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Israel votes next week, and MK Ohad Tal of the Religious Zionist Party says this election will decide whether Israel can withstand what is coming. Trump won’t be in the White House forever. A future Democratic president could recognize a Palestinian state, Europe is already moving that way, and the UN veto Israel has relied on for decades may not last. On this episode of the Universal Zionist, MK Tal explains why he doesn’t trust Eisenkot, Bennett, Lieberman or Yair Golan to hold the line, and why opposing construction in E1 tells you more about a politician than any statement against a Palestinian state. He lays out a plan rooted in the Bible: three options for Israel’s neighbors, the “Emirates plan” for dealing with local tribes instead of a Palestinian nation, and a foreign policy built on new alliances in Latin America, India, the Abraham Accords countries and a changing Europe. He also goes after the money. MK Tal argues that Qatar, Iran and their networks fund the campus protests, the media campaigns and the provocations in Judea and Samaria, including staged confrontations timed for visiting European diplomats. He points to more than 100 new communities and nearly 200 farms established in Judea and Samaria over the past four years, and to Regavim’s data showing how UN “settler violence” figures are inflated. Finally, he takes on the toughest criticism of his own party: the Haredi draft. MK Tal, who fought in Gaza himself, calls the current reality a moral disgrace, then makes a case you probably haven’t heard. Six thousand Haredim volunteered after October 7 and the army took 450. The Netzah Yehuda battalion has 18,000 reservists, and only a fraction get called up. According to MK Tal, the real obstacle isn’t the rabbis. It’s the IDF.

Days before Israel’s October 27th election, Knesset candidate Mati Gill sits down with Tuly, his classmate since kindergarten in Columbus, Ohio, to make the case for Naftali Bennett as Israel’s next prime minister. Mati doesn’t hedge. He calls for Netanyahu to retire, blaming him for the failure of October 7th, years of appeasing Hamas, and a political strategy built on dividing Israelis against each other. Tuly pushes back hard: Why not join a broad government with Likud? Will Bennett sit with the Haredi parties, Ben Gvir or Smotrich? Can a coalition that includes Yair Golan hold a hawkish line on security? Mati lays out where Bennett’s party stands on the biggest fights in this election. No Palestinian state and not a centimeter of land handed over. Drafting the ultra-Orthodox and ending funding for communities that don’t serve or work. A constitution based on the Declaration of Independence to end the battles over the courts. Enforcing the law in Judea and Samaria. Rebuilding bipartisan support in America, which he says Netanyahu has lost in both parties. Declaring Qatar an enemy state for funding antisemitism online. And protecting Israel’s economy through AI and technology partnerships if sanctions talk in Washington turns real. He also shares how he got here: aliyah in 1992, six years in the IDF’s foreign relations division, closing the gates at Rosh Hanikra during the 2000 Lebanon withdrawal, commanding a joint operations center with US CENTCOM after October 7th, a decade at Teva, and founding a venture that brings AI into drug discovery. Whether you agree with him or not, this is a candid look at what an opposition government could mean for Israel. Get 15% off The Pro-Israel Handbook with code HANDBOOK15.

Is another new party on the right a gift to the left? Rabbi Tuly Weisz puts that hard question straight to Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem and number five on the Amcha Yisrael list led by Brig. Gen. (res.) Ofer Winter. Fleur explains why she believes the party is expanding the right-wing bloc instead of splitting it, pulling votes from Lieberman voters, new immigrants, and pro-Israel Arab Christians who have never had anyone to vote for. She tells the story of Ofer Winter, the general who was reprimanded for reciting the Shema with his soldiers and who warned the top brass about Gaza years before October 7th. She also shares the remarkable story of Yoseph Haddad, the Christian Arab from Nazareth who served in Golani and was carried for miles by fellow soldiers after being badly wounded in the Second Lebanon War. Fleur also talks about Campus Israel, her initiative helping Jewish students, and soon Christian students, earn affordable English-language degrees at Israel’s top universities instead of paying for the privilege of being harassed on campuses abroad. And she reveals the real story behind the bronze Lion of Judah in Jerusalem’s Bloomfield Garden, a gift from the Christian community that one Israeli news channel tried to turn into a missionary conspiracy. Learn more about Campus Israel: https://campusisrael.com

The prophet Zechariah saw a day when people from every nation would take hold of a Jew’s robe and say, “Let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you” (Zechariah 8:23). Since October 7, that picture looks less distant than ever. Rabbi Tuly Weisz sits down with Michael Decker, founder of Decker-Pex & Co., one of Israel’s leading immigration law firms. Michael’s office has seen inquiries from people wanting to move to Israel rise roughly fourfold since the war began, many from non-Jews watching their own countries turn against Israel. In this episode: Who qualifies under the Law of Return, and the surprising cases that fall in betweenSpouses and grandchildren of Jews, and people who discover their Jewish roots later in lifeResidency for descendants of the Righteous Among the NationsInvestor, expert, and volunteer visas for friends of IsraelThe honorary citizenship offered by the governors of Judea and SamariaA proposed visa for the ger toshav, the Bible’s “resident gentile”Whether welcoming non-Jewish Zionists would weaken Israel’s Jewish identity or strengthen itThis conversation is part of the Universal Zionism podcast, based on Rabbi Tuly Weisz’s book Universal Zionism, which explores Israel’s calling to be a blessing to all the nations. Contact Michael Decker at Decker-Pex & Co.: [email protected]

Yael Eckstein, president and CEO of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), joins Rabbi Tuly Weisz for a candid conversation about faith, prophecy, and the changing bond between Jews and Christians. Yael shares how she went from a "wild child" with little connection to faith to leading the organization her father, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, built against fierce opposition. She tells the story of Flags of Fellowship, the October 7 memorial movement that has grown to more than 3,000 churches this year. She also reveals how the Fellowship has worked with the IDF to bring aid to persecuted Christians in Syria and southern Lebanon. Together they explore Isaiah's vision of the nations standing with Israel, the biblical command to love the stranger, and why Universal Zionism may make Israel a refuge for Christians as well as Jews in the days ahead. Learn more and join Flags of Fellowship at ifcj.org.

Dan Illouz made aliyah from Montreal at 23, trading a promising legal career for an IDF uniform as a lone soldier. He went on to serve on the Jerusalem City Council and in the Knesset as a member of the Likud. This year, he left the party, gave back his Knesset seat, and joined Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beytenu ahead of the October 27th election. In this episode, Illouz explains what drove him out of Netanyahu's party. He talks about his fight to bring Haredi men into the IDF, and why he sees it as essential to Israel's survival. He also shares his frustration over the war's unfinished results and his view that leadership after October 7th must take responsibility. He draws on the Bible to make that case, pointing to Judah, the father of the Jewish people's name, as the model of a leader who owns his failures. Illouz also reflects on his own journey to Israel, and why he believes the return of the Jewish people to their land is an even greater miracle than the Exodus from Egypt. The Universal Zionism podcast explores Israel's role not only as a home for the Jewish people, but as a light to the nations and a source of blessing to the whole world.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe never called himself a Zionist. Yet few people loved the Land of Israel as deeply, or fought as hard to protect it. In this episode, Rabbi Tuly Weisz sits down with Rabbi Elisha Pearl, author of Make Peace: A Strategic Guide to Achieving Lasting Peace in Israel, to explore the Rebbe's teachings on Israel, security and the end of days. The book is now out in Hebrew as Oseh Shalom. They discuss: Why the Rebbe taught that anyone who reads the Bible should see the Jewish return to Israel as a sign of the end times, based on the prophecy of BalaamThe Rebbe's urgent warnings to Israel's leaders about the ceasefire with Egypt, and why he cried out, "I have called, but no one answers" (Isaiah 50:2)His three conditions for Israel to be ready for the Messiah: shleimut ha'Torah (the wholeness of the Bible's teachings), shleimut ha'am (the wholeness of the Jewish people) and shleimut ha'aretz (the wholeness of the land)Why he warned that giving away land, including Gaza, would cost livesThe private conversation between the Rebbe and Benjamin Netanyahu that has never been revealedHow non-Jews can take part in bringing the redemption by keeping the seven Noahide lawsThis conversation brings the Rebbe's teachings on Israel to an audience far beyond Chabad, and shows how much of what he foresaw has come true. Subscribe to the Universal Zionist Podcast for more conversations about Israel, the Bible and the redemption of the world.

Is Bible prophecy unfolding in the hills of Judea and Samaria? Eyal Turgiman grew up in Ashkelon, served in the IDF, and then ran from his Jewish identity to Africa and Europe. A near-fatal accident brought him home, and living in Judea and Samaria brought him back to the Bible. Today he is one of the leading builders in Judea and Samaria. His company has built thousands of homes across roughly 25 communities, from Gush Etzion to the Jordan Valley and the hills near biblical Shiloh. He also runs Lev Haolam, a monthly box that brings the tastes and stories of the Land of Israel to tens of thousands of homes worldwide. Many of those homes are Christian families who say it feels like Christmas every month. Rabbi Tuly Weisz and Eyal talk about why Israel's army is unlike any other, how Lev Haolam started as an answer to the BDS movement, and why Israel should never try to be a beach resort. Eyal also shares his vision for spiritual tourism that could bring tens of millions of people to Israel. It is a hopeful look at Isaiah's promise that God's house will be "a house of prayer for all nations" (Isaiah 56:7).

Yishai Fleisher is running for Knesset. In this conversation with Rabbi Tuly Weisz, the Jerusalem broadcaster and longtime Zionist activist announces that he has been added to the Otzma Yehudit slate, his first time on a major list after twenty five years of trying. He tells the story behind Route 60. Four years of lobbying to rename the road that runs through the biblical heartland, past Shechem, Shiloh, Beit El, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron, as Derech HaTanach, the Biblical Highway. He explains why a road sign is a national strategy, why Israelis do not know the book of Genesis, and why the Ministry of Tourism spent decades selling beaches instead of the land of the Bible. Then the harder conversation. Yishai argues that Judaism has no real offering for the non-Jew who loves the God of Israel, calls the Noahide framework a branding failure, and proposes an Abrahamic path instead: houses of worship that face Jerusalem and follow the Jewish calendar, without asking anyone to convert. Rabbi Tuly answers with a different biblical category, the Ger Toshav, and the two work out what a Ger Toshav visa could look like. Also: Ben Gvir's record at National Security, gun permits, prison policy, and the pastor at the National Religious Broadcasters convention who told the State of Israel exactly what Christians actually want. Hosted by Rabbi Tuly Weisz, founder of Israel365 and publisher of The Israel Bible.

Rabbi Tuly Weisz sits down with Dimas Guaico of Generation Zion on a hillside in Samaria for a conversation that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. It starts with a verse. Isaiah 61:5 promises that strangers will tend Israel's flocks and foreigners will work her fields and vineyards. In Hebrew, that word does not refer to Jews. Jeremiah 31:5 adds the location: vineyards planted again on the mountains of Samaria. Both men are standing on those mountains while they read it, watching Christians and Jews put vines in the ground together. From there the conversation goes where these conversations usually don't. Dimas raises Paul's image in Romans 11 of roots and grafted-in branches, and Tuly takes it seriously — then turns it around. If the Jewish people are the roots, what responsibility do the roots carry for branches that may be withering in America and Europe? What does it mean that the next generation is losing the connection? They visit Gvaot Winery, where petrified grape seeds recovered from clay vats near ancient Shiloh were dated and eventually replanted, producing wine that may descend from the vines of the Tabernacle period. They walk into Shiloh itself, where the Tabernacle stood for 369 years, where Hannah prayed so intensely that Eli assumed she was drunk, and where the Jewish approach to prayer was born. And they lean into the subject both sides have spent decades politely stepping around: the Messiah. Tuly explains the deliberately scandalous bloodline running through Lot, Judah and Tamar, and Ruth of Moab, and why Jewish tradition holds that the Messiah points toward God rather than being worshiped himself. Dimas answers honestly from the Christian side, and neither man flinches. What emerges is not agreement, but something more useful — two people who trust each other enough to disagree out loud. Subscribe for more conversations from the land where the Bible comes to life.

President Trump stood before the Israeli Knesset during one of the most emotional celebrations in recent memory — the release of the hostages — and in the middle of his speech, he turned to Miriam Adelson, widow of Sheldon Adelson and one of his most devoted supporters, and asked her a question that cut straight to the heart of Jewish identity in America. She never answered. In this episode, Rabbi Tuly Weisz sits down with Rabbi Elie Mischel, author of the new book Countdown: American Jews and God's Plan for Redemption, to unpack why that moment matters so much more than it seemed. This isn't really about loyalty to America — it's about where the heart of the Jewish people truly belongs. Drawing on the Book of Esther, the story of the Exodus, and the biblical case for Jewish nationhood, Rabbi Mischel explains why American Jews are being forced to confront their identity in a way they haven't in generations, and why rising antisemitism may be part of a much bigger, prophetic picture. Whether you're Jewish, Christian, or simply curious about what the Bible says about Israel's role in the world, this conversation will change how you see the headlines. Countdown is available now at Israel365store.com.

Barak Seener, author of 'Israel 2048: a Bluprint for a Rising Asymmetric Geopolitical Power' https://henryjacksonsociety.org/publications/israel2048/ What will Israel look like in 2048, when the Jewish state celebrates its 100th anniversary? On this episode of the Universal Zionist Podcast, Rabbi Tuly Weisz sits down with geopolitical strategist Barak M. Seener, Senior Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and founder of Strategic Intelligentia. Seener is the co-author, with Dr. David Wurmser, of the landmark report "Israel 2048: A Blueprint for a Rising Asymmetric Geopolitical Power." Seener argues that October 7 ended what he calls Zionism 1.0, the defensive, reactive posture Israel held from its founding through October 6. In its place, Zionism 2.0 has emerged, defined by preemptive action, air dominance over Tehran, and power projection thousands of kilometers into Yemen. But he warns that Israel's vulnerability is conceptual, not kinetic. Without a national mission rooted in Jewish civilizational identity, Israel will remain tactically dominant yet strategically exposed, mistaking operational victories for strategic ones while its enemies reconstitute faster than Israel can degrade them. The conversation turns to identity. While the West drifts from its Judeo-Christian foundations, Israel is rediscovering its biblical identity for the first time since 1948. Seener explains why the cyclical pattern of the Book of Judges is the key to understanding where Israel stands right now, and why compression has always led to expansion in Jewish history. Rabbi Weisz then presents ten predictions for 2048, and Seener responds to each. Among them: the Abraham Accords expanding to replace NATO as the region's security architecture, Israeli universities becoming the world's top study abroad destination, a demographic realignment sending diaspora Jews toward Christian communities, Israeli hospitals serving the entire Middle East, biblical borders from the Nile to the Euphrates, and a new category of citizenship formally recognizing Christian Zionists and supporters of Israel worldwide. The episode closes on the boldest predictions of all: Jerusalem hosting the 2048 Summer Olympics, and the dedication of the Third Temple. Seener agrees with one and pushes back on the other, arguing that the Temple must not come as a response to Jewish persecution alone, but as something all the nations of the world cry out for together. For Christians who love Israel and want to understand what Scripture, strategy, and the last two years reveal about the decades ahead. Israel365 builds relationships between Jews and Christians in support of Israel. Subscribe for more conversations on the Bible, prophecy, and the Jewish state.

Rabbi Daniel Korobkin leads the BAYT in Toronto, the largest Orthodox congregation in Canada. He is the translator of The Kuzari: In Defense of the Despised Faith, Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi's medieval masterwork on the Land of Israel, and a past president of the Rabbinical Council of America. He sits on the board of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. And after fifteen years in the pulpit, he is making aliyah. In this conversation, Rabbi Korobkin describes the rupture that October 7th caused in Canadian Jewish life: the protests outside the synagogue, the children waking from nightmares, the Friday night in March when the front doors of two shuls were shot up. He now writes two or three aliyah letters a week, where he once wrote one a month. Not a single Jew he knows in Canada, he says, is without a contingency plan. He also traces his own intellectual path to Zion through the Kuzari, and explains the ancient debate that still shapes how believers read Scripture: whether the holiness of the Land is a divine designation or something woven into the land itself. For Christian listeners, the final stretch of this episode matters most. Rabbi Korobkin argues that Jewish-Christian partnership has run too long in one direction, and that the Jewish people now owe the Church something in return — not political favors, but Torah, teaching, and spiritual friendship at a moment when Christians are watching their own societies drift from God. He argues that secularism cannot defend a nation against hatred, and that redemption is arriving as a slow unfolding rather than a sudden miracle, with a role for every person who recognizes what is happening.

Are Christians only supporting Israel to speed along the end times? Did Rav Soloveitchik forbid all interfaith contact? And what does halacha permit when the stakes are no longer one Jew and one neighbor, but an entire nation that needs allies? Rabbi Yitzchak Adlerstein served for twenty years as Interfaith Affairs Director at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and now serves as Director of Global Faith Engagement at Israel365. In this conversation with Rabbi Tuly Weisz, he argues that Orthodox Jews, not liberal ones, share the real common vocabulary with serious Christians, because the conversation runs on Scripture rather than on Tikkun Olam. In this episode: Why the old interfaith language of shared social causes never worked, and what replaced itRav Soloveitchik's two objections to interfaith dialogue, and why today's work is a different thing entirelyThe elephant in the room: replacement theology, N.T. Wright, and a black itinerant pastor's answer over coffee in DallasThe most frequently asked question in the field, and Rabbi Adlerstein's honest answer after 20 yearsGenesis 12:3 and why evangelical support for Israel is grounded in the text, not in prophecy chartsKabdehu v'chashdehu: respect them and suspect them, and how that principle governs the whole enterpriseWhere the halachic red lines sit, who is actually paskening these questions, and Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky's one piece of adviceRav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, Or LaGoyim, and the shift from passive witness to active outreachSaying Kel Malei at Treblinka beside a Catholic priest, and the moral failure of the last two popesUniversal Zionism as the third phase after political and religious ZionismRabbi Tuly Weisz is the founder of Israel365 and author of Universal Zionism.

Ezra Cohen's grandfather left Jerusalem for Colombia because the city had nothing to offer him. His father fought in the War of Independence, held the Old City with 35 men against 2,000 Jordanian soldiers, spent nine months as a prisoner of war, and then moved to Panama looking for a country with no war and no winter. Seventy-four years later, Ezra Cohen arrived in Jerusalem as Panama's ambassador, rented a house down the street from the one his grandfather built, and walked into the same synagogue where his grandfather's name still hangs on the donor wall. In this conversation, Tuly Weisz sits down with Ambassador Cohen to talk about the Jewish community of Panama dating back to 1501, the Panamanian corporation that smuggled Israel's first fighter planes past the European embargo in 1948, and why Panama remains the only country in Latin America that refuses to recognize the Palestinian Authority. Along the way, the ambassador offers a reading of the spies in Parshat Shelach that explains how a small community learned to see the cup half full, wear a kippah without apology, and build a nation alongside its neighbors instead of behind walls.