Understanding Israel Palestine

Send us Fan Mail Josh Paul joins the show again to discuss A New Policy, the organization that he co-founded with Tareq Habash. A New Policy is an organization dedicated to transforming American foreign policy toward Israel/Palestine to reflect American values and foundational principles of liberty, equality, democracy, and human rights; advancing American interests abroad; and protecting American...

Send us Fan Mail Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, speaks to Margot Patterson about the war in Gaza in 2025 and the Trump administration's efforts to repress Palestinian activism in the United States over U.S. support for it. Abuznaid discusses changes in U.S. politics over Palestine, which he acknowledges have not so far translated into changes i...

Send us Fan Mail This is a rebroadcast of the second portion of a talk organized by Eyewitness Palestine entitled We Refuse to Be Silent: Having Faith in the Truth. This portion was given by Huwaida Arraf, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and a member of the Steering Committee of the Freedom Flotilla. The first portion of the talk was given by Amazon Labor Union Organizer Chris...

Send us Fan Mail Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls – The Oligarchs, The Spies, and The Grand Bargain that Sold Out the Palestinians and the United States  Host: Jeremy Rothe-Kushel Guests: Seth Abramson (Proof), Richard Silverstein (Tikun Olam) Episode Summary: For this episode, I feature segments of 2 interviews from the last half of 2020 with public interest writers & analysts...

Send us Fan Mail Milena Ansari joins the show to share the findings of Human Rights Watch's latest report about the forced depopulation of refugee camps in the West Bank. These actions of the Israeli army in early 2025, which constitute a crime against humanity, forcibly displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians, who have been prevented from returning.

Send us Fan Mail The Rev. Dr. Allison Tanner is a Baptist pastor and national coordinator of Apartheid-Free Communities. She discusses the effort to get Christian churches to pledge to become apartheid-free communities and oppose Israeli occupation and apartheid. Dr. Tanner will bring her perspective and experience to a panel discussion Sunday, Dec. 14 on “A Deafening Silence? U.S. Church Leadersh...

Send us Fan Mail “The Detonator and the Survival Kit: Recovering the Map Beyond the Wreckage” featuring Jonathan Kuttab "Welcome back to Understanding Israel Palestine , a Beyond the Walls edition. I’m Jeremy Rothe-Kushel. Today, we re-open a black box recording from a time of useful consciousness : my March 2021 conversation with long-serving Palestinian human rights attorney Jonathan Kuttab...

Send us Fan Mail Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, director of Israel-Palestine Research at the non-profit DAWN (Democracy in the Arab World Now), discusses the accelerating pace of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank,  which is sparking fears of a new genocide. He describes the history of settler violence, the U.S. role in enabling Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide, and the need for measures tha...

Send us Fan Mail Mamdani’s Panopticon Burden: To Inherit the Hardened and Databased Political Epistemology of the Security State(s)? By Jeremy Rothe-Kushel Host/Producer, Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls New York City is a paradox disguised as a metropolis. Above, the glass-and-steel canyons of Midtown reflect the accumulated wealth of empire—the real estate dynasties, the hedge fu...

Send us Fan Mail Jen Marlowe, the founder of Donkeysaddle Projects, and producer of the recent film Severed, joins the show to talk about the crisis of disability in Palestine and particularly in Gaza, where thousands of amputees struggle to get the care in the aftermath of Israel's escalated genocide and its suffocating blockade. 

Send us Fan Mail The project director on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group, an independent non-profit focused on preventing and resolving deadly conflict,  Max Rodenbeck discusses the Crisis Group's recent report on the Gaza Peace Plan advanced by President Trump. He describes how Trump's 20-point plan developed, its unavoidable ambiguity, the many questions about  the...

Send us Fan Mail This is Understanding Israel Palestine: A Beyond the Walls edition. I’m Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, public interest producer, deep political analyst & Jewish American patriot of conscience. Here in late October 2025, a tentative alleged Gaza so-called peace deal is roughly unfolding—almost exactly two years after the initiation of the October 7th attacks & the subsequent genocida...

Send us Fan Mail In the fall of 2023, a shady land deal signed a few years earlier between the Armenian Patriarchate and an Australian-Israeli businessman came to light. Despite the Patriarchate's cancellation of the deal on Nov. 1, 2023, Israeli surveyors and settlers pushed ahead with their plans to develop the property into a luxury hotel and permanently alter the character and demography...

Send us Fan Mail In anticipation of Voices from the Holy Land's upcoming October 19th online film salon "The Israel Occupation Tech Lab," we will hear a segment Jeremy Rothe-Kushel produced in December 2020 and then remixed for August 2021 titled "Cyberweaponry, Kill-Switch Diplomacy and the Technology of Occupation." To find out about and register for Voices from the Holy...

Send us Fan Mail Jurist Richard Falk discusses the double game being played by some of the European countries recently recognizing Palestine as a state in a show of concern over Israel's war of annihilation in Gaza. Their condemnation of Israel is largely symbolic, with many states continuing to do business as usual with Israel. With Western countries failing to uphold international law, Falk...

Send us Fan Mail From the People's Conference for Palestine 2025: Over the past year, we have seen a shift in public consciousness: from demanding an immediate ceasefire to demanding a full arms embargo on Israel. Mass protests have erupted in the ports of Morocco, French dockworkers have refused to handle military cargo destined to Israel, and Spain has passed a policy to enact an arms embar...

Send us Fan Mail Amidst the flames, ruin & human destruction currently being escalated by the Israeli military in Gaza City and the UN's finally emergent declaratory analysis of genocide, a more than century-old haunting logic has destructively unfolded. In the US, the political fallout from the cloaking & cloaked wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk has accelerated Executive &am...

Send us Fan Mail Emmaia Gelman, director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, discusses Zionism's relationship to racism and colonialism, the threat to Americans' First Amendment rights posed by the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism which the Anti-Defamation League and other Zionist groups are promoting, and how Zionism is evolving into an arm of American fasci...

Send us Fan Mail For this week’s episode, we are excerpting portions of a panel entitled The Struggle Continues: The Fight for Palestine in North America held on Aug 30, 2025 at the second annual People's Conference for Palestine in Detroit. We are excerpting PYM organizer Mohammed Nabulsi’s responses to questions posed by the moderator Loubna Qatami. In response to the last two years of Zion...

Send us Fan Mail Hadar Susskind, president and CEO of New Jewish Narrative, talks about Israel's decision to advance a controversial, long-planned and long-delayed settlement regarded as a death knell for an independent Palestinian state. The E1 settlement would add 3,400 new settlement units east of Jerusalem and split the Occupied West Bank in two.  Susskind was previously head of Americans...

Send us Fan Mail On this Beyond the Walls edition of Understanding Israel Palestine, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel proposes an evolving Beyond the Walls edition mission statement, covers the news and speaks with Harry Davies — Guardian investigations correspondent — about his investigations along with colleagues like Yuval Abraham — at +972 & Local Call — into the major project & contract by Israeli...

Send us Fan Mail Since 1967, Israel has imprisoned as many as one million Palestinians—men, women, and children. Many are “administrative detainees,” taken without charge or a fixed release date, and receiving little or no due process and no trial by jury. Original detention orders can be renewed repeatedly. Many remain imprisoned for years, subjected to mental and physical abuse and torture. Migh...

Send us Fan Mail Lecturer, anthropologist and activist Jeff Halper, director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, continues talking with Margot Patterson about Israelis and Palestinians' past, present and future together. He discusses how Zionists historically and today perceive Israel's right to Palestine, their views of Palestinians and the ongoing war in Gaza, and  how...

Send us Fan Mail Anthropologist, activist and director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Jeff Halper speaks to Margot Patterson about how Israel’s genocide in Gaza and recent attack on Iran fit into its larger geopolitical goal of normalization with the Arab world and regional hegemony. Halper says Israel is intent on breaking Palestinian resistance, pacifying Palestine and creat...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Emilio Dabed, who we last spoke with one year ago in July of 2024, returns to the show to offer a retrospective on the argument he advanced in an article published around that time. In that article, Dr. Dabed argues that the true purpose of international law is to administer colonial violence, and he defends this contention in light of the ICJ ruling that Israel's occupat...