Haaretz Podcast

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.
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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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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.”
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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:
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Student Oscar-winning Film 'Mirrors the Experiences of Palestinians in Israel'

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Reports of U.S. anger with Israel for targeting Iran’s oil fields in the intensifying conflict have been “massively exaggerated,” said Haaretz senior defense analyst Amos Harel on the Haaretz Podcast.
While the American president “probably felt that Israel took this a step too far,” Harel said, “the truth of the matter is that the Israelis and the U.S. military are deeply coordinated.”
Regarding the entrance of Hezbollah into the expanding war, Harel said that the Lebanese group is “still quite capable of creating damage” to Israel, which is why the IDF has deployed large-scale force against them with airstrikes across Lebanon. Still, he said, “most of the effort and most of the focus remains on Iran.”
Despite the disruption to life in Israel, he pointed out that in the first 12 days of this war, there has been far less actual damage and loss of life in Israel during the two weeks of war last June.
Also on the podcast, Haaretz Jewish World Editor Judy Maltz visits an underground parking lot tent city populated by Tel Aviv residents without adequate overnight protection from missiles - many of whom were second-time refugees.
“Most of the people I met had been there in June” she said. “When Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran, they just packed their bags and came back. They knew the drill already.”

Read more:
Israel Focuses on Hitting Iran's Regime After Exceeding Military Target Expectations
Trump Signals Iran War Nearing End Amid Oil Fears as Hezbollah Surprises Israel
'Priciest Real Estate in Town': Tel Avivians Ride Out the War Deep Underground

Sleepless in Tel Aviv: Iranian Missile Barrages Trigger All-night Sirens in Central Israel
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