On May 28, 2026, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program (JKISP) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted a seminar with Yossi Melman, a longtime intelligence and security correspondent for Haaretz and author of ten books on Israel's intelligence community, including the New York Times bestseller Every Spy a Prince. Amichai Magen, Director of JKISP, introduced the talk, and Or Rabinowitz, Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies, led the conversation. Melman said Israel's 2026 war plan against Iran included an attempt to install former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a regime-change figurehead, an idea Mossad had cultivated for years through contacts made during his foreign travels. The plan collapsed when a strike meant only to kill Ahmadinejad's guards wounded him instead, a scheme Melman called "ludicrous," noting that Iranian intelligence already suspected Ahmadinejad of being compromised. He pointed to the assassination of Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, on the war's first day as an example of the tactical side of Israeli intelligence working exactly as it should. Turning that kind of precision into a lasting strategic outcome is the part Israel keeps failing at, Melman said.

Asked to connect this pattern to October 7th, Melman discussed the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Egypt staged repeated military drills along the border before its real invasion and trained Israeli intelligence to expect nothing. Melman said the same pattern held in Gaza. Female spotters had warned for weeks about unusual activity along the border, but their commanders told them to report only what they saw, not what they thought it meant, and Hamas had activated and deactivated emergency communications twice in the weeks before the attack, so that when the real signal came, Israeli analysts dismissed it as another drill. Mossad, Shin Bet, and military intelligence were still arguing over who was responsible for Gaza nearly two decades after Israel's 2005 withdrawal, and Melman said that confusion over jurisdiction was part of the failure as well. Asked whether Israel deliberately strengthened Hamas to weaken the Palestinian Authority, Melman said yes, since Hamas, unlike the Palestinian Authority, will never be negotiated with, which made it a useful tool for a government that wanted to keep the Palestinians divided. The biggest threat facing Israel right now, Melman said, is not Iran, Gaza, or Hezbollah, but rather the country's own internal polarization.

On May 26, 2026, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program (JKISP) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted a panel titled "Cross-Sectoral Mobilization in Defense of Democracy," part of a series on global democratic resistance organized in collaboration with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School; the Cornell Center on Global Democracy; Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania; the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame; the Democratic Futures Project at the University of Virginia; and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Amichai Magen, Director of JKISP, moderated alongside Ben Yoel, an incoming postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL for the 2026-27 academic year. They were joined by three founders of Israel's Protest Headquarters, the coordinating body behind the 2023 movement against the government's judicial overhaul: Yossi Kucik, former Director-General of Israel's Prime Minister's Office; Orni Petruschka, a former fighter pilot turned tech entrepreneur; and Advocate Dina Zilber, former Deputy Attorney General of Israel. Zilber said the crisis represented a shift “from policy conflict to regime conflict.” The government's plan would have let politicians pick judges and override Supreme Court rulings, among other changes, and Zilber said that went well beyond a normal reform. Kucik added that the Headquarters decided early on that its founders would act as enablers, not leaders. There were two hundred separate protest groups with their own methods and politics, he said, and no one person could have run all of them. The group adopted the Israeli flag and national anthem as symbols. They branded the government's plan a "judicial coup," and Kucik said they decided early on to stay nonviolent and to fight specific policies rather than try to topple the government outright.

Petruschka said funding came in approximately equal thirds from crowdfunding, Israeli philanthropists, and the Jewish diaspora. Zilber credited a volunteer network of 150 legal academics for writing up plain-language explanations of each proposed law as it came out, which provided “a nationwide civics lesson.” Petruschka said many protests around the world would benefit from the headquarters model. One concern for protest movements worldwide, according to Zilber, is the need to turn civic energy into political power, since voters choose parties, not protests. They also need a governing plan ready for the day after they win; Zilber pointed to Poland as a case where that did not occur. Kucik expressed concern that the Headquarters’s refraining from adopting an explicit goal to topple the government may have cost momentum. However, he noted the protests’ success; for example, an attempt to fire the defense minister over Haredi military conscription brought around a million people into the streets within minutes and pushed coalition partners towards near-defection, leading Netanyahu to draw back on his reforms. Petruschka said the movement's momentum was cut short by October 7th, redirected toward wartime relief, and has since folded into the campaign for Israel's coming elections.

On May 21, 2026, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program (JKISP) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted Ambassador Daniel Shapiro for the latest installment of its Israel Insights webinar series. Ambassador Shapiro, a distinguished fellow with the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, joined Amichai Magen, Director of JKISP, and Or Rabinowitz, Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies. Ambassador Shapiro described the Trump administration as caught between three unappealing options on Iran's nuclear program: an ongoing stalemate over the closed Strait of Hormuz, military escalation that risks a global economic crisis, or a far weaker nuclear deal than Trump has demanded. He discussed similar issues of refusal to disarm obstructing negotiations in Lebanon, where Hezbollah's refusal to disarm blocks normalization despite new talks among ambassadors in Washington, and Gaza, where Hamas's refusal to disarm has stalled the transition to non-Hamas governance.

On U.S.-Israel relations, Ambassador Shapiro said Israel's standing in American public opinion is the lowest he recalls, primarily due to the toll of the Gaza war, but also due to the rightward drift of Netanyahu's coalition and Netanyahu's history of partisan relationships within U.S. politics. He outlined the difference between legitimate debate over the terms of U.S.-Israel security assistance and arguments that question Israel's existence as a state. Looking ahead to Israel's elections, expected between September and October, Ambassador Shapiro argued that rather than a pro- versus anti-Netanyahu split affecting the outcome, votes will be affected by public opinion on whether the government succeeded against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran; Israel's eroded international standing; and the ultra-Orthodox exemption from military service. Asked to close with his thoughts on Israeli-Saudi normalization, Ambassador Shapiro, drawing on his direct involvement in pre-October 7th talks and a return trip to Saudi Arabia in December, explained how the widening Saudi-UAE regional rift and the unresolved Iran war further complicate Riyadh's existing conditions for a deal.

On April 16, 2026, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program (JKISP) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted political theorist Tomer Persico for the 20th installment of its Israel Insights webinar series. Persico, a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and Senior Research Scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, joined Amichai Magen, Director of JKISP,  and Or Rabinowitz, Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies, to trace liberalism's surprising roots in Zionism's founding — including the once-overlooked fact that Menachem Begin's Herut party, not the ruling socialist left, was Israel's most consistent liberal force in its early decades — through its 1990s peak and into its present crisis. Persico argued that liberalism's troubles stem not from failure but from success: having become "the only game in town" after the Soviet collapse, it lost the ideological competitors that once distracted from its core weakness, namely that liberalism is an arrangement rather than a story, and cannot tell people who they are or where they belong. That vacuum, he said, is now filled by populism on the right and identitarian politics on the left, and in Israel, by religious fundamentalism.

Pressed by Magen on whether liberalism can defend itself against illiberal threats — from autonomy's corrosion of community to AI's challenge to human-centered politics — Persico argued that liberalism must be paired with complementary sources of meaning, such as tradition, religion, and nationalism, rather than trying to supply its own story. Turning to Israel's coming elections, he criticized Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, calling them fundamentalists pursuing a theocratic "halachic state," and argued the Likud has shifted from a liberal to a populist party under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since 2015. He said the liberal camp must reclaim patriotism and Judaism itself from the religious right, rather than cede both. "We can have authentic, real Judaism as secular people, or as liberal religious people," he said, warning that failing to do so risks producing "a Jewish Iran."

In a seminar hosted by the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Matthew Levitt, who directs the Washington Institute's Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, discussed the Middle East's changing strategic landscape through the lens of the 2026 Iran conflict. While Israel and the United States have achieved significant tactical successes against Hezbollah and the Houthis, Levitt argued, the countries have struggled in progressing the victories to long-term resolutions. He said state actors alone do not drive the region's conflict, but rather that proxy networks and aggressive public relations narratives hinder efforts towards stability.

Levitt then discussed the larger geopolitical effects of the conflict, including the shrinking chances for traditional peace agreements and increasingly negative international views of Israel after the October 7 attacks. He suggested that real changes in Israel’s global position would need political shifts and more transparency at home, while also noting the deep domestic doubts about solutions like a two-state framework. The discussion included the role of outside powers — especially China — in influencing regional dynamics through economic ties to Iran. He also touched on the likelihood that U.S.-Israel relations will increasingly shift from direct aid to joint investments in technology and defense.