Arts and Culture in a Palestinian Refugee Camp

Send us Fan MailThis 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 Israel during its war on Gaza — including many that publicly condemned Israel, announced embargoes on weapons sales to the country, and demanded a ceasefire.These weapon transfers took place after the International Court of Justice warned on Jan. 26, 2024 that there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and reminded states of of their obligations to act to prevent genocide under the Geneva Convention. All of the 51 states arming Israel were signatory to the convention, yet arms shipments to Israel actually increased after the warning. The Al Jazeera report was based primarily on an analysis of Israeli Tax Authority import data between 2022 and 2025. The 5 largest suppliers of military goods to Israel were the United States, India, Romania, Taiwan and the Czech Republic.A French activist shared on  live TV  what she experienced in Israeli detention after Israeli forces abducted members of the Global Summed Flottilla seeking to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. The 428 activists on 54 boats were intercepted May 19th in international waters  and taken  to Israel where their mistreatment in Israeli custody stirred international outcry after National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir posted a video showing him taunting blindfolded, bound activists. On French TVMay 23, Merriam Hadjal said she was slapped, beaten, kneed in the ribs and repeatedly groped and sexually assaulted by multiple Israeli soldiers. Hadjal is one of numerous flotilla activists who have  come forward alleging sexual violence in Israeli custody, including claims of sexual assault and rape by Israeli soldiers. Flotilla organizers say at least 15 of the detained activists reported sexual assault.Israel conducted more than 120 air strikes on southern and eastern Lebanon on May 26, after IPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will escalete  its  war on the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah.The  entire city of Tyre, and at least 10  southern villages in Lebanon have been ordered to evacuate. The expanding war violates  a nominal April 16 ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel and threatens to complicate negotiations between Iran and the U.S. IIran has said any agreement to end the war should end hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon. Since March 2,  at least 32oo  have been killed in Lebanon and 9700 wounded. More than 1 million people in Lebanonhave been displaced.My guest today is Robert Malley,  a Middle East expert and specialist in conflict negotiation.. He served as Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs from 1998-2001 and was among the peace negotiators at the Camp David Summit of 2000. He was a member of the National Security Council during the the Obama administration and  was lead negotiator of the Iran nuclear deal. He was President Biden’s envoy to Iran and is now at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. His book,  Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine, was co-authored with Hussein Agha and looks at how the Oslo Accords deteriorated into an endless peace process that became a joke and then a fraud. This is the second of a two-part conversation. The first part aired May 15. You can find it on our program page on the KKFI website at www. kkfi.org or listen to it on our podcast available on most streaming platforms. Robert Malley, thanks for coming on the program again. When we spoke earlier, you talked about how the two-state solution has always been more popular with the international community than with either Israelis or Palestinians. That made it a heavy lift from the get-go. Not impossible, but difficult.In your book, you paint a very honest, nuanced picture of Yasser Arafat, who succeeded in convincing Palestinians that a Palestinian state on 22% of historic Palestine was not a betrayal of their rights and aspirations but a worthy goal. Could you talk more about Arafat and how the very traits that enabled him to unify and lead the Palestinian people made him suspect in Israeli and American eyes? Malley: It's a great question because he is the target of such contradictory perceptions and images in the West. The fact that he never left his military garb, that he, sometimes insisted on carrying a gun, spoke in very militant terms, particularly when he spoke to his own audience, particularly when he spoke in Arabic. All of that convinced many Americans, and certainly a majority of Israelis, that he was somebody with whom ultimately a peace couldn't be made because he could never give up on the aspirations of being a fighter, a militant in their eyes, often a terrorist. Now, Palestinian eyes, those are the traits that made it possible for him to sell some compromises which otherwise would have been even more difficult to swallow. You just mentioned the principal one, which is that even though the fight that the Palestinians have waged from, 1948 onwards was not a fight for a state on 22% of historic Palestine, it was a fight for liberation of all the land. It was a fight for the return of the refugees. And so his efforts, which were to make the Palestinians view that compromise not as a defeat but as a triumph, not as surrender but as conquest, was in part due to the fact that he retained, in their eyes, precisely the image that the West and Israel found repugnant, which is the image of somebody who would not drop his gun, who would not trade in his military garb for a diplomatic outfit, who would not only speak in the diplomatic language, but in the language of a rebel, of a militant, of a revolutionary. In some ways, what made it possible for him to sell the compromise to his own people made it very difficult and sometimes impossible for other audiences, Israeli or Western, to believe a word he said. Q.: You note that Americans were very deferential to the political constraints facing different Israeli leaders, but ignored those affecting Palestinian leaders. That was true for Arafat, but also for Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat's successor and the man who has led the Palestinian Authority for umpteen years now. Abbas believed that nonviolence was the only way forward for the Palestinian cause and has lived that credo, but his efforts to advance statehood have gone nowhere. How did the United States unwittingly sabotage him? How do you think they failed him, and why haven't his efforts been able to go anyplace?Malley:  A word on your first point. The U.S. identifies much more closely with Israel; they are more familiar with its political system. We could debate how much a democracy it is, since today the majority of the people living under Israeli governance, half of the people, don't have the same rights as others and a large percentage, the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, have no political rights at all when it comes to Israel's political system. So you could debate how democratic Israel, is, but certainly from an American perspective, it's a system that runs through parliamentary elections an election system that we can understand with regular polling and regular elections. The Palestinian system is a very different one, and I think in the eyes of many Americans, and this doesn't just apply to the Palestinians, it applies to many other countries, and particularly many Arab countries, they view it as more of a one-man show, in the past, the one-man show of Arafat, then the one-man show of Abbas, in which they believe that even though sometimes there are the accoutrements of democracy, the elections don't mean all that much. The system can be run in a more autocratic way by the supreme leader, in this case the head of the PLO, Palestine Liberation Organization, head of Fatah, the main party, the head of the Palestinian Authority. They believe that Palestinian politics don't matter, that ultimately because they project this image of a system that is run by a single person or by a small group of people, that they can impose whatever they want on their own population. Public opinion doesn't really matter. You hear that when people speak about Saudi Arabia, when they speak about Egypt, when they speak about many of these countries that either are not democratic or don't have a form of democracy that the U.S .is accustomed to. Whereas in fact, it doesn't work that way at all. Precisely because the Palestinian leadership doesn't have, and Arafat didn't have, those regular mechanisms in which his authority could be validated at the polls, in which you had democratic institutions that would legitimize his rule, he was very dependent on a popular form of consensus for his decision-making, and he couldn't afford to stray too far away from that core center of gravity, that consensus, because then he would have no legitimacy at all. And that's been true of one Palestinian leader after another. I think there is this misperception that because Israel is more, quote-unquote, "democratic," we need to pay attention and sometimes excessive attention. I can't tell you how many times I heard American officials for whom I was working saying, "We can't do X or Y or Z because it will imperil the coalition in power because of the democratic institutions and processes that Israel has to go through." I never heard that when it came to the Palestinians. It was, if Arafat wants it, Arafat could get it. If the next leadership would want it, it could get it. If the next leadership would

Send us Fan MailThe Architecture of Empire: Walter L. Hixson on the Israel Lobby and the Machinery of Endless WarPart Two: The Nakba’s Blast Radius and the Capture of U.S. Foreign PolicyEpisode DescriptionSeventy-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 has metastasized into a sprawling, multi-front geopolitical fire. We are now watching the Middle East get swallowed by a disastrous and widely rejected regional war with Iran—a conflict fueled by corrupt demagogues desperate to trade human lives for their own political survival.How does a republic repeatedly bankrupt its moral standing and its treasury to underwrite conflicts its citizens actively despise? It doesn’t happen by accident. It is engineered.In Part Two of our historical deep-dive into the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship, host Jeremy Rothe-Kushel reaches back to a profoundly relevant late-2021 conversation with diplomatic and cultural historian Walter L. Hixson.Stripping away the polite fictions of Washington double-speak, Hixson exposes the actual plumbing of imperial power. We break down the modern Israel lobby in plain daylight: the massive flow of capital, the ruthless political coercion, and the organized infrastructure of silence that captures U.S. foreign policy and locks the American public into a perpetual cycle of militarism and repression.If we are ever going to extinguish the fire, we must first understand exactly who built the furnace. Step beyond the walls with us.Guest Bio: Walter L. Hixson is a diplomatic and cultural historian, a contributing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the author of numerous vital books, including Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy and Imperialism and War: The History Americans Need to Own.Listen & Explore Further:Walter Hixson’s Bio & Work: University of AkronExplore the Show Archives: Listen to past episodes, including Part 1 with Grant Smith, at the KKFI Understanding Israel Palestine archive: kkfi.org/program/understanding-israel-palestine/Beyond the Walls Substack: beyondthewalls.substack.com

Send us Fan MailLongtime 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 MailAbdelfattah 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 MailUnderstanding Israel Palestine: A Beyond the Walls EditionEpisode: 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-KushelEpisode OverviewIn this deep political analysis of US-Israel relations, we examine the foundational architecture and historical continuity of the modern Israel lobby within the United States. Grant Smith, a leading investigative researcher and author of America's Defense Line, Foreign Agents, and Divert, joins the program to unpack the counterintelligence history and covert networks that have shaped American foreign policy in the Middle East.This conversation moves beyond standard political discourse to conduct a forensic examination of the structural immunity surrounding historical espionage and unregistered foreign lobbying in America. From suitcases of campaign cash on presidential whistle-stop tours to the covert smuggling of highly enriched uranium and nuclear triggers, Smith details the intricate, multi-decade efforts to subvert U.S. regulatory and defense frameworks.Key Historical & Structural Topics ExploredThe Origins of AIPAC & FARA Subversion: How Isaiah Kenen and the American Zionist Council (AZC) navigated the Justice Department's efforts to force them to register as foreign agents under the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), ultimately restructuring into the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to bypass compliance.Truman & Whistle-Stop Campaign Financing: The pivotal role of Abraham Feinberg in securing a $2 million suitcase of cash to save Harry S. Truman's floundering 1948 presidential campaign, effectively cementing early executive support for the Israeli state.NUMEC & Nuclear Espionage in the U.S.: The diversion of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium from the NUMEC facility in Apollo, Pennsylvania, under Zalman Shapiro, which was covertly funneled to the early Israeli nuclear weapons program.Project Pinto & The MILCO Smuggling Ring: The covert procurement network that successfully smuggled 810 nuclear-triggering krytrons out of the United States, utilizing operatives like Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and involving current political figures like Benjamin Netanyahu.Political Immunity & Quashed DOJ Investigations: The systemic political pressure that successfully shut down Department of Justice and FBI investigations into these smuggling networks, resulting in a distinct lack of prosecutions and quiet pardons for the few operatives who were caught.Resources & LinksInstitute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep): irmep.orgThe Israel Lobby Archive: israellobby.orgKKFI Show Page (archives): Understanding Israel PalestineBeyond the Walls (full length audio): https://beyondthewalls.substack.com/

Send us Fan MailJews, 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 embrace following Israel’s establishment in 1948, to the tight embrace that followed the war in 1967 and the hegemony of the David and Goliath myth it spawned. After Israel’s destructive and disastrous war of choice in Lebanon that began in 1982, the gap between the myth of Israel as underdog and its reality as a settler-colonial regional hegemon began to disintegrate. In our discussion he traces this relationship up until the present, post-October 7 reality in which Israel is losing support across all fronts. 

Send us Fan MailSonya 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 but also an attempt to destroy Lebanon's pluralistic social fabric. She says Israel has long coveted Lebanon's land and resources and seen Lebanon as part of a vision of a Greater Israel that goes back to the early founders of Zionism.

Send us Fan MailBeyond 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 digital infrastructure has actively penetrated our personal devices, corporate networks, and municipal utilities.In this episode of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls, host Jeremy Rothe-Kushel investigates the technological front lines of geopolitics and cyber warfare. Joining the broadcast is independent researcher and former Congressional candidate in Washington State, Mary Silva, who helps map the massive concentration of U.S. technology research and development within Israel and analyzes the deep penetration of foreign espionage networks into American sovereignty.Bridging the gap between the surveillance systems deployed on Palestinians and the espionage vulnerabilities faced by American citizens, this conversation examines the geopolitical outsourcing of U.S. national security.Silva details how major tech conglomerates—including Microsoft, Google, and Intel—have functionally outsourced core development to veterans of elite Israeli military intelligence cohorts, such as Unit 8200 and the IDF's Talpiotprogram. The analysis moves past surface-level electoral politics to expose the strategic dangers of embedded hardware backdoors, the proliferation of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, and how algorithmic suppression operates as a tool for narrative control in the current "information war."Crucially, this technological penetration is not restricted to federal intelligence networks. Silva highlights how local U.S. infrastructure—from smart-meter utility grids to public transit systems—is actively being compromised, often subsidized and locked in by legislative frameworks buried within the NDAA.Key Episode Insights:The Intelligence-to-Corporate Pipeline: How elite IDF veterans shape the core architecture and penetrate the supply chains of American government and civilian technology.Legislating Dependency: The federal frameworks mandating the integration of foreign surveillance tech into local U.S. municipal grids.The Export of "Combat-Proven" Systems: Unpacking how biometric and cyber-control tools, initially field-tested under military occupation, are repackaged as essential global security products.The Information Battleground: A critical look at algorithmic suppression on platforms like X, and the mechanisms used to manage public perception during global multipolar realignments.Upcoming Event: Field Testing Israeli Occupation Tech This broadcast serves as a vital primer for the upcoming online salon, Field Testing Israeli Occupation Tech: The Palestine Lab. Co-sponsored by Voices From the Holy Land and Nonviolence International, this panel features experts examining how Israel exports drones, cyber-weapons, and biometric systems to over 130 countries worldwide.When: Sunday, April 19, 2026 | 3 PM ET • 12 PM PT • 10 PM JerusalemRSVP: Register on the front page at VoicesFromTheHolyLand.orgListen & Subscribe:Radio Archives: Listen to past broadcasts of Understanding Israel Palestine on demand at KKFI.org.Extended Cuts & Deep Dives: For the longer form audio of this interview subscribe to the Beyond the Walls Substack.

Send us Fan MailPalestinians 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 learning is taking place. We discuss the role of education in peacebuilding and Aisha's activism over the years with Combatants for Peace.

Send us Fan MailJournalist, 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.