On the Ground in Gaza: An Aid Worker Describes Continuing Violence and Fear

Send us a textRasha Abouselem has been a humanitarian aid worker since 2014. In December she was in Gaza preparing a field assessment for an aid organization there. She reports on the conditions she found there, the violence Palestinians continue to live with despite the ceasefire, the ongoing shortfall in aid, and the uncertainty and trauma Palestinians are living with. She says the media is not reporting on the reality in Gaza.

Send us a textJanuary 2026. We navigate a landscape where advocacy, social media, and surveillance blur into a digital haze. To face the mounting crisis, we must trace the analog patterns that first forged the cage.In July 2021, I spoke over the phone with Jeffrey Blankfort—a Jewish-American journalist whose memory as a veteran Palestinian solidarity activist is a breach in the static. Blankfort deconstructs the Anti-Defamation League—the ADL—looking past the shield of civil rights to find a critical node in a transnational espionage network.We return to his landmark exposure of an illegal surveillance web; a clandestine bridge built between the Israel lobby and apartheid South Africa to monitor the American pulse. In this era of state and non-state convergence, this 2021 archive serves as a sobering lens. To understand the future, we must study the shadow it has already cast.Beyond the walls of the narrative... here is Jeffrey Blankfort.----------------------In beginning to critically deconstruct the key role of the Anti Defamation League in the Israel Lobby, producer Jeremy Rothe-Kushel speaks with Jewish American Journalist & Pro-Palestinian activist Jeffrey Blankfort, about his work to expose the ADL and its collaborators for colluding with apartheid Israel and South Africa on espionage against civil society in the United States.https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/12/adl-spies/https://www.foodnotbombs.net/adl_examiner.htmlhttps://www.wrmea.org/the-israel-lobby-is-it-good-for-the-us-is-it-good-for-israel-the-adl-covert-action-censure-and-courting-law-enforcement.htmlhttps://www.israellobby.org/ADL-CA/https://www.irmep.org/ADLespionage.asp——http://www.palestinechronicle.com/jeffrey-blankfort-breaking-the-silence-on-the-israel-lobby/“Are there Israeli lobby gatekeepers and damage control squads on the left?”  https://www.natsummit.org/transcripts/jeffrey_blankfort.htm“Jeffrey Blankfort: Chomsky Misfires on U.S.-Israel Relations” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T33IdUl1S8—–https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Jeffrey_Blankforthttp://www.jeffblankfortphotography.com/contact.htmJeff Blankfort is a radio producer, photographer & journalist of Jewish-American background, who has been a pro-Palestinian human rights activist since 1970. He was formerly the editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin and co-founder of the Labor Committee of the Middle East. He was also a founding member of the November 29 Coalition on Palestine and the Palestine Solidarity Committee. He won a settlement from the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in February 2002 for its vast illegal spying against him, as well as hundreds of other progressive social, political, labor and environmental organizations and thousands of individuals (including anti-Apartheid groups/activists).Blankfort‘s articles have appeared in CounterPunch, Dissident Voice & Mondoweiss, among many others.

Send us a textJosh 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 freedoms at home. Josh will be a panelist on the upcoming Voices from the Holy Land Film Salon on Sunday, January 18 at 3 pm ET entitled International Law and the Israel Exception. Listeners are invited to register for the film salon for free at www.voicesfromtheholyland.org.

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.