Welcome to +972’s Sunday Recap! 

Last Wednesday, Palestinian teenager Owais Hammam was on a walk near his home in the West Bank village of Kharbatha Bani Harith, when he was ambushed by a group of Israeli settlers, dragged to a hilltop outpost, and beaten unconscious. From his hospital bed in Ramallah, Hammam spoke to photojournalist Faiz Abu Rmeleh, recounting how both settlers and Israeli soldiers took part in his brutal torture.

Meanwhile, Israel is moving to expropriate swaths of Sebastia, a Palestinian village north of Nablus, in the largest act of “archeological cleansing” in the West Bank. And despite claiming to hold ethical commitments, Alon Arad argued (originally published on Local Call), Israeli archeologists are putting up no resistance — subordinating scientific value to colonial expansion.

Muhammad Shehada wrote about how Israel’s Gaza proxy strategy is collapsing: The killing of gang leader Yasser Abu Shabab last week, a known felon and druglord, by one of his own men has exposed the bankruptcy of Israel’s vision for the Strip’s future.

The October ceasefire agreement brought about the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees, including some 250 who were serving lengthy or life sentences in Israeli prisons. But as Baker Zoubi reported, Palestinian citizens of Israel were excluded from the deal altogether, trapped between Israel’s refusal and an absence of leadership.

For Meron Rapoport, Benjamin Netanyahu’s formal request for a pardon from corruption charges, which his lawyers sent to President Isaac Herzog at the end of November, is a lens into Israel’s political psyche: the Israeli Prime Minister’s refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing mirrors a society conditioned to interpret remorse as weakness and brute force as destiny (originally published on Local Call).

And as right-wing antisemitism has spilled into full view in recent months, Republicans in the U.S. Congress are feigning shock. Yet as Natasha Soffer-Roth argued, the GOP and and their allies have mainstreamed antisemitism for years, only to portray it as a left-wing problem to advance Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

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