Show Notes
From a recent SAND Community Gathering (December 2025). This urgent conversation, facilitated by Ashira Darwish and rooted in Haidar Eid’s new book Banging on the Walls of the Tank, moves through the fractured present of Gaza, bringing forth a chorus of resistance, mourning, refusal, and clarity.
This is a dispatch from within the rubble, the classroom, the lull between airstrikes. Together. Eid and Darwish hold the line inside the unbearable: the grief of ongoing genocide and the insistence on liberation; the impossibility of hope and the necessity of imagining otherwise.
Their conversation refuses erasure, insists on dignity, and carries the clarity of those living under siege with purpose and memory intact.
This conversation carries the vibration of Gaza’s resistance outward, inviting listeners not just to witness, but to respond.
Topics
00:00 Introduction and Opening Remarks
00:58 Context of the Gaza Genocide
02:23 Introducing Haidar Eid and Ashira Darwish
02:32 Haidar Eid's Background and Experience
03:19 Ashira Darwish's Introduction and Role
05:42 Haidar Eid's Personal Account of the Genocide
07:17 The Impact of the Genocide on Haidar's Life
09:51 Tribute to Fallen Colleagues and Students
11:55 The Importance of Palestinian Narratives
14:57 Historical Context and Ongoing Genocide
27:34 The Human Cost and Personal Stories
29:00 Protecting Stories and Dignity
29:40 Understanding Israeli Society and Zionism
32:33 The Role of International Support
34:08 The BDS Movement and Palestinian Civil Society
35:47 The Call for Global Solidarity
43:18 Banging on the Walls of the Tank
53:12 A Shift in the Global Narrative
58:17 Final Thoughts and Call to Action
Resources
Project Hope Palestine
Catharsis Holistic Healing Palestine
BDS Movement
Ashira Darwish’s Website
Where Olive Trees Weep
Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member
More from Sounds of SAND
What if humans and AI share the same hallucination?
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee grew up with a Sufi teacher living downstairs and fell in love with jazz at an early age. He is now a Sufi teacher himself, a filmmaker, and the founder of Emergence Magazine. His new book Remembering Earth asks what it would take to come back into relationship with the living world. We talk about silence, the primordial covenant, the eye of unity, walking as practice, dreams, and what it means to meet this moment without turning away from beauty.
Joan Tollifson returns to the podcast three years after her first conversation. We talk about her June essay Two Inseparable Truths, on the relative and the absolute and the trouble with getting stuck in either one. Along the way: the silence of many nondual teachers in a dark time, what cancer and an aging body insist on that philosophy cannot, and why "I don't know" may be the answer closest to truth. She closes by reading her essay 'Radiant Light in Dark Times' in full.