Middle East conflict

In his new book, We Can Have Peace In The Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work, former President Jimmy Carter presents his strategy to end fighting between Israelis and Palestinians.

Ethan Bronner is the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times. He joins Fresh Air host Terry Gross to discuss recent developments in Gaza.

Filmmaker Ari Folman was a 19-year-old Israeli soldier serving in Beirut at the time of the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refuges. Though he has no memory of the time, he revisits the mission in his new film, Waltz With Bashir, a surreal, animated documentary of the terror.

Bassam Aramin and Zohar Shapira, the co-founders of Combatants for Peace, are on a mission to end the cycle of violence in Israel and Palestine by bringing together individuals who previously fought against each other. So far, around 450 former enemies have joined the group.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, a regular guest on Fresh Air, returns to discuss developments in Pakistan, where former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto died after an attack at a political rally that also killed at least 20 others. Bhutto recently had returned to Pakistan from an eight-year exile to challenge President Pervez Musharraf for the country's leadership. Ahmed Rashid covers Pakistani politics and culture for various Western publications; he has written extensively about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the country.

After former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes reported on the fall of the Taliban in 2001, she decided to stay in Afghanistan as the country was being rebuilt. In 2005, she established the Arghand Cooperative, a business that sells local products for use in perfumes, soaps and food. The author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, Chayes wrote about her experiences starting the cooperative and selling beauty products in December's Atlantic Monthly.

Journalist Philip C. Winslow has worked for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, ABC radio and CBC radio.

But he hasn't always been a journalist: His new memoir, Victory for Us Is to See You Suffer, chronicles the time he spent working with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the West Bank. It was during the second Palestinian intifada, during which Winslow transported aid across checkpoints to villages and refugee camps.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine. He has written in depth about the Bush administration. His article in this week’s edition (“Shifting Targets”) is about the administration’s shift in position on Iran, redefining the war in Iraq as a strategic battle between the U.S. and Iran. Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004, in a series of articles published in the magazine early in 2005. He has been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and a dozen other prizes.

A foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Yaroslav Trofimov traces the beginning of the global jihad to Nov. 20, 1979.

It was the first morning of the new Muslim century, and hundreds of fundamentalist gunmen seized Islam's holiest shrine — the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The event and its ringleaders have since inspired militants, including al-Qaida.

Trofimov is also the author of Faith at War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu.

In The Deadliest Lies, Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman responds to The Israel Lobby, arguing that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's work "serves merely as an attractive new package for disseminating a series of familiar but false beliefs" about Jews and Israel.