Palestine This Week

In this episode, we explore why Palestine remains central to understanding the region’s escalating crises, from the war on Iran and Gaza to Lebanon and the mounting pressure on Gulf states. We unpack the dangerous assumptions, political delusions and power plays driving the Middle East deeper into chaos.

We begin this week’s episode with a tribute to the late Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi before turning to the stories being overshadowed by the war on Iran. Muhammed Shehada unpacks what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank while global attention shifts elsewhere, and explains why rising settler violence and deepening Israeli control should not be ignored. 

We also examine his report on Trump’s dystopian vision for Gaza, ask whether that plan can survive the regional fallout from the Iran war, and explore the disturbing similarities between Israel’s conduct in Iran and its genocidal war on Gaza. From Israel’s wider regional strategy to the religious rhetoric driving this conflict, this is a sharp and essential conversation you do not want to miss.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction & Overview

00:01:32 Remembering Walid Khalidi and his lifelong work documenting the Nakba.

00:04:10 What has happened while Israel and the US focus on bombing Iran?

00:13:15 What does Muhammed Shehada’s report reveal about the future being planned for Gaza?

00:23:12 Can Trump’s Gaza plan survive the war with Iran?

00:30:11 What similarities are visible in Israel’s conduct across both wars?

00:37:45 What does the war on Iran reveal about Israel’s wider ambitions in the Middle East?

00:47:48 Did the architects of 7 October foresee a scenario in which Israel would be fighting on so many fronts?

00:54:37 How are the US and Israel framing this conflict in religious terms, and how influential is that view?

01:04:46 Has Israel become defined by the toxic mix of ultimate victimhood, overwhelming power and impunity?

In this episode, we examine explosive new documents exposing Israel’s systematic ethnic cleansing in 1948 and trace how its unending quest for security has fuelled decades of expansion, war and regional upheaval.

We unpack the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, question whether Trump torpedoed diplomacy at the very moment negotiations were gaining traction, and ask whether Tehran's bombing of Gulf states is a strategic miscalculation. With Washington’s credibility fraying and uncomfortable parallels to the 2003 Iraq invasion resurfacing, we confront the stark possibility that the region is being driven, step by step, towards another devastating and entirely avoidable war.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction & Overview
02:31 Smoking gun: new documents reveal Israel’s 1948 ethnic cleansing blueprint
17:37 Security or supremacy? Israel’s relentless drive for regional domination
23:58 Regime decapitation? The assassination talk around Khamenei
35:27 War over diplomacy? Did trump bomb Iran to kill a deal?
40:58 Strategic blunder? Has Iran’s gulf gamble backfired?
46:27 Abandoned allies: Has Washington left the gulf exposed?
49:06 Iraq 2.0? Is the drumbeat for war on Iran following the 2003 script?

In this week’s episode, we unpack the implications of remarks made by Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, whose unapologetic defence of Israeli expansionism reflects the enduring influence of Christian Zionism on American foreign policy. We explore how this radical theological current has shaped political discourse and helped sustain Israel. 

The discussion also examines the latest Lancet report suggesting Gaza’s death toll may be significantly higher than previously recorded. Finally, we assess the significance of the newly convened Board of Peace.

In this episode of Palestine This Week, we ask whether the two-state solution has finally run out of graves to bury it in. As Israel tightens its grip on the occupied West Bank and rewrites the Oslo framework in real time, we examine the collapse of diplomatic illusions and the rise of raw power politics.

We unpack the shifting narrative around Gaza’s death toll, Israel’s parallel aid system, Netanyahu’s Washington visit and growing fractures inside the US conservative base over Israel.

And in a deeper dive, we explore the idea of a “common enemy” — from the legacy of Oslo to the emergence of what some are calling the Epstein class — and what that says about the global networks shaping the fate of Palestine.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction & Overview
02:03 How many burials can the two-state solution survive? Israel tightens grip on the West Bank
12:48 Oslo rewritten? Israel’s foreign ministry accused of historical revisionism
20:40 50,000 “militants”? The dangerous new narrative around Gaza’s death toll
28:55 Gaza’s parallel aid system: is Israel replacing humanitarians with the security industry?
35:47 Netanyahu meets Trump: Iran rift or green light on Palestine?
42:14 Smear campaign against UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese: who is trying to silence her?
49:15 Epstein, Oslo and power networks: what the files reveal about global influence
53:11 Cracks in the conservative base: are American evangelicals turning away from Israel?

Is Israel collapsing before its centenary? In this episode of Palestine This Week, we examine warnings from a former Israeli major general that the state may not exist by 2048, citing internal fracture and growing international isolation. We analyse how the language of ceasefire now functions to manage, rather than end, Palestinian death and destruction, while dismantling Israeli claims used to justify the high civilian toll. 

The episode investigates evidence that prohibited weapons have erased thousands of bodies in Gaza, the killing of a 14-year-old boy left to bleed to death in the illegally occupied West Bank amid accelerated settler expansion, signs of democratic retrenchment in the UK through the criminalisation of Palestine solidarity, and a looming scandal inside Human Rights Watch over the Palestinian right of return.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction & Overview
01:52 Ceasefire as cover for continuing genocide 
08:14 Hearing voices from Gaza
09:30 Gaza and the collapse of legal and moral limits on killing
18:03 Urban warfare and the deliberate devaluing of Palestinian life
22:13 The killing of 14-year-old Jadallah Jadallah in the West Bank
32:15 Christian Zionism and the exodus of Christians from the Holy Land
38:35 Former Israeli general warns of Israel’s collapse by 2048
46:52 Human Rights Watch shelves right of return report
54:19 UK jury acquits Palestine Action defendants

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Israel now admits Gaza’s death toll—but only after years of denial. Mouin Rabbani joins to explore what this shift means, and how media and political elites helped enable genocide. We look at US complicity, the BBC’s Gaza coverage collapse, and the ideology of Jewish supremacy inside Israel’s government. Plus: the Epstein files, vice as political currency, and Arab states scrambling to prevent war with Iran.
 
00:00 Introduction & Overview
02:30 Why has Israel now accepted Gaza’s death toll after years of denial?
14:46 Has the media become Israel’s ‘getaway car’ in genocide?
21:28 Did US envoys help suppress warnings of Gaza becoming an 'apocalyptic wasteland'?
26:37 Is Jewish supremacy ideology now mainstream in Israeli politics?
30:04 What does Mike Huckabee’s tribute to Ze’ev Jabotinsky reveal about Israel’s historical trajectory?
34:42 Is virtue signalling being replaced by vice signalling in Western politics?
40:15 Why is the global far right flocking to Jerusalem and promoting the ‘great replacement’ myth?
42:18 Do the Epstein files point to Mossad ties and deeper political compromise?
51:27 Are Arab states trying to prevent a catastrophic US-Israel war on Iran?

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://tinyurl.com/447fpn8k
Visit our website: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/

Follow us on social media:
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/middleeastmonitor
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/middleeastmonitor
TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@middleeastmonitor
X https://www.x.com/middleeastmnt

This week’s episode takes apart Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace”—or as some are calling it, a board of chaos—and the move to install a National Committee to run Gaza. Is this about rebuilding, or reshaping Gaza to fit Israel’s terms? We dig into the UN’s report showing a staggering 10.6 per cent drop in Gaza’s population. In Beit Jala, we look at how Palestinian Christians are being wiped from the map, and in the US, ICE tactics are starting to look eerily like the tools of colonial control. Plus: why the UAE is being called Israel’s Trojan horse in the region.

In this episode of Palestine This Week we break down a turbulent and revealing few days in regional and global politics. The conversation moves from Trump’s proposed “Gaza Board of Peace” and what it says about the push to sideline the UN and reshape global governance, to Israel’s own contradictions over Gaza’s future and the demolition of UNRWA’s headquarters in Jerusalem. 

We also look at a rare and forceful intervention by Christian leaders in Jerusalem warning against Christian Zionism and rising tensions involving Iran and Syria. The episode closes with shifting alliances across the region, especially the deepening rift between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and what all of this could mean for Palestine.

From Gaza to Tehran, the region is hitting a breaking point. We expose Israel’s crackdown on humanitarian groups, the fiction of a “peace process,” the quiet Israeli exodus, and the lawfare campaign against Palestine advocates — before turning to Iran’s unrest and the new fault lines splitting the Arab world

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

00:48 Israel bans aid groups and silences medical witnesses

10:37 Phase two without foundations: the US pushes a broken Gaza deal

16:53 West Bank annexation: the settlement plan to kill the Palestinian state

23:23 A crisis in Zionism: why Israelis are leaving

29:25 Lawfare backfires: Ghassan Abu-Sittah and the collapse of Israel’s censorship strategy

39:57 Iran in revolt: protests, crackdowns, and the push toward war

49:03 The Muslim Brotherhood bogeyman and the Gulf power struggle