Gooday, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. A special bonus double feature episode today.

The uncomfortable question is this. Does Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and the increasing violence by rogue Israeli settlers against Palestinians there

call into question the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Since the October 7th attack and since the

Gaza War, a lot of criticism of Israel has broadened from perhaps a previously targeted critique of

Israel's actions in the Palestinian territories to a more general criticism that the state

itself, the state of Israel, is a colonial apartheid ethno state.

And while we've all been focused on Gaza,

not enough attention has been paid to the larger and more populous part of the Palestinian

territories, the West Bank, and Israel's actions there.

I want to dig into the reality on the ground there with two very different

voices to give you the full range of opinions. The first is Andre X, who's a young Russian-Israeli

journalist and activist who lives in the Palestinian West Bank and who documents Israeli violence

there for his 400,000 odd Instagram followers.

First in this episode, I speak with him to understand his impression of the facts on the ground

from an anti-Israel perspective.

And then, to inject some historical context, I'm bringing back on the show the American-Israeli educator

of Jewish and Israeli history, Charlotte Korchak, who was born in Los Angeles, moved to the Palestinian

part of Jerusalem in 1997 and lived through the Second Intifada, sort of straddling Israel and

Palestine at the time. So both of these guests today have lived

in the occupied territories. They've lived and worked with and reported on both Israeli settlers

and also Palestinian residents there. And both of them have very different ideas.

Not so much about what is actually happening on the ground in the West Bank at the moment, but why?

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