Understanding Israel Palestine

Send us Fan Mail Water is life — and Israel’s systematic theft, restriction, and destruction of Palestinian water resources is extinguishing both daily survival and an entire way of life. While Israeli settlers building ‘Eretz Israel’ consume over 350 liters of water per person daily, West Bank Palestinians survive on a fraction of that. In the Gaza Strip, where the population has only a few liter...

Send us Fan Mail Kansas City Rabbi Doug Alpert discusses his recent trip to the Occupied West Bank where he and other volunteers helping Palestinians harvest olives were detained by the Israeli military. Alpert says his Jewish values are why he seeks to defend Palestistians from violence by Jewish settlers and the Israeli state. 

Send us Fan Mail Greetings and welcome to Understanding Israel Palestine: A Beyond the Walls Edition. I’m Jeremy Rothe-Kushel. We speak today in October 2026 at a moment of profound and agonizing contradiction. On the ground across historic Palestine—from the mass destruction of Palestinian lives & rubbled civilization of Gaza to the besieged refugee camps, checkpoints, and torture centers of...

Send us Fan Mail International jurists Richard Falk and Hilal Elver discuss the work of the International Gaza Tribunal, a people’s tribunal examining Israeli war crimes in Gaza. A response by members of civil society to the failure of states and the United Nations to hold Israel accountable for crimes committed in its war on Gaza, the tribunal collected testimony from human rights experts, former...

Send us Fan Mail Since October 7, 2023, Israel has dropped explosive power equivalent to seven times the Hiroshima bomb on Gaza. Where does this lethal arsenal originate, and which nations and corporations fuel this crisis? Hine-Wai Loose joined the show to discuss the organization she directs, Control Arms and the Arms Trade Treaty which it championed over ten years ago. We examine the contents o...

Send us Fan Mail The Structural Origins and Damaging Impact of the Deep Israel Lobby Part 2 (with Grant Smith ) Greetings and welcome to Understanding Israel Palestine, a Beyond the Walls edition, I am Jeremy Rothe-Kushel. For this episode, after a Beyond the Walls special Cyber Occupation Report, we return to hear the 2nd part of my archived interview with Grant F. Smith, the research director at...

Send us Fan Mail How did the US media enable Israel's genocide in Gaza? What was happening in newsrooms as Israel intensified its onslaught on Gaza? Professor Emerita Robin Andersen joins the show to discuss how US media outlets encouraged Israel's genocidal campaign through uncritically repeating the lies of the Israeli government and through using sanitized language to describe acts of...

Send us Fan Mail In this updated rebroadcast of a program from November, 2025, Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, director of Israel-Palestine at DAWN (Democracy in the Arab World Now) discusses the accelerating pace of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank,  the history of settler violence, the U.S. role in enabling Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide, and measures that could prompt Israel to chart a...

Send us Fan Mail For this episode of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel speaks with Stacy Gilbert about the background of her public resignation from the Biden State Department, the longterm humanitarian crisis deepened by the ending of US financial aid and political support of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, and why all of th...

Send us Fan Mail How is anti-Muslim animus driving races around the country, from Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan to Zohran Mamdani in NYC? What accounts for the way in which Muslims, a religious group entitled to freedom of religion, instead are targeted for their participation in American politics? Dr. Sahar Aziz of Rutgers Law School joined the show to unpack these questions. Follow Sahar Aziz on so...

Send us Fan Mail Ian Lustick speaks to Margot Patterson about his and Eli Clifton's new book, "Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power." He discusses how changes both in the United States and in the world have affected the Israel lobby over the last 20 years, altered its strategy and made it more dangerous to Americans' freedom. Lustick is professor emeritus...

Send us Fan Mail Sparked by the International Criminal Court's prosecution of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamnin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense chief Yoav Gallant for war crimes, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared in July that the United States was launching a government-wide campaign to dismantle the ICC. Richard Falk, Princeton University professor emeritus of international la...

Send us Fan Mail No Peace Prescription for Gaza, and Dr. El-Sayed's Proscription of AIPAC Impunity (with Richard Silverstein) For this episode of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel is joined by Richard Silverstein.  Richard is an independent journalist, a Jewish American moral essayist, and the creator of the Tikun Olam blog, where he has for more than two d...

Send us Fan Mail Bryce Greene, organizer, student, and writer based in Bloomington, Indiana, joins the show to discuss hasbara. Most Americans have never heard of hasbara"the Israeli governments official global propaganda and influence program"yet they are targeted by it every day. At $730 million, the 2026 budget is more than 11 times what it was in 2023. Hasbara fuses traditional PR wi...

Send us Fan Mail Margot Patterson talks to Robin Andersen, professor emerita of communications at Fordham University, about Andersen's new book, The Complicit Lens: U.S. Media Coverage of the Genocide in Gaza. In it, Andersen writes that the mainstream media in the United States abandoned journalistic standards of accuracy and impartiality in its coverage of events following the Oct. 7 Hamas...

Send us Fan Mail For this episode, we return to a 2021 interview with Zahir Zaydani , the penname of a grassroots Palestinian intellectual from the West Bank. As the news cycle escalates, returning to deeper, historical lines of analytical frameworks closer to the source ensures that we don't let the headlines obscure the forest for the trees.  But first, some news... Story 1: When Ferran Tor...

Send us Fan Mail The life and work of journalist Amy Goodman, host of "Democracy Now," is the subject of award-winning film-makers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's new documentary film, "Steal This Story, Please." Goodman has provided close amd consistent attention to  Gaza and the Occupied West Bank since and even before Oct. 7. She talks about the role her Jewish upbringing ha...

Send us Fan Mail Do you want to take action but don't know where to start? Ben Case, organizer, author, and co-founder of Project for Responsive Democracy joins the show to talk about Not on Our Dime Pittsburgh, a local campaign to divest from genocide by direct vote. He details how the effort started, its results, and his advice for people hoping to take action. 

Send us Fan Mail In this rebroadcast of an earlier episode, Eamon speaks with Hind Shraydeh, Jerusalem-based journalist, about the practice of administrative detention in Palestine and her own husband's ordeal as a prisoner (administrative detainee).

Send us Fan Mail Acclaimed poet and writer Naomi Shihab Nye discusses her life and work in this conversation that originally aired in March of 2023 on KKFI's Understanding Israel Palestine program.  The daughter of a Palestinian refugee and an American mother, Nye was a teenager living with her family near Jerusalem when the Six-Day War broke out in 1967, causing the family to return to the U...

Send us Fan Mail Ben Freeman discusses a provision in the fy 2027 National Defence Authorization Act that would deepen and entrench U.S.-Israeli military cooperation to an unparalleled degree, creating partnerships hard to unravel and gutting Congressional oversight and accountability. An equally alarming provision in the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 2027 would force the U.S to s...

Send us Fan Mail The Premeditated Clampdown: Alison Weir on the Calculated Campaign to Protect Israeli State-Sponsored Destruction In this archival dive from September 2021, Alison Weir , executive director of If Americans Knew , exposes the calculated rollout of weaponized antisemitism laws. Five years later, the true design behind that campaign is undeniable. Host Jeremy Rothe-Kushel breaks out...

Send us Fan Mail This is Understanding Israel Palestine. I'm Margot Patterson, the producer of this week's episode. ’ll be talking to Robert Malley again, Mideast peace negotiator and author of the recent book Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine after news briefs. A yearlong Al Jazeera investigation found that as many as 51 countries armed Isra...

Send us Fan Mail The Architecture of Empire: Walter L. Hixson on the Israel Lobby and the Machinery of Endless War Part Two: The Nakba’s Blast Radius and the Capture of U.S. Foreign Policy Episode Description Seventy-eight years ago, the Nakba dismantled Palestinian society. Today, we are living inside its blast radius. What began in 1948 with the violent mass displacement of over 700,000 people h...

Send us Fan Mail Longtime Mideast peace negotiator Robert Malley discusses how diplomatic illusions, blunders and deceptions undermined the Oslo Accords and created an endless, unproductive peace process that led to the atrocities of Oct. 7 and Israel's calamitous war on Gaza.