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Understanding Israel Palestine
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.
Eric Goldstein, acting Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch, discusses the human rights organization’s new report “A Threahold Reached: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.” While the the term “apartheid” has been used for years as a warning of what could happen if current trends in Israel continue, the U.S.-based rights group concludes in a comprehensive 213-page report that Israel already meets the legal definition of apartheid described in international law. Goldstein discusses the legal basis for the finding and Human Rights Watch’s recommendations of how other countries should respond to Israel’s systematic discrimination against Palestinians. Insofar as the United States is concerned, Human Rights Watch advises the U.S. government to condition aid to Israel on dismantling its apartheid system and observes that after 53 years of military occupation human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territory cannot be ignored or dismissed as temporary conditions that will disappear if and when a two-state solution to the conflict is implemented. That solution is increasingly unlikely and should not be used to ignore the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israeli officials intent on maintaining the domination of Jewish Israelis over another people.
