Show Notes
When people concerned with the future of the Palestinian people talk about the future, they often say, hopefully, that change will come only once we can replace Hamas and other terror groups with entrepreneurial technocrats more interested in building projects than in starting wars. They’re talking, in short, about men like Bashar Masri, a Palestinian-American mogul who developed some of the best known and most lucrative real estate projects in Gaza, including luxury hotels and thriving industrial zones. But as a new bombshell lawsuit argues, Masri’s properties were all used as launching pads for Hamas attacks, including on October 7, 2023, and Masri himself knowingly collaborated with individuals closely tied to the terror group. Gary Osen, one of the attorneys representing October 7 victims in the lawsuit, joins Liel to talk about how Hamas’s terror infrastructure dominates everything in Gaza, and about how the UN and other international aid groups gave millions to support projects that did little more than give terrorists better cover. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from Tablet Studios
As part of our coverage of the Battle for Israel's Soul, we're going to be sharing the full interviews we did while prepping the series. Most of these will be for subscribers only, but this first one with Yaniv Rosnai is available here for all.
By the summer of 2023, it was clear that judicial reform was never really the story: The real battle was over Israel’s identity. And that battle touched on the deepest fears and disagreements Israelis were too busy surviving to address ever since the nation’s inception.
Early in 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu’s newly elected government announced its intention to embark on sweeping reforms to the country’s judicial system. The announcement was soon met with the biggest wave of popular protests in the nation’s history, dividing Israel like few issues before. But what did the reform actually propose? What were its architects trying to achieve? And what, precisely, did its detractors find objectionable?
The real fight tearing Israel apart these days isn’t against Hamas, Hezbollah, or even Iran. It’s a struggle to answer some very urgent—and very old—questions, the same questions that haunted Zionism’s founding fathers more than a century ago. Should Israel be a state for the Jews, the thoroughly modernized Vienna on the Mediterranean imagined by Theodor Herzl? Or a Jewish State, a vision championed by many of Zionism’s more traditional and religious followers? In this episode, we trace the roots of a conflict that long predates Benjamin Netanyahu, the Supreme Court, or the protests of 2023, and shed light on the historic reasons that drove hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take to the streets and protest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Early 2023 was a good time in Israel. The attack of October 7 was months in the future, and Israelis were enjoying a period of peace and prosperity. The economy was booming. The country came out fourth in the ranking of the world's happiest nations. You'd expect Israelis to sit back and celebrate their good fortune. Instead, they took to the streets en masse, sending the country into a tailspin that now, three years later, only grows stronger.