Award-winning journalist, author and documentary film-maker James Bamford discusses his recent article in The Nation magazine, "The Anti-Defamation League: Israel's Attack Dog in the U.S." Since the war in Gaza began in October, the ADL is claiming a dramatic rise in anti-Semitism, citing statistics disputed by its own staff, some of whom have quit the ADL in protest at the conflation of anti-war protests with anti-Semitism. Bamford speaks to Margot Patterson about the ADL's ...
Apr 06, 2024•29 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast MJ Rosenberg, political commentator, joined the show this week to discuss the Israel lobby from his vantage point as a former insider. After working on Capitol Hill for various Democratic members of the House and Senate for 15 years, Rosenberg worked for AIPAC for four years. Rosenberg recounts his experiences being threatened with destruction of his career as a Hill staffer. He also shares how AIPAC has intervenes in Congressional elections through directing donations to candidates who support ...
Mar 29, 2024•28 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast Grant F. Smith, the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, discusses the influential American-Israel Public Affairs Committe (AIPAC). Smith has written several books on AIPAC. which was started with $6 million in foreign funding, largely from Israel, but eluded U.S. efforts to register it as a foreign agent. While it's treated as a domestic lobbying organization, Smith says AIPAC today continues to act as a foreign agent for Israel, employing campaign contributions, ...
Mar 25, 2024•29 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast In Part I of a series on the Israel lobby, Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard and co-author of the book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," discusses the effect of the lobby on U.S. foreign policy and the ongoing war in Gaza. The Israel lobby is an informal alliance of various interest groups that work to foster unconditional American support for Israel by pressuring Congress, the executive branch, media institutions and the academy. Professor Walt argu...
Mar 17, 2024•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last week's conversation with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson about the U.S.-Israeli relationship concludes. Wilkerson was chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and now teaches government and public policy at the College of Willliam and Mary. Margot Patterson then speaks to Dr. Majdi Hamarshi, founder of the Palestinian-American Medical Association (PAMA). Since 2013, PAMA has been sending medical missions to Gaza and the Occupied West Bank to help meet the medical needs of Pale...
Mar 04, 2024•28 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson discusses U.S.-Israel relations today and how the Israel lobby shapes U.S. politics and U.S. foreign policy. He speaks to Margot Patterson about the war in Gaza, what he believes Israel’s intentions are for it, the anger the war is creating and the blowback he sees in store for the United States for its role in arming and enabling Israel’s campaign. Colonel Wilkerson served as special assistant to General Colin Powell when Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Sta...
Feb 27, 2024•29 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast Wun Wong (they/them) from Librarians and Archivists with Palestine speaks about the destruction of cultural heritage in Palestine at the hands of the Israeli armed forces. Israel has targeted Palestinian institutions of cultural production since the Nakba, but the ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza has seen an intensification of this scholasticide, or the destruction of knowledge. They also speak about how Palestinians have resisted the destruction of their cultural heritage and embraced alterna...
Feb 16, 2024•29 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast Scott Paul, associate director of peace and security at Oxfam America, talks about why 20 aid organizations have issued a public letter protesting a pause in Western funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main aid agency in Gaza offering services that the aid groups says are indispensable in the current crisis. Oxfam, Save the Children, the AFSC and other aid groups working in Gaza say cutting aid to UNRWA will have devastating effects on what is already a humanitaria...
Feb 12, 2024•29 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast Documentary filmmaker Maurice Jacobsen speaks about his efforts to tell Gaza's stories amid the carnage and destruction of Israel's onslaught. Maurice works with a team of Gazan filmmakers called the Gaza Media Group who have been documenting the last several months of war despite much of their equipment being destroyed. We focused on individual stories that testify to the resilience of the Palestinian people and displayed on we-gaza.com. We also discussed the Hamas government in Gaza,...
Feb 02, 2024•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of Palestinian human rights in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, discusses the case South Africa has brought to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide in Gaza and asking the ICJ to order preventive actions. Falk discusses the divide between white settler-colonial states and European former colonial powers on one hand, and the Glo...
Jan 26, 2024•29 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Noam Perry of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) joined the show this week to discuss his organization's research into the business of military occupation and apartheid in Palestine/Israel and the USA. Since Israel began assaulting Gaza after Oct. 7, the AFSC has put together a comprehensive resource on their website detailing the weapons companies fueling Israel's genocidal campaign. This resource is part of a larger investigative project detailing the intersection of t...
Jan 20, 2024•29 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast Mideast expert Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, discusses how U.S. militarism is raising the risk of a wider Mideast war, what more the United Nations could do to press Israel and the United States to adopt a ceaefire in Gaza, and the suit South Africa has filed at the International Court of Justice charging Israel with the crime of genocide. At the Institute for Policy Studies, Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project, focused on U.S. mllita...
Jan 12, 2024•29 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast The Rev. Dr. Robert Smith discusses his scholarly work on Christian Zionism and his activism for Palestinian liberation. An enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and professor history, Smith lived in Palestine for several years working for the University of Notre Dame before returning to Turtle Island/United States. Our conversation began with a discussion about the intersection between Smith's work in Palestine and his I...
Jan 05, 2024•29 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast Historian Rashid Khalidi discusses the Israel-Hamas war in the context of the past century of Israeli settler colonialism and Palestinian resistance. The current war has seen Israel push Palestinians in Gaza from the north to the south and is another step in a process of ethnic cleansing and depopulation long pursued by Zionist forces and the Israeli state, with the support first of Great Britain and later the United States. This episode repeats one aired 6 weeks ago
Jan 02, 2024•29 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast After over 11 years working as a Director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, Josh Paul recently resigned from the State Department. In this role he was responsible for U.S. defense diplomacy, security assistance, and arms transfers. He joined the show this week to discuss the pipeline of US weapons being sent to Israel. While the letter of the law has perhaps been followed regarding these arms transfers, Josh argues that its spirit has not. Congress is failing to perform its oversight ...
Dec 23, 2023•29 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast Three experts on the Holocaust discuss the uses and abuses of Holocaust memory in the context of current events in Israel/Palestine and the war in Gaza. They note that since Oct. 7 the Holocaust has been invoked by Israeli leaders with accompanying calls for mass violence against Palestinians and a war in Gaza that has now killed close to 20,000 people. The conversation was convened in November by Jewish Currents magazine and the Diaspora Alliance. The historians are Omer Bartov, professor of Ho...
Dec 16, 2023•29 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast Professor Barry Trachtenberg, the Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University, talks about turmoil on college campuses over the Israel-Hamas war, critical concerns about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, why the Holocaust is not a justification for oppression, and why he thinks arguments for Jewish exceptionalism are flawed and not in Jews’ best interests.
Dec 08, 2023•29 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast Tala Nasir, lawyer at Addameer, Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association sheds light on the issue of the Palestinian political prisoners. Addameer, the Arabic word for conscience, is a Palestinian non-governmental, civil institution that works to support Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli and Palestinian prisons. In the first half of our interview, we talked about the Palestinian prisoners being released by Israel as a part of the recently-negotiated deal between Israel and Ham...
Dec 01, 2023•28 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast Khaled Elgindy, director of the program on Israeli-Palestinian Affairs at the Middle East Institute, discusses mounting violence in the West Bank, the crack-down on free speech inside Israel, the ongoing war and looming prospect of starvation in Gaza and a shambolic U.S. policy, characterized as a run-away train with no brakes and no destination.
Nov 24, 2023•29 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast Historian Rashid Khalidi discusses the current Israel-Hamas war in the context of the past century of Israeli settler colonialism and Palestinian resistance. The current war has seen Israel push Palestinians in Gaza from the north to the south and is another step in a process of ethnic cleansing and depopulation long pursued by Zionist forces and the state of Israel, supported first by Great Britain and then by the United States. An advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid Confer...
Nov 17, 2023•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast In his 2011 book Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations: 1820-2001, Professor Ussama Makdisi of University California Berkeley wrote, “No matter how one turns the kaleidoscope of US-Arab relations, one always returns, or is returned to, the picture of Palestine.” In his book Makdisi highlights several historical pivot points to chart the trajectory of the two-hundred-year-long relationship between the Arab world and United States, one that has been fraught with tension and re...
Nov 10, 2023•34 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast Prof. Mazin Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem University discusses the longue durée of the progressive Zionist colonization of the Holy Land. He highlights the current siege-like situation in the ghetto of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, before going on to discuss the numerous Israeli assaults in the West Bank and their context in international law. He notes the deleterious effects on Palestine's environment of colonization before turning his attention to Israel's attempt to starve out the tr...
Nov 03, 2023•29 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast Film-maker Maurice Jacobsen speaks about efforts he and long-time colleagues in Gaza have been making to document the war as best they can with "We All Live in Gaza: The War Chronicles," short videos posted on the Internet. Journalist Yousef Al-Jamal talks about the recent book he contributed to, "Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire," his growing up in Gaza, the 16-year siege imposed by Israel and the Israel-Hamas war now devastating Gaza.
Oct 27, 2023•35 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast Former U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied by Israel since 1967, Michael Lynk discusses international law as it applies to the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. The Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas as well as Hamas' ongoing missile strikes on Israel violate international law. So too does Israel's indiscriminate shelling of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and its tightening siege. Lynk addresses the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaz...
Oct 20, 2023•28 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab-American Institute, discusses Arab-Americans' outrage at the Biden administration's announcement Sept. 27th that it is accepting Israel into the U.S. visa waiver program, a program which allows citizens from select countries to travel to the United States without a visa. Arab-American, Palestinian-American and U.S. Muslim civil rights groups say Israel doesn't meet the United States' own established criteria for admission to the prog...
Oct 06, 2023•29 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast The Rev. Dr. Fahed Abu-Akel joined Understanding Israel Palestine to share about his journey from his childhood in Palestine to becoming a pastor in the Presbyterian Church USA and then Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA, the highest elected position in the church. In the latter half our discussion, we turned our attention towards interfaith dialogue on the conflict, the theology operating in the Holy Land, and Rev. Abu-Akel's view of the current situation....
Sep 29, 2023•29 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Eyal Hareuveni of the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem discusses how and why Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank face a chronic shortage of water. He is the author of a new study by B'Tselem called "Parched: Israel's Policy of Water Deprivation in the West Bank," which examines Israel's discriminatory use of water to control the Palestinian population under military occupation. Though Israel is a water super-power, producing twice as much water as it re...
Sep 11, 2023•28 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Yousef Munayyer, Senior Fellow and head of the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C., discusses the complexity of Israel's internal fissures, changing battlefield dynamics between Israelis and Palestinians, and the increasing turn to armed resistance among Palestinians.
Aug 13, 2023•29 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast A day after Israel's passage of a highly contested bill to curb the power of the Supreme Court, Mickey Gitzin, director of the New Israel Fund, a non-profit in Jerusale that works to advance liberal democracy in Israel, and Nivine Sandouka, a Palestinian who heads the NGO Our Rights in Jerusalem, discuss its significance, the dangers of the far-right government, the contradictions in the Israeli protest movement and some new openings for progress they see emerging. Gili Getz, chair of the b...
Jul 31, 2023•29 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast Jehad Abusalim is executive director of the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development and author of a recent article in "The New Arab" that looks at Gaza 16 years after Israel imposed its ongoing siege. He discusses Gaza today amid new concerns raised in the wake of the Israeli attack on Jenin in July that Israel may begin treating the West Bank as it does Gaza, subjecting it to increased closures and aerial bombardment. Abusalim notes that the international community is d...
Jul 17, 2023•29 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast 
