Israel’s Near Death Experience - with Micah Goodman
Micah Goodman is on the speed-dial of a number of Israeli political leaders – from right to left, but especially on the center-left and the center-right. He is a polymath, a podcaster and one of Israel’s most influential public intellectuals, having written books ranging from biblical lessons for the modern age to Israel’s geopolitics. One book in particular, had an outsized impact in terms of its framing of the conundrum that Israel has been in with the Palestinians since 1967. That book is called Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War, Not only have all of his books been bestsellers in Israel, he essentially created a new genre; books that bring core texts of Jewish thought to a general, secular audience. But Micah has a new book, which he wrote in a four-month sprint following October 7.
His new book is called ‘The Eighth Day’, in which Micah tries to understand the implications of the nation’s trauma and what it means for the other ‘day after’ (not the ‘day after’ in Gaza, but the ‘day after’ inside Israel). What does this moment mean for Israelis? How will 10/07 re-shape Israeli society…and its politics? This is the first interview Micah has done about his new book, which will be published (in Hebrew) at the end of March.
Micah Goodman’s books:
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] What we were seeing was impossible. It was the unimaginable. And I think that was part of the state of shock that we were at October seven, but now we are transformed Israelis. Anyone that has visited Israel ever since October seven has noticed and realized that Israelis post October 7th, we're not the same people.
Part of the transformation that we're going through is for the first time in my life, in my generation's life. We could imagine something that we couldn't ever imagine before. We can imagine a reality where Israel doesn't exist. That's what October 7th did to us. It reminded us of something that we've all forgotten.
That this existence of the Jewish sovereignty of the state of Israel And like any individual that went through a near death experience, and then you got your life back, you're forever transformed. Because you know, not to take your life for granted, I think that's what we're going through as a nation. We went through a near death [00:01:00] experience, and now we are different Israelis.
Because now, Our sovereignty, our statehood will not be taken for granted anymore.
It's 1130 p. m. on Tuesday, March 5th in New York City. It's 6. 30 a. m. on Wednesday, March 6th, in Israel, as Israelis begin their day. Mika Goodman is on the speed dial of a number of Israeli political leaders from right to left, but especially those on the center left and the center right. He is a polymath, a podcaster.
and one of Israel's most influential public intellectuals, having written books ranging from biblical lessons for the modern age to Israel's geopolitics. One book in particular had an outsized impact, at least on me, and I think on many others inside Israel, in terms [00:02:00] of its framing of the conundrum that Israel has been in vis a vis the Palestinians since 1967.
The book is called Catch 67, The Left, The Right, and the Legacy of the Six Day War. I highly recommend it. Not only have all of his books been bestsellers in Israel, but he essentially created a new genre, books that bring core texts of Jewish thought to a general secular audience. Mika hosts the most downloaded podcast in Israel.
He's also an especially colorful and quotable character in the new book I recently wrote with Saul Singer called The Genius of Israel. But Mika has a new book, a really, really, really new book, as in He wrote it in four months, in a sprint, immediately following October 7th. His new book is called The Eighth Day, in which Mika tries to understand the implications of Israel's trauma, of the nation's [00:03:00] trauma, and what it means for the other day after.
We hear the term the day after all the time, usually referred to, what's Israel's plan for the day after in Gaza? But Mika writes about the day after inside Israel. What does this moment mean for Israelis? How will October 7th reshape Israeli society and its politics? This is the first interview Mika has done about his new book, which will be published in Hebrew at the end of March.
Mika Goodman on Israel's near death experience. This is Call Me Back.
And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast my long time friend Mika Goodman, who joins us from Israel, who I have been in touch with since October 7th, but has not been on this podcast since October 7th, because he's been fast at work on dealing with a number of issues and projects, not the least of which working on a book, which we're going to talk [00:04:00] about.
But first, Mika, how are you holding up? On a personal individual level, this is a nice time. Yeah, it's a good time. But on a national level, I'm very worried There's also a lot of potential at this moment. It's the most intense time of our lives. Mika, I think part of what explains some of the popularity of your Hebrew language podcast is that you're sort of Israel's national psychoanalyst.
You've dedicated your academic and intellectual life to quite insightfully making sense of Israel's history, its politics, its society, and its psyche. And your books offer forms of, if you will, prescriptions or treatment. Your new book is called The Eighth Day, which you wrote, which you crashed on, really, during the war.
And in a sense, you psychoanalyze the post traumatic nation in real time. You're writing it while you're processing and understanding what's going on in the country. What got them to this moment, and God willing, will move them forward. move Israelis forward. So in this conversation, I want to, I [00:05:00] just want to try to understand we, the term the day afters is thrown around a lot.
What's the day after plan for Gaza? Not as much attention is focused on what's the day after state of mind be in Israel. in Israeli society, it's politics, and in the, just the overall direction of the country, and I know that covers a lot, and I want to do as much of it as we can today, and maybe we'll lure you into coming back to continue the conversation.
We've lured you out of your writing bunker, which you've been in for four plus months, and, and you haven't given any interviews until now, so, or at least no English language interviews, so I want to start with October 7th. So I guess the first question I want to ask you is the Shabbat of October 7th.
Simchat Torah. Close to five months ago now. How did you experience that day? I was walking to Shoal, the synagogue, and uh, there were sirens going off. And I take my girls, we run into a bomb shelter nearby. And somebody shows me, I try to [00:06:00] stay away from screens in Shabbat. It's a very big thing for me, not, not to get close to screens in Shabbat.
And somebody shows to me her screen, she shows me that there's Terrorists in Sderot, on jeeps in Sderot, and everybody was around, looking at it, and they were looking at me because they think I know something, and I explained to them exactly what they're saying. I told them, listen, Israel is under attack, but it's a cyber attack.
What you're seeing, what you're observing, is deep fake. Iran is attacking Israel. It's a deep fake. It's not real. And what they want us is to panic. And they all looked at me and they think I know something. They think I have some kind of intellectual authority and they were all calmed. Okay. It's not real.
It's a cyber attack. It's deep fake. That's how crazy it was there. It was, I was looking at it, watching it, and it was completely unbelievable, uncredible. This isn't real by the most. Logical explanation I had it's a cyber attack. It's deep fake. They're trying to scare us There's not a chance in the world [00:07:00] That these terrorists managed to pass defense of gaza and to make it to sderot with jeeps filled with terrorists That wasn't a possibility So that I think explains the state of mind of myself and I think most israelis what we were seeing was impossible It was something it was the unimaginable and I think that was part of the state of shock That we were at October 7th, but I think we're still in a state of shock.
But now we are, I think we are transformed Israelis. Anyone that has visited Israel ever since October 7th has noticed and realized that Israelis post October 7th were not the same people. Part of the transformation that we're going through is for the first time in my life, in my generation's life, We can do something that we couldn't ever do before.
We could imagine something that we couldn't ever imagine before. We can imagine a reality where Israel doesn't exist. That's what October 7th did to us. It reminded us of something that we've all forgotten. That this existence of Jewish [00:08:00] sovereignty of the state of Israel is fragile. And like any individual that went through a near death experience, and then you got your life back, and then you're forever transformed.
Because you know not to take your life for granted and every moment shouldn't be trivialized. I think that's what we're going through as a nation. We went through a near death experience and now my generation could for its first time imagine a reality where Israel doesn't exist and now we are different Israelis.
Because now our sovereignty, our statehood will not be taken for granted anymore. Mika, there's been a lot of discussion and analysis since October 7th inside Israel about October 7th has changed Israel's view of what has been the status quo for the last several decades, the conceptia, as they call it, the concept in terms of the balance of power between Israel and its [00:09:00] various adversaries on its borders and its overall security doctrine that everyone places at the feet of Israel.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, obviously, but there, there have been many leaders at various points who've also been in the top seat from Naftali Bennett to Yair Lapid. The, the Concepcja was, was a consensus view. Completely. And I have spent a lot of time in Israel over the years, and when I meet with officials involved with the security establishment, I never heard real concern about the possibility of something happening like what happened on October 7th.
So how has this changed your thinking? I woke up. In the metaphorical day after October 7th, and I realized, you see, I, I, I like to think a lot about the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and as you know, I wrote a book about it, Kast 67, and in my Shavut, we had 30 episodes about the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
30 episodes and every episode, we try to take a different dilemma regarding the conflict and try to [00:10:00] articulate it, offer all the arguments for all sides, 30 episodes. And I think a few weeks after October 7th, I went back to my book, Kash 57. I saw there was not one chapter about Gaza and in 30 episodes, and we flagged at the book and our, and me and a frat's up here was a book's podcast.
There wasn't one chapter about Hamas. So this was a blind spot, a massive blind spot, in my own intellectual world. And just for our listeners to understand, Catch 67, it was focused on you had come, there's this debate in Israel between the two state solution and no solution, and you thought either of those, basically where you came down, in the near term, near to medium term, was unsustainable, so you were trying to come up with a way to shrink the conflict, even if we couldn't, even if we couldn't solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict, you were coming up with interim steps.
That could perhaps bring down the tension within the conflict. And you're, what you're telling me now is even in that context, you weren't even focused on Gaza and Hamas. You were focused on the [00:11:00] Palestinians in the West bank. Exactly. Gaza wasn't the chapter in my book and it wasn't the episode in my, in my podcast.
So I realize there's a moment where you realize. Oh my God, the blind spot of the entire intelligence and political and security establishment, which nobody saw that coming, was also my blind spot. And how embarrassing it is, it is as an intellectual that you wake up one morning and you realize that you think you're an out of the box thinker, but your mind is inside the box of the entire system.
You're part of the group thinking, maybe even contributed to the group thinking. That was for me, still is, a very shaking experience. I'm still asking myself, am I a group thinker? Like, I don't see myself as a group thinker, but I think no group thinker thinks of himself or herself as group thinkers. So for me, that was, that was a shaking experience.
And I think I know why I didn't think about Gaza. Why did I miss Gaza? Why wasn't Gaza interesting enough to [00:12:00] really think hard about? The way I understood, and still understand, although I have to revise my thinking, The Israeli Palestinian conflict, there's two threats that the Israeli Palestinian conflict presents on Israelis.
One threat is a security threat, and the second threat is a demographic threat. And these two threats are alive when we talk about West Bank or Judea and Samaria. Because if Israel leaves the West Bank or Judea and Samaria, choose your term, so that puts Israel in a real serious security threat. But if it stays there, it creates a reality where 1.
8 million Palestinians could integrate into Israel and then we could lose our massive Jewish majority. So if we stay there, we're risking our majority. If we leave the territories, we're risking our security. And I thought that's a very interesting and challenging dilemma. And all my focus was on that and Gaza, Gaza doesn't contain that.
Why? Because since we left [00:13:00] Gaza in 2005, the demographic threat doesn't really exist. The two point whatever million Palestinians in Gaza can't really integrate into Israel. So there's no demographic threat, and because this was my naive thinking, Gaza geographically and topographically It's not right above Tel Aviv.
So Gaza is a threat to 50, 000 Israelis living in the envelope of Gaza, which is a horrible thing, but a strategic threat to 5. 5 million Israelis living in the center of Israel. So it doesn't impose an existential security threat. It doesn't present an existential demographic threat. It's not existentially threatening our majority or our security.
So it's, it's a problem like car accidents and crime. It's a problem we have to think about, but it's not an existential problem. And that's why I let myself keep my eye off the ball of Gaza. The thought that Hamas Could pull [00:14:00] off what they pulled off and try to activate the entire Iranian octopus, because according to our Western logic, the strong activates the weak.
So Iran could activate Hezbollah, Hezbollah could activate Hamas, the strong activates the weak. On October 7th, Yigis Sinwar and all his team, they wanted to reverse it. Instead of the strong activating the weak, the weak tried to activate the strong. Hamas tried to activate the weak. Hezbollah, Tehran, the Houthi, and because they tried to do that and they almost succeeded, and to some extent they did succeed, so it turns out that Gaza is not.
A problem like car accidents or crime or traffic jams. It does present a strategic threat on Israel. That is what I didn't see. I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't see that, especially because you wake up in the morning and you realize that your blind spot is a blind spot of the entire system, which means your mind, your intellectual activity was somehow trapped [00:15:00] within the Israeli.
And as an intellectual and as a thinker, and as a person that was been thinking of this, this is in Hebrew, we say, there's a lot, I have to rethink the way I think about things. This idea that October 7th was the first time in modern times that we're like, Oh, this is what it looks like when there's not a Jewish state.
Can you explain what you meant by that? The founding fathers and mothers of Israel, they were alive in two different periods of Jewish history. They were alive in a time where Jews didn't have power, didn't have their state, didn't have sovereignty, and they were alive when Jews did have power and did have a state, and they saw they were existing in both periods.
And that's why they would never take Jewish sovereignty for granted, because they knew two things. One, that Israel is a miracle, and two, that it's a fragile miracle. Because they existed in a world where Israel didn't exist, they lived in a world where Israel didn't exist, they could imagine a world where Israel can't exist.
So that double awareness that Israel is a miracle and it's a fragile miracle, that created the [00:16:00] energy that created Israel. The founding fathers and mothers knew they can't risk this and they have to make this strong and build this and strengthen this. That's the founding fathers and mothers. Generation two, the miracle is less a miracle and doesn't seem that fragile.
By the time we go to generation four, Israel is taken for granted and people that are born here feel like this is so stable. This is here forever because my generation was born into Israel. And for us, the thought that Asia won't exist is unthinkable, and we lost what some philosophers call the tragic sense of reality.
The idea that everything could collapse, all achievements of civilization could collapse beneath our legs at any moment. That that could happen. And we lost that. And one of the interesting paradoxes, by the way, that I think we find in our Bible, but we could find in a very articulate way in the Dao De Jing, in the ancient Chinese philosophy, is the following paradoxes that when you think that reality is stable, it starts to [00:17:00] collapse.
But when you will realize that it could collapse, it could stay stable. I think what happens to Jews in the fourth generation is that you feel like it's so stable, you start messing around with it. And Dan, that's exactly what we started to do in the past in 2023. We started, which is what happened also in the past, what we, what we started entering, saying it's very close to a cold civil war in Israel.
We, I think we discussed this and you discussed this many times, this podcast, including with me. And, uh, that made us weak and our enemies saw the weakness and they wanted to leverage it. And they attacked us. And then October 7th happened. My generation has adopted the perspective of the founding fathers and mothers, because now just like the founding fathers, we saw 24 hours where Israel didn't exist.
I'm saying in the envelope of Gaza for 24 hours. There was no real sovereignty. The intelligence community didn't create the warning. The military wasn't really there. The [00:18:00] state of Israel for 24 hours, the black hole in my book, it called the black hole of Israeli history. It didn't exist. And just like the founding fathers and mothers also, we tasted a reality.
where Israel doesn't exist. And since now we live in a reality where Israel doesn't exist, now we could see the difference. And I think we're restoring the tragic sense of reality. We know that Israel should not be taken for granted. We know how fragile it is. And when you know when reality is fragile, that's when it becomes more stable.
And that I think is bringing out of many Israelis, the awareness that this thing is fragile, that we could imagine that this could end. That is bringing the best version out of Israelis in my book. I think it's creating the awareness. The fourth generation of Israelis is starting to adopt the attitude and the awareness and the perspective of the founding fathers and mothers.
I think because many Israelis are starting to see themselves. As the new founders of the next version of Israel in your book, [00:19:00] you make a distinction between political views and political identities and how they map over each other in Israel. I want to get to that at the moment before I do, can you just with a little more granularity describe what was happening in politics in Israel before October 7th, not an analysis of this party was doing that and that party was doing this, but, but what was it representative of?
The politics of Israel pre October 7th was representative of what? Israel pre October 7th was, we were living in an optical illusion that Israel is divided into two political tribes which have very radically different values. And those values are clashing. And there was one tribe that saw itself as the Jewish tribe, the tribe that's more national, more patriotic, more Jewish, more connected to tradition, more connected to the past.
And that's one tribe. And the second tribe is the liberal tribe. The more Western tribe, the [00:20:00] tribe of human rights, the tribe of liberties, the tribe of Tel Aviv, not of Jerusalem, the tribe of secularism. And many Israelis started to believe the myth that were divided into two Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, liberalism versus Judaism.
And those tribes started clashing and the political system reflected that optical illusion. That's where we were living. Until October 7th, and we were with the victims of this optical illusion. In my book, I'm trying to argue that October 7th is breaking this optical illusion because Israel is not divided into two.
This illusion was bringing Israel down. Can we talk just, I wanna drill down for a moment on the Rad, on the Ultra Orthodox, because obviously they're in the news right now because of this debate over a draft exemption. I just talked about it recently with Aviva at De Gore at length that. There's all this talk, will the Israeli government fracture, will the war cabinet fall apart, will differences in war planning bring down the government, and I, I [00:21:00] constantly tell audiences in, in the West, you know, having spent time with most, not all, but most of the members of the war cabinet or their advisors, while there is personal animus between these men, I have a hard time finding much daylight in them.
Their overall at a high level their overall strategy and approach to what to do about Gaza But what to do about the actual war there's not that much disagreement So disagreement on what to do in Gaza is unlikely in my view to bring down the government and then this sleeper issue comes up Which is the Haredi military exemption.
So this is an issue that's come up before in Israel Can you explain how it's come up in the past in terms of its role in? Internal debates and how divisive it's become and then how it's playing out now I think a way to map out the Israeli political debate is ask every generation has one debate that becomes a dominant debate.
And that's the debate that divides Israel into two. Our political debate is a biography with three episodes. Episode number one, I would say, between 48 and roughly [00:22:00] 67. It actually goes into the 70s, but the turning point is 67, is that Israel was divided between roughly socialists and capitalists. That was The main debate, the government was led by a socialist party, a moderate dramatic socialist party been grin.
And, uh, they had a vision of a very egalitarian country based on values of socialism and these values will radiate the Israeli model of socialism to the entire world and the whole world will imitate Israel. It will be all going to lighten to the nations and there was a party called the Tzioni Makarim.
And Menachem Begin's party, they didn't like that. They wanted privatization and free markets. And that was a debate, it was a classic big government small government debate. 1967 changed the debate. It changed the debate because a new debate was born. And a new debate divided Israel into two. And it wasn't a debate about the size of the government, but the size of the country.
After the Six Day War, what do we do with all the land? Sinai, Peninsula, the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria. That's true. What do we do with all this land? And one [00:23:00] camp said we should We should hand this and we should make a deal and trade this land for peace. And the other camp said, no, we should settle this land.
And okay, you know, that, that debate. So we moved the grand transformation. Israel went through in the seventies. As a result of the six day war is that the debate was transformed instead of arguing that the size of the government, you know, taxes and privatization. The size of the country and all these, all these territories should be an organic part of Israel or should we trade them for peace?
And that debate divided Israel into two again. And then something happened roughly entering the 21st century. That debate started dying. It's not that the conflict, these really Palestinians conflict ended, but the debate over the conflict lost its energy. And the right became, I think, Most parts of the right became more pragmatic, the left completely over, most of the left completely grew out of the fantasy of the dream that peace is possible now and a two [00:24:00] state solution is possible in the foreseeable future.
And when that happens, no real debate replaced that debate. Land and peace replaced socialism and capitalism, but no real debate replaced that debate. And there's many competitors. Some people think that the new debate is like, we're like America conservatives versus liberals. And some people think it's the people versus the elites.
And some people think it's about the judicial reform. But if you go into all these issues. According to polls, most Israelis agree. By the way, Dan, in the height, height of the judicial reform, uh, debate, 57 percent of Israelis agreed that we need a reform, but much more balanced and moderate. There was like, I don't know, roughly 20 percent that wanted a radical reform.
And roughly the same amount of number that wanted no reform at all. So again, Israel is divided into three, but there is the optical illusion is divided into two. So no debate managed to replace that. Now, some [00:25:00] Israelis think, I don't know if this is going to happen, but it might happen that the new debate has enough energy.
To replace the debate of land and peace and to create new dividing lines in Israel is the debate over the ultra Orthodox community. And the reason why this, the new dividing lines in Israel won't be right left, will be the people that are serving and the people that don't serve. So if this new, the policy debate gains traction, gains momentum, and it seems like it will, this policy debate.
will transform Israeli politics, so it will actually reflect Israeli values. There is a division, they're polarized, but the division is not between right and left, but between the Israelis that serve and the Israelis that don't serve. This, I think, has two reasons. One, hybrid Israelis net each other, secular, religious.
Right wingers, left wingers spent 120 days together with each other and were willing to die for each other and they bonded and they [00:26:00] realized that they're very close to each other. Guess who wasn't there? The Old Swarthodox. So they didn't go through this bonding experience. That's one aspect. And the second, that's, I would say a emotional aspect, but now there's also an existential aspect where we woke up one day in the morning and we realized that we don't have enough soldiers.
Now this is, I think this is a tremendous, when we talk about a concept, a concept that collapsed. Um, one of the big concepts that collapsed was the idea that, that Israel could have a very, a small and technological army, a very small. I myself served in a reconnaissance unit of a brigade of tanks. And throughout my career in the military, I was belonged to one brigade.
They closed it. They shut it down. I moved to another one after a few years, they shut it down. I moved to another breed of things. They shut that one too. So in my career in the military, I saw how the army is shrinking. Uh, the paradigm that we don't need many tanks. We don't many soldiers. We're at a startup nation.
Sorry, Dan, that [00:27:00] illusion created the myth that without a lot of soldiers with a lot of AI and a 200 and air force and special units. a smart and small army can meet the threats. And now I think Israelis are realizing we actually need a lot of tanks, a lot of soldiers, and we don't have enough. And let me just share with you three conversations I had the past week.
One friend of mine was in Han Yunis for 120 days. And guess what? He's called for duty in June, June. And his wife told me, I don't want him to go. He did enough. And then another guy was in the up north for a hundred days. And he's just got home and he's out of a job by the way. I mean, this guy was a manager of storage, a lot of storage space.
He's back and his boss told him, now you're the guard. Sorry, you're the guard. Because you're back. Why? Because he's called back to duty in two months. So what is he going to do with him in the meantime? This is a massive crisis in [00:28:00] Israel now. And you realize we don't have enough soldiers. And now we're looking around and we see there's over 60, 000 ultra Orthodox that are in the age that can serve in the army.
If a fifth of them will serve, we have many of our problems solved. So on the one hand, mainstream Israelis have bonded. And the experience of bonding, the old Shorothaks weren't there. On the other hand, now we're recognizing on an intellectual level that there's a new need. We actually need them to serve.
You put these two together and you realize that it's very passable that the new dividing lines in Israel is not about big government, small government, big country, small country, but the people who serve because we need a big army and the people who don't serve. And they say that we don't need to serve.
Because our prayers and our studying does the work. Now, here's, here's the thing. I just want to say something. In the beginning the 50s and 60s it was clear we needed a big army. Everybody thought we needed a big army, but there weren't that many ultra Orthodox. We didn't really need them. Then the [00:29:00] ultra Orthodox community grew, but we were in the concept that we don't need a big army.
We need a small army. So we don't need them. Then, only now, after October 7th, we're in the moment where we realized we need a lot of soldiers. And there are a lot of ultra Orthodox Israelis. So this is a moment that might transform Israeli politics and create new dividing lines between Israelis. And do you sense that there are, it's been my sense, since before October 7th, we talked a little bit about this in our book, but I think I have been struck by this even more so since October 7th, this notion that Ultra Orthodox don't want to serve is too stark an observation.
It's, it's softer than that. It's not as rigid as, um, the political, uh, coverage of this debate would lead one to believe. Well, I think there is, um, the ultra, I think there is a very large group. Within the ultra orthodox israel that wants to integrate into israel the best way to integrate into israel is to serve in the army but there is four [00:30:00] groups within the ultra orthodox community which like the elite of the ultra orthodox community which is the leaders of the the school system like the yeshiva the school system The politicians, the rabbis, and the people that are controlling the newspapers, the internal newspapers in the ultra orthodox world, and they, that group is protecting the status quo.
I have a theory that the most powerful weapon they have is the shidduch market. You know, the, uh, the dating market, where if you serve in the army. Your value in a dating market goes down. That is one hell of a way to keep people in line, right? And why does that happen? Well, if you go to the army, if you serve in the army, so they might think about you, that you are now your Yiddish guide and you're less of a serious student.
Meaning, if you're not, if you're if, if you're not in the seminary, if you're in the battle, if you're in the army, you're not in the seminary. If you're not in the seminary, you're not as a lead of a student and you have best friends that are, [00:31:00] listen, when you're in the army, even if you're very religious, your best friend becomes a secular Israeli and you become his best friend.
And then you breathe in, you know, his values and his ideas and the whole idea of ultra orthodoxy is to protect, preserve my identity. By protecting it, by closing it off from the external world. Serving in the army means that you are, you are in high interaction with we with the western secular world.
Right. You're fully integrated as opposed to living a separate ultra orthodox communal life. Exactly. So if your brother went to the army, somehow already will say, not only does his. Value in the shut of market go down. Also, your value's going down 'cause you might be influenced by him. By the way, I don't understand en enough to talk about the shut of market exactly how it works.
But I do wanna pick up an idea here. And the idea is that one of the reasons why the why most kdi, even after October 7th, are not showing up. And they're not knocking on the, on the doors of the army. They're not [00:32:00] saying, I wanna serve, I wanna protect my country. It's not because they don't identify with Zionism and with service.
But because they're afraid, and I mean, some don't, some identify with the Haredi ideology of, of, of not serving in the arm because they're serving God through studying Torah, the alternative narrative, but many people are just afraid, and I don't think that fear Is something that could keep a community going for a long time and Israelis are now thinking if what's blocking them critical mass of them from serving is fear and it's not that they believe in this.
I mean, many of them stop believing in this ideology and identifying with it, but it's about fear. So there is different ideas of how can you crack fear now? I'm not a fan of breaking fear with alternative fear. Maybe there's other ways to do it, but that's an important Israeli debate. That we used to think it's a nice to have debate.
Now we realize it's an existential debate. We need these soldiers in order [00:33:00] to survive and win this war. I, you, you have made this point to me in the past in conversation. And I've even leaders within the Haredi community, albeit not on the record, have, have made this point to me that. The way the Haredi are organized and live this total separate life along the lines that you're describing in Israel and the way the majority of the men do not work and the majority of them do not serve, this is unlike any other time this community has lived in other parts of the world, in Eastern Europe before the founding of the state, this idea that everyone was a potential of the world.
elite student, and therefore everyone had a path to not working. It's just, at a practical level, it's just never existed before, that this period in Israel is, has been the, the outlier, not the other way around. Exactly, this is um, throughout Jewish history, Jews always valued Jewish education. And by the way, this was In Talmudic times, it was probably the first time in human history where there was the idea of democratization of education, where it's not only an elite that [00:34:00] learns that everyone, I mean every, all males have to, have to know how to read, how to write and how to learn.
And that is something way, way, way before modernity, the idea of democratization of education is an ancient Jewish idea. But throughout the generations, there was a, okay, we all have to learn how to read. But only a small part of the community will be excellent, will strive for excellence. And the ones that have the abilities to strive for intellectual Talmudic excellence, we will say, okay, you don't have to work.
You don't have to do anything. We'll take care of you. We'll give you scholarships. You're taken care of. You study. In Haredi Israel, a new invention was created, not a community. That enables the elites to learn, but a community that learns a community of learners. So it's the democratization of intellectual excellence.
Now, we treat you every one of you, as we used to treat in the diaspora as an excellent intellectual. [00:35:00] And I would say, and maybe this is, try to try to bring this home. One of the reasons why Israel developed this was that in the 1950s there was a sense within Israel. that the whole world, the yeshiva world, was destroyed in the Holocaust.
Because the greatest yeshivot were in Eastern Europe. In Lithuania, in Poland, it was destroyed in the Holocaust. And in the 1950s, a very, very tiny community of survivors came to Israel and said, we have one job and one job only, to rebuild everything that was destroyed. And the great rabbis of the time, the chazonish, and others said, Okay.
So for that, we'll change the model. It's not the model that one or two people learn and everybody works. We all learn because we have a mission. We have to rebuild what was destroyed by the Nazis. So in the 1950s, you had secular Israel trying to create the type of Jew that never existed before. The kibbutznik, the socialist, the secular, and that was one very passionate project of secular Israel.
And ultra orthodox Israel had another very [00:36:00] passionate project, but it was the opposite, not to create the Jew that never existed before, but to create a replica, an exact replica of the Jew that existed in Eastern Europe. So they want to create a reconstruction of the past, they want to rebel against the past, and that's Israel of the 1950s.
And by the way, the project of ultra Orthodox Israel of rebuilding the yeshiva world that was destroyed in Eastern Europe was so successful that today in Israel there is more yeshivot and more people studying the yeshivot than there ever was in Jewish history. So I would say in the 1950s the Haredim go to this project and they are winners.
They are winners. I would say they could teach us all a lesson of to learn how to lose. They got hit in the Holocaust and they picked themselves up. It's a great lesson. That's how you deal with loss. That's how you deal when you get hit. I would say now ultra Orthodox Israel has the alternative challenge.
Now they have to understand that their challenge is the other way around. What do you do with success? [00:37:00] What do you do after you've won? What do you do after you realize that you are victorious in your historical project? So they knew how to get hit and get themselves back up and I think and we all start to understand that just like it Will be a tragedy if Haredi community that knew how to lose And to pick themselves up, they don't know how to win.
They don't realize, okay, the project, we've managed to rebuild everything that was destroyed, and now we have to shift, change the paradigm. Because if they don't change their paradigm, it's not that the Haredi community is in trouble, I think our entire country is in trouble. Okay, Mika, I want to just wrap here in a few minutes, but one question I have to ask you.
The, the Israeli Palestinian issue, which we talked about earlier, has been definitional for Israeli politics, even when it wasn't definitional. I mean, it was definitional from, from basically the Intifada from 87 through the second Intifada, through the collapse of the Camp David talks between Barack and Arafat and Clinton in [00:38:00] 2000.
And ever since then, the Israeli public, most of the consensus in the Israeli public was There's, there's nothing to be done here. These people, these people, or at least their leaders are not serious about a peaceful coexistence. Obviously that. Has reached a whole new level since October 7th. If you remove the Israeli Palestinian issue as a focal point in the debate in domestic Israeli politics from the national discussion, that's a pretty big void.
Like, what is, A, what does that look like with just this issue just not being addressed, and B, what replaces it? This is a great opportunity of the future of Israel. That hybrid Israelis have always divided between themselves. Around this issue of land and peace, two state solution, if that issue is taken away, there is nothing that could really divide them anymore.
This is the promise. There's many ways that people are thinking about this war. And some people call it the Second War of Independence. Yeah, [00:39:00] yeah. Explain. When I speak to reservists, to soldiers, so I ask them, like, do you like this term? So I get two answers. Answer number one, in the First War of Independence, Israel was under existential risk.
We're not under the risk of the same level. By the way, before David Ben Gurion declared the State of Israel, um, he realized that a big war will break out. And he realized that it's a very dangerous war. And he asked one of his generals, Igal Yadin, what are our chances of winning this war? You know what Yadin told him?
Fifty fifty. And creating the State of Israel was a strategic gamble of Ben Gurion. We're lucky. We landed on the right 50 by the way, if we would have landed on the wrong 50 now we know how that could have looked like, right, right. But we landed on the right 50 I think there is real risks here. Some are existential.
I wouldn't say it's 50 50 I would say it's 95 five. Okay. Sometimes when I panic it's 90 10 okay but it's not 50 50 I mean there are scenarios you can imagine it's not 50 50 so we're not in the [00:40:00] second war of independence because of the size. Of the risk, but we might be in our second war of independence because of the size of the opportunity After the first war of independence israelis came home and built israel Many israelis feel that when this war is over our role of our generation is to found israel All over again to rebuild Israel.
And in that sense, it is the second war of independence, not because of the size of the risk, because of the size of the opportunity and the opportunities, but hybrid Israelis, they used to have all these optical illusions, all these false dichotomies, like the illusion that we actually have an argument about a two States solution that might appear tomorrow morning in a euphoric or against it.
Okay, when that issue is removed and other issues are removed, and we found each other when we were in reserves, and this is a moment where hybrid Israelis, which are very patriotic and very liberal, and they feel comfortable with these two, with living within, like living in this tension. They might [00:41:00] feel comfortable also with different tribes, secular and religious, soft right, soft left, to build the new coalition that could rebuild Israel.
That is the promise of this moment. That, that's, this is, I mean, this moment is pregnant with so much and maybe possibly very bad scenarios, but it's also pregnant with a real promise of the rebirth of Israel. By hybrid Israelis, all right, Miko, we will leave it there. That is certainly a high note, uh, to, uh, leave this discussion on what are otherwise, at least from here seem like very dark times, but, um, I am grateful as always for your voice and, uh, I, for, for those who are Hebrew readers.
I highly encourage you getting your hands on, on this book and for those who are not Hebrew readers, we'll try to figure out a way to, uh, get this, uh, Mika doesn't believe, by the way, that, that there'll be an audience for this book outside of Israel. I was just telling him I think there will be. There is many people interested in the conversation with Israel.
Over [00:42:00] here, abroad, and your book is, um, the pointing end of the spear on that, on that debate. So, thank you for the book, and thank you for the time, and I will see you soon. Alright, see you soon. Bye bye.
That's our show for today. If you want to keep up with Mika, the best thing to do is read his books. And we'll link to his books in the show notes. I highly recommend all of them. Especially Catch 67, and obviously The 8th Day. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom.
Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.