Daily Briefing June 9 – Between a rocket and a hard place: PM faces Trumpian dilemma

Welcome to The Times of Israel’s Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what’s happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.

Editor David Horovitz joins host Amanda Borschel-Dan for today’s episode.

WATCH the full episode here:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly called off a further major strike on Iran on Monday following Israel’s initial retaliation to Iran’s ballistic missile barrages overnight Sunday. With IAF fighter jets on the runway, Trump instructed the premier to deescalate Israel’s fight with the Islamic Republic. Later, the president explained to a BBC reporter, “If I tell him to do something, he does it.”

On today’s episode, we unwind the political ripple effect of Trump’s assertion and ask whether Israel is truly still operating as a sovereign nation even as its hands are increasingly tied when combating the terror threat on its northern border.

Additionally, as Iran appears to consider Lebanon its own vassal state that is intrinsically embedded in the Trump ceasefire negotiations, we talk through the initial goals of the war launched on February 28 and assess the Jewish state’s current standing.

In the second half of the program, Horovitz gives a broad-strokes picture of where political parties lie in recent polling — while it’s still anyone’s game — as Israel gears up for elections a few months away.

Check out The Times of Israel’s ongoing liveblog for more updates.

For further reading:

Trump seeks to tie Netanyahu’s hands, as the partnership that went to war 100 days ago collapses

Netanyahu called off major Iran strike after Trump warned Israel would be on its own — reports

Vance: Iran deal a ‘home run for the American people,’ whether Israel likes it or not

IDF downs drone over Eilat launched by Yemen’s Houthis

Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Yitzchak Ledee.

Check out yesterday’s episode here:

Today’s Transcript:

Amanda Borschel-Dan: Welcome to The Times of Israel’s Daily Briefing. Today is Tuesday, June 9. I am Amanda Borschel-Dan here in Jerusalem with our founding editor, David Horovitz. David, thank you so much for joining me today.

David Horovitz: How are you doing, Amanda?

Borschel-Dan: I am okay after our 24-hour blip of a little warlet, what we’ll call it, with renewed strikes between Iran and Israel that were sparked on Sunday night when Iran sent several volleys of ballistic missiles to Israel. Israel responded in kind. Now, we’re going to nail down whether this response from Israel was okayed by US President Donald Trump and maybe whether it needed to be. So all of this and much, much more when we’re back.

And we’re back. I’m Amanda Borschel-Dan here in our Jerusalem studio with founding editor David Horovitz. David, we heard reports this morning from the BBC that US President Trump was in line with our Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in terms of the response to the Iranian strikes that occurred on Sunday. So there had been a bit of a narrative that there’s a rift between the president and the prime minister, of course, stemming from a very contentious, or at least reportedly contentious, phone call that occurred last week using expletives. So what are we thinking right now? Are the two aligned? We’re hearing US President Donald Trump saying, “Bibi will basically do everything I tell him to do.” What’s happening here?

Diverging US/Israel interests in the Iran war

Horovitz: Okay, so we’re going to try and nail it down, but it’s not going to be simple. And there’s lots of contradictory information and a complicated timeline. We’ll do our best. But I think to summarize, you have to understand that there is friction between them. Because there are divergent interests. And if you want to be really nakedly political about this, for example, Trump has interests going into midterms, his personal popularity, the needs of his electorate, of the American public, all pushing him to try and you see him desperately trying to come to an agreement with Iran. And you see Iran recognizing his desperation and playing hard to get. And you have Netanyahu also heading to elections in a maximum of three months or so. Very, very difficult political position. If you look at the polls, he’s not going to get reelected. But don’t believe the polls, just be wary about that. But the last thing he would want is to go into elections looking weak with Israel under attack, not able to defend itself effectively because of constraints placed by the American president, and so on. So that’s sort of the bigger context.

I think it is clear that there was an expletive-filled phone call. Trump has essentially confirmed that, although he didn’t go into the details of how many times he used the f-word. Again, this is born of divergent interests. And what’s striking about this, of course, is that Israel and the United States went to war on February 28 together, aligned, perceiving themselves to have broadly common interests. In trying to stop Iran’s nuclear program, stopping its ballistic missile developments, because America recognized that was not only an Israeli interest but a free world interest, an American interest, trying to stop Iran fomenting terrorism all over the world, and essentially trying to create the circumstances in which this terrible regime — look at the words that Trump used, “these people who have been spreading terrorism for half a century” and so on, “bad people,” “they’ve been mass murdering their own people,” trying to get them out of power. And it didn’t work, right? Or it certainly hasn’t worked yet. The regime is still in place. Trump likes to say it’s a new regime, they’re more reasonable people. That’s not true. There might be some more reasonable people in the mix somewhere, but it’s the same regime, if not even more hardline and uncompromising, and a little less religiously driven, I would say, and more rapaciously ambitious, right? And violent.

So the interests diverged as the key goals were not being achieved, and you had the potential of this going on and on, American lives being lost, and so on. And of course, you had Iran leveraging its control over the Strait of Hormuz and playing havoc with international energy prices, supplies, and so on. And Trump just wants to get out, probably wants to get prices down at the gas tank for the American public, and so on. And Israel under Netanyahu, but Israel broadly, needs to stop Iran, needs to stop that nuclear drive, and essentially needs this regime to fall. This is a regime that is trying to destroy Israel. As Trump says, if it gets the bomb, it will use it against Israel. We don’t know that for a fact, but that’s not an unreasonable assessment. And that’s, again, the context in which all of this is playing out. Trump wants to stop it. Netanyahu and Israel are worried he’s going to do a lousy deal. And many of the things that Trump says — Vice President [JD] Vance just a few hours ago saying stuff — underline the diverging interests and underline why Israel is concerned.

There’s still this American commitment, “We’re gonna make sure that Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon,” but the terms of the reported agreement that America is working towards do not inspire confidence that that’s what would happen. You had Trump being very hawkish on “Iran mustn’t be able to enrich uranium at all.” That’s kind of fallen by the wayside now. He’s talked about a 20-year suspension of enrichment and so on. We’ve heard Trump talking about “We could have gone in to get their stockpile of highly enriched uranium buried in one, two, or three underground nuclear sites, but we chose not to do it because of the risk to American lives.” I mean, for Israel, of course, that’s something that should have been done. That was perhaps the most urgent imperative of this war. So again, you see this friction. And then in the flare-up of the last few days, as an Israeli, never mind as the Prime Minister, you’re watching Hezbollah batter the north of Israel. And Israel is trying to stop it. And there was an emphasis by Trump, who’s trying to broker a deal between Lebanon and Israel.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Except that a deal between the Israeli government and the Lebanese government doesn’t stop Hezbollah. So Israel needs to keep fighting Hezbollah. And Trump is saying, yeah, but you’re going to jeopardize my deal, which doesn’t seem to be a particularly viable deal anyway. Israel, largely symbolically, I would say, struck at Hezbollah targets in Beirut on Sunday. And then Iran threatened to hit back, right? Israel attacked a terrorist organization in the capital of a neighboring country, and Iran, basically deciding that it’s the patron of Lebanon, attacked northern Israel. And of course, Israel hit back, apparently to some displeasure from President Trump. And then the last part is a further attack that Israel was about to mount yesterday afternoon, our time, with the jets on the runway, Trump basically told Netanyahu, “Don’t do it,” and reportedly told him, “If you do this and things escalate, you might find yourselves on your own.” So the very long answer to your very succinct question is, boy, is there friction, and boy, are there complexities about this relationship now.

Lebanon and Israel as vassal states for Iran and the United States?

Borschel-Dan: In my mind, and I know this is slightly glib, I think of our prime minister as being between a rocket and a hard place, because you can’t not retaliate when Iran is sending missiles your way. But the whole intertwined knottiness of the problem has only become more and more difficult to unwind since the war began. Meaning, before the war, Israel was acting pretty freely in Lebanon, and Iran was not responding. Since the war, all of a sudden, Iran feels like, as you said, it’s the patron of Lebanon, at least in the Hezbollah-controlled areas, which Israel struck outside of Beirut. That was a Hezbollah-controlled area. Israel is operating in southern Lebanon. Israel is also operating in other cities, including Tyre. It is a very difficult situation for Israel to be in, thinking that, wait a minute, all of a sudden, Lebanon is a vassal state of Iran? And wait a minute, is Israel now a vassal state of the United States? We pride ourselves on our independence. And put aside the political ramifications for Netanyahu not to respond, what kind of Middle East would we be living in if we didn’t respond to any kind of Iranian strike on our sovereign territory?

So really, hearts out to our prime minister, but hearts out to us because since the war began, we are in a worse situation. So, one of the things you didn’t list in terms of the war goals, you touched on Iran spreading terror, but I believe that one of the war goals was also to prevent Iran from having these proxies throughout the region. And again, we have the Houthis sending missiles yesterday and today. We have Hezbollah sending drones and rockets also overnight, also this morning. Things are still hitting Israel, and Israel is not meant to respond at this point? According to US President Donald Trump?

Horovitz: So indeed, in terms of the war goals, fomenting terrorism most emphatically includes, and it can be a separate category, terrorist organizations, terrorist governments, in the case of Hamas. Terrorist armies, in the case of Hezbollah, with a foot in government, the Houthis, all kinds of militias in Iraq, and so on. Yeah, one of the goals of the war was to make sure that Iran would not continue to support these terrorist proxies. That hasn’t happened. I would agree with you that Israel is in a worse situation than it was before the war. In contrast, for example, to last year’s war, when Iran was really set back, when its nuclear program was directly targeted and set back. I heard former defense minister Yoav Gallant saying yesterday that 60% enriched uranium, the stockpile of 400 kilos of uranium, if that is retrieved, that sets Iran back decades. Now, I’ve not heard people saying that again, because partly it would depend on what other enrichment facilities they have and capabilities, but that’s a really dramatic thing. Nobody’s been talking about setting back Iran decades, and again, I wouldn’t overstate it, but it was the key thing that could have been done in this war, and by Trump’s own acknowledgment, he chose not to do it.

Gallant said that Israel and the US could have done it together, and so on. That wasn’t done. The regime has survived. For it, victory is in its survival. When Israel’s looking at that equation, it needs to make sure this regime ultimately does not survive. So that is really what this is all about. The regime is emboldened. It may be very battered, it may have been set back a little bit, but in terms of the geo-strategy, as you say, a worse situation. So Iran is essentially trying to claim, I would say, Lebanon as a vassal state because it’s trying to marginalize a Lebanese government that heroically is maybe a bit of an overstatement, but that is actually trying to forge a partnership with Israel and bring stability to its country. Iran is trying to make sure that doesn’t happen. So I think that vassal state thing applies. And the concern, as you expressed it, that Israel is at the very least increasingly perceived in this region, I would say. And we’re talking about in the last few days, especially, as some kind of American vassal state.

And Trump is emphasizing that. It’s not the first time that he said Netanyahu will do what I tell him to do. Imagine that you’re Netanyahu. Now again, we’ve had enough podcasts over the years to know that I don’t think that everything Netanyahu does is automatically right by any means, or automatically wrong by any means. But it’s not just about Netanyahu. This is the president saying, “The leader of that Israel thing, he’ll do what I tell them to do.” In other words, “Israel will do what I tell it to do.” And by definition, if you’re having to tell it what to do, probably to some extent counter to its own interests, it will do what I tell it to do, even if they’re not happy about it. That’s frankly an intolerable situation. It’s an intolerable situation because we’re a very small country in a ruthless neighborhood with enemies that want to wipe us out. And if we have a vital interest, we need to be sure that nobody who’s supposedly on our side, least of all, would stop us protecting ourselves, acting as we need to act. And it may have been a relatively minor flare-up this week, but the bottom line is Israel was coming under attack, and as far as we understand, the president of the United States didn’t want Israel to retaliate against Iran attacking Israel when Israel had not even initiated an attack on Iran.

These are contexts and events that are unfolding in ways that haven’t happened before. And part of the complexity here is this is an American president who has been perceived hugely in Israel as supportive, who moved the embassy to Jerusalem, who acknowledged Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights, etc., etc., who joined us in setting back Iran last year, and now telling us, “I don’t care that Iran attacked you, I don’t want you to fire back.” And, of course, you’re also dealing with Trump and these complex formulations and self-contradictory things that he says. It’s not even always clear exactly which stage of an event he’s talking about, and so on. But the bottom line, like I say, telling Israel, “hey, your prime minister will do what I tell him to do,” that’s not a tenable situation for Israel.

Borschel-Dan: Let’s go to a short break.

And we’re back. I’m Amanda Borschel-Dan down here in our Jerusalem studio with founding editor David Horovitz. You mentioned earlier in the episode that our Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party is not currently leading in the polls. Everything is so liquid in terms of polling, and they’re not usually 100% accurate, to say the least. But who is rising in the polls at this point? We hear three figures, I would say, talked about more than anything. There’s, of course, opposition leader [MK] Yair Lapid. He probably is the third ranking, I would assume. There is former prime minister Naftali Bennett, and there’s also Gadi Eisenkot. And Gadi Eisenkot is perhaps the wild card, in my opinion, to these elections that are coming up. So let’s talk a little bit about Gadi Eisenkot and who is actually, in terms of his party, who is leading right now in the polls.

Leading political challengers to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Horovitz: Okay, so first of all, I assume most people listening to this and watching this are somewhat familiar with Israel’s election system, but just to enable us to understand what’s going on here, we’ve never had a single-party government in the whole history of Israel. There’ve always been coalition governments. Whoever can muster a majority in the Knesset, broadly speaking, even that is not as straightforward as what I just said, but if you can get to 61 seats in the 120-member Knesset, you can form a coalition. So it’s not a function of who’s the leader of the biggest party, it’s not a function of who’s the most popular person, it’s who can build an alliance that gets you into that 61 area. So Netanyahu’s Likud, for example, in the polls right now is generally the biggest party, but he and his allies are, generally in most of the polls, 7, 8, 9 seats short of that 61. They’re in the low 50s. The Zionist, anti-Netanyahu parties are generally in the high 50s. We had a poll last week that showed them at 61, I think, or maybe 62, which is atypical. In other words, with the majority.

And the balance between those two blocks is a couple of Arab parties, one of whom sat in a coalition in the past with Bennett and Lapid. That’s sort of where things stand.

The polls are unreliable. Imagine that you’re a pollster and you’re polling an election in which there are a dozen or more parties, complicated by the fact that if you don’t get over 3.25% of the vote nationwide for your party, all those votes go down the tubes, go to waste, and everything has to be recalculated. So what we lack in Israel is pollsters with some modesty, a lack of hubris, who should be saying, “this is what we’re gauging at the moment, but don’t take us too seriously. This reflects the trends.” And then in terms of the trends, you’ve got Netanyahu, this extraordinary politician who’s led Israel for 15 of the last 17 years. You’ve got Bennett and Lapid, who for a year and a half ousted Netanyahu. They’ve merged again, ahead of elections, which will be held in September or October. Lapid is irrelevant because in that merger, now it is Bennett that is leading the merged party, which is called Together.

Which is quite complicated when you read the words, right? Bennett’s Together? What? No, capital T Together, that’s what they’re called. So Bennett is, I suppose you would say, at the moment, the main challenger to Netanyahu. And then there’s Gadi Eisenkot.

Borschel-Dan: Before we move on to Gadi Eisenkot, you said Lapid is irrelevant. And I would put to you that davka, as we say here, he is not irrelevant. And in the very joining of forces with Bennett, Bennett probably lost a whole electorate, actually. So all of this is very, very complicated, and it is very personality-driven, even though it’s a party election situation, a parliamentary election.

Horovitz: Okay, so let’s address that because Lapid is irrelevant in terms of, he’s not going to be the next prime minister of Israel. I don’t even know that he’s going to be the number two in that party because he has said, I’ll do whatever is necessary. And maybe they’ll merge with Gadi Eisenkot’s party, I don’t know. So Bennett is the key challenger, which is my only point. Of course, when they merge, I mean, really, folks, it’s gonna get worse for another few months, but it’s very complicated. When two parties merge, their goal is to together be worth more than they would be separate, but there’s an argument to be made that Bennett and Lapid merging, a right-wing politician and a centrist politician, as you say, potentially alienating a swathe of the electorate. If you don’t like Netanyahu, you’re a Zionist, you’re right-wing, you were maybe gonna vote for Bennett, and now he’s merged with Lapid, that might be a problem for you. You might look elsewhere. You might look to [MK] Avigdor Lieberman, who we didn’t mention, another right-wing Zionist politician, who lives in a settlement, pretty hawkish, very anti-Netanyahu.

You might be driving votes. If Bennett’s merged with Lapid, he might be driving votes to Lieberman; he might be driving votes elsewhere, so you’re absolutely right about that. And then there’s the Eisenkot factor. Now, Eisenkot is a former chief of staff. I don’t know where he would place himself. I think he would like to think of himself as broadly somewhere in the center, maybe a little to the right of center on security issues. We’ve seen him visiting settlement outposts quite strikingly just a few weeks ago. He was allied with Benny Gantz, who was a former high-rising Israeli politician who almost unseated Netanyahu, and I would say has made a succession of bad political choices and is struggling to even return to the Knesset, according to the polls. Eisenkot struck out on his own, abandoned Gantz, chose not to continue to work with Gantz, and has risen. Indeed, what usually happens is when politicians who by definition are egotistical — so when egotistical politicians break away, sometimes they enter the political theater on a huge high and you see them, you know, the mayor of Tel Aviv, Ron Huldai, I don’t remember, a couple of elections ago, set up a party, ran, he was polling at seven seats, which is not terribly good, but suggested that there was something there, and it all just evaporated.

Very typical process. Eisenkot strikes out on his own. He conveys a certain [former prime minister Yitzhak] Rabin-esque, I suppose, Yitzhak Rabin-esque conviction and sincerity. He’s certainly not polished. If he has charisma, it’s that kind of anti-charisma of an ex-general. He’s certainly not smooth or slick or anything like that, but he seems to speak with conviction. And the sense of sincerity and public service is underlined by the fact that his son was killed fighting in Gaza, and a nephew was killed as well. This is somebody who has known terrible loss, who himself was a soldier for decades, and rose to Chief of Staff. In other words, someone who is credibly coming from a background of commitment to the public good. I think that’s been very helpful. And what we’ve seen is we’ve seen his numbers rise, and it’s certainly not clear, however, that he’s taken votes from the pro-Netanyahu block. He may have dented Bennett’s rise. You can assess where the votes are coming from. It’s pretty complicated. But the fact is that Eisenkot is rising. I would say at the expense, a little bit, of the merged Bennett-Lapid alliance. And maybe the most striking — don’t take it too seriously — poll finding was again just in the last few days.

Pollsters often see, even though it’s not relevant because we don’t directly elect our prime minister, who do you think is more appropriate to be prime minister? And even at Netanyahu’s real lows, and he’s been lower closer to October 7, 2023, when he appeared to be really finished politically. He’s generally been relatively popular in a one-on-one against almost anybody. So in the last few days, for the first time, you saw a poll to the whole Israeli public in the polling, all the respondents — who do you think would be the most appropriate prime minister for Israel? Bennett is less popular than Netanyahu. Lapid was always, certainly as long as I can remember, maybe there were times that it was different, I don’t think so, less popular than Netanyahu. Eisenkot overtook Netanyahu by a narrow margin, not far beyond the margin of error, as a more appropriate choice in the minds of Israelis to be prime minister. I wouldn’t get carried away, but it does underline that he has a growing appeal and that people have a sense that here is somebody who would do his best to put Israel’s interests first.

You’d think that’s a ridiculous thing to say. Doesn’t everybody assume the prime minister puts Israel’s interests first? Where Netanyahu is concerned, certainly as far as his critics are concerned, Netanyahu does not always put the national interest first. He puts his personal interest. He’s trying to avoid going to jail. He’s maneuvering. He’s doing things, he’s kept the Haredim out of the army, all so that he can retain power and so on. I think with Eisenkot, for sure, he’s trying to become prime minister, but I think that poll showing suggests a growing public belief that here is somebody who might be good for Israel. I wouldn’t get too far carried away, but I think it was an interesting poll finding.

Borschel-Dan: But I think the key will be siphoning off some of the Likud voters. And in terms of his personality makeup, he’s definitely Eisenkot, somebody who rose from the grassroots. He’s not coming from the elite like Netanyahu or Bennett definitely is associated with high tech. He’s a millionaire from high tech. So he has that elitist kind of personality. So does Yair Lapid. So Eisenkot potentially maybe could kind of speak to the “sane” Likud voter who is a little fed up with the [MK] Tally Gotliv type personality overrunning and behaving badly in front of cameras. But everything is still fully open, and we are approaching 50 years since Operation Entebbe. And why do I even mention this? Because, of course, the sympathy that the Israeli voter has with Eisenkot comes from his status as a bereaved father, which is, as we say, kadosh, it’s sacred. But one of the reasons why our prime minister rose up through the ranks is because he, too, has the status of a bereaved brother. And so very shortly, the whole world, or at least our world, will be reminded of that status with the observation of 50 years to this heroic operation where his brother Yoni [Yonatan Netanyahu] fell.

It’s so fluid, there’s no way of knowing right now. But what we haven’t really talked about is whether [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich or [MK] Itamar Ben-Gvir is going to pass the electoral threshold. And there was talk for a while, at least, that Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the religious Zionist party, was not going to make it. It seems like at this point he is. What are you saying, David?

Horovitz: So first of all, it’s interesting that you mentioned Entebbe, and in a way, for Netanyahu, the elections are going to come too soon, right? It would be more convenient for him, from the Entebbe point of view, if elections were being held a little closer to that anniversary, as opposed to September/October, when we’ll be coming up to the anniversary of October 7. That’s a big issue for him. You talk about the “sane Likud,” which sounds like an outrageous thing to say, but you watch the antics of someone like Tally Gotliv in the Knesset yesterday, fighting losing her immunity. She’s trying to not lose her immunity from prosecution for publicly exposing a Shin Bet agent. I mean, outrageous stuff. There’s outrageous stuff all the time. The remarks of the Justice Minister, who, when pressured by the Supreme Court to appoint judges and cooperate in the matter with the president of the Supreme Court, says, “you’re absolutely right, I will do that when there is a president of the Supreme Court,” because he has decided to demonize and delegitimize the current President of the Supreme Court [Yitzhak Amit].

So, you may have said something that to some listeners would sound, “wait a minute, this is the party of government, and you’re saying the same people don’t want what’s going on there?” There’s really a basis for that. And in terms of where votes are going, including to the far right of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, Ben-Gvir is very safely way above the threshold, depending on the polls, heading for eight, nine, or 10 seats. I think there are probably people who, depending on where Netanyahu steers, because he may try to steer a little bit towards the center, because he would feel that the right is safely in his camp, I think you might see more votes going in the Ben-Gvir direction, publicly very populist, I would say, viciously racist as regards Arabs, Palestinians, thuggish in his behavior. I don’t know how much there is appeal for that, but there seems to be some appeal. So I don’t think Ben-Gvir is in any danger. I think he’s a rising force on the far right. And as you rightly say, Smotrich, however, was polling just below the threshold in the last few weeks.

Again, let’s not get too carried away about polls, seemed to be making it over the threshold. But of course, if things are going very badly on the far right, Netanyahu will do his utmost, as he’s done in the past, to tell Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, “Run together in the elections, artificially merge your party slates, and then after the election you can split apart. But we don’t want all those votes going to waste.” That may not be necessary because Smotrich may be doing well enough. And you see that on the anti-Netanyahu side as well. You see, we mentioned Benny Gantz before. Benny Gantz is hovering around the threshold in the anti-Netanyahu Zionist camp. The pressure is on Gantz: step aside, do not run again. You risk throwing tens, even hundreds of thousands of votes away. And our elections are often decided by very small margins. So one of the factors to watch as things get closer, I wouldn’t expend too much energy on it until then, is — on which side of the spectrum are they being just more politically smart? Netanyahu is reliably smart, reliably crushes parties together, and merges. We don’t want to waste any votes.

You might have minor ideological differences, put that aside for now; we don’t want to waste votes.

Whereas in recent elections, you saw Meretz fall below the threshold because Labor would not merge with Meretz. Lots of votes wasted. One of the Arab parties fell below the threshold because they couldn’t get it together. It’s generally been the case that Netanyahu wields his authority and brings the right side of the spectrum into sensible decisions. And on the center-left, much less effective. So that will be a factor too.

Potential political tensions in the upcoming World Cup

Borschel-Dan: So David, I’m not a sports fan, and for me, politics is kind of filling that vacuum, shall we say. But sports fans around the world do have their eye on this major event that’s coming up very soon. What’s it called again?

Horovitz: Oh, you’re not talking about the Israeli elections? You’re talking about that soccer thing?

Borschel-Dan: Right, that soccer thing, which might offend some.

Horovitz: I’m offended to have said the word “soccer.” Of course, football. Yes, the World Cup.

Borschel-Dan: Right. And so there has been a little bit of political tension around this particular World Cup. And I wonder, when is the opening ceremony?

Horovitz: It’s a few days from now. The whole thing, Thursday is the first game, I think.

Borschel-Dan: Exactly. And so, David Horowitz, where are you putting your attention?

Horovitz: Really?

Borschel-Dan: Yeah.

Horovitz: Honestly, I hadn’t given that much thought generally. Of course, I’m an Arsenal fan, which might alienate some viewers. That was a very good year for us, fortunately, or a pretty good year. “Us,” of course, I played particularly well in my Arsenal kit.

Obviously, I grew up in England, so that’s a thing where there are Arsenal players, there are a few for France, there are a few for Norway, you know, there’s some good play in the England team as well. But also, of course, it’s behavior during the Holocaust that’s a big factor. So that, it’s sort of a Denmark and Bulgaria kind of thing. But I hadn’t given it much thought yet. But it will be a very entertaining spectacle taking place in the United States with Iran in the tournament. Boy, you’re not going to be able to keep politics out of this either.

Borschel-Dan: David, to be continued. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Horovitz: Thanks, Amanda.

Borschel-Dan: Thanks for listening to The Times of Israel’s Daily Briefing. Please check out another episode tomorrow. This episode was produced by Yitzchak Ledee. Until tomorrow, Shalom.