Hadeel Al-Shalchi
speaker
31 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 7 Dec
Hadeel Al-Shalchi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Hundreds of people gathered in Manger Square in Bethlehem near the site where Christians believe Jesus was born.
A prayer was read and cheers broke out as people stood around the giant Christmas tree.
Bethlehem Mayor Maher Kanawati spoke.
We will raise our voices with a message of peace that comes from the pain we experience, he said.
Since the war in Gaza broke out, the Israeli military has ramped up its operations in the West Bank and restricted movement.
contributing to a fall in tourism in Bethlehem.
According to the local government, unemployment rose from 14% to 65%.
Today, there is cautious hope that the new year will bring peace.
Hadil Al-Shalchi, NPR News, Tel Aviv.
Consider This from NPR · Why did Israel restart the war? One answer: Bezalel Smotrich. · 28 Mar 2025
podcast
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was once a wanted man by Israel's version of the FBI. In 2005, Israel was rocked by mass protests. Israeli settlers were demonstrating against the removal of Jewish settlements from Gaza. At the time, Dvir Kariv was an agent with Israel's internal security agency, the Shin Bet.
Kariv says late on July 11, 2005, they raided a home in central Israel.
He says, in the basement, we found several jerrycans filled with a lot of oil and fuel.
They arrested five people there. One of them was a student called Bezalel Smotrich. Kariv says the men were interrogated for three and a half weeks. From the Shin Bet's perspective, we successfully thwarted what Bezalel Smotrich and his group had planned, Kariv says.
While he says he can't divulge what that was, Israeli media has reported that Smotrich and his group were planning to blow up a major Israeli highway. Smoltrich remained completely silent during his interrogations and was released without charge. He did not give away his secrets, but later as a politician, he spoke a lot about what drives his political motivations.
My long-term desire is for the state of Israel to be governed according to the Torah, or Jewish holy scripture, he once told Israeli radio. Smotrich is an ultra-nationalist religious Zionist, a type of Judaism that branched out from the secular Zionist movement that founded Israel. While many ultra-religious Jews historically rejected the Zionist movement, a minority accepted it.
Many of them embraced the settlement movement after Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the War of 1967. Tomer Persico is a scholar of Jewish extremism.
Persico says Smotrich is on the far right of the spectrum of religious Zionism, also known as ultra-Orthodox nationalists, who follow Jewish law and reject values like feminism, liberalism, and LGBTQ rights. Smotrich and his followers believe that the Israeli-occupied West Bank is the Jewish people's ancestral home featured in the Bible, a God-given land they must make a permanent part of Israel.
Smotrich, a lawyer, was first elected to parliament in 2015. Two years later, he wrote a manifesto called Israel's Decisive Plan. In it, he writes how to tackle the main obstacle to settling the West Bank, the Palestinians.
Only a few years later, Smotrich became the leader of the religious Zionist party. Ohad Tal is a lawmaker in Smotrich's party.
Smotrich was perfectly poised for what happened in the most recent Israeli national election. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won and looked for allies to form a coalition. But he's facing trial on corruption charges. Persico says Netanyahu was desperate.
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