As a part of our series on the first intifada, as its 30th anniversary approaches, this episode features a conversation with Mubarak Awad, the Palestinian-American who in the mid-1980s returned to Jerusalem, determined to lead a revolution, to get the Palestinians to shift from armed struggle to nonviolence. Awad got in trouble with both the Israeli authorities, which ended up deporting him, and with the PLO, which at first viewed him as a sellout, a collaborator and a traitor, but ended up embracing and adopting many of the methods he advocated. 

Awad is the founder and director of Nonviolence International 

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The U.S. State Department notified the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) late in November 2017 that it may shut its mission to the United States in Washington DC. The move sparked livid reactions by the Palestinian leadership and raised many eyebrows among Washington's policy community. Why would an administration that says it wants to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace act to alienate one of the parties it wants to bring to the negotiating table? Are the administration's hands truly tied by congressional legislation on this issue? 

To answer these and other questions, PeaceCast hosted Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, and the former director of policy and government relations of Americans for Peace Now. 

Check out FMEP's web site: https://fmep.org/ and Lara's explainer of the crisis: https://fmep.org/blog/2017/11/understanding-plo-mission-crisis-key-documents/

Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel: 1917-2017 is Ian Black's new book on a hundred years of conflict. 

Ian Black is a veteran British journalist, who over his many years of reporting has focused on the Arab world, Israel, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He recently retired from the Guardian, where for many years he was the Middle East editor, and is now He is now a visiting senior fellow at the Middle East Centre in London.

We spoke about his disciplined writing style, about the dynamics of the conflict, about important moments along the timeline of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and about hope. 

Danny Seidemann is one of the world’s leading experts on Jerusalem, on Israeli-Palestinian relations there and on the Jerusalem-related requirements for a future Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

On November 14th 2017, we hosted Danny at Americans for Peace Now’s office in Washington to talk about the current situation in Jerusalem and about the prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Danny is the director of Terrestrial Jerusalem http://t-j.org.il/

Boycotts divestment and sanctions (BDS) are a tool used against Israel by activists worldwide either to compel the government of Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip or to punish it for violations of Palestinians’ human rights. Some who support BDS do it because they oppose the very existence of Israel – not just its occupation of territories captured in 1967 – and seek ways to damage Israel as a state.

Americans for Peace Now opposes this blunt tool for various reasons, and encourages people to engage economically and otherwise with Israel. However, we do support boycotting West Bank settlements, which we believe are a major obstacle to peace. We also believe that people have a First Amendment right to express their positions on Israel through boycotts, if they so choose, even if we don’t endorse the action.

We are therefore gratified to have the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on our side in opposing the avalanche of anti-BDS that are being adopted both on the Federal and state level. We oppose them because they conflate Israel and the West Bank settlements, and like the ACLU we also oppose them because they violate the basic civil rights of Americans.

To discuss how the ACLU is opposing these laws, we hosted for a briefing call Attorney Brian Hauss, who leads the American Civil Liberties Union’s litigation on this issue.

For more – a lot more – see here: http://peacenow.org/page.php?name=boycott-occupation#.WfyU42hSyUk