Understanding Israel Palestine
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.
Episodes
72 episodes
The Palestine Exception at Swarthmore
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 organiz...
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28:30
Israel's Assault on the United Nations
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 o...
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28:30
The War is Coming Home: Palestinian and Israeli Peacebuilding Duo Call on Americans to Act
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...
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28:30
Diplomat Warns of Blowback from U.S. Support of Israel's Wars
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, ineffectua...
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28:30
Israel Applies Gaza Tactics in Lebanon as Hizbullah Refuses to Back Down
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 c...
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28:29
Widening War in Lebanon Evinces Biden's Failed Approach to Israel
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 ...
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28:30
As Palestinians in Egypt Remain Separated from their Families, Israel Escalates in the West Bank
Anna 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, Ann...
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28:30
Challenging Churches' Complicity in Genocide
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 ...
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28:29
An American in Gaza with Scott Anderson
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 ...
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28:30
"There Is No Military Solution to the Gaza Conflict"
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 ...
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28:30
Freedom Summer: the Handala Prepares to Sail to Gaza
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
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28:30
Terrorism and its Semantics in the Middle East
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...
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28:29
The West Turns a Blind Eye to Genocide Across Palestine
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...
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28:30
Understanding and Preventing Genocide
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 w...
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28:30
The ICJ and the Administration of Colonial Violence
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 exactl...
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28:30
The Many Faces of Israel
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 befor...
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28:30
The Regional Consequences of Israel's Assault on Gaza
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 wh...
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28:29
Will Israel Open a New War Front?
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 ...
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28:48
Enduring the Unendurable: Stories from 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 h...
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28:30
Combatants for Peace
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...
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28:32
The Evolution of Hamas
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 ...
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28:30
Israel's Turn Toward Fascism
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 academ...
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28:28
Assessing War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, and Genocide
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 warra...
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28:30
Khalil Sayegh on Peacemaking, Israel’s War Aims and Gaza’s Future
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 Christi...
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28:30
Mubarak Awad on Nonviolence as the Path to Palestinian Liberation
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. Expe...
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Season 4
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Episode 17
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28:30