Understanding Israel Palestine

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.        

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 the West Bank and...

Margot Patterson speaks to jurists Richard Falk and Hilal Elver about the work of the International Gaza Tribunal, a people's tribunal investigating and documenting 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 e...

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 of this treaty and...

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 the Institute fo...

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 extreme violence.

This program is an updated rebroadcast of  a Nov. 21, 2025 program with Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, director of Israel-Palestine at DAWN (Democracy in the Arab World Now).  He 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 d...

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 this deeply haunts...

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 social media @sahar...

Professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a specialist in the history and politics of the modern Middle East, 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. Lustick says the Israel lobby has changed significantly since 2007 when Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt publ...

In July, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that the United States was launching a government-wide campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court. His announcement follows President Trump's Executive Order 14,203 in February of 2025 imposing economic sanctions on a dozen ICC officials. Citing the ICC's arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israe...

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 decades reported on Isra...

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 Israel's 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 attacks on Israe...

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.

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 Torres scored in the 106th...

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 has played in highlighting the oppression of...

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).

Acclaimed poet and writer Naomi Shihab Nye discusses her life and work in this conversation that originally aired on Understanding Israel Palestine in March of 2023. 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 United States. She reads from her poetr...

Ben Freeman discusses a provision in the fy 2027 National Defence Authorization Act that would deepen U.S.-Israeli military ties to an unparalleled degree, making them difficult to unravel and removing Congressional oversight and accountability. An equally alarming provision in the Intelligence Autorization Act would force the U.S to share almost all intelligence about the Middle East with Israel....

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 the tape to rev...

In this rebroadcast of the program of April 17,  Sonia Meyerson-Knox provides historical context for Israel's war in Lebanon, its seventh since the founding of Israel in 1948. She discusses Israel's decades-long ambition to expand into Lebanon and why she believes Israel is intent not just on destroying Hezbollah but the fabric of Lebanese society and Lebanon's territorial integrity.  Now communic...

Mideast peace negotiator Robert Malley continues his conversation with Margot Patterson about the road to Oct. 7th. Part I of the interview aired May 15.  In Part II, he speaks about the differing strategies pursued by Palestinian leaders Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, U.S. misconceptions of Palestinian politics, the lack of accountability for failed U.S. policies in the Middle East, the worseni...

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 has metastasized i...

Longtime Mideast peace negotiator Robert Malley talks about his and Hussein Agha's recently published book, Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine. Malley discusses  how diplomatic illusions, blunders and deceptions undermined the Oslo Accords signed in 1993, created an endless, unproductive peace process and led to the atrocities of Oct. 7 and Israel's cal...

Abdelfattah Abusrour, founder and director of Alrowwad Cultural and Arts Society in Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, Palestine, joined the show this week to discuss his life's work. We discussed how he came to found Alrowwad and the many inspirational students and works of art that have come of it.