Category: Interviews

interviews

Interview: Rabbis protest of ongoing genocide in Gaza and growing Jewish resistance

Posted on

KSQD Community Radio, August 18, 2025 [1-hour]:
Zunes and Rabbi Chaim Schneider discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the growing Jewish resistance to what is being done in their name.
On Monday, August 11, roughly 18 San Francisco Bay Area rabbis and cantors sat down in the street, after speaking in front of the barricaded Israeli Consulate building, in opposition to Netanyahu’s plan to re-occupy the Gaza Strip and to express dismay at the unrelieved starvation and suffering of the people of Gaza and all hostages–on both sides–enforced by the Israeli and U.S. governments. The civil disobedience action yielded no arrests, although the group escalated from blocking Montgomery Street to sitting in the intersection of Montgomery and Sacramento for approximately half an hour of singing and prayer.

Interview: Israel prepares takeover of Gaza City

Posted on

KTVU, Bay Area television network affiliate, news show
August 23, 2025: Zunes’s analysis of the worsening situation in Gaza. In the Middle East as negotiators try to broker a ceasefire in Gaza, Israel’s military is preparing to invade and occupy Gaza City. The Israeli defense minister on Wednesday said there are plans to call up 60,000 more reservists and extend the service of another 20,000. The military is urging Palestinians to head south…

Analysis: How will the US respond to Israel’s killing of Al Jazeera crew?

Posted on

DAWN Newspaper, August 11, 2025: Stephen Zunes, the chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, says he believes Israel’s killing of Al Jazeera’s crew will increase public pressure on the US government. “The American people are waking up,” Zunes told Al Jazeera from San Francisco.
“I’ve dealt with issues around Palestine, US policy, for more than 40 years. It really strikes me the way that the attitude is shifting. And I think this killing is really going to, at least on the civil society level, going to only increase pressure on the United States to stop giving this blank check to Israel in the face of atrocities, including genocide. “But unfortunately, I don’t see a shift in terms of Washington’s policy,” he said. Zunes also described the killing of the Al Jazeera correspondents as a warning to other journalists, noting that it came hours after Netanyahu said he would allow foreign reporters into Gaza for the first time since the war. “It’ll be interesting to see who he allows in and what restrictions they have, and perhaps these murders are a sign that you better not report anything critical,” he said.

A Two-Year Road to Genocide. Israel-Palestine Conflict. Its Past, Present, and Future.

Posted on

Wyoming Star, August 13, 2025, ByJoe Yans, quoting Stephen Zunes
Stephen Zunes: … This is not a religious conflict, first and foremost, and that hasn’t stopped extremists, both Jewish and Muslim, from trying to turn it into one. Not to mention some Christian fundamentalists in the West. But in these two competing nationalisms, Israel ultimately won. And while Zionism for Jews was a national liberation movement for historically oppressed people, like many of the nationalist movements arising during the late 19th Century, it felt more like a colonial settler enterprise, like the French in Algeria or the British in Rhodesia… And because of the support from the West and their own technological prowess, the Israelis have had the upper hand, not only claiming 78% of historic Palestine in the First War, which led to the fleeing and expulsion of the majority of the indigenous Palestinian population, but, since 1967, they’ve had effective control of the rest of Palestine, giving the Palestinian Authority these tiny urban enclaves, surrounded by Israeli settlements…