Abdelfattah Abusrour, founder and director of Alrowwad Cultural and Arts Society in Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, Palestine, joined the show this week to discuss his life's work. We discussed how he came to found Alrowwad and the many inspirational students and works of art that have come of it.  

Understanding Israel Palestine: A Beyond the Walls Edition

Episode: The Structural Origins of AIPAC & The History of Israeli Espionage in the U.S.

Guest: Grant Smith, Research Director at the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep)

Host: Jeremy Rothe-Kushel

Episode Overview

In this deep political analysis of US-Israel relations, we examine the foundational architecture and historical continuity of the modern Israel lobby within the United States. Grant Smith, a leading investigative researcher and author of America's Defense Line, Foreign Agents, and Divert, joins the program to unpack the counterintelligence history and covert networks that have shaped American foreign policy in the Middle East.

This conversation moves beyond standard political discourse to conduct a forensic examination of the structural immunity surrounding historical espionage and unregistered foreign lobbying in America. From suitcases of campaign cash on presidential whistle-stop tours to the covert smuggling of highly enriched uranium and nuclear triggers, Smith details the intricate, multi-decade efforts to subvert U.S. regulatory and defense frameworks.

Key Historical & Structural Topics Explored

• The Origins of AIPAC & FARA Subversion: How Isaiah Kenen and the American Zionist Council (AZC) navigated the Justice Department's efforts to force them to register as foreign agents under the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), ultimately restructuring into the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to bypass compliance.
• Truman & Whistle-Stop Campaign Financing: The pivotal role of Abraham Feinberg in securing a $2 million suitcase of cash to save Harry S. Truman's floundering 1948 presidential campaign, effectively cementing early executive support for the Israeli state.
• NUMEC & Nuclear Espionage in the U.S.: The diversion of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium from the NUMEC facility in Apollo, Pennsylvania, under Zalman Shapiro, which was covertly funneled to the early Israeli nuclear weapons program.
• Project Pinto & The MILCO Smuggling Ring: The covert procurement network that successfully smuggled 810 nuclear-triggering krytrons out of the United States, utilizing operatives like Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and involving current political figures like Benjamin Netanyahu.
• Political Immunity & Quashed DOJ Investigations: The systemic political pressure that successfully shut down Department of Justice and FBI investigations into these smuggling networks, resulting in a distinct lack of prosecutions and quiet pardons for the few operatives who were caught.

Resources & Links

• Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep): irmep.org
• The Israel Lobby Archive: israellobby.org
• KKFI Show Page (archives): Understanding Israel Palestine
• Beyond the Walls (full length audio): https://beyondthewalls.substack.com/

Jews, especially American Jews, have never been of one mind about Israel and the United States’ support for it. Eric Alterman, Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, CUNY, joins the show to discuss his 2022 book We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel. He documents the ebbs and flows of American Jews’ relationship to Israel, from the more muted embrace following Israel’s establishment in 1948, to the tight embrace that followed the war in 1967 and the hegemony of the David and Goliath myth it spawned. After Israel’s destructive and disastrous war of choice in Lebanon that began in 1982, the gap between the myth of Israel as underdog and its reality as a settler-colonial regional hegemon began to disintegrate. In our discussion he traces this relationship up until the present, post-October 7 reality in which Israel is losing support across all fronts. 

Sonya Meyerson-Knox spent 16 years in Beirut, Lebanon working as a journalist and for U.N. agencies. She discusses the new war in Lebanon that began after the United States and Israel attacked Iran February 28, 2026, describing the war within the context of previous Israeli wars on Lebanon. She views Israel's current scorched-earth campaign as not only an attack on Hezbollah but also an attempt to destroy Lebanon's pluralistic social fabric. She says Israel has long coveted Lebanon's land and resources and seen Lebanon as part of a vision of a Greater Israel that goes back to the early founders of Zionism.

Beyond the Walls: The Israel-Silicon Valley Nexus and the Penetration of U.S. Critical Infrastructure (with Mary Silva)

Episode Overview: While public discourse naturally gravitates toward the physical realities of the occupation and destruction in Palestine, a parallel, largely invisible architecture of control operates far beyond the checkpoints of Gaza and the West Bank. This digital infrastructure has actively penetrated our personal devices, corporate networks, and municipal utilities.

In this episode of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls, host Jeremy Rothe-Kushel investigates the technological front lines of geopolitics and cyber warfare. Joining the broadcast is independent researcher and former Congressional candidate in Washington State, Mary Silva, who helps map the massive concentration of U.S. technology research and development within Israel and analyzes the deep penetration of foreign espionage networks into American sovereignty.

Bridging the gap between the surveillance systems deployed on Palestinians and the espionage vulnerabilities faced by American citizens, this conversation examines the geopolitical outsourcing of U.S. national security.

Silva details how major tech conglomerates—including Microsoft, Google, and Intel—have functionally outsourced core development to veterans of elite Israeli military intelligence cohorts, such as Unit 8200 and the IDF's Talpiotprogram. The analysis moves past surface-level electoral politics to expose the strategic dangers of embedded hardware backdoors, the proliferation of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, and how algorithmic suppression operates as a tool for narrative control in the current "information war."

Crucially, this technological penetration is not restricted to federal intelligence networks. Silva highlights how local U.S. infrastructure—from smart-meter utility grids to public transit systems—is actively being compromised, often subsidized and locked in by legislative frameworks buried within the NDAA.

Key Episode Insights:

• The Intelligence-to-Corporate Pipeline: How elite IDF veterans shape the core architecture and penetrate the supply chains of American government and civilian technology.
• Legislating Dependency: The federal frameworks mandating the integration of foreign surveillance tech into local U.S. municipal grids.
• The Export of "Combat-Proven" Systems: Unpacking how biometric and cyber-control tools, initially field-tested under military occupation, are repackaged as essential global security products.
• The Information Battleground: A critical look at algorithmic suppression on platforms like X, and the mechanisms used to manage public perception during global multipolar realignments.

Upcoming Event: Field Testing Israeli Occupation Tech This broadcast serves as a vital primer for the upcoming online salon, Field Testing Israeli Occupation Tech: The Palestine Lab. Co-sponsored by Voices From the Holy Land and Nonviolence International, this panel features experts examining how Israel exports drones, cyber-weapons, and biometric systems to over 130 countries worldwide.

• When: Sunday, April 19, 2026 | 3 PM ET • 12 PM PT • 10 PM Jerusalem
• RSVP: Register on the front page at VoicesFromTheHolyLand.org

Listen & Subscribe:

• Radio Archives: Listen to past broadcasts of Understanding Israel Palestine on demand at KKFI.org.
• Extended Cuts & Deep Dives: For the longer form audio of this interview subscribe to the Beyond the Walls Substack.

Palestinians have long faced difficulties accessing education, and these only intensified in the West Bank following Oct. 7, 2023. Aisha Al-Khatib, a principal in Nablus and a peace activist with Combatants for Peace, joined the show to discuss the state of education in the West Bank. Since the outbreak of the war on Iran, most schools have been shuttered and only limited online learning is taking place. We discuss the role of education in peacebuilding and Aisha's activism over the years with Combatants for Peace.

Journalist, author, academic and editor of the news site The Palestine Chronicle, Ramzy Baroud discusses the connections between the Israeli-U.S. war on Iran, Israel's war in Lebanon and Israeli actions in the Occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 

As the devastation in Gaza threatens to be spilled over into a full-scale annihilation of Beirut, the Middle East crossed a Rubicon the morning this episode was recorded. With Israel’s sudden announcement of high-level assassinations targeting the upper echelons of Iranian leadership, the region faces an unprecedented era of engineered chaos. Is this a sudden escalation, or the culmination of a decades-old geopolitical strategy?

This week on Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel is joined by independent journalist and Tikun Olam publisher Richard Silverstein to unpack the terrifying realities of this active multi-front war. We dive deep into Richard's latest reporting, beginning with the delusional Trump-Netanyahu attempts to decapitate Iranian leadership. We analyze the harrowing collateral realities of this "War of Annihilation," including the deliberate ecocide of burning oil raining down on the Iranian populace and the calculated destruction of ancient Islamic historical sites.

Pivoting to the Levant, we examine the IDF's psychological and physical warfare in Lebanon, breaking down the chilling leaflets dropped on Beirut that explicitly threaten the city with a Gaza-style "Genocide 2.0." Finally, we begin to address the underlying psychological framework of Israeli state terror—a calculated mechanism designed not only to frighten the West into compliance, but to deliberately terrorize the global Jewish community into a state of reactive Zionism.

Please note: Due to terrestrial broadcast time constraints, this radio edit omits our extended deep-dive into the 1996 neoconservative "Clean Break" strategy, the deeper history of the Israeli state, and the beginning of an urgent conversation about critical disentanglement of and reckoning with Jewish religion and identity in direct relationship to Israeli state violence. For that complete, raw analysis, listeners are encouraged to seek out the Full Raw Cut of this interview here: https://beyondthewalls.substack.com/p/breaking-the-realm-the-iran-assassinations

Resources & Links mentioned in this episode:

• Tikun Olam Blog: richardsilverstein.com
• Article: Beirut: 1,000 Dead as Israel Threatens Gaza-Style Genocide
• Article: Iran: Trump’s War of Annihilation
• Article: Israeli Cultural and Environmental Genocide in Iran
• Article: Zionism, Genocide and Jews: Which Side Are You On?

Civilian casualties continue to climb in the region, especially in Iran and Lebanon, as the US and Israel intensify their assault on Iran. Iran retaliates by using its array of drones and missiles to hit US and Israeli military targets in the region, oil infrastructure, and other civilian targets. Hundreds of ships continue to be unable to transit the Strait of Hormuz, raising global energy prices. Dr. Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft joins the show to discuss these developments.

Mai Shaheen is a Palestinian peace activist and therapist who uses nonviolent communication in her work with victims of trauma.  In a conversation both frank and inspirational, she talks  about how nonviolent dialogue brings Israelis, Palestinians and internationals together for healing, solidarity and nonviolent action.  A founder of the Satyam Homeland Peace Center in the Occupied West Bank, she discusses the growing number of Palestinians and Israelis taking action together even as conditions in the West Bank worsen for Palestinians. 

In light of the recent passage of a bill in Missouri codifying the IHRA definition of antisemitism for K-12 schools and college campuses, in addition to similar efforts in several other stage legislatures, we are reposting an interview conducted in April 2025 with Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. She discusses the threat to free speech posed by the International Holocaust Rembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of antisemitism being adopted by many institutions, communities and states in the United States and around the world. The definition associates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. While opposed by a broad range of groups, including human rights organizations, civil liberties groups, Palestinian rights defenders, peace activists, progressive Jewish and Christian groups, and even some strong pro-Israel supporters, the IHRA is increasingly being used as a legal standard. Friedman says the IHRA Working Definition of antisemitism is part of a long-standing effort to chill free speech on Israel and Palestine and to limit what can be said about Israeli policies and practices. 

Paul Pillar discusses the multiple obstacles facing Phase 2 of the Gaza Peace Plan and prospects for the U.S.-Iran talks now underway even as U.S. forces are poised to attack Iran. A 28-year veteran of the CIA, Pillar is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy institute for Responsible Statecraft and at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. He’s the author of several books on foreign policy.  His most recent book, published in 2023, is “Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy.”

Overcoming the Structures of Erasure and the Semantics of Genocidal Management with Aseel AlBajeh

"How do we talk about a reality that is being systematically erased in real-time?"

On this episode of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls, we examine the epistemology of erasure and how to transcend it through factual reframing. We explore the reality that a genocide is not just committed with bombs, but maintained with words.

Host Jeremy Rothe-Kushel is joined by Aseel AlBajeh, the Advocacy Officer at the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD). A legal researcher turned advocacy strategist, Aseel joins us to elucidate the "Communicating Palestine" guide—a vital new strategic manual designed to help advocates move beyond defensive fact-checking and into offensive narrative power.

We dive into the guide’s core pillars—"Reframing Narratives" and "Engaging Palestinian Voices"—to understand how to shift the conversation away from the "security" traps set by the occupier and back toward the root causes of history, colonization, and rights.

Together, we use the guide to decode the deceptive language of "Peace Plans" and "Day After Scenarios" that currently mask permanent military encampment and starvation logistics in Gaza. We analyze the "Rogue Actor" myth of settler violence in the West Bank to reveal the unitary reality of state annexation.

Crucially, we confront the historical architecture of "Sacred Terrorism." Drawing on the definitive work of Livia Rokach, Thomas Suarez, and Naeim Giladi, we trace how the foundations of the Israeli state were built by self-confessed terrorists like David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin—figures who utilized political violence not as a desperate last resort, but as a calculated tool of statecraft. We examine how this history has been inverted, trapping Western diplomacy in a "double bind" where the victims are labeled terrorists to justify their erasure, while the state architects of terror are shielded by the very "Peace Process" they designed to fail.

Finally, we address the ultimate weapon of the status quo: Apathy. We discuss how the claim that the situation is "too complex" is often a deliberate tactic to induce paralysis. Aseel shares how the Communicating Palestine guide provides the epistemological confidence and ethical clarity needed to cut through this weaponized complexity, empowering listeners to move from feeling overwhelmed to speaking truth with power.

This episode serves as a primer for the upcoming Voices From the Holy Land online film salon and workshop on Sunday, February 15th.

Links & Resources

The Guest & The Tools:

• The Strategic Guide: Communicating Palestine
  • A comprehensive resource for reframing the conversation on Palestine, moving away from exceptionalism and towards universal rights and historical context.
• The Organization: Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD)
• The Event: Voices From the Holy Land: "Say What??" Workshop (Register for Feb 15th)

The Show:

• Radio Broadcast: Understanding Israel Palestine at KKFI 90.1 FM
• Substack: Beyond the Walls with Jeremy Rothe-Kushel

Keywords

Overcoming Structures of Erasure, Genocidal Management, Commu

Beyond the Language of the Israel-Palestine 'Conflict' and the Unconscious Grammar of Genocidal Consent with Alex McDonald

On this episode of Understanding Israel Palestine, a Beyond the Walls edition, we move beyond the kinetic warfare on the ground to examine the cognitive warfare in our own minds. We investigate the "deep structural politics" of language—the specific mechanisms used to manufacture consent and maintain an information blockade here in the West.

Our guest suggests that we aren't just "misinformed"; we have been acculturated into a specific foreign policy dialect designed to obscure the structural realities of what we have been taught to call the Israel-Palestine "conflict."

 Jeremy Rothe-Kushel speaks with Alex McDonald, a researcher, co-founder of the Texas Coalition for Human Rights, and an educator working to correct the historical record in U.S. instructional materials. Alex brings the dual perspective of an analyst and a witness, having served on the Steering Committee of Voices From the Holy Land and as a volunteer on the Freedom Flotilla. He is the author of How I Learned to Speak Israel: An American's Guide to a Foreign Policy Language and When They Speak Israel: A Guide to Clarity in Conversations about Israel.

This conversation serves as a primer and invitation for a vital upcoming event. On February 15th, Alex will lead the Voices From the Holy Land (VFHL) Online Film Salon, a workshop dedicated to decoding and dismantling this disinformation architecture.

Links:

• Register for the VFHL Salon: Tinyurl.com/VFHL-February2026
• Alex McDonald’s Work & Books: SpeakIsrael.info
• Understanding Israel Palestine: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2016486
• Beyond the Walls: https://beyondthewalls.substack.com/

Keywords: Israel-Palestine, Cognitive Warfare, Manufacturing Consent, Alex McDonald, Voices From the Holy Land, Gaza Genocide, Foreign Policy Language, Disinformation, Deep Politics, Freedom Flotilla, Educational Bias, How I Learned to Speak Israel.

As the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt prepares to open, we're rebroadcasting a show about the crisis of disability in Palestine and particularly in Gaza. With thousands of amputees struggling to get the care they need in Gaza, their only hope lies in exiting through the severely limited Rafah border crossing.  

Rasha Abouselem has been a humanitarian aid worker since 2014. In December she was in Gaza preparing a field assessment for an aid organization there. She reports on the conditions she found there, the violence Palestinians continue to live with despite the ceasefire, the ongoing shortfall in aid, and the uncertainty and trauma Palestinians are living with. She says the media is not reporting on the reality in Gaza.

January 2026. We navigate a landscape where advocacy, social media, and surveillance blur into a digital haze. To face the mounting crisis, we must trace the analog patterns that first forged the cage.

In July 2021, I spoke over the phone with Jeffrey Blankfort—a Jewish-American journalist whose memory as a veteran Palestinian solidarity activist is a breach in the static. Blankfort deconstructs the Anti-Defamation League—the ADL—looking past the shield of civil rights to find a critical node in a transnational espionage network.

We return to his landmark exposure of an illegal surveillance web; a clandestine bridge built between the Israel lobby and apartheid South Africa to monitor the American pulse. In this era of state and non-state convergence, this 2021 archive serves as a sobering lens. To understand the future, we must study the shadow it has already cast.

Beyond the walls of the narrative... here is Jeffrey Blankfort.

----------------------

In beginning to critically deconstruct the key role of the Anti Defamation League in the Israel Lobby, producer Jeremy Rothe-Kushel speaks with Jewish American Journalist & Pro-Palestinian activist Jeffrey Blankfort, about his work to expose the ADL and its collaborators for colluding with apartheid Israel and South Africa on espionage against civil society in the United States.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/12/adl-spies/

https://www.foodnotbombs.net/adl_examiner.html

https://www.wrmea.org/the-israel-lobby-is-it-good-for-the-us-is-it-good-for-israel-the-adl-covert-action-censure-and-courting-law-enforcement.html

https://www.israellobby.org/ADL-CA/

https://www.irmep.org/ADLespionage.asp

——

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/jeffrey-blankfort-breaking-the-silence-on-the-israel-lobby/

“Are there Israeli lobby gatekeepers and damage control squads on the left?”  https://www.natsummit.org/transcripts/jeffrey_blankfort.htm

“Jeffrey Blankfort: Chomsky Misfires on U.S.-Israel Relations” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T33IdUl1S8

—–

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Jeffrey_Blankfort

http://www.jeffblankfortphotography.com/contact.htm

Jeff Blankfort is a radio producer, photographer & journalist of Jewish-American background, who has been a pro-Palestinian human rights activist since 1970. He was formerly the editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin and co-founder of the Labor Committee of the Middle East. He was also a founding member of the November 29 Coalition on Palestine and the Palestine Solidarity Committee. He won a settlement from the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in February 2002 for its vast illegal spying against him, as well as hundreds of other progressive social, political, labor and environmental organizations and thousands of individuals (including anti-Apartheid groups/activists).

Blankfort‘s articles have appeared in CounterPunch, Dissident Voice & Mondoweiss, among many others.

Josh Paul joins the show again to discuss A New Policy, the organization that he co-founded with Tareq Habash. A New Policy is an organization dedicated to transforming American foreign policy toward Israel/Palestine to reflect American values and foundational principles of liberty, equality, democracy, and human rights; advancing American interests abroad; and protecting American freedoms at home. Josh will be a panelist on the upcoming Voices from the Holy Land Film Salon on Sunday, January 18 at 3 pm ET entitled International Law and the Israel Exception. Listeners are invited to register for the film salon for free at www.voicesfromtheholyland.org.

Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, speaks to Margot Patterson about the war in Gaza in 2025 and the Trump administration's efforts to repress Palestinian activism in the United States over U.S. support for it. Abuznaid discusses changes in U.S. politics over Palestine, which he acknowledges have not so far translated into changes in U.S. policy and funding for Israel, prospects for the movement and a range of measures activists can take. 

This is a rebroadcast of the second portion of a talk organized by Eyewitness Palestine entitled We Refuse to Be Silent: Having Faith in the Truth. This portion was given by Huwaida Arraf, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and a member of the Steering Committee of the Freedom Flotilla. The first portion of the talk was given by Amazon Labor Union Organizer Chris Smalls.

Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls – The Oligarchs, The Spies, and The Grand Bargain that Sold Out the Palestinians and the United States 

Host: Jeremy Rothe-Kushel Guests: Seth Abramson (Proof), Richard Silverstein (Tikun Olam)

Episode Summary: For this episode, I feature segments of 2 interviews from the last half of 2020 with public interest writers & analysts Seth Abramson and Richard Silverstein, both quite prescient in their insights into the current geopolitical crisis surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, most glaring in the international relational faultlines constructed amongst the United States & the Middle East, especially the Israeli security state and its Emirati and Saudi state partners, directly tied to the geopolitical collusion to attack American elections while selling out the Palestinians, and the role of Russian sphere Kremlin-associated oligarchs, some publicly defended from sanctions by Israeli officials, in sponsoring the escalation of Israeli settler politics bent on ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people.

Government officials and the media largely told us that the 2016 election interference was just about Russian "troll farms." They lied by omission. In this explosive episode of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls, we tear down the firewall between "Russiagate" and the Middle East to reveal the true geopolitical architecture of the Trump era.

We go deep with Seth Abramson, author of the Proof trilogy, to decode the Senate Intelligence Committee’s massive Volume 5 report. Abramson exposes what the Mueller Report ignored: the "Grand Bargain" between the Trump campaign, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. We track the fingerprints of Israeli cyber-intelligence mercenaries like Psy-Group and Joel Zamel, the shadowy role of George Nader, and the August 2016 Trump Tower meeting that cemented an alliance of autocrats against democracy and Palestinian rights.

Then, we pivot to the money trail with security journalist Richard Silverstein. Breaking down the FinCEN files, Silverstein reveals how Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich funneled over $100 million into Elad, the settler organization aggressively "Judaizing" East Jerusalem. We discuss how dirty money from the post-Soviet sphere is being laundered into the ethnic cleansing of Silwan, turning the biblical "City of David" into a weapon of displacement.

This is the deep politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—where intelligence operations, oligarchic wealth, and settler ideology collide to sell out the Palestinian people and compromise the American republic.

Featured Guests:

Seth Abramson [PROOF]: https://www.sethabramson.net 

Richard Silverstein [TIKUN OLAM]: https://www.richardsilverstein.com

Host/Producer: 

Jeremy Rothe-Kushel [BEYOND THE WALLS]: https://beyondthewalls.substack.com

Milena Ansari joins the show to share the findings of Human Rights Watch's latest report about the forced depopulation of refugee camps in the West Bank. These actions of the Israeli army in early 2025, which constitute a crime against humanity, forcibly displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians, who have been prevented from returning.

The Rev. Dr. Allison Tanner is a Baptist pastor and national coordinator of Apartheid-Free Communities. She discusses the effort to get Christian churches to pledge to become apartheid-free communities and oppose Israeli occupation and apartheid. Dr. Tanner will bring her perspective and experience to a panel discussion Sunday, Dec. 14 on “A Deafening Silence? U.S. Church Leadership in the Face of Genocide." sponsored by Voices from the Holy Land. Every month the inter-faith, interdenominational coalition makes available a documentary on Israel-Palestine to members of the public who sign up to see it. The screening is followed by  a discussion of the film Sunday afternoons at 3 p.m. Eastern Time with expert voices on the topic.

“The Detonator and the Survival Kit: Recovering the Map Beyond the Wreckage” featuring Jonathan Kuttab

"Welcome back to Understanding Israel Palestine, a Beyond the Walls edition. I’m Jeremy Rothe-Kushel.

Today, we re-open a black box recording from a time of useful consciousness: my March 2021 conversation with long-serving Palestinian human rights attorney Jonathan Kuttab. Back then, the UN, US, EU, Russia Quartet kept the 'Two-State Zombie craft' aloft—rough but steady. Peace could be claimed to still be just around the alley. But this recording identified sabotage in real time. We saw the Abraham Accords not as peace, but as lubricant for a slow detonator—weapons deals designed to erase the Palestinian question entirely.

We listen now during ongoing human catastrophe and cease-less firing in Gaza from Thanksgiving Week 2025. The detonator triggered. Moscow —as Hamas confirmed on TV soon after October 7th —welcomed the explosion as chaff to distract the West from war in Ukraine. Netanyahu then hung his genocidal Gaza 'response' to his own alleged 'failures' of security as an albatross around his coalition of the willing American neck. He seized the smoke to flee forward from corruption trials, political resistance and credible suspicion of his regime’s treason, and pulled the trigger on a 'Second, possibly final, Nakba' by fire.

Don Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff has now picked at the ash, with no real ceasefire or reconstruction plan, but a realestate prospectus—$70 billion for a beachfront windfall with Palestinians to be gone for a generation. Serious diplomacy walks dead. But this recording holds pieces of a survival kit. Kuttab offers a Hybrid Confederation: A Jewish Defense Minister for existential safety; a Palestinian Police Chief for internal dignity. Mutual sharing of language and culture. To get Beyond the Walls, we must go Beyond the Two-State Solution. Separation was sabotage from the get-go. Shared security and mutual survival may be the only path to return home."

Jonathan Kuttab: https://jonathankuttab.org/

Understanding Israel Palestine: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2016486

Beyond the Walls: https://beyondthewalls.substack.com/

Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, director of Israel-Palestine Research at the non-profit DAWN (Democracy in the Arab World Now), discusses the accelerating pace of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank,  which is sparking fears of a new genocide. He describes the history of settler violence, the U.S. role in enabling Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide, and the need for measures that could prompt Israel to chart a different path. The author of the recently published book,"From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine," written with co-author Sarah Leah Whitson, Omer-Man says international allegiance to the Oslo two-state solution has entrenched Israeli occupation and apartheid and prevented countries from challenging it or developing new strategies for resolving the conflict.

Mamdani’s Panopticon Burden: To Inherit the Hardened and Databased Political Epistemology of the Security State(s)?

By Jeremy Rothe-Kushel Host/Producer, Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls

New York City is a paradox disguised as a metropolis. Above, the glass-and-steel canyons of Midtown reflect the accumulated wealth of empire—the real estate dynasties, the hedge funds, the global insurers. But beneath the asphalt, pulsing through fiber-optic cables and radiating from the microwave dishes atop One Police Plaza, lies a second, silent city: a digital autocracy. The invisible city does not vote. It watches, and targets. It is a “Ring of Steel” that has metastasized from a temporary post-9/11 shield into a permanent, self-governing intelligence agency.

On this broadcast of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls, we descend into the friction point where local governance meets global counter-insurgency. We are joined by Ali Winston, an award-winning investigative journalist whose forensic reporting - including for WIRED, The Guardian, ProPublica, and The Baffler, among many others - regularly exposes police corruption, right-wing extremism, and surveillance.

Our point of departure is Winston’s incendiary new reporting: “Zohran Mamdani Just Inherited the NYPD Surveillance State.” It documents a profound collision: Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, whose platform was built on the promise of Palestinian rights and systemic reform, now holds the keys to a machine built to repress those very ideals.

It is a machine currently operated by Commissioner Jessica Tisch—a scion of the very financial and real estate interests that fought Mamdani’s rise...

--Full article is here: https://open.substack.com/pub/beyondthewalls/p/mamdanis-panopticon-burden

-----------

Ali Winston is an independent investigative journalist and co-author of The Riders Come Out at Night. His new podcast with Popular Front is Big Terror.

https://bleeding-edge.ghost.io/about/

https://www.wired.com/story/welcome-to-mamdanis-surveillance-state/

Listen to the full interview to hear a decoding of the signals of the surveillance state and what it means when the ‘War on Poverty,’ ‘War on Terror’ & ‘War’ on Gaza all come to roost as a permanent counter-political and epistemological insurgency state.

Jen Marlowe, the founder of Donkeysaddle Projects, and producer of the recent film Severed, joins the show to talk about the crisis of disability in Palestine and particularly in Gaza, where thousands of amputees struggle to get the care in the aftermath of Israel's escalated genocide and its suffocating blockade. 

The project director on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group, an independent non-profit focused on preventing and resolving deadly conflict,  Max Rodenbeck discusses the Crisis Group's recent report on the Gaza Peace Plan advanced by President Trump. He describes how Trump's 20-point plan developed, its unavoidable ambiguity, the many questions about  the ceasefire's terms and prospects. He notes sustained engagement by other countries, and above all by the United States, is a must if  the plan is to advance beyond Phase I. If it doesn't, Palestinians in Gaza will be left in an indefinite humanitarian nightmare, unable to reconstruct their homes and their lives.

This is Understanding Israel Palestine: A Beyond the Walls edition. I’m Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, public interest producer, deep political analyst & Jewish American patriot of conscience.

Here in late October 2025, a tentative alleged Gaza so-called peace deal is roughly unfolding—almost exactly two years after the initiation of the October 7th attacks & the subsequent genocidal response. 

But as American allies have recognized an apparently not yet existent & likely non-viable Palestinian state, there largely remains no serious journalistic investigation into the true & full origins of that day’s terror.

Was it really a surprise? Or was it part of a deeper political provocation, escalated by security & intelligence stand-downs and the 'Mass Hannibal Directive'?

We cast back to an AnteDote analysis I pursued with colleague Greg McCarron - recorded less than 2 weeks after the 2023 attacks - to begin examining the obfuscated circumstances, pretext, and plausible intent of 'Israel's 9/11.'

-----------

https://beyondthewalls.substack.com/p/a-return-to-the-deep-politics-of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j27SNo-XD4s

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/the-antedote/episodes/Israels-911–The-Simchat-Torah-Treason-Terror-War-Part-1-e2asqfi/a-aagpb47

In the fall of 2023, a shady land deal signed a few years earlier between the Armenian Patriarchate and an Australian-Israeli businessman came to light. Despite the Patriarchate's cancellation of the deal on Nov. 1, 2023, Israeli surveyors and settlers pushed ahead with their plans to develop the property into a luxury hotel and permanently alter the character and demography of the Old City's Armenian Quarter. In this episode we speak with Armenian peacebuilder Christopher Huth, Communications Coordinator at the Churches for Middle East Peace office in Washington, DC about the history of the Armenian community in the Holy Land, and the grassroots and international efforts to resist this latest attempt by Israel at Judaizing occupied East Jerusalem, of which the Old City is a part.

In anticipation of Voices from the Holy Land's upcoming October 19th online film salon "The Israel Occupation Tech Lab," we will hear a segment Jeremy Rothe-Kushel produced in December 2020 and then remixed for August 2021 titled "Cyberweaponry, Kill-Switch Diplomacy and the Technology of Occupation."

To find out about and register for Voices from the Holy Land's October 19th "Israel Occupation Tech Lab" film salon, you can go to

 voicesfromtheholyland.org or Tinyurl.com/VFHL-October2025

"In this week's segment, I preliminarily explore the realm of cybertechnology and cyber weapons 'battle-tested' on Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories and then deployed worldwide. This will work also to begin establishing a foundation for further future explorations into cyber breaches, cyberwar, and what could seen as a geopolitical & defacto Israeli policy; a policy to solidify Israel's realpolitikally absolute international immunity from the effective sanctioning of its asserted official territorial expansion in the West Bank and Golan Heights, and its long-term ongoing abuse of Palestinian human rights:  

This geopolitical strategy could be titled "kill-switch diplomacy", based upon the presence of Israeli military intelligence originated hardware and software delivered via both civilian and military spheres, and deployed into the epicenter of critical infrastructure in countries around the world, with civil society carrots of access to Israeli high technology up front, and an implied threat of Israeli-military intelligence accessed infrastructure kill-switch sticks on the backend.

The recently announced hack of SolarWinds Orion Network management software that was cyber-penetrated in early 2020 via supply side software update delivery into thousands of Information Technology systems around the world, including significant portions of the US government, such as the Pentagon, Secret Service, State Department, Treasury, Commerce and Homeland Security, and vast numbers of Fortune 500 companies, is both resonant and possibly relevant here. 

While we will not delve deeply into it now, I just want to mention that there is industry analysis alleging a Microsoft 365 Office Cloud tie-in to the delivery of the SolarWinds Orion exploit, plausibly tying it to the issue of last year's surprising Trump-pushed Pentagon Cloud Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract to Microsoft over the expected recipient and previous cloud partner of the US government Amazon, led by Trump-critic Jeff Bezos, who was also personally targeted and hacked by Saudis apparently using Israeli NSO group cyberweaponry. 

Microsoft, which has had Research and Design units, facilities and operations heavily based in Israel for many years, in 2015 purchased an Israeli-originated company Adallom, started by 3 veterans of the Israeli NSA Unit 8200 and cyber entrepreneurial special forces-style super-elite Talpiot Program with Series A investment funding from the "Bill Gates of Israel" and godfather of it's modern cybertechnology industry, Zohar Zisapel of the RAD Group.  The next year, and in the lead up to the development of the Pentagon Cloud project announcement and then contract award, Microsoft put Adallom in the place of and rebranded it as Microsoft Cloud App Security.

And while the SolarWinds hack, described as possibly the most substantial hack in US history giving the exploiters of the intrusion "God door access", has been publicly and preliminarily ascribed to Russian SVR advanced persistent threat cyber intelligence units, as this show's earlier interview with New York Times best-selling author and journalist Seth Abramson showed, Russia and Israel worked in cyber purpose together in relation to the 2016 elect

Jurist Richard Falk discusses the double game being played by some of the European countries recently recognizing Palestine as a state in a show of concern over Israel's war of annihilation in Gaza. Their condemnation of Israel is largely symbolic, with many states continuing to do business as usual with Israel. With Western countries failing to uphold international law, Falk says civic activism is necessary to hold leaders to account. He notes the two-state solution has long since ceased to be practicable and warns that any peace plan that excludes Palestinian participation will not produce a durable peace. Falk is professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Occupied Palestine and president of the Gaza Tribunal, an independent inquiry into British complicty in Israeli war crimes.

From the People's Conference for Palestine 2025: Over the past year, we have seen a shift in public consciousness: from demanding an immediate ceasefire to demanding a full arms embargo on Israel. Mass protests have erupted in the ports of Morocco, French dockworkers have refused to handle military cargo destined to Israel, and Spain has passed a policy to enact an arms embargo against Israel. This panel brings together speakers from across different geographies to discuss the momentum behind grassroots arms embargo campaigns; the strategic role of labor, civil society and state forces; and most importantly, how we can enact a peoples arms embargo.  

Amidst the flames, ruin & human destruction currently being escalated by the Israeli military in Gaza City and the UN's finally emergent declaratory analysis of genocide, a more than century-old haunting logic has destructively unfolded.

In the US, the political fallout from the cloaking & cloaked wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk has accelerated Executive & Legislative moves to crush dissent, providing a stark domestic backdrop to the massive moral crisis still being perpetrated abroad.

Historian Zachary J. Foster of Palestine Nexus joins Jeremy Rothe-Kushel to begin connecting this genocidal catastrophe to its foundational blueprint, exposing the unsettling and often antisemitic history of Zionism's architects: Herzl & Jabotinsky among them. Was it inevitable that a movement forged in embraced persecution & auto-antisemitism combined with a highly cynical alliance with authoritarians & genocidaires lead to the violent destruction of Palestine?

Join us for a critical conversation as we look to Understand Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls.

Zachary Foster:

https://x.com/_zachfoster

https://palestinenexus.com/

Jeremy Rothe-Kushel:

https://x.com/jeremywrk

https://beyondthewalls.substack.com

Emmaia Gelman, director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, discusses Zionism's relationship to racism and colonialism, the threat to Americans' First Amendment rights posed by the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism which the Anti-Defamation League and other Zionist groups are promoting, and how Zionism is evolving into an arm of American fascism under the Trump administration.

For this week’s episode, we are excerpting portions of a panel entitled The Struggle Continues: The Fight for Palestine in North America held on Aug 30, 2025 at the second annual People's Conference for Palestine in Detroit. We are excerpting PYM organizer Mohammed Nabulsi’s responses to questions posed by the moderator Loubna Qatami.

In response to the last two years of Zionist genocide in Gaza, a powerful mass movement has erupted. From the streets to the workplace, from university campuses to the classrooms, millions of people across North America and the world have been exposed to injustice in Palestine and in their own lives. In this panel, leaders in the movement for Palestinian liberation in North America will reflect on the last two years of struggle and examine the movement’s current state, its key challenges, and its future direction.

The full 2 hour long panel can be accessed on the YouTube channel of Breakthrough News. Special thanks to Breakthrough News, PYM and the panelists.

Hadar Susskind, president and CEO of New Jewish Narrative, talks about Israel's decision to advance a controversial, long-planned and long-delayed settlement regarded as a death knell for an independent Palestinian state. The E1 settlement would add 3,400 new settlement units east of Jerusalem and split the Occupied West Bank in two.  Susskind was previously head of Americans for Peace Now,  a peace group that tracked the growth of Jewish settlements in the Occupied West Bank. That organization recently merged with Ameinu, another progressive, venerable Jewish group, to establish New Jewish Narrative.  It continues Americans for Peace Now's activities. Susskind describes the vision of full equality of Jews and Palestinians in Israel that the new organization is based on and holds out hope that forces both outside and within Israel may yet stop the E1 settlement and the Israeli government's annexation of the West Bank.

On this Beyond the Walls edition of Understanding Israel Palestine, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel proposes an evolving Beyond the Walls edition mission statement, covers the news and speaks with Harry Davies — Guardian investigations correspondent — about his investigations along with colleagues like Yuval Abraham — at +972 & Local Call — into the major project & contract by Israeli Military Intelligence Unit 8200 with Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Servers in Europe to bulk collect Palestinians’ communications of all sorts in order to mass surveil & target.

———-

Harry Davies:
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/harry-davies
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-israeli-military-palestinian-phone-calls-cloud
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/10/activists-in-netherlands-protest-on-roof-of-microsoft-site-storing-israeli-military-data
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/15/microsoft-launches-inquiry-claims-israel-used-tech-mass-surveillance-palestinians

Yuval Abraham:
https://www.972mag.com/writer/yuval-abraham/
https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-8200-intelligence-surveillance-cloud-azure/
https://gijn.org/stories/investigating-israel-war-972-local-call/

News Stories:
1) https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-west-bank-e1-settlements-8a713939ee6f6552381246dacc8a1301
2) https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-calls-up-tens-thousands-reservists-before-new-gaza-offensive-2025-08-20/
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/8/19/israeli-attacks-kill-35-palestinians-in-gaza
3) https://zeteo.com/p/second-most-powerful-house-democrat-gaza-genocide
4) https://www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/predator-spyware-firm-intellexa-resurgent-after-u-s-sanctions/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_81
5) https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/senior-israel-national-cyber-directorate-official-arrested-suspicion-paedophilia

If you are interested in future access to further Beyond the Walls edition archives, extended episodes and more, you can sign up for the Beyond the Walls archive/newsletter here:
https://beyondthewalls.substack.com

Since 1967, Israel has imprisoned as many as one million Palestinians—men, women, and children. Many are “administrative detainees,” taken without charge or a fixed release date, and receiving little or no due process and no trial by jury. Original detention orders can be renewed repeatedly. Many remain imprisoned for years, subjected to mental and physical abuse and torture. Might these detainees, arrested for so-called “public security,” more appropriately be called captives, hostages, or abductees? Journalist Hind Shraydeh joined us to discuss these Israeli arrest practices, prison conditions, prisoner abuse, the impact on families and communities, and efforts to end the occupation and its unjust system of abduction and incarceration. Hind will also be a panelist on this topic for the Voices from the Holy Land Film Salon on 8/17 at 3PM. More info can be found at voicesfromtheholyland.org.

Lecturer, anthropologist and activist Jeff Halper, director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, continues talking with Margot Patterson about Israelis and Palestinians' past, present and future together. He discusses how Zionists historically and today perceive Israel's right to Palestine, their views of Palestinians and the ongoing war in Gaza, and  how Israel's brutal conduct of the war is altering Americans' perception of Israel and ending the taboo on criticism of it. A co-founder of the One Democratic State Campaign in Israel, Halper explains why a two-state solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is no longer possible; living together in one democratic state is the only way forward for Israelis and Palestinians.

Anthropologist, activist and director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Jeff Halper speaks to Margot Patterson about how Israel’s genocide in Gaza and recent attack on Iran fit into its larger geopolitical goal of normalization with the Arab world and regional hegemony. Halper says Israel is intent on breaking Palestinian resistance, pacifying Palestine and creating a period of industrial quiet in which it can normalize relations with the Arab world via the Abraham Accords. 

Dr. Emilio Dabed, who we last spoke with one year ago in July of 2024, returns to the show to offer a retrospective on the argument he advanced in an article published around that time. In that article, Dr. Dabed argues that the true purpose of international law is to administer colonial violence, and he defends this contention in light of the ICJ ruling that Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is illegal. Only with a strategic and disciplined mass solidarity movement behind them will Palestinians may be able to make use of the international legal system.

For this episode of Understanding Israel Palestine — a Beyond the Walls edition — Jeremy Rothe-Kushel speaks with Matthew Ghobrial Cockerill, a doctoral candidate in International History at the London School of Economics (LSE) and holds a law degree from the University of Chicago.

Cockerill’s research, especially during the past year, hones in on the demographics of fatalities in the Gaza Strip and their implications for determining the true nature & real intent of Israeli military conduct. His research exposing various Israeli claims as reliant on a falsification of the relevant statistics has been primarily published by the British NGO Action on Armed Violence.

Under his History Speaks social & multimedia platforms, Cockerill engages as a public intellectual, in vigorous public interest dialogue, analysis & debate, while contributing to the crucial aforementioned research about the reality of the genocidal Israeli assault on & criminal atrocities in Palestinian Gaza done under the apparent pretext of a war in response to the October 7th attacks.

https://x.com/history__speaks

https://www.youtube.com/@historyspeaksYT

Masafer Yatta is a collection of hamlets in the Occupied West Bank that Israel has long tried to wrest from Palestinians living there. The intensifying struggle there is the topic of the recent Oscar-winning documenary "No Other Land." Robert Suberi is an American who has been going to Masafer Yatta since 2019 to document human rights abuses and to  be a protective presence for Palestinians under threat of attack by Israeli soldiers and state-backed settlers.  Suberi  talks about his evolution from ardent Zionist to a critic of the Israeli state committed to solidarity with the besieged residents of Masafer Yatta. Tthere are many groups providing protective presence in Palestine; Suberi discusses what they do and his own positive experience with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence.

In this rebroadcast of our July 2024 interview with Dr. Emilio Dabed, a Palestinian-Chilean lawyer specializing in constitutional matters, international law, and human rights, we discuss his recent article for 972 Magazine entitled, "By failing to stop the Gaza genocide, the ICJ is working exactly as intended." We discuss the ICJ's failure to order a ceasefire in Gaza in the South Africa vs. Israel genocide case. Dabed argues that this reveals the true purpose of the international legal order: the administration of colonial violence. In light of Dabed's argument, we conclude by turning to the more recent ICJ case demolishing the legal foundations of Israel's occupation of Palestine. 

This prescient conversation with Richard Falk, international law expert and former U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in Occupied Palestine, anticipates the catastrophe that has been unfolding in Gaza for the past 18 months. In an interview recorded January of 2023, Falk discusses the significance of Israel’s 2018 nation-state law and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that Israel possesses exclusive right to all of the Land of Israel. Brazenly defying international law, the assertion repudiates the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle that has been promoted by the international community for decades. Professor Falk says Netanyahu’s claim on behalf of Israel to all of historic Palestine, including the West Bank, represents the final chapter in the Zionist enterprise. Like successful settler-colonial projects in the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, it will entail the elimination or complete marginalization of the indigenous population. Falk paints a somber scenario of what it is likely to mean for the Palestinians unless civil society mobilizes to defend them. 

Pollster and Middle East scholar James Zogby discusses his recent column on the Drobles plan for Palestine, which he says Israel is advancing in Gaza and the West Bank despite or perhaps aided by its recent attack on Iran. Founder and president of the Arab-American Institute and managing director of Zogby Research Services, Dr. Zogby has written a weekly column on American politics for Arab newspapers for more than 30 years.  He speaks to Margot Patterson about the goal of ethnic cleansing that undergirds Israel and the United States' new aid mission in Gaza (the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation), Israel's unprovoked attack on Iran, the international community's weak response to it and to Israel's brutal war on Gaza,  and the U.N. conference on Palestine scheduled for June 17-20, which has now been cancelled. 

 Since it's founding in 1996, Jewish Voice for Peace has advocated for Palestinian freedom and an end to Israeli occupation, apartheid and war. In early May, JVP held its first national meeting since 2017.  Some 2,000 members attended the national meeting in Baltimore, which JVP said was the largest gathering of anti-Zionist Jews in history. The convention drew well-known figures including Angela Davis, writer Naomi Klein, Congressman Rashida Tlaib, journalist Amy Goodman and others to discuss and organize how  to end U.S. support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza in the face of increasing government repression.  This episode airs some of  the speeches from that meeting. It  includes remarks by Stephanie Fox, executive director of JVP, and Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a board-certified  emergency medicine physician  at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Chicago who has provided emergency care to wounded patients in Gaza.

How have humanitarian organizations managed to deliver life-saving aid to millions of Gazans despite the dangerous and difficult conditions since Oct 7? Despite their success, why have the US and Israel set up an alternative mechanism for distributing aid under the auspices of the secretive Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)? What principles guide the field of humanitarian relief, and how does the existing UN-backed mechanism compare with the practices of the GHF? Abby Maxman, President and CEO of Oxfam America, joined the show this week to answer some of these questions and call on the world to allow her colleagues to do what they do best: deliver life-saving food, water, and aid to the people of Gaza as the UN announces that the entire population of the enclave is now at risk of famine.

University administrators have imposed an unprecedented array of repressive measures designed to squelch student protests against Israel's war in Gaza. Faculty have been affected as well, with many losing their jobs for advocating for Palestine. Margot Patterson talks to NYU Professor Andrew Ross, the secretary of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, a national network of 130 campus chapters supporting student protesters and academic freedom, and Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), about the repression of dissent on campuses, the weaponization of antisemitism and the new McCarthyism. They say what's involved is not just pro-Palestine speech but an effort to destroy American universities. | 

 Zeiad Abbas Shamroukh, Executive Director of the Middle East Childrens Alliance joins the show to talk about the conditions people in Gaza are facing, as Israel's total blockade on food, water, and medical supplies enters its third month and international groups warn of starvation and famine setting in. 

Israel is calling up thousands of reservists to escalate its war on Gaza. Its vow to conquer the entirety of the Gaza Strip, rescue the hostages and eradicate Hamas comes after 19 months of a brutal assault on the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 52,000 Palestinians but has not dislodged Hamas. Khaled Elgindy discusses how a far-right ideologically driven government and a prime minister desperate to stay out of jail are prompting Israel to declare new war aims that include holding territory in the Gaza Strip indefinitely and forcing the Palestinian population into a small area in the south. The war plan approved May 4 by the Israeli cabinet comes as Israel maintains a total blockade on food, water, fuel  and humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip imposed March 2. Middle East analyst Khaled Elgindy is the author of Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians from Balfour to Trump. He teaches at Georgetown University, is a frequent commentator on the Middle East for the BBC, Al Jazeera and other news outlets and is the former  director of the program on Israeli-Palestinian Affairs at the Middle East Institute.

Middle East analyst Khaled Elgindy discusses Israel's continuing bombardment and total blockade on food and humanitarian aid to Gaza, the U.S. role in the ongoing devastation there,  and what lies ahead for Palestinians and Israelis when Israel finally ceases its onslaught. Elgindy is the former director of the Middle East Institute's program on Israeli-Palestinian Affairs and the author of "Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians from Balfour to Trump." 

This week we are rebroadcasting an interview we aired on June 28, 2024 by my co-host Margot Patterson. She interviewed journalist Mahmoud Mushtaha, assistant manager of We Are Not Numbers, a non-profit in Gaza that pairs young Palestinian writers with professional journalists to help them tell their stories to an English-speaking audience. Mahmoud had left Gaza for Egypt just a month before the interview, in which he describes the harrowing conditions he and his family faced in Gaza. The conditions that Mahmoud describes have only intensified since his interview in June 2024. On March 2, Israel resumed its blockade of humanitarian supplies and on March 18 the ceasefire collapsed after Israel bombed Gaza, killing 400 people in one day. On April 3, Mahmoud published an article for 972 Mag entitled “In Gaza’s devastated hospitals, treatable patients face ‘slow, quiet death.’ In the piece, he describes the well-documented massacre of Red Crescent paramedics on March 23 and the almost complete collapse of Gaza’s medical system.

In a talk given on Thursday, April 10 at the First Presbyterian Church in Hartford, Issa Amro reflects on the challenges he and Palestinians have faced in nonviolently resisting Israel's ethnic cleansing in and around Hebron following Oct. 7. Issa Amro is a Palestinian human rights activist who has dedicated his life to peaceful resistance against Israeli occupation in the West Bank city of Hebron. Together with the activist group he founded, Youth Against Settlements (YAS), he has become a leading voice in the non-violent movement, striving to create a future where Palestinians live freely and with dignity. 

Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, discusses the threat to free speech posed by the International Holocaust Rembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of antisemitism now being adopted by many schools, institutions, communities and states. The definition associates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. While opposed by a broad range of human rights organizations, civil liberties groups, Palestinian rights supporters and religious groups, the IHRA is increasingly being used as a legal standard. Friedman says the IHRA is part of a long-standing effort to limit what can be said about Israeli policies and practices and to suppress free speech on Israel and Palestine.

On Oct. 7, 2024 the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism. Since the Trump administration took office, this document has served as the basis for the escalating crackdown on Palestine solidarity in the United States, under the guise of combating antisemitism. To unpack this document, we spoke with Dr. Yoav Litvin, author a recent article entitled Project Esther: A Trumpian blueprint to crush anticolonial resistance. We discussed the document's fascist, McCarthyist overtones and how the initiative can be resisted.  

Margot Patterson talks to Dr. James Zogby about the Trump administration's effort to deport foreign students and scholars who have protested Israel's war on Gaza. The attempt to stifle dissent over U.S. support for Israel is part of a larger attack on free speech and academic freedom at universities that the Trump administration is waging. Pollster, Middle East scholar and the founder and president of the Arab-American Institute, the political and policy research arm of the Arab-American community, Dr. Zogby says what's being dismantled is an architecture of human rights that will not easily be rebuilt.

This is the second part of a talk given by Dr. Norman Finkelstein at the University of Connecticut on February 27. The talk was sponsored by the Northeast Connecticut Gaza Peace Group. In this part, Dr. Finkelstein discusses the consequences of the horror inflicted on Gaza and makes recommendations for the tactics and strategy of the movement moving forward.

This is the first part of a talk given by Dr. Norman Finkelstein at the University of Connecticut on February 27. The talk was sponsored by the Northeast Connecticut Gaza Peace Group. In this part, Dr. Finkelstein dismantles the characterization of the devastation in Gaza as a war between Israel and Hamas. To make this argument, he makes observations about the nature of Israel's actions in Gaza, notes the rulings of international legal institutions, and points out the reports of major human rights organizations. 

Shaul Magid, visiting professor of modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School, talks to Margot Patterson about the long-standing debate among Jews over Zionism and about the impact of the 1967 Six-Day War on the Zionization of American Jews. The author of several books on Jewish mysticism, radicalism and identity, Magid says anti-Zionism is a Jewish phenomenon as old as Zionism itself, and distinct from anti-Israelism among non-Jews.P

Shaul Magid, visiting professor of modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School, discusses his views and personal experience of Zionism, a movement that he says was from its very inception beset by internal divisions. Magid lived in Israel for a decade. He talks to Margot Patterson about the 1940s when World War II transformed Zionism from an ideology into a means of survival and describes his own evolving perspectives on Zionism. Magid is the author of several books on Jewish mysticism and Jewish radicalism. His most recent book is The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance.

What is the spectrum of Zionism in modern-day Israel? How has this changed over time, especially since October 7? And what forces are driving the continuation of the current ceasefire deal? Ori Goldberg, a political analyst and academic based in Israel, joined the show to answer these questions.  

Historian Michael Brenner discusses the secular roots of Zionism, the stance of Liberal Zionists and the shrinking space Liberal Zionism occupies in Israel today. A professor of Jewish history and culture at the University of Munich, Brenner also holds the Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies at the American University in Washington D.C. There he is also the directer of the Center for Israel Studies. He is the author of numerous books on Jewish history, including “In Search of Israel. The History of an Idea” and “Zionism: A Brief History.”

Though Christian Zionism precedes Jewish Zionism by almost two centuries, this fact is often overlooked in discussions of Palestine and Israel. In this illuminating discussion with Prof. Robert Smith (Chickasaw), he defines Christian Zionism, pinpoints its historical origins, and connects this to the interplay between theology and Western empire in the past and present.  

A retired CIA officer, senior fellow at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and author of several books on U.S. foreign policy, Paul Pillar discusses his recent article on why the ceasefire in Gaza is unlikely to last. He says the political realities in Israel militate against making the ceasefire anything but a temporary pause and explain Israel's escalating attacks in the West Bank, the continued presence of Israeli troops in Lebanon and Syria and Israel's determined pursuit of war.

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For centuries, Western countries have been attacking indigenous peoples and stealing their land in an ongoing process of settler colonialism, engendering resistance and international solidarity. Mazin Qumsiyeh returns to the show to place the Gaza genocide into this historical continuum. 

Following his death on Dec. 29th, 2024, President Jimmy Carter received accolades for his many achievements, among them his key role in the  1978 Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. But little attention has been paid to President Carter's efforts to make peace between Israelis and the Palestinians despite the ongoing war in Gaza. An international human rights lawyer and the executive director of the Christian Palestinian organization Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA), Jonathan Kuttab met Carter on several occasions. He talks about Carter's advocacy for Palestinians, the president's controversial 2006 book “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid,”  his meeting with Hamas leaders and his views on the pernicious role of the pro-Israel lobby.

How should those committed to human rights and Palestinian liberation analyze the geopolitics of the Middle East? What does it mean to be an internationalist when it comes to the question of Palestine and the fall of Assad? Answering these questions is Joseph Daher, author of Syria after the Uprisings, The Political Economy of State Resilience; Hezbollah: the Political Economy of Lebanons Party of God; and Marxism and Palestine.  

In a 2023 Christmas Eve sermon entitled “Christ Under the Rubble” that drew global attention, the Rev. Munther Isaac of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem charged the Western church with complicity in genocide in Gaza. Rev. Isaac delivered another sermon - "Christ is Still in the Rubble" - one week ago on December 20, 2024. In light of this, we're reposting our September 2024 interview with David Wildman, executive secretary for human rights and racial justice with the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Global Ministries, who attended the Christmas Eve 2023 service in Bethlehem. In his role, he serves as a liaison to the United Nations, the Middle East and Afghanistan. He talks with Margot Patterson about the truth of that charge and what Christians are and are not doing to stop atrocities in Palestine.

Christians in Bethlehem will mark Christmas this year, but in a subdued and reflective fashion as they pray for an end to the unfolding genocide in Gaza and the intensifying settler attacks in the West Bank. In the face of this, Sami Awad, in his position as Co-Director of Nonviolence International, works to create spaces to heal intergenerational collective trauma and develop leadership, especially youth. We discussed the challenges of doing this in Palestine and Israel and of the nuances of creating a container for the pain of all affected by violence in Palestine while remaining resolute and focused on the necessity of creative nonviolent resistance in the face of Israel's occupation. 

The author of two books on the intersection of gender, politics and religion in the contemporary religious right in Israel-Palestine, Lihi Ben Shitrit discusses Religious Zionism and the role of settler women in feminizing and mainstreaming the Israeli Occupation.  Shitrit is the director of the Taub Center for Israel Studies at New York University. She is the editor of the recent book "The Gates of Gaza: Critical Voices from Israel on October 7 and the War with Hamas." She talks with Margot Patterson about her books, the ascendency of the right wing in Israel, and the need for thoughtful reflection during a time of war.

Professor Arie Dubnov discusses the development of the Zionist movement during the British Mandate for Palestine. A historian who specializes in the study of Jewish nationalism, he holds the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University where he serves as director of the university's Middle East program.

Dr. Sam Brody, the author of the award-winning book Martin Buber's Theopolitics, discusses the many competing strands of Zionism and how they shaped the battle for Palestine. He also describes the intellectual and spiritual legacy of Martin Buber, whose prolific writings about Zionism and Israel/Palestine have been give relatively little attention as compared with his other works. Buber advocated for an egalitarian Zionism: a binational state in Palestine/Israel with equal rights for Jews and Arabs. Buber never gave up on his vision during his long career, which saw him flee to Mandatory Palestine from Nazi Germany. This is the second half of our conversation. The first half aired the previous week.  

Dr. Sam Brody, the author of the award-winning book Martin Buber's Theopolitics, discusses the many competing strands of Zionism and how they shaped the battle for Palestine. He also describes the intellectual and spiritual legacy of Martin Buber, whose prolific writings about Zionism and Israel/Palestine have been give relatively little attention as compared with his other works. Buber advocated for an egalitarian Zionism: a binational state in Palestine/Israel with equal rights for Jews and Arabs. Buber never gave up on his vision during his long career, which saw him flee to Mandatory Palestine from Nazi Germany. This is the first half of our conversation. The second half will air the following week.

 Barry Trachtenberg, the Rubin Presidential Chair in Jewish History at Wake Forest University, continues his discussion of the origins and early development of Zionism. A minority movement within Judaism until World War II, Zionism faced opposition from many Jews who believed it transgressed religious law and tradition. It was frequently facilitated by Christian Zionists who saw in Jews' return to Palestine after 2,000 years a fulfilment of Christian eschatology and a way of resolving what some saw as Jews' problematic presence in Euopean society.  From its inception, Zionism was a settler-colonial project that reflected European assumptions of cultural superiority.

In the first of a new series called "What Is Zionism?" Professor Barry Trachtenberg talks to Margot Patterson about the origins of Zionism in the late 1800s. By the turn of the 20th century, Jews living in Eastern Europe had experienced two decades of rising anti-Semitism. Some sought to change the conditions of the societies they lived in; others responded to emerging nationalism in Europe by developing ideologies of Jewish nationalism. Unlike other European peoples, however, Jews lacked territory. Those seeking a place where Jews could gather and establish a state eventually fixed on Palestine, where their quest for land and sovreignty almost immediately brought them into conflict with the people living there.  Trachtenberg holds the Rubin Presidential Chair in Jewish History at Wake Forest University, where he teaches courses on the history of Zionism

Swarthmore students have faced unprecedented repression in their Palestine solidarity organizing in the past year, despite using tactics embraced in earlier campus struggles. A recent graduate of Swarthmore involved in campus divestment organizing details the double standard that exists at Swarthmore for Palestine-related speech. Students speaking out against the Gaza genocide, many of them low-income and/or people of color, face an array of administrative charges in an internal justice system that affords them few rights.

Michael Lynk, professor of law at the University of Western Ontario and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied by Israel since 1967, discusses international law, Israel's defiance of it and its recent attack on U.N. peacekeeping troops in Lebanon. He notes that undergirding Western support for Israel is the residue of colonialism and the influence of a powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States.

Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon are tourism entrepreneurs and peace activists that have been working for peace in Palestine and Israel for years. Hamas militants killed Maoz's parents on October 7th and Israeli prison guards beat Aziz's brother so severely that he died after being released from prison. Recently, they joined forces and are now traveling across the United States speaking about the need for Americans to act now for peace in the Middle East because inaction itself is a risk. They argue that their relationship, built on the basis of equality, offers a path toward reconciliation. The path of violence has led nowhere and the US has forgotten the art of diplomacy in its foreign policy.

Ret. Ambassador Chas Freeman, Jr., discusses the widening wars in the Middle East, Israel's hegemonic ambitions,  and the catastrophic collapse of U.S. influence in the region as a result of the Biden administration's one-sided, ineffectual diplomacy. By arming and funding Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza and brutal war in Lebanon, the United States is breeding hatred in hundreds of thousands of people who are being bombed by U.S. weapons. He notes that "If you bomb people, they bomb back," and warns of the grave consequences if the United States does not change course.  Freeman was in the U.S. Foreign Service for 30 years. He served as President Nixon’s principal interpreter during Nixon’s ground-breaking visit to China in 1972 and was the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War. He is the author of three books on foreign policy and two books on  diplomacy, 

Heiko Wimmen of the International Crisis Group details the quickly changing situation in Lebanon and northern Israel after the assassination of Hizbullah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and Iran's launch of ballistic missiles on Israel. We compare Israel's stated goals and tactics in Gaza with those in Lebanon. Absent a ceasefire in Gaza, Israel is unlikely to achieve its war aims in Lebanon. 

Margot Patterson talks to Mideast scholar Juan Cole about last week’s dramatic escalation in the year-long cross-border attacks between Israel and Hezbollah, Israel's maximalist goals in Lebanon, the history of Hezbollah and how the failure of the Biden administration’s policy on Gaza is scrambling traditional alliances in the Middle East and configuring new ones. Cole is the the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of several books on the history of the Middle East and on Islam. 

Jenna Martin is a Montana-based journalist who writes about resistance movements and politics and how the two intersect with each other. We spoke with her as she was wrapping up her recent reporting trip to Egypt and the West Bank. In Egypt, Anna spoke with families separated by the closure of the Rafah Border Crossing and their struggle to survive without documents as their loved ones remain trapped in Gaza. In the West Bank, she traveled to Beita, where American activist Aysenur Eygi was recently killed by the Israeli army. Already tense before October 7, Anna reports that a massive escalation has taken place in the West Bank.

In a 2023 Christmas Eve sermon that drew global attention, the Rev. Munther Isaac of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem charged the Western church with complicity in genocide in Gaza. Attending that Christmas Eve service in Bethlehem was David Wildman, executive secretary for human rights and racial justice with the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Global Ministries. He serves as its liaison to the United Nations, the Middle East and Afghanistan. He talks with Margot Patterson about the truth of that charge and what Christians are and are not doing to stop atrocities in Palestine.

This week on Understanding Israel/Palestine, we're rebroadcasting an episode from Let's Talk UNRWA, entitled An American in Gaza with Scott Anderson. Mara Kronenfeld, Executive Director of UNRWA USA, speaks with Scott Anderson, who is leading UNRWA's efforts in the Gaza Strip. They discuss the need for a ceasefire, the ongoing polio vaccination campaign, and the challenges of providing for millions of displaced people in Gaza amid the immense and ongoing damage to critical infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. Almost everyone in the Gaza Strip has been displaced, many multiple times, with some unable to afford being displaced again.

James Gelvin, professor of history at UCLA and author of "The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War," discusses the war in Gaza and the student protest movement it's spawned. He says there is no military solution to the war or to the century-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians other than an independent Palestinian state, unlikely as that now seems. He advises student protesters to go off-campus and get into the Democratic Party if they want to change U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine.

Retired Col. Ann Wright of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla details the numerous ships that have attempted to break the siege of Gaza over the years. After a summer sailing to European ports to raise awareness of the Gaza genocide, the Handala will be on its way to Gaza after repairs are completed. Zane Wolfang also reports from the DNC in Chicago, where police and protestors have been squaring off for a week while Uncommitted Movement delegates push for an arms embargo on the inside.

Terrorism is generally held to be political violence that is illegitimate, but what confers legitimacy on some acts of political violence and illegitimacy on others? Is terrorism simply the name we give to the violence we do not like or support, while finding euphemisms for the violence we do like or support? Professor of history Richard Drake asks these questions in his popular course Terrorism - Violence in the Modern World at the University of Montana. With this critical frame in mind, we approach the history of terrorism in the Middle East, from the post-WWI Treaties of Versailles and Sèvres to the ongoing Gaza genocide. Our conversation concludes with a discussion of how Senator Robert La Follette, the subject of a book by Prof. Drake, came to understand US empire in the Middle East following WWI.

The former endowed chair in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Keene State College, Keene, NH, Dr. Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey is the co-founder and executive director of the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention. In Part II of her conversation with Margot Patterson, she discusses what the Lemkin Institute identifies as genocide not just in Gaza but throughout Palestine and the assault on democracy that Western support for Israel's genocide in Palestine involves.

Genocide scholar Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey discusses what constitutes genocide, how and why she and international human rights lawyer Irene Victoria Massimino came to found the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention to avert it,  and why the West is supporting genocide in Palestine. Dr. von Joeden-Forgey is the former Endowed Chair in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Keene State College, Keene, NH, and the Dr. Marsha Raticoff Grossman Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University, NJ.

Dr. Emilio Dabed, a Palestinian-Chilean lawyer specializing in constitutional matters, international law, and human rights, discusses his recent article for 972 Magazine entitled, "By failing to stop the Gaza genocide, the ICJ is working exactly as intended." We discuss the ICJ's failure to order a ceasefire in Gaza in the South Africa vs. Israel genocide case. Dabed argues that this reveals the true purpose of the international legal order: the administration of colonial violence. In light of Dabed's argument, we conclude by turning to the more recent ICJ case demolishing the legal foundations of Israel's occupation of Palestine.  

Mickey Gitzin is director of the Jerusalem office of the New Israel Fund, a non-profit funding Israeli civil society groups working to promote democracy and human rights in Israel. He talks about the democratic fissures in Israeli society before and after Oct. 7, the repression of Arab Israelis' rights since the Hamas attack, the limits of Israeli power vis a vis the Palestinians, and why he is hopeful that progressive values can prevail despite the far-right government now leading the country. 

Dr. Annelle Sheline, fellow at the Quincy Institute, speaks about her resignation from the State Department in protest over the Biden administration's role in backing Israel's assault in Gaza. She's now one of a dozen US government employees who have resigned. An astute student of the region, she talks about the regional consequences of the war in Gaza, including the escalations with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with Yemen's Ansar Allah in the Red Sea. She closes by discussing Iran's role in the region's power dynamics vis-à-vis the US and Israel.

Khaled Elgindy, director of the program on Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute, discusses growing concerns about war on the Israel-Lebanon border, deteriorating conditions in the West Bank, and the whack-a-mole game Israel is playing in Gaza. 

Journalist Mahmoud Mushtaha, assistant manager of We Are Not Numbers, a non-profit in Gaza that pairs young Palestinian writers with professional journalists to  help them tell their stories to an English-speaking audience, describes the harrowing conditions in Gaza. Mushtaha left Gaza a month ago and is now in Egypt. He discusses his journey, the difficulties that confront those who leave Gaza and those who stay, and the eyewitness accounts and stories We Are Not Numbers is publishing.

Rana Salman and Eszter Koranyi of the Israeli-Palestinian NGO Combatants for Peace joined the show this week to discuss their work over the years and its challenges in the wake of October 7. Combatants for Peace espouses mutual understanding of each others' sides, nonviolent resistance as a tool for change, and joint struggle to end the occupation and bring peace and equal rights for all in the region. Their organization organizes events such as the Joint Memorial Day Ceremony and the Joint Nakba Remembrance Ceremony.

Khaled Hroub talked to Margot Patterson about the evolution of Hamas, the Oct. 7th attack on Israel, and the ceasefire plan proposed by President Biden to end the war in Gaza. A professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Northwestern University in Qatar, Hroub has studied and written about Hamas for 25 years.  His essay about the Oct. 7th Hamas attack appeared in the recently published book "Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm."

Dr. Shira Klein, Associate Professor and Chair of History at Chapman University, discusses Israel's turn toward fascism in the wake of the National Union of Israeli Students proposing a new law that would require universities to fire all academics who express dissent, including tenured professors. An Israeli by birth, Dr. Klein is an expert in the history of Italy's Jews, including during Mussolini's Fascist government. We touch on the academics who have been targets of repression, whether from the Israeli state or right-wing actors, and the extent to which Israel bears the hallmarks of a fascist state. As a scholar-activist, Dr. Klein also promotes peace in Israel/Palestine, and we conclude by discussing her work as founder and president of Academics4Peace, a 501c3 dedicated to amplifying the voices of academics who call for justice and equality in Israel/Palestine.

Margot Patterson talks to Neve Gordon, a professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London.  Gordon discusses the significance of the International Criminal Court’s decision on May 20th to seek arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders (Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismael Haniyeh) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. He also examines  the International Court of Justice’s May 24th  ruling on Israel’s invasion of Rafah. He describes the criteria used to gauge war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide under international law and why some European nations support Israel despite its history of violating international law. An Israeli academic who used to teach at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and a prominent peace activist in Israel, Gordon has written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a wide variety of publications, including The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The London Review of Books. He is the author of three books: Israel’s Occupation and, more recently, with Nicola Perugini, The Human Right to Dominate and Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire.

Now a political analyst in Washington, D.C. focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,  Khalil Sayegh grew up as a Palestinian Christian in Gaza, home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Sayegh speaks of the Christian role in Gaza, the recent loss of family members there, the diverse responses of Christian churches in the United States to the war in Gaza, Israel’s war aims — ethnic cleansing and the resettlement of the Gaza Strip with Jewish settlers — and the different objectives of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority as regards Gaza’s future. Sayegh is co-founder of the Agora Initiative, a non-profit that seeks to advance constitutional democracy in the Middle East. Later in the program, Eamon speaks briefly to war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody about the ICC’s recent decision to issue arrest warrants to three Hamas leaders and to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Sometimes called the Arab Gandhi, Palestinian peace activist Mubarak Awad talks to Margot Patterson about how he came to embrace the principles of non-violence,  his views of the war in Gaza and the future of the Palestinian movement. Expelled from Israel in 1988 for leading non-violent resistance during the First Intifada, Awad is the founder of Nonviolence International, an NGO in Washington D.C. that advocates for creative nonviolence in the struggle for liberation of oppressed peoples around the world.

This week we speak with Robert Bletcher, Director of the Future of Conflict program at International Crisis Group (ICG). He was the lead author of the ICG's recent report Stopping Famine in Gaza. We discuss how famine is defined and measured in the realm of international politics and the key axes to consider when attempting to mitigate famine: distribution and access. Israel's actions in Gaza, including its harsh restrictions on aid entering Gaza and its targeting of individuals and groups attempting to distribute aid, have resulted in a situation of imminent famine in Gaza. In the absence of a ceasefire, groups distributing aid must not be targeted and humanitarian aid must be allowed to enter. We conclude by discussing the obstacles to this and the war aims of Hamas and Israel. 

Rutgers University law professor Sahar Aziz and Mitchell Plitnick, president of Rethinking Foreign Policy, discuss student protests of Israel’s war in Gaza, the growing threat to free speech on college campuses, and how pervasive anti-Muslim bias in U.S. society and U.S. foreign policy perpetuates a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Aziz and Plitnick are co-authors of the report “Presumptively Anti-Semitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine-Israel Discourse,” published in November, 2023, by the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers. The report  examines how Islamophobia distorts U.S. foreign policy and is being used by some Zionist groups  to delegitimize Arab or Muslim experts on Israel-Palestine and to press unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism.

The Gaza Freedom Flotilla movement began with a 2006 email from a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement sent to other volunteers struggling with how to bring to the attention of the world that Israel, while attacking Lebanon, was imprisoning Gaza. The email proposed chartering a big boat to sail from New York to Gaza, to Break the Siege, while acknowledging their proposal was so big it might need a sanity check. Rising to the challenge, two years later in 2008 a boat sailed all the way into the Gaza harbor, greeted by thousands of enthusiastic Palestinians. The book Freedom Sailors, written and edited by the people who lived this first step, is a vivid description of amazing courage and fortitude. Since 2008 flotillas bound for Gaza have been blocked by Israel. In 2010 Israel attacked the Mavi Marmara, one ship of a 6-ship flotilla, while still in international waters, killing 9 of the crew. The crew was totally unarmed. Alex McDonald, author of How I Learned to Speak Israel, a guide for Americans wanting to better understand the Israel/Palestine situation, was on the Freedom Flotilla boat that sailed to northern ports this summer to raise the world’s awareness of the flotilla movement. Another boat is due to sail to Gaza this spring. Video footage of the 2010 attack is shown in The Truth: Lost at Sea.

In the last part of a series on the Israel lobby in the United States, Margot Patterson talks to Alison Weir, founder and executive director of If Americans Knew, a non-profit established more than 20 years ago to educate Americans about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Weir discusses some of the many groups and individuals that comprise the Israel lobby, why and what Americans should know about the lobby, and how Israel's advocates have been responding to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the controversy over Israel's war in Gaza.

Dr. Sam Brody, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at The University of Kansas, discusses the history of the Anti-Defamation League (or the ADL) and the role it plays as a part of the Israel lobby. Dr. Brody contends that the ADL’s stance that anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism is wrong-headed, cynical, and ahistorical. He argues that countering anti-Semitism can only be done in coalition with other liberation movements, including the Palestine solidarity movement. We conclude by discussing the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism and how muddying the distinctions between the two ultimately makes it harder for Jews to address real instances of anti-Semitism.

Award-winning journalist,  author and documentary film-maker James Bamford discusses his recent article in The Nation magazine, "The Anti-Defamation League: Israel's Attack Dog in the U.S." Since the war in Gaza began in October, the ADL is claiming a dramatic rise in anti-Semitism, citing statistics disputed by its own staff, some of whom have quit the ADL in protest at the conflation of anti-war protests with anti-Semitism.  Bamford speaks to Margot Patterson about the ADL's underside as a propaganda arm for Israel and its history as a hostile intelligence agency, surveilling a wide array of U.S. groups and passing information about them to Israel, the U.S. government and apartheid South Africa. 

MJ Rosenberg, political commentator, joined the show this week to discuss the Israel lobby from his vantage point as a former insider. After working on Capitol Hill for various Democratic members of the House and Senate for 15 years, Rosenberg worked for AIPAC for four years. Rosenberg recounts his experiences being threatened with destruction of his career as a Hill staffer. He also shares how AIPAC has intervenes in Congressional elections through directing donations to candidates who support Israeli government policy. While it formally eschewed the use of a political action committee (PAC), AIPAC now openly intervenes in Democratic primaries with the use of dark money from primarily Republican donors through its United Democracy Project PAC. Rosenberg blogs on Substack at substack.com/@mjx847.

Grant F. Smith, the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, discusses the influential American-Israel Public Affairs Committe (AIPAC). Smith has written several books on AIPAC. which was started with $6 million in foreign funding, largely from Israel, but eluded U.S. efforts to register it as a foreign agent. While it's treated as a domestic lobbying organization, Smith says AIPAC today continues to act as a foreign agent for Israel, employing campaign contributions, covert pressure campaigns and espionage in collusion with Israel to advance policies that serve the state of Israel but not the United States or the public good. 

In Part I of a series on the Israel lobby, Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard and co-author of the book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," discusses the effect of the lobby on U.S. foreign policy and the ongoing war in Gaza. The Israel lobby is an informal alliance of various interest groups that work to foster unconditional American support for Israel by pressuring Congress, the executive branch, media institutions and the academy. Professor Walt argues that this unconditional support runs counter to U.S. national interests. The consequences, which include the stalled and defunct peace process and U.S. complicity in Israel’s apartheid system and “plausible genocide” in Gaza, have seriously damaged the credibility of the United States and threatened its foreign policy priorities.  Walt notes the biggest factor that explains the continuining overwhelming support in the U.S. Congress for Israel's war in Gaza  is the  Israel lobby. Backing for Israel's military campaign continues in Washington despite domestic and international pressure to end the war,  which is devastating Gaza and has killed 31,000 people. Subsequent episodes in the new UIP series will examine how the Israel lobby started and evolved, how it operates and why it is so effective.

Last week's conversation with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson about the U.S.-Israeli relationship concludes. Wilkerson  was chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and now teaches government and public policy at the College of Willliam and Mary.  Margot Patterson then speaks to Dr. Majdi Hamarshi, founder of the Palestinian-American Medical Association (PAMA). Since 2013, PAMA has been sending medical missions to Gaza and the Occupied West Bank to help meet the medical needs of Palestinians living there. Now PAMA is sending medical missions to Gaza to help local doctors and nurses in Gaza treat the many wounded by the war. Dr. Hamarshi reports on the difficulties PAMA has faced getting teams into Gaza and what its doctors and nurses are seeing and experiencing there.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson discusses U.S.-Israel relations today and how the Israel lobby shapes U.S. politics and U.S. foreign policy. He speaks to Margot Patterson about the war in Gaza, what he believes Israel’s intentions are for it, the anger the war is creating and the blowback he sees in store for the United States for its role in arming and enabling Israel’s campaign. Colonel Wilkerson served as special assistant to General Colin Powell when Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later served as chief of staff to General Powell when Powell was U.S. Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005.  Col. Wilkerson teaches government at the College of William and Mary and is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Wun Wong (they/them) from Librarians and Archivists with Palestine speaks about the destruction of cultural heritage in Palestine at the hands of the Israeli armed forces. Israel has targeted Palestinian institutions of cultural production since the Nakba, but the ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza has seen an intensification of this scholasticide, or the destruction of knowledge. They also speak about how Palestinians have resisted the destruction of their cultural heritage and embraced alternative platforms to keep narrating the story of their people.

Scott Paul, associate director of peace and security at Oxfam America, talks about why 20 aid organizations have issued a public letter protesting a pause in Western funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency  (UNRWA), the main aid agency in Gaza offering services that the aid groups says are indispensable in the current crisis. Oxfam, Save the Children, the AFSC and other aid groups working in Gaza say cutting aid to UNRWA will have devastating effects on what is already a humanitarian catastrophe.  The suspension of funds to UNRWA by 18 countries, including the United States, the Uniked Kingdom, Germany and others, follows still-unverified allegations that 12 of UNRWA's employees in Gaza may have links to the Hamas attacks on Oct 7.  UNRWA  employs 13,000 people in Gaza and 30,000 throughout the region and may be forced to cease operations by the end of February unless funding is resumed. The pause in aid to UNRWA come on the heels of the World Court ordering Israel to take measures to prevent genocide in Gaz and to provide more humanitarian aid. Margot Patterson talks to Chimène Keitner, an expert on international law and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California-Davis, about that ruling and its significance and impact.

Documentary filmmaker Maurice Jacobsen speaks about his efforts to tell Gaza's stories amid the carnage and destruction of Israel's onslaught. Maurice works with a team of Gazan filmmakers called the Gaza Media Group who have been documenting the last several months of war despite much of their equipment being destroyed. We focused on individual stories that testify to the resilience of the Palestinian people and displayed on we-gaza.com. We also discussed the Hamas government in Gaza, primarily composed of bureaucrats and civil servants like fire fighters, police, and the like. 

Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of Palestinian human rights in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, discusses the case South Africa has brought to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide in Gaza and asking the ICJ to order preventive actions.  Falk discusses the divide between white settler-colonial states and European former colonial powers on one hand, and the Global South on the other, over Israeli actions in Gaza, the merits of the arguments by South Africa and Israel, the crime of complicity perpetrated by the United States and some other Western countries, and the long-standing crisis of implementation at the United Nations that has kept the U.N. from acting effectively to prevent war. This Jan. 20th interview provides the background to the ICJ decision rendered Jan. 26

Dr. Noam Perry of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) joined the show this week to discuss his organization's research into the business of military occupation and apartheid in Palestine/Israel and the USA. Since Israel began assaulting Gaza after Oct. 7, the AFSC has put together a comprehensive resource on their website detailing the weapons companies fueling Israel's genocidal campaign. This resource is part of a larger investigative project detailing the intersection of the weapons, prison, border, and surveillance industries. Dr. Perry concludes by detailing steps people can take to avoid being financially complicit in human rights violations and state violence.

Mideast expert Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC,  discusses how U.S. militarism is raising the risk of a wider Mideast war, what more the United Nations could do to press Israel and the United States to adopt a ceaefire in Gaza, and the suit South Africa has filed at the International Court of Justice charging Israel with the crime of genocide. At the Institute for Policy Studies, Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project, focused on U.S. mllitarism, the Middle East, and the United Nations. She is a long-time analyst and commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the author and editor of 11 books on U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East. Her popular book Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict was recently updated and is now in its 7th edition.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Smith discusses his scholarly work on Christian Zionism and his activism for Palestinian liberation. An enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and professor history, Smith lived in Palestine for several years working for the University of Notre Dame before returning to Turtle Island/United States. Our conversation began with a discussion about the intersection between Smith's work in Palestine and his Indigenous identity before we defined and dissected the phenomenon of Christian Zionism. Smith then articulated the tenets of Palestinian liberation theology, the most substantial critique of Christian Zionism. Finally, we discussed the broader frame of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance to it.

Historian Rashid Khalidi discusses the Israel-Hamas war in the context of the past century of Israeli settler colonialism and Palestinian resistance.  The current war has seen Israel push Palestinians in Gaza from the north to the south and is another step in a process of ethnic cleansing and depopulation long pursued by Zionist forces and the Israeli state, with the support first of Great Britain and later the United States. This episode repeats one aired 6 weeks ago

After over 11 years working as a Director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, Josh Paul recently resigned from the State Department. In this role he was responsible for U.S. defense diplomacy, security assistance, and arms transfers. He joined the show this week to discuss the pipeline of US weapons being sent to Israel. While the letter of the law has perhaps been followed regarding these arms transfers, Josh argues that its spirit has not. Congress is failing to perform its oversight role and hold the Biden administration accountable. We discussed the laws that are supposed to govern the transfer of weapons, namely the Arms Export Control Act, the Leahy Laws, and the Foreign Assistance Act and their circumvention by the Biden Administration. We closed by discussing the larger lessons that the US should draw from its own experience fighting the Global War on Terror.

Three experts on the Holocaust discuss the uses and abuses of Holocaust memory in the context of current events in Israel/Palestine and the war in Gaza. They note that since Oct. 7 the Holocaust has been invoked by Israeli leaders with accompanying calls for mass violence against Palestinians and a war in Gaza that has now killed close to 20,000 people.   The conversation was convened in November by Jewish Currents magazine and the Diaspora Alliance. The historians are Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and the author of Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine; Raz Segal,  an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide; and Jelena Subotić, the author of Red Star, Yellow Star: Holocaust Remembrance After Communism. Moderator Linda Kinstler is the author of Come to this Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends and a contributing writer to Jewish Currents.

Professor Barry Trachtenberg, the Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University, talks about turmoil on college campuses over the Israel-Hamas war, critical concerns about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, why the Holocaust is not a justification for oppression, and why he thinks arguments for Jewish exceptionalism are flawed and not in Jews’ best interests.

Tala Nasir, lawyer at Addameer, Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association sheds light on the issue of the Palestinian political prisoners. Addameer, the Arabic word for conscience, is a Palestinian non-governmental, civil institution that works to support Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli and Palestinian prisons. In the first half of our interview, we talked about the Palestinian prisoners being released by Israel as a part of the recently-negotiated deal between Israel and Hamas. In the second half our interview, we turned towards the broader legal architecture of Israel’s system of military rule in the occupied Palestinian territories. We also highlighted the individual stories of some of the Palestinian political prisoners.

Khaled Elgindy, director of the program on Israeli-Palestinian Affairs at the Middle East Institute, discusses mounting violence in the West Bank, the crack-down on free speech inside Israel, the ongoing war and looming prospect of starvation in Gaza and a shambolic U.S. policy, characterized as a run-away train with no brakes and no destination.

Historian Rashid Khalidi discusses  the current Israel-Hamas war in the context of the past century of Israeli settler colonialism and Palestinian resistance.  The current war has seen Israel push Palestinians in Gaza from the north to the south and is another step in a process of ethnic cleansing and depopulation long pursued by Zionist forces and the state of Israel, supported first by Great Britain and then by the United States. An advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid Conference,  the Columbia University professor says the 30-year failed U.S.-sponsored  peace process opened the door to Hamas. While the United States has brokered peace beetween Israel and Arab countries, it  has never made resolving the Israeli-Palestinian a strategic concern and has undermined peace by its one-sided support for Israel.

In his 2011 book Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations: 1820-2001, Professor Ussama Makdisi of University California Berkeley wrote, “No matter how one turns the kaleidoscope of US-Arab relations, one always returns, or is returned to, the picture of Palestine.” In his book Makdisi highlights several historical pivot points to chart the trajectory of the two-hundred-year-long relationship between the Arab world and United States, one that has been fraught with tension and resentment. What began in the nineteenth century as a favorable exchange of cultural understanding and economic opportunity deteriorated with America’s increasing interest in oil, and finally collapsed when America pushed for the legitimization of the State of Israel. The United States’ support for Israel’s ongoing assault on the Palestinian people of Gaza, unprecedented in its ferocity and wanton disregard for civilian life, has driven the final nail in the coffin of America’s reputation in the Arab world.

Prof. Mazin Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem University discusses the longue durée of the progressive Zionist colonization of the Holy Land. He highlights the current siege-like situation in the ghetto of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, before going on to discuss the numerous Israeli assaults in the West Bank and their context in international law. He notes the deleterious effects on Palestine's environment of colonization before turning his attention to Israel's attempt to starve out the trapped Palestinian people in Gaza. The rhetoric of Israel's leaders and the war crimes of its military lead him to an inescapable conclusion: the Israeli government is carrying out a genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip. 

Film-maker Maurice Jacobsen speaks about efforts he and long-time colleagues in Gaza have been making to document the war as best they can with "We All Live in Gaza: The War Chronicles," short videos posted on the Internet. Journalist Yousef Al-Jamal talks about the recent book he contributed to, "Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire," his growing up in Gaza, the 16-year siege imposed by Israel and the Israel-Hamas war now devastating Gaza.

Former U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied by Israel since 1967, Michael Lynk discusses international law as it applies to the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. The Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas as well as Hamas' ongoing missile strikes on Israel violate international law. So too does Israel's indiscriminate shelling of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and its tightening siege. Lynk addresses the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza and says the Biden administration's support for Israel's actions is complicity in war crimes.

Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab-American Institute, discusses Arab-Americans' outrage at the Biden administration's announcement Sept. 27th that it is accepting Israel into the U.S. visa waiver program, a program which allows citizens from select countries to travel to the United States without a visa. Arab-American, Palestinian-American and U.S. Muslim civil rights groups say Israel doesn't meet the United States' own established criteria for admission to the program and violates Arab-Americans' rights as U.S. citizens to equal protection under the law. The visa waiver program requires reciprocity in how citizens enrolled in the program are treated, but as 15 U.S. senators noted in a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken dated Sept. 8, Israel does not yet meet the standards for admittances, and Israel continues to discriminate against Arab-Americans, particularly Palestinian-Americans, seeking to travel to and inside Israel and the Occupied Territories. Berry says her own country is now facilitating Israeli discrimination against her and other U.S. citizens, not only Arab-Americans but all U.S. advocates of Palestinian human rights, who also face discrimination at Israel's borders.

The Rev. Dr. Fahed Abu-Akel joined Understanding Israel Palestine to share about his journey from his childhood in Palestine to becoming a pastor in the Presbyterian Church USA and then Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA, the highest elected position in the church. In the latter half our discussion, we turned our attention towards interfaith dialogue on the conflict, the theology operating in the Holy Land, and Rev. Abu-Akel's view of the current situation.

Eyal Hareuveni of the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem discusses how and why Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank face a chronic shortage of water. He is the author of a new study by B'Tselem called "Parched: Israel's Policy of Water Deprivation in the West Bank," which examines Israel's discriminatory use of water to control the Palestinian population under military occupation. Though Israel is a water super-power, producing twice as much water as it receives from natural sources, it limits Palestinians' consumption of water and prevents them drilling new wells or supplying water to needy communities.  Nancy Murray of the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine speaks to the toll the shortage of water takes on Palestinians' lives, health and economy and addresses the effects of this not only in the West Bank but also in the Gaza Strip,where 98 percent of the ground water is now contaminated.

Yousef Munayyer, Senior Fellow and head of the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C., discusses the complexity of Israel's internal fissures, changing battlefield dynamics between Israelis and Palestinians, and the increasing turn to armed resistance among Palestinians.

A day after Israel's passage of a highly contested bill to curb the power of the Supreme Court, Mickey Gitzin, director of the New Israel Fund, a non-profit in Jerusale that works to advance liberal democracy in Israel, and Nivine Sandouka, a Palestinian who heads the NGO Our Rights in Jerusalem, discuss its significance, the dangers of the far-right government, the contradictions in the Israeli protest movement and some new openings for progress they see emerging. Gili Getz, chair of the board of American Friends of Combatants for Peace, which sponsored the discussion, moderates. Combatants for Peace is a peace group composed of former Israeli and Palestinian fighers, which since 2006 has worked to promote peace and end the Israeli military occupation.

Jehad Abusalim is executive director of the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development and author of a recent article in "The New Arab" that looks at Gaza 16 years after Israel imposed its ongoing siege. He discusses Gaza today amid new concerns raised in the wake of the Israeli attack on Jenin in July that Israel may begin treating the West Bank as it does Gaza, subjecting it to increased closures and aerial bombardment. Abusalim notes that the international community is doing nothing to end the siege of Gaza, and that its promise to put pressure on Israel in exchange for the Palestinian Authority pursuing a policy of pacification in the West Bank has not been met. The PA has emphasized economic opportunity over political and civil rights for Palestinians, but Abusalim says the failure of the policy is increasingly evident to Palestinians, who see Israel confiscating more and more of their land.

Human rights advocate Samer Daoudi and international human rights attorney Jonathan Kuttab discuss the recent demolition of the Jubbet adh-Dhib village school by the Israeli army on May 7, 2023. The demolition of the school is emblematic of a larger strategy to deny Palestinians access to education and, accordingly, the ability to even live in area C, argues Samer Daoudi. Jonathan Kuttab contends that the demolition of the school is in keeping with the goal of preventing the Palestinians from exercising their right to self-determination.

Chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2001-2005, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson talks frankly about the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel. Fear and intimidation lead the United States to ignore or condone human rights violations by Israel, even when U.S. lives are involved. Wilkerson discusses the parallels between the killing of U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie 20 years ago by an Israeli soldier and Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh's death in 2022 in what many believe was an Israeli extra-judicial murder and says securing accountability for Abu Akleh's death is no more likely now than it has been for Rachel Corrie's family, whom he tried to assist when in the State Department. The wide-ranging conversation includes a discussion of the many factors in  the U.S. invasion of Iraq, including Israel, and the misdeeds and crimes of the CIA.

May 15 marks the 75th aniversaryof the Nakba, the Arabic word for “catastrophe” when 3/4 of the indigenous population of Palestine lost their homeland in the establishment of the state of Israel. Commemorations of the anniversary are taking place across the United States, including in Kansas City where Palestinian- Americans and their friends will gather Saturday, May 20, at 6 p.m. at the Islamc Center of Greater Kansas City both to recognize the Nakba and to celebrate the survival of Palestinian culture. In this episode members of the local Palestinian community in Kansasa City share their recollections of the Nakba, their reflections on its continuance and why they are commemorating it. 

The Rev. Mae Elise Cannon, executive director of Churches for Middle East Peace, says Jerusalem’s status as a city that is home to two peoples and sacred to three faiths has never been more endangered in the modern era than it is today. Recently returned from a trip to the Middle East, she discusses the Israeli government’s intentional erosion of the historic status quo that has governed Jews, Christians and Muslims’ access to the holy sites in Jerusalem and the dramatic rise in attacks on Christians.  Though both pre-date the current government, Cannon says they have escalated under the new government and reflect rising Jewish nationalism that is undermining religious tolerance and human rights. Churches for Middle East Peace is a coalition of more than 30 church communions in the United States that advocates for just, comprehensive, long-last resolutions to conflicts in the Middle East, and the obstacles. 

Stephen M. Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard University,  talks about the Israel lobby in the United States and the negative effect unconditional support for Israel has had on U.S. foreign policy in the Mideast and on Israel itself. Walt is the author, along with John Mearsheimer, of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.  Published in 2007, the book was controversial when it first came out  but many of its arguments are now widely accepted. Walt discusses the political power of the lobby and changing views of Israel in the United States since the book was written. 

Political scientist Norman Finkelstein discusses the massive protests taking place in Israel, describing them not as a battle for democracy but as a culture war not unlike the tensions seen in U.S. society. He discusses the role and record of Israel's high court, U.S. Jews' shifting relationship with Israel,  the role of the pro-Israel lobby.  A prolific scholar who has spent his life examining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Finkelstein says the word "democracy" does not accurately describe Israel today.

Acclaimed writer and poet Naomi Shihab Nye discusses her poetry, her experiences as the daughter of a Palestinian refugee, her many trips of witness to Israel and Palestine,  her thoughts on the current tensions there.

Ori Nir, vice-president of public affairs for the liberal Zionist peace group, Americans for Peace Now, talks about tensions within the U.S. Jewish community over Israel. An Israeli journalist for 24 years, Nir says the frenzy of legislation coming out of the new right-wing government in Israel reflects how the anti-democratic nature of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is now seeping into Israel, with right-wing extremists seeking to permanently entrench the Occupation and make it impossible for future governments to end it. The assault on democracy and religious pluralism in Israeli is leading more U.S Jewish leaders to speak out against the government there.

Writer, anthropologist and activist Jeff Halper, chair of the Israeli Committee Against House Demlitions, discusses current conditions in Israel/Palestine -- the Israeli campaign against the last vestiges of resistance to the Judaization of Palestine, the dire choices facing Palestinians today, the acceptance of apartheid Israel by the international community, the massive protests by Jewish Israelis seeking to preserve democracy for Jews while ignoring the apartheid nature of the state for Palestinians.
Please note: This same episode appeared a few days ago under the title "Saving Democracy/Ignoring Apartheid in Israel," but then was no longer available.

Richard Falk, international law expert and former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967, discusses the significance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recent assertion that Israel possesses exclusive right to all of the Land of Israel. In addition to brazenly defying international law, the assertion repudiates the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle that has been promoted ineffectually and often cynically by international diplomacy for the last several decades. Professor Falk says Netnyahu's claim on behalf of Israel to all of historic Palestine, including the West Bank, represents what could be the final chapter in the Zionist project. He paints a somber scenario of what it is likely to mean for the Palestinians unless civil society mobilizes to defend them.

Omar Barghouti, iconic leader of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, disccusses the aims of the BDS campaign against Israeli apartheid and how it differs from the indiscriminate sanctions the West is applying to Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine. Barghouti discusses the hypocrisy in the West's response to Russia and its response to  Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestinian land and says the racism of the West is on full display. Russia should be sanctioned for its agression,  but boycotting individuals for their identity or political beliefs is not something the BDS movement supports. Barghouti discusses U.S. support for Israeli apartheid and the constant threat from Israel to his activism and to his life.

Dov Waxman, professor of political science and the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Israel Studies at UCLA, assesses the likely consequnces of the far-right coalition government taking shape following the November elections in Israel. Waxman discusses how and why the right has grown steadily in Israel over the last 30 years and what policies the new far-right government will pursue.