Haaretz Podcast

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Yuval Abraham on 'NAZA' storm, 'unhinged' Netanyahu and why he wants to come back home after all Sep 26, 2026

Show notes

On the eve of the New York premiere of their film, "NAZA," co-directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor sat with Haaretz U.S. senior writer Etan Nechin to talk about the journalistic investigations behind the film, the unprecedented criticism of them in Israel – including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threat to strip them of their citizenship – and why it’s important to them to come back home and engage with Israelis.

In this episode of the Haaretz podcast, you can listen to Abraham discuss what he thought of Netanyahu likening the documentary to “dozens of missiles” being fired at Israel; the Trump administration's material support of the Gaza war and U.S. debate about arms sales to Israel; the film’s title and thematic association with Nazi Germany; why so many specific details were taken out of the film; and his plan to return to Israel and continue his work.

“I don't want to be an exile,” he said, declaring that “there are no grounds” to revoke his or Szor’s citizenship.

“We're journalists. We're filmmakers. … The storm will pass, and we will come back and move on to the next thing.”

The full interview with Abraham and Szor will be available on haaretz.com on Sunday.

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Ed Sheeran and Macklemore-gate: What happened and what does it mean? Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

After rapper Macklemore cried "Free Palestine!" as he took the stage as the opening act for music superstar Ed Sheeran, opened a Pandora's box of controversy over free speech and the place of politics at a music concert "that is not dying down any time soon," said Philissa Cramer on the Haaretz Podcast.

Cramer, recently appointed senior Jewish Life correspondent for Haaretz, recounted on the podcast how, when Gillette Stadium and New England Patriots billionaire owner Robert Kraft refused to have Macklemore at his venue later in the Sheeran tour, and the rapper was removed as an opening act for Sheeran, the incident "turned from a story about was Macklemore doing something that his audience found objectionable - to a story about cancel culture."

In addition to telling the story of the war of words and promises of donations, Cramer discussed with podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer whether the episode carried lessons for the embattled organized U.S. Jewish community as the list of prominent celebrities speaking out publicly Palestinian rights continues to grow.

Ed Sheeran Apologizes for Macklemore Controversy, Says Gaza Devastation Is 'Unjustifiable'

Robert Kraft vs. Macklemore Reveals New Reality in 'Free Palestine' Debate

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'Under siege by settlers:' A Palestinian American on his month trapped in his West Bank home Sep 17, 2026

Show notes

The violence of extremist settlers on the West Bank as they systematically terrorize, attack and even displace Palestinian communities is a “perversion of Judaism” and a desecration of God’s name,” said Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, speaking on the Haaretz Podcast in the week between the Jewish New Year and its Day of Atonement.

Joining Weiman-Kelman on the podcast is Loui Ridi, a Palestinian American who flew from Ohio back to his home in the West Bank village of Qusra, after settlers laid siege to his neighborhood and the IDF declared a closed military zone. Ridi has been unable to leave his house for a month due to the order, and says the closure has been selectively enforced against Palestinians, while the army refuses to remove the settlers.

Ridi is flying the American flag on his house, he said, “as a message to the U.S. government, to the U.S. officials, that I need protection and I need help.”

Weiman-Kelman, a former president of Rabbis for Human Rights and retired spiritual leader of Kol HaNeshama, a Reform synagogue in Jerusalem, reflected on the situation in the West Bank and the overall state of the country following Rosh Hashanah and ahead of Yom Kippur – a day on which, he said, “I want to atone for still feeling the effects of October 7, for the nationalist part of me overcoming the universal vision that is also part of me.”

Israel today is not only threatened by external enemies, but “threatened from within by the moral center of this country beginning to shatter and disintegrate before our eyes,” he said.

“We live in a country where people feel encouraged and empowered to express their darkest sides through acts of physical violence,” he said, including repeated vandalism to the Reform synagogue in Jerusalem he founded in 1985.

Palestinian-American Returns to West Bank Home Besieged by Israeli Settlers

B'Tselem Says Israel Is Implementing a 'Project of Elimination' Against Palestinians in the West Bank

IDF Dismisses Commander Over Praying With Settlers at West Bank Outpost

American Rabbis Confront a Fraught Question This High Holy Day Season: How to Talk About Israel

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'Bibi or a Wannabibi?': Anshel Pfeffer and Dahlia Scheindlin on what the elections are all about Sep 15, 2026

Show notes

The intensifying Israeli election campaign encompasses a long list of issues, but at its heart, the results of the vote on October 27 will be “about the transition out of the Netanyahu era,” contended Anshel Pfeffer, Israel correspondent for The Economist, speaking on the Haaretz Podcast.

Pfeffer said that many have done their best “to be the next Netanyahu,” attempting to project his confidence, authority and leadership, while consciously or unconsciously replicating the current prime minister’s style. The front-runner, former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, he noted, has a “big advantage is that he’s the first ‘wannabe Bibi’ who is not a ‘wannabe Bibi’” in looks and behavior.

Pfeffer returned to Haaretz for the podcast, where he worked as a correspondent and columnist for over 25 years and continues to contribute, for a reunion with columnist Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin, with whom he co-hosted the “Election Overdose” podcast during the run-up to the 2022 elections.

In the first Haaretz Election Podcast since the party lists were finalized on September 8, Scheindlin and Pfeffer assessed the chances of each party and bloc, as well as grappling with the larger issues: most importantly, the legacy of October 7.

Netanyahu’s newest challenge from the far-right former general Ofer Winter “is saying this election is about October 7, and that’s something that Netanyahu really doesn’t want the election to be about. For him, October 7 is kryptonite,” Pfeffer said.

But, Scheindlin said, it is inescapable.

“The sense that there has been no accountability for what happened on October 7 is not a marginal issue,” she emphasized. Israelis whose lives were upended by the events on that day and their aftermath “feel betrayed not only by the government, but by the state itself.”

Poll: Most Israeli Voters Say October 7 Will Be Main Consideration at Ballot Box

Netanyahu's Likud Seeks to Disqualify Arab Party From 2026 Knesset Election Run

Analysis | Netanyahu's Terrible Tuesday Left Him Almost Unscathed in Election Polls – for Now

Analysis | The Quiet Radicalism of Mansour Abbas and Yoav Segalovitz

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‘It’s a real struggle against neo-Nazis’: Behind the far-right’s political rise in Germany Sep 10, 2026

Show notes

The stunning triumph of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in a German state election represents a true “challenge to democracy” and has shaken the country’s Jewish community, said author and activist Dr. Ofer Waldman, speaking on the Haaretz Podcast

“It's the first time that a right‑extremist party has had such a landslide victory in Germany,” said Waldman, who heads the Heinrich Boll Foundation office in Tel Aviv.

Haaretz writer and editor David Issacharoff, who joined Waldman on the podcast for a discussion of the election results, said that state of Saxony-Anhalt, which gave 44 percent of its vote to the controversial AfD party, is populated by voters who “feel abandoned, forgotten, and very isolated,” blaming the state and mainstream parties for their situation and channeling their resentment in an extremist political direction.

This is worsened, both Waldman and Issacharoff said, by the fact that East Germany was not part of the post-Holocaust democracy education push in the West. "Keeping Jewish memory there is a real struggle of individuals in that state, and they're up against real forces of neo‑Nazis,” Issacharoff noted,

Both commentators pointed to the contrast between the expressed deep worry and concern of the German Jewish community regarding AfD antisemitism, and the resounding “utter silence” coming from the Israeli government – together with comments from Israel’s ambassador in Berlin during the election campaign that highlighted antisemitism on the left, while downplaying the AfD’s positions.

"When Israel and its representative in Germany focus all the fire towards the left, then they're totally absolving the right from its responsibility for antisemitism. And when the representatives of the Jewish state say that, it matters in Germany," Issacharoff said.

Waldman added the source of the dissonance was “what is perceived as a mutual enemy” by Israel’s far-right government.

“The AfD is perceived as the enemy of the Muslim community in Germany and, as such, a possible ally to the current Israeli administration,” Waldman said.

The AfD's Victory Shatters Germany's Illusions of Immunity to the Far Right

Several European States Clarify Settlement Trade Restrictions Depend on EU Action

The Far-right German Party AfD Says It Has Nothing Against Jews. This Book Proves Otherwise

Inside the German pro-Israel Lobby's Campaign to Defund UNRWA

Who Stole All the Holocaust Memorial Stones on Oct. 7, Shaking This Quiet East German Town?

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Hasan Piker, Mike Huckabee and a week of Israeli political party-hopping Sep 07, 2026

Show notes

A last-minute scramble before the party lists for Israel’s elections are finalized on September 8 has led to the disappearance of small parties, politicians switching parties and the dismissal of veteran ultra-Orthodox Knesset members by leaders who want to “refresh” their party lists.

On the Haaretz Election Podcast, correspondents Linda Dayan and Etan Nechin reviewed the week’s big changes – along the return of October 7 conspiracy theories and the intermingling of U.S. and Israeli political campaigning with host Allison Kaplan Sommer.

Dayan noted the leap by controversial Likud MK Tally Gotliv to the extremist Otzma Yehudit party led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, pointed out that the move “shows how much Likud has absorbed toxic far-right populism.”

The drastic shrinking of Yesh Atid as its leader Yair Lapid has played second fiddle to more popular center-right figures like Benny Gantz, Naftali Bennett and Gadi Eisenkot, Nechin said, “represents the limitations of liberal Jewish Israeli society. ... There’s a segment of Israeli liberal society which deems itself very liberal and very open‑minded, but would rather cede to the right than explore new political possibilities."

Nechin also discussed his decision to interview controversial streamer Hasan Piker and why, despite pushback, he felt it was important to be the first in the Israeli media to do so.

"His platform, where young people – mostly men – might hear for the first time the term ‘anti‑Zionist’ or ‘settler colonialism’ or learn about Israel… makes him a person that is worth talking to," he said.

Bennett and Lapid Bid to Oust Netanyahu Again as They Unveil Joint Slate

As Election Focus Shifts to October 7, Netanyahu Pivots to Conspiracy Theories

Hasan Piker Talks Hamas, anti-Zionism and Why Americans Are Fed Up With Israel

A Convicted Terror Inciter and a Man Who Killed a Palestinian: Meet Ben-Gvir's Election Team

The One Thing Hasan Piker Could Say to Begin Healing Ties With U.S. Jews

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Fear of Muslims, socialists and Tucker Carlson: Behind the scenes at the Republican Jewish Coalition confab Sep 03, 2026

Show notes

Vice President JD Vance’s charm offensive failed to completely win over skeptical GOP donors who gathered this week in Las Vegas at the Republican Jewish Coalition National Leadership Summit, Haaretz’s Washington D.C. correspondent Arno Rosenfeld told the Haaretz Podcast.

There were mixed reactions to Vance’s speech to the crowd of 1,000, meant to be off the record, but leaked publicly, in which the vice president attempted to reassure those attending that, despite his isolationist leanings and association with media figures who regularly peddle antisemitic tropes, that he believed in the “mutually beneficial” relationship between the U.S. and Israel, that he was not “abandoning” the Jewish state and appreciated “American Jewish contributions to the United States.”

Vance’s words were a bit more “weird and convoluted” in a strange discussion of “blood guilt” – a term popularized by right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, as a variation of the term “blood libel” with a slightly different meaning.

“It was quite telling that Vance was using a framework that Carlson has come up with to talk about antisemitism,” Rosenfeld said, at a moment in which even the most conservative Jews have been disturbed by Carlson’s conspiratorial theories.

On the podcast, Rosenfeld, who covered the three-day event, also spoke with host Allison Kaplan Sommer about the “anxiety” among some present over the dramatic drop in support for Israel among young conservatives, but the lack of any genuine strategy to address it, as well as the primary targets of the attack lines of the speeches: Muslims and socialists.

Rosenfeld said he was particularly “struck by the degree of just sort of open animosity toward Muslims and Islam” at the gathering, “because of how much of a focus there was on antisemitism and on extremism and on radicalism and on hate. You would get that in one breath, and then in the next breath, there would be talk about how we need to defeat ‘Islamo-fascism’ and the ‘red-green alliance’ between socialism and Islam.”

GOP Jews Rail Against Democrats at Vegas Confab, but Worry About Their Own Party's Israel Drift

Israel's U.S. Envoy Yechiel Leiter Says Government Is Failing to Stop Jewish Terrorism in West Bank

Michigan Jews Help Form 'Democrats for Mike Rogers,' With Little Talk of Israel

JD Vance's 'Communion' Gives Readers a Chronicle of Unconvincing Conversions

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Do Israelis care about settler violence enough to change their vote? Aug 31, 2026

Show notes

Nothing is helping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current coalition boost its standing in the polls, and it is clear that the premier is “panicking,” said Haaretz columnist Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin, speaking on the Haaretz Election Podcast.

Scheindlin joins Haaretz correspondent Judy Maltz and host Allison Kaplan Sommer to discuss the entrance of a new right-wing party led by ex-general Ofer Winter into the race, joining the plethora of “pop-up” right-wing parties that are causing Netanyahu’s alarm at the possibility that one or more will fall under the electoral threshold, and the precious votes in his camp will be wasted.

"Netanyahu is begging the right wing not to fragment the parties. He's warning the right wing: If you do the wrong thing, the entire world explodes," Scheindlin said, ahead of the September 8 deadline for merging with other parties and submitting final lists.

On the podcast, Maltz shares what she’s found as she visits cities and towns around Israel taking the pulse of voters. Kiryat Shmona – Israel’s most targeted city, devastated by three years of war – is still grappling with the 2023 evacuation that is proving to be somewhat permanent, Maltz says. “People are pretty angry and often talk about themselves being abandoned, unseen and forgotten.”

Still, like the Likud strongholds along the Gaza border that she has visited, Maltz found many clinging to party loyalties despite their disappointment with Netanyahu and his government. Some favor non-Netanyahu right-wingers, but others remain loyal to the prime minister despite the devastating events that happened on his watch.

"Many of them subscribe to these conspiracy theories about the army in cahoots with Hamas together orchestrating October 7 to make Netanyahu look bad," Maltz explained.

Analysis by Dahlia Scheindlin | Two Months Out, Netanyahu's Bloc Is Stuck in Polls. But All the Rest Is a Mystery

By Smashing a Palestinian Monument, an Israeli Far-right Lawmaker Brought West Bank Reality to Light

Reality Check: As the Election Nears, Haaretz Debunks Israeli Politicians' Biggest Lies

'Israel on Steroids': Arad Foreshadows What Another Netanyahu Victory Might Look Like

'People Here Like Ben-Gvir's Tough-guy Approach': Will This Netanyahu Stronghold Near Gaza Go Further Right?

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Is Turkey the new Iran? Aug 28, 2026

Show notes

Israel's controversial strike on an airbase in northern Syria close to Turkey was "first and foremost a message to the United States" that Turkish military penetration deeper into Syrian territory "can be turned into a real and total war," and any U.S. policy that tolerates it is "not sustainable," according to Dr. Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak, speaking on the Haaretz Podcast.

The attack has been criticized as an election ploy by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While Yanarocak said such considerations may have played a role in its timing, he stressed that Turkey's ambitions in post-Assad Syria are a legitimate source of deep concern for Israel. Israel's military establishment sees them as a substantial threat and pushed for the attack after Turkey ignored warnings.

The past three years of war have shifted the balance of power in Turkey's favor with the weakening of both Iran and the Gulf states, he explained in a conversation with podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer. He discussed the bold ambitions of the country led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the key role Syria plays in them.

"The public discourse in Turkey is neo-Ottomanism," Yanarocak said. "Putting it more familiar to the American ears: 'Make Turkey Great Again' … Turkey is thinking very big."

Netanyahu Warns Turkey's Erdogan Against Military Expansion in Syria, but Hopes a Warning Is Enough

Attacking Erdogan or Clinging to the Status Quo? Israel's Turkey Paradox

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A desperate Netanyahu is firing at all fronts to win the election. Even Trump has had enough Aug 24, 2026

Show notes

The glut of new small parties throwing their hats in the ring is increasing the chances that after the voters have their say, there will not be a decisive win either for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition nor the opposition parties determined to topple him.

"All of these new little parties are headed by individuals who are placing their ego above the political outcome. They can't possibly join an existing party – they have to try to start their own," said Haaretz columnist Dahlia Scheindlin on the Haaretz Election Podcast.

As a result, the voters may not end up determining who will be prime minister, and instead a “little gang” of “six, seven or eight male party leaders” will meet and decide the make-up of the coalition, Scheindlin said.

Scheindlin joined fellow columnist Esther Solomon and host Allison Kaplan Sommer to discuss the results of the Likud primaries, opposition frontrunner Gadi Eisenkot’s declaration that there will be no Palestinian state on his watch, what appears to be a politicized decision by Israel’s internal security service not to officially protect Eisenkot, and how Netanyahu, stuck in the polls, appears to be dangerously “firing in all directions” in order to find a way to victory.

"He has the capacity to aggravate, or provoke, or exploit any number of crises that are happening in this region,” Solomon said.

Little, however, Scheindlin pointed out, appears to be moving the needle for the prime minister. He has shown that "you can attack Iran and attack Iran again. You can bomb Lebanon. You can kill Hassan Nasrallah, and nothing has changed the polls."

Netanyahu Rival Eisenkot Vows No Palestinian State: 'Not Now, Not in Next Government'

Reality Check: As the Election Nears, Haaretz Debunks Israeli Politicians' Biggest Lies

The Petty Politics Destroying Israel's Opposition

Likud's Casualty List: The Netanyahu Loyalists Headed Home After a Brutal Primary

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