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.