You are listening to an Art Media Podcast. Hi, it's Dan. This is a sneak peek from the members-only edition of our show, Inside Call Me Back, where we pull back the curtain and have the conversations we typically have after the cameras stop rolling. This week, Amit was on the hot seat, taking your questions. I hope you enjoyed this segment, and if you want to get the full episode and support our mission at ARK Media, please become an Inside Call Me Back member by following the link in the description or by going to ARKmedia.org. That's A-R-K-Media.org. And to all our insiders, thank you. It's your support that keeps the lights on at ARK Media. amit welcome back to the inside it's been a minute thanks for having me again amit i gotta tell you i feel these days like i'm not the host of a podcast i feel like i'm basically an info desk i'm the recipient of a steady stream of whatsapp messages text messages email messages and phone calls all asking me the same question when is the u.s military operation against iran going to happen the people who are mostly asking me this question are not asking me because they have any kind of geopolitical analysis that they need the precision of my timing prediction to input into their geopolitical analysis the reason they're asking is all about logistics these are people who are living in israel who have to fly out of israel but don't want to get stuck abroad if there's going to be a war and not be able to get back or they're people in the tech scene who are flying to israel to do business and they are excited to go to israel but they can't afford to get stuck in Israel and not be able to get out for days if a war starts. So they would like me to know if the coming military operation will affect their travel plans. And I don't have an answer, Amit. So on behalf of the hundreds, and I literally mean hundreds, hundreds of people who have reached out to me from acquaintances to friends to colleagues to close family, I ask you, Amit, would you travel in and out of Israel in the next few days? Okay. I am seriously about to print a T-shirt with which I'm going to go tomorrow to the market in Jerusalem with the title, I don't know when the attack is going to happen. Because that's the only way to skip the hundreds of people approaching to me. So you feel my pain. You feel my pain. Exactly And I want to make it even more dramatic I mean there is a difference We can sit here for an hour and discuss the timing And I might tell you that it something between days and weeks let say But then it totally different than someone with a flight ticket or you know a hotel reservation telling you listen should I cancel Should I go there or not Because then you are tested against your own predictions which is very very dangerous for a journalist Not because people will mock you if you say that Trump is never going to attack Iran and then he's attacked. This is terrible, but even more terrible than that is if your parents-in-law count on you. I just speak hypothetically, of course. And now they're stuck in London and they're angry at you and your wife is mad at you because she doesn't have a babysitter. So to be honest, I would never recommend anyone to really give, you know, an assumption or to make a prediction to someone with tickets. While I still think that the attack is imminent, not within days, but within weeks and inevitable, I would question those, you know, waves of reports or reporting saying exactly the same simultaneously. 48 hours ago, it was the war, you know, great negotiations with Iran, many concessions being made. And we are approaching an agreement. And all of a sudden, now it's no, we are heading to a war. This war is inevitable. This looks like a spin to me. So my general assumption hasn't changed. There is going to be an attack. It's going to be massive, unprecedented in the scope of Iranian wars. And yet it is not a matter of, you know, hours or days. Yeah, that's why I tell people, if you have travel plans, don't change them. All right, we've got a lot of great questions. Dan from Atlanta has a question. Dan asks, from listening to Amit on Call Me Back, I would imagine him being much closer to Naftali Bennett ideologically than to Netanyahu. Bennett is religious. He's pro-settlements. He advocates for ultra-Orthodox to enlist in the IDF. He's not corrupt. He's a Zionist through and through, writes Dan from Atlanta. And yet Amit seems to identify Bennett as his opposition, as your Amit's opposition. Why is Amit advocating for Netanyahu rather than for Bennett? But there is this question, I think, Amit, for people of your general ideological disposition. A lot of people over here in the diaspora don't understand why there isn't stronger support for Bennett for all the reasons that Dan from Atlanta just laid out. Okay, so over the last 15 years, I've been blamed by Netanyahu for being Bennett's mouthpiece, and by Bennett for being Netanyahu's mouthpiece, and by others for all of the above. However, I'll explain my ideology. And people mix. I mean, it's like guilt by association. I am not supporting any specific politician, and I will never do this. However, I support ideology. So, yes, I mean, I share something like I have never counted 75, 80 percent of the ideology that Netanyahu has and perhaps 80, 85 percent of the ideology that Bennett used to actually possess. However, in Israel, it's not only who is, I mean, who's running for prime minister, but who's on the hidden ticket. Now we don have a ticket with a vice president but just think about it as if you already know that the so vice president we call it coalition partners of Netanyahu is Smotrich Ben Gevier and the Altar Orthodox parties Not my favorite coalition, to say the least. But if you examine what Bennett says or has said recently, so the outcome is that his coalition consists of Yair Golan, Yair Lapid, etc. which is, I mean, even quite far from my ideology, both in terms of capitalism versus socialism, the future of the settlements, and first and foremost, about the judicial reform. According to Yair Golan, the judicial system in Israel is perfect. Now, Bennett, over the last few years, hasn't articulated any opinion regarding the judicial system, unlike in the past, when he said the Ottoni general in the army is more dangerous than it is in war. Just to explain how an extremist he used to be, I guess he no longer thinks this, which makes it quite harder for right-wingers to actually support him, both because of the new manifesto he introduces to the public and, first and foremost, his coalition partners. okay here's a question that's even closer to home oliver from israel dr oliver sanders writes amit segal's father recently wrote an interesting editorial in the newspaper makar rushon that the response to the attack in sydney the the terror attack that resulted in the tragic deaths of a lot of australian jews should not be to strengthen jewish life in the diaspora but rather to encourage Aliyah by all means. And then Oliver writes, this extreme Jabotinskyism is more common than you would think in the right of center, but non-extreme Israeli Jewish world. So somewhere in the just center right political segment of Israeli society, I wonder what Amit would think of his father's position. So here you are, Amit, having to be a spokesperson for your father, or at least provide insight on what you think. Okay, so since some of your most devoted listeners are part of my family, So I'll be quite picky when it comes to words. No, this is the inside coming back becomes family therapy. So we are here. Okay. The hell with them. Hi, Penny, Shira. We're putting all of you on the couch. We want you to work it out. Penny, Shira, Samantha, nothing personal. Okay. I just want to describe what happened in the 90s. In the 90s, my father's father, my grandfather, he made Aliyah at the age of five from Romania and he never left Israel again. So Israel was quite an important sacred place for us. But my mother's family, my mother was born in Pennsylvania and then moved to Beverly Hills 90211. No, 90210. No, no, no. She was in 90211. That's the tragedy. That's the tragedy. In a parallel universe, I'm part of, you know, a TV series. I mean, somehow I just don't see it. I don't see you in the Beverly Hills 90210, but that's a conversation for another episode. Go ahead. So you add insult to injury, I see. Yes. However my father wrote some of his most bitter op about the Jews who refused to make Aliyah to Israel Now this was a sensitive issue in the 90s Now just imagine the situation They live abroad and he writes op-eds. Now, I'll give an example. My father would never write a word against someone he knows personally because he's a polite guy. His mother was British. I mean, I'm adopted probably. I mean, every time I have Twitter fights with someone, I think, yes, I'm adopted. They picked up the wrong baby from the hospital. However, they all made Aliyah, every single one of them. And I think this is what he means. I'll give you my example, okay? There was a very famous book by Yossi Beilin, the founder of Taglit, a birthright, who wrote in the year 2000 a book named The Death of the Uncle from America. He tried to say that we used to have an uncle, very rich. he used to send us gifts to protect us to send letters to wish happy birthday but he died he's very old and he died and we must manage without him and i would like to expand i think that the next generation saw the cousin syndrome you know we have cousins some of them we become very close to them but the most of them we phone each other before passover to wish a happy passover or happy New Year, and every once in a while we meet in weddings or funerals. But now we reach the point of the second cousin once removed syndrome, in which we barely have mutual language. And I think what, I guess what my father meant was that we cannot, in this huge family named the Jewish people in 2026, we cannot rely anymore on the idea that they want to immigrate and all we have to do is just to give a budget to meet them here. We have to support Jewish communities abroad. We have to call the second cousin once removed in Passover and to say, do you need anything? Can I help you with something? I think this is at least my perception. Maybe we'll have him on a Call Me Back episode too. Amit, what do you think? I am afraid that he would be quite disturbed with the level of English because, listen, this is a tragedy, really. His mother, my late grandmother, was an English teacher born in London. That's it for our sneak peek today. If you want to catch the full episode, please subscribe to Inside Call Me Back by following the link in the description or by going to arkmedia.org. That's A-R-K-Media.org. Your support is what allows us to do what we do here at ARK Media. I hope to see you there. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Alon Benatar. ARK Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin-Aretti. Our production manager is Brittany Cohn. Our community manager is Ava Wiener. Sound and video editing by Liquid Audio. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.
