The +972 Podcast

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 their own survival over any coherent response to Israel’s genocide, leaving Palestinians without a national vision and strategy at the moment they need it most.Additional Reading:Omar Rahman’s archive at +972October 7 Exposed the Depth of the Palestinian Leadership CrisisRupture and Representation: The Palestinian National Movement After October 7The full transcript of this episode will be available on our website.Theme music by Ghassan BirumiSupport the show

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, and present occupation and ethnic hierarchy as natural facts of life. As Israel's genocide in Gaza lays bare the consequences of decades of dehumanization, she reflects on what this system has produced — and, having experienced the post-October 7 crackdown on dissent firsthand, what it does to those who challenge it.The full transcript of this episode will be available on our website.Theme music by Ghassan BirumiSupport the show

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 researcher, comes from one of the few families that never left. Today, he is raising his children in the city his great-grandfather refused to flee. Abou Shhadeh traces how the catastrophe of 1948 unfolded specifically in Jaffa, the parallels he draws between the ethnic cleansing of the city and the genocide in Gaza, and what it means to resist erasure across generations.Additional reading:Abed Abou Shhadeh’s archive at +972For Palestinian parents, every day of this war provokes existential anxietyThe full transcript of this episode will be available on our website.Theme music by Ghassan BirumiSupport the show