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Mamdani’s Panopticon Burden: To Inherit the Hardened and Databased Political Epistemology of the Security State(s)?

By Jeremy Rothe-Kushel Host/Producer, Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls

New York City is a paradox disguised as a metropolis. Above, the glass-and-steel canyons of Midtown reflect the accumulated wealth of empire—the real estate dynasties, the hedge funds, the global insurers. But beneath the asphalt, pulsing through fiber-optic cables and radiating from the microwave dishes atop One Police Plaza, lies a second, silent city: a digital autocracy. The invisible city does not vote. It watches, and targets. It is a “Ring of Steel” that has metastasized from a temporary post-9/11 shield into a permanent, self-governing intelligence agency.

On this broadcast of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls, we descend into the friction point where local governance meets global counter-insurgency. We are joined by Ali Winston, an award-winning investigative journalist whose forensic reporting - including for WIRED, The Guardian, ProPublica, and The Baffler, among many others - regularly exposes police corruption, right-wing extremism, and surveillance.

Our point of departure is Winston’s incendiary new reporting: “Zohran Mamdani Just Inherited the NYPD Surveillance State.” It documents a profound collision: Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, whose platform was built on the promise of Palestinian rights and systemic reform, now holds the keys to a machine built to repress those very ideals.

It is a machine currently operated by Commissioner Jessica Tisch—a scion of the very financial and real estate interests that fought Mamdani’s rise...

--Full article is here: https://open.substack.com/pub/beyondthewalls/p/mamdanis-panopticon-burden

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Ali Winston is an independent investigative journalist and co-author of The Riders Come Out at Night. His new podcast with Popular Front is Big Terror.

https://bleeding-edge.ghost.io/about/

https://www.wired.com/story/welcome-to-mamdanis-surveillance-state/

Listen to the full interview to hear a decoding of the signals of the surveillance state and what it means when the ‘War on Poverty,’ ‘War on Terror’ & ‘War’ on Gaza all come to roost as a permanent counter-political and epistemological insurgency state.

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Jen Marlowe, the founder of Donkeysaddle Projects, and producer of the recent film Severed, joins the show to talk about the crisis of disability in Palestine and particularly in Gaza, where thousands of amputees struggle to get the care in the aftermath of Israel's escalated genocide and its suffocating blockade. 

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The project director on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group, an independent non-profit focused on preventing and resolving deadly conflict,  Max Rodenbeck discusses the Crisis Group's recent report on the Gaza Peace Plan advanced by President Trump. He describes how Trump's 20-point plan developed, its unavoidable ambiguity, the many questions about  the ceasefire's terms and prospects. He notes sustained engagement by other countries, and above all by the United States, is a must if  the plan is to advance beyond Phase I. If it doesn't, Palestinians in Gaza will be left in an indefinite humanitarian nightmare, unable to reconstruct their homes and their lives.

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This is Understanding Israel Palestine: A Beyond the Walls edition. I’m Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, public interest producer, deep political analyst & Jewish American patriot of conscience.

Here in late October 2025, a tentative alleged Gaza so-called peace deal is roughly unfolding—almost exactly two years after the initiation of the October 7th attacks & the subsequent genocidal response. 

But as American allies have recognized an apparently not yet existent & likely non-viable Palestinian state, there largely remains no serious journalistic investigation into the true & full origins of that day’s terror.

Was it really a surprise? Or was it part of a deeper political provocation, escalated by security & intelligence stand-downs and the 'Mass Hannibal Directive'?

We cast back to an AnteDote analysis I pursued with colleague Greg McCarron - recorded less than 2 weeks after the 2023 attacks - to begin examining the obfuscated circumstances, pretext, and plausible intent of 'Israel's 9/11.'

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https://beyondthewalls.substack.com/p/a-return-to-the-deep-politics-of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j27SNo-XD4s

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/the-antedote/episodes/Israels-911–The-Simchat-Torah-Treason-Terror-War-Part-1-e2asqfi/a-aagpb47

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In the fall of 2023, a shady land deal signed a few years earlier between the Armenian Patriarchate and an Australian-Israeli businessman came to light. Despite the Patriarchate's cancellation of the deal on Nov. 1, 2023, Israeli surveyors and settlers pushed ahead with their plans to develop the property into a luxury hotel and permanently alter the character and demography of the Old City's Armenian Quarter. In this episode we speak with Armenian peacebuilder Christopher Huth, Communications Coordinator at the Churches for Middle East Peace office in Washington, DC about the history of the Armenian community in the Holy Land, and the grassroots and international efforts to resist this latest attempt by Israel at Judaizing occupied East Jerusalem, of which the Old City is a part.

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In anticipation of Voices from the Holy Land's upcoming October 19th online film salon "The Israel Occupation Tech Lab," we will hear a segment Jeremy Rothe-Kushel produced in December 2020 and then remixed for August 2021 titled "Cyberweaponry, Kill-Switch Diplomacy and the Technology of Occupation."

To find out about and register for Voices from the Holy Land's October 19th "Israel Occupation Tech Lab" film salon, you can go to

 voicesfromtheholyland.org or Tinyurl.com/VFHL-October2025

"In this week's segment, I preliminarily explore the realm of cybertechnology and cyber weapons 'battle-tested' on Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories and then deployed worldwide. This will work also to begin establishing a foundation for further future explorations into cyber breaches, cyberwar, and what could seen as a geopolitical & defacto Israeli policy; a policy to solidify Israel's realpolitikally absolute international immunity from the effective sanctioning of its asserted official territorial expansion in the West Bank and Golan Heights, and its long-term ongoing abuse of Palestinian human rights:  

This geopolitical strategy could be titled "kill-switch diplomacy", based upon the presence of Israeli military intelligence originated hardware and software delivered via both civilian and military spheres, and deployed into the epicenter of critical infrastructure in countries around the world, with civil society carrots of access to Israeli high technology up front, and an implied threat of Israeli-military intelligence accessed infrastructure kill-switch sticks on the backend.

The recently announced hack of SolarWinds Orion Network management software that was cyber-penetrated in early 2020 via supply side software update delivery into thousands of Information Technology systems around the world, including significant portions of the US government, such as the Pentagon, Secret Service, State Department, Treasury, Commerce and Homeland Security, and vast numbers of Fortune 500 companies, is both resonant and possibly relevant here. 

While we will not delve deeply into it now, I just want to mention that there is industry analysis alleging a Microsoft 365 Office Cloud tie-in to the delivery of the SolarWinds Orion exploit, plausibly tying it to the issue of last year's surprising Trump-pushed Pentagon Cloud Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract to Microsoft over the expected recipient and previous cloud partner of the US government Amazon, led by Trump-critic Jeff Bezos, who was also personally targeted and hacked by Saudis apparently using Israeli NSO group cyberweaponry. 

Microsoft, which has had Research and Design units, facilities and operations heavily based in Israel for many years, in 2015 purchased an Israeli-originated company Adallom, started by 3 veterans of the Israeli NSA Unit 8200 and cyber entrepreneurial special forces-style super-elite Talpiot Program with Series A investment funding from the "Bill Gates of Israel" and godfather of it's modern cybertechnology industry, Zohar Zisapel of the RAD Group.  The next year, and in the lead up to the development of the Pentagon Cloud project announcement and then contract award, Microsoft put Adallom in the place of and rebranded it as Microsoft Cloud App Security.

And while the SolarWinds hack, described as possibly the most substantial hack in US history giving the exploiters of the intrusion "God door access", has been publicly and preliminarily ascribed to Russian SVR advanced persistent threat cyber intelligence units, as this show's earlier interview with New York Times best-selling author and journalist Seth Abramson showed, Russia and Israel worked in cyber purpose together in relation to

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Jurist Richard Falk discusses the double game being played by some of the European countries recently recognizing Palestine as a state in a show of concern over Israel's war of annihilation in Gaza. Their condemnation of Israel is largely symbolic, with many states continuing to do business as usual with Israel. With Western countries failing to uphold international law, Falk says civic activism is necessary to hold leaders to account. He notes the two-state solution has long since ceased to be practicable and warns that any peace plan that excludes Palestinian participation will not produce a durable peace. Falk is professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Occupied Palestine and president of the Gaza Tribunal, an independent inquiry into British complicty in Israeli war crimes.

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From the People's Conference for Palestine 2025: Over the past year, we have seen a shift in public consciousness: from demanding an immediate ceasefire to demanding a full arms embargo on Israel. Mass protests have erupted in the ports of Morocco, French dockworkers have refused to handle military cargo destined to Israel, and Spain has passed a policy to enact an arms embargo against Israel. This panel brings together speakers from across different geographies to discuss the momentum behind grassroots arms embargo campaigns; the strategic role of labor, civil society and state forces; and most importantly, how we can enact a peoples arms embargo.  

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Amidst the flames, ruin & human destruction currently being escalated by the Israeli military in Gaza City and the UN's finally emergent declaratory analysis of genocide, a more than century-old haunting logic has destructively unfolded.

In the US, the political fallout from the cloaking & cloaked wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk has accelerated Executive & Legislative moves to crush dissent, providing a stark domestic backdrop to the massive moral crisis still being perpetrated abroad.

Historian Zachary J. Foster of Palestine Nexus joins Jeremy Rothe-Kushel to begin connecting this genocidal catastrophe to its foundational blueprint, exposing the unsettling and often antisemitic history of Zionism's architects: Herzl & Jabotinsky among them. Was it inevitable that a movement forged in embraced persecution & auto-antisemitism combined with a highly cynical alliance with authoritarians & genocidaires lead to the violent destruction of Palestine?

Join us for a critical conversation as we look to Understand Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls.

Zachary Foster:

https://x.com/_zachfoster

https://palestinenexus.com/

Jeremy Rothe-Kushel:

https://x.com/jeremywrk

https://beyondthewalls.substack.com

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Emmaia Gelman, director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, discusses Zionism's relationship to racism and colonialism, the threat to Americans' First Amendment rights posed by the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism which the Anti-Defamation League and other Zionist groups are promoting, and how Zionism is evolving into an arm of American fascism under the Trump administration.