Episodios
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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 Courtâs 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 Justiceâs May 24th ruling on Israelâs 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: Israelâs Occupation and, more recently, with Nicola Perugini, The Human Right to Dominate and Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire.
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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, Israelâs war aims â ethnic cleansing and the resettlement of the Gaza Strip with Jewish settlers â and the different objectives of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority as regards Gazaâs 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 ICCâs recent decision to issue arrest warrants to three Hamas leaders and to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
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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.
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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.
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Rutgers University law professor Sahar Aziz and Mitchell Plitnick, president of Rethinking Foreign Policy, discuss student protests of Israelâs 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 âPresumptively Anti-Semitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine-Israel Discourse,â 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.
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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 worldâs 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.
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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.
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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 ADLâs 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Israelâs apartheid system and âplausible genocideâ 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.
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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.
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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 Israelâs 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 Israelâs 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.
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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.
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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 ChimĂšne 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.
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