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Greetings and welcome to Understanding Israel Palestine: A Beyond the Walls Edition. I’m Jeremy Rothe-Kushel.
We speak today in October 2026 at a moment of profound and agonizing contradiction. On the ground across historic Palestine—from the mass destruction of Palestinian lives & rubbled civilization of Gaza to the besieged refugee camps, checkpoints, and torture centers of the West Bank and Jerusalem—a nationally genocidal project continues its daily work of erasure. Yet in the halls of Western culture and international diplomacy, a strange theater of belated recognition & partial disclosure is playing out. At the Venice Film Festival, a 25-minute standing ovation greeted NAZA—a documentary named after the Israeli military’s acronym for anticipated civilian deaths, featuring anonymized Israeli soldiers confessing on darkened Tel Aviv rooftops to the automated mass slaughter of Palestinian families. And in Oslo, the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize has recently been awarded to South African anti-apartheid jurist Navi Pillay, who chaired the United Nations Commission of Inquiry that formally determined Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
What does it mean when the world’s cultural and legal institutions validate Palestinian suffering only after it has been filtered through the conscience, or apparent lack thereof, of its perpetrators, or recorded like a coroner’s report long after tens of thousands of lives, and very likely many many more, have been extinguished & Gaza has been decimated?
To reckon with the reality on the ground and the meta-psychological terrain of this moment, we are joined by Ashira Darwish.
Born and raised in Palestinian Jerusalem, Ashira spent many years on the front lines as an investigative television and radio journalist and human rights researcher in Palestine for the BBC, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. After surviving Israeli military detention, torture, and a brutal beating by Israeli soldiers that severed her spinal cord and left her paralyzed, Ashira defied medical prognosis through a remarkable journey of physical and spiritual recovery. She is the founder of Catharsis Holistic Healing in Palestine, where she pioneers trauma therapy rooted in Sufi active meditation and ancestral Indigenous knowledge—built for a people enduring not "post-traumatic" stress, but continuous, ongoing trauma. She is also the central voice and an Executive Producer of the acclaimed documentary Where Olive Trees Weep.
Ashira Darwish: ashirapremrachana.com
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Understanding Israel Palestine: https://kkfi.org/program/understanding-israel-palestine/
Beyond The Walls: beyondthewalls.substack.com
