One Year Since October 7th - with Yossi Klein Halevi
As we approach the grim one-year anniversary of 10/07, we are featuring a dedicated series in which we take a longer horizon perspective, asking one guest each week to look back at this past year and the year ahead. If you are listening to this episode on a podcast app, please note that this series was filmed in a studio and is also available in video form on our YouTube channel.
For the third installment of this special series, we sat down with Yossi Klein Halevi, who is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Yossi has written a number of books, including his latest, "Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor," which was a New York Times bestseller. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Times of Israel. He is co-host of "For Heaven's Sake" podcast.
Yossi Klein Halevi's books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001IXOA04
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
YKH: What we learned on October 7th, Dan, is that for the last 20 years, we were living a fantasy. And that fantasy was that we could somehow coexist with genocidal enclaves literally on our border. And we thought that this was all somehow manageable. You know, the policy of feeding the beast will appease Hamas and by allowing hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar to flow through. And in the North, we'll be able to deter them. And it was all a fantasy. And what we learned is that when you live next door to enemies who say to you, ‘one of these days we're going to cross the border and we're going to slaughter you,’ then one of these days they're actually going to do it and you're going to wake up into an October 7th. And so there is nowhere to go except to the next stage of this war. And for me, it's not an escalation. It is the inevitable next step of what began on October 7th.
DS: I’m pleased to welcome to this conversation from Jerusalem, my longtime friend, Yossi Klein Halevi. Yossi, thanks for being with us.
YKH: Great to be with you, always Dan.
DS: Yossi, as you and I discussed, we're doing this special series leading up to the one-year anniversary, that grim one-year anniversary of October 7th. I couldn't imagine we'd be here one year later with not only a war in the South, but war fronts opening up elsewhere and hostages, over 100 hostages in the dungeons of Gaza. I just wouldn't have imagined this as we are approaching the High Holidays, the Chagim, and the one year anniversary. In this special series, and for those listening to this conversation, you can also watch this conversation on YouTube. For this special series, we started with Douglas Murray in which we talked about the world's reaction to October 7th. We talked to Sam Harris in the last episode about the moral dilemmas that October 7th has presented not only Israel but the West and what it means for Western civilization. And with you we want to talk about what it means for Israel and what it means for the Jewish people, the Jewish diaspora, Jewish peoplehood that the past year presents for where Israel and the Jewish people go from here. And I wanna start with this idea that October 7th changed everything. So I want to start with, try to take us to where your head was at as you were processing the events of October 7th. And here I have a little bit more of a guide than I have with most of my guests because I have here what you said on your podcast that was recorded on October 8th: ‘The walls closing in. The floor opening under my feet. The ceiling blowing open. Total insecurity. Anything can happen from any direction. Radical disorientation.’ So again, that was you, Yossi, on October 8th describing on your podcast how you felt on October 7th. What were you actually describing there?
YKH: I could have been describing how I feel today. You know, when you said that who could have imagined a year later that we'd be in this situation and that the threats to Israel have only grown since October 7th is astonishing, really. And so what happened on October 7th was that the Jewish world entered a new historical era, which does not yet have a name, but I would call it, tentatively, the end of the post-Holocaust era. We all grew up in the post-Holocaust era, which was a time of seemingly limitless Jewish possibilities. You know, there were two great dreams that the Jewish people carried through the exile. There was the dream of return home, but there was also the dream of finding in the interim a safe refuge, finding a welcome home on the way home. And the amazing thing that happened to us after the Holocaust is that both those dreams were simultaneously fulfilled. And you know, the atmosphere that we all grew up in was basically, yeah, we've got lots of problems. There are always Jewish problems. But the trajectory is toward the happy ending of this story. And I tried to explain to my Israeli kids when they were little that, you know, they're dual citizens. I said that you all have the two dream passports of the Jewish people. To have a passport of the State of Israel and to have an American passport. It doesn't get any better than that. I still basically believe that, but I would say it with a little bit less self-confidence. And the other day I saw a bumper sticker in Jerusalem that said, l’sippur shelanu yesh sof tov. There will be a good ending to our story. And I saw that and I was struck by the incongruity of the optimism that that slogan was expressing and how everyone I know in this country is feeling right now. And it doesn't matter what your politics are and it doesn't matter from what place you're feeling that, but everyone is feeling in some way a deep dislocation. And I thought about that slogan. I said, yeah, you know, before October 7th, I think any of us would have said unequivocally not only that our story will have a happy ending, but we are basically living the happy ending with some ups and downs. And now there's this deep sense of uncertainty. I've spent a fair bit of time since October 7th traveling in the US and Canada and speaking on campuses, meeting Jewish communities. And this is the first time that I've ever experienced when American Jews and Israeli Jews are sharing this deep sense of vulnerability. Different reasons, it's playing out in different ways, but in the past, whenever Israel was at war, the diaspora would support us. Right? We were going through the crisis. You guys were there to have our backs. But now there's this feeling of, wait a minute, yes, we hope you'll have our backs, but who's got your back? And this is something different. I've never experienced that sense of simultaneous angst that the whole Jewish people is going through. And if Jews in North America are going through this, then we know what the rest of the diaspora is experiencing.
DS: I know this is gonna be hard for you to process because American Jews or North American Jews don't have their children going into Gaza or going into potentially southern Lebanon to fight wars. But I'm struck by when I talk to North American Jews and Israeli Jews, it's North American Jews who seem more disoriented, more unmoored, feel more insecure than Israeli Jews.
YKH: I think because the transition from a feeling of more or less security. You know, the last few years there've been some warning signs. There was the Tree of Life synagogue and other incidents, but those were still somehow aberrations. And one could have even made the argument that there were really more throwbacks than harbingers. And suddenly here you are in this state of acute insecurity, which is really the Israeli normative reality. You know, we go through the pretense or we went through the pretense of normal daily life. And so, as profound as the shock of October 7th was, and I don't want to minimize the shock for us here because we've never experienced a shock like this. Still, I think that we had less of a psychological distance to travel than you did.
DS: Just to stay on this point for a moment, when you say you've never had a shock like this, there have been big shocks. The Yom Kippur War in 1973. Obviously the Second Intifada was a prolonged but a period in Israeli history that felt like to me, watching it from outside and spending time with a lot of Israelis, including family, like a prolonged shock. We can go back to the pre-state years, the riots against Jews in Hebron. There are various periods where there have been shocks. When you say this, there's no shock like this. Why?
YKH: Since I joined this story in the summer of 1982, which was a very complicated moment to come here. That was the beginning of the first Lebanon War. Israeli society was deeply divided over the war. Until October 7th, the most difficult period of my life, and I suspect for many Israelis, was the Second Intifada, those five years of suicide bombings. I was raising teenagers at the time and they had numerous close encounters. They lost friends and there was this sense of losing the solidity of our public space. But what we experienced on October 7th was a much deeper crisis because it threatened the two foundational elements of the Israeli ethos. The first is that we know how to protect this country. And the second is we can trust the solidarity of Israeli society. And both of those two assumptions were really upended on October 7th. We effectively abandoned 1,200 Israelis within the sovereign borders of the state to a fate that nobody could have imagined was possible in a sovereign Jewish state. It was such a throwback through the pre-state condition. It's as if the Jewish state stopped, well, it's not as if, the Jewish state stopped functioning on October 7th. The emotional impact is something we have not recovered from, and I don't think this generation will ever fully recover from that experience of seeing the collapse of the covenant that Zionism made with the Jewish people of creating a safe refuge here. October 7th was the first time since 1948 that entire Jewish communities were overrun, occupied, and destroyed. Israel today is the most dangerous place in the world, physically, for Jews.
DS: Let's take this one, I wanna take you one month past October 7th to, let's peg it at November 7th. So Israel's now a month into the response. At that point, on November 7th, a month into the war, where did you think we would be today? What did you think it would look like?
YKH: I thought we would be in a direct war with Iran at this point.
DS: Why?
YKH: Because it's inevitable. And the more we defer a direct confrontation in Iran, the more we play by their ground rules. Iran for the last 20 years has sat back and allowed us to bleed in a series of mini wars with its proxies. We go back and forth, Hezbollah, Hamas. Hamas, Hezbollah. And meanwhile, Iran keeps getting stronger and is moving closer to the nuclear threshold, is already on the nuclear threshold. I was hoping, in fact, on October 8th that we would set Hamas aside and go directly for the nuclear facilities in Iran. That to me would have been a proportionate response to October 7th. And there were voices, by the way, in the Israeli security establishment that at the very least were calling for a…
DS: The North.
YKH: For the North, exactly.
DS: Right. And we can get into it. I worry that Israel doesn't have the capabilities to deal with Iran on its own.
YKH: I worry about that too, but we probably will have no choice. No one is going to help us on this. Certainly no one is going to do this for us. And so if we take seriously what we've been warning about for 20 years or more, that a nuclear Iran is literally an existential threat, is an untenable situation for Israel, then I can't afford to ask the question of how much damage I can inflict on that program. I have to do what I can to stop it.
DS: And we're recording this on September 18th. By the time this episode is released, Israel could be in some kind of war with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
YKH: Any day we know the missiles are coming.
DS: And so where do you see that war heading? What does that look like?
YKH: We're looking at a war of the cities. We're looking at the first war of the home front. It's going to be a war of missiles and rockets.
DS: But meaning hitting Israeli cities, though. That's what you mean by the war of the cities, right? So a city like Tel Aviv, which anyone who's traveled to Tel Aviv in the last couple of decades have gotten very used to life under Iron Dome, as you said. And what you're saying is…
YKH: You can, today, you can sit in your shelter through a siren and be reasonably confident that you'll come out okay. That's going to change.
DS: Based on what you're saying then, Yossi, is Yahya Sinwar therefore inching towards his goal of inflaming the Middle East in a regional war centered around Israel?
YKH: Look, this conflict has always been a regional war. In our formative decades it was the Sunni-Israeli war, the entire Sunni world against Israel. Today that has shifted to a Shiite-Israeli war. And what began on October 7th was the Israeli-Iranian war and we're just moving the front you know, it's a constantly shifting front, and yes, Hamas initiated the next regional war.
DS: Do you think Israelis understand what you're saying and what you're forecasting, which is Israel is in a multi-front war and what that actually means?
YKH: I don't know how much we've internalized what it means, although the army has been trying to warn the Israeli public for years. What I'm saying has been public knowledge, I don't know, the last five years at least. So I think that we've had enough time to internalize this. What we learned on October 7th, Dan, is that for the last 20 years, we were living a fantasy. And that fantasy was that we could somehow coexist with genocidal enclaves literally on our border. You could sit in the village of Metula on the far north. You could sit on your porch and look out onto a Hezbollah enclave. I saw it many times. When I was in Metula, you'd look out across the fence and there they are. You could wave to them. And we thought that this was all somehow manageable. You know, the policy of feeding the beast will appease Hamas and by allowing hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar to flow through. And in the North, we'll be able to deter them. And it was all a fantasy. And what we learned is that when you live next door to enemies who say to you, ‘one of these days we're going to cross the border and we're going to slaughter you,’ then one of these days they're actually going to do it and you're going to wake up into an October 7th. And so there is nowhere to go except to the next stage of this war. And for me, it's not an escalation. It is the inevitable next step of what began on October 7th.
DS: And just to put a more visual point, it was already pretty visual, but a more visual point on what you just said a moment ago. I often think that when I try to explain how unique this war is for Israel, how unprecedented it is in its modern history, I try to explain that Israel has no strategic depth. In other words, when we say Hamas invaded southern Israel from Gaza, it's not like Hamas invaded this big open expanse of land and Israelis somewhere hundreds of miles away were concerned at some point they could make their way up, but the IDF was going to, you know, fight Hamas in that southern open expanse. No, sorry. When Hamas invades Israel, they are a couple of kilometers at most from I don’t know about major but highly concentrated population centers. Sderot…
YKH: Yeah. From an Israeli perspective, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Be 'er Sheva, these are major population centers, sure.
DS: Exactly. Israel has no strategic depth so that when an enemy crosses the border into Israel, they are in civilian population areas fighting that minute, not that hour, not that day, not a week or two away, that minute. You know, we have a chapter, Saul and I have a chapter in our book. “15 Seconds” we call that chapter, which is how long Israelis living in Sderot have to get into their shelter when the siren goes off, when rockets are flying, because they're worried. It's so close that a rocket launch from Gaza could be in Sderot in 15 seconds.
YKH: You know, Dan, one of the things I like to do when I have guests in my home, I live in French Hill in Jerusalem, and it's literally the last row of houses in the city facing northeast toward the West Bank, toward Jordan. And we stand on the porch and I say, from this vantage point, you're looking at three distinct political entities. The sovereign state of Israel ends right at this road under my building. In the near distance, you can see the beginnings of the Palestinian Authority. And in the far distance, which is a 45-minute car drive, are the mountains of Jordan. And that's the unbearable intimacy of Israeli geography is what makes this conflict so intractable. Really why it's so—I mean, this is a whole other issue—one of the reasons it's so hard to solve the Palestinian problem is that if a Palestinian state goes wrong, and chances are it would, it's not there, it's here. It's literally outside my porch.
DS: I want to talk about the current state of Israeli leadership in this moment. Let me start by asking you about your own, just for our listeners who don't know your background. You've been involved politically in various causes over your life. Can you describe your journey?
YKH: How far back do you want me to go?
DS: And we don't need to go to the bris. We don't even have to go back probably to the Bar Mitzvah. But we start…
YKH: Actually, we may have to go back to the Bar Mitzvah because that's when I became politically active. I joined the Soviet Jewry Movement.
DS: OK, so talk about that.
YKH: So this was in the, this was 1965, I joined. The student struggle for Soviet Jewry, which was very small in those first years. These are the people who really saved Soviet Jewry and never got the credit. And then as I became more and more frustrated with our failure to break into the mainstream, Meir Kahane shows up, 1968, starts the Jewish Defense League, and a year later pivots, and he adopts the Soviet Jewry cause and he introduces violence into the Soviet Jewry movement. And this is the late 60s. Violence was, I think it was Abbie Hoffman who said violence is as American as apple pie. And violence was part of the political culture, certainly the youth culture that I grew up in. And I switched allegiance. I went from the student struggle, which was really the moderate wing of the Soviet Jewry Movement, and joined with Kahane. I was also, you know, my upbringing was also in the Jabotinsky Movement. I grew up in the Zionist right. And I moved to Israel in 1982. And by that time, I had long since broken with Kahane, seeing up close Kahane's own transition to radical theology, an apocalyptic fanatic. I broke with him, almost all of my friends in the JDL broke with him.
DS: The Jewish Defense League?
YKH: Yeah, that’s not what we had signed up for. Maybe he always was that way, but kept it under wraps. I'm speaking about his racism, his hatred for Jews who disagreed with him, violent hatred. And so Kahane, who had been my teenage hero, my rabbi, really became my anti-rabbi. He became everything to avoid. And so Kahane helped clarify for me the dangers of extremism.
DS: But your politics, Yossi, and I've known you for a while, were still, your politics were still considerably right of center.
YKH: Yeah, they were right of center. I would soften the word ‘considerably,’ but definitely right of center. And on security, they still are. My politics are whatever we need to do to defend ourselves in the Middle East is on the table. What changed for me is that we won, we defeated the Soviet Union because the Jewish people was united. And my deepest commitment was to try to do anything that I could to contribute to holding the Jewish people or an Israeli society together because we can so easily tear ourselves apart. Fast forward to 2023, the Netanyahu coalition. I call it the coalition of ultras: ultra-nationalist, ultra-Orthodox, and ultra-corrupt. And what I suddenly was confronted with with this coalition was the realization that there is a greater threat to the Jewish people than disunity. And that is an assault on our basic decency. You know, I grew up, many of us grew up on the stories of the rabbis from 2,000 years ago about why was the temple destroyed because of sinat chinam, hatred among Jews. And I took that as a given. And this government taught me that that story is actually not the complete story. Because what I think destroyed the second commonwealth was a combination of the corruption of the monarchy and the priesthood, and political zealotry. Sinat chinam, hatred among Jews, was the consequence. It wasn't the cause. And that's what I experienced with this government. And what terrified me most of all, and I've used, I've borrowed your and Saul's expression of startup nation liberally. For the last two years, I've been constantly referring to this government's assault on startup nation. This government is the greatest threat to the Israeli success story that I've ever experienced. And my greatest fear was that this government was going to provoke a mass emigration of despair of young liberal Israelis who are the backbone of the next generation of startup nation. That's what terrified me. And so I became a political activist again. I have not been a political activist for more than 40 years. And I was back out on the streets every week, sometimes every day, writing appeals to diaspora Jews. This is your fight too. This is not a left-wing, right-wing issue. This is, we are trying to save startup nation here. And the message didn't get across. And this was one of my great frustrations. And especially my frustration with many of my friends who are American Jews who are on the right, center-right, right, who didn't understand that this was not another left-right issue. It was not. You know, I have friends who said, this is all about the Israeli elites. It's about the secular Ashkenazi elites and Netanyahu is galvanizing the Israeli working class. That's a very old story that had nothing to do with what was happening now. And so, yeah, you're gonna have to stop me on this Dan, because I really could, I could go on and on.
DS: Yossi, I know, I know. And as you know, you're talking to, right now, one of those American center-right Jewish, although I prefer not to think of myself as an elite. So Yossi, regardless of my views on judicial reform and that debate in 2023, and I had a lot of views on it, many Israelis like you were telling diaspora Jews like me, get in the fight with us on this issue. And what I think many of you didn't in Israel didn't appreciate is that in the diaspora we're defending Israel against a whole range of criticisms and charges and and canards that are out there about Israel. The least controversial of them was judicial reform. Meaning, in a world in which critics of Israel are accusing Israel of apartheid, the Israeli government tinkering with its judicial system, an important issue, was like the least of the most dangerous criticisms of Israel in the international arena, nothing about inside Israel. There's the intra-Israel dialogue and then there's the international dialogue around Israel, and I regard myself as someone who feels a sense of responsibility for the sake of Western civilization, for the sake of the future of the US, and for the sake of the future of the Jewish people in Israel to defend Israel in the international arena against unreasonable accusations. And then when I'm out there and if I join the fight on judicial reform, I'm invoked as, see, Israel's crazy. See, the government is crazy. Even people like Dan Senor are saying X, Y, and Z. Now, if I were living in Israel, maybe I would operate differently. But in the international scene?
YKH: Yeah, I appreciate that, Dan. And look, I'm not a stranger to that arena. I spend a good deal of my life defending Israel abroad. So I appreciate that. And until this government began its assault on the independent judiciary, I would have never taken a strong stand against an Israeli government, and I didn't. What made this different is that I did not see this as the least of threats that Israel faced. If Israel became a Jewish version of Hungary, and this is where the government was trying to take us before October 7th, that would have had historic damage to the Israeli-American relationship, to the diaspora-Israeli relationship.
DS: But it does raise an issue that we're dealing with now. Can those of us abroad in the diaspora, abroad from Israel, who care deeply about Israel and want to defend Israel, can we defend Israel in the international scene and join in the criticism of Israel at the same time?
YKH: I believe that the credibility of defenders of Israel is enhanced if we're able to critique Israel. And I'm using the word critique. It’s a softer word. To critique Israel when it requires calling out. You know, we are in full-blown crisis mode, but in general, Israel is a very delicate work in progress. And we are a democracy under extremity. There's no other democracy that I can think of in the world that has lived under such sustained pressure as we have. We were born in war, literally our first day. We were born into war and we've never really known a day of peace. And so when I measure Israeli democracy, for me, Israel is not a paragon of democracy because it can't be. When you're living under this kind of pressure, you have to make constant compromises between security and democracy and other considerations. But Israel is a model of democracy in extremity. We're a laboratory for trying to work out the balance between security, morality, and democratic norms. And sometimes we lose that balance. And friends of Israel have a responsibility, not only to Israeli society, but also to your own standing, your own credibility. You have a responsibility to speak about Israel honestly. Now, Rabbi David Hartman, alav ha-shalom, who was one of my teachers, used to say to diaspora Jews, by all means criticize us, but criticize us like a mother and not a mother-in-law. Now I happen to have a wonderful mother-in-law who for me is really like…
DS: That's the correct answer every time. Everyone should say that regardless of… Kissinger used to say, it has the virtue of being true. It also has the virtue of being true.
YKH: It has the additional virtue of being true. That's right. So, but look, the reason that I also believe very deeply that diaspora Jews should criticize Israel when they feel that's necessary is if Israel is the center of Jewish life, it not only has to be ideologically, but in practice, Israel is the center of Jewish life in the same way that the land of Israel was conceptually the dream center of the Jewish people for 2,000 years of exile. The State of Israel is the practical center of Jewish life today. But if I'm going to ask diaspora Jews to get involved with Israel, to be good citizens of the Jewish people, then that means being fully engaged with Israel. It means loving criticism. Now, it does not mean developing a relationship with Israel that is based entirely on criticism. And there are parts of the diaspora left that don't understand that. They speak about tough love. And my friend David Suissa, the editor of the LA Jewish Journal, always says, you know, I hear the tough, I don't hear the love so much. So yes. Tough love, okay, but where's the love? Let's hear the love. And if your relationship with Israel is only based on criticism, then sooner or later you're going to lose the love. And we know that as parents, and that goes for any relationship. I need partners in anguish, partners who understand the maddening complexity of Israel's dilemmas. And yes, I want you to be realistic about Israel. I don't want cheerleaders. It doesn't work anymore. I want genuine partners. And that means rolling up your sleeves, entering into the messiness of Israel, but doing so from a place of total engagement.
DS: So, speaking of messiness of Israel, one of the hardest issues or dilemmas we're all wrestling with a year in is, as I said earlier, that there are still Jews being held in captivity a year on from October 7th. And this presents an extraordinary dilemma for Israelis on how to deal with this. You are a religiously observant person, so you know how all this comes into conflict with the concept of pidyon shvuyim. Can you talk a little bit about that Jewish idea, that principle, and why this is such a dilemma for Israel?
YKH: The hostages are such an excruciating dilemma because they posit two essential elements of the Israeli ethos against each other. The first is pidyon shvuyim, the redemption of the captives, which is a very old Jewish term that we absorbed into the Israeli ethos. And pidyon shvuyim, the redemption of the captive, was really one of the ways in which the Jewish people in the dispersion defined itself. Jews in any part of the world knew that if they fell into captivity, that Jews elsewhere would do everything they could to redeem them, whether it meant paying exorbitant ransom or interceding with the powers that be. That is a defining principle of who we are as a people. And it became a defining principle of Israeli solidarity. At the same time, we also have the core ethos of self-defense. And after October 7th, what I felt was that the weight had shifted from pidyon shvuyim to re-establishing the credibility of our military deterrence, which we had lost because it was our weakest enemy that delivered the most devastating blow in our history. We had to regain the credibility of our deterrence in the most dangerous region in the world. And I felt that was a matter of life and death for Israel. I still feel that. And so I didn't participate in the demonstrations against the government for the hostages. It was very painful for me not to. The demonstrations were inadvertently strengthening Hamas's position.
DS: And we know that Sinwar is a consummate consumer of Israeli press. So he's following these demonstrations.
YKH: Oh, absolutely. He knows Hebrew. He knows Hebrew, sure. What began to change for me was the realization that we were coming to the point where very large numbers of Israelis felt that if we allowed the hostages to die, they no longer felt part of the Israeli story. People were starting to emotionally opt out. And what made this even more intense was that many Israelis, and I include myself among them, began to sense that Netanyahu's priority here was not security. It was not security versus pidyon shvuyim. It was Netanyahu's political interests versus pidyon shvuyim. The fact that very large numbers of Israelis believe that we have a prime minister who is ready to sacrifice the lives of fellow Jews for his own political interests, we have never been in a situation like that in Israel's history, where you have such a profound lack of fundamental trust in the prime minister. And so I began to feel that the balance was shifting toward the urgency to save the hostages for strategic reasons, for preserving minimal solidarity among Israelis and for preserving the credibility of our ethos. So in that sense, I see Netanyahu as a clear and present danger to Israeli solidarity. And we have to prioritize the fate of the hostages. And there's one quick point here as well about ending the war in Gaza, which also helped me reach the point where I felt comfortable in going to demonstrations, and I do now, demonstrations for the hostages and taking a public position for prioritizing the hostages over victory against Hamas, and that is that we need to take the long-term view of this war. This is not just the Israeli-Hamas war. And now we have demonstrably shifted our attention to the North.
DS: Well, but what you're saying is there's a correlation. I don't want to say it's causation, but there's a correlation between your concern about Israeli attitudes, about whether or not its government is doing the right thing as it relates to the hostages. And that's what motivated you to get involved. But there's also correlation with Israel having tremendous success…
YKH: You're putting it in such a delicate way.
DS: A consummate diplomat here. But it also correlates with Israel having tremendous success in Gaza. Israel has had extraordinary success in crushing Hamas. I mean, I'm not saying no success is permanent, no success is final, but the reality is, it sounds to me like you're also comfortable. You're more comfortable now than you were six months ago that Israel can take a little bit of risk.
YKH: Yes. Yes, I would like to believe that we've had extraordinary success. I don't think we know. I don't think we will know til a year or two from now. But it's not quite that. It's the feeling that we have actually greater problems to deal with than Sinwar. Hezbollah is a far more formidable threat. And ultimately, we have to confront Iran. And I believed on October 8th that we needed to go right to Iran. That was my scenario. We've been fighting Hamas for a year now. This is the longest war in Israel's history since the 1948 war. It's time to start dealing with some of the more substantive threats.
DS: Strategic threats, I guess. Hamas is…
YKH: Yeah, strategic threats.
DS: I want to wrap the conversation by asking a couple questions about the future of Israel, the future of Zionism. The future of a two-state solution. It's still talked about. I just want to hit some of these. You wrote in your book, Letters to my Palestinian Neighbor, we’ll link to the book in the show notes, as well as all of your books.
YKH: Which we launched Dan, you may recall…
DS: In my living room.
YKH: In your living room.
DS: I remember. We launched it in my living room.
YKH: Thank you, thank you by the way for that.
DS: It’s about time you thank me, you know, it's taken a few years. But you said in that book and I'm paraphrasing here that everyone around the world saw the conflict as one about resolving the outcome of 1967, of the Six Day War, except for the Palestinians who, their view was resolving the conflict which was born out of 1948. Meaning, if you just want to go back to 1967, you can start to carve out how you can have a two-state solution. 1948? Not so simple.
YKH: It's zero sum.
DS: Right, it's either a Jewish state or not, whereas 1967, if you go back to 1967 borders, you can actually start to see pieces of a two-state solution. Now you and I have spoken about this since. I think you've said to me, and I'd like you to talk a little bit about it, but the wake-up call of October 7th was, you were wrong about the whole world being on board with 1967 except for the Palestinians. Maybe it was just the Jews in Israel who thought it was 1967, that we didn't get the joke. And the Palestinians were much more tied in to global public opinion, global attitudes towards the Jews in Israel. Just the overall zeitgeist was, no, no, no, the whole world's saying, sorry Israel, it's 1948. That's the problem.
YKH: Yeah, I think it feels that way sometimes, but I don't think we're anywhere near there yet. Where global opinion is with the Palestinian position of politicide. We've certainly seen an extraordinary rise in the popularity of the genocidal position around the world. But we still have lots of friends and the international political system, certainly the West, the political elites in the West still are not there for the most part. And there is no political leader in the United States, major political leader in the Democratic Party, who's the equivalent of Jeremy Corbyn, for example. And Jeremy Corbyn himself was fatally discredited.
DS: Well, there is a rising force within the Democratic Party among some of the progressives.
YKH: There is. Absolutely. And we could be there in 10 years from now, a major figure could emerge from the Democratic Party who will try to take it where Corbyn took Labor. Or like Mélenchon in France. I mean, there are these European pro-genocidal politicians. But you don't have their equivalent of major stature in the US.
DS: So then October 7th and the blowback from October 7th against Israel and how it manifests…
YKH: Oh, it's one of my deepest traumas. The fact that college students adopted the Hamas slogan, From the River to the Sea, at exactly the moment when Hamas made clear what that would look like for seven million Jews. You know, October 7th was a kind of pre-enactment of the Hamas vision of the destruction of Israel. The fact that you have anti-Zionist Jews whose takeaway from October 7th wasn't that we need more power because look what happens to Israelis when the army disappears, but their takeaway was no, our problem is we have too much power. That's their takeaway of October 7th. You feel as if people are going mad. And I look at Jewish anti-Zionists, regard with equanimity the prospect of leaving seven million Jews defenseless, and then want to be part of a Jewish conversation, want me to treat them as if we're part of the same story, as if we share some common future. What do I have in common with Jewish anti-Zionists? What do I have in common with these people who don't care whether my family is able to protect itself in the Middle East? So it's so profoundly appalling to me what has happened. I'm not minimizing that. I was just questioning the totality, the seeming totality of we're alone. We're not alone, But do we have problems? Boy, do we have problems. And it begins within ourselves.
DS: You used the word Jewish power, that for some critics of Israel, including some Jewish critics of Israel, that their takeaway after October 7th is Israel should have less power. Can you just, you've talked about this, this tension between power and victimhood for Jews, which are in constant tension, the difference between October 7th where we felt like Jews felt like total victims to October 8th, where Israel said at the same time, we have the capacity to respond, which Israel didn't have in Hebron in the 1920s, which the Jews didn't have in Kishinev or, you know, pick your pre-state trauma site.
YKH: You know, what's happened to the Jewish people is that we are experiencing a return of vulnerability. Vulnerability is not victimhood. It's very hard for us as a people, for understandable reasons, to find that balance between powerlessness and the complete safety of power. There is no complete safety in power and now we're experiencing the acute vulnerability, the paradox of acute vulnerability with power. You can't look at the ruins of Gaza and see ourselves as victims. We're not victims anymore. Nor should we want to be. The victim identity is something that the Jewish people in 1945 collectively decided was literally untenable. We could not be victims anymore. And so, you know, in the intersectional world, in the DEI world, when they deny us a place in their hierarchy of victimhood, my response is, make my day. That's exactly right. We fought. The post-Holocaust Jewish victory was that we transcended victimhood. Now, at this moment we're in this kind of pathological loop where part of the world sees us as victimizers and many of us see ourselves as victims. And neither category is a useful lens through which to understand Israel's situation. I do not for a moment apologize for this war. But the fact is this is Israel's most brutal and ugly war. It's also one of our most necessary wars. We had the power and we've used it. And I believe that any nation in our place would have done at the very least what we've done in Gaza. And so I don't apologize for this. But I can't claim the identity of victim. Yes, on October 7th we had a momentary lapse into victimhood. And it lasted for all of one day. And I am not a victimizer because I'm doing what anyone would do in my place. And nor am I a victim because I have more than enough power to protect myself.
DS: Let me ask you one final question. If you had to make a prediction, how will the Israelis, Israeli society, the soul of the nation, how will Israelis come out at the end of this? And in the end of this, I'll let you define what the end of this is. What's the lasting legacy of this past year on Israelis?
YKH: Look, we've experienced in the last two years two scenarios of Israel's unraveling. In the year leading up to October 7th, we went through the unraveling of Israeli society, of the minimal cohesiveness that we always took for granted. Suddenly Israelis were looking at each other. And it wasn't just about politics. We can argue about politics. This was something much deeper. I don't trust your basic decency. If you can support this government or alternatively, if you can say you're opting out of military service because you oppose the government, we began to look at each other as people who just happen to share the same geographical space but we don't have the same vision, the same commitments. And that was one vision of the end of Israel. The second vision of the unraveling of Israel was the attack from without. And that was the experience of October 7th. October 7th we saw what would happen when the Israeli army would be in complete disarray, when Israeli civilians would be left to fend for themselves against the unthinkable, and we saw the collapse of the government. We had no government on October 7th. We had no army on October 7th. What we had were individual Israelis rushing to the South with pistols. Extraordinary stories. But that's what the unraveling of Israel would look like from without. And so what do we do with these two scenarios? That's the question that Israelis are going to confront the morning after. And as someone who has been up until two years ago, was based on the political commitment of unity and solidarity, and then I felt that I had no choice but to go against part of my fellow Israelis, to go against my government. That's a question that I'm going to face very personally. What do I do with that now? Where do I take that? I’ll tell you a story. The other day I ran into a friend, Hadassah Froman, who was the widow of Rabbi Menachem Froman, who was really someone I loved very much and I was close with him. The two of us worked together on Muslim-Jewish dialogue. And he was an extraordinary man, one of the leaders of, founders of the settlement movement. He was the rabbi of the settlement of Tekoa. And yet, he was also Israel's leading Muslim-Jewish interfaith activist. Now, if you don't know Israel, you can't possibly compute that.
DS: Right, you can’t hold all of those things together.
YKH: You can't make sense of that. But it's Israel, so you live with contradictions. So I ran into his widow, and Hadassah has continued Menachem's work in Palestinian-Israeli dialogue. And I said to her, ‘so new Hadassah, is there any hope?’ And without hesitating, she said,’ there is faith.’ And I said to her, ‘you know, I can live with that.’ Now, I'm a person of faith, and I believe, you know, I mentioned this bumper sticker earlier, l’sippur shelanu yesh sof tov, our story will have a good ending. I'm a person of faith. I believe that we're not alone in this world, we're not alone in this story. There is, I believe there is a God in the world. And my reading of 4,000 years of Jewish history is that there is a God in the world. That this strange premise of a people insisting that its history would somehow reflect God's presence in the world and then going through 4,000 years of torment and yet still believing that its story reveals God's presence in the world. I take that as a serious religious argument. So I believe we've come back to this land for a purpose. I don't know what the purpose is. Maybe that purpose is gradually being revealed. Maybe we are that purpose, maybe trying to figure out how to reconcile all of our intense divisions that we've brought back with us from all over the world. Maybe that's the religious purpose of our story. But I believe that we're here for a reason and Israel exists for a reason and we came back for a reason. So I'm in this story for the long term.
DS: Yossi, as always, thank you for your soulfulness, and insights, and analysis, and teaching and friendship.
YKH: Well, thank you, Dan. Thank you for your friendship as well. And it's really great to be with you.
DS: And I hope to see you in Israel very soon.
YKH: Looking forward.