The +972 Podcast

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, a...

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...

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 hara...

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...

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 t...

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...

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 mean...

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 intif...

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,...

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 t...

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 P...

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 Palest...

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.” Dec...

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 m...

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 nat...

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...

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 Ar...

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 aspira...

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 ma...

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 w...

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...

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 Isra...

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 b...

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...

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 remaine...