A conversation with Yadin Kaufmann, an Israeli technology investor, social entrepreneur and writer. A veteran venture capitalist, Kaufmann works to stimulate a Palestinian high-tech industry.
This episode is an edited version that Americans for Peace Now held with Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann on February 28th, 2020.
Danny is the director of Terrestrial Jerusalem, an Israeli non-profit that works to identify and track the full spectrum of developments in Jerusalem relating to Israeli-Palestinian, Jewish-Arab relations, with an emphasis on developments that could impact a final-status peace resolution to the conflict in and around Jerusalem.
This briefing call examines the Israeli government’s policy of creating wedge settlements around East Jerusalem to deny a contiguity to a future Palestinian state.
For more on the E-1 project and on Givat Hamatos settlement, check out Peace Now’s backgrounders here and here
Watch this video of Danny explaining the significance of E-1
To contact Ori Nir, write to: onir@peacenow.org
To donate to PeaceCast click here and write “podcast” in the comments field.
This episode features a talk by Arye (Arik) Carmon, the founder and former director of the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI).
Carmon's book Building Democracy on Sand: Israel without a Constitution.
write to Ori Nir
John Lyndon is the Executive Director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), an umbrella that brings together over 100 organizations in Israel and the West Bank to assist them with funding, capacity building, visibility, and impact.
John talked about issues directly related to ALLMEP and its activity, and explored the ways in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict plays out in Europe, particularly in the wake of President Trump's vision for Israeli-Palestinian relations.
To buy a deck of cards, please use this link. Make a $25 donation, and in the comments field, please write "Cards."
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Ori’s email address: onir@peacenow.org
John Lyndon’s bio:
Partnership Fund for Peace Bill
JTA story on the Partnership for Peace Bill
During his term as US ambassador to Israel between 2001 and 2005, Daniel (Dan) Kurtzer spent time trying (and failing) to devise ground rules for limiting West Bank settlement construction. His efforts, at the time, were to minimize Israeli facts on the ground of the West Bank in order to maximize prospects for a two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
Donald Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, in contrast, will represent the United States on a joint US-Israeli committee that will help the Israeli government create the most consequential facts on the ground of the West Bank since Israel captured it in 1967: defining the areas in the West Bank that will be annexed by Israel.
Ambassador Kurtzer, who today is a professor at Princeton University is the guest of this episode.
Ambassador Kurtzer’s bio: https://wws.princeton.edu/faculty-research/faculty/dkurtzer
Ambassador Kurtzer’s 2010 American Interest article: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2010/03/01/behind-the-settlements/
Dan Rothem’s rendering of Trump’s map: https://centerpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/From-Peace-to-Prosperity-Recreation-with-population.pdf
Joel Singer was the Israeli legal architect of the Oslo Agreements. He is an expert on annexation and what it means for Israel and prospects for peace.
His full biography is available on his web site, where he runs a blog, which includes an article referred to in this conversation.
To support this podcast please donate here: https://peacenow.org/donate
This episode features a conversation with Daoud Kuttab, a veteran Palestinian journalist who splits his time between the West Bank and Amman, Jordan. He is the Director-General of the Community Media Network in Amman and a regular contributor to leading publications in both English and Arabic.
Check out his and his very active Twitter account and his web site
Hadar Susskind is a longtime activist and Jewish nonprofit professional. Currently, he is the campaign director for Hatikvah Slate, a slate that several progressive Jewish organizations – including Americans for Peace Now – have put together to run for the World Zionist Congress.
This episode features a conversation with Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch. Shakir investigates and documents human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
We talked about his recent deportation from Israel and about Human Rights Watch’s new report, Born Without Civil Rights.
Omar’s bio: https://www.hrw.org/about/people/omar-shakir
A link to the report: https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/palestine1219_web_0.pdf
PeaceCast’s April 9th, 2018 interview with Omar: https://peacenow.libsyn.com/38-snipers-on-the-gaza-border
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.
Links:
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