Haaretz Podcast

“It is a time of fear and worry, but also a time of hope” in Iran after the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the early days of the U.S.-Israel assault on the regime in Tehran, said Iranian-American scholar and journalist Arash Azizi.
“The first thing [my family in Iran] told me was that they called me to say they were alive after Tehran was hit, and there are hundreds of civilian casualties,” said Azizi, speaking on a wartime edition of the Haaretz Podcast. Of Khamenei, he said “most Iranians are happy to see him gone.”
Azizi was sharply critical of U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s calls for Iranian civilians to rise up and overthrow their regime.
“It's absolutely bonkers,” he said. “If you had a population that had organized networks ready to take over, you could imagine perhaps something like that happening. But we don’t. So both Trump and Netanyahu keep saying this, and it makes me wonder, do they really believe it?”
He also had harsh words for Iranian exiles like himself, who he said were unprepared for this moment. “We have not done the work, we have not built organizations, we did not get our act together in a way that would be ready to make a successful transition to democracy.”
Also on the podcast: Gregg Carlstrom, The Economist’s Dubai-based Middle East correspondent, reports on the growing anger in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates sparked by the intensity of the Iranian assault that could fuel support among everyday people to pick sides in this conflict.
“The question is, what does that mean? Is it allowing America to use bases and Gulf countries to carry out attacks against Iran, or is it going a step further and militarily getting involved with their own warplanes and troops? I think it's more likely that they're willing to do the former than the latter.”
Read more:
Trump: U.S. Ahead of Schedule in Iran but Can Extend Fighting Beyond Projected 4-5 Weeks
Three Israeli Teenage Siblings Among Nine Killed in Iranian Missile Strike on Bomb Shelter
Analysis by Amos Harel | As Israeli Defense Officials Push for a Long Offensive, Trump Still Has Doubts
Analysis by Zvi Bar'el | Khamenei's Chosen Successor Could Offer Trump a 'Dream Deal' to End the Iran War
'Fire-Starter' or 'Historical Justice'? How Middle Eastern Media Frames the Iran War
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In this special edition of the Haaretz Podcast, recorded during the first hours of the dramatic joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, and as Tehran began its retaliatory strikes on Israel and on U.S. targets across the Middle East, Haaretz senior analyst Amos Harel joins host Allison Kaplan Sommer for a real-time update and discussion.
"The stakes are much higher than last time," Harel said, referring to the 12 day Israel-Iran war in June 2025. For Israelis, "there is a certain amount of danger," although it is impossible to say at this point how hard the country will be hit by Iran and its proxies. For Iranians, "this is going to get messy and bloody," not only because of the military strikes, but also because of growing clashes between government forces and those hoping to throw over the regime.
Read more on the escalating situation:
How the First Day of the Israel and U.S. War with Iran Unfolded
War for Regime Change in Iran: U.S. and Israel Have Ambitious Aims, but Will Trump Stay the Course? / Amos Harel
'Unnecessary, Idiotic, and Illegal' | After Strikes on Iran: U.S. Lawmakers Split on Party Lines As Congress Left in the Dark
Larnaca or Sharm el-Sheikh: Can Israelis Stuck Abroad Amid Iran War Get Back Home?
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For Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, the financial support and professional opportunities afforded by her fellowship at the Wexner Foundation, which plugged her into a network of the “the most powerful Jewish professionals in the country,” were substantial.
But as a feminist rabbi whose most recent book is titled “On Repentance and Repair,” she felt she could not ignore the disturbing reality of the close personal and financial ties between Leslie Wexner, the benefactor of the foundation, and the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, she tells the Haaretz Podcast.
In a personal act of accountability and repentance, in 2019, Ruttenberg – “shocked, disturbed and unsettled” by the early revelations regarding Epstein and Wexner – donated the funds she took from the foundation to an organization confronting sexual violence and challenged others to take similar steps.
There was little reaction to her call at the time. Now, with new details revealed in the Department of Justice release of the Epstein files, she says “my only regret is not speaking out earlier and more forcefully, no matter the cost.”
She warned that “when we try to pretend that none of this is happening, we feed every conspiracy theory. And when we say that who matters are raped children, and when we center the people who are harmed, and when we live the values of our Torah and of every other teaching that we claim is holy, then we dispel those theories, because we become the people who we are supposed to be … the people who are living our values.”
Read more:
Island Visit, NYC Flat and 'Belarusian Girls': Ex-Israel PM Ehud Barak Addresses Jeffrey Epstein Ties
The Ferrari, the Meetings and 'The Redhead': Latest Jeffrey Epstein Files Reveal Ties With Popular Israeli-American Researcher Dan Ariely
Memorializing Jeffrey Epstein? Pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 Confuses Convicted Sex Offender With Beloved Israeli Singer
Life After Harvard: What's in Store for Wexner Foundation's Israeli Leaders Program?
From 2020: Wexner Foundation Named After Billionaire Philanthropist Distancing Itself From Founder
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When an ultra-Orthodox mob attacked two women soldiers in the city of Bnei Brak earlier this week, Israelis were shocked and horrified.
But for Uri Keidar, CEO of Free Israel, this violent expression of ultra-Orthodox opposition to being drafted into the military did not come as a surprise.
“It’s not the first violent occurrence we have seen, and unfortunately, it probably also won't be the last incident. But it's definitely a sad moment for us as a country,” Keidar said, speaking on the Haaretz Podcast.
As the Netanyahu government continues to seek a way to pass legislation exempting tens of thousands of able-bodied ultra-Orthodox men from mandatory military service in order to preserve their political coalition, Keidar sees the country at a “historic” crossroads in which Israelis will stand up and refuse to let it happen.
“It's a very basic idea, I think, that the law applies to everyone,” he said on the podcast. In a post-October 7 reality alongside the IDF in a manpower crisis, he said, “the Israeli public just will not accept the fact” that “there are tens of thousands of young haredi men who are totally healthy, who can join the IDF at any given moment, and are refusing to do so.”
That refusal, he said, represents the country’s “biggest civil disobedience movement since its history” and Israelis “from the right, left and center” are uniting to oppose it.
Read more:
Explained: The Military Conscription Bill Driving Riots in Haredi Cities
Overturned Cars, Motorcycles on Fire: Police Arrest 26 in Haredi Riot Sparked When Two IDF Soldiers Visit Bnei Brak
Bnei Brak Riots Break From Ideology and Become an Outlet for Aimless Rage
Israel Police Tells IDF They Will Not Assist in Arrest of ultra-Orthodox Draft Dodgers
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Even by the most extreme “Romeo and Juliet” standards, Sari Bashi’s romance and marriage to her partner, Osama, has overcome impossible odds.
When the two met in 2006, she related on the Haaretz Podcast, “It was very confusing for both of us, both because of the overwhelming social taboos, and the fact that it was also literally illegal for us to meet up together.”
The two met after he had been “trapped” for six years in the city of Ramallah, where he was pursuing a career in academia. Registered as a resident of Gaza, where he was born, travelling elsewhere in the West Bank – or abroad – meant that the authorities would send him back to Gaza. Bashi had recently founded the human rights organization Gisha, and was assisting him gain permission from the Israeli authorities to study for his doctorate abroad.
Bashi’s new book “Upside-Down Love” – written diary-style from both Bashi’s and Osama’s perspective – chronicles the story of the logistics of their courtship, like a date in which they took a hike in a West Bank countryside and “as we encountered more and more settlers with guns, it became apparent that I had an identity and a language that was common with the people who terrified him.”
But despite the ongoing identity and security challenges, their love persevered. Bashi, who is also the newly appointed executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, talks about their life as a family in the West Bank – and the evolving complicated identities of their two Palestinian Jewish children, as she watches them “engage more in a process of trying to assert who they are. I think it'll change probably a million times before they become adults.”
Read more:
A Jewish Mom and a Palestinian Dad Raise a Family Full of Endless Contradictions
Browse the Umm Forat column (2019-2022) in Haaretz
Israeli Human Rights Groups Tell UN That Israel Increased Use of Torture During Gaza War
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