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...

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,...

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 t...

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 ...

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 ba...

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 t...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...