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
67 episodes
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
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 Jenna as she was wrapping up her recent reporting trip to Egypt and the West Bank. In Egypt, ...
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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
Stopping Famine in Gaza
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...
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Season 4
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Episode 16
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28:30
Islamophobia is Ignored in Ferment over Anti-Semitism on College Campuses
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 bi...
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Season 4
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Episode 15
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30:42
Breaking the Siege of Gaza: Freedom Flotillas since 2008
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...
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Season 3
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Episode 14
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28:30
Part VI of the Israel Lobby: Advocates Double Down After Oct. 7
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 Is...
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28:30
Part V of the Israel Lobby: The ADL's Exploitation of the Charge of anti-Semitism
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 ...
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Season 3
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Episode 6
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28:41