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 peoples around the world.

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 attempting to distribute aid, have resulted in a situation of imminent famine in Gaza. In the absence of a ceasefire, groups distributing aid must not be targeted and humanitarian aid must be allowed to enter. We conclude by discussing the obstacles to this and the war aims of Hamas and Israel.

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 November, 2023, by the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers. The report examines how Islamophobia distorts U.S. foreign policy and is being used by some Zionist groups to delegitimize Arab or Muslim experts on Israel-Palestine and to press unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism.

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 the way into the Gaza harbor, greeted by thousands of enthusiastic Palestinians. The book Freedom Sailors, written and edited by the people who lived this first step, is a vivid description of amazing courage and fortitude. Since 2008 flotillas bound for Gaza have been blocked by Israel. In 2010 Israel attacked the Mavi Marmara, one ship of a 6-ship flotilla, while still in international waters, killing 9 of the crew. The crew was totally unarmed. Alex McDonald, author of How I Learned to Speak Israel, a guide for Americans wanting to better understand the Israel/Palestine situation, was on the Freedom Flotilla boat that sailed to northern ports this summer to raise the world’s awareness of the flotilla movement. Another boat is due to sail to Gaza this spring. Video footage of the 2010 attack is shown in The Truth: Lost at Sea.

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 the controversy over Israel's war in Gaza.

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 discussing the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism and how muddying the distinctions between the two ultimately makes it harder for Jews to address real instances of anti-Semitism.

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 underside as a propaganda arm for Israel and its history as a hostile intelligence agency, surveilling a wide array of U.S. groups and passing information about them to Israel, the U.S. government and apartheid South Africa.

MJ Rosenberg, political commentator, joined the show this week to discuss the Israel lobby from his vantage point as a former insider. After working on Capitol Hill for various Democratic members of the House and Senate for 15 years, Rosenberg worked for AIPAC for four years. Rosenberg recounts his experiences being threatened with destruction of his career as a Hill staffer. He also shares how AIPAC has intervenes in Congressional elections through directing donations to candidates who support Israeli government policy. While it formally eschewed the use of a political action committee (PAC), AIPAC now openly intervenes in Democratic primaries with the use of dark money from primarily Republican donors through its United Democracy Project PAC. Rosenberg blogs on Substack at substack.com/@mjx847.