Sharren Haskel bustles into her office in the Knesset in central Jerusalem, a small entourage in tow and a massive smile on her face. “We’ve just had a big win,” announces Israel’s deputy foreign minister.

The victory she is referring to is a successful vote on the legalisation of medicinal cannabis.

At first, this seems incongruous. Is the rising star of the Israeli Right, the woman tipped by some as a future prime minister and referred to as “Israel’s Margaret Thatcher”, a secret hippy?

It’s all about trauma, she explains, trauma from Israel’s many wars and terrorist atrocities.

“We have a lot of people from the October 7 massacre who are being treated for it,” she says. “A lot of soldiers who came back from combat with post-traumatic stress.”

Opioids barely work, the minister contends, and are “extremely addictive”, whereas medicinal cannabis not only treats stress effectively, but also physical pain.

“We have quite a few soldiers who are amputees and they suffer from extreme pain because of the nervous system. This is one of the only medications that treats it to the point where they can actually sleep at night.”

We are speaking the day after the British government announced that agents of Iran would be forced to sign up to a new foreign influence register. It was a muscular-sounding move, but falls short of the outright ban on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that many argue is necessary to properly curb the regime’s insidious activities overseas.