Ep12. Nationalism - Can it be a force of peace? w/ Omar Dajani 🇺🇸🇵🇸

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How much do you understand your national background? What is your relationship with your local environment? And what kind of ideologies move you without realizing?

We’re back! We start Season 2 with a deep and delicious discussion around our relationship to nations.

My guest Omar Dajani, is an American Palestinian law professor, and this is his story about how a college debate opened him up to explore his Middle Eastern origins, and took him on a journey to become part of the Negotiations Support Unit of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the late ninteis.

In this episode we tackle:

• The experience of being a dual national, and how nations are intertwined with our imagination.

• The complexities of nationalism and the many ways it shapes our world.

• We ask: Is nationalism always bad? If not, can it actually propel us forward?

• The Palestinian occupation, and the grim reality of how far we’ve come from the end of the nineties. Is there any hope? What does it look like?

• White nationalism in America, and how a lonely world is driving people to look for more structure. Are we at risk of a fascism?

• The power of the local, and why talking to those who trigger us is critical to humanity.

About Omar Dajani:

Omar lives in San Francisco and is a Professor of Law at the University of the Pacific - McGeorge School of Law. He grew up in Texas, and lived for a long time in Palestine where has been part of the Negotiations Support Unit

Things we mentioned (and further reading!)

• What makes you Antifragile?

• An Ode to Heartbreak: A book of poems and meditations, on losing relationships, nations and friendships.

• The Palestinian First Intifadah

• Imagined Communities: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson

• What Makes a Nation? By Ernest Renan

• Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

• A Land for All: The Two States, One Homeland initiative

• The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That's Pulling Apart by Noreena Hertz

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If you liked this, stay tuned for the upcoming weeks, we will release some more short soundbites from this episode!

On behalf of the Gumpcast team,

Thanks for listening!

Omar Shaker