Ma’an Odah grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp. We last caught up with him at a solidarity march on Oʻahu in the fall when hundreds of people turned out to protest the violence in Gaza.
The war broke out in 2023 after Hamas attacked Israel, killing more than 1,000 people and taking 251 people hostage.
President Donald Trump is suggesting that some 2 million Palestinians be moved out of Gaza and that the area become a resort development, “the riviera of the Middle East.”
Odah said Wednesday that he now has 42 relatives who have died in the bombings. He appeared to be numb to Trump's latest statements.
"This is no news to us. The intention behind the Zionist entity has always been to confiscate land and treating our land as a real estate opportunity. To colonialists, that's always been the mentality, how do you exploit and make money off of the land," he said.
"There is no other way for us to survive but the land. So the concept of kicking us away from our land is to to de-attach us from our umbilical cord, to really just kill our only way to survive, and that's never going to happen, because it's impossible to erase a population," Odah continued.
Odah currently lives in Hawaiʻi but has family and friends who still live in Gaza.
"What I'm hearing from my family is this spirit of, while we are resilient, how much more can we take? We've been displaced eight times in the past two years," he told HPR. "While we see so much horror and pain, people are going through it collectively, and that eases some of the pain, that distributes the burden."
Meanwhile, the White House press secretary said Wednesday that the president “has not committed to putting boots on the ground in Gaza.”
This interview aired on The Conversation on Feb. 5, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m.
