What Two Decades of Palestinian Human Rights Struggle Can Teach Us

With a Master’s Degree in International Peace and Conflict Resolution, Matt Bowles has over two decades of human rights and activism experience.

He led activist delegations to monitor human rights abuses in the north of Ireland, co-founded an organization to stop U.S. aid to Israel, organized solidarity delegations to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and did solidarity work with the indigenous Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico.

In the past few years, many more people around the world have tuned in to the injustice that has been happening in Palestine for the past 75 years.

If you want to understand the origins of this injustice AND what you can do to help stop it, this conversation is for you.

I first became immersed in the struggle for Palestinian liberation in 2017, when I visited the West Bank and saw the Israeli soldiers at checkpoints, the humiliation of people, the treatment of Arabs like second-class citizens, and the Israeli system of apartheid with my own eyes.

Matt has been working on Palestinian solidarity since 1998. It has been so helpful to hear the perspective of someone with this much longer view on the struggle.

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Listen to the Episode

What you’ll hear:

Current moment in the Palestinian human rights advocacy
Travel media's sanitized version of seeing the world
The power asymmetry and the longest military occupation in modern history
Confronting antisemitism and misrepresentation
Matt dismantles "It's too complicated"
Why do we give states more rights than people?
The origins of this settler colonial project
The history of Palestinian nonviolent resistance
Why is there zero accountability for the State of Israel's actions?
What can an individual do? A lot!
Why Yulia believes that Gaza will change the world

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"Genocide is always wrong, no matter who's committing it." – Matt Bowles

The Maverick Show

Reflections on identity, the power dynamics that shape our world, and how we can be more thoughtful, conscious travelers as we move through it.

Matt Bowles is the host of the Maverick Show podcast, where he interviews diverse world travelers and digital nomads who share their journeys to location-independence as well as their reflections on identity, the power dynamics that shape our world, and how we can be more thoughtful, conscious travelers as we move through it.

I was a guest on Matt’s podcast as well, which you can listen to here and here.

Learn more about the Maverick Show here.