Dahlia Scheindlin – Israel and Hamas at War: Does Democracy Matter?

Israel is wracked by war, following the catastrophic attacks of October 7th. Israelis have mobilized for the home front, but their anger at the government is compounding earlier national turmoil.  Long before the current Israel Hamas War, Israel was facing an unprecedented social and political crisis over the nature of governance, democracy and the future of the country.  Join the Tel Aviv-based political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin, author of the newly-published book The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel, for a conversation about the convulsions of war and what it means for Israeli society. A longtime political consultant, Scheindlin argues that Israeli politics has long revolved around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is inseparable from Israel’s democratic crisis. Her book traces the historic erratic path of democracy in Israeli history, and the talk will open difficult questions about Israel’s missing constitutional anchor, the tension between Jewish identity and citizen equality, religion and state, borders, occupation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  

Scheindlin appears in conversation with investigative reporter Peter Waldman. 

Dahlia Scheindlin is a political scientist, a public opinion expert and a political consultant. She has advised nine national election campaigns in Israel since 1999 and has worked in fifteen other countries as well. In Israel, her research focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, foreign policy, democracy, human rights and civil rights, political analysis, and comparative conflict analysis. Scheindlin has regional expertise in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, post-conflict societies and transitional democracies. She holds a PhD from Tel Aviv University; she is a policy fellow at The Century Foundation, a regular columnist at Haaretz (English), and a foreign affairs analyst on the BBC television program, Context; she is among the founders of +972 Magazine and has co-hosted several podcasts including the Tel Aviv Review of Books and Election Overdose. She lives in Tel Aviv. 

Peter Waldman is an award-winning investigative writer with Bloomberg Green and Businessweek magazines and spent 22 years as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He was the Journal’s Middle East Correspondent for six years in Jerusalem and Amman and has reported extensively in Iran, most recently in 2015. The following year he was one of the first American journalists to interview Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. 

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