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No Peace Prescription for Gaza, and Dr. El-Sayed's Proscription of AIPAC Impunity (with Richard Silverstein)

For this episode of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel is joined by Richard Silverstein. 

Richard is an independent journalist, a Jewish American moral essayist, and the creator of the Tikun Olam blog, where he has for more than two decades reported on Israel Palestine, the broader geopolitical machinations in and of the Middle East, and how this all intersects at the heart of American politics.

 After an overview of Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, the episode focuses on Richard's recent article: 

As Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan primary, is it the end of AIPAC?

www.newarab.com/opinion/abdul-el-sayed-wins-michigan-primary-it-end-aipac

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Richard Silverstein' Tikun Olam blog: www.richardsilverstein.com

Understanding Israel Palestine archives: kkfi.org/program/understanding-israel-palestine/

Beyond the Walls newsletter: beyondthewalls.substack.com

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Bryce Greene, organizer, student, and writer based in Bloomington, Indiana, joins the show to discuss hasbara. Most Americans have never heard of hasbara"the Israeli governments official global propaganda and influence program"yet they are targeted by it every day. At $730 million, the 2026 budget is more than 11 times what it was in 2023. Hasbara fuses traditional PR with AI-driven digital psy-ops, coordinated social-media manipulation using chatbots"including a $145 million foreign-ministry campaign to influence AI tools like ChatGPT"paid grassroots influencers, and church-targeted initiatives that push Israeli-aligned narratives on congregants cell phones without disclosure. These tactics brainwash the public, suppress free speech, silence dissent, drive hatred of Palestinians, and manufacture the illusion of public consent for pro-Israeli policies. For many, the truth will be shocking"and that shock is overdue. Bryce is a panelist on the voicesfromtheholyland.org film salon on Sunday, August 16.

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Margot Patterson talks to Robin Andersen, professor emerita of communications at Fordham University, about Andersen's new book, The Complicit Lens: U.S. Media Coverage of the Genocide in Gaza. In it, Andersen writes that the mainstream media in the United States abandoned journalistic standards of accuracy and impartiality in its coverage of events following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. Recycling Israeli talking points without adequate scrutiny, U.S. legacy media became stenographers of genocide, she asserts.

Andersen is on the Board of Directors of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, (FAIR), for which she writes regularly. She is the author, or co-author, of a dozen books, including A Century of Media, A Century of War, for which she won th the  Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award.

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For this episode, we return to a 2021 interview with Zahir Zaydani, the penname of a grassroots Palestinian intellectual from the West Bank.

As the news cycle escalates, returning to deeper, historical lines of analytical frameworks closer to the source ensures that we don't let the headlines obscure the forest for the trees. 

But first, some news...

Story 1:

When Ferran Torres scored in the 106th minute to seal Spain’s 1–0 World Cup victory over Argentina, the street celebrations and reactions from Madrid to Buenos Aires—and across Gaza's displaced tent camps—played out as a direct geopolitical clash.

The match followed a complete rupture between Madrid and Tel Aviv. After Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez recognized Palestinian statehood, imposed an arms embargo, and banned Israel-bound military cargo from Spanish ports, Benjamin Netanyahu issued a video statement in Hebrew accusing Spain of "waging a diplomatic war" and warning that Madrid "will pay an immediate price". Netanyahu’s office accused Sánchez of issuing a "genocidal threat," escalating diplomatic hostility to an unprecedented peak.

On the pitch, 19-year-old prodigy Lamine Yamal carried that political weight; his waving of the Palestinian flag during Barcelona's title parade had drawn public condemnation from Israeli officials. Opposing him was Lionel Messi’s Argentina, aligned with Javier Milei’s pro-Israel stance. Messi’s commercial ties to Tel Aviv AI firm OrCam—founded by Israeli military intelligence veterans—and his reliance on Israeli private security details gave Argentina’s team a distinct perceived Israeli alignment.

For some global audiences, Spain’s victory served as a public assertion of Palestinian rights and international law over state-backed & corporatized military intelligence powers of persecution and intimidation.

Story 2: 

Capitol Hill is currently locked in legislative standoff over the future of binational U.S.-Israel security ties.

At issue is Section 219 of the National Defense Authorization Act—derived from the U.S.-Israel FUTURES Act—which creates a Department of War executive agent to hardwire cyber-military intelligence integration between Washington and Tel Aviv. The provision authorizes joint operations in AI target processing, autonomous systems, quantum computing, missile defense and real-time data fusion.  

The bill has now triggered severe deadlock. House leadership blocked a bipartisan amendment by Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie to strip the measure. Shortly after, Senate leadership brought the broader NDAA to a procedural vote, where a 50–46 majority blocked the bill. Opposing lawmakers cite warnings from former intelligence officials that structural integration risks installing surveillance backdoors and bypassing congressional oversight. The legislative battle now moves to conference committee negotiations. 

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You can find the Understanding Israel Palestine archives at its show page at https://kkfi.org/program/understanding-israel-palestine/

and the Beyond the Walls newsletter on Substack at https://beyondthewalls.substack.com

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The life and work of journalist Amy Goodman, host of "Democracy Now," is the subject of award-winning film-makers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's new documentary film, "Steal This Story, Please." Goodman has provided close amd consistent attention to  Gaza and the Occupied West Bank since and even before Oct. 7. She talks about the role her Jewish upbringing has played in highlighting the oppression of Palestinians.  She and Lessin discuss Israel-Palestine, the importance of independent media to that and other critical stories,  and the threat to journalism posed today by media conglomeration, a repressive president, and corporate ownership of the media. "Steal This Story,Please," has won multiple awards in international film festivals.

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Do you want to take action but don't know where to start? Ben Case, organizer, author, and co-founder of Project for Responsive Democracy joins the show to talk about Not on Our Dime Pittsburgh, a local campaign to divest from genocide by direct vote. He details how the effort started, its results, and his advice for people hoping to take action. 

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In this rebroadcast of an earlier episode, Eamon speaks with Hind Shraydeh, Jerusalem-based journalist, about the practice of administrative detention in Palestine and her own husband's ordeal as a prisoner (administrative detainee).

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Acclaimed poet and writer Naomi Shihab Nye discusses her life and work in this conversation that originally aired in March of 2023 on KKFI's Understanding Israel Palestine program.  The daughter of a Palestinian refugee and an American mother, Nye was a teenager living with her family near Jerusalem when the Six-Day War broke out in 1967, causing the family to return to the United States. She reads from her poetry and talks about how her experiences in Palestine affected her and her poetry, giving her a perspective that shapes her to this day. 

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Ben Freeman discusses a provision in the fy 2027 National Defence Authorization Act that would deepen and entrench U.S.-Israeli military cooperation to an unparalleled degree, creating partnerships hard to unravel and gutting Congressional oversight and accountability. An equally alarming provision in the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 2027 would force the U.S to share almost all intelligence about the Middle East with Israel. The president would have to go before Congress with a detailed rationale to suspend this. Section 219 (formerly Section 224) of the fy2027 NDAA is called the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. It and Section 622 of the fy 2027 Intelligence Aithorizatin Act pose risks to U.S. sovereignty and national security. An expert on defence spending and foreign influence operations, Freeman heads the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. 

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The Premeditated Clampdown: Alison Weir on the Calculated Campaign to Protect Israeli State-Sponsored Destruction

In this archival dive from September 2021, Alison Weir, executive director of If Americans Knew, exposes the calculated rollout of weaponized antisemitism laws. Five years later, the true design behind that campaign is undeniable.

Host Jeremy Rothe-Kushel breaks out the tape to reveal how this premeditated legal framework was built specifically for this moment: to preemptively criminalize dissent and provide an impenetrable shield for state violence. We are watching the trap spring shut as these laws are actively deployed to protect the Gaza genocide, push the U.S. into an engineered war with Iran, and mask the NDAA's unprecedented fusion of U.S. and Israeli military, cyber, and data infrastructure.

From local speech codes locking down states like Kansas and Missouri, to Jeremy’s own 2016 Kansas City Library arrest exposing the DHS-Israel intelligence nexus, the machinery to erase our national interests and silence the public was installed right before our noses. When laws are designed to protect atrocities, the truth becomes our only defense.

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Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew and author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel. 

https://israelpalestinenews.org/iak-investigation-international-campaign-is-criminalizing-criticism-of-israel-as-antisemitism/

 https://israelpalestinenews.org/iak-investigation-international-campaign-is-criminalizing-criticism-of-israel-as-antisemitism/#timeline

 https://ifamericansknew.org/download/antisemitismbooklet.pdf

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Understanding Israel Palestine archives: kkfi.org/program/understanding-israel-palestine/

Beyond the Walls newsletter: beyondthewalls.substack.com

https://mondoweiss.net/2016/10/security-arrests-questioner/