In this week's episode of the Haaretz Weekly podcast, Haaretz English editor-in-chief Esther Solomon explores a topic that has angered the Israeli public since the start of the Israel-Hamas War: Why haven't representatives of the Red Cross been able to visit Israeli hostages who are being held in Gaza in unknown locations and conditions for almost two months? As some captives were released by Hamas during a temporary cease-fire, Israelis – who were closely watching the daily releases on television - have started to see the Red Cross's representatives as taxi drivers, who can do nothing more than drive the hostages to the border. Yael Friedson, Haaretz’s legal correspondent, has been reporting on the plight of the hostages held by Hamas. She says, “Everyone hopes that the Red Cross representatives could visit the hostages and pass on medicine and messages from the families,” but, she notes, there is a knowledge gap about what a neutral humanitarian organization can actually do without the consent of both parties.  Sarah Elizabeth Davies, ICRC spokesperson based in Jerusalem, explains that the anger directed at the organization is misdirected. “We cannot force our way in, we don't have weapons, and we don't have political power. We stay neutral, so that we can be trusted. And this is not something that is always easily understood, particularly in the emotional reality of a conflict.” Jonathan Adiri, former IDF chief liaison officer to the Red Cross, tells Haaretz that Israel’s relationship with the Red Cross “has had its ups and downs”, but stresses: “Their neutrality is critical. The fact that there’s an organization with enough carrying capacity to receive our hostages [from Hamas] and bring them to safety is not to be taken lightly.”  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While attention is on the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank face unprecedented violence. Settler violence has increased, resulting in mass arrests and Palestinian villages evacuating. Olive harvest season is fraught with threats and attacks from settlers. The blurring of lines between military, authorities, and settlers has caused confusion and violence. The escalating violence in the West Bank has led to increased IDF raids and destruction of infrastructure. The Biden administration's response, settler violence, and the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority are also discussed.

A disinformation war is raging online and Israel is losing, says Omer Benjakob, Haaretz cyber and technology correspondent at Haaretz. It isn’t as if an effort isn’t being made by Israel to professionally curate and manage information about its war with Hamas in a responsible and reliable “high value content,” he told to Allison Kaplan Sommer on the Haaretz Weekly podcast. “The problem is that when you juxtapose that to what Hamas is doing.” In today’s digital space, Benjakob explains, “highly produced graphics looks like your country hired a PR company to do PR for you, which is literally what we do and what we've always done. The whole idea of Hasbara - that you need to do professional level kind of explanation - is actually shooting us in the foot right now. Hamas is just flooding the internet with raw materials that people can then supposedly check on their own.” When it’s checked, much of it is unreliable and untrue but by then it’s too late because they have controlled the discourse for days. Also on the podcast, 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev, who became a Tiktok sensation with nearly half a million followers, and his life partner Julie Gray. They explain why, with “grief and anger,” they deactivated their account this week as the platform was unwilling to confront the unprecedented wave of antisemitism that has overwhelmed Tiktok since the October 7 Hamas massacres. When asked about his initial reaction to October 7, Lev says: "I said to my son: ‘these people that did the massacre, they must have had Nazi instructors.’ In some ways, they were even worse. I can’t describe what they did.” Gray talked about the helplessness in the face of a wave of denialism and antisemitism that came with the Gaza War. "Our followers, who thanked us for learning [about the Holocaust], are the same people who are hating us now," she says. "They liked this little holocaust survivor with a sad sad tale. I’m used to getting hate from Nazis, the ones with the thunderbolts and swastikas, but the people that are sending us this hate now, their bios say ‘vegan’ and ‘organic fiber creators’ - they are our followers. So I feel like our three years of work have unraveled. That nothing was taught to them at all."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a former UN Committee member, discusses the horrific sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7. The terrorists filmed their actions, broadcasting them to victims' families and on social media. Lili Ben Ami, a domestic violence advocate, expresses concern over the expansion of access to personal weapons in Israel without background checks, which may pose risks for domestic violence cases.

One of the first journalists to be embedded with forces in the Israeli army’s ground operation in Gaza, Haaretz senior columnist Anshel Pfeffer shares his observations with Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer after returning from a challenging battlefield. Pfeffer, who accompanied a Givati infantry unit, tells how the maze of tunnels under Gaza forces the soldiers to continually sweep the territory from every angle so “gunners and the commanders can constantly look at every point where they think a tunnel could open up and to try and spot it before it's used to launch a missile against them.” He also addresses the “many convenient but very inaccurate comparisons” between the Russia-Ukraine war, which he also covered, and Israel’s operation in Gaza, which is “totally different” both operationally and emotionally. While Russians ran away from serving in their war, he points to the highly motivated IDF soldiers who rushed to join in the fight after the atrocities of October 7. “Many of them know people who were killed, who were taken hostage, or wounded. Some of them are from families which have been forced to leave their homes because of the war. It’s very personal for everybody. There's no question about it.” While the soldiers on the ground “are very focused on their mission,” Pfeffer says, “when you go up the IDF hierarchy to the top, there is a growing sense of frustration that there is no clear strategic idea of the next stage.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Prof. Dov Waxman has been on university campuses for several decades and experienced bursts of unrest following violence in the region and controversy over Israeli policies since the second intifada in the early 2000s. But what has happened since the brutal attack by Hamas on Israeli citizens on October 7 and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza, he says, “has felt qualitatively different. The atmosphere is different from anything I’ve experienced in the past. The tensions are greater. The animosity is greater, the fear is greater,” Waxman, the director of UCLA’s Israel Studies Center, tells Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer. In the past, Waxman says, he has felt that Jewish and Israeli advocacy groups tended to exaggerate the levels of antisemitism on campuses and that “it’s grossly simplistic and reductionist to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.” But in the last few weeks, there have been “manifestations and expressions of anti-Zionism that are antisemitic,” and “some campuses have actually become hostile environments for Jewish students.” Waxman believes that today, a vocal minority of students “have come to see Israel in such a negative way, to see it as essentially this kind of settler-colonial entity that has no right to exist.” He says “they have come to see all Israelis as effectively colonists and colonizers. That has led them to somehow think it’s acceptable or tolerable or defensible to slaughter innocent Israeli civilians. And it’s something that I and many of my colleagues have really been shocked by.” Also joining the podcast is Haaretz New York correspondent Judy Maltz, who has covered anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protests in the U.S. since the start of the war. She believes the controversies and confrontations on campuses may change the way even the most status-conscious American Jewish parents view their children’s options for higher education. “Many parents are asking themselves ‘What would be a safer school for my kids?’ and whether they would rather send them to a place that’s safe, but maybe not as prestigious – or a place that’s prestigious but where they will have to walk around looking down as they move around campus and rush into their dorms so they don’t have to confront anything that’s very ugly.” Like Waxman, Maltz always felt the issue of antisemitism on campuses was overblown – until recently. “That has changed now,” she says. “I really think Jewish students don’t feel safe on campuses, certainly those students that I have spoken to in the New York area. They don’t feel safe walking around with a yarmulke on their head, while students are talking about the need to resist ‘Zionist genocide by any means necessary.’ What I’m hearing from them is that they try to avoid campus. They don’t hang out.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The “alternative universe” Rachel Goldberg has been living in since her son Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, was kidnapped by Hamas, has included non-stop interviews with the media. Rachel and her husband Jonathan have appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine and spoke to “any outlet that would talk” to them, to advocate for humanitarian treatment and expedited release of their son and over 220 hostages being held captive in Gaza. An appearance on CNN last week, she recounts to Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer, took an unexpected turn when anchor Anderson Cooper – who is making a documentary about the Supernova music festival massacre - put together her account of witnesses saying her son’s arm had been severed, and something he had seen while in the field reporting on the deadly attack. “At the end of the interview, Anderson Cooper said: have you guys seen any video of Hersh? We said no - and we've had a friend who has been trying - searching through all the horrible videos that are out there. And then Anderson said, ‘I have a video of your son.'“ As to how the continuing efforts to release the hostages will play out, Goldberg hopes that even though "you have people in the street who have gone through complete and utter trauma and are thirsty for an aggressive response… the government is using every ounce of thoughtfulness and wisdom when making its plan." "There are hundreds of innocent hostages, and I'll also mention there are hundreds of thousands of innocent Gazans who are trapped there," she says. "We have to be very careful about not causing harm that we can't undo, and I think there is time to plan this out in a way that our soldiers are not embroiled in a situation that will bring us so much more pain, danger and loss of life."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Brouria Carni Hadass lives in the tiny Kibbutz of Kerem Shalom on the Israel-Gaza border. On Saturday, October 7th, she went into the fortified safe room in her house when the first alarm sounded, quickly realizing this attack was "unlike anything we went through before. It felt like something else." On this week's episode of the Harretz Weekly podcast, Carni Hadass spoke to host Allison Kaplan Sommer from the hotel in the southern city of Eilat, where the members of her community are staying since they were evacuated from their homes following the Hamas attack on Israel's Gaza border communities, which killed over 1,300 people. "Every simple thing is complicated now," she says, though she acknowledges that compared to so many other people affected by the massacres, she and her family are "spoiled refugees," trying to maintain some sense of normalcy while living in a hotel. In the conversation, she describes how shortly after the attack began, a friend from a nearby Kibbutz – Holit – contacted Brouria to see how she was doing. The friend, Shahar Debbie Mathias, said her son Rotem was worried about his friend, Brouria's son. But their next conversation was the last. Hamas gunmen were already inside Debbie's house, and she was hiding with her husband Shlomi and their son in the safe room. The gunmen managed to shoot into the room and get in. When Debbie stopped replying to Brouria's messages, she asked her son to text his Rotem, who texted back: "My parents are dead, I need help." "We were lucky. We're alive, but we are devastated," Carni Hadass says now. In the second part of this week's episode, Haaretz columnist Alon Pinkas explains why U.S. President Joe Biden has proved to be a true friend of Israel this week, why the current Israel-Hamas War is the last thing that Washington wanted to deal with at the moment and how he "doesn't see Netanyahu surviving this, nor should he."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this podcast, the hosts discuss the major war unfolding in Israel, which took the country by surprise. They analyze the significant intelligence failure, with no indications of the attack. The emotional impact on affected families and the responsibility of Netanyahu are also examined. The podcast delves into the speculation of Iran's involvement in recent events and addresses concerns about preventing escalation and the safety of hostages.

The prospect of a U.S-Saudi-Israeli deal, that would include the normalization of relations between the Jewish state and one of the most influential forces in the Arab world, intrigues citizens in all three countries. But while the opinions of Israelis and Americans are covered widely, the media seems to be overlooking the Saudi angle. Dr. Nora Derbal, an expert on Saudi Arabia currently at the Martin Buber post doctoral program at the Hebrew University, tells Haaretz podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer, that Saudi society is drastically changing, and any step towards normalizing relations with Israel should be seen in a wider context. "10 years ago, if you arrived in Riyadh as a woman you would probably just go to your hotel and wait there for your next meeting," says Drbal, "but nowadays, there is so much to do in Riyadh...  many Saudis want to prove to the world that it is possible for Saudi Arabia to change and to be the best. If we break it down to the individual Saudi, many Saudis at the moment have the feeling that everything is possible." Young Saudis, and also middle class and upper class older people, says Derbal, "Have an interest in sidelining politics for prosperity and stability in the region, and for a good future for their own children… they are looking at the economic side of things." Derbal also discusses the way that the debate over women’s rights, religion and gender segregation in the public sphere parallels that of conversations she hears in Israel. “I think this is really something where Israelis and Saudis would have a lot to share and discuss and maybe also to learn from each other,” she says. Also on the podcast, Haaretz diplomatic correspondent Amir Tibon assesses the possible Saudi deal and the reasons that President Joe Biden seems determined to make it happen, and what it would mean for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political future.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.