PeaceCast

Danny Seidemann is one of the world’s leading experts on Jerusalem, on Israeli-Palestinian relations there and on the Jerusalem-related requirements for a future Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

On November 14th 2017, we hosted Danny at Americans for Peace Now’s office in Washington to talk about the current situation in Jerusalem and about the prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Danny is the director of Terrestrial Jerusalem http://t-j.org.il/

Boycotts divestment and sanctions (BDS) are a tool used against Israel by activists worldwide either to compel the government of Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip or to punish it for violations of Palestinians’ human rights. Some who support BDS do it because they oppose the very existence of Israel – not just its occupation of territories captured in 1967 – and seek ways to damage Israel as a state.

Americans for Peace Now opposes this blunt tool for various reasons, and encourages people to engage economically and otherwise with Israel. However, we do support boycotting West Bank settlements, which we believe are a major obstacle to peace. We also believe that people have a First Amendment right to express their positions on Israel through boycotts, if they so choose, even if we don’t endorse the action.

We are therefore gratified to have the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on our side in opposing the avalanche of anti-BDS that are being adopted both on the Federal and state level. We oppose them because they conflate Israel and the West Bank settlements, and like the ACLU we also oppose them because they violate the basic civil rights of Americans.

To discuss how the ACLU is opposing these laws, we hosted for a briefing call Attorney Brian Hauss, who leads the American Civil Liberties Union’s litigation on this issue.

For more – a lot more – see here: http://peacenow.org/page.php?name=boycott-occupation#.WfyU42hSyUk

After a hiatus of about a month (vacation, Jewish High Holidays, heavy workload), PeaceCast is returning with a special episode, marking the 30th anniversary of the first intifada, the Palestinian popular uprising that started on December 9th 1987.

This episode features conversation between three reporters who covered the first intifada: Mary Curtius, who then reported for the Christian Science Monitor and later for the Boston Globe, Joel Greenberg, who then worked for the Jerusalem post (and later covered Israel for the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and other US and British newspapers) and Ori Nir, who then covered Palestinian affairs for Israel’s Haaretz.

The three got together in Jerusalem early October 2017 to talk about this formative experience in the history of Palestinian-Israeli relations and to put it in perspective of the three decades that elapsed since then.

This is the first in several episodes that would be devoted to the first intifada.

To donate to APN and help us produce more episodes like this , please click here: https://peacenow.org/donate

To learn more about musician Mark Eliyahu (mentioned in this episode), click here: http://markeliyahu.com/

You might expect Daniel Shapiro, Barack Obama’s ambassador to Israel, to dismiss the Trump administration’s rickety Israeli-Palestinian peace brokering efforts.

Surprisingly, Shapiro believes that Trump and his aides have only marginally strayed from traditional U.S. policies on the issue. In fact, he says, more than in any other policy arena, the Trump administration is exercising more continuity and adherence to past administrations’ policies in the field of Israeli-Palestinian relations.

This episode is based on a September 14th 2017 APN briefing call with Ambassador Shapiro. It is preceded by a conversation between APN’s Stephanie Breitsman, Debra Shushan and Ori Nir, PeaceCast’s host.

The full recording of our briefing call with Shapiro is available here. 

This episode features two conversations. The first is an interview with Dr. Bashir Karkabi, a Palestinian Israeli physician, who is among the organizers of an event that will take place on September 14th in the Israeli Arab town of Kalanswa, bringing together Jewish and Arab activists to forge together a shared agenda for a joint political struggle.

Our second conversation is with Nadia Abuelezam, a Palestinian-American, who is the creator and host of a podcast that tells the stories of Palestinians in the United States. The podcast is called Palestinians Podcast. Here is a link to the podcast’s web site: http://www.palestinianspodcast.com/

And here is a link to APN’s donate page: https://peacenow.org/donate

If you have any ideas or any feedback about PeaceCast, we would love to hear from you at [email protected].

Abby Smardon, the executive director of UNRWA-USA, the American organization that supports the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, returned to Washington after a couple of weeks in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It was her sixth consecutive annual visit to Gaza. She says it was the most distressing. The Gaza Strip, she says, has never experienced such a prolonged crisis. Starved for electricity, relief from the heat and hope for the future, the Gaza Strip's 2 million residents, most of them refugees, are struggling to survive while holding on to their humanity. Stephanie Breitsman and Ori Nir talked with Abby.

The title of this PeaceCast episode is Major Departure – with a question mark.

Episode 22 is a major departure from our typical modus operandi.

Unlike past episode, this one is a round-table discussion by APN staff.

The topic of our discussion is whether the Trump administration's failure to endorse the two-state solution is a major departure from what has been a tenet of US foreign policy for the past fifteen years: a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Participating are Debra Shushan, APN's new Director of Policy and Government Relations, Aaron Mann, our associate director of communications, Stephanie Breitsman, our program assistant and co-producer of PeaceCast, and Ori Nir, APN's communications director and PeaceCast's host.

Daoud Kuttab a veteran Palestinian journalist, now lives and works in Amman as the director-general of the Community Media Network a not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing independent media in the Arab world. In a conversation with APN's Ori Nir and Debra Shushan, he lays out Jordan's perspective on the recent Temple Mount / Haram al-Sharif crisis and the deteriorating relations between the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the State of Israel. 

Ofer Zalzberg, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group is a leading expert on the Holy Esplanade, the site in Jerusalem that Jews refer to as the Temple Mount and Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif. Ofer analyzes the current crisis and discusses ways in which similar crises may be avoided in the future. 

This episode is a slightly edited recording of Americans for Peace Now's second edition of The Dove, a storytelling event modeled after the well-known storytelling enterprise, The Moth. 

This event took place as violence was spiraling in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The seven storytellers, however, tried to underscore hope, and we deeply appreciate them for it.

This event was co-sponsored by New Story Leadership, a Washington-based organization that brings together young Palestinians and Israelis to Washington for networking, honing leadership skills, and building bridges of peace and mutual understanding.