A year ago, protests began to rock Israel. For months, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken the country’s Supreme Court. Then came Hamas’s attack on October 7, and everything changed.

“The war has caught Israel at perhaps its most divided moment in history,” writes Aluf Benn in a new piece for Foreign Affairs. Benn, the editor of Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, argues that Netanyahu worked to divide Israeli society with policies that put the country on track for disaster.

He spoke to Foreign Affairs Executive Editor Justin Vogt on February 27.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.