Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis

We won, right? Or at least so we’re being told. But if we won, why is everyone here feeling so …. It’s very hard to describe what people are feeling. To be sure, there’s a deep sense of pride, even awe, at what the Air Force and Mossad accomplished (though there’s now a bit of a public pissing match between the Air Force and Mossad as to who really gets the credit—it can be exhausting to live in a...

For all intents and purposes, for the next short while, this war is a waiting game. Is Donald Trump going to do the right thing—not just for Israel, but for America as the leader of the Free World—or not? Does he have the stomach for the undeniable risks? Does he understand how he can cement his legacy, at least in terms of the world’s international order, if he strikes down evil? We shall see. Bu...

There’s a Facebook post that came out just yesterday (16 hours ago, as of this writing), that already has 10,000 responses, 2,500 shares, and 1,100 comments. It’s clearly touched something very deep here. It’s by someone named Ran Apelberg, whom I don’t know. Below is a screenshot of part of the post, and below the screenshot, an AI-generated translation of the rather long post. A few brief commen...

We close this brief week (shortened due to the holiday of Shavu’ot) with two glimpses of very different sorts of stories that describe the lives of IDF soldiers, stories that are a bit off the beaten path, but that Israelis hear and read about regularly. Headlines like the one below about a soldier seriously wounded are tragically not unusual in the Israeli press, either in Hebrew or any other lan...

Yesterday, we met a new, brewing political party called El Ha-Degel, “To the Flag,” and heard from one of its founders, David Sherez (additional links to El Ha-Degel are at the bottom of this post). Since we dove into the world of politics and political figures with yesterday’s post, it seemed appropriate today to share two quick videos that have made their way across Israeli social media—worth sh...

We posted this video, to which we’ve added subtitles for our readers and listeners, a few weeks ago. It’s an obvious evocation of Ben-Gurion, invited back to see the “country that sank.” These aren’t simple times in Israel. The war has turned into a slog, soldiers keep dying (yesterday morning we learned of three more) and it’s not entirely clear (at least to those of us not privy to inside conver...

Yair Golan, who now heads The Democrats, the Jewish political party that was forged out of a combination of the Labor Party and Meretz, has been much in the news for the foolish comment he made about Israel killing babies as a hobby, a comment we covered yesterday. Golan is a serious and accomplished person, and he knows that what he was said not true. Why he allowed himself to say something like...

“You’re the only reason that I’m here. You saved my life.” That’s what Edan Alexander said to Donald Trump in the video above, released by the White House. Edan, and particularly his mother, have taken a lot of heat on Israeli social media for thanking Donald Trump and not Benjamin Netanyahu. It might have been an oversight—but perhaps not. Either way, having a just-released hostage say to the Pre...

Over the hundreds of interviews that I’ve done for Israel from the Inside since we launched it in 2021, I’ve met fascinating people, been inspired by extraordinary stories and have learned an enormous amount. Still, though, until I interviewed Rabbi Hanan Schlessinger, I had never had the experience of interviewing someone, closing the interview, clicking on “Stop Recording” and then … just sittin...

I’ve mentioned this a few times in recent months, but beyond hostages (always my primary concern), war and politics, one of the questions that has lodged itself in my mind is that of what I would call “Jewish religiosity with moderation at its heart.” By that I don’t mean this movement or that movement, or this way of Jewish life or that way of Jewish life, this mode of practice or that mode of pr...

Here’s what appeared on all our screens in the middle of the day yesterday. Already yesterday afternoon, the country was abuzz with the news that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had spoken publicly about trading an end to the war for the return of all the hostages. Later, in the evening, the government announced that Israel would be providing humanitarian aid throughout the Gaza strip. Both topi...

A few day ago, I was having lunch with some friends from abroad along with some people who live here, when the friends from abroad asked, “Are you worried? Are you scared? How do you think it’s going to play out?” One of the people who lives here said, “I’m very worried about our son getting called up. For me, personally, I’m not scared. I’m terribly worried about the future. And there’s nowhere e...

When I lived in Israel as a kid, there was Yom Ha-Zikaron (Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terror), and then, the next day, Yom Ha-Atzma’ut (Independence Day). The transition, at least as I recall from back then, was harsh and immediate. The entire country went from the agony of cemeteries to barbecues and celebrations. It made no sense. Some thirty years ago (I believe that was wh...

A while back, I saw the opening to a book review in Haaretz with the following question in large black letters: Reform Rabbi Meir Azari: “When Jews go into an Arab Village and burn homes on Shabbat, that’s Judaism?” To a certain ilk of Jews in this country, of course, the answer is “yes.” They won’t quite say that explicitly, but their actions leave no doubt as to what they think. Their rabbis don...

Noam Kalush has actually spoken on our podcast once before, when we interviewed him and colleague who are very active in the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. In the course of that conversation, several months ago, Noam mentioned that he, his wife and their children made a harrowing escape from their community, Netiv Ha’Asara, which sits on Gaza’s northern border. In the map above, you can see...

The fast pace of the news cycle in the US — the tariffs and their impact on the economy around the world, fears (on the part of some) about the freedom of speech and the independence of academia, the deportations of an innocent man to Salvadorian prisons from which he will or will not be extricated, and more — make some of what is happening in Israel less than the high profile news it would once h...

Today, in the final segment of our three part conversation with Professor Kandel, I sought to articulate, however inadequately, why I found his proposal brilliant but also unsettling. Is three semi-independent cantons really the state that we hoped it would be? Was it what the founders labored and died for? What about limits? If the “Haredi” canton decided that women could not vote, would the rest...

When you look at photos of Eli Sharabi before he was kidnapped on the day that his wife and two daughters were murdered, it’s hard to believe that it’s the same human being we see upon his release from Gazan captivity. Sharabi’s interview with Ilana Dayan on UVDA, Israel’s “60 Minutes,” more or less, has had a huge impact in Israel. It has now been posted on Facebook and Twitter with English subti...

On many of the critical issues facing the State of Israel, reasonable minds can differ. End the war or do not end the war? Draft the Haredim by force or let their evasion continue? How Jewish should the public square be, and how do we ensure that it remains Jewish while safeguarding Israelis’ individual rights? There are hundreds of such issues. But it would be hard to argue that prostitution, and...

The poster reads: 500 days. Get them out of hell. There must be ways of tracking the mood of a country, its ups and downs, its moments of celebration and its moments of mourning. Social scientists, I imagine, have their ways of calculating. Perhaps they’re measuring such data even as we speak. Even those of us who are not social scientists, though, know. We don’t have the data, but we also have no...

In a recent Haaretz opinion piece , leading Israeli security expert Chuck Freilich wrote that it’s time to give up on the “mindless ‘two-state solution’ mantra.” There’s no way that Israel will get the security guarantees it needs in a two state solution, so it’s time to get honest and to move on. That, he believes, is the main contribution of the Trump “Riviera” plan—it’s likely not realistic, bu...

At the conclusion of the video below, you’ll see this: It translates as follows: Over the past year, we spoke with dozens of young people and asked to hear their stories as they are, without filters. Evacuees, survivors of the massacre, bereaved families, widows, reserve soldiers – the stories they told us are stories of friendship, courage, resilience, and of a generation that sees without illusi...

For those of us who didn’t hear the news until after Shabbat, it was an intense Saturday night. The three additional hostages, it turned out, had been released. But as we’d all become accustomed to seeing their faces on the hostages posters, the faces that we now saw when they actually left Hamas captivity were simply hard to believe. Comparisons like these flooded Israeli social media: The same i...

Eretz Nehederet , Israel’s more-or-less SNL, did a piece on the Red Cross this week that it clearly wanted the Red Cross and the international community to understand —which is why they produced it in English. It’s gotten more than a few chuckles out of Israelis as it’s made its way across social media, but not much more than a chuckle—because the whole International Red Cross thing and the staged...

I recently had the pleasure of reading a pre-publication copy of Melanie Phillips’ new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West—and Why Only They Can Save It . In classic Melanie Phillips style, it is powerfully written, pulls no punches and cuts to the very heart of some of the most pressing issues of our time. I then had an opportunity to discuss with book with Melanie f...