Sima Shine, Alireza Nader, and Jonathan Rynhold consider the achievements of Israeli and American action in Iran. Were the aims to degrade or destroy the Iranian nuclear programme? What do they assess has been the true damage to the programme? What comes next in this war, and what do the latest developments signify in terms of the grip the Tehran regime holds on the country?

Tal Becker is the vice president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, where he leads educational initiatives on Israel in the Jewish world. He served until recently as a legal advisor with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has been a senior member of Israeli peace negotiation team in successive rounds of peace negotiations. He also played an instrumental role in negotiating and drafting the Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain. America. In this interview, Becker recounts his time negotiating during the Annapolis process and the Abraham Accords, and shares his insights about creating a better future in the Middle East.

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.

Veteran negotiator Ambassador Dennis Ross speaks to Fathom about his experiences of multiple thwarted Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. A scholar and diplomat with more than two decades of experience in Soviet and Middle East policy, Ambassador Dennis Ross played a leading role in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process, dealing directly with the parties as the U.S. point man on the peace process in both the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. 

Azar Gat, Ezer Weizman Chair for National Security at Tel Aviv University, speaks to Calev Ben-Dor about the war in Gaza. Gat argues that failing to fully defeat Hamas would constitute an existential threat to Israel: not in the sense that Hamas alone can destroy Israel, but in the impact that Israel’s inability to defeat those responsible for 7 October would have on the psychological security of Israelis. He asserts that while it is not possible to remove Hamas as an idea, or even as a guerrilla movement, it can – and has largely already been – successfully defeated as a governing entity.

Counter-terror expert Matthew Levitt speaks to Fathom about Hamas’s vision and strategy. What is Hamas’s strategy for the destruction of Israel? Is it strategically divided? What are the chances of a rapprochement with Fatah? What does Levitt mean by Hamas following the ‘Hezbollah model’?

Fathom speaks to Toby Greene about two articles co-authored with Professor Jonathan Rynhold and dealing with the political future of a post-Hamas Gaza: ‘Beyond Humanitarian Aid: A Plan for Gazan Civilians Is a Strategic Necessity for Israel’ and ‘URGENT: An Israeli Strategy for a Post-Hamas Gaza’. Despite Prime Minister Netanyahu’s repeated denial that Israel will support the involvement of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Greene says that ‘if you don’t want continued Hamas rule and permanent Israeli occupation you have to work with what tools are available (which is a potentially reformed PA).’ Greene advocates the kind of technocratic approach once seen under former Prime Minister Fayyad, saying ‘a key component of getting from where we are now to Palestinian statehood is credible bottom up state-building institutions albeit within a credible diplomatic path that can work in concert with it.’ Toby is a Visiting Fellow in the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and a Lecturer in the Department for Political Studies at Bar Ilan University. He is the author of Blair, Labour & Palestine: Conflicting Views on Middle East Peace After 9/11. He is also a former deputy editor of Fathom.  

Journalist and Middle East analyst Jonathan Spyer talks to Fathom about the Iranian threat and the Western response to it. Spyer is director of research at the Middle East Forum and the author of The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict. He is a veteran of the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006 and has been a regular contributor to Fathom for a decade.

Jack Omer-Jackaman and Calev Ben-Dor interview Fania Oz-Salzberger, an Israeli writer, history professor and public intellectual. They discussed her thoughts about 7 October, the ensuing war, the Israeli government and her disappointment with parts of the international left. Oz-Salzberger is Professor Emerita at the University of Haifa Law School and previously taught at Princeton, Monash University, Munich University etc. Her field is the history of political thought and her books include Jews and Words, coauthored with Amos Oz. She is a peace and democracy activist.

Jack Omer-Jackaman and Calev Ben-Dor interviewed Einat Wilf. They discussed Wilf’s essay ‘Zionism as Therapy’, which seeks to correct anti-Zionism’s success in divorcing Zionism from its intellectual and historical origins. Wilf is a leading thinker on Israel, Zionism, foreign policy and education. She was a member of the Israeli Parliament from 2010 to 2013, where she served as Chair of the Education Committee and as a Member of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee. She is the author of seven books, including We Should All Be Zionists.

Calev Ben-Dor and Jack Omer-Jackaman interviewed Michael Milshtein, a leading expert on the Palestinian arena. They discussed the failures which led to 7 October – which Milshtein characterises as a failure of understanding as much as intelligence – and the current state of Israel’s war in Gaza.