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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.
After the United Nations partitioned the Palestine Mandate giving 55% to the proposed Jewish state, Israel declared independence, the large-scale expulsions of Palestinians began and almost immediately violence broke out, long before the armies of neighboring Arab states became involved. This was the onset of the Nakba.
The Nakba has continued from 1948 through today in the form of Israel’s ongoing theft of Palestinian land for settlements and for Jewish communities inside Israel, its destruction of Palestinian homes and agricultural land, revocation of residency rights , deportations, periodic brutal military assaults that result in mass civilian casualties, and the denial of the internationally-recognized legal right of return of millions of stateless Palestinian refugees.
On May 7 I spoke with Jonathan Ofir, Israeli musician, conductor, blogger and writer,
Jonathan talked about Tantura, a recent documentary that chronicles the 1948 massacre of Palestinian civilians in the village of Tantura during the Nakba. More than 50 years after the massacre a firestorm erupted among Israelis following media exposure of the Master’s thesis that lies at the core of this story. Jonathan grew up with Teddy Katz, the academic whose career was sabotaged over his Master’s thesis. Tantura is currently included in the 2022 Sundance Film festival.
