After Amazon and Google signed a $1.2bn contract to launch Project Nimbus, providing cloud technology to the Israeli government and the military, tech workers started to notice more Israeli use of artificial intelligence against the Palestinian people.Many of those engineers have become activists for “No Tech for Genocide”, including Zelda Montes, who was one of the dozens of Google staff who were recently fired for protesting against their company’s involvement with Israel.Montes and tech...

In this episode, host Steve Clemons speaks with Ussama Makdisi, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley; and Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group.The exchange of direct attacks between Iran and Israel is likely to subside, but the shadow war goes on, which could intensify as long as the war on Gaza continues, argues Vaez.And as long as the wider Palestinian issue remains unresolved, there is little to no hope for long-lasting stability...

To the United Nations official tasked with reporting on Palestinian human rights, international law is clear: Israel should withdraw from the territories it occupied in 1967.Instead, Israel aims for the “impossibility to continue civil life in Gaza,” as UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese tells host Steve Clemons.Israel doesn’t deny the killings and mass destruction, but instead justifies its behaviour as “compliance with international humanitarian...

In this episode, Annelle Sheline tells host Steve Clemons that the contradictions in US policy toward Israel’s war in Gaza made her job as a State Department officer in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor “so difficult”. Sheline announced her resignation publicly on March 27.And Khaled Elgindy, a political scientist at the Middle East Institute, argues that US President Joe Biden is a big factor in the country’s stagnant policy toward Israel – supporting the war, with some...

The Biden administration has fallen into a predictable pattern on Gaza, according to Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch: Talk about concern for civilian casualties, but undercut any pressure on Israel to stop the war.Roth tells host Steve Clemons that US President Joe Biden is engaging in “cynical” election politics by refusing to enforce the UN resolution calling for a ceasefire, or the World Court ruling ordering Israel to allow more food into Gaza, where starvation and disease...

All of Israel’s modern wars have ended with US intervention, but the current war in Gaza has gone on for half a year because “Biden is a slow learner”, argues University of Pennsylvania political scientist Ian Lustick.Israel needs an outside power to blame when it cannot achieve its aims. “That's because the war aims are fundamentally political, and the military cannot achieve them,” says Lustick.Lustick and Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti talk to host Steve Clemons about the current...

“Does the United States want to be complicit in genocide?” This is the question that US leaders should be asking themselves as Israel’s war on Gaza continues, argues Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs.Sachs tells host Steve Clemons that Israel could not continue “for one day” without US support, and the rhetoric from top Democrats criticising Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “meaningless” because no action is taken to stop the war crimes.This has led to US isolation on...

US Senator Chris Van Hollen says it is time for the Biden administration to tell Israel, “If you continue to ignore us, there will be consequences.”Senator Van Hollen, who is one of seven senators (out of 100) to have called for a permanent ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza, tells host Steve Clemons that Hamas’s surprise attack last year “does not justify the humanitarian catastrophe that we’re witnessing in Gaza”.The Democratic senator from Maryland said that the United States has to use...

US policy on Israel “looks incoherent because it is incoherent,” argues Matt Duss, former adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, and this is making the United States look “feckless and weak”.Duss tells host Steve Clemons that Israel is violating US law by using US-supplied weapons while preventing humanitarian aid. But President Joe Biden “has simply taken the tools of leverage off the table”.Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, says there are still no...

The Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis was the last big medical facility in the Gaza Strip destroyed by Israel’s war.The World Health Organization says Israel killed 627 doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and other healthcare workers between October and January.With almost no supplies entering Gaza, what is next for the 2.3 million Palestinians forced to live in inhuman conditions?Host Steve Clemons speaks with Dr Thaer Ahmad, an emergency room physician in Chicago who recently returned from...

About 20 countries have announced suspension of funding to UNRWA, the agency that has been providing services to Palestinian refugees since 1950.The official reason for the suspension was Israel’s accusation that a dozen UNRWA employees in Gaza had participated in the October 7 Hamas attacks.To understand the potential consequences of undermining UNRWA – especially amid a humanitarian catastrophe – host Steve Clemons speaks with Leila Hilal, a former adviser to the UNRWA commissioner-general,...

The United States' support for Israel’s war on Gaza makes the country look ineffectual and hypocritical to the rest of the world, according to Harvard University professor Stephen Walt, co-author of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.Walt tells host Steve Clemons that Israel and the US-Israel relationship have changed over the decades, but US President Joe Biden is holding on to a view of Israel formed in the West in the 1970s.By rejecting a ceasefire, the US looks like it "encourages...

American voters feel “impotent and hopeless” as they approach an election where the main choices are a “neo-fascist Pied Piper” (Donald Trump) or “the war criminals of the Democratic Party”, argues independent presidential candidate Cornel West.West, one of the United States’s pre-eminent philosophers and justice activists, tells host Steve Clemons that President Joe Biden is enabling Israeli genocide and that Israel cannot be secure if “precious Jewish security and safety is predicated on...

Actions speak louder than words, so journalists should conclude that Israel’s war on Gaza is proceeding exactly as the Biden administration likes, argues Jeremy Scahill, one of the co-founders of the independent news website The Intercept.Scahill tells host Steve Clemons that the United States offers political, legal, diplomatic and military support for Israel’s scorched-earth campaign, while some officials have voiced concern for Palestinian lives.Scahill argues that even if Hamas did not...

President Joe Biden’s failure to demonstrate the same regard and sympathy for Palestinian suffering as he has shown Israel has turned the United States into “Israel’s lawyer,” says former US State Department official Aaron David Miller.Miller tells host Steve Clemons that Israel has lost the Western perception of being David in the story of “David v Goliath,” and its image will be further damaged the more its people veer to the right.US officials “don't have any better answers right now than...

Israel waged 15 wars against Gaza in the last 75 years, and all failed to resolve the core issues, says former French diplomat Jean-Pierre Filiu, professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po.Filiu tells host Steve Clemons that Gaza’s rich history as a trading post connecting Africa and Asia goes back 4,000 years. The way Israel has cut it off from the world “goes against its history and the nature of its people”.He says Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s heritage sites - ancient mosques,...

By mimicking United States tactics in World War II in Germany and Japan, Israel has made a grave mistake with its war on Gaza, according to retired US Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt.Kimmitt tells host Steve Clemons that Israel’s tactics - firebombing and “starting new” - have made it unwelcome among the peoples of the region.Despite Israel’s assassination of a top Hamas commander in Lebanon and disruption of shipping routes in the Red Sea, the US is less concerned about regional...

David Frum, staff writer for The Atlantic magazine and a pro-Israel supporter, tells host Steve Clemons that Israel and the United States should “avoid solution-ism” for the Palestinians and focus on day-to-day necessities, like food and water.The way Israel has responded to the Hamas attack of October 7 was “inevitable”, Frum says, adding that “Israel has never been allowed this much scope to act”, by the US, United Kingdom and European Union.Join this wide-ranging conversation on the...

In the evangelical Christian worldview, the 1948 creation of Israel was a fulfilment of Biblical prophecy and the Palestinians are either “non-existent” or “the enemies of God, because they are the enemies of the State of Israel”, explains Palestinian human rights defender Jonathan Kuttab.Kuttab tells host Steve Clemons that believers of this interpretation of holy scripture do not care about international law or catastrophic war in the region. “They say, ‘Bring it on. That’s the End Times....

“No national liberation movement in history is based on what its enemy wants,” says the former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad.For the Palestinian Authority to have any legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinian people, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) would have to expand its membership to include Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Fayyad tells host Steve Clemons.Without achieving a "national consensus", the Palestinian Authority is in no position to rule the Gaza...

Contrary to what Israeli leaders say, the war on Gaza is not making Israel safer, according to political scientist Ian Bremmer, founder of Eurasia Group, which studies geopolitical risk.Bremmer argues that the human carnage created by Israel in Gaza over the past few weeks is strengthening Hamas and isolating Israel.Meanwhile, United States support for Israel’s actions has made Washington “more isolated … than the Russians were when they invaded Ukraine”.Join host Steve Clemons as he asks...

Israel has gone far beyond “going after Hamas” in the first 10 weeks of its war on Gaza, according to one of the United States' leading political scientists, John Mearsheimer.He tells host Steve Clemons that murdering hundreds of civilians daily and starving the rest is a “punishment campaign” and “should be unacceptable to decent people all over the world”.In this episode, Mearsheimer, who teaches international relations at the University of Chicago, looks into Israel’s long-term strategies...

University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami says US President Joe Biden is making his decisions on Palestine and Israel “based on personal beliefs, personal preferences, personal emotions,” and “not necessarily driven by a considered assessment of American interests at stake”.Telhami tells host Steve Clemons that Biden’s “inability to show empathy” for the Palestinians is shocking, and that the president’s recent warnings to Israel were driven in part by his calculations for next year’s...

For expressing their opinions on the Israel-Palestine, many Muslim Americans and Arab Americans have paid a hefty price, including the loss of jobs and suspension from college.Universities across the US are also cracking down on student activism.Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza on October 7, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has received double the usual amount of reports of bias and requests for help, according to the executive director, Nihad Awad.Speaking to host...