"Bloodlines" and Unveiling the Realities of Israeli Occupation and U.S. Imperialism w/ Meital Yaniv - Ep 173

this is Fortress On A Hill, with Henri, Danny, Kaygan, Jo

vonni, Shiloh, Monisha , and Mike

Welcome back everyone to another episode of Forges on the Hill,

a podcast about the US foreign policy and team parallelism, capitalism.

The American way of war.

I'm Jovanni, your host.

I'm here with Shiloh.

Shiloh, how you doing?

I am good.

It's good to see you.

And good to see you too, Al.

Thank you for coming, Shiloh we have a special guest today, and

today's episode we'll confront the ongoing genocide and Gaza, where

over 67,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including thousands of women

and children, have been killed in a calculated campaign by the Israeli

state under the political cover and full military support of the United States.

At the heart of the devastation is the Ethnostate ideology of Zionists, which

centers around Jewish nationalism and Jewish supremacy, which drives the

Israeli government and its military, the IDF, to finally assert control

over Palestinian lands and lives.

Yet Palestinians fight for the fundamental right to live

clearly in their ancestral land.

While some former Zionist soldiers have begun shedding the indoctrination,

dare to speak out against the crimes of the states is committing.

Today, we explore this intersecting struggles of survival, conscious and hope

for justice to material compensation.

We're honored to welcome Metel Yannick, born in 1984 in

Tel Aviv occupied Palestine.

Metel is an artist and writer who is learning how to be in a human form

They work with words moving and still images, threads, bodies in front of

bodies, and with the earth itself.

As death laborer, metel tends to a prayer for the liberation of the land of

Palestine and the lands of our bodies.

They keep fires and offense me themselves in ocean and sea water,

listening deeply to the waters.

Spirit songs, caretakers and ancestors as they walk as a guest

on the home and gathering places of

Nation

Serrano.

Metel is the author of a powerful book, bloodline and they make offers

through the true name collective.

Today, metel join us to share insights from the journey, from the former IDF

soldiers to activists artists, and advocate for justice and liberation.

How you doing Meto?

Thank you for coming to the show and having a conversation with us.

Thanks so much for having me.

It's an honor to be here and It's nice to see you.

Shiloh, also just a word about in my bio that you

read the, native lens are written in the languages of each tribe.

another way to say their names is Kuya, Tova, Serrano, and Luciano.

Right.

I was trying to practice it before we got on the show, and I put it on,

you know how on Google you can put it like, to listen to how it sounds.

I was trying to practice it and I went over it several times, but

just, you know, the time going.

Yeah.

You know, as we're going through this now, you just, I was like, man, I

was struggling with how to, mm-hmm.

Pronunciation, but thank you.

Thank you for bringing that up though.

Yeah.

so you were in the Army or Air Force?

I was in the Air Force.

In the Air Force.

my father was an Air Force commander.

because of that I was second generation in the enlistment.

because I was his child, I automatically was referred to the Air Force.

Oh.

Because, I had a question because, when I read the articles

and reports and everything.

Also in your book when I was reading your book they use Army

and Air Force interchangeably.

and also the articles that I've always read always said IDF, they're

never distinguished with the Navy or the Air Force or the Army.

I was wondering how is the structural of the Israeli military?

Because the reason I asked is I lived in Saudi Arabia for a year as a contractor,

and the way they have the Saudi Arabian national Guard, and they had

the Moda with the Minister of Defense.

And within the Moda, they have our versions of the Army, air Force and

Navy, all together into one force.

Right.

So I was wondering if it's a similar structure in Israel, or is it different?

It's basically from my understanding it's all under

the umbrella of what Israel will

call the Israeli Defense Forces and what we will call the Israeli

oppression occupation forces.

And the separation there is, yeah, there's different units.

Under the umbrella, there's different almost like departments.

And then the Air Force is kinda known within Israeli society to be

that kind of like, top top option I say that I did time in the Army.

But yeah, the Air Force is considered to be like a perk if you go there.

Pilots are considered to be elite.

there's like always ways in which there's a lot of supremacy

within the system of the Army and it plays out in who goes where.

if we look at racism within Israeli society Ashkenazi.

Jews who are more white presenting will usually be in the Air Force.

and I wanna go back to the Ashkenazi, which you mentioned earlier.

because I know that in the book you talked about different hierarchies

between Ashkenazi, the Misa, the

departing

And safari and et cetera.

Right.

So we'll go back to that.

something interesting also, when I was reading your book, you were what

we call here an army brat, right?

I was an army brat as well.

I guess your kids would be an Air Force brat.

you're the child of a military person that was in the military

for, 26 years, I think.

And, we moved around a lot.

I know that you also had opportunity to move with your parents.

Also, you spent some time in Alabama in the base there.

There was an interesting story that you wrote in your book first how was

your experience in that movement?

Because I know I can relate to a lot of things that you say in your book, the

same way you describe how you saw your dad coming to pick you up at the kindergarten,

You saw the uniform and then everybody was just such at awe watching, you know?

And I believe your father was a decorated commander as well.

So you had a lot of prestige behind you.

I can relate with that because the same way that you saw your father,

you know, with the lunch from military child time, I did the same thing.

I used to go to my desk's job and Play with the stuff there that

they had the army stuff there, crawling, climbing the vehicles.

My dad was an engineer.

So I can relate to that.

can you tell a little bit about your experience in Alabama?

So I think, that is one of the most profound,

Experiences I've had since, working with Shiloh and about face and hearing

more stories of veterans here is just to see how much similarities there is.

'cause in a way, I think before coming to the US my understanding

was, well, in Israel there's like mandatory army enlistment, so everyone

must do their time in the Army.

It's not a choice.

And I, I've always thought about the US as this place where like

you choose to become a soldier.

But then now when I've been, educated in this system for over a

decade I understand that a lot of the time there is no choice here.

the racism and every other form of oppression that lives on this land

is also in the ways that people, find themselves with the only option

to become a soldier to survive.

And also how it is generational, how, it is within the family.

it is almost like a duty you are being born into and must continue.

so I think there's a lot of similarities between those things.

I think for me specifically in my personal story, it was a combination of

even before my father, on my maternal side, my grandparents, for the listeners

that don't know me, I come from Ashkenazi Jewish lineage from Poland,

Sardi, Jewish lineage from, Greece and Arab, Jewish lineage from Palestine.

So my maternal grandparents my grandfather was the Arab Jewish

who was from Palestine, and my grandmother came from Greece, escaped

from Rome there in the thirties.

they met in Palestine in the thirties, and they were both for the Lefty out of

all the Jewish militias that were working in Palestine at the time, to fight the

British and the Palestinian people at the same time, the lefty is known by

Jewish as a terrorist organization.

They were all terrorist organization.

They all committed terrorist acts, but the Lei is the one that is known for it.

For instance, the massacre, one of many massacres that happened during

the Nakba, was committed by the lei.

So my parents were recruiters and, you know, soldiers for the lei and my

upbringing start the duty that comes from that kind of indoctrination into Zionism,

which is very much by all means necessary.

on my paternal side, my dad is an Air Force commander.

His brother died in Yom War as a soldier, in the Gani Brigade.

So that kind of combination of grief duty and other things that we can get

into later created this Zionist lineage that I was really groomed to follow.

In terms of moving around, occupied Palestine is tiny.

it's not like here where, when you're a child of army, people, you can move.

from one edge of the state to another, and it'll take you days to get there.

Occupy Palestine, you know, from the north and to the south is

a seven hour, eight hour drive.

Right.

So within Occupy Palestine, we didn't move a lot.

there was one time during the Gulf War that we moved, to a southern base.

when I was eight years old, there was a collaboration between the Navy and the IOF

and my dad, along with other pilots, had to move to Montgomery, Alabama for a year.

I lived in Montgomery, Alabama when I was eight, didn't know English at the time,

was sent to a public school with a very, informative moment in my upbringing.

When I look back at it.

Yeah.

one of the stories that you write there, I was close to Montgomery, I

was in the School of the Americas.

they changed the name to Western Hemisphere Institute

for securing cooperation.

That was in Georgia to about two hours away from Montgomery.

there was another base, nearby where they collaborated with where

I worked which was an institute.

We switched to a schoolhouse institute.

mostly what we taught was, indoctrinate and teach Atlanta American soldiers.

they had Atlanta soldiers go over there and we trained them while I was there, I

did get, that's the first time I actually seen, Israeli, soldiers visiting us.

They came to visit us, a group of Israeli officers.

They came to visit us to see our training and stuff like that.

That's the first time I've seen one.

It has to be some type of collaboration, what you were talking about there

with that schoolhouse there.

mm-hmm.

Institution in Alabama and with pilots and whatnot, that's student pilot

as part of also that school as well.

So who knows what they were doing there

A year ago,

I went to Tucson, to offer a grief ritual.

my friend lives there, and when I arrived my friend who was, at my wedding

a few years ago when my dad was at my wedding, apparently they talked then,

and my dad shared with her during my wedding that he used to train in Tucson.

So I get to Tucson and my friend is telling me, you know what?

Your dad trained here.

And I was like, no, I no idea.

And then I was in Tucson for a few days and Tucson really

felt like an Air Force base.

Then also just the relationship between Tucson and the border.

And I was like, yeah, like of course my dad trained here.

any kind of soldier, from the IOF comes to spaces in the US

to train and vice versa, right?

Like outside of Gaza, the I built, mini Gaza, which is basically, a small,

space where the soldiers get to train, before going into Gaza, Cap cities

are based on Gaza City, on mini Gaza.

Like all of those things, like they don't start here and stop

there or start here and stop there.

There's a continuous info and outflow of, of information and tactics.

ICE was invented.

A law enforcement trip, of US officials to Israel when they saw,

the tactics that Israelis are doing within airport system, that they

were, exposed to the surveillance to the snipers on the wall with Gaza

to the checkpoints in the West Bank.

All of that created what we know of today as ice.

So I think as much as we can undo the separation of here and there, the

more that we can really understand how those systems are actually intertwined.

And when we break one of them apart, it reverberate within the whole, and

we just need to like, keep doing that.

go ahead, jump in there.

I was actually born on a Air Force base in Tucson, so I was

like, oh yeah, I know that base.

I was gonna ask you about that though.

specifically the connection of no borders, like there's no here and there, and about

from your memory, how was the US portrayed in Israel as you were growing up?

I'm so curious about that because here it's all positive

I think that's also all by design,

right?

For me growing up it was very much we were indoctrinated into this

Zionist sabar soldier identity, there was also, this desire for an

American dream that we saw on tv.

So the exposure we get, first of all in Israel very different

than European countries and some Middle Eastern countries, the TV

is not being translated to Hebrew.

You hear it in English and just have subtitles, which creates this connection

to the language I grew up on, on Beverly Hills, 1 0 9, 0 and like Melrose

Place and those other TV shows that, you know, I think were kind of like

born, I was born in 84, I'm assuming.

We share a decade to some capacity.

so yeah, those TV shows.

And yeah, and, and the US was seen as like, first of all, that like big brother

energy of like, you know, like, like if I think about myself in the Gulf War

sitting in a bomb shelter with a gas mask over my face because the US was

bombing Iraq and Iraq was bombing us,

It's like, oh yeah, we do this for each other.

they got our back and we got their back.

And it's very, but from a distorted place, which can be seen today

in how BB treats like Trump.

There's like this, like, almost like kingly, like, let me put

a red carpet in front of you.

So I think there's this really distorted relationship of we

must have the US on our side.

At the same time, within Israeli society and specifically Zionist

Israeli society, there's a constant need to amplify the victim hood.

So it, it goes like, we must have the US on our side.

And at the same time they don't fully understand us and no one really

understands our pain why is there any kind of limitation on what we can do?

And you know, like a very kind of childish like we need the

approval of this big brother.

And at the same time, I wanna mess up this big brother 'cause

they put too many constrained on me and they don't understand me.

And then in relation to Jewish American culture, there's a big like, almost like

a looking down at oh, you need us to exist for your safety and we will take it on.

So like, give us your funds and give us your support and give us all of that.

But at the same time, as much as I was raised to be Zionists

and Israeli and Soldier, I was also raised to be antisemitic.

Towards religious Jews and American Jews toward any kind of Jewishness or

European Jews, any kind of Jewishness that reminded Jews during the Holocaust.

We were trained to see it as like, that's bad, that's ugly.

that is why, you know, there's the famous saying.

we were sheep going to slaughter in relation to the Holocaust.

There's like, we were not strong enough, we were weak, we were

feminine, we were all those things.

We were people of the book.

So any kind till this very day, any kind of representation of that kind of

Jewishness within Israeli culture is seen through a lens of antisemitism.

and one of the way that I, have broken through my own indoctrination

is actually returning to Jewishness and returning to Jewish practice

as a way to heal that antisemitism that was planted inside of me.

It's funny you said, I was listening to, I forget his name, but he

was describing Zionism, and that's at the beginning where the Gaza Holocaust

was happening, he described, what you were describing right there, saying

about, the anti-Semitism, among Zionists and how Zionism, the way he described

it is pretty much muscular Jewishness.

Mm-hmm.

this idea precedes the Holocaust.

Zionism proceeds, but it was not as popular.

before that and after the Holocaust, there was also a lot of Jews who did not

agree with Zionism and did not believe that there should be a nation state and

were resisting the Zionist ideology.

one of the reason that in the end of the day the Jews quote unquote receive a state

was, first of all, because the European state did not wanna have them back.

And also it kind of solved the problem and offered the US an ally in the Middle East.

it was very much in support and connection to colonialism and imperialism that, not

to mention also that Jews in relation to other people throughout history

that navigated, genocides of sorts.

Jews are closest to white that we can see.

And that is also connected to superiority and why Jews received the state and

other, communities of people did not.

Absolutely.

I was curious if you could talk about this idea of,

Intense American exceptionalism.

when it comes to, the IOF and the brutality of the IOF because of my work, I

talk to a lot of us veterans every day and they often have this interesting concept

of how the IOF is extra brutal but it's like this weird, American exceptionalism

to think that they're any different.

I think the entirety of what we know of Israel, is the largest

US military base in the world.

There's no other way to look at it.

in terms of funding, in terms of technology, in terms of brutality,

in terms the indoctrination.

I think, there's always been, and hopefully not forever, this American

notion that, we're the best, and everyone else can do what they do,

and then where does that come from?

It's like, what I wanna say is like everyone is, baric and we're holy, right?

that is the root of colonialism.

It's the root of the creation of the US on Turtle Island.

It's all in here.

it's in imperialism.

And we can see this if we look at the prison system in the US when things leak

out or there's an image of something, then people come to terms with what's

happening here on a daily basis, right?

But when it's like business normal and you know, it's still the country that

has the most prison in the world and incarcerates most people in the world

within a racial hierarchy, and supremacy, then that kind of becomes the backdrop.

Then all of a sudden like.

We commit torture.

And in the same way, like recently photos from which is like, you know,

the mirror image of what was that leaked from Israel to the world.

And all of a sudden, like what the IOF tortures Palestinians,

none of it happens in an instant

It happens throughout history.

These forces are training each other on how to torture people,

and they do it on a daily basis.

for us it's really important to keep undoing that thought that

we're different, we're not as bad.

there's something also interesting to me in relation to how veterans are, regarded

in Israel we have Memorial Day where it honors all of the, soldiers who died

while, doing their time in the Army.

And between that day.

And Holocaust Memorial Day are the most two important days, and Memorial

Day ends with Independence Day.

So it's like there's not even a beat between them.

It's like one day bleeds into the other.

we grieve for the soldier for 24 hours and then it immediately

becomes fireworks for the state.

Because that's a part of the indoctrination

It's like a movie, you know, you hit the climate.

And you hit the, what do you call that?

The, how they, show stories.

You know, the challenges, whatever.

And then at the end, at the end,

the solution

Yeah.

you have it

Yeah.

Yeah.

most Holocaust memorial, museums around the world that I've

been in with a giant Israeli flag,

right?

And like the Zionist agenda into the nation state of

Israel, which saved the Jews.

you go through hallways of Holocaust imagery and testimonies and come out

into the light and a giant Israeli flag.

all of that is by design.

This is Israeli propaganda in its most obvious and, and in its most,

attractive to some people, I guess.

But that's, that's what they do.

They, they have found a way to continuously victimize themselves

while legitimizing anything they do in relation to their safety, to their

to their need for security, defense, whatever word we wanna put there.

I don't know that I fully answered your question, Shiloh, but we got somewhere.

Yeah.

I mean, I think you're absolutely correct about the strategic points of Israel as

an unsinkable, aircraft carrier in West Asia, which was a British purpose, right?

it was a place.

For them to, control the routes through the, Sinai, through the, West Canal,

after the first World War, after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the bridge

and the French, they wanted to have a footprint there, To control the traffic.

yeah.

and then from the British, he went to pass on to the Americans.

And now the Americans pretty much control that space right there.

the purpose of Israel apart from religion and all that, the strategic

military purpose of Israel is to have a presence, a western presence into West

Asia, and to maintain, this balance among the surrounding Arab states.

keep them from Coming together as the project of Arabism.

It was to keep them separate, right.

Keep client states, to the West United States.

And that's the purpose of Israel there.

and maintaining, Israeli, military primacy, and you're

absolutely correct with that.

but also there is the religious factor here in the United States as well.

here I live in San Antonio.

Here we have what call the, kufi.

Have you heard of Kufi before?

Christian, friends of Israel.

Christian United.

Yeah.

Israel, something like that.

Right.

Here's the headquarters here in San Antonio.

And it's the, pastor is, his name is, John Ha, right?

Yeah.

He's Angeles.

And.

they own a huge block.

You drive by their church.

It's like a big old temple, they have tv, they have schools and everything.

Right?

And,

and they're, I mean, it's like a multimillion dollar

enterprise that they have.

Right.

And they'll pay taxes.

Mm-hmm.

and they are active in funding, settlements, you know?

Funding.

I know you probably talked about the Brooklyn Jew

moving to the settlements and

Israel that's one of their projects, to fund.

those movements, from Americans Yeah.

To Israel and, and not only tour, but also to settle.

Yeah.

Most of the settlement organization in Israel have like a sister

organization in the us that funds their enterprise on the land.

aside from government funds and IOF protection that they need to settle and

continue the illegitimate, existence Jews within occupied Palestine.

but yeah, I mean the kufi and in general, the notion of Christian

Zionism, is something that, in our work, for Palestinian Liberation in our

work to end, funding, for the Israeli government and the Israeli military.

a lot of that has to do with, undoing the indoctrination of Christian Zionism.

and really, there's like the folks that believe in, the story that, Jews

are the ones that will be on the land when, the Messiah return and then the

world will become again and they will have the choice between converting and

going to heaven or dying with everyone else in the fire of what's left.

And that like how to make someone not believe in that story.

I don't know how to do that.

I know that I was raised in a lot of stories that I don't believe in anymore.

I believe that there is a way I don't have the specific Christian

upbringing to penetrate that fully.

I can try from my own experiences, but I think there's also just in general,

if we look at the more Christian Zionism slash Evangelical ideology of, the land

belongs to the Jews, The land belonged to the Jews among many other people.

there were always Arabs and Jews and Christians and other people

from other religions on the land.

I say this as someone raised within a Zionist identity, I don't get to imagine

Palestine, when Palestine is free.

I get to support that vision arriving, Palestinians are the

ones that will envision their land.

Once the land is free.

if they decide Jews are welcome to be there, then Jews

will be welcome to be there.

I, for one, like in my prayer that is a part of this book, bloodlines, which is

a prayer to bring the Israeli identity and stay to a loving and caring death.

I am looking forward for the day that I will be able to offer my parents home back

to a Palestinian family returning home.

Like that to me is, the, healing of my own generational cycle of like,

we are offering this back, right?

It's like the place where a right of return and land back meet.

But in terms of what that means to Christian Zionists, right?

that is work that.

We must invest in right now because otherwise we have an entire people

invested in this Zionist project for reasons beyond Judaism.

how do we make sure that as we do that work, we also find

an alternative, identity story ideology and healing, process.

so that they can also understand that this vision of the land is

their own ownership of land and they don't get to own any land.

None of us get to own any land.

how do we as a collective on this planet earth, return to this true

belonging with the earth that has no ownership and has no land?

Yeah.

and may Jesus help us.

Absolutely.

Meel, let's get to your book bloodlines.

Your book is very raw.

It's very, deeply personal, look into the Israeli system through the

eyes of someone that, part of it.

Very vividly poetic, blending personal reflection with powerful storytelling.

you trace your family's history surviving, fascism and Nazi

persecution in Eastern Europe.

It'll bounce around between, Eastern Poland to the Soviet

Union towards today's Ukraine.

And being raised, in a Zionist environment afterwards from your family migrating,

from your paternal side, migrating to Israel in 1950s, and the they did

there talk a lot about assimilation.

How.

They were pushed to assimilate to, the state's, ideology to become Israelis.

can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah.

so it connects to what we talked about earlier in relation to this militarized

identity of the Israeli my paternal family when, when they arrived, my dad

was already one years old, and then his brother was born a few years later.

they were also Ashkenazi Jews.

So they were offered, a lot of opportunity and privileges as, as newly migrates to

the state that other folks from Sephardic and mis images from Northern Africa

and other Arab states did not receive.

The resources to really resettle and start this new life.

But in order to start this new life, they had to give up a lot of

whether it was language interest, the way that they raised their kids.

A lot of the things had to shift.

And something that happened in the generation of what we will

call my parents' generation.

The first generation after the Holocaust is a lot of them

were ashamed at their parents.

A lot of them were ashamed that happened.

They were, ashamed that they didn't have, family.

Members, that their families were really small, that they only had,

each parent maybe had one other or not at all, family member.

there was this understanding of what was lost in grief that was also not fully

digested by the people who survived it.

That then got moved into the bodies of the children who were raised within

the Zionist ideology that taught them to, change their names, that they

have to have, Zionist Israeli names.

the first thing my father and his brother did when they were 18 years old was

to, change their last name from a more polish sounding last name to Yanni,

which is a very Israeli, sounding name.

my father for most of his life when he was growing up was ashamed of

the food that his parents made.

He wanted to eat the food that the land made, which is also, food

that was stolen from Palestinians.

so there all these ways in which they were raised into this extremely,

masculine, extremely, patriarchal, extremely militarized, shape of a

soldier from a very young age, and had to remove everything that came before.

from that indoctrination, you have my generation that, the ancestral

language, that my family spoke, Yiddish Ladino Arabic, all of

those languages stopped with them.

most of them are languages my parents knew in some capacity,

and they did not move them.

So I was raised in a generation where we only speak Hebrew and English.

that assimilation is continuing to this very day.

what I try to do in bloodlines is really resurface all of those generational wounds

that did not get a chance to be grieved or tended to, because I believe that

it's our duty, not to go to the Army, but instead to actually drown in those

wounds and from that drowning, find the healing and movement, of how we undo.

The inability to drown in those wounds created for so many generations since.

I hope that makes sense.

I wanted to ask you Al I like concrete ways.

learning from you and with you around your own personal transformation is so

beautiful and inspiring what are some concrete ways that you transformed

Yeah.

thank you.

I do

feel like This will be my life I constantly find more and more things

that need to be, removed, shed digested, thrown away, if there's a through line,

that's what the book is talking about.

I see the indoctrination starting in the womb.

from that moment of being sewn, army uniform on my little baby body inside a

womb to this very day, something happened when I was 18 and I left the army.

I left the army after, six months and I wanted to kill myself in that moment.

Because it was, something that my body had to do.

And at the same time, something that I was so ashamed about doing because it was

against everything I was raised to be.

And I kind of didn't understand how to continue my life 'cause

this was supposed to be my life.

if I see a through line from that birth moment to that 18-year-old

the Army to today, what I keep finding is more embodiment.

So the more that I have connection with my body, which is our water and earth and

fire and air, like our bodies are elements of life that we can see reflected to us.

When we look at plants, when we look at animals, when we look at the sky,

when we look at any living thing, we have the same elements in us.

and the more that I have connection to that.

core knowing the more I have capacity to surface the traumas I'm also, a

survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

that took a lot of, restructuring to be able to surface everything that happened.

Everything that I had to dissociate from my own survival.

which again, I don't see that separated from the militarization of our society.

I think that childhood sexual abuse and people in army police and

other of boots is very connected.

That's in the next book, a different conversation.

I think in general I can say that the more that I am able

to, surface and realize and.

Find out about my own life, the more I'm able to piece those memories

together, the more embodiment I find, the less shame I carry.

Because this body is not my own.

This body is held by generations of bodies that have been trying to get

free from the beginning of time.

and when I'm able to ground myself and feel whether it's well ancestors, whether

it's other, spirit ancestors the way that each one of us is fully held, the way

that our backspace is fully supported, and all we have to do is lift our hands

and lean back and be held while holding and allow that to continue, the less

room there is for, am I good enough?

how do I carry the shame of what I've done as a soldier?

all the other things that I'm sure people who will listen to this, show and people

in about face are facing on a daily basis how to live with the knowledge

of what we were indoctrinated to do.

we didn't know another way.

when we start piecing those things together, when we find our body as a

part of an earth body, there's so much more support and capacity it really

becomes a journey to free our hearts, Our hearts were never in uniform.

they were covered by armors, they were covered by tanks, they were covered

by whatever they needed to be covered in order for us to become the soldiers

that we were indoctrinated to be.

So in the shedding of all of that, our heart was always free.

And the more that we can find that regional relationship and connection, the

more I think we have capacity to heal.

And for me it's really about the body and embodiment of all that

this body is able and unable to do.

Thank you Al. I look forward to that.

That second conversation you're talking about something I think a lot about.

So militarization of societies and our bodies and the attempt,

militarization of our hearts and souls.

yeah.

You have to go, but I love you so much.

I Love you so much.

It was so nice to see you

See you next week

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's coming up.

Tell

you have a couple more minutes,

Sure.

Okay.

Thank you

Thank you for coming on Meto, some of the things that I picked

up from the book really jumped at me your, analysis on assimilation?

Me being, Dominican, Puerto Rican and coming here to the United States, I was

born here, but grew up between New York and Puerto Rico my first formative years.

then my dad joined the military and we started traveling around.

as a person coming from Latin America we feel that pressure of assimilation.

In the context of Puerto Rico, which a US colony, Since 18 90, 98.

there's this, torn identity amongst people.

see Puerto Ricans, who have fully, embraced their colonial status, and

their relationship with the United States, and they defended, particularly

in the military, they become more Americans than Americans, right?

but then you have other people who have not embraced that, who see themselves

as Puerto Ricans and see Americans as foreigners, and they're Puerto

Ricans, so we travel within those two communities, that dualism in our mind,

you talk about assimilation, you talk about erasure, I saw a lot of

parallels with, the history of the United States and in Israel, Israel

being, what, 75-year-old state, right?

And United States,

I think 77 now,

Right.

so it's like a mini United States and

absolutely.

77 years, right?

And, you know, whereas from 200 years to 77 years package right there,

I've been in, you know, different,

absolutely

different mixture of people come from different parts of the world.

You know, in your case as the National Jews, right?

Which mostly where, central Eastern Europe, Eastern European, right?

Mm-hmm.

you have the blank right now.

On your mother's side.

The Sephardic.

Jews.

and then Arab Jews from

Palestine.

Arab Jews.

Exactly.

Right.

And then you mentioned also the Ethiopian Jews which is interesting.

Mm-hmm.

Which is not found, found also that during the sixties there was

a Black Panther party in Israel.

There was,

you know, mm-hmm.

But yeah.

so a lot of those, so I can relate to a lot of this three things that

you talked about, the association

Simulation.

Mm-hmm.

And erasure, erasure being, pretty much erasing your culture, but also the other.

You mentioned you also had the testimony from that soldier, from breaking the signs

mm-hmm.

And where they're totally blanked out and erased about

those children they were harassing Talk a little bit about that.

I think in terms of erasure, looking at the US as a prism from which

we can see, the occupation of Palestine in the future, Or, looking at Palestine

today from, a past lens of Turtle Island, there's a lot of information

there that can really support us.

I think that's one of the reasons why I, in my practice try to intertwine,

land back and right of return.

those movements, feel really, interconnected to me.

We see a lot of indigenous tribes, internal island these days.

And a lot of them are in processes of returning to the land and reestablishing

the native languages and practices.

and we still, you know, they're still in internal island through US institutions.

There's still so much, that was stolen and still kept in archived,

whether it's ritual, materials, entire bodies are still in archives.

so I think there's a way in which what the level of erasure that has happened here.

we can see how.

Deep it went.

And as much as there's so much work to uncover it, it's gonna take,

more generations coming together to really uncover, everything that was

stolen, everything that was erased, everything that, was brutally taken.

in Palestine.

what we see today is that, every Palestinian person that I know in the

diaspora, and in Palestine knows the name of the village and where it is that their

grandparents were, forcefully expelled, raped out of, killed in, in 1948 when

the state of Israel was established, that memory has not been lost.

Everyone know where they have a right to return to, in terms of

recipes rituals practices language and plants the ancestral, knowledge.

It's all alive.

It's all here.

we have a sacred opportunity to end fiscal colonization before, it gets

to a place where in a few generations Palestinians do not have access to that,

ancestral knowledge where too much has been erased, where too many bodies have

been killed, where too much land has been, buried under Zionist occupation.

where too many olive trees, were burned by Zionist soldiers.

We have this opportunity to stop the erasure and offer

the land back to its people.

offer the people back to its land, it's like the land of Palestine is

alive and waiting for the Palestinian people to return, to the practices

and land tending that they know how to do, ancestrally and beyond.

the erasure that has happened within Jewish lineages that has created,

what we know of is the Israeli state and society that erasure

also can be removed from the land.

we can also become diasporic, again, as we've been for hundreds of years and know

that there is belonging in the diaspora.

Being a J in the diaspora.

that is how our tradition historically has survived and thrived.

Population of what?

7 million, right?

What is Israeli population?

I believe.

you mentioned that diaspora.

for example, there are more Puerto Ricans that live in the

United States than in Puerto Rico.

I believe Judaism is treated as an ethnicity it's seen as an ethnicity.

here.

I'm not sure if you see it that way,

That's where I read it in United States.

So roughly around the same, amount of the population, Jewish people

identify Judaism about the same size of the Israeli population.

and Argentina, for example, has the largest, Jewish population, south America.

And, you know, you have the Jews, you have, I even out there

are communities of Judaism.

So in the number of American Jews is the same number as,

that's what I was,

Israelis,

that's what I was looking, I was looking at similar.

people who identify with the religion of Judaism or the

cultural Tradition of Judaism.

Right.

Because a lot of people are not practicing.

mm-hmm.

It's culturally Jewish.

I

mean, but if you look at it from like a, a ethnicity, which

is how the, state will look at it,

right?

if you're Jewish, you're Jewish.

Whether you practice it or not.

Even Dominican Republic, we do have a tiny Jewish

population, Dominican Republic.

Mm-hmm.

They, 1930s, around 300 families, mm-hmm.

Moved there from, there were German Jews, they moved there.

And they established a, they were given land.

They were given land uhhuh community there as well.

But yeah, so that resonate with that Theia Baric, right?

Because the state is seeing Judaism as an ethnicity, but in fact it is more

of a culture and tradition, right?

Am I right?

Correct.

Because

I grew

Catholic.

and Catholic

Judaism has been diasporic for the majority of time that we

know of people being on this planet.

I

don't know.

I think that's a good place to wrap it up today.

thank you so much for coming to the show.

yeah.

Talking to us, sharing your knowledge, your insights

and your experience with us.

anything that you want, last words before, last comments before we depart.

Thank you so much for having me.

Really grateful.

I think last words would be just the, if we can all really center

ourselves here in the privilege of living in the belly of empire

and

knowing that

the only way we stop the Israeli.

Army and society and government from, not only committing a genocide, but

from the practice of ethnic cleansing and occupation that have been on

the land from the moment that Israel came into existence, that really come

down to the US stopping to support Israel financially and otherwise.

And we can make that change from here.

in this moment in time living here, we are complicit in so many

other genocides happening around the world in Sudan and the Congo.

and just to keep asking ourselves how am I feeding Empire today?

So Empire is because we are.

for empire to not be anymore, we all need to stop feeding it.

my question to us all on a daily basis is how am I feeding Empire

today and how can I cut that tie?

Absolutely.

May Palestine be free in our lifetime.

Be free.

Let's see.

work.

Thank you so much,

when's the next book coming out?

I don't know yet when the next book is coming out.

It's been written so probably within a year or two in terms of

finding my work, I'm on Instagram under bloodlines lower dash book.

You can also find, my offering.

I do energy work and death work through True name collective.

And that is on our website, true name collective.com.

Bloodlines has its own

website, bloodlines book.com.

It was published by Communities of Memory, which is where you can buy a copy.

explain that What's death work?

And I don't know if there was a quote that I found in your book that

I'm looking for now in my notes.

In the book there's a death prayer that Israeli identity state.

that.

death work.

a loving and caring death.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

So that work for me first of all, it's just supporting

people who are actively dying.

In their process of dying through supporting their caregivers, supporting

them in the process that they're in.

I also work with not currently, dying, also known as not

currently Ill very much alive.

And young people in relation to getting advanced directive support together.

especially folks from the queer and trans communities in which a lot of

the time the, folks that we want to care for us are not our blood family.

an advanced directive can support in that I also support people in

dead name rituals and other ways in which, just from hearing a little bit

about my story, there's so many death cycles we go through spiritually.

Right.

a part of my death work and energy work is to support people in that process.

You related to the state of Israel.

In order for it to save itself, it needs to die,

not to save itself, it just needs to die in order for us to,

well, the way you've said it in a book is very poetic.

I kind of cleansing type of thing, you know?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you

again.

care

everybody.

Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you again, Maytel.

Thank you for coming.

Yeah, speaking to you again in the future.

Take care.

Thank you, Jovanni.

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