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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, Jenna 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, Jenna traveled to Beita, where American activist Aysenur Eygi was recently killed by the Israeli army. Already tense before October 7, Jenna reports that a massive escalation has taken place in the West Bank.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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, 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.
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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.
- Visa fler