The +972 Podcast

In the occupied West Bank today, life looks completely different than it did just two years ago — with unprecedented levels of state-backed settler violence, arbitrary arrests, new road closures, and mounting economic pressure. But resistance, too, is changing. Veteran activist Munther Amira connects this moment to earlier chapters of the Palestinian struggle and reflects on what it means to keep resisting when survival itself has become the fight.

Additional Reading:
From the Cemetery of the Living: A Plea for the Rights of Palestinian Detainees
‘They intended to kill us’: Masafer Yatta reels from bloody settler assaults
My father was jailed for believing Palestine must be free

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Two years after October 7, Israeli public opinion remains shaped by fear, grief, and a siege mentality. But could the fragile ceasefire mark a turning point — or will Israel slip back into an “October 6 way of thinking,” ignoring the root causes of the violence and paving the way for future wars? Political analyst, public opinion researcher, and A Land For All member Dahlia Scheindlin joins us to discuss how Israeli attitudes toward the war on Gaza have evolved, whether there’s any possibility of a public reckoning, and what it would take to begin a process of genuine political transformation between the river and the sea — from both within Israeli society and the international community. 

Additional Reading:
Dahlia Scheindlin’s archive at +972
‘Israelis are frustrated, but do they want to stop the war? Not exactly’

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How do Palestinians conceive of liberation and hope today, after decades of disillusion, and beyond the narrow language of statehood? In this bleak moment, what forms of governance, sovereignty, or resistance still feel possible?

Zayne Abudaka argues that understanding Palestinian public opinion requires a new approach to polling — one that doesn’t flatten or distort Palestinian perspectives. A co-founder and senior fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Progress in Ramallah, Abudaka leads the Institute’s polling efforts in the West Bank and Gaza, adapting methods throughout the war to reach Palestinians under extraordinarily difficult conditions. Among other issues, he discusses his team’s recent findings on Palestinians’ attitudes towards party politics, armed struggle, the two-state paradigm, and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement.

Additional Reading:
Latest Polls from The Institute for Social and Economic Progress 

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More journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023 than in any other conflict since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting data in 1992. According to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, Israel’s onslaught has killed 250 media workers to date. Yet despite facing conditions without parallel in the history of modern warfare, journalists in Gaza continue to bear witness. With Israel barring foreign reporters from entering the Strip for nearly two years now, Palestinian journalists have shouldered the entire burden of informing the world about the ongoing genocide, reporting on a story that is also their own.

In this episode, Ruwaida Amer reflects on the difficulties of reporting from Gaza, where the atrocities she documented –– massacres, destruction, displacement, and starvation –– are inseparable from her own lived experience.

Additional Reading:
Ruwaida Amer’s archive at +972 

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It’s been nearly two years, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza shows no signs of abating. At the same time, Israel has further entrenched its control over Palestinians in the West Bank, and accelerated its persecution over Palestinian citizens of Israel, while expanding the war to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. Inside Israel, protests against the war among Jewish and Palestinian citizens are continuing to grow louder, but have not yet reached a tipping point. 

In this episode, Orly Noy connects the dots between the unfolding genocide in Gaza and Israeli actions and policies everywhere else in this land and beyond. Orly is a regular contributor to +972 Magazine and an editor at the Hebrew language media outlet Local Call. 

Additional Reading:
B’Tselem report: Our Genocide
Orly Noy Archive
Israel’s greatest threat isn’t Iran or Hamas, but its own hubris

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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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