Day 533 - David Horovitz on external threats and internal divisions

The Times of Israel Daily Briefing

The Times of Israel

News

4.4 • 864 Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.

Editor David Horovitz joins host Amanda Borschel-Dan for today's Daily Briefing, which is a bonus episode of our weekly What Matters Now series.

Recording at noon on Thursday in ToI's Jerusalem office ahead of a planned fateful cabinet vote on the firing of Shin Bet head Ronen Bar tonight, Horovitz attempts to summarize this fraught Israeli moment.

As Israel Defense Forces troops are again entering the Gaza Strip for ground operations, fears of a crumbling Israeli democracy are bringing thousands to the streets, alongside others who reject the notion of a renewed war in Gaza without a hostage deal first.

Horovitz takes us through a litany of issues fueling the domestic strife and assesses how Israel again finds itself at a crossroads.

"All of us want Israel to survive and to thrive and we have two things simultaneously: We have terrible threats from without and we have tremendous division from within," says Horovitz. "This is extremely dangerous for Israel."

And so this week, we ask ToI editor David Horovitz, what matters now?

Please see today's ongoing liveblog for more updates.

For further reading:

For Israel, everything will not be okay

Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves.

IMAGE: Israelis march in a protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his plans to dismiss the head of the Shin Bet internal security service, in Jerusalem on March 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Times of Israel's What Matters now, a weekly podcast drilling down into one issue facing Israel and the Jewish world right now.
0:12.8	I'm your host, Deputy Editor Amanda Borchelle Dan, here with our editor, David Horvitz, in our Jerusalem office.
0:19.2	David, thank you so much for joining me today.
0:21.4	Sure, Amanda.
0:22.3	We are here for a free-flowing conversation to give our listeners a bit of a glimpse of where
0:30.4	Israel is in this very fraught moment. Israel, from my perspective, is standing at a crossroads from many, many, many different
0:41.5	issues. We are before any kind of renewed, very intensive fighting in Gaza, which may or may not
0:48.9	happen. We are also before another clinched release deal for our hostages, which may or may not happen.
0:56.8	But more than that, taking a couple steps backwards away from the war itself,
1:02.0	we are at a moment of domestic strife, perhaps that's the word for it,
1:07.9	in which there's so much fraught tensions over everything having to do
1:14.6	with democracy. And yesterday we saw a very large display of demonstrations here in the Capitol.
1:22.7	David, what was seen yesterday here?
1:25.7	I think you're right that it's a very fraught moment, and I do think, since you're speaking to me, you get my take on it.
1:32.1	I do think aspects about democracy are under significant threat, and I think the mood of the nation reflects the concern about that.
1:42.1	What you seem to have is a government, and a prime minister trying to center complete control of all branches of government in his hands.
1:53.6	How that's playing out right now is that tonight the cabinet is meeting for the first time in history to dismiss the head of the
2:03.4	Shimbab, the domestic security agency, who has said he's planning to step down because of his
2:08.6	organization's failure surrounding October the 7th, but has resisted, had resisted Netanyahu's
2:13.5	pressure for him to resign, among other reasons, because he thinks Netanyahu will try to put in a loyalist, a loyalist to Nathania.
2:19.8	In other words, somebody who is more inclined to worry about the Prime Minister's interests than the States.
2:24.3	And he has said there needs to be a State Commission of Inquiry into October the 7th, and which Netanyahu is resisting,
	...

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