Understanding Israel Palestine

KKFI 90.1 FM

Understanding Israel/Palestine advocates for a fair and even-handed U.S. foreign policy that recognizes the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis. The program offers multiple perspectives through interviews with journalists, scholars, policy experts and activists to clarify the underlying issues that are often obscured by mainstream media. 

  1. Oct 23

    Moving through Ongoing Personalized Trauma to Transformative Intergenerational Healing, and Beyond 'Transparency' to Truthful Accountability in Palestine and around the World (with Ashira Darwish)

    Send us Fan Mail Greetings and welcome to Understanding Israel Palestine: A Beyond the Walls Edition. I’m Jeremy Rothe-Kushel. We speak today in October 2026 at a moment of profound and agonizing contradiction. On the ground across historic Palestine—from the mass destruction of Palestinian lives & rubbled civilization of Gaza to the besieged refugee camps, checkpoints, and torture centers of the West Bank and Jerusalem—a nationally genocidal project continues its daily work of erasure. Yet in the halls of Western culture and international diplomacy, a strange theater of belated recognition & partial disclosure is playing out. At the Venice Film Festival, a 25-minute standing ovation greeted NAZA—a documentary named after the Israeli military’s acronym for anticipated civilian deaths, featuring anonymized Israeli soldiers confessing on darkened Tel Aviv rooftops to the automated mass slaughter of Palestinian families. And in Oslo, the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize has recently been awarded to South African anti-apartheid jurist Navi Pillay, who chaired the United Nations Commission of Inquiry that formally determined Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. What does it mean when the world’s cultural and legal institutions validate Palestinian suffering only after it has been filtered through the conscience, or apparent lack thereof, of its perpetrators, or recorded like a coroner’s report long after tens of thousands of lives, and very likely many many more, have been extinguished & Gaza has been decimated? To reckon with the reality on the ground and the meta-psychological terrain of this moment, we are joined by Ashira Darwish. Born and raised in Palestinian Jerusalem, Ashira spent many years on the front lines as an investigative television and radio journalist and human rights researcher in Palestine for the BBC, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. After surviving Israeli military detention, torture, and a brutal beating by Israeli soldiers that severed her spinal cord and left her paralyzed, Ashira defied medical prognosis through a remarkable journey of physical and spiritual recovery. She is the founder of Catharsis Holistic Healing in Palestine, where she pioneers trauma therapy rooted in Sufi active meditation and ancestral Indigenous knowledge—built for a people enduring not "post-traumatic" stress, but continuous, ongoing trauma. She is also the central voice and an Executive Producer of the acclaimed documentary Where Olive Trees Weep. Ashira Darwish: ashirapremrachana.com ------------ Understanding Israel Palestine: https://kkfi.org/program/understanding-israel-palestine/ Beyond The Walls: beyondthewalls.substack.com

    Moving through Ongoing Personalized Trauma to Transformative Intergenerational Healing, and Beyond 'Transparency' to Truthful Accountability in Palestine and around the World (with Ashira Darwish)
  2. Oct 2

    The Structural Origins and Damaging Impact of the Deep Israel Lobby Part 2 (with Grant Smith)

    Send us Fan Mail The Structural Origins and Damaging Impact of the Deep Israel Lobby Part 2 (with Grant Smith) Greetings and welcome to Understanding Israel Palestine, a Beyond the Walls edition, I am Jeremy Rothe-Kushel. For this episode, after a Beyond the Walls special Cyber Occupation Report, we return to hear the 2nd part of my archived interview with Grant F. Smith, the research director at the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, about the Structural Origins and Damaging Impact of the Deep Israel Lobby.   Resources & Further Reading To review the primary source documents, declassified files, and extensive research discussed in this episode, please explore Grant Smith’s archival work: Israel Lobby Archive: A comprehensive repository of declassified documents regarding lobbying and espionage.IRmep: The Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy's ongoing reports and analysis.----------- Understanding Israel Palestine archives: kkfi.org/program/understanding-israel-palestine/ Beyond the Walls newsletter: beyondthewalls.substack.com ----------- A Beyond the Walls special Cyber Occupation Report From Occupied Palestine to American Precincts: The Cyber-Intelligence Pipeline Seeking to Be Behind Your Local 911 Across the United States, municipal police departments are quietly signing off on cellular interception gear from Cognyte Solutions—an Israeli surveillance vendor spun out of Verint Systems. Long before Cognyte began marketing interception hardware to American city councils, Verint was building the physical tap into domestic telecommunications. As investigative author James Bamford and former NSA Technical Director William Binney have documented, the surveillance pipeline ran in a full, cynical circle. Binney—the veteran cryptanalyst-mathematician who resigned from the NSA in late 2001 after thirty years when the agency turned its collection apparatus inward—revealed how advanced U.S. signals intelligence technology was shared with Israeli intelligence. Following September 11, that very technology was repackaged, privatized, and sold back to the U.S. government through companies like Narus and Verint—contractors wired directly into AT&T and Verizon switches to execute bulk domestic surveillance with foreign-administered backdoors. Today, that architecture has migrated from federal switchboards straight into domestic neighborhoods. Flock Safety now operates an automated license plate reader network logging billions of vehicular movements across American streets every month. Flock’s operational scaling was driven under its former Chief Operating Officer, Elan Greenberg. Greenberg—a Cornell graduate and NYU Stern MBA who served more than a decade as an officer in the U.S. Marine Forces Reserve—subsequently transitioned to executive leadership at Augury. Augury, an AI sensor firm founded in Haifa and backed by Israeli venture capital, is steeped in veterans of Israel’s military-technical sector. It represents a recurring circuit: U.S. military-trained logistical leadership bridging domestic tracking grids with Tel Aviv-founded hardware networks. Meanwhile, Axon Enterprise has absorbed Fusus, pulling private Ring cameras, commercial video feeds, and municipal traffic sensors into unified "Real-Time Crime Centers." All that neighborhood telemetry flows into the Microsoft Azure Government cloud—an environment fortified and audited by Adallom, the cybersecurity firm founded by alumni of Israel’s elite Talpiot military program and Unit 8200, which was swallowed into Microsoft’s core architecture. The final lock turned in early 2026 when Axon completed its 625-million-dollar acquisition of Carbyne911. Originally launched and financed by convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein alongside former Israeli Prime Minister and military intelligence chief Ehud Barak, Carbyne was engineered to access citizen smartphone cameras, real-time geolocation, and biometric audio streams the moment a caller dials 911. Just as Verint and Narus established bulk-collection interception points inside telecom switches twenty years ago, Axon’s absorption of Carbyne hardwires an identical architecture directly into municipal emergency dispatch: Cognyte intercepts the mobile signal.Flock logs vehicular movement.Fusus aggregates private and public cameras.Carbyne taps the 911 caller at the point of distress.And Talpiot- and Unit 8200-engineered cloud infrastructure guards the vault.What was beta-tested on subjugated populations in occupied Palestine hasn't just arrived on Main Street—it has become the privatized nervous system of American municipal policing, turning public safety into an end-to-end digital occupation.

    The Structural Origins and Damaging Impact of the Deep Israel Lobby Part 2 (with Grant Smith)
  3. Sep 11

    How Deceptive American State Complicity in the Israeli Destruction of Palestinian Gaza Should Continue to Haunt (w/ Stacy Gilbert)

    Send us Fan Mail For this episode of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel speaks with Stacy Gilbert about the background of her public resignation from the Biden State Department, the longterm humanitarian crisis deepened by the ending of US financial aid and political support of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, and why all of this deeply haunts her and should publicly and politically haunt all those on up through President Biden who facilitated these crimes against humanity, and against American and International law. Stacy Gilbert is a former Senior Civil-Military Advisor in the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, where she worked for more than 20 years in humanitarian emergencies and refugee crises worldwide. She advised U.S. and foreign militaries on humanitarian principles, civilian protection, aid worker security, and emergency response, and deployed to major crises including Kosovo, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. In May 2024, she resigned from the State Department in protest after it concluded that Israel was not blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza, a decision that drew national and international attention. She continues to advocate for humanitarian issues, adherence to law, and public accountability. Stacy will be a panelist on this month’s Voices From the Holy Land film and discussion salon titled The Palestinian Exile - 78 Years and No Future about the ongoing reality and necessary humanitarian resolution to the decades long and recently escalated Palestinian UN refugee camp crisis. The salon will take on place on Sunday September 20th, 2026 at 3pm Eastern time. You can go to VoicesFromTheHolyLand.org to find out more and gain access to the films and salon. ------ Understanding Israel Palestine archives: kkfi.org/program/understanding-israel-palestine/ Beyond the Walls newsletter: beyondthewalls.substack.com

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About

Understanding Israel/Palestine advocates for a fair and even-handed U.S. foreign policy that recognizes the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis. The program offers multiple perspectives through interviews with journalists, scholars, policy experts and activists to clarify the underlying issues that are often obscured by mainstream media. 

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