The +972 Podcast

Noam Shuster-Eliassi, an Israeli comedian based in south Tel Aviv, spent her childhood and early adulthood invested in a traditional model of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. Growing up in Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam, a mixed community in central Israel where Jews and Palestinains live together by choice, Shuster-Eliassi took to peace activism as a young adult, becoming part of dialogue groups and working with a UN subsidiary.Yet she came to find this mode of activism inadequate,...

Archeology is presumed to be a neutral endeavor, a practice of excavation that merely uncovers clues about the past. But according to Israeli archeologist Yonathan Mizrahi, it's easy to frame archeological discoveries in a way that privileges one narrative or one history over another. That's very much what is happening in Israel-Palestine, and a lot of that is concentrated in East Jerusalem.Until recently, Mizrahi served as the executive director of Emek Shaveh, an Israeli NGO that examines t...

When Sahar Mustafah, a Palestinian-American author and teacher, heard about the 2015 murder of three Muslim students in North Carolina by their white neighbor, she turned to writing to process the attack and its ramifications."It was the kind of event that just rattled me to my core," says Mustafah, who is based in Chicago. "What compels someone that you know, a neighbor, to bring a gun to your door and shoot you in cold blood?"That Mustafah's 2020 debut novel, “The Beauty of Your Face,” was ...

Perhaps the most enthralling story in Israel-Palestine last month was the startling escape of six Palestinians from the notorious Gilboa prison, using simple tools like spoons to dig a tunnel out of their cells and on to freedom. Although the prisoners were re-captured several days later, their feat dominated Israeli news headlines and captured the Palestinian popular imagination.To unpack the story, +972 editor Amjad Iraqi interviews attorney Abeer Baker, a Palestinian human rights lawyer ba...

Earlier this month, American ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s announced that will stop selling their products in Israeli settlements located in the occupied West Bank.The company’s decision has sparked an uproar by Israeli politicians, from the far-right to the Zionist left. Along with cries of “antisemitism” and “economic terrorism,” the Israeli government has called on U.S. states to sanction the company through domestic laws that effectively punish any boycotts or divestments relating t...

It was in the early days of the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research that one of the researchers stumbled upon a document that had disappeared since first being published in the mid-1980s. Dubbed the Immigration Document, the 18-page memo authored by an Israeli intelligence officer in 1948 lists the Palestinian villages and towns that had been depopulated by Israeli forces, as well as the ways they had been depopulated.“It says, among other things that some 70 percent of...

In late May, Israeli police launched the largest nationwide crackdown against Palestinian citizens of Israel in decades. The campaign, known as Operation Law and Order, has led to the arrest of hundreds of Palestinians who participated in last month’s wave of protests, sparked by the imminent expulsion of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, the police raid of Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the war on Gaza.The editors of +972 Magazine sat down at the height of the crackdown to discuss what led to this...

In this episode, we interview +972 contributor Orly Noy about the shocking display of racism and brutality in Jerusalem last week, when hundreds of Israeli Jews, many of them young men, marched through the streets of the city chanting "Death to Arabs.” The march was organized by Lehava, a notorious extreme right wing organization, after several videos posted on TikTok showed Palestinians harassing ultra-Orthodox Jews.Noy, who witnessed the violence that night, spoke about how Lehava preys on ...

As the coronavirus pandemic spread across the world this past year, home has become an especially important source of shelter and safety. While some governments have responded to pressure from activists and paused evictions, Palestinians in East Jerusalem still face uncertainty.That's the case with the Sumarin family, who live just outside Jerusalem's Old City in the Palestinian village of Silwan. The Jewish National Fund and the Elad organization have long been promoting Jewish settlement in...

On June 23, 2020, Ahmad Erakat crashed into the Container checkpoint in the occupied West Bank. Border Police officers shot him six times in two seconds, claiming he had attempted a car-ramming attack. But a new forensic investigation undermines the authorities’ version of events.At the request of the Erakat family, Forensic Architecture, a research agency that relies on spatial and media tools to investigate human rights violations, in collaboration with Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq...

Israel is heading into its fourth election in less than two years, and with the COVID-19 pandemic, is facing rather uncharted territory. Like previous rounds, these elections are in many ways a referendum on Netanyahu. But there are bigger factors that could determine if the fourth contest will be different from the last.+972 Magazine Editor-in-Chief Edo Konrad and Editor Amjad Iraqi sat down to talk about how the elections are pitting different strands of the Israeli right against each other...

There was palpable relief, and even joy, throughout the progressive movement when the U.S. presidential race was finally called for Joe Biden at the beginning of November. Four years of an administration that relentlessly attacked every minority group imaginable would finally be coming to an end, and with it, perhaps, a move away from constant firefighting.Yet Biden's election was by no means welcomed by progressives as an unmitigated win. Beyond the unimaginable wreckage left behind by the T...

Significant historic threats have befallen the Palestinian people this year, including the Trump administration’s “Deal of the Century” and Israel’s current push to formally annex parts of the occupied territories. But it is still unclear how Palestinians plan to confront these events, both on the leadership and grassroots levels.For example, why have there been no mass protests akin to the intifadas of 1987 or 2000? Why has the Palestinian leadership not put forward a new political strategy ...

This is the third and final episode in our series on the right of return for Palestinian refugees.In the first, we got a glimpse of what return might feel like with Tarek Bakri’s visual documentation project. Then, BADIL’s Lubnah Shomali discussed the practical ways in which return can be made possible. In this episode, we explore what Jewish Israelis think about return. According to Tom Pessah, the answer is not what you might think.Tom is an academic who serves as the chairperson of th...

Palestinian refugees are the longest-standing displaced population in modern history. There are currently more than 8 million displaced Palestinians, including internally displaced persons inside Israel.In the second episode of a three-part series on the right of return for Palestinian refugees, Lubnah Shomali from BADIL, a Palestinian center that advocates for the rights of refugees, discusses the practicalities of return.She answers questions like, how would return be facilitated? Who would...

Almost 10 years ago, Tarek Bakri accidentally started a project called Kunna ou Ma Zilna, Arabic for “we were and are still here,” as a way of visually documenting Palestine in the social media era.Using old photos and oral history, he helps Palestinians find their original homes and villages, many of which are now depopulated, destroyed, or occupied by Jewish Israelis.The right of return for Palestinian refugees is often sidelined in discussions on Palestine-Israel. To shift back the focus o...

A month after U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled his Middle East plan, Israelis went to the polls for a third time in a year. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to declare victory, not much has shifted the deadlock from the previous two rounds, and no party is able to form a government yet.For Diana Buttu, Palestinian human rights lawyer, analyst, and former advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the contents of the “Trump-Netanyahu plan,” as she calls it, ar...

When Meir Kahane, an extremist rabbi who advocated for Jewish supremacy through the use of violence, ran in Israel’s 1988 elections, the state’s Central Elections Committee barred his party, claiming it incited racism and threatened the democratic nature of the state. Similar to the fascist movements of 1930s Europe, Kahane envisioned a Jewish society that is ethnically and religiously “pure.”Decades later, Kahanism is still viewed as radical in Israeli society. Otzma Yehudit, the political p...

Singer-songwriter Maysa Daw always knew she wanted to become a musician. At 27, the Haifa native has a debut album out and is a member of two bands: famed Palestinian hip hop group DAM and new, all-women ensemble Kallemi. In this episode, Maysa talks about the importance of shattering social taboos and airing out the dirty laundry, about her journey toward radical self-acceptance, about writing music in Arabic without access to the Arab world, and about the struggle to remain authentic w...

The deportation of Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director of Human Rights Watch, put a spotlight on Israel's attempts to suppress dissent and criticism of its policies in the occupied territories.For Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man, one of the lawyers representing Shakir in his lengthy battle to stay in the country, the deportation “has huge potential ramifications” not only for foreign nationals trying to enter the country to work, study, or visit family, but also Israeli citizens and parti...

Almost two weeks after Israeli voters cast their ballots for a second time this year, it is still unclear which candidate will lead the country. To make sense of all this, The +972 Podcast turns to leading public opinion analyst Dahlia Scheindlin, who says not much has changed since the April elections. What’s different this time, however, is the growing debate over the separation of religion and state in Israel. This internal conflict “is not new, but it became a new arena of political ...

Whereas in 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu tried to appeal to his voter base by warning of Arabs going to vote “in droves,” now he is openly accusing Palestinian citizens of voter fraud and of “stealing” the elections.Sawsan Zaher of Adalah, the legal center for Palestinian rights in Israel, talks to The +972 Podcast about how this voter intimidation campaign is affecting Palestinians in Israel, what Arab voters care about, and why some are deciding to vote for Zionist parties.Visit +972 Magazine an...

By understanding Zionism as a white supremacist project, the division between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians becomes reductionist, says Noura Erakat, Palestinian human rights activist and author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.Thinking of racism merely as a distinction between Jews and non-Jews pits Palestinians against the very groups who also suffer from Israel’s aspiration to whiteness, like Arab Jews and African immigrants and asylum seekers.Reconstructing the rac...

It is no secret that for decades, the Zionist left discriminated against Mizrahim, or Jews with roots in Arab and Muslim countries, treating them as second-class citizens and pushing them to the economic, political, and cultural margins of Israeli society. Mizrahim took matters into their own hands, forming political movements and parties of their own. Their resentment against the left pushed many of them into the arms of the right-wing Likud party. And yet, says +972 writer and ve...

The United States’ approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has dramatically transformed since Trump took office, but a lot of those changes — from legislation to defund the Palestinian Authority to an attempt to criminalize boycotting Israel — actually came from Congress.It’s BDS and the idea of boycotting Israel to pressure into changing its policies, however, that has turned into a major wedge issues in American politics. Republicans are pushing radical legislation that would criminali...

Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack is working to uncover both Israel’s historic ties to brutal military regimes, such as Pinochet’s Chile, as well as its current arms exports to countries carrying out gross violations of human rights, like South Sudan and Myanmar.Israel's ticket to becoming an arms exporter — with deals dating as far back as the 1950s, when the global arms industry was already saturated — is Israel’s “no questions asked” policy, explains Mack: “You don’t criticize what we...

For more than a year now, Israel has been trying to deport the Israel and Palestine Director of Human Rights Watch, Omar Shakir. The ongoing litigation began in May 2018, when Israel decided to revoke Shakir’s work authorization in Israel.This was the first time the Israeli government had used a 2017 amendment to its Law of Entry, which denies entry to those who publicly support a boycott of Israel, to deport someone already present in the country.Shakir's case has become a watershed moment f...

Is the two-state solution really dead? Who knows if it ever will be. But an equitable one-state solution isn’t a given, and there are other models out there for creating a Palestinian state.Confederation keeps the basic idea of two states but without separation between them. Borders are open and meant to facilitate movement instead of hinder it. Palestinians and Israelis alike can live anywhere between the river and the sea. But both peoples have their own government and get to exercise their...

Every year, thousands of tourists travel to Tel Aviv in mid-June to take part in the annual Pride Week festivities.For LGBTQ Palestinians living in Israel, however, the celebrations are far more complicated. Israel likes to celebrate how liberal and pluralistic it is while covering up — or “pinkwashing” — its human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories, says our guest on this episode, journalist Zizo Abul Hawa.Caught between wanting to celebrate their gender identities and...

Every year for over two decades, thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel have marked Nakba Day by marching to the site of a different village that was depopulated and destroyed during the Nakba.While the story of Palestinian refugees — 700,000 of whom were driven out or fled in 1948 — is relatively well known, we rarely speak of those who were internally displaced during the war. They remained in what became Israel but were never allowed to return to their homes.This year, the Return Marc...

In early April, Sudanese armed forces deposed dictator Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity after nearly three decades of rule.The Sudanese refugee community in Israel celebrated al-Bashir’s fall, which came after months of protests across Sudan. Along with the excitement of regime change, however, there’s concern that those who deposed al-Bashir are the same generals who committed genocide in his name.In this episode, our guest Mutasim Ali, a re...

A week after Netanyahu easily won another election, things don’t look all that different in Israel-Palestine. But one thing has changed: Everyone who told themselves Israel was seeking a two-state solution all this time now has some difficult and painful questions to face.Our guest this week, +972 Magazine co-founder and contributing editor Lisa Goldman, doesn’t think most people have the courage to look that reality in the eyes.“They're going to come up against a pretty thick wall pretty soo...

Israeli elections are right around the corner. But for a country that controls millions of non-citizens, the concept of democracy becomes muddled.In this episode, +972 Magazine writer Noam Sheizaf explains why, as opposed to the one- or two-state paradigm most of the world thinks in, Israelis consistently vote for a third option: maintaining the occupation just as it is."Netanyahu and the right have been saying to Israelis that, not only is the status quo is significantly better than the one-...

Two rockets fired toward Tel Aviv from Gaza were described, by both Israel and Hamas, as "mistakes" in recent weeks. Tareq Baconi, of the International Crisis Group, joins The +972 Podcast to talk about why that's probably not the whole truth (14:00), how the Great March of Return (8:40) and Israeli elections come into play (15:30), and the consequences we're starting to see from the Trump administration's change in approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (24:50)."I personally don't beli...

Decades after the first Ethiopian immigrants arrived in Israel, the community still suffers from high poverty, discrimination, and recent police shootings have brought on mass protests. Mazal Bisawer, a prominent activist, says Israelis can't seem to admit that anti-black racism exists in their society.Later in the episode, editor-in-chief Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man discusses the Supreme Court's recent decision to disqualify a Jewish supremacist candidate from running in Israeli elections, an...

Millions of Palestinians living under Israeli rule don't get to vote in the upcoming Israeli elections — but some other Palestinians can. Rejecting calls to boycott the elections, Palestinian Member of Knesset Aida Touma-Sliman says that when things get hard you're supposed to fight harder, not run away.In the first episode of The +972 Podcast, we speak with MK Touma-Sliman about the Palestinian struggle for equality as an oppressed and persecuted minority in Israel. Later in the episode, +97...