About the Podcast

Groundwork: Season 2

In our new season we tell the stories of people on the front lines. Israel is about to have its most extreme-right wing government in the country’s history. Religious Zionism- Otzma Yehudit – now the country’s third largest party – calls for full annexation of the West Bank. There were recent bombings in Jerusalem. Deadly violence in the West Bank spiked in 2022. Everyone is asking what might happen next. And we’ll be be honest, sometimes we feel hopeless. But that’s not the whole story. Long-time activists are gearing up for a new level of action. 

Season 1 – “The Mixed Cities Edition”

We are using the term “mixed cities” to describe cities in which Jews and Palestinian Arabs live together. According to historians the term came into common use in the late 1940s to denote previously majority Arab municipalities that had a certain number of new Jewish residents deemed sufficient to warrant the lifting of military rule restrictions. Eventually it became the general Israeli term for towns and cities that are home to both Jewish and Palestinian Arab communities. 

As we’ll explore in these episodes: each city is very different, with painful histories, legacies of dispossession and injustice, and current realities of inequality. Not least in Jerusalem, which is bisected by the Green Line, and where most Palestinian residents do not hold Israeli citizenship, and whose residency and property rights remain under threat. Yet what unites them is their dual Arab and Jewish identities, and the presence of activists working to make that reality more just and equitable.

Sally Abed is a member of the national leadership at Standing Together: the largest Jewish-Arab grassroots movement in Israel. In recent years, Sally has become a prominent Palestinian voice in Israel, advocating progressive causes for social and climate justice, and highlighting their connection to the struggle for peace and an end to the occupation through building a new majority in Israeli society.

Dina Kraft is the Opinion editor of Haaretz English. A veteran foreign correspondent, she began her overseas career in the Jerusalem bureau of The Associated Press. She was later posted to AP’s Johannesburg bureau where she covered southern Africa. She’s also reported from Senegal, Kenya, Pakistan, Jordan, Tunisia, Russia, and Ukraine. Dina has taught journalism at Northeastern University, Harvard University, and Boston University. She was a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and a 2015 Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University.

Dina is the former Christian Science Monitor correspondent covering Israel and the Palestinian areas. She hosted “The Branch” podcast, about ties between Jews and Palestinians and her work has also been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and among other news outlets. She’s the co-author with Hannah Goslar of the upcoming memoir, My Friend Anne Frank, published by Penguin Random House, UK.

Yoshi Fields is the co-founder and producer of Groundwork and has worked in the podcast industry for about 5 years. In 2018, he moved to Israel-Palestine and has worked on several podcasts in the region, focusing on both political and human interest stories, including as a producer at Israel Story, The Branch, and Unsettled. 

Through his work, Yoshi aims to empower the voices of others, and facilitate the expression of their stories. He has previously hiked the Himalayas while carrying out a research study on the intersection of love and Buddhism, and worked in a hospice for a year writing about the experience of mortality for health workers.