PeaceCast

Dr. Marwan Muasher, currently the Amman-based Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was Jordan's foreign minister, deputy prime minister, information minister, Jordan's ambassador to the United States and its first ambassador to Israel. He was deeply involved in the peace process, and helped compose the Arab Peace Initiative. 

We met him in Amman as part of Americans for Peace Now's study tour to the region. 

This episode is an edited down version of our conversation with him. Due to technical difficulties, questions asked by members of our group could not be recorded. Some of Dr. Muasher's comments are in reply to questions that are not in this recording, which sometimes makes his remarks a bit difficult to follow. 

Dr. Muasher, recorded on November 5th 2019, refers to meetings that our group was to have the next day (in his words "tomorrow") with Jordanian government officials. 

With any questions or comments, please email [email protected]

Avner Gvaryahu is the executive director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of veteran soldiers who have served in the Israeli military since the start of the Second Intifada and have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories.

APN’s Debra Shushan and Ori Nir spoke with Avner on October 30th, 2019.

Breaking the Silence’s web site: https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/

Avner’s Twitter handle: @AGvaryahu

This episode features the panel discussion that Americans for Peace Now sponsored at the J Street National conference in Washington DC on October 27th, 2019.

Included are the full presentations of the three panelists -- former Palestinian ambassador to Washington Maen Areikat, Peace Now's director Shaqued Morag, and Yesh Din director Lior Amihai --  well as the introduction by Debra Shushan, APN’s policy and government relations director.

An edited down recording of a panel that we held on Capitol Hill on October 26th 2019, featuring two representatives of our Israeli sister organization, Peace Now (Shalom Achshav), Israel’s peace movement.

Peace Now’s Shaqued Morag and Brian Reeves spoke about the danger to Israel that West Bank annexation poses – both the de-facto annexation that is being advanced every day on the ground in the West Bank and the de-jure annexation that Israel’s right-wing government is vowing to advance.

Their talk was a window into the current agenda and the emphases of Israel’s peace movement, as well as the challenges that the Israeli peace camp faces.

This episode features a conversation with Menachem Klein,  a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Bar Ilan University, who specializes in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is the author of several books on the topic. His new books is Arafat and Abbas: Portraits of Leadership in a State Postponed. 

When I heard Yuli Tamir, one of the icons and the leading intellectuals of Israel’s moderate left, expressing optimism at a panel discussion in Washington, I rushed to her with a recorder and cajoled her to elaborate about her optimism.

Yuli Tamir is one of the founders of Israel’s peace movement, Peace Now. She is a former minister in the Israeli government and a former Knesset member. She is a professor of philosophy and now the President of the Shenkar College near Tel Aviv.

This episode features a presentation that Nizar Farsakh and Ori Nir gave at Ithaca College on September 17th. The talk was an attempt to make the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more accessible to young people by weaving personal narratives of an Israeli-American and a Palestinian-American into the collective national narratives of Israelis and Palestinians.

Nizar and Ori are happy to take this show on the road. We would love to come to other university campuses, synagogues churches – any institution that would like to invite us. If you are interested (or with any questions and comments), please write to Ori at [email protected] .

In this special episode of PeaceCast, APN’s Debra Shushan and Ori Nir are the interviewees rather than the interviewers on the Bill Press Pod. A co-production. 

With any comments or questions, please email [email protected]

Amer Zahr is a Palestinian-American stand-up comedian, who for the fourth year in a row is producing One Thousand and One Laughs, a stand-up comedy festival in the West Bank joins PeaceCast from Ramallah.

He talked about humor and his use of humor as a tool to help fellow Palestinians resist the occupation and generate change.

Zahr’s web site: www.amerzahr.com

Zahr’s blog: http://www.civilarab.com

Zahr’s book: https://smile.amazon.com/Being-Palestinian-Makes-Me-Smile/dp/0991467906/ref=sr_1_1?ascsubtag=1ba00-01000-org00-win10-other-smile-us000-gatwy-feature-SEARC&keywords=being+palestinian+makes+me+smile&qid=1566264147&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Erez Maggor, an Israeli social scientist who specializes in the history and the political economics of the West Bank settlement, says that the impetus for the West Bank settlement policies of the Likud government in the late 1970s and 1980s is largely misunderstood.

What chiefly pushed the Israeli government to build across the Green Line, he says, was not an ideological Greater Israel zeal but rather a demand by the Likud’s low-income electoral base for affordable housing.

Maggor is a doctoral candidate at New York University’s Department of Sociology.

His article on this subject was recently published in Israel’s Hazman Hazeh magazine (Hebrew) 

Maggor co-edited the book Normalizing Occupation, The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements (2017)

With ideas or feedback for PeaceCast, please write to [email protected]