PeaceCast

Together with several other participants, Bethany Zaiman walked out on a Birthright program earlier this month to protest the program's imbalanced, one-sided approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its avoiding the occupation. 

Zaiman, an anthropology doctoral student, explains why she and a handful of other young women walked out on the program, nd what she thinks is wrong about Birthright.

A conversation with author and journalist Sarah Tuttle-Singer, an editor at the Times of Israel and the author of Jerusalem Drawn and Quartered: One Woman’s Year in the Heart of the Christian, Muslim, Armenian, and Jewish Quarters of Old Jerusalem.

More than 40 years ago, Dr. James Zogby wrote a short book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and published it a couple of years later. The book was unique in that it laid out the Palestinian narrative of the conflict and its history at a time when this narrative was all but absent from the conversation on Israel-Palestine in the US.

Forty years later, Zogby talks about what has changed and what has not, and explains his somewhat surprising decision to take an old short book, dust it off, write a new introduction, and republish it as is.

APN's Policy and Government Relations Director, together with PeaceCast's host Ori Nir, spoke with Zogby on July 6th, 2018 about a host of issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Please don't hesitate to continue sending us feedback and ideas. Best is to email Ori at [email protected]

This episode, the third in a mini-series on Gaza, crosses the Gaza border to the Israeli communities that surround the Gaza Strip. It features a conversation with Julia Chaitin, a leader of Other Voice (Kol Acher), an peace movement that brings together Israeli peace activists who reach out to their neighbors in Gaza.

The photo shows Chaitin at a weekly vigil of Other Voice, shortly after being attacked by right-wing bullies who threw hot coffee at her.

In this episode, the second in a series about the collective emotional state of the Gaza Strip’s population, APN’s Debra Shushan and Ori Nir speak with Dr. Brian Barber, a psychologist, who in the past quarter of a century has been studying the psyche of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Barber is a professor of child and family studies and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Youth and Political Conflict at the University of Tennessee, from which he recently retired. He is now a scholar at the New America Foundation and the Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington, DC.

He is working on a book documenting the lives of three Palestinian men, all Gazans, who spent their entire lives under Israeli occupation. The book is an extension of Barber’s large study of young Palestinians, documented in the important article “Whither the ‘Children of the Stone’? An Entire Life under Occupation” published in 2016 in the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Here are links to some of his other publications:

This Is Why Gazans Won't Back Down; The Politics of Development; After the War;  

(Photo: New America) 

Omar Shaban is the founder and director of PalThink for Strategic Studies, a Gaza City-based think tank, or as Shaban likes to call it, a “think and do tank.”

Debra Shushan, Stephanie Breitsman and Ori Nir sat with Shaban at APN’s office in Washington on Friday June 8th, for a long, fascinating conversation on the economy, society, and politics of the Gaza Strip.

This is an unusually long episode.

PalThink’s web site is www.palthink.org

His most recent Foreign Policy article is here: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/29/gazans-are-protesting-their-economy-not-israels-existence/

Thank you for your feedback and ideas. Please contact Ori at [email protected]

This episode’s guest is Yizhar Be’er, an Israeli podcaster who formerly reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for Haaretz and was the director of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and the founder and director of Keshev, an Israeli nonprofit that focuses on improving public discourse in Isreali society relating to the conflict.

Yizhar’s Hebrew podcast Sacred Cows (Parot Kdoshot) takes apart Israeli myths. One of his chief topics is the Gaza Strip. In an eight-episode series, Yizhar addresses the Israeli truism that nothing can be done about Gaza.

The series features interviews with past Israeli governors of the Gaza Strip. One of the things that hit me when I listened to these interviews was the foreshadowing, the writing that Israeli governors saw on the walls of Gaza’s neighborhoods and refugee camps in four decades of direct occupation, predicting the crisis that we see today in Gaza.

The web site of Sacred Cows, where the podcast is hosted, is: http://parotk.com/

A conversation with Gadi Baltiansky and Nidal Foqaha, the Israeli and Palestinian directors of the Geneva Initiative talk about their Two-State Index, a new tool to measure the feasibility of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement based on the division of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean into two states, Israel and Palestine, living in peace and security alongside each other.

Please visit the Geneva Initiative’s web site, and the separate site of the new Two-State Index.

Why does the Palestinian Authority continue its security collaboration with Israel even today, when Israeli-Palestinian political relations are at an all-time low? What is the nature of this cooperation? Who are the Palestinian security forces?  How sustainable is their law-enforcement and counter-terrorism assignment? How long can they continue collaborating with Israel at the absence of any progress toward a political accord between Israel and the Palestinians?

Our current episode addresses these questions with the help of two experts who just published a report on this topic.

To download Neri Zilber and Ghaith al-Omari's report State with No Army, Army with No State - Evolution of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, 1994–2018 click here: 

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/state-with-no-army-army-with-no-state

This episode features:

* Swiss-American photo journalist Saskia Keeley, who through the lenses of cameras that she gives to women -- West Bank Israeli settlers and Palestinian women who live in adjacent towns and villages -- helps these women explore the humanity of the other, open to the other, and discover the many commonalities of Palestinian and Israeli women. Saskia’s web site: https://www.saskiakeeley.com/

* Father Josh Thomas, the executive director of Kids for Peace, a youth movement based in Jerusalem, which brings together Israeli and Palestinian teens, West Jerusalemites and East Jerusalemites and their families. Kids for Peace’s web site: http://www.k4p.org/

I met Father Josh and Saskia Keeley at a conference at Yale University, organized by Yale’s chapter of One Voice, an organization that works to bring together Israelis and Palestinians under a joint agenda of a two-state solution.

Ori’s email address for feedback: [email protected]

APN’s donate page: https://peacenow.org/donate