The +972 Podcast

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 criminalize boycotting Israel, a move opposed by the ACLU and others as unconstitutional, and Democrats are falling into their trap.

"There's got to be a point when you say, whether or not I adopt this tactic, this is a legitimate nonviolent tactic that we will defend," says Lara Friedman, an expert on everything Israel-Palestine on the Hill, and president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

Democrats need to decide not to throw those in their party who do support boycotts under the bus "in order to make the right, which will never ever be satisfied with our position, feel better about us. We're never going to be in that tent — we don't want to be in that tent," she says.

Follow Lara Friedman on Twitter: @LaraFriedmanDC

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The music in this episode is by Ketsa.

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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 are doing in the occupied territories and inside Israel, and we won’t say anything and won’t ask questions about what you’re doing.”

Read more about uncovering Israel’s shady arms sales:

• Supreme Court rules against exposing Israel’s role in Bosnian genocide
• Israelis demand state open up past ties to Argentina junta
• Despite war crimes, Israel insists on selling arms to Myanmar
• The untold story of Israeli military exports to South Sudan

Just a reminder that +972 Magazine and The +972 Podcast are nonprofit journalism. Like what you hear? Please consider making a donation: https://972mag.com/donate.

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The music in this episode is by Ketsa.

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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 for democracy and free speech in Israel. In the latest episode of the podcast, he talks about Israel's attempt to limit criticism of its policies in the occupied territories, and the impact this crackdown has on Palestinian rights in particular.

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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 right to national self-determination.

Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin joins The +972 Podcast to talk about how the plan addresses Palestinian refugees, why physically splitting Jerusalem is a horrible idea, and to discuss other models of confederation and what we can learn from them.

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The theme music in this episode is by Ketsa.

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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 stand up for Palestinian rights, Pride Week brings into focus the balancing act that queer Palestinians often face.

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The music in this episode is by Ketsa.

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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 March marking Nakba Day was held in one such village, Khubbeiza. +972 Magazine's Henriette Chacar went to the march to hear from participants of various ages what it means to them.

See photos from this year's return march.

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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 refugee from Darfur and one of the leaders of the Sudanese refugee community in Israel, talks about witnessing a revolution in exile, being a refugee in Israel, and his dreams of returning home.

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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 soon. How can we be a democracy if half the people living permanently under Israeli control can't vote? That's going to be pretty difficult to explain to the outside world.”

In this week’s episode, we debrief after the elections and discuss both their short and long-term consequences.

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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-state or two-state solution, but some of the things that people said you can only achieve through a peace deal, can [actually] be achieved within the status quo."

In the second half, former +972 writer Omar Rahman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, talks about what it means for Palestinians to have no say in elections that in many ways could determine their national fate, in addition to their daily lives.

"When we're looking at Israeli elections, whether it's the left or the center or the right or the far-right that's elected, that has a tremendous impact on the daily lives of Palestinians and they don't have any say over that. So there's a deep uneasiness over what's coming, which you have no control over."

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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 believe the story that the two rockets were fired by mistake. This narrative allows both Hamas to claim that it is still is abiding by its policy of not firing rockets, and giving Israel the leeway to not respond in force or through a major escalation. It's basically a fig leaf that allows both parties to to pretend that they're still interested in averting an escalation, but also reminding the other that they could if the cease fire doesn't hold."

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The music in this episode is by Ketsa.

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