The Deep Dive

Jerusalem Post Podcasts

The Deep Dive is The Jerusalem Post's flagship podcast series, hosted by Jacob Laznik.  Each week, we review the top stories, put an up-close lens on a major topic, and dissect the main story of the week. 

  1. -4 ч

    The Iran story the mainstream media isn't telling you

    Everyone thinks the Iran file has stalled. Ex-IDF officer Or Horvitz argues the opposite: a quiet US strategy shift is already underway. In this Deep Dive episode, host Jacob Laznik sits down with JPPI Senior Fellow Or Horvitz, former head of the IDF's Hezbollah and Lebanon desk, to argue that Washington has quietly abandoned deal-making for a "maximum pressure 2.0" campaign aimed at the collapse of the Iranian regime, and that almost no one in mainstream coverage is naming it. Horvitz maps the two camps inside the Trump administration (Secretary Rubio betting pressure topples the regime, VP Vance betting it forces compromise), why he thinks negotiating with today's hawkish leadership is pointless, and how Iran's economic freefall sets a starting point far worse than the first sanctions era. "I genuinely now believe that there is no other way but to topple this regime," he says, while warning, "Iran is a bully, and you cannot appease a bully." Drawing on the Reagan-era pivot from containment to proactive pressure against the USSR, Horvitz explains why change has to come from inside Iran, what the West missed during the January uprising, his fear of a secret nuclear program in the desert, and the historic window opening in Lebanon as a cash-starved Iran can no longer fund Hezbollah. He closes on Syria's new leadership, the growing-but-lesser challenge of Turkey, and a plea to strip Israeli and American foreign policy of election-season politics. Sober analysis with, in his words, cautious optimism.

  2. 6 авг.

    Harounoff: Iran's greatest strength is that it's not a democracy

    Iran's regime slaughtered its own people in January and the world moved on. British-Iranian journalist Jonathan Harounoff speaks on the people nobody is negotiating for. More than a month and a half after the US–Iran memorandum of understanding was signed, talks remain frozen in what Harounoff calls a Groundhog Day cycle of revived and denied negotiations. The Iranian people were never on the agenda in the first place. Speaking to Deep Dive host Jacob Laznik, he describes a "tale of two Irans" — a regime with a bottomless reserve for missiles and cutting-edge military technology, and a population facing blackouts, water shortages and inflation it cannot survive. His sharpest point cuts against Western assumptions entirely: the Islamic Republic's single greatest strategic asset is that it isn't a democracy. It doesn't answer to polls, petrol prices or public fury, so its strategy is not to defeat Washington and Jerusalem militarily but to out-suffer them in a war of attrition, with the Strait of Hormuz as its bargaining chip. Harounoff spent nearly two years as Israel's international spokesperson at the United Nations, and he is unsparing about what he saw there: a Secretary-General who took two to three weeks to issue a statement of concern after the January killings, when comparable events elsewhere in the region would have produced a response within hours. He argues the deeper problem isn't indifference but access, the longest internet blackout in recent history sealed off the voices that might have forced the story onto the agenda, the gap his book Unveiled: Inside Iran's #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt set out to fill. And he closes on the observation that most unsettles Western listeners: the people lobbying him hardest for continued operations against the Islamic Republic are Iranians themselves: At Nowruz parties in Brooklyn, from families with relatives still inside the country. The ones with actual skin in the game.

  3. 30 июл.

    Is Israel written out of the new Middle East order?

    Netanyahu got his eighth Trump meeting, but no South Portico welcome, no cameras, no one-on-one. Former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Yaakov Katz asks what that silence means. Three months before Israelis vote on October 27, Yaakov Katz argues the more urgent question isn't who won the room, it's whether Israel is still in it. Turkey may get F-35s, Saudi Arabia is moving on a nuclear agreement, and the presidents of Lebanon and Iraq received the White House embrace and Oval Office cameras Netanyahu did not. "Is it possible that there's a new regional order that's being written here, that Israel just might not be one of the coauthors for?" Katz asks. On the anti-Iran coalition forming without Israel: "Israel is not being invited to sit at the table." Host Jacob presses Katz on two reports that landed this week: unreleased documentary footage of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, in which Graham questions whether Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are suited to Middle East negotiations given their financial ties in the Gulf; and a New Yorker piece in which former Biden administration officials say they were misled about Israel's plans in Gaza. Katz, who knows many of those officials personally, makes an argument that cuts against both camps: Biden and Trump were both deeply supportive of Israel, and neither will be on the ballot in 2028. Israel, he says, needs to get serious about the America that comes next.

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The Deep Dive is The Jerusalem Post's flagship podcast series, hosted by Jacob Laznik.  Each week, we review the top stories, put an up-close lens on a major topic, and dissect the main story of the week. 

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