The Honest Take

A good friend of Yaakov Katz spent a whole conversation complaining about the ultra-Orthodox: they block roads, they take too much government funding, they don't work and they don't serve in the army. So Yaakov asked him who he was voting for. Netanyahu. Didn't he see the contradiction? Netanyahu's government is the one that keeps giving the ultra-Orthodox what he was complaining about. "You know what," the friend said, "my values are with Netanyahu." Yaakov says there are a lot of Israelis like him, still trying to figure out where they stand.

On October 27, Israel votes for the first time since October 7th, and the coalition on the ballot is the one that was in office that morning. Yaakov calls the election a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu and a question about accountability. But he doesn't pretend the picture is simple. He calls October 7th "a coin" with two sides: the failures that led to it, and a war that has left Hamas a shadow of its former self, Hezbollah significantly degraded and Iran's nuclear facilities damaged. When Israelis go to the polls, he says, they ask one question: "who's gonna keep me safe?" Netanyahu is the commodity they know. Everyone else feels like a gamble, even Gadi Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff who lost a son in this war.

He walks through how Israeli elections actually work: you vote for a party, not a prime minister, and 61 of the Knesset's 120 seats make a government. The president hands the mandate to whoever gets the most recommendations, not necessarily whoever leads the biggest party. Will we know the next government on election night? "Pretty sure we won't." He explains why left and right don't explain this race. The two-state solution has all but disappeared from the campaign, so what keeps Netanyahu, Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman apart is personalities. He lays out what a national unity government could look like, the question that gets everybody stuck (who's prime minister?), and why he thinks another election would be "a catastrophe."

Then identity. He describes the tribes of Israeli politics and the Ashkenazi-Sephardi divide politicians still know how to touch. Eisenkot's parents are Moroccan immigrants and he grew up in the periphery, while Netanyahu grew up in Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood. He says Donald Trump's endorsement "mostly helps" Netanyahu, why he worries Israel is becoming a football in American politics, and the three things he thinks a new government could do about it. And he says what American Jews misunderstand: "what government, statehood, and a Jewish state actually means."

Yaakov ran The Jerusalem Post through five elections in three and a half years. His verdict on how the world's media explains Israeli politics: "Mostly wrong." His prediction for the real headline the morning after: "we're stuck." He closes on what still gives him hope: the resilience of Israel's young people, including his three nephews, who until recently were all serving.

Also in this episode: the konseptziya, and why While Israel Slept goes all the way back to Hamas's founding in the 1980s; why there's still no state commission of inquiry into October 7th, and how one would be appointed; why the Haredi draft, the commission and "fix the country" never caught on as campaign issues; Netanyahu fighting "for political survival, for potential personal freedom, and for the legacy"; why Arab parties in the core 61 became a hard sell after October 7th; why voting feels "real" in Israel; and copy-pasting the front page by the third election.

Yaakov has his own view of how this should go. He thinks Israel needs a change of government, and he says so plainly. He also explains why so many Israelis see it differently.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open
00:40 Intro
03:28 The first election since October 7th: the mood on the ground
05:12 Why voters still see Netanyahu as the one who keeps them safe
12:38 Coalition math after October 7th
17:51 How Israeli elections actually work
20:49 Why left and right don't explain this race
24:14 Why the commission of inquiry isn't a campaign issue
25:59 While Israel Slept: what the research found
29:31 Turnout, and why voting feels real in Israel
31:24 What each side fears
36:48 Identity politics and Israel's tribes
38:09 Trump's endorsement and Israel in American politics
45:33 What American Jews misunderstand about Israel
49:29 Could there be a national unity government?
51:50 How the world's media will cover the results
53:37 What still gives him hope
56:25 Outro

YAAKOV KATZ Website: https://www.yaakovkatz.com/ Column at The Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/author/yaakov-katz While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East, with Amir Bohbot (St. Martin's Press, 2025): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250345685

MORE FROM THE HONEST TAKE Daniel Gordis, "America Is Not Zion": https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/america-is-not-zion-why-american-jews-and-israelis-are-living-two-different-jewish-lives-with-daniel-gordis Colonel Richard Kemp, "Hamas' Human Sacrifice": https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/human-sacrifice-not-human-shields-a-british-commander-on-why-gaza-is-a-war-not-a-genocide-with-richard-kemp

THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReporting

The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com.

If this one helped you make sense of the election, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.

A bonus episode for Honest Take listeners: meet CHECKED, HonestReporting's new weekly live show. Every Wednesday, Ben Chertoff and Joe Truzman take apart the week's coverage of Israel: what got reported, what got left out, and who decided.

This is The Feed, one segment from CHECKED's first episode. Former NYC Comptroller Brad Lander goes to the West Bank olive harvest, calls it "ethnic cleansing," gets detained in a closed military zone, and posts about it from the bus. We compare his post with what the IDF actually said, and ask Matti Friedman's question: why does an olive harvest draw more cameras than entire countries?

For the full episode, including Front Page, Open Cases and Honest Mistake or On Purpose?, follow CHECKED on Apple Podcasts and Spotify: https://checked.transistor.fm/

CHECKED is live every Wednesday at 12:30 ET on YouTube, X and Instagram. Follow @HonestReporting so you catch the next one. The Honest Take continues right here in this feed, like always.

Shortly after the war began, a European journalist wrote to Daniel Gordis. She wanted to interview the leaders of Israel's 2023 protest movement about the war, and she couldn't reach any of them. He wrote back that they were in cockpits and in tanks, and he says that wasn't a metaphor. That, he argues, is the difference between the two lefts. Israel's left "at the end of the day serves in the army," and almost none of it still talks about a two-state solution.

For most of the last century and a half, American Jews worked from a quiet bargain: the Jews are a faith, not a people, and America is the promised land. In a Hebrew essay this summer, Gordis says the bargain is over. He traces it from the rise of Reform Judaism, through Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew and Woodrow Wilson's warnings about "hyphenated" Americans, to Jacob Blaustein telling David Ben-Gurion that America was American Jews' Zion. His conclusion: "We are a people, and America is not Zion."

Then the personal side. His son is called up for reserve duty, and his daughter-in-law and three grandchildren move into the Gordises' Jerusalem home. He describes families who leave the front door open so no one will knock, the October 7th night his son made him buy a lock for the safe room, and why he thinks these have been such lonely years for Israelis. He also says what distance can give American Jews that Israelis don't have.

Gordis is candid about his own book. We Stand Divided, published in 2019, held up for two-thirds of its length, he says, and the last third, about building bridges, was wrong. He says he never believed it. The core still stands: "No American Jew ever went to war because she or he was an American Jew… Israelis go to war because we're Jews." He rejects the easy line that classical Zionism was simply right. He also says Israel "invested exactly zero effort in trying to tell its story to the wider world," and he describes the question Israelis now ask each other at their own Shabbat tables.

On what an American Jew owes Israel, his first answer is understanding: "the depth of the brokenness here, the depth of the exhaustion, the depth of the fear." He suggests starting with Israeli novels and television. He draws a hard line at Jewish anti-Zionism and says why he will no longer debate Peter Beinart. And he closes with hope, borrowing a distinction from the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: you don't have to be optimistic, but "hopeful is a command."

Also in this episode: Rabbi David Ingber's Rosh Hashanah sermon and the image of the watchman asleep at his post; the Jewish professionals who paid for boats from Haifa to Cyprus; the matching tents at Columbia; Howard Zinn's America and Israel's own left-wing historians; why tikkun olam isn't what the Jews are for; why Gordis says to skip the King David Hotel pool; David Grossman's To the End of the Land and Fauda's fifth season; an afternoon with Rabbi Yitz Greenberg; and Kol Nidre on the playground where his neighbors once sat and wept over judicial reform.

DANIEL GORDIS Israel from the Inside (Substack): https://danielgordis.substack.com/ Daniel Gordis at Shalem College: https://shalem.ac.il/en/personnel/daniel-gordis/ We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2019): https://www.harpercollins.com/products/we-stand-divided-daniel-gordis

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Daniel Gordis, "The Jews Are a Nation, and America Is Not Zion," HaShiloach (in Hebrew), June 28, 2026: https://hashiloach.org.il/usa-judaisam/ "The Alarm We Must Not Ignore," Rabbi David Ingber's Rosh Hashanah sermon, shared on Israel from the Inside, Sept. 18, 2026: https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/the-alarm-we-must-not-ignore

MORE FROM THE HONEST TAKE Ben M. Freeman, "The Broken Mirror": https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-broken-mirror-internalized-antisemitism-the-non-jewish-gaze-and-why-jews-are-the-only-ones-who-get-to-define-what-jewish-means-ben-m-freeman

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The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show — 60 to 90 minutes, recorded remotely, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com.

If this conversation gave you something to chew on, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.

Almost everyone now has an opinion about how Israel fights its wars: mayors, cabinet ministers, courts, comment sections. Almost none of them have ever had to make the call. Colonel Richard Kemp has.

Kemp served 29 years in the British Army. He did tours in Northern Ireland, the Gulf War and Bosnia, and in 2003 he commanded British forces in Afghanistan. He later ran the international terrorism team at the Cabinet Office in London during the 7/7 bombings. In Kabul, he once had to decide whether to order an attack on an al-Qaeda cell hiding in a civilian neighborhood, knowing there was a very high likelihood of killing civilians. He gave the order. In this conversation he explains what that decision is actually like, how rarely intelligence is complete, and why every commander, himself included, makes mistakes that cost lives.

Then he takes on the word genocide. Genocide is a crime of intent, not a crime of scale. So what would it look like if the IDF were actually trying to destroy a people? Kemp's answer: it would not warn civilians, abort strikes, or put its own soldiers at greater risk to keep civilians out of harm's way. It would not build roads inside a combat zone to move food and water, or open new crossings, or bring in vaccines. And if Israel's war in Gaza counts as genocide, he argues, so does almost every modern war fought among civilians.

He walks through what the law of armed conflict actually says about hospitals and human shields, and who it holds responsible when civilians die. He also explains why he would rather call Hamas's strategy "human sacrifice" than "human shields." He describes sitting in an IDF planning meeting inside Gaza before a strike on a former school compound housing displaced people, where he says at least half the meeting was spent on how to protect civilians. He also tells the story of an Israeli Air Force pilot who flew sortie after sortie against one target and abandoned the attack because there were too many civilians nearby.

Also in this episode: how much time a commander really gets when the shooting starts; what IDF precautions cost in soldiers' lives; the debate over civilian-to-combatant ratios; where the legal line sits between a besieged population going hungry and a commander starving it on purpose; what a ceasefire actually obligates each side to do; how a democracy fights an enemy that wants its own civilians killed; whether Israel could defend itself if the United States cut off arms; where the IDF could have done better; and the one question Kemp would put to someone convinced it's a genocide.

He's not a neutral party, and he says so himself. But he has stood where the people being accused stand.

COLONEL RICHARD KEMP Website: https://richard-kemp.com/ Writing at Gatestone Institute: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/author/Richard+KempWriting at JNS: https://www.jns.org/author/richard-kemp

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The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show, 60 to 90 minutes long and recorded remotely. It's hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode is at podcast.honestreporting.com.

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Recorded live on October 7, 2026, three years to the day.

Shahar Horovitz was 22 and had just come home from nine months of backpacking in South America when she went to the Nova music festival with about 30 of the friends she'd made on that trip. At 6:29 a.m. the music stopped. By 7:30 there were gunshots, and when she asked a police officer what to do, the officer told her: you have to run, I can't help you.

She ran for hours through the fields of the Gaza envelope, lost her friends, and joined three strangers she found catching their breath under a tree. They hid in a greenhouse, called the police and were told to hide, and finally reached a farm run by a Bedouin farmer named Yunus. When terrorists came into the farm, they crawled under his office and lay there while armed men walked inches away. Yunus, hiding under a tractor, was found and told them the survivors had left. He saved eight people that day, and was later honored at the President's Residence.

Shahar talks about thinking of her great-grandparents, Auschwitz survivors, while she lay under that building; going to five or six funerals in the first week; the guilt survivors carry; and why she gave herself and her friends new names in her book but kept the real names of the five friends who were killed. She also talks about recovering in New York, the stranger who called her book "biased" without reading it, the therapist who told her "you're not finished," and the text a friend sent her the day after: "You fought yesterday and you won. Keep winning."

SHAHAR HOROVITZ Surviving October 7 (published in Hebrew as We Were the Sun), on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FV2SG227 We Were the Sun: https://www.wewerethesun.com/

THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReporting

The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com.

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A rabbi picks Dara Horn up at the airport and tells her what she's walking into. Someone had been posting online about murdering children on the playground of the town's Jewish day school, and then their parents in the carpool line. The horrible part, her host says, isn't the plot. It's who was behind it: the school's own security guard. After People Love Dead Jews, stories like that came to her by the hundreds, and one of her sisters started calling her the antisemitism Lorax. So October 8 didn't shock her. The speed and the organization of it did.

Her new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, argues that we've been fighting the wrong thing. We treat antisemitism as a prejudice, something you cure by building empathy. Horn says it works more like a con. "The lie is always the same. Jews are destroying what you value the most." Only the value changes. To capitalists the Jews are communists, and to communists they're capitalists. To racists they're race polluters, and to anti-racists they're racists. To human rights advocates, the world's only Jewish state is the world's worst violator of human rights.

That changes the answer. Instead of debunking claims one at a time, which she compares to taking the stand in a show trial, Horn turns the question back on the people spreading the lie and asks who profits from it. When campus hecklers hand her a slogan, she answers it as if they meant the question, and she says the conversation usually ends right there. Her advice to students is that "you don't need a PhD to defeat an argument that's three words long." What they need is courage, and the discovery that far more people are standing behind them than they knew.

Horn also talks about what she saw from inside the antisemitism advisory group Harvard's president convened after October 7, and why the student complaints there were about harassment, not slogans. She covers the 2001 UN conference in Durban, where crowds were already chanting what you hear on campus today. And she remembers the week a fact checker asked her to document pogroms from a century ago while the same paper put Hamas's account of the al-Ahli hospital blast in a banner headline.

She closes on what the book's title means. Every Jew alive today is descended from someone who made a costly, countercultural choice. And for the young people chanting at her talks, she now feels something closer to sympathy than fear.

Also in this episode: "kill the Jews, save the turtles"; the Z word and the J word; why antisemitism inside an institution is the tail end of its collapse, not the canary; the Talmud's Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish, and why a study partner who agrees with you is useless; the Passover story as a story about burning down the palace; pre-bunking and the eight-lesson curriculum at The Tell Institute; the Muslim allies risking their lives, and the Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Mir; and New York City's new antisemitism plan ("Wait, how is it something?").

DARA HORN Dara Horn: https://www.darahorn.com The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster): https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Final-Solution-to-the-Jewish-Question/Dara-Horn/9781668090169 Buy it at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/a/1688/9781668090169 The Tell Institute: https://www.thetellinstitute.org

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Bret Stephens, "For America's Jews, Every Day Must Be Oct. 8," The New York Times, Nov. 7, 2023: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/opinion/us-jewish-israel-sept-11.html American Muslim Multifaith Women's Empowerment Council (AMMWEC): https://ammwec.org NYC Mayor's Office, "Mayor Mamdani Unveils New York City's First Strategy to Combat Antisemitism," Sept. 29, 2026: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani-unveils-new-york-city-s-first-strategy-to-combat-a Ben M. Freeman on The Honest Take, "The Broken Mirror": https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-broken-mirror-internalized-antisemitism-the-non-jewish-gaze-and-why-jews-are-the-only-ones-who-get-to-define-what-jewish-means-ben-m-freeman Hillel Neuer on The Honest Take, on Durban and the genocide charge: https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/a-verdict-waiting-for-a-trial-where-israel-is-committing-genocide-came-from-decades-before-gaza-with-hillel-neuer

THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReporting

The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show — 60 to 90 minutes, recorded remotely, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com.

If this one gave you something to argue about at your own table, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.

"If you are Hamas, you have to be laughing at how easily you can play the international and American news media." For Elliot Kaufman, the coverage turned ten days in, when the blast at al-Ahli hospital was reported around the world as an Israeli strike that had killed hundreds. He points out that it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that landed in the hospital's parking lot. From there, he argues, the war was told as if Hamas weren't in it: not in the footage, not in the casualty counts, not in the story of the aid. He's just as blunt about Israel's own failures. On aid, he says, "I don't think Israel messed up on the PR there. I think Israel messed up. Period."

Kaufman is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, and he writes about Israel and Iran. With Yonah Jeremy Bob of The Jerusalem Post, he wrote In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis. The two reported it while the war was still going on. They interviewed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, who made up the original war cabinet, along with Jake Sullivan, Steve Witkoff and more than a hundred Israeli military officials.

The Netanyahu in the book is not the one most coverage describes. Kaufman argues that in the opening weeks he was the brake. He held back Gallant's plan to hit Hezbollah first. On October 11, 2023, Israeli warplanes were already in the air to strike Hezbollah when radar picked up what looked like paragliders crossing from Lebanon; they turned out to be geese, and the planes were called back. Kaufman says the whole war could have turned on that one misreading. Netanyahu then spent the 20 days between October 7 and the October 27 ground invasion holding back the push into Gaza. Kaufman says the IDF had no plan on the shelf for a full invasion of Gaza at all. His verdict on the war that followed is that Israel didn't go too far in Gaza. "I think it fought for too long," he says, because under a raid-and-leave strategy troops had to fight for the same neighborhoods again and again.

Then the conversation comes home to Brooklyn. In 2021 Kaufman went back to the 1991 Crown Heights riot for the Journal. For three nights, Jews in the neighborhood hid in their homes while rioters threw bricks through their windows, and Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed and killed. His argument is that the police stood back and the press filed the violence as a racial clash, when the actual story was antisemitism.

He closes on hope, and on a warning. He argues that the practical, interest-based case for Israel as an ally has never been stronger. He's worried about the right as well as the left: "The subtext of, say, the Tucker Carlson Show isn't that all Jews are evil. It's that all evil is Jewish."

Also in this episode: the joke Kaufman heard from the Prime Minister's Office about a "two-state solution" (Michigan and Nevada); the Students for Justice in Palestine toolkit sent to campus chapters on October 8, 2023; the advice Gallant got from General David Petraeus; what Netanyahu's own 2022 memoir predicted about invading Gaza; a documentary's claim about civilian-casualty approvals, set against the strike on Mohammed Deif; and how the war looks from Tehran.

ELLIOT KAUFMAN Elliot Kaufman at The Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/news/author/elliot-kaufman Elliot Kaufman at Simon & Schuster: https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Elliot-Kaufman/260068537

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Elliot Kaufman, "Could the Crown Heights Riots Recur?" The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 20, 2021: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/crown-heights-riot-hasidic-jews-black-chabad-dinkins-giuliani-brooklyn-new-york-11629481962 WSJ Opinion, "'Get the Jew': The Crown Heights Riot Revisited" (documentary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpjLx-8xyJQ Matti Friedman on The Honest Take, "The Familiar Villain": https://share.transistor.fm/s/5f71c087

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The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show — 60 to 90 minutes, recorded remotely, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com.

If this episode changed how you think about the first draft of this war, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.

A fourth-grade math textbook asks Palestinian children to add the number of martyrs killed in the First Intifada to the number killed in the Second. A physics lesson teaches Newton's second law using a boy with a slingshot aimed at an Israeli soldier. A first-grade Arabic book introduces the letter ha with two words: attack, and martyr.

Marcus Sheff runs the institute that found all of it. He was a political reporter, then an editor at The Jerusalem Post, then a foreign correspondent, and then he ran a communications firm — and now he is CEO of IMPACT-se, the Jerusalem-based research institute that reads school textbooks across the Middle East and Europe line by line and grades them against UNESCO's own standards on peace, tolerance and non-violence. His analysts go through every line of every book of every subject of every grade; one country can mean 350 textbooks in a year. The Syrian report is 300 pages.

His central claim is not that the books are offensive. It is that they are predictive. "Textbooks are remarkable political predictors," Sheff says. "What children are taught today in classrooms all over the world is a pretty good indication of what the country is going to be like in ten years' time." A fourteen-year-old reading a physics problem about throwing rocks is twenty-four in a decade, and a fully formed member of a society. What a regime prints is what it intends.

Sheff walks through what IMPACT-se found in the Palestinian Authority curriculum and why he reads it as strategy rather than accident: the peace agreements that used to be in the books — Israel and Egypt, Israel and Jordan, the Wye Accords — were taken out when the curriculum was rewritten between 2016 and 2018, leaving only a dismissive account of Oslo, along with the letter Yasser Arafat wrote to Yitzhak Rabin renouncing violence, which was doctored. None of that, he argues, happens by accident. It was done at the top, in the open, with the international community in the room.

Then there is UNRWA — the UN agency that runs most of the schools in Gaza, teaches the Palestinian Authority curriculum in them, and has produced some of its own supplementary material besides, one piece of which describes an attack on a bus full of Israeli civilians as a barbecue party. Sheff testified to the committee the UN set up to investigate the agency after October 7; IMPACT-se was the only nonprofit asked. He describes what the committee recommended and what happened next, which was very little.

The obvious objection gets its turn: does any of this actually change anyone, and isn't the whole thing impossible to fix anyway? Sheff's answer is the most useful thing on the tape. Changing a curriculum is not hard. These are thin, magazine-format books, reprinted constantly, and the world has two billion children in school — it is not short of experience in producing textbooks. The refusal is not technical. "This is not a pedagogical question," he says. "This is a political question."

He also turns the same standards on Israel — IMPACT-se examines the Israeli curriculum, he says, more comprehensively than any other — and describes what the Ministry of Education's civics textbook actually teaches Israeli children about 1948, including the Palestinian account of it.

And there is a genuinely hopeful half to this. The Palestinian Authority curriculum is not the regional norm; it is the outlier. The United Arab Emirates rebuilt its textbooks first. Saudi Arabia has been reforming its curriculum since 2020. Morocco's books, built on the country's 2011 constitutional reform, treat the Jewish community and the Amazigh as part of the Moroccan tapestry, right down to a photograph of a Muslim family at a Jewish Friday night table. Central Asia is doing better on antisemitism than much of Western Europe, where Sheff calls the picture a mixed bag and puts Ireland at the bottom of it.

Also in this episode: what the analysts physically do with a stack of several hundred textbooks; why UNESCO doesn't conduct this kind of country-level review itself; the fact that Hamas, on taking Gaza, did not change a word of the curriculum Fatah wrote in Ramallah; why the US withdrew its UNRWA funding after IMPACT-se testified in Congress; what Sheff would say if he had one sentence in front of the UN General Assembly; and where his hope comes from after a career spent reading the worst material anyone produces.

MARCUS SHEFF AND IMPACT-se IMPACT-se: https://www.impact-se.org/ All IMPACT-se reports and research: https://www.impact-se.org/blog/ Marcus Sheff, Washington Institute expert bio: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts/marcus-sheff-0 IMPACT-se team page: https://www.impact-se.org/about-us/team-impact/

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Sheff's written testimony to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, "UNRWA Exposed," Jan 30 2024: https://chrissmith.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2024-1-30-_witness_testimony_of_marcus_sheff.pdf IMPACT-se, "Analyzing UNRWA's Response" — the July 2 2026 review of UNRWA's compliance with the Colonna Report, including the eighth-grade Arabic textbook: https://impact-se.org/publication/analysing-unrwas-response-to-the-un-independent-review-colonna-report/ IMPACT-se, "Review of the 2025-2026 Palestinian Authority School Curriculum, Grades 1-12," November 2025 — 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides: https://www.impact-se.org/wp-content/uploads/Review-of-the-2025-2026-Palestinian-Authority-School-Curriculum-v2.pdf IMPACT-se, "Review of UNRWA Schools Headed by Hamas Principals," Nov 10 2024: https://impact-se.org/publication/review-of-unrwa-schools-headed-by-hamas-principals/ IMPACT-se, "When Peace Goes to School: The Emirati Curriculum 2016–21": https://www.impact-se.org/wp-content/uploads/When-Peace-Goes-to-School_The-Emirati-Curriculum-2016%E2%80%9321.pdf IMPACT-se, "Review of Saudi Textbooks 2024–2026," July 2026: https://impact-se.org/publication/review-of-saudi-textbooks-2024-2026/ IMPACT-se, "In Syria, the Real Foreign Policy Is Written in the Classroom," July 21 2026: https://impact-se.org/publication/in-syria-the-real-foreign-policy-is-written-in-the-classroom/ IMPACT-se, "Review of the Jordanian Curriculum 2025–2026," Aug 11 2026: https://impact-se.org/publication/review-of-the-jordanian-curriculum-2025-2026/ US Government Accountability Office, GAO-26-107708 — gaps in State Department reporting on UNRWA textbook content, Jan 8 2026: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107708 Dr. Charles Asher Small on The Honest Take, "Follow the Money: How the Muslim Brotherhood Bought a Seat in America's Schools": https://share.transistor.fm/s/a2cab...

"The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is not Israel. The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is the Jewish people."

That's Ben M. Freeman, and that's where this episode starts.

Most weeks on The Honest Take, we spend an hour with one guest. This week is different. We're in the Ten Days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the stretch when you're supposed to sit down and take an honest accounting of yourself. So we went back through the conversations on this show and pulled the moments that had nothing to do with the news cycle.

Nobody in this episode is going to tell you what's being done to us. You already know that. Instead, nine people take on a harder question: Who are we? What do we actually know about ourselves? And what do we owe the people who handed this to us?

Ben M. Freeman, founder of the Jewish Pride movement, explains why Jews are a people, a nation and a civilization, not only a religion, and why "religions don't have homelands."

Rawan Osman grew up in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and spent seven years reading her way out of what she was taught about Jews. She describes what she found when she finally walked into a synagogue, and tells young Jews that being born a Jew "is like winning the lottery."

Yossi Klein Halevi of the Shalom Hartman Institute names the failure: "We have the most compelling national story out there… And we're not telling it."

Dr. Henry Green, founder of Sephardi Voices, turns the same charge inward. Nearly every Jewish community marks Yom HaShoah, and almost none mark Yom HaPlitim, the day that honors the Jews who left the Arab world.

Author Meg Keene says the community is going to have to build its own institutions, and pay for them.

Brigadier General Amir Avivi argues that security starts with spirit and purpose, and that a nation that has been around for thousands of years should be able to think a thousand years ahead.

Alana Newhouse, founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet, says Zionism is "not something that we picked up at Walmart 20 years ago," and lays out four survival tests that, she argues, only Israel in the West currently passes.

Shai Davidai, who was teaching at Columbia Business School on October 7, explains what he decided to do after getting punched in the face.

And Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki was murdered in the 2001 Sbarro bombing in Jerusalem, answers the question of what still gives him hope: "I'm a Jew. I'm a proud Jew."

From all of us at HonestReporting, g'mar chatima tova.

If this episode was worth your time, send it to someone who needs it, and leave a rating and a review. It genuinely helps other people find the show.

Full conversations

Every guest in this episode sat down with Ben for a full-length episode of The Honest Take.

• Ben M. Freeman: Broken Mirror: Internalized Antisemitism, the Non-Jewish Gaze, and Why Jewish Pride is the Answer to Jew Hate — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-broken-mirror-internalized-antisemitism-the-non-jewish-gaze-and-why-jews-are-the-only-ones-who-get-to-define-what-jewish-means-ben-m-freeman
• Rawan Osman: Why Is the Jew the Enemy? How Arab Antisemitism Is Built — And How It Breaks — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/why-is-the-jew-the-enemy-how-arab-antisemitism-is-built-and-how-it-breaks-with-rawan-osman
• Yossi Klein Halevi: The Other Side of the Nakba: The Forgotten History of 1948 — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-other-side-of-the-nakba-the-forgotten-history-of-1948-with-yossi-klein-halevi
• Dr. Henry Green: The Second Exodus: How 850,000 Jews Were Erased From the Arab World — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/exodus-erased-850-000-jews-were-erased-from-the-arab-world-heres-what-really-happened-dr-henry-green
• Meg Keene: No One Wants a Jewish Protagonist: Inside Publishing's New Blacklist — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/no-one-wants-a-jewish-protagonist-inside-publishings-new-blacklist-with-meg-keene
• Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi: There Is Nowhere Else: Israeli Security, Zionist Pride, and the Doctrine That Broke on October 7 — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-solution-is-israel
• Alana Newhouse: The Jews Are Not the Target. The West Is. Can Zionism Save It? — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-jews-are-not-the-target-the-west-is-can-zionism-save-it-alana-newhouse
• Shai Davidai: Elite, Educated, Antisemitic: How Academia Fosters Jew Hate — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/elite-educated-antisemitic-how-academia-fosters-jew-hate-with-shai-davidai
• Arnold Roth: What "Globalize the Intifada" Actually Means, From Someone Who Lived It — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/what-globalize-the-intifada-actually-means-from-someone-who-lived-it-arnold-roth

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"Israel is committing genocide." It's a sentence heard every day since October 7, and it is far older than the war. Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch in Geneva, returns to The Honest Take to trace where the charge came from, and how it was in circulation decades before the war it is now used to describe.

Neuer traces the vocabulary back to Soviet propaganda that he says probably began in the 1950s, and to the UN's 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution, which was repealed in 1991. A decade later it was revived at the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, which the United States and Israel walked out of 25 years ago this month. As Neuer puts it, "a conference that was supposed to be against racism became a conference that promoted racism." Marchers equated Zionism with Nazism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were handed out as literature. A parallel NGO Forum adopted a declaration accusing Israel of "acts of genocide," "Israel's brand of apartheid" and "racist crimes against humanity." At the time, Human Rights Watch's Reed Brody, while accusing Israel of "serious crimes against Palestinian people," told CNN that "it is simply not accurate to use the word genocide." Congressman Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, called the conference "the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I had seen since the Nazi period."

Neuer argues that the charge never went away. The same accusation now comes from UN mechanisms, including the Human Rights Council's commission of inquiry and Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese.

The UN is still marking the anniversary. On Monday, September 28, the General Assembly holds a high-level meeting to commemorate 25 years since the adoption of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. The resolution setting it up passed in July, 142 to 3 with 13 abstentions; Argentina, Israel and the United States voted no. Ten countries pulled out of the 2009 Durban Review Conference in Geneva, and 38 boycotted the General Assembly's 20th-anniversary meeting in 2021. UN Watch is asking democracies to stay away again.

Also in this episode: Secretary-General António Guterres telling the Financial Times that many UN special rapporteurs are "totally out of control, from the point of view of the Secretariat," and his spokesman's clarification days later; Deborah Lipstadt's account that Guterres privately called Albanese "a horrible person"; and Neuer's answer to Albanese's defamation charge: "Please go ahead and sue me. Make my day."

SIGN THE PETITION UN Watch — Durban 25 petition: https://unwatch.org/petition-pull-out-of-uns-antisemitic-durban-25-meeting/ UN Watch — Durban 25 campaign and boycott history: https://unwatch.org/durban-25/

HILLEL NEUER AND UN WATCH UN Watch: https://unwatch.org Hillel Neuer on X: https://x.com/HillelNeuer UN Watch on X: https://x.com/UNWatch

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE UN High-Level Week 2026 (the September 28 Durban meeting): https://www.un.org/en/high-level-week-2026 UN press release GA/12774 — the July 28, 2026 vote, 142–3–13: https://press.un.org/en/2026/ga12774.doc.htm Resolution text, A/80/L.93: https://docs.un.org/A/80/L.93 US Mission to the UN — explanation of vote: https://usun.usmission.gov/explanation-of-vote-for-unga-resolution-scope-modalities-format-and-organization-of-the-high-level-meeting-of-the-general-assembly/ Durban 2001 NGO Forum Declaration (full text): https://www.adalah.org/uploads/oldfiles/eng/intladvocacy/ngoforumdecl.htm CNN, Sept. 2, 2001 — the NGO Forum declaration, and Human Rights Watch on the genocide charge: https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/africa/09/02/durban.racism/index.html CNN, Sept. 3, 2001 — the US and Israel walk out: https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/africa/09/03/racism.reaction/index.html UN Watch — Tom Lantos and other voices on the 2001 NGO Forum: https://unwatch.org/leading-international-voices-on-the-2001-durban-ngo-forum/ UN Watch — 25 Years After Durban (Feb. 2026): https://unwatch.org/25-years-after-durban-antisemitism-repackaged-as-human-rights/ James Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Yale): https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300217247/rooted-cosmopolitans/ NGO Monitor: https://ngo-monitor.org Guterres: Hamas attacks "did not happen in a vacuum" (Fortune, Oct. 2023): https://fortune.com/2023/10/25/un-secretary-general-says-hamas-attack-did-not-happen-in-vacuum-guterres-israel/ UN Watch — Guterres on rapporteurs "totally out of control," and Lipstadt's account: https://unwatch.org/un-chief-guterres-admits-special-rapporteurs-are-totally-out-of-control-after-privately-calling-francesca-albanese-a-horrible-person/ Jerusalem Post — the UN spokesman's clarification: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-906973 UN Watch — Albanese tells Middle East Eye the Secretary-General never spoke to her: https://unwatch.org/francesca-albanese-says-un-chief-never-spoke-to-her-and-expects-he-never-will/

Hillel Neuer's first Honest Take episode (March 24, 2026): https://honestreporting.com/the-un-is-broken-how-hillel-neuer-is-fighting-the-uns-anti-israel-machine-from-the-inside/

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