Unsettled

There’s a lot going on right now in Israel-Palestine. Right-wing Jewish Israeli mobs are attacking Palestinians in cities like Lod and Haifa. Israel is bombing Gaza. Hamas is firing rockets into Israel. Just last week, Israeli police were attacking worshippers inside Al Aqsa mosque. This round of violence began in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

A number of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah are facing imminent eviction from their homes, to be replaced by Jewish settlers. Palestinian demonstrators in Sheikh Jarrah were met with overwhelming force from Israeli police. In this episode, Max Freedman speaks to Rasha Budeiri, whose parents are right in the middle of all this: they live in Sheikh Jarrah, in one of the homes threatened with displacement.

Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

• Spotify playlist: Unsettled essentials: May 2021
• “Palestinians fear loss of family homes as evictions loom” (Joseph Krauss, Associated Press, 5/9/21)
• “Tax-exempt U.S. nonprofits fuel Israeli settler push to evict Palestinians” (Alex Kane, The Intercept, 5/14/21)

Born and raised in Jerusalem, Palestine, Rasha Budeiri is a mother of two girls; ages 14 and 12. Rasha holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications and Sociology from Birzeit University in the West Bank. She worked with Palestinian communities through her employment at the United Nations for the Relief and Welfare of Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in Jerusalem. After several years of working in the media and NGO fields in Jerusalem, she moved to Kuwait and continued to build on the knowledge and expertise in the communications and research fields. Rasha now resides in Ottawa, Canada.

In 1948, Rasha’s grandparents (Fouad and Badria Al-Dajani) were forcibly displaced from their house in Al-Baq'aa, south of Jerusalem by the occupying Israeli forces. As was the case for many Palestinian refugees, they moved to Jordan, then Syria, and back to Jerusalem where they lived in rental homes until 1956.

Through an agreement between the Jordanian Government and UNRWA in 1956, Rasha’s grandparents, along with 27 other Palestinian refugee families, were offered housing units in Karm Al-Jaouni, Sheikh Jarrah. In return, these families’ refugee status and benefits were revoked.

Raising their six kids at that house, Rasha’s grandfather passed away in 1977 and her grandmother in 1992. Their legacy and love to the place was passed down to her aunts, uncles, and grandchildren. Israeli forces are now in the process of confiscating Rasha’s grandparents' house and evicting her parents, who currently live in it.

When it comes to peace in Israel-Palestine, the two-state solution has been the party line for much of the international community for a long time. But lately, many experts and activists have been saying the two-state solution is dead. If that's true, what’s the best path forward?

According to Palestinian entrepreneur Sam Bahour, it’s time to try confederation. In this episode, Ilana Levinson talks to Sam about why he believes a confederal model is best for Israelis and Palestinians.

Unsettled is produced by Ilana Levinson, Emily Bell, and Max Freedman. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business consultant from Ramallah/Al-Bireh in Occupied Palestine. He is a frequent independent political commentator and is co-editor of “Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians” (1994). He blogs at ePalestine.ps. @SamBahour

• "Want Israeli-Palestinian Peace? Try Confederation" (Sam Bahour and Bernard Avishai, The New York Times, 2/12/21)
• Sam Bahour on Blogspot
• Sam Bahour on YouTube
• "J Street finally wants the US to think beyond the two-state solution" (Arianna Skibell, +972 Magazine,  4/16/21)

For the past year, as the coronavirus pandemic spread across the world, home has become an especially important source of shelter and safety. While some governments have responded to pressure from activists and paused evictions, Palestinians in East Jerusalem still face uncertainty.

That’s the case with the Sumarin family, who live just outside Jerusalem’s Old City in the Palestinian village of Silwan. The Jewish National Fund and the Elad organization have long been promoting Jewish settlement in the area — often at the expense of the Palestinian residents.

In April, after a decades-long legal battle, an Israeli court will finally decide whether the Sumarin family will be forcibly evicted from their home. On this episode, we teamed up with the +972 Podcast to tell the story of the Sumarin family and their struggle to remain in the house they’ve lived in for generations.

This episode was produced by Ilana Levinson, Max Freedman, and Emily Bell. Music from Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Henriette Chacar and Edo Konrad at +972; Asaf Calderon, Uri Blau, Ayat Yaghmour, Hagit Ofran, and Leena Dallasheh.

• Emek Shaveh website
• Timeline of the Sumarin eviction case (Peace Now, 9/23/19)
• Common Ground: The politics of archaeology in Jerusalem (Rachel Poser, Harper’s Magazine, September 2019)
• In Search of King David’s Lost Empire (Ruth Margalit, The New Yorker, 6/29/20)
• Palestinian family faces latest setback to save Jerusalem home (Aseel Jundi, Middle East Eye, 7/2/20)
• Documents reveal decades of close cooperation between JNF and Elad (Uri Blau, +972 Magazine, 10/19/20)
• JNF Plan to Expand Settlements Could 'Endanger Its Existence,' Jewish Groups Warn (Allison Kaplan Sommer, Haaretz, 2/15/21)
• Update on the Sumarin case before the Supreme Court (Peace Now, 4/6/21)

Israel is about to hold its fourth parliamentary election in the past two years. The last time Israelis went to the polls, in March 2020, the Joint List — a coalition of four Arab Palestinian political parties — won an unprecedented 15 seats in the Knesset. But since then, the Joint List has fractured. Why? And what does this mean for the future of Palestinian politics?

Producer Max Freedman speaks with Anan Maalouf, former chief of staff and policy advisor to Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint List and leader of its largest party, Hadash-al Jabhah.

Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Amjad Iraqi.

Photo: Makbula Nassar; election night in Nazareth, March 2015.

Anan A. Maalouf is an Urban Planner and a Ph.D. student of Urban and Public Policy at Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment (The New School). He earned his M.Sc. of Urban and Regional Planning from the Technion IIT (2018), his thesis focused on the relationship between urban forms and technological alterations. Before moving to New York, Maalouf served as Nazareth Mayor’s Assistant (2012-2013), and as MP Ayman Odeh Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor (2015-2018). Anan works currently at The Arab Center for Alternative Planning (ACAP) and is a teaching assistant at The New School and at Barnard College.

• “The Only Left That Is Left” (Joshua Leifer, Jewish Currents, 3/5/2020)
• “The Beginning of Breakdown” (Joshua Leifer, Jewish Currents, 3/31/2020)
• Arabs in Israel Split over Homosexuality (Dima Abumaria, The Media Line, 7/24/2020)
• How Israel’s Netanyahu helped break apart the Joint List (Jonathan Cook, Middle East Eye, 2/9/2021)
• As Arab consensus splinters, wangling for community’s vote sparks hard questions (Haviv Rettig Gur, Times of Israel, 2/12/2021)
• Israel’s Islamists Side with Netanyahu (Joshua Leifer, Jewish Currents, 2/16/2021)

“So it becomes this dance of cameras where the whole goal of the Palestinian camera is to document a human rights violation, to take back some kind of power. And the goal of the Israeli camera is to block that power from being taken through vision.” — Liat Berdugo

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, has been running its Camera Distribution Project since the early 2000s. The project distributes video camcorders to Palestinians, training them in documentation, and building an archive of citizen-recorded video. These videos cover a wide-range of topics, including settler violence, IDF night searches and demolitions.  How do visuals disrupt historical narratives of conflicts? What does it mean for someone to later on witness preserved traces of events? And in the context of Israel-Palestine, what impact does a camera actually have in the face of entrenched power dynamics? 

Producer Emily Bell interviews Liat Berdugo, author of the recently released book, The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East: Videography, Aesthetics, and Politics in Israel and Palestine.

Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Video courtesy of the B’Tselem video archive.

Liat Berdugo is an artist and writer whose work investigates embodiment, labor, and militarization in relation to capitalism, technological utopianism, and the Middle East. Her work has been exhibited and screened at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), MoMA PS1 (New York), Transmediale (Berlin), V2_Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), and The Wrong Biennale (online), among others. Her writing appears in Rhizome, Temporary Art Review, Real Life, Places, and The Institute for Network Cultures, among others, and her latest book, The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East, was released from Bloomsbury in 2021. She is one half of the art collective, Anxious to Make, and is the co-founder of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art series. Berdugo received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Brown University. She is currently an assistant professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco. Berdugo lives and works in Oakland, CA.

• The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East: Videography, Aesthetics and Politics in Israel and Palestine
• B’Tselem Camera Project Archive
• Spectral Power (Real Life, 8/22/17)
• Five Broken Cameras
• Eyal Weizman

In recent years, a term has emerged in leftist activist circles: “progressive except for Palestine,” or “PEP” for short. It describes a person whose values and political leanings are consistent across issues of racial justice, homophobia, healthcare, immigration and more—but on Palestine, they are either silent, or actively hostile to a progressive point of view. It’s a worldview that permeates media spaces, academia, and Washington. What causes the progressive exception for Palestine, and are we seeing a shift on the horizon? In this episode of Unsettled, producer Ilana Levinson interviews Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick, authors of the forthcoming book, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics.

Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

Marc Lamont Hill is an award-winning journalist and the Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions at Temple University. He is the author of multiple books, including the New York Times bestselling Nobody, and co-author (with Mitchell Plitnick) of Except for Palestine (The New Press). He lives in Philadelphia.

Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy and is a frequent writer on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, is the former vice president at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, director of the U.S. Office of B’Tselem, and co-director of Jewish Voice for Peace. The co-author (with Marc Lamont Hill) of Except for Palestine (The New Press), he lives in Maryland.

• Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
• Marc Lamont Hill fired from CNN after his speech on Israel draws outrage (NBC, 11/30/18)
• Republicans and Democrats Grow Even Further Apart in Views of Israel, Palestinians (Pew Research Center, 1/23/18)

President Joe Biden campaigned on the idea that he'd bring the country back to “normal.” But that message has raised some eyebrows, as many have pointed out that America’s “normal” doesn’t necessarily mean good, or right.  In this episode of Unsettled, producer Ilana Levinson interviews Lara Friedman, President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, about what is considered normal U.S. foreign policy on Israel-Palestine, the relationships with Israeli and Palestinian leaders that Biden inherits from former President Donald Trump, and what we can expect from Biden given his record as Vice President in the Obama administration.

Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

GUEST BIO:

Lara Friedman is the President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. With more than 25 years working in the Middle East foreign policy arena, Lara is a leading authority on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, with particular expertise on the Israeli-Arab conflict, Israeli settlements, Jerusalem, and the role of the U.S. Congress. She is published widely in the U.S. and international press and is regularly consulted by members of Congress and their staffs, by Washington-based diplomats, by policy-makers in capitals around the world, and by journalists in the U.S. and abroad. 

RESOURCES:

• Foundation for Middle East Peace
• Biden may offer some key opportunities for Palestinians and their allies (Noura Erakat, Washington Post, 11/17/20)
• Biden’s Israel-Palestine policy: A chance to restore and reset (Lara Friedman, Foundation for Middle East Peace, 11/12/20)
• Bill to define anti-Semitism passes state House (Wissam Melhem, AZ Mirror, 3/9/20)
• ACLU Statement on Senate Introduction of 'Anti-Semitism Awareness Act'  (5/23/18)
• How the Israeli flag became a symbol for white nationalists (Ben Lorber, +972, 1/22/21)
• Israel announces new settler homes, risking Biden's anger (Joseph Krauss, ABC News, 1/22/21)

Samiha Hureini is a university student from the village of a-Tuwani, in the South Hebron Hills. She is one of the founders of Youth of Sumud, a group of young people who came together to defend their community in the wake of a dramatic direct action (chronicled in the very first episode of Unsettled).

In this interview with producer Max Freedman, Samiha explains how Youth of Sumud has maintained a Palestinian presence in the caves of Sarura despite the constant threat of violence from soldiers and settlers, and the price that she and her family have paid for their activism.

• Youth of Sumud: Facebook, Instagram
• Center for Jewish Nonviolence: Facebook, Instagram
• “The Story of Sumud” (Unsettled, 8/4/17)
• “Palestinian children travel dangerous route to school in At-Tuwani” (DCI Palestine, 9/10/13)
• Yuval Abraham, “He grabbed his generator. They shot him in the neck” (+972, 1/3/21)
• Amira Hass and Hagar Sheizaf, “The Village Where Palestinians Are Completely Powerless” (Haaretz, 1/5/21)
• Twitter thread on Sami Hureini’s recent arrest (1/9/21)

"Five years ago, Jeremy Corbyn brought Palestine solidarity politics into the heart of the largest left-wing party in Europe. And [his leadership has] ended with criticisms of the occupation being untenable in British politics." How did this happen?

The unlikely election of Jeremy Corbyn to lead the Labour Party in 2015 appeared to signal the renewed political viability of both socialism and Palestine solidarity. But under Corbyn's leadership, Labour was consumed by a series of anti-semitism scandals, with disastrous results. Was the charge of anti-semitism simply a weapon in Labour's long-running factional conflict, or is the British left irredeemably anti-semitic? What can Americans learn from Corbyn's mistakes?

Producer Max Freedman talks to Joshua Leifer, assistant editor at Jewish Currents and author of "The Tragedy of Jeremy Corbyn."

CREDITS

Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

Joshua Leifer is an editor, writer, and translator. He is currently an assistant editor at Jewish Currents. He was previously an associate editor at Dissent, and before that, at +972 Magazine. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, n+1, Jacobin, Haaretz, and elsewhere. 

REFERENCES

• Joshua Leifer, “The Tragedy of Jeremy Corbyn” (Jewish Currents, November 27, 2020)
• Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn (2020)
• J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (1996)
• Nathan Thrall, “How the Battle Over Israel and Anti-Semitism Is Fracturing American Politics” (The New York Times Magazine, March 28, 2019)
• Mari Cohen, “Jewish Federations Urge Biden to Promote Controversial Definition of Antisemitism” (Jewish Currents, December 10, 2020)

When we first pitched our documentary "The shepherd and the settler" to be part of the "Rulebreakers" series on the BBC World Service, we started with a question: What are the rules, exactly, where Palestinian shepherds and Israeli settlers live side-by-side? Who makes the rules, and who’s breaking them?

To better understand the legal landscape in the occupied West Bank, we turned to Noura Erakat: a human rights attorney, a scholar of law in the Middle East, and the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.

Unsettled is produced by Asaf Calderon, Emily Bell, Ilana Levinson, and Max Freedman.