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Understanding Israel/Palestine advocates for a fair and even-handed U.S. foreign policy that recognizes the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis. The program offers multiple perspectives through interviews with journalists, scholars, policy experts and activists to clarify the underlying issues that are often obscured by mainstream media.
141 Episodes
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Send a text 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 oppr...
Send a text 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 a...
Send a text 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,” ...
Send a text 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 boa...
Send a text 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 conc...
Send a text 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...
Send a text 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 candidat...
Send a text 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 contr...
Send a text 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...
Send a text 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 Join...
Send a text 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 e...
Send a text 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 ...
Send a text 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 ...
Send a text 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 ...
Send a text 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...
Send a text 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, f...
Send a text 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...
Send a text 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
Send a text 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...
Send a text 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 B...
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