Arab-Israeli conflict

After years as a reporter, Avi Issacharoff co-created an action series about an elite unit of the Israeli military whose members work undercover in the West Bank. Fauda is now streaming on Netflix.

The Seven Good Years spans the time between the birth of his son and the death of his father. Keret says his father, who was a Holocaust survivor, taught him to "look reality straight in the face."

The eight-part drama that begins Thursday stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a British baroness with an Israeli passport. She's a fearless actor in a show full of kidnappings, seductions and betrayals.

Journalist Ari Shavit says Israel must find a way to reconcile its democratic values with the reality of everyday life there. His new book draws from interviews with hundreds of Israelis — both Jews and Arabs — as well as his military experience and Zionist family history.

Author and journalist Yoram Kaniuk died June 8 at age 83. He joined Fresh Air's Terry Gross in August 1988 to talk about fighting in the Israeli underground and his belief that, for Israelis and Palestinians, "the only way is to live somehow together."

Director Dror Moreh interviews six former heads of Israel's Shin Bet security service in his Oscar-nominated documentary. The men look back on their work and conclude that continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinians will not resolve the conflict.

The Oscar-nominated documentary directed by Dror Moreh is not a defense of Israeli security policy, but a critique. The six Shin Bet heads Moreh interviews may believe in the tactics they devised, but it's the overall strategy they think is flawed.

Robert Malley, a program director for the International Crisis Group, analyzes the complexity of the situation in the Middle East, a region where conflicts interconnect and expand upon one another. "These alliances," says Malley, "are not clear cut ... they are alliances of convenience."

Journalist Peter Beinart supports Israel but thinks the Jewish settlements in the West Bank are compromising Israel's commitment to democracy. He has proposed a boycott of goods made in those Jewish settlements.

Peter Beinart's new book, The Crisis of Zionism, argues that Israel cannot be a true democratic state as long as there are settlements in the West Bank and calls for a boycott of goods made in those settlements. Gary Rosenblatt, publisher of The Jewish Week of New York, disagrees with this argument.