Day 736 - Haviv Rettig Gur: Israel's next front is its own fractures
The Times of Israel Daily Briefing
The Times of Israel
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with The Times of Israel's senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur, marking two years since the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught on southern Israel.
To gain a sense of the Israeli public sentiment after two years of war, Rettig Gur analyzes a new survey conducted by Agam Labs and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, led by Nimrod Nir and Dr. Gayil Talshir.
The researchers found, in surveying 2,170 Jewish Israelis and 459 Arab Israelis, that there is a drastic shift in Israelis' perceptions of their society and politicians.
In one of the more dramatic findings, the report states that the initial unity found in the early months of the war has flipped to a division: from 77% in 2023 saying the war “united society” to 66% in 2025 saying it made society more divided.
Pointing to Israel's strengths and human capital, Rettig Gur leaves us with an optimistic framing of the internal work that needs to be done, even as Israel has largely defeated its greatest enemies.
And so this week, we ask Haviv Rettig Gur, what matters now.
What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves.
IMAGE: On October 7, 2025, thousands assemble in Hostages Square, Tel Aviv, to watch the broadcast of the Bereaved Families Memorial Ceremony marking two years since the October 7, 2023, massacre. (Paulina Patimer)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to What Matters Now, the Times of Israel's weekly podcast diving into one issue affecting Israel and the Jewish world right now. |
| 0:10.4 | I'm your host, Amanda Borschal Dan, here with our senior analyst Chaviv Retegour. |
| 0:15.7 | Chaviv, thank you so much for joining me today, October 7th. |
| 0:19.5 | That's good to be here, Amanda. It's good to have you, |
| 0:22.5 | and we are going to have a talk, talking about the state of Israel, two years into this war. |
| 0:29.7 | Kaviv, how are you feeling today, October 7th? It's always a rough anniversary. I happen to |
| 0:36.3 | talk to Eli Sharabi today, the hostage who got out back in the February exchange and lost his wife, two daughters and brother, and didn't know about it for 491 days when he was inside and found out about it when he got out. And he has a book, the first book written by a hostage, and we |
| 0:55.9 | were talking about his book. And one of the things he said really kind of struck me as, as |
| 1:01.5 | God knows, you know, nobody, nobody experienced that day the way Elie Sharabi experienced that |
| 1:05.9 | day. But those who were not at ground zero, so to speak, of the actual massacre, you still remember. |
| 1:12.2 | You remember those hours of the morning where the slow revelation of the scale of it all. |
| 1:16.9 | Nobody knew anything. |
| 1:17.9 | The information was trickling out, and some of the things seemed totally unbelievable. |
| 1:22.4 | So they were probably crazy, just it was some kind of big terror attack. |
| 1:25.3 | And I still remember it. |
| 1:28.3 | And because I have friends who were so deeply affected by it, I have friends who died in the army, in the war that followed, it's something that doesn't go away. |
| 1:40.3 | You know, they're all, the way Elie Shara-by put it it is he almost dismissed the anniversary because what is a memorial day when you just see, you know, his family in front of him all the time. |
| 1:52.3 | And so it doesn't mean much for it to be a specific memorial day. |
| 1:56.2 | I think we're still very much in the new world that October 7 inaugurated, because Hamas took a great |
| 2:03.5 | gamble, and the great gamble was that the desire to rid the world of this grain of sand in the |
| 2:13.4 | shoe, of this constant irritant, a Jewish state on what was supposed to be Muslim land or |
| 2:21.3 | Jewish nationalism in a world that, you know, in an ideological world in the West of certain parts of the West, that shouldn't, there shouldn't be nationalism. |
... |
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