The Fathom Podcast

Fathom Co-editor Calev Ben-Dor spoke with Matthew Levitt, the Director of Reinhard Counter terrorism program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Ksenia Svetlova, executive director at ROPES and a research associate at Chatham House. They discussed the current war between Israel and Iran and potential scenarios for how it might play out.

Six months after the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah was secured, Fathom editors Jack Omer-Jackaman and Calev Ben-Dor talk to Lebanon expert Hanin Ghaddar, Friedman Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute and author of Hezbollahland: Mapping Dahiya and Lebanon’s Shia Community. Ghaddar talks about Hezbollah’s current strength; whether the Lebanese government will succeed in its aim to disarm the organisation through negotiation; and Iran’s response to the apparent weakening of the ‘crown jewel’ in its regional ‘ring of fire’.

Attorney Gilead Sher is a former Israeli senior peace negotiator and Chief of Staff to PM Ehud Barak. Formerly a peace negotiator under PM Rabin, he is a Rice University’s Baker Institute fellow and a former senior fellow at Tel Aviv's Institute for National Studies INSS. In 2023, Sher co-founded the Central Resistance Headquarters for the pro-democracy struggle. He has authored three books, co-edited two, contributed numerous chapters in edited volumes and published dozens of articles in Israeli and international media.
In this conversation, Sher recounts the reasons for the failure of the negotiations he was involved in during the Barak era. He argues that personalities and tactical issues were secondary - although he believes Arafat was unwilling to seriously negotiate and make the requisite compromises. Sher explains that too little time was spent trying to resolve all the myriad issues: 'not enough time and not enough continuous effort was put into the purpose of ending the conflict.' He also critiques the 'package approach' that meant nothing was agreed until everything was agreed, and suggests replacing it with a gradual formula whereby what is agreed should be immediately implemented, which Sher believes would create positive traction on the ground, allowing people to realise that something is changing.
In the later part of the conversation, Sher details his current vision for creating a better future for Israelis and Palestinians in the aftermath of 7 October.

Koby Huberman talks to Fathom about his insights from decades of work in regional peacemaking.

Najwa AlSaeed talks to Fathom about Gulf states' desire for a post-Hamas Gaza freed from Iranian influence; navigating President Trump's declared policy of US 'ownership' of Gaza; and the difficulties of being publicly supportive of normalisation with Israel in the Middle East. AlSaeed is a Saudi-born analyst, researcher, and news contributor, with a focus on the GCC and the MENA region. She is Assistant Professor at American University in the Emirates, Dubai-UAE, and a columnist at Al Ittihad and Israel Hayom.

Alan Johnson and Calev Ben-Dor spoke to Alexander Yakobson, co-author of Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights and a regular contributor to Haaretz and other Israeli publications. They discuss Israel's wars against Hamas and Hezbollah, including accusations of genocide, starvation as an instrument of war and the explosion of Hezbollah pagers.

Itai Anghel is an Israeli correspondent and documentary filmmaker and a staff reporter for Uvda, a television news program on Channel 12. He mainly covers conflict zones all over the world, including five separate trips to Syria between 2012 - 2019. In 2017 Anghel was awarded the 'Sokolov Award' which is Israel's highest award for journalism. He speaks to Deputy Editor Calev Ben-Dor about the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, the blow to the Iranian sponsored regional axis, and Israel's opportunity to ally with the Kurds.
 

Alan Johnson and Calev Ben-Dor spoke to Michael Walzer, the leading American public intellectual and author of Just and Unjust Wars. We discussed the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, the charge of 'genocide' against Israel, the question of whether Israel is facilitating enough humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, as well as the pager attacks against Hezbollah operatives, and how Just War thinking applies to the conduct of war by a country in an existential battle against non-state actors.

Matt Levitt is the Director of Reinhard Counter terrorism program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He and Fathom Deputy Editor Calev Ben-Dor talked about the second edition of his book Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God. They discuss Hezbollah’s role as a regional actor throughout the Middle East, acting in tandem with and at the direction of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Nasrallah’s strategy, and how effective Israel has been in degrading the group’s military threat in the current war.

In the third episode of the Fathom series ‘Those who tried: Conversations with the Peace Processors’, Yair Hirschfeld recalls his role in the process which led to the Oslo Accords. Hirschfeld argues, based on his experience in Oslo and subsequent peace tracks, Hirschfeld argues that attempts to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict decisively, and all in one go, do not work. A gradualist approach is what is needed, he says, arguing, ‘it’s very simple: all or nothing doesn’t work, and gradualism is very difficult but does work.’
Hirschfeld first became involved in peacemaking in February 1979 when he met Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, who asked him to become involved in Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and sent a proposal of his to the Crown Prince of Jordan and in October 1980. That process ultimately led to the Madrid Conference, and you were one of two Israeli academics who first met with PLO leaders in Oslo, Norway, which subsequently set the scene for the Oslo Accords. Hirschfeld was one of two Israeli academics (alongside the late Ron Pundak) who began unofficial and secret discussions with Palestinian officials in Oslo that led to the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the PLO. He was intimately involved in creating the Beilin-Abu Mazen agreement and worked with the parties throughout the 1990s. Since then, he has continued to work on track 2 initiatives. He recently published The Israeli–Palestinian Peace Process - A Personal Insider's Account.