Podcast
Understanding Israel Palestine
Hosted by KKFI 90.1 FM Kansas City Community Radio · EN
This show is inspired by Citizens for Justice in the Middle East, a local group that has advocated for 20 years for a fair and even-handed U.S. foreign policy that recognizes the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis. Our program offers interviews with journalists, scholars, policy experts and activists to offer multiple perspectives, and to clarify the underlying issues that are often obscured by headline news. 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.
10episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
“The Detonator and the Survival Kit: Recovering the Map Beyond the Wreckage” featuring Jonathan Kuttab
Nov 2700:28:30Tap to summarize“The Detonator and the Survival Kit: Recovering the Map Beyond the Wreckage” featuring Jonathan Kuttab "Welcome back to Understanding Israel Palestine, a Beyond the Walls edition. I’m Jeremy Rothe-Kushel. Today, we re-open a black box recording from a time of useful consciousness: my March 2021 conversation with long-serving Palestinian human rights attorney Jonathan Kuttab. Back then, the UN, US, EU, Russia Quartet kept the 'Two-State Zombie craft' aloft—rough but steady. Peace could be claimed to still be just around the alley. But this recording identified sabotage in real time. We saw the Abraham Accords not as peace, but as lubricant for a slow detonator—weapons deals designed to erase the Palestinian question entirely. We listen now during ongoing human catastrophe and cease-less firing in Gaza from Thanksgiving Week 2025. The detonator triggered. Moscow —as Hamas confirmed on TV soon after October 7th —welcomed the explosion as chaff to distract the West from war in Ukraine. Netanyahu then hung his genocidal Gaza 'response' to his own alleged 'failures' of security as an albatross around his coalition of the willing American neck. He seized the smoke to flee forward from corruption trials, political resistance and credible suspicion of his regime’s treason, and pulled the trigger on a 'Second, possibly final, Nakba' by fire. Don Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff has now picked at the ash, with no real ceasefire or reconstruction plan, but a real estate prospectus—$70 billion for a beachfront windfall with Palestinians to be gone for a generation. Serious diplomacy walks dead. But this recording holds pieces of a survival kit. Kuttab offers a Hybrid Confederation: A Jewish Defense Minister for existential safety; a Palestinian Police Chief for internal dignity. Mutual sharing of language and culture. To get Beyond the Walls, we must go Beyond the Two-State Solution. Separation was sabotage from the get-go. Shared security and mutual survival may be the only path to return home." Jonathan Kuttab: https://jonathankuttab.org/ Understanding Israel Palestine: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2016486 Beyond the Walls: https://beyondthewalls.substack.com/
Transcribe →Accelerating Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank
Nov 2100:28:31Tap to summarizeMichael Schaeffer Omer-Man, Director of Israel-Palestine Research at the non-profit DAWN (Democracy in the Arab World Now), speaks about the accelerating pace of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, which is raising fears of a new genocide. He describes the history of settler violence, the U.S. role in enabling Israeli occupation and apartheid, and what measures could prompt Israel to chart a different path. The co-author, with Sarah Leah Whitson, of From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine, Omer-Man says international allegiance to the Oslo two-state solution has entrenched Israeli occupation and prevented other countries from challenging it or developing new paradigms. Their book lays out an immediate path to a more democratic state in which Israelis and Palestinians have the freedom to decide on the future they want.
Transcribe →Mamdani’s Panopticon Burden: To Inherit the Hardened and Databased Political Epistemology of the Security State(s)?
Nov 1400:28:30Tap to summarizeMamdani’s Panopticon Burden: To Inherit the Hardened and Databased Political Epistemology of the Security State(s)? By Jeremy Rothe-Kushel Host/Producer, Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls New York City is a paradox disguised as a metropolis. Above, the glass-and-steel canyons of Midtown reflect the accumulated wealth of empire—the real estate dynasties, the hedge funds, the global insurers. But beneath the asphalt, pulsing through fiber-optic cables and radiating from the microwave dishes atop One Police Plaza, lies a second, silent city: a digital autocracy. The invisible city does not vote. It watches, and targets. It is a “Ring of Steel” that has metastasized from a temporary post-9/11 shield into a permanent, self-governing intelligence agency. On this broadcast of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls, we descend into the friction point where local governance meets global counter-insurgency. We are joined by Ali Winston, an award-winning investigative journalist whose forensic reporting - including for WIRED, The Guardian, ProPublica, and The Baffler, among many others - regularly exposes police corruption, right-wing extremism, and surveillance. Our point of departure is Winston’s incendiary new reporting: “Zohran Mamdani Just Inherited the NYPD Surveillance State.” It documents a profound collision: Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, whose platform was built on the promise of Palestinian rights and systemic reform, now holds the keys to a machine built to repress those very ideals. It is a machine currently operated by Commissioner Jessica Tisch—a scion of the very financial and real estate interests that fought Mamdani’s rise. I. Ground Zero and the Architecture of Paranoia To understand the burden Mamdani has inherited, we must first perform an autopsy on the psychic break of September 11, 2001. As Winston details, the trauma of Ground Zero did not just militarize the police; it fundamentally altered its constitutional DNA. “The NYPD transitioned,” Winston explains, “from a law enforcement agency into essentially a small to mid-sized intelligence agency.” Under the “Never Again” doctrine of Commissioner Ray Kelly, the department imported David Cohen, a veteran CIA executive, to run its Intelligence Division. The result was a domestic force operating with foreign rules. Winston describes the creation of the “Demographics Unit”—a secret squad that engaged in “mosque-raking,” mapping Muslim communities from New Jersey to Long Island not based on criminal suspicion, but on the “pre-crime” logic of identity. This digital dragnet was matched by a physical one: Stop and Frisk, turning the bodies of Black and Brown New Yorkers into data points for the machine. II. The Towering Shadow: The Iron Triangle of the Permanent State The surveillance state does not float in the cloud; it is anchored in the bedrock of Manhattan real estate and the liquidity of Wall Street. As reports break - just in the days after our interview - that Mamdani and Tisch have officially scheduled their first transition meeting, the question of her retention moves from theoretical to imminent. In the broadcast, I drew attention to the “top 10 list” of donors who backed Andrew Cuomo against Mamdani. These figures seem to sit at the epicenter of an ossified “Iron Triangle”: Financialization, Real Estate, and Political Zionism. While not explicitly named in our dialogue, this anti-Mamdani donor class—which notably included direct funding from Tisch’s own family members and was typified by hedge fund titans like Bill Ackman—views “law and order” as a euphemism for asset protection and ideological control. Commissioner Jessica Tisch is the avatar of this nexus. An heiress to the Loews Corporation fortune (hotels and theaters, not the hardware store), she sits at the precise intersection where the old-money real estate lobby meets the Israel Lobby donor class. By retaining Tisch, Mamdani isn’t just keeping a police commissioner; he is signaling a truce with the towering interests of Capital that define New York’s power structure. She is, as Winston argues, a “sacred cow to the business elite”—the human firewall protecting the property values of the 1%. Ultimately, Winston posits that this truce may be short-lived: Tisch will likely not remain if Mamdani imposes the serious oversight and reform conditions that his political backing might demand. III. The High Priest of the Deep State: William Bratton If Tisch is the heir, I see William Bratton as an architect. Bratton is the High Priest of modern policing, the man who institutionalized the architecture of the surveillance state. Bratton currently sits as Chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. A look at this council reveals the “Deep State” in plain sight. Sitting alongside Bratton in this pantheon is Jamie Gorelick. Gorelick is a master key to the American establishment. A former Deputy Attorney General and a central figure on the 9/11 Commission, she is synonymous with the management of official narratives and the legal scaffolding of the “FISA Wall” that ‘explains’ such security ‘failures’ like the September 11th attacks, and then aiding British Petroleum, Fannie Mae, Big Student Loan and Jared Kushner through their various corruption and emolument scandals. Her web of influence connects the “liberal” establishment (she is a mentor to Merrick Garland) to the “conservative” defense elite (through her long association with Alan Dershowitz). This raises a troubling question to me regarding the present moment: Did Merrick Garland’s “kid gloves” handling of what ultimately became the Trump “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States” case, and the delays in the high-level January 6th prosecutions, stem not from caution, but from the camaraderie of this permanent club? Bratton, Gorelick, and their peers represent a bipartisan truth: the security state often appears immune to elections. It was Bratton who returned to New York in 2014 to anoint Jessica Tisch as Deputy Commissioner of Information and Technology, ensuring the dynasty—and the ideology—would continue uninterrupted. IV. The Hardware of Empire: British Steel, Israeli Silicon Winston offers a crucial historical correction regarding the original conceptual hardware of this surveillance state. While we often look to Tel Aviv for the origins of our post-9/11 escalated police state, the physical “Ring of Steel” is a pre-9/11 product of British counter-insurgency. “It’s not an Israeli import,” Winston explains. “It’s directly patterned off the London Ring of Steel... developed by the British in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.” However, while the pervasively-deployed cameras concept is British, I asserted in our conversation that the software— and the ideological brain of the System—is deeply Zionist. The “Domain Awareness System” (DAS) runs on infrastructure built in partnership with Microsoft. As I noted, Microsoft is not a neutral ‘American’ vendor. It has functioned effectively as an Israeli corporation for decades. I pointed to the history of former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold—a man at the epicenter of the Jeffrey Epstein network, who even accompanied Epstein on an early trip to Russia. Myhrvold was the catalyst for Bill Gates’ deep investment in the Israeli tech sector. Today, the DAS is the domestic application of that lineage: a fusion of Big Tech and Unit 8200 that turns New York into a laboratory for algorithmic control. V. The Epistemological War: The “Gaza Logic” Comes Home Here, we arrive at the heart of the conflict. This is not just a war over data; it is an epistemological war—a battle over the definition of truth. In Palestine, we see “algorithmic warfare” generating kill lists and a war of nomenclature where the “West Bank” becomes “Judea and Samaria,” erasing a people through language. As I asserted to Winston, this epistemological violence has been imported to the American interior. I spoke from personal experience. In 2016, I was arrested at the Kansas City Public Library for merely asking a question at a public event. The arresting detective, who worked at the local fusion center and had recently returned from an “educational” trip to Israel funded by private interests, tagged me—a Jewish American—with an “anti-Jewish” BIAS code. This is the operationalization of Natan Sharansky’s “New Antisemitism” doctrine: reclassifying anti- or even non-Zionism as antisemitism. Winston confirmed this ideology is active within the NYPD, noting that Tisch gave opening remarks at a training where the keffiyeh and the watermelon were branded as “hate symbols.” The machine does not just record the city; it re-codes it, turning dissidents into terrorists to justify its own budget. VI. The Sanctuary Trap: The Boomerang Effect This leads to the final trap. Winston warns that the surveillance state is a boomerang waiting to return and strike Mamdani’s progressive base. “You can’t be a sanctuary city and a surveillance state,” the logic goes. The data amassed by the DAS—fingerprints, facial recognition, movement patterns—sits in a digital silo that the federal government can tap. “The rubber will meet the road,” Winston predicts. “I expect that to happen within the next few months when on whatever day the feds decide to surge their immigration sweeps into New York City.” Mamdani cannot protect undocumented New Yorkers while maintaining the very architecture designed to hunt them. VII. The Panopticon Burden: The Mayor in the Dossier Finally, Winston offers a chilling, personal reality check for the Mayor-elect. The conflict isn’t just political; it is existential. Winston points out that given Mamdani’s long history of vocal pro-Palestinian activism, and that of his parents (filmm
Transcribe →Severed: the Crisis of Amputation in Palestine
Nov 700:28:30Tap to summarizeJen Marlowe, the founder of Donkeysaddle Projects, and producer of the recent film Severed, joins the show to talk about the crisis of disability in Palestine and particularly in Gaza, where thousands of amputees struggle to get the care in the aftermath of Israel's escalated genocide and its suffocating blockade.
Transcribe →The Gaza Peace Plan's Uncertain Terms and Prospects
Oct 3100:28:31Tap to summarizeThe project director on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group, an independent non-profit focused on preventing and resolving deadly conflict, Max Rodenbeck discusses the Crisis Group's recent report on the Gaza Peace Plan advanced by President Trump. He describes how Trump's 20-point plan developed, its unavoidable ambiguity, the many questions about the ceasefire's terms and prospects, and what will be needed for the plan to succeed. He notes sustained engagement by other countries, and above all by the United States, is a must if the plan is to advance beyond Phase I. If it doesn't, Palestinians in Gaza will be left in an indefinite humanitarian nightmare, unable to reconstruct their homes and their lives.
Transcribe →A Return to the Deep Politics of October 2023 - The Obfuscated Israeli Circumstances, Pretext and Intent of 'Israel's 9/11'
Oct 2400:28:31Tap to summarizeTwo years after the October 7th attacks, a so-called Gaza peace deal is roughly unfolding. But there widely remains no serious analytical investigation into the full origins of that inciting event. Was it really a surprise? Or was it part of a deeper provocation, escalated by security stand-downs and the 'Mass Hannibal Directive'? We cast back to an AnteDote analysis from October 2023 to begin re-examining the fuller circumstances and plausible deep intent of 'Israel's 9/11.' ------- https://beyondthewalls.substack.com/p/a-return-to-the-deep-politics-ofhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j27SNo-XD4shttps://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/the-antedote/episodes/Israels-911--The-Simchat-Torah-Treason-Terror-War-Part-1-e2asqfi/a-aagpb47
Transcribe →Armenian Jerusalemites Resist Judaization of their Old City Home
Oct 1700:28:28Tap to summarizeIn the fall of 2023, a shady land deal signed a few years earlier between the Armenian Patriarchate and an Australian-Israeli businessman came to light. Despite the Patriarchate's cancellation of the deal on Nov. 1, 2023, Israeli surveyors and settlers pushed ahead with their plans to develop the property into a luxury hotel and permanently alter the character and demography of the Old City's Armenian Quarter. In this episode we speak with Armenian peacebuilder Christopher Huth, Communications Coordinator at the Churches for Middle East Peace office in Washington, DC about the history of the Armenian community in the Holy Land, and the grassroots and international efforts to resist this latest attempt by Israel at Judaizing occupied East Jerusalem, of which the Old City is a part.
Transcribe →Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls - "Cyberweaponry, Kill-Switch Diplomacy and the Technology of Occupation"
Oct 1000:28:00Tap to summarizeIn anticipation of Voices from the Holy Land's upcoming October 19th online film salon "The Israel Occupation Tech Lab," we will hear a segment Jeremy Rothe-Kushel produced in December 2020 and then remixed for August 2021 titled "Cyberweaponry, Kill-Switch Diplomacy and the Technology of Occupation." To find out about and register for Voices from the Holy Land's October 19th "Israel Occupation Tech Lab" film salon, you can go to: voicesfromtheholyland.org or http://Tinyurl.com/VFHL-October2025 ------ "In this week's segment, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel preliminarily explores the realm of cybertechnology and cyber weapons 'battle-tested' on Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories and then deployed worldwide. This will work also to begin establishing a foundation for further future explorations into cyber breaches, cyberwar, and what could seen as a geopolitical & defacto Israeli policy; a policy to solidify Israel's realpolitikally absolute international immunity from the effective sanctioning of its asserted official territorial expansion in the West Bank and Golan Heights, and its long-term ongoing abuse of Palestinian human rights: This geopolitical strategy could be titled "kill-switch diplomacy", based upon the presence of Israeli military intelligence originated hardware and software delivered via both civilian and military spheres, and deployed into the epicenter of critical infrastructure in countries around the world, with civil society carrots of access to Israeli high technology up front, and an implied threat of Israeli-military intelligence accessed infrastructure kill-switch sticks on the backend. The recently announced hack of SolarWinds Orion Network management software that was cyber-penetrated in early 2020 via supply side software update delivery into thousands of Information Technology systems around the world, including significant portions of the US government, such as the Pentagon, Secret Service, State Department, Treasury, Commerce and Homeland Security, and vast numbers of Fortune 500 companies, is both resonant and possibly relevant here. While we will not delve deeply into it now, I just want to mention that there is industry analysis alleging a Microsoft 365 Office Cloud tie-in to the delivery of the SolarWinds Orion exploit, plausibly tying it to the issue of last year's surprising Trump-pushed Pentagon Cloud Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract to Microsoft over the expected recipient and previous cloud partner of the US government Amazon, led by Trump-critic Jeff Bezos, who was also personally targeted and hacked by Saudis apparently using Israeli NSO group cyberweaponry. Microsoft, which has had Research and Design units, facilities and operations heavily based in Israel for many years, in 2015 purchased an Israeli-originated company Adallom, started by 3 veterans of the Israeli NSA Unit 8200 and cyber entrepreneurial special forces-style super-elite Talpiot Program with Series A investment funding from the "Bill Gates of Israel" and godfather of it's modern cybertechnology industry, Zohar Zisapel of the RAD Group. The next year, and in the lead up to the development of the Pentagon Cloud project announcement and then contract award, Microsoft put Adallom in the place of and rebranded it as Microsoft Cloud App Security. And while the SolarWinds hack, described as possibly the most substantial hack in US history giving the exploiters of the intrusion "God door access", has been publicly and preliminarily ascribed to Russian SVR advanced persistent threat cyber intelligence units, as this show's earlier interview with New York Times best-selling author and journalist Seth Abramson showed, Russia and Israel worked in cyber purpose together in relation to the 2016 election operations that served to install Donald Trump in the White House. Thus, a potential collaboration or cyber alliance of some sort between Russian and Israeli leadership is not necessarily implausible nor off the table. But fin introducing this segment and its focus on Israeli cyber weapons company associates NSO group and Circles, that have mainly been deployed against individuals such as journalists, dissidents and corruption investigators, there are 2 ideas about this realm of cyber that I want to make explicit, both revolving around the fact this technology is being deployed via a military intelligence network of a garrison warfare state: 1) these are cyber weapons that were, what is called in marketing materials, battle-tested. In the case of this garrison state Israel, and its cyber weapons, that means that they have been tested in the battle for maintaining a long term violent occupation, which by many credible accountings is criminal under international law. These cyber weapons are literally, whether used for surveillance or targeting for what the Israeli ministry of strategic affairs calls civil assassination or for more blunt physical assassination, such as when Saudi dissident analyst Jamal Khashoggi was targeted for his ultimate dismemberment via the use of the Israeli military intelligence firm NSO group cyberweapon called Pegasus, technologies of occupation. 2) even when hardware and hardware are being deployed by this military intelligence network for apparent civilian commercial and/or defensive purposes, it remains technology of cyberwar developed by operatives and officers of the Israeli military and intelligence command structure. and thus the question of a backdoor military application or implication of diplomatic threat remains present" https://beyondthewalls.substack.com
Transcribe →No Weapons for Genocide: The People Demand an Arms Embargo
Sep 2600:28:31Tap to summarizeFrom the People's Conference for Palestine 2025: Over the past year, we have seen a shift in public consciousness: from demanding an immediate ceasefire to demanding a full arms embargo on Israel. Mass protests have erupted in the ports of Morocco, French dockworkers have refused to handle military cargo destined to Israel, and Spain has passed a policy to enact an arms embargo against Israel. This panel brings together speakers from across different geographies to discuss the momentum behind grassroots arms embargo campaigns; the strategic role of labor, civil society and state forces; and most importantly, how we can enact a peoples arms embargo.
Transcribe →A Burning World Made of Erasure & Elimination Echoes from the Rubble: From the Antisemitic Dream of a 'New Jew' to the Genocidal Nightmare o
Sep 1800:28:22Tap to summarizeAmidst the smoke and ruin of Gaza City, as the world grapples with the UN's analysis of genocide, a haunting logic unfolds—one written a century ago. Amidst the flames, ruin & human destruction currently being escalated by the Israeli military in Gaza City and the UN's finally emergent declaratory analysis of genocide, a more than century-old haunting logic has destructively unfolded. In the US, the political fallout from the cloaking & cloaked wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk has accelerated Executive & Legislative moves to crush dissent, providing a stark domestic backdrop to the massive moral crisis still being perpetrated abroad. Historian Zachary J. Foster of Palestine Nexus joins Jeremy Rothe-Kushel to begin connecting this genocidal catastrophe to its foundational blueprint, exposing the unsettling and often antisemitic history of Zionism's architects: Herzl & Jabotinsky among them. Was it inevitable that a movement forged in embraced persecution & auto-antisemitism combined with an highly cynical alliance with authoritarians & genocidaires lead to the violent destruction of Palestine? Join us for a critical conversation as we look to Understand Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls. ------ Zachary Foster: https://x.com/_zachfosterhttps://palestinenexus.com/ Jeremy Rothe-Kushel: https://x.com/jeremywrkhttps://beyondthewalls.substack.com
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