The +972 Podcast

Israel’s abuse of Palestinian prisoners and detainees has reached new heights since October 7, particularly for those arrested in Gaza. But what does this incarceration regime actually look like? Human rights lawyer Sahar Francis knows it better than most. She has spent decades advocating for Palestinian prisoners, and she tells +972 that the past three years are the worst she’s ever seen — even though conditions ...

As Israel prepares for elections on Oct. 27, the past four years demand a reckoning: what has prolonged far-right rule changed in law, policy, and political culture? And what does it reveal about the ability of Israeli institutions and civil society to protect rights during a time of acute crisis? Noa Sattath, Executive Director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) — one of the country's oldest and most promin...

In 2011, social media helped topple dictators. Today, platforms deprioritize political content across the board. But for Palestinians, the problem goes deeper than algorithms — it's systematic. A new report from 7amleh, the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, documents more than 3,000 cases of Meta restricting Palestinian content over five years. 7amleh's executive director Nadim Nashif joins us to break down the mechan...

On July 1, Israel and the United States signed an agreement to build a permanent U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem on confiscated Palestinian property. Among the descendants of the Palestinian families who own the site is historian Rashid Khalidi. He details his family’s nearly 30 year legal battle against the planned embassy — and reflects on whether the hundred-year war on Palestine may finally be entering a new chapter, give...

Since October 2023, much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble. But architect and Forensic Architecture founder Eyal Weizman argues that destruction alone does not capture what is taking place. Drawing on his new book, “Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide,” he describes a process that goes beyond erasure: the “rubbing out of any trace of existence” aimed at expelling the Palestinian population and permane...

The global movement for Palestinian justice has achieved real gains — in international courts, in diplomatic shifts, in a transformation of public opinion. Yet the official Palestinian leadership remains deeply fractured, ill-equipped to meet the moment. Omar Rahman, fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, makes the case that the Palestinian leadership crisis is a national emergency: those in power prioritize the...

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...

Jaffa was once a cosmopolitan port city deeply connected to the Arab world. Then, within a few years after 1948, it was transformed: most of its Palestinian population was expelled, its institutions seized and repurposed, and the few residents who remained were confined to a ghetto, often in houses that were not their own, under laws designed to make that dispossession permanent. Abed Abou Shhadeh, a community organizer and researc...

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,...

How has Israeli society become so deeply militarized, and what does that mean for how “security” is defined? Sahar Vardi, a veteran anti-militarist activist and researcher, traces how militarization shapes everyday life, drives policy, and exports arms and doctrines of control far beyond Israel's borders — and asks who profits, who pays, and why we accept this as inevitable.

Additional reading:

Israel’s arms s...

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 epis...

For more than half a century, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was framed as temporary, even as realities on the ground told a different story. Now, legal experts say recent government measures have pushed Israel into de facto annexation. In the face of these moves, and in the shadow of the genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority has never looked so weak. Longtime Palestinian affairs journalist Dalia Hatuqa unpacks wh...

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—wh...

As violent organized crime and police violence reshape everyday life in Palestinian communities in Israel, and as another election approaches, MK Aida Touma-Suleiman reflects on a decade inside the Knesset –– and on the moment she decided she could no longer stay. In a conversation about feminist leadership, political exhaustion, and the limits of trying to fight from within  the Israeli system built to exclude Pal...

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 th...

This time of year, Palestinian Christians are often invoked in media and political discourse as emblems of faith, coexistence, and hope, while the political conditions shaping their lives — including military occupation, genocide, and forced displacement — are ignored. Palestinian theologian and lecturer John Munayer sheds light on the Palestinian Christian experience, from Israeli efforts to separate them from the Arab...

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...

Over a month into the ceasefire, Gaza’s future remains in the hands of Western powers — with Palestinians largely excluded. Gazan political analyst Muhammad Shehada provides an in-depth look at the diplomatic and geopolitical strategies at play, the ongoing realities of displacement and deprivation inside the Strip, and what this moment might mean for Palestinians’ political horizons.

Additional Reading:
Muhamm...

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 itsel...