With Israel and Palestine experiencing the worst violence in decades, we speak with two co-founders of Combatants for Peace, a group composed of people from both sides of the conflict who have committed to nonviolence and peaceful coexistence. Avner Wishnitzer is a former member of Sayeret Matkal, one of the Israel Defense Forces’ elite commando units, and Sulaiman Khatib spent more than 10 years in prison after being arrested as a teenager for an attack on Israeli soldiers.

With a four-day truce between Israel and Hamas set to expire after Monday, we look at who has been released and the growing pressure to extend the pause in fighting that has given Gaza residents small respite from Israel’s relentless bombardment and allowed humanitarian aid to reach people inside the territory.

In this special broadcast, we air excerpts from a recent event organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature at the Union Theological Seminary here in New York. The event featured a discussion between the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. Coates won the National Book Award for his book Between the World and Me. Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia.

“But We Must Speak: On Palestine and the Mandates of Conscience.” That was the name of a recent event organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature here in New York, where leading writers and academics came together to speak out against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Speakers included Yasmin El-Rifae of PalFest and the civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

We speak with Josh Paul, a former State Department official, about his decision to resign from his position in protest of U.S. arms sales to Israel amid its recent bombardment of Gaza. Paul tells Democracy Now!, “I decided to resign for three reasons, the first and most pressing of which is the very, I believe, uncontroversial fact that U.S.-provided arms should not be used to massacre civilians, should not be used to result in massive civilian casualties.

Hear from Craig Mokhiber, a longtime international human rights lawyer, who previously served as director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, on why he left his post while decrying U.N. inaction over what he calls a “text-book case of genocide” unfolding in Gaza. Mokhiber’s letter of resignation went viral last month. He spoke to Democracy Now! shortly after.

Lakota historian Nick Estes talks about the violent origins of Thanksgiving and his book Our History Is the Future. “This history … is a continuing history of genocide, of settler colonialism and, basically, the founding myths of this country,” says Estes, who is a co-founder of the Indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.