotting reveals that that empire demands our participation. That it's our p participation that's keeping that engine going. And so I'm not naive. Boycotting is not an end in itself. It has to operate, you know, hand-in-hand with a broader political repertoire and a wider strategy of collective struggle. It has to span direct support and cultural intervention and legal advocacy and transnational solidarity. But global work stoppages can amplify pressure in monumental ways by halting the flow of labor and logistics and profit that these corporations and states depend on. So when workers boycott their labor across borders, they're exposing the fragility of the system that's enabling this militarism and occupation. And they're demonstrating that economic power is collective power. So coordinated boycotts and strikes, I feel like they remind us that solidarity is not only symbolic, but it is materially disruptive and it's capable of interrupting the machinery of violence and it's capable of forcing political concessions that isolated actions can't achieve. And relatedly this understanding of a shared leverage opens into a broader truth which you already touched upon that the conditions we resist are not isolated. This collective disruption it reveals what movements across the globe already know. you know the systems we oppose are deeply intertwined and from this shared power a clearer vision can flow and our struggles are are bound together. So I feel really adamant about what others many people much smarter than I am have have said you know which is that everything is connected. So whether it's Palestine or Congo or Sudan or Haiti or the cows that are stuck at sea right now, we witness the same forces. You know, it's all the same forces. It's colonialism and it's land theft. It's resource extraction. It's imperialist greed. So, you know, in my own recent history, it's easy to link like the torching of lives and infrastructure in Palestine with the recent fires in Los Angeles. Like one of my more recent posters drew connections between Gaza and Los Angeles between like the brutal IF raids and the brutal ICE raids currently going on in the US and between environmental collapse and militarized violence. So, you know, many US policing institutions have been trained by the IOF. The fires and the ice raids are just symptoms of the same disease, a system that values conquest over conservation and values profit over people and expansion over existence. I mean, I got somewhat off track there, but it is on some level all connected to this notion of the boycott. And I'm very inspired. I'll just mention this last thing. I was fortunate enough to go to the People's Conference for Palestine in Detroit in August. And one of the people that spoke there was Chris Smalls. And for those who don't know Chris, he was a one-man force who organized and succeeded in the only successful strike that resulted in a union against Amazon. And then people may be more familiar with him in Palestine because he was joined on the flotilla mission. And of course, uh, being a black man was also subject to more detention and violence than anyone else that was on that crew. Chris has been a really incredibly terrific voice for both boycotting and trying to generate a global work strike. I think again as I said at the beginning boy the boycotting and the general strikes they're the only tools left we have to really disrupt. I want to add one of the lines that I read on the cover of your book that when every force distorts the truth telling the truth is resistance. Yes. So what is your what is your message to our audience who are listening to us today? Oh that's a great question. I think that I do believe telling the truth is resistance. I think it's so important. One of the things we didn't get to talk about, but I'll just mention is how vital telling the truth is amid the incredible bias and complicity that we're witnessing of corporate media. I'll just mention as an aside that I've taught seminars on media culture for decades and I have never seen this level of censorship and rep repression. Nothing, nothing compares to this. So speaking the truth is important. Seeking out information is important. And for many people who don't have the luxury of time, it's important I think to share information about places where one can easily and accessibly get that information. But my primary message would be to really ask people to try to come to understand how all these things are interconnected and that my life in the United States is directly entangled with your life in Palestine. And my largest message of course would be to respect that people are tired and respect that it is over two years of a genocide but we don't have the luxury of stopping doing everything we can every day to try to end the occupation. And that sounds a little bit like a Hallmark card, but that would, you know, really be my strongest me message is that especially right now when you can see that the news cycle is really shifting and there's nowhere near the coverage that there was even in the places where they've been fantastic about covering the genocide, which of course are few few and far between, but even those places have really reduced their coverage that we just cannot we can't stop. We can't stop speaking out. We can't stop generating work. We can't stop boycotting. We can't stop trying to implement a global strike. All those things we have to just stay at it for as long as it takes. And yeah, I really hope people receive and share this message from our episode today. 

DALAL: And also I have to also mention that boycotting is vegan friendly. So please go on and boycott and be loud and proud that you're fighting and advocating for for a just cause. And also don't forget to read this incredible book, Art of Defiance, Protest, Graphics, and Poetry for Palestine by SA Bachman. It was really my pleasure talking to you and having you on the Vegans for Palestine podcast. Thank you very much for for your time, for your wisdom, for your activism, for all that you shared with us and you continue to share with people through your platforms and through the work that you do. Thank you so much. 

S.A BACHMAN: And I'll mention for those people who are far away, I'll just mention quickly that there is a very affordable ebook version of the book. And just to remind people that every single penny goes to directly to aid Palestinians in Palestine, but I've really enjoyed talking to you. I feel like I have a new friend. Thank you so much for having me. 

DALAL: It was really my pleasure. And you do surely have a friend in Palestine and I really hope we cross roads in person. You know, life is weird. You never know. 

S.A BACHMAN: Yep! 

DALAL: Well, thank you very much.

[MUSIC]

TIKTOKER: [ __ ] Israel. Free my people in Gaza. Free Sudan. Free Congo. [ __ ] Israel. [ __ ] Israel. [ __ ] America. [ __ ] colonization. [ __ ] everything. [ __ ] Donald Trump. [ __ ] the Democrats. [ __ ] Hakee Jeff. [ __ ] everything. [ __ ] Thanksgiving. I said it.