Understanding Israel Palestine

Send us a textAhmad 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 in U.S. policy and funding for Israel, prospects for the movement and a range of measures activists can take. 

Send us a textThis 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 Smalls.

Send us a textUnderstanding 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 Seth Abramson and Richard Silverstein, both quite prescient in their insights into the current geopolitical crisis surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, most glaring in the international relational faultlines constructed amongst the United States & the Middle East, especially the Israeli security state and its Emirati and Saudi state partners, directly tied to the geopolitical collusion to attack American elections while selling out the Palestinians, and the role of Russian sphere Kremlin-associated oligarchs, some publicly defended from sanctions by Israeli officials, in sponsoring the escalation of Israeli settler politics bent on ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people.Government officials and the media largely told us that the 2016 election interference was just about Russian "troll farms." They lied by omission. In this explosive episode of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls, we tear down the firewall between "Russiagate" and the Middle East to reveal the true geopolitical architecture of the Trump era.We go deep with Seth Abramson, author of the Proof trilogy, to decode the Senate Intelligence Committee’s massive Volume 5 report. Abramson exposes what the Mueller Report ignored: the "Grand Bargain" between the Trump campaign, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. We track the fingerprints of Israeli cyber-intelligence mercenaries like Psy-Group and Joel Zamel, the shadowy role of George Nader, and the August 2016 Trump Tower meeting that cemented an alliance of autocrats against democracy and Palestinian rights.Then, we pivot to the money trail with security journalist Richard Silverstein. Breaking down the FinCEN files, Silverstein reveals how Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich funneled over $100 million into Elad, the settler organization aggressively "Judaizing" East Jerusalem. We discuss how dirty money from the post-Soviet sphere is being laundered into the ethnic cleansing of Silwan, turning the biblical "City of David" into a weapon of displacement.This is the deep politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—where intelligence operations, oligarchic wealth, and settler ideology collide to sell out the Palestinian people and compromise the American republic.Featured Guests:Seth Abramson [PROOF]: https://www.sethabramson.net Richard Silverstein [TIKUN OLAM]: https://www.richardsilverstein.comHost/Producer: Jeremy Rothe-Kushel [BEYOND THE WALLS]: https://beyondthewalls.substack.com

Send us a textMilena 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 a textThe 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 Leadership in the Face of Genocide." sponsored by Voices from the Holy Land. Every month the inter-faith, interdenominational coalition makes available a documentary on Israel-Palestine to members of the public who sign up to see it. The screening is followed by  a discussion of the film Sunday afternoons at 3 p.m. Eastern Time with expert voices on the topic.

Send us a text“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. Back then, the UN, US, EU, Russia Quartet kept the 'Two-State Zombie craft' aloft—rough but steady. Peace could be claimed to still be just around the alley. But this recording identified sabotage in real time. We saw the Abraham Accords not as peace, but as lubricant for a slow detonator—weapons deals designed to erase the Palestinian question entirely.We listen now during ongoing human catastrophe and cease-less firing in Gaza from Thanksgiving Week 2025. The detonator triggered. Moscow —as Hamas confirmed on TV soon after October 7th —welcomed the explosion as chaff to distract the West from war in Ukraine. Netanyahu then hung his genocidal Gaza 'response' to his own alleged 'failures' of security as an albatross around his coalition of the willing American neck. He seized the smoke to flee forward from corruption trials, political resistance and credible suspicion of his regime’s treason, and pulled the trigger on a 'Second, possibly final, Nakba' by fire.Don Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff has now picked at the ash, with no real ceasefire or reconstruction plan, but a realestate prospectus—$70 billion for a beachfront windfall with Palestinians to be gone for a generation. Serious diplomacy walks dead. But this recording holds pieces of a survival kit. Kuttab offers a Hybrid Confederation: A Jewish Defense Minister for existential safety; a Palestinian Police Chief for internal dignity. Mutual sharing of language and culture. To get Beyond the Walls, we must go Beyond the Two-State Solution. Separation was sabotage from the get-go. Shared security and mutual survival may be the only path to return home." Jonathan Kuttab: https://jonathankuttab.org/Understanding Israel Palestine: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2016486Beyond the Walls: https://beyondthewalls.substack.com/ 

Send us a textMichael 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 that could prompt Israel to chart a different path. The author of the recently published book,"From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine," written with co-author Sarah Leah Whitson, Omer-Man says international allegiance to the Oslo two-state solution has entrenched Israeli occupation and apartheid and prevented countries from challenging it or developing new strategies for resolving the conflict.

Send us a textMamdani’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 WallsNew 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 funds, the global insurers. But beneath the asphalt, pulsing through fiber-optic cables and radiating from the microwave dishes atop One Police Plaza, lies a second, silent city: a digital autocracy. The invisible city does not vote. It watches, and targets. It is a “Ring of Steel” that has metastasized from a temporary post-9/11 shield into a permanent, self-governing intelligence agency.On this broadcast of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls, we descend into the friction point where local governance meets global counter-insurgency. We are joined by Ali Winston, an award-winning investigative journalist whose forensic reporting - including for WIRED, The Guardian, ProPublica, and The Baffler, among many others - regularly exposes police corruption, right-wing extremism, and surveillance.Our point of departure is Winston’s incendiary new reporting: “Zohran Mamdani Just Inherited the NYPD Surveillance State.” It documents a profound collision: Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, whose platform was built on the promise of Palestinian rights and systemic reform, now holds the keys to a machine built to repress those very ideals.It is a machine currently operated by Commissioner Jessica Tisch—a scion of the very financial and real estate interests that fought Mamdani’s rise...--Full article is here: https://open.substack.com/pub/beyondthewalls/p/mamdanis-panopticon-burden-----------Ali Winston is an independent investigative journalist and co-author of The Riders Come Out at Night. His new podcast with Popular Front is Big Terror.https://bleeding-edge.ghost.io/about/https://www.wired.com/story/welcome-to-mamdanis-surveillance-state/Listen to the full interview to hear a decoding of the signals of the surveillance state and what it means when the ‘War on Poverty,’ ‘War on Terror’ & ‘War’ on Gaza all come to roost as a permanent counter-political and epistemological insurgency state.

Send us a textJen 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 a textThe 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 ceasefire's terms and prospects. He notes sustained engagement by other countries, and above all by the United States, is a must if  the plan is to advance beyond Phase I. If it doesn't, Palestinians in Gaza will be left in an indefinite humanitarian nightmare, unable to reconstruct their homes and their lives.