The +972 Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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, the Tel Aviv municipality flouted Education Ministry guidelines.

The episode was a timely reminder of what +972 editor Amjad Iraqi and Meron Rapoport, an editor at Local Call, argued in a pair of essays they wrote for The Nation in August: that the Green Line, both as a result of Palestinian grassroots resistance and Israeli efforts to undermine the idea that the West Bank is a separate entity, is gradually becoming irrelevant. 

You can read Iraqi and Rapoport's pieces at +972 Magazine here and here, or at The Nation here and here.

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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, she told the +972 Podcast. "I got to a very extreme point where I couldn't deal anymore with how much we were not making any progress in humanitarian work and in the NGO world." 

Turning to stand-up comedy, she said, not only helped her feel less alone in struggling against the situation in Israel-Palestine, but also helped the trilingual Shuster-Eliassi — she speaks Hebrew, Arabic, and English — express herself in the way that she wanted. "[Comedy] released my voice. It made me say the things that I dreamed of saying, it made me reach the people I'm dreaming of reaching — it made me speak in all the languages that I know."

The music in this episode is by DAM and Ketsa.

The audio clips in this episode are taken from the short documentary "Reckoning With Laughter," directed by Amber Fares and produced by Rachel Leah Jones. "Reckoning With Laughter" can be watched at either Al Jazeera or The New Yorker.

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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 to investigate human rights violations, in collaboration with Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, examined the incident. The visual reconstruction was published this week, eight months after the crash.

The investigation sought to establish the circumstances of of the car crash, the use of lethal force, whether Ahmad received medical care after being shot, and how the various Israeli authorities at the scene treated Ahmad’s body.

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The music in this episode is by Circus Marcus, Daniel Birch, and The Joy Drops.

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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 talk about how the elections are pitting different strands of the Israeli right against each other for control of the government, and the reasons behind the disintegration of the Palestinian-led Joint List.

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The music in this episode is by Ketsa and Crowander.

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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 means welcomed by progressives as an unmitigated win. Beyond the unimaginable wreckage left behind by the Trump administration — damage that will likely outlast Biden's presidency — those in the movement are also clear-eyed about the limitations of a centrist Democratic government.

Nowhere does that assessment ring as true as in the Palestine movement, where, as Sandra Tamari, executive director of the Adalah Justice Project, tells the +972 Podcast, activists have to reckon with an administration that is "no friend of Palestine." 

At the same time, Tamari stresses, there is cause for optimism: unlike the Trump White House, a Biden administration is "a target that can be moved." The current generation of Palestinian activists are more than up for the task, Tamari adds, calling them "more fearless and unapologetic than ever before."

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The music in this episode is by Ketsa and Unheard Music Concepts.

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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 intifadas of 1987 or 2000? Why has the Palestinian leadership not put forward a new political strategy to face these threats? What is preventing Palestinians from breaking the so-called “status quo” designed to suppress them?

On the latest episode of The +972 Podcast, Dana El Kurd, an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and a researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, answers these questions and more. El Kurd is the author of “Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine,” a book that examines how the Palestinian Authority, which was created under the Oslo Accords in 1993, repressed and diluted political activity in the occupied territories.

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The music in this episode is by Ketsa and Unheard Music Concepts.

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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, the answer is not what you might think.

Tom is an academic who serves as the chairperson of the board of Zochrot, an Israeli nonprofit bringing awareness to the Nakba among the Jewish Israeli public.

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The music in this episode is by Ketsa and Unheard Music Concepts.

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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 the practicalities of return.

She answers questions like, how would return be facilitated? Who would be involved in the process? And what happens in cases where refugees aren't able to return to their original homes?

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The music in this episode is by Ketsa and Unheard Music Concepts.

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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 Palestinian refugees is often sidelined in discussions on Palestine-Israel. To shift back the focus on this issue, we at +972 Magazine set out to explore what return means — 72 years since the Nakba, the catastrophe that culminated in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, and which continues to impact millions more to this day. Is return merely a symbolic demand? Is it at all feasible?

This episode is the first in a three-part series on the right of return for Palestinian refugees. We will be releasing a new episode every Friday over the next few weeks, starting with Tarek. With his help, we will travel from Safad, to Akka, to Jaffa, to Beit Nabala, and get a sense of what return might look like.

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The music in this episode is by Ketsa and Unheard Music Concepts.

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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 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the contents of the “Trump-Netanyahu plan,” as she calls it, are cause for alarm. 

The arrogance that characterizes the deal, which deliberately excludes Palestinians from the conversation, reflects an Israeli “fantasy” that “somehow Palestinians are going to agree to their own subjugation,” says Buttu. That exclusion is compounded by the Palestinian Authority’s failure to effectively respond to the plan, she explains.

The Trump plan has also “showed Netanyahu’s true face,” says Buttu. “It says to Palestinians who are living in the occupied territories, ‘We don’t want you.’ But the plan is also saying to Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, ‘You also don’t belong in the State of Israel, and so we have the right to get rid of you.’

For Buttu, this was one of the reasons Palestinians in Israel voted in even greater numbers this time around. That fact that Netanyahu’s rival, Benny Gantz of the Blue and White party, supports the Trump deal and echoes many of Likud’s policies shows “just how far to the right Israeli society is.”

Despite — or perhaps because of — mounting racist attacks, the Palestinian-led Joint List won a record 15 seats, making it the third-largest party once again. But now, its members must decide how to use this political capital.

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The music in this episode is by Ketsa and Unheard Music Concepts.

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