The +972 Podcast

For generations, Jewish-Israeli children have been brought up in an education system where Palestinians rarely appear as Palestinians. Instead, they are "Arabs," “enemies,” and a "demographic threat" — or, in the words of scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan, "a problem to be solved." A professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Peled-Elhanan has spent years documenting how Israeli textbooks erase Palestinian life, mobilize Holocaust memory to produce existential fear, ...

In April 2024, a sixteen-year-old boy named Hassan Al-Qatta rode his bicycle out of his neighborhood in Gaza and never came back. He is not confirmed dead. He is not confirmed alive. He has simply disappeared. Hassan is one of an estimated 9,000 to 15,000 people missing in Gaza. Journalist Mahmoud Mushtaha spent eight months reporting on what that number actually means. This investigation was produced by the Palestine Reporting Lab, a project of Just Vision. The investigation was published la...

Israel spent 30 years depicting the Iranian regime as an existential threat, and now it is trying to eliminate it. But if the regime falls, which enemy will it choose next? Meron Rapoport joins us under Tel Aviv sirens to talk about the war's real goals, what it means for Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, and why “victory” may only set the stage for an even bigger challenge. The full transcript of this episode will be available on our website. Additional reading: Meron Rapop...

Across the occupied West Bank, Palestinian communities are being expelled at an alarming pace. Violent settler attacks are increasingly routine—and often ignored by authorities and much of the Israeli media. For the past two decades, Oren Ziv has documented these communities’ struggles to stay on their land when much of the Israeli press would not. In this episode, he shares how the constant threat of expulsion—whether from coordinated settler attacks, state policies, or both—reshapes lives, ...

Over 9,000 Palestinians are currently being held in Israeli prisons and military detention centers. While the majority of their names will be unfamiliar to most, the name of one Palestinian prisoner stands out above all others: Marwan Barghouti. Decades behind bars haven’t dimmed his influence—thanks, in part, to his family’s tireless advocacy. His son Arab Barghouti shares how Marwan’s life embodies both the ordinary struggles of countless Palestinians and the extraordinary impact of one man...

Investigative journalist Yuval Abraham takes us inside his reporting on the systems driving Israel’s mass killing in Gaza over the past two years. He discusses the core challenges and ethical dilemmas of uncovering state-backed atrocities, and why the stories revealed so far are just the tip of the iceberg. Abraham highlights the need to hold powerful institutions, like Israel’s military accountable rather than focusing only on individual perpetrators, offering a deeper look at the mechanisms...

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 ...

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...

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 conn...

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...

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,” w...

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 ...

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 th...