Haaretz Podcast

As the number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza climbs to 20,000 while the number of Israeli soldiers killed in fighting grows daily, it is becoming harder every day for the two sides of the bloody conflict to see the humanity in the other side, says Sheren Falah Saab, who is covering the Gazan side of the conflict for Haaretz.

Falah Saab tells Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer about the difficulty of covering a war when you can't be on the ground and the individual human stories among the thousands of Gazan victims of the war she has chosen to bring the world through her journalism.

"In the end, they are human beings and Hamas didn't ask Gazans if they wanted to go to war or not," Falah Saab says, as she discusses the challenges of being an Arab citizen of Israel writing in Hebrew to Israeli readers at a time when speaking of death in Gaza "is taboo." She has personally lost friends on both sides of the conflict.

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The Houthis in Yemen, the Islamist rebel group that has shot missiles and drones at Israel and is now intensifying attacks on key shipping lanes in the Red Sea, have progressed from being "a nuisance and a headache to a major strategic threat to Israel," according to Dr. Yoel Guzansky, a former member of Israel's National Security Council and a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies.

Their escalating attacks on international shipping over the course of the Israel-Hamas conflict have raised the stakes of Israel's conflict with its neighbors into a global concern. On Monday, the U.S. announced the formation of a coalition of ten nations to take action against the Houthi aggression against cargo ships which threatens global trade.

On the Haaretz Weekly podcast, Guzansky, and Haaretz National Security editor Avi Scharf, sit down with host Allison Kaplan Sommer to discuss who the Houthis are and how Israel - and the world - should respond to them.

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From the horrifying live videos broadcasted by Hamas militants on the morning of October 7 during their invasion of Israeli villages, to IDF soldiers entering Gaza, the bombarded buildings, and the long lines of refugees with few belongings – The Israel-Hamas war is probably the most continuously, visually, documented war in history.

Pictures have great power. And that means those in power have a great interest in directing images towards their political narrative. On this episode of the Haaretz Weekly podcast, Israeli journalist and activist Anat Saragusti, who has lived and reported from both southern Israel and the Gaza Strip, and is recognized as Israel's first woman war photographer, talks to Esther Solomon about the striking visuals we have been exposed to since the October 7 massacre, and the one's that are missing in Israeli media.

Saragusti is currently the curator of an exhibition called 'Local Testimony': a collection of the iconic photographs from the past year in Israel.

In the conversation, Saragusti also addresses the fact that Israeli mainstream media barely shows images of what's happening in Gaza and isn't regularly reporting on the dire situation in the Strip. "The fact that Israeli audiences don't see images from Gaza means that journalists are not doing their jobs," she states matter-of-factly. "They have to show the images. Hebrew speaking Israelis watching television news are not exposed at all to what's going on in Gaza. We don't see the atrocities, the rubble, the destruction and the humanitarian crisis. The world sees something completely different."

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In this week's episode of the Haaretz Weekly podcast, Haaretz English editor-in-chief Esther Solomon explores a topic that has angered the Israeli public since the start of the Israel-Hamas War: Why haven't representatives of the Red Cross been able to visit Israeli hostages who are being held in Gaza in unknown locations and conditions for almost two months?

As some captives were released by Hamas during a temporary cease-fire, Israelis – who were closely watching the daily releases on television - have started to see the Red Cross's representatives as taxi drivers, who can do nothing more than drive the hostages to the border.

Yael Friedson, Haaretz’s legal correspondent, has been reporting on the plight of the hostages held by Hamas. She says, “Everyone hopes that the Red Cross representatives could visit the hostages and pass on medicine and messages from the families,” but, she notes, there is a knowledge gap about what a neutral humanitarian organization can actually do without the consent of both parties. 

Sarah Elizabeth Davies, ICRC spokesperson based in Jerusalem, explains that the anger directed at the organization is misdirected. “We cannot force our way in, we don't have weapons, and we don't have political power. We stay neutral, so that we can be trusted. And this is not something that is always easily understood, particularly in the emotional reality of a conflict.”

Jonathan Adiri, former IDF chief liaison officer to the Red Cross, tells Haaretz that Israel’s relationship with the Red Cross “has had its ups and downs”, but stresses: “Their neutrality is critical. The fact that there’s an organization with enough carrying capacity to receive our hostages [from Hamas] and bring them to safety is not to be taken lightly.”

 

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While the world is watching the Israel-Hamas war unfold in Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank are suffering some of the worst violence and restrictions on their daily life in years.

Since Hamas militants entered Israel on October 7 and killed an estimated 1,200 people, Israel's security forces have cracked down on Palestinian factions in West Bank cities, while also detaining a huge number of Palestinians and allowing settlers threaten and attack West Bank residents without consequences.

In this week's episode of the Haaretz Weekly podcast, Haaretz West Bank correspondent Hagar Shezaf speaks to host Allison Kaplan Sommer about why ignoring settler violence and other deepening problems in the occupied West Bank is a very dangerous course of action for Israel.

Since October 7, more than 200 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces in the West Bank. "There have been mass arrests of Palestinians suspected of being part of Hamas and also other groups, and settler violence has increased – not that it wasn't very high before the war," says Shezaf. "This has resulted in some Palestinian villages evacuating themselves due to the settlers threats and violence."

One of the main friction points has been the olive harvest. According to Shezaf, many Palestinians find themselves unable to harvest this year at all: "They [young settlers] have WhatsApp groups where they notify others about where there are Palestinians picking olives, and then they show up to scare them."

Another critical issue in the conversation was the number of Palestinians detained in Israel since the start of the Gaza war. "One of the first things that Israel did on October 7 is cancel the work permits of thousands of Gazans," who were in Israel, working legally at the time.

This has led to overpopulation and mistreatment of detainees. "A couple weeks into the war, I found out that two Palestinians had died in Israeli detention," in unrelated incidents, Shezaf shares. "Both of them were sick. One had diabetes and one was a cancer patient. When I spoke to the family of the detainee that had diabetes, they did not know that he died. It was a very unfortunate role that I played, confirming to his family that he died. He was a diabetic, but he basically died because no one gave him his medicine."

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A disinformation war is raging online and Israel is losing, says Omer Benjakob, Haaretz cyber and technology correspondent at Haaretz.

It isn’t as if an effort isn’t being made by Israel to professionally curate and manage information about its war with Hamas in a responsible and reliable “high value content,” he told to Allison Kaplan Sommer on the Haaretz Weekly podcast. “The problem is that when you juxtapose that to what Hamas is doing.”

In today’s digital space, Benjakob explains, “highly produced graphics looks like your country hired a PR company to do PR for you, which is literally what we do and what we've always done. The whole idea of Hasbara - that you need to do professional level kind of explanation - is actually shooting us in the foot right now. Hamas is just flooding the internet with raw materials that people can then supposedly check on their own.” When it’s checked, much of it is unreliable and untrue but by then it’s too late because they have controlled the discourse for days.

Also on the podcast, 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev, who became a Tiktok sensation with nearly half a million followers, and his life partner Julie Gray. They explain why, with “grief and anger,” they deactivated their account this week as the platform was unwilling to confront the unprecedented wave of antisemitism that has overwhelmed Tiktok since the October 7 Hamas massacres.

When asked about his initial reaction to October 7, Lev says: "I said to my son: ‘these people that did the massacre, they must have had Nazi instructors.’ In some ways, they were even worse. I can’t describe what they did.”

Gray talked about the helplessness in the face of a wave of denialism and antisemitism that came with the Gaza War. "Our followers, who thanked us for learning [about the Holocaust], are the same people who are hating us now," she says. "They liked this little holocaust survivor with a sad sad tale. I’m used to getting hate from Nazis, the ones with the thunderbolts and swastikas, but the people that are sending us this hate now, their bios say ‘vegan’ and ‘organic fiber creators’ - they are our followers. So I feel like our three years of work have unraveled. That nothing was taught to them at all."

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“I knew right away that sexual violence was part of the events of October 7, but obviously, I could not have known the extent of the cruelty that Hamas engaged in,” says Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, who served for 12 years on the UN Committee on Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Halperin-Kaddari now feels “completely betrayed” by the international women’s rights organizations with whom she’s worked for years, for their failure to condemn - or even recognize - the rape, kidnapping and other atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli citizens on October 7.

In conversation with Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer, Halperin-Kaddari, a member of the newly-formed Civil Commission on Hamas’s Oct. 7th Crimes Against Women and director of the Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women at Bar-Ilan University, explains that “unlike any previous incidents of 'conflict related sexual violence,' as the UN calls it, the Hamas terrorists had body camera and they filmed their actions. They broadcasted it both to the families of the victims and on social media, so the horrific footage emerged right away.”

Also on the podcast, domestic violence advocate Lili Ben Ami, founder of the Michal Sela Forum, expresses her deep concern over the dramatic expansion of the ability of Israelis to obtain personal weapons in a campaign initiated by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

Her organization, she says, “is now receiving calls every day from worried women and domestic violence survivors” that their abusers will now get access to a firearm. When her group looked into the matter, she tells Haaretz Weekly, they found that the distribution plan did not contain a screening mechanism that would prevent men with a criminal record related to domestic violence from obtaining a gun.

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One of the first journalists to be embedded with forces in the Israeli army’s ground operation in Gaza, Haaretz senior columnist Anshel Pfeffer shares his observations with Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer after returning from a challenging battlefield.

Pfeffer, who accompanied a Givati infantry unit, tells how the maze of tunnels under Gaza forces the soldiers to continually sweep the territory from every angle so “gunners and the commanders can constantly look at every point where they think a tunnel could open up and to try and spot it before it's used to launch a missile against them.”

He also addresses the “many convenient but very inaccurate comparisons” between the Russia-Ukraine war, which he also covered, and Israel’s operation in Gaza, which is “totally different” both operationally and emotionally. While Russians ran away from serving in their war, he points to the highly motivated IDF soldiers who rushed to join in the fight after the atrocities of October 7.

“Many of them know people who were killed, who were taken hostage, or wounded. Some of them are from families which have been forced to leave their homes because of the war. It’s very personal for everybody. There's no question about it.”

While the soldiers on the ground “are very focused on their mission,” Pfeffer says, “when you go up the IDF hierarchy to the top, there is a growing sense of frustration that there is no clear strategic idea of the next stage.”

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Prof. Dov Waxman has been on university campuses for several decades and experienced bursts of unrest following violence in the region and controversy over Israeli policies since the second intifada in the early 2000s.

But what has happened since the brutal attack by Hamas on Israeli citizens on October 7 and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza, he says, “has felt qualitatively different. The atmosphere is different from anything I’ve experienced in the past. The tensions are greater. The animosity is greater, the fear is greater,” Waxman, the director of UCLA’s Israel Studies Center, tells Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer.

In the past, Waxman says, he has felt that Jewish and Israeli advocacy groups tended to exaggerate the levels of antisemitism on campuses and that “it’s grossly simplistic and reductionist to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.” But in the last few weeks, there have been “manifestations and expressions of anti-Zionism that are antisemitic,” and “some campuses have actually become hostile environments for Jewish students.”

Waxman believes that today, a vocal minority of students “have come to see Israel in such a negative way, to see it as essentially this kind of settler-colonial entity that has no right to exist.” He says “they have come to see all Israelis as effectively colonists and colonizers. That has led them to somehow think it’s acceptable or tolerable or defensible to slaughter innocent Israeli civilians. And it’s something that I and many of my colleagues have really been shocked by.”

Also joining the podcast is Haaretz New York correspondent Judy Maltz, who has covered anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protests in the U.S. since the start of the war. She believes the controversies and confrontations on campuses may change the way even the most status-conscious American Jewish parents view their children’s options for higher education.

“Many parents are asking themselves ‘What would be a safer school for my kids?’ and whether they would rather send them to a place that’s safe, but maybe not as prestigious – or a place that’s prestigious but where they will have to walk around looking down as they move around campus and rush into their dorms so they don’t have to confront anything that’s very ugly.”

Like Waxman, Maltz always felt the issue of antisemitism on campuses was overblown – until recently. “That has changed now,” she says. “I really think Jewish students don’t feel safe on campuses, certainly those students that I have spoken to in the New York area. They don’t feel safe walking around with a yarmulke on their head, while students are talking about the need to resist ‘Zionist genocide by any means necessary.’ What I’m hearing from them is that they try to avoid campus. They don’t hang out.”

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The “alternative universe” Rachel Goldberg has been living in since her son Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, was kidnapped by Hamas, has included non-stop interviews with the media. Rachel and her husband Jonathan have appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine and spoke to “any outlet that would talk” to them, to advocate for humanitarian treatment and expedited release of their son and over 220 hostages being held captive in Gaza.

An appearance on CNN last week, she recounts to Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer, took an unexpected turn when anchor Anderson Cooper – who is making a documentary about the Supernova music festival massacre - put together her account of witnesses saying her son’s arm had been severed, and something he had seen while in the field reporting on the deadly attack.

“At the end of the interview, Anderson Cooper said: have you guys seen any video of Hersh? We said no - and we've had a friend who has been trying - searching through all the horrible videos that are out there. And then Anderson said, ‘I have a video of your son.'“

As to how the continuing efforts to release the hostages will play out, Goldberg hopes that even though "you have people in the street who have gone through complete and utter trauma and are thirsty for an aggressive response… the government is using every ounce of thoughtfulness and wisdom when making its plan."

"There are hundreds of innocent hostages, and I'll also mention there are hundreds of thousands of innocent Gazans who are trapped there," she says. "We have to be very careful about not causing harm that we can't undo, and I think there is time to plan this out in a way that our soldiers are not embroiled in a situation that will bring us so much more pain, danger and loss of life."

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