To Achieve Peace in Gaza, Kennedy Calls for New Leadership in Israel and Hamas

By Nikos Biggs-Chiropolos, The Kennedy Beacon

This week, the Democratic Party brought out its brightest stars at the DNC convention in Chicago and tried to present itself as the party of peace. It does not promote that platform.

In reality, protestors descended upon Chicago to oppose the party’s stance in the Israel-Palestine conflict as fears of war with Iran loom abroad and polarization soars in the U.S.

In her Thursday night speech, democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, raised and then skirted the Gaza issue, preferring a safer route as reflected in the convention organizers’ decision not to include a pro-Palestinian speaker on stage.

Against this backdrop, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has once again established himself as a voice of reason, compromise, and dialogue in his latest Path to Peace podcast episode, which is the third part in this series.

The series has focused on ending the conflict between Israel and Palestine since war broke out after the attacks on October 7, 2023. In each episode, Kennedy  has brought together guests with different perspectives and facilitated dialogue with the goal of achieving compromise. On this third episode, his guests are AP journalist Dan Perry, an expert in the region, and Ghada Zoabi, a Palestinian-Israeli entrepreneur. As frustration mounts among Democrats about lack of dialogue in their own party, this podcast series reflects Kennedy’s campaign in emphasizing the need for dialogue and compromise, with no topic too difficult to tackle.

The previous two episodes in the series, covered in The Kennedy Beacon here and here, presented the history of the conflict and some worthy, ambitious potential long-term solutions. Part three offers more analysis about why the war is still ongoing. Kennedy and his guests agreed that the problem is a failure of current leadership on both sides: Hamas, on the Palestinian side, and Benjamin Netanyahu, on the Israeli side, are more focused on their own political survival than seeking peace and serving the people they ostensibly represent.

Zoabi in particular offered an inspiring account of why people should keep working hard for peace and not lose hope. Much of her family fled the region in 1948 after the Nakba (ethnic cleansing of Palestinians) to both the U.S. and Gulf countries. But her branch decided to stay in Israel, and she persevered to become a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist who does business with both Arabs and Jews. While most coverage of the region focuses on conflict, Zoabi shows by her example that coexistence of different peoples and cultures is indeed possible in the Holy Land.

Perry was educated in the U.S. and is a Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press. For the past several decades he has lived in Arab countries as well as Israel, where he lives now. Having covered countless political regimes and conflicts during that period, he has a deep understanding of the current situation.

Both guests criticized Netanyahu’s leadership of the crisis, with Perry going so far as to say that “it borders on crime against the country.” He elaborated by saying that a government would typically resign after a crisis such as the one on October 7, but Netanyahu’s Likud Party has managed to retain its power by claiming that the country needs to stay united in the face of war.

Perry then insinuated that Netanyahu is therefore trying to prolong the war as long as possible, in order to retain his hold on power and avoid being held accountable. The guests also discussed dangerous reforms, promoted by this extremist leadership, to Israel’s judiciary system that undermine freedom of the press, democratic principles and tolerance. The New York Times recently broke a story that confirmed some of these allegations with leaked documents showing that Netanyahu’s government has prioritized maintaining its ruling coalition over freeing the hostages, whose safe return is purportedly the central objective of the ongoing war.

The guests converged in criticizing the damaging leadership of Hamas that has propagandized Palestinian people into hating their neighbor. Nevertheless, the two guests stressed the difference between victimized Palestinian individuals and their corrupt leadership; Perry also reminded listeners of the difference between Hamas’s leadership in the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which though imperfect is not an extremist political regime.

Kennedy also asked his guests what they thought about Israel recently banning Al Jazeera correspondents on charges of national security. As a journalist, Perry reacted strongly, saying it is a violation of free press, while also reminding people that Al Jazeera is still free to spread anti-Israel opinion to the rest of the region without counter opinion. As Kennedy has often noted, the antidote to bad speech is more speech, not censorship.

This part of the discussion contains fairly evident similarities to the current political situation in the U.S. As Kennedy and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, have often discussed, political polarization has created a system in which Democrats and Republicans turn Americans against each other while excluding more moderate common sense voices like Kennedy’s from their debates, and censoring reasonable questions of establishment orthodoxy.

Meanwhile, the uniparty serves corporate giants rather than voters and engages the U.S. in endless wars rather than promoting peace, as Kennedy has talked about at length. While the Path to Peace focuses on the need for new leadership in Israel and Palestine, both guests agreed that new leadership in the U.S. is important as well, to help dismantle this broken status quo, rather than continue to promote ineffective policy solutions.

At least 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, most of whom are civilian women and children. To achieve peace, the world urgently needs practical solutions, which can only come through new leadership, instead of more of the ineffectual policies put forward by both Democrats and Republicans.