Show Notes
Sixty-eight days from the election, the hardest problems on Benjamin Netanyahu's desk are arriving from Washington. Jared Kushner is meeting Hamas directly, and the Gaza withdrawal deadlines he is carrying — thirty, sixty and ninety days — all land inside the Israeli campaign. Yonit and Jonathan read the timing as an unfriendly act rather than an accident, and ask what Donald Trump wants in return for the endorsement he keeps withholding. Also this week: the anti-Netanyahu bloc still cannot say who leads it, the IDF publishes its decisions in five Gaza cases, and the prime minister calls Britain an Islamic Republic on a podcast. Plus a Chutzpah award for an American broadcaster who has found proof of Israeli hostility to Christians in a mathematical symbol, and a Mensch of the Week that took more than 500 days to arrive.
More from Unholy: Two Jews on the News
Reunited in the same studio in Tel Aviv just five days before Israelis head to the polls, Yonit and Jonathan dive into the high-stakes homestretch of an election that feels less like routine politics and more like a referendum on the country’s soul. Jonathan reports from the ground—from the packed, expat-heavy El Al flight from London to a campaign rally with Gadi Eisenkot—while Yonit parses the razor-thin bloc arithmetic, the damaging fallout from the Yonatan Urich Qatari funding investigation, and the electoral tightrope Benjamin Netanyahu is walking with ultra-Orthodox draft evasion.
With just a week to go, Israel’s election campaign caught fire at the weekend, thanks to an incendiary intervention by one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s most ardent media supporters. Channel 14’s Yinon Magal re-opened a deep racial divide when he repeatedly referred to Netanyahu’s prime challenger, Gadi Eisenkot - whose family roots are in Morocco - as a “monkey”.
Twelve days before Israel votes, Yonit observes that the national mood is neither Britain in 1997 nor America in 2008 - a nation certain that it’s on the brink of change - but one of pure tension on both sides. In the final stretch, Binyamin Netanyahu is on an interview blitz, making no secret of his plans to maintain his current coalition while insisting Itamar Ben-Gvir will not be defense minister—a denial Jonathan reads as an outright forecast.
Two weeks before Israel votes, the polls seem to be telling two different stories — Channel 14 has the Netanyahu bloc at 63 seats, Channel 12 has it at 49. Dahlia Scheindlin, pollster and senior analyst at Haaretz, who has advised nine Israeli election campaigns, tells Yonit and Jonathan the picture is far less wild than it looks. Why do six of eight pollsters agree while two keep drifting? Who is actually still undecided, and does the much-discussed wave of expats flying in to vote amount to anything? Why have October 7 and everything since barely moved an electorate that has been shifting one way for fifteen years? And what is the iron rule that lets a pollster name your vote before you know it yourself — in an election whose result, she argues, now rests in the minds of six men.
Three years after October 7th, and eighteen days before Israel votes, this third anniversary felt different from the first two — and yet it may not move a single vote. With no state commission of inquiry, a flydubai near-disaster that echoed the state's failures and polls that point in wildly different directions, Yonit and Jonathan ask if the question of Netanyahu's responsibility has already been priced in by the Israeli electorate. They discuss whether a restrained, divided opposition is fighting according to the rules against a campaign that is not, and whether Avigdor Lieberman could end up in the prime minister’s chair - as the leader of a realigned right. Outside Israel, Zohran Mamdani and the Green Party of England and Wales approached October 7th in something other than solemn mood. Plus: a crowded field for Mensch of the Week and a Chutzpah award that takes aim at punctuation.