A war that never ends & pain that’s never shared: Understanding Israel-Palestine via Middle East podcasts

There’s good reason that the days-old Hamas attack on Israel is still shocking. Terrorists stormed out of Gaza, Israel’s intelligence system failed, Hamas butchered Israeli civilians, including children, and dragged scores of hostages back to the Palestinian enclave. Now, the world holds its breath as it waits for a possible Israeli land offensive in Gaza. Everyone knows it’s going to be brutal. No one knows how it will end. There are a thousand questions – and some attempts at answers.

Conflicted , a podcast that breaks down the complexities of history, religion and politics in the Middle East, takes on some of these questions in its latest episode hosted by Islamic scholar Thomas Small and ex-jihadi-turned-spy Aimen Dean. Their conclusion: Iran had a possible role to play in Hamas’s outrageous attack. Israel and Saudi Arabia were just weeks away from announcing the biggest deal of the Middle East that would see normalisation of relations between Riyadh and Tel Aviv. As part of this deal, the Saudis supposedly had two sets of demands: The building of an American nuclear plant in Saudi Arabia, fully under American control, and the beginning of the creation of a Palestinian state with Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem.

However, the Iranians, despite inking a restoration of relations agreement with the Saudis earlier this year, supposedly instigated Hamas to pull the trigger to undermine the Riyadh-Tel Aviv rapprochement. The podcast says the situation has resulted from a “Mexican standoff within a Mexican standoff” with everyone pointing two guns at each other – Iran at Israel through Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel at Iran through Azerbaijan and the Kurdish movement in Iraq, Iran at Saudi Arabia through Iraqi militias and the Houthis, Saudi Arabia at Iran through the current regime in Pakistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Ahopeless situation? Not according to some brave people living in Israel and Palestine. Groundwork , a podcast hosted by Sally Abed, a member of the national leadership at Standing Together – a Jewish-Arab grassroots movement – and Dina Kraft, the opinion editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, tells stories about the people on the frontline of the conflict. In the episode ‘Two States, One Homeland’ the hosts talk to May Pundak, the daughter of one of the architects of the Oslo Accords, Ron Pundak. May advocates a confederate, shared homeland for both Palestinians and Israelis with complete freedom of movement and settlement.

Many would say that’s a wild dream. Over in Gaza, described by some as the world’s largest openair prison, the Gaza Up Closepodcast by Lital Firestone delves into the systematic restrictions imposed on freedom of movement for everyday life in the Palestinian enclave. This particularly hits the women of Gaza hard who must contend with the concrete ceiling of the Israeli blockade even if they break through the glass ceiling of their own patriarchal societies. This means that even highly educated women in Gaza have little economic opportunities and liberties, keeping them poor, destroying their potential.

In Unsettled, a podcast featuring diverse viewpoints on Israel-Palestine, the episode ‘Politicised Pain’ talks about how expressions of pain on both sides are used to cancel each other out every time violence erupts. It’s only through empathy and compassion around that shared pain that Israelis and Palestinians can find a peaceful future for themselves.

But who’s listening?

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