In this episode, we sit down with Palestinian journalist, author, and editor of The Palestine Chronicle Ramzy Baroud for a wide-ranging conversation on the unraveling of the Zionist project, the resurgence of resistance across the region, and the long arc of anti-colonial struggle.
Baroud begins with the present moment: the military defeats Israel has absorbed in Lebanon, the strategic exhaustion of a state that was sold to its own citizens as invincible, and the psychological fracture now spreading through Israeli society as the myth of permanent dominance collapses in real time.
He then takes us back to his childhood in Gaza, where he first encountered the Merkava tanks of the occupation — not as symbols, but as machines rolling through the streets of his refugee camp. It is a portrait of how a generation of Palestinians came to understand Empire viscerally, in the body, before they ever read a word of theory.
The conversation moves outward to Iran, and to the broader axis of resistance that has reorganized the political map of West Asia. Baroud discusses what it means for a state and a people to refuse the terms Empire offers, what the cost of that refusal has been, and why the resistance has endured where so many predicted collapse.
We close with a discussion of activism itself — how it evolves, how it ages, how it can curdle into performance or ripen into discipline, and what the movements of the imperial core have to learn from the movements of the colonized world.
This is a conversation about defeat and endurance, about memory and inheritance, about the faith that drives a people to keep standing when every rational calculation says they should have fallen long ago.
About the guest:
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author, and editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is a non-resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and has been writing on Palestine, Empire, and the Global South for over three decades.
His most recent books include Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out (2022) (co-authored with Ilan Pappe) and These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (2020). His earlier works — The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (2018) and My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (2010) — remain essential reading for anyone trying to understand the Palestinian condition not as a policy file but as a lived inheritance.
His writing appears regularly in publications across the world, and his voice has become one of the most consistent and clear-eyed in the global conversation on Palestine.
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