The +972 Podcast

Last month, a controversy erupted in Israel when the Tel Aviv municipality, in time for the new school year, distributed maps to classrooms that showed the Green Line. Although the 1949 armistice lines that formed Israel's unofficial borders at the cessation of the 1948 war are internationally recognized, in Israel the Green Line is a contentious point, seen as incorrectly demarcating between "Israel proper" and the settlements in the occupied West Bank. Indeed, in sending the maps to schools, the Tel Aviv municipality flouted Education Ministry guidelines.

The episode was a timely reminder of what +972 editor Amjad Iraqi and Meron Rapoport, an editor at Local Call, argued in a pair of essays they wrote for The Nation in August: that the Green Line, both as a result of Palestinian grassroots resistance and Israeli efforts to undermine the idea that the West Bank is a separate entity, is gradually becoming irrelevant. 

You can read Iraqi and Rapoport's pieces at +972 Magazine here and here, or at The Nation here and here.

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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, she told the +972 Podcast. "I got to a very extreme point where I couldn't deal anymore with how much we were not making any progress in humanitarian work and in the NGO world." 

Turning to stand-up comedy, she said, not only helped her feel less alone in struggling against the situation in Israel-Palestine, but also helped the trilingual Shuster-Eliassi — she speaks Hebrew, Arabic, and English — express herself in the way that she wanted. "[Comedy] released my voice. It made me say the things that I dreamed of saying, it made me reach the people I'm dreaming of reaching — it made me speak in all the languages that I know."

The music in this episode is by DAM and Ketsa.

The audio clips in this episode are taken from the short documentary "Reckoning With Laughter," directed by Amber Fares and produced by Rachel Leah Jones. "Reckoning With Laughter" can be watched at either Al Jazeera or The New Yorker.

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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 the interplay between archeology and the occupation. In his 15 years at the helm, he witnessed the increasing encroachment of right-wing settler groups on the city's Palestinian neighborhoods — a process which has, to a significant extent, relied on archeological excavations.

Such digging "brings [settlers] the opportunity to justify the settlement," said Mizrahi. "Instead of looking at the settlers as a group of people living in Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, they can come and say, 'Listen, we are living in Jewish history. We have historic rights here. It's not just the Bible — you can see the ruins here."

The music in this episode is by Ketsa.

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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 timely is beyond doubt: it arrived in the final year of a Trump administration that had opened the floodgates of white nationalist violence and further inscribed Islamophobia into federal law. Yet in shopping the book to publishers, Mustafah says, it was precisely the sections involving the shooter's attack on a Muslim girls' school run by the main character, Afaf, that led most publishing houses she approached to pass on the novel.

In this episode, editor Natasha Roth-Rowland interviews Mustafah about the responsibility of representing her community to a mainstream audience, the grief of immigration, and writing as a critical tool of emancipation.

The music in this episode is by Ketsa.

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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 based in Akka who represents Palestinian prisoners before Israeli courts, about the sweeping nature of Israel’s incarceration regime, the ways in which Israeli law legitimizes the state’s policies, and how Palestinians are resisting their jailers even behind prison walls.

The music in this episode is by Ketsa.

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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 to Israel.

In the latest episode of The +972 Podcast, editors Edo Konrad and Amjad Iraqi discuss the significance of the company’s decision and the backlash it continues to face, the shifting opinions among American Jews, and what this moment could mean for the movement for Palestinian rights.

The music in this episode is by Ketsa and Crowander.

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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 Palestinian depopulation in Palestine, up to that point in early March of 1948, was due to activities by Jewish forces rather than what we learned, a result of Palestinian leadership calls for people to evacuate or other similar reasons,” explains Lior Yavne, the founder and director of Akevot.

On the latest episode of The +972 Podcast, Yavne and Akevot researcher Adam Raz talk about the need for archival research in human rights work in Israel, the impact that concealing official documents has on Israeli society, and the challenges the organizations faces in their efforts to declassify and access records.

The music in this episode is by Ketsa and Unheard Music Concepts.

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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 moment, the synchronization of the Palestinian struggle from the river to the sea, and how Israeli and international media have been covering recent events.

The music in this episode is by Ketsa.

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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 disempowered young Mizrahi and ultra-Orthodox Jews, how the Israeli and international media got the story wrong, and what kind of hope, if at all, she has for the city she has called home for most of her life.

You can also read her essay, titled "I write to remember the brutality of Jewish violence I saw in Jerusalem," here.

The music in this episode is by Ketsa.

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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 the area — often at the expense of the Palestinian residents. 

In April, after a decades-long legal battle, an Israeli court will finally decide whether the Sumarin family will be forcibly evicted from their home. On this episode of the +972 podcast, we teamed up with Unsettled Podcast to tell the story of the Sumarin family and their struggle to remain in the house they've lived in for generations.

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Music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions.

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