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The Security Council is again taking up the question of Palestinian membership to the United Nations. While this bid will almost certainly fail, the diplomatic dynamics around Palestine’s attempt to join the United Nations are changing in some important and revealing ways.

On April 1st, Israel launched airstrikes on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing seven Iranian officials, including a very senior general. Iran responded with a massive drone attack on Israel, marking the first time that Iran directly attacked Israeli soil. All this is happening, of course, in the context of the conflict in Gaza.
My interview guest Dalia Dassa Kaye is a Senior Fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and a Fulbright Schuman Visiting Scholar at Lund University. She has done extensive research and writing on the mechanics of armed conflict escalation in the Middle East, which we discuss in the context of this current crisis. We kick off discussing the recent series of events since April before having a broad conversation about the dynamics of escalation between Israel and Iran. This includes the potential that the United States becomes more deeply dragged into this conflict in the Middle East.

On the one year anniversary of the outbreak of civil war, Sudan is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world today. On April 15, 2023, fighting spread from Khartoum to other parts of the country, including Darfur, where the conflict took on ugly ethnic dimensions, potentially leading to genocide. Over 8 million people have been displaced, and the UN is warning of famine in parts of the country.
My interview guest today, Kholood Khair, is the founder and director of Confluency Advisory, a think-and-do tank formerly based in Khartoum. She explains how the conflict has evolved over the last year and why the humanitarian crisis is as dire as ever. In our conversation, we spend a lot of time discussing potential ways out of this crisis, which thus far have been elusive.
Kholood Khair explains:
How the conflict in Sudan began.
How the conflict has changed over the last year.
Why the conflict is becoming more complex and harder to solve the longer it lasts
What the international community, including the United States, can do to better support a peace process.
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The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, better known as UNRWA, was established in 1949 to support Palestinians displaced during the first Arab-Israeli war. Today, it provides services and humanitarian relief to nearly 6 million Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and of course Gaza. 
There has always been some tension between Israel and UNRWA, but since the October 7th attacks and the Israel war in Gaza, Israeli leaders have sought to dismantle UNRWA all together and the United States seems to be a willing partner in this effort.
Following accusations that 12 out of UNRWA's 13,000 staff in Gaza took part in the October 7 attacks, the United States suspended funding for UNRWA and many other key donors followed suit. This funding suspension took place even as UNRWA's humanitarian relief networks in Gaza are widely regarded as irreplaceable. To the extent that aid is reaching besieged populations in Gaza, it is UNRWA facilitating the deliveries. 
My interview guest today, Jonathan Lincoln is a former United Nations official who served as a Senior Coordination Officer at the Jerusalem office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, where he worked on aid in the West Bank and Gaza. He is now the interim Director of the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He recently wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs about the necessity of UNRWA and the need for reforming the agency which inspired this interview.

On March 31st, Turkey held local elections across 81 provinces. These elections took place less than a year after national elections cemented President Erdogan and his AK Party's hold on power, which he had been consolidating for nearly 20 years through democratic backsliding. But these elections were different -- very different. Erdogan's AKP suffered huge defeats across the country, perhaps none more impactful and symbolic than the AKP's crushing loss in the Istanbul Mayoral race.
As my guest today, Lisel Hintz, explains, these may have been local elections, but the results show a growing nationwide opposition to Erdogan and his authoritarian leadership style. Lisel Hintz is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. We kick off by discussing the implications of the election results before delving into a lengthy conversation about Istanbul's mayor, who is emerging as a prominent national leader challenging Erdogan.
 

World Central Kitchen’s success in creating a maritime corridor for Gaza aid was humanitarianism at its finest. But this impromptu jetty should never have been built in the first place. There is a well-established port in Ashdod, Israel just 19 miles from the north of Gaza, where the UN warns that famine may have already set in. But that larger port has been mostly off limits for Gaza aid, despite repeated pleas from the United Nations. Denied the use of a real port just a few miles away, World Central Kitchen opted to build a makeshift jetty in a war zone.

This tragedy should never have happened, not only in the sense that Israel should not be killing aid workers. Rather, this tragedy was born from a perverse logic that has taken hold in recent weeks as famine conditions spread across Gaza: Getting aid to Gazans is seen as a logistical challenge to overcome, rather than a political problem to solve.