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The Honest Take is HonestReporting's long-form interview series bringing together leading voices to examine how Israel and the Middle East are covered — and what goes into creating and feeding the narratives that target Israel.Each episode features leading experts, analysts, researchers, and journalists who work on media bias, terrorism, NGO accountability, foreign influence, antisemitism, and international institutions. These are professionals directly involved in investigating how narratives are shaped, amplified, and protected across global newsrooms.The conversations go beyond breaking news to unpack:• Media bias and misinformation about Israel• How terrorist organizations exploit humanitarian and civil society frameworks• The role of NGOs and international bodies in shaping public perception• Foreign state influence on Western media and education• Why context disappears in reporting on Israel and the PalestiniansThis series is for listeners seeking in-depth analysis, ev
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- 2 days ago1h 10m
A Caste of Saints: The Jewish Elites Who Turned on Israel, and Why the Line Isn't Hard to See | With Benjamin Kerstein
The day after 9/11, Benjamin Kerstein sat in a political science class at Boston University while his professor explained why America deserved what it got. Then the professor wrote ISRAEL in capital letters on the blackboard, pointed at it and said, "The cause." Kerstein argued with him, civilly, and got nowhere: "His answers to me were all, well, I'm just criticizing Israeli policy." He never took another college class in America. He went to study at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva instead, and he stayed for twenty years.That isn't where he started. He grew up in Boston in a very liberal Reform home, and by the end of high school he was openly telling people that Israel had no right to exist. The second intifada broke that. He watched Yasser Arafat turn down peace and turn to violence, and he watched everyone around him blame Israel anyway. As he writes in his new book, it was Arafat who made him a Zionist.Jews of Privilege: Elites, Anti-Zionists, and Our Secret Civil War is half memoir and half argument. The argument is that the Jews running interference for today's antisemitism aren't just a faction of the left. They're a class: the ideological heirs of an old, assimilated Jewish upper class that dismissed Herzl, while Zionism has always been "the movement of the Jewish masses." He names names, from Peter Beinart and Ben Rhodes to Norman Finkelstein and Richard Falk, and he says the line between them and Jews who criticize Israeli policy isn't hard to find: "The tell is the hate." Do they know they're being used? "I think they genuinely believe that they are a caste of saints."Beersheva taught him what his bubble hadn't. He met Mizrahi Jews he didn't know existed growing up, Russian immigrants who had "gone through unmitigated hell" to get to Israel, leftist professors who wanted to change Israel but never hated it, and a Holocaust survivor in his nineties who told him his life story in a doctor's waiting room: a death march, liberation, and then 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 in uniform. The Jews of Privilege, he says, talk about ideals. Israelis live with "the horrors of life."Can anyone who has crossed the line be brought back? "If I can be converted, anybody can." He won't read them out of the Jewish people, but he won't debate anyone who denies Israel's right to exist. For the students in between, he'd open with a question: "Do you realize what you're giving up?" His answer is to teach the next generation what he wasn't taught, from Ahad Ha'am to the poets and philosophers of the Jewish tradition, and to protect the refuge Herzl wore himself out trying to build.Also in this episode: why his father joined the U.S. Army; Stefan Zweig at Herzl's funeral; the parvenu who adopts the elite's morality to be accepted; how the Red-Green Alliance pulls in Jews who think of themselves as universalists; Benny Morris and the leftist teachers who never hated Israel; whether the Jews of Privilege would convert under an Inquisition; Einat Wilf's Teaching Zionism; and the Z3 Institute's idea of "Zionism 3.0."CHAPTERS00:00 Cold open: "A caste of saints"00:18 Introducing Benjamin Kerstein03:15 "Israel had no right to exist": a Boston Reform upbringing05:20 The second intifada and a red line07:50 No connection to Israel, and a father in the Army09:26 The Oslo years and Arafat's choice11:06 Who are the Jews of privilege?13:25 The Ostjuden and a movement of the masses14:11 Stefan Zweig at Herzl's funeral15:36 Herzl's choice and the Dreyfus case17:26 Where's the line? "The tell is the hate"21:08 IfNotNow, JVP and young Jews: myopia or malice?25:04 The Jews who stayed in Europe, and TikTok University27:03 Ahad Ha'am and what assimilation gives up28:34 The day after 9/11 at Boston University31:26 Why Beersheva33:56 Mizrahim, Russian immigrants and the refuseniks34:57 A Holocaust survivor in a doctor's waiting room35:39 Leftist teachers who didn't hate Israel37:59 Benny Morris and intellectual courage40:10 "The horrors of life"42:31 Four wars and a number on his arm43:39 Soros, Sanders and the ideology of privilege44:56 The parvenu46:57 The Red-Green Alliance50:50 Useful idiots, or a caste of saints?52:56 Ben M. Freeman and "out of the tent"55:30 Can they be brought back? "If I can be converted, anybody can"57:46 Einat Wilf's Teaching Zionism58:31 Who he will and won't debate1:00:58 "Do you realize what you're giving up?"1:02:33 The Inquisition question: would American Jews stay Jewish?1:05:28 A place to go1:06:48 What Herzl would grieve1:07:22 The Z3 Institute and "Zionism 3.0"1:08:40 Closing thoughtsBENJAMIN KERSTEIN No Delusions, No Despair (Substack): https://benjaminkerstein.substack.com/ Jews of Privilege: Elites, Anti-Zionists, and Our Secret Civil War, foreword by Ben M. Fre
- 1 weeks ago57 min
Who Will Keep Me Safe? What the First Election Since October 7th Really Means For Israelis | With Yaakov Katz
A good friend of Yaakov Katz spent a whole conversation complaining about the ultra-Orthodox: they block roads, they take too much government funding, they don't work and they don't serve in the army. So Yaakov asked him who he was voting for. Netanyahu. Didn't he see the contradiction? Netanyahu's government is the one that keeps giving the ultra-Orthodox what he was complaining about. "You know what," the friend said, "my values are with Netanyahu." Yaakov says there are a lot of Israelis like him, still trying to figure out where they stand.On October 27, Israel votes for the first time since October 7th, and the coalition on the ballot is the one that was in office that morning. Yaakov calls the election a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu and a question about accountability. But he doesn't pretend the picture is simple. He calls October 7th "a coin" with two sides: the failures that led to it, and a war that has left Hamas a shadow of its former self, Hezbollah significantly degraded and Iran's nuclear facilities damaged. When Israelis go to the polls, he says, they ask one question: "who's gonna keep me safe?" Netanyahu is the commodity they know. Everyone else feels like a gamble, even Gadi Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff who lost a son in this war.He walks through how Israeli elections actually work: you vote for a party, not a prime minister, and 61 of the Knesset's 120 seats make a government. The president hands the mandate to whoever gets the most recommendations, not necessarily whoever leads the biggest party. Will we know the next government on election night? "Pretty sure we won't." He explains why left and right don't explain this race. The two-state solution has all but disappeared from the campaign, so what keeps Netanyahu, Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman apart is personalities. He lays out what a national unity government could look like, the question that gets everybody stuck (who's prime minister?), and why he thinks another election would be "a catastrophe."Then identity. He describes the tribes of Israeli politics and the Ashkenazi-Sephardi divide politicians still know how to touch. Eisenkot's parents are Moroccan immigrants and he grew up in the periphery, while Netanyahu grew up in Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood. He says Donald Trump's endorsement "mostly helps" Netanyahu, why he worries Israel is becoming a football in American politics, and the three things he thinks a new government could do about it. And he says what American Jews misunderstand: "what government, statehood, and a Jewish state actually means."Yaakov ran The Jerusalem Post through five elections in three and a half years. His verdict on how the world's media explains Israeli politics: "Mostly wrong." His prediction for the real headline the morning after: "we're stuck." He closes on what still gives him hope: the resilience of Israel's young people, including his three nephews, who until recently were all serving.Also in this episode: the konseptziya, and why While Israel Slept goes all the way back to Hamas's founding in the 1980s; why there's still no state commission of inquiry into October 7th, and how one would be appointed; why the Haredi draft, the commission and "fix the country" never caught on as campaign issues; Netanyahu fighting "for political survival, for potential personal freedom, and for the legacy"; why Arab parties in the core 61 became a hard sell after October 7th; why voting feels "real" in Israel; and copy-pasting the front page by the third election.Yaakov has his own view of how this should go. He thinks Israel needs a change of government, and he says so plainly. He also explains why so many Israelis see it differently.CHAPTERS00:00 Cold open00:40 Intro03:28 The first election since October 7th: the mood on the ground05:12 Why voters still see Netanyahu as the one who keeps them safe12:38 Coalition math after October 7th17:51 How Israeli elections actually work20:49 Why left and right don't explain this race24:14 Why the commission of inquiry isn't a campaign issue25:59 While Israel Slept: what the research found29:31 Turnout, and why voting feels real in Israel31:24 What each side fears36:48 Identity politics and Israel's tribes38:09 Trump's endorsement and Israel in American politics45:33 What American Jews misunderstand about Israel49:29 Could there be a national unity government?51:50 How the world's media will cover the results53:37 What still gives him hope56:25 OutroYAAKOV KATZ Website: https://www.yaakovkatz.com/ Column at The Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/author/yaakov-katz While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East, with Amir Bohbot (St. Martin's Press, 2025): <a href="https://www
- 1 weeks ago6 min
BONUS Introducing CHECKED: Brad Lander's Olive Harvest Post vs. What Actually Happened in the West Bank | With Joe Truzman
A bonus episode for Honest Take listeners: meet CHECKED, HonestReporting's new weekly live show. Every Wednesday, Ben Chertoff and Joe Truzman take apart the week's coverage of Israel: what got reported, what got left out, and who decided.This is The Feed, one segment from CHECKED's first episode. Former NYC Comptroller Brad Lander goes to the West Bank olive harvest, calls it "ethnic cleansing," gets detained in a closed military zone, and posts about it from the bus. We compare his post with what the IDF actually said, and ask Matti Friedman's question: why does an olive harvest draw more cameras than entire countries?For the full episode, including Front Page, Open Cases and Honest Mistake or On Purpose?, follow CHECKED on Apple Podcasts and Spotify: https://checked.transistor.fm/CHECKED is live every Wednesday at 12:30 ET on YouTube, X and Instagram. Follow @HonestReporting so you catch the next one. The Honest Take continues right here in this feed, like always.
- 2 weeks ago1h 18m
America Is Not Zion: Why American Jews and Israelis Are Living Two Different Jewish Lives | With Daniel Gordis
Shortly after the war began, a European journalist wrote to Daniel Gordis. She wanted to interview the leaders of Israel's 2023 protest movement about the war, and she couldn't reach any of them. He wrote back that they were in cockpits and in tanks, and he says that wasn't a metaphor. That, he argues, is the difference between the two lefts. Israel's left "at the end of the day serves in the army," and almost none of it still talks about a two-state solution.For most of the last century and a half, American Jews worked from a quiet bargain: the Jews are a faith, not a people, and America is the promised land. In a Hebrew essay this summer, Gordis says the bargain is over. He traces it from the rise of Reform Judaism, through Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew and Woodrow Wilson's warnings about "hyphenated" Americans, to Jacob Blaustein telling David Ben-Gurion that America was American Jews' Zion. His conclusion: "We are a people, and America is not Zion."Then the personal side. His son is called up for reserve duty, and his daughter-in-law and three grandchildren move into the Gordises' Jerusalem home. He describes families who leave the front door open so no one will knock, the October 7th night his son made him buy a lock for the safe room, and why he thinks these have been such lonely years for Israelis. He also says what distance can give American Jews that Israelis don't have.Gordis is candid about his own book. We Stand Divided, published in 2019, held up for two-thirds of its length, he says, and the last third, about building bridges, was wrong. He says he never believed it. The core still stands: "No American Jew ever went to war because she or he was an American Jew… Israelis go to war because we're Jews." He rejects the easy line that classical Zionism was simply right. He also says Israel "invested exactly zero effort in trying to tell its story to the wider world," and he describes the question Israelis now ask each other at their own Shabbat tables.On what an American Jew owes Israel, his first answer is understanding: "the depth of the brokenness here, the depth of the exhaustion, the depth of the fear." He suggests starting with Israeli novels and television. He draws a hard line at Jewish anti-Zionism and says why he will no longer debate Peter Beinart. And he closes with hope, borrowing a distinction from the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: you don't have to be optimistic, but "hopeful is a command."Also in this episode: Rabbi David Ingber's Rosh Hashanah sermon and the image of the watchman asleep at his post; the Jewish professionals who paid for boats from Haifa to Cyprus; the matching tents at Columbia; Howard Zinn's America and Israel's own left-wing historians; why tikkun olam isn't what the Jews are for; why Gordis says to skip the King David Hotel pool; David Grossman's To the End of the Land and Fauda's fifth season; an afternoon with Rabbi Yitz Greenberg; and Kol Nidre on the playground where his neighbors once sat and wept over judicial reform.DANIEL GORDIS Israel from the Inside (Substack): https://danielgordis.substack.com/ Daniel Gordis at Shalem College: https://shalem.ac.il/en/personnel/daniel-gordis/ We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2019): https://www.harpercollins.com/products/we-stand-divided-daniel-gordisREFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Daniel Gordis, "The Jews Are a Nation, and America Is Not Zion," HaShiloach (in Hebrew), June 28, 2026: https://hashiloach.org.il/usa-judaisam/ "The Alarm We Must Not Ignore," Rabbi David Ingber's Rosh Hashanah sermon, shared on Israel from the Inside, Sept. 18, 2026: https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/the-alarm-we-must-not-ignoreMORE FROM THE HONEST TAKE Ben M. Freeman, "The Broken Mirror": https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-broken-mirror-internalized-antisemitism-the-non-jewish-gaze-and-why-jews-are-the-only-ones-who-get-to-define-what-jewish-means-ben-m-freemanTHE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube:
- 3 weeks ago1h 16m
Hamas' Human Sacrifice: A British Commander on Why Gaza Is a War, Not a Genocide | With Richard Kemp
Almost everyone now has an opinion about how Israel fights its wars: mayors, cabinet ministers, courts, comment sections. Almost none of them have ever had to make the call. Colonel Richard Kemp has.Kemp served 29 years in the British Army. He did tours in Northern Ireland, the Gulf War and Bosnia, and in 2003 he commanded British forces in Afghanistan. He later ran the international terrorism team at the Cabinet Office in London during the 7/7 bombings. In Kabul, he once had to decide whether to order an attack on an al-Qaeda cell hiding in a civilian neighborhood, knowing there was a very high likelihood of killing civilians. He gave the order. In this conversation he explains what that decision is actually like, how rarely intelligence is complete, and why every commander, himself included, makes mistakes that cost lives.Then he takes on the word genocide. Genocide is a crime of intent, not a crime of scale. So what would it look like if the IDF were actually trying to destroy a people? Kemp's answer: it would not warn civilians, abort strikes, or put its own soldiers at greater risk to keep civilians out of harm's way. It would not build roads inside a combat zone to move food and water, or open new crossings, or bring in vaccines. And if Israel's war in Gaza counts as genocide, he argues, so does almost every modern war fought among civilians.He walks through what the law of armed conflict actually says about hospitals and human shields, and who it holds responsible when civilians die. He also explains why he would rather call Hamas's strategy "human sacrifice" than "human shields." He describes sitting in an IDF planning meeting inside Gaza before a strike on a former school compound housing displaced people, where he says at least half the meeting was spent on how to protect civilians. He also tells the story of an Israeli Air Force pilot who flew sortie after sortie against one target and abandoned the attack because there were too many civilians nearby.Also in this episode: how much time a commander really gets when the shooting starts; what IDF precautions cost in soldiers' lives; the debate over civilian-to-combatant ratios; where the legal line sits between a besieged population going hungry and a commander starving it on purpose; what a ceasefire actually obligates each side to do; how a democracy fights an enemy that wants its own civilians killed; whether Israel could defend itself if the United States cut off arms; where the IDF could have done better; and the one question Kemp would put to someone convinced it's a genocide.He's not a neutral party, and he says so himself. But he has stood where the people being accused stand.COLONEL RICHARD KEMP Website: https://richard-kemp.com/ Writing at Gatestone Institute: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/author/Richard+KempWriting at JNS: https://www.jns.org/author/richard-kempTHE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReportingThe Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show, 60 to 90 minutes long and recorded remotely. It's hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode is at podcast.honestreporting.com.If this episode gave you something to think about, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.
- 4 weeks ago58 min
LIVE — Surviving October 7th: The Nova Festival Massacre and What Comes After It | With Shahar Horovitz
Recorded live on October 7, 2026, three years to the day.Shahar Horovitz was 22 and had just come home from nine months of backpacking in South America when she went to the Nova music festival with about 30 of the friends she'd made on that trip. At 6:29 a.m. the music stopped. By 7:30 there were gunshots, and when she asked a police officer what to do, the officer told her: you have to run, I can't help you.She ran for hours through the fields of the Gaza envelope, lost her friends, and joined three strangers she found catching their breath under a tree. They hid in a greenhouse, called the police and were told to hide, and finally reached a farm run by a Bedouin farmer named Yunus. When terrorists came into the farm, they crawled under his office and lay there while armed men walked inches away. Yunus, hiding under a tractor, was found and told them the survivors had left. He saved eight people that day, and was later honored at the President's Residence.Shahar talks about thinking of her great-grandparents, Auschwitz survivors, while she lay under that building; going to five or six funerals in the first week; the guilt survivors carry; and why she gave herself and her friends new names in her book but kept the real names of the five friends who were killed. She also talks about recovering in New York, the stranger who called her book "biased" without reading it, the therapist who told her "you're not finished," and the text a friend sent her the day after: "You fought yesterday and you won. Keep winning."SHAHAR HOROVITZ Surviving October 7 (published in Hebrew as We Were the Sun), on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FV2SG227 We Were the Sun: https://www.wewerethesun.com/THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReportingThe Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com.If this conversation stayed with you, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.
- Oct 6, 20261h 30m
I Can't Believe You Fell for It: Why Antisemitism Is a Lie, Not a Prejudice | With Dara Horn
A rabbi picks Dara Horn up at the airport and tells her what she's walking into. Someone had been posting online about murdering children on the playground of the town's Jewish day school, and then their parents in the carpool line. The horrible part, her host says, isn't the plot. It's who was behind it: the school's own security guard. After People Love Dead Jews, stories like that came to her by the hundreds, and one of her sisters started calling her the antisemitism Lorax. So October 8 didn't shock her. The speed and the organization of it did.Her new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, argues that we've been fighting the wrong thing. We treat antisemitism as a prejudice, something you cure by building empathy. Horn says it works more like a con. "The lie is always the same. Jews are destroying what you value the most." Only the value changes. To capitalists the Jews are communists, and to communists they're capitalists. To racists they're race polluters, and to anti-racists they're racists. To human rights advocates, the world's only Jewish state is the world's worst violator of human rights.That changes the answer. Instead of debunking claims one at a time, which she compares to taking the stand in a show trial, Horn turns the question back on the people spreading the lie and asks who profits from it. When campus hecklers hand her a slogan, she answers it as if they meant the question, and she says the conversation usually ends right there. Her advice to students is that "you don't need a PhD to defeat an argument that's three words long." What they need is courage, and the discovery that far more people are standing behind them than they knew.Horn also talks about what she saw from inside the antisemitism advisory group Harvard's president convened after October 7, and why the student complaints there were about harassment, not slogans. She covers the 2001 UN conference in Durban, where crowds were already chanting what you hear on campus today. And she remembers the week a fact checker asked her to document pogroms from a century ago while the same paper put Hamas's account of the al-Ahli hospital blast in a banner headline.She closes on what the book's title means. Every Jew alive today is descended from someone who made a costly, countercultural choice. And for the young people chanting at her talks, she now feels something closer to sympathy than fear.Also in this episode: "kill the Jews, save the turtles"; the Z word and the J word; why antisemitism inside an institution is the tail end of its collapse, not the canary; the Talmud's Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish, and why a study partner who agrees with you is useless; the Passover story as a story about burning down the palace; pre-bunking and the eight-lesson curriculum at The Tell Institute; the Muslim allies risking their lives, and the Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Mir; and New York City's new antisemitism plan ("Wait, how is it something?").DARA HORN Dara Horn: https://www.darahorn.com The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster): https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Final-Solution-to-the-Jewish-Question/Dara-Horn/9781668090169 Buy it at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/a/1688/9781668090169 The Tell Institute: https://www.thetellinstitute.orgREFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Bret Stephens, "For America's Jews, Every Day Must Be Oct. 8," The New York Times, Nov. 7, 2023: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/opinion/us-jewish-israel-sept-11.html American Muslim Multifaith Women's Empowerment Council (AMMWEC): https://ammwec.org NYC Mayor's Office, "Mayor Mamdani Unveils New York City's First Strategy to Combat Antisemitism," Sept. 29, 2026: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani-unveils-new-york-city-s-first-strategy-to-combat-a Ben M. Freeman on The Honest Take, "The Broken Mirror": https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-broken-mirror-internalized-antisemitism-the-non-jewish-gaze-and-why-jews-are-the-only-ones-who-get-to-define-what-jewish-means-ben-m-freeman Hillel Neuer on The Honest Take, on Durban and the genocide charge: <a href="https://podca
- Sep 29, 20261h 8m
What Really Happened After October 7: Inside Israel's War Room, and the Press That Got It Wrong | With Elliot Kaufman
"If you are Hamas, you have to be laughing at how easily you can play the international and American news media." For Elliot Kaufman, the coverage turned ten days in, when the blast at al-Ahli hospital was reported around the world as an Israeli strike that had killed hundreds. He points out that it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that landed in the hospital's parking lot. From there, he argues, the war was told as if Hamas weren't in it: not in the footage, not in the casualty counts, not in the story of the aid. He's just as blunt about Israel's own failures. On aid, he says, "I don't think Israel messed up on the PR there. I think Israel messed up. Period."Kaufman is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, and he writes about Israel and Iran. With Yonah Jeremy Bob of The Jerusalem Post, he wrote In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis. The two reported it while the war was still going on. They interviewed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, who made up the original war cabinet, along with Jake Sullivan, Steve Witkoff and more than a hundred Israeli military officials.The Netanyahu in the book is not the one most coverage describes. Kaufman argues that in the opening weeks he was the brake. He held back Gallant's plan to hit Hezbollah first. On October 11, 2023, Israeli warplanes were already in the air to strike Hezbollah when radar picked up what looked like paragliders crossing from Lebanon; they turned out to be geese, and the planes were called back. Kaufman says the whole war could have turned on that one misreading. Netanyahu then spent the 20 days between October 7 and the October 27 ground invasion holding back the push into Gaza. Kaufman says the IDF had no plan on the shelf for a full invasion of Gaza at all. His verdict on the war that followed is that Israel didn't go too far in Gaza. "I think it fought for too long," he says, because under a raid-and-leave strategy troops had to fight for the same neighborhoods again and again.Then the conversation comes home to Brooklyn. In 2021 Kaufman went back to the 1991 Crown Heights riot for the Journal. For three nights, Jews in the neighborhood hid in their homes while rioters threw bricks through their windows, and Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed and killed. His argument is that the police stood back and the press filed the violence as a racial clash, when the actual story was antisemitism.He closes on hope, and on a warning. He argues that the practical, interest-based case for Israel as an ally has never been stronger. He's worried about the right as well as the left: "The subtext of, say, the Tucker Carlson Show isn't that all Jews are evil. It's that all evil is Jewish."Also in this episode: the joke Kaufman heard from the Prime Minister's Office about a "two-state solution" (Michigan and Nevada); the Students for Justice in Palestine toolkit sent to campus chapters on October 8, 2023; the advice Gallant got from General David Petraeus; what Netanyahu's own 2022 memoir predicted about invading Gaza; a documentary's claim about civilian-casualty approvals, set against the strike on Mohammed Deif; and how the war looks from Tehran.ELLIOT KAUFMAN Elliot Kaufman at The Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/news/author/elliot-kaufman Elliot Kaufman at Simon & Schuster: https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Elliot-Kaufman/260068537REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Elliot Kaufman, "Could the Crown Heights Riots Recur?" The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 20, 2021: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/crown-heights-riot-hasidic-jews-black-chabad-dinkins-giuliani-brooklyn-new-york-11629481962 WSJ Opinion, "'Get the Jew': The Crown Heights Riot Revisited" (documentary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpjLx-8xyJQ Matti Friedman on The Honest Take, "The Familiar Villain": https://share.transistor.fm/s/5f71c087THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5HonestReporting: <a href="https://hone
About The Honest Take
The Honest Take is HonestReporting's long-form interview series bringing together leading voices to examine how Israel and the Middle East are covered — and what goes into creating and feeding the narratives that target Israel.Each episode features leading experts, analysts, researchers, and journalists who work on media bias, terrorism, NGO accountability, foreign influence, antisemitism, and international institutions. These are professionals directly involved in investigating how narratives are shaped, amplified, and protected across global newsrooms.The conversations go beyond breaking news to unpack:• Media bias and misinformation about Israel• How terrorist organizations exploit humanitarian and civil society frameworks• The role of NGOs and international bodies in shaping public perception• Foreign state influence on Western media and education• Why context disappears in reporting on Israel and the PalestiniansThis series is for listeners seeking in-depth analysis, ev
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When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
Is this an official The Honest Take product?
No. Podzilla is an independent service that summarizes publicly available podcast content. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by HonestReporting.
Can I get summaries of other podcasts too?
Absolutely! The free plan covers up to 3 podcasts, any in the catalog. Basic raises that to 15, Pro to 40 and Max to 100. Browse our full catalog at /podcasts.
What topics does The Honest Take cover?
The Honest Take covers topics including News, Politics, Commentary. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
Start getting The Honest Take summaries tomorrow morning.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.