What brought her down keeps him up: Ilana Dayan on Netanyahu, Eisenkot and October 7

Ilana Dayan has anchored Uvda, Israel's flagship investigative programme, for three decades. Six weeks before the 27 October election she joined Yonit Levi and Jonathan Freedland for Unholy Conversations to talk about the choice Israelis face, the two men at the centre of it, and what 7 October did to the country's belief in its own state.

Three arguments from the conversation.

Anne Hathaway and Benjamin Netanyahu

Dayan reads the internet's years-long hatred of Anne Hathaway as a verdict on a woman who wanted success and could not hide it. Reading a Haaretz piece on Hathaway's comeback in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, she set that double standard beside Benjamin Netanyahu.

A woman's ambition makes her toxic, she argues. A man's makes him serious. Netanyahu's obsession with the job makes him larger than life, and in her reading it is why his base never blames him for failure and always credits him for success.

"What brought her down keeps him up."

Gadi Eisenkot has a story

Dayan puts Gadi Eisenkot beside Barack Obama in 2008: a candidate who comes to voters with a story to tell. Born in Tiberias, raised in Eilat, the son of parents who came from Morocco. He climbed to the top of the military and became chief of staff. He lost his son in the war in Gaza.

That story, she argues, counts for more than whether he sits left or right of centre, or whether he can reposition himself on a Palestinian state.

"Gadi Eisenkot has a story."

The state was nowhere to be found

Dayan says 7 October broke Israelis' belief in the state because it broke the promise the state was founded on. Jews were being killed in Europe, in Iraq, wherever they lived, and Israel was built so they could stop dying and start living. On 7 October, she says, the state was nowhere to be found while people crossed the border, smashed the fence and killed.

Yonit asked her about the Uvda monologue on the sanctity of life that made waves in March. Her answer was that human life has to sit at the centre of who Israelis are.

"That's the essence of Zionism. That's it."

The full conversation runs to just over an hour and ranges well beyond these three moments. It is on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.