In this special miniseries from Unsettled, producer Max Freedman spends nine days in the South Hebron Hills with Palestinians and Jews working together to oppose and obstruct the occupation. This trip, organized by the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, culminates in a dramatic direct action known by a code name: “the birthday party.”

In the first episode, Max gets to know Tariq, a Palestinian teacher from the village of Umm al-Khair. Umm al-Khair is surrounded on three sides by an Israeli settlement, and the residents live under constant threat of violence and demolition. Tariq explains how his family came to live in this area, how he became an activist, and why he believes in co-resistance with Jewish allies.

“The Birthday Party” is reported by Max Freedman, and produced by Max Freedman, Emily Bell, and Ilana Levinson, with help from Asaf Calderon. Music from Blue Dot Sessions.

On March 15, Israel’s High Court of Justice heard a case that could lead to one of the largest forced population transfers in recent history. For more than 20 years, Israel has been trying to expel the residents of 12 Palestinian villages in a part of the West Bank called Masafer Yatta. The state claims they need the land for a military firing zone. If the court agrees, 1,300 Palestinians might be removed from their homes.

In this episode, producer Max Freedman speaks to Ali Awad and Maya Rosen about this decades-long legal battle and what’s at stake. Ali and Maya are both organizers of the Save Masafer Yatta campaign, which aims to stop this eviction by turning Masafer Yatta into a household name.

Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Music by Nat Rosenzweig and Blue Dot Sessions. Photo credit: Yahel Gazit.

Save Masafer Yatta

To exact ‘revenge,’ Israeli settlers wreaked havoc in my village (Ali Awad, +972 Magazine, 4/4/22)

Explainer: The threat of mass expulsion in Masafer Yatta (+972 Magazine, 3/14/22)

Maya Rosen & Daniel Roth: KKL-JNF (Unsettled, 3/23/22)

Before there was a state of Israel, there was the Jewish National Fund. The JNF, or Keren Kayamet L’Yisrael in Hebrew, was founded in 1901 to buy land in Palestine for Jewish settlement. Today, most American Jews know the JNF for its tin tzedakah boxes and tree planting campaigns. But KKL-JNF owns 13% of the land in Israel — which it allocates exclusively to Jews — and has been involved in evicting Palestinians in the Negev, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank.

This episode was produced by Ilana Levinson. Music by Nat Rosenzweig and Blue Dot Sessions.

When Hisham Abu-Hawash ended his 141-day hunger strike last month, he had been imprisoned by Israel for more than a year without charges or a trial. He was just one of about 500 Palestinians held in “administrative detention.”

In this episode, we speak to Milena Ansari, International Advocacy Officer at Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. Milena explains Israel’s military court system and how Palestinians are fighting to end administrative detention.

Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. This episode was reported and produced by Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

Mahmoud Muna is part of the family that runs the Educational Bookshop: the only English language bookstore in East Jerusalem. The current iteration of the Bookshop was opened in the 1980s by Mahmoud’s father, Ahmed. Today, the shop has multiple locations and thousands of titles on its shelves. "Any book on Palestine-Israel that has ever [been] written," Mahmoud says, "there's a good chance we have it."

When Unsettled producer Max Freedman visited Jerusalem at the start of 2020, he stopped by the Educational Bookshop and sat down with Mahmoud. In this episode of Unsettled, they talk about the history of the bookshop and what it means — to Palestinians in East Jerusalem and people around the world.

Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. This episode was reported by Max Freedman and produced by Emily Bell. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

MAHMOUD’S PICKS: NON-FICTION

• Jerusalem in History by Kamil Asali
• I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti
• Palestine on a Plate: Memories from My Mother’s Kitchen by Joudi Kalla
• In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story by Ghada Karmi
• The Palestinian Table by Reem Kassis
• Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore
• Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life by Sari Nusseibeh
• The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine—A Tale of Two Narratives by Padraig O’Malley
• The Peace Process: From Breakthrough to Breakdown by Afif Safieh
• Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh
• The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World by Avi Shlaim
• Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman

MAHMOUD’S PICKS: FICTION

• Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa
• Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
• Out of It by Selma Dabbagh
• The Parisian by Isabella Hammad
• The Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury

Unsettled producer Asaf Calderon grew up in Israel in a household of “smolanim”: leftists. His parents raised him to think critically and to fight against injustice, even if it means going against what most people consider normal. But today, even while their values remain the same, there is a deep ideological rift between them when it comes to Zionism. In this episode, Asaf sits down with his parents, Nissim and Rivka Calderon, to learn about their political development and discuss whether Zionism is compatible with left politics and Palestinian rights.

These episodes of Unsettled was produced by Asaf Calderon and edited by Ilana Levinson. Unsettled theme music is by Nat Rosenzweig with additional music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions.

Unsettled producer Asaf Calderon grew up in Israel in a household of “smolanim”: leftists. His parents raised him to think critically and to fight against injustice, even if it means going against what most people consider normal. But today, even while their values remain the same, there is a deep ideological rift between them when it comes to Zionism. In this episode, Asaf sits down with his parents, Nissim and Rivka Calderon, to learn about their political development and discuss whether Zionism is compatible with left politics and Palestinian rights.

This episode of Unsettled was produced by Asaf Calderon and edited by Ilana Levinson. Unsettled theme music is by Nat Rosenzweig with additional music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions.

This summer, New York City’s Astor Place hosted a bat mitzvah ceremony unlike any other: the Anti-Zionist Bat Mitzvah, an all-day musical extravaganza created by Morgan Bassichis and Ira Khonen Temple. The event started with tutoring sessions on Palestinian popular resistance and the weaponization of the Torah, and ended with a celebratory dance to “Hava Nagila” remixed as an anti-police anthem.

In this episode of Unsettled, producer Ilana Levinson talks to Morgan and Ira about their collaboration, and the importance of joy in collective liberation.

The Anti-Zionist Bat Mitzvah was first performed on July 4, 2021 on Rashid Johnson’s Red Stage in Astor Place. The performance was commissioned by Creative Time and curated by Diya Vij. Performers: Morgan Bassichis, Ira Khonen Temple, Emma Alabaster, April Centrone, Zoë Aqua, and Pam Fleming. Tutors: Shirly Bahar, Brooke Lober, Izzy Mustafa, Tamar Ghabin, Dean Spade, Rabbi Miriam Grossman, and Ita Segev.

This episode was produced by Ilana Levinson and edited by Emily Bell. Original music by Nat Rosensweig.

Special thanks to Aleksei Wagner and Creative Time for performance recordings.

In October, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz declared six Palestinian civil society organizations “terror groups." These groups work in issue areas like women’s rights, children’s rights, and agricultural labor. The "terror" designation is based on alleged connections to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a small political faction. But so far, Israel’s evidence has failed to convince many international leaders. In this episode of Unsettled, we look closely at one of those groups, Al-Haq: its founding principles, its role in Palestinian society, and the impact of Israel's terror designation on its ability to continue documenting Israeli human rights abuses. 

This episode was produced by Ilana Levinson and features Jonathan Kuttab and Khaled Elgindy.

Archival footage courtesy of Al-Haq. 

RESOURCES

Tareq Baconi: Hamas, Explained (Unsettled Podcast, 5/17/21)

‘They targeted us for one reason: We’re succeeding in changing the paradigm’ (Yuval Abraham, +972 Magazine, 10/25/21)

Israeli dossier on rights groups contains little evidence (Joseph Krauss, AP, 11/6/21)

Israel/OPT: Designation of Palestinian civil society groups as terrorists a brazen attack on human rights (Amnesty International, 10/22/21)

"Grief is something that, alas, as human beings we're just going to keep experiencing over and over and over again in all of its many manifestations. And I think poetry can help us know that we're not alone in experiencing it, that it's a place to place our pain, and to place our unresolved questions, our mysteries." - Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American writer, educator, and editor. Her published work includes poetry, children’s books and essays, and she has been awarded a Lifetime Achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle. She has also spent decades as an educator, visiting classrooms all around the world. 

In this episode, producer Emily Bell speaks with Naomi Shihab Nye about finding inspiration in her father's notebooks, processing grief, and writing about Palestine. Naomi shares a selection of old and new works, including two from her book "Transfer."

Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

Palestinian-American writer, editor and educator Naomi Shihab Nye grew up in Ferguson, Missouri, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she continues to live.

She is the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the United States (Poetry Foundation). Her late father Aziz Shihab was a journalist and author of Does the Land Remember Me? A Memoir of Palestine. She has been a visiting writer in hundreds of schools and communities all over the world for more than 40 years and has written or edited 35 books including collections of poetry, novels for teens, picture books, essays, very short fictional stories, anthologies of poetry. Her books Sitti’s Secrets, Habibi, This Same Sky, & The Tree is Older than You Are: Poems & Paintings from Mexico have been in print more than 20 years. Her volume 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Recent books include Everything Comes Next, Cast Away, The Tiny Journalist, and Voices in the Air. She is on faculty at Texas State University and won recent Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Book Critics Circle and the Texas Institute of Letters. The Turtle of Oman (Greenwillow) a novel for children set in Muscat, will soon be followed by its sequel The Turtle of Michigan.

• Naomi Shihab Nye at the Poetry Foundation
• Works by Naomi Shihab Nye at poets.org
• “This Court Decision in the Gavin Grimm Case Will Bring Tears to Your Eyes” (American Civil Liberties Union, 4/10/17)
• “A memorial to a great Arab American Journalist, Aziz Shihab” (Ray Hanania, The Arab Daily News, 10/28/07)
• “Texas journalist Aziz Shihab on 'Does the Land Remember Me?: A Memoir of Palestine'" (Michael King, The Austin Chronicle, 7/20/07)