The View From Here

I sat down with Wael Al Zayat, the CEO of Emgage, an organization working to empower Muslim Americans through civic engagement. We talk about what it means to lead a national organization in this moment—one in which Muslim Americans are becoming more politically active, but also more targeted, as we saw during the mayoral race in New York City recently. Wael walks us through the trends he’s seeing...

I wanted to start this season with a topic that has been severely underreported in the media and under prioritized by governments, and that is Sudan. Sudan has been in the headlines recently after the city of el-Fasher was captured by the RSF, the Rapid Support Forces, one of two parties, the other being the Sudanese Armed Forces, to a conflict that has ravaged the country in unimaginable ways. Mo...

In this solo episode, Jasmine reflects on the key themes and lessons learned from season one: the importance of human security and the responsibility to protect; the role of trust, whether between states or between societies and their governments; why exhibiting empathy in negotiations is not a weakness, but rather, sound strategy; why recognizing and understanding human fear is necessary to break...

Israel's September 9th strike on Hamas leaders in Doha has raised urgent questions about whether any red lines exist anymore. For the first time, Qatar, a major non-NATO ally to the US, host to Hamas’ political office and a key mediator in ceasefire talks, was directly targeted. What does this mean for Qatar’s security, its relationship with Washington, and the fragile regional balance moving forw...

As the Trump administration continues to attack America’s democratic values and institutions, and with political violence on the rise, the Democratic party seems hapless, seemingly unable to offer a real alternative vision. To analyse the current moment, Jasmine sat down with the Vice President of the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy advisor Matt Duss to discuss the Democr...

Nearly two years after the Oct 7 attacks on Israel, Jasmine sits down with two Israelis, Etan Nechin and Iddo Elam, who made the rare choice to refuse to serve in the Israeli military. Etan is a writer for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, where he has written extensively about the Netanyahu government's policies and Iddo is an activist against the occupation, apartheid and the genocide in Gaza. She...

What made Vladimir Putin the person he is today and what does he want out of Ukraine? Three and a half years on from Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, and more than ten years on from annexing Crimea, Jasmine sat down with Russian analyst and the head of the Berlin-based Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, Alexander (Sasha) Gabuev, to understand the man behind the villainous character in the headli...

Alex Smith is a lawyer, humanitarian, famine expert, and former USAID official who resigned in protest over U.S. policy in Gaza. Together with Jasmine, they unpack how a famine - so preventable and so widely predicted - was allowed to unfold in Gaza, the first famine ever declared in the Middle East by the UN-backed IPC. Alex draws on more than two decades of work in conflict zones, from Afghanist...

It's been four years since the West left Afghanistan in shambles and the Taliban swept back to power. After years of foreign forces in the region, under the stated aim of ensuring peace, prosperity and freedom for Afghan men, women and children, the Taliban reimposed their repressive regime - with horrendous consequences for Afghan women and girls. Shukria Barakzai is an Afghan journalist, former...

We are not numbers: A Palestinian story of life under occupation. Ahmed Alnaouq is known for being the Palestinian journalist who lost 21 members of his family in an Israaeli military strike after October 7th. But he's more than that. He's an author and editor on a mission to push back against the dehumanization of Palestinians in the Western media and by Western governments. He's here to remind u...

What brought about the violence in Sweida? Who are the Bedoins and the Druze and why are they fighting? Is the al-Sharaa government making things better or worse? And what do Israel and the US have to do with all of this? Jasmine El-Gamal sits down with Orwa Ajjoub for part 2 of their conversation, where they discuss the ever growing challenges facing Syrians since the fall of Bashar al-Assad's re...

What led to the sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s rule? How was it experienced inside Syria? And how did a little-known former al-Qaeda fighter rise to take his place? In the first of a two-part series, Jasmine explores the fall of the Assad regime and the end of a repressive dynasty that ruled Syria with an iron fist for more than five decades. She is joined by Syrian academic Orwa Ajjoub to u...

What was it like working in Nasser Hospital in Gaza when it was bombed? What price have the children of Gaza paid since October 7, 2023? And how desperate is the situation in the coastal enclave right now for civilians? In the first episode of The View From Here, Jasmine El-Gamal sits down with Morgan McMonagle - an Irish trauma surgeon who joins humanitarian missions at hospitals in some of the m...

From war rooms to conflict zones to refugee camps, former Pentagon official and foreign policy analyst Jasmine El-Gamal draws on her experiences to examine how policy decisions impact real lives, uncovering the unseen costs of power. Each Tuesday on The View From Here, Jasmine connects the dots between global headlines and the human stories behind them. The View from Here is foreign policy, reimag...