Throw Down for Peace/ Start-up Cities

Ralph welcomes back Hassan El-Tayyab, the Legislative Director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation to talk about the FCNL's recent lobbying efforts in support of a ceasefire in Gaza, as well as the recently-introduced bill to restore funding to UNRWA. Then, Ralph is joined by journalist Rachel Corbett to discuss her recent article for the NY Times Magazine "The For-Profit City That Might Come Crashing Down" about Próspera, the private, for-profit city off the coast of Honduras. Finally, our resident international-law expert Bruce Fein stops by to discuss Israel's recent coordinated attacks in Lebanon. 

Hassan El-Tayyab is Legislative Director for Middle East policy and Advocacy Organizer at the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL). Previously, he was co-director of the national advocacy group Just Foreign Policy, where he worked to reassert Congressional war authority and promote human rights in the Middle East and Latin America. He played a major role in the successful passage of the War Powers Resolution to end US military aid to the Saudi-UAE coalition’s war in Yemen. 

I've been reading a recent statement that the Friends Committee has put out on the Gaza situation. They just can't seem to keep up with the massive expansion of Israeli state terrorism and the death and destruction that's being wrought on hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians, families, children, mothers, fathers, and the civilian infrastructure. [Their] effort on Capitol Hill—which is a longstanding feature of the Friends Committee on Legislation—seems hopelessly overwhelmed by the AIPAC-led Israeli-government-can-do-no-wrong lobby.

Ralph Nader

We try to find common ground. As you know, the Quaker way is to believe that there's a spirit and light in everybody—whether we agree with them or not, we want to engage. And that's just a philosophy that we've had for over 80 years as an organization, and much longer than that as Quakers doing peace advocacy work going back hundreds of years. So we try to engage with everybody. Maybe we don't agree on the weapons shipments, but we can agree on sending US Navy hospital ships to the region. 

Hassan El-Tayyab

If we care about peace, we have to throw down for peace. And not just support humanitarian aid, but actually get involved in the political end of this as well. Because we are spiraling. We're spiraling into a dark place if we don't get our act together.

Hassan El-Tayyab

Rachel Corbett is a journalist who has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and New York Magazine, among other publications. And she is the author of You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin which won the 2016 Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing.

On the one hand, you could almost laugh at something like this. There's so many silly anecdotes that come out of it. And on the other hand, it seems incredibly serious, like something that may be happening underneath the surface that has actually been intentionally happening underneath the surface. I think there's a concerted effort to keep things quiet while these cities get built and become almost too big to tear down… Although they're not that advanced, the sheer money behind them and the influence of the people behind them is serious, and this tribunal case alone proves it could have really serious effects on the actual world.

Rachel Corbett

Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law.  Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.

There is no way that Israel was able to limit the distribution of the pages to Hezbollah, so they knew that they were taking a very high risk that civilians would be killed or injured—which is a violation of the Geneva Convention prohibition upon resorting to any military endeavor where the risk of harm to civilians is dramatically disproportionate to the military objective at issue.

Bruce Fein

Even with the low bar that many people present before the Biden administration, it is unsettling to see White House spokespeople day after day knowingly lying about Israel “complying with all laws.”

Ralph Nader

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