The Intercept Briefing

There will be much analysis and innumerable postmortems of what Kamala Harris and her campaign got wrong about the electorate this election.

Already, the trends are becoming clear: She failed to reach Black and Latino men, who flocked to Donald Trump this cycle. She underperformed in cities, typically Democratic strongholds. And she even lagged among younger voters vital to her party’s present and future.

What’s behind this dismal showing? One explanation is Harris’s inability to put forth a distinct agenda that would appeal to disaffected Democrats. Instead, she held steady to the policies of President Joe Biden, despite general voter dissatisfaction and anxiety about the economy and the direction of the country.

“We see Democrats over and over turning to courting this mythical moderate voter,” says senior politics reporter Akela Lacy on this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing. “We also see a big failure to account for the rightward shift among young people and figure out how to give young voters a reason to support the Democratic Party.”

Listen to understand what Intercept reporters were hearing at the polls in Georgia and Pennsylvania this week.

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Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, a new podcast from our newsroom. In our first episode, politics reporters Jessica Washington and Akela Lacy break down The Intercept’s recent investigation on how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has shaped U.S. foreign policy, as well as, as well as its record-breaking spending in the 2024 election cycle to unseat members of Congress who are who are insufficiently pro-Israel. 

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The process of Jewish expansion over Palestinian land has involved maintaining a "system of domination," says author Nathan Thrall on this week's Intercepted. In order to constrict "Palestinians into tighter and tighter space" over the decades, Israel has deployed a strict permit system, movement restrictions, walls, fences, segregated roads, and punitive actions such as arrests and detentions, even of children.

In “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy," Thrall’s book, published just before the start of the current war, tells the story of one Palestinian man’s struggle to navigate Israel’s painful system of legal and security controls after his son’s school bus is involved in a fatal accident. Thrall joins host Murtaza Hussain in a discussion about the system of control that Israel maintains over Palestinians, violence in the West Bank, the future outlook for a negotiated solution to the conflict in Gaza, and possible escalation amid fighting at Israel’s northern border.

"A Day in the Life of Abed Salama" is a 2024 nonfiction Pulitzer Prize winner. Thrall is also the author of "The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine."

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Throughout the past nine months of Israel’s scorched-earth war against the people of Gaza, the world has watched as the official death toll has increased by the day. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed. These figures are likely a stark undercount of the true devastation. A recent report from the British aid organization Save the Children estimates that more than 20,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza. A new documentary by Fault Lines called “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza” tells the story of the war's impact on the lives of three Palestinian families in Gaza.

This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill speaks to the film's correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous and executive producer Laila Al-Arian, the Emmy award-winning executive producer of Fault Lines, Al Jazeera English’s flagship U.S.-based news magazine.

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The escalating military confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel now threatens to expand the conflict in Gaza into a full-blown regional war. For the past eight months, Israel and Hezbollah have traded missile attacks, leading to the evacuation of tens of thousands of civilians from northern Israel and southern Lebanon. The two sides have fought devastating wars in the past, but a cold peace has reigned for nearly 17 years. That peace is now in jeopardy, as Hezbollah has mobilized in sympathy with Hamas following Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip. To discuss the situation this week on Intercepted is Sam Heller, a fellow with the Century Foundation and expert on Lebanon and Hezbollah. Heller spoke with host Murtaza Hussain on the prospects of the conflict escalating, as well as the potential impact on the Lebanese, Israelis, and the broader Middle East.

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An Israeli military operation in Gaza this week aimed at rescuing four hostages from Hamas killed over 270 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. The Nuseirat refugee camp, where the attacks occurred, became a scene of horror as the injured sought care from Gaza's few remaining hospitals. Karin Huster, a Doctors Without Borders medical coordinator, witnessed the aftermath. She joins host Murtaza Hussain on Intercepted to discuss what she saw following the Israel Defense Forces attack alleged to involve grave war crimes, and the ongoing impact of the war on Gaza's civilian population.

Transcript coming soon. 

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After eight months of brutal fighting with no end in sight, the war in Gaza is at risk of metastasizing into a regional conflict. Recent tensions between Egypt and Israel — normally security partners who have cooperated in the blockade of Gaza — have thrown into stark relief the growing risks of a spillover from the war.

This week on Intercepted, security expert H. A. Hellyer discusses with co-host Murtaza Hussain the growing hostilities between the two countries, which have resulted in Egypt joining the International Court of Justice genocide case against Israel, threats to annul the Camp David peace accords, and even a fatal shooting incident between Egyptian and Israel troops.

The war in Gaza is at risk of exploding into a far greater war that could cause the destruction of the tenuous security architecture that has held the region together for decades.

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The past week in Gaza has seen a major escalation in Israeli attacks against the besieged and starving Palestinians trapped in a killing cage. The Biden administration has aggressively sought to portray itself as being increasingly at odds with Israel’s tactics, mostly focusing on U.S. threats to withhold some weapons shipments if Benjamin Netanyahu conducts an invasion of Rafah. But the cold reality is that Israel has already bombed and occupied large swaths of Rafah. 

The regime has ordered the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, not only from Rafah, but also from areas of northern Gaza, once again thrusting masses of civilians — many of whom are wounded, starving, dehydrated, and traumatized — on a desperate hunt for a place to pitch a makeshift tent as they await either death or a ceasefire.

Despite the White House leaking stories to insider media outlets about how Biden is fed up with his great friend Netanyahu, the U.S. has made clear it continues to arm and support the Israeli regime.

This week on Intercepted, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the feminist antiwar organization Code Pink, speaks with Jeremy Scahill. Since the launch of the so-called war on terror in 2001, the 71-year-old activist has spent more than two decades disrupting congressional hearings, chasing members of Congress through the halls of the Capitol for answers, and traveling to countries the U.S. has labeled as enemies. Benjamin discusses her personal path to activism and the siege on Gaza, and offers a guide on how ordinary people can disrupt business as usual in the chambers of power in Washington, D.C.

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Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, reached a deal with students to work toward divesting from “companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.” It is one of the few schools to reach deals with students protesting Israel's war on Gaza as demonstrations spread to more than 154 campuses nationwide.

This week on Intercepted, we bring you a special episode from inside the student movement for Gaza. Prem Thakker, a politics reporter for The Intercept, breaks down the campus protests and students' demands for schools to cut off financial ties with Israel and weapons makers. Thakker is joined by Gillian Goodman, a freelance writer and journalism graduate student at Columbia University. Gillian takes us inside the protest encampment at Columbia, which inspired similar demonstrations nationwide before it was violently dismantled by police.

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Last month, the famed American philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler was thrust into the center of a controversy after remarks Butler made about the October 7 attacks in Israel. A longtime critic of Zionism and Israel’s war against the Palestinians, Butler had condemned the attacks in the immediate aftermath. But at a March roundtable in France, Butler offered a historical context for the Hamas-led operations and stated that the attacks constituted armed resistance. The blowback was swift, and Butler was criticized in media outlets across Europe and in Israel. This week on Intercepted, Butler discusses the controversy and their position on Hamas, Israel, and crackdowns on student protests.

Butler is currently a Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School. They are the author of several books, including “The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind,” “Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,” and most recently, “Who's Afraid of Gender?”

For full show transcript visit the episode page.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

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