Grant Rumley is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank, where he focuses on Palestinian politics. Amir Tibon is the newly-appointed bureau chief of Israel's Haaretz newspaper.
Together, they authored a new biography of Mahmoud Abbas, (Abu Mazen) the President of the Palestinian Authority and the Chairman of the PLO.
Their book, The Last Palestinian: The Rise and Reign of Mahmoud Abbas, was launched on July 11 2017, and we interviewed them the next day at APN's office in Washington. This episode is slightly longer than our most recent ones. We hope you agree it's worth it.
Katya Lipovetzky, an Israeli, recently graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Hashem Sayyed, a Palestinian, recently graduated from al-Quds University, the Palestinian university of Jerusalem.
Hashem and Katya are APN's summer interns, working together to produce our second storytelling event, The Dove.
The two are enrolled in New Story Leadership, a summer program in Washington that gives young Israelis and Palestinians a chance to meet each other, to network, to learn how Washington works and to hone their leadership skills.
In this short episode, Ori Nir and Stephanie Breitsman talk with Katya and Hashem about their lives and the conflict. To meet the two of them and four more of the NSL fellows Come to The Dove on July 20th, at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC at 8:30 PM. If you can't attend, you'll be able to listen to these young people's stories on a special episode of PeaceCast.
Carmi Gilon, the former chief of Israel’s secret service, Shin Bet, for years helped run Israel's occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Like many other Israeli former senior security officials, he became an anti-occupation peace advocate when he finish his service. If you watched the documentary The Gatekeepers, which features Carmi Gilon among six past heads of Israel’s Shin-Bet, you understand why.
Episode 16 of PeaceCast features a conversation with Gilon, who today is the executive chair of Cytegic, an Israeli cyber security company.
Gilon served in the Shin Bet from 1972 just a few years after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, through 1996. He was the head of the service for a year (1995 to 1996), and then served in several public positions including the director of the Peres Center for Peace and Israel’s ambassador to Denmark.
Stephanie Breitsman and Ori Nir spoke with him at APN’s office in DC on June 29th, 2017, while Gilon was on a Washington visit organized by J Street.
Around 15% of the Jewish settlers’ population in the West Bank are of American origin, American Jews who have made Aliyah (emigrated to Israel), and chose to settle the West Bank.
It feels as if their proportion is even larger, because they are so central to the ideological settlers’ movement, so active and so vociferous.
The expert on this issue is Dr. Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a lecturer at Oxford University in the UK. Her recently published book on this topic, is City on a Hilltop. Sara spoke about the focus of her research at a book event co-sponsored by the Foundation for Middle East Peace and Americans for Peace Now at Busboys and Poets in Washington DC on June 25th. This show is an edited version of her talk. I moderated the discussion, and learned a lot.
Please subscribe to Peace Cast. We are on iTunes here and on Google Play here. Send me feedback to onir@peacenow.org and recommend the podcast to a friend.
Sara's Haaretz articles
The Atlantic's review of Sara's book
This episode is the second in a series that focuses on the Gaza Strip. APN's Ori Nir and Stephanie Breitsman interview Rania al-Hilou, a young professional woman living in Gaza City, who describes living conditions with only two hours of electricity a day, and UNRWA's Scott Anderson, formerly the Gaza operations director and currently the West Bank operations director of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. And, as a kicker, an introduction to the Gaza Strip's only rock band.
Hyperlinks: UNRWA, ANERA, Rania's essay on life without power in Gaza, Typo band's "Dream of Dawn" on YouTube, Typo's Facebook page
This episode has two segments, both relate to the Gaza Strip.
The first segment is an interview with the World Bank’s country director for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Marina Wes. She talked about the terrible state of the Gaza economy, about its dependence on external financial assistance, and about its grim future.
The second segment is a conversation with Haim Malka of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, who focused on Gaza’s largest donor, the gulf emirate of Qatar.
This special edition of PeaceCast features four interviews recorded at Peace Now’s massive “Two States – One Hope” demonstration marking fifty years of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and calling on Israel’s government to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians. Interviewed are Peace Now co-founder Tzali Reshef, former Israeli ambassador to France and veteran Israeli diplomat Daniel Shek, Haaretz’s senior columnist Chemi Shalev and Peace Now’s director of external relations Anat Ben Nun.
Israeli-American storyteller and peace activist Noa Baum, whose show A Land Twice Promised has won praise throughout the US, has now published a book under the same title. APN’s Stephanie Breitsman and Ori Nir spoke with Noa about the power of storytelling, about empathy and compassion, about changing hearts and minds, and about hope.
Why did ten American rabbis, ten US evangelical pastors and ten American Muslim Imams fly together to the Gulf Emirate of Abu-Dhabi? And is there a justified security rationale for the extremely tight Israeli restrictions on Palestinians’ movement into and out of the Gaza Strip?
These are two of many fascinating questions discussed in this short episode of PeaceCast, which features two interviews. A conversation with Sari Bashi of Human Rights Watch about restrictions on movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza Strip, and a talk with Rabbi Laurie Rice of Nashville on an extraordinary gathering of Jewish Muslim and Christian clergy in the United Arab Emirates.
What does Israel’s West Bank settlement policy have to do with international soccer?
Dr. James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, is the leading world expert on this subject. He is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, a book that among other things explores the topic of this episode's discussion. Dorsey closely follows the way in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict plays out on the soccer field, in FIFA, the international soccer association.
FIFA is expected to take up the issue of Israel's establishing soccer clubs in West Bank settlements in the upcoming meeting of its governing bodies in Manama, Bahrain, on May 9th 2017.
Dr. Dorsey joined us by Skype from his home in Singapore. Apologies for the subpar audio quality.
James M. Dorsey
This episode is a treat. It is a recording of APN’s first in a series of storytelling events, modeled after the popular storytelling show The Moth. We call ours “The Dove.” Ours focuses on stories about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, personal stories that inspire hope for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
This show features US journalists Barbara Slavin and Tim Phelps, Palestinian journalist Nadia Bilbassy, Ori Nir, formerly with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, and Noa Baum, the show’s host, a professional storyteller, educator and author.
The show was recorded on April 6th, 2017 at Washington DC’s Busboys and Poets.
This show of The Dove is the first in a series. If you have ideas for future storytellers, please contact us at onir@peacenow.org and if YOU have a story to tell about hope for Middle East peace, which you are willing to share it with us, please send it, preferably as an MP3 audio file attachment, and we may feature you on our podcast or in one of our upcoming events of the Dove.
Israeli political science Professor Galia Golan has in recent years focused her research on opportunities that the government of Israel has missed to advance peace with its neighbors or to avert wars. A recent Israeli State Comptroller report asserts that Prime Minister Netanyahu and his then-minister of defense Moshe Ya’alon were advised of possible ways to avert the 2014 “Protective Edge” Gaza war, but did not discuss them with members of the Cabinet. Golan says the decision to wage war fits into a longtime Israeli leadership pattern that mainly stems from a deep mistrust of the other side. Golan also addresses the Israeli government’s de-facto creeping annexation of portions of the West Bank, pointing out that such actions are slamming the door on the two-state solution and pushing Israel into a state of apartheid.
This episode features a documentary film about Israeli and Palestinian former combatants, who have come together to advocate within their societies and across the societies for peace. These are people who in the past saw each other through the crosshairs and today are jointly devising strategies to break the status quo of enmity and apathy, fear and hate in both societies, working together to pave a way for ending the conflict.
The name of the documentary is Disturbing the Peace; more on the significance of this name in the following conversation. The name of the organization that is profiled in the film is Combatants for Peace. Participating in the conversation are Stephen Apkon and Marcina Hale, the co-creators of the film, and Maya Katz, a member of Combatants for Peace.
In their first meeting since Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the new President of the United States and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel are expected to reach some understandings on the chief national security challenges facing Israel. To discuss these challenges and the way in which the two leaders perceive them, and to set the stage for the March 14 meeting in the Oval Office, PeaceCast formatted a February 9th APN briefing call with Israeli national security expert Yossi Alpher. Using his rare analytical skills, Alpher connects the dots between Israel, Washington, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Russia and beyond, to paint a coherent picture of the current US-Israel national security agenda.
The Israeli government’s enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump and his controversial policies is further exacerbating the estrangement and alienation that many American Jews increasingly feel toward Israel’s leadership -- and perhaps toward Israel more generally.
President Trump, for most American Jews, represents the antithesis of what they view as Jewish values and American values. Seeing Trump and some of his policies – particularly his immigration policy – being embraced by the prime minister of Israel is for liberal American Jews – and most American Jews are liberal -- like fingernails on a chalkboard.
At this low point in the history of Israel’s relations with America’s Jewish community, the Ruderman Program for American Jewish Studies at Israel’s Haifa University released a new study about this topic. The study, titled “Israel – a Unifying or Divisive Issue among American Jews” was published this week. We spoke with its author, Alon Pinkas.
A large majority of Israelis were born into a situation in which their country is occupying the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. A new poll shows that many Israelis don’t know the basics of that situation – for example, that Israel has never annexed the West Bank, or that settlements like Ariel and Maale Adomim are not under Israeli sovereignty. Oded Haklai, a Canadian-Israeli scholar who conducted the poll demonstrates how the occupation-ignorance tipping point among Israelis is the age of 50, and explains why. For more on Haklai’s poll, read his Washington Post article here.
On January 3rd, an Israeli military court convicted sergeant Elor Azaria of manslaughter for killing a young, severely injured unarmed Palestinian who moments earlier stabbed and injured one of Azaria’s fellow combatants in the West Bank town of Hebron. The Azaria trial was about much more than the conduct of one soldier and the IDF’s rules of engagement in the West Bank. It ended up being about the relationship between Israeli society and the IDF, about the rule of law, about the cynical way in which the IDF has been politicized by demagogical politicians – and, of course, about the occupation. IDF Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Amos Guiora, the former commander of the IDF’s School of Law, suggests a several contexts in which to examine the verdict and what it means.
This first episode of APN’s new podcast features two interviews. Both were recorded recently in Jerusalem coffee shops (apologies for the boisterous ambiance).
The first interview is with Elias Zananiri, the deputy director of the PLO’s Committee for Interaction with the Israeli Public. Elias, a veteran Palestinian journalist and a member of the Geneva Initiative, talks about the PLO’s efforts to demonstrate to Israelis that they do have a partner for peace across the Green Line and that peace would be a win-win for Israelis and Palestinians.
The second interview is with Talia Sasson, the former Israeli government attorney, who authored the famous 2005 “Sasson Report” on illegal outposts in the West Bank. Sasson, who is now the President of the New Israel Fund, talks about her recent book (published in Hebrew and soon to be translated into English) on the report and on West Bank settlements. She finishes the interview with an important message for American friends of Israel.