Understanding Israel Palestine

Send us a textIn 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 Land's October 19th "Israel Occupation Tech Lab" film salon, you can go to voicesfromtheholyland.org or Tinyurl.com/VFHL-October2025"In this week's segment, I preliminarily explore the realm of cybertechnology and cyber weapons 'battle-tested' on Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories and then deployed worldwide. This will work also to begin establishing a foundation for further future explorations into cyber breaches, cyberwar, and what could seen as a geopolitical & defacto Israeli policy; a policy to solidify Israel's realpolitikally absolute international immunity from the effective sanctioning of its asserted official territorial expansion in the West Bank and Golan Heights, and its long-term ongoing abuse of Palestinian human rights:  This geopolitical strategy could be titled "kill-switch diplomacy", based upon the presence of Israeli military intelligence originated hardware and software delivered via both civilian and military spheres, and deployed into the epicenter of critical infrastructure in countries around the world, with civil society carrots of access to Israeli high technology up front, and an implied threat of Israeli-military intelligence accessed infrastructure kill-switch sticks on the backend.The recently announced hack of SolarWinds Orion Network management software that was cyber-penetrated in early 2020 via supply side software update delivery into thousands of Information Technology systems around the world, including significant portions of the US government, such as the Pentagon, Secret Service, State Department, Treasury, Commerce and Homeland Security, and vast numbers of Fortune 500 companies, is both resonant and possibly relevant here. While we will not delve deeply into it now, I just want to mention that there is industry analysis alleging a Microsoft 365 Office Cloud tie-in to the delivery of the SolarWinds Orion exploit, plausibly tying it to the issue of last year's surprising Trump-pushed Pentagon Cloud Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract to Microsoft over the expected recipient and previous cloud partner of the US government Amazon, led by Trump-critic Jeff Bezos, who was also personally targeted and hacked by Saudis apparently using Israeli NSO group cyberweaponry. Microsoft, which has had Research and Design units, facilities and operations heavily based in Israel for many years, in 2015 purchased an Israeli-originated company Adallom, started by 3 veterans of the Israeli NSA Unit 8200 and cyber entrepreneurial special forces-style super-elite Talpiot Program with Series A investment funding from the "Bill Gates of Israel" and godfather of it's modern cybertechnology industry, Zohar Zisapel of the RAD Group.  The next year, and in the lead up to the development of the Pentagon Cloud project announcement and then contract award, Microsoft put Adallom in the place of and rebranded it as Microsoft Cloud App Security.And while the SolarWinds hack, described as possibly the most substantial hack in US history giving the exploiters of the intrusion "God door access", has been publicly and preliminarily ascribed to Russian SVR advanced persistent threat cyber intelligence units, as this show's earlier interview with New York Times best-selling author and journalist Seth Abramson showed, Russia and Israel worked in cyber purpose together in relation to

Send us a textJurist 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 says civic activism is necessary to hold leaders to account. He notes the two-state solution has long since ceased to be practicable and warns that any peace plan that excludes Palestinian participation will not produce a durable peace. Falk is professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Occupied Palestine and president of the Gaza Tribunal, an independent inquiry into British complicty in Israeli war crimes. 

Send us a textFrom 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 embargo against Israel. This panel brings together speakers from across different geographies to discuss the momentum behind grassroots arms embargo campaigns; the strategic role of labor, civil society and state forces; and most importantly, how we can enact a peoples arms embargo.  

Send us a textAmidst 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 & Legislative moves to crush dissent, providing a stark domestic backdrop to the massive moral crisis still being perpetrated abroad.Historian Zachary J. Foster of Palestine Nexus joins Jeremy Rothe-Kushel to begin connecting this genocidal catastrophe to its foundational blueprint, exposing the unsettling and often antisemitic history of Zionism's architects: Herzl & Jabotinsky among them. Was it inevitable that a movement forged in embraced persecution & auto-antisemitism combined with a highly cynical alliance with authoritarians & genocidaires lead to the violent destruction of Palestine?Join us for a critical conversation as we look to Understand Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls.Zachary Foster:https://x.com/_zachfosterhttps://palestinenexus.com/Jeremy Rothe-Kushel:https://x.com/jeremywrkhttps://beyondthewalls.substack.com

Send us a textEmmaia 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 fascism under the Trump administration.

Send us a textFor 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 Zionist genocide in Gaza, a powerful mass movement has erupted. From the streets to the workplace, from university campuses to the classrooms, millions of people across North America and the world have been exposed to injustice in Palestine and in their own lives. In this panel, leaders in the movement for Palestinian liberation in North America will reflect on the last two years of struggle and examine the movement’s current state, its key challenges, and its future direction.The full 2 hour long panel can be accessed on the YouTube channel of Breakthrough News. Special thanks to Breakthrough News, PYM and the panelists.

Send us a textHadar 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 for Peace Now,  a peace group that tracked the growth of Jewish settlements in the Occupied West Bank. That organization recently merged with Ameinu, another progressive, venerable Jewish group, to establish New Jewish Narrative.  It continues Americans for Peace Now's activities. Susskind describes the vision of full equality of Jews and Palestinians in Israel that the new organization is based on and holds out hope that forces both outside and within Israel may yet stop the E1 settlement and the Israeli government's annexation of the West Bank.

Send us a textOn 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 Military Intelligence Unit 8200 with Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Servers in Europe to bulk collect Palestinians’ communications of all sorts in order to mass surveil & target.———-Harry Davies:https://www.theguardian.com/profile/harry-davieshttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-israeli-military-palestinian-phone-calls-cloudhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/10/activists-in-netherlands-protest-on-roof-of-microsoft-site-storing-israeli-military-datahttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/15/microsoft-launches-inquiry-claims-israel-used-tech-mass-surveillance-palestiniansYuval Abraham:https://www.972mag.com/writer/yuval-abraham/https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-8200-intelligence-surveillance-cloud-azure/https://gijn.org/stories/investigating-israel-war-972-local-call/News Stories:1) https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-west-bank-e1-settlements-8a713939ee6f6552381246dacc8a13012) https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-calls-up-tens-thousands-reservists-before-new-gaza-offensive-2025-08-20/https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/8/19/israeli-attacks-kill-35-palestinians-in-gaza3) https://zeteo.com/p/second-most-powerful-house-democrat-gaza-genocide4) https://www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/predator-spyware-firm-intellexa-resurgent-after-u-s-sanctions/https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_815) https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/senior-israel-national-cyber-directorate-official-arrested-suspicion-paedophiliaIf you are interested in future access to further Beyond the Walls edition archives, extended episodes and more, you can sign up for the Beyond the Walls archive/newsletter here:https://beyondthewalls.substack.com

Send us a textSince 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. Might these detainees, arrested for so-called “public security,” more appropriately be called captives, hostages, or abductees? Journalist Hind Shraydeh joined us to discuss these Israeli arrest practices, prison conditions, prisoner abuse, the impact on families and communities, and efforts to end the occupation and its unjust system of abduction and incarceration. Hind will also be a panelist on this topic for the Voices from the Holy Land Film Salon on 8/17 at 3PM. More info can be found at voicesfromtheholyland.org.

Send us a textLecturer, 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 Israel's brutal conduct of the war is altering Americans' perception of Israel and ending the taboo on criticism of it. A co-founder of the One Democratic State Campaign in Israel, Halper explains why a two-state solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is no longer possible; living together in one democratic state is the only way forward for Israelis and Palestinians.