Haaretz Podcast

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.
Read more:
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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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Most Israelis Back Iran War but Support Low Among Arab Citizens, Poll Shows
Just One in Four Americans Supports U.S. Strikes on Iran, Poll Finds
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.”
Read more:
What a Difference 12 Days Make: Why This Israel-Iran War Is Different From the Last One
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House Democrats Urge Congressional Testimony by Trump Administration Officials on Iran War
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:
Oscar-nominated Israeli Filmmaker on Gaza: 'Focusing on Dead Children Does Not Diminish Our Pain'
Why Israel Fears the Faces of Dead Palestinian Children on Its Streets

It Looks Like a Memorial Day Ceremony: The Israelis Protesting With Photos of Dead Gazan Children
Student Oscar-winning Film 'Mirrors the Experiences of Palestinians in Israel'

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