Yossi Alpher is a Mossad veteran, and he doesn't spare Israel. He says the mistake of 1967 was not the conquest but staying, that Jerusalem was never really reunited, and that Netanyahu's government has backed settlers who push Palestinians off their land. He is just as blunt about the Arab rejection of partition in 1947, about Hamas, and about what "from the river to the sea" means when either side says it. Answering a listener who asked for the basics, Daniella and Yossi Alpher also cover why the land is called Palestine, Areas A, B and C, Gaza, and end on Yossi's bottom line: the land has to be divided, and neither side is ready.

The Houthis now control Bab al-Mandeb, which means they control whether Saudi oil leaves the Red Sea. Yossi Alpher has stood on that coastline. In 1981 he traveled through Somalia, visited Hargeisa and the port of Berbera, and interviewed President Siad Barre in the courtyard of the presidential villa in Mogadishu, where Siad Barre, freshly abandoned by the Soviet Union, asked him what a country with no friends should do next.

In this episode, we talk about why the strait matters more than the headlines suggest, what it costs Egypt, why Israel has taken an interest in Somaliland, and the music Yossi bought on cassette in Mogadishu.

Then the other story of the week: the call from Abu Dhabi that warned Netanyahu ten days before October 7, the denial, and why a commission of inquiry depends on the October 27 Israeli election.

The Somali music clip is "Sharero 75" by Sharero Band, composed by Ahmed Naji Sa’ad (Axmed Naaji Sacad), from Light & Sound of Mogadishu (Afro7 Records). Used with permission.

To book the Sweet Sound podcast studio in Tel Aviv, email Ittai Shaked ittaisha@gmail.com.

A listener in New York asked how Yossi became a Zionist, and what he makes of the word now. The answer starts in Washington D.C. in the mid-1950s, with a Jewish education in which the Holocaust took up two sentences and Israel meant nothing at all. It was the Eichmann trial in 1961 that changed everything. Daniella and Yossi Alpher trace one man's Zionism from a kibbutz to the Mossad, and ask what is left of it after 1967, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and October 7.