Memorializing a war while still fighting - with Matti Friedman
This past Monday marked the grim one-year anniversary of October 7th. Around the world, Jewish communities gathered to memorialize a war still being fought.
How did Israeli society experience this grief, and how did Diaspora communities memorialize? What are Israelis going through that we might not be able to see from a distance? And what are Diaspora communities going through that Israelis may not see?
To discuss, we are joined by Matti Friedman, who is one of the most thoughtful writers when it comes to all matters related to Israel, the broader Middle East, and also trends in the world of journalism. He is a columnist for The Free Press: https://www.thefp.com/
Matti’s most recent book is called “Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.” Before that he published "Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel," and before that "Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War.” Matti’s army service included tours in Lebanon. His work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, and other hotspots across the Middle East and around the world. He is a former Associated Press correspondent and essayist for the New York Times opinion section.
Matti’s book referenced in the episode: “Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War” — https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/pumpkinflowers-matti-friedman/1122279367?ean=9781616206918
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
MF: This is not the society that fought the Six Day War or the Yom Kippur War. This is a very different place. And I think that the way this is commemorated in 5 years or 10 years depends to a large extent on what happens to our leadership in the next 5 or 10 years. So if we can regain a unified leadership, if we can somehow channel the incredible resilience and kind of grim determination of the majority of Israelis and translate that into a government that represents the Zionist majority in Israel, then I think you'll have a unified commemoration in 5 years. If this divisive style of government continues and we see the fissures in Israeli society continue to expand, then I'm not sure where we're going to be in 5 years or 10 years, not just in terms of where the commemoration is, but in terms of where the country is.
DS: It's 9:15 AM on Tuesday, October 8th here in New York City. It's 4:15 PM in Israel as Israelis wind down their day. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast, Matti Friedman, a bestselling author, longtime journalist, currently a columnist writer for the Free Press. Matti, where does this podcast find you?
MF: It finds me at home in Jerusalem.
DS: So in full transparency, Matti, I think we should let our listeners know the sausage making of the Call Me Back podcast. We had originally recorded a conversation, you and I, two weeks ago while you were in New York City. We actually had two talks in New York City. One was for the podcast and then we also spoke at an event together. And we had recorded that conversation for our special video series, One Year Since October 7th. And it was right after the pager attack, however, before Nasrallah was killed by the IDF. That period, the killing of Nasrallah, was a turning point in the war, in which Israel was finally delivering what seems to be crippling blows to its enemies. After that conversation, Matti, you and Ilan and I agreed that the tone didn't fit the mood in Israel, given the string of successes that the IDF has had in Lebanon since we recorded that conversation. It was post-pager attack, but before the new, let's call it the new momentum, and so we just decided it didn't fit. We decided to have this conversation instead. I had wanted to talk to you about the mood in Israel following the one-year memorial events that took place in Israel on October 7th. So we're effectively scrapping the conversation that was two days ago, which might as well have felt like two years ago, and we're having this conversation today. So I thank you for your patience in recording a new conversation with us.
MF: It's totally a pleasure and I hope that we get this episode out within five minutes of this recording. Otherwise, it might be out of date as well.
DS: Exactly. The Middle East these days, you just don't know. Matti, you are an astute observer of Israeli society. How did you personally experience this grim one-year anniversary and what did you observe? Not only what did you observe about yourself, but also what did you observe about how the Israeli public, and I'm just saying the Israeli public in general terms, you can take that anywhere you want, how did they experience the day?
MF: I was actually quite surprised at my own mood on October 7th. I wasn't planning to mark it in any particular way because I feel that we're still living it. It's not a war that we have to remember. It's not the Yom Kippur War. It's not something that we have to kind of reach back into the past to commemorate. We're literally in it. Rockets were hitting Israel on October 7th. Rockets are hitting Israel as we record this podcast. We’re very much in the war that began on October 7th, so I didn't think that a day of commemoration was even really necessary given that the events are still going on. And because of that approach, I think I was quite taken aback by how dark it was and how incredibly upsetting and depressing it was to be flooded with images from October 7th. So much has happened in the past year that the actual events of the day itself have receded and suddenly yesterday, we were flooded with them. They were all over the media. They were all over social media. You were seeing these terrible images from the kibbutzim, from Sderot, the images that we all remember from October 7th, no matter how hard we've tried to forget. And we heard voices of people screaming from their safe rooms that terrorists are outside the house. And we saw images from the Nova Music Festival. And as much as we think those images are in our consciousness, I think to a great extent they've been kind of forced aside by the pace of events since October 7th, 2023. So I was quite surprised at the potency of the commemoration on October 7th. And I think, I don't want to project my own sentiments onto the entire Israeli public, but I do think that the national mood was very dark on October 7th, both because of the commemoration and because it was so clear while the commemoration was going on that the war isn't over. Literally rockets were hitting Haifa. My parents were in their safe room in the northern town of Nahariya. My sister was on a train coming home from work when the rocket siren went off and everyone had to kind of crouch down on the train while a Yemeni cruise missile made its way in our direction. So it was a dark day because we were reminded of what happened and a dark day because we were forced to reckon with the fact that the events are still going on and no matter what successes we may have had in the past couple of weeks, we have been unable to successfully end this war on our own terms.
DS: Matti, two of the most moving days for me as someone who doesn't live in Israel but has a lot of family and close friends in Israel and spends a lot of time in Israel, two of the most moving days for me every year in the Israeli calendar are Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron, so Holocaust Remembrance Day and Israel Memorial Day. And Saul Singer and I wrote about those days and how they are observed in Israel in our most recent book, The Genius of Israel. And we talk about that siren that goes off nationwide, the air raid siren where the whole country stops. I'm reading here: “At exactly 11 AM, Israel's national air raid siren system would fill the air with a loud plaintiff note, a blaring high-pitched sound that could be heard everywhere, as if it were coming out of the air itself. For two minutes, the world would stop, as in a sci-fi movie. Cars would stop on the highways, the drivers standing like sentries next to them. In restaurants and hotels, schools and offices, stadiums and homes, everyone would stand in silence. But it wasn't just that Israelis were doing the same thing, they were tuned to the same channel.” Now that scene, or version of that scene I just read about from our book, I could imagine becoming a ritual on October 7th now, every year going forward, especially that focus on all the people lost. And we had one line here, the channel was at once collective and personal. Collective is the word that jumped out at me. On those days in Israel, Yom Hazikaron and Yom Hashoah, there's no sense of division in Israeli society. For those of us over here, we didn't get a sense, at least on the anniversary of October 7th, on the division in Israel and how it manifested itself through this one-year anniversary date. But if you follow the Israeli press, it was definitely there. And the moment that really blew me away was that there were actually dual memorial ceremonies in Israel. One was organized by the families who lost their loved ones on October 7th. And then it was immediately followed by the “official ceremony” produced by the state, so… I don't think would have ever had something like that on Yom Hazikaron or Yom Hashoah. So can you talk a little bit about whether or not this day feels like it's going to become like a Yom Hashoah date in terms of how it's honored and remembered? And if so, juxtapose it with what I'm describing here with these dueling ceremonies.
MF: Right, so just for listeners who might not be familiar with what happened. On October 7th, there was an unofficial ceremony that was put together by the families of hostages, particularly by one brother of a hostage who was killed in Gaza. A guy named Jonathan Shamriz is a really impressive young Israeli whose brother, Alon, was taken hostage on October 7th and then was one of the three hostages killed by mistake by the IDF in one of the most awful events of this war. And the ceremony was held in Tel Aviv. It was supposed to be attended by about 40,000 people. 40,000 people had registered to come and then tickets ran out within a matter of hours. It could have been much bigger, but because of the rocket threat, they had to hold it with a much smaller crowd of families of hostages and families of Israelis who'd been killed in this war. And that was followed by an official state ceremony that was put together by the Netanyahu government and pre-recorded, in part because they were worried that if it was filmed live, people would disrupt the ceremony. So you had these two ceremonies. It's definitely an illustration of a society that does not agree on what is going on. And that makes it very different, as you mentioned, from our commemoration of the Holocaust or our general commemoration of fallen soldiers on Yom Hazikaron. Israeli society is deeply divided. And we have to remember that on October 6, 2023, this society was divided in a way that it had never been divided before. We have a government in power that does not have the confidence of all the mainstream Israeli society. Many people do support the government of course, but many Israelis feel that the government includes people who should be nowhere near positions of power. I'm thinking chiefly of Itamar Ben-Gvir, but there are other examples of not just extremism, but of incompetence in this government that make it really an unprecedented government for Israelis. Of course, the government rests on the votes of ultra-Orthodox Israelis who do not serve in the armies. You have a government trying to run a war demanding incredible sacrifices of the Israelis who do serve, but it rests on the votes of people who demand a draft exemption. And there are many other reasons to be dissatisfied, I think, with the level of leadership in Israel. I mean, I think that the lack of faith that many Israelis feel in this government is quite unprecedented. And the fact that we're navigating what is probably the darkest moment in the history of the state with what is, I think, certainly the least competent government in the history of the state. That's a big part of the darkness here. And it's one reason that we can't have a unified ceremony. It's not that the siren is going to go off and everyone's just going to agree on the interpretation of what this war is, how it started, and where it's going. So it's definitely, I think, a sad symptom of where our society is. And we can talk, if you'd like, about what each ceremony was. But certainly, this is not the society that fought the Six Day War or the Yom Kippur War. This is a very different place. And I think that the way this is commemorated in 5 years or 10 years depends, to a large extent, on what happens to our leadership in the next 5 or 10 years. So if we can regain a unified leadership, and this was actually discussed at the family's ceremony. If we can somehow channel the incredible resilience and kind of grim determination of the majority of Israelis and translate that into a government that represents the Zionist majority in Israel, then I think you'll have a unified commemoration in 5 years. If this divisive style of government continues and we see the fissures in Israeli society continue to expand, then I'm not sure where we're going to be in 5 years or 10 years, not just in terms of where the commemoration is, but in terms of where the country is.
DS: This mood that you're describing seems so far removed from the mood really just a week ago following the string of head spinning victories by the IDF in Lebanon or the string of head spinning successes by the IDF in Lebanon. No one should feel victorious yet, but one would think that that would strengthen solidarity and a sense of common purpose. How has that factored in that there's this new momentum now in the war that Israel seems to be on the march finally?
MF: I wouldn't want to play that down. I think that October 7th was a dark day here because we were just flooded with everything that's happened in the past year, most of which has been awful. But the past few weeks have, I think, seen a real change in the direction of the war. And I think it's very important. because I've written in the past about the Yom Kippur War, I feel like the past couple of weeks, which of course, play out just as we're recording our last podcast episode that will never be heard, which really begins with the explosion of thousands of Hezbollah pagers, followed by the explosion of walkie talkies, followed by the elimination of the Radwan Force command structure, that the elite Hezbollah strike force has their command structure taken out in an Israeli airstrike, and then Nasrallah, who's the leader of Hezbollah, is assassinated in an airstrike. He's not just a military leader. He's really a symbol of the Iranian alliance system and he's a symbol across the Arab world and across the Islamic world. He's assassinated and the direction of the war really changes. And it feels like we're at the moment of the crossing of the Suez Canal. That moment of the Kippur War where Ariel Sharon crosses the Suez Canal, it doesn't mean that the war is won, but it marks the return of the initiative to the Israeli side. And it marks a change in the direction of the wind. I think we've experienced that. This is one of the most incredible successes against a terrorist organization that we've ever seen in the history of the world. And I wouldn't want to play that down. So you have an Israeli society that's divided, that's in a very dark mood, that lacks confidence in our leadership, but at the same time has been restored to some extent. We've had our confidence in our military restored and we see the direction of the war, I hope, change. So I think you're right to mention that. And I think that those things exist somehow together. I think we're in a better place now than we were a month ago. But I'm interested to hear a bit about how this felt from the United States. What did October 7th feel like through America, from New York, from the diaspora?
DS: I gotta say, Matti, as I was listening to you describe what's happening in Israel, this is gonna sound really odd, but as I was listening to you describing what's happening in Israel, as heavy as it all was, I still would take, as an American Jew, I would still take what you were experiencing in Israel then what I was experiencing here. What I'm experiencing here, what I'm seeing here, is in many respects much more alarming for Jews than I think what any Jew in Israel is experiencing. Over the weekend in the lead up to October 7th, a friend of mine at the ADL sent me some new data that the Anti-Defamation League was reporting out, I guess, timed for the one-year anniversary, on the staggering rise in incidents of antisemitism in the United States since October 7th. So they chronicle from October 7th, 2023 through late September, 2024. And during that time period, some 10,000, they've reported 10,000 incidents of antisemitism. When I say incidents of antisemitism, they include three categories: violent antisemitism; vandalism of Jewish institutions, Jewish owned businesses, Jewish homes, Jewish owned homes; and verbal expressions and written expressions of antisemitism. 10,000 incidents, just to give you a sense, that's like a 200%, I think, increase from the same period the previous year, which at the time was the highest reported number of incidents of antisemitism. So you just see the data. It's just like, it's shocking. And then you think, okay, well, at least on October 7th, on the one-year anniversary, people will be restrained. And it was the opposite. I started my day doing a couple of television interviews in New York talking about the one-year anniversary. And much of the interviews were focused on the new wave of quasi pogroms that were already taking place or planned for October 7th on college campuses, on the streets of major cities, right in Columbus Circle in New York City, right in Times Square. Sometimes violent clashes between pro-Hamas, and even to say this is so… pro-Hezbollah, people waving the Hezbollah flag, protesters tormenting Jews at Columbia University. There were Jewish students who tried to organize a ceremony, quiet, minding their own business, a quiet ceremony just to honor the Jews that were slaughtered on October 7th and it was effectively overrun by a counter-protest by mask-wearing, keffiyeh-wearing Hamas and Hezbollah flag-waving protesters, who were chanting the language of Hamas, from the river to the sea. I mean, they were, you know, bomb Tel Aviv, globalize the Intifada, honoring the resistance. I mean, the language of Hamas from October 7th, they were using not in isolation, but actually to drown out the Jews who were taking the day to reflect, they were taking some time to reflect and remember those lost. And the versions of what I'm describing were going on all over the place, certainly all over the city I'm in, all over the country. I did one interview on CNBC on Squawk Box, and they asked a very basic, very fair question, which was, we have a lot of CEOs who watch this show, they asked me, we have people who are in business settings, how should people interact with their Jewish colleagues on this day? And on the one hand, I appreciated the question they were asking because it was sincere. On the other hand, it was such a window into how broken Jewish life is today relative to the country we live in in the United States, that that is even a question. I mean, December 7th, 1942, on the one-year anniversary of Pearl Harbor, or on September 11th, 2002, on the one-year anniversary of September 11th, you would never imagine having to have a conversation about how to talk to people who are somehow connected to those who were slaughtered. It wouldn't even be an issue. And yet, weirdly, counterintuitively was an actual very fair question because even people operating good faith don't know how to navigate this question because they feel like it's so loaded and it's so political and it's so, you know, there's the two sides, there's the both sides and the issue's more nuanced, so how do you express empathy for people who may be hurting on this day while at the same time recognizing there's nuance? And you would never ask those questions or think those things on any of these other historical comparisons I'm pointing to. But this day for American Jews feels like we still have to explain, that we still have to argue. We can't just reflect and remember. We have to still argue. And the only space that seemed protected from this craziness, obviously, were Jewish communal spaces. So my children go to a Jewish day school and I think they had family members of a hostage come speak. They had a ceremony. There's gonna be another ceremony, there’s gonna be a ceremony tonight that I'm participating in. And so when I talked to my son about what was going on at school, he was totally in the moment of October 7th and was protected because he was just with other Jews within four walls of a Jewish institution that's protected, literally protected by physical security. And so he was in a bubble. But yet at the same time, we received a notice from the school telling us that there were going to be protests going on around the school, near the school, and they were alerting the parents to the measures they were taking to protect students from what would be going on outside the school. And to me, that's its own metaphor, that if you're in a Jewish space with other Jews, you're fine. But we gotta be careful outside of those spaces. Now maybe that'll have the effect of reminding Jews that their assimilated lives in America, and I think it applies to the UK and Canada and Australia and other parts of the world too, but I'm focused on the US right now because that's where I am, maybe their assimilated lives went too far and October 7th was a wake-up call as you and I have discussed in terms of people who you thought had your back, people who you thought were your friends, people who thought were trusted colleagues, suddenly either stabbed you in the back or stabbed you in the front actually by turning on you after October 7th. And so maybe that's a wake-up call that will bring Jews back into these spaces, to these Jewish bubbles, to communal Jewish life, ritualistic Jewish life, whatever you put a premium on. Maybe that's healthy, but I gotta tell you, right now, it does not feel healthy. Jews feel unsafe in America today, and that was highlighted to me by the anniversary of October 7th. The day ended. I went to a beautiful ceremony in Central Park. A few thousand people attended. The parents of Omer Neutra, who's a hostage, American kid from Long Island, New York, who's been held hostage in Gaza for a year, his parents spoke, others spoke, other Israelis spoke. It was quite moving. The ceremony was moving. Again, we were all with Jews. We were in this “protected area.” But you know, blocks away when we were on our way home, we were watching Palestinian flags and Israeli flags, people going head-to-head right outside Central Park, right at Columbus Circle, protesters tormenting Jewish Americans. So if you look at the history of antisemitism, wherever it has existed, whenever there's an attack on the Jews, it's always been followed by vilification of the Jews, by blaming the Jews for their suffering. Everything I saw today reminded me that we're just in a newer version of it, but it's the same old story.
MF: Yeah, that's an incredibly dark depiction of this moment in the West. I mean, I think we're… two halves of the Jewish world are experiencing different kinds of darkness. You just described one and we have, of course, everything that's going on here. There's no question that this is not just an earthquake, I think, for Jews here in the Middle East and in North America and the diaspora, but it seems like a civilizational moment. It's a moment of real change in the West. A lot of people, and not only Jews, have become aware that many of the formerly liberal institutions of the West have been taken over by essentially by the hard left or by some alliance of the hard left and an Islamist activist. And that's true of the human rights world. It's true of much of the press, which is where I used to operate. It's true of much of the academy. And the effects of this have really, they've been bubbling for years. And I wrote about it 10 years ago, but they've really just exploded to the surface and they've made themselves apparent. And that is both frightening and potentially helpful. Once you can see the change on the surface, then you can begin to deal with it. And I think that many people have just been trying to ignore it and it's become impossible to ignore. So I think that you're right that one thing that's happening is that many Jewish people are being driven back into the ghetto.
DS: Into the shtetl.
MF: Yeah, for lack of a better term. And, you know, people on the one hand, feel threatened in spaces like, I think, the universities. On the other hand, synagogue membership is up as we know, synagogue attendance is up, people are showing up at Jewish organizations who haven't been in touch with them for years. And I know this firsthand, people have been visiting Israel who haven't been here for years. People have been rediscovering their communal ties and in a dark reality, that's a silver lining, I think. But I think it's also important not to forget that we have many friends. And I think that there's a kind of an old Jewish instinct that we fall back on, which is the shtetl instinct, which is that everyone hates us. We’re going back into the community and we're building a really high wall and waiting for this to blow over. But I think that if we look above the wall, we'll see that we have many friends. Israel has many, many friends. Many people have made their friendship apparent in the past year. And like you said, you've been surprised by people who've turned out not to be friends. I've also been surprised by people who've done the opposite. And I think that there are reasons for optimism and I'm hoping, you this might be just me trying to see the glass half full, we are at a moment of clarity. So it's a very frightening moment for Jewish people and not only for Jewish people, but on the other hand, I think it's a moment when a lot of people are realizing something about what's going on. And once you realize what's going on, you can act to address it. Whether or not that will happen is a good question. If I'm trying to see the bright side, then I'll cling to that.
DS: So, speaking of the bright side, I do want to spend a little more time on what is actually going on in the war. It seems to be going well between the news and what we're seeing on X and Instagram and Telegram and the likes. The war in Gaza is probably the most filmed war in history. It's the most documented in real time war in history. But when it comes to the ground invasion in Lebanon by the IDF, that has been pretty much held under wraps. And you obviously have spent a lot of time in Lebanon, both as a soldier and as a tourist, as a civilian. You've written extensively about it. I recommend Pumpkin Flowers, your book about your time in Lebanon. I recommend it all the time. We'll post it in the show notes to our listeners if you want to read. There are many books to read about Israel's experience in Lebanon, but the one I recommend the most is Matti’s. I want to ask you, what's going on in this ground operation in Lebanon these days? What do we know?
MF: Thanks for the kind words about Pumpkin Flowers. It's been quite amazing and shocking in many ways to see the IDF back in Lebanon. The book Pumpkin Flowers is about the last years of the Israeli presence in south Lebanon, in what we call the security zone in south Lebanon, which was meant to guerrillas or Hezbollah fighters away from the border. And we pull out in 2000, in the spring of 2000, in what seems to most Israelis like a very good move, and we would retreat to the border. And there's another war in 2006 and now Israeli soldiers are back in south Lebanon and I'm hearing the same names of places, places like Maroun al-Ras or Bint Jbeil or Debel. There are many other names of places that we heard in 2006 and that I remember hearing in the late 90s. And here we are again, it's almost like a tidal movement of the Israeli military back and forth over the Lebanon border. And it's always the same story. I mean, it's the fact that Lebanon is a state that cannot control its own territory. The territory is then exploited by other groups with other plans. In the late 70s and early 80s, it was the PLO. Now it's Hezbollah, which is an arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And they've been firing rockets into Israel, upwards of 9,000 rockets have been fired into Israel by Hezbollah since October 8th when Hezbollah opens a second front with Lebanon. And Israel has been trying to contain it over the past year, evacuated almost 70,000 people from the region of the northern border, and beginning a few weeks ago with the pager operation and the assassination of Nasrallah, Israel goes on the offensive in Lebanon and sends ground forces in. And on October 7th, one of the things that I was following alongside all of the awful commemorations of what happened in the South a year ago was the entrance of three new IDF brigades into Lebanon and more apparently went in today. My parents live in Nahariya, as I said, which is pretty close to the border, and you can hear the booms from their house. And one of the kind of unavoidable or one of the points of reality that I think is very difficult for many liberal people to accept, but is increasingly easy to see, is that the Israeli army is now fighting in three places from which Israel withdrew. Whether it's the cities of the West Bank 30 years ago, or southern Lebanon 24 years ago, or the Gaza Strip 19 years ago, Israel's back at all those places because in every instance Israel withdrew, the territory was taken over by terror organizations that built infrastructure under the civilian landscape and attacked from those territories. I think one of the key takeaways from looking at south Lebanon and looking at Gaza and looking at the cities of the West Bank, in some of which there's real combat going on, including the use of air power, which is new and we need to keep an eye on that. And the conclusion is depressing for many of us who hope for a peaceful resolution to this conflict. But the conclusion is entirely clear, and that is there will be no Israeli withdrawals. And anyone who's imagining an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank or two-state solution, that's all gone. I think that it's a depressing conclusion, but it's just a reality we're going to have to deal with. I think not only us in Israel, think Israelis have already dealt with it, but I think our friends abroad, I think the American administration, there are still these slogans that are left over from the 90s about a two-state solution, about agreed upon borders. Given that our soldiers are now fighting and dying in three areas that we once controlled and gave back, the conclusion for us is quite clear and that's one of the things that I've been thinking about as I watch the operation unfold in Lebanon, which is a place where I served in the late 90s in which I thought we'd never have to go back to again. I have two boys who are in 12th grade, meaning that they're eyeing their draft date, and it's occurred to me that they might find themselves back at Outpost Pumpkin, which is the outpost in Lebanon that's at the center of that book that I wrote. It's not likely, but it's not impossible and it's not something that would have occurred to me six months ago or a year ago.
DS: Matti, can you talk a little bit about what you may know or what's being reported on how the actual fighting is going?
MF: I don't know much beyond what's being reported in the news. There are heavy Israeli airstrikes not only in south Lebanon, but also in Hezbollah controlled parts of Beirut, particularly the southern parts of Beirut where Hezbollah has its installations, their command posts and their weapons storage facilities, of course hidden among civilians. It's not only Hezbollah supporters in those areas. So think it's important to remember as Israelis that most people in Lebanon are not Hezbollah. Hezbollah represents the Shia minority in Lebanon. It's the biggest minority in Lebanon, but it's not a majority. And among the Shia, there are many who don't support Hezbollah. So Hezbollah is an important part of the Lebanese picture, but it's not the whole picture in Lebanon. And I think that Israel has actually done a pretty good job so far of not attacking the infrastructure of the state of Lebanon. In 2006, Israel attacked the airport, gas storage facilities and we haven't seen that this time. The army has been trying to focus its strikes on Hezbollah and the effects have been quite significant from what we know. I mean, several echelons of the Hezbollah leadership have been taken out by the Israeli Air Force and every time they replace their leadership, that person is taken out. So clearly Israel has excellent intelligence inside the organization and the ability to accurately strike the organization while causing not no civilian casualties, but much fewer than I think we would have expected. And we looked at this a year ago. Israeli ground forces are operating in south Lebanon in an attempt to push Hezbollah back from the border. The 2006 war in south Lebanon ends with a UN resolution called 1701, according to which UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon are supposed to disarm Hezbollah south of the Litani River, which means adjacent to the Israeli border, and that resolution is never enforced. There are UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon who've been absolutely useless and have allowed Hezbollah to rearm and attack Israel under their noses. And that's really forced Israel into this ground operation. Israel has said that this is not the beginning of a long-term occupation, that this is a short-term military operation that's designed to clear the border area and allow our 70,000 displaced civilians to return to their homes. However, Lebanon has a way of sucking you in. And as we saw in 1982, when Israel went into Lebanon, also saying that this was a limited operation, Israel extricated itself from Lebanon 18 years later. And as America saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, you can get involved in something that seems like it's short-term and straightforward and discover that it's neither. So I think we have to really be careful to keep our goals achievable and limited and make sure that we have a way of getting out before we sink into some situation in Lebanon that will be too complicated and too dangerous for us to successfully control.
DS: You said earlier that Israel had withdrawn from three areas that it's now fighting in again and dying in again. Southern Lebanon, cities within the West Bank, and then the entirety of Gaza. You said something to me that there's a sense among Israelis that they've tried every formula, they've tried every model to try to get some version of peace. And right now, when asked, what's your day after plan, what's your plan, what are you gonna do with it, there's just a general sense of we're out of ideas. We'll listen to ideas, but we're out of ideas. So can you talk a little bit about that?
MF: I think that's true. And I think that's part of the darkness of this moment in Israeli society for many years. We had a big part of the populace here that believed that peace was really a possibility and that the way to get there would be territorial concessions. It would be diplomacy. And that really explodes in 2000. In 2000, we have the most left-wing government we've ever elected. And that government is on the receiving end of the worst wave of terrorism that we've ever experienced. And since then, more or less, the Israeli left has been politically defunct. There's always been the idea that we could, if threatened, carry out a military operation that would be so overwhelming that it would achieve peace and quiet. That also turns out not to be true. And we also see that the allies who we depend on are often confused and weak and have priorities that contradict an Israeli victory over our enemies. And I think that all of that contributes to the very dark sentiment here in Israel. Israelis, I think, are really at a moment of despair and part of it is just the nature of the region. The nature of the region was really made apparent to us on October 7th. There's just no way to ignore it. The kibbutzim along the Gaza border as a kind of metaphor, kibbutzim that are full of people who are from the left fringe even of Israeli society, people who believe in peace, people who are in some cases driving Palestinian kids from Gaza to Israeli hospitals and those people are slaughtered by their neighbors in Gaza. So there's really not much left in that old dream that lasted up until 2000 of a peaceful resolution. At the same time, I think we're seeing the limits of military power. We've been in Gaza for a year. We've been hitting Hamas for a year. And yesterday they fired rockets from Gaza. So there's also a sense that the limits of military power have been reached. And one of the most striking moments at the families ceremony on October 7th was when Jonathan Shamriz, who's this young man who I mentioned, the brother of a hostage who was killed in Gaza, when he spoke and he's speaking from the heart, and the crowd, which included Israelis across the political spectrum, as far as I could see, it was really kind of a cross-section of everyone who's been hurt by the war. He said, we have no leadership and we have no vision. And that's a hundred percent true. I mean, I think you can discuss whether or not the Netanyahu government has done a good job of running the war, but there's no question that Netanyahu is a leader who is unable to provide a hopeful vision for the people who live here. He’s a very dark character. He sees threats and claims to be the best person to deal with the threats, but he has no hope to offer a country whose national anthem is literally called The Hope. Hatikva means the hope. Zionism is based on the hope of a better future for the Jewish people, and we have a very dark leadership that isn't doing one of the most basic things that you're supposed to do in a war, as Winston Churchill would tell you, which is provide your people with a vision of a better future. Tell them why they're fighting. Tell them that things are bad now, but they'll be better in the future and say that in a way that people believe in. And Netanyahu has been unable to do that. And I think that's part of the darkness in Israeli society. But at the same time, in that ceremony, which I encourage listeners to find, you can find it online, you see this young guy who's speaking and he ends his speech, which is a critique of the leadership, a statement that we have no vision, a call for a commission of inquiry into what happened on October 7th, which still has not happened. Most of the people who were in charge of the country on October 7th and in charge of the army are still in charge. And Israelis have not been given good answers about how that could have happened. And the people responsible have, for the most part, not paid the price for what happened. So he's giving this very dark comment on the state of our society a year into this war. And he ends by saying, what we're seeing now is the birth of the new Israeli generation, that that is not just resilient, but is incredibly powerful and it's the generation that we're seeing now fighting in Gaza and in Lebanon, an incredible young generation. And he ended his speech by saying, get up, Am Yisrael Chai, the people of Israel live. So it's a dark statement about our leadership, but it's a statement of pure Zionism. So I think that you can see kind of a despair about the government, but an incredible energy that's bubbling in Israeli society at this moment of crisis. And our hope is that that energy can somehow be channeled into political change and a better leadership that can take us out of this moment of crisis and into the future.
DS: It's believed, Matti, that Israel is days away on the eve of a significant Israeli counterattack on Iran in response to the roughly 200 ballistic missiles fired at Israel last week. How does that factor in? Because when I talk to my family members in Israel, so much of the conversation is anticipating the counterattack, what the counterattack could look like. Is Israel headed for, I guess Israel's already in a regional war, but headed to a new stage in the regional war? My sister, who you know, and Saul lived near you in Jerusalem. They were in their mamad, in their safe room, a few nights ago when the Iranian attack happened. Normally Jerusalem is not on the receiving end of the siren alerts, these warnings to get into your mamad. And yet here even Jerusalem was being hit with this. And there's just a sense that… you know, flights are being canceled and everyone's bracing for the next stage of the war. Can you talk about how that fits into everything you're talking about?
MF: It's funny. I mean, I'm not sure funny is the right word, but we met twice in New York and I flew back and was on the plane. I didn't have internet. was completely unaware of what was going on. And I turned on my phone as we hit the tarmac at Ben Gurion next to Tel Aviv. And I found that people were kind of panicking that there was this imminent Iranian attack. And in fact, I landed on one of the last flights that landed before all the flights were shut down because Israel's airspace was closed. I got home, opened the door, basically, and the siren went off and we had to get into our safe room, then wait out the barrage from Iran. And it's amazing that that was a week ago because it seems like 5 or 6 years ago, the pace of events here is so incredible that you really can't keep track of it. And every day feels like a decade. And one thing that I wrote about several years ago, I've been writing about it for a while, but I published an op-ed in the New York Times making the point that this is not an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And to this day, this is something that many Western observers find hard to understand, because this is the way that it's covered. It's covered as if are two actors in the conflict and one is Israeli and one is Palestinian, when in fact the Palestinians are one component of a regional war in which the main actor opposing Israel is Iran. And that is now obvious. And a lot is riding on how Israel chooses to respond in the next week or two weeks or whenever they decide to do it, and I think depends to a large extent on the American administration. And the American administration has been not just wary of directly taking on the Iranians. They've been kind of solicitous of the Iranian regime in recent years, maybe in the past decade. And that has encouraged the Iranians to expand their influence across the region and we're shedding blood as a result of that change. So if the American administration decides that it's time for that to end, I think that we could see the Iranians pay a real price for their aggression and that will lead the Middle East in a better direction. Once you either remove the Iranian regime or clip its wings to such an extent that they're limited to acting inside Iran, then you've freed up the rest of the region to move in a more positive direction. And there are many American allies here who would like to take the region in a more stable direction. There are a lot of positive forces here that are being kept in check by the rise of the Iranians. And the Iranians are rising in the vacuum left by American influence and power. Israel can counteract it to some extent, and that's what we're doing. Israel's punching way above its weight in the Middle East at the moment. Israel's a country of 10 million people. It's a very small place. Israel as a percentage of the landmass of the Arab world is one fifth of one percent. And Israel is bearing the brunt of this regional war alone. So a lot depends on how far Israel is willing to go it alone. To what extent the American administration is willing to finally use its power to counteract a regime whose slogan is, Death to America. And one thing that's been quite bewildering for someone like me, who's someone who has a positive take on America, someone of liberal sentiments to see over the past decade and a half, that the Americans have really ceded much of the region to a power like the Iranians and we're dealing with the consequences right now. The consequences can be reversed, and I hope that they will be.
DS: Matti, before we wrap, I do want to bring up one other topic because I have you in this conversation and you've written about this topic that I'm going to raise. And actually, when we last spoke in the lost tape, this topic wasn't front and center. Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a new book called The Message, which deals with three geographies, three societies, but one of them is Israel and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. He deals with it quite extensively and he basically compares Israel's administration over Palestinian life to the Jim Crow laws. I don't know whose idea it was to release this book days before the one-year anniversary of October 7th, but either it was just an absence of judgment or it was diabolical. I don't know which it was. I try to give people the benefit of doubt, but that may be my own naivete. Basically, what Coates does is he projects a big part of the debates in the US about civil rights or what he thinks are the lack of civil rights or what he, you know, describes as institutional racism and a quasi-apartheid system. He projects that onto Israel. And I'm just going to play a brief clip here of an interview he did last week on CBS Mornings, a prominent morning show, here in which he had somewhat of a contentious back and forth with the interviewer. So let's just play a clip from that.
[From CBS Mornings]
CBS: Ta-Nehisi Coates, good morning, how you doing?
TC: Thanks for having me. Good morning, guys.
CBS: Ta-Nehisi, I want to dive into the Israel-Palestine section of the book. It's the largest section of the book. And I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be at a place in the backpack of an extremist. And so then I found myself wondering, why does Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I've known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy, leave out so much? Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the First and the Second Intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you just don't believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?
TC: Well, I would say the perspective that you just outlined, there is no shortage of that perspective in American media. That's the first thing I would say. I am most concerned always with those who don't have a voice, with those who don't have the ability to talk. I've been a reporter for 20 years. The reporters of those who believe more sympathetically about Israel and its right to exist don't have a problem getting their voice out. But what I saw in Palestine, what I saw on the West Bank, what I saw in Haifa, in Israel, what I saw in the South Hebron Hills, those were the stories that I have not heard. And those were the stories that I was most occupied with. I wrote a 260-page book. It is not a treatise on the entirety of the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis.
CBS: But if you were to read this book, you would be left wondering, why does any of Israel exist? What a horrific place committing horrific acts on a daily basis. So I think the question is central and key. If Israel has a right to exist, and if your answer is no, then I guess the question becomes, why do the Palestinians have a right to exist? Why do 20 different Muslim countries have right to exist?
TC: My answer is that no country in this world establishes its ability to exist through rights. Countries established their ability to exist through force, as America did. And so I think this question of right to Israel does exist. It's a fact. The question of its right is not a question that I would be faced with with any other country.
CBS: But you write a book that delegitimizes the pillars of Israel. It seems like an effort to topple the whole building of it. So I come back to the question, and it's what I struggled with throughout this book, what is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state, that is a Jewish safe place, and not any of the other states out there?
TC: There's nothing that offends me about a Jewish state. I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy no matter where they are.
CBS: Muslim included?
TC: I would not want a state where any group of people lay down their citizenship rights based on ethnicity. The country of Israel is a state in which half the population exists on one tier of citizenship and everybody else that's ruled by Israelis exists on another tier, including Palestinian Israeli citizens. The only people that exist on that first tier are Israeli Jews. Why do we support that? Why is that okay? I'm the child of Jim Crow. I'm the child of people that were born into a country where that was exactly the case, of American apartheid. I walk over there, and I walk through the Occupied Territories, and I walk down a street in Hebron. And a guy says to me, I can't walk down the street unless I profess my religion. This is very, very important. Extremely important. Let me lay it down. I'm working with the person that is guiding me, is a Palestinian whose father, whose grandfather and grandmother was born in this town. And I have more freedom to walk than he does. He can't ride on certain roads. He can't get water in the same way that Israeli citizens who live less than a mile away from him can. Why is that okay?
CBS: Why is that? Why is there no agency in this book for the Palestinians? They exist in your narrative merely as victims of the Israelis, as though they were not offered peace at any juncture, as though they don't have a stake in this as well. What is their role in the lack of a Palestinian–
TC: I have a very, very, very, very moral compass about this. And again, perhaps it's because of my ancestry. Either apartheid is right or it's wrong. It's really, really simple. Either what I saw was right or it's wrong. I am, for instance, against the death penalty. What the person did to get the death penalty, it really doesn't matter to me. I don't care if they were selling a nickel bag of marijuana or if they were a serial killer. I am against the death penalty. I am against a state that discriminates against people on the basis of ethnicity. I'm against that. There is nothing the Palestinians could do that would make that okay for me. My book is not based on the hyper morality of the Palestinian people–
CBS: Because many people feel it's complicated. You say it's not complicated. Less than 20 seconds. What's your message?
TC: Less than 20 seconds. I want people to read the book. And I don't make the assumption that somebody would just read the book and have read nothing else.
CBS: Okay, you're still invited to high holidays. I'll see you at the shul.
[End]
DS: So, a lot to unpack there. The person asking most of the questions was Tony Dokoupil, who's an anchor on CBS Mornings and I think Ta-Nehisi Coates was taken a little bit back by the questions. There since been a lot of press coverage in the US about blowback within CBS because that was viewed as a hostile set of questions. It struck me as basic journalism that Dokoupil was practicing there. You've written a lot about this before that interview, so I thought of you when I saw that interview. What's your reaction?
MF: I mean, I haven't read Coates’s book, but I've been dealing with this question of projection for many years. I was a correspondent for the AP, which is the American News Agency, between 2006 and the very end of 2011. And as you know, I've written a lot about it. And what you see if you consume a lot of Western media, particularly American media in this case, is that people don't know very much about foreign countries. And that's true of Israel too. What they do is they project their own preoccupations and issues onto foreign countries. So, I saw this happen all the time where reporters would come in here. They don't know anything about the history of this place. They don't speak any relevant language, but they come with a lot of baggage from home and they start projecting it as a way of making the story relevant. And you know, in the case of Americans, often they'll see race as if Israeli Jews are white people and Palestinian Muslims are black people and that there are Americans who really believe that a country 8,000 miles away, which has a completely different history, completely unrelated to race in America, somehow maps onto America's racial preoccupations. And of course it doesn't. And for many Europeans, it will be colonialism. That's what they say because that's the skeleton in their closet. That's what they're processing in their own societies. And there's a history of projecting whatever ills you see in the world onto Jewish people and then condemning them as kind of the avatars of the ills that you see. So I'm not particularly surprised by it, to be honest. This is not a guy who spent any time here, according to what I've seen. He was here for a week and a half or something, which for the basis of a book is ludicrous. A lot of people come here, they do an NGO tour, they see a highly selective list of sites and draw conclusions that are essentially conclusions they came with already. So a good reporter looks at a place or goes into an interview or approaches a story with a willingness to understand the story on its own terms. And a bad reporter comes to a story and sees a mirror. They basically see any story as a reflection of themselves. And I think that's what you're seeing there. I mean, the idea that this country somehow or a reflection of the experience of African Americans is of course completely divorced from reality, which isn't to say that this place is necessarily better or worse. It's just completely different. And if you want to understand this place, you have to live here, you have to speak relevant languages. The history here is incredibly complicated and the closer you get to it, the more it defies simplification. It's very easy to simplify if you're the kind of lazy journalist who would come here for a brief visit, get shown around by political activists and then write a book about it. I mean, this isn't just a comment on the state of Israel analysis. I think it's a comment on the state of American journalism. I mean, it's completely unserious of course. The attempt to kind of map America onto other parts of the world has led Americans into grave errors of judgment. And the one that comes to mind most readily is the invasion of Iraq. And America saw Iraq as an America in waiting. And then, if they could only remove the regime, then Iraq would be free to become, you know, America, Iraqi freedom. It was going to be a democracy. And of course, that was, as we know, hallucination based on a projection of America onto a completely different society and the results were disastrous and you can… there are many other examples, Vietnam is probably one of them and there are probably many others. So Americans get into a lot of trouble because, this is going to sound terrible, but because America is such a big place and many Americans don't necessarily travel that much and often don't speak foreign languages. There is a real tendency to assume that everywhere is America. And if you do that, you're going to misunderstand foreign societies in a way that can be disastrous. I mean, in this case, it's just a bad book that will be forgotten in a few weeks. But wars have been started based on projections of American concerns on other countries. So it's very important when observing foreign societies to make sure that you are living in reality, that you're grasping the complexities of each society. I actually wrote an article about this a few years ago for the Atlantic, which was called, Israel's Problems are not America's or possibly America's Problems are not Israel's. I can't remember what the headline was, but it was about precisely this, which is a problem that I encountered in my time in the American press corps. It’s one of the reasons that I’m kind of despaired of international press coverage because what many of the press organizations are doing is what this author is doing, which is just coming at the story with no knowledge and no respect for its difference and just projecting their own baggage onto it. I mean, it's an ultimately narcissistic approach to journalism. You just go anywhere and say, this is just like home? That's not journalism.
DS: You've written a lot about the Mizrahi communities in Israel. You were writing about this long before October 7th, that if you are concerned about how “people of color” are treated, most Israelis, including those thriving, are people of color.
MF: Yeah, I'm not even sure if any of this society maps onto this discussion of color and not color in America, but certainly more than half of the Jewish citizens of Israel come from the Islamic world and are as native to the Islamic world as anyone else in the Islamic world. And not to understand that part of Israel's story is a recipe for not understanding anything about Israel. That really nothing in this society can be understood if you don't understand that. And of course, you can look at the Ethiopian Jewish community. And I'm not saying that everything is great here. And I'm not saying that there isn't steep and entrenched inequality in the West Bank. I think Israel's made grave moral errors in the way it's handled the West Bank. And I think you can explain why those errors have happened. And I think they have a lot to do with Palestinian behavior and the behavior of actors like Iran. But even if you look at Israeli society, in no way does it correspond to what Coates seems to be saying here. And again, this is very American style of journalism. I'm going to come for a few days. Surprisingly, what I find in this completely foreign society is exactly what I expected to find based on my own experiences in a completely different country. Again, it's just a symptom of essentially the collapse of mainstream journalism into different strains of ideological advocacy. And this particular one maps onto this moment in America. I mean, it's not a coincidence that the book comes out, right? There's an attempt to use Israel as the embodiment of injustice on earth. And you can really see that in the examples that you were giving, Dan, about college campuses and just the general climate of hostility toward Israel and toward anyone who's associated with Israel. And of course, for America, the evil is racism. The demon that stalks America is the demon of racial injustice. And that's real. I mean, I understand why that's the demon that stalks America. So there's an attempt to kind of harness antagonism toward Israel and Jews to different American causes. And you can see it in Queers for Palestine. And there are many other examples. There's a very energized social movement that has discovered that you can use Jews effectively for mobilization. It's very hard to mobilize against China. Everyone has a Chinese-made cell phone. Everyone has a car full of Saudi petroleum. It's really hard even to mobilize against Russia. Russia doesn't generate the kind of street level antagonism that you need to get a protest together. But in an interesting way, Israel does and Jews do. And this book is part of that. So I think it needs to be seen in the context of what's been going on in the past year, which as I think you pointed out is quite scary.
DS: And the manipulations work in both directions. You've pointed out to me in another conversation that Yahya Sinwar used the George Floyd killing to great effect to manipulate American media.
MF: Absolutely. There's a confluence of forces here that increasingly understand each other. And I think that when Hamas embarked on its war on October 7th, they understood that there are forces in the West that will join them.
DS: Can you just describe that Sinwar interview and then we'll-
MF: Sure. It was an interview for Vice. I think it was 2021, where Sinwar, who's this, you can call him a psychopath. I mean, he's a religious fundamentalist. He's the military head of Hamas and the man who's responsible more than anyone else for what happened on October 7th. And subsequently he, In the middle of the interview with Vice, he says, I want to take this moment to commemorate the killing of George Floyd, because the kind of injustice that he faced is the injustice that we face. And it's an amazing statement, right? There are 300 million Arab Muslims and just under 7 million Jews in Israel. There are 2 billion Muslims on Earth. And the Jewish population of the world is about 13 million, which is a lot smaller than the population of Cairo. So the suggestion that this is somehow equivalent to the experience of African Americans in the United States is of course obscene, but it's also remarkably effective. And what a guy like Sinwar understands, and what the Qataris understand, and what the kind of alliance, a strange alliance that we're seeing of anti-Western forces, whether they call themselves Marxist or call themselves left-wing or call themselves Islamist, they understand that you can mobilize against this particular enemy. There's a reason that a guy like Coates sets out into the world. There are a lot of countries in the world. Israel is one one-hundredth of one percent of the surface of the world. There's a lot in the world that we never hear about. This is the most heavily covered country on earth. And I can quantify that with numbers than I think I have in previous podcasts. But there's a reason that people use this place as a symbol. It elevates you. If you attack, you know, the Russians, not many people will care. If you stick your career on an attack against the Chinese regime, it's not going to help your career. But if you go after Israel and the Jews, you're going to find yourself lifted up on a strange tide. And I think a lot of people are playing that game.
DS: I was hoping to end on an upbeat note. I guess in the spirit of this one-year anniversary, we will leave it on that downbeat note. But Matti…
MF: I think you can say if you want to end on a positive note that I think what a lot of people in the Jewish community are discovering is the incredible strength and inspiration that we have in our texts, in our traditions, in the community. There's a lot that we've forgotten and in an interesting and kind of sad way, it's the external hostility that has led people to rediscover it. We've been here before. This isn't the worst we've seen. In many ways, Jewish people are better off now than we have been at any time in our history. And I don't think we want to forget that amid all of the darkness and the depression. And I also want to point out the luxury that I have as an Israeli, that I'm not buffeted by voices like the one that you just played. I mean, I think you have to live in a society that's affected by them. But we have a state where you have to deal with a lot of other problems, but you don't have to deal with those. And I think that we shouldn't lose sight of the incredible accomplishments of the Jewish people in the last century and the incredible wisdom that exists in what is, after all, one of the oldest and wisest civilizations in the world. It's all there. It's at our fingertips. And if we're rediscovering it because of external hostility, then that's a silver lining in a very dark moment.
DS: There you go. You managed to wrap it up in a positive way. That I would say is the genius of Israel. So I actually agree. I agree with everything you're saying. Matti, thanks for this.
MF: It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Dan.