Haaretz Podcast

With a high-profile conflict between IDF soldiers and a CNN crew, the establishment of five new Israeli settler outposts on territory meant to be under Palestinian Authority control in a single night, and skyrocketing settler violence aimed at erasing Palestinians from their land, the situation in the West Bank has “definitely worsened” during the Iran war, Haaretz West Bank correspondent Matan Golan told the Haaretz Podcast.

Golan joined her colleague, Yarden Michaeli, for a podcast conversation focused on what is unfolding in the West Bank and Gaza while the world’s attention is diverted to the major regional conflict between Iran, Israel and the United States. 

“It’s hard to count how many incidents of cars set on fire, and raids of settlers on Palestinian villages” have occurred over the past month, Golan said. 

What the West Bank and Gaza have in common, Michaeli noted, is a situation in which steps designed to be interim measures – such as the Yellow Line separating Gaza – don’t appear to be temporary. 

Since last autumn’s cease-fire, the IDF has maintained control of more than half of the Gaza Strip, and, as Michaeli explained, a Haaretz investigation has revealed the construction of military outposts and infrastructure that point to plans for an entrenched long-term presence. 

“All of this is happening in the context of the government pushing in a certain direction,” he explained, “and what makes us so concerned about it is the experience we have from the West Bank.”

In the rest of the Strip, which remains under Hamas’ control, he said, the humanitarian crisis continues. 

“We have 2.1 million people now in Gaza that are crammed to less than half the size of the land that they had prior to the war” with hundreds of thousands living in tents or makeshift shelters amid destroyed buildings with no access to power, fuel or running water – and over 18,000 severely ill people who have been denied entry to the West Bank and Jerusalem to receive medical care by Israeli authorities, Michaeli explained. 

Read more:

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Analysis by Dahlia Scheindlin | Don't Buy the Israeli Right's Sudden Concern for Settler Violence

Who Gets to Decide What Counts as an Accident in the West Bank?

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As Israelis continue to run to bomb shelters for protection from deadly Iranian missile attacks, the prospect of hosting Passover meals has felt overwhelming.

On the Haaretz Podcast, acclaimed food writer and cookbook author Adeena Sussman offers her best advice and coping tips and shares recipes that are easy and fun to execute, even in wartime. Cooking for the holidays can be stressful, she said, but in challenging times, becoming immersed in what is happening in the kitchen “can be a little bit of an escape”

“This year, let’s focus on what is meaningful and what will keep us sane,” she suggested.

Sussman is the author of three cookbooks – the first was published as the COVID-19 epidemic was sweeping the world, the second on the eve of October 7. Now her upcoming cookbook is due to be published this month in the shadow of the war with Iran. 

This makes her, she says, experienced with “simple cooking for complicated times,” which is the theme of her new book, "Zariz," the Hebrew word for “speedy.” 

Also complicated: being one of the most prominent representatives of Israeli cuisine in the U.S. at a time when Israel is such a hot-button issue that mainstream media outlets balk at writing about her work. Despite that, she said, her audience continues to grow, particularly online.

As she prepares to tour to promote her new book, she said, “I'm not trying to hide where I live or who I am, and I'm neither trying to defend nor indict a political situation for which I personally have no control.” 

On the podcast, Sussman shares her tales of running an informal “WarBnB” where she cooks for friends and family camped out at their home because of the lack of a bomb shelter where they live, plus the most popular bomb shelter snacks, and how the war has transformed the atmosphere of Tel Aviv's Carmel Market near her home.

Read more:
Adeena Sussman Offers You Something for the Weekend in Her New ‘Shabbat’ Cookbook

This Love Letter to a Tel Aviv Food Market Is Getting a Lot of Love in America

Only the Shelves Remain: Inside Tel Aviv Wine Bar Shattered by Missiles

Tel Aviv-born Top Chef in London: 'It's Best Not to Say the Word 'Israel' Right Now'

Sex, Wine and Sacrifice: Jewish Holidays Used to Be Wild, Dramatic Affairs

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While at war with Iran and a civilian population under missile attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “has been working relentlessly towards the goal of making the public sphere of Israel more religious, its governance more autocratic, and the chances of replacing its leader slimmer,” Haaretz editor-in-chief Aluf Benn said on the Haaretz Podcast. 

The push for the anti-democratic judicial coup and empowerment of ultra-Orthodox autonomy “hasn't changed despite October 7,” Benn said. He observed that it had slowed significantly on that date, but today, the massacre and ensuing war has given Netanyahu “even more motivation” to “escape any responsibility and accountability for October” as he looks ahead to the election scheduled for this fall. 

In Benn’s wide-ranging conversation with podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer on the four-week-old war and its impact on Israeli politics and society, Benn pointed out that the effort was not unusual, with many examples of wartime leaders taking advantage of “less public resistance” to consolidate their power. 

“Governments at war use it to limit civil liberties. We see it in Russia in the past four years, very visibly, where the last remaining bastions of some sort of opposition to President Putin have been wiped out.” 

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Op-ed by Aluf Benn: The Strange Case of Dr. Bibi and Mr. Benjamin

Analysis by Anshel Pfeffer: In Iran, the Netanyahu Doctrine Is Now Facing Its Ultimate Test

 

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The U.S.-Israeli goal of initiating war in order to prevent Iran from going nuclear may result in a boomerang effect, according to former senior Mossad official Sima Shine, speaking on the Haaretz Podcast. 

After the war, “if the regime stays in power, and there are good chances that it will,” Shine said, it will be far weaker, but it will possess “high emotional revenge” for what it has suffered and reinforce a belief that “only nuclear capability will deter future attacks, and I think they will do anything they can do to get to a nuclear bomb.”

Shine says that Western countries and Israel both fail to understand that “Iran is a system” – not driven by individual leaders, which is why the targeted assassinations of the country’s top officials have not harmed the country as much as expected. 

While Iran would surely like the war to end sooner or later, she said, they have staying power and will only do so if they can exact a “high price,” and Tehran’s threats to disrupt world energy markets must be taken seriously.

In her conversation on the podcast, Shine categorized Iran’s hold on Lebanon through Hezbollah as a “tragedy” for Israel’s neighbor. She said it appeared that the strength of Hezbollah when it joined the war in Iran came as a “surprise to Israel. They have more capabilities than we saw before.”

The group, she said, will fight with all they have to preserve their political and military position in Lebanon. A buffer zone in southern Lebanon may be the only way to keep residents of northern Israel safe, “not from rockets and missiles, but from special forces of Hezbollah invading kibbutzim and cities” as Hamas did on October 7. 

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Survivors of the Iranian strike in Arad: 'We Came Out of the Shelter and Saw Everything Destroyed. Like What We Do in Lebanon'

Israel to Hold Southern Lebanon, Block Residents' Return, Defense Minister Says

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is getting high marks from the Israeli public regarding his performance leading the country in its war against Iran – but for now, these sentiments are not giving his coalition a significant boost in political polling, according to Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin, speaking on the Haaretz Podcast. 

Scheindlin, a Haaretz columnist and political analyst, noted the war’s “overwhelming support” among Israeli Jews – reaching over 92 percent. 

Despite the “near consensus” supporting the war and high personal approval of Netanyahu as a war leader, she points out, “poll ratings for the Likud and for the coalition government have been flat and stuck at 40 percent, and Netanyahu does not have a majority,” which does not bode well for the election scheduled for October. 

While support for the war cuts across partisan lines in Israel, despite attitudes towards Netanyahu, Scheindlin says that surveys in the United States paint a different picture.

"If you look at the results of the question: ‘Do you approve or disapprove of Trump's handling of Iran?’ Scheindlin said, “it basically mirrors his approval ratings in general.”

She added that poll numbers point to the fact that the talk of a split among Trump’s base – especially “America First” Republicans – may be overly “hyped.”

Instead, she observed that U.S. opinion surveys reflected “overwhelming support from Republican voters… close to 80 percent."

Read more:

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Analysis by Joshua Leifer: The post-October 7 Wars in Iran and Lebanon Are Turning Into Netanyahu's Vietnam

Netanyahu's Likud Party Makes No Gains Amid Iran War, Poll Finds

A Billion Shekels a Day: The Number That May Decide When Israel's War With Iran Ends

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U.S. President Donald Trump “needs to find an off ramp” from the war with Iran as soon as possible, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro said on the Haaretz Podcast.

While Shapiro said the military results of the war – the decimation of Iranian military assets and elimination of top leaders – are “incredibly impressive,” the United States must recognize that “the weaker party has cards to play, and their cards grow more influential as this conflict drags on,” pointing to the choking of world oil supply in the Strait of Hormuz, draining of U.S. and Israeli anti-missile resources, and attacks by proxies and terrorist groups. 

Shapiro, who was ambassador from 2011–2017, said he wants regime change in Iran, but “not through a military campaign. That's not really something we're capable of at any acceptable cost.”

Additionally, he warns, a fall of the Iranian regime will spark “a great deal of chaos, a great deal of spillover of instability to neighboring countries, perhaps a civil war, waves of terror outside of Iran” and more.

“All of that has the potential to suck the United States in much further to the whole region. I could imagine that this is not a high concern for Israelis. Israelis could live with that set of concerns in ways that the United States and the American people will maybe feel differently about and certainly have not been prepared for.” 

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Analysis by Amos Harel | IDF's Grandiose Plans for South Lebanon Ground Offensive Won't Topple Hezbollah

Netanyahu Isn't Dead. But Even His 'Proof of Life' Video Is Being Derided as AI

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Under the shadow of the Gaza war, even before the current conflict with Iran, Israeli filmmaker Hilla Medalia found it “very surprising” that her short film “Children No More: Were and Are Gone” was nominated for an Academy Award – but she was thrilled. 

Despite the atmosphere in Hollywood even before the U.S.-Israel military attack in Iran, with petitions to boycott Israeli filmmakers circulated, two Israelis are nominated to take home golden statues at the March 16 ceremony: Medalia's film, in the category of Best Documentary Short, along with Meyer Levinson-Blount’s “Butcher’s Stain,” which is nominated for Best Live Action Short Film. 

The nominations are “an incredible achievement of course for both Meyer and I, but also for the entire Israeli film community,” she said, speaking on the Haaretz Podcast. 

Medalia’s film follows a group of Israeli activists who in March 2025, after the second cease-fire between Israel and Hamas collapsed, learned that 139 Palestinian children had been killed in a single day by IDF attacks in Gaza. 

The small group decided to print out photographs of the children, and stand holding the images silently as an accompaniment to the raucous demonstrations taking place in Tel Aviv calling for a cease-fire that would bring back the Israeli hostages. 

Over time their action, Medalia explained, “slowly grew into this bigger vigil that had more than 1,000 people. On each poster there is a picture of a child, their name, their age, where they're from, the day that they were killed. That's it. No political slogans. And they stood in silence.”

She was inspired and impressed by the group’s commitment to remaining silent – even as passersby insulted and cursed them. 

Unlike the other films Medalia is competing against, “Children No More” did not make the rounds of the prestigious film festivals to increase its Oscar chances – its path from conception to filming to release was unusually rapid.  

“We felt that we could not wait to share with the local Israeli audience and the world.”

 

Read more:

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Student Oscar-winning Film 'Mirrors the Experiences of Palestinians in Israel'

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Reports of U.S. anger with Israel for targeting Iran’s oil fields in the intensifying conflict have been “massively exaggerated,” said Haaretz senior defense analyst Amos Harel on the Haaretz Podcast.

While the American president “probably felt that Israel took this a step too far,” Harel said, “the truth of the matter is that the Israelis and the U.S. military are deeply coordinated.”

Regarding the entrance of Hezbollah into the expanding war, Harel said that the Lebanese group is “still quite capable of creating damage” to Israel, which is why the IDF has deployed large-scale force against them with airstrikes across Lebanon. Still, he said, “most of the effort and most of the focus remains on Iran.”

Despite the disruption to life in Israel, he pointed out that in the first 12 days of this war, there has been far less actual damage and loss of life in Israel during the two weeks of war last June.

Also on the podcast, Haaretz Jewish World Editor Judy Maltz visits an underground parking lot tent city populated by Tel Aviv residents without adequate overnight protection from missiles - many of whom were second-time refugees.

“Most of the people I met had been there in June” she said. “When Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran, they just packed their bags and came back. They knew the drill already.” 

 

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Recalling the first day of the war with Iran is still traumatic for journalist and activist Anat Saragusti, whose apartment building in central Tel Aviv began to shake as she ran to seek shelter from Iranian missiles targeting the city following the U.S.-Israel attack that morning. 

"I didn't believe my eyes," she says of what awaited her when she returned. "The whole living room was covered with broken glass - the carpets, the sofa, the chairs - all over. It was really so scary."

Matching the shattering of the glass in her home, said Saragusti, who monitors press freedom at the Union of Journalists in Israel, is the ongoing shattering of her trust in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government as the war continues, and her dissatisfaction with what she views as an overly-compliant media. 

Most Israelis, Saragusti said on the Haaretz Podcast, are "glued to television screens" where retired IDF generals spout military facts and statistics. "There is no room for alternative voices, questions or doubts" regarding the war and "what the end game will be."

"They promised us in the last war in Iran in June that we destroyed the majority of the infrastructure for the ballistic missiles and the nuclear plan of Iran. Then in nine months, [Iran rebuilt] everything from scratch? I don't understand that. I feel that they are lying to us."

Read more:

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'You Can't Live by the Sword': Israeli TV's Tel Aviv Street Interview Backfires

Iran's Cluster Missiles: What You Need to Know About the Controversial Weapon Targeting Israel

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While the Iranian regime “by and large, needed to be punished” and “did not deserve any mercy,” according to former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, it is possible that “a little bit more flexibility” in the negotiations for a nuclear agreement leading up to the U.S.-Israel assault might have meant they “would have resulted in a different way.” 

Olmert made his remarks in a dialogue with Haaretz Global Editor Noa Landau, featured in a plenary at the J Street Convention in Washington D.C. – and coinciding with the initial days of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. 

Olmert expressed satisfaction that U.S. President Donald Trump pushed back on remarks from prominent Republicans that Israel pushed the US into the war and “did not pretend to say that he was fighting for us. He said in the most explicit manner: ‘They are American enemies. This is an American war. I'm fighting for America, and I had to do it for America.’ No one saved Israel, or no one got mixed up in a war in order to save Israel.”

In his dialogue with Landau, Olmert also discussed the Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative he is pursuing with former Palestinian Authority foreign minister Dr. Nasser al-Kidwa to “move forward into entirely new realities on the basis of cooperation and mutual respect and compromise and compassion.” He harshly condemned the ongoing and record-setting settler violence in the West Bank as “obnoxious” and “heartbreaking.” 

Speaking out against such actions, he added, "is essential if you want, as a Jew, not to be linked to these actions. You have to speak up.”

Read more:

'I Might Have Forced Israel's Hand': Trump Denies Israel Dragged U.S. Into Iran War After Rubio Comments Draw Ire

As Israeli Defense Officials Push for a Long Offensive, Trump Still Has Doubts

'Both Sides Are Tired of War': Former PM Ehud Olmert Makes Two-state Proposal With Former Palestinian Minister

Police Report Average of Four Daily Incidents of West Bank Settler Violence in Early 2026

The latest reporting on West Bank settler violence

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