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• CAREER GUIDE
• 04 September 2024

Guide, don’t hide: reprogramming learning in the wake of AI

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integral to the world outside academia, universities face a crucial choice: to use or not to use.

• Monique Brouillette

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In the early days of generative artificial intelligence (AI), Ethan Mollick told his students to use it freely as long as they disclosed it. According to Mollick, a specialist in innovation and entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, “it worked great when ChatGPT-3.5 was the best model out there”. The program was good, but did not replace students’ input and they still had to edit and tweak its responses to earn a high grade in Mollick’s course. Things changed with the release of ChatGPT-4, the latest version of the chatbot developed by the US tech firm OpenAI. The new AI was noticeably smarter, and it became much harder to distinguish its output from that of a person’s. Suddenly, the program was outperforming students in Mollick’s classes and he knew he had to rethink his approach.Nature Career Guide: Faculty

Today, academia faces a dilemma as AI reshapes the world beyond the campus walls: embrace the technology or risk being left in the dust. However, as versions of the software become more robust, so does the risk of cheating. According to a 2023 -survey, roughly 50% of students over the age of 18 have admitted to using ChatGPT for an at-home test or quiz or to write an essay (see go.nature.com/4fpwrtv).

Educators today have two options, says Mollick. The first is to treat AI as cheating and intensify conventional measures such as in-class writing assignments, essays and hands-on work to demonstrate students’ mastery of the material. “We solved this problem in math in the 1970s with calculators,” he says. “If cheating is the thing you are worried about, we can just double down on what’s always worked.” The second option, which he terms “transformation”, involves actively using AI as an educational tool.

Lesson logics

The transformative approach is gaining traction on campuses. Innovative educators in various fields, including computer science, literature, business and the arts, are now exploring how AI can enhance learning experiences and prepare students for a technology-driven future. One area in which AI tools have shown particular promise is languages.

“One of the main things you need to learn languages is communication,” says Christiane Reves, who teaches German at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe. “‘You need to talk to people and have actual interactions.”

In 2024, Reves decided to build an AI tool to meet this need. Through a collaboration between ASU and OpenAI, she developed an AI program called Language Buddy that simulates human conversation. Students interact with the AI just as they would with a real partner — using it to practise everyday interactions, such as ordering a meal at a restaurant, in spoken German.

If the conversation is too advanced, the student can adjust its complexity. Reves offers the tool for her beginner-level German course. She says it helps students to sidestep the natural anxiety that comes with trying to talk in a foreign language, which is a barrier to people getting the practice they need. Overall, she has been pleased with its performance. “It’s not robotic; it doesn’t just repeat sentences, and it creates a conversation. So you never really know what the next sentence is, which is the natural way,” she says.

Suguru Ishizaki, an English specialist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, uses AI tools to teach new ways of writing. He has spent his career studying the challenges of becoming an effective writer and has now developed a tool to aid the process. Ishizaki says the problem is that inexperienced writers spend too long trying to craft nicely written sentences, which slows the process of getting their ideas onto the page. By contrast, expert writers and authors spend most of their time thinking, planning and preparing their ideas before hammering out prose on the keyboard. The “cognitive load of sentence craft” creates a hindrance to novice writers, which is where AI can help.

David Kaufer, a colleague of Ishizaki’s at Carnegie Mellon, agrees: “In the early writing process, you shouldn’t be worried about polishing. You should be worried about prototyping your ideas. What you need is a quick scribe to get these things down.”

In 2024, Ishizaki and Kaufer released myProse, an AI-powered tool that helps students to focus on their big ideas while AI handles the mechanics, transforming a student’s notes into grammatically correct, smoothly written sentences. They added ‘guardrails’ to ensure that the only information used by the tool used to create prose is generated from students’ notes, and not from its training data, which is taken from the Internet.

Kaufer says that he doesn’t want AI getting in the way of student creativity. AI should be “an attention tool that simply allows the student to attend to the most important things”, he says — namely, the ideas. By letting myProse finesse the sentence structure and produce drafts “efficiently and professionally”, students have more room to nurture their ideas.

He adds that the course is offered to upper-level undergraduates who already have an understanding of sentence crafting and grammar. It is not meant to be a replacement for learning how to write or practising creative writing, and it will be geared towards technical and professional writing. “Our goal is to preserve English departments and writing instruction,” says Kaufer. “AI cannot get in the way of that, but at the same time it is here to stay.”

Changing minds

Despite the exuberance among early adopters of AI, there is still much resistance among faculty members and students. Lecturers need to stay up to date with AI’s new capabilities and adopt it in an iterative way to encourage familiarity with the technology while maintaining the educational experience.

In his classroom, Mollick focuses on assigning projects to challenge students beyond the current capabilities of AI. In one example, he asked students to do things that AI struggles to do, such as building and testing a board game. He also asks students to reflect on how they’ve used ChatGPT, and what they’ve learnt from it, to gauge their thinking process. In another class, he created a tool that simulates job-interview scenarios for his students to get practice. He requires them to turn in the transcript and write a reflection on the exercise. He also assigns oral presentations with question-and-answer sessions designed to assess students’ knowledge and communication skills.

The challenge, according to Mollick, is that the technology advances and adds new capabilities rapidly, and students are adopting it quickly. Educators cannot simply use AI as an add-on to their courses, he says. Instead, they will have to overhaul their curriculum regularly to keep up with the technology. “We will have to do what we do terribly as academics, which is coordinate and move quickly in teaching,” he says. He urges teachers to share and collaborate with each other to maintain up-to-date teaching tools.

David Malan, a computer scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recognizes AI’s immense potential to boost productivity, but thinks it is too powerful for the university setting. In his introductory-level coding course that he uses at Harvard, Malan prohibits the use of general AI tools until the end of the course. Instead, he developed his own tool, which offers a more nuanced approach to AI integration in education.

“We set out to make ChatGPT less useful for students, in the sense of providing them with a specific chat tool that still answers their questions but does not provide them with outright answers to problems, or solutions to homework assignments,” says Malan.

To achieve this balance, Malan and his team applied what he calls “pedagogical guardrails” to the AI, designing his tool to nudge students towards the correct solutions without actually providing them. The tool acts like a tutor that is available 24 hours a day, he says, offering help when students get stuck. It allows students to highlight one or more lines of code and get explanations of its function. It also disables autocorrect and autoformat, but it advises students to improve their coding style in the manner of a grammar-correction function, flagging text that needs improvement. His favourite feature is that the AI answers students’ questions any time of day, any day of the week.

Future visions

For Vishal Rana, a business-management -specialist at the University of Doha for -Science and Technology in Qatar, the biggest challenge is the cheating mindset. Students are wary of AI tools because of concerns about academic misconduct. But Rana stresses that once students enter the workforce, prompting AI is a skill that the job market requires. He thinks that using the technology does not constitute plagiarism, and that the final product should be credited to the person who is prompting and knowing how to ask the right questions. “As an employer, I would rather hire somebody who could ask the right questions and increase productivity in a short time span,” he says.

Last year, Rana had a vision of transforming the business-education classroom from a conventional lecture-based environment to one in which students and lecturers worked alongside AI as partners in hands-on projects. Students were required to tap into generative AI programs, such as ChatGPT and Claude (from tech firm Anthropic in San Francisco, California), for many aspects of product development; these included brainstorming, e-mail writing and pitching to investors. The AI created ideas in seconds that allowed students to step into the role of editor, sifting through possible options and finding a feasible one. “Our goal was to create a more dynamic and interactive learning experience that prepares students for the AI-driven future of work,” he says.

In a product-development course, Rana instructed his students to put their real-world skills to the test and conduct in-person interviews with potential clients and stakeholders. The students used AI to write e-mails and generate interview questions, but they were the ones who had to go out and talk to people face to face, which bolstered their social skills. He said that in this case, the AI was working “as a co-pilot in this experiential learning”.

Rana suggests that educators will have to adapt their assignments for use with AI and experiential learning in future. “We suggest to all our academic colleagues [that they] now bring an element of experiential learning into their assessments,” he says. “This will replace old-school report writing and essay writing.”

Malan is optimistic that AI will eventually become a one-to-one teaching assistant — perhaps especially for students who aren’t financially able to go to university. “As much as we are focused on the on-campus students, for us, what’s been especially exciting about AI is the potential impact on self-taught students who aren’t as resourced or as fortunate to live in a part of the world where there are educational resources and institutions,” he says.

“There are quite a few students, young and old, around the world who don’t have a friend, a family member or a sibling who knows more about the subject than they do. But, with AI, they will now have a virtual subject-matter expert by their side,” Malan says.

Nature 633, S1-S3 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02837-0

This article is part of Nature Career Guide: Faculty, an editorially independent supplement. Advertisers have no influence over the content.

Project 2025’s stance on nuclear testing: A dangerous step back

By Tom Armbruster | September 6, 2024

Detonation of atomic bomb during Operation Crossroads Baker on July 25, 1946, the second of several atomic bomb tests to be conducted in the Marshall Islands—and one of the few to be exploded underwater, which was the cause of the column of radioactive sea spray seen here. Public Domain Image, courtesy of US Defense Department.Share

There are few places more peaceful than a Pacific island. At 6:45 am on a March morning in 1954, that peace was shattered by the largest nuclear test in American history: Operation Bravo.

The Bravo test was a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Now, 70 years later, Project 2025 is proposing a resumption of testing. That should alarm every military service member, downwinder, Pacific Islander, and taxpayer.

As US Ambassador to the Republic of the Marshall Islands, I joined in the solemn observance of “Remembrance Day,” the Marshallese national holiday that pays tribute every March 1 to those who lost their homeland, fell victim to cancer, or were otherwise affected by the Bravo shockwave and fallout.

The shorthand for the 67 nuclear tests from 1946 to 1958, including two undersea tests that wiped out rich Pacific marine life, is the “Nuclear Legacy.” It would be more accurate to call it the “Nuclear Wound.” The tests on Bikini, Enewetak, and Kwajalein wounded the land and the ocean, the people—both Marshallese and American servicemen—and the relationship between our two countries. Healing is marked in decades, if not centuries.

We’ve had the nuclear tiger by the tail for a long time. No leader of any country would want their legacy to be the use of such indiscriminate and destructive weapons. When I joined the Foreign Service from Hawaii, Ronald Reagan was President. A chance for nuclear disarmament came and went with his summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik. Today, the Soviet Union is gone but nuclear weapons are still here. We’ve made progress, but Reagan’s vision of a nuclear-free world remains out of reach. Until we achieve that goal, maintaining a test ban is in everyone’s interest. It is part of the legacy we leave our children.

I’ve stood on the Runit Dome concrete cap that covers the nuclear scrap that was bulldozed into a pit. That is also part of the legacy. As Nuclear Affairs Officer at the US Embassy in Moscow, I also visited some of the vast Russian nuclear architecture. I joined the late Sen. Pete Domenici (R-New Mexico) on a trip to Arzamas-16, a once-secret Russian nuclear city now known as Sarov. We saw abandoned ballrooms with torn curtains and dusty grand pianos, a testament to the empty result of spending on nuclear weapons. A waste of millions of dollars, rubles, or whatever currency used by the nuclear actor.

On page 431, Project 2025 calls for the United States to “Reject ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and indicate a willingness to conduct nuclear tests in response to adversary nuclear developments if necessary. This will require that the National Nuclear Security Administration be directed to move to immediate test readiness… .”

The Project 2025 proposal is a tremendous step backwards. We should be negotiating further cuts in the world’s nuclear arsenals, a prohibition of weapons in outer space, and cleanup of the “legacy” test sites around the world. It would help if Russia were a responsible partner in denuclearization but sadly that is not the case. We could be working together to find ways to mend the planet, rather than inflict further damage that will last for thousands of years.

The planet is resilient. Even sharks have returned to Bikini, although the sons and daughters of those displaced by testing have not. Pacific Islanders would never allow a return to testing in the Pacific, but no one on Earth should ever wake up again to a test like Bravo.

Together, we make the world safer.

The Bulletin elevates expert voices above the noise. But as an independent nonprofit organization, our operations depend on the support of readers like you. Help us continue to deliver quality journalism that holds leaders accountable. Your support of our work at any level is important. In return, we promise our coverage will be understandable, influential, vigilant, solution-oriented, and fair-minded. Together we can make a difference.

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Keywords: Bikini, Bravo, CTBT, Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Marshall Islands, Project 2025, Runit Dome, downwinders, nuclear tests, nuclear weapons, test ban treaty
Topics: Nuclear Weapons, Opinion

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Iranian MP blasts Iran’s leaders for missile transfer to Russia

8th August 2024

A former Iranian MP and commentator Heshmatollah Falhatpisheh has called Iran’s latest arms sales to Russia “the dirtiest example of Russophilia” as Iran gets ever closer to its allies in Moscow.

He said Iran’s leaders “have turned Iran into a playing card” in the war on Ukraine as Iran already faces global sanctions for providing drones to Russia used in civilian areas of Ukraine.

The outspoken former MP said the latest debacle was part of a “dirty game” as Iran is dragged further into global conflict and sanctions which have led to the country’s worst economic crisis since the founding of the Islamic Republic.

“It will continue until the dictator [Putin] leaves the quagmire,” he blasted.

The former chairman of the National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, he is now a faculty member of Allameh Tabatabaei University. He has made no secret of his opposition to the government’s policies which continue to lead the country closer to conflict with global powers such as the US.

The latest arms sales to Russia were confirmed by an Iranian lawmaker who denied that the delivery of ballistic missiles would risk heavy implications for Iran, also sanctioned for human rights abuses at home and its nuclear weapons program. Iran’s supply of kamikaze drones to Russia since 2022 has already angered Western powers that have imposed sanctions against Iranian entities and individuals.

Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani justified it by saying Iran has to subsequently “barter for our needs, including importing soybeans and wheat. Part of the barter involves sending missiles, and another part involves sending military drones to Russia.”

When asked whether sending ballistic missiles to Russia might lead to further sanctions or trigger the so-called “snapback” mechanism against Iran, the member of the Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee replied, “It can’t get any worse than it already is. We give missiles to [our proxies] Hezbollah, Hamas, and Hashd al-Shaabi, so why not to Russia?”

On Sunday, Nasser Kanaani, the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, once again denied being an ally to Russia in its war in Ukraine, saying “the Islamic Republic has never been part of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.”

Iran’s delivery of ballistic missiles to Russia ‘imminent’, Europe warns

Ukraine opens case against Iranian general for aiding Russia in war crimes

Russia uses large number of Iranian drones in attack on Ukraine

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Struggling with attention and organization as you age? It could be ADHD, not dementia

April 21, 2020

By Stephanie Collier, MD, MPH, Contributor; Editorial Advisory Board Member, Harvard Health Publishing

As we get older, occasional forgetfulness may become more worrisome. Is this the start of dementia, or are we just stressed? Has the loss of structure due to retirement led to this change? Or could we be suffering from another illness, maybe the same illness as our son or granddaughter, who also struggle with attention and organization?

What are the symptoms of ADHD in older adults?

Although the diagnosis of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is often associated with school-age children, this condition may persist throughout adulthood and into old age. Older adults with ADHD struggle with attention, memory, and planning. They may struggle with finishing projects or remembering information consistently, and they may become distracted during conversations and experience difficulty maintaining relationships. When older adults lose the structure of employment, they may experience an exacerbation of symptoms, similar to when young adults with ADHD lose the structure of school. During retirement older adults may start to re-experience challenges with time-management and procrastination, which may result in feelings of anxiety or guilt.

Is it normal aging or ADHD?

When people share concerns with their doctor about their memory, attention, or difficulty completing tasks, they may receive a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a stage between normal aging and dementia. However, older adults with ADHD may never have received a diagnosis of ADHD, especially if they had learned skills to compensate during their lifetime. To help doctors differentiate between mild cognitive impairment and ADHD in old age, the timing of symptoms and family history can provide good clues (after ruling out potential medical causes, such as thyroid or seizure disorders).

ADHD is one of the most heritable disorders in medicine, so having children, grandchildren, or siblings with this diagnosis should increase a doctor’s suspicion that their patient’s symptoms may be the result of ADHD. Understanding a patient’s timeline of symptoms is also crucial, as symptoms must have occurred in childhood to make the diagnosis of ADHD. Screening tools in adults may also be useful, such as the ADHD Self-Report Scale, although a positive screen doesn’t always mean you have ADHD.

What are effective treatments for ADHD in older adults?

The most effective medications for the treatment of ADHD in older adults are stimulant medications such as methylphenidate or dextroamphetamine. These medications provide significant benefit to older adults, as well as children and younger adults. However, in older adults doctors must also consider the cardiac risks of these medications, including increased blood pressure and heart rate, as well as a potential increase in the risk of an irregular heartbeat, particularly in people with known heart blockage.

Nonmedication options are also valuable to help a person create structure and learn organization tools, such as use of a daily planner, alarms, and lists. Therapists or coaches can help older adults with ADHD through the use of behavioral therapies, which may lead to improved time and money management, increased productivity, reduced anxiety, and higher life satisfaction.

What can you do in addition to getting medical treatment?

If you suspect your symptoms may be the result of ADHD, especially if a close family member has received this diagnosis, do not hesitate to ask your primary care physician for a referral to a specialist with expertise in the diagnosis and management of ADHD in older adults. In addition, the following strategies can be useful in managing symptoms at home.

Exercise regularly. Physical activity increases brain neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, which can affect attention.

Improve sleep. Set up a bedtime routine, avoid caffeine after noon, and try to avoid electronic devices within an hour of bedtime.

Enlist the help of others. Family members and other supports may help with creating structure and simplifying tasks.

Set reminders. Calendars, alarms, written notes, and lists can provide additional assistance in remembering tasks.

About the Author

Stephanie Collier, MD, MPH, Contributor; Editorial Advisory Board Member, Harvard Health Publishing

Dr. Stephanie Collier is the director of education in the division of geriatric psychiatry at McLean Hospital; consulting psychiatrist for the population health management team at Newton-Wellesley Hospital; and instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. … See Full Bio

View all posts by Stephanie Collier, MD, MPH

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Under cover of war, Israel is demolishing home after home in Silwan

The government has accelerated plans to depopulate the East Jerusalem neighborhood, displacing dozens of Palestinian residents this year.

By Jessica Buxbaum September 6, 2024

Israeli security forces destroy a house in Silwan, February 14, 2024. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)

Younes Odeh and his 3-year-old grandson stand atop the remains of a house in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in the shadow of Jerusalem’s Old City. “This is where he slept,” Odeh says, pointing to a pile of broken drywall and crumbled concrete — all that’s left of his grandson’s bedroom. 

On Aug. 27, Israeli bulldozers tore apart the house belonging to Odeh’s son, also named Younes, which he built adjacent to his father’s home in 2015. The same day, Israeli forces also demolished another home a few doors down. 

Located in a section of Silwan known as Al-Bustan, the houses here have long been targeted for demolition over municipal plans to replace the residential area with an archaeological park. Negotiations between residents and the municipality to legalize building in the area and implement a zoning plan for Al-Bustan have largely forestalled the forcible displacement of the community, which numbers over 1,500 residents. Yet with international attention on Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and the possibility of a broader regional escalation, residents believe the Israeli government has sensed an opportunity to push ahead with the demolitions.

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“They’re using the war and the fact that all eyes are on national security to implement their own agenda in Jerusalem — which is displacement, increasing settlements, and transforming East Jerusalem from being majority Palestinian into Jewish-Israeli,” says Fakhri Abu Diab, chair of Al-Bustan’s residents’ committee, whose own home was demolished in February.

Younes Odeh stands on the remains of his son’s home. (Jessica Buxbaum)

According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, Israel destroyed 128 Palestinian structures in East Jerusalem between Jan. 1 and Aug. 2 this year; 19 of these were in Al-Bustan, displacing 52 of the community’s residents. Meanwhile, since October 7, the Israeli government has approved or advanced the construction of thousands of housing units in Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem.

In early July, the Jerusalem Municipality and Israeli Border Police issued 16 demolition orders for homes in Al-Bustan, threatening more than 120 residents with homelessness. The notices warned residents that they had less than a month to vacate their homes — and sure enough, on Aug. 5, the authorities returned to demolish the home of Odeh’s cousin, Muhammad Abed Odeh. He, his spouse, and their five children are now crammed into his in-laws’ house. Meanwhile, Younes Odeh, his wife Shireen, and their two young children are currently living with his father while they search online for an affordable apartment. 

One of the first items Younes grabbed before the demolition was his son’s Spiderman backpack. He should have been starting his first year of school this September, but his parents were forced to pull him out because they no longer know that they will be in the vicinity of the school. Now, Shireen says, her son wakes up at night drenched in urine, asking if the police are coming. 

‘Settlement under the guise of tourism’

While all of East Jerusalem is coveted by the Israeli state and settler groups, Silwan’s proximity to the Old City makes it a higher priority for demolition. The Jerusalem Municipality has been eyeing Al-Bustan for nearly two decades, alleging that the community is built on the site where the revered Jewish monarch, King David, established his kingdom around 1,000 BCE.

Workers at the Givati Parking Lot excavation grounds next to the City of David National Park and the Palestinian village of Silwan, across the street from the Old City walls, Jerusalem, July 28, 2019. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

The municipality issued its first demolition orders for buildings in Al-Bustan in 2005, as part of plans to transform the area into “The King’s Garden” archaeological park. Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO that monitors Israeli policy in Jerusalem, has described the proposal as “settlement under the guise of tourism.”

But the roots of the community’s housing crisis go deeper. After Israel occupied and illegally annexed East Jerusalem, it never approved zoning plans for most of the territory — including Al-Bustan, which the authorities instead designated as “green space.” Without such a plan, residents can’t obtain building permits, which are a necessary prerequisite for legal construction. As a result, all new construction, even on residents’ privately-owned land, is subject to demolition.

The municipality’s plans to raze the entire community to build a national park galvanized residents to push for a housing solution. International pressure, in addition to residents’ negotiations with the municipality, succeeded in securing a demolition freeze for Al-Bustan that has largely held since 2018. 

But now, things are changing. The municipality rejected the residents’ zoning plan and began pressuring them to sign off on the municipality’s own proposal — developed without any local input. That plan reserves only 8 percent of the land for residential housing, while 85 percent is designated for “The King’s Garden.”

Palestinians inspect the damage after Israeli municipality workers demolish a house in Silwan, May 17, 2023. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)

“Since October 7, the municipality has stopped negotiations,” Younes Odeh tells +972. “Before, there was a committee speaking with the municipality. Now, there is nothing.” And when there is any form of dialogue, it’s replete with hostility. “They talk to us like we are terrorists now,” Muhammad Abed Odeh says. 

In a press release in early August, Ir Amim stated: “Demolitions of Palestinian homes have reached unparalleled levels since the outbreak of the war. Such practices constitute a form of collective punishment [and] retaliatory state violence.” The rights group also warned that the rate of demolitions may accelerate further after the Knesset transferred the Real Estate  Enforcement Division, which carries out demolitions in East Jerusalem, from the Finance Ministry to the National Security Ministry, led by far-right lawmaker Itamar Ben Gvir.

Most read on +972

‘This is also America’s war’: Why the U.S. isn’t stopping Israel’s Gaza onslaught

‘Israelis are frustrated, but do they want to stop the war? Not exactly’

‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza

As Al-Bustan faces this dire future — a threat to its very identity as a Palestinian community — the Odeh family already confronts their loss on a daily basis. “We see our house in front of us demolished while we live just next door,” Shireen Odeh says, surrounded by the furniture of her former home. 

• East Jerusalem
• Silwan
• home demolitions
• City of David
• October 2023 war

Jessica Buxbaum is an American-Israeli journalist based in Jerusalem. She covers human rights, social movements, the environment, and politics, with a strong focus on Palestinian and indigenous communities.

Our team has been devastated by the horrific events of this latest war. The world is reeling from Israel’s unprecedented onslaught on Gaza, inflicting mass devastation and death upon besieged Palestinians, as well as the atrocious attack and kidnappings by Hamas in Israel on October 7. Our hearts are with all the people and communities facing this violence. 

We are in an extraordinarily dangerous era in Israel-Palestine. The bloodshed has reached extreme levels of brutality and threatens to engulf the entire region. Emboldened settlers in the West Bank, backed by the army, are seizing the opportunity to intensify their attacks on Palestinians. The most far-right government in Israel’s history is ramping up its policing of dissent, using the cover of war to silence Palestinian citizens and left-wing Jews who object to its policies.

This escalation has a very clear context, one that +972 has spent the past 14 years covering: Israeli society’s growing racism and militarism, entrenched occupation and apartheid, and a normalized siege on Gaza.

We are well positioned to cover this perilous moment – but we need your help to do it. This terrible period will challenge the humanity of all of those working for a better future in this land. Palestinians and Israelis are already organizing and strategizing to put up the fight of their lives.

Can we count on your support ? +972 Magazine is a leading media voice of this movement, a desperately needed platform where Palestinian and Israeli journalists, activists, and thinkers can report on and analyze what is happening, guided by humanism, equality, and justice. Join us.

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