Professor Menachem Mautner is a Professor of Comparative Civil Law and Jurisprudence at the Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law. In this episode he explains why he wrote two recently-published books that are unrelated to his academic expertise: a dystopian novel that predicts the devastation that Mautner believes will lead to Middle East peace, and a book analyzing the crisis of Israeli Liberalism.
Professor Nurit Shnabel is a psychologist at Tel Aviv University, who researches the way in which empathy can diminish the sense of exclusive victimhood that each side feels in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
Some of her findings could be leveraged by leaders and other members of both societies to help find a way toward peace and reconciliation.
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Our one hundredth episode(!) coincides with the end-of-year holidays, a time of positivity and hope. To talk about positivity and hope in the context of Israeli-Palestinian relations and Jewish-Arab relations we are hosting Dina Kraft. Her monthly podcast, The Branch documents Israelis and Palestinians and Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel forging meaningful relationships with each other in a complex reality.
Dina is a veteran journalist, currently based in Tel Aviv, reporting for both Haaretz and The Christian Science Monitor. Her writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic. She is the former Israel correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Kraft was formerly an Associated Press correspondent based in Jerusalem and Johannesburg. She has reported throughout Africa, as well as from Pakistan, Jordan, Tunisia, Russia and Ukraine.
Link to The Branch: www.hadassah.org/thebranch
Link to the latest episode of The Branch: https://www.hadassah.org/multi-media/podcasts/branch-episodes/episode-16-the-tour-guides.html
Link to our December 2017 conversation with Elias Zananiri (PeaceCast’s first episode): https://peacenow.libsyn.com/-1-partner-and-outpost-expert-interviews-with-elias-zananiri-and-talia-sasson
This episode, an edited recording of a conversation with Palestinian pollster and social scientist Khalil Shikaki is another recording from APN’s 2019 study tour to Israel and the West Bank.
We met with Dr. Shikaki at his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah on November 12th. He reviewed trends in Palestinian public opinion in the past decade and offered some predictions of possible future scenarios in Palestinian society based on these trends.
Dr. Marwan Muasher, currently the Amman-based Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was Jordan's foreign minister, deputy prime minister, information minister, Jordan's ambassador to the United States and its first ambassador to Israel. He was deeply involved in the peace process, and helped compose the Arab Peace Initiative.
We met him in Amman as part of Americans for Peace Now's study tour to the region.
This episode is an edited down version of our conversation with him. Due to technical difficulties, questions asked by members of our group could not be recorded. Some of Dr. Muasher's comments are in reply to questions that are not in this recording, which sometimes makes his remarks a bit difficult to follow.
Dr. Muasher, recorded on November 5th 2019, refers to meetings that our group was to have the next day (in his words "tomorrow") with Jordanian government officials.
With any questions or comments, please email onir@peacenow.org
Avner Gvaryahu is the executive director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of veteran soldiers who have served in the Israeli military since the start of the Second Intifada and have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories.
APN’s Debra Shushan and Ori Nir spoke with Avner on October 30th, 2019.
Breaking the Silence’s web site: https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/
Avner’s Twitter handle: @AGvaryahu
This episode features the panel discussion that Americans for Peace Now sponsored at the J Street National conference in Washington DC on October 27th, 2019.
Included are the full presentations of the three panelists -- former Palestinian ambassador to Washington Maen Areikat, Peace Now's director Shaqued Morag, and Yesh Din director Lior Amihai -- well as the introduction by Debra Shushan, APN’s policy and government relations director.
An edited down recording of a panel that we held on Capitol Hill on October 26th 2019, featuring two representatives of our Israeli sister organization, Peace Now (Shalom Achshav), Israel’s peace movement.
Peace Now’s Shaqued Morag and Brian Reeves spoke about the danger to Israel that West Bank annexation poses – both the de-facto annexation that is being advanced every day on the ground in the West Bank and the de-jure annexation that Israel’s right-wing government is vowing to advance.
Their talk was a window into the current agenda and the emphases of Israel’s peace movement, as well as the challenges that the Israeli peace camp faces.
This episode features a conversation with Menachem Klein, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Bar Ilan University, who specializes in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is the author of several books on the topic. His new books is Arafat and Abbas: Portraits of Leadership in a State Postponed.
When I heard Yuli Tamir, one of the icons and the leading intellectuals of Israel’s moderate left, expressing optimism at a panel discussion in Washington, I rushed to her with a recorder and cajoled her to elaborate about her optimism.
Yuli Tamir is one of the founders of Israel’s peace movement, Peace Now. She is a former minister in the Israeli government and a former Knesset member. She is a professor of philosophy and now the President of the Shenkar College near Tel Aviv.
This episode features a presentation that Nizar Farsakh and Ori Nir gave at Ithaca College on September 17th. The talk was an attempt to make the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more accessible to young people by weaving personal narratives of an Israeli-American and a Palestinian-American into the collective national narratives of Israelis and Palestinians.
Nizar and Ori are happy to take this show on the road. We would love to come to other university campuses, synagogues churches – any institution that would like to invite us. If you are interested (or with any questions and comments), please write to Ori at onir@peacenow.org .
In this special episode of PeaceCast, APN’s Debra Shushan and Ori Nir are the interviewees rather than the interviewers on the Bill Press Pod. A co-production.
With any comments or questions, please email onir@peacenow.org
Amer Zahr is a Palestinian-American stand-up comedian, who for the fourth year in a row is producing One Thousand and One Laughs, a stand-up comedy festival in the West Bank joins PeaceCast from Ramallah.
He talked about humor and his use of humor as a tool to help fellow Palestinians resist the occupation and generate change.
Zahr’s web site: www.amerzahr.com
Zahr’s blog: http://www.civilarab.com
Erez Maggor, an Israeli social scientist who specializes in the history and the political economics of the West Bank settlement, says that the impetus for the West Bank settlement policies of the Likud government in the late 1970s and 1980s is largely misunderstood.
What chiefly pushed the Israeli government to build across the Green Line, he says, was not an ideological Greater Israel zeal but rather a demand by the Likud’s low-income electoral base for affordable housing.
Maggor is a doctoral candidate at New York University’s Department of Sociology.
His article on this subject was recently published in Israel’s Hazman Hazeh magazine (Hebrew)
Maggor co-edited the book Normalizing Occupation, The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements (2017)
With ideas or feedback for PeaceCast, please write to onir@peacenow.org
On June 14th 2009, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a major policy speech at Bar Ilan University, in which he endorsed the two-state solution.
On its face, it was a revolutionary statement. Until then, Netanyahu was the most visibly identified Israeli politician with opposition to Palestinian statehood.
Today, ten years later, it is clear that Netanyahu’s political worldview did not undergo a metamorphosis. Rather, it was a rhetorical ploy to deflect US pressure under President Obama.
A new article by Dr. Guy Ziv of American University documents and analyzes what led up to the landmark Bar Ilan Speech, and what happened in the past decade to Netanyahu’s stated endorsement of an idea that has always been anathema to him.
This episode features our annual The Dove event, an evening of stories that inspire hope for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Americans for Peace Now partners with New Story Leadership to produce the Dove. NSL is a Washington-based organization that brings to DC a small group of young Israelis and Palestinians to provide them with leadership tools needed to create social, economic and political transformation toward peace between the two peoples.
Write to Ori Nir with feedback or ideas: onir@peacenow.org
To support The Dove go here: https://www.classy.org/give/238969/#!/donation/checkout
To support Americans for Peace Now: https://peacenow.org/donate
What are the settlers doing in the East Jerusalem village of Silwan? How do their actions and the policy of the Netanyahu government impact the Palestinians living there? What is the impact of the Trump administration’s collusion with the settlers and with Netanyahu’s government regarding East Jerusalem impact prospect for peace? More broadly, what are current trends in East Jerusalem, and how do they effect a possible two-state solution? On July 11th 2019, APN hosted Hagit Ofran and Daniel Seidemann for a briefing call to explore these questions.
Hagit Ofran is the co-director of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project. Widely-recognized as Israel’s foremost expert on a full range of issues related to West Bank settlements and settlement-related developments in East Jerusalem, Hagit’s work includes traveling daily throughout the West Bank, examining aerial photos and browsing official Israeli documents. The “Settlement Watch” project serves as a resource for Israeli politicians, diplomats, international media organizations, and first and foremost – for the Israeli public. Ofran has been chosen by Haaretz newspaper as one of “66 Israeli women you should know,” women “breaking barriers, defying stereotypes and wielding influence.”
Daniel Seidemann has been a practicing attorney specializing in legal and public issues in East Jerusalem for over three decades. He has also worked on issues and cases related to government and municipal policies and practices in Jerusalem, representing Israeli and Palestinian residents of Jerusalem before the statutory Planning Boards regarding development issues. Danny is the founder and director of Terrestrial Jerusalem an Israeli NGO that works to identify and track the full spectrum of developments in Jerusalem that could impact either the political process or permanent status options, destabilize the city or spark violence, or create humanitarian crises.
Eran Nissan is the Project Coordinator at Israel's Peace Now movement, the Israeli sister-organization of Americans for Peace Now. This summer, he is one of eight fellows participating in the annual summer program of Washington's New Story Leadership (NSL), and interning at APN.
In this conversation, Eran tells the story of his becoming a political activist, following his service as a combat soldier at the Israel Defense Force.
Eran and his fellow NSL scholars will be featured in a subsequent episode of PeaceCast next month, when we live-record this year's edition of The Dove, our annual storytelling event. Stay tuned.
This special episode features a visit to the newly launched Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington DC.
I was joined by my daughter Noa Nir, who participated in interviewing Nizar Farsakh, the chair of the Board of the museum.
A link to the museum’s web site: https://mpp-dc.org/
With any questions, comments or ideas, please write to me at onir@peacenow.org
Donate to APN: https://peacenow.org/donate
Ameer Fakhouri, a Palestinian citizen of Israel is active in efforts to generate a closer Jewish-Arab political partnership in Israel going into the September elections and beyond.
A lawyer by trade and a scholar specializing in conflict resolution, he is the director of the Research Center at Neve Shalom, Wahat al-Salam, the cooperative Jewish-Arab community halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, which recently published a new book titled “Attainable Alliances,” edited by Fakhouri.
This episode features the most significant trend among the progressive camp in Israel today: Examining the potential for political cooperation between Jewish and Arab citizens of the state to generate change.
This special episode of PeaceCast is produced in partnership with T’ruah, the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.
It features six stories told by rabbinical students at a recent story telling evening in Israel, at the end of their one-year T’ruah program there.
With any feedback, comments or ideas, please email Ori Nir at onir@peacenow.org
Non-Israelis often find it surprising or counter-intuitive that Israel’s top brass, its senior security officials are consistently more dovish than its political leadership. For years, Israeli security officials – retired officials publicly and serving ones privately -- have been the most solid proponents of the two-state solution. Anecdotally, this was a well-known fact.
Now there is a scientific study that shows just how true this truism is. This episode features Dr. Guy Ziv of the School of International Service at American University, and Benjamin L. Shaver, a master’s student at the University of Chicago’s Committee on International Relations. Their new study shows that some 85% of Israel’s leading retired generals, spymasters and other senior security officials support a peace agreement based on the establishment of an independent Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel in peace and security.
A link to the study (behind a paywall): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2019.1614790
A link to a Q&A with Dr. Ziv about the study: https://www.american.edu/sis/news/20190524-a-near-consensus-israels-security-establishment-and-the-two-state-solution.cfm
Write to me at onir@peacenow.org
A speech I gave at the Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day ceremony in Washington on May 7th.
Dov Waxman is a Professor of Political Science, International Affairs, and Israel Studies and the Director of the Middle East Studies program at Northeastern University.
On the day of its official release, we spoke with Dov about his new book The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know.
This episode’s guest is Khaled Elgindy, a scholar at the Brookings institution who specializes in Palestinian affairs. He is the author of a new book Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump, which was published on April 4th, 2019.
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