The +972 Podcast

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 permanently preventing their return.
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Additional reading:
‘Render it unusable’: Israel’s mission of total urban destruction (+972 Magazine)
The Killing Of Hind Rajab (Forensic Architecture)
Israeli Disinformation: Al-Ahli Hospital (Forensic Architecture)
The Massacre of Aid Workers in Tel Al-Sultan (Forensic Architecture)
A Cartography of Genocide (Forensic Architecture)

The full transcript of this episode will be available on our website.
Theme music by Ghassan Birumi

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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 +972
October 7 Exposed the Depth of the Palestinian Leadership Crisis
Rupture and Representation: The Palestinian National Movement After October 7

The full transcript of this episode will be available on our website.
Theme music by Ghassan Birumi

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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 Birumi

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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 +972
For Palestinian parents, every day of this war provokes existential anxiety

The full transcript of this episode will be available on our website.
Theme music by Ghassan Birumi

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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 last month in partnership with WIRED and published in Arabic on Raseef22.

Additional reading:
What Happens When You Can’t Get a Death Certificate in Gaza
Hassan Took a Bike Ride. Now He’s One of the Thousands Missing in Gaza
Mahmoud Mushtaha’s archive at +972

The full transcript of this episode will be available on our website.

Theme music by Ghassan Birumi

Support the show