{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Honest Take","title":"Who Will Keep Me Safe? What the First Election Since October 7th Really Means For Israelis | With Yaakov Katz","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3458,"description":"A good friend of Yaakov Katz spent a whole conversation complaining about the ultra-Orthodox: they block roads, they take too much government funding, they don't work and they don't serve in the army. So Yaakov asked him who he was voting for. Netanyahu. Didn't he see the contradiction? Netanyahu's government is the one that keeps giving the ultra-Orthodox what he was complaining about. \"You know what,\" the friend said, \"my values are with Netanyahu.\" Yaakov says there are a lot of Israelis like him, still trying to figure out where they stand.\nOn October 27, Israel votes for the first time since October 7th, and the coalition on the ballot is the one that was in office that morning. Yaakov calls the election a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu and a question about accountability. But he doesn't pretend the picture is simple. He calls October 7th \"a coin\" with two sides: the failures that led to it, and a war that has left Hamas a shadow of its former self, Hezbollah significantly degraded and Iran's nuclear facilities damaged. When Israelis go to the polls, he says, they ask one question: \"who's gonna keep me safe?\" Netanyahu is the commodity they know. Everyone else feels like a gamble, even Gadi Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff who lost a son in this war.\nHe walks through how Israeli elections actually work: you vote for a party, not a prime minister, and 61 of the Knesset's 120 seats make a government. The president hands the mandate to whoever gets the most recommendations, not necessarily whoever leads the biggest party. Will we know the next government on election night? \"Pretty sure we won't.\" He explains why left and right don't explain this race. The two-state solution has all but disappeared from the campaign, so what keeps Netanyahu, Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman apart is personalities. He lays out what a national unity government could look like, the question that gets everybody stuck (who's prime minister?), and why he thinks...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/MWvudMeeQbLLprkXao5bQURkY3G_5oMcfe3JeW4xoBg/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81Nzg1/NjYxZjIyMzBiODU5/OTczZmQzNjUzMmZi/YWIwNC5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}