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Dr. Noam Perry of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) joined the show this week to discuss his organization's research into the business of military occupation and apartheid in Palestine/Israel and the USA. Since Israel began assaulting Gaza after Oct. 7, the AFSC has put together a comprehensive resource on their website detailing the weapons companies fueling Israel's genocidal campaign. This resource is part of a larger investigative project detailing the intersection of the weapons, prison, border, and surveillance industries. Dr. Perry concludes by detailing steps people can take to avoid being financially complicit in human rights violations and state violence.

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Mideast expert Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC,  discusses how U.S. militarism is raising the risk of a wider Mideast war, what more the United Nations could do to press Israel and the United States to adopt a ceaefire in Gaza, and the suit South Africa has filed at the International Court of Justice charging Israel with the crime of genocide. At the Institute for Policy Studies, Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project, focused on U.S. mllitarism, the Middle East, and the United Nations. She is a long-time analyst and commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the author and editor of 11 books on U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East. Her popular book Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict was recently updated and is now in its 7th edition.

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The Rev. Dr. Robert Smith discusses his scholarly work on Christian Zionism and his activism for Palestinian liberation. An enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and professor history, Smith lived in Palestine for several years working for the University of Notre Dame before returning to Turtle Island/United States. Our conversation began with a discussion about the intersection between Smith's work in Palestine and his Indigenous identity before we defined and dissected the phenomenon of Christian Zionism. Smith then articulated the tenets of Palestinian liberation theology, the most substantial critique of Christian Zionism. Finally, we discussed the broader frame of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance to it.

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Historian Rashid Khalidi discusses the Israel-Hamas war in the context of the past century of Israeli settler colonialism and Palestinian resistance.  The current war has seen Israel push Palestinians in Gaza from the north to the south and is another step in a process of ethnic cleansing and depopulation long pursued by Zionist forces and the Israeli state, with the support first of Great Britain and later the United States. This episode repeats one aired 6 weeks ago

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After over 11 years working as a Director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, Josh Paul recently resigned from the State Department. In this role he was responsible for U.S. defense diplomacy, security assistance, and arms transfers. He joined the show this week to discuss the pipeline of US weapons being sent to Israel. While the letter of the law has perhaps been followed regarding these arms transfers, Josh argues that its spirit has not. Congress is failing to perform its oversight role and hold the Biden administration accountable. We discussed the laws that are supposed to govern the transfer of weapons, namely the Arms Export Control Act, the Leahy Laws, and the Foreign Assistance Act and their circumvention by the Biden Administration. We closed by discussing the larger lessons that the US should draw from its own experience fighting the Global War on Terror.

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Three experts on the Holocaust discuss the uses and abuses of Holocaust memory in the context of current events in Israel/Palestine and the war in Gaza. They note that since Oct. 7 the Holocaust has been invoked by Israeli leaders with accompanying calls for mass violence against Palestinians and a war in Gaza that has now killed close to 20,000 people.   The conversation was convened in November by Jewish Currents magazine and the Diaspora Alliance. The historians are Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and the author of Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine; Raz Segal,  an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide; and Jelena Subotić, the author of Red Star, Yellow Star: Holocaust Remembrance After Communism. Moderator Linda Kinstler is the author of Come to this Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends and a contributing writer to Jewish Currents.

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Professor Barry Trachtenberg, the Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University, talks about turmoil on college campuses over the Israel-Hamas war, critical concerns about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, why the Holocaust is not a justification for oppression, and why he thinks arguments for Jewish exceptionalism are flawed and not in Jews’ best interests.

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Tala Nasir, lawyer at Addameer, Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association sheds light on the issue of the Palestinian political prisoners. Addameer, the Arabic word for conscience, is a Palestinian non-governmental, civil institution that works to support Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli and Palestinian prisons. In the first half of our interview, we talked about the Palestinian prisoners being released by Israel as a part of the recently-negotiated deal between Israel and Hamas. In the second half our interview, we turned towards the broader legal architecture of Israel’s system of military rule in the occupied Palestinian territories. We also highlighted the individual stories of some of the Palestinian political prisoners.

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Khaled Elgindy, director of the program on Israeli-Palestinian Affairs at the Middle East Institute, discusses mounting violence in the West Bank, the crack-down on free speech inside Israel, the ongoing war and looming prospect of starvation in Gaza and a shambolic U.S. policy, characterized as a run-away train with no brakes and no destination.

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Historian Rashid Khalidi discusses  the current Israel-Hamas war in the context of the past century of Israeli settler colonialism and Palestinian resistance.  The current war has seen Israel push Palestinians in Gaza from the north to the south and is another step in a process of ethnic cleansing and depopulation long pursued by Zionist forces and the state of Israel, supported first by Great Britain and then by the United States. An advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid Conference,  the Columbia University professor says the 30-year failed U.S.-sponsored  peace process opened the door to Hamas. While the United States has brokered peace beetween Israel and Arab countries, it  has never made resolving the Israeli-Palestinian a strategic concern and has undermined peace by its one-sided support for Israel.