Haaretz Podcast

Brouria Carni Hadass lives in the tiny Kibbutz of Kerem Shalom on the Israel-Gaza border. On Saturday, October 7th, she went into the fortified safe room in her house when the first alarm sounded, quickly realizing this attack was "unlike anything we went through before. It felt like something else."

On this week's episode of the Harretz Weekly podcast, Carni Hadass spoke to host Allison Kaplan Sommer from the hotel in the southern city of Eilat, where the members of her community are staying since they were evacuated from their homes following the Hamas attack on Israel's Gaza border communities, which killed over 1,300 people.

"Every simple thing is complicated now," she says, though she acknowledges that compared to so many other people affected by the massacres, she and her family are "spoiled refugees," trying to maintain some sense of normalcy while living in a hotel.

In the conversation, she describes how shortly after the attack began, a friend from a nearby Kibbutz – Holit – contacted Brouria to see how she was doing. The friend, Shahar Debbie Mathias, said her son Rotem was worried about his friend, Brouria's son. But their next conversation was the last. Hamas gunmen were already inside Debbie's house, and she was hiding with her husband Shlomi and their son in the safe room. The gunmen managed to shoot into the room and get in.

When Debbie stopped replying to Brouria's messages, she asked her son to text his Rotem, who texted back: "My parents are dead, I need help."

"We were lucky. We're alive, but we are devastated," Carni Hadass says now.

In the second part of this week's episode, Haaretz columnist Alon Pinkas explains why U.S. President Joe Biden has proved to be a true friend of Israel this week, why the current Israel-Hamas War is the last thing that Washington wanted to deal with at the moment and how he "doesn't see Netanyahu surviving this, nor should he."

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Israel's reality transformed overnight this weekend and what looks like a major war is unfolding. Events are progressing rapidly, so in this week's Haaretz podcast, editor in chief of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, and Haaretz senior analyst Yossi Melman explain in conversation with Allison Kaplan Sommer how a country that has prided itself with having the best intelligence in the world was hit hard by an unprecedented surprise attack from the Gaza Strip.

Benn says the Hamas orchestrated attack – that has already claimed the lives of over 600 Israelis - was a "total surprise," and that "there was no intelligence indicating anything remotely like this."

Even though there was a sense that Israel's enemies would take advantage of its inner rifts, "none of the warnings included anything similar to what happened yesterday."

According to Benn, "This is the worst blow to Israel in any war, since 1948, and of any terrorist attacks inside Israel or abroad. In 1973 Israel was taken by surprise, but the fighting took place far away from civilians. Now this is first and foremost an attack against civilians, and for the first time we have dozens of military prisoners of war and civilians taken hostage in Gaza. People are desperately trying to find out what happened to their family members. We know people, friends, that have children who are missing or dead. It's a very sad, unprecedented situation for all of us."

Melman addresses the "huge failure" of Israel's Intelligence. "When you talk to people in the intelligence community, they are confused, they are puzzled, they don't know what happened. They have no explanation," he says. "Certainly it was a huge failure, Israel has been prided with having the best intelligence in the world, and the intelligence failed. For many Israelis, what happened on Saturday, 50 years and one day after the Yom Kippur War started, is reminiscent of the same failure. But there is a big difference: Before the war in 1973, the intelligence was there. Israel had a lot of pieces of intelligence but didn't know how to read it or didn't want to analyze it in the correct way. This time there was nothing."

The Gaza Strip is an area Israel was supposedly watching very closely, so having hundreds of militants cross into Israel on a holiday morning was unimaginable. "It's a failure of the military intelligence, it's a failure of the domestic security service - the Shin Bet – both the organizations have the technological means to listen to the other side, to recruit agents for human intelligence. It's a huge machine of intelligence gathering that didn't function."

Looking forward, both Benn and Melman think the wounds will take years to heal. "It's going to take time for the public to realize what happened," Benn says. "We are talking about hundreds of bereaved families, hundreds of hostage families, it's still unthinkable. I'm hearing horrible stories from people I know."

 

 

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The prospect of a U.S-Saudi-Israeli deal, that would include the normalization of relations between the Jewish state and one of the most influential forces in the Arab world, intrigues citizens in all three countries. But while the opinions of Israelis and Americans are covered widely, the media seems to be overlooking the Saudi angle.

Dr. Nora Derbal, an expert on Saudi Arabia currently at the Martin Buber post doctoral program at the Hebrew University, tells Haaretz podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer, that Saudi society is drastically changing, and any step towards normalizing relations with Israel should be seen in a wider context.

"10 years ago, if you arrived in Riyadh as a woman you would probably just go to your hotel and wait there for your next meeting," says Drbal, "but nowadays, there is so much to do in Riyadh...  many Saudis want to prove to the world that it is possible for Saudi Arabia to change and to be the best. If we break it down to the individual Saudi, many Saudis at the moment have the feeling that everything is possible."

Young Saudis, and also middle class and upper class older people, says Derbal, "Have an interest in sidelining politics for prosperity and stability in the region, and for a good future for their own children… they are looking at the economic side of things."

Derbal also discusses the way that the debate over women’s rights, religion and gender segregation in the public sphere parallels that of conversations she hears in Israel. “I think this is really something where Israelis and Saudis would have a lot to share and discuss and maybe also to learn from each other,” she says.

Also on the podcast, Haaretz diplomatic correspondent Amir Tibon assesses the possible Saudi deal and the reasons that President Joe Biden seems determined to make it happen, and what it would mean for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political future.

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How did Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff square become a battleground for religion and gender segregation on Yom Kippur and how did the conflict become so charged and bitter?

In conversation with Allison Kaplan Sommer on the Haaretz Weekly podcast, Orly Erez-Lizhovski, executive director of the Israel Religious Action Center and the country’s leading attorney on gender segregation cases, explains the background to the disturbing pictures that dominated Israeli media over Judaism’s most solemn holiday.

The sight of Jews battling each other in the first Hebrew city were “heartbreaking” and “hard to watch” she said, and were caused by the “failed decisions” of the Israeli police and the Tel Aviv municipality, who refused to intervene when an illegal gender separation barrier was erected in the center of a public square.

At the same time, she believes, this moment may represent a turning point, since it “marks a tremendous change in the attitude of this very liberal public toward both issues of religious pluralism and gender segregation. I think it's a very hard and difficult period, but it also signals change into what may be a better future.”

This “awakening” she says is happening in the context of the battle against the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul. “What people may have been willing to accept up until a few years ago, or up until basically the last few months, they are not willing to accept anymore.”

The far right anti-liberal group that organized the prayer in Dizengoff square - Rosh Yehudi - "holds extremist views and has been trying to bring these views into the public sphere of Tel Aviv for years," adds Erez-Lizhovski, "But now they were confronted with a reality they have never met before."

 

Israelis like the ones who went out on Yom Kippur eve to confront the extremists who are trying to force a certain kind of Judaism on society, she says, now “understand that this is not only a fight for the democratic structure of Israel, it's a fight for our Jewish identity.”

 

 

 

 

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On this week’s podcast, Haaretz New York correspondent Judy Maltz talks to Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip to the U.S. and the unprecedented demonstrations against him on American soil.

Thousands of Israeli expats calling the Prime Minister of the Jewish state a “fascist” and a “dictator” on the streets of New York is not a site American Jews are used to, and as Maltz notes, many of them still haven't understood “the gravity, the severity, and the existential crisis” that the judicial overhaul represents for Israelis.

“For American Jews, it is much more difficult to make sense of it all,” explains Maltz. “One woman I met at a meeting with Brothers and Sisters in Arms said: 'Israelis are always crying for help, there's terror attacks, or wars, missiles, or an election, there's always some crisis going on.' In a way, they are crying wolf… so Americans don't understand yet that this is something different, something we haven't seen before, an attack on the people from within. But it is starting to seep through."

The expats, says Maltz, “understood from day one what this judicial overhaul means... Israelis in the diaspora want to know that there is a place to go back to. I think, that since the Yom Kippur war, there has not been an event that has shaken them up as much as the judicial overhaul."

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Constitutional expert Prof. Yaniv Roznai, an associate professor and Vice-Dean at Reichman University's Harry Radzyner Law School - and one of the leading academic voices in the protest movement against the judicial coup - attended the historic hearing at Israel's supreme court this week.

After watching the sides debating the petitions against the first judicial overhaul law that the Netanyahu government had passed, Roznai joined Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer for a discussion about the anti-reasonableness law, the "inappropriate political speech" by judicial overhaul architect MK Simcha Rothman, the attacks by the coalition's attorney on Israel's Declaration of Independence and what the different outcomes of the court session could mean for Israel.

Speaking about how the court ruling will impact Israel's future, Roznai finds it hard to believe that the government won't abide by it, but said "It's difficult to predict if the judges will strike down the anti-reasonableness law. It seems there is a majority of judges that would accept the proposition that the court has the authority to strike down basic laws. And this is the most important issue. But then the second part is whether this is the case they will intervene in. And here it's quite difficult to predict".

If the government really does decide to ignore a supreme court ruling, Rozani warns, "That would mean complete anarchy." Because, "If the government doesn't abide by the ruling, why would ordinary citizens abide by it? Just imagine what it would mean for our partners in the EU and the U.S. I can't see it happening. It would be a complete destruction of the rule of law".

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After dominating political conversation in Israel for the past eight months, the protest movement against the judicial coup – which has brought millions of Israelis out to the streets – made a strategic decision.

In the nationwide municipal elections on October 31, various protest groups will field candidates in mayoral and city council races, hoping that voters will use the local political sphere to send a resolute national message against the Netanyahu government’s attempts to change Israeli democracy.

On Haaretz Weekly, two Tel Aviv City Council candidates join host Allison Kaplan Sommer to discuss the bold move.

Noah Efron is head of the Green Party – which, together with Meretz and a list of protest activists, is running as the “New Contract” slate in Tel Aviv. He says on the podcast that he believes when we wake up in Israel on November 1, “there will be council members and a number of mayors whose identity was forged primarily politically in these protests. It will be dramatic.”

Efron, who served on the Tel Aviv Municipality in the past, also discusses the complexities of integrating the protest movement into the framework of local politics, calling it “an extremely exciting challenge to turn the big words with capital letters like ‘Freedom’ and ‘Democracy’ into policy.”

Together with Efron is Inbal Orpaz, a high-tech marketing executive and active member of the tech protest. She talks about what has driven members of her industry – who were previously politically uninvolved, focusing instead on their world of startups and company sales – to become some of the most outspoken and active leaders of the protests. She discusses her motivations for becoming active in the protest movement – and her recent decision to run for city councilor alongside Efron.

“When this government was elected, I felt as if all of my identities were under attack: as a woman, as a secular person, as someone who’s part of the tech sector. I understood if I want to live here – and I want to live here – to live in Israel and to live in Tel Aviv, I must fight for the future of this country. Living in the place they want this country to become is not an option for me.”

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As Israel wrestled with the assault of COVID-19 on its health care system, politics and public life, Professor Haggai Levine, an epidemiologist and chairman of Israel’s Association of Public Health Physicians, became a familiar face on Israeli television screens.

Today, Levine has moved from battling the coronavirus to fighting the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul. He is a founding member of the “White Coats” collective, a grass-roots organization of doctors fighting the judicial coup, and has, each week, spoken at the mass protests against the overhaul, delivering the message that “in order for Israel's citizens to be healthy, we need a healthy government and a healthy democracy.”

Speaking to Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer, Levine said that in his view, the threat to democracy - and the related threat to public health - “feels worse than the pandemic in terms of how we feel and in terms of what the future looks like.” He attributes this to the fact that this time, the country is facing an “internal threat” instead of battling together against a hostile nation or a rampaging virus.

Levine notes that he wasn’t totally taken by surprise by the current crisis since “we know from history, that after pandemics, there are often aftershocks… I expected that we would have several very tough years in Israel, and that there would be an unstable government.”

In addition to other reasons that the overhaul is bad for health in Israel, he discusses the alarming brain drain statistics regarding the number of young doctors planning to emigrate after their training if the overhaul moves forward, and his colleagues who are training abroad “and are now extending the fellowship because they feel it's not a good time to go back to Israel.”

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As settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank continues to intensify, Haaretz West Bank correspondent Hagar Shezaf joins host Allison Kaplan Sommer to share her experiences covering the deadly incidents in Hawara, Turmus Aya, Um Safr, and, over the past weekend, the clashes in the village of Burqa that resulted in the killing of 19-year-old Qosai Jammal Mi'tan. Two settlers are suspected in the shooting.

Friction between settlers living in the outposts that ring and encroach on Palestinian villages is nothing new, Shezaf explains, but their level of violence has been on the rise since the ascendance of the Netanyahu government, whom she says seem to be emboldening the perpetrators.

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Israeli democracy is facing its biggest challenge since the founding of the state, after the Knesset passed the first law in its package of legislation designed to cripple the judicial branch.

Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, joins Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer to discuss what comes next in the battle between Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which appears determined to move forward with its “radical and extreme” judicial overhaul, and the protest movement that has been battling the move for the past 30 weeks.

Plesner looks ahead to the Knesset session in the fall and, before that, the upcoming petitions against the law in the Supreme Court (sitting as the High Court of Justice). He also reacts to Netanyahu’s refusal to state – in response to a question he was asked on both CNN and Fox News – that he would abide by any potential Supreme Court ruling striking down the reasonableness law that was passed last week.

“I think it’s despicable and a new low,” he says of Netanyahu’s remarks. “Israel is a democracy and the basic character of democracies is the rule of law, human rights, an independent judiciary, and everyone in the land – including the politicians – obeying court decisions. And Netanyahu was elusive. I think this is very bad.”

The fact that the prime minister “is conveying such a message is extremely reckless and disappointing,” he adds.

Plesner, a military reservist in the elite Sayeret Matkal unit, also discusses the “heartbreaking” choice by his fellow soldiers to suspend their service due to opposition of the overhaul, as well as his recent call to the United States and American Jews not to give up on Israel.

To American Jews who insist that internal Israeli affairs are none of their business, he counters that “of course it's your business if Israel ceases to be a Jewish and democratic state, and it turns into a religious ethno-nationalistic state – this will end the relationship between Israel and the majority of Diaspora Jewry.”

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