Plans by anti-war protesters to disrupt the wedding of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Avner have turned the festivities into the focus of controversy in Israel, said Haaretz journalist Rachel Fink , speaking on the Haaretz Podcast. The protests reflect an attempt to send a message that holding such a celebration as war continues in Gaza, represents an “unacceptable” level of insensitivity, Fink explained. “At a time when so much of Israel is suffering for so many reasons – the hostages,...
Jun 12, 2025•23 min•Season 1Ep. 408
Israel’s new controversial aid initiative in Gaza and its support for the Abu Shabab criminal gang rivaling Hamas share the common goal of helping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prolong the war, journalist Nir Hasson said on the Haaretz Podcast. “Netanyahu must preserve the radical right-wing fantasy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza for political survival. For this, he needs the war to continue,” said Hasson, who covers the humanitarian toll of the war for Haaretz. Hasson said that until “we have ...
Jun 10, 2025•25 min•Season 1Ep. 407
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began facing cross-examination by prosecutors in his criminal trial, the majority of Israelis are much more focused on “life-and-death” issues as the Gaza war wears on, Haaretz columnist and public opinion expert Dahlia Scheindlin said on the Haaretz Podcast. The subdued level of public interest “highlights how Israelis have become resigned to the extraordinary situation of their prime minister being on trial for corruption during the longest war and the most...
Jun 06, 2025•24 min•Season 1Ep. 406
Internal political debates between American Jewish organizations have ground to a halt following the violent attacks in Washington and Boulder, with the community united and focused squarely on safety, Haaretz's Washington D.C. correspondent Ben Samuels said on the Haaretz Podcast. "Acts like this are just so unimpeachably antisemitic that there really is no gray area," he said. "We're seeing a real unanimity from the community. Whatever disagreements they may have with [U.S. President Donald] T...
Jun 04, 2025•26 min•Season 1Ep. 405
Early on, it was clear the Beinin-Atzili family was not a typical hostage family, filmmaker Brandon Kramer , director of the new award-winning documentary “Holding Liat” said on the Haaretz Podcast. After learning that his relatives, Liat and Aviv Atzili, had been kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7 and held hostage by Hamas , and that Liat’s father and son were traveling to Washington, D.C. several weeks later with other Israeli-American hostage families to lobby on behalf of their loved...
May 30, 2025•28 min•Season 1Ep. 404
The shootings of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky as they stepped out of an American Jewish Committee event in Washington D.C. was “the realization of our worst fears,” the organization’s CEO, Ted Deutch , said on the Haaretz Podcast. In his conversation with host Allison Kaplan Sommer, Deutch said he hoped the tragedy would mark a “turning point” and send a message to world leaders that “this is what happens when you don't speak out, when there isn't moral clarity, when you allow language lik...
May 27, 2025•32 min•Season 1Ep. 403
Since October 7 and throughout the endless months of the tragedy of the Gaza War, "fiction writing has felt impossible," Israeli author Dror Mishani said on the Haaretz Podcast. "There are too many tragedies around us." Mishani is Israel's premier writer of crime novels and a successful screenwriter. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and adapted for television in the U.S. and Europe. "Before October 7, I was writing a crime novel. I'm trying to work on it again," Mishani s...
May 22, 2025•29 min•Season 1Ep. 402
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fancies himself as Israel's Winston Churchill, when in fact, the Gaza war has demonstrated he is exactly the opposite of Great Britain's storied leader, asserted Anshel Pfeffer , Israel correspondent for The Economist, former Haaretz analyst and a Netanyahu biographer, on the Haaretz Podcast. "We shouldn't be making this World War II – the Nazis against everybody else, and comparing that to Israel's war with Hamas. But that's being almost forced upon us by Netan...
May 20, 2025•30 min•Season 1Ep. 401
It was clear during U.S. President Donald Trump's tour of the Gulf states that his foreign policy is in a very "different place" than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's, Washington-based veteran diplomatic journalist Laura Rozen said on the Haaretz Podcast, pointing to the growing divergence in interests between the White House and Israel's ruling coalition, both on Gaza and Iran. In his second term in office, Trump "wants to make peace deals and trade deals," Rozen said, as Netanyahu, ...
May 15, 2025•23 min•Season 1Ep. 400
Announcing the release of Edan Alexander – the last living Israeli hostage in Gaza with U.S. citizenship – U.S. President Donald Trump did something he never did before, Haaretz columnist Amir Tibon said on the Haaretz podcast. “Trump has spoken before releasing hostages, but this is the first time that he explicitly called to end the 'brutal war' to bring back 'ALL of the hostages,'" Tibon said. It is a hopeful sign, he explained, because without new determination by the U.S. president to apply...
May 12, 2025•22 min•Season 1Ep. 399
Benjamin Netanyahu's government may have announced plans to intensify its Gaza offensive and call up thousands of reservists – but "many Israelis, and especially the IDF top brass, are actually hoping that President [Donald] Trump will again intervene and reach some kind of deal," Haaretz senior security analyst Amos Harel said on the Haaretz Podcast. Pressure from the American president will be the only way Netanyahu can resist the "huge political pressure to proceed" with the escalation and a ...
May 08, 2025•34 min•Season 1Ep. 398
Orly Erez-Likhovski was worried when she heard about the threats against attendees of a screening of the annual alternative Israeli-Palestinian Joint Memorial Ceremony in the city of Ra'anana set to be held at a Reform synagogue on the eve of Israel's Memorial Day. Erez-Likhovski, Executive Director of the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), told Haaretz Podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer how the "emotional and moving" ceremony was disrupted by hundreds of opponents chanting outside, throwing...
May 06, 2025•28 min•Season 1Ep. 397
This Wednesday, Israelis will mark Yom HaZikaron, the Memorial Day for Israel's Fallen Soldiers. As of last count, there were more than 25,000 of them. Although Israel has a highly developed culture of grieving and mourning, as a country that has suffered war and bloodshed since its first days, an unusual commemoration project has literally taken over the public sphere this year. It began on a small scale, with friends and relative of soldiers killed in action since October 7 hanging up stickers...
Apr 28, 2025•18 min•Season 1Ep. 396
Ittay Flescher , like most peace activists who devote their lives to cultivating Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, has gotten used to being called dangerously deluded and naive. “I hear it at least five or six days a week. Recently, there have been thousands of online comments saying that I am naive,” he told host Allison Kaplan Sommer on the Haaretz Podcast, in a conversation about his newly published book “The Holy and the Broken: a cry for Israeli-Palestinian peace from a land that must be shared...
Apr 21, 2025•31 min•Season 1Ep. 395
Israel and Ireland are in the midst of a diplomatic crisis – with the Israeli embassy in Dublin closed in protest of Ireland’s decision to join South Africa’s genocide lawsuit at the International Court of Justice and its recognition of a Palestinian state. But that didn’t stop the Irish embassy in Tel Aviv from inviting peace activist Bronagh Hinds to meet with Jewish and Palestinian civil society organizations and women’s groups to share the lessons learned in Northern Ireland and encourage th...
Apr 15, 2025•28 min•Season 1Ep. 394
With 59 hostages still in Gaza, both dead and alive, Jon Polin , the father of slain Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, doesn’t believe it’s appropriate for any Jew to have a festive Passover celebrating freedom this year. "The point," he says, "is let's lean into the pain this year, and not even try to sugarcoat it for our kids" Polin and his wife Rachel became prominent international advocates for their son Hersh’s release until the tragic news of his murder by Hamas terrorists in ...
Apr 10, 2025•38 min•Season 1Ep. 393
Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson has been covering the war in Gaza for months. He has seen so many horrifying acts of war go unpunished and uninvestigated, that he was hardly surprised by the killing of 15 aid workers at the end of March that shocked the world. The IDF first said the paramedics who were killed were suspicious, and claimed the vehicles they were in did not have their emergency lights on. Then a video of the incident was exposed to the world in the New York Times, showing clearly mar...
Apr 07, 2025•28 min•Season 1Ep. 392
For Haaretz columnist Amir Tibon , the renewed fighting in Israel with hostages still in captivity, as scandal unfolds around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, represents a “nightmare scenario.” Speaking on the Haaretz Podcast, Tibon reviewed the turbulent events of the past week with host Allison Kaplan Sommer – from the arrest of two of Netanyahu’s top aides in the deepening Qatargate affair and the questioning of the prime minister himself, to the botched attempt to replace embattled Shin Be...
Apr 03, 2025•27 min•Season 1Ep. 391
Alongside the threats of the Gaza war and the troubling Qatargate scandal, Israelis should be paying attention to a renewed direct threat to their democracy, according to law professor Meital Pinto . Speaking on the Haaretz Podcast, Pinto explains the implications of the newly passed law politicizing the Judicial Appointments Committee, compromising judicial independence and removing the most powerful check on the ruling coalition. But her greatest worry regarding the new push to revive the Neta...
Apr 01, 2025•28 min•Season 1Ep. 390
Like the Watergate affair that brought down President Richard Nixon, the details of the latest scandal to rock the Prime Minister’s Office and the whole of the Netanyahu government have emerged gradually over the past six months. Mounting evidence shows that close aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have, unbeknownst to the Israeli public, been working directly or indirectly for Qatar, the country that funded Hamas as it was planning the murderous rampage of October 7. Bar Peleg , the Haa...
Mar 28, 2025•32 min•Season 1Ep. 389
It was supposed to be a “coming out party” for the newly cozy relationship between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Europe’s burgeoning far-right politicians. But the International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, planned for Thursday, turned into a “fiasco” and an “embarrassment” due to its controversial guest list, Haaretz English Editor-in-Chief Esther Solomon said on the Haaretz Podcast. The invitations to numerous illiberal populist European politicians w...
Mar 26, 2025•35 min•Season 1Ep. 388
Israel’s decision to return to full-scale war in Gaza was a devastating and tragic turn of events for the families of hostages still being held there, Ruby Chen , father of Itay Chen, an Israeli-American IDF soldier, said on the Haaretz Podcast. “It feels as if the hostages and their families are being viewed now as collateral damage,” said Chen, who has not taken a day off from the families’ struggle in over 530 days. “The current government has not done everything in its power to prioritize th...
Mar 22, 2025•37 min•Season 1Ep. 387
Haaretz Jewish World editor Judy Maltz joins this episode of the Haaretz Podcast to discuss the crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists in America. According to Maltz, the Trump administration’s targeting of Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil for deportation as punishment for leading disruptive anti-Israel protests is “pulling the American Jewish community apart.” Khalil is “no Mother Teresa or Righteous Among the Nations” and is “probably pro-Hamas,” said Maltz, but there is “no evidenc...
Mar 18, 2025•26 min•Season 1Ep. 386
Ruth Patir had been, in her own words, an “artist without art” over the past year. Until this week. Patir’s inventive feminist video installation "(M)otherland" was set to debut in the Israel Pavilion at the Venice Biennale last April - under the shadow of protests against the Gaza War and efforts to oust her from the festival. Ultimately, she made a controversial decision to keep the exhibit intact but shuttered behind closed doors, with a note on the door saying: “The artist and curators of th...
Mar 16, 2025•33 min•Season 1Ep. 385
What if former U.S. President Joe Biden’s envoys had negotiated directly with Hamas behind Israel’s back? Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel says Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would surely have cried betrayal and called it de facto recognition of a terrorist group. But it was President Donald Trump’s White House that made such a move, and therefore no criticism or condemnation was uttered from Jerusalem after it was revealed that the direct talks were taking place. The fact that the U.S. pr...
Mar 10, 2025•32 min•Season 1Ep. 384
Peter Beinart’s new book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning” confronts his “horror” - even as a long-time harsh critic of Israeli policies - at the devastation that has taken place over the past 15 months. “In 2023, I wrote about my concerns about the possibility of ethnic cleansing on a large scale, as opposed to the small scale ethnic cleansing that has been going on for years,” Beinart said, speaking on the Haaretz Podcast. “But I really could not imagine what we've see...
Mar 05, 2025•37 min•Season 1Ep. 383
On this episode of the Haaretz Podcast, host Allison Kaplan Sommer speaks to two journalists who covered last week’s German election, which concluded with a historically strong showing by Germany’s far-right AfD party. German journalist Vera Weidenbach said the popularity of the AfD, which is “a direct successor of the Nazis, and, especially in the East, deeply rooted in neo-Nazi culture,” is a troubling and dangerous development, even though it did not get as many votes as its leaders had hoped...
Mar 02, 2025•23 min•Season 1Ep. 382
The death and devastation on October 7 was "the end result of antisemitism unchecked," Jonathan Greenblatt , CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said on the Haaretz Podcast. “Dehumanizing Israelis or Zionists or Jews - leads to inhuman acts.” Greenblatt said that the traumatic events also reinforced for him the “reality that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism.” “The crisis is real,” he said. “The danger is here and now. And yet the challenge for all of us is not to lose our humanity in this ...
Feb 26, 2025•33 min•Season 1Ep. 381
Daniel Shapiro , former U.S. ambassador to Israel and a key architect of the cease-fire-for-hostages deal underway between Israel and Hamas, said on the Haaretz Podcast that the "ultimate condition" of any post-war settlement for Gaza must be the removal of Hamas from power. Shapiro, speaking to host Allison Kaplan Sommer on the week Israel received the bodies of the murdered Bibas family, said the "terrible and heartbreaking" event revived memories of the days following October 7, when "there w...
Feb 23, 2025•40 min•Season 1Ep. 380
At a time when most Israelis, across the political spectrum, have expressed appreciation and gratitude towards the Trump White House for pushing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to implement the Gaza cease-fire and hostage release agreement, Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), says the "vast majority" of U.S. Jews strongly oppose President Donald Trump's policies. Spitalnick, who spoke to Haaretz Podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer while on a visit t...
Feb 17, 2025•35 min•Season 1Ep. 379
