Understanding Israel/Palestine KKFI 90.1 FM

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...

Rutgers University law professor Sahar Aziz and Mitchell Plitnick, president of Rethinking Foreign Policy, discuss student protests of Israel’s war in Gaza, the growing threat to free speech on college campuses, and how pervasive anti-Muslim bias in U.S. society and U.S. foreign policy perpetuates a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Aziz and Plitnick are co-authors of the report “Presumptively Anti-Semitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine-Israel Discourse,” published in...

The Gaza Freedom Flotilla movement began with a 2006 email from a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement sent to other volunteers struggling with how to bring to the attention of the world that Israel, while attacking Lebanon, was imprisoning Gaza. The email proposed chartering a big boat to sail from New York to Gaza, to Break the Siege, while acknowledging their proposal was so big it might need a sanity check. Rising to the challenge, two years later in 2008 a boat sailed all...

In the last part of a series on the Israel lobby in the United States, Margot Patterson talks to Alison Weir, founder and executive director of If Americans Knew, a non-profit established more than 20 years ago to educate Americans about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Weir discusses some of the many groups and individuals that comprise the Israel lobby, why and what Americans should know about the lobby, and how Israel's advocates have been responding to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and th...

Dr. Sam Brody, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at The University of Kansas, discusses the history of the Anti-Defamation League (or the ADL) and the role it plays as a part of the Israel lobby. Dr. Brody contends that the ADL’s stance that anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism is wrong-headed, cynical, and ahistorical. He argues that countering anti-Semitism can only be done in coalition with other liberation movements, including the Palestine solidarity movement. We conclude by disc...

Award-winning journalist, author and documentary film-maker James Bamford discusses his recent article in The Nation magazine, "The Anti-Defamation League: Israel's Attack Dog in the U.S." Since the war in Gaza began in October, the ADL is claiming a dramatic rise in anti-Semitism, citing statistics disputed by its own staff, some of whom have quit the ADL in protest at the conflation of anti-war protests with anti-Semitism. Bamford speaks to Margot Patterson about the ADL's under...