During his term as US ambassador to Israel between 2001 and 2005, Daniel (Dan) Kurtzer spent time trying (and failing) to devise ground rules for limiting West Bank settlement construction. His efforts, at the time, were to minimize Israeli facts on the ground of the West Bank in order to maximize prospects for a two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

Donald Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, in contrast, will represent the United States on a joint US-Israeli committee that will  help the Israeli government create the most consequential facts on the ground of the West Bank since Israel captured it in 1967: defining the areas in the West Bank that will be annexed by Israel.

Ambassador Kurtzer, who today is a professor at Princeton University is the guest of this episode.

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Joel Singer was the Israeli legal architect of the Oslo Agreements. He is an expert on annexation and what it means for Israel and prospects for peace. 

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This episode features a conversation with Daoud Kuttab, a veteran Palestinian journalist who splits his time between the West Bank and Amman, Jordan. He is the Director-General of the Community Media Network in Amman and a regular contributor to leading publications in both English and Arabic.

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Hadar Susskind is a longtime activist and Jewish nonprofit professional. Currently, he is the campaign director for Hatikvah Slate, a slate that several progressive Jewish organizations – including Americans for Peace Now – have put together to run for the World Zionist Congress.

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This episode features a conversation with Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch. Shakir investigates and documents human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

We talked about his recent deportation from Israel and about Human Rights Watch’s new report, Born Without Civil Rights.

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Listen to the Americans for Peace Now briefing call from Tuesday, January 7 with strategic affairs expert Yossi Alpher, on what Qassim Suleimani’s assassination means for Israel and the Middle East.

Yossi Alpher, an independent security analyst, is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with Israel’s Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. He is the author of Hard Questions Tough Answers, APN’s weekly analysis of Israeli and Middle Eastern strategic affairs. His brief from this week on the Soleimani issue is HERE.

Menachem Mautner is a Professor of Comparative Civil Law and Jurisprudence at the Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law. In this episode he explains why he wrote two recently-published books that are unrelated to his academic expertise: a dystopian novel that predicts the devastation that Mautner believes will lead to Middle East peace, and a book analyzing the crisis of Israeli liberalism.

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Professor Nurit Shnabel is a psychologist at Tel Aviv University, who researches the way in which empathy can diminish the sense of exclusive victimhood that each side feels in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Some of her findings could be leveraged by leaders and other members of both societies to help find a way toward peace and reconciliation.

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Our one hundredth episode(!) coincides with the end-of-year holidays, a time of positivity and hope. To talk about positivity and hope in the context of Israeli-Palestinian relations and Jewish-Arab relations we are hosting Dina Kraft. Her monthly podcast, The Branch documents Israelis and Palestinians and Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel forging meaningful relationships with each other in a complex reality.

Dina is a veteran journalist, currently based in Tel Aviv, reporting for both Haaretz and The Christian Science Monitor. Her writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic. She is the former Israel correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Kraft was formerly an Associated Press correspondent based in Jerusalem and Johannesburg. She has reported throughout Africa, as well as from Pakistan, Jordan, Tunisia, Russia and Ukraine.

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This episode, an edited recording of a conversation with Palestinian pollster and social scientist Khalil Shikaki, is another recording from APN’s 2019 study tour to Israel and the West Bank.

We met with Dr. Shikaki at his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah on November 12th. He reviewed trends in Palestinian public opinion in the past decade and offered some predictions of possible future scenarios in Palestinian society based on these trends.

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