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Yoram Hazony, founder of National Conservatism and a key intellectual influence on JD Vance, explains why he says Tucker Carlson has become the right's biggest antisemitism problem. In this wide-ranging Jerusalem Post interview, the philosopher and Edmund Burke Foundation chairman maps the three warring camps inside today's Republican Party: the nationalist mainstream he says Trump built, the shrinking "liberal wing" of figures like Nikki Haley and Ted Cruz, and a small but agenda-setting "alt right" he argues turned from fringe to force when Tucker Carlson left Fox in 2023. Hazony doesn't soften his language: he calls Carlson's show a platform pushing the idea of Jews as "a demonic force in history," and reveals that Carlson personally asked to speak at NatCon in Jerusalem, a request Hazony refused. He also offers a counterintuitive defense of JD Vance. When Vance calls Israel "one of our top allies, like Britain and France," Hazony argues, Jews should embrace it rather than mourn the loss of the old "love-bombing" style of Bush, Clinton and Biden. It's a generational shift, he says, and a warning about what happens if Jewish outreach to the new right never gets done.

In the second part of her interview with The Jerusalem Post, Former Knesset member and Oz Party founder Einat Wilf makes a startling claim: Israel's most important front isn't Gaza or Iran, it's the world's Jews. Speaking with The Jerusalem Post weeks before Israel's October 27 election, Wilf describes a "rising global psychosis" that casts the Jew as "the obstacle to a better world," and argues that October 7 opened a worldwide assault on Jewish life. She rejects the old answer of "just make aliyah," insisting the state has abandoned a responsibility it can no longer ignore: "This is a time to take care of our own." Pressed on whether the diaspora can stay a priority amid Gaza, Iran and a looming commission of inquiry, she is blunt: "Governments never get to sequence things the way they want." One of the Jewish world's most prominent voices on Zionism, Wilf has spent 25 years studying the ideology of Israel's enemies, and she frames the bond between Israel and world Jewry not as a sentimental afterthought but as a strategic front in a global war of words. It's a perspective that will resonate with olim and diaspora Jews who feel unrepresented, and challenge Israelis who, in her words, still live inside a "bubble." For anyone trying to understand how October 7 reshaped Jewish identity worldwide, this is a rare, unvarnished map.

Former MK Einat Wilf, now third on the Reservists–New Economic Party list, argues Gaza shouldn't be rebuilt until its people choose to end the war. Ahead of Israel's October 2026 election, Wilf lays out a plan she says no other party will touch: divide Gaza into three. A small area adjacent to Israel as a permanent price for October 7; a Hamas-run "Gaza of war," reconnected to Egypt and cut off from Israeli supply; and an IDF-secured "Gaza of peace," open to any Gazan willing to renounce UNRWA refugee status and the claim of return. "It sounds small, but it's not," she says. "This is how you begin to create a new consciousness." On the Board of Peace's reconstruction program, she is blunt: "Give them the respect of choice, and if they choose war, don't throw $2.5 billion at them." Wilf also explains why she joined Yoaz Hendel and Yaron Zelekha outside the traditional blocs, what a "broad Zionist government" should mean for Haredi and Arab parties, and why she calls the Western refusal to take Palestinians at their word "the bigotry of low expectations."  Drawing on her Oxford Union debate, she describes how anti-Zionist messaging works and why "when your enemy gets lazy, there's always an opportunity in that." Whether you share her conclusions or challenge them, this is one of the most detailed day-after proposals put forward by any candidate this campaign. This is part one of The Jerusalem Post's interview with Wilf. Stay tuned for part two.

Yoseph Haddad, a Christian Arab Israeli and Golani veteran, is No. 2 on Ofer Winter's right-wing slate. He explains why and what he wants to change. Haddad spent a decade advocating for Israel abroad before October 7 made him a household name. Ahead of the October 27 election, he is running for the Knesset with Amcha Yisrael (People of Israel) party. He says he wants to become Israel's next public diplomacy (hasbara) minister. He rejects the word "coexistence" in favor of partnership: "Coexistence is like this. You're not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere… Let's live in coexistence." He argues that relations between Jewish and Arab citizens should go further, pointing to the Arab Muslim bus driver who rescued Jewish partygoers at the Nova festival. He also predicts his party will be "the surprise of this election." The interview covers his experience of racism from both Jewish and Muslim extremists. It also covers his plan to hold weekly press conferences in Hebrew, Arabic, and English as minister, and his party's model for an October 7 commission of inquiry, with judges nominated through Knesset signatures. He sharply criticizes the Joint List and Ra'am's decision to place Jewish former MK Yoav Segalovich at No. 2. He also explains where he agrees and disagrees with Itamar Ben-Gvir. He was pressed on how a party promising only new faces can back Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister, and his answer is part of the interview.

Former US deputy presidential envoy to the Middle East, Morgan Ortagus, reveals how she quietly pushed Israel and Lebanon toward direct talks, and why she says Hezbollah cannot survive without Iran. Ortagus, who oversaw the Lebanon file as Deputy US Special Envoy for the Middle East under Steve Witkoff, sits down with The Jerusalem Post's diplomatic reporter, Amichai Stain, to trace the behind-the-scenes effort to bring two neighbors who hadn't negotiated directly since the 1980s into the same small room. She describes reviving the military "mechanism," bringing US Marines back to Beirut, and building trust one biweekly meeting at a time, while arguing the window opened by Nasrallah's killing must not be squandered. "Hezbollah essentially can't really exist without the Islamic Republic," Ortagus says, calling Iran the "thousand-pound elephant" behind every Lebanese calculation. She insists there is "no way to have internal security and stability with an armed Hezbollah," and makes a blunt case to Lebanon's communities that Israel is the one neighbor willing to fight for them against Tehran. With negotiations now led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Michel Issa, her account explains what's already been set in motion, and what still stands in the way. The conversation also turns personal: why Ortagus wears a Star of David everywhere she negotiates, her reflections on her late friend Senator Lindsey Graham and their final conversation, and why she believes sanctions alone are "a tactic, not a strategy" against Iran. It's a candid, on-the-record look at the diplomacy shaping Israel's northern border from one of the people who helped build it.

Former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett calls Benjamin Netanyahu the man "most responsible for October 7th," then argues Netanyahu should be pardoned and sent home, not jailed. In this Jerusalem Post interview, Bennett, Israel's prime minister from 2021 to 2022 and now leader of a new party ahead of the 2026 election, lays out the case for his political comeback. He says Netanyahu "should go home… he should be pardoned" as part of a deal to exit politics, while insisting the former leader initiated the "strategy of feeding Hamas" that ended in catastrophe. Bennett also unveils his flagship reform: integrating 1.5 million ultra-Orthodox Israelis into the military, workforce and a shared school curriculum through financial incentives rather than arrests: "I'm a big believer in Milton Friedman, in free to choose." The conversation ranges across Bennett's own October 7 record versus Netanyahu's Hamas "containment" policy, his call to declare Qatar "a full-fledged enemy state immediately," and his claim that Netanyahu's wartime advisers were "on Qatari payroll." He addresses the broken promise that formed his 2021 coalition, why he won't govern with non-Zionist parties after October 7, and how he'd rebuild ties with the United States and American Jews, arguing half the damage is "self-inflicted." It's a candid, combative preview of the platform he's taking into the election.

US Ambassador Mike Huckabee makes the case for the US–Israel alliance at a moment he openly admits American support for Israel is at an all-time low. Sitting down with the Jerusalem Report editor-in-chief, Ruth Marks Eglash, and the diplomatic reporter, Amichai Stein, at the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, Huckabee argues the partnership pays off for both sides and pushes back on the idea that the relationship is one-directional. He is blunt about where progress has stalled: on Hamas disarmament, he notes the group has surrendered "not even a cap pistol," and on the permanence of the US embassy he insists America is "putting our flag deep in the ground." Huckabee also details the joint US–Israel strike on Iran, describing pilots flying "wingtip to wingtip" and operations rooms where the only way to tell the two militaries apart was the flag on their shoulders. Across the conversation Huckabee ranges over Iran's nuclear ambitions and expanding missile range, the plot against Prime Minister Netanyahu's son on US soil, Hezbollah's foothold across the Western Hemisphere, settler violence in the West Bank, tensions with Turkey over Syria, the slow-moving Lebanon talks, and the prospects for new Abraham Accords. A former governor of Arkansas and two-time presidential candidate with a direct line to President Trump, he brings an unusually personal, Judeo-Christian framing to the role, and offers a preview of what the third anniversary of October 7 means to Washington.

Iranian-born and married into a Jewish family, NeOnc CEO Amir Heshmatpour says he's fighting cancer on two fronts, the brain, and the Iranian regime. In this Jerusalem Post interview, Heshmatpour tells news editor Alex Winston how the Islamic Republic jailed and tortured his father, who died at 46, the loss that shaped his life. He explains why he calls the regime "a cancer in this part of the world," and describes being in Israel during the 12-day war with Iran. He also lays out the science behind NeOnc (Nasdaq: NTHI): an intranasal delivery platform, protected by more than 179 patents, that bypasses the blood-brain barrier to treat aggressive brain tumors. "I'm fighting cancer on two fronts," says Heshmatpour, "one for the brain and one for the Iranian people." It's a rare vantage point, a Persian entrepreneur from Tabriz, now a Los Angeles biotech executive, who wants trials running at Sheba and Tel Aviv alongside sites in the US and UAE, and who talks openly about the Abraham Accords, a hoped-for "Cyrus Accords," and what a post-regime Iran could look like. Whether you follow Middle East politics, diaspora Jewish affairs, or the business of biotech, this conversation sits at the intersection of all three.

Dr. Aliza Bloch, Beit Shemesh's first female mayor, turned down a Likud seat to join Erdan and Edelstein's new Unity Party, and she explains why. After leading one of Israel's most religiously and ethnically mixed cities, Bloch says October 7 convinced her that Israel's real battle is internal: "There is more than one way to be a good person, and nobody has a monopoly on our country or our Torah." She argues that only a broad Zionist government, left and right together, can rebuild trust after the war, that universal enlistment is "a responsibility for everybody," and that education, starting in kindergarten, is where national unity is won or lost. On the leaders now topping the polls, her message is blunt: "To be prime minister is very important, but to build our society is more important." A math teacher with a doctorate in education, daughter of Moroccan immigrants, and the mother of six children (including in-laws) who all served during the war, Bloch is a hard candidate to place in a box, right-wing by her own description, yet staking her political future on coalition-building. As Israel heads toward the 2026 election with a crowded field of small parties fighting over the threshold, her bet on unity over ideology is one of the race's more revealing tests.

Twenty-five years after the Sbarro pizzeria bombing, Arnold and Frimet Roth are still fighting to bring their daughter Malki's killer to justice.

Israel officially recognizes 3,500 "street dwellers." Ori Shoham, who has worked with them for 13 years, says the real figure is far higher, and nobody is counting. There is no legal definition of homelessness in Israel. What exists is a Ministry of Welfare category called "street dweller," and Shoham says Israel applies the harshest recognition criteria in the OECD: you have to be visibly on the street, visibly neglected, and you have to walk into a municipal welfare office and declare yourself. Those who manage it receive roughly 800 shekels a month plus about 1,100 shekels in housing aid paid directly to a landlord, money that, in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, buys a bed in an apartment shared with nine other people. Everyone else: people sleeping in cars, on friends' sofas, in a car park, simply isn't in the data. "They don't have a house," Shoham says. "But they will not be considered street dwellers." Home Base takes the opposite approach, and it is a deliberately strange one: soccer teams, a women's choir, a theater group, Friday dinners, lockers. Israel is a member of the Homeless World Cup network of some 70 countries, and the point of the ball is not fitness: it's contact. Shoham refuses to ask people what they need on a first meeting, calling it patronizing, and waits until trust exists. He says roughly 60% of participants who stay with the program turn their lives around. The interview closes with one of them: a man who spent 20 years in and out of prison and addiction, met Home Base in a hospital bed at 50, became captain of the team, and is now married with three children.

Most Israeli parties are founded by one person's ambition. Dr. Yoav Heller's was founded by a vote, 11,000 members of his grassroots Fourth Quarter movement chose to launch it, 69% in favor. His pitch to voters isn't "vote better," it's "vote different." Historian and Fourth Quarter founder Yoav Heller sits down with the Jerusalem Post to explain why he's turning a four-year-old anti-polarization movement into a political party now, despite admitting the party is "struggling" while the movement keeps growing. He argues Israel's so-called third bloc, polling at 9–11 seats, isn't just disillusioned left-wingers: by his account, a large share are former coalition voters who feel let down. Heller lays out his first priorities in government, justice and judicial reform, and a "new Israeli contract" rethinking who shares the national burden, and makes an unusual case for giving Israelis abroad, and even world Jewry, a greater voice. At the heart of the conversation is a distinction Heller keeps returning to: the Knesset represents those who voted for it, but a government, he insists, belongs to all citizens, "talk to everyone," not only your base.

Alex Rif spent her childhood trying to erase her Russian accent. Now she's running for Knesset on Gadi Eisenkot's list to make sure no immigrant has to. Rif is a poet, founder of the One Million Lobby, and architect of Yashar's immigration absorption platform, and brings numbers that rarely make headlines: of olim who arrived in 2025, only 18% studied in ulpan and 17% found work in their field.  "55% feel that they're not welcomed in Israel," she says. She lays out the plan for the 30,000 Holocaust survivors living in poverty, the scams targeting elderly Russian speakers, and a bureaucracy that sends new arrivals to ten offices for one answer. The conversation turns personal on what Israeli politics avoids: why she has three children with a partner she can't legally call her husband, why families of October 7 victims discovered their children would be buried in separate plots, and why she defends the Law of Return's grandchild clause. She also answers the Likud campaign attacking Eisenkot's English: "We should evaluate people not by their English, but by their actions." With Israel voting on October 27, this is one of the few detailed English-language conversations about what a change of government would mean for olim.

A Haredi writer, a religious Zionist philosopher and a Palestinian Israeli from Nazareth sit in one room and talk about the conflict, without pretending to agree. They are part of TEMA, a cross-sector Israeli leadership network that deliberately has no solution to sell. Its method is unusual: participants first meet in homogeneous groups, Haredi with Haredi, Palestinian Israeli with Palestinian Israeli, and only later cross over. Kholoud Abu Ahmad, who grew up in Nazareth, describes how engaging with politics became an obligation rather than a choice from childhood. Prof. Benjamin Ish-Shalom draws a hard distinction between diplomatic agreements and human contact, pointing to more than fifty years of peace with Egypt that produced almost no ordinary traffic between the two societies. Tzippy Diskind describes a Haredi upbringing in which contact with non-Jews was bounded by halakhic norms, and recalls Rav Shach's position during the Oslo years that the questions could not simply be refused. What makes this conversation different from most Israeli dialogue programming is that it began roughly three years ago, before October 7, and that nobody in it is representing an official position. The participants also describe discovering something they hadn't expected: that the internal disagreements inside each of their own communities are as wide as the gaps between them. Chapters: 00:00 - What TEMA is, and why it has no solution to sell 02:30 - Growing up Palestinian in Nazareth: when politics stops being optional 08:00 - A Haredi childhood in Jerusalem during the First Intifada 13:30 - Prof. Ish-Shalom on Gesher, Beit Morasha and the limits of state-to-state peace 20:00 - Rabin's assassination and Oslo: two communities, two memories 26:00 - Inside TEMA's method: homogeneous groups first, mixed groups later

Most olim aren't lost on the way to Israel, they're lost the week after. Ofer Nachshon and Rabbi Sid Slivko explain why so many go home. Olim Paveway doesn't try to convince anyone to make aliyah. That's the point. Co-founder Ofer Nachshon, an Israeli entrepreneur, and Rabbi Sid Slivko, an American oleh of 30 years, sat down with the Jerusalem Post's Batsheva Shulman to talk about the part of aliyah nobody prepares for: the day after the plane lands. "Aliyah doesn't stop when you get the taxi back from Ben-Gurion," Slivko says. "Aliyah just starts when you do that." Their argument is that the return rate, still significant even as it declines, is driven less by ideology than by bank forms, bureaucracy, and a culture gap that can't be understood from abroad. The conversation gets specific about what actually helps: a personal guide who walks olim through the supermarket, the cell phone contract and the school registration; a vetted network of service providers held to fair pricing; and weekly Toolbox Talks with experts. It also gets blunt about expectations. "Israel is not an escape," Slivko warns, and there is "no carbon copy aliyah," the friend who got a driver's license in two days is not a benchmark. Nachshon adds a challenge aimed squarely at Israelis: most, he argues, don't grasp what it costs to abandon a career, a status and a community and start from zero.  What makes this interview unusual is that both men are inside the problem from opposite sides: one a native Israeli watching olim collide with his own country's systems, the other still calling himself "an oleh with 30 years of experience." Slivko closes with the advice that rescued his own aliyah three decades ago: don't try to carbon-copy your American career, turn what you love into your profession. For anyone weighing aliyah, in year one of it, or quietly wondering how much longer they can last, this is the honest version.