This week on “The Watchdog,” Lowkey welcomes returning guest, Ahmed Alnaouq, to discuss his new, best-selling book and his spat with Piers Morgan. Ahmed Alnaouq is a writer and journalist who grew up in central Gaza and now lives in the United Kingdom. In 2015, he co-founded We Are Not Numbers, a nonprofit organization dedicated to sharing the stories of Palestinians with the world.
Recently, he published a book of the same name, which has been a runaway bestseller, drawing interest from around the world. “We Are Not Numbers” is a collection of 74 stories from 59 Palestinian writers. It attempts to shed light on the Palestinian struggle prior to October 7, in order to better understand why it occurred. It has already been translated into multiple languages. A deeply humanistic work, two of its contributors have since been killed in the genocide.
For decades, Alnaouq tells Lowkey, Palestinians have been told to keep quiet about Zionism, and that it is anti-Semitic to discuss the ideology. He flatly rejects this notion. As he said:
We Palestinians are the best equipped to talk about Zionism, because Zionism is a practice on us. The ideology of Zionism was practices on my mother and father. My family was killed because of the ideology of Zionism. My homeland was stolen away because of Zionism… We have been living through genocide and starvation and a blockade for the past 18 months, because of Zionism. How can I not talk about it? We must talk about it!”
The official Gaza death toll stands at 55,000, of which around 70% are women and children. Yet the real impact is certainly higher, as institutions dealing with counting the dead have all but collapsed. Since March 2025, the United Nations notes, Israel has tightened the blockade on Gaza, trapping its population in a densely populated and destroyed strip of land, reducing homes to rubble. More than two million people are in desperate need of humanitarian aid, and face disease, starvation, and death.
“With every Palestinian killed, part of us is killed, all of us, around the world. So the matter of Palestine is a matter for everyone. It is a matter for humanity. And we should all share this burden, think of the Palestinians and talk about those who are murdering our brothers and sisters in Palestine in the name of this death cult ideology,” Alnaouq said.
Al-Naouq recently went viral after appearing on Piers Morgan’s show, arguing against the host’s claim that the genocide in Gaza represents a religious conflict between two sides, and that Palestinians are hellbent on destroying Judaism. “This is not a religious war,” he said, adding;
It is a war between colonizers and colonized, between occupiers and occupied, people who have been living under blockade, under siege, under occupation for the past 77 years. It’s not with the Jews.”
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Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
