PeaceCast

Grant Rumley is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank, where he focuses on Palestinian politics. Amir Tibon is the newly-appointed bureau chief of Israel's Haaretz newspaper.

Together, they authored a new biography of Mahmoud Abbas, (Abu Mazen) the President of the Palestinian Authority and the Chairman of the PLO.

Their book, The Last Palestinian: The Rise and Reign of Mahmoud Abbas, was launched on July 11 2017, and we interviewed them the next day at APN's office in Washington. This episode is slightly longer than our most recent ones. We hope you agree it's worth it.

Katya Lipovetzky, an Israeli, recently graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Hashem Sayyed, a Palestinian, recently graduated from al-Quds University, the Palestinian university of Jerusalem.

Hashem and Katya are APN's summer interns, working together to produce our second storytelling event, The Dove.

The two are enrolled in New Story Leadership, a summer program in Washington that gives young Israelis and Palestinians a chance to meet each other, to network, to learn how Washington works and to hone their leadership skills.

In this short episode, Ori Nir and Stephanie Breitsman talk with Katya and Hashem about their lives and the conflict. To meet the two of them and four more of the NSL fellows Come to The Dove  on July 20th, at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC at 8:30 PM. If you can't attend, you'll be able to listen to these young people's stories on a special episode of PeaceCast. 

Carmi Gilon, the former chief of Israel’s secret service, Shin Bet, for years helped run Israel's occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Like many other Israeli former senior security officials,  he became an anti-occupation peace advocate when he finish his service. If you watched the documentary The Gatekeepers, which features Carmi Gilon among six past heads of Israel’s Shin-Bet, you understand why.

Episode 16 of PeaceCast features a conversation with Gilon, who today is the executive chair of Cytegic, an Israeli cyber security company.

Gilon served in the Shin Bet from 1972 just a few years after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, through 1996. He was the head of the service for a year (1995 to 1996), and then served in several public positions including the director of the Peres Center for Peace and Israel’s ambassador to Denmark. 

Stephanie Breitsman and Ori Nir spoke with him at APN’s office in DC on June 29th,  2017, while Gilon was on a Washington visit organized by J Street.

Around 15% of the Jewish settlers’ population in the West Bank are of American origin, American Jews who have made Aliyah (emigrated to Israel), and chose to settle the West Bank.

It feels as if their proportion is even larger, because they are so central to the ideological settlers’ movement, so active and so vociferous.

The expert on this issue is Dr. Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a lecturer at Oxford University in the UK. Her recently published book on this topic, is City on a Hilltop. Sara spoke about the focus of her research at a book event co-sponsored by the Foundation for Middle East Peace and Americans for Peace Now at Busboys and Poets in Washington DC on June 25th. This show is an edited version of her talk. I moderated the discussion, and learned a lot.

Please subscribe to Peace Cast. We are on iTunes here and on Google Play here. Send me feedback to [email protected] and recommend the podcast to a friend.

Sara's Haaretz articles

The Atlantic's review of Sara's book

This episode is the second in a series that focuses on the Gaza Strip. APN's Ori Nir and Stephanie Breitsman interview Rania al-Hilou, a young professional woman living in Gaza City, who describes living conditions with only two hours of electricity a day, and UNRWA's Scott Anderson, formerly the Gaza operations director and currently the West Bank operations director of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. And, as a kicker, an introduction to the Gaza Strip's only rock band. 
Hyperlinks: UNRWA, ANERA, Rania's essay on life without power in Gaza, Typo band's "Dream of Dawn" on YouTube, Typo's Facebook page 

This episode has two segments, both relate to the Gaza Strip. 

The first segment is an interview with the World Bank’s country director for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Marina Wes. She talked about the terrible state of the Gaza economy, about its dependence on external financial assistance, and about its grim future. 

The second segment is a conversation with Haim Malka of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, who focused on Gaza’s largest donor, the gulf emirate of Qatar. 

This special edition of PeaceCast features four interviews recorded at Peace Now’s massive “Two States – One Hope” demonstration marking fifty years of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and calling on Israel’s government to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians. Interviewed are Peace Now co-founder Tzali Reshef, former Israeli ambassador to France and veteran Israeli diplomat Daniel Shek, Haaretz’s senior columnist Chemi Shalev and Peace Now’s director of external relations Anat Ben Nun.

Israeli-American storyteller and peace activist Noa Baum, whose show A Land Twice Promised has won praise throughout the US, has now published a book under the same title. APN’s Stephanie Breitsman and Ori Nir spoke with Noa about the power of storytelling, about empathy and compassion, about changing hearts and minds, and about hope. 

Why did ten American rabbis, ten US evangelical pastors and ten American Muslim Imams fly together to the Gulf Emirate of Abu-Dhabi? And is there a justified security rationale for the extremely tight Israeli restrictions on Palestinians’ movement into and out of the Gaza Strip?

These are two of many fascinating questions discussed in this short episode of PeaceCast, which features two interviews. A conversation with Sari Bashi of Human Rights Watch about restrictions on movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza Strip, and a talk with Rabbi Laurie Rice of Nashville on an extraordinary gathering of Jewish Muslim and Christian clergy in the United Arab Emirates.

What does Israel’s West Bank settlement policy have to do with international soccer?

Dr. James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, is the leading world expert on this subject. He is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, a book that among other things explores the topic of this episode's discussion. Dorsey closely follows the way in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict plays out on the soccer field, in FIFA, the international soccer association.

FIFA is expected to take up the issue of Israel's establishing soccer clubs in West Bank settlements in the upcoming meeting of its governing bodies in Manama, Bahrain, on May 9th 2017.  

Dr. Dorsey joined us by Skype from his home in Singapore. Apologies for the subpar audio quality.

James M. Dorsey