Understanding Israel/Palestine KKFI 90.1 FM

Khaled Hroub talked to Margot Patterson about the evolution of Hamas, the Oct. 7th attack on Israel, and the ceasefire plan proposed by President Biden to end the war in Gaza. A professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Northwestern University in Qatar, Hroub has studied and written about Hamas for 25 years. His essay about the Oct. 7th Hamas attack appeared in the recently published book "Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm."

Dr. Shira Klein, Associate Professor and Chair of History at Chapman University, discusses Israel's turn toward fascism in the wake of the National Union of Israeli Students proposing a new law that would require universities to fire all academics who express dissent, including tenured professors. An Israeli by birth, Dr. Klein is an expert in the history of Italy's Jews, including during Mussolini's Fascist government. We touch on the academics who have been targets of repression, whether fr...

Margot Patterson talks to Neve Gordon, a professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London. Gordon discusses the significance of the International Criminal Court’s decision on May 20th to seek arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders (Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismael Haniyeh) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. He also examines the International Court of Justice’s May 24th ruling on Israel’s i...

Now a political analyst in Washington, D.C. focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Khalil Sayegh grew up as a Palestinian Christian in Gaza, home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Sayegh speaks of the Christian role in Gaza, the recent loss of family members there, the diverse responses of Christian churches in the United States to the war in Gaza, Israel’s war aims — ethnic cleansing and the resettlement of the Gaza Strip with Jewish settlers — and the dif...

Sometimes called the Arab Gandhi, Palestinian peace activist Mubarak Awad talks to Margot Patterson about how he came to embrace the principles of non-violence, his views of the war in Gaza and the future of the Palestinian movement. Expelled from Israel in 1988 for leading non-violent resistance during the First Intifada, Awad is the founder of Nonviolence International, an NGO in Washington D.C. that advocates for creative nonviolence in the struggle for liberation of oppressed people...

This week we speak with Robert Bletcher, Director of the Future of Conflict program at International Crisis Group (ICG). He was the lead author of the ICG's recent report Stopping Famine in Gaza. We discuss how famine is defined and measured in the realm of international politics and the key axes to consider when attempting to mitigate famine: distribution and access. Israel's actions in Gaza, including its harsh restrictions on aid entering Gaza and its targeting of individuals and groups at...