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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.
The Rev. Dr. Alex Awad talks about the realities of today’s Bethlehem where, like elsewhere in the West Bank, local residents are experiencing the expropriation of their land. A Christian Palestinian minister who grew up in Bethlehem and returned to work there as a teacher and pastor, Dr. Awad describes who lives in Bethlehem, the the economic and political pressures on Palestinians there, the frustrations they endure living in a besieged city, ringed by a 17-foot-high wall and surrounded by expanding Jewish settlements. He urges Americans to go to Bethlehem to see for themselves the oppression that the U.S. government enables and supports and to speak out against it. “Take stand with justice, take stand with love,” he urgest U.S. Christians. “We cannot go on singing about the Bethlehem of 2,000 years ago and ignore the Bethlehem of today.”
