Departures Podcast featuring Oren Kessler, author of ‘Palestine 1936’

There is a strong argument to be made that the root of Palestinian identity can be traced back to the 1936-1939 Great Revolt, which united rival families and communities, melded urban with rural, and joined rich and poor together in a struggle against Zionism and the British Empire. This is the starting point in Oren […]

Departures Podcast Featuring Ron Robin, President of the University of Haifa

In the weeks following the October 7 Hamas terror attacks against Israel, Departures with Robert Amsterdam welcomes special guest Prof. Ron Robin, the President of the University of Haifa in Israel, who provides an assessment and analysis of what the country is going threre and what paths we see coming ahead. Amsterdam and Prof. Robin […]

Departures Podcast featuring Uri Kaufman, author of ‘Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Changed the Modern Middle East’

In October of 1973, Israel’s existence as an independent state was shaken to its core when Egyptian and Syrian forces crossed into the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights, triggering a conflict of sprawling geopolitical scale. This week, in October of 2023, following an unprecedented series of violent terror attacks against Israel by the Palestinian group […]

Special Departures Podcast on the Crisis in Israel featuring Ron Robin

In light of the escalating violence taking place in Israel this week, we reached out to our friend and colleague Ron Robin, a scholar, author, and the President of Haifa University. In this brief interview, which was interrupted at several points by air raid sirens nearby Prof. Robin’s location, we discuss the origins of the […]

If no one reports a massacre somewhere on earth, has it still happened?

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” Philosopher George Berkeley asked this question while he was looking for answers to the notion that perception creates our reality. “Sound” is used to describe a physical phenomenon, an audible wave of pressure; but it is also an […]

How the Syrian War Became the Gravest Mistake of Our Era

When the Kwantung Army of Japan invaded Manchuria crushing Chinese forces in 1931, the world did nothing. It was the first sign of the ineffectiveness of the League of Nations as a force to preserve peace. Then, in 1937, Japan started to invade China capturing city after city. When Nanking fell, they killed hundreds of […]

Departures Podcast with Philip Gordon

For the past 70 years, the United States has toyed with interventionism in the Middle East on numerous occasions, from Iran to Afghanistan (twice), Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, among others. And yet, despite the consistently disastrous consequences of these efforts, the same policies continue to attract support, as US decision-makers consistently underestimate the costs […]

Departures Podcast with Noah Feldman

Only a few years after the Arab Spring failed to convert Middle Eastern dictatorships into democracies (with the exception of Tunisia), many scholars and analysts stopped talking about it entirely, as if to pretend these events never took place. Harvard law professor and constitutional scholar Noah Feldman set out to change that with his latest […]

Departures Podcast with Michael Scharf

As the Syrian conflict has raged on for almost a decade, and the United Nations is hamstrung with Russia’s veto power over proposed legal instruments to intervene, international law finds itself being innovated at light speed in response. Michael Scharf, the co-dean of the Law School of Case Western Reserve University and the co-author of […]

From Libya to Syria, French-Turkish Interests Collide

Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said Friday that Turkey is still waiting for an apology from France over a naval standoff last month in the Mediterranean Sea. To recap, an incident happened between the navy forces of Turkey and France, two NATO allies, in the Mediterranean on June 10. Paris accused a Turkish navy of […]