Understanding Israel Palestine

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.

Send us Fan Mail 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.  

Send us Fan Mail Understanding Israel Palestine: A Beyond the Walls Edition Episode: The Structural Origins of AIPAC & The History of Israeli Espionage in the U.S. Guest: Grant Smith, Research Director at the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) Host: Jeremy Rothe-Kushel Episode Overview In this deep political analysis of US-Israel relations, we examine the foundational archit...

Send us Fan Mail Jews, especially American Jews, have never been of one mind about Israel and the United States’ support for it. Eric Alterman, Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, CUNY, joins the show to discuss his 2022 book We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel. He documents the ebbs and flows of American Jews’ relationship to Israel, from the more muted embr...

Send us Fan Mail Sonya Meyerson-Knox spent 16 years in Beirut, Lebanon working as a journalist and for U.N. agencies. She discusses the new war in Lebanon that began after the United States and Israel attacked Iran February 28, 2026, describing the war within the context of previous Israeli wars on Lebanon. She views Israel's current scorched-earth campaign as not only an attack on Hezbollah...

Send us Fan Mail Beyond the Walls: The Israel-Silicon Valley Nexus and the Penetration of U.S. Critical Infrastructure (with Mary Silva) Episode Overview: While public discourse naturally gravitates toward the physical realities of the occupation and destruction in Palestine, a parallel, largely invisible architecture of control operates far beyond the checkpoints of Gaza and the West Bank. This d...

Send us Fan Mail Palestinians have long faced difficulties accessing education, and these only intensified in the West Bank following Oct. 7, 2023. Aisha Al-Khatib, a principal in Nablus and a peace activist with Combatants for Peace, joined the show to discuss the state of education in the West Bank. Since the outbreak of the war on Iran, most schools have been shuttered and only limited online l...

Send us Fan Mail Journalist, author, academic and editor of the news site The Palestine Chronicle, Ramzy Baroud discusses the connections between the Israeli-U.S. war on Iran, Israel's war in Lebanon and Israeli actions in the Occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 

Send us Fan Mail As the devastation in Gaza threatens to be spilled over into a full-scale annihilation of Beirut, the Middle East crossed a Rubicon the morning this episode was recorded. With Israel’s sudden announcement of high-level assassinations targeting the upper echelons of Iranian leadership, the region faces an unprecedented era of engineered chaos. Is this a sudden escalation, or the cu...

Send us Fan Mail Civilian casualties continue to climb in the region, especially in Iran and Lebanon, as the US and Israel intensify their assault on Iran. Iran retaliates by using its array of drones and missiles to hit US and Israeli military targets in the region, oil infrastructure, and other civilian targets. Hundreds of ships continue to be unable to transit the Strait of Hormuz, raising glo...

Send us Fan Mail Mai Shaheen is a Palestinian peace activist and therapist who uses nonviolent communication in her work with victims of trauma.  In a conversation both frank and inspirational, she talks  about how nonviolent dialogue brings Israelis, Palestinians and internationals together for healing, solidarity and nonviolent action.  A founder of the Satyam Homeland Peace Center in the Occupi...

Send us Fan Mail In light of the recent passage of a bill in Missouri codifying the IHRA definition of antisemitism for K-12 schools and college campuses, in addition to similar efforts in several other stage legislatures, we are reposting an interview conducted in April 2025 with Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. She discusses the threat to free speech posed by the...

Send us Fan Mail Paul Pillar discusses the multiple obstacles facing Phase 2 of the Gaza Peace Plan and prospects for the U.S.-Iran talks now underway even as U.S. forces are poised to attack Iran. A 28-year veteran of the CIA, Pillar is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy institute for Responsible Statecraft and at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. He’s the author of several bo...

Send us Fan Mail Overcoming the Structures of Erasure and the Semantics of Genocidal Management with Aseel AlBajeh "How do we talk about a reality that is being systematically erased in real-time?" On this episode of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls , we examine the epistemology of erasure and how to transcend it through factual reframing. We explore the reality that a ge...

Send us Fan Mail Beyond the Language of the Israel-Palestine 'Conflict' and the Unconscious Grammar of Genocidal Consent with Alex McDonald On this episode of Understanding Israel Palestine, a Beyond the Walls edition , we move beyond the kinetic warfare on the ground to examine the cognitive warfare in our own minds. We investigate the "deep structural politics" of language—th...

Send us Fan Mail As the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt prepares to open, we're rebroadcasting a show about the crisis of disability in Palestine and particularly in Gaza. With thousands of amputees struggling to get the care they need in Gaza, their only hope lies in exiting through the severely limited Rafah border crossing.  

Send us Fan Mail Rasha Abouselem has been a humanitarian aid worker since 2014. In December she was in Gaza preparing a field assessment for an aid organization there. She reports on the conditions she found there, the violence Palestinians continue to live with despite the ceasefire, the ongoing shortfall in aid, and the uncertainty and trauma Palestinians are living with. She says the media is n...

Send us Fan Mail January 2026 . We navigate a landscape where advocacy, social media, and surveillance blur into a digital haze. To face the mounting crisis, we must trace the analog patterns that first forged the cage. In July 2021 , I spoke over the phone with Jeffrey Blankfort —a Jewish-American journalist whose memory as a veteran Palestinian solidarity activist is a breach in the static. Blan...