Haaretz Podcast

• 'He called out Bibi's bluff': Within days of Oct. 7, this hostage's father spoke out against Netanyahu's war

  Early on, it was clear the Beinin-Atzili family was not a typical hostage family, filmmaker Brandon Kramer, director of the new award-winning documentary “Holding Liat” said on the Haaretz Podcast. After learning that his relatives, Liat and Aviv Atzili, had been kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7 and held hostage by Hamas, and that Liat’s father and son were traveling to Washington, D.C. several weeks later with other Israeli-American hostage families to lobby on behalf of their loved ones, Kramer knew he had to document the visit. As he began to film what would become “Holding Liat” – which won Best Documentary upon its debut at the Berlinale Film Festival and is about to make its U.S. premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival – Kramer noticed that their family’s experience “didn't fit neatly into any box.” Yehuda Beinin, Liat’s father, was openly calling for peace and reconciliation, and opposing the forceful military response the Israeli government was planning - from the start. At the same time, Kramer explains, “His grandson Netta – who had barely survived the attacks and was traumatized and very angry – and his other daughter, Tal, didn’t want to speak about politics at all. So within this one family, we saw a microcosm of the debates and fractures, and we felt we had a responsibility to try to make sense of this moment through this one family's lens.” Also speaking on the podcast, one of the film’s producers, Libby Lenkinski, noted that the authenticity of “Holding Liat” held it apart from the slew of October 7 documentaries designed with a political agenda that comprise “hour-and-a-half long visual op-eds” focused on making either a pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian case. At the same time, Yehuda, the film’s focus, “is a really great example of something that we see often on the left – a person warning about what might be coming and initially being thought of as alarmist or paranoid, and it turning out to be true.” When Yehuda was filmed in the first months of the war, warning that Netanyahu would pursue a brutal and endless war to serve a far-right political agenda, “I don’t think any of us could have imagined the kind of devastation that we would be seeing in Gaza, the endless killing and destruction. I think so many Israelis wanted to believe that this was necessary to bring back the hostages, and now it's just so clear that that was never the point. …Yehuda called out Bibi's bluff early on, and it turned out to be truer than we ever would have wanted to believe.” Subscribe to Haaretz.com for up-to-the-minute news and analysis from Israel in English. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 'It’s crazy for American Jews to need metal detectors, armed guards and SWAT teams to feel safe'

  The shootings of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky as they stepped out of an American Jewish Committee event in Washington D.C. was “the realization of our worst fears,” the organization’s CEO, Ted Deutch, said on the Haaretz Podcast. In his conversation with host Allison Kaplan Sommer, Deutch said he hoped the tragedy would mark a “turning point” and send a message to world leaders that “this is what happens when you don't speak out, when there isn't moral clarity, when you allow language like ‘globalize the intifada’ and ‘from the river to the sea’. People espousing these things while wearing Palestinian Islamic Jihad headbands and marching the streets in support of Hamas - this is where it can lead.” In the U.S., Deutch said, he called on politicians and other leaders to “stand up and say Jews should not feel afraid to gather together in a synagogue, community center or anywhere just because of who they are. It's crazy that we've accepted checkpoints and armed guards and metal detectors and tactical SWAT teams standing outside of synagogues on Shabbat as normal. And that's what we need to hear from our leaders. Have we heard enough of that? No.” Asked about Israeli ministers who pointed fingers of blame for the killing at European leaders supporting sanctions against Israel for atrocities in Gaza, Deutch said “We need the world to stand with us, and I'm not pushing anyone away right now. I want them to try to learn from this, to be our allies and take a firmer stand than they might have previously.” “The person that I blame for what happened is the shooter,” he added, “but the environment in which it happened? That's something for which I blame the entire world.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 'We have to find ways to live here together': Why this Israeli author wrote an 'unheroic war diary'

  Since October 7 and throughout the endless months of the tragedy of the Gaza War, "fiction writing has felt impossible," Israeli author Dror Mishani said on the Haaretz Podcast. "There are too many tragedies around us." Mishani is Israel's premier writer of crime novels and a successful screenwriter. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and adapted for television in the U.S. and Europe. "Before October 7, I was writing a crime novel. I'm trying to work on it again," Mishani said. "But the story and the characters are completely changed by the war, because I am. I'm still looking for the right ways to write fiction about what we're going through. As I've said, I'm still not quite sure it is possible." For many years, Mishani made a clear separation between politics and his art. But since the war, he told podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer, confronting the topic "is the only form of engagement possible now – for writers, for scholars, for journalists. We have to stop this war. We have to figure out how to avoid the next catastrophe, and we have to find ways to live here together." Throughout the first year of the war, Mishani published columns in Haaretz critical of the war. He also kept a diary of his experiences of wartime Israel, publishing the entries as a column in the European press. The result is his latest book "Unheroic War Diary," published in German, French, Spanish and Hebrew. The reception of his war diary overseas, he says, has been positive, and thus far, he does not feel shunned by his readers in Europe. Along with criticism of Israel's war policies, he has felt "sympathy and identification" from fans abroad with the trauma Israel experienced on October 7. "Maybe this is because I wrote this diary," he said. "I don't know what would have happened if I had gone there bringing my French or German or Spanish readers another detective novel – if they would have wanted to read it. Maybe they would be right." "We are living in this divide," he says of the current stage of the war for Israelis. "On one hand, life is apparently normal: We watch TV, go to restaurants, we live our lives while we know that something is deeply, terribly wrong with what our country is doing in our name just a few kilometers from us. I don't know what the consequences of that will be. I know that a lot of people have decided to leave the country because that divide was too much, and they just chose normality." For now, he said, "I have chosen to give up normality." See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 'Netanyahu's vision of victory in Gaza is more Stalin than Churchill'

  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fancies himself as Israel's Winston Churchill, when in fact, the Gaza war has demonstrated he is exactly the opposite of Great Britain's storied leader, asserted Anshel Pfeffer, Israel correspondent for The Economist, former Haaretz analyst and a Netanyahu biographer, on the Haaretz Podcast. "We shouldn't be making this World War II – the Nazis against everybody else, and comparing that to Israel's war with Hamas. But that's being almost forced upon us by Netanyahu and his supporters," said Pfeffer in conversation with host Allison Kaplan Sommer. Pfeffer, who recently published a column in Haaretz about Netanyahu's repeated slogan of achieving "total victory" over Hamas and his misguided identification with Churchill in the second world war, said "Churchill was a brilliant wartime leader. He managed to bring the British together at that crucial point in history, uniting a country at a time of a terrible war. Yet, he didn't have the ability to win elections. Netanyahu is the opposite. As we've seen so clearly, he is totally useless at uniting Israel at a time of war, but he's very, very good at winning elections and clinging onto power." Pfeffer also pointed out that the "scorched earth" victory model that Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners are pursuing in Gaza hews closer to former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and Russian President Vladimir Putin than Churchill and the other Western allies. Netanyahu should be reminded, Pfeffer said, that the U.K. and the U.S. were "magnanimous and benevolent" victors who poured millions into rebuilding a de-Nazified Germany. "That is a very, very different vision of victory."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• Laura Rozen on what Trump's 'made-for-TV diplomacy' means for Israel and the Middle East

  It was clear during U.S. President Donald Trump's tour of the Gulf states that his foreign policy is in a very "different place" than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's, Washington-based veteran diplomatic journalist Laura Rozen said on the Haaretz Podcast, pointing to the growing divergence in interests between the White House and Israel's ruling coalition, both on Gaza and Iran. In his second term in office, Trump "wants to make peace deals and trade deals," Rozen said, as Netanyahu, "for his own political reasons, wants to continue the Gaza war indefinitely." From his behavior, it seems that Netanyahu "may be missing the signals that Trump is going in such a different direction," she said, pointing to Trump's agreement to cease U.S. attacks on the Houthis, his meeting with Syria's leader during his stay in Riyadh, his statements favoring a diplomatic nuclear deal with Iran over military confrontation, and his willingness to negotiate directly with Hamas for the release of Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander. Netanyahu's decision to sit on the sidelines, she said, and failure to make a gesture that could have moved Trump to include a stop in Jerusalem on his Middle East visit, was something that not only the Trump administration but "a lot of pro-Israel Americans" found disappointing. Many of the changes in Trump's Middle East policies – particularly regarding Iran – since his first term, Rozen noted, can be attributed to a power shift in the Republican Party. The increasingly strong "America First, MAGA wing of the GOP is not interested in wars of choice in the Middle East," she said, and thus far, in the second Trump term "the neoconservative element, the hawkish element, is definitely getting battered." As a result, "strangely, you see MAGA people who are almost with the more traditional progressive Democrats when it comes to looking for a diplomatic solution on Iran, which is not something we saw in Trump's first term. It feels a little bit disorienting, even here in Washington."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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