Who's afraid of Palestinian Christianity?

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 and Palestinian national movements, to the role of Christian leadership and institutions in legitimizing their subjugation. Arguing that religion and politics cannot be disentangled, he explains why Palestinian liberation theology offers not only a framework for resistance but a challenge to the colonial, Zionist assumptions embedded in Western Christian thought.Right now, your donation is worth up to 12 times more. As part of our end-of-year campaign, a generous donor is multiplying each new +972 membership by 12 and doubling every one-time donation. If you believe in our fight to end impunity and ensure justice for all between the river and the sea, now is your chance to act.Join the +972 family. Make a donation. Make a difference.Additional reading:Sheltering in churches, Gaza’s Christians face another Christmas under firePalestinian Christians do not tolerate life under occupationFollow +972 Magazine: 972mag.com Instagram, Facebook, and  XSupport +972 Magazine:Become a Member Sign up for our newslettersTheme music by Ghassan BirumiSupport the show

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 that produce and conceal systemic violence.Additional reading:Yuval Abraham’s archive at +972Follow +972 Magazine: 972mag.com Instagram, Facebook, and  XSupport +972 Magazine:Become a Member Right now, your donation is worth up to 12 times more. As part of our end-of-year campaign, a generous donor is multiplying each new +972 membership by 12 and doubling every one-time donation.If you believe in our fight to end impunity and ensure justice for all between the river and the sea, now is your chance to act.Join the +972 family. Make a donation. Make a difference.Theme music by Ghassan BirumiSupport the show

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: Muhammad Shehada’s archive at +972What’s behind Israel’s new plan to divide Gaza in twoFollow +972 Magazine: 972mag.com Instagram, Facebook, and  XSupport +972 Magazine:Become a Member Sign up for our newslettersTheme music by Ghassan BirumiSupport the show

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 the Living: A Plea for the Rights of Palestinian Detainees ‘They intended to kill us’: Masafer Yatta reels from bloody settler assaultsMy father was jailed for believing Palestine must be freeFollow +972 Magazine: 972mag.com Instagram, Facebook, and  XSupport +972 Magazine:Become a Member Sign up for our newslettersTheme music by Ghassan BirumiSupport the show

Two years after October 7, Israeli public opinion remains shaped by fear, grief, and a siege mentality. But could the fragile ceasefire mark a turning point — or will Israel slip back into an “October 6 way of thinking,” ignoring the root causes of the violence and paving the way for future wars? Political analyst, public opinion researcher, and A Land For All member Dahlia Scheindlin joins us to discuss how Israeli attitudes toward the war on Gaza have evolved, whether there’s any possibility of a public reckoning, and what it would take to begin a process of genuine political transformation between the river and the sea — from both within Israeli society and the international community. Additional Reading: Dahlia Scheindlin’s archive at +972‘Israelis are frustrated, but do they want to stop the war? Not exactly’Follow +972 Magazine: 972mag.com Instagram, Facebook, and  XSupport +972 Magazine:Become a Member Sign up for our newslettersTheme music by Ghassan BirumiSupport the show

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 leads the Institute’s polling efforts in the West Bank and Gaza, adapting methods throughout the war to reach Palestinians under extraordinarily difficult conditions. Among other issues, he discusses his team’s recent findings on Palestinians’ attitudes towards party politics, armed struggle, the two-state paradigm, and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement.Additional Reading: Latest Polls from The Institute for Social and Economic Progress Follow +972 Magazine: 972mag.com Instagram, Facebook, and  XSupport +972 Magazine:Become a Member Sign up for our newslettersTheme music by Ghassan BirumiSupport the show

More journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023 than in any other conflict since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting data in 1992. According to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, Israel’s onslaught has killed 250 media workers to date. Yet despite facing conditions without parallel in the history of modern warfare, journalists in Gaza continue to bear witness. With Israel barring foreign reporters from entering the Strip for nearly two years now, Palestinian journalists have shouldered the entire burden of informing the world about the ongoing genocide, reporting on a story that is also their own.In this episode, Ruwaida Amer reflects on the difficulties of reporting from Gaza, where the atrocities she documented –– massacres, destruction, displacement, and starvation –– are inseparable from her own lived experience.Additional Reading: Ruwaida Amer’s archive at +972 Follow +972 Magazine: 972mag.com Instagram, Facebook, and  XSupport +972 Magazine:Become a Member Sign up for our newslettersTheme music by Ghassan BirumiSupport the show

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 connects the dots between the unfolding genocide in Gaza and Israeli actions and policies everywhere else in this land and beyond. Orly is a regular contributor to +972 Magazine and an editor at the Hebrew language media outlet Local Call. Additional Reading: B’Tselem report: Our GenocideOrly Noy ArchiveIsrael’s greatest threat isn’t Iran or Hamas, but its own hubrisFollow +972 Magazine: Website:972mag.com Instagram, and Facebook,  XSupport +972 Magazine:Become a Member Sign up for our newslettersMusic by Ghassan BirumiSupport the show

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.Visit +972 Magazine and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.Become a member of +972 Magazine: 972mag.com/membersSupport the show: 972mag.com/donateSign up for our weekly newsletter, The Landline: 972mag.com/newsletterSupport the show

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.Visit +972 Magazine and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.Become a member of +972 Magazine: 972mag.com/members/Support the show: 972mag.com/donate/Sign up for our weekly newsletter, The Landline: 972mag.com/newsletter/Support the show