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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.
In Part I of a series on the pro-Israel lobby, Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard University and co-author, with John Mearsheimer, of the book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, discusses the effect of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the war in Gaza. The lobby is an informal alliance of various interest groups that work to foster unconditional American support for Israel by pressuring Congress, the executive branch, media institutions, and the academy. Prof. Walt argues that this unconditional support, the hallmark of the U.S.-Israel special relationship, runs counter to U.S. national interests. The consequences, among them the stalled and defunct peace process and U.S. complicity in Israel’s apartheid system and “plausible genocide” in Gaza, have seriously damaged the credibility of the United States and threatened its foreign policy priorities.
